More Mieville

I’m just back from a week in the Bay Area, with limited web access - John H mentions a friendly argument that we had last year over China Mieville and the economics of fantasy. My two posts on the subject are on my old blog, which is a bit difficult to access these days - for those (if any) who are interested in the topic, I’ve posted them below the fold. I note that I’ve mellowed a bit on the topic in the meantime, partly in response to criticisms from PNH and others.

Goblin Markets

I’m re-reading China Mieville’s rather wonderful fantasy novel, ‘The Scar,’ and noticing (as I didn’t the first time around), how much work Mieville has put into the economics of his created world. Now this is hardly surprising; he’s a committed Marxist, who has written a very interesting Ph.D. thesis on the roots and form of international law. Mieville is a historical materialist, and pays a lot of attention to the economic fundamentals underlying his created societies. But he’s very nearly unique among fantasy authors in so doing; most of them prefer to sweep the dirty business of material accumulation underneath the prettily woven carpet of chivalry, noblesse oblige &c.

Much of this can be traced back to Tolkien of course; his Middle Earth is almost entirely innocent of economics. Bits and pieces of exchange go on in the Shire and its environs but they’re more or less completely submerged in a bucolic and idealized rural yeoman society. And anyone who can guess what the aristos of Gondor and horselords of Rohan live off is a better man than me. Indeed, Tolkien is fervently opposed both to trade and industrialization. When Pippin and Merry find that Saruman has been able to import Long Leaf pipeweed to Isengard, it’s presented as a serious disillusionment, while Tolkien’s horror at nasty factories and mechanized mills that pump out steam, smoke and pollution is notorious.

Those who follow Tolkien in writing fat trilogies with Dark Lords and the like, nearly invariably wear the same blinkers. Kings, lords and earls throng the pages, without much in the way of indication as to what they live off. Or else, the author draws tortured distinctions between “good” nobles (tall, aristocratic in bearing, beloved by their forelock-tugging peasants), and “bad” ones (secretly in league with the Dark Lord, hunchbacked, get their kicks from lashing serfs to death). On all of this and more, read Dianna Wynne Jones’ Tough Guide to Fantasyland

There’s a second line of fantasy cliche that descends more or less directly from Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar stories. Not that Leiber himself is to blame; his Lankhmar books have a strong line in political satire (the city’s overlords and civil authorities are invariably either inept or corrupt), and the prosperity of Leiber’s imagined city is founded on the rather unromantic business of exporting grain. Yet multitudes of fantasy hacks have taken the more romantic bits of Leiber’s city (Thieves Guilds, gem merchants, exotic bazaars) and transplanted them into a bog-standard feudal-fantasy setting. The result is what might be called a romanticized mercantilism, in which gold, jewels, treasures, and their getting, are fetishized as being somehow magical in and of themselves, rather than material goods which have simple economic value. Merchants feature occasionally, and sometimes even get rich, but are more interested in the wonderful adventure of it all than in capital accumulation.

It’s this set of cliches that Mieville subverts almost as a matter of course, by reinserting them into a more realistic economic and political setting. NB - mild spoilers follow. Mieville’s city of New Crobuzon is semi-industrialized, but resembles one of the city-states of the late Renaissance; a patina of republicanism that barely conceals the real nexus of power; industrial magnates working together in a monopolistic cabal. Trade and imperial domination go hand-in-hand. Mieville has enormous fun creating outlandish societies - New Crobuzon itself, the pirate polyarchy (i.e. mix of modes of government - forget Dahl) of Armada - and strange creatures. But he never forgets the relationship between the economic, social and political. One of the key characters in The Scar, Silas Fennec, is exactly the kind of merchant-adventurer that populates hack fantasy epics in multitudes. However, unlike his literary comperes, Fennec is primarily interested in making money. In other words, he’s the real thing. One of the most important moments in the book occurs when the main protagonist, Bellis Coldwine, realizes she’s been had by Fennec. She’s been taken in by his traveller’s tales, and has failed to penetrate through to the sordid economic relations of colonial domination and exploitation that underly them. What he presents as romantic adventure, is in fact an effort to extend New Crobuzon’s economic grasp to new territories.

You may agree, or disagree with Mieville’s political analysis as you like (in any event, he never lets it get in the way of telling a good story). But one of the reasons why his fantasies are subversive is precisely because they reintroduce the economic and the political into a genre that sometimes tries to run away from them. Fantasy all too frequently harks back to a never-never land in which exploitative economic relations, clashes of interest and the like, never take place, or are airbrushed out of the picture. This isn’t an unmitigatedly awful thing; a bit of escapism here and there is quite harmless. But fiction that takes society - and the forces underlying different kinds of social organization - seriously, is fundamentally more interesting. At least to people like me, who study this stuff for a living.

Update: John Holbo responds at length with some interesting counter-arguments. Will reply when I get a chance …

From Mieville to Melville

John Holbo politely dissents from my earlier piece on Mieville, primitive accumulation, heroic fantasy and the like, and makes some rather good points. Two in particular that are worth highlighting. First, a summation of Tolkien that is worth quoting in full.

of course, Tolkien is sort of at fault for all of this, providing the blueprint for the factory farm. But, then again, he isn’t at fault. He did nothing of the sort. He’s practically an outsider artist (there, I said it) with his obsessive, borderline Asperger linguistic and historical constructions and conceits. His wilful refusal of the 20th century; hell, of the 19th century. I think part of him feels that everything after Beowulf, in English literature, is sort of a misstep. It is hard to make fun of such a man by poking him in the ribs with his inadequacy, compared to Proust and Joyce and so forth. He is too far away from you for you to reach his ribs.

This is a large part of the explanation of Tolkien’s substantial immunity to criticisms of the sort brought against him since Edmund Wilson’s day. He is just too intense and authentic. Tolkien is so true to himself that he simply can’t be untrue to anyone or anything else. So when he seems to lack technique, for example ending chapter after chapter by bonking hobbits on the head - ‘A great blow fell, and Frodo saw no more’; or sort of stipulating that unfunny jokes are funny - ‘And they all laughed heartily’; or pointlessly grammatically inverting - ‘Ever have I wondered,’ ‘Never have I witnessed’ - I forgive him all. Funny as it sounds, when I never ever get to hear about sex, I feel that I am being shown the man’s bared soul. That it is a very odd, in some ways crabbed and cramped and limited soul … well, that’s just how he was. It wouldn’t be better if he airbrushed these features out, merely less honest. And the genre of fantasy is, in a weird way, just a dull formalization of many of Tolkien’s intense limitations as a man and a writer.

This strikes me as being exactly right. And, in the best possible sense of the word, it’s a useful way of talking about Tolkien. It allows you to think about his work without being overwhelmed by the oppressive presence of his epigones and self-appointed heirs - the Jordans, Goodkinds, Brooks and (gawd help us) Eddings of this world. A sort of Henry Darger figure (although far less weird and far more genuinely gifted), puttering away, crafting his idiosyncratic world of Middle Earth without really caring all that much about what anyone else might think of it. Holbo’s analogy makes you realize how personal Tolkien’s work is. Tolkien can still serve as a scratching post for radicals to sharpen their claws upon, and as an inspiration for conservatives of a certain brand (as witness this essay by Gene Wolfe). But he’s something else besides - and the something else is the more important bit.

Still, I’m going to take issue with John’s second point (although again I think it says some rather useful things). John thinks that Mieville isn’t genuinely subversive, because his two books are monster hunts. In other words the structure of the books (humans confronting big scary monsters and eventually winning) makes nuanced description of character virtually impossible - and means that the books descend into genre cliche. For John, the backgrounds of the books are richer and more convincing than the plot. Nor does he think that the books are politically subversive.

I don’t think Miéville holds a mirror up to our own society, culture, politics. The specific lessons he teaches are about how to stop slakemoths, raise giant avancs from the bottom of the ocean, etc.; which is ‘how-to’ of dubious export value. The general and genuinely exportable morals – e.g. people with power are usually calculating, self-centered bastards – are interesting and important; but, I think, too well known and documented to credit Miéville with their significant advertisement.

A lot of this is right. When John says “the story-telling – good as it is; and it is good – positively gets in the way of the backgrounds,” he’s getting at something. The little hints that Mieville drops about his world are what fascinate; snippets here and there about the Malarial Queendom, the thanatocracy of High Cromlech; which give you the sense of a richly imagined world stretching beyond the page. (apparently he cut big chunks of background from The Scar to make it less baggy). I’m in full agreement when John says that Mieville has yet to write his Great Book - there’s the potential for something quite extraordinary, but Mieville hasn’t quite gotten there yet.*

Still, I reckon that John misses the ways in which Mieville’s books, and especially The Scar are genuinely subversive. He’s right to say that The Scar is a monster hunt - but wrong to think that monster-hunt books are stunted by necessity. First Witness for the Defence is that barnacle-encrusted Leviathan of the genre, Moby-Dick. Melville’s masterpiece is not strong on the subtleties of characterization or politics - the white whale is Too Big to be reduced easily to a simple metaphor for either. But it excels at capturing certain aspects of the human condition.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that Mieville is another Melville - but he is, I think, doing rich and important things with his monster hunt. He’s trying to use the fantasy novel to interrogate itself. There’s a tension running through The Scar, the tension between the fantastic and the material. This can be seen at the level of the main characters’ motivations - all the main characters are inclined to romanticize, to mistake the motivations of others and themselves for being something other than what they are, to think that they are living in an adventure story. And they find themselves manipulated by others, bruised, scarred, and sometimes broken as a result. But they only have any capacity for action because they’re romantic in this sense - the “realists” in the book (Fennec, Uther Doul) are pathetic characters without any real autonomy; they’re trapped within their own manipulations.

This tension also structures the book at a more fundamental level. Mieville isn’t trying to undercut fantasy, by showing how sordid and unpleasant people and politics really are; instead, he’s trying to interrogate it, shoving it up against the churning wheels of politics to see what sparks are generated. Both sets of elements in The Scar- the exotic backdrop, the exuberant fun of pirate stories, whale hunts and vampire vs. swordsman face-offs on the one hand, and the machinations, grubby transactions and de-mystification of romance on the other - are essential to the workings of the novel. Imo, the hunt (which is never satisfactorily concluded - the avanc is snared, but the Scar itself is never reached) allows Mieville to do this rather well, playing grubby avarice for power against romantic aspirations for the infinite. Hunts, whether they be for whales, avancs, snarks or submarines, allow one to tease out the tangled motivations of the hunters.

I’m probably teetering on the precipice of over-analysis - The Scar is much more entertaining than it likely sounds from this extended exercise in criticism. The bits that John likes are the bits that I enjoyed the most too. But there is something more there to Mieville’s book, even if he doesn’t always achieve precisely what I think he’s setting out to do. The Scar isn’t subversive in its overt political analysis, nor in introducing rich characterization to fantasy. But it interrogates fantasy, pokes and prods it, says interesting things about it, and still manages to be fun. What more could you ask for?

And while you’re checking out John’s site, take a look at the first chapter of Belle’s (his wife’s) unpublished novel. A rather wonderful opening image among other good things.

== * I’d suggest that there are three genuinely great novels in the fantasy genre. Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast sequence (including the last one, which most people don’t like), Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun series, and John Crowley’s Little, Big. Any of those three deserves to stand with the great novels of the last century. It’s interesting (now that I think of it) that they’re all written by idiosyncratic conservatives.