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December 11, 2006

Things I Should Have Read Long Ago

I'm just getting around to reading the Crooked Timber seminar on China Mieville. I bought Perdido Street Station because it was the first of his books that I came upon in a book store, but put off the seminar until I'd read Iron Council. And, of course, by the time I had done so, I had forgotten about the essays. They're both good books, though IC is a bit laborious at times. Anyway, here's a bit from the seminar, which I think might convince a person or two to go out and get PSS.

The subject under consideration is Mieville's tendency to kill off or maim his characters. He does it with stated disregard for the reader's comfort, which can be a bit bracing at times. If you're accustomed to literature in which only Tragic characters are ever harmed, the fate of the character discussed here comes as a real punch in the gut. After it happens, you read the rest of the novel in a bit of a daze, completely unsure of what kind of shit the author is going to put you through next.

Anyway, Mieville, respoding to Belle Waring's suggestion that the character's fate is too much (in particular, the character is beaten, possibly raped, and brain damaged so that she is left in an odd state of child-like adulthood):

If you kill a main character, then you're obviously a 'brave' writer. Etc etc. This is the specious and middlebrow gravitas of charactercide. It's not always an aesthetic con to do a protagonist in, of course, but it shouldn't be an automatic brownie point.

This apparently most extreme thing you can do to a character, bumping her/him off, is easily assimilable by nebulous structures of comfort. (The question of what if anything is wrong with that is huge, of course, and fundamental to many of the issues here. For here, I'm just going to assert that all my writing tends to be sceptical of consolation and comfort.)

This is precisely why I'm not surprised by Belle’s resentment at the fate of [SPOILER] in PSS. It was, yes, precisely 'uncalled for'. 'That [SPOILER] should get killed,' Belle says, 'OK.' Well quite. Had she been killed, it would have been ok. More than that, it would have presented us with one of the most trite figures in Romantic Art: The Beautiful Dead Female Lover. I didn’t want [SPOILER] to turn into Eurydice, which is why what happened to her had to be utterly foul and uncalled for. I maintain that it was more respectful of her as a character to give her a fate that vigorously resisted aestheticisation, than to subordinate her to the logic of myth, symbol and genre. (Particularly when (Ophelia in the water, consumptive beauties a-coughing) it's a logic deep-structured with fetishised misogynist despite. Hmmmm... raping and mind-ruining a female character as striking a blow against the structures of gender essentialism? Well yes, actually.)

That's the important bit, but I think I'll keep on below the fold.

This is precisely why Mieville is so much fun to read. For one thing, he's fantastically inventive. Elsewhere in her essay, Belle says:

The material in the average two-sentence Miéville observation would serve a more parsimonious author of fantasy as the meat of a trilogy. (Or more: just consider that there are about 18 Robert Jordan novels, none of which contains a single thought not pilfered, feebly, from Tollkein or Stephen Donaldson.)

Indeed. PSS is bubbling over with ideas to which one responds, "Huh. Cool." But that is, in essense, just a nice paint job on a well-made car. The above quotation displays the best qualities of Mieville: 1) he's incredibly smart, 2) he has interesting ideas about the nature of narrative, and 3) he is absolutely willing to go out of his way to subvert your expectations and to get you thinking -- not only about his stories, but about what you expect from and what you like about stories in general.

Posted by todd at December 11, 2006 11:14 AM

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