changed my mind about the Lovecraft monsters

The big news of work on the project today is that I’ve changed my mind about the un-depectability of Lovecraft’s monsters. I now think there are two completely separate classes of things going on, and I should have seen this earlier because it fits my “Husserlian” reading of Lovecraft all the better.

*the things that are truly impossible to put in pictorial form in Lovecraft are lines like this: “Parker… was swallowed up by an angle of masonry which… was acute, but behaved as if it were obtuse.” There’s literally no way for an artist to depict such an angle, though perhaps a clever artist could find some humorous way to hint at it. Here we have the Heideggerian/Kantian side of Lovecraft, undercutting the very representability of whatever he’s describing.

*but as for the actual descriptions of the monsters –and here I mean not only the Elder Ones from Antarctica but also Brown Jenkin in “Dreams in the Witch House”– there is simply a vast piling up of incongruent features whenever they are described. It is always difficult to follow these descriptions, just as it is difficult to unpack a cubist painting, but not inherently as impossible to visualize or depict as “an acute angle that behaves as if it were obtuse.” This is the Husserlian side of Lovecraft, as described in my article on that topic of three years ago.

So, as of last night and this morning, I’m now convinced that there are two separate issues going on here that need to be treated separately.

That’s one of the ways you know that a book is coming to life… when you end up having to scrap a couple of things you said in the early chapters because the experience of thinking things through teaches you that they don’t really work.