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A Miéville Bestiary: Monsters As Commentary on the Hybridity of Real and Conceptual Landscapes in the Work of China Miéville

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A Miéville Bestiary: Monsters As Commentary on the Hybridity of Real and Conceptual Landscapes in the Work of China Miéville 1 A Miéville Bestiary: Monsters as Commentary on the Hybridity of Real and Conceptual Landscapes in the Work of China Miéville. Robert James O’Connor Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds York St John University School of Humanities, Religion and Philosophy April 2020 2 3 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. The right of Robert James O’Connor to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. © 2020 The University of Leeds and Robert James O’Connor 4 Abstract To date, China Miéville has written: 12 novels; two short story collections; four volumes of non-fiction; graphic novels; roleplaying games and numerous essays and articles in a writing career spanning since the late 1990s. Miéville’s novels are celebrated for being distinctly different from each other yet there are three concepts of landscapes which Miéville keeps revisiting: genre landscapes, urban landscapes and socio-political landscapes. This thesis will explore the theoretical approaches Miéville utilises to explore these conceptual landscapes before using the form of the bestiary to highlight how these concepts are manifested in his novels. The most important of those fantastical elements at his disposal is the monster which naturally encourages an examination of hybridity and liminality. The Bestiary has existed in the form that is familiar to us for many centuries. The interweaving of morality and mysterious depictions of the natural world imbued historical bestiaries with a sense of the mythological. Their power as a device for world creation is particularly recognised by writers of fantasy fiction. This thesis will demonstrate that by using monsters as manifestations of these conceptual landscapes Miéville successfully utilises the hybridity and liminality of both monsters and fantastic fiction as a methodology to critique our own contemporary late-capitalist social landscape. Key Words: Miéville, monsters, bestiary, hybridity, genre, Weird, psychogeography, Marxism. 5 Contents Introduction…………………………………………….…………………………………….7 Concepts of Landscape and the Role of the Bestiary in the Work of China Miéville 0.1 Concepts of Landscape 0.2 China Miéville and Marxist Literary Theory 0.3 Miéville and Derrida’s Theory of Hauntology 0.4 Monsters and Bestiaries as Social Commentary Chapter One…………………..…………………………………………………………….37 China Miéville and the Landscapes of Genre Fiction 1.1 China Miéville and Fantasy 1.2 China Miéville and Science Fiction 1.3 China Miéville and Horror 1.4 China Miéville and the Evaporation of Genre Boundaries Chapter Two…………………...……………………………………………………..……..78 Embracing the Tentacular and the Abcanny Monstrous: China Miéville and (New) Weird fiction 2.1 Miéville, Lovecraft and the Tentacle in Weird Fiction 2.2 New Weird Fiction: A Slippery Term Chapter Three……………………………………………………………………….……...106 China Miéville, Psychogeography and Marxist Urban Theory 6 3.1 Psychogeography and the Importance of Urban Landscapes in London’s Overthrow and The City & The City. 3.2 A Marxist Exploration of Urban Space: China Miéville, New Crobuzon and the Contemporary London Gothic. Chapter Four………………………………………………………………………………..170 “The Perpetual Train”: Socialism, Revolution, Law and Justice in the work of China Miéville 4.1 Onboard the Perpetual Train: Socialism and Revolution in China Miéville’s work. 4.2 The Broken Dream? Socialist-Utopian Ideals in Miéville’s work. 4.3 Law and Justice in Bas-Lag and Beyond. 4.4 The Railroad to the Horizon. Chapter Five…………………………………………………………………..…………….214 The Miéville Bestiary: Monsters as social commentary in the work of China Miéville Conclusion……………………………………………………………...……..…………....299 Liminal, Interstitial and Hybrid Landscapes and the Monsters that Inhabit Them Bibliography………………………………………………………………….…...……......314 7 Introduction Concepts of Landscape and the Role of the Bestiary in the Work of China Miéville My first experience of China Miéville’s work was Perdido Street Station (2000) which I read almost a decade after its publication. As a lifelong fan of fantasy fiction, Miéville’s novel was a paradigm shift in my interpretation of what a fantasy novel could be. I was used to the secondary world-building of fantasy fiction but what Miéville was offering with Bas-Lag was something different. Quasi-medieval cities and magic are replaced with steam-powered urban landscapes and hard sciences. The quest narrative is superseded by an exploration of social ideas. Perdido Street Station clearly demonstrates the evaporation of genre borders, combining elements of fantasy, science fiction, horror and the literary Weird. Miéville himself has commented that he finds the ‘bleeding of genre edges completely compelling’ (Gordon and Miéville, 2003). All of this is also done with a panache and love for creating imaginative monsters. The Slake Moths and the Remade are some of the greatest examples of teratology in the past few decades - repulsive, terrifying and fascinating. His second novel, Perdido Street Station not only established Miéville as a writer to watch, it also established the core principles and concepts that Miéville continues to explore. Even though his novels are all distinctly different there are three key concepts which Miéville revisits: genre fictions, urban environments and socio- political commentary. Each of these concepts can be interpreted as “landscapes” which Miéville inhabits as a writer. 0.1 Concepts of Landscape It is important to first present a definition of the term landscape in the context of this thesis. Dictionary definitions obviously refer to a terrain, a set of visible and distinctive features, a stretch of land. It also refers to the landscape formatting of images (as 8 opposed to portrait), a specific manner of presenting information, images or words. Landscape also has connotations with art, referring to the methodology of capturing painted interpretations of natural scenery. The term in this context emerged around the turn of the sixteenth century and is now an established and common interpretation of the word. However, there is a close association between landscape and literature too, particularly in poetry, where a focus on language and word-use produces similar intensity of expression as landscape painting. There are several strands of landscape poetry - ranging from pastoral poetry depicting an idealised countryside, to the close examination of geography in topographical poetry, to the more recognisable poets of the Romanticism period, especially the work of William Wordsworth. Gothic literature relies heavily on landscape to produce a sensation of sublime awe and wonder. More recently, the explosion creative non-fiction exploring different aspects of landscape demonstrates that this continues to be an important inspiration for the written word too. The etymology of the word landscape reveals interesting features which suggest another, more conceptual, meaning. The word land is German in its origin and refers simply to “something in which people belong”. However, the suffix -scape is interesting in its origin, being similar in meaning to the suffix -ship, a development of the Old English word scapan or scieppan, meaning to shape. This, of course, is accurate in our modern interpretation of the word landscape as referring to physical geographical space, inhabited by people, that has been shaped in some way, either through natural processes or human activity. As a verb, landscaping, or to landscape, also suggests the process of shaping, to make something more attractive or efficient through the deliberate alteration of an existing design.1 In the early twentieth century the geographer Otto Schlüter posited the concept of “cultural landscapes” (Kulturlandschaft) – a landscape created by human cultural 1 Etymological history of the word landscape taken from the Online Etymological Dictionary www.etymonline.com. 9 activity.2 Schlüter’s concept was further developed by the human geographer Carl O. Sauer, who expressed in his 1931 essay “Cultural Geography” that ‘the latest agent to modify the earth’s surface is man. Man must be regarded directly as a geomorphologic agent’ and that cultural geography is ‘concerned with those works of man that are inscribed into the earth’s surface and give to it characteristic expression’ (Sauer, 2009: 129-130). It becomes clear that as well as being a result of natural processes, landscape is also intrinsically linked and shaped by human behaviour. This interpretation of -scape, meaning to shape, also suggests that the word can refer to the features of a specific sphere of activity and how the interactions of people with that sphere of activity can drastically affect it. This can be seen through association with another word – political. The phrase “political landscape” is commonly used in the media to express the shaping of society by political activity, for example in the phrase: “This event has changed the political landscape of the country”. Here, the shaping aspect of the word remains prominent, with the influence of human agency and activity still present. However, this is not a geographical landscape but something more conceptual, rather
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