The Real Miéville

This happens to you a lot as a writer: you watch a television show, and you can see the clever, intricate way it's going to end, and then it doesn't. The show ends with one fewer plot twist than you had foreseen, and you're disappointed that the writers weren't clever enough to see the final twist that would have made it so much better.

Recently, I read an article by China Miéville called "M.R. James and the Quantum Vampire." When I started the article, I thought, what a clever parody of academic prose! Because of course Miéville is a Ph.D., which means he must have encountered a lot of that prose, but he's also a writer, so he knows what's wrong with it, ridiculous about it. We all do. And I had a great deal of respect for him, because I thought it was a brilliant, and incredibly funny, parody.

As I continued reading, I started wondering – was it a parody, or was he actually just writing like that? Because if he was actually writing like that, in all seriousness, then – I didn't know what to make of it.

Here are the first two paragraphs:

"0. Prologue: the Tentacular Novum

"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)"

What's so funny about this? First, numbering the prologue 0, then calling it "The Tentacular Novum." Classic examples of academic pretentiousness, the 0 and the introduction without definition of the term "novum" (from Darko Suvin), but punctured by calling the novum "tentacular." Then, the inclusion of terms that seem to define a category, but are also somewhat ridiculous: "high Weird," becoming the even fancier French "haute Weird" in the second paragraph. The use of scientific terms applied to the literary: "teratology," "tera­toculture." (Teratology is the study of developmental defects.) The glancing reference, without explanation, to Georges Bataille's The Accursed Share. The paragraphs are dense with academicspeak, and the funniest thing of all is what they describe: the birth of a new genre that has gotten absolutely 0 academic respect because it's about gods with octopus heads. He's writing about the grotesque in a way that is itself grotesque, by which I mean that his writing is continually reaching out like tentacles to incorporate the most ridiculous instances of academicese. Tentacular novum indeed!

I'm going to include a few examples of what I consider particularly funny passages because of the way in which they parody academicspeak.

"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."

Pre-emptively to de-Weird it! All right, he's putting us on. I know he is. This is The Pooh Perplex with tentacles.

"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."

All righty. It's ab-canny (refering to Julia Kristeva's notion of the abhuman) rather than un-canny (referring to Freud's notion of the uncanny). Clever clever.

And of course he refers to Freud, Lacan, Kristeva. How could he not? The article contains (or attempts to contain – there you go, now I'm being all academicy myself) an excess of references. It's easiest to read with Wikipedia on standby, although if you haven't read Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, you're not going to get the references anyway.

But then I start to doubt, because it goes on for so long, and it's all like this. So maybe it's not a parody after all? Maybe Miéville is taking himself completely seriously? As he goes on, the academicese drops away to a certain extent and the article sounds more like an actual standard academic article, rather than a parody of one.

(I just have to point out that when he mentions "the proto­plasmic formlessness of the dying vampire Carmilla (1872)," he must be thinking of Helen Vaughan from The Great God Pan, because we do not actually see how Carmilla dies – her protoplasmic formlessness comes earlier in the text.)

Although you still have paragraphs like this:

"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)."

Aufhebung: a term used by Hegel to explain what happens when a thesis and antithesis interact, meaning something like "abolish," "preserve," or "transcend." (Hunh? Wikipedia, you are not being helpful. Maybe I need to just go ahead and read Hegel.)

And it's shortly followed by this: "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." Which I understand, but which is tiring to read. But then Miéville tells us what such a resolved third term would look like, a human skull surrounded by tentacles, and suddenly the article is funny again. There you go, there's your aufhebung! It looks like a biker tattoo.

I don't need to go on, right? You get the point. I don't know whether to read the article as parody or not, but I'd like to read it as parody, because Miéville is wonderful at writing in different genres (as in The City and the City, which was clever beyond clever), and he must be aware that he's doing all the things that academics complain about in academic papers. And doing them to excess.

And Miéville seems aware of that. After all, the article is subtitled "Weird; Hauntological: Versus and/or and and/or or?" (seriously? I think not), and he ends the article with his own illustration of the aufhebung: a skulltopus! Also, his blog is a perfect parody of what a blog should be, or what we are all told a blog should be. It's an anti-blog.

In March, I'm going to be at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, where Miéville will be one of the guests of honor. I look forward to hearing what he has to say, and to getting him to sign some books. But I wonder: who is the real China Miéville? Is he the guy who takes himself seriously enough to write an article like that, without seeing the parodic elements? Or is he the guy who wrote the parody I think I'm reading? I hope he's the latter. I hope I'm seeing the right plot twist.