Lovecraft, misprision and hypernovel

Excerpt from page 58-59 of Alan Moore's BBC Maestro Course Notes 1.0, related to the 29th episode of the series, Approaches To The Future. Full course: HERE!

Alan Moore: [...] I recently came across ‘misprision’, an academic term that – if I’ve got it right – means a wilful misunderstanding where you know that a certain idea is not correct but you use it anyway because it opens up creative possibilities. When I was preparing my H. P. Lovecraft opus, Providence, I was reading an awful lot of Lovecraft criticism including the so-called ‘Cthulhu Mythos’ that had been an invention of later writers and that Lovecraft himself would not have recognised. 

One psychologist, Dirk Mosig, suggested that all of Lovecraft’s stories were intended as episodes of some gigantic hypernovel, that he was creating a new form of the novel that comprised these 30 or 40 fragmentary stories. 

While H. P. Lovecraft had not meant anything like that, with the concept of ‘misprision’ in my mind, I thought, ‘But what if he had?’ 

And so I began building that hypernovel and so came the plot structure for Providence. [...]

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