china mieville essay

The Non-Human World of China Miéville

Sep 7, 2008

A lthough I do not particularly admire the criticism of Harold Bloom, his Freudian theory that ambitious authors want to “kill” their strong literary predecessors is getting a lot of empirical support these days from British fantasy writers, first from Phillip Pullman, who wrote his trilogy His Dark Materials as an atheist antidote to C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia , and now from China Miéville, who describes his looming father figure, J.R.R. Tolkien, as “a wen on the arse of fantasy literature.” In style and substance, this almost tells as much about Miéville’s writing as anything I will say in this review, but one might as well look at the rest of the quotation:

His [Tolkien’s] oeuvre is massive and contagious—you can’t ignore it, so don’t even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there’s a lot to dislike—his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien’s clichés—elves ’n’ dwarfs ’n’ magic rings—have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was “consolation,” thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader.

I am not a fan. I dislike Miéville’s work. I don’t like the way he writes sentences, paragraphs, or collections of paragraphs. His first book, King Rat , was a badly written graphic novel without pictures. In his second book, Perdido , the writing improved dramatically, but not enough. His plots are thin and unoriginal, but Perdido and Scar run close to 600 pages each, which means they are stuffed with filler, usually of the atmospheric variety. His characters have no depth and neither does his fictional world, Bas-Lag, which he unreels like a vast expanse of post-modern wall paper. Over the length of his novels, certain verbal ticks become very annoying: the ubiquitous one-sentence paragraph (used, apparently, to ramp up the rhetoric by emphasizing sentences too tired to make an impression at the end of a paragraph), and repetition of words like “surreal” (in case you didn’t get the dream-like quality from the rest of the description) or the comic-bookish “puissant,” with which he truly falls in love in Scar . (I am reminded of the word “invulnerable,” which was drilled into my generation by Superman comics.) I have no idea whether Miéville is coming up with interesting ideas about quantum mechanics, urban life, or social engineering, as some blogs would indicate. He just can’t write compelling fiction.

Let’s start with setting, or more appropriately for fantasy, world-building. This is where Miéville gets his highest marks from his fans. In Miéville’s first book, King Rat , two tendencies occur that continue into his Bas-Lag series: fascination with part-human, part-animal characters and sewage. King Rat , which takes place mainly in the sewers of London, features two rat people, a birdman, and a spider man. Perdido , the first Bas-Lag book, gives us bug-people, cactus-people, more bird-people, a species something like the flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz , and the Remade, people who are cobbled together with other animal parts or machine parts in punishment for various crimes. Bringing in the Remade allows Miéville to indulge his penchant without creating entire species; thus in Scar we get a one of a kind squid/amphibian/man by the name of Tanner Sack and a steam locomotive woman named Angevine, along with mosquito-people, crayfish-people, scab-people, and more traditional vampires and ghouls. Born in 1972, Miéville has a long career ahead of him, and there is no reason to believe he won’t get half the London Zoo into his oeuvre before he’s finished. There is nothing wrong with lots of aliens, but one would hope that the steady parade would have a point, that it would tell us something important, perhaps, about being human. It doesn’t.

Getting back to the sewage. Stephen King once said that as a horror writer he wasn’t proud. If he couldn’t make his reader’s skin crawl, he’d go for the gross-out. Fair enough—I’ve enjoyed some Stephen King. But the pervasive mise-en-scène in King Rat and Perdido make the pages of King or scenes from, say, Alien , look like a sterile operating theater. Take the following as an example from Perdido , think of it as a thin to thick film that covers the entire novel, and you’ll have the atmosphere of Miéville’s first two books:

Five feet below them, the trench was filled with a noisome gelatinous soup of [s**t] and pollutants and acid rain. The surface was broken with bubbles of fell gas and bloated animal corpses. Here and there bobbed rusting tins and knots of fleshy tissue like tumours or aborted foetuses. The liquid undulated rather than rippled, contained by a thick surface tension so oily and strong that it would not break . . .

This “crapuscular” thread in Miéville’s writing is continuous, and he cooks along when he is writing about this subject. While looking at the ugliness of the world is part of the writer’s duty, I have a sense that the sheer repetitious volume of it in Miéville’s books is a fetish. Beauty, while not excluded as an idea, is never evoked by fine writing and is seldom mentioned. Bas-Lag’s relentless orientation toward ugliness makes it a cliché, as if the ugly were always more real, more sophisticated, than the beautiful. Miéville’s world is utterly thin. Probably no one will ever duplicate the depth of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, but later writers like Ursula LeGuin and Robert Holdstock have created very deep and convincing worlds. The back-story of Bas-Lag is perfunctory. For example, in Scar , Tanner Sack is telling a story to his young friend Shekel. Compare this to the scene in Lord of the Rings when Frodo hears Aragorn singing about Beren and Luthien, which we know is “real” and important, even though we only get a snatch of it:

All right then.” [Tanner Sack continued] “So Darioch calls Crawfoot to him and shows him the Batskins on their way, and he says to him, ‘This is your [f**k]-up, Crawfoot. You took their stuff. And it happens that Salter’s away at the edge of the world, so you’re going to have to do the fighting.’ And Crawfoot’s bitching and moaning and giving it all this . . .

The reader is blessedly saved from more of this baloney when Tanner Sack’s story is interrupted—and Miéville is blessedly saved from having to work too hard to create an illusion of historical depth. That there is no story of Crawfoot and the Batskins is painfully obvious. Miéville’s “creativity” does not go deeper than this. It is as if he has a bottomless and disorganized desk drawer out of which he dumps new material into Bas-Lag, but little of it is developed or connected. How do all of these semi-human species come to exist in the same world? How is it that a culture that knows about petroleum is limited to steam engines? Why has no political structure larger than the city-state ever developed? A world with genuine historical depth, rather than off-the-cuff references to by-gone ages, would suggest answers to these questions. Tolkien’s masterpiece suggested answers because Tolkien had the answers—Bas-Lag fails because it hasn’t been imagined. All its depth is on the surface.

Plot? Rebels versus Authoritarians, although you can’t care for the rebels much. Arguably the most admirable character in all the novels is renegade scientist Isaac Grimnebulin, who at the end of Perdido uses his utilitarian calculus to justify killing an innocent old man, using him as bait to lure in monsters that must be destroyed to save his city, New Crobuzon. (Well, the guy was old and not much use anyway.) Perdido is a “bug-hunt,” Aliens in a new locale. It throws in that sci-fi cliché, the computer that becomes sentient and dangerous. (This one, in a feat of Darwinian “punctuated equilibrium,” assembles itself from the contents of a junkyard—well, given enough time, anything can happen, right?) Scar presents pirate/mad scientist/totalitarians versus the even worse New Crobuzon totalitarians. The Iron Council presents socialist train-riding totalitarian rebels against moreNew Crobuzon totalitarians.

Characters? There are none, only markers that move on the page. One of the great pleasures of reading is encountering people we care about. They don’t have to be good people. James M. Cain produced some of worst monsters in American fiction, but you can’t fail to care about the homicidal pairs of The Postman Always Rings Twice or Double Indemnity because we understand their longings and fears and regrets. The alchemy that makes this happen is not the result of conveying mere information about characters, but of using words to evoke an emotional response in readers that is synchronized with what the characters feel. Empathy is the fuel of great writing. Most novels, even bad ones, have some shred of this effect. I do not see this in Miéville. Never once am I led to care about the fate of one of his people. I am told in Perdido Street Station that Isaac loves his “xenian” mate Lin; I am even given some details in corroboration. But I’m never led to feel it—I’m told to take it as a premise.

The implied author? People love to read because they get interested in that shadowy character behind the narration, the mind telling the story. Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are as much about Samuel Clemens’s voice as they are about the title characters. This is even true of modernist novels in which the storyteller works hard to remain anonymous—we get to know a version of Virginia Woolf when we read To the Lighthouse , and of Ernest Hemingway when we read even his most telegraphic short stories. Miéville’s authorial presence is as thin and machine-like as any character in his books.

This brings us back to Tolkien, who is far more complex than Miéville on any level, and at the same time, much clearer. The fundamental difference between these writers is moral, as Miéville clearly understands when he attacks Tolkien’s “absolute morality,” which “blurs moral and political complexity.” I believe it is more accurate to say that Miéville’s confusion about morality leads not to complexity but to triviality and muddle. Tolkien does believe in an absolute morality but his analysis of how people go wrong is anything but simplistic. We believe in Frodo and Sam and Galadriel, largely, because we believe in their shortcomings and see their potential for tragedy. We also have a moral scale, based on ultimate ends, on which their actions can be understood and evaluated. In contrast, it is hard to say that Miéville believes in much of anything, except frenetic and pointless creation, and so his characters remain psychological homunculi .

Unlike Tolkien, Miéville has no sense that human beings have an ultimate purpose, and, therefore, he cannot create characters who have an interesting trajectory. We just don’t care about them. They don’t care much about themselves. They fill up their time in “thaumaturgic” or scientific inquiry, or spewing out art, and so what? Like Beckett’s Didi and Gogo, they are engaged in pastimes that have no meaning. The phenomenon of Miéville is finally more interesting than his writing. Do so many people read him with pleasure, not despite the lack of humanity in his books, but because of it? It’s a little like asking how so much tuneless elevator music has gotten into church hymnals. I’d like to know the answer to both questions.

Craig Bernthal is a professor of English at California State University, Fresno.

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The City & the City

China miéville, everything you need for every book you read..

Inspector Tyador Borlú arrives at the scene of a murder. A constable named Lizybet Corwi is already there, looking at the body of the dead woman. The pathologist, Stepen Shukman , determines that the woman died from puncture wounds to her chest, although there are also significant gashes across her face. Another detective, Bardo Naustin , says the dead woman was probably a sex worker. However, after Borlú and Corwi go around the area asking local sex workers if they knew the woman, none of them does. Borlú goes to Shukman’s lab, where Shukman informs him that there are no signs of sexual intercourse or self-defense, and that it seems as if the killer approached the woman from behind.

On Borlú’s request, posters go up around the city of Besźel asking for information about the dead woman. He gets a call from a colleague, Yaszek , informing him that the policzai (the police) have found the van that was used to transport the dead woman’s body. The van is owned by Mikyael Khurusch , a man with a criminal record for theft and soliciting prostitution. Borlú and Corwi interrogate Khurusch, who claims his van went missing. They learn that he has an alibi for the night of the murder.

On the Monday after the body is found, Borlú receives a personal call from a man speaking strangely archaic, accented Besź . Nervously, the man says the dead woman is named Marya , and if she is dead, he and his friends are also in danger. He says that she lived in the other city, Ul Qoma. Ul Qoma and Besźel exist in the same physical, geographic space, but they operate completely separately from one another. The man tells Borlú that he knew Marya from the underground political scene. Despite the fact that the man is calling from Ul Qoma, he admits that he saw Borlú’s poster, then immediately hangs up. Simply knowing this information makes Borlú guilty of breach , the crime of engaging with the opposite city from the one you are currently in. In Besźel and Ul Qoma, breach is “far worse than illegal.”

Without wanting to implicate Corwi in this breach, Borlú suggests to her that they look into the local unificationists —dissidents who believe that the two cities should merge into one. Borlú explains that no one knows whether the two cities began as one that divided, or whether they were founded separately. Corwi and Borlú go to a unificationist headquarters, where they meet a man called Pall Drodin . Drodin says he knew the dead woman by the (obviously fake) name of Byela Mar. He says that she used to come to the headquarters to use the library, and that she was obsessed with Orciny, the mythical third city that exists between the other two.

After receiving information faxed over from Ul Qoma, Borlú and Corwi learn that the dead woman’s real name was Mahalia Geary, and that she was a 24-year-old American PhD student in the archeology department of Prince of Wales University, a Canadian University with a campus in Ul Qoma. Borlú presents this information to the Oversight Committee, a governing body containing a mix of Besź and Ul Qoman politicians that meets in Copula Hall . Years ago, at a conference about recently discovered ancient artifacts found at an Ul Qoman dig called Bol Ye’an, Mahalia caused outrage by giving a presentation on Orciny. Borlú argues that—considering Mahalia lived in Ul Qoma and her body was discovered in Besźel—her murder must have involved breach and should be turned over to Breach, the authority charged with policing breaches. However, one member of the committee argues that Breach is an “alien power” that should only be invoked in rare circumstances. The committee reluctantly agrees to turn the case over to Breach nonetheless.

Mahalia’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Geary , arrive in Besźel to view their daughter’s body. Mr. Geary becomes frustrated when Borlú reminds him of the restrictions involved in traveling to Ul Qoma and tells him that he will not be able to know the outcome of Breach’s investigation into the case, because they work in an extremely opaque manner. After the Gearys leave, Borlú suggests to Corwi that they keep working on the case while they wait for Breach to take over.

Borlú calls Mahalia’s PhD supervisor, Professor Nancy , who scoffs at the idea that Mahalia would be studying Orciny within an archeology department. Nancy assures him that Mahalia left her interest in Orciny behind, and that her thesis focuses on the artifacts found at Bol Ye’an, which are highly technologically advanced for their era and are rumored to have mysterious, even magical properties. Nancy says that before Mahalia lost interest in Orciny, she was interested in the work of David Bowden , an adjunct professor at Prince of Wales who wrote a book called Between the City and the City , which argues for the existence of Orciny. Borlú looks up the book online and encounters conspiracy theory websites about the existence of Orciny. He learns that Mr. Geary breached, and that he and Mrs. Geary are immediately being deported.

Mr. Geary had been carrying a piece of paper with the address of the headquarters of the True Citizens, a Besź nationalist organization. Borlú and Corwi go there, but soon after they begin questioning the people, someone calls the True Citizens’ lawyer, Harkad Gosz , who forces them to leave. The next morning, Commissar Gadlem tells Borlú that the Oversight Committee has, surprisingly, decided not to forward the case to Breach after all. Borlú is therefore still working on it, and will soon be sent over to continue the investigation in Ul Qoma.

Borlú is driven to Copula Hall, where he passes the official border and enters Ul Qoma. An Ul Qoman detective named Qussim Dhatt is waiting to greet him. As they drive away together, Dhatt warns Borlú that his role in Ul Qoma is as a “consultant” and “guest.” When Borlú asks if he can explore the city on his own, Dhatt replies that it would be best if he didn’t. The militsya (the Ul Qoman police) get a call saying that Mahalia’s best friend, another PhD student named Yolanda Rodriguez , is missing. That night, Borlú walks to Bol Ye’an and is intercepted by two members of the militsya, who politely escort him back to his hotel.

The next morning, Borlú and Dhatt go to Bol Ye’an together. They speak to Professor Nancy, David Bowden, and several of Mahalia’s fellow students. One of the security guards, a young man named Aikam Tsueh , expresses deep concern about the case. After Borlú tells Dhatt about the anonymous phone call, which he believes came from a unificationist, they go to a unificationist headquarters and interrogate the people there, but this leads nowhere conclusive. Afterward, Borlú and Dhatt go to Bowden’s apartment, where Bowden dismisses his own book, Between the City and the City , as the work of a “stoned young man.” However, he also emphasizes that most of the research in the book is still cited and considered legitimate.

The same man who originally called with the anonymous tip calls Borlú again, introducing himself as Jaris , one of the people at the unificationist headquarters. He thanks Borlú for not turning him in and explains that Mahalia believed she was helping Orciny, and told him shortly before her death that “everyone who knows the truth about Orciny is in danger.” Borlú gets a call from Dhatt saying that someone has sent a bomb to Bol Ye’an.

Showing up at the dig, Borlú learns that the bomb was addressed to Bowden and is the kind designed to target just one specific person. There is a message on it in Illitan (the language of Ul Qoma), a line from a patriotic Ul Qoman song. Borlú tells Dhatt about the phone call from Jaris, and Dhatt insists that they put aside their differences and commit to working together. This is made difficult when Dhatt’s colleagues from the militsya harass Borlú for being Besź. The next day, Borlú tracks down Yolanda, who is hiding in a derelict apartment on the outskirts of the city. Her boyfriend, Aikam, goes to visit her, indirectly leading Borlú to her. Yolanda explains that before Mahalia’s death, Orciny had been contacting Mahalia, and now Yolanda is terrified that Orciny is going to kill her as well. Borlú suggests she commit breach to protect herself, but Yolanda thinks that Orciny and Breach might be the same thing. Borlú promises that he will get Yolanda to safety via Besźel.

Bowden is missing, but Borlú manages to get in contact with him via phone. Along with Dhatt and Corwi, he makes a plan to secretly smuggle both Bowden and Yolanda into Besźel by pretending that they are militsya. However, just as they are about to pass through Copula Hall, Yolanda and Dhatt are shot. Dhatt is just injured, but Yolanda dies.

Borlú runs after the shooter and shoots him, thereby committing breach (because the shooter is in Besźel). Breach surround Borlú, and he is enveloped in darkness.

Borlú wakes up inside a kind of prison cell, which he is told is in “the Breach.” There are three people in there (Breach avatars) who do not introduce themselves by name, only as Breach. They tell him that he committed a particularly violent breach, and that it is up to them how long he stays there. They need to figure out the details of the case in order to make a decision.

Borlú walks through the cities along with another Breach avatar, who goes by Ashil . None of the citizens can properly see them. Ashil explains that they are not in one city or the other, but both. They go to the Ul Qoma University library, where they find Mahalia’s copy of Between the City and the City . They then go back to Bol Ye’an, where they figure out that Mahalia was smuggling some of the artifacts to (what she thought was) Orciny. Borlú then realizes that Mahalia wasn’t killed because she believed in Orciny, but rather because she eventually stopped believing in it, which jeopardized the smuggling operation.

Back at the Breach headquarters, Borlú realizes that a corporation called Sear and Core was behind the operation to smuggle the artifacts; they were using Mahalia in order to get the artifacts out of Bol Ye’an in order to sell them in Besźel for a profit. Orciny, it becomes clear, does not actually exist. Just as Ashil agrees to use the forces of Breach to apprehend Sear and Core, he gets news that unificationists have engineered a crash between two busloads of refugees. It is a massive breach event, and the wholes of both cities are being placed on lockdown.

Borlú and Ashil go to the Sear and Core building, where they find a representative from the company, Ian Croft , alongside a Besź social democrat politician named Mikhel Buric and two Besź nationalists. Buric admits to arranging the whole smuggling scheme for Sear and Core, boasting that he was enriching Besźel at Ul Qoma’s expense. A shootout takes place; Buric is killed and Ashil injured. Croft escapes, thereby evading punishment for his role in the scheme. After making sure Ashil is taken care of, Borlú tracks down Bowden with the help of Corwi and Dhatt, although his ability to communicate with them is limited by the fact that he is in Breach. In the confrontation that ensues, Borlú accuses Bowden of using and then killing Mahalia out of his own egoism. Bowden was the one who decided to use her as part of the Sear and Core smuggling operation, and he chose Mahalia because he wanted her to believe in Orciny in order to legitimize his scholarly work; he was furious when she realized the truth. Up until this point, Bowden has been moving in a perfectly neutral manner, such that no one can tell whether he is in Besźel or Ul Qoma. However, Borlú forces Bowden to breach, and they are both taken by Breach.

At the end of the novel, Borlú remains in Breach, unsure of how long he will be there or if he will ever get out. He now lives “in both the city and the city.”

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China Miéville by Rob O'Connor LAST MODIFIED: 28 July 2021 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199846719-0174

China Miéville is a British author and a significant writer of Fantastika fiction in the 21st century, his work showcasing a desire to write across a variety of different forms and genres. Miéville is associated with the writing of the New Weird movement, although he does not describe his work in this manner anymore. Born on 6 September 1972 in Norwich, UK, Miéville was brought up and has lived in London for much of his life. Miéville taught English in Egypt for a year before attending university. Here Miéville developed an interest in politics, especially Marxism and socialism, which continues to influence his academic life and creative work. After studying social anthropology at Cambridge, Miéville gained a master’s in 1995 and a PhD in international relations from the London School for Economics in 2001. Miéville found his own political viewpoint being drawn firmly toward Marxism due to feeling dissatisfied with the postmodern theories he was exposed to during his studies. Miéville’s first novel, King Rat , was published in 1998, but it was the following Bas-Lag trilogy ( Perdido Street Station, The Scar , and Iron Council ) that cemented his reputation as a writer. Miéville wrote Perdido Street Station alongside his PhD studies. His work has won many awards, including the Hugo Award for The City & The City , the Arthur C. Clarke Award an unprecedented three times, the British Fantasy Award twice, and Locus Awards four times across different categories. Miéville has been the guest of honor at multiple conventions and conferences, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Fiction in 2018, and has held positions in both politics and creative writing in UK and US higher education institutions. Socialist politics is a constant theme throughout Miéville’s biography and creative work. Miéville was previously a member of the Socialist Workers Party in the United Kingdom, leaving the party in 2013 in disgust at the leadership’s attempted suppression and refusal to deal with rape allegations against a party member. He stood for election as a candidate for the Socialist Alliance in the 2001 general election for the constituency of Regent’s Park and Kensington North. Alive with creative world-building and experimental representations of monstrous bodies, Miéville’s work challenges the borders between categorization and presents genres as literary spaces that can be both politically engaging and socially relevant.

Even though Miéville has a strong reputation among genre communities, not many full-length volumes of Miéville-focused criticism are available. This section highlights some introductions to Miéville’s fiction that readers and scholars will find as a useful overview of Miéville’s themes, politics, and approaches. Edwards and Venezia 2015 is a useful volume in terms of scope, with several scholars providing input on a variety of themes within Miéville’s work. Freedman 2015 also looks at a scope of subjects and, more significantly, each chapter focuses on a separate book from Miéville’s oeuvre, making it a very accessible format. Clute 2020 provides a useful starting point for consideration of Miéville’s biography and his contribution to genre fictions. VanderMeer and VanderMeer 2008 is a significant evaluation of the New Weird movement, so strongly associated with Miéville. Vint 2009 was the first Miéville-centric scholarly collection and remains an excellent evaluation of his earlier work. A second special issue is surely warranted. The Rejectamentalist Manifesto blog provides valuable insight into Miéville’s thought processes.

Clute, John. “ China Miéville .” In The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction . Edited by John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls, and Graham Sleight. n. p.: Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 2020.

Clute’s entry on China Miéville is a useful assessment of his work to date, with extensive links to subjects, themes, and other areas of interest that appear within Miéville’s work. Clute provides brief but succinct examination of Miéville’s novels and presents a useful, foundational overview from which to expand.

Cramer, Kathryn. The New Weird Archives .

An archive of an important discussion from April 2003 regarding the definitions of the New Weird movement, started by the author M. John Harrison on his The Third Alternative message board. Many authors and critics joined the conversation, discussing tropes, motifs, and literary style of the New Weird. Miéville gets involved in the debate and many other contributors cite Miéville’s work as a prototype for the movement.

Edwards, Caroline, and Tony Venezia, eds. China Miéville: Critical Essays . Canterbury, UK: Gylphi Limited, 2015.

A book-length collection of essays focusing on Miéville’s work and its central themes. Edwards and Venezia highlight Miéville’s taxonomic playfulness with an “UnIntroduction” that effectively summarizes the three key subjects of Miéville’s work: exploration of genre fluidity through application of the Weird, psychogeographical exploration of the urban, and sociopolitical commentary regarding revolution and utopia. A detailed, critical analysis of Miéville’s oeuvre.

Freedman, Carl. Art and Idea in the Novels of China Miéville . Canterbury, UK: Gylphi Limited, 2015.

The first one-author, full-length exploration of Miéville’s work, Freedman’s book establishes Miéville as not only one of the most relevant writers in modern fiction but also the important relationship in his work between fantastic literature and contemporary politics. In each chapter, Freedman focuses on one specific Miéville novel and uses it to critically engage with various themes such as Marxism, imperialism, revolution, and language.

Miéville, China. The Rejectamentalist Manifesto .

The closest thing to a dedicated author website, The Rejectamentalist Manifesto is a blog where Miéville deposits thoughts and extracts from discarded pieces or work in progress. Sporadic posting means that it is not an accurate reflection of Miéville’s developing portfolio. However, the website does have some fascinating fragments to consider and was also where London’s Overthrow and some of his stories from Three Moments of an Explosion were first made available.

VanderMeer, Ann, and Jeff VanderMeer, eds. The New Weird . San Francisco: Tachyon, 2008.

The canonical anthology of the New Weird movement, Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s book uses the 2003 M. John Harrison conversation on the New Weird as a starting point and presents influences, current examples, and academic essays about the movement. The anthology contains a reprinting of Miéville’s short story “Jack” (from Looking for Jake and Other Stories ), and Perdido Street Station is highlighted as the flashpoint of the movement’s growing popularity.

Vint, Sherryl, ed. Special Issue: China Miéville . Extrapolation 50.2 (Summer 2009).

An insightful and relevant analysis of Miéville’s work can be found in this special issue of the science fiction journal Extrapolation . Edited by Sherryl Vint, the articles in this special issue cover all the pertinent themes of Miéville’s work to date, such as capitalism, fantasy world building, urbanism, hauntology, socialism, and revolution.

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China Miéville: The Limits of Utopia

Utopias are necessary. But not only are they insufficient: they can be part of  the system, the bad totality that organises us, warms the skies, and condemns millions to peonage on garbage scree.

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China Miéville is an English science fiction author, political activist and Marxist academic. His most recent book, October (Verso 2017), is a masterful ground-level account of the Russian Revolution of 1917. This essay, based on his keynote presentation at an Earth Day Conference in Madison, Wisconsin in 2014, is republished with permission, from Salvage , a journal of revolutionary arts and letters.

by China Miéville

Dystopias infect official reports.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) demands a shift in our emissions by a third to avoid utter disaster. KPMG, in the leaden chattiness of corporate powerpoint-ese, sees the same horizon. NASA part-funds a report warning that systemic civilizational collapse “is difficult to avoid.”

We may quibble with the models, but not that the end of everything is right out there, for everyone to discuss.

The stench and blare of poisoned cities, lugubrious underground bunkers, ash landscapes… Worseness is the bad conscience of betterness, dystopias rebukes integral to the utopian tradition. We hanker and warn, our best dreams and our worst standing together against our waking.

Fuck this up, and it’s a desiccated, flooded, cold, hot, dead Earth. Get it right? There are lifetimes-worth of pre-dreams of New Edens, from le Guin and Piercy and innumerable others, going right back, visions of what, nearly two millennia ago, the Church Father Lactantius, in  The Divine Institutes , called the “Renewed World.”

“[T]he earth will open its fruitfulness, and bring forth the most abundant fruits of its own accord; the rocky mountains shall drop with honey; streams of wine shall run down, and rivers flow with milk; in short, the world itself shall rejoice, and all nature exult, being rescued and set free from the dominion of evil and impiety, and guilt and error.”

And it’s never only the world that’s in question: for Lactantius, as for all the best utopias, it’s humanity too. The world will rejoice because we at last will be capable of inhabiting it, free from the evil and impiety and guilt and error with which we’ve excoriated it. The relationship between humanity and what we’d now call the environment will be healed.

But so rich a lineage has hardly stopped countless environmentalisms from failing, not merely to change the world, but to change the agenda about changing the world.

We who want another, better Earth are understandably proud to keep alternatives alive in this, an epoch that punishes thoughts of change. We need utopias. That’s almost a given in activism. If an alternative to this world were inconceivable, how could we change it?

But utopia has its limits: utopia can be toxic.

What price hopelessness, indeed? But what price hope?

In 1985 the city government announced that it would locate a trash incinerator in South Central Los Angeles, a year after California Waste Management paid half a million tax-payers’ dollars to the consultancy firm Cerrell Associates for advice on locating such controversial toxic facilities. The Cerrell Report is a how-to, a checklist outlining the qualities of the “‘least resistant’ personality profile.” Target the less educated, it advises. The elderly. “Middle and higher-socioeconomic strata neighborhoods,” it says, “should not fall at least within the one-mile and five-mile radii of the proposed site.”

Target the poor.

That this is the strategy is unsurprising: that they admit it raises eyebrows. “You know,” one wants to whisper, “that we can hear you?”

In fact the local community did resist, and successfully. But what are sometimes called the Big Ten green groups – The Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, the National Resources Defense Council, the Wilderness Society, and others – refused the request to join the campaign. Because, they said, it was not an environmental, but a “community health” issue.

The fallacies of Big Green. Start with heuristics like  rural  versus  urban ,  nature  versus  the social , and in the face of oppressive power you easily become complicit, or worse, in environmental injustice, in racism. Such simplistic urbophobic utopianism can unite the most nostalgic conservative, seeking solace in a national park with the most extropian post-hippy touting an eco-start-up.

For Lactantius, it was God who would heal a broken nature. This is a more secular age – sort of. But not everyone leaves such messianism aside: some incorporate it into a new, and newly vacuous, totality.

In 1968, Stewart Brand opened the first  Whole Earth Catalogue  with an image of the Blue Planet, Spaceship Earth, a survival pod in which we mutually cuddle. Beside it the text read, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”

Here, says the image, is a beautiful Gaian totality. Here, say the words, is the ecological subject: “We.” Which obviously leaves unanswered, in the famous punchline to the blistering, uneasy joke, Tonto’s question to the Lone Ranger: “Who is ‘we’?”

Faced with the scale of what’s coming, there’s a common and baleful propriety, a self-shackling green politeness. “Anything,” the argument goes, “is better than nothing.” Hence solutions to tempt business, and the pleading for ecologically-inflected economic rationality. Capitalism, we are told by Jonathan Porritt, an eminent British environmentalist, is the only game in town.

And businesses do adapt, according to their priorities. Whatever the barking of their pet deniers, the oil companies all have Climate Change Divisions – less to fight that change than to plan for profit during it. Companies extend into newly monetized territories. Thus the brief biofuels boom, and that supposed solution to the planet’s problems drives rapid deforestation and food riots, before the industry and market tanks. The invisible hand is supposed to clean up its own mess, with Emissions Trading Schemes and offsetting. Opportunities and incentives for shady deals and inflated baseline estimates increase, as, relentlessly, do the emissions. EU carbon bonds remain junk. New financial instruments proliferate: weather derivatives that make climate chaos itself profitable. What are called ‘catastrophe bonds’ change hands in vast quantities, because one of the minor casualties of capitalism is shame.

Citizens fret about their own refuse, which we should, absolutely, minimise. But in the UK only ten percent of waste is down to households. Recall that the very concept of litter was an invention of the American packaging industry, in 1953, in response to a local ban on disposable bottles. The caul of atomized and privatised guilt under which we’re encouraged to labour is a quite deliberate act of misdirection.

At a grander scale, the most conciliatory green organizations obfuscate the nexus of ecological degradation, capitalism and imperialism in which they’re caught up. In 2013 the US Environmental Protection Agency presented its National Climate Leadership Award, for “tackling the challenge of climate change with practical, common-sense, and cost-saving solutions,” to Raytheon.

It isn’t clear whether Raytheon’s drones will be embossed with the award’s symbol, so their commitment to sustainability can flash like a proud goldfish fin as they rain death on Afghan villages.

In the service of profit, even husbanding trees supposedly to counteract emissions can be violence. Far worse than merely a failure, UN-backed emission-reduction forest offsetting schemes – known as REDD – legitimate monocultures and seize land, in the name of the planet, all so corporations can continue to pollute. In Uganda, 22,000 farmers are evicted for the UN-Accredited New Forests Company plans. In Kenya, Ogiek people are threatened with violent expulsion from the Mau Forest, in a project blessed by the UN. And in case we need an unsubtle metaphor, the Guaraquecaba Climate Action Project in Brazil, bankrolled by Chevron, General Motors and American Electric Power, locks the Guarani people away from their own forest, and to do so it employs armed guards called ‘Forca Verde’ –  Green Force .

This is environmentalism as dispossession, what the Indigenous Environmental Network calls Carbon Colonialism.

And stocks of heavy industry go up. The recent IPCC report left financial markets unmoved: the value such markets continue to grant oil, coal and gas reserves ignores the international targets according to which the bulk of such reserves not only are still in the earth, but must remain so. This carbon bubble declaims that the choice is climate catastrophe or another financial one.

Or, of course, both.

Forget any spurious  human  totality: there is a very real, dangerous, other modern totality in commanding place, one with which too much environmentalism has failed to wrestle. As Jason Moore puts it, “Wall Street is a way of organizing Nature.”

The very term Anthropocene, which gives with one hand, insisting on human drivers of ecological shift, misleads with its implied “We.” After all, whether in the deforestation of what’s now Britain, the extinction of the megafauna in North America, or any of countless other examples,  Homo sapiens ,  anthropos , has always fed back into its – cene , the ecology of which it is constituent, changing the world. Nor was what altered to make these previously relatively local effects planetary and epochal, warranting a new geochronological term, the birth (as if, in too many accounts, by some miracle) of heavy industry, but a shift in the political economy by which it and we are organised, an accelerating cycle of profit and accumulation.

Which is why Moore, among others, insists that this epoch of potential catastrophe is not the Anthropocene, but the Capitalocene.

Utopias are necessary. But not only are they insufficient: they can, in some iterations, be part of the ideology of the system, the bad totality that organises us, warms the skies, and condemns millions to peonage on garbage scree.

The utopia of togetherness is a lie. Environmental justice means acknowledging that there is no whole earth, no “we,” without a “them.” That we are not all in this together.

Which means fighting the fact that fines for toxic spills in predominantly white areas are five times what they are in minority ones. It means not only providing livings for people who survive by sifting through rejectamenta in toxic dumps but squaring up against the imperialism of garbage that put them there, against trash neoliberalism by which poor countries compete to become repositories of filth.

And it means standing directly against military power and violence. Three times as many land-rights and environmental activists were murdered in 2012 than a decade before. Environmental justice means facing down Shell not only for turning Nigeria’s Ogoniland into a hallucinatory sump, a landscape of petrochemical Ragnarok, but for arming the Nigerian state for years, during and after the rule of Sani Abacha.

Arms trading, dictatorships and murder are environmental politics.

Those punching down rely not on the quiescence, but on the  weakness  of those against whom they fight. The Cerrell Report is clear: “All socioeconomic groupings tend to resent the nearby siting of major facilities, but the middle and upper-socioeconomic strata possess better resources to effectuate their opposition.”

The poor should be targeted, in other words, not because they will not fight, but because, being poor, they will not win. The struggle for environmental justice is the struggle to prove that wrong.

So we start with the non-totality of the “we.” From there not only can we see the task but we can return to our utopias, to better honor the best of them.

Those rivers of milk and wine can stop being surplus. There’s nothing foolish about such yearnings: they are glimmerings in eyes set on human freedom, a leap from necessity. Far from being merely outlandish, these are abruptly aspects of a grounded utopia incorporating political economy, a yearning on behalf of those who strive without power. In the medieval peasant utopia Cockaigne it rains cheese. Charles Fourier imagined the seas turned to lemonade. The Big Rock Candy Mountain. These are dreams of sustenance out of reach of the dreamers, of the reduction of labour, of a world that will let exhausted humanity rest.

We can dispense with the most banal critiques of utopia. That it is unconvincing as a blueprint, as if that is what it should ever be. That it is drab, boring, faceless and colourless and always the same. The smear that the visionary aspiration for better things always makes things worse. These canards serve stasis.

There are sharper criticisms to be made, for the sake of our utopias themselves and of the day-to-day interventions without which they risk being – and this, itself, is one of those criticisms – valves to release pressure.

Utopia, for one thing, has never been the preserve of those who cleave to liberation. Settlers and expropriators have for centuries asserted their good environmental sense against the laziness of feckless natives, in realizing the potential of land spuriously designated empty, of making so-called deserts so-called bloom. Ecotopia has justified settlement and empire since long before the UN’s REDD schemes. It has justified murder.

There is a vision of the world as a garden, under threat. Choked with toxic growth. Gardening as war. And the task being one of ‘ruthlessly eliminating the weeds that would deprive the better plants of nutrition, the air, light, sun.’

Here the better plants are Aryans. The weeds are Jews.

SS-Obergruppenfuhrer  and  Reichsminister  of Agriculture in the Third Reich, Walther Darré coagulated soil science, nostalgia, pagan kitsch, imperialism, agrarian mystique and race hate in a vision of green renewal and earth stewardship predicated on genocide. He was the most powerful theorist of  Blut und Boden , ‘Blood and Soil’, a Nazi ecotopia of organic farmlands and restocked Nordic forests, protected by the pure-blooded peasant-soldier.

The tree may not have grown as Darré hoped, but its roots didn’t die. A whole variety of fascist groups across the world still proclaim their fidelity to ecological renewal, green world, and agitate ostentatiously against climate change, pollution and despoliation, declaring against those poisons in the service of another, the logic of race.

Of course reactionary apologists for Big Pollute routinely slander ecological activists as fascists. That doesn’t mean those committed to such activism should not be ruthless in ferreting out any real overlaps: very much the opposite.

Aspects of eliminationist bad utopia can be found much more widely than in the self-conscious Far Right. Swathes of ecological thinking are caught up with a nebulous, sentimentalized spiritualist utopia, what the ecofeminist Chaia Heller calls ‘Eco-la-la.’ Crossbred with crude Malthusianism, in the combative variant called Deep Ecology, the tweeness of that vision can morph into brutality, according to which the problem is overpopulation, humanity itself. At its most cheerfully eccentric lies the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, advocating an end to breeding: at the most vicious are the pronouncements of David Foreman of Earth First!, faced with the Ethiopian famine of 1984: ‘[T]he worst thing we could do in Ethiopia is to give aid – the best thing would be to just let nature seek its own balance, to let the people there just starve’.

This is an ecological utopia of mass death. That we could also call an apocalypse.

Apocalypse and utopia: the end of everything, and the horizon of hope. Far from antipodes, these two have always been inextricable. Sometimes, as in Lactantius, the imagined relationship is chronological, even of cause and effect. The one, the apocalypse, the end-times rending of the veil, paves the way for the other, the time beyond, the new beginning.

Something has happened: now they are more intimately imbricated than ever. “Today,” the bleak and sinister philosopher Emile Cioran announces, “reconciled with the terrible, we are seeing a contamination of utopia by apocalypse … The two genres … which once seemed so dissimilar to us, interpenetrate, rub off on each other, to form a third.” Such reconciliation with the terrible, such interpenetration, is vivid in these Deep Ecological hankerings for a world slashed and burned of humans. The scourging has become the dream.

This is not quite a dystopia: it’s a third form – apocatopia, utopalypse – and it’s all around us. We’re surrounded by a culture of ruination, dreams of falling cities, a peopleless world where animals explore. We know the clichés. Vines reclaim Wall Street as if it belongs to them, rather than the other way round; trash vastness, dunes of garbage; the remains of some great just-recognizable bridge now broken to jut, a portentous diving board, into the void. Etcetera.

It’s as if we still hanker to see something better and beyond the rubble, but lack the strength. Or as if there’s a concerted effort to assert the ‘We’ again, though negatively – “We” are the problem, and thus this We-lessness a sublime solution. The melancholy is disingenuous. There’s enthusiasm, a disavowed investment in these supposed warnings, these catastrophes. The apocalypse-mongers fool no one. Since long before Shelley imagined the day when “Westminster Abbey shall stand, shapeless and nameless ruins, in the midst of an unpeopled marsh,” these have been scenes of beauty.

We’ve all scrolled slack-mouthed through images of the Chernobyl zone, of Japan’s deserted Gunkanjima island, of the ruins of Detroit, through clickbait lists of Top Ten Most Awesomely Creepy Abandoned Places. This shouldn’t occasion guilt. Our horror at the tragedies and crimes behind some such images is real: it coexists with, rather than effaces, our gasp of awe. We don’t choose what catches our breath. Nor do the images that enthrall us read off reductively to particular politics. But certainly the amoral beauty of our apocatopias can dovetail with something brutal and malefic, an eliminationist disgust.

We can’t not read such camply symptomatic cultural matter diagnostically. What else can we do with the deluge of films of deluge, the piling up, like debris under Benjamin’s angel of history, of texts about the piling up of debris?

Symptoms morph with the world. One swallow, of however high a budget, does not a summer make, but one doesn’t have to be a Žižek to diagnose a cultural shift when, in Guillermo Del Toro’s recent  Pacific Rim , Idris Elba bellows, “Today we are cancelling the apocalypse.” Perhaps we’ve had our fill of the end, and with this line we usher in a different kind of aftermath – the apocalypse that fails. We’re back, with muscular new hope.

A similar shift is visible in the rise of geoengineering, ideas once pulp fiction and the ruminations of eccentrics. Now, planet-scale plans to spray acid into the stratosphere to become mirrored molecules to reflect radiation, to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere, to bring up benthic waters to cool the oceans, are written up by Nobel laureates, discussed in the  New Yorker  and the  MIT Technology Review . A new hope, a new can-do, the return of human agency, sleeves rolled up, fixing the problem. With  Science .

This planet-hacking, however, is utterly speculative, controversial, and – according to recent work at Germany’s Helmholtz Centre – by the most generous possible projections thoroughly inadequate to halt climate chaos. It is, by any reasonable standards, absurd that such plans seem more rational than enacting the social measures to slash emissions that are entirely possible  right now , but which would necessitate a transformation of our political system.

It’s a left cliché to pronounce that these days it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism: Andreas Malm points out that with the trope of geoengineering, it’s easier to imagine the deliberate transformation of the entire planet than of our political economy. What looks at first like a new Prometheanism is rather capitulation, surrender to the status quo. Utopia is here exoneration of entrenched power, the red lines of which are not to be crossed.

What price hope indeed?

Seventy percent of the staff at the mothballed Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, India, had been docked pay for refusing to break safety routines. Staffing levels were inadequate, readings taken half as often as intended. None of the six safety systems worked as it should, if at all. The trade union had protested, and been ignored.

On 3 December 1984, twenty-seven tonnes of methyl isocyanate spewed from the plant. Between 8,000 and 10,000 people died that night. 25,000 have died since. Half a million were injured, around 70,000 permanently and hideously. The rate of birth defects in the area is vastly high. The groundwater still shows toxins massively above safe levels.

Initially, the Indian government demanded $3.3 billion in compensation, which Union Carbide spent $50 million fighting. At last, in 1989, the company settled out of court for $470 million, 15 percent of that initial sum.  The survivors received, as lifetime compensation, between $300 and $500 each. In the words of Kathy Hunt, Dow-Carbide’s public affairs officer, in 2002, “$500 is plenty good for an Indian.”

Why rehearse these terrible, familiar facts? Not only because, as is well-known, Warren Anderson, Carbide’s ex-CEO, has never been extradited to face Indian justice, despite an arrest warrant being issued. Nor because Carbide, and Dow Chemicals, which bought it in 2001, deny all responsibility, and refuse to clean the area or to respond to Indian court summonses. There is another reason.

In 1989, the Wall Street Journal reported that US executives were extremely anxious about this first major test of a US corporation’s liability for an accident in the developing world. At last, in October 1991, came the key moment for this discussion: the Indian Supreme Court upheld Carbide’s offer and dismissed all outstanding petitions against it, thereby offering the company legal protection. And its share price immediately spiked high. Because Wall Street knew its priorities had prevailed. That it was safe.

A real-world interpenetration of apocalypse and utopia. Apocalypse for those thousands who drowned on their own lungs. And for the corporations, now reassured that the poor, unlike profit, were indeed dispensable? An everyday utopia.

This is another of the limitations of utopia: we  live  in utopia; it just isn’t ours.

So we live in apocalypse too.

Earth: to be determined. Utopia? Apocalypse? Is it worse to hope or to despair? To that question there can only be one answer: yes. It is worse to hope or to despair.

Bad hope and bad despair are mutually constitutive. Capitalism gets you coming or going. “We” can fix the problem “we” made. And when “we,” geoengineers, fail, “we” can live through it, whisper “our” survivalist bad consciences, the preppers hoarding cans of beans.

Is there a better optimism? And a right way to lose hope? It depends who’s hoping, for what, for whom – and against whom. We must learn to hope with teeth.

We won’t be browbeaten by demands for our own bureaucratized proposals. In fact there is no dearth of models to consider, but the radical critique of the everyday stands even in the absence of an alternative. We can go further: if we take utopia seriously, as a total reshaping, its scale means we can’t think it from this side. It’s the process of making it that will allow us to do so. It is utopian fidelity that might underpin our refusal to expound it, or any roadmap.

We should utopia as hard as we can. Along with a fulfilled humanity we should imagine flying islands, self-constituting coraline neighborhoods, photosynthesizing cars bred from biospliced bone-marrow. Big Rock Candy Mountains. Because we’ll never mistake those dreams for blueprints, nor for mere absurdities.

What utopias are, are new Rorschachs. We pour our concerns and ideas out, and then in dreaming we fold the paper to open it again and reveal startling patterns. We may pour with a degree of intent, but what we make is beyond precise planning. Our utopias are to be enjoyed and admired: they are made of our concerns and they tell us about our now, about our pre-utopian selves. They are to be interpreted. And so are those of our enemies.

To understand what we’re up against means to respect it. The Earth is not being blistered because the despoilers are stupid or irrational or making a mistake or have insufficient data. We should fight our case as urgently as we can, and win arguments, but we shouldn’t fool ourselves: whatever the self-delusion, guilt, or occasional tears of a CEO, in a profit-maximizing world it’s  rational  for the institutions of our status quo to do what they do. Individuals and even sometimes some organizations may resist that in specific cases, but only by refusing that system’s logic. Which the system itself of course cannot do.

The fight for ecological justice means a fight against that system, because there is massive profit in injustice. This battle won’t always be over catastrophic climate change or land expropriation: in neoliberalism, even local struggles for fleeting moments of green municipal life are ultimately struggles against power. The protests that shook the Turkish state in 2013 started with a government plan to build over Gezi Park, one of the last green spaces in the city.

Rather than touting togetherness, we fight best by embracing our not-togetherness. The fact that there are sides. Famously, we approach a tipping point. Rather than hoping for cohesion, our best hope lies in conflict. Our aim, an aspect of our utopianism, should be this strategy of tension.

There is bad pessimism as well as bad optimism. Against the curmudgeonly surrender of, say, James Lovegrove, there are sound scientific reasons to suggest that we’re not yet – quite – at some point of no return. We need to tilt at a different tipping point, into irrevocable  social change, and that requires a different pessimism, an unflinching look at how bad things are.

Pessimism has a bad rap among activists, terrified of surrender. But activism without the pessimism that rigor should provoke is just sentimentality.

There is hope. But for it to be real, and barbed, and tempered into a weapon, we cannot just default to it. We have to test it, subject it to the strain of appropriate near-despair. We need utopia, but to try to think utopia, in this world, without rage, without fury, is an indulgence we can’t afford. In the face of what is done, we cannot think utopia without hate.

Even our ends-of-the-world are too Whiggish. Let us put an end to one-nation apocalypse. Here instead is to antinomian utopia. A hope that abjures the hope of those in power.

It is the supposedly sensible critics who are the most profoundly unrealistic. As Joel Kovel says, “we can have the accumulation of capital, and we can have ecological integrity, but we can’t have both of them together.” To believe otherwise would be quaint were it not so dangerous.

In 2003, William Stavropoulos, CEO of Dow – who has, recall, no responsibility to the chemically maimed of Bhopal – said in a press release, “Being environmentally responsible makes good business sense.”

And that, in the pejorative sense, is the most absurd utopia of all.

• What the new IPCC report says about climate change and land
• Andreas Malm: Revolutionary Strategy in a Warming World
• The liberal attack on Naomi Klein and ‘This Changes Everything’
• From 'common goods' to the 'common good of humanity'

“Here instead is to antinomian utopia. A hope that abjures the hope of those in power.” Very well then. Jolly good. Just ignore all the disparities of power, and all hopes will be realized. Thanks for the advice column. Can’t say it makes much in the way of “sense,” but perhaps that is asking too much.

Eh? How can you read this and think that it’s advocating ignoring disparities of power? It’s a call for a project developed and deployed in conscious opposition to that which originates in centres of established power.

That call, for that project, has been made over and over, from the 60s through Sesame Street and now here with “antinomian utopia,” without anything but accrual of more power to those “centres of established power.” Why ignore that?

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‘Oh, London, You Drama Queen’

By China Miéville

• March 1, 2012

An invisible bridge spans the Thames at Blackfriars. Victorian pilings jut from the river, the railway they once supported long gone. Dangling above them on this cold day, helicopters surveilled thousands of strikers and supporters processing loudly through central London. It was Nov. 30, 2011, and two million public-sector workers were on strike.

Mary Ezekiel, staff nurse at University College London Hospital, itemized the baleful effects that pension cuts — the cause of the day’s action — will have. She flattened down her T-shirt. Many British tchotchkes are emblazoned with the cloying World War II propaganda slogan “Keep Calm and Carry On.” “Get Angry,” Ezekiel’s shirt demanded instead, “and Fight Back.” “All the speakers have been amazing,” she said. “That’s what I feel positive about. I just hope that it reaches Mr. Cameron” — she said the prime minister’s name disdainfully — “in his mansion.”

Cameron first denounced the day’s action, then dismissed it. For the Right, strikes are both devilish and pathetic, have both terrible and absolutely no effects.

“The perils of marching!” a young woman said with a laugh, pushing banners out of her face. “Lashed by flags!” She was surrounded by bobbing cloth and cardboard. The logo of the Society of Radiographers wobbled near placards of the Worker-communist Party of Iran. Under a huge pink triangle, a young Ugandan man called Abbey said, “We are helping gay asylum seekers from over the world, especially Uganda, Nigeria, Cameroon, Senegal.” He was there to support the workers. It’s all linked, he explained. Cuts to social spending, soaring university tuition fees, scapegoating.

There’s strife beyond the public sector. Several days after the strike, electricians working for the construction company Balfour Beatty walked out in protest against aggressive new contracts. People are fighting to stand still, whatever line of work they’re in.

Stratford, East London , is being reconfigured on a biblical scale. It’s December, and from the acres of mud and blue wrapping of the Olympic Park juts the city’s new monument, the ArcelorMittal Orbit, by the artists Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond, a vast sculpture of knotting girders like a snarled Gaian hernia. Its name is a corporate grandiosity on the part of its donor, Lakshmi Mittal, the richest man in Britain. Near it is the stadium, its post-Olympic future a question mark, with bickerings and legal shenanigans ongoing. There’s Zaha Hadid’s aquatic center, its celebrated lines ruined by temporary seating.

At the southern end of the development site, the walkway is on the path of an old sewer. Oh, London, you drama queen. You didn’t have to do that. We watch from the route of effluent.

The Olympics are slated to cost taxpayers $14.7 billion. In this time of “austerity,” youth clubs and libraries are being shut down as expendable fripperies; this expenditure, though, is not negotiable. The uprisen young of London, participants in extraordinary riots that shook the country last summer, do the math. “Because you want to host the Olympics, yeah,” one participant told researchers, “so your country can look better and be there, we should suffer.”

This is a city where buoyed-up audiences yell advice to young boxers in Bethnal Green’s York Hall, where tidal crowds of football fans commune in raucous rude chants, where fans adopt local heroes to receive Olympic cheers. It’s not sport that troubles those troubled by the city’s priorities.

Mike Marqusee, writer and activist, has been an East London local and a sports fan for decades. American by birth, he nonetheless not only understands and loves cricket, of all things, but even wrote a book about it. He’s excited to see the track and field when it arrives up the road from him in July. Still, he was, and remains, opposed to the coming of the Olympics. “For the reasons that’ve all been confirmed,” he says. “These mega-events in general are bad for the communities where they take place, they do not provide long-term employment, they are very exploitative of the area.”

Stratford sightseers are funneled into prescribed walkways; going off-piste is vigorously discouraged. The “access routes,” the enormous structures are neurotically planned and policed. For the area to be other than a charnel ground of Ozymandian skeletons in 30 years, it will have to develop like a living thing. That means beyond the planners’, beyond any, preparations.

Kathryn Firth, chief of design at the Olympic Park Legacy Company, the public body responsible for long-term planning of the park, laughs quietly at that. “You really hit the nail on the head,” she told me. “I’ll be honest; it’s a constant struggle. Not surprisingly, the planning-decisions team who essentially is the arbiter of our planning application wants comfort and certainty in the future, then you’re kind of going, Well, but the future lies a long way out, and we need to be a little bit light on our feet.” Is it easy? “No, you’re right, planning is very constrained, and it’s a kind of blunt tool to do something where you want places that are like those grittier, more diverse places.”

Her thoughtful honesty is refreshing. Mostly what we get in London is unending rah-rah from official channels. At the London Policy Conference, a high-powered talking shop in December for urbanologists, politicians and academics in the Brutalist concrete art zone of London’s Southbank Center, Mayor Boris Johnson chortlingly describes those skeptical of the Games as “the gloomadon poppers!” Johnson is crush-heckled: someone in the audience bleats that we all love him. The mayor is a ninja of bumptiousness, a man with a genius for working rooms full of the easily pleased. “The many gloomsters!” he beams, still on Olympic theme.

The Games’ security plans grow ever more dystopian and surreal. There will be snipers in helicopters; jets; warships in the Thames; more British troops on duty in London than in Afghanistan.

“They won’t do it,” Marqusee says, “but what would have been nice is if they’d made these the Austerity Games in a nice way. Just get rid of everything else, it’s not appropriate, it’s just going to be the sports, and we’ll enjoy it, everyone’ll go half-cost, no big hotels.” With the pleasure of the Londoner by choice, he continues: “And you know, this is London! No, we’re not going to compete with Beijing, we’re not that kind of place anyway, we’re not an authoritarian state that can get 10,000 people to march up and down. But why not be, you know, just who we are? Get some local kids out to do some hip-hop or whatever.”

The video for “Unorthodox,” by the London rapper Wretch 32, takes place in the Broadwater Farm Estate in Tottenham, North London. It’s an area of extraordinary ethnic diversity and local pride, and one troubled by unemployment, poverty, poor housing. In the video, it’s startlingly beautiful. “I kind of want to turn it on its head,” says Ben Newman, the director, of the cliché. “I know a lot of people film and represent those areas in a negative way.” Instead, the mixed-up area captured in the stairwells is a good, boisterous London dream, and true.

There’s another Tottenham, equally true, an image on endless repeat last summer. A conflagration, the charcoal shell of a local landmark, a well-known carpet shop. It was near here that a riot started Aug. 6, in response to the fatal shooting of a young local man, Mark Duggan, by the police, under heavily contested circumstances, and to the police’s subsequent dealings with his family. This was the first of a series of disturbances that spread over successive nights around London and the United Kingdom. Britons saw loop after loop of images of buildings on fire, smashed glass, streets in raucous refusal. Youths taking TVs, clothes, carpets, food from broken-open shops, sometimes with dizzy exuberance, sometimes with what looked like thoughtful care.

The aftermath was one of panicked reaction. Courts became runnels for judicial cruelty, dispensing sentences vastly more severe than anything usual for similar crimes. The government’s watchdog announced that the police might use live ammunition against those setting fires — some were teenagers — in future.

In December, in an effort to make sense of the extraordinary events, The Guardian and the London School of Economics released “Reading the Riots,” a joint report on the events. What they discovered, through extensive research and interviews, was that what motivated many of those on the streets was resentment of the police and a deep sense of injustice.

Eyes roll with the duh.

Self-evident or not, this does not convince everyone. Theresa May, the Conservative Home Secretary, blames instead “sheer criminality.” It’s singalong for the Right. They know this tune: It was played after the Brixton riots of 1981 and 1985, Tottenham 1985, after every riot in London, or anywhere, since forever. While May’s denunciation of the obvious continues, her own department quietly gets on with examining the police’s stop-and-search powers, a cause of huge resentment among young Londoners, which — when do such powers not? — disproportionately affect minorities.

“Feeling powerless, for me, is a very dangerous thing that we’ve seen in the riots,” says Symeon Brown at the London Policy Conference. Brown’s a young man from Tottenham himself, a youth activist, a researcher who worked on the Guardian report. Giving himself the voice of one of those involved in the riots, he explains that that night there came “that sense that for once in my life I had power.”

In Britain between 1998 and 2009, there were at least 333 deaths in police custody, 87 of them after restraint by officers. Not a single officer was convicted. Of all the more and less unsubtle ways young Londoners — those not from Chelsea, from Bloomsbury; those not rich — are told that they are not terribly important, none are as overt or as cruel as this.

Standing so straight on a raised dais, in so immaculate a uniform that he looks like a ventriloquist’s dummy, the Metropolitan Police Service’s new commissioner, Bernard Hogan-Howe, tells the conference in an avuncular voice about his plan for “total policing.” He is enthusiastic but nebulous. Details are vague. He enthuses about large forces zooming into small areas and clamping down on minor infractions. He mentions uninsured vehicles.

Helen Shaw, co-director of Inquest, an organization dedicated to the investigation of contentious deaths in official custody, has a different understanding. She suspects that total policing will mean “a much more aggressive police presence, a stance that’s more aggressive, and more about fear.” Indeed, Hogan-Howe says he wants “to put fear into the heart of criminals.” Shaw is more stark: “We think we’ll see more deaths.”

The police have not had a good couple of years. Constituencies not traditionally antipathetic have been shocked by its fervent enthusiasm for “kettling,” corralling demonstrators tightly without charge, food, water or release, for hours. The brutal policing of student protests on Dec. 9, 2010, left one young man, Alfie Meadows, in the hospital with brain injuries. At that same protest, the police hauled Jody McIntyre, a 20-year-old with cerebral palsy, from his wheelchair, dragging him across the ground. At a demonstration on April 1 the previous year, an unresisting and uninvolved newspaper seller, Ian Tomlinson, was hit by the police and died shortly after. And then Mark Duggan, about whom each rumor initially leaked — that he shot first, that he shot at all — was shown one by one to be untrue.

Two boys get on a bus from northwest London heading to the center. They swagger upstairs, lounge on the front seats, turn their phones into inadequate speakers and drawl along with the Notorious B.I.G.: “Every Saturday ‘Rap Attack,’ Mr. Magic, Marley Marl/I let my tape rock till my tape popped.” Like they know what tape is.

You want to see how much London hates its young — some of them; “Let’s be honest,” says the writer Owen Jones, “they’re not talking about Etonians” — watch them play music on public transport. Everyday silliness, adolescent thoughtlessness are treated like social collapse. Of which there’s a fair bit going around, true, but does it really inhere in this?

“On the one hand you have this patronizing attitude toward young people, coddling them,” says Saleha Ali, 25, the volunteer coordinator at WORLDwrite, an education charity in Hackney. “And on the other hand you have heavy-handed regulation, so there’s a hysteria about young people getting really drunk, going out and all these kinds of things, it’s just like panic, Oh, my God, what are we creating, a generation of monsters?”

Tinny music raises disproportionate ire. Travelers shift and glare as 14-year-olds give themselves soundtracks, as if they’re boxers. Not all, but a fair few of the older passengers look wrathful.

Who cares? You’re getting off in five minutes, he’s 14 and trying it on a bit and boisterous to fill the city with music.

In 1998, Tony Blair ushered into being ASBOs, antisocial-behavior orders. Sharp laws, the better for society, like Cronus, like a traumatized hamster, to eat its children. These startling civil orders criminalize legal behavior, individually, tailor-making offenses. A 17-year-old was banned from swearing. Another was told he could go to jail if he dropped his trousers. A 19-year-old was barred by law from playing football in the street.

“I do think that there is something very particular about here,” says Camila Batmanghelidjh. The founder and director of the advocacy organization Kids Company, Batmanghelidjh is one of the best-known figures in British child welfare. “I have a hunch. Which is that the British are very ashamed of vulnerability. So what happens is whereas another culture might look back on their childhood and say, ‘God, I was so cute, I thought clouds were cotton wool,’ the British will look back and say, ‘I was so stupid, I thought clouds were cotton wool.’ ”

It used to be startling to see a fox in London — impossible not to feel that the city had slipped into a fable. Now you spot them on any late-night jog. In 2011, one of these agents of animal chaos infiltrated the Shard — at 32 London Bridge, the city’s unfinished tallest building — and climbed a thousand feet above the streets to live on builders’ scraps.

At dusk and dawn, green bolts shoot low, as flocks of feral parakeets set about bird business. Walking at dawn in the mud of Wormwood Scrubs, a rough, wild common next to the prison of the same name, we approach a screaming copse. Incredible flocks of these nonnatives preen and screechingly bicker, overlooking the glow of waking London.

David Lindo is the Urban Birder, a writer and broadcaster, well known in the British bird world. To him, these parakeets are bullies, worse than a distraction. He eyes them with dislike.

“See, these are black-headed gulls,” he says, looking in another direction. He points out a young lesser black-backed gull, a female blackbird, a magpie. Lindo reminisces about the waxwings brought in by last year’s snow. But he is indulgent of the nonspecialist’s fascination with the unlikely parakeets. They fly low, hook-billed, hungry into the dawn, and he leads the way into the unbirded trees.

Manero’s Bar on Kingsland Road in London. “These are the hipsters, the young, beautiful and, oftentimes, moneyed crowd,” said Mark Neville.

The Boston Arms pub, shown here on a rockabilly themed New Year’s Eve. “I am interested in how alcohol is basically a legal drug,” Neville said.

Traders at the London Metal Exchange, a commodities market with a daily volume of more than $60 billion.

Neville commented on the retro look of the employees at Lloyd’s. “People have worked there for generations; there is a continuity between now, the 1970s and further back,” he said. “There is a certain nostalgia in my work.”

At the Bank of Ideas, which is in alignment with the Occupy London movement. At the time of this photograph, the Bank of Ideas was housed in a reclaimed UBS building in the East End.

A performer at the Bank of Ideas.

Children come to the Somerford Grove Adventure Playground in Tottenham, shown here, after school or on weekends to learn life skills like cooking. “There’s a real sense of adulthood to what the children are doing there,” Neville said.

For many children, Neville said, the Somerford Grove Adventure Playground “is their first introduction to cooking. Perhaps they’re not getting a lot of attention at home, but they get it here.” 

Children put out a barbecue fire at the Somerford Grove Adventure Playground. “I liked the tension of how this photograph seems like the kids are in danger, when in fact, they are very safe because they are at a supervised playground,” Neville said.

He continued: “But the point of the Adventure Playground is that it is not a sanitized, rubberized place. There are inherent dangers involved in play, and that’s O.K.”

Fans leaving an Arsenal versus Leeds match. As Craig Taylor discusses in his article on what it means to be a “real Londoner,” soccer allegiances can mean everything.

Smithfield Market, in Central London, is rooted in the past.

Commuters crossing the London Bridge on their way to jobs in the City. Members of the Bank of Ideas turned up when this photo was taken to write messages of love on the sidewalk. Neville said, “It’s very difficult to love yourself at 7 in the morning, isn’t it?”

Clubgoers at Boujis, an exclusive private club in the wealthy neighborhood South Kensington.

A woman emerges from a circle of men at Boujis nightclub. “At Bouji’s you have the people who are truly jet set, and then the people who want to bed them,” Neville said.

The scene at Plastic People, a club in Hackney, where people dance to dubstep music. "People may go to other clubs to see and be seen," Neville says. "But at this club, people come to dance."

Dalston Superstore in Hackney is “a carefully indifferent, confidently cool and slightly camp dive bar split between two floors, clad in cement, brick and steel vents,” Neville said.

Children goof off at the Nightingale Primary School, where 97 percent of the students are from minority groups. “One of the things I really do love about London is its fabulous diversity,” Neville said.

The students at Nightingale Primary School. “I told the children that this was going in The New York Times Magazine. I asked the boys to give me ‘serious New York attitude’ and the girls to give me ‘Lady Gaga,’ ” Neville said. “This is what they came up with.”

Children at Sebright Primary School are giving less attitude.

Guano devastation. Limey spatters ruin the winter vegetation like the aftermath of some epochal paintball war.

“They nest in holes,” Lindo says. “There’s anecdotal evidence that they oust our native hole-nesters, like starlings, stock doves and nuthatches. And” — he pauses grimly — “there’s a shortage of holes in Britain as it is.”

For all of us. Everyone knows there’s a catastrophe unfolding, that few can afford to live in their own city. It was not always so.

“The big difference from the American system is that in Britain what we call council housing is publicly owned and provides general-need housing,” says Eileen Short, chairwoman of Defend Council Housing. “It’s not welfare housing; it’s housing as a right, and this was the model that was used to clear the slums and provide the housing in the crisis years after the First and the Second World Wars.” Across London, that means “good quality spacious housing of its day was built, which now means that lower-paid and average-paid workers and the elderly and parents and so on can live in some of the most expensive areas of London.” Rich areas of this city have long been unusually mixed. “In Britain even 30 years ago, 30 percent of the population lived in council housing. And it has a proud and treasured part to play in life for ordinary people.”

But that stock has been depleted for years. Houses taken from the pool were left unreplaced, at rates accelerating fast under Thatcher’s right-to-buy scheme from the 1980s. New Labor did little to reverse this. The shortage is severe. Rents are rocketing, house prices, stagnating gently or not, are utterly prohibitive. Everyone knows this. Now the government is capping housing benefits, which the Chartered Institute of Housing warns is likely to price 800,000 households across the country out of their own communities. Rough sleeping is up.

The trends are obvious, the results predictable. “What we think is likely to happen,” says Bharat Mehta, chief executive of Trust for London, whose job it is to investigate London poverty, “is that there’ll be a movement of people from inner to outer London.”

MARK RYLANCE, 52.

Select accolades: Two-time Laurence Olivier Award winner; two-time Tony Award winner. Sample rave: “What lends the play its amphetamine rush of excitement is watching Rylance, an actor of indisputable greatness, giving the most thrilling performance it has ever been my privilege to witness.’’ Charles Spencer, The Daily Telegraph, on ‘‘ Jerusalem ’’

JUDI DENCH, 77.

Select accolades: Dame of the British Empire; Academy Award winner; six-time Laurence Olivier Award winner and recipient of the Society of London Theater Special Award. On her dream role: ‘‘I don’t have a dream role I’m dying to play. I’m a very bad chooser. I just wait to be asked to play it.’’

BERTIE CARVEL, 34.

Select accolades: Nominated for Best Actor in a Musical, Laurence Olivier Awards; shortlisted for Best Actor, Evening Standard Theater Awards. On getting his start: ‘‘I started my career in London with a series of roles that involved me being naked onstage. I was starting to think I’d never work clothed again. Luckily that stage seems to have passed.’’

SIMON RUSSELL BEALE, 51.

Select accolades: Commander of the Order of the British Empire; three-time Laurence Olivier Award winner. On his stage debut: ‘‘I was in my 20s. At that age, it doesn’t feel like anything. But as you get older, the stress of playing parts that have been played before by great actors gets worse and worse.’’

VINETTE ROBINSON, 31.

Sample rave: ‘‘Vinette Robinson is deeply moving and crystal clear as Ophelia.’’ Henry Hitchings, This Is London On approaching a role: ‘‘The characters that most intrigue me are the ones furthest away from myself. What I find interesting is delving into those aspects of life or approaches to life or ways of seeing the world which are different from mine.’’

DANIEL KALUUYA, 22.

Select accolades: London Evening Standard Theater Award: Editor’s Award. Sample rave: ‘‘At the heart of Roy Williams’s bracing new play is a performance of piercing intensity by Daniel Kaluuya ... [who] combines anger, eloquence, a pained worldliness and a strangely childlike capacity for fantasy.’’ Henry Hitchings, This Is London

ANNE-MARIE DUFF , 41.

Sample rave: ‘‘Duff’s growing reputation as the finest British actress of her generation is bolstered with every performance.’’ Jenny McCartney, ‘‘Is This the New Judi Dench?’’ The Daily Telegraph On theater: ‘‘When you’re in a production in London, you feel like you’re in the eye of the storm. It’s a sprawling city that’s swollen with creative activity.’’

EILEEN ATKINS, 78.

Select accolades: Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire; three-time Laurence Olivier Award winner. On acting in London versus America: ‘‘I love working with British actors. Method acting is unacceptable to most of us; it means too much time talking about it rather than doing it.’’

PATRICK STEWART, 71.

Select accolades: Knight Bachelor; three time Laurence Olivier Award winner. On inspiration: ‘‘When I was a teenager, I came to London to see Sir John Gielgud in ‘The Tempest’ and was introduced to him in his dressing room. I was bowled away by it. London still means to me what it did then: it is the heart of so much that’s important and skilled in British theater.’’

In Paris, cheap housing is pushed out of sight of the boulevards, to the banlieues, the impoverished, underserved, tense suburbs. With its history of public housing, London has always been far more of a medley, incomes jostling together across the city. Now the poor are to be pushed centrifugally, faster and faster. The banlieuefication of London is under way.

There is building , just endlessly not of public housing. The city’s showcase architecture is elemental. The 30 St. Mary Axe building — the Gherkin — less than a decade old, is established in the skyline. The spine of the Shard soars over South London accumulating glass as if it’s in solution, growing crystals. No. 20 Fenchurch Street — the Walkie-Talkie — rises by now aboveground. It’s too early to be sure how such leviathan construction will submit to the city.

Some will be ugly. That might not be the worst sin: that, London can metabolize. Centre Point, stubby tower at the junction of Oxford and Tottenham Court Road, is ugly and, if grudgingly, rather loved. But London’s growing fake public space, corporate-owned stretches that pretend to be piazzas and streets but lock down and exclude citizens as Occupy movements and other irritations necessitate, abjures the backstreet-and-alleyway gestalt of the city. It and its planners have little room for any urban contingency, places where railway bridges cut low over streets, on their own business, at angles that make no sense from below, forming strange obliques and acutes with the houses they meet.

The question is whether London’s new glass boxes of large size can, over time, submit, surrender, become part of the city. This is something that Canary Wharf, the Docklands financial district begun in the late ’80s, every day a thuggish and hideous middle-finger-flipped glass-and-steel at the poor of the East End, every night a Moloch’s urinal dripping sallow light on the Isle of Dogs, has never done and will never do.

Diasporas have sustained us. It’s a terrible cliché, multiculturalism through food, but there’s a reason it’s what Londoners reach for. Smart restaurants like St. John have rehabilitated English fodder, glorying in pork, blackberries, eulogizing offal. Fine. If you’re of a certain age and grew up here, you remember that aside from the lucky, rich or recently immigrant, we had no food. We gnawed bread like bleached plastic, cheese like soap. We yowled, a hungry people. New Londoners took pity before the rest of us succumbed to malnutrition and misery, and shared their cuisines. Indian, Jamaican, whatever — name a culinary tradition, it won’t be too far to find, near the greasy spoons keeping the faith. Each new group of incomers brings something — now Polish food has mainstreamed, and there’s dense bread in the corner shops, krufki in supermarkets. Racism, of course, endures, adapts. According to the exigencies of ideology, it casts around for one, then another first-choice hate. Jews in the 1930s, then black people, then Asians. For the past 10 years, Muslims in particular have worn the bull’s-eye. If they’re women who cover their hair, those few who veil entirely or those who chat into scarf-tucked phones, the hijab hands-free, their choice of headgear is bizarrely troublesome to those whose business it is not. The government’s official counterterror strategy includes asking university lecturers to report depressed Muslim students. Hate crimes against Muslims rise, fueled, researchers at the University of Exeter suggest, by the mainstreaming of Islamophobia among politicians and in the media. You can say shocking, scandalous things about Muslims, and opinion makers do, then push out their chins as if they’ve been brave.

Feeding on that disgrace, Britain is seeing a mutation of its “traditional” fascism into a form fixated on these new scapegoats. Emerging from groups like the British National Party and football hooliganism, the English Defense League aims its spite squarely at Muslims. It follows a familiar trajectory of intimidation; it tries to march in “Muslim” areas. But it has taken a few unusual turns, too, showing off a (very) few members of color, Jewish members, gay members. Pitching for a “liberal” fascism.

The Houses of Parliament, London, 2012.

Buckingham Palace, London, 2012.

The London Eye, London, 2012.

St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, 2012.

Tower Bridge, London, 2012.

But London is London. “Their situation in London is incredibly weak,” says Martin Smith, a leader of Unite Against Fascism. “Because London’s so integrated,” he adds enthusiastically, “you can literally go from estate to estate, and it’s black, white, mums and dads, mixed, all that.

“I think with migrants,” he continues, pausing slightly, “you can get what I would call racist sentiments developing, even among blacks and Asians.” Smith knows this fight. He’s optimistic but not relaxed. These are not easy times. “There could be, I suppose — panic issues could develop around that. I wouldn’t rule that out in London. I think it would be hard, but I wouldn’t rule it out.”

London is full of ghosts — ghost walks; a city’s worth of cemeteries; ghost-advertising, scabs of paint on brick. The city invoked something, read a grimoire it shouldn’t have. Thatcher’s face recurs at every turn, not in clouds of sulfur but of exhaust, on buses bearing posters advertising Meryl Streep’s celluloid turn as our erstwhile prime minister. Cabinet reports from the aftermath of other riots across the country, 31 years ago, have been released. A policy was mooted, they suggest — the point is disputed — of “managed decline” of the troublesome areas. Leaving them to rot.

Lionel Morrison considers the past. Few people are so well poised to parse this present, of press scandals, claim and counterclaim of racism and police misbehavior, deprivation, urban uprising. A South African radical, facing the death penalty in 1956 for his struggles against apartheid — in his house there is a photograph of him with one of his co-defendants, Nelson Mandela — Morrison got out, came to London in 1960. In 1987, he became the first black president of the National Union of Journalists. In 2000 he was honored by the British government with what is bleakly, amusingly, still called an O.B.E., Order of the British Empire.

We sit in his home, between English oil portraits that must be two centuries old, and carvings and sculptures from the country of his birth. Is Morrison hopeful? An optimist?

“I’ve been thinking about it myself,” he says gravely, his voice still strongly accented after all these years. “In a sense, I’m optimist. But it hits and completely, constantly kicks at this optimism, you understand?” The “it” is everything.

“It’s like a big angry wolf having it over here. And it’s not prepared to move, and sometimes its legs will go, but slow.” He mimes the animal moving, leaving a little space, a little hole, an exit. “And people will say, ‘Ah, we’ve got it!’ And then chop, it goes again.” His hands come down, the wolf’s grasp closes.

Morrison doesn’t sound despairing. But he does sound tired. “Every time you do something and nothing goes any further, it eats at you,” he says. “It starts this bitterness.” It can break people down. Make them hopeless, or worse. When none of their efforts to improve anything work, some, he warns, will stop fighting. They will say, “Let us just wait for things to — for chaos, really, to take place.”

China Miéville is the author of several novels, including " The City and the City ." He lives and works in London. An expanded version of this essay will be published on March 5, 2012, on his Web site www.londonsoverthrow.org .

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The Rupture of Desire: An Interview with China Miéville

The following is a small portion of a longer interview with China Miéville in the journal Political Theology.

China Miéville is a writer whose awards and recognitions include a fellowship in the Royal Society of Literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Hugo Award, the British Science Fiction Award, the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, and more. In 2001 he received a PhD in International Law from London School of Economics.

Miéville has long since been active on the intellectual and political Left. He is a founder and editor of Salvage , a journal of revolutionary arts and letters, and an essayist who has written widely on Marxism, art, and politics. His most recent book is A Spectre, Haunting , a work of non-fiction which expounds on the Communist Manifesto .

The following is a small portion of a longer interview with China Miéville in the journal Political Theology .

NS: Many people take this religious dimension of Marxism to be a critique, and oftentimes just an outright dismissal, of Marxism; indeed, it is a critique from people on the Left and the Right! Nonetheless, the idea that Marxism sublated Christianity and took some bad aspects of Christianity, namely, trying to immanentize the eschaton, is debated by Marxists. Moreover, if you study Cold War Christianity and its relation to United States foreign policy, you find abundant references to Marx as a leader of a religion with its own sins, sacred texts, and, of course, its own eschaton. Similarly, Enzo Traverso’s Revolution , discusses how Trotsky was so frustrated, owing to his own anti-clerical wishes, that [Vladimir] Lenin’s body was embalmed. As you know, embalmment was imagined as a religious exercise that clashed with Trotsky’s atheism.

Now, you take this quasi-religious structure of Marxism to have some positive attributes and aspects. In A Spectre, Haunting you look at workers who requested that they do not be buried Bible in hand, but with the Communist Manifesto in hand. Again, this is a religious practice and I want to hear why you appreciate that. And, perhaps, offer a response to those who say Marxism should be something entirely other than a religion.

CM: Well, I suppose there is, broadly speaking, a thin and a thick version of my answer. And the thin version is one of which I think is hardly going to be news to the readers of the journal. One of the things that’s become very prominent in the last few years is the notion that many of our political categories are, indeed, theological categories. And you can invert those terms as well. But the point is, there is no hard line between one and the other. Now, I have an argument with the way this is often formulated—again, I don’t want to overstate that there are certainly exceptions—but this is often formulated as if the reason such and such happens politically is because, occultly, this is a theological category that has been transplanted. And because that theological category requires a certain belief, people suppose this is why certain political phenomena are going on.

I would say that’s two different claims. (And, of course, I think that the slipperiness between the categories of the theological and the political seems to me to be just straightforwardly true, really interesting, and worth investigation.) First, I do not think that theological categories demand certain beliefs—I think that those beliefs are always contested. Second, often times that causality of the theological to the political is the other way around; certain politics, which is to say, in our context, certain a political economy predicated around accumulation, demands certain actions which tend to suppose or encourage certain beliefs which can then be justified with the occult theological. With regard to idealism (and I’m not a Philistine when it comes to idealism), there is a smuggled in and rather unconvincing idealism about causality in some of the discourses about political theology.

I want to put that out there as something that needs to be very carefully watched. Theological categories are mostly or very often justifications or aftermaths or resonances or contributors to, but they are very rarely causes. So, there’s a thin category, and as a thin category, why would we think that Marxism as a political phenomenon, as a political movement, or a very heterogeneous political movement, would be immune to that? Of course [Marxism] is going to be rife with theological categories, and those are surly worth investigating. There is, if you like—and there is nothing wrong with this—a history of ideas and of common sense that can be done here and you’ll obviously find there is going to be theological categories in Marxism. What’s more, what goes further, I suppose, is the thicker sense, in which you’re right. It seems to me there is, call it an elective affinity, call it a resonance, around Marxism’s relationship to rupture, revelation, and revolution….

All of which is to say that it’s a question of the causality. Because theological categories are so prevalent and so pregnant throughout our history, we can too easily glom onto them as causes. But why don’t we put it a different way? Why don’t we say people who are oppressed, people who are exhausted—and it’s tiredness that recurs to me as a heuristic for thinking about the unbearableness of the world, how exhausting it is, and how exhausting it’s been for so long—who throughout history, these signifying monkeys called humans, were exhausted and miserable, and had no power of themselves, would not hanker on some level or another for radical alterity. And then it’s no surprise, given the prevalence of religious institutions, and I could provocatively say a certain kind of desire for enchantment in humans, that this desperate desire for alterity will take on a religious form…

Hence, we can bring it back to your question. If you hear about a miner who is at the end of his life in the early part of the 20th century, who knows he is about to die, and he says to the doctor, “Don’t let the priest put the Bible in my coffin and make them put the Communist Manifesto in my coffin,” you can have two relations to that—well, you can have as many as you want—but on the one hand, you have some, maybe a leftist, who says, “Well, that’s illogical, you know you’re going to die anyway, it doesn’t matter what is in the coffin with you.” Or you can say, “That is one of the most profoundly moving and inspiring moments of utopian censored, cleaving towards emancipation that I have ever heard.” It seems to be the height of an intellectual, let alone spiritual, but even just an intellectual miserliness and point missing-ness, to simply say, “Well, there is no God, so there’s no point about what goes in the coffin with you.” That seems to me to be a deeply powerful moment, at which, as you say, cannot be read as other than a religious urge, an urge for the end of exploitation and for a rupture worthy of the name.

NS: For those who have neither read your work nor Marx’s, it may be is very helpful to delineate between what you take to be apophatic Marxism, which we’ve been hinting at, and what you call ‘cataphatic Marxism’—obviously rifting off of these theological categories. How is your apophatic Marxism different than these explicitly cataphatic Marxisms?

CM: … I suppose the brief version would be that there is a certain tradition of what I think of as orthodox cataphatic Marxism, which is about making pronouncements like the universe is knowable, the social universe is knowable, this follows from that, we have our engines of understanding, this is why that has happened. And there’s very little room in cataphatic Marxism for uncertainty or aporia (except to the extent that [cataphatic Marxism] considers it may not have enough data).

I don’t want to sound like I’m parodying this tradition; in the essay I quote Herbert Apthekar, the Communist Party leader who gives a very clear annunciation of this tradition…I feel very fortunate because in the essay and the exchange that followed, I debate with a couple of comrades named [Harrison] Fluss and [Landon] Frim and we completely disagree. However, I’m really grateful to them because they were very clear and comradely, it was not vinegary. I’m grateful for their clear and honest representation of this [cataphatic Marxist] tradition in its modern form (which comes out of the radical enlightenment). They say, for example, “reason must be totalizing or else the game is lost.” They say, “all limits to knowledge are merely provisional.” And they say that such an approach is “wholly necessary to develop a coherent emancipatory program.”

For me this corresponds a bit to what [Ernst Bloch] called the cold and warm streams of Marxism. So, this [cataphatic tradition] would be connected with scientism and economism. But there’s a real danger in reducing it to that; which is to say, “Hey, we’re all hip humanity graduates here and we know that economics is really kind of clunky and it’s all about humanism.” I don’t want to sound like that at all. I come out of and am inspired by the radical enlightenment, I’m inspired by the notion ‘ours is not to reason why,’ the idea of uncovering truths, it is all deeply empowering. Where I differ from that particular school of cataphatic Marxism is in thinking that that’s the end of the story… I don’t want to dispense with the rational elements at all, but I think that element has been stressed overwhelmingly…

The work of Rudolph Otto is so crucial and one of the most elegant ways of breaking the binary model of rationalism and irrationalism. Fluss and Frim, to their great credit, because they’re very clear about this, essentially say you have rationalism and you have irrationalism. And what Otto says is that you have rationalism, you have irrationalism (which he is a big opponent of), and then you have the non-rational…

I simply don’t think that the human agent works on that binary model. I think we work on a trinary model; the non-rational is not in the middle or between the rational and irrational, it’s on a different axis. There is an element to which I find this quite difficult to argue, because to me it is so absolutely self-evident… I won’t keep quoting them, but Fluss and Frim are very, very clear about the idea that in the absence of the rational you have the irrational. And when someone says something like that, one of the things I want to say—though again, I really want to stress these are comrades, I don’t mean this in a pissy way—“What is your favorite color? Why is that your favorite color? Is that rational?” But then, conversely, is it irrational? If I prefer red over green or I prefer blue to brown, clearly that’s not rational. But it makes no sense at all to say that that’s irrational, it is neither of those things. That’s obviously a very glib example, but you can extrapolate from that. And in your questions you mentioned bread and roses. If you have a binary axis, it’s very easy to know why you would want bread, but it’s really hard to understand why you would want roses. Is it irrational to want roses in your room? No, but it’s hardly rational, either. It’s not going to give you any more calories or whatever it may be. So, that is one of the bases of apophatic Marxism for me; it redresses that balance and brings in various elements like psychoanalysis, and so on…

NS: … Regarding these notions of the rational, irrational, cataphatic, and apophatic: there are important debate going on, at least in the American left, concerning desire versus interest. These very rational Marxists, to the likes of the Vivek Chibber and others, are insisting that you can only organize around one’s given material interests—which there is certainly some truth to. However, the question other comrades on the Left are raising is that though people often act according to their material interests, they at time do not act according to their material interests. Thus, there is also another notion some scholars call desire, which is less empirically articulable and perhaps more even libidinal. Indeed, some of the important debates, too, on afro-pessimism and traditional Left politics are pointing to this libidinal aspect of political economy. There are, of course, as we’ve both mentioned, Marxists hesitations to embracing this libidinal economy tout court , but nonetheless the notion of desire and libido does point to this important distinction regarding rationalism and irrationalism, interest and desire, cataphatic and apophatic…

CM: As you would imagine, I completely agree. And this is something that both my work has been doing but also more generally what we’ve been trying to do in Salvage . We’ve tried to relate to these issues concerning the politics of desire (and to try to be generous while doing as much, because I’m really not interested in hip-checking). But it’s perfectly understandable why people on the Left would be very anxious about the idea of organizing around desire. Famously and obviously, fascism is a libidinal politics of aesthetics and desire as much as anything else… And I think that a socialist would be a lunatic if they were not careful and concerned about the idea of tapping into the libidinal economy. But I would turn, if you like, orthodox Chibberism on its head and say you cannot organize only on the basis of shared interest. This doesn’t mean you’re throwing interest out the window; this doesn’t mean interest is not important; however, it does mean acknowledging and pointing out that this paradigm [of desire versus interest] is bullshitting itself.

There are always desire and libido in any politics, so you might as well acknowledge that and work out your relationship to desire and libido. But the idea that you’re this pure sort of mechanistic Chibberite and you’re just going to turn up and explain the interest while not getting involved in politics and desire, you’re kidding yourself. Of course, you’re relating to desire in a certain way and desiring to be a perfectly cool, rational, or whatever it might… Again, I’m not casting as much as at Chibber himself, but I’m saying this particular paradigm is rather enthralled by its own notion while kidding itself about its particular investments…

But when you say you don’t have time for these bourgeois indulgences and niceties or that what is important to you is just the sheer facts in which you’re explaining your shared interests—all of which is why you just default to a picture of a strike on the cover and twelve-point Times New Roman—or that you’re not doing aesthetics or that you’re not invested in a certain type of no- nonsense socialist aesthetic (I mean, you have no duty to use any particular aesthetics, I don’t care about that), but let’s stop kidding ourselves about the idea that there is a clear and straightforward and unlibidinal socialist politics and then there’s the bad socialist politics that gets caught up in libido…

It’s just to say, in the same way as you and I agree that there is no human being without this arational sphere, that there is no human being without the sphere of desire, libido, et cetera. So, how the fuck are you supposed to bracket that element of yourself in a mass movement when you’re talking to other people? I mean, if you can do that, that’s true Promethean superhuman, that’s some U ̈ bermensch shit. So, there is a very obvious level in which we should sort of get over this, but I would go further because I think it is an absolutely pressing element of socialist politics to relate seriously to and work out our strategic and ethical relationship with desires and libido. And there are certain points of principle [regarding desire] that can never be; it can never mean lying to people, it can never mean tapping into the reactionary, let alone fascistic, it can never mean denying the complexities of life, it can never mean prioritizing desire to the exception of other socialist pillars, and so on. But given how much of politics exists and happens on the [level of desire and libido], it would be a complete political dereliction if you were not taking that level seriously as part of your political strategy and way of dealing with people politically.

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We shall rise to the challenge of their appointment to life for that single moment – An Essay On China Miéville

by John Holbo on January 11, 2005

1 Three Things About Miéville

This post will be substantially pastiche of others I’ve written about China Miéville; remasticated bits encrusted around critical consideration of his new novel, Iron Council . No plots spoiled.

I’m going to pose a few questions for the author. I am not usually one for sniffing out intentionality behind the scenes, mind you. (Not that I think there is anything indecent about that angle.) But unusually, in this case, I find I am curious what the man can have been thinking. How admirably the world is arranged, since – oddly – he may answer.

Now a brief statement, not of my thesis, but of the obvious, to which my thesis hopes to bear a sturdy relationship.

1) Miéville is a superlative subcreator, to use Tolkien’s term of art for the art of fantastic world-building. 2) Miéville is a polemical critic of Tolkien – more so: of Tolkien’s generic legacy – on behalf of an allegedly more mature conception of fantasy as a genre. 3) Miéville himself tells stories which are substantially in line with generic fantasy conventions, in terms of overall form, also in terms of many types of detail.

So a critical question about Miéville is whether 1) suffices to back 2), with some to spare; for 3) has a notable tendency to corrode the credibility of 2).

One possibility also to be considered is that 2) is just snarky fun Miéville had, being a punk blowing steam on a webpage . Then 1) and 3) needn’t fight each other by proxy, knocking over and propping 2), but can simply be considered side by side.

2. The cluttered kipple of humanity shall never be swept neat

Ridley Scott said of Blade Runner that ‘film is a 700-layer cake’. This is a philosophy of production and composition, but it becomes a point about the content of a fictional world. Blade Runner was a revelation to SF fans not so much on account of its ideas or characters or story as on account of the stunning accretions of visual …(what shall we call it?) kipple , convincing us this world is thick, clotted; completely peopled (no pun on any screenwriter’s name intended.) SF, in its thought-experimental way, can often  be disappointing thin, like an abstract technical schematic. You want to see the clean, essential lines of the idea. But fictionally that can be a bad idea.

In Blade Runner , the kipple obscuring all clean, essential lines is largely chronological: 40 years in the future piled onto 40 years in the past, to paraphrase Scott; but it is also cultural, economic, scientific and social. Humanity turned kipple, our very memories just odds and ends swept into our heads, perhaps someone else’s after-thought. History as dustbin of history. Of course, Blade Runner ultimately affirms the individual human spirit against this. And, oddly, the story doesn’t really make a lot of sense. A lot of noir and tough cop clichés jumbled together, but the lavish production makes this overlookable. We’ll get back to this, implicitly if not explicitly.

What has Blade Runner to do with China Miéville or Iron Council ? I think Miéville wants to write fantasy’s Blade Runner . Make a world in which (as per Miéville’s manifesto) "things are gritty and tricky, just as in real life."  

Back to Blade Runner . Yes, yes, it would be wrong to say Blade Runner did anything first . Dark, brooding, gritty, tricky, messy, dystopian SF existed before. But the film did something new, largely visually. (I remember hearing William Gibson at a reading – or maybe I read it. He said he ran from the theater screaming. In 1982 he was in the process of writing Neuromancer ; and, lo and behold, this director has scooped his highly surface-oriented visual conception.) Blade Runner achieved a decisive gravitational shift in SF sensibility. If it didn’t cause the shift, it remains a highly visible marker for it. Yes, yes; by no means were we stuck before 1982 in some Hugo Gernsbackish rut. But – to get to the point – you might say fantasy hasn’t had its Blade Runner . Yet. No work that drops a world in amongst all the Tolkien knock-offs, setting those typing monkeys howling like they’ve seen a monolith. Miéville wants to do that .

Miéville, like Ridley Scott, composes in the medium of kipple: artful accretions of haphazard junk – animate, inanimate, abanimate – conveying the powerful illusion of depth and density in all dimensions; time and horizontal expanse, upbuilt habitation and promiscuous inhabitation. Miéville’s subcreative efforts succeed through sheer superfluity of … debris; detail , if you prefer the polite term.

This is important because fantasy, like SF, can often be unsatisfyingly thin, not like an SF thought-experiment but through weak dependence on cliché. Henry Farrell quoted a nice bit from Mike Harrison some time back:

Before the word “fantasy” came to describe a monoculture, it was an umbrella term for work actually fantastic in nature. Nobody “wrote fantasy”. They wrote personal, strongly-flavoured, individual stuff, and the term was applied at a later stage in the proceedings. Unpredictability, inventiveness, oddness, estrangement, wit, could all be found there, along with machinery for defamliarising the world and making it seem new. What we have now—or what we had at least until very recently—is long, evenly-planted fields of potatoes, harvested by machines in such a way as to make them acceptable to the corporate buyers from Sainsbury’s, McDonalds, & HarperCollins.

As I wrote at the time (I presume to quote myself since it will turn out I was literally right about the cart):

First, ‘dreary monoculture’ pegs it dead-on; that is the problem with genre fantasy, and Miéville deserves all credit for doing his part to muscle the cart out of horrid ruts. (If there’s a new Robert Jordan novel, it must be Saturday!) And, 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.

Anyway, the strategy is to recover all those admirable literary qualities by planting weeds in all the even rows. This points the way to Miéville’s anti-Tolkien polemics. But let’s work up.

One of the choicest dramatic details in Iron Council is the scene in which The Flexible Puppet Theatre Troupe have their avant garde production of "The Sad and Instructional Tale of Jack Half A Prayer" disrupted by the New Crobuzon censors (for "Rudeness to New Crobuzon in the Second Degree"), then devolve into riot. ( Here’s a Miéville detractor, for example, who gives the Flexibles their grudging artistic due.) Little bits like this, multiplied a hundredfold, trick the reader’s eye into regarding the city – its society, culture, economy, history, people – as real . New Crobuzon, where all roads in Bas-Lag lead, is not some Potemkin Village against which paper cut-out elves and wizards stage clichéd clashes with standard issue ultimate Evil. On the other hand, just because the scenery is palpably real, doesn’t mean the performers aren’t generic cut-outs. We’re getting to that concern.

Now I’m going to do a stupid critic trick. China can say ‘no, you’re wrong;’ and I’ll probably take his word for it. Let me seize one detail and insist it is really a perfect lens through which all aspects of Miéville’s art can be apprehended.

Miéville seeks to do, for fantasy, what his puppeteers are doing for Jack. (If you want to know about Jack, read the book, or Henry’s post.) Consider the art of the Flexibles (their name is, I suppose, homage to martyred Ben Flex,right?) The fantasy cart of cliche, of which I spoke, shows up on schedule, in need of renovation and a load of fresh kipple:

There was the usual – the cart-sized puppet theatre with its little carved figures in garish clothes stock-still on their stage – but the miniature wings and proscenium had been torn off, and the puppeteers stood in plain view dressed too-nearly like militia officers in dark grey. And the stage was littered with other things, strange debris. A sheet was stretched and hammered taut and on it some magic lantern was projecting newspaper print … These Flexibles were consummate – arrogant pranksters yes but serious – and they played their audience with skill, so that after every such imposition [forbidden obscenities] was quick and funny dialogue, or jaunty music, and it was hard to sustain anger. But it was an extraordinary challenge or series of challenges and the crowd vacillated between bewilderment and discontent … No one was sure what they were seeing, this structureless thing of shouts and broken-up lines and noises, and cavalcades of intricate incomprehensible costumes. The puppets were elegantly manoeuvered, but they should have been – were designed to be – wooden players in traditional moral tales, not these little provocateurs whose puppeteers had them speak back tartly to the narrator, contradict him (always in the puppets’ traditional register, a cod-childish language of compound nouns and onomatopoeia), and dance to the noise and mum lewdness as far as their joints and strings would allow. Images, even animations – pictures in such quick cycles that they jumped and ran or fired their guns – came in stuttering succession onto the screen. The narrator harangued the audience and argued with the puppets and other actors, and over growing dissent from the stalls the story of Jack Half-a-Prayer emerged in chaotic form.

I connect this passage with Miéville’s anti-Tolkien screed :

Tolkien is the wen on the arse of fantasy literature. His oeuvre is massive and contagious – you can’t ignore it, so don’t even try. The best you can do is consciously try to lance the boil. And there’s a lot to dislike – his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien’s clichés – elves ‘n’ dwarfs ‘n’ magic rings – have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was ‘consolation’, thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader. That is a revolting idea, and one, thankfully, that plenty of fantasists have ignored. From the Surrealists through the pulps – via Mervyn Peake and Mikhael Bulgakov and Stefan Grabinski and Bruno Schulz and Michael Moorcock and M. John Harrison and I could go on – the best writers have used the fantastic aesthetic precisely to challenge, to alienate, to subvert and undermine expectations. … Why not try to come up with some different themes, as well as unconventional monsters? Why not use fantasy to challenge social and aesthetic lies?

Nothing fishy about it, exactly, but odd that cod would show up in both if there were no connection. (Cod-childish, cod-Wagnerian. Am I reaching?) What Miéville is urging is a critical mass of new fantasy, updating the New Wave of the 60’s; perhaps to be known as ‘the New Weird’. So: Tolkien’s arse wen is to Miéville’s ‘New Weird’ as traditional New Crobuzon puppet theater is to the Flexibles’ subversive art. (Am I right, China?)

3. Oh, sweet ursinality of lifelessness! Proceeding on this assumption, some thoughts about puppets, mannequins, golems. A tension. On the one hand, the idea might be that fantasy can become – well, more like Henry says Miéville’s fantasy already is (see also here ):

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.

I say something similar, but tongue in cheek, here .

On the other hand, puppet theater – however socially aware and subversive – is never going to be about economic fundamentals, except in the most one-dimensional, expressionistic way. So when Miéville writes, in his manifesto, " Characters are more than cardboard cutouts," this is ambiguous. Is he going to make these traditionally one-dimensional beings three-dimensional, or is he going to deploy their one-dimensionality with a bit more puppeteer dexterity and brains? Two flavors of ‘more’, and not obviously flavors that go well together.

Let me quote again from one of my old posts, which seems to me prescient about this issue of puppet-mastery.

It took me a while to warm to Miéville. We had a moment of miscommunication, he and I. He comes wrapped up and recommended by reviewers as the rightful heir to the mantle of Mervyn Peake (to whom a very fine website has recently been dedicated. There are poems I had not read and pictures I had not seen and first edition covers and much wonderful stuff. May I recommend, in particular, this delightful envisioning of Carroll’s walrus and carpenter; and this rather fey Alice.) As I was saying, Miéville comes billed as the new Peake, and he acknowledges Peake as a main influence. And – well, yes, I can see it. And it isn’t fair to blame Miéville for departing from his model (a debt of gratitude is not an obligation to plagiarize, after all.) Nevertheless, what Miéville has gotten from Peake is not what I like best about him: the grotesque whimsy and compulsive, self-delightedly overblown verbal energy of the Gormenghast trilogy. Haven’t read it? Think Edward Gorey writes The Pickwick Papers . Better yet: read it. And by the by, here is a nice Edward Gorey cover gallery . As I was saying, every Peake character is a puppet, and Peake’s language dances these finely crafted artifacts about in the most astonishingly skillful – above all visual – manner. It would be very natural to stage Gormenghast as puppet theater, except it would be less impressive that way because, after all, one expects to see puppets at a puppet theater. To meet with them – to really see them leaping off the page – in a novel; that is a more unique aesthetic achievement.

In that post I quote some long bits to illustrate the difference, if you want to go read more.

And now it occurs to me to ask, although this may seem beside the present point, just what Peake is up to with his puppet Gormenghast characters? It seems to me the likely answer – sheer aesthetic self-delight in lavish, expert construction of sets and mannequins – is expressed well by another author Miéville praises in his polemic, about whom I have written quite a bit lately: Bruno Schulz.

Here is my post on golems and Schulz’ Cinammon Shops (a.k.a. The Street of Crocodiles ). It contains a link to this Schulz page , where you can read some new translations for free. The father character in Cinammon Shops is praised by the narrating son as a champion of escape … from boredom at reality’s drab dullness. I imagine this is what Mervyn Peake would have been like, if grossly underappreciated by his family:

The final and splendid countermarch of fantasy which that incorrigible improviser, that fencing master of the imagination led on the dugouts and trenches of the sterile and empty winter. Only today do I understand the lonely heroism with which he single-handedly gave battle against the boundless element of boredom numbing the town. Devoid of any support, without acknowledgement on our part, that astonishing man defended the lost cause of poetry. He was a wonderful mill into whose hoppers the bran of empty hours was poured, to burst into bloom in its mechanism with all the colours and aromas of oriental spices. But, grown accustomed to that metaphysical prestidigitator’s splendid jugglery, we were inclined to belittle the value of his sovereign magic which had delivered us from the lethargy of empty days and nights.

No language of social or political challenge here, I might note. Unapologetic escapism, which seems to me what Peake is all about (also, Schulz.) I don’t say Miéville denies it, but perhaps he is tempted to equate ‘undermining expectations’ with ‘challenging lies’, or tempted to equate escapism – i.e. a conscious refusal to face wintery reality – with mollycoddling readers in some warm, snug fashion. (Maybe Miéville isn’t really equating these things. Maybe I’m reading too much in.)

What strikes me even more about Schulz, in relation to Miéville is that Iron Council is not just about puppets, it’s about golems, also about a strange breed, the Remade. Schulz has a whole philosophy of mannequins – of golemetry ,to use Miéville’s term. I have quoted this stuff at length before but will do so now again because it is perfect for present purposes. (All the following comes from new translations of Schulz – see link above):

– DEMIURGOS – said my father – did not possess a monopoly on creation – creation is the privilege of all souls. Matter is prone to infinite fecundity, an inexhaustibly vital power and, at the same time, the beguiling strength of the temptation which entices us to fashioning. In the depth of matter indistict smiles are shaped and tensions are constrained – congealing attempts at figurations. All matter ripples out of infinite possibility, which passes through it in sickly shudders. Awaiting the invigorating breath of the soul, it overflows endlessly into itself, entices us with a thousand sweet encirclements and a softness which it dreams up out of itself in its blind reveries. Devoid of its own initiative, voluptuously pliant, malleable in the feminine fashion, and compliant in the face of all impulses it constitutes outlaw terrain – open to every kind of sharlatanism and dilettantism, the domain of all abuses and dubious demiurgic manipulations. Matter is the most passive and defenceless essence in the cosmos. All may knead and shape it; it is submissive to all. All arrangements of matter are impermanent and loose, liable to retardation and dissolution. There is nothing evil in the reduction of life to other and new forms. Murder is not a sin. Many a time it is a necessary infringement in the face of stubborn and ossified forms of being which have ceased to be remarkable. In the interests of an exciting and valuable experiment, it might even constitute a service. Here is a point of departure for a new apologia of sadism. My father was inexhaustible in his glorification of that astonishing element – such was matter. – There is no dead matter – he taught – lifelessness is merely a semblance behind which unknown forms of life are concealed. The range of those forms is infinite, their shades and nuances inexhaustible. Demiurgos was in possession of valuable and interesting creative recipes. Thanks to these, he called into being a multitude of genuses, renewing themselves with their own strength. It is not known whether these recipes will be reconstructed at any time. But it is unnecessary, for, even should those classical methods of creation prove to be inaccessible once and for all, certain illegal methods remain, a whole host of heretical and illicit methods.

We are not intent – he said – on long winded creations, on long-term beings. Our creatures will not be the heroes of romances in many volumes. Their roles will be fleeting and concise, their characters without far-reaching plans. Often for a single gesture, for a single word, we shall rise to the challenge of their appointment to life for that single moment. We openly admit: we will not place any emphasis on either the permanence or solidity of the workmanship; our handiwork will be, as it were, provisional, made for a single occasion. If they are to be people, for example, then we shall give them only one side of a face, one hand and one leg – namely the one they shall require in their role. It would be pedantry to worry about their other leg, not coming into play. From the rear they might simply be patched with canvas, or whitewashed. We shall state our ambition by this proud motto: for every gesture another actor. In the service of every word, every action, we shall call into life another character. Such is our fancy that there will be a world in accordance with our taste. Demiurgos was extremely fond of refined, excellent and complicated materials; we give precedence to shoddiness. We are simply enraptured by it; cheapness transports us, the scrappiness and shoddiness of the material. Do you understand,’ my father asked, ‘the profound meaning of that weakness, that passion for tissue paper in bright colours, for papier mâché, for lacquered colour, for straw and sawdust? It is – he said with a woeful smile – our love for matter as such, for its downiness and porousness, for its singular, mystical consistency. Demiurgos, that great master and artist, will render it invisible, commanding it to vanish beneath the pretence of life. We, to the contrary, love its raspingness, its unruliness and its ragdoll ungainliness. We like to see beneath every gesture, beneath every movement, its ponderous exertion, its inertia, its sweet ursinality.

So we are back to human kipple – brief, entropic debris of demiurgic subcreation. I have quoted these passages before, as I said, but without noting the almost unbelievably harsh irony of the manner of Bruno Schulz’ own death: murdered callously by the Nazis, who didn’t regard it as a sin to terminate an inferior form. A point of departure for a new apologia for sadism, Schulz’ era proved to be, soon after he wrote this book. (I’ve posted a bit more about Schulz here and (only implicitly) here . His appropriation as an ideal romantic figure in David Grossman’s See Under: LOVE .)

I don’t mean Schulz is, in any sense, complicit in the manner of his own death, merely because he wrote a romantic phatasmagoria of an escapist work in which he riffed about murder being all right. I mean, rather, to give Miéville his due. He urges political seriousness and social responsibility, even on writers of fantasy, and no doubt he’s got a point. Puppeteer escapists aren’t necessarily right about everything. But I am saying (how to put it? I’m not quite sure) that Miéville hasn’t really worked out what he’s up to – whether his subcreations are going to be responsibly thick or brilliantly, expressionistically thin. Fantasy novels matured into economic and political treatises, or characters thinned into puppets whose strings are plucked more dexterously. I must say, there is always an artistic way, but here I’m not seeing a way to combine these two impulses perfectly happily. I think Miéville is somewhat held back from his full potential as an author by an inability to decide between modes, both of which clearly attracted him, either of which he might plausibly master.

4. Paper Cutouts, Feats of Clay Let me illustrate Miéville’s penchant for mixing political economy and puppetry – colorful grotesques that are theatrical with ones humanly horrible . In the following passage we hear about how New Crobuzon finds itself at war with Tesh, City of the Crawling Liquid. (Miéville never actually lets us see "its moats and glass cats, and the Catoblepas Plain and merchant trawlers and tramp diplomats and the Crying Prince.")

The arcane Tesh ships, the barquentines and dandy catboats [very Peakeish language] all raggedy with coloured cloth, whose crews wore henna and filed their teeth, had ceased to come to New Crobuzon’s docks. There was a rumour through long-disused channels, Tesh’s secret and hidden ambassador had told the Mayor that their two states were at war. Reports of Tesh depredations in the Firewater Straits became more common and higher-profile, in the papers and government newposters. the Mayor had promised reverge and counterattack. Recruitment to the New Crobuzon Navy was intensified, along, Ori, heard, with ‘booze recruitment’ – press gangs. It was still distant, abstract: battles at sea thousands of miles off. But it had escalated. It had featured more and more in the speeches of ministers. The city’s new mercantilism was unrewarded; markets did not open for its exports; the war blocked its sources of uncommon commodities. Ships went and did not come back. New Crobuzon’s boarded-up plants did not reopen, and others closed, and the signs on the doors grew mildew that mocked their proclamations of ‘temporary suspension of industry.’ The city was stagnant; it slumped and slummed. Survivors began to come home. Destroyed soldiers left to beg and preach their experiences to crowds in Dog Fenn and Riverskin. Scarred, their bones crushed, cut by the enemy or in frantic battlefield surgery, they also bore stranger wounds that only Tesh’s troops could have given them. Hundreds of the returned had been made mad, and in their mania they raved in unknown sibilant tongue, all of them across the city speaking the same words together, in time. There were men whose eyes were haemorrhaged blood-sacs but who still had sight, Ori heard, who cried without ceasing as they saw the death in everything. The crowds were afraid of the veterans, as if their own bad conscience. Once, many months ago, Ori had come past a man haranguing the horrified crowd and showing them his arms, which were bleached a dead grey. ‘You know what this is!’ he was shouting at them. ‘You know! I was at the edge of a blast, and you see? The sawbones tried to take my arms, told me they had to go, but they just didn’t want you to see …’ He waggled his ghastly limbs like paper cutouts, and the militia came and stifled him, took him away. But Ori had seen the onlooker’s terror. Had Tesh truly remembered the lost science of colourbombs?’

I say this is perfect pitch. Right on the line between grim realism and gleeful puppeteering. The colourbombed veteran could be an Otto Dix painting . But it seems to me, frankly, that the pitch can’t – anyway, isn’t – maintained.

But first, another good example. New Crobuzon employs thaumaturges in its Punishment Factories to remake criminals into grotesques. The philosophy of these remakings is, as it were, a sinister Foucaultian twist on Schulz’ father figure’s simple delight at demiurgic potentiality of dull matter. Poor criminals are Remade (then made to work to pay for their own remaking.) Their limbs replaced by animal parts or machine parts, to fit the crime or merely to mock and degrade their possessors. Very ghastly descriptions. A boy with insect legs growing all around his neck, like a ruff. Humans who die if their coke fires go out. Unsuitably Remade slaves forced to work, building the transcontinental railroad that is, in fact the focus of much of the novel. (See Henry’s post.)

– Fucking useless , one overseer screams and beats a fallen man who wears many delicate eyes on his hands. – What fucking point is there making more Remades if they’re peacocks like you ? I tell ’em every godsdamned week we need Remade built for industry, not for their sodding whims. Get up and fucking haul.

Ghastly nightmare image. As Schulz writes: "If they are to be people, for example, then we shall give them only one side of a face, one hand and one leg – namely the one they shall require in their role." Ugly industrial implications. (Which is worse, in human flesh: enforced whimsicality or machine efficiency?) But I fear that soon, as per Belle’s post, Miéville is no longer succeeding as an expressionist but perversely refusing to show us anything nice or pretty or pleasant, despite having promised to show us everything , politically and economically speaking. (Where are all the nice parts of town?)

On the other hand, golemetry is nice; a kind of Hegelian dream. In Iron Council Judah Lowe considers:

What is it I’ve done? … I made a golem from gas. Can I make a golem from even less solid things? Golemetry’s an argument, an intervention, so will I intervene and make a golem of darkness or in death, in electrycity, in sound, in friction, in ideas or hopes?

What is Hegel’s World-Spirit but a strangely animate, yet strictly unliving golem of an Idea?

As a counterpoint to that: if you pity humanity as so much entropic kipple, swept together and apart by the absent-minded broom of history, then golemetry can be a humanism. Pennyhaugh lecturing Judah on this science:

The living cannot be made a golem – because with the vitality of orgone, flesh and vegetable is matter interacting with its own mechanisms. The unalive, though, is inert because it happens to lie just so. We make it meaningful. We do not order it but point out the order that inheres unseen, always already there. This act of pointing is at least as much assertion and persuasion as observqation. We see structure, and in pointing it out we see mechanisms and grasp them, and we twist. Because patterns are asserted not in stasis but in change. Golemetry is an interruption. It is a subordinating of the statis IS to the active AM.

The difficulty is acknowledging, as the father says, "the profound meaning of that weakness, that passion for tissue paper in bright colours, for papier mâché, for lacquered colour, for straw and sawdust," while yet shoring up any mere brief interruptions against immanent destruction.

On that note I pass you over to Henry’s discussion of Walter Benjamin and the nunc stans of Iron Council, lest I spoil a plot.

5. Storytelling Let us now consider stories Miéville tells. The first thing I would like to say is that I greatly enjoy these stories. Hours of entertainment. The second is that I find that my fellow contributors have, by now, said most of what I was going to say in a negative vein. Belle makes the point that Miéville exhibits a peculiar obsession with whimsically grab-bag tactical situations. Matt Cheney says it bluntly:

The three books [Perdido, Scar, Council] are adventure novels, ones with similar plots overall: a mystery is raised and slowly solved, leading to unexpected outcomes, the main characters’ lives are imperiled, the setting threatened with total destruction, and then lots of people kill each other, with bittersweet results. The formula works well in Iron Council up until the last two hundred pages, partly because of the complex juxtapositions of chronology and events, but threatening New Crobuzon yet again with eldritch forces from beyond seemed unnecessary, and I could have lived with about half as many battles, because the book began to feel more like a scenario for a roleplaying game than a novel: one seemingly impossible battle ("Good dice roll!") leads to an even more seemingly impossible battle ("Your weapons aren’t effective against noncorporeal entities, but luckily coming down the hill…") leads to another and another and…. While I hope Mieville develops a new formula soon, I also understand that the one he keeps reverting to is inherent for the kind of story he wants to tell, and that it has been done much worse by other writers. Many readers won’t mind at all – will, in fact, find the innumerable battles to be the best moments of the books. Mieville has so much else to offer, though, that it seems a shame he always ties things up by having his characters spend most of their time killing each other.

Let me add one detail. Miéville has an odd (given his polemical stance) penchant for Hollywood-style special-effects extravaganzas just before credits roll. I am sure he is not in any conscious sense pitching for Hollywood. An unelective affinity, perhaps. It is also true of many small scenes that one thinks: better as CGI. For example, from the end of Part I, about 10 seconds of quality (but expensive) screen-time:

The golem was crude and instructed with murderous simplicity. Moving with assasin speed it reached arms that weighed many tons and held the handlingers [nasty beasties that possess animal hosts]. They tried to face it. It took only minute beats of time for the golem to drive stone into the animal and break its neck, crushing the handlinger, the hand-parasite squirming in the horse’s man. The man was quicker. He spat fire that billowed without effect over the golem’s face. With impossible strength the man wrenched at the arm of coagulated stone and dislocated it, so the golem moved clumsily. But its grip held. Even with its arm falling off in grots, the golem pulled the dangling man down, gripped his legs with one pebbled hand and his head with another and twisted him apart. As the host was killed, while the flung-apart corpse was still in the air, the golem ceased, its task done. Its rocks and dust fell. They cracked and rumbled in a bloodied pile, half buried the dead horse. The host’s ruined parts rolled into bracken and sent blood down the stones. Something was spasming beneath the suit. ‘Get away,’ Cutter said. ‘It wants another host.’ Drogon began to fire at it while the corpse still descended. The thing had just come to rest when something many-legged the purple of a bruise scuttled from its clothes. It came with an arachnid gait. They scattered. Pomeroy’s gun boomed but the thing did not let up [awkward term for not getting killed], and it was only feet from Elsie screaming when Drogon’s repeated shots stopped it. The whispersmith walked toward it firing as he went, three bullets sent precisely to the thing hidden in the grass. He kicked it, hauled it up ragged and bloody. It was a hand. A mottled right hand. From its wrist a short tail grew, it wung deadweight and dripping. ‘Dextrier,’ the whispersmith said to Cutter. ‘Warrior caste.’

Now frankly this is not what the novel is made for. You might try an apologetic line about orthodox Flexible Puppet Theater dramaturgy: "Images, even animations – pictures in such quick cycles that they jumped and ran or fired their guns – came in stuttering succession onto the screen." But even that admits it belongs properly on the screen . Blow-by-blow splatter can never be novelistically great , as opposed to sort of fun . Even so, I had fun. More than that, I admired Part I of the novel for the unbelievably fast pacing. As a little experiment, I counted the number of new and original settings and/or exciting battles from the first 40 pages of the book. (Obviously a somewhat subjective metric.) Iron Council clocked in at a respectable 25. Perhaps you won’t quite believe me that this is a good thing, but it truly does end up being far, far better than an advanced D&D module with a manticore in one room and, through the door, 30 orcs, and, in the corridor, a gelatinous cube, at the end of the corridor, a barrow wight and a chaotic evil cleric. Temporally, the speed is perfectly in order: "their roles will be fleeting and concise, their characters without far-reaching plans. Often for a single gesture, for a single word, we shall rise to the challenge of their appointment to life for that single moment." Geographically and socially, the effect is not like an ill-conceived dungeon graph-papered out by a 12 year old with no sense that he’s left nowhere for the orcs to get food or go to the bathroom. No, it’s like a Hieronymous Bosch painting. You admire this inventive cramming of grotesques onto one canvas. It’s better for being absurdly busy. You don’t ask: what do the bird-head guys eat? Who is paying that mason to build the wall? (Does he ever go on strike, and then who gets hired to scab? That guy with all the scabs?) Do they barter with those dead guys coming out of the eye of the demon? Etc.

Again we are back to the problem of political economy vs. puppeteering expressionism.

Miéville’s talent for generating an ungodsly superabundance of incidental Boschian detail was truly impressed on me when I read, recently, Steph Swainston’s The Year Of Our War . It has been heralded as proof there is such a thing as ‘The New Weird’. It’s not just China Miéville. (Although I fear the sub-genre will soon be afflicted with it’s own tag, the equivalent of ‘elves and dwarves’; ‘bugs and drugs’, maybe.) Swainston’s book sports an effusive Miéville blurb, but I felt it didn’t measure up, largely because the travels of its winged protagonist, Jant, across Swainston’s world didn’t leave me with such a rich sense of what that world contains. It didn’t feel like a 700-layer cake. Maybe 70-layers at most. I didn’t suffer the illusion that I was seeing every square inch of the mire even while being dragged through it at high speed, the way I feel with Miéville. Somehow this made it more apparent that, underneath the bugs and drugs, The Year of Our War is basically a stock ‘the dark forces are coming’ fantasy, plus soap opera costume-melodrama infighting among the stalwart defenders. It wants to be The Lion In Winter meets Aliens , with a touch of Naked Lunch . But I think the Lion In Winter bit didn’t quite come together, nor the Naked Lunch bit, leaving bug fights, which are really quite impressive. I quite enjoyed it. It just didn’t think it was great . It was entertaining escapism .

In Miéville’s case, rapid-fire grotesque inventiveness – puppet a page – serves to disguise the conventionality of much of the narrative (although, as per Henry’s post, a case can be made for Iron Council marking a sort of departure.) The disguise holds, largely, but it remains a disguise. And the only problem with our author being a conventional genre storyteller is – well, it just doesn’t fit with the polemic about this more mature, genre-busting sort of fantasy we are supposed to be getting. As Belle puts it in her post, if you are going to let a few absurdly overmatched heroes defeat the slakemoths, there is no obvious reasons why a preposterously successful revolution shouldn’t be staged. The mature sense of ‘history is painful that way’ just doesn’t resonate with the rigged, affirmative (sentimental, call it what you will) ‘Frodo and Sam can make it!’ conventions otherwise in effect. And there is a serious problem going for psychological realism while indulging these action-adventure genre expectations. No real person would be so heroic, so the sense of these characters as real people melts away like wax, when the action heats up, leaving us with … well, genre mannequins. (And after all that painstaking effort to get the wax to look right.)

In short, just because Miéville’s stories are "gritty and tricky, just as in real life" doesn’t mean they are gritty and tricky in the same way life is. Life doesn’t usually go in for conventional Freytag’s triangle-style structures. (At this point I despair of ever finding a half-remembered quote from John Barth about Freytag’s triangle and funhouses, only to find – to my amazement – that google knows all, sees all.) As I was saying, certainly life doesn’t go in for ‘the bomb is going to go off and everyone will die if we can’t stop it!’ Hollywood-style rollercoaster ride of thrills, spills, chills n’ kills. Life itself goes in more for the Jim Woodring , "Dear Supreme Altruist, Thanks very much for placing within me the bomb that never stops exploding,"-style story. And, in a way, that’s what Miéville is going for with the train story. Fair enough. But the bomb story-line is straight outa Hollywood; all the grit and trick can’t change that.   

To conclude on a positive note, when I think back on the scenes I have liked most in all these novels … well, first come the sheer accumulations of kipple, considered in its own right. That comes in first, second and third. Next come the scenes – as per above – in which for a brief moment political economy and puppetry seem balanced, but those moments can’t last. For the rest, I like the moments when one or the other mood (political economic or puppet) is clearly ascendent. In Perdido Street Station , when Rudgutter and co. are negotiating with the devils for help against the slakemoths, then they realize the devils are afraid so they have to turn (shudder) to the Weaver. That scene is such giddy puppetry of power politics and ‘fixers’ who have to be called in when things get ugly. In the same vein, the overall ‘hunting of the Snark’ arc of The Scar is nice (thanks for pointing that out, Henry; I gather China himself clued you in to the puns on names. I didn’t get them on my own.) For someone so influenced by Peake, Miéville really doesn’t do comic. Which seems to me regrettable. He ought to try to write more comic stuff.

Moving to the political economic pole, we have the rough labor politics of the vodyanoi dock strike. (I’ve posted about that here .) Very nice. Also, the secret agent spinning yarns about a grindylow invasion in The Scar . In Iron Council the best parts, I think, present us with the character of Weather Wrightby (whether right be?), captain of industry behind the transcontinental railroad; plus Judah’s stint working for Wrightby as a scout-turned-anthropologist among the doomed stiltspear. There is a kind of low-key novelty to this wryly insistent insertion of social types and troubles from our world. Herein is supposed to lie the maturity, I suppose. It would be easy for these bits to devolve into parody, or plain hokiness, but they don’t. (Not that parody is bad . It can be quite good. I’m thinking of stories like Andy Duncan’s "Senator Bilbo" (in here ) in which race relations in the Shire after the fall of Sauron are envisioned. Orc immigrants, but old Bilbo can’t stomach ’em. Nice pun on Senator Bilbo . Miéville does things like what Tolkien parodists do, but without it turning into parody.) 

Anyway, I think Weather Wrightby, who is oddly sympathetic in his monomaniac avuncularity, comes closest to meeting the high standards Miéville sets himself: not to portray good and evil simplistically. Wish there were more of him in the novel. That character had potential.

6. Tolkien I meant for a bunch of thoughts about Tolkien to get worked in somewhere above, but now I’m not sure where to insert the shoehorn and start pushing. Surely I have said enough. Here goes. First, it seems unfair to swipe at Tolkien for " boys-own-adventure glorying in war". A man who fought at the Battle of the Somme – who saw friends die horribly in the mud, who was friends with C.S. Lewis, left for dead on the battlefield – may be guilty of glorying in war. But he cannot plausibly be accused of doing so in a boyish ‘you only think it’s fun because you haven’t seen the mud and blood’ way. If Tolkien is morally disordered, the disorder is of a different order. (Am I remembering the inklings’ war records right?) I recall a bit from the audio commentary to The Two Towers , from Tom Shippey . I’ll just fire up that DVD and transcribe roughly:

So all these writers [Lewis, Tolkien, other inklings] – traumatized authors … they have to write their own explanation [of W.W. I]. And strangely, but pretty consistently, they can’t do it by writing realistic fiction. They have to write something which is in some way or other fantastic. So, after W.W. I, medieval literature seemed to be entirely relevant again. It was actually addressing issues which people had forgotten about, or thought were outdated. Well, they were wrong about that. They’d come back in.

The fact that they were veterans doesn’t make them right, but it does complicate the interpretation of their response to their experiences. Also, it might be countered that there is a great deal of ‘boyishness’ in Miéville’s own battle scenes. At their best they are like Bosch canvases, or inspired puppet theater. But the narrative thrill of Judah Lowe’s golemetry powers – honed in games played in New Crobuzon, then taken into the field – is much the same as that of the protagonist’s victories in Ender’s Game . Instead of video game kid makes good, we have wargamer champ makes good. (That’s a bit too harsh.) 

Regarding narrative structure: one of the striking things about Tolkien is how badly he writes. Or rather, how he does things no self-respecting commercial author would try, apparently because he was writing to please himself and didn’t know what the ‘right’ way to do it was. He composes text like masonry, as I’ve said before; which is just how he conceived of his beloved Beowulf , as per his essay "The Monster and the Critics". This is what gives Tolkien his monumental dignity. It’s not like monoculture farming. It’s gothic architecture; admittedly, clumsy stuff. This is what makes his hoards of imitators think they can be just plain clumsy and get away with it, commercially. Which they can. But that is not Tolkien’s fault.

Here again there is some interesting information on the Two Towers commentary, so I’ll keep roughly transcribing.

Tolkien started writing, ran into trouble. Instead of cutting and pasting and blocking, he went back and started writing it all over again. Got into trouble. Started all over. Got a little further. Got into trouble. Went back to the beginning. Like the waves coming up the beach, each wave got a bit further, but each one retreated back to the starting point, as the voice on the commentary approves. But it’s worth adding that when a person behaves like that we thinks it’s a bit obsessive-compulsive. (This fits well with my somewhat strained characterization of Tolkien as an untutored outsider artist . Yes, yes, I know. He wasn’t exactly isolated. He had C.S. Lewis and other inklings to critique his work in progress.)

LOTR is not structured like a proper novel, important characters not developed, too repetitive, opening too slow, ending too short, great deal of talk, long stretches of no action, Council of Elrond is 15,000 words of a badly chaired committee meeting, including much talk from characters who haven’t been properly introduced to the reader. What courage to expect that the reader will put up with this nonsense! What brilliant naivete not even to realize it was courage to try!

Now more from Fran Walsh (half of the adapting team for the book-to-film) and (I think it’s Shippey again?) on the oddity of the narrative structure of The Two Towers . As a narrative it’s two books, almost artificially made one. The storyline through Rohan. And the Frodo-Sam-Golem story. Not really significantly intercut. You lose whole character groups for 150-200 pages at a go. Could have been a dangerous sacrifice of momentum. A sense of (wait for it) realism comes from a sense of not knowing what’s going on, and what is going to happen next. Because the structure of the story gives you rather few genre cues, so oddly is it constructed. You can’t deduce what’s going to happen by surveying the angle of the plain on which you stand and deducing where you are on Freytag’s triangle, in other words. A lot of the tension is the reader just burning up to know what’s going on in the other narrative thread and having to defer gratification, rather than being treated to lots of comforting, fast Hollywood intercutting.

Anyway, the present point is that there is a sense in which – in constructing the story – Tolkien let his tutored competencies as philologist, historian, pedant and obsessive-compulsive hobbyist run away with his untutored incompetencies as commercial fiction writer. To glorious effect. What has happened since then, in the fantasy genre factory, is that Tolkien’s highly personal idiosyncracies have ossified into cliches. Personal limitations that were authentic in him are not authentically transferable to just anyone else who wants to mimic them.

Miéville, despite the tell-it-backwards inventiveness of the anamnesis section of Iron Council (see Matt Cheney’s post ), is in some sense a more conventional fantasy novelost than Tolkien. This is not to say that Miéville is actually part of the monoculture culture, after all, but it could be argued that in certain respects he is closer to it than Tolkien himself. Although Tolkien is the source of it.

And so: Tolkien, like Miéville, is suspended between thick and thin. Thick world-making. Oddly thin characters. In Tolkien the characters range from the just plain wooden to beautiful, architectonic figures. In Miéville they range from animated fantasy genre clichés, just muddied up a bit, to well-danced flexible puppets. It is precisely the oddity of lavish world creation plus paper-thin or wooden characterization that has so vexed many of Tolkien’s detractors (Edmund Wilson, for example.) Miéville may be in the same boat with his critics (as I argue in Oo, that wicked watercraeft .) So perhaps what Miéville should do is try to get even further off the factory farm not by trying to get away from Tolkien but by following him in this respect: writing less clearly commercial fiction and trusting his audience will understand what private preoccupations made him do it that way.

In other respects, of course, Miéville is free to go on being annoyed by elves and dwarves and Sam’s dog-like devotion to Frodo. (But remember! Homosociality does not equal homosexuality! How often must we Tolkien defenders make this defensive point?) I have saved a snippet of choice Chuniania from the abyss of the man’s disappeared blog.   

Tolkien is the "wen on the arse" of Mieville’s brand of fantasy. He has some cute descriptions of the Master: "cod-Wagnerian pomposity," "small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quo," and "belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity." I suppose one of the first questions that arises when evaluating this claim is to what extent these qualities are present in Tolkien’s source material. Beowulf, to take one obvious example, does not have the "cod-Wagnerian pomposity," if I understand what Mieville means by this delicious phrase correctly, but it most certainly reflects a belief in "absolute morality" and a fondness for "hierarchical status-quo." Indeed it would be surprising if it didn’t, considering its origin.

I said at the beginning it is quite possible Mieville really didn’t mean all that stuff he says against Tolkien on that old page; that he just put it out there to get a rise. Which would be quite alright. It would mean I’ve rested a little too much critical weight on it here, and in my posts over the last year and a half. But it does seem to me that Miéville could probably clarify to himself what he is up to, in a salutary way, by trying to say exactly what it is that he objects to. Strip back the polemic and see what sober core of dispute remains. Since, after all, he and Tolkien have so much in common. As Shippey says, there is a brand of writer who can’t respond to reality realistically. This lot have to write fantasy. Tolkien is one such. Miéville another.

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{ 18 comments }

lth 01.11.05 at 4:18 pm

Am I the only person who was bored by Perdido Street Station? How can you say he is a superlative creator, when he lacks the creative energy to eg. call his rivers something better than ‘Grime’ and ‘Slime’ or whatever they were. I read the first 100 pages of it and put it down in disgust at its cliched genre fantasy.

Nick 01.11.05 at 5:16 pm

About naming the rivers Grime and Slime — what would be better? It seems to me that fantasy authors are usually stuck between a rock and a hard place with their naming conventions. To name the rivers Grime and Slime might seem unsatisfactory, but, on the other hand, creating more fantastic names that would traffic in lots of apostrophes and dipthongs with potentially unpronounceable juxtapositions of consonants could be just as bad. To be honest, I’d rather have a name that I could pronounce and forget about, allowing me to focus on the rest of the book and what it’s working at.

Sebastian Holsclaw 01.11.05 at 6:04 pm

And there’s a lot to dislike – his cod-Wagnerian pomposity, his boys-own-adventure glorying in war, his small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos, his belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity. Tolkien’s clichés – elves ‘n’ dwarfs ‘n’ magic rings – have spread like viruses. He wrote that the function of fantasy was ‘consolation’, thereby making it an article of policy that a fantasy writer should mollycoddle the reader.

Assuming Miéville was serious, he seriously misunderstands the word ‘consolation’ in Tolkien

The entire text of the speech which Miéville is referring to can be found here . The part which he finds objectionable is probably this:

And lastly there is the oldest and deepest desire, the Great Escape: the Escape from Death. Fairy-stories provide many examples and modes of this—which might be called the genuine escapist, or (I would say) fugitive spirit. But so do other stories (notably those of scientific inspiration), and so do other studies. Fairy-stories are made by men not by fairies. The Human-stories of the elves are doubtless full of the Escape from Deathlessness. But our stories cannot be expected always to rise above our common level. They often do. Few lessons are taught more clearly in them than the burden of that kind of immortality, or rather endless serial living, to which the “fugitive” would fly. For the fairy-story is specially apt to teach such things, of old and still today. Death is the theme that most inspired George MacDonald. But the “consolation” of fairy-tales has another aspect than the imaginative satisfaction of ancient desires. Far more important is the Consolation of the Happy Ending. Almost I would venture to assert that all complete fairy-stories must have it. At least I would say that Tragedy is the true form of Drama, its highest function; but the opposite is true of Fairy-story. Since we do not appear to possess a word that expresses this opposite—I will call it Eucatastrophe. The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function. The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist,” nor “fugitive.” In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.

First of all this is a comment on fairy-tales not modern fantasy as it came to be known after Tolkien. Second, trying to sum that up as mollycoddling misses the point entirely. Tolkien is deeply influenced by the Norse myths, which celebrate the necessity of the good fight even though you are going to lose. At the end of the LOTR the world is saved, and the elves still leave the world with much of their magic. Frodo got the ring to the fiery pit, and was not strong enough to cast it in. He succeeded in his mission and was so damaged that he could not ultimately stay in the world he wanted to save. “Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”

LOTR is not structured like a proper novel, important characters not developed, too repetitive, opening too slow, ending too short, great deal of talk, long stretches of no action, Council of Elrond is 15,000 words of a badly chaired committee meeting, including much talk from characters who haven’t been properly introduced to the reader.

The idea that Tolkien was not writing a novel is completely correct. But that is not because he was a poor writer. He was writing a fictional history in the form of historical narratives. An old tradition, much like the oral tradition of hero stories told by bards to use up the long winter nights in unending winter months. Not a novel indeed. But there you are. The badly chaired committee comment is especially silly. Ever read the wills in 18th and 19th century novels? Why are they there?

Now more from Fran Walsh (half of the adapting team for the book-to-film) and (I think it’s Shippey again?) on the oddity of the narrative structure of The Two Towers. As a narrative it’s two books, almost artificially made one.

This almost made me laugh. You know that it really was two book artificially made one by the publishers…right? Or to be completely correct it was six books meant to be considered one codex which was artificially divided into three books by the publisher.

But I got caught up in the Tolkien side of things.

Miéville is a fun writer. His Remade are fascinating. I really enjoyed Perdido St. Station and Scar. But I’m not sure he has broken very far from the fantasy structures he claims to dislike. His changes are more in setting than anything else. He uses eucatastrophe even more clearly than Tolkien.

Sebastian Holsclaw 01.11.05 at 9:37 pm

Miéville is a fun writer. His Remade are fascinating. I really enjoyed Perdido St. Station and Scar. But I’m not sure he has broken very far from the fantasy structures he claims to dislike. His changes are more in setting than anything else.

eric 01.11.05 at 10:07 pm

Just a quick note as I scan through this post at work. Shippey has a whole lot of interesting things to say about Tolkien’s mindset and about the members of the TCBS who were killed during the war (couple of them at Somme) in The Road to Middle-Earth .

In the same work, Shippey debunks a boatload of anti-Tolkien criticism with a detailed reading of the text.. see the sections on entrelacement and narrative structure.

None of this, of course, really excuses the fact that Tolkien wrote in a way that no self-respecting commercial author would try. Shippey just points out some of the underpinnings… LoTR is a bit more intricate than some realize.

That plus Shippey’s description of Tolkien’s mode of work (which is mentioned above), combined with his OCD tendencies (yes, I agree that Tolkien was a little crazy. How else can you explain the countless revisions… I keep thinking that it would be nice to see his papers at Bodleian library, and then think I would be horrified at the sheer bulk of them.) and we end up with LoTR in all its odd brilliance.

Anyway. Check out the book.

derek 01.12.05 at 12:19 am

fantastic names that would traffic in lots of apostrophes and dipthongs with potentially unpronounceable juxtapositions of consonants

Speaking of the last, it’s di-phthong, not dip-thong :-)

jholbo 01.12.05 at 1:30 am

Yes, of course I know, Sebastian (how could I not?) I admit that there is something clunky about saying ‘it’s almost artificial to regard Two Towers as a novel’ because it wasn’t even supposed to be one. So it’s not just almost but ACTUALLY artificial. (Fair enough.) And of course it’s SUPPOSED to be like a history, as you say. But that hardly automatically gets him off the hook of being a poor writer. The question is whether writing a novel with this sort of history-like structure is a good idea. Of course I love the novels – excuse me, the one codex – so I think it proved to be a good idea. But it was touch-and-go. Ending all those chapters by bonking hobbits on the head, while pretending to be writing epic history. Very questionable technique.

Sebastian Holsclaw 01.12.05 at 2:06 am

You are judging the technique from the point of view of the modern 20th century novel, which is not what Tolkien was writing or attempting to write. Most people would think that telling a story entirely through ‘reproducing’ letters–many repetitive–is a questionable technique, but Clarissa is still very good for what it is and what it was trying to be. You wouldn’t slam a musical for the fact that it has that silly convention of having people unrealisitically sing instead of talk.

LOTR is called a novel only because we don’t read the type of thing that it really is anymore and because it is kind of similar to a novel. The fact that it does not follow all of the conventions of a novel has more to do with the fact that we are mislabeling it than that Tolkien was a poor writer. It shares many forms which you can see in earlier English pre-novels including most specifically what you think is tedium in the Rivendell scene. Another ‘problem’ many people complain about is that he doesn’t get in the heads of the characters like we see in many modern novels. But that isn’t a complaint for a fictional history. They recount actions and words, they don’t pretend to be able to see into the characters’ heads. If you have a taste for the modern novel, you will think that Tolkien doesn’t write one very well. And you will be correct. But you are correct because it wasn’t written as a novel.

jholbo 01.12.05 at 2:38 am

No, Sebastian, I’m really NOT judging the novel from a provincially 20th Century perspective (well, no doubt I am; but no doubt you are too to some degree.) I’m trying to judge it from the perspective of whether it works from any perspective. I’m certainly not insisting it pander to my taste in 20th Century novels, merely that – whatever it does – it has to work. If I am staging a gritty naturalistic drama and I decide to have all the characters suddenly burst into song, it is no sufficient defense of this that ‘you wouldn’t complain if it were a musical’. Not every plan works, so it is simply not sufficient to say that he planned it this way.

And of course we aren’t arguing about much because I think it works, but it creaks at the joints. That is part of what makes it work in the end.

It seems to me you are on the verge of denying that LOTR is a novel, because it wasn’t written as one, and because that would cut the legs from under my critique quite handily. It seems to me that it’s a novel – or three, as you like it – even if it was written with certain other models in mind. I take it you aren’t going to argue that it is a pure return to earlier forms. It’s a hybrid, so the question is whether it’s a successful hybrid.

Nick 01.12.05 at 6:47 am

Speaking of the last, it’s di-phthong, not dip-thong :-)

Oops. Of course it is. Thanks for that. : )

Sebastian Holsclaw 01.12.05 at 7:13 am

Umm, ok. It is a tremendously successful hybrid of 19th century novel and historical fiction in the Norse oral tradition that you find annoying in some parts then. :)

I guess my problem is that the issues you have explicitly raised seem to me to be non-appreciation of the form rather than poor expression of the form. The Elrond council is absolutely demonstrative of that. The complaint about the repetitive nature seems to be a failure to understand the nature of the bardic tradition of storytelling. The complaint about the suspension of the narrative thread is similar. You complain about missing genre cues, but it follows the Roman military story and the style of stories which it later influenced quite noticeably. There is a riff on the Return of the King myth that should be familiar to practically anyone versed in English or German literature. There is chivalry in both its good and bad aspects. There is the monster story repeated in at least four instances. There are the interesting blends of Christian and pagan relgions. Which of your complaints about repetitiveness or ‘boring’ parts couldn’t be used to damn Clarissa or any of the major epistolary novels of the 1700s? Have you read Robinson Crusoe? Many of the boring parts are quite obviously in the vein of the travel narrative, which meshes easily with Tolkien’s view of his story as a real history of a fictional world. I presume are a fan of biographies?

I guess ultimately I feel that you are confusing what fantasy became with what Tolkien was doing. I won’t say that he did it perfectly, but the specifics of your complaints suggest a lack of resonance to your modern style more than anything else. And so your description of annoyances will be useful to those who aren’t interested in older forms. There isn’t anything wrong with a lack of interest in older forms. But that doesn’t make them bad or poorly crafted. A lot of people don’t like Kunst der Fugue but that doesn’t mean that Bach didn’t know how to craft counterpoint.

david g 01.12.05 at 11:04 am

“The Council of Elrond” was always one of my favorite chapters (38 years now since I first read it). But that’s probably because I’m (1) a historian, not a literary critic, (2) love invented history and (3) am therefore one of those people whom Tolkien himself said “found this sort of thing [invented history, invented languages] only too fatally attractive.” He was himself split between the urge to follow his own made-up words and legends into mythological and etymological labyrinths and his desire to tell a story people would want to read and which would (I quote again from memory, bard-style), “deeply move them”. For me and millions he succeeded.

As for the silly and typically late-twentieth-century immature argument that he glorified war, Shippey pointed out the truth about that. I recall that C. S. Lewis in his religious autobiography “Surprised by Joy” talks about what he felt and realized when he first got to the front in 1916. He said it suddenly came to him that “This is war. This is what Homer wrote about”. I loved that, not just because I also love Homer (all of which Lewis had read in Greek under a tough tutor in Belfast), but because Lewis meant that whatever the Great War was, it was also neither more nor less than “war”, and so, as Lewis and Tolkien would put it, a tragic feature and consequence of our fallen condition.

John is of course right that Tolkien is unique, I think for more reasons than he adduces, and that the imitators are almost all hopeless. They imitate the form without the religious and philological ballast that T. had. Of course they fail.

jholbo 01.12.05 at 11:19 am

I should mention that my crack about the ‘badly chaired committee meeting’ is in fact not my crack but someone else’s from the TT commentary. I don’t think it was Shippey or Walsh. I can’t remember who it was. But I thought it was funny. (In writing my post I probably should have made clearer the scope of my DVD commentary paraphrasis.)

Robert McDougall 01.12.05 at 9:32 pm

“Novelost” is a fine new word, now it just needs a suitable job to do.

Like David G I loved the “Council of Elrond” way back. The “badly chaired committee meeting” complaint I don’t understand. The chapter gets in lots of back story and side story just when the reader’s ready for it; it makes an effective transition from the “four little hobbits on an adventure” part of the book to the “mission of world-historical importance” part; the committee meeting machinery marshalls the flashbacks fluently without getting in the way, till in the end the committee does get down to work to some dramatic purpose. One might even admire the skill with which Tolkien shifts from using the council as a narrative device to making it a substantive part of the narrative. To critique the meeting’s chairmanship seems like faulting Pamela for her unduly copious correspondence. [I agree though that is a funny quote.]

jholbo 01.13.05 at 5:03 am

I’ll just make another response to Sebastian, who writes: “The complaint about the repetitive nature seems to be a failure to understand the nature of the bardic tradition of storytelling.” I am sure there are many things about the nature of the bardic tradition of storytelling I don’t know, but there are more than a few I do know. I really don’t think my problem is that I don’t see what Tolkien is imitating. I think I see it well enough. It may help matters if I mention that I’ve read the bloody thing a dozen times since I was twelve, I love the council scene. (Not that it honestly matters what I think, but if it helps people to understand what I have written to know that I love Tolkien – well, it’s true. I do.) I just think the way to analyze Tolkien’s achievement is to start by frankly cataloguing all the reasons why it would seem that these antique grafts shouldn’t, by all rights, take.

It does occur to me that one thing that may be setting Sebastian off is my ‘outsider artist’ point. Outsider art would seem to be proverbially untutored and naive – a kind of primitivism. It may seem that I am conflating appreciative antiquarianism and scholarship, the careful and preservation-minded rescusitation of old forms, with primitivism. I agree there is a bit of a problem here. But there is still something self-taught and naive and private and mildly obsessive-compulsive about Tolkien. This is, quite frankly, the root of the authenticity of his literary voice, just as the scholarship is the source of its intelligence. What I am indicating by ‘outsider artist’ is that rather indefinite personal stamp that preserves LOTR from being an unfortunate exercise in twee pedantry.

So you find Tolkien’s strengths by taking a poke at the things that should, by rights, be his weaknesses.

Sebastian Holsclaw 01.13.05 at 4:44 pm

“It may seem that I am conflating appreciative antiquarianism and scholarship, the careful and preservation-minded rescusitation of old forms, with primitivism. I agree there is a bit of a problem here. But there is still something self-taught and naive and private and mildly obsessive-compulsive about Tolkien.”

Now I’ll definitely give you the obsessive-compulsive part. :)

People pretty much don’t do fugues anymore. Personally I would love to hear some new ones even if that made the artist antiquarian.

I think I understand what you are saying, and I think it is correct in some parts–but not correct as a more general critique of the work as a whole.

Hmm, is this thread proof that if you want to talk about anything else you shouldn’t bring up Tolkien? It is like trying to have a passing reference to Michael Moore–impossible.

Donald Johnson 01.13.05 at 7:27 pm

You should do more threads on Tolkien, just to give me the experience of agreeing with Sebastian more often. Well, I guess this wasn’t about Tolkien, but as he said, there are some names that automatically hijack threads when they are mentioned.

Glenn Bridgman 01.14.05 at 1:51 am

I suppose I should preface my comment by noting that I am one of those odious folk known as libertarians, so my capacity for trafficking in the language of socialist allusion is somewhat limited. Nonetheless, I’ll try to comment without making a total idiot out of myself.

I took PSS out of the library when the first of these posts was published and absolutely devoured it–it was an amazing book. These are my initial, unfermented thoughts:

Mr. Mieville, it seems to me that in your attempt to escape the limitations of genre, you manage to trap yourself just as thoroughly as if you were writing genre-fiction. At the risk of being too self-referential, are you not simply writing for the “gritty genre-rejection” genre? By self-consciously rejecting simple classification, you introduce the same comfortable familiarities as, say, traditional sci-fi—the reader learns to expect the unexpected. Wouldn’t it be better to just write and if you fall into the trappings of genre honestly, so be it?

The strangest part of the novel for me was that you were constantly poised on the edge of making a truly socialist point, but you manage to never quite fall from that tension into political hackery. To my shame, I have to admit that my “crazy socialist” alarm was running for portions of your book, but again, you never actually sparked that reflexive rejection. Despite the presence of many conferrable tropes of the socialist worldview—the bourgeoisie overclass quite literally dealing with the devil was a stroke of genius—the presence of small-scale capitalism seemed to reject a stodgy socialist orthodoxy. Isaac’s offer to buy winged things is met with such success that one could be fooled into thinking you were writing a Hayekian wetdream.

Lastly, I think you miss the point with regards to Lin. By having the slake-moth devour her mind, you are, in a way, forcing her back up onto Holden’s cliff. Rather than rejecting the beautiful, Tragic with a capital T, simplicity of Ophelia, you give that to Lin in perpetuity. At least with the consumptive beauties, there is a respectful transience about them—they will decay and pass from this world. Lin is forced to endure it forever. Is that not infinitely more disrespectful?

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On Social Sadism

by China Miéville | December 17, 2015

Two women sit leaning against a wall, wrapped in dirty clothes. Their hair is raddled, their faces filthy. One holds a bottle, the other a cardboard sign on which is scrawled a slogan both plaintive and defiant. But their smiles are arch, and the schmutz on their faces is as artlessly precise as a child’s clown makeup – easy on, easy off.

Halloween. This is a fancy-dress party, and the women have come as the destitute.

Marie Antoinette performed rustic fantasies of peasant life to herself and her sycophants in  Hameau de la Reine , her pre-Disney theme park. The privileged have long enjoyed playing at poverty.

The dominant mode of these games shifts. Class spite, always present, stops half-heartedly disguising itself with bowdlerising condescension, as in Versailles. It’s a rampant articulating principle in the venom of TV comedies, in the ‘chav parties’ so in vogue at elite institutions in the late 2000s. At a gathering at Sandhurst in 2006, Prince William talked all common, like, ‘swaggering from side to side’, the  Sun  reported, in his baseball cap. The Halloween party dress-up was in this tradition, and was also its intensification.

It occurred a little after the high point of the jocular pleb-sneer: two years, instead, into the eruption of the financial crisis, simultaneously with a historic peak in foreclosures. Nearly 2.9 million US properties had foreclosure actions against them initiated in 2010 – huge numbers improperly, even according to the system’s own rules – up 2 per cent from 2009, itself a record. Millions were fighting, and failing, not to lose their homes. These 2010 Halloween celebration occurred at the Buffalo, New York, law offices of Stephen J Baum, a specialist firm acting mainly for banks and lenders. It was what’s known as a ‘foreclosure mill’, the largest of its kind in the state: its expertise was evicting the poor.

This wasn’t, then, some generalised, timeless jeer. It was more specific and pointed, gleeful malice at those whose lives were, at that very moment, being ruined, directed at them by those doing the ruining.

In the photos, props embody favourite ideologemes of the rich: the booze, the misspelt signs denouncing the injustice. The homeless are drunkards; the homeless are stupid; the homeless take no responsibility. But these gestures are perfunctory; they make no attempt to convince. The anonymous former employee who leaked the images in 2011 did so aghast at what she called a ‘cavalier attitude’, but what’s on display is the opposite: not cavalier, but considered. She decried a ‘lack of compassion’, but what’s visible is a swaggering  presence  – of cruelty.

‘Will worke [sic]’, one sign reads, ‘for Food.’ The sign’s the prop of a comedian waiting for the laugh. The homeless are starving. We made them homeless and now they’re starving. Laugh laugh laugh laugh.

Capitalism’s history might be tracked in a genealogy of the corporate apology. That of Baum’s eponymous head was typical of this sub-epoch of viciousness, mawkishness and entitlement. An initial denial of anything untoward; a rapid U-turn and apology for ‘inappropriate’ behaviour, ostentatiously meeting a homelessness activist; ultimately, parading in the mourning clothes of victimhood. Three weeks after the exposé – of a firm already under investigation – the company closed. ‘There is blood on your hands’, Baum wrote to Joe Nocera, in whose  New York Times  column the scandal broke. ‘I will never, ever forgive you’.

Baum’s quivering lip should provoke only piss and vinegar. It’s true, too, that the ritual slaying of a designated scapegoat, however just, can serve as exoneration by and for the system that threw up, nurtured, rewarded their behaviour. Our rulers and their media  clerc s are shocked, shocked by such Baum moments, these cruelties-too-far. As if there hasn’t always been, in capitalism’s marrow, a drive not only to repression but to cruelty, to down- punching sadism. They denounce it, partake of it, propagate it.

Consensual peccadilloes are not at issue here: this is about social sadism – deliberate, invested, public or at least semi-public cruelty. The potentiality for sadism is one of countless capacities emergent from our reflexive, symbolising selves. Trying to derive any social phenomenon from any supposed ‘fact’ of ‘human nature’ is useless, except to diagnose the politics of the deriver. Of  course  it’s vulgar Hobbesianism, the supposed ineluctability of human cruelty, that cuts with the grain of ruling ideology. The right often, if incoherently, acts as if this (untrue) truth-claim of our fundamental nastiness justifies an ethics of power. The position that Might Makes Right is elided from an Is, which it isn’t, to an Ought, which it oughtn’t be, even were the Is an is. If strength and ‘success’ are coterminous with good, what can their lack be but bad – deserving of punishment?

Meanwhile, liberal culture wrings its hands over the thinness of the veneer over our savagery, from the nasty visionary artistry of  Lord of the Flies , to lachrymose middlebrow tragedy-porn, emoting and decontextualising wars. These jeremiads beg for a strong hand, for authority, to save us from ourselves. A state, laws. As if those don’t – and increasingly – target the poor.

Class rule necessitates violence and its contested, overlapping, jostling ideologies. It justifies, or more, Orgreave in 1984, the armed wing of the state laying down manners on insurgent workers. It insists that waterboarding is not torture and anyway it defends our freedoms. It explains the necessity of the spikes carefully fitted at the bases of new buildings to ensure the homeless can’t sleep there. Rising unevenly from a fundamental necessity to capital – oppression – are brutalities necessary to sustain class rule at home; to sustain imperialism abroad; everyday sadisms so metabolised their cruelties often hide in plain sight.

The drives to such phenomena are hazy-edged, non-identical but inextricable, imbricated, mutually constituting. They’re constant but not static. The parameters and place of violence, repression and sadism change with history. And with them, from the rush of  jouissance  they tap, inevitably flows their excess – a scandalous, invested sadism, enjoying its own cruelty. A surplus sadism. Baum’s Halloween party.

In the first issue of  Salvage , Neil Davidson mooted that neoliberalism may be undermining the basis for capital accumulation itself. What we inhabit, the phase we’ve tentatively come to term ‘late’ capitalism, is its senescence. With its means and relations of production so violently out of joint it’s an economic, political and cultural milieu of increasing derangement and toxicity.

The concept of decadence is tainted on the Marxist Left by association not only with moralist Stalinist kitsch, but with economic teleology. But what if decadence isn’t a prelude to its own inevitable end? In the absence of a project that can overthrow it, what might follow but more of it and its monstrosities?

Monstrosities: not, or not simply, pathologies. The sadism of capitalism is a deep grammar, and it is  always  functional. And/but it is never  only  functional. With the  jouissance  comes the surplus, what Bataille might call its accursed share.

In neoliberalism’s decadence, social sadism is entering a febrile new stage.

In the 1990s the energy company Enron was a favourite child, a cause for capitalist celebration. It is in 2004 that it becomes a morality play. Audio tapes of internal conversations relating to its role in the profitable and socially catastrophic deregulation of California energy are released.

A forest fire shuts down a transmission line, with all the misery that the ensuing blackout provokes, and – supply, demand – spiking prices. ‘Burn, baby, burn,’ we hear two traders sing. ‘That’s a beautiful thing,’ one concludes.

For fifty years, since Arendt’s report on Eichmann, we’ve been assured that what characterises evil is its banality. A cliché deployed against a cliché. The avatar of evil’s enormity, goes the claim, is no operatic Satan, but a dull quotidian bureaucrat, number-crunching, invested in the agonies she or, more usually, he inflicts only insofar as they impact the spreadsheet.

The banality of the banality of evil, the eagerness with which official liberal culture has adopted this description, should arouse Red suspicion (as should the obvious class sneer of it, of the middle-class intellectual’s favourite caricature, the vulgarian petty bourgeois – the architect of the Final Solution recast as a variant of that awful little jobsworth councillor who refused planning permission for the conservatory). Becoming a radical critic of capitalism involves a process of disenchantment, the dying of surprise at the system’s depredations; but  being  one, a long-term witness to those depredations, is to repeatedly discover that we can be shocked by what no longer surprises us.

On 20 November 2000, Enron traders Kevin McGowan and Bob Badeer moan about growing complaints from officials over their price-gouging, in the context of those catastrophic power cuts. The exchange becomes infamous.

‘They’re fucking taking all the money back from you guys?’ says Kevin. ‘All those money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?’

‘Yeah,’ says Bob. ‘Grandma Millie, man.’

A moment’s banter about the contested election, then Kevin continues: ‘Yeah, now she wants her fucking money back for all the power you’ve charged right up – jammed right up her ass for fucking 250 dollars a megawatt hour.’

This image of rape and electrocution provokes much laughter.

She’s old, she’s cold, she has no light, or if she does we supplied it like torturers and made her pay for it. We did it to make money but that’s no reason we can’t enjoy her misery too.

Evil may indeed often be the most banal Eichmann. Perhaps sometimes it comes instead with Mephistophelean splendour. But very often it’s a party-goer; boisterous; braying; a frat alumnus; a bully who loves being a bully; a successful professional, lip-smacking at the misery of those s/he hurts; and one who is increasingly happy to cop to that enjoyment, to proclaim it, to perform it.

There’s an arrogance to despair. Everyone thinks their own epoch is unique, and the sense that it’s uniquely awful is no less solipsistic or ahistorical than the belief that it’s the culmination of  Weltgeist . But history is not endless recursion: some times are worse, in certain ways, than others. The fact that it has become commonplace on the Left and the liberal left to claim that neoliberalism is a culture of cruelty doesn’t mean the diagnosis is wrong.

August 2015. Bobby Douglas, a UKIP council candidate in Wales, calls for immigrants to be ‘gassed like badgers’. It would be hyperbolic to attach much significance, in and of itself, to the spleen of a racist mediocrity. But quantity becomes quality, and Douglas is one of many, many such symptoms. His ranting breached even his own party’s standards – UKIP suspended him. This doesn’t obviate the fact that such sadistic cathexis was shoved into the public sphere in the first place: in fact, as we’ll see, it’s part of how it performs a function. UKIP’s an efficient machine for the extrusion of such fantasies into social life, to a purpose, and the party’s repeated suspension of its own members is just the clattering of the mechanism resetting itself.

In their discussion of what the media theorist Nick Couldry calls its ‘theatre of cruelty’, Henry Giroux and Philip Mirowski, among many others, have have written extensively on neoliberalism’s sadistic culture, the increasingly open vilification of ‘losers’ and the crowing of and over ‘winners’. Swathes of mass entertainment celebrate physical agony (‘torture porn’), metaphorical ‘eviction’ (reality TV) and the punitive gaze at the desperate – leavened with the schmaltz that is its obverse. As Mirowski points out, in  Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste , it is not, of course, that ‘spectacles of cruelty’ are new, but that the theatre is ‘unabashed’, ‘has been made to seem so unexceptional’; and that in the context of neoliberalism it is doing something distinct. It serves, he says, ‘more targeted purposes [than distraction], such as teaching techniques optimised to reinforce the neoliberal self’.

Cultural products, however tendentiously or at whatever effort, may be read against their grain. But the elective affinities could hardly be much clearer between such programming – ‘so ubiquitous that one need hardly recite the titles’ – and the depths of political economy on which it is the froth: the lionising of the flexible, depth-free, entrepreneurial subject, pat redemption for those who earn it, and the ‘debasement of victims’.

2013. Hip San Francisco entrepreneur Greg Gopman complains online that he has to share the streets with the poor.

There is an area of town for degenerates … There is nothing positive gained from having them so close to us. In other cosmopolitan cities, the lower part of society … beg[s] coyly, stay[s] quiet, and generally stay[s] out of your way. They realize it’s a privilege to be in the civilized part of town…  

Nietzsche, in  On the Genealogy of Morals , saw social sadism as inextricable from debt.

[T]he creditor is given a kind of pleasure as repayment and compensation – the pleasure of being allowed to discharge his power on a powerless person … the delight in ‘ de fair le mal pour le plaisir de le faire ’ [doing wrong for the pleasure of it], the enjoyment of violation. This enjoyment is more highly prized the lower and baser the debtor stands in the social order, and it can easily seem to the creditor a delicious mouthful, even a foretaste of a higher rank. By means of the ‘punishment’ of the debtor, the creditor participates in a right belonging to the masters. … The compensation thus consist of a permission for and right to cruelty.

This reads far less like some timeless truth of human psyche than like advice for the culture industry and their paymasters on how to dole out a public and psychological wage, the ‘aspirationalism’ and ‘entrepreneurialism’ of neoliberalism channelled into spectacular sadisms. Extending to the lower orders a small share in domination.

Law has always, in capitalist states, been a class project. ‘In its majestic equality,’ Anatole France allows, ‘the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges’. But the back-handed oppression of abstract equality is not always sadistic enough. More and more, with increasingly overt spite, laws and the politics they bespeak and shore up explicitly punish the poor for their poverty.

The US Supreme court may have ruled against imprisonment for failure to pay legal fees, but that hasn’t stopped defendants in several US states being jailed, says the American Civil Liberties Union, ‘at increasingly alarming rates for failing to pay legal debts they can never hope to afford’. In Arkansas tenants are jailed for failing to pay rent on time. A mentally ill teenager in Georgia is prosecuted for stealing school supplies, released only when her mother can pay the $4,000 cost of her incarceration – ransom.

In the UK, the Institute for Fiscal Studies projects that the slashing of tax credits will lose 8.4 million low-income working households £750 per year. Jeremy Hunt, the Conservative Health Secretary, openly proclaims the exemplary nature of these attacks. Those who live with the help of welfare, he implies, lack dignity and self-respect. The cuts, he insists with orientalism as fervent as his atlanticism, are ‘a very important cultural signal’ which will encourage people to be ‘prepared to work hard in the way that Asian economies are prepared to work hard, in the way that Americans are prepared to work hard’. Mining tycoon Gina Rinehart, richest woman on earth, clarifies for the poor: ‘don’t just sit there and complain. Do something to make more money yourself – spend less time drinking or smoking and socialising, and more time working’.

To succeed in such a landscape, to be a ‘winner’ among necessarily despised ‘losers’, takes a certain mindset. If one’s too full of the milk of human kindness to  enjoy  everyday sadism, one must at least negotiate it without hesitation or regret. It’s a popular and titillating factoid that Wall Street and the City are statistically heavily overpopulated with psychopaths. And for those who aren’t, culture sells the traits as pedagogy. ‘Should we all be a bit psychopathic at work?’ asks the BBC. ‘Unleash your inner psycho for success’, the  Sun  answers, one of countless outlets to puff  The Good Psychopath’s Guide to Success  by Kevin Dutton and ex-SAS soldier Andy McNab. ‘The ability psychopaths have to turn down their empathy and block out other concerns make them the best operators in high- pressure environments,’ McNab tells the  Telegraph.

This is sacred, holy stuff: one highlight of Forbes’ ‘Leadership’ section in 2012 was, in the words of its headline, ‘Learning From Psychopaths and Monks’.

Cruelty is common and tenacious. In their eagerness to dampen down the empathy that might restrain it, aspirational capitalists attest to the tenacity of that capacity, too. Not even professionals in pain are immune from guilt and its somatic effects.

Of course whether innate or assiduously acquired, that profitable adaptation psychopathy, as indifference to, rather than investment in, others’ pain, is not sadism. But sadism can be learned, once the initial visceral distress at inflicting pain subsides. Though, according to Roy F. Baumeister and W. Keith Campbell in their paper ‘The Intrinsic Appeal of Evil: Sadism, Sensational Thrills, and Threatened Egotism’, ‘the majority of perpetrators do not seem to develop a sadistic pleasure’, for others ‘the pleasure in harming others … seems to emerge gradually over time and is described by some as comparable to an addiction’.

Sadism is not for everyone, not even for every neoliberal. Some just don’t have what it takes. ‘Mr Clinton’, Kissinger once famously (and rather unfairly) muttered into a cocktail, ‘does not have the strength of character to be a war criminal.’

The Reign of the Cops 

On Canadian TV, in January 2014, businessman Kevin O’Leary is asked to respond to the fact that the wealth of the eighty-five richest people in the world is equal to that of the bottom 3.5 billion. It is, he says, ‘fantastic news’. Because the statistic ‘inspires’ the poor. But it’s self-evidently impossible for even a tiny proportion of that impoverished mass to become economically secure, let alone, in his words, ‘stinking rich’, and he can only enjoy the statistic  because  of that.

John Tammy takes on the argument in an article for Forbes in that same month. Income inequality, he says, is ‘ unrelentingly beautiful ’. The emphasis is his.

At some level O’Leary knows, whatever flimsy Horatio-Alger lie he might recite to himself, why he likes that statistic so much, and we know why, and he knows we know why, and that we know he knows it, and so on. The imposition of their own reality is a key component in the dominance of those who dominate.

2006. Ten-year-old Huda Ghalia’s family are blown apart on a Gaza beach. The Israeli government denies, in the face of all logic, history, evidence, and the researches of a Pentagon battlefield analyst, that their shells are to blame. The sheer absurdity of the claim that the munitions were Palestinian is part of its social- sadistic traction, the relentless bark of the attacking bully. ‘Why are you bombing yourself? Why are you bombing yourself?’

History is a procession of torture and the spectacle of agonised mass deaths, in the Colosseum, the ziggurats of the Aztecs, the  autos-da-fé  of heretics. ‘Without cruelty’, Nietzsche says, ‘there is no carnival.’ Again, as a theory of humanity this is arrant nonsense: as advice for statecraft, it has proved invaluable.

But though social sadism has not been rare, there’s no eternal social ontology of cruelty. All these moments are defined by and do specific and distinct things, perform functions. The Roman games grew from funerary rites, showcased the increasing and spectacular power of ruling classes; provided for the popular punishment of scapegoats, all sanctified and embedded within legal codes and  mores  – and libidinally sanctioned, too, in their sadism, in part because of the empathic load that those who’d make them spectacles must overcome. In countless societies performed violence was openly descriptive and sustaining, according to various parameters, of boundaries and social logic.

By contrast, there is something distinct about social sadism in modern capitalism, and in neoliberalism in particular. This is surplus cruelty in a specific sense, sadism supererogatory in relation to the – conjunctural, contested – ‘functional’ requirements of the system, a social formation characterised by the hedged, reversible, embattled but well-documented historical shift away from social punishment as  overt  – the qualification is crucial – spectacular, sanctioned, performative cruelty. The sociologist Norbert Elias, discussing punishment politics in 1939’s  The Civilizing Process , described the adjustment of behaviour over hundreds of years according to ‘the expanding threshold of repugnance’. A socially stimulated sense of revulsion, that a growing field of acts are considered ‘uncivilised’, and – at least openly, at least proclaimedly – unacceptable.

This is not to buy capitalism’s bullshit about itself. Uncovering the dynamics behind this deeply uneven trend reveal it to be conditioned by subtler and no less ruthless power politics, to be a thin, fragile result of overlapping social pressures and powerplays, rather than because of any Whiggish dynamic to history. The concomitant diffusion of the state into the biopolitics of everyday life underlies its growing powers, including for repression, and sadism. Nor of course does the repugnant cease to happen. It may happen more. The politics of  where  and  how  become central.

The Enlightenment was always a dark enlightenment. Viciousness and brutality in their most unmediated forms were still – and are – deemed appropriate for the colonies. Today, our everyday and surplus sadisms are inextricable from capitalism’s history of racist violence.

Few countries have cultivated so assiduously and ostentatiously a self-image not only of ‘civilisation’ but ‘civilisedness’ as Britain. Its imperialism is the ostentatious bad conscience to this ‘civilising process’: there’s not much sign of expanding repugnance in the savage beatings and sexual assaults of prisoners during the ‘Aden crisis’; the torture by pepper and the waterboarding  avant le lettre  in Cyprus in the 1950s; castration, rape, mass-murder in Kenya in the same decade, in what Caroline Elkins has called Britain’s Gulag.

It is not irrelevant that these acts were not proclaimed: with varying success, they were hidden, denied, and if uncovered, variably defensively justified. When the cover-up of a massacre in Hola in Kenya failed, the parliamentary record for July 1959 runs through the gamut. The security services do a tremendously difficult job; problems are the result of muddle and crossed wires; in any case, their enemies are, as one MP insisted, ‘sub-human’.

There’s no surprise in that: in a system of white supremacism, there is an exclusion clause in the ‘arc of civilisation’ at the edges of the polity. Accumulation, particularly so-called ‘primitive accumulation’, is always-already a system of rapacity and its sadisms. A grim corollary of the uneven and countervailed tendency to juridical equality and the abstraction of commodity exchange is the expropriation of colonial theft, and the concretely subordinated colonial subject.

Its settler-colonial nature is key to the vivid social sadism of the Israeli state. ‘Supererogatory’ cruelty is brazen and startling and often remarked upon, by visitors and victims and dissident Israelis themselves. ‘The vindictiveness of many (not all) Israeli soldiers’, John Berger carefully writes, ‘is particular.’ The relentless surplus sadisms of everyday life for Palestinians, of the checkpoints, described exhaustedly by Oded Na’aman and others who once manned them, accompany those of politicide – senior Israeli official Dov Weisglass impishly describing the starvation strategy of the blockade as to ‘put the Palestinians on a diet’.

Colonial sadism is not a result of racism; racism, rather, is created by that sadism – viciousness justifying itself post-facto. The agonies inflicted by the metropole’s torturers  are  the ‘civilising process’.

This exonerated colonial savagery continues even – especially – where the ‘civilised’ population is a subset within the borders of the state. Thus the management techniques of slavery, the panoply of baroque, spectacular, inventive viciousness, whips and rapes, punitive scatology, spiked wheels, salt-rubbed wounds.

Capitalist social sadism is still, of course, a racialised, colonial logic. Its victims are by no means always non-white, nor are those who apply it always white, but it’s intrinsically derived from these techniques of colonialism, its social Darwinism and naturalisation of hierarchies, and the racialising drive is irrepressible. New configurations of viciousness illuminate this, as neoliberalism stretches the boundaries of quotidian sadism.

Civil-rights struggles mean that, for now, mainstream culture deems the overtly white-supremacist sadisms of Jim Crow impolite. Which leads to immense white resentment. Of course there are strategies aplenty to maintain racist power in this new climate: ‘By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” – that hurts you,’ explained Lee Atwater, Republican strategist, in 1981. ‘Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff.’ The sadistic racial drive is unabated – a result of the ‘economic things’ that Atwater explained replaced the racist slurs as mobilising calls is that ‘blacks get hurt worse than whites’.

But white supremacy wants, unendingly, its mastery to be overt. To be rehabilitated under neoliberalism, racial sadisms have to be deployed with a kind of abusive suppleness. Subtler microaggressions are inadequate, whatever the power structure they maintain: they must be obvious and swaggering, conspicuous consumption of the public and psychological wages of white spite; and they must also,  just , be plausibly deniable as such, enough to redouble the cruelty with racial gaslighting, huffing that to read race into racist sadism is to play the legendary race card, to be obsessed with race.

This can go too far. When Cliven Bundy muses on camera about whether ‘the Negro’ was not ‘better off’ under slavery, even Fox TV distances itself. But as we’ll see, though not without risk, such excess, such surplus sadism, can perform an invaluable role.

Some virtuoso racialised sadisms have been displayed in the aftermath of the death of Eric Garner at the hands of the NYPD. Arrested for selling cigarettes, his last moments are filmed as he’s choked by Officer Daniel Pantaleo, desperately and repeatedly gasping, ‘I can’t breathe!’

Jason Barthel, a corporal in the Indiana Police with a sideline in clothing, promptly releases a t-shirt bearing the words ‘Breathe Easy: Don’t break the law’. ‘[P]lease understand’, he writes online, with palpable twinkle, ‘when we use the slogan “Breathe Easy” we are referring to knowing the police are there for you!’

December 2014. Around 100 people turn up to counter-protest a demonstration against the police murder. They wear black hoodies on which is written, ‘I CAN BREATHE’.

More, far more than in the other counterslogans ‘Blue Lives Matter’ or ‘All Lives Matter’, the will to viciousness is visible. What possible relevance is it to these people proclaiming their gratitude to the killers – ‘Thanks to the NYPD’ the shirts say on the back – what possible ethical claim could it announce, that they can breathe, except that Eric Garner cannot, and never will again?

The ‘civilising process’ inheres not in any ending of these acts of sadism, but in a certain draping of a veil over the acts. But to perform their tasks they  must  be detectable. The act of veiling is visible, cognitive distortion, the creation of reality. So, like a children’s puzzle in which you’re asked to find images hiding in the lines of another picture, if this is a camouflage it is one that exists to be uncovered. That is what ‘dog-whistle’ politics is.

The point of plausible deniability has never been believability. Now, in the sadism culture of neoliberalism, the necessity of even the barest due diligence, the performance of a scrap of such deniability diminishes. The threshold of repugnance recontracts.

When Moussa Khebaïli , like so many North Africans, was taken by the police in Paris to the torture room in 1958, he was told, ‘ C’est le régime des flics qui commence’  – ‘The reign of the cops is beginning.’ It’s still the reign of the cops, and – as the Chicago police’s Homan Square black site, uncovered by the  Guardian , makes clear – they still have their torture rooms. But they are also doing their business out in plain sight, in the glare of social media, not retreating but doubling down on the sadism of the acts and their justifications.

There’s contestation, certainly, a debate about what’s appropriate, even within the ruling class. The direction of the trend, however, is hard to deny.

In 2009, anchor Shep Smith, in a debate about torture on foxnews.com, slams his desk, announcing, ‘We are America. I don’t give a rat’s ass if it helps. We are America. We do not fucking torture!’ America does, of course, but Smith’s naïvety on that point is less important than the almost touching, outraged bewilderment of a man having the wrong argument. He dates himself: his interlocutors Trace Gallagher and Andrew Napolitano have long-since moved on, are discussing torture’s possible efficacy.

Torture is even recast as politically progressive – sadism as the salvation of civilisation. One of the most acclaimed attorneys in the US, Alan Dershowitz, among many others, proposes not only that it should be legalised, but that the ‘torture warrant’ would be a restraint, minimising ‘excesses’.

In his seminal work  Two Laws of Penal Evolution , Durkheim described the  loi d’adoucissement,  the law of softening, according to which, as societies ‘advance’, the penalties for crimes are reduced in intensity, particularly physical intensity. Never monolinear, the trend he identified was away from physical cruelties towards the deprivation of liberty. This obscures the fact that the advance in ‘moral education’, and the ‘softening’ of social life for some can be congruent with deepening repression, a hardening of punishment for others. There is a very partial truth that  legitimation  has stressed the ‘amelioration’; that there was a juridico-political performance of an ‘ adoucissement ’ trend. Note the past tense.

It’s no surprise that it’s in this most symptomatic arena of juridical punishment that the shift to social sadism is so blatantly manifest. Nor, given the incarceration frenzy of the US state against the black population, could its racialisation be more finely poised: to viciously punish the ‘criminal’ is, literally in hundreds of thousands of cases, and synecdochically in general, to be invested in the torments of the black subject. It’s particularly vividly in carceral history that the ‘civilising process’ – the phrase remains useful, if spoken with a sneer – is visible. As is, increasingly, the countervailing tendency, the neoliberal trend towards its unravelling.

In 1990, David Garland wrote, in  Punishment and Modern Society , that

our culture imposes heavy restraints upon … emotions … ‘Vengeance’, for example, is no longer an acceptable sentiment to be voiced in this context. … In fact, ‘punitiveness’, as such, has come to be a rather shameful sentiment during the twentieth century, at least among the educated elite, so that arguments about prison conditions, severity of sentences, or the justice of the death penalty tend to be couched in utilitarian terms.

A quarter of a century later, the claim rings absurdly naïve. The cultural shift is undeniable. The chain gang, pioneered in the southern states, was phased out by 1955. In 1995, Alabama was the first state to reintroduce it: it still exists in Arizona. In Georgia, under a program called ‘Tier Step Down’, inmates are deliberately malnourished, receiving half-rations, are denied access to medical and educational opportunities – and are unable to flush their toilets. This is widely understood to be collective punishment for a series of strikes and hunger strikes in 2010 and 2012 against degrading conditions, the aftermath of the first of which saw one inmate, Kelvin Stevenson, brutally beaten by guards, on film, with a hammer.

On 23 June 2012, at the Dade Correctional Institution in Florida, according to testimony by fellow prisoners, Darren Rainey, a 50-year-old mentally ill man who had, in a long-established act of jail resistance, shat in his cell, was locked in a shower by prison officers with the water blasting on its hottest setting. This was not a new form of punishment. ‘I can’t take it no more,’ he started to scream. ‘I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.’ He was left for an hour as the narrow chamber filled with scalding water and steam. When the guards finally opened the door, he was lying dead on his back, his skin so burned it had shrivelled from his body. No one has been charged.

Even fifteen years ago Jonathan Simon could counter Garland, with a wealth of examples, that ‘it is far from clear that cruelty or vengeance is no longer an acceptable sentiment’. He cites the growth of ‘life-trashing’ sentences and ‘shame’ sentences, and changes around the death penalty and its culture.

States pump up the spectacularity of death, reintroduce the electric chair and firing squads. In an article from 2002, Mona Lynch described how support for the death penalty in the US has ‘especially intensified and “hardened”’, that it is not just uninformed but doesn’t wish to be informed, that ‘deterrence’ is cited by fewer and fewer Americans, ceasing to be the majority justification that it was in the 1970s, and that support is not even driven by fear but by ‘more and more by anger and retributive urges’.

The growth in social sadism is not in contradiction to, but codependent with, the growth of social sentimentality and the mindfulness industry. This Simon calls the ‘therapeutic culture of punishment’ – and we can add, sadism. ‘[T]he notion of retribution’, he writes, ‘is giving way to the ability of specific individuals to obtain satisfaction from cruelty, and is reflected in the prominence that politicians now give to the desires of family members of the victims … for the emotional satisfaction of a death penalty carried out with … a minimum of solicitude for the offender.’

These desires, of course, articulate their culture, and would be unthinkable as part of a formal legal process in many other parts of the world. ‘A new kind of state psychology is evident in the frequency with which elected officials invoke the need for surviving loved ones of the victim to achieve “closure”’.

Given the record of ‘humane’ executions, and the recalcitrance of human empathy, this ideology of therapeutic viciousness is valuable. The suffering of those frozen by the anaesthetic in lethal injunction is unknown, but the litany of even those who’ve  obviously  visibly suffered, gasping, looking up, straining against the straps holding them, repeatedly stuck by misplaced needles, moaning, is long. Clayton Lockett, Dennis McGuire, Joseph Clark, Emmitt Foster, Angel Diaz, Justin Lee May, Tommie Smith, Joseph Cannon, Raymond Landry, Michael Lee Wilson, whose last words as the drugs entered him were, ‘I feel my whole body burning’.

These agonies are not mistakes: they are accounted for, legally. Before the execution of McGuire, in January 2014, David Waisel, a Harvard professor of anaesthesia, warned the Ohio court that the cocktail of drugs would leave McGuire awake, conscious and in pain, and cause ‘agony and horror’. He was correct. McGuire was to gasp for breath, snort, clench his fists, try to rise, as he slowly died. Judge Gregory Frost rejected the stay, while acknowledging in his ruling that the process was ‘an experiment’. He heeded Thomas Madden, Ohio assistant attorney general, who insisted in his submission that ‘you’re not entitled to a pain-free execution’.

Sometimes all this unsubtle subtext is simply spoken as text: the pain of the executed is not just permissible, but desirable. On the 24 July 2014, Arizona executed Joseph Wood for the shooting dead of his ex-girlfriend, Debra Dietz, and her father, in 1989. The process of his death continued for two hours. After the first 10 minutes Wood was gasping, ‘sucking air’ as he fought for breath, in the words of one witness. Another described it as like a fish thrown to shore.

Richard Brown, Dietz’s brother-in-law, lambasted the press. ‘You guys are blowing it out of all proportion about these drugs. … Why don’t we give him a bullet? Why don’t we give him some Drano? People on death row deserve to suffer.’

Below the Line

Anyone who doubts that everyday surplus sadism is everyday need only read the comments below the articles, follow threads, brave twitterstorms. Even allowing for hyperbolic moral panicking over new modes of expressions, online bullying displays a real, toxic seam of performative sadism – particularly, of course, aimed at women and minorities.

Rot is fecund. Fruiting bodies sprout and spore on the body politic: gamergate; the ‘beta uprising’. The clamour of such trolling shows how very unquiet sadism is, how not nearly repressed enough. It seems poised to become less so.

It would be absurd technological determinism to blame social media for this, just as it would to praise it for creating any of the collaborative collective action it has, without question, aided. Conversely, it would be naïve to deny that forms impact norms. With social media and online culture the barrier to entry to performative psychological sadism is lowered. The conjunction of the addictive narcissistic economy of social media with neoliberal subjectivity feeds, feeds off and encourages such obsessive and toxic behaviours, and the performativity of the panopticon.

The release of coagulated clots of such matter as online ‘manifestos’ and statements by racist and misogynist mass- murderers such as Anders Breivik, Elliot Rodgers and Christopher Harper-Mercer is commonplace. Their actual acts, too, feel inspired by below-the-line sadism, in spectacle and vindictiveness, in the pettiness-as-terror. This is real-life and -death trolling, the literalising of the flame-war injunctions to hate-objects, targets of spite and sadism, to die.

For non-stupid analysis, it’s a truism about ‘Islamic State’ (Daesh) that it is no atavism, but intensely modern: in the demographic of its personnel; in its particular state form; in its vigorous social media presence. In the erosion of the line between statement, trolling and policy, the group represents a hypertrophy of the modern state’s reliance on social sadism. It is unusual less in that its representatives rape, enslave, torture and brutally execute, than in that it justifies such practices explicitly as such.

Part of the ‘civilising process’ has traditionally been the meandering historical growth of the state’s function as a repressive superego, battening down various egoic drives, such as that to sadism, deemed, for various social reasons, impermissible. So repressed, they will dutifully return, as indeed the superego state needs them to. Not so here: though in recent documents it has stressed more loudly the joys of citizenship, there is still in Daesh’s output an explicit glorying in what one researcher calls ‘ultraviolence’.

Always eager to instrumentalise the worst human drives, the modern state has tended, officially, to relax the superegoic repression of sadism mostly to circumspect degrees and at specific moments – for the embattlement and carnage of war; in fascism; during times of ‘exceptionality’. Though by no means  tout court , Daesh collapses state ego and superego on this point of sadism: it’s open about the fact that its exceptionality is permanent.

In the US-hegemonic sphere, there remains a line between the superego of the social lie, and the comments threads below – unconscious desire, the righting of imagined wrongs, the social -adistic ego of enjoyed spite – the troll-culture it neither can nor would be without.

The membrane is not only permeable, but movable. And it is moving quickly, through telling mechanisms.

Every person’s name is legion. Among our components are those we don’t want, and/or want not to want, and/or surrendered to which society itself couldn’t survive. A modicum of repression, then, is a necessity for social life. Herbert Marcuse, in  Eros and Civilization,  his lurching 1955 attempt at a synthesis of Marx and Freud, coined the term ‘surplus repression’ for the degree of repression above and beyond that necessary for human social life at all .  The term was perhaps somewhat misleading, or utopian, describing as it did phenomena nonetheless functional for the maintenance of oppressive class systems. Is there no surplus beyond this surplus? A level of repression, including sadism, excessive even for the exigencies of the class rule which has thrown it up?

In fact, capitalism, an astoundingly adaptive system, can and will use  any  depredation: this doesn’t, though, imply that they’re all equally, or merely, functional in its service.

Liberal outrage that pathologises social sadism as ‘madness’, backhandedly counterposing capitalism to it, is naïve or obfuscatory. Conversely, to deny that some excesses may be, indeed, accursed shares, potentially troublesome, embarrassments and autotelic reveries, would be left functionalism, granting capitalism a homeostatic hermetic smoothness it doesn’t warrant. The ‘civilising process’ – sneer and all – means that particular actions that could be proclaimed at one moment must be hidden the next, as Atwater makes clear. The boundaries of social sadism – and other ethical loads – are changeable and contested, according to a capitalist logic of accounting.

7 September 2015. Responding to the devastating plight of refugees, British Prime Minister David Cameron bizarrely proclaims that ‘[w]e will continue to show the world that this country is a country of extra compassion, always standing up for our values and helping those in need’.

Extra  compassion? Compared to what? To the ‘natural’ compassion capacity of our polity, presumably. That the government offered to take a risible 20,000 Syrian refugees by 2020 was thus signalled as a kind of ethical superprofit. An ingenious ideological move. ‘British compassion’ is inflated, while the brief, grotesquely inadequate opening of the door is flagged as, literally, surplus: it can be closed at any moment, ‘extra’ compassion withdrawn, without any ethical deficit.

As with compassion, so with sadism: the bookkeeping heuristic is an absurdity that the system strives to make true. And which, because capitalism is dynamic, is functional, excess and all.

The Elasticity of Spite 

Increasing and better calories, improved housing, time to rest – such progress is fought for, wrested from rulers, sometimes won, sometimes lost again. An outrageous demand becomes a contested principle becomes a right.

‘In contradistinction … to the case of other commodities, there entered into the determination of the value of labour-power a historical and moral element’. On top of the cost of the physical reproduction of the worker’s animal body, there is, as Marx describes in  Capital , that moral-historical element. It is no illusion: it is part of labour-power’s value, according to which, many mediations later, wages are paid. What comprises that historical and moral element, leads to the incorporation of expanding or contracting social norms as part of a worker’s baseline needs, is class struggle.

While the contestation is ongoing, is yet undecided, the status of the mooted elements are quantum. It’s only with the success or failure of each struggle that the box is opened, and the constantly shifting value of labour-power becomes, fleetingly, clear.

Particularly in crisis, moments of constricting accumulation, capitalists will fight vigorously against any expansion of this moral- historical element. The fight will mean blood and blows and bullets, and the onslaught will be as brutal as necessary. And, especially where hegemony relies particularly on fear as well as consent or habit, the attacks and the general culture will be savage enough to be exemplary.

Go too far, and resulting outrage may backfire against the state. The limits of viciousness are no more timeless than are the moral-historical components of labour-power they’re deployed to restrain. What’s socially possible in one epoch might bring down the government in another.

The more techniques and degrees of repression are  openly  available to the ruling class (because black ops are always an option) the more room it has for cruel manoeuvre. In a bleak echo of the struggle over the constituent elements of labour-power, so there is a struggle, waged down, by the powerful against the rest of us, over those of repression. The historical and (im)moral components of social sadism.

Here, supersadism, both in its specificities and as part of a generalised culture of spite, can be functional to capitalism even when scandalous. These are moments of class struggle, to push the limits of brutality.

The results are plain, in the normalised sadisms of fascist powers, and within the bounds of liberal democracies too. Even the simple fact of the reintroduction of the death penalty in the US in 1976, let alone its later apotheosis as a totem for legitimation of sadism, shows how the threshold of repugnance can shrink. Or to put it more accurately, how it can be shrunk. The unconscionable becomes the exceptional becomes mainstream class rule.

The constitutive, superpositionally avowed and disavowed supersadisms of capitalism test, inform and shape politics by breaching its limits. Even decried. In this decadence, essence and excrescence are inextricable – in the first issue of  Salvage , we termed this an excr/essential capitalism.

This is its secret: it is a system that can instrumentalise its own decadent excess.

To expand their field of possible action, the clerks of ideology must keep pushing at both the permissible and the impermissible.

This claim is not abstract. Liberal professors of law debate not how to end torture, but how best to torture. American state functionaries, who would doubtless join in the magisterial disgust of the ‘civilised’ at the human experiments of Mengele or Unit 731, carry out experimental executions, declared as such.

As fast as capitalism outrages, it excuses as much as it can, through special pleading, tendentious reasoning, bullying and bullshit. As soon after the Enron scandal as 2006,  Newsweek , in a piece going ‘beyond the verdicts’, insisted that ‘this was a company that not only had a number of great ideas, but pointed the way for other businesses to make billions’. Nothing so gauche as an explicit defence of the Grandma Millie fantasy; only an encomium to the profits and practices of which it was exuberant expression.

What remains more steadfastly inexcusable, capitalism deploys negatively, to legitimate new debasement of norms on the grounds that the debasement is not as bad as it might have been. ‘What  they’re  saying is obviously unacceptable: we, by contrast, propose only this.’

And the inexcusable is used to shift the grounds.

In 2000, hard-right provocateur Ann Coulter glossed  Genesis  1:28 by declaring that ‘[t]he ethic of conservation is the explicit abnegation of man’s dominion over the Earth. … God said so: Go forth, be fruitful, multiply, and rape the planet — it’s yours.’ Like a five-year-old who has learnt a swear-word, she was to repeat the sentiment more than once. Despite the best efforts of  Time  journalist John Cloud, in his 2005 cover-piece gush about her, to advocate rape, even of Gaia, remains almost unrecuperable – as Coulter, neither a fool nor a person who gains her energy from being liked, must have known. The phrase remained shocking.

But its work was done, an agenda stretched. It looms, an unacknowledged parent, over the Republican slogan born in 2008, and given later prominence by Sarah Palin: ‘Drill Baby Drill!’ Not only in its enthusiastic scorn for any environmental concerns but in the grotesque and ostentatious sexualisation of the image. Wink wink: this is the symbolic rape you can get away with, the sadism you can speak to push your politics of remorselessness, and it relies on the excess that proceeded it.

Here is the class logic of surplus social sadism. Whether any particular iteration of sadism is rehabilitated or not – which is the result of class as much as an ethical struggle – the bounds of permissible punitivity are constantly stretched. Depths plumbed.

For our enemies there are, in an inverse of the boosterism of the Left, and one with more claim to realism, #massiveopportunitiesfortherightinallthis.

A Harder Battle 

Can you fight sadism with its opposite? What even would that be? We have, astoundingly, a Labour Party leader of the principled socialist left, who has declared for a ‘kinder politics’. And because of who Corbyn is, this does not sound like the kind of lie-turd we’re used to hearing drop from politicians’ mouths. Should Reds overcome traditional hippyphobia on this issue? What is the potential in a revolutionary strategy of political kindness? Kindness is – here cautiously – worth celebrating. Both for its own sake, and because, particularly in excr/essential capitalism, it does embed a utopian dissenting kernel. But always with that caution. The injunction to kindness can usher in a pro-kindness sadism, a ruthless positivity, hunting infractions. Open up: it’s the tone police. Still, the  jouissance  sadism taps can become autotelic, can shock consciences far wider than the hard Left. There are dangers in any strategy which relies on provoking opponents’ outrage. In a milieu of generalised cruelty and encouraged sadism, unlikely, seemingly ‘pre-political’ qualities of empathy – courtesy, decency, good neighbourliness – might even be nascent solidarity, recruitable to radical opposition. The liberal is often the most outraged and vociferous chanter on the demonstration. Richard Seymour once made the indispensable distinction between those who are liberals out of fidelity to liberal ideas, and those who are liberals out of fidelity to the liberal state. The latter will never be on the side of emancipation. The former, to the extent that such ideas embed ethical politics predicated, however fallaciously and ideologically, on certain supposedly liberatory and universal claims, may be.

The issue is whether the liberal remains in radical opposition when the demonstration is over. This can’t remain a stable alliance, but it might be a valuable one, and grounds can shift, especially to the extent that the Left can show that this is a  system  of sadism, with an underlying logic and dynamic. To this extent there may be radicalism in kindness. In acting, in Alasdair Gray’s words, as if we are in the early days of a better nation.

But this can be no grounds for systemic opposition. The politics of kindness are an opportunity, but a vague and inadequate one, and one that runs far too strong a risk of taking social ‘common sense’ at its own word. Social-democratic kindness, no matter how sincere and radically inflected, cannot face the amoral ruthlessness of reaction and have the slightest hope of not being destroyed.

Hate is frightening, and dangerous. But class hate is also inevitable, and – particularly faced with social sadisms – legitimate, and radicalising, and necessary.

Failed revolutions bring forth a blossoming of ruling-class viciousness, carnivals of reaction, the sadisms of relief and retrenched rule. In the new social sadism, it seems as if the bourgeoisie are intent on getting their counterrevolution in first.

None of which is to say that socialists shouldn’t strive for a politics of radical empathy. Not cool calculation; not  realpolitik ; not,  in extremis,  necessary ruthlessness; nor our earned hate, obviates that. Indeed hate, unlike contempt,  presumes  empathy. An empathy which can check what surplus hate might provoke.

No matter how much we might wish it, no uprising of the oppressed will be disciplined and rigorous enough to contain all expressions of the vengeful urge, nor even that to cruelty. Much ‘Leninism’ has fondly fantasised about leading charges: it’s as likely – and desirable – that a key role of socialists in any insurgency should be precisely to act, as far as it is feasible, as fleeting superego for a new empathic politics, to hold retribution back – vanguardism as restraint. Marlin, leader of the International in Paris in 1871, risked his life in the dying days of the embattled Commune begging a furious and terrified crowd not to execute hostages. He was unsuccessful. There may be brutal necessities in hard times: still, it’s not at all to be hamstrung by a ‘beautiful soul’, to have illusions in prefigurative politics, to want there to be ten, twenty Varlins in the communes to come. To want success in their future efforts, to break the equivalence principle of violence or spite.

Long Live Death 

There’s obviously more than mere grim approval at necessity in the deaths of those marked out as enemies: there’s a sadistic  jouissance  in it, and in displaying it. Ann Coulter enthuses about Donald Trump’s proposed border wall with Mexico: ‘I love the idea of the Great Wall of Trump. I want to have a two-drink minimum … And every day live drone shows whenever anyone tries to cross the border.’ In Sderot, 2014, Israelis settle down with picnics on sofas on the hillside to spectate IDF jets bombing civilians in Gaza. ‘What a beauty!’ Harriet Sherwood describes one observer exclaiming at a particularly destructive blast.

It doesn’t have to be ‘enemies’: the death of the merely disposable is also grounds for raucous partying. Martin Peake and Karen Reilly were teenage joyriders, not paramilitaries, when British paratroopers killed them in Northern Ireland in 1990. But the eighteen-year-old Reilly’s death was still commemorated in a party decoration the soldiers rigged up, a cardboard car, festooned with balloons, a Reilly-doll’s face lolling from it, bleeding red paint.

In the testerical sadism of neoliberalism, in fact, ‘losers’ are  all  disposable, so ultimately the dead’s deadness justifies their death.

Defending the Confederate Flag, South Carolina representative Bill Chumley criticised those murdered by racist killer Dylan Roof for their passivity. ‘These people sat in there and waited their turn to be shot,’ Chumley said. ‘Why didn’t somebody just do something?’

Like the disdain (shared by antisemite and hard-right Zionist) for those scornfully described to one Jewish survivor of Kamionka as having gone ‘passively to the camps and then to their deaths’, death here does the Darwinian job. Thins the herd. Before its ineluctable drive, the sadistic spite at its victims for their ‘weakness’ can be disavowed.

In an example of the process described here, by which sadistic excess can be functional by pushing the limits of discourse and behaviour, a scant four months after Chumley’s victim-blaming, Ben Carson, presidential candidate, chides the corpses left by another mass-murderer. Unlike them, he would ‘probably not cooperate with him … would not just stand there and let him shoot me’.

Carson is criticised, yes, but he said it, in this new discursive space. He does not back down.

Social sadism’s affair with death runs deeper, more uncontrollable, than its most fervent and cynical advocate may know. It taps a powerful psychoanalytical current, and it’s by no means in the control of those who deploy it.

Martin Amis, in a once-notorious interview with the  Times  in 2006, said: ‘There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.”’ Here, with vivid clarity, is an indispensable element in the justification of social sadism: complicity.

‘Don’t you have it?’

Even before the exposition of the sadistic drive, Amis demanded not only the agreement and empathy of his interlocutor, and the reader, but pre-emptively expressed scepticism that it was not there.

This appeal to complicity is a mainstay of the Right. ‘In your heart’, read Barry Goldwater’s 1964 slogan, ‘you know he’s right.’ The more prominent the Right’s violence program, its appeal to cruelty, the more overt the annunciation of pre-emptive social complicity. On 5 October 2015, at a meeting of the quasi-libertarian right-wing pressure group the Taxpayers’ Alliance, their research director demanded that a variety of pensioner benefits should be cut immediately, including the winter fuel allowance, designed to keep the elderly warm. Many affected, Alex Wild insisted, would die before the next election, and many others, he implied, would be too doddery to remember who was responsible for their misery. The high-profile Conservative MP Liam Fox spoke too. He described a ‘great opportunity for us to do some of the more difficult things, however unpalatable they will be in the short term’. ‘We need to do’, he said, ‘what we all know deep in our hearts to be right.’

Social sadism relies on complicity for legitimation. Most defences of such sadism, particularly surplus supersadism, focus less on the necessity of the measures, and more on insisting that everyone has these drives, that we all understand and share them. We are all sinners, all fallen, all always-already sadists.

The tactic of complicity goes back to slave management.

On the 28 January 1756, Thomas Thistlewood, enlightenment gent, autodidact, successful Jamaican farmer, caught his slave Derby eating sugarcane. ‘Had Derby well whipped’, Thistlewood wrote in his diaries, ‘and made Egypt’ – another slave – ‘shit in his mouth’.

Thistlewood was to repeat ‘Derby’s Dose’, as it became known, each time forcing the victim immediately into a gag, their mouth full, for several hours. He did not use his own waste. Each time, part of this inventive act of sadistic degradation was to force another slave to do the shitting or the pissing.

‘Shame’, writes Jeremy Seabrooke, ‘is the most persistent attribute of contemporary poverty’ – and, we can add, of capitalism in general. As regards poverty in particular, in the culture of neoliberalism, as Seabrooke puts it, ‘under the barrage of resentment and loathing this incapacity’ – the failure to avail themselves of the ‘opportunities’ about which capitalism crows – ‘incurs’, the self-image of many is an echo of the culturally dominant ideology.

There is also the Thistelwoodian, Amisian, Goldwaterian, Foxian dimension: the social sadist can be expert at projecting shame. And no matter how blank-faced their indifference at the distress they cause – or how gleeful their pleasure – a source of the shame they project, at some chthonic level, is their own.

This is neither to excuse the perpetrators, nor to recast them as victims: only to point out a psychoanalytical truism, often well- recognised within their own ranks. In 1985, Bernard Ingham, Thatcher’s press secretary, wrote to her, ‘You should also have at the back of your mind the guilt complex among the “haves” about the “have-nots”. It is vital that you signal your compassion – and don’t deride the word, because that is what many of your supporters think you lack – to the “haves”’.

Thus the poisonous imbrication. Sympathy for the suffering of the ruled, as acknowledgement of ruling-class shame, as justification for brutality, as tactic for repression.

To the extent that it is successful in normalising social sadism, the invocation of complicity taps shared shame.

That doesn’t imply the innate wickedness of humanity, nor is it a retreat into therapy-babble. It is only to insist that we are, indeed, legion, that we are snarled in a complex of drives; that the perpetrator is performing and perhaps relishing what they know to be a transgression: sadism being an empathic function, a curdled one. Self-loathing is a cliché, but it is real. In social sadism, it is in part made functional for rule by disavowal and projection. And in a culture of shame, most especially of those at the bottom, for their ‘failure’, for being despised by the culture they inhabit, it’s no surprise that this is often effective.

Sadism and masochism are inextricable. And beneath them and social sadism  tout court  is something urgent and bleak and mute, looking a lot like Freud’s late discovery, the status or existence of which even many of his devout followers doubt: the death drive. Thanatos. A will to oblivion.

Whatever it is, it knows no boundaries at all.

Social sadism is a culture of death. Death aimed foursquare at enemies and the disposable without or within – Susan George describes the new central question of neoliberal politics as ‘Who has a right to live and who does not’ – but a total death too. One that encompasses object, subject, and indeed everything.

Nor is this sadistic culture’s desperation for total death, its idolatrous love of death, even hidden.

We’ve seen that the trope of the culling of the supposedly weak is deployed – with all due regret – by lawmakers and presidential candidates. There is also a far more overt enthusiasm for its ministrations in this culture of death.

At a debate between Republican candidates in September 2011, Wolf Blitzer, the chair, mooted the case of a hypothetical thirty-year-old uninsured man who becomes sick. ‘[C]ongressman,’ Blitzer asks Ron Paul, ‘are you saying that society should just let him die?’

‘Yeah!’ comes a shout from the audience. A smattering of applause. The shout is repeated, and again, and the applause grows. But still the victims of  this  imaginary death are too few. Naomi Klein, in  This Changes Everything,  has written about the ‘subtext’, the ‘crueler side of the [climate change] denial project’ becoming more overt: that, lurking always under the increasingly absurd and fantastic claims to believe that it is not happening, is that it is, and that it is good, because of all the death it will wreak. 2011. Joe Reed of the Montana state legislature, tries (and fails) to pass a bill announcing that ‘Global warming is beneficial to the welfare and business climate of Montana’. Jim Geraghty in  The Philadelphia Inquirer  claims that ‘climate change will help the US economy in several ways and enhance, not diminish, the United States’ geopolitical power’. ‘Expect’, as Klein says, ‘more of this monstrousness’. But though both these expressions of the tendency accentuate the positive with a kind of thuggish idiot’s prometheanism, this remorseless drive for death is grander and more total than even that implied in Geraghty’s spiteful glee at the ‘dire circumstances’ for developing countries.

The dream is of nihil. Disavowed, certainly, unconscious most likely, but right there. The telos of this apologia is the end of all.

This makes little political odds, but for one thing: there is no point attempting to persuade partisans most invested in social sadism of the logic or science of ecological catastrophe, or that it makes not even strategic sense to retain nuclear ‘deterrence’, or what have you. Yes, they find profit in the catastrophe or the arms race; yes, they will be in unending denial.

And besides, that deep part most in thrall to spite and shame and sadism wants the apocalypse to come.

The Montana Waters 

It has been drably traditional for socialist essays to conclude with a call for something. What fits here?

Against Sadism!

No to the Disavowed Pining for Death!

Good luck. One day, long after the Event, with the utter reconfiguring of everything, the Oedipal family a peculiar Gothic story, perhaps. For now, for all our lifetimes, even if socialism were to arrive tomorrow, there will be sadisms, and the drives that underline them, and the drives that undermine them

We can abjure the complicity demanded of us. Even as it snares us (as, creatures of it, it will), by speech act for a start. We aren’t immune to Thanatos, but we can recognise it and see who is pressing it most effectively to their service. As creatures of it, we may likely hate ourselves, and the world, but that’s not all we feel about us or it, and besides, we hate the sadisms of capitalism more, here, now, and we hate those who wreak them, without stint.

Humans have many capacities. It’s a doomed enterprise to prefigure socialism, but we can certainly feed the drives that, as far as we can imagine, we’d like to hope will cut with its grain.

Optimism of the will. The principle of hope. In the face of spite and history, there’s a better category of the positive, perhaps, to recruit into radical theory. One that’s rarer, that we don’t need to strive,  a priori , to sustain, and/but that we know, even if for flecks of time in the worst times, we might experience, and that is joy.

Property itself is everyday sadism. To see it overthrown, even for a moment, is to know that joy exists, and to know that it is a material force.

We build against sadism. We build to experience the joy of its every fleeting defeat. Hoping for more joy, for longer, each time, longer and stronger; until, perhaps, we hope, for yet more; and you can’t say it won’t ever happen, that the ground won’t shift, that it won’t one day be the sadisms that are embattled, the sadisms that are fleeting, on a new substratum of something else, newly foundational, that the sadisms won’t diminish or be defeated, that those for whom they are machinery of rule won’t be done.

That the idea of quotidian social sadism won’t be unthinkable. There will be a new everyday.

The hotel overlooks the slums. The people from the slums are watched by the UN ‘peacekeepers’, the forces so central to the multilateralist reign of terror on the island, who try and fail to keep them out.

The protestors wave posters and chant as they take over the grounds. They explore. ‘Now is the time!’ they chant. A helicopter evacuates guests noisily from the roof. The protestors climb trees. They lie at rest on the sunlounges.

Most of the intruders, like so many in Haiti, lack running water. But on 13 February, the masses of the slums, of Cité Soleil, including very many children, dive into the Montana pool, and swim.

China Miéville is a founding editor of  Salvage . He is the author of various works of fiction and non-fiction, including  The City & the City  and  London’s Overthrow . His latest book is  October: The Story of the Russian Revolution . He is currently collaborating with Robert Knox on the forthcoming  Against International Law .

Weird Fiction Review

Your non-denominational source for the weird, m.r. james and the quantum vampire, weird; hauntological: versus and/or and and/or or, china miéville.

Many thanks to the author for kind permission to reprint this essay. It originally appeared in Collapse IV  — please visit their website and consider a donation to their efforts if you enjoy this piece. — The editors 

0. Prologue: the T entacular N ovum

Taking for granted, as we do, its ubiquitous cultural debris, it is easy to forget just how radical the Weird was at the time of its convulsive birth.(1) Its break with previous fantastics is vividly clear in its teratology, which renounces all folkloric or traditional antecedents. The monsters of high Weird are indescribable and formless as well as being and/or although they are and/or in so far as they are described with an excess of specificity, an accursed share of impossible somatic precision; and their constituent body parts are dispropor­tionately insectile/cephalopodic, without mythic resonance. The spread of the tentacle – a limb-type with no Gothic or traditional precedents (in ‘Western’ aesthetics) – from a situation of near total absence in Euro-American tera­toculture up to the nineteenth century, to one of being the default monstrous appendage of today, signals the epochal shift to a Weird culture.(2)

The ‘Lovecraft Event’, as Ben Noys invaluably understands it,(3) is unquestionably the centre of gravity of this revolutionary moment; its defining text, Lovecraft’s ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, published in 1928 in Weird Tales . However, Lovecraft’s is certainly not the only haute Weird. A good case can be made, for example, that William Hope Hodgson, though considerably less influential than Lovecraft, is as, or even more, remarkable a Weird visionary; and that 1928 can be considered the Weird tentacle’s coming of age, Cthulhu (‘monster […] with an octopus-like head’) a twenty-first birthday iteration of the giant ‘devil-fish’ – octopus – first born to our sight squatting malevolently on a wreck in Hodgson’s The Boats of the ‘Glen Carrig’ , in 1907.(4)

There are, of course, honoured precursors: French writers were early and acute sufferers from Montfort’s Syndrome, an obsessive fascination with the cephalopodic.(5) In short order, the two key figures in the French pre-Weird tentacular, Jules Verne and Victor Hugo, produced works – Verne in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1869) and Hugo in The Toilers of the Sea (1866) – which include extraordinary descriptions of monster cephalopods. These texts, while indispensable to the development of the Weird, remain in important respects pre -Weird not only temporally but thematically, representing contrasting oppositions to the still-unborn tradition, to varying degrees prefigurations of the Weird and attempts pre-emptively to de-Weird it.

Verne reveals his giant squid(6) at the end of a character’s careful itemisation of its qualities, qualities which he can see, but which we for several paragraphs suppose him to be remembering from descriptions (‘Did it not measure about six metres? […] was its head not crowned with eight tentacles…? […] were its eyes not extremely prominent […] ?’).(7) The animal thus appears pre-mediated by human understanding, at the end of a long section detailing the history of architeuthology, so that its monstrousness, though certainly not denied, is already defined by human categorisation. Frisson notwithstanding, the Weird, usually implacably Real in Lacanian terms, is preincorporated into the symbolic system.

When he sees it, the narrator Arronax relays the sight with a laborious itemised description interrupted by pedantic asides (‘Its eight arms, or rather legs, were […] implanted on its head, thus giving these animals the name of cephalopods’) and questionable exactitude that can only undermine the ‘cosmic awe’(8) which typifies the Weird (‘We could distinctly see the 250 suckers in the form of hemispherical capsules […]’). Arronax carefully uses ‘ bras ’ then ‘ pieds ’ to describe the limbs, rather than his assistant’s ‘ tentacules ’: scientism rejects the tentacle. ‘I did not want to waste the opportunity of closely studying such a specimen of cephalopod’, Arronax tells us. ‘ overcame the horror its appearance caused me, picked up a pencil, and began to draw it.’(9) Verne mounts a pre-emptive rearguard defence of a bourgeois ‘scientific rationality’, depicting it as stronger than this new bad-numinous.

Arronax describes his own description as ‘too pallid’, and says that only ‘the author of The Toilers of the Sea ’ could do it justice. The reference is to the extraordinary passage in which Hugo’s Gilliat is attacked by a ‘ pieuvre ’ (Guernésiais for octopus), the greatest and strangest of the pre-Weird reveries on the tentacular, and favourite for the title tout court . The chapter is a visionary rumination on the horror of octopus-ness. The creature is described in a vomit of aghast and contradictory metaphors and similes: ‘a rag of cloth’, ‘a rolled-up umbrella’, ‘disease shaped into a monstrosity’, ‘a wheel’, ‘a sleeve containing a closed fist’, ‘birdlime imbued with hate’, ‘a pneumatic machine’ – and on and on.(10)

Though Hugo is far less cited than Verne as an influence on the fantastic genre-cluster with which Lovecraft is also associated, his passage is much closer to haute Weird. Hugo counterposes the octopus to the chimera, to underline the former’s afolkloric monstrousness. He repeatedly stresses the octopus’s taxonomic transgression: it has no claws, but deploys vacuum as a weapon; it eats and shits with the same orifice (supposedly); it swims and walks and crawls; it is – as he stresses with ecstatic Kristevan disgust at the octopus-as-abject – flaccid, gangrene-like, and, ‘horrifyingly […] soft and yielding’.(11) The octopus is problematised ontology.

Hugo is nowhere more Weird than in his admirably clear insistence that octopuses, ‘killjoys of the contemplator’, demand a  rethinking of philosophy .(12) There are, nonetheless, what one might archly call ‘countervailing tendencies’ pulling the passage away from haute Weird (it should go without saying that this is genealogy not criticism).

Though distinguished from the chimera, the octopus is identified with the Medusa, demon, and, repeatedly, with the vampire, reacquainting it, if unstably, with ‘traditional’ teratology. The octopus is obsessively depicted as evil – indeed, such a ‘perfection of evil’ that its existence is a vector of heresies of a double god, a cosmic parity of good and evil.(13) Although, in a more subterreanean moment of French cephalopodia, Lautréamont deploys the octopoid to mock moralism, as when ‘legions of winged squid(14) […] scud swiftly toward the cities of the humans, their mission to warn men to change their ways’, a similar problematic is evident in Maldoror (1869). Lautréamont’s God is confronted by Maldoror ‘changed into an octopus, clamp[ing] eight monstrous tentacles about his body’, the two now knowing they ‘cannot vanquish each other’.(15)

This Manichean tentacular is in sharp contrast with the monstrosities of haute Weird, which are impossible to translate into such terms – predatory and cosmically amoral, but not ‘evil’. If they serve any morally heuristic purpose it is precisely to undermine any religiose good/evil binary.

Counterintuitively, it is also precisely Hugo’s heady itemisation of the octopus’s dreadfulness that pulls against its Weirdness. Hugo decries the devilfish as unthinkable with what is almost a sermon, that unfolds aghast, yes, but without surprise . Hugo’s octopus lurks like a bad conscience, a horror that we already know we are inadequate to thinking. By contrast, whether one deems it successful, risible, both, or something else, Lovecraft’s hysterical insistences that nothing like this had ever been seen before , that nothing could possibly prepare anyone for such a sight , when his Great Old Ones appear, is the narrative actualisation of the Weird-as-novum, unprecedented, Event.

In 1896, the other great early adopter of the tentacular, H.G. Wells, published the first and neglected haute Weird text (despite its author not generally being located in the sub-genre, perhaps because of the never-convincing Fabian camouflage draped over his bleak numinous). ‘The Sea Raiders’ tells of Haploteuthis ferox , a hitherto-unknown and aggressively predatory cephalopod which besieges the English coast, rising from deep waters to feed on boaters, and disappearing again.(16)

There is no Vernian rejection of ‘tentacle’: the word and its derivations appearing twenty times in the short piece. There is no moralism – though horrifying, the monsters are predators, not devils. Above all, ‘this extraordinary raid from the deeper sea’ is unprecedented, unexpected, unexplained, unexplainable – it simply is. All that we who suffer this tentacular Event can hope is that they have returned ‘to the sunless depths of the middle seas, out of which they have so strangely and so mysteriously arisen.’

The three decades between the Verne/Hugo/Lautréamont moment and Wells’s saw the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, the so-called ‘Long Depression’ of 1873 – 1896, the rise of ‘new unionism’, and the ‘new imperialism’ and murderous ‘scramble for Africa’.(17) In­creasingly visible, especially in the last, the crisis tendencies of capitalism would ultimately lead to World War I (to the representation of which traditional bogeys were quite inadequate). It is the growing proximity of this total crisis – kata-culmination of modernity, ultimate rebuke to nostrums of bourgeois progress – that is expressed in the shift to the morally opaque tentacular and proto-Lovecraftian radical Weird of ‘The Sea Raiders’.

Like Wells and unlike Lovecraft, William Hope Hodgson was barometric enough to the incipient apocalypse to en-monster it before it exploded into the war that killed him. In a stunning letter describing the front, he refers to what he considered his masterpiece, The Night Land : ‘My God, what a Desolation! […] the Infernal Storm that seeps for ever, night and day, day and night, across that most atrocious Plain of Destruction. My God! Talk about a lost World – talk about the END of the World; talk about the “NightLand” – it is all here, not more than two hundred odd miles from where you sit infinitely remote.’(18) The Weird is here explicitly, in John Clute’s magnificent formulation, ‘pre-aftermath fiction’.(19)

The Weird’s unprecedented forms, and its insistence on a chaotic, amoral, anthropoperipheral universe, stresses the implacable alterity of its aesthetic and concerns. The Weird is irreducible. A Weird tentacle does not ‘mean’ the Phallus;(20) inevitably we will mean with it, of course, but fundamentally it does not ‘mean’ at all (perhaps Weird Pulp Modernism is the most Blanchotian of literature).

1. Deathmatch

The Weird, then, is starkly opposed to the hauntologi­cal. Hauntology, a category positing, presuming, implying a ‘time out of joint’,(21) a present stained with traces of the ghostly, the dead-but-unquiet, estranges reality in an almost precisely opposite fashion to the Weird: with a radicalised uncanny – ‘something which is secretly familiar, which has undergone repression and then returned from it’(22) – rather than a hallucinatory/nihilist novum. The Great Old Ones (Outer Monstrosities, in Hodgson’s formulation)(23) neither haunt nor linger. The Weird is not the return of any repressed: though always described as ancient, and half-recalled by characters from spurious texts, this recruitment to invented cultural memory does not avail Weird monsters of Gothic’s strategy of revenance, but back-projects their radical unremembered alterity into history, to en-Weird ontology itself.

Weird writers were explicit about their anti-Gothic sensibility: Blackwood’s camper in ‘The Willows’ experiences ‘no ordinary ghostly fear’; Lovecraft stresses that the ‘true weird tale’ is characterised by ‘unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces’ rather than by ‘bloody bones, or a sheeted form clanking chains according to rule’.(24) The Weird entities have waited in their catacombs, sunken cities and outer circles of space since aeons before humanity. If they remain it is from a pre-ancestral time. In its very unprecedentedness, paradoxically, Cthulhu is less a ghost than the arche-fossil-as-predator. The Weird is if anything ab‑, not un‑, canny.

This must be insisted upon for the heuristic edges of the Weird and the hauntological – and indeed of other fantastic categories – to stay sharp. Hence the importance of ‘Geek Critique’, which rebukes, say, Terry Eagleton when he blithely discusses the ‘rash of books about vampires, werewolves, zombies and assorted mutants, as though a whole culture had fallen in love with the undead’;(25) because whatever the merits of the rest of his argument, only two of those figures are undead , and they are all different . Teratological specificity demands attention. And, granting the controversial position that ghosts are teratological subjects, such specificities are nowhere more different and important than between Weird and hauntological.

Eagleton’s sort of cavalier hand-waving is increasingly rare, at least when it comes to the ghostly. Compare Eagleton with Sasha Handley, who points out that ‘to distinguish the particular meanings attached to ghosts’ demands taxonomy, and that her object of study is not ‘anonymous angelic or evil spirits’ but ‘spirit[s] appearing after death’.(26) Some years previously, however, two such perspicacious writers as Julia Briggs and Jack Sullivan as a matter of policy play fast and loose with categories of ghosthood. ‘I am […] compromis­ing’, Sullivan says. ‘All of these stories are apparitional, in one sense or another, and “ghost story” is as good a term as any.’(27) According to Briggs, ‘the term “ghost story” […] can denote not only stories about ghosts, but […] spirits other than those of the dead […] To distinguish these from one another according to the exact shape adopted by the spirit would be an unrewarding exercise.’(28) I have argued, rather, that the ‘exact shape’ is of enormous importance.

Briggs and Sullivan are wrong, but their error is not merely personal. While we may sympathise with S.T. Joshi in finding this use of the term ‘ghost story’ ‘irksome’, his deployment of a robust common sense against it – ‘To me “ghost story” can mean nothing but a story with a ghost in it’(29) – does not get at the nature of the problem. Key here is Briggs’s justification of her imprecision by claiming that the term ‘ghost story’ ‘is being employed with something of the latitude that characterizes its general usage’.(30) The imprecision is that of the culture, and it shifts.

A quarter-century before Briggs, ‘reasons of simplicity’ were sufficient for Penzoldt to ‘use the term “ghost story” also for tales of the supernatural that do not deal with a ghost’.(31) Mindful that there is nothing simple about such a decision, Briggs by contrast feels the need to justify her own position at some length: the looseness of usage is changing. A quar­ter-century after her, the new common sense has become that ghostly ghost stories are ‘a distinct literary form’,(32) and when Handley asserts her own position, precisely contrary to Briggs’s, almost as read but not quite , she takes a moment to argue it. Clearly the politics of ghostly specificity has shifted markedly, but has not banished all remnants of its countertendency – hauntology is haunted by a pre-haunto­logical taxonomic indeterminacy.

At this point in history, describing as a ‘ghost story’ a piece about werewolves or vampires, let alone about Shub-Niggurath or similar, would likely be considered false advertising. But it was not always so. In the early twentieth century, the terato-taxonomic membrane least breached today, that between the Weird and the Hauntological, was more likely to be permeated than that between ghosts and ‘traditional’ monsters. The self-styled ‘ghost stories’ of the 1920s might feature, say, giant flesh-sucking slugs (‘Negotium Perambulans’ and ‘And No Bird Sings’, by E.F. Benson).

As Handley points out, a ghost meant to the eighteenth-century English just what it does to us now: a revenant, not some eldritch oozing tentacled thing. At some point after 1800, however, that distinct ghost-ness of the ghost ebbed – temporarily, as it turned out – until by 1910 Hodgson’s haute -Weird adventurer Carnacki could without embar­rassment be described as a ‘Ghost Finder’ in his battles with Hog-manifestations of ‘million-mile-long clouds of monstrosity’.

It is not so much irony as a constitutive contradic­tion that it was a few years before that, in the mid-to-late nineteenth century, almost precisely in the middle of that trajectory of the de-ghosting ghost, that the key works of what is now vaunted as a  high ghostly, an echt hauntologic, the ‘tradition’ of the English ghost story, appeared.

2. A ncestral Sp irits

The eighteenth-Century ghost was a revenant who tended to moralism and anti-Popish sniping, embodying as dread example lessons about virtue, justice, and so on.(33) In the early nineteenth century, the explicitly sectarian character of that moralism had waned, but the instructional nature of hauntings remained.

Cultural production expressed anxiety over the sclerotic arrogance of the Victorian era and its victims, as well as the dominant culture’s ideological counterattack, the tendency to increased and cruder moralism. Non-mimetic art tends to express such frictions particularly vividly, and in the nineteenth century we can see the battle for the two souls of the ghost in the fictions of Dickens, versus those of the man he published,(34) Sheridan Le Fanu.

Dickens thinks nothing of jostling together, in ‘A Christmas Carol’, the ghost of a person, Jacob Marley, with those of various Christmases. To post-hauntological eyes this is a category-error, but Dickens is merely subordinating the specifics of the ghost to his extreme and mawkish extrapolation of the preceding epoch’s tendency to morally ‘mean’ with spectrality. In neither ‘The Haunted House’ (1859) nor ‘The Haunted Man’ (1848) are the haunts revenants of the dead, but ‘of my own innocence’, or a doppelganger who performs a selective mnemectomy so the story can thumpingly moralise that it is important to remember wrong done to us ‘that we may forgive it’. Dickens’s ghosts are apotheoses of the instructional ghosts of the preceding century – out of time, rearguard in their sentimentality, themselves haunted by the future. They are not so much convincing, morally, as performatively flourished. These are not modern ghosts, but the last, already-dead walking dead of a dead epoch, bobbed about on sticks.

Le Fanu’s ghosts, by contrast, in their moral contingency, are intimations of disaster.(35) Even in his more seemingly traditional ‘moral’ stories, such as ‘Mr Justice Harbottle’ (1872), the nature of the spectral agents of revenge – their inhuman, de-subject-ed strangeness, and the repeated intimations that they, victims of injustice, are in hell (‘pallid […] secretly suffering […] glittering eyes and teeth’) makes sense according to no moral accounting. In the extraor­dinary ‘Green Tea’ (1869), the text’s insinuations that Jennings’s merciless torment at the hands of the abominable monkey spirit is in some way payback – that he is ‘guilty’, that he shows ‘shame’, though for what is unknown – read as morally obscene.

The blurring of the Weird with the ghostly is prefigured in the auditioning of animal spirits as avatars of the monstrous (before the Weird’s demand to be considered cephalopod was clear), in the stark and amoral universe, in the autotelos of the monster (the monkey in ‘Green Tea’ just  is ), perhaps in the formlessness-implying shapeshifting of the vampire Carmilla (1872).* For these reasons it is tempting to agree with Sullivan that Le Fanu, rather than the more-usually-cited James, is the key revolutionary figure in the so-called ‘traditional’ ghost-story that we can now see was a – Weird-inflected – ‘New Ghostly’.

However, while his fiction is if anything more vatic and perspicacious than James’s (shades of Hodgson and Lovecraft), Le Fanu is a towering interstitial figure. The popular story of his death is so theoretically kitsch on this point that it could have been scripted by a cultural critic. Le Fanu was reputedly a martyr to a recurring nightmare about being crushed to death by the collapse of an old grand mansion. When discovered dead, a horrified look on his face, his doctor was said to have intoned: ‘I feared this. That house fell on him at last.’ The story is tenacious, which, in the face of the fact that it is almost certainly untrue,(36) bespeaks its cultural resonance. Le Fanu’s problematic is the crisis and coming fall of the house of Victoriana (and of the particular colonial upheavals of fading Protestant Ascendancy), and as such foundational to what followed; but the present of which it is a vivid expression is the fringe of a past, rather than the start of a future. His fiction is of end and failure.

The politics of sensory perception are important. Le Fanu, in his masterwork ‘Green Tea’, stresses the malevolent inhuman strangeness of the monkey, but also that it was incorporeal . This was, in ghost-story terms, not ‘New Ghostly’ but ‘new traditionalism’, uniting Le Fanu with Dickens and other pre-Weird, fabular-logic-wielding ghost-smiths. As Victorian ghosts grew more ostentatiously moralistic, they decorporealised. (In earlier centuries they had moralised and provided the thrills of physicality: they were often ‘thought capable of moving material objects and of inflicting physical harm […] [and] those who were confronted by ghosts believed that they could inflict material damage by shooting or stabbing the spirit’.)(37)

Central in marking him out as the key figure in this peculiar period, later to be designated the birth of a ghost-nation, Le Fanu’s disciple M.R. James’s ghosts could be touched, and touch.

3. T he O l d N ew W eir d G hostly

James is regularly cited as a – or the – founder of the ‘tradition’ of English ghost stories. It is commonplace to then wryly point out that James’s ghosts are in fact often not ghosts, but inhuman ‘demons’ of one sort or another.38 Lovecraft stressed that James had ‘invent[ed] a new type of ghost’, not ‘pale and stately, and apprehended chiefly through the sense of sight’ but ‘lean, dwarfish, and hairy – a sluggish, hellish night-abomination midway betwixt beast and man – and usually touched before it is seen ’.(39) In the rubble of the Lovecraft Event we can go further: the adversaries of James’s stories are disproportionately and emphatically Weird .

• Touch and touchability is central. James’s is the horror of the physical universe (a trauma that would trace into the obsessive materiality/-ism of Lovecraft’s horror). It is the cloth-ness of the notorious face ‘of crumpled linen’ in ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad’ that makes it so terrible. James even names one of his late stories ‘The Malice of Inanimate Objects’. The touchability of his ‘ghosts’ is not a return to that of their 18 th -century cousins: this is a new (Weird) haptos, with little to do with human somaticism, and everything to do with the horror of matter. The most grotesque moment in ‘The Ash Tree’ is the ‘soft plump, like a kitten’, with which a just-glimpsed giant spider drops off the bed.

•  James’s repeated insistence that he is an ‘antiquary’ is not convincing. He is acutely conscious of capitalist modernity, and a surprising number of his ‘ghosts’ manifest through it. The demon in ‘Casting the Runes’ bizarrely announces its intent by means of an advertisement in a railway carriage. The attack which the runes occasion is brought down quite amorally on whoever took them last, according to the depersonalised passings-on of bits of paper. The horror is of the universal equivalent in mass commodification: the runes are Bad Money. Most astonishingly, in ‘The Diary of Mr Poynter’, what is haunted is not a scrap of fabric nor the materials with which it is made but the design upon it: it is the copied design, reprinted with explicitly cutting-edge modern techniques, that is the locus for the apparition. This is the work of hauntology in the age of mechanical reproduction.

•  James, like the haute Weird, is largely uninterested in plot, subordinating it to his invented strangeness. Unlike Lovecraft, who might simply dispense with it, to present Weirdness in pulp bricolage, ‘flashed out’, as he puts it, ‘from an accidental piecing together of separated things’,(40) James goes through the motions of plot; but i) his narrative arcs are utterly predictable, and ii) he knows this, and repeatedly uses formulations like ‘I surely do not need to tell you …’ or ‘It will be redundant to conclude…’ or similar. This palpable impatience is underlined by his later increasingly epigrammatic and sparse stories. And like Borges, when he cannot be bothered even with half-hearted narrative, James simply describes his ideas freed of it, as in ‘Stories I Have Tried to Write’.

• Most important, of his non-ghost ‘ghosts’, a dispro­portionate number have appurtenances of the Weird, and read now as startlingly teratologically ahead of their time. His apparitions are hairy (‘The Diary of Mr Poynter’, ‘Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook’), chitinous (‘The Ash-Tree’), slimy and/or amphibious (‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’), totally bizarre (‘The Uncommon Prayer-Book’), and more than once, tentacled (‘The Treasure of Abbot Thomas’, ‘Count Magnus’).

Today’s ghost stories are, overwhelmingly, exclusively hauntological, their figures revenant dead in time out of joint.(41) This tradition misremembers itself into existence. Many of its claimed foundation texts can only be so anointed in an act of heroic misrepresentation. Neurotically insistent on his own status as a ghost-story writer James may have been (the titles of his collections reiterate: Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), More Ghost Stories … , (1911), A Thin Ghost and Others (1919), A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories (1925)); however, though he is often considered to have perfected or inaugurated such hauntological work, it is not, for the most interesting part, what defines James’s oeuvre .

Nor, though, did he write Weird in any straightfor­ward sense. James does not have the visionary abandon of later haute Weird. His use of more traditional ghosts and/or occasional folk-ish figures is repeated alongside Weird figures that in shortly forthcoming work would be repudia­tions of them. James’s corpus represents an under-one-roof co-existence – that would be all but unsustainable at any but that unique fulcrum moment – of what will later be seen to be hauntology and the Weird, the oppositional dyad.

In this context, the key James story is without question ‘Count Magnus’. Here, the ‘strange form’ from whose hood projects ‘the tentacle of a devil-fish’ – a Weird, inhuman, Cthulhoid figure who sucks faces from bones – is the servant of ‘a man in a long black cloak and broad hat’, a malevolent human ghost. This is an astounding crossover, its categoric transgression eclipsing any Marvel-DC or Cerebus-meets-Teenage-Mutant-Ninja-Turtle shenanigans. James creates the ultimate tag-team: Hauntology deploys Weird as its sidekick.

4. Jean Painlevé’s Quantum V am p ire

There is, in ‘Count Magnus’, and in James in general, no aufhebung of the Weird and hauntological. The two are, I suggest, in non-dialectical opposition, contrary iterations of a single problematic – hence in ‘Count Magnus’ the peculiarly literal and arithmetic addition of Weird to haunto­logical (with the latter privileged, precisely because James is , fundamentally, somewhat ghostlier than he is Weird). 

Alongside the fantasist’s urge to literalise and concretise problematics, modern – particularly geek – culture is characterised by an accelerating circuit of teratogenesis, new monsters endlessly produced and consumed (exemplified in commodity form by the innumerable RPG and video-game bestiaries; by the coquetry with which films hint at and protect their ‘monster shot’; by Pokémon, which deployed the cultural addiction as its slogan: ‘Gotta catch ’em all!’).

If the contradiction between Weird and hauntological was sublatable, then such drives would surely have led to the monstrous embodiment of any putative ‘resolved’ third term between Weird and haunt.

Nor is it difficult to imagine what such a synthesis would be. The outstanding synecdochic signifier for a revenant human dead is the skull – mind-seat now empty-eyed, memento mori, grinning, screaming.(42) The nonpareil iteration of the embodied Weird is the tentacle, and by suspiciously perfect chance, the most Weird-ly mutable – formless – of all tentacled animals is the octopus, the body of which, a bulbous, generally roundish shape distinguished by two prominent eyes, is vaguely homologous with a human skull.

The shapes are ready, and take little to combine: the Weird-hauntological monster is clearly a tentacled skull (see below for my own rendition).

Bataille’s favourite anarcho-visionary marine biologist, Jean Painlevé, understood this. His 1945 ‘Le Vampire’44 contains extraordinary footage of an octopus lasciviously crawling over a human skull very similar to it in shape and proportion. The octopus should, with that oozability of Weird skin, merge with the skull to become a skulltopus.

That event is the asymptote of the interaction we see – but of course it does not happen, because it cannot.

Instead, Painlevé shows us the unstable haptic flirtation of the two without merger . Those seconds are fleeting – the intervening years have distinguished the traditions of skull and octopus, and James’s ingenious ‘Count Magnus’ solution would be hard to pull off now – but are the heart of the film (which otherwise pretends to be about vampire bats and ticks). They are the outstanding cultural example of the superposition of Weird and hauntological. We cannot sustain the skulltopus; as close as we can come is Painlevé’s skull-and-octopus-interaction quantum vampire.

5. N eoliberalism, the S kull an d the O cto p us

Hauntology and Weird are two iterations of the same problematic – that of crisis-blasted modernity showing its contradictory face, utterly new and traced with remnants, chaotic and nihilist and stained with human rebukes. We can see these tendencies of the fantastic pulling at each other in the years since James, who inaugurates their contrary twinned birth, in waves of varying speeds depending on the ideological moment. At times one or other iteration might be dominant, but neither can ever efface the other. Opposed but not separable, the traces of the Weird are inevitably sensible in a hauntological work, and vice versa.

The degree to which one or the other has been stronger has affected the tendency towards their separation as genres of thought and pulp. Since the 1970s their ‘separateness’ has become dominant, not because there is a ‘drive to separate’, but as a corollary of the oscillating efficacy of as-simon-pure-as-possible Weird and/or hauntology, for thinking our fraught and oppositional history since the end of Keynes­ianism, that great Cthulhu-swat and ghostbuster.

In quick and dirty caricature, with the advent of the neoliberal There Is No Alternative , the universe was an ineluctable, inhuman, implacable, Weird, place. More recently, however, as Eagleton haunto-illiterately points out, the ghosts have come back, in numbers, with the spectral rebuke that there was an alternative, once, so could be again.

We do not get to choose, however – and why would we want to? If we live in a haunted world – and we do – we live in a Weird one.

This essay is available in PDF form from Collapse .

* The original version of this essay erroneously conflated the fate of Helen Vaughan from Machen’s ‘The Great God Pan’ with Carmilla’s. I am very grateful to Theodora Goss for pointing out this embarrassing geek fail.

(1) S.T. Joshi’s periodisation of the golden age of Weird as 1880 – 1940 is persuasive (S.T. Joshi, The Weird Tale , Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

(2) I have argued this elsewhere: ‘Introduction’ to H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness ( NY : Random House, 2005); presentation at the ‘Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Theory’ event, London, Goldsmiths, 26 April 2007; ‘Weird Fiction’, in Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint (eds.), Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (London: Routledge, 2008 [forthcoming]).

(3) In his contribution to the ‘Weird Realism’ event in 2007 (see previous note).

(4) William Hope Hodgson, The House on the Borderland, and Other Novels (London: Gollancz, 2002), 28 – 29.

(5) Named by Reza Negarestani for Pierre Dénys de Montfort (1766 – 1820), pioneering and dissident French malacologist, author of, among others, the multi-volume Histoire Naturelle Générale et Particulière des Mollusques (6 volumes [1 – 4 only by de Montfort]Paris: F. Dufart, 1801 – 5), which took seriously the existence of the ‘kraken octopus’ and ‘colossal octopus’, and included still-iconic illustrations.

(6) In fact the animal is, fittingly, slightly evasive of precise taxonomy: it is described as a ‘ poulpe ’, usually translated ‘octopus’, and as ‘ calmar ’, ‘squid’. Though it seems to resemble the latter more than the former, with eight limbs it is lacking the squid’s two longer hunting arms. It has also been translated into English as an ‘immense cuttlefish’, ‘devil-fish’, and indeed as a ‘poulp’.

(7) All quotations from Jules Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, translated by William Butcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, revised 2001. Available at: http://home.netvigator.com/~wbutcher/books/20t.htm .)  

(8) What Lovecraft calls ‘Cosmic alienage or “outsideness”’ (H.P. Lovecraft, Notes on Writing Weird Fiction , 1937. Among many other locations, see: http://www.geocities.com/soho/cafe/1131/14notesen.htm ).

(9) Verne, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea [emphasis added].

(10) Victor Hugo, The Toilers of the Sea , translated by James Hogarth (New York: Random House, 2002), 350 – 352.

(11) Ibid., 351.

(12) Ibid., 354.

(13) Ibid., 355.

(14) ‘ poulpes ’ – octopuses, properly.

(15) The Comte de Lautréamont, Maldoror &  The Complete Works , translated by Alexis Lykiard (Cambridge: Exact Change, 1994), 101, 103.

(16) http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Sea_Raiders

(17) Simultaneous with the increase of its formlessness and historylessness, its efficacy as placeholder for the unrepresentable, the octopus’s somatic specificity – its spreading tentacles – also saw it increasingly deployed in satire as symbol for the ‘new imperialism’.

(18) William Hope Hodgson, The Wandering Soul (Hornsea: Ps Publishing/Tartarus Press, 2005), 384.

(19) Personal communication.

(20) Which is why, despite the seeming isomorphism of interests and recent inevitable cross-fertilisation, haute Weird is radically opposed to the sub-genre of pornographic ‘hentai’ manga and anime known as ‘tentacle rape’.

(21) Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (London: Routledge, 1994): et, subsequently, very many al.

(22) Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919). < http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~amtower/uncanny.html > .

(23) William Hope Hodgson, ‘The Hog’ (1947) http://www.forgottenfutures.com/game/ff4/hog.htm .

(24) Algernon Blackwood, ‘The Willows’ (1907). <http://www.Gutenberg.org/files/11438/11438.txt>; H.P. Lovecraft, ‘Supernatural Horror in Literature’ (1927). http://www. yankeeclassic.com/miskatonic/library/stacks/literature/lovecraft/essays/supernat/supern00.htm .

(25) Terry Eagleton, ‘Mark Neocleous: The Monstrous and the Dead: Burke, Marx, Fascism ’, Radical Philosophy ,137, May/June 2006: 45 – 47, at 45.

(26) Sasha Handley, Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth Century England (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007), 8.

(27) Jack Sullivan, Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1978), 9. While praising the book in her invaluable bibliography on the supernatural, Jessica Amanda Salmonson takes Sullivan to task for the ‘obscene impression that there were no women writers of ghost stories in England’. http://www.violetbooks.com/bib-research.html

(28) Julia Briggs, Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London: Faber 1977), 12.

(29) Joshi, Weird Tale , 2.

(30) Briggs, Night Visitors , 12.

(31) Peter Penzoldt, The Supernatural in Fiction (London: Peter Nevill, 1952), 12 n.12.

(32) Srdjan Smajic, ‘The Trouble with Ghost-Seeing: Vision, Ideology, and Genre in the Victorian Ghost Story’, ELH , 70:4, Winter 2003, 1107 – 1136, at 1131.

(33) Handley, Visions, 134.

(34) Le Fanu’s masterly ‘Green Tea’ appearing in All the Year Round in 1869. 6 – 19.

(35) Sullivan is excellent on this point, and I draw on him here extensively. Elegant Nightmares , 32 – 68.

(36) Jim Rockhill, ‘Introduction’, in J Sheridan Le Fanu, Mr Justice Harbottle and Others (Ashcroft, BC : Ash-Tree Press, 2004). xii-xv.

(37) Handley, Visions , 9.

(38) See for example Rosemary Pardoe, ‘ MR James and the Testament of Solomon’ (1999). http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~pardos/ArchiveSolIntro.html

(39) Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror.

(40) Lovecraft, ‘The Call of Cthulhu’.

(41) Of the sixteen stories in the acclaimed recent collection of ‘new ghost stories’ The Dark (New York: Tor, 2003), various innovations of approach notwithstanding, there is only really one story (‘One Thing About the Night’, by Terry Dowling) in which the haunt is not a revenant function of the human (and it is not Weird, but the dark of the collection’s title). Even more telling is All Hallows , the journal of the Ghost Story Society, that contains, according to its own guidelines, work ‘in the style of the classic supernatural tale’, listing James as its first exemplar. Of the 23 stories in a recent bumper issue ( All Hallows 43, Summer 2007), one contains a hint of the genuinely Weird (‘The Reflection’, by S.D. Tullis, haunted both by ghosts and by the ‘wrinkled tentacles’ (253) which may have trapped them in a mirror). For the others, two time-slips and one imp aside, to be a ghost story is, reasonably enough but innovatively , and in contradiction to James, definitionally to be a story of a ghost.

(42) See for example The Screaming Skull directed by Alex Nichol (1958); F. Marion Crawford’s ‘The Screaming Skull’ (in Uncanny Tales , London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1911).

(43) There is a five-second animation ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly2jNr1_nro )); an illustration ( http://tachyonmkg.deviantart.com/art/skulltopus-11383138 ); a hipster t‑shirt ( http://www.HowlingGoodTshirts.com/marketplace/87072931/skulltopus_t_shirt ); and, most impressively, Becky Cloonan’s cover illustration for her comic East Coast Rising Volume 2 (Los Angeles: Tokyopop, 2008 (forthcoming)), visible online at http://stabstabstab.deviantart.com/art/wrist-hurts-in-color-66012269 .

(44) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjNh0uZCCLc

12 replies to “ M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire ”

Goodness gracious! There’s some haunting words piled into this essay, one may even say uncanny ones. Besides a couple of really good short stories I haven’t read Mieville so can’t venture to say whether this ultra-specific vocabulary is his style generally or just here, with his tentacle-in-cheek. It’s apt in either case. It did seem to take him a long time to say but a little, but then I agree with what seems to be the crux of the essay, which is the opinion that M. R. James is an highly influential figure in the development of the Weird tale. I would endorse that as I’m in the middle of a James-appreciation patch myself, but I must say I don’t think the actual form of his fiends and bogeymen (it’s true that many of them can’t really be classified as ghosts as such, though they’re clearly far removed from being Lovecraftian entities) has much of an influence on the effectiveness of his work. With James it’s all about the way he establishes his tone, crafting a background of mundanity (in the best sense of the word) into which his terrors emerge. beware the hopping thing. The stories have a charm that is of their time/place, as do the tales of New England in the ’20s/30s. I did enjoy the drawing of the skulltopus, however. I’ve never thought of octopodes and skulls as being in any way connected before. From now on I won’t be able to resist seeing a link.

For what it’s worth, the last place I saw the Skulltopus was as the Hydra insignia in Captain America. Come to think of it, that might have been the first place I saw it, and yet, appropriately enough, it had a resonance even then of a thing witnessed and not quite fully remembered. Or perhaps I’d never witnessed it, but the synchresis seemed so inevitable that I felt I had.

Either way, fun.

Hauntology haunts the world. Words that change, words that disappear, reappear, or appear from nothing. There’s a whole realm of the supernatural we do not acknowledge because to do so would be to understand that we live in a nightmare.

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I am curious if this is a coincidental usage of the word “hauntology”, bred by necessity, or if it has some relation to the musical “hauntology” of Burial, The Advisory Circle, and Coeur Machant, which was supposedly dismissed as a hoax, or the philosophical “hauntology” which is the current tenant of the wikipedia article. While the above explanation may be most likely, it appeals to my poetic side that perhaps there is a critical conspiracy to use the word like a clothes-horse for ever more intriguing and modish outfits. Or perhaps, if that is placing too much weight on the concept, then it may be that “hauntology” is a persistent rolling donut at which scholars may send an aerial fornication. For what it’s worth, this literary definition of the word seems the most well-developed. Bravo, again, Mr. Mieville.

Excellent essay. One quibble: James was indeed an antiquary in the sense that the term was used at the time. Although we remember him most notoriously for his supernatural tales, he was also the translator of numerous ancient and medieval manuscripts; he produced the de facto translation of the Apocryphal New Testament, still widely in use to this day:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M._R._James#Scholarly_works_2

I have yet to find whether James’ scholarly work had great influence on his fiction; although, as a collector of Non-canonical Christian texts, I could readily identify features both ‘weird’ and ‘hauntological’ in a number of them.

“ The spread of the tentacle – a limb-type with no Gothic or traditional precedents (in ‘Western’ aesthetics) – from a situation of near total absence in Euro-American tera­toculture up to the nineteenth century, to one of being the default monstrous appendage of today, signals the epochal shift to a Weird culture.”

What about the kraken in Greco-Roman mythology? Viking legends about squid-like monsters? The appearance of tentacled beasties in Renaissance woodcuts of sea-monsters? I would agree that tentacled monsters were disproportionately rare in European myth to other monster-legends, but to claim Lovecraft created a radical shift in popularizing it is really only a change in relative degree rather than necessarily a change in kind.

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Everyone loves it when individuals get together and share opinions. Great website, continue the good work!

Magnificent site. A lot of useful info here. I am sending it to some friends ans additionally sharing in delicious. And certainly, thank you in your effort!

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Marvelous essay. As an aside re: skulltopus; the emblem of the H.P. Lovecraft Society is a tentacled skull.

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China Miéville: Beatrix Potter, Enid Blyton and the 'pictureskew'

Artists and authors have long celebrated the picturesque qualities of the English landscape, but there is a counter-tradition – particularly in children’s literature – that unearths the savage violence of nature

Y ou know the picturesque when you see it. Higgledy-piggledy, a winding country path, overhanging hedgerow, tumbledown cottages. You can point at it, and sometimes that’s the best you can do, because it is evasive when you try to define it. The word, pilfered from Italian pittoresco , has at its heart the likeness to a picture. Pictureness. The picturesque is the framing and formulation of a landscape, and it is in the gaze. Not precisely beautiful, but pretty. Charming. Scenic. But there is an inextricable counter-tradition. Not a contradiction to the picturesque, but its bad conscience.

A 1980 episode in the TV series Hammer House of Horror, Children of the Full Moon , opens with a slow pan of picturesque imagery: a gnarled tree, undergrowth, dense flowers. A child sings “All Things Bright and Beautiful” as she strokes a lamb. When she turns to camera we see her blood-smeared face where she has torn out its throat. A heavy-handed bait-and-switch subversion of the picturesque.

There are hundreds of other examples: more Hammer, such as the 1966 village horrors The Reptile and The Witches ; the jolly maypole nightmare of The Wicker Man , of course; some of the ghost stories of MR James, such as “The Uncommon Prayer Book” , set in a “highly picturesque” area. The strange pastorals of film-maker Ben Wheatley . Peter Strickland’s extraordinary 2012 Berberian Sound Studio , a meta-horror, the most disturbing moments of which are snippets from a documentary about the English downs, visited by tourists, bucolic Englishness made uncanny by their and our gaze.

This bad picturesque works by skewing the framed scene, the picture. It mispronounces the terms of the picturesque, so let mispronunciation give it a name: this is the pictureskew.

The pictureskew is just one element of a whole fabric of affect and aesthetic, brilliantly outlined by Robert Macfarlane in his recent essays on the “ English eerie ”. There’s a slippage, between uncovering that eerie as an existing aesthetic in various works; expounding it as a methodology of reading other, perhaps less overt or obvious, works; and as a potential artistic practice. Historically, this is true of the picturesque itself, which was from its 18th-century birth an unstable negotiation between a theory of aesthetics and an aesthetic style.

In 1792, William Gilpin discussed in Three Essays on the picturesque, ruminations on “that kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture”. For which neither of the two aesthetic categories offered by Burke in 1757 worked: not the pleasing, relaxing beauty based vaguely on “smoothness”; nor the opposed term, that favourite of the Romantics, the Sublime – a sheer vastness provoking awe, if commingled with pleasure, of which, Burke says, “terror is in all cases whatsoever the ruling principle”.

Between those two, said Gilpin, in perfectly composed images of rolling hills, tangled trees and rivers and cottages, was the picturesque. After him came Richard Payne Knight and Uvedale Price, John Ruskin and countless others, through the centuries, developing his seminal post-Burke take.

For Gilpin, the picturesque, unlike the smooth beautiful, was variegated – “broken”, “rugged”, “rough”. Nature needs help. Composition is its weak point. Gilpin instructs the reader in the location of the gaze – favour low viewpoints, look up, not from a godlike sublime vantage. Where nature lets you down, make picturesque with artifice: don’t be restricted to “a painted survey, a mere map”. “Deem not Art defective, which divides, / Rejects, or recombines: but rather say, / Tis her chieff excellence’.”

And enabling that picturesque gaze are dreams of violence. “A piece of Palladian architecture may be elegant ... But if we introduce it in a picture, it ... ceases to please. Should we wish to give it picturesque beauty, we must use the mallet, instead of the chisel: we must beat down one half of it, deface the other, and throw the mutilated members around in heaps.”

There is also Englishness, which is central. Picturesque was first systematically developed in Britain (if often by Scots), and associated both as theory and style, including by continental writers, with England. That sense still informs us. The picturesque is somehow defining of an English pastoral, of Constable’s Hay Wain , of little villages.

Picturesque has been a propaganda of the English imaginary, a heavy whiff lingering around Albion like honeysuckle around a cottage door, central to the Englishness of the mind – “the sight,” to quote prime minister Stanley Baldwin, “of a plough team coming over the brow of a hill, the sight that has been seen in England since England was a land”.

The picturesque remains an organising principle, at work in cities as well as the country. Not uncontested, by any means, but with real, bureaucratic, institutional, as well as ideological, power.

Now turn to definitions: picturesque is “visually attractive, especially in a quaint or charming way”. How damning, with such very faint praise. The same terms recur. Delightful, pretty, lovely, pleasant, scenic. Charming. Quaint. Say “picturesque” and you bring forth chintz, china shepherdesses and chocolate boxes in at least as much quantity as tumbledown stiles and rolling hills. It’s only a very short step from pretty to pretty-pretty. From picturesque to charming to quaint to twee.

Hence, as John Macarthur, author of The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities, argues: “Many think of the picturesque with a tinge of disgust”, as “a too easy reconciliation of past and present”, that it is “trivial, sentimental and ultimately disgusting”.

A lot of this disgust is aesthetic, even class scorn. But there is a righteous bile and an unease to it, too. There is a sense that the picturesque might be a threat, because brutality undergirds its gaze.

Ruskin excoriates the picturesque ideal as “an eminently heartless one”. His is not a criticism of the picturesque tout court , but of its most vulgar iterations, which he calls the “lower picturesque”, and to which, as part of a shout-out to Turner, he counterposes the “noble picturesque”. One of the crucial elements of which is that of knowing . The picturesque for him is unconscionable insofar as it is unconscious.

The noble picturesque does understand the reality on which it gazes. It is acutely aware of “suffering, of poverty or decay nobly endured by unpretending strength of heart. Nor only unpretending but unconscious”.

The gazer may, should, feel sympathy, and perhaps even, later, with suitable propriety, donate to charity or some such. But though the noble picturesque is melancholy, as Macarthur points out, it’s still predicated on the naturalisation of poverty, misery, “distress and decay”: arguably more so.

In 1816, Humphrey Repton published Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening , including before and after pictures of the view from his Essex garden – artfully constructed with folds – to show how he made it picturesque, by enclosing common land.

“By the appropriation of 25 yards of garden, I have obtained a frame to my landscape.” By the planting of which he was able to hide the butcher’s shop that displeased him, and to preclude the poor from coming close to his garden and looking in. Because when his view “looks as if it belonged to another”, it “robs the mind of the pleasure derived from appropriation”. It is not that with these improvements he was able to forget the poor and the shop. Repton draws attention to what he has hidden and how he has hidden it. The obscuring is visibly invisible. He can now pretend the poor aren’t there while knowing they are. This picturesque Tory gaze is not just expropriating and exclusionary, though it is that: it’s sadistic. It doesn’t forget: it remembers to efface.

The pictureskew is the picturesque with its viewpoint moved a hair to one side or the other so what the constructed view obscures is visible again. The pictureskew sees not what this picturesque misses, but what it unsees.

The fact that there is no picturesque without pictureskew and vice versa is particularly evident in art wherein the eerieness, the anxiety, seem not to be deliberately, overtly deployed. And nowhere is this more vivid than in works for children.

For the horror writer Sarah Lotz, it was The Tale of Samuel Whiskers , containing the most full-on torture porn of Beatrix Potter’s works, that provoked horror and awe; but all Potter’s works are pictureskew, combining an echt English picturesque with ruthless unsentimentality about the cruelty in its details, up to and including violence and death.

And yet, the horror isn’t only in that disavowed brutality, but in the irruption of something more vast and alien and weird.

The great horror writer Ramsey Campbell tells of his introduction to supernatural horror. As a very young child he received a Rupert Bear annual, containing the story “Rupert’s Christmas Tree”, in which the tree uproots itself and stalks home through the woods at night. “The panel that was altogether too much for me,” he says, “shows the tree clinging with clawlike roots to a rock against a moonlit sky and leaning towards Rupert.”

Rupert’s pages are full of the chthonic unquiet; the weird figure, including that ambulatory tree and Raggety, the avatar of unfriendly undergrowth; hedgerow gnosis; and, repeatedly, the existentially destabilising dark sublime. Nutwood is a place of the most thoroughgoing, frankly twee picturesque – and it borders an infinite void.

The top of Enid Blyton’s eponymous Faraway Tree reaches into strange lands, but, as one character warns, “sometimes the lands aren’t very nice. Once there was the Land of Bad Temper. That was horrid. And a little while ago there was the Land of Smacks”. In the canopy of the picturesque tree are entire ontologies of rage and pain.

This should be no surprise: from the birth of the picturesque, it was conceived as a mediation between the paltry beautiful, and the awesome real behind our symbolic order, the unrepresentable, the unthinkable, beyond language.

“Delightful horror,” said Burke, “is the most genuine effect and truest test of the sublime.” Delightful? Perhaps. For Schopenhauer it was caused “by the sight of a power beyond all comparison superior to the individual, and threatening him with annihilation … a mere magnitude in space and time, whose immensity reduces the individual to nought”. How can the picturesque mediate the everyday with that?

It can’t, of course. There is no mediation. The best that the picturesque can do is attempt a holding position, and it will be unstable. Price, in Essay on the Picturesque , knows this. “The limbs of huge trees shattered by lightning or tempestuous winds, are in the highest degree picturesque; but whatever is caused by those dreaded powers of destruction must always have a tincture of the sublime.”

Ruskin goes further than “tincture”: in a brilliant, horrifying phrase, he calls the picturesque “parasitical sublimity”. The pictureskew is picturesque that knows it is a parasite.

We see this parasitism in the repeat appearance, in picturesques, of a usually very saccharine Pan. Most embarrassing is the “Piper at the Gates of Dawn” chapter of The Wind in the Willows , which tries to gloss the sublime as a kind of ecstatic twee: “the rich meadow-grass seemed that morning of a freshness and a greenness unsurpassable. Never had they noticed the roses so vivid, the willow-herb so riotous, the meadow-sweet so odorous and pervading ... In midmost of the stream, embraced in the weir’s shimmering arm-spread, a small island lay anchored, fringed close with willow and silver birch and alder ... [Ratty and Mole saw] the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns ... saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners”, and so, lengthily, on.

But the sublime won’t be domesticated. Even here, comes terror: “Afraid!” says Ratty. “Of Him? O, never, never! And yet – and yet – O, Mole, I am afraid!”.

The sublime will always push through, and the picture will skew.

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China miéville on crime novels.

Posted on May 26, 2009    Posted by John Scalzi      42 Comments

China Miéville’s new novel The City & The City hits the stores today, and it’s a novel that simultaneously fulfills Miéville fan expectatation and is something that they never would have seen coming. Fans of the author almost certainly expected a complex and satisfying tale of a fantastic city real enough that you get the genuinely tactile sense of the place, given the author’s long association with New Crobuzon, in Perdido Street Station and Iron Council . If there’s anything Mieville knows (and to be clear, he knows lots ), it’s how to put his reader into a city with all senses firing.

What they couldn’t have expected were Beszel and Ul Qoma, the cities of the book’s title, or their intimate relationship as sisters and rivals — or the fact that Mieville would give them their view of these cities through the lens of a murder procedural — or that Mieville both supports and subverts the crime novel form exploring the cities he’s made. He’s doing a lot of fascinating stuff here, and makes it look easy, which it’s not. Expect The City & The City to be an awards front runner, and not necessarily just in the genre of science fiction and fantasy.

Having now written his own crime novel, China Mieville has some thoughts on the nature of the form, and why it’s so hard for whodunnits to stick the dismount, as it were. I’m delighted to give him the floor here at Whatever to explain it to you.

CHINA MIÉVILLE:

Crime novels never end well. We’re talking here about the whodunnits. There’s a body in the library. Seven people hated him. A cantankerous cop plays by her or his own rules, or a small-town librarian charmingly uncovers sordid truths. There are other paradigms, of course — the alt-crime formulas perfected by geniuses like Patricia Highsmith, the youalreadyknowwhodunnits, the whodunwhats, the doesitreallymatterwhodunnits. But the centre of gravity of the genre, the pull against which such brilliant dissidence chafes, is the whodunnit. Be it cozy, police procedural, noir, the problematic is shared. And these novels – which I like many passionately love – always end badly. Even the brilliant ones. I don’t mean for those still alive within the books’ worlds, necessarily, but for those of us beyond the text.

Reviews of crime novels repeatedly refer to this or that book’s slightly disappointing conclusion. This is the case even where reviewers are otherwise hugely admiring. Sometimes you can almost sense their bewilderment when, looking closely at the way threads are wrapped up and plots and sub-plots knotted, they acknowledge that nothing could be done to improve an ending, that it works, that it is ‘fair’ (a very important quality for the crime aficionado – no last-minute suspects, no evidence the reader hasn’t seen), that it is well-written, that it surprises… and yet that it disappoints.

The reason, I think, is that crime novels are impossible. Specifically, impossible to end.

Obviously there’s a danger here of exoneration, of using this argument to evade responsibility for all manner of bullshit and bad writing. So let’s insist that one of the reasons for any crime novel’s – sometimes nebulous but in my opinion inevitable – failure may very well be authorial inadequacy. Nonetheless. Even absent that, such books always leave the reader feeling, even if just a bit, let down.

Because crime novels are not what they say they are. They are not, for a start, realist novels. Holmes’s intoxicating and ludicrous taxonomies derived from scuffs on a walking stick are not acts of ratiocination but of bravura magical thinking. (Not that they, or other ‘deductions’, are necessarily ‘illogical’, or don’t make sense of the evidence, but that they precisely do so: they make it into sense. The sense follows the detection, in these stories, not, whatever the claim, vice versa.) The various manly Virgils who appear ex nihilo to escort Marlowe through his oneiric purgatories are not characters, but eloquent opacities in man-shape: much more interesting. Dalgliesh’s irresistibility to hyperrealised moral panics du jour – the poor man manages to contract SARS – is an elegiac opera of Holland Park angst, rather than any quotidian gazette of a policeman’s unhappy lot. Detective fiction is a fiction of dreams. Not only is this no bad thing, it is precisely what makes it so indispensable.

Secondly, detective novels are not novels of detection, still less of revelation, still less of solution. Those are all necessary, but not only are they insufficient, but they are in certain ways regrettable. These are novels of potentiality. Quantum narratives. Their power isn’t in their final acts, but in the profusion of superpositions before them, the could-bes, what-ifs and never-knows. Until that final chapter, each of those is as real and true as all the others, jostling realities all dreamed up by the crime, none trapped in vulgar facticity. That’s why the most important sentence in a murder mystery isn’t the one starting ‘The murderer is…’ – which no matter how necessary and fabulously executed is an act of unspeakable narrative winnowing –  but is the snarled expostulation halfway through: ‘Everyone’s a suspect.’ Quite. When all those suspects become one certainty, it’s a collapse, and a let-down. How can it not be? We’ve been banished from an Eden of oscillation.

It’s no cause for despair. Even if these stories fail, we still love them, and can’t do without them. And they’re only one of countless phenomena which can, in this here-and-now where we live, only always fail. But Beckett’s advice is good: fail again, and fail better. Some detective stories, after all, fail very well indeed.

(And for the lit-geek, there is one, just once, in the history of the genre, that succeeded in the impossible, and defeated this narrative kobayashi maru . It’s its brilliant solution to this impossible narrative conundrum that makes Darcy Sarto’s Lady Don’t Fall Backwards the only flawless crime novel ever completed.)

The City & The City: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Powell’s

Read an excerpt from the first chapter of the novel . Read a Q&A with Miéville on The City & The City . China Miéville’s book tour itinerary .

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42 Comments on “China Miéville on Crime Novels”

I read The City & The City this weekend. It defintely more than lived up to expectations.

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The resolution in a whodunnit novel as the collapse of quantum state vectors… what a wonderful insight. Going to have to let this one roll around for a while so I can look at it from many different directions.

I get to see him tonight.

/epic_squee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111111111

I’m waiting for mine to arrive (should be here today). I’m looking forward to it.

I’m probably not the only one who didn’t recognize “Darcy Sarto’s Lady Don’t Fall Backwards ” and was inclined to search for it on Amazon. Perhaps all who are likewise confused will do the same googling I did, but it probably bears noting this explanation of that hard-to-acquire book:

The title refers to Lady Don’t Fall Backwards by Darcy Sarto, a whodunnit that Tony Hancock was reading in an episode of Hancock’s Half Hour called “The Missing Page” (first shown around March 1960). The book features detective Johnny Oxford and the murder of twenty five United Nations Organisation typists. Hancock arrives at the end of the book and, as the murderer is about to be revealed, realises that some previous reader has torn the last page from the book. The rest of the episode follows Hancock’s attempt to turn sleuth himself and deduce the identity of the murderer from the clues in the novel.

I love the crime genre, but am perpetually dissatisfied with some aspect of the novels. I am very much looking forward to getting my hands on a copy of this book to see it done right.

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I think that the The Murder of Roger Ackroyd nicely subverted the crime novel in an effective way.

There seems to be a pronounced divide, in genre fiction, betweem the writers who promise everything but frank duplication of traditional favorites — I am thinking of SF writers who, shyly or proudly acknowledge reviewers’ comparisons to Tolkien, Asimov, Heinlein, Joss Whedon, whoever wrote that episode of Jonny Quest that everyone likes — and the writers who preface each work with an essay or interview or two about their predecessors’ mistakes. To bring it back to the contingency that Mieville is so enamored of, a story without mistakes might not be all that interesting.

Hmm, I too love the thought of crime solving as quantum collapse; an end of possibility. What’s also interesting is that with it is a concurrent end of implication; as you say, from everyone being implicated in the crime, to one person being implicated and then punished. The moral stain has been excised, and with it moral complexity / ambiguity – from ‘we’re all potential murderers’, to ‘here’s an actual murderer and everyone else is good again’. That kind of unsatisfying end-of-tragedy reset button being pushed (is Fortinbras the end-of-play tidier an ur-detective?)

For me, the way round the problem is to extend the moral ambiguity beyond the solution of the crime; so either the crime itself remains morally troubling even when solved (as in Raymond Chandler’s superb ‘The King in Yellow’), or even the innocent are all implicated (I wonder if ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ came from or parodies a similar perception?)

I also adore the quantum narrative metaphor. Therein lies the problem of trying to write a good one — making all the endings equally probable; all the red herrings equally succulent.

So considering that “Darcy Sarto’s Lady Don’t Fall Backwards” seems to be an old radio play from the UK, anyone know if this is available for purchase somewhere? I am now desperately intrigued.

The subgenre of crime fiction I know best, hardboiled, is certainly not ‘realist,’ in spite of the gritty flavor. All detective fiction, like SF/F and most hist-fic, really belongs in the great super-genre of Romance. (As does romance in the usual modern sense.)

It has been said that SF novels often fail in the final third, and I’d suggest for the same meta-reason that crime novels do, because strictly speaking they aren’t *novels*. Novels evolved out of the comedy of manners, never a subgenre of Romance. At least in hardboiled, what is ultimately memorable is rarely the crime or the solution, indeed not the story itself, but the archetypal figure of the detective.

silbey, I’m with you. By happenstance that was the first Agatha Christie I ever read, and it took me a while to recover from it!

If it’s set in the same incomprehensible universe as Iron Councel, I’ll pass; and thank’s for the warning.

As someone who reads crime novels, it’s almost never the revelation of whodunnit that’s the exciting part. It’s no the crime, it’s the cover up that makes the story go, and it’s frequently the idea of justice, who’s meting it out, and what effect it has on them to do so that really ends a book in a satisfying way. Detective fiction is different than police procedural, though.

Couldn’t disagree with you more on the Bas-Lag universe, but no, The City & The City is set (more or less) in “the real world.”

OK, a tangent, because I tend to be obsessive about this kind of thing: What’s the correct pronunciation of “Mieville” (with the acute accent on the “e” that I can’t seem to get the comment form to recognize)? I’m guessing from the accent it’s supposed to be something like “Mee-EH-vill?”

Perdido Street Station was good, if unpolished; The Scar remains one of my favourite fantasy novels. Iron Council I found too strident, and the Parliament too much a straw man. I haven’t read Un Lun Dun … it will be interesting to see how this one compares, but I think I’ll wait to read it in the library before I go out and buy it.

If I had to point to one “perfect” crime novel that I think satisfies on every level possible, it would be the late James Crumley’s THE LAST GOOD KISS.

I always thought Ten Little Indians was meant to be the perfect crime novel in that way – or maybe the perfect inversion of it. Every character is guilty until the moment he dies, and then it seems that everybody is going to die. You start to fear that you will find your murderer through the process of elimination, an entirely boring prospect. Then you start to fear that the detective is a killer who’s been gaining your sympathy the whole time, like in Psycho , when – *Boo!!*

Audible seems to have a copy: http://www.audible.com/adbl/site/products/ProductDetail.jsp?productID=RT_BBCW_001164&BV_UseBVCookie=Yes

Alternatively keep an eye on the BBC Radio 7 website ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio7/programmes/schedules ). The old Hancock shows make regular appearences.

I tried to read Mieville’s “ Perdido Street Station ” and found that not only was the city a character, but it was one that would not shut up . I couldn’t get through it.

I can’t say as hearing Mieville spew about how detective stories aren’t REALLY detective stories and how everyone fails to write them but oh, it’s OK because they’re impossible to actually write but hey my book is pretty swell even though they’re actually quantum singularities and blah blah blah.

Sorry, but I find Mieville both arrogant and insulting, here. He’s just not for me, as a writer.

Reviewed it last week…click on my name. Excellent. Though it is a fact Mieville is not a writer for everyone.

I read an ARC of The City and The City a while back. I’ve always found China Mieville’s writing to be gorgeous but frustrating. This is the first of his books that I want to reread! And the first time I’ve seen him make his characters as compelling as his cities.

If “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is the first true detective story (a fairly big if, but still arguable), then the second true detective story is an explicit exercise in failing to collapse the quantum possibilities of the crime. “The Mystery of Marie Roget” doesn’t name a killer, but simply narrows down to the possible killers to all the single individuals, as opposed to groups.

It even begins, after the epigraph, like so:

There are few persons, even among the calmest thinkers, who have not occasionally been startled into a vague yet thrilling half-credence in the supernatural, by coincidences of so seemingly marvellous a character that, as mere coincidences, the intellect has been unable to receive them. Such sentiments –for the half-credences of which I speak have never the full force of thought — such sentiments are seldom thoroughly stifled unless by reference to the doctrine of chance, or, as it is technically termed, the Calculus of Probabilities. Now this Calculus is, in its essence, purely mathematical; and thus we have the anomaly of the most rigidly exact in science applied to the shadow and spirituality of the most intangible in speculation.

Some mysteries are more satisfying left unsolved.

By happenstance that was the first Agatha Christie I ever read, and it took me a while to recover from it!

Yeah, it would. Ouch. You read it right after seeing The Crying Game , right?

What a great breakdown of the mystery novel.

Yeah, not all mysteries need to be solved .

Ratiocination… to the dictionary!

Dammit, this one might actually manage to distract me from the Robert Jordan I’m trying to re-read.

DG Lewis @17> Yeah, basically. More ‘ey’ than ‘eh’, but I’m not too good at transcribing sounds I’m afraid.

Mr Mieville has quite a way with sentence structure. I’m about half way through and am finding it quite enjoyable, but it takes a few paragraphs to get back into the story (after a break) due to the weird cadence he uses. I really struggle to explain the book to my wife. That’s how I know its good :)

I tried to read Mieville’s “Perdido Street Station” and found that not only was the city a character, but it was one that would not shut up

Just like a major metropolis. (Which is not to say that you “should have” liked it, btw.)

I’d be interested to see Mieville’s take on Terry Pratchett’s crime novels – and yes, they’re Discworld novels so genre’d as fantasy, but don’t tell me Night Watch or Feet of Clay aren’t really crime novels.

He’s so brilliant.

after reading china m’s post, i promise NOT to read this book…quotidian gazzette…blech

Have anyone tried Julius Falconer? He is developing the whodunnit as an intellectual challenge in which the reader is given exactly the same information as the detective and can therefore solve the mystery before him – if he or she is clever enough, of course!

I think I’ve worked out why none of China Mieville’s characters talk like actual human beings. It’s because he doesn’t either. His editor calls him in and says “Look, you have to rewrite this bit, the conversation sounds incredibly stilted and the vocabulary’s really weird” and he just looks at her and goes “Really? You think so? As the idiolect’s inspiration led, torrent of uncertain nuance, so I related this cromulent interphrasis” and then she sighs to herself and wonders if it’s too late for a nice job in children’s publishing or something.

So, what with its multiple endings, does this mean Clue is a successful whodunnit?

I think Perdido Street Station and The Scar are brilliant but I could not get through Iron Council .

I do love mystery/crime procedurals (Ian Rankin’s Inspector John Rebus anyone?) so I will give The City & The City a try…

by Mieville’s own reckoning (i.e., based on what he says here), The City & the City doesn’t subvert the crime genre at all–not structurally, at least. there’s the same structure of collapsing superpositions; the disappointing collapse of possibilities at the end remains disappointing after the final reveal. or maybe you mean to say that C&C is thematically subversive, in that the book isn’t really ‘about’ the crime at its heart but about the mystery of the cities themselves? (in that sense i’d argue that writers like Ellroy and Peace make more interesting ‘thematic subversions’ with their books.) at any rate, it seems to me that with his (admittedly brilliant) deconstruction, he’s also given us an excuse for his book’s failings–like, he didn’t even try…(don’t get me wrong, i enjoyed C&C–it’s definitely Mieville’s best work to date. i just think that, in spite of being a great read, it’s still vastly overrated and didn’t quite achieve its ambitions.)

meanwhile, following Mieville’s thinking, then i’d say Roberto Bolaño hit the nail on the head with his approach to ‘subverting the genre’ in The Skating Rink.

How does Priestley’s An Inspector Calls – complete with time loops, retroactive/pre-emptive guilt of all concerned , and the crime recurring for real after the deduction has been staged and found everyone guilty/complicit for something yet to happen?

But in some ways it isn’t really a detective story at all, since the conclusion one draws is the guilt of the suspects insofar as members of an indifferent society.

This is a great book idea for mothers / fathers day! Try in audio book format.. good stuff :)

I will be searching for the book in a downloadable format for my dads Kindle, crime novels are his favourite but I like the fantasty world of Sherlock Holmes.

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