Art and Idea in the Novels of China Mieville

Carl Freedman

Description

This book offers (in the first six chapters) critical readings of six novels by China Mieville, which are followed (in the seventh chapter) by a theoretical meditation on some of the conceptual issues raised by and engaged in the Mieville oeuvre. Carl Freedman is the Russell B. Long Professor of English at Louisiana State University and the author of many articles and books, including Critical Theory and Science Fiction (2000) and, most recently, The Age of Nixon (2012) and Versions of Hollywood Crime Cinema (2013). "There comes a moment in The City & the City, though it is not necessarily the same moment for every reader, when you realise that Beszel and Ul Qoma are not separate realms but the same space divided. Likewise, art and idea are often subject to absurd partition, but then along comes an author such as China Mieville who shows them to be, in truth, indissoluble. So argues Freedman's inordinately readable and just as rigorous account of Mieville's major novels. Highly recommended." (Mark Bould, University of the West of England). "Freedman offers a compelling interpretation of Mieville's novels informed equally by an impressive range of literary influences and a carefully documented exploration of historical antecedents. Seeing Mieville's genre hybridity as an illustration of the power of dialectical thinking, Freedman illuminates the complex utopian project of Mieville's fiction. Freedman is one of our finest critical voices on Mieville, one of the most important speculative writers of the 21st century." (Sherryl Vint, University of California, Riverside).

Sujets

• Idioma inglés
• English
• Anglais

Informations

• Publié par: Gylphi
• Date de parution: 16 octobre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781780240329
• Langue: English

Extrait

Art and Idea in the Novels of China Miéville


A Gylphi Limited Book
First published in Great Britain in 2015
by Gylphi Limited
Copyright © Carl Freedman, 2015
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form or binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-78024-030-5 (pbk)
ISBN 978-1-78024-031-2 (Kindle)
ISBN 978-1-78024-032-9 (EPUB)
Design and typesetting by Gylphi Limited. Printed in the UK by imprintdigital.com, Exeter. Cover illustration by Benjamin Sjöberg.
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Art and Idea in the Novels of China Miéville
Carl Freedman



Dedicated to Annette – once again, and forever

Contents Preface Acknowledgements I King Rat; or, Towards a Marxist Urban Sublime II Establishing Bas-Lag in Perdido Street Station : Peaceful Love, Capitalist Monsters, and Dialectical Hybridity Against Postmodern Pastiche III The Scar , Pirates, and the Pressures of Imperialist Power IV The Representation of Revolution in Iron Council V From Genre to Political Economy: The City & The City and Uneven Development VI Embassytown ; or, Between Language and Language VII The Dialectic of Art and Idea Notes Index


SF Storyworlds
Edited by Paul March-Russell, this new and exciting book series aims to explore the evolution of Science Fiction (SF) and its impact upon contemporary culture. The series will argue that SF has generated a series of storyworlds: first, in terms of SF’s own internal landscape – the extent to which SF has grown self-referentially – and second, in terms of SF’s external effect – the extent to which SF storyworlds have influenced the vocabulary of political, social and cultural discourse. The series is interested in rethinking the possibilities of the genre, in particular, by engaging with different media (literature, film, television, radio, the Internet and the visual arts), critical and aesthetic theory, and reading in translation, including SF from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Although the series focus is on SF, it is open to writers who have alternated between genres (M. John Harrison, Ursula Le Guin) or who have cross-fertilized SF with Gothic and fantasy (China Miéville, Christopher Priest). We are interested in the current and future directions of SF.
Series Editor
Paul March-Russell (University of Kent)
Editorial Board
Andrew M. Butler (Canterbury Christ Church University)
Rob Latham (University of California, Riverside)
Farah Mendlesohn (Anglia Ruskin University)
Helen Merrick (Curtin University of Technology)
Adam Roberts (Royal Holloway College)
Sherryl Vint (University of California, Riverside)
Patricia A. Wheeler (University of Hertfordshire)

Preface
The plan of this book is straightforward. I offer (in the first six chapters) critical readings of six novels by China Miéville, which are followed (in the seventh chapter) by a theoretical meditation on some of the conceptual issues raised by and engaged in the Miéville oeuvre. Here I will merely offer a few comments about what kind of book this is, and what can (and cannot) be expected of it.
All intellectual work is provisional, as Louis Althusser memorably insisted, but this maxim applies with special force to a critical treatment of a living author. Given Miéville’s age (he was born in 1972) and his rate of productivity, it seems likely that his output thus far – nine novels and one nonfiction book, plus numerous shorter works in both fiction and nonfiction – will ultimately constitute a minority of the Miéville canon. What his future writings will be like cannot be guessed; and this quite obvious point applies with special force, since the work that Miéville has produced to date is so extremely varied. It would, indeed, be hard to name another current author more concerned not to repeat himself and more eager always to be attempting something new. Even to whatever degree that definitiveness may be an appropriate ambition for a work of literary criticism at all, it is, therefore, clearly not one to which this book can aspire. Yet, though I necessarily lack the kind of perspective that will one day be available to the critic looking back on Miéville’s complete writings, I think there is value in the observations of a critic contemporary with the author, and one who has been reading his work from the beginning. At the very least, I hope to lay some foundations on which future Miéville critics can build.
Moreover, this volume, as its table of contents makes clear, confines itself, for the most part, to only a portion of the work by Miéville currently available. Specifically, I concentrate on six novels: King Rat (1998), Perdido Street Station (2000), The Scar (2002), Iron Council (2004), The City & The City (2009), and Embassytown (2011). I write little about Miéville’s two novels for younger readers – Un Lun Dun (2007) and Railsea (2012) – or about his exuberant urban fantasy Kraken (2010). These books (especially Un Lun Dun ) seem to me noteworthy achievements. But I find them of less interest, ultimately, than the six novels on which I have decided to focus.
I have also had little to say about Miéville’s shorter works of fiction, the finest of which – such as “An End to Hunger” (2000), “Entry Taken from a Medical Encyclopaedia” (2003), “’Tis the Season” (2004), and, especially, “Jack” (2005) – I consider to be small masterpieces. But I believe that Miéville is by literary temperament the opposite of a miniaturist; that is, he is the kind of author – like Joyce or Faulkner, who also produced brilliant short stories, and unlike, say, Maupassant, Poe, Chekhov, Hemingway, or Theodore Sturgeon – who requires the large canvas of the full-length novel to show what he can do at his very best.
Finally, though I do, in the following pages, say a few things about Miéville’s nonfiction, it is (with the partial exception of my fairly detailed treatment of Miéville’s treatise on international law) mainly as his nonfiction happens to be directly relevant to readings or theoretical arguments of my own. A useful survey essay on “Miéville as Critic and Theorist” remains to be written. But the need that such a study would fill is not one I have attempted to meet in this volume. Though none of Miéville’s writings seems to me of negligible value, the six novels that I treat in detail constitute, I believe, the real core of his achievement as a novelist so far. Whether they will continue to seem such in ten or twenty or thirty years is of course a different question. It would not be particularly surprising if Miéville were, in the future, to produce work surpassing even his finest achievements to date.
A book about a contemporary novelist may well prompt the reader to wonder what sort of personal relationship, if any, exists between author and critic. So I should put on the record that I have known Miéville personally for well over a decade and consider him a friend. But we are two busy people living in different hemispheres, and circumstances have never permitted us to spend much time together. Our personal contact has been limited to a handful of meetings (mostly at academic conferences in the US or the UK) and phone calls, plus a somewhat larger number of e-mails. Miéville has known about this project from its inception, and his attitude toward it has been entirely friendly. But neither he, nor I, has ever had any notion that it should be an “authorized” study. Though I have sometimes consulted with Miéville, nothing in this book has been submitted for his approval; and nothing in it is said with his authority (except, of course, in those places where I directly quote him). I feel pretty sure that I have never allowed friendship to affect matters of critical judgment. But, since there is no way that I can be completely certain on this point, I offer the reader the information contained in this paragraph.
Insofar as this volume is concerned, the most important connection between author and critic is, I believe, more political than personal. Both Miéville and I have frequently made clear our respective commitments to Marxism. It should be – but is not – unnecessary to add that this does not mean that he and I are necessarily in agreement on every point. I can recall a series of fairly extensive private e-mails in which we disagreed quite vigorously on certain matters concerning the socio-economic structure of the Soviet Union: not to mention, in Miéville’s published writings, at least one point (discussed in the seventh chapter below) at which he has taken sharp exception to some literary theorizing of mine. Still, I do take it that, on most major issues, Miéville’s position and mine are fundamentally at one, or pretty close to it; and my literary-critical interest in Miéville is primarily as a Marxist novelist – with equal emphasis on the adjective and the noun. The thinkers whose names appear prominently in the pages to follow – Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Lúkacs, Benjamin, Adorno, Bloch, Brecht, Pashukanis, and Althusser, among many others – should suggest many of the intellectual tools of which I have availed myself in trying to understand Miéville’s fiction, and also much of the conceptual substance of that fiction, as I read it. What it means to be a Marxist novelist – that is, what the relations are between art and idea – is a central conc