At the time Wilcox was haunted by mysterious visions of Cyclopean cities. The bas-relief was created by sculptor Henry Wilcox in March 1925 while half-asleep. Thurston finds the bas-relief among the belongings of his great-uncle Professor Angell. The first part, "The Horror in Clay", concerns a mysterious clay bas-relief depicting Cthulhu. The story consists of three interconnected parts, and is presented as notes belonging to Francis Thurston, a Boston resident investigating the ancient deity Cthulhu. Wells' The War of the Worlds was an influence on "The Call of Cthulhu", citing the thematic similarities of ancient, powerful, but indifferent aliens associated with deities physical similarities between Cthulhu and the Martians and the plot detail of a ship ramming an alien in a temporarily successful but ultimately futile gesture. Joshi says that, 'Merritt's mention of a "moon-door" that, when tilted, leads the characters into a lower region of wonder and horror seems similar to the huge door whose inadvertent opening by the sailors causes Cthulhu to emerge from R'lyeh'. Merritt's novella The Moon Pool (1918) which Lovecraft 'frequently rhapsodied about'. The "slight earthquake" mentioned in the story is likely the 1925 Charlevoix–Kamouraska earthquake. Another Dunsany work cited by Price is A Shop in Go-by Street (1919), which stated "the heaven of the gods who sleep", and "unhappy are they that hear some old god speak while he sleeps being still deep in slumber". Price also notes that Lovecraft admired the work of Lord Dunsany, who wrote The Gods of Pegana (1905), which depicts a god constantly lulled to sleep to avoid the consequences of its reawakening. It is also assumed he got inspiration from William Scott-Elliot's The Story of Atlantis (1896) and The Lost Lemuria (1904), which Lovecraft read in 1926 shortly before he started to work on the story. Schultz cited other literary inspirations: Guy de Maupassant's " The Horla" (1887), which Lovecraft described in Supernatural Horror in Literature as concerning "an invisible being who.sways the minds of others, and seems to be the vanguard of a horde of extraterrestrial organisms arrived on Earth to subjugate and overwhelm mankind" and Arthur Machen's " The Novel of the Black Seal" (1895), which uses the same method of piecing together of disassociated knowledge (including a random newspaper clipping) to reveal the survival of a horrific ancient being. Price claims the irregular sonnet " The Kraken", published in 1830 by Alfred Tennyson, was a major inspiration, since both reference a huge aquatic creature sleeping for an eternity at the bottom of the ocean and destined to emerge from its slumber in an apocalyptic age. In a footnote for his writing down of his own dream, Lovecraft then finished with the suggestion "Add good development & describe nature of bas-relief" to himself for future reference. Lovecraft then used this for a brief synopsis of a new story outlined in his own Commonplace Book at first in August 1925, which developed organically out of the idea of what the bas-relief in the dream actually might have depicted. It is new, indeed, for I made it last night in a dream of strange cities and dreams are older than brooding Tyre or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon. This can be compared to what the character of Henry Anthony Wilcox tells the main character's uncle while showing him his sculpted bas-relief for help in reading hieroglyphs on it which came through Wilcox's own fantastical dreams:
Why do you say that this thing is new? The dreams of men are older than brooding Egypt or the contemplative Sphinx, or garden-girdled Babylon, and this was fashioned in my dreams. Lovecraft then remembers himself answering the curator: The curator initially scoffs at him for trying to sell something recently made to a museum of antique objects.
In the dream, Lovecraft is visiting an antiquity museum in Providence, attempting to convince the aged curator there to buy an odd bas-relief Lovecraft himself had sculpted. The first seed of the story's first chapter The Horror in Clay came from one of Lovecraft's own dreams he had in 1919, which he described briefly in two different letters sent to his friend Rheinhart Kleiner on May 21 and December 14, 1920. Written in the summer of 1926, it was first published in the pulp magazine Weird Tales in February 1928. " The Call of Cthulhu" is a short story by American writer H. Title page of "The Call of Cthulhu" as it appeared in Weird Tales, February 1928.
0 kommentar(er)
