CHAPTER 4 SEEING VISIONS: EXPERIMENTAL SIGHT

The logic of the Allos is that physical, psychological and socio-political limits are meaningless to Fantasy. This is a literature under no obligation to respect the ʻnormalʼ frontiers of our bodies, minds or societies. Each can be bent out of shape, mangled, constructed anew, augmented, or re-invented – the only limit, indeed, is the imagination of the Fantasy author: The capacity of the Fantasy author to experiment with norms. This Chapter, then, will consider a third mode in which Fantasy can transform ʻrealʼ-world elements in order to open up new forms of political engagement: Experimental transformation. This is a meddling with our model of ʻrealityʼ, a mocking of our bodily, mental and societal norms that challenges the assumption that the model of ʻrealityʼ which we so blindly construct and in which we so blithely move is somehow natural, just part of the order of things... It is a look into the Fantasy Hall of Mirrors that allows a glimpse of the hidden phantoms that stalk our very ʻrealʼ; phantoms that haunt us and hold us with their spectral power. Three paradigms for this Fantasy capacity to create insight through experimental transformation will be considered. In the first, I will examine how Pratchett and Miéville transform the sensory, the structure of perception-consciousness, in order to challenge anthropocentric hubris; in the second, I will examine how Miéville links transformation of the body to the political body in order to uncover the intersection between libido and power; and, in the third, I will examine how Pratchett and Miéville (again) twist political bodies into fantastic shapes in order to contest hegemonic socio-political paradigms. Mind; body and mind; body and society; mind and society – looping from the fantastic body proper to the fantastic body politic, it will be seen that the introduction of the experimental impossible, the seeing of visions that cannot be, opens up yet more unique opportunities for political critique.

112 Fantasy, Politics, Postmodernity

It is a constant refrain of Pratchett that (ʻsaneʼ, adult) human perception is unreliable, both in the way that information received is often falsified because brain and senses may work to separate agendas and in the way that what can be perceived is limited by the sensory apparati of the body. In terms of the first of these, the falsification of sensory data, the Fantasy medium allows Pratchett to play with this idea by setting the unusual (fantastic) few on Discworld who can truly see in sharp relief to the ordinary many who “never really look at things”,1 or who merely “see things that are not there” – a much simpler task because “everyone does that”.2 Witches (Tiffany Aching), wizards (Ridcully), immortals (Susan), apes (the Librarian), anthropomorphic personifications (Death), fantastic beings (the Pictsies) – all are ʻstrangeʼ, non-human, enough to have what Pratchett calls First Sight, that is, “‘When you can see whatʼs really there, not what your head tells you ought to be there’”.3 The brains of those with First Sight do not override their senses because they do not have the usual mental filters (the “reality-dampers”, 4 the “selective blindness”)5 that prevent ordinary (ʻsaneʼ, adult) humans from seeing “what cannot possibly be true”.6 Time and time again, in fact, in Pratchett, “well-known facts […] override the senses”. 7 It is ʻa well-known factʼ that skeletons cannot walk around and speak, so those who look at Death do not see a skeleton but just a very thin man; it is ʻa well-known factʼ that dogs cannot talk, so those who hear Gaspode speak hear the sound ʻwoofʼ not the word ʻwoofʼ; it is ʻa well-known factʼ that soldiers are men, so no one can see it when a whole Monstrous Regiment is composed of women; and since it is ʻa well-known factʼ (at least to members of the Fidgettʼs Club) that women do not exist, Susan does not even have to become invisible to enter the club:

[She knew this] because she knew that the members of Fidgettʼs would simply not see her, or believe that she really existed even if they did. Women werenʼt allowed in the club at all except under Rule 34b, which grudgingly allowed for female members of the family or

1 Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment, London, 2004, 242 2 Pratchett, Thief of Time, 103 3 Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men, London, 2004, 140 4 Pratchett, Small Gods, 75 5 Pratchett, Hogfather, 427 6 Pratchett, Thief of Time, 121 7 Terry Pratchett, Men At Arms, New York, 2008, 68