Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

China Miéville is routinely read and understood as an overtly political and specifically Marxist fiction writer. What it means to be a Marxist fiction writer, and what “Marxist fiction” might look like, however, are up for debate. According to Miéville, he doesn’t start a fictive project by asking “how about if we organise society like this?” Rather, he suggests, the political potential of fiction is made possible by “[starting] from the presumption the impossible is true” (2011 ArtReview ). Miéville imagines an impossible language where words open portals between the minds of their speakers (Embassytown 2011), an impossible pair of cities that literally sit on top of each other but where the residents of each “unsee” the buildings and residents of the other (“The City & The City” 2009), and an impossible history where post-WWII Paris is trapped in a state of interminable Nazi occupation and stalked by the manifestation of Surrealist paintings come to life (“The Last Days of New Paris” 2016). These novels imagine an inter-galactic colonial outpost of the future (“Embassytown”), an alternative version of post-Soviet, post-Yugoslav eastern Europe (“The City & The City”), and an alternative non-ending of WWII (“The Last Days of New Paris”). The argument of this paper is that Miéville’s political project is manifest in what it means to interpret, language, maps, paintings, in each imagined world, rather than in the political structures of those worlds. Provocatively, it is only by reading his fiction along with his most recent work, “October,” a narrative history of the Russian Revolution wherein he insists he has “invented nothing,” that the relationship between fiction, interpretation, history, and politics can be fully understood.