To what degree did last Thursday’s Lovecraft conference at Goldsmiths succeed in identifying a Lovecraftian “weird realism”? Without a doubt the object of our enquiries eluded definition; but this, arguably, was in the nature of the beast.

As Mark k-punk pointed out early on, the very label “weird realism” is somewhat chimerical. Lovecraft eschewed the realisms of narrative continuity, psychological plausibility and biological feasibility in favour of a style that was not only anti-realist but also anti-literary. Lovecraft’s fiction presents the weird less as an interlude in the normal running of human affairs than as an objective, inexorable wyrd unfolding in complete indifference to them.

In doing so, it reveals in passing the deep complicity of literary realism in an anthropocentrist metaphysics. “Magical” realism remains literary to the extent that it preserves - indeed, recapitulates and amplifies - the essential traits of the literary subject: it is the exercise of poetic licence in the pursuit of annexable imaginative real estate. Weird realism does not extend the domain of the literary; if anything, it represents a reverse intrusion, a haemorrhaging of the pulp into the realist universe.

I suggested that we might regard Lovecraft as launching an attack on “folk materialism” analogous to the Churchlands’ campaign against “folk psychology” in favour of a weirder (and more theoretically complete) description of mental processes. China Miéville made an acute point about the “neurotic over-specificity” of Lovecraft’s monstrous apparitions, the wealth of precise detail that often accompanies his accounts of “indescribable” horrors.

It turns out however that I’m not alone in finding the Elder Things impossible to visualise, in spite of the plethora of individual parts spread out across the dissecting table: Lovecraft’s weird anatomy never quite seems to add up to a wholly coherent and organically viable abomination. Organs without a body…of which the pre-eminent is undoubtedly, as China also suggested, the tentacle.

In spite of the difficulty of nailing down the term, everyone at the conference persisted in using the word “weird” - sometimes weirding out a second word, sometimes bolstered by a definite article all of its own - as if they had some notion of what it meant. There was I suspect some hope that if we all persisted in this practice, a common sense might coalesce out of the common usage. I’m not sure that it quite did, but I also wasn’t aware of anybody making an attempt to qualify something as “weird” where the usage definitely jarred, which suggests that some reasonably efficient implicit norm may have been at work.