In the second part of our interview (first part here), Mr. Miéville discusses his prose style, contemporary comic books, the politics of narrative and his work on international law.
(N.B. See also Bionic Octopus for China's essay on the London bombings.)
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JOHN PISTELLI: Where does the question of prose style come in for you? You have a distinctive one, willingness to use jargons, to employ a wide vocabularly based on real or invented sciences as well as a penchant for the “high style” (longer detail-packed sentences, sonorous rhythms) that have earned you comparisons to Dickens, Melville, Faulkner, etc. Could you theorise after the fact about your style?
CHINA MIÉVILLE: There's more than one thing going on there. I'm tempted - as you say, theorising post facto - to think it's a triangulation of two things. On the one hand it's a predilection for the high pulp style that is, intriguingly, shared across genres. Lovecraft of course is its neurotically overblown high priest, but you see the same kind of somewhat overwrought prose in, say, Zane Grey. The fact that 'minimalist' prose in various iterations has been designated the official aesthetic form of acceptable bourgeois fiction, especially its newer hipster versions, is I think the triumph of a rather fatuous notion of a playful text, and it gives a silly but enjoyable radical pulp chic to not playing by those rules. Not that I've any objection to all precise prose, at all - M John Harrison is one of my outstanding literary heroes, and he is a prose scalpel-wielder - but the idea that that is 'how you do it' is absurd. The irony is that this reaction against a certain subset of boojy fiction is _also_ a reaction against a certain tendency in genre. Because a lamentable antipathy to Modernism and formal experimentation has taken some root in sf/f/h. You hear readers say things like 'I'm not bothered so much about the language, I just like to find out what happens.' There's an embedded, mostly untheorised notion that prose should be a window, through which you see, as clearly as possible, that it should be as nearly invisible as possible, to let us get to the content. Not only do I think that's sadly philistine, but it's also, in some sense, a betrayal of what makes fantasy fantasy. That alienation from the everyday can be achieved through form as well as content. So by playing with form like this, you get to link to your pulp heritage as opposed to trying to play by 'mainstream' rules, and paradoxically at the same time distance yourself from the failures of much genre. From Ben Watson, 'Fantasy and Judgement', in Historical Materialism 10, 4: 'The use of a transparent medium for the depiction of 'wonders' and 'ideals' - ... the flat efficiency of the prose of run-of-the-mill romance, horror, porn and fantasy fiction - betrays the fantastic subject-matter.' As not infrequently, I think Ben maybe veers toward the excessively prescriptive, but here I think he's very, very onto something.
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