Hamburger Helper: Food For Thought?
Moments ago I was just sitting and eating my Hamburger Helper for lunch. So I grabbed a nearby magazine to peruse while I ate. The magazine I picked up was Locus, an American published sci-fi/fantasy mag. I'd back ordered a few issues from the magazine for some important articles written by China Mieville. Well, I came across a paragraph that summed up the importance, I believe, of the New Weird movement:
New Weird, in attempting lovingly to invert, subvert, culvert, and convert the cliches of the fantastic, is both a renunciation and a return. Hackneyed fantasy is a betrayal of the very fantastic it pretends to represent, and it is because New Weird surrenders to the fantastic that it wants to rescue it from itself.
It strikes me, even more after reading Heng's Empire of Magic, that Mieville is right. Fantasy--rooted in medieval romance--is anchored in history and trauma, held together by the imaginary or fantastic. He calls New Weird "post Seattle fiction", an interesting thought. It is political literature, exploring the politics of everything: the city, sex, race, architecture, anarchy, activism, hybridity, gender, power.
As Mieville has argued, and I believe too, the modern conception of fantasy has been supplanted by Tolkien's ahistorical, allegorical fairy-story--a simulacrum. No trace of the modern world (outside of allegory) exists in Tolkien, no doubt a symptom of his maxim of Escape from the modern world. Rural, bucolic = good, Urban, mechanistic = bad. This is the classic cliche of fantasy. So I find it is interesting how Mieville reminds me of Byron, who harkened to the Medieval and Renaissance Romances and Epics to evaluate his own world. It is as Mieville says, both a "renunciation and a return" of medieval conceptions of romance. Looking at his first novel, King Rat, Mieville sets his novel in the CITY, anathema for Tolkien-esque fantasy, but bases it on the myth of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. His conceptions of monstrosity, too, come straight out of medieval culture. The juxtaposition of pre-capitalist, medieval tropes to capitalist, modern equivalents is neat (The flute meets its modern equivalent in Drum'N'Bass music).
Well I've let myself get off-track from my studying, re-reading Difficult Daughters for Post-colonial South Asian Literature.
New Weird, in attempting lovingly to invert, subvert, culvert, and convert the cliches of the fantastic, is both a renunciation and a return. Hackneyed fantasy is a betrayal of the very fantastic it pretends to represent, and it is because New Weird surrenders to the fantastic that it wants to rescue it from itself.
It strikes me, even more after reading Heng's Empire of Magic, that Mieville is right. Fantasy--rooted in medieval romance--is anchored in history and trauma, held together by the imaginary or fantastic. He calls New Weird "post Seattle fiction", an interesting thought. It is political literature, exploring the politics of everything: the city, sex, race, architecture, anarchy, activism, hybridity, gender, power.
As Mieville has argued, and I believe too, the modern conception of fantasy has been supplanted by Tolkien's ahistorical, allegorical fairy-story--a simulacrum. No trace of the modern world (outside of allegory) exists in Tolkien, no doubt a symptom of his maxim of Escape from the modern world. Rural, bucolic = good, Urban, mechanistic = bad. This is the classic cliche of fantasy. So I find it is interesting how Mieville reminds me of Byron, who harkened to the Medieval and Renaissance Romances and Epics to evaluate his own world. It is as Mieville says, both a "renunciation and a return" of medieval conceptions of romance. Looking at his first novel, King Rat, Mieville sets his novel in the CITY, anathema for Tolkien-esque fantasy, but bases it on the myth of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. His conceptions of monstrosity, too, come straight out of medieval culture. The juxtaposition of pre-capitalist, medieval tropes to capitalist, modern equivalents is neat (The flute meets its modern equivalent in Drum'N'Bass music).
Well I've let myself get off-track from my studying, re-reading Difficult Daughters for Post-colonial South Asian Literature.
posted by Davyth | 1:17 PM
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