I love China Miéville’s sentences.
I love Miéville’s sentences because they are simultaneously beautiful and political. I love them because their aesthetic power is that of a stylistic intervention into the idiom and ideology of fantasy as it is transmitted from J.R.R. Tolkien to George R.R. Martin. I love them because, especially in Miéville’s 2004 novel Iron Council, they intervene in that genealogy with a toolkit borrowed in part from the Cormac McCarthy of the baroquely existential Blood Meridian of 1985, even as they betoken the barer life of sentences in McCarthy’s 2006 bestseller The Road. I love them because in all of this they claim style as a locus of contemporaneity.
Miéville is a peculiarly contemporary creature. Born in 1972 and raised in late twentieth-century London, his contemporaneity is not only generational but also generic. In a recent Guardian profile, Miéville himself confesses to feeling like he became “‘exemplary of a moment’” in the early 2000s, when the generically hybrid mode known as the “New Weird” emerged. As Justine Jordan puts it in that profile, the New Weird was known for “dark, politically aware urban visions that explicitly rejected the consolatory, escapist strain established by Tolkien.” This anti-Tolkien strain streams visibly through the novels for which Miéville is best known to date: the Bas-Lag trilogy, which includes Perdido Street Station (2000), The Scar (2002), and Iron Council (2004). Often seen as Miéville’s anti-Lord of the Rings, this trilogy represents a mix of dark fantasy and politicized steampunk that brings together the Victorian novel, Lovecraftian horror, Melvillean maritime adventure, the Marxist marriage plot, and the American Western. As with his more recent fiction—the comically apocalyptic Kraken (2010), for example—these novels are the products of a socially sprawling and politically creative imagination, not to mention the imaginative actions of a citizen who at one point ran for Parliament as a Socialist.1
Even more, Miéville’s fiction reveals a novelist in love with excavating and exploring the modernity that he denounces Tolkien for avoiding in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. “In opposing what he called the Robot Age,” insists Miéville in a 2000 interview with the International Socialism Journal, “Tolkien counterposes it with a past that of course never existed. He has no systematic opposition to modernity—just a terrified wittering about ‘better days.’” This terrified wittering is meant to soothe readers disturbed by the onslaught of modernity in the form of world wars, political revolutions, unceasing technological developments, and widespread socioeconomic injustice. “In Tolkien,” says Miéville, “the reader is intended to be consoled by the idea that systemic problems come from outside agitators, and that decent people happy with the way things were will win in the end. This is fantasy as literary comfort food. Unfortunately, a lot of Tolkien’s heirs—who may not share his politics at all—have taken on many tropes that embed a lot of those notions in their fantasy.”
One of the most interesting features of Miéville’s critique of Tolkien’s “comfort food” is that it focuses not merely on fantasy conventions of storytelling such as the happy ending in which decent people are victorious, or the character system in which the outsider is evil (and evil is therefore always from the outside), but also on style. In a 2002 essay for The Socialist Review, Miéville continues his argument against the conservative conventionality of Tolkien, adamantly maintaining that The Lord of the Rings is both a “fairyland version of genetic determinism” and “a conservative hymn to order and reason—to the status quo.” Crucially, however, he also locates Tolkien’s conservatism in his anti-modern style. Tolkien “deliberately tried to sound antique and ‘epic,’” Miéville contends. “Clichés constantly snuffle up to us like moronic dogs. Laughter comes in ‘torrents,’ brooks ‘babble,’ and swords never fail to ‘flash.’ The dialogue sounds faintly ridiculous, like opera without music. Even 50 years ago this cod Wagnerian pomposity was stilted and clumsy. ‘Fey he seemed,’ says J.R.R.—in Middle Earth, rare the clause is that reversed isn’t.”
| . | I wish to thank my Fall 2011 steampunk class at the University of Rochester for some great discussions about China Miéville. This essay has also benefited enormously from a number of truly amazing interlocutors: Andy Hoberek got me to write it, and then edited it brilliantly, patiently, and artfully; Arthur Bahr got me to think less generously about Miéville, which was necessary; and Rachel Haidu got me to talk about why I love Miéville, what the nature of that love is, and how to write about it. [↩] |
| 1. | Miéville’s electoral past reflects his understanding of the difference between the political and the imaginative. Across interviews, it is clear that he believes that novels, though not without their political effects, are not structurally identical to humans intervening in the world in an effort to change the conditions under which they live by way of direct action. Nor is my taking note of this meant to say that either Miéville or myself would argue that novels do not belong to the domain of the political. Understanding how they belong to that domain as imaginative actions might begin by taking seriously Raymond Geuss’s assertion in Philosophy and Real Politics that “politics is in the first instance about action and contexts of action, not about mere beliefs and propositions.” While it may not be the same as a direct political action such as running for Parliament, writing a novel can be political to the extent that, as Geuss writes, “propounding a theory, introducing a concept, passing on a piece of information, even, sometimes, entertaining a possibility, are all actions, and as such they have preconditions and consequences that must be taken into account” (11-12). [↩] |