[Download] "Towards a Marxist Urban Sublime: Reading China Mieville's King Rat (1)." by Extrapolation # Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Towards a Marxist Urban Sublime: Reading China Mieville's King Rat (1).
- Author : Extrapolation
- Release Date : January 22, 2003
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 194 KB
Description
The multi-volume fictional work that China Mieville currently has in progress--the work that may eventually be known as the New Crobuzon sequence--promises to rank as one of the major achievements of early twenty-first-century Anglophone fiction; certainly the two thick volumes that have already appeared, Perdido Street Station (2000) and The Scar (2002), are both important novels in their own right. It is thus understandable that Mieville's more compact first novel, King Rat (1998), which immediately precedes the New Crobuzon books, should be somewhat overshadowed by its successors: understandable, but regrettable. For not only is King Rat an excellent piece of work in and of itself, but it also announces a good many of the themes and concerns that find ampler (but not necessarily more brilliant) development in the later books. In this paper I will sketch out the conceptual basis of the Mievillian fictional universe and will then focus on one particularly important theme, namely, the construction of what I call an urban sublime. "Sublime" is here meant in something very like its core Longinian sense, but with the major difference that the natural environment with which Longinus and his eighteenth-century followers like Hume, Burke, and Kant associate the awe and grandeur of sublimity usually gives way, in Mieville's work, to an emphatically urban setting; and I will also maintain that the Mievillian sublime strives to incorporate the specifically political sublimity of Marxism. King Rat is an unusually complex book to classify generically; it includes elements of fantasy, science fiction, Dickensian urban realism, detective fiction, allegory, the beast fable, the superhero comic book, and the Bildungsroman. The neat formulation that Mark Bould has suggested to describe Perdido Street Station--"a science fiction story set in a fantasy sub-creation" (310)--does, however, seem to me somewhat applicable to the earlier novel as well, so long as we add that here the "fantasy sub-creation" looks partly like the actual end-of-millennium London in which Mieville himself happens to live. In any case, the plot of King Rat is cogent and streamlined, despite the apparent (although, as we will see, only apparent) generic eclecticism. The novel opens as Saul Garamond is returning, late at night, to the high-rise London flat that he shares with his father, from whom he is somewhat estranged emotionally and in whose earnest Marxist politics he has no interest whatever. Saul goes to bed without seeing his father and is rudely awakened in the morning by the police's pounding on the door. It turns out that Saul's father is dead, having fallen or jumped or been pushed out of the apartment window; and the police take Saul into custody as a possible suspect. Alone in a cell, Saul is joined by what seems to be a ratty-looking man, who helps Saul to escape. This "man" is actually King Rat--who is literally the king of the rats--and he claims Saul as his nephew; he explains that Saul is himself half rat, because his long-dead mother was King Rat's sister, who married, as it were, out of the species. Under King Rat's mentorship, Saul's rat nature awakens, and he develops many remarkable powers: superhuman strength and speed, and the ability to dash straight up a wall, to squeeze through tiny chinks and cracks, to make himself so inconspicuous as to become practically invisible to human eyes, and to digest and enjoy any sort of food, no matter how rotten or filthy.