the difference between my Lovecraft book and my earlier Lovecraft article

Ran across this reposted comment on ligotti.net:

“Quote Originally Posted by gveranon
A new book by Graham Harman entitled Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy is scheduled to be published September 28, according to Harman’s blog. I suspect this book has some relation to Harman’s “On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl” which appeared in Collapse IV: Concept Horror.”

Yes, there is plenty of similarity, though I changed my mind about one key point in the several years in between.

In the article, I was very hard on the “Kantian” or noumenal reading of Lovecraft and defended a Husserlian reading of Lovecraft that I also linked with cubism in the arts.

The difference is that while writing the book, I decided that both strands are operative in Lovecraft. There are two completely different major stylistic devices at work in Lovecraft. One of them is the allusion to the unutterable, and I no longer have any objection to relating that to Kant. The other is the one I was championing exclusively in my article, in which Lovecraft claims to be describing something literally but piles up such a ridiculous number of incompatible descriptions that the bond between the objects and its qualities, while not withdrawn into a noumenal realm, explicitly becomes an operative principle over and above its list of qualities. This is what is most typical of Husserl, who’s as anti-noumenal as it gets but is still a philosopher of objects over and above their qualities.

It’ll all be clear when you finally see the book.

There’s an introductory section, then I analyze 100 individual passages (not plot summaries, but short passages) from eight of the key stories, then conclude with some further thoughts.

Work on the book only increased my sense of Lovecraft’s greatness as a stylist. I’m well aware of the objections that he overwrites his prose and overloads it with adjectives, but rules like this are always beside the point. You can do just about anything as a writer as long as you know how to handle it. At most there is some unevenness in Lovecraft as a stylist, as often happens with amateurs in any field who are isolated from mainstream critical feedback. For example, I happen to think the opening paragraph of “The Whisperer in Darkness” is a disaster, and also can’t figure out why “The Shadow Out of Time” is generally considered one of his great tales. (I would probably replace it on that list with “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.”)