City without a name (short story)

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Town With No Name ( english The Nameless City ) is the title of a fantastic horror story by the American writer HP Lovecraft , written in January 1921 and in November of the same year in the amateur magazine Wolverine was printed. In November 1938 it appeared in pulp magazine Weird Tales and in 1939 it was included in the collection The Outsider and Others of Arkham House . A German translation by Charlotte Countess von Klinckowstroem was published in 1973 in the anthology, Stadt ohne Namen, of the book seriesLibrary of the House of Usher , which was reprinted in 1981 in the 52nd volume of the Fantastic Library of Suhrkamp Verlag .

The story, much appreciated by Lovecraft himself, but later rejected by many magazines, shows the influence of Lord Dunsany , who is quoted at one point, and introduces the author of the Necronomicon , the "mad Arab" Abdul Alhazred. It takes the reader into the interior of the Arabian desert , which is the ruins of an ancient city built by reptilian creatures. With the description of wall paintings , frescoes and reliefs of an apparently lost civilization, she anticipates elements of his short novel Berge des Wahnsinns .

content

An archaeologist, the nameless first-person narrator of the work, approaches the city without a name, which lies “dilapidated and mute” in the “interior of the Arabian desert” in the cold moonlight and which seems to be cursed to him. The city, which was avoided by the Arabs and Sheikhs, is said to have been almost hidden from the sands of the eons even before the founding of Memphis and Babylon . He thinks of the words of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred: "That is not dead that which lies forever / Until time conquers death."

Sandy desert of the Arabian Peninsula

He does not enter the site until dawn and wanders around for a long time among its remains, noticing strange architectural proportions that disturb him. The next day, he continues his expedition through the rubble, exposing a sand-covered entrance and discovering an underground temple that is too low to be walked upright in and whose simple symbols and primitive altars leave him puzzled as to whether a race is atrocious there May have practiced rites .

Despite the nightfall, he lingers in the eerie ruined city and becomes aware of a somewhat larger temple, the entrance of which is not as buried as in the other places of worship , by a wind blowing up sand that seems to come from a crevice in the rock. He enters a dark room, notices traces of painting by a presumably ancient race and discovers a narrow tunnel leading into the depths. Via an almost endless, steep staircase he reaches a low corridor through which he squeezes. He climbs further down and notices that his torch has gone out, while sentences from Alhazred, lines from "L'Image du monde" by Walther von Metz and other excerpts come to mind and he is reciting Lord Dunsany and Thomas Moore . In the darkness he finds himself in a corridor, on the walls of which he notices coffin-like wooden boxes with glass fronts, the outlines of which he can recognize because of a slowly becoming visible phosphorescence . Following a glimmer of light, he comes across the narrow corridor into an artful hall with a series of wall paintings. In the boxes he can now make out mummified creatures in precious robes, which with their grotesque reptile-like shapes are sometimes reminiscent of crocodiles , then again of seals , and which appear unclassifiable . In the frescoes he believes he is describing the history of the beings with wars , cultural rise above the level of Egypt and Chaldea and finally decay, but considers this to be an allegorical representation and thinks of the Capitoline Wolf . In addition to the decline, he is worried about the increasing cruelty towards the outside world and the physical atrophy of the people who seem to be represented by the “sacred reptiles”. At the end of the hall he reaches a gate that surprisingly does not lead into another room, but reveals an endless glow, as if "from the summit of Mount Everest you were looking at a sea of ​​sun-drenched fog".

At some point he perceives a strange sound that gets louder and louder and, together with a raging storm, ends in a screeching howl. The storm becomes so strong that it clings to the ground so as not to be "swept into the shining abyss" while babbling the song of the mad Arab to itself. Later he doesn't know “which angel from hell” “brought him back to life”, but remembers that the cacophony took on linguistic forms and he could hear swearing. In front of the shining abyss he saw a horde of "devils racing ... a race that no one can confuse - the crawling reptiles of the city with no names."

Origin and background

The City Without a Name is Lovecraft's first work, written in 1921 . On January 26th, he wrote to Frank Belknap Long that he had "just completed and typed it". According to his information, he had to start twice in order to get the story down on paper, was dissatisfied in each case and only hit the right note on the third attempt.

Hūd with the people ʿĀd

As Lovecraft explained, this too is due to a dream inspired by a phrase from a story by Lord Dunsany, whom he admired. It is the phrase "the unreverberate blackness of the abyss" at the end of the short story The Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men , which can be found in The Book of Wonder and by Lovecraft in was quoted from his work.

Another suggestion was the article “Arabia” in the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica , which Lovecraft owned and translated sections into his “Commonplace Book”, a notebook that he began to keep in early 1920, after his description “Ideas, Images and quotations ”“ which were briefly noted in order to be processed ”in later narratives. This included a passage about Irem , the ancient “city of pillars […] mentioned in the Koran , which was supposedly built by Shedad, the last despot of ʿĀd in the area of Hadramaut , and which today, after the annihilation of its inhabitants, according to the Arab tradition is invisible to the eyes of ordinary people [...] but is occasionally seen by a particularly gifted traveler. "

In the short story, the narrator suggests that the nameless city is older than Irem, which Sunand T. Joshis believes may explain the strange rhyme Lovecraft ascribes to Abdul Alhazred. In the prehistoric place, even forgotten by the legend, the residents of Irem may have faced a horror. In his notebook, Lovecraft later described details of the dream that the narrative goes back to. He saw a man who tried to break open a "bronze door" in a "strange underground chamber", but was "overwhelmed" by the incoming water.

reception

The story, so much appreciated by Lovecraft, was rejected by many magazines and, after publication in November 1921, it was not printed again until autumn 1936, shortly before his death, in the semi-professional magazine Fanciful Tales , which Joshi can explain with its inferior quality. Like other early works by Lovecraft, their meaning lies more in what they foresee: ten years later, Lovecraft took up the scenario again in his mountains of madness and gave a more understandable justification for the abnormal figures with the extraterrestrial origin of the beings. In his late work, the scientist's attempts to explain are repeated, desperately trying to convince himself that the creatures depicted have only symbolic meaning.

With its overheated language, the absurdities and illogical developments of the plot , the narrative does not seem to be well thought out. So it remains unclear where the creatures come from, since the text does not contain any references to an earthly region of prehistoric times or a foreign planet . According to Joshi, it is just as unclear how the beings came to their composite form, which lies outside the evolution of the living beings , or how they could continue to exist in the depths of the earth. The first-person narrator, who does not immediately understand that they built the city themselves, makes a dubious impression.

For Marco Frenschkowski, on the other hand, Lovecraft succeeded in gaining its own pages from the frequently dealt with topic - archaic monsters survive in a ruined city - and creating something new through unique linguistic compression and sublimation, including the namelessness of the city. The curiosity of the reader is thus directed towards the atmosphere and exoticism of the beings who have survived in the depths, while the fate of the human observer is irrelevant.

Text output (selection)

  • Wolverine , November 1921
  • Fanciful Tales , fall 1936
  • Weird Tales , November 1938
  • The Outsider and Others , Arkham House , 1939
  • Dagon and Other Macabre Tales , 1986
  • The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories , 2004
  • City without a name , German by Charlotte Countess von Klinckowstroem, Library of the House of Usher, 1973
  • City without a Name , Fantastic Library, Vol. 52, 1981

literature

  • Sunand T. Joshi . HP Lovecraft - Life and Work. Volume 1, German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, ISBN 3944720512 , pp. 493–495
  • Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: Nameless City, The . In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia , Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, ISBN 0-9748789-1-X , pp. 181-182

Web links

Wikisource: The Nameless City  - Sources and full texts (English)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ HP Lovecraft: City Without a Name. In: City without a name. Horror stories. German by Charlotte Countess von Klinckowstroem, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1973, p. 5
  2. ^ HP Lovecraft: City Without a Name. In: City without a name. Horror stories. German by Charlotte Countess von Klinckowstroem, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1973, p. 16
  3. ^ HP Lovecraft: City Without a Name. In: City without a name. Horror stories. German by Charlotte Countess von Klinckowstroem, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1973, p. 19
  4. ^ HP Lovecraft: City Without a Name. In: City without a name. Horror stories. German by Charlotte Countess von Klinckowstroem, Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1973, p. 20
  5. Quoted from Sunand T. Joshi : HP Lovecraft - Life and Work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 493
  6. Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 494
  7. Sunand T. Joshi, David E. Schultz: Nameless City, The . In: An HP Lovecraft Encyclopedia , Hippocampus Press, Westport 2001, p. 181
  8. Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 466
  9. Quoted from: Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - Life and Work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, pp. 494–495
  10. ^ Marco Frenschkowski : HP Lovecraft: a cosmic regional writer. A study of the topography of the uncanny. In: Franz Rottensteiner (ed.), HP Lovecrafts kosmisches Grauen , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 85
  11. Quoted from: Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - Life and Work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 495
  12. Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 495
  13. Sunand T. Joshi: HP Lovecraft - life and work. Volume 1. German by Andreas Fliedner, Golkonda-Verlag, Munich 2017, p. 494
  14. ^ Marco Frenschkowski: HP Lovecraft: a cosmic regional writer. A study of the topography of the uncanny. In: Franz Rottensteiner (ed.), HP Lovecrafts kosmisches Grauen , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 85