Robert M. Price’s MOLDY MANUSCRIPTS vol. 04

Jacques Derrida, father of Deconstruction, aptly said that people either love or hate Deconstruction. Once I was teaching a class on Postmodernism and Deconstruction, and one fellow, a retired professor if I recall correctly, was so outraged and incensed by what I was saying that he just could not control himself! He continually interrupted me to sound off about how outrageous Deconstruction’s methods and claims were! I had to ask him to be patient and hear me out. What I was really asking him was to try to be teachable, to stop defending himself against an idea that struck him as counter-intuitive. Give it a chance, try to understand it as its advocates do. If you still disagree, then you will at least be in a position to level an informed critique.

Now I am asking you to do me the same favor. Many readers have found Donald R. Burleson’s and my Deconstructive analyses to be unpalatable. Initially I reacted the same way to Don’s. But eventually I began to realize there had to be a method in this seeming madness. Burleson was no dummy! He must see something in it, so I started reading up on the subject—and I got converted! In what follows, please try to be open-minded.

Don’s “Identity and Alterity in Henry James’s ‘The Jolly Corner’” first appeared in Studies in Weird Fiction #8 (February 1990). His “Arthur Machen’s ‘N’ as Allegory of Reading” first appeared in Studies in Weird Fiction #7 (Spring 1990). My own “The Criticism of Azathoth” appeared (where else?) in Crypt of Cthulhu #80 (Eastertide 1992).

Three essays, three unstable worlds

Why deconstruction fits weird fiction

Weird fiction repeatedly destabilizes comfortable distinctions: real and unreal, self and other, known and unknowable. That makes it unusually fertile ground for critical approaches concerned with ambiguity, contradiction and the way texts undermine their own apparent certainties. Readers new to the field can use LORE’s Weird Fiction guide as a broader introduction, while the Lovecraft hub provides context for Price’s Azathoth essay.