Loving Miéville’s Sentences

I love China Miéville's sentences. 1

I love Miéville's sentences because they are simultaneously beautiful and political. I love them because their aesthetic power is that of a stylistic intervention into the idiom and ideology of fantasy as it is transmitted from J.R.R. Tolkien to George R.R. Martin. I love them because, especially in Miéville's 2004 novel Iron Council, they intervene in that genealogy with a toolkit borrowed in part from the Cormac McCarthy of the baroquely existential Blood Meridian of 1985, even as they betoken the barer life of sentences in McCarthy's 2006 bestseller The Road. I love them because in all of this they claim style as a locus of contemporaneity.

Miéville is a peculiarly contemporary creature. Born in 1972 and raised in late twentieth-century London, his contemporaneity is not only generational but also generic. In a recent Guardian profile, Miéville himself confesses to feeling like he became "'exemplary of a moment'" in the early 2000s, when the generically hybrid mode known as the "New Weird" emerged. As Justine Jordan puts it in that profile, the New Weird was known for "dark, politically aware urban visions that explicitly rejected the consolatory, escapist strain established by Tolkien." This anti-Tolkien strain streams visibly through the novels for which Miéville is best known to date: the Bas-Lag trilogy, which includes Perdido Street Station (2000), The Scar (2002), and Iron Council (2004). Often seen as Miéville's anti-Lord of the Rings, this trilogy represents a mix of dark fantasy and politicized steampunk that brings together the Victorian novel, Lovecraftian horror, Melvillean maritime adventure, the Marxist marriage plot, and the American Western. As with his more recent fiction—the comically apocalyptic Kraken (2010), for example—these novels are the products of a socially sprawling and politically creative imagination, not to mention the imaginative actions of a citizen who at one point ran for Parliament as a Socialist. 2

Even more, Miéville's fiction reveals a novelist in love with excavating and exploring the modernity that he denounces Tolkien for avoiding in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. "In opposing what he called the Robot Age," insists Miéville in a 2000 interview with the International Socialism Journal, "Tolkien counterposes it with a past that of course never existed. He has no systematic opposition to modernity—just a terrified wittering about 'better days.'" This terrified wittering is meant to soothe readers disturbed by the onslaught of modernity in the form of world wars, political revolutions, unceasing technological developments, and widespread socioeconomic injustice. "In Tolkien," says Miéville, "the reader is intended to be consoled by the idea that systemic problems come from outside agitators, and that decent people happy with the way things were will win in the end. This is fantasy as literary comfort food. Unfortunately, a lot of Tolkien's heirs—who may not share his politics at all—have taken on many tropes that embed a lot of those notions in their fantasy."

One of the most interesting features of Miéville's critique of Tolkien's "comfort food" is that it focuses not merely on fantasy conventions of storytelling such as the happy ending in which decent people are victorious, or the character system in which the outsider is evil (and evil is therefore always from the outside), but also on style. In a 2002 essay for The Socialist Review, Miéville continues his argument against the conservative conventionality of Tolkien, adamantly maintaining that The Lord of the Rings is both a "fairyland version of genetic determinism" and "a conservative hymn to order and reason—to the status quo." Crucially, however, he also locates Tolkien's conservatism in his anti-modern style. Tolkien "deliberately tried to sound antique and 'epic,'" Miéville contends. "Clichés constantly snuffle up to us like moronic dogs. Laughter comes in 'torrents,' brooks 'babble,' and swords never fail to 'flash.' The dialogue sounds faintly ridiculous, like opera without music. Even 50 years ago this cod Wagnerian pomposity was stilted and clumsy. 'Fey he seemed,' says J.R.R.—in Middle Earth, rare the clause is that reversed isn't."

Since Miéville made the above statements, which verge on ad hominem attacks, he has backed away from such aggressive bravado when it comes to Tolkien. He has published, for example, "There and Back Again: Five Reasons Tolkien Rocks," and even in the early 2000s he always acknowledged Tolkien's power as a world-builder. Given his swings between anger and praise, it's clear that Miéville possesses a vexed relationship with Tolkien. The thorny bond between the Father of Fantasy and his Socialist Son explains why pitting them against one another has become a commonplace in discussions of Miéville among fans, critics, profilers, and interviewers. But overused and oversimplified as the opposition between the two writers may be, the important point to stress right now is that the Bas-Lag trilogy, anti-Lord of the Rings or no, is Miéville's effort to drag fantasy darkly into modernity. And to do so through both story and style.

The plots of Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council all keep an industrial modernity parallel to our own resolutely before our eyes. Miéville inflects these plots with contemporary elements such as interracial romances, queer love stories, distant wars with utterly alien cultures, and artificial intelligence. Iron Council, my current favorite, focuses on revolutionary politics that we associate with capitalism under industrial modernity. It tells the triple story of a universal strike by a coalition of prostitutes and free and indentured railroad workers against the owners of a railway after wages trickle to a halt; of an anarchist plot against the Mayor of the capitalist city-state of New Crobuzon; and of an uprising reminiscent of the Paris Commune of the 1870s that develops as a result of extended unemployment, exploitative working conditions, and a distant conflict evocative of the War on Terror. As the oblique evocations of Iraq and Afghanistan in Iron Council suggest, Miéville's stories in the Bas-Lag trilogy converge with the post-1989 news and narratives of the early 2000s even as they take their settings from nineteenth-century modernity. This post-1989 contemporaneity pointedly inflects the ending of Iron Council: revolutionary politics do not bring about happy endings for the underclasses of New Crobuzon in the manner either of the Hobbits of Middle Earth overcoming the forces of Mordor or of the awakened proletariat of Marxist dreams-come-true overthrowing the forces of capital. Revolution finally fails, its time not yet come—or perhaps already gone. The ending of Iron Council leaves us at a historical impasse, confronted with a question about the tactical intelligence of embracing politics by untimely means in both life and literature. 3

I love the story that Iron Council tells. I love the novel's engagement with the present by way of the past, especially its narration of the way we live now in a manner that is both thickly historical and densely political. I respond to this momentous mix of history and politics much as I find myself drawn in by Miéville's critique of Tolkien's conservative and conciliatory retreat from modernity. But what attracts me to the Miéville of Iron Council even more is the style of that novel, which constitutes a deep source of fascination for me, particularly when placed next to the other novels in the Bas-Lag trilogy. While all three novels tell stories that have some bearing on the present, the storyworld of Bas-Lag has a consistently industrial feel that anchors it in an alternative nineteenth century. Miéville's sentences, however, are less steadfastly attached to the nineteenth century than his stories. His sentence style advances in time, moving forward in literary history. As the trilogy progresses, that is, Miéville's sentences modernize and contemporize in sensible and sensuous ways.

Consider first the opening of Perdido Street Station, the style of which belongs to a moment in literary history earlier than our own:

A window burst open high above the market. A basket flew from it and arced towards the oblivious crowd. It spasmed in mid-air, then spun and continued earthwards at a slower, uneven pace. Dancing precariously as it descended, its wire-mesh caught and skittered on the building's rough hide. It scrabbled at the wall, sending paint and concrete dust plummeting before it.

The sun shone through uneven cloud-cover with a bright grey light. Below the basket the stalls and barrows lay like untidy spillaga. The city reeked. But today was market day down in Aspic Hole, and the pungent slick of dung-smell and rot that rolled over New Crobuzon was, in these streets, for these hours, improved with paprika and fresh tomato, hot oil and fish and cinnamon, cured meat, banana and onion.

The food stalls stretched the noisy length of Shadrach Street. Books and manuscripts and pictures filled up Selchit Pass, an avenue of desultory banyans and crumbling concrete a little way to the east. There were earthenware products spilling down the road to Barrackham in the south; engine parts to the west; toys down on side street, clothes between two more; and countless other goods filling the alleys. The rows of merchandise converged crookedly on Aspic Hole like spokes of a broken wheel.

In the Hole itself all distinctions broke down.... (7)

Perdido Street Station begins omnisciently. The narrator authoritatively sets the scene, not only locating us in the space and time of "market day down in Aspic Hole," but also accumulating sensory details that make this neighborhood of New Crobuzon feel like an empirical reality to us. Those details are strikingly olfactory, including the reek of shit mixed with the smell of food both savory and sweet. They are in equal proportion economic, describing the clutter of consumer goods to be found in the streets of Aspic Hole. It is hard not to see all of this detail as an iteration of the reality-effect that Roland Barthes famously associates with the nineteenth-century novel—an excess of detail the purpose of which is to assert the empirical materiality of the world being mapped for us impersonally, objectively, authoritatively. The omniscience of the narrator here is only further shored up by the fact that we get a general point of view detached from any specific human perspective, a view from nowhere that the basket mediates as it traces an arc through the air. That arc serves as a pathway along which the narrator can accumulate sensory details, including the map of classes, races, humans, and robots that the narrator will produce in the paragraph that begins by noting the breakdown of distinctions in Aspic Hole. While the narrative point of view subsequently comes to coincide briefly with that of a "costermonger" (8) who plucks the basket from the air, eventually migrating back to the basket, Perdido Street Station assumes a distinctly omniscient perspective at the outset.

This omniscience dates the style of Perdido Street Station to an earlier moment in literary history than our own: the nineteenth century. This is the perspective of the empirically and socially authoritative narrator associated with the Victorian novel, especially in its realist mode. By the time we get to Iron Council, however, omniscience has given way to a free indirect style that feels markedly modern, even contemporary. Here is the beginning of Iron Council:

A man runs. Pushes through thick bark-and-leaf walls, through the purposeless rooms of Rudewood. The trees crowd him.

This far in the forest there are aboriginal noises. The canopy rocks. The man is heavy-burdened, and sweated by the unseen sun.

Just before dark he found his place. Dim hotchi paths led him to a basin ringed by roots and stone-packed soil. Trees gave out. The earth was tramped down and strained with scorching blood. The man spread out his pack and blanket, a few books and clothes. He laid down something well-wrapped and heavy among loam and centipedes.

Rudewood was cold. The man built a fire, and with it so close the darkness shut him quite out, but he stared into it as if he might see something emergent. Things came close. There were constant bits of sound like the bronchial call of a nightbird or the breath and shucking of some unseen predator. The man was wary. He had pistol and rifle, and one at least was always at hand. (5)

The impersonal distance provided by the basket in Perdido Street Station, the view from nowhere that it contours as the perspective with which the first novel of the Bas-Lag trilogy begins, is superseded in Iron Council by the immediacy of a specific point of view attached to a particular human being. Iron Council begins with a view from someone. The frantic tone of the passage matches the actions of the man running through the trees. The present tense plunges us into his experience, from which there is not yet the greater perspective afforded by the temporal distance of the past tense. Even when the narration shifts to the past tense in the third paragraph, the sentences remain highly restricted in the sensory details they provide, cleaving to the point of view of the man. The narrator cannot see, at least not much, beyond his purview: the narrator doesn't tell us what the "something well-wrapped" is, doesn't illuminate what the "something emergent" in the "darkness" might be, and doesn't clarify which "Things came close" with anything like omniscience.  The narrator's ignorance of these things seems to extend to the very name of this man. Despite his subsequent centrality to the plot, the man will be named—but only by his first name—in dialogue with another character on the second page of the first chapter of Iron Council (later in the narration than it might seem, since each book in the Bas-Lag trilogy begins with an extended preface). This, too, contrasts with the opening of Perdido Street Station, where the far-more-knowledgeable narrator provides the full name of the protagonist at the same point in the book.

From the first to the final novel of the Bas-Lag trilogy, style modernizes and contemporizes in moving from omniscience to free indirection. It is as if in the course of the trilogy Miéville's sentences pass through the sequence of modernist innovations in prose that both unsettled the authority of the nineteenth-century narrator and gave rise to techniques that brought the language of fiction asymptotically closer and closer to the consciousnesses of characters. Run through the stylistic machinery of modernism over the course of the trilogy, Miéville's sentences come out on the other side of those innovations resembling the sentences of a range of contemporary novelists from Toni Morrison to Cormac McCarthy.

In fact, the eventual rapprochement of Miéville's style with the literary present in Iron Council can be traced precisely to the influence of McCarthy on that novel. In a 2005 interview with The Believer, Miéville comments that the "prose [of Iron Council] is very, very different from [that of Perdido Street Station and The Scar]," drawing "quite a lot on someone like Cormac McCarthy. What impresses me about Cormac McCarthy's prose is that it achieves a kind of very powerful, very knotted poetry and rhythm but with quite tight structures." McCarthy's influence on Miéville can be felt in the opening of Iron Council, with its tense shift from present to past echoing a similar temporal transition at the beginning of Blood Meridian. The impact of McCarthy is also audible in a sentence such as "The man is heavy-burdened, and sweated by the unseen sun." There is a McCarthy-like knottedness to the passive voice that Miéville adopts for this sentence, which recalls the unnaturally passive sound of sentences like these in Blood Meridian: "Glanton looked at the men. They were stood some looking down at the old woman, some already seeing to their mounts or their equipage" (98, my emphasis) and "In the predawn light he made his way out upon a promontory and there received first of any creature in that country the warmth of the sun's ascending" (213, my emphasis). Miéville also seems to have been heavily affected by the figural language that gives McCarthy's prose a poetic quality. Recall this sentence from the opening of Iron Council: "There were constant bits of sound like the bronchial call of a nightbird or the breath and shucking of some unseen predator." Such similes are an unavoidably prominent feature of McCarthy's writing in Blood Meridian, as in this sentence describing a scene akin to the one that sets Iron Council going: "A lobeshaped moon rose over the black shapes of the mountains dimming out the eastern stars and along the nearby ridge the white blooms of flowering yuccas moved in the wind and in the night bats came from some nether part of the world to stand on leather wings like dark satanic hummingbirds and feed at the mouths of those flowers" (148, my emphasis).

There are even times when the very plot of Miéville's novel seems to spring forth from similes, analogies, and metaphors in McCarthy's novel, as if McCarthy's figural language provided raw material for the narrative of Iron Council. The narrator of Blood Meridian speaks of the scalphunters at the center of that novel as a "vanguard of some ragged uprising" (166). This analogy, which could describe any of the equally "ragged" revolutionary collectives in Iron Council, resonates with the metaphor, appearing just pages before, of the scalphunters as a collective spirit of existentially and mythically new proportions: "For although each man among them was discrete unto himself, conjoined they made a thing that had not been before and in that communal soul were wastes hardly reckonable more than those whited regions on old maps where monsters do live and where there is nothing other of the known world save conjectural winds" (152). Miéville similarly describes the prostitutes and railroad workers in the successful wake of their strike as "utterly new" (261), a newness which prior to their defeat at the end of Iron Council they preserve for years by fleeing "[i]nto wilderness where there is nothing, a new unmapped place" (263). This wilderness is equally beyond the "known world" as the metaphoric "wastes" figured as part of the "communal soul" of the scalphunters in Blood Meridian, except that now those unknown wastes are not figural, but literal, an actual geography within the world of Iron Council. This literal "new unmapped place" in Miéville's novel allows a post-revolutionary culture of life and labor to spring up and flourish among the successful strikers. And to at least one major character in the novel, the basic activities of that culture look, no matter how much they resemble pre-revolutionary life and labor in its basic activities, "like new things": "The painting was different, and the ploughing, knife-grinding, bookkeeping. These are new people, he thought" (346).

And this is new fantasy, I think. Miéville is trying to push past the stylistic conventions of fantasy prose that he contends Tolkien has unduly determined since the beginning of the post-1945 period. Breaking with that influence in Iron Council means not only (as I showed earlier) modernizing and contemporizing his style of narration, but also drawing on the knotty syntax and figural language of McCarthy. Another way of putting this point is to say that Miéville's sentences bring a generic style typically originating in and oriented on the archaic past into increasing contact with the literary present: they mobilize style as a locus of contemporaneity. This is nowhere more tangible than in the rhythm of Miéville's sentences in Iron Council. That rhythm, with its affinities to McCarthy's style, disrupts the antiquity of Tolkien's prose by updating one of the most common stylistic devices of The Lord of the Rings: parataxis.

Parataxis is a stylistic device in which the writer strings together sentences or phrases without the help of a subordinating conjunction, depending either on a coordinating conjunction (such as and) or on no conjunction at all to connect sentences or phrases (often using a semi-colon, dash, colon, or comma in an effectively non-subordinating way). According to The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, the device involves "a relative paucity of linking terms between juxtaposed clauses or sentences, often giving the effect of piling up, swiftness, and sometimes compression. A paratactic style is one in which a language's ordinary resources for joining propositions is deliberately underused" (879-880). This style punctuates the prose of The Lord of the Rings with paratactic rhythms, as in this entirely unexceptional passage from The Return of the King in which a series of ands repeatedly structures the syntax of Tolkien's prose:

And in that moment all the trumpets were blown, and the King Elessar went forth and came to the barrier, and Húrin of the Keys thrust it back; and amid the music of harp and of viol and of flute and the singing of clear voices the King passed through the flower-laden streets, and came to the Citadel, and entered in; and the banner of the Tree and the Stars was unfurled upon the topmost tower, and the reign of King Elessar began, of which many songs have been told.

In his time the City was made more fair than it had ever been, even in the days of its first glory; and it was filled with trees and with fountains, and its gates were wrought of mithril and steel, and its streets were paved with white marble; and the Folk of the Mountain laboured in it, and the Folk of the Wood rejoiced to come there; and all was healed and made good, and the houses were filled with men and women and the laughter of children, and no window was blind nor any courtyard empty; and after the ending of the Third Age of the world into the new age it preserved the memory and the glory of the years that were gone. (304)

This is clearly a passage that Miéville could single out as exemplary of Tolkien's conservative content and traditionalist form. The scene itself is conservative in that it celebrates a human order restored to its past glories by a regal savior, the Ranger Aragorn now crowned King Elessar, who has defeated the less-than-human outsiders that threatened a dark—and cataclysmically modern—future for Middle Earth in The Lord of the Rings. At the level of form, Tolkien's sentences constitute an objective correlative to this conservatism. The parataxis creates a consistent rhythm as a function of the ordered pattern of semi-colons in conjunction with the comparatively regular recurrence of and. This regularity adds force to the sense of epochal restoration that King Elessar's return and reign engenders: the order of the sentences reflects the order of the return. To put this point differently, Tolkien's sentences possess a restorative rhythm in that the stylistic device of parataxis rules them with a metrical regularity that makes the return of the King feel historically right.

This rhythm has a historical quality of restored pastness, moreover, because it densely and allusively echoes medieval and Renaissance works in which parataxis was highly pronounced, such as Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur and the King James Bible, not to mention "postmedieval, romantic" works like the King James-influenced poetry of Lord Byron and the "conventionally medieval" writings of William Morris and other pre-Raphaelites (Lynch 80; Flieger 21). Such echoes sounded particularly loudly in the moment during which Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings between 1937 and 1949. This was the period by which modernist aesthetics had spread far and wide, and were no longer the sole purview of an avant-garde of poets, novelists, artists, and architects. This was also an era marked by the cataclysmically modern onslaught and global upheaval of World War II, an event that personally affected Tolkien since his son was a member of the Royal Air Force. In this moment, Tolkien wielded parataxis "as an anti-modernist cultural weapon" (Lynch 80) with which to assert a powerful will-to-antiquity over and against the present.

For Miéville, by contrast, parataxis embodies a powerful will-to-contemporaneity. Although he doesn't employ this device in the Bas-Lag trilogy with the same frequency that Tolkien does in The Lord of the Rings, Miéville uses parataxis in striking ways throughout Iron Council. Parataxis makes an especially arresting appearance in one of that novel's scenes devoted to the universal strike of the prostitutes and railroad workers against the railway. This scene revolves around a Weaver, a giant godlike spider capable of traversing dimensions. Reminiscent of the evil arachnid Shelob in The Lord of the Rings, Weavers are distinct in that they are less interested in eating Hobbits than in creating Beauty. They do so out of the events unfurling in the world that seize their senses, if not their imaginations, the latter feeling like the name for something more human than the occult strangeness of Weavers allows. The events that compel the Weaver to appear in Iron Council seem to be not only the building of the railroad, but also the build-up of anger among workers about wages withheld by the railway—a condition of wageless life that impacts the prostitutes because the workers come to expect sex on credit. But after the Weaver's appearance, anger turns to action as the strike gathers real momentum, eventually culminating in that post-revolutionary culture of "new people" that I discussed earlier (Miéville 346).

Before we even get to the workings of parataxis here, then, it's hard to miss how radically this scene differs from the one I considered from The Return of the King, in a way that exemplifies the novels' differences more broadly. Where the scene from The Return of the King addresses restoration, the appearance of the Weaver in Iron Council leads to scene after scene of revolution. In The Return of the King, the coronation of King Elessar initiates what seems to be a "new age" in name only, especially given that the underlying purpose of that age is to return to a past order, to conserve "the memory and the glory of the years that were gone" (Tolkien 304). In Iron Council, on the other hand, the Weaver precipitates a natal political order by inserting itself into the events unfolding on the railroad, with Miéville describing the prostitutes and workers as "knotted in a new configuration" (235) following their collective encounter with the quasi-divine and multidimensional archanid. 4 Scenes such as this one remind us that Miéville pointedly confronts the modernity that Tolkien infamously avoids, especially as it manifests itself in socioeconomic injustice and political unrest stemming from capitalist exploitation. Iron Council's account of the latter significantly involves not only occult creatures like the Weaver, but also the eruption of a post-revolutionary culture that in the real world entered a stage of "wholesale obsolescence" following the collapse of European Communism in the contemporary period—a geopolitical event that the end of Iron Council vividly calls to mind for many post-1989 readers. 5  As a result, Miéville himself assumes a role not unlike that of the Weaver when it comes to the fantasy mode. In works such as Iron Council, he knots the contents of that mode into a configuration that is historically newer than Tolkien's Middle Earth, a configuration that is more thickly intertwined with the genealogical origins of our historical present than the stories of Bilbo Baggins, Gandalf the White, and King Elessar in The Lord of the Rings.

Accordingly, Miéville's sentences in the Weaver scene also knot parataxis into a new configuration for fantasy, especially when compared to the paratactic rhythms of Tolkien's prose. In this scene the parataxis that characterizes much of Iron Council intensifies, as in the following passage:

And the Weaver pulls in all its arms and drops lightly unreeled from its turning point in the air still sucking in what light there is and bloating on it as if it is the only real thing and Judah and the ground he stands upon and the threadbare trees he clutches are all old images, sun-bleached, on which a vivid spider walks.

The Weaver picks up its legs one by knifepoint one and threads at the edge of the ravine and it dances along it the uncoloured women and men edge behind it and it turns its head in sly playful slide to stare at them with a constellation of eyes like black eggs. Each time it does the people who follow it freeze and haul back until it turns again and moves on and they follow it as if bound to.

It slips over the rim of the cliff and they run to see the arachnid thing pick dainty as a high-shoed girl down the sheer. It runs, it begins to run, until its huge absurd shape careers downward and it is by the roots to the bridge, the girders that spit out from the rock halfway to the earth, and the Weaver leaps out and without passing through intervening space is on the half-done stump of construction, and small in the distance it begins to spin, to turn cartwheel, it becomes a rimless wheel and skitters the girders where in the day the Remade bridge-monkeys hang and build.

...AND BREAK AND BREAK...The Weaver's voice comes as loud as if it were next to Judah...PUSH BRUSH THEY AWAIT WITH BREATHBAIT AND ADRIP FOR YOUR INTERVENTION DEVILS OF THE MOTION ELATION CITATION CITE THE SITE TOWER SIGH NIGH VEER STAR AND CLEAR YOU ARE YOU ARE FINE IN TIME YON OF THE PLAINS STEAM-MAN...And the Weaver is gone and the weak night light bleeds back into Judah's eyes. The Weaver is gone and it takes many seconds of staring at the spider-shaped absence on the bridge until the men and women of the railroad turn away. Someone begins to cry. (Miéville 234-235)

This is an unrulier parataxis than we get in the sentences from The Return of the King. In Tolkien's sentences, repeated semi-colons dictate an ordered pattern of pauses within the paratactic style, a style in which and recurs in what feels like a relatively fixed rhythm that stresses the rightness of the King's restoration. In Miéville's sentences, by contrast, there is no pattern of punctuation to rule the rhythm of the paratactic style above—a style in which and recurs a great deal, but with what feels like a far less fixed and much more syncopated rhythm. This paratactic disorder engenders a hallucinatory effect that, in keeping with the powerfully contemporizing shift into free indirect style in Iron Council, draws us into the experience that the characters are having of the Weaver in this moment. A version of modernist experimentation as heightened realism, the unruliness of the parataxis reflects the disorder that is engendered among the prostitutes and workers by the Weaver's appearance. It also reflects their experience of temporal dilation, with the parataxis prolonging the moment much as a stutter prolongs speech, each and mirroring for readers the characters' intense attention to an instant of action on the part of the Weaver. 6 In this manner, Miéville's sentences sputter beautifully and politically forward. Parataxis is reconfigured in Iron Council to stylistically capture a historical rupture instead of an epochal restoration. This is politics by paratactic means, if you will, with Miéville rebelling against Tolkien's influence on fantasy on the terrain of style as much as story.

These paratactic politics entail a turn towards the literary present at odds with Tolkien's attempted turn away to the past in the sentences he wrote at mid-century. For parataxis in Miéville's sentences originates in literary tendencies far more historically recent than those of Tolkien. Its immediate source is, once again, Cormac McCarthy. And it is of course William Faulkner—that is, a figure heavily associated with the very literary tendencies against which Tolkien was wielding parataxis as an anti-modernist weapon in his time—who lies behind McCarthy's own paratactic prose. Parataxis is everywhere in McCarthy, including the examples I cited from Blood Meridian earlier for their passive syntax and figural language. As the Believer interview suggests, what interests Miéville the most about McCarthy's paratactic style is the "very knotted...rhythm" it lends his sentences. Such a rhythm characterizes this sentence from Blood Meridian, which in its fragmentation of a moment of action resonates with the temporal dilation we saw above in Miéville's use of the device to describe the experience induced by the Weaver: "He levered the ball home and capped the piece and spun the heavy pistol in his hand and returned it to the scabbard at the horse's shoulder and took the dripping trophy from McGill and turned it in the sun the way a man might qualify the pelt of an animal and then handed it back and took up the trailing reins and led his horse out through the square toward the water at the ford" (98-99). 7 In drawing upon a postmodernist stylist such as McCarthy, then, Miéville updates parataxis, transforming it into something manifestly different from the device that, for most readers and critics, marks Tolkien as indelibly arcane.

I want to say again that I love Miéville's sentences for the interventions they make into the stylistic idiom of fantasy. I love how his use of parataxis not only stylistically mediates a moment of political awakening, but also arrives at a new stylistic configuration for the fantasy mode. At this point, however, I risk letting my love as a reader of Miéville's sentences overcome my commitment to being a critic of his sentences as well. As much as Miéville unsettles Tolkien's influence by pursuing style as a locus of contemporaneity, there remain resonances between the two writers' work. In an eloquent essay on Tolkien's archaism, Andrew Lynch points out that in "twentieth-century prose fiction such abundant parataxis, sentence inversion, and metricality [as one finds in The Lord of the Rings] must strike the reader as elements of stylistic individuality, choices to heighten literary 'tone,' rather than as integral features of a narrative medium that the writer shares as normal with a contemporary audience" (81). Can't something similar be said of Miéville, especially the Miéville of Iron Council? Doesn't prose such as the kind Miéville develops in the Weaver scene, which is by no means atypical of Iron Council more generally, have the effect of simultaneously defamiliarizing and heightening the typical tone of the fantasy mode? Indeed, this would explain what is often a highly divided reaction among fantasy fans and Miéville followers to this novel, in contrast to the more positive reception of Iron Council among critics—including, yes, myself. Moreover, there is the question of Miéville's own archaism. He admits to a love of arcane words and baroque structures in The Believer interview, and from McCarthy he inherits Biblical resonances as well as stylistic contemporaneity.

It would be easy to dismiss what Miéville does in light of such questions. We could simply say that in trying to escape, or kill, the Father of Fantasy, the Socialist Son repeats his mistakes. Gotcha China! This response is too easy, however. In Iron Council, the post-revolutionary culture that emerges after the prostitutes and railroad laborers strike appears new even as it is characterized by the same basic activities that define the old way of life: painting, ploughing, knife-grinding, bookkeeping. Similarly, Miéville's style feels new, allowing him to intervene in and innovate the fantasy mode even as he remains in some ways recognizably within the pattern established by Tolkien. Other parallels beyond those of style only reinforce this sense of similarity. Miéville's Rudewood recalls Tolkien's Mirkwood, and the Iron Council eytmologically evokes Saruman's Isengard, which translates as "Iron Fortress."  To stress these similarities is to offer a more complex critique than the one that dismisses Miéville. That critique is the old-fashioned one grounded in the anxiety of influence, which takes seriously how Miéville is entangled in a series of repressed repetitions (that may, in fact, not be totally repressed in the first place). Using McCarthy as a screen of sorts when he explicitly names him as an influence, Miéville deflects attention away from the authoritative effects of Tolkien on his work, getting us to look away from how his predecessor shapes the memorable prose he writes in the Bas-Lag trilogy. But it is as the predecessor who variously engenders bravado and praise, aggression and admiration, that Tolkien becomes the figure who exerts the most powerful influence on Miéville. As a result, the aesthetic power of Miéville's sentences is arguably a somewhat mitigated intervention into the idiom and ideology of fantasy as Tolkien transmits it to post-1945 novelists writing in this generic tradition.

At some level, it feels as if seeing the anxiety of influence ought to force me to revise my love of Miéville's sentences. It seems like revealing the vexed relationship of transmission that Miéville has to Tolkien should alter the affectionate direction of my aesthetic judgment. It should turn it towards critique. It should turn it away from love. After all, I have revealed that Miéville's sentences do not in fact "intervene" into the idiom and ideology transmitted by Tolkien, at least not as much as my declarations of love at the start of this essay projected they might. Recognizing those projections as such would be the rational thing to do given my identity as a critic.

But my love is still there. It remains, intractable, its affective stubbornness regarding the value of Miéville's sentences arguably obscene in its sentimentality to the more rational spirit of critique. 8 This suggests a parallel between my love of Miéville and his aggression towards Tolkien. Each of us knows better—with me conceding similarities between Miéville and Tolkien in this essay, and with Miéville acknowledging the good that Tolkien has done for fantasy of late—but each of us to some insistent degree persists in our feelings despite that knowledge. Uncomfortable as it is to admit, I think my love for Miéville persists both because he has spoken out against what angers him about Tolkien with a certain blind brashness and aggressive bravado, and because he finds in Iron Council a sentence style that expresses the vexed nature of that anger sensibly and sensuously. I can't help but noting how odd all of this feeling is, and not merely because of the work of critique I have done here. For beautifully and politically sensuous as I find Miéville's sentences, attracted as I am to their rhythms and temporalities, it's not as if they are ever going to love me back. Iron Council will never return my love in the way that lovers, friends, and family do. Yet my love of his sentences does not exactly leave me alone, since they are still there, awaiting the moment when, whether as critic or lover or both, I open Iron Council yet again.

This leaves me with what may be an impossible question: What does it mean to love your object of critique, especially when you know better? What does it mean to persist in that love, whether that love takes the form of a sensuous, even amorous relationship to sentence style; of a redemptive perspective that sees "a certain type of repetition of experience in art [as repairing] inherently damaged or valueless experience"; or of a partisan advocacy for the political positions that find their way into an artwork? 9 No absolute answer will be forthcoming as I conclude. I know that whatever the answer may be for me, it is not about some of the excellent thinking being done on the standards of criticism, particularly the divide between interpretive and evaluative criticism that James Harold has recently discussed vis-à-vis genre fiction like Miéville's. My goal has not been to convince anyone that Miéville is a good writer, and that his novels are worthy of critical attention. His and their value seem self-evident to me.

What I can say is that the work of critique that I have done here has clarified the nature of my love for my object. It has made the intractability of that love more definite in ways that can only be generative for whatever further work of critique I will pursue regarding artwork about which I feel angrily, fearfully, amorously, redemptively, happily, contemptuously, shamefully, infatuatedly, even uncertainly or neutrally. It has reminded me that aesthetic judgment pulls us in many directions—towards the sensuous rhythms of sentence style, towards the relationship of that style to progenitors, towards the politics of that style and the psychic energies of that relationship, towards our own investments and histories. Here aesthetic judgment has pulled me back towards love not only in spite of but also because of critique, reminding me that whatever sovereignty I imagine the latter brings about in my relationship to an object, the former obstinately lives on. My identity as a critic will never be entirely sovereign because that love will inevitably, fortunately, rush back in and make itself felt.

 

Joel Burges is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Rochester, where he is also on the faculty of Film and Media Studies. He is completing a book on technological obsolescence and historical time in contemporary culture, and co-editing a collection of "keywords for the present" with Amy Elias. His next book will address what happens to literature after TV in the post-1945 period.

 

 

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