Abstract
China Miéville is a prolifically experimental novelist who constantly challenges the linguistic and generic expectations of his readers. The ‘weird’ creatures, landscapes, and urban configurations he relishes appear in a cognitive perspective as a series of impacted collocations that violate this-worldly norms. Beginning with an account of collocation as a linguistic phenomenon, this chapter explores violent or counter-intuitive conjunctions of bodies and spaces (especially urban spaces) across a wide range of Miéville’s fiction—from the political world of the Bas-Lag series via the impacted cityscape of the procedural noir novel The City & the City to the weird linguistics of Embassytown. It shows both how robust collocations can be in Miéville’s inventive storyworlds, and how they warp and break down when placed under intense fictional pressure. The chapter argues accordingly that the power of Miéville’s writing comes not so much from his ideological critiques or his self-referential games with generic tropes, as it does from his ability to exploit the explosive power of barely possible collocation.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
The poem is included in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1971: 134–136). The first stanza runs as follows: ‘’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; / All mimsy were the borogroves, / And the mome raths outgrabe.’
- 3.
Unlike some earlier versions of cognitive science, in which the mind was regarded as a kind of computer lodged in a soft wet envelope, the embodied perspective that is now widely accepted (but of course, still controversial in many of its aspects) includes in ‘cognition’ not only rational modes of thought and perception, but also proprioceptive and sensorimotor processes, affect, memory, and imagination. For an early but still useful overview of this rapidly expanding field, see Pecher and Zwaan 2005.
- 4.
Bolens’s book as a whole demonstrates the scope and value of this mode of analysis across a historically wide range of texts. Among other things, it opens up a powerful alternative way of talking about literary mimesis (see also Cave 2016, especially Chaps. 3 and 7).
- 5.
In a recent novella, The Last Days of New Paris, Miéville plays explicitly and exuberantly on what is perhaps the most powerful twentieth-century reservoir of collocated bodies, the writings of the Surrealists (see Miéville 2016: ‘Afterword’ and ‘Notes’).
- 6.
For an alternative (although not incompatible) reading of this novel, see Schimanski 2016.
- 7.
Miéville’s novel for young adults, Un Lun Dun (2007), similarly collocates a city (London) with itself, or with its ‘other’, a down-at-heel and dangerous place; the crossing-over points between them are quasi-magic, as opposed to the policed border of Besźel/Ul Qoma, but in both cases, the border is impacted. And the title already contains the ‘un-’ prefix which will become a leitmotif of The City & the City. There may be another echo here of Philip Pullman’s adjacent worlds in the ‘Lyra’ novels, but the topos is primarily grounded in the rise of ‘parallel worlds’ theory, which is now common in science fiction and has been popularized, for example, by the television series Torchwood.
- 8.
It must be acknowledged that Embassytown itself does not reference Derrida, whereas at one point, via Scile, it references both Ricœur and the cognitivist linguist Lakoff (2011: 163). Glaz proposes a significantly different reading of the language themes in Embassytown; Derrida is again not mentioned, but there is a good deal of discussion of post-Saussurean linguistics (2015: 335–352).
- 9.
Avice would in that scenario need to make plain to the Ariekei the evolutionary advantage of speaking with a single orifice, which constrains the potential proliferation of cognitive manifestations, the flaunting of cognitive dissonance. She would have to admit, of course, that ‘body language’, hesitations, shifty facial expressions, blushing, etc., undermine the apparent singularity of oral utterance.
Works Cited
Armstrong, P. (2013). How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Literature and Art. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Bolens, G. (2012). The Style of Gestures: Embodiment and Cognition in Literary Narrative. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Carroll, L. (1971). Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. Green, R. L., ed. London: Oxford University Press.
Cave, T. (2016). Thinking with Literature: Towards a Cognitive Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Derrida, J. (1967). De la grammatologie. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.
Derrida, J. (1972). La Dissémination. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Gibson, J. (1989). ‘The Theory of Affordances’. In Gibson, J., The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp.127–43.
Glaz, A. (2015). ‘Reversals and Paradoxes: China Miéville’s Anti-Language’. Extrapolation, 56(3), pp.335–352.
Harrison, M.J. (2002). Light. London: Gollancz.
Harrison, M.J. (2006). Nova Swing. London: Gollancz.
Harrison, M.J. (2012). Empty Space: A Haunting. London: Gollancz.
Kafka, F. (1970). Die Verwandlung. In Raabe, P., ed., Sämtliche Erzählungen. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag.
Lehecka, T. (2015). ‘Collocation and Colligation’. In Östman, J.O., and Verschueren, J., eds., Handbook of Pragmatics. Amsterdam: Benjamins, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1075/hop.19.col2.
Marks, P. (2013). ‘Monitoring the Unvisible: Seeing and Unseeing in China Miéville’s The City & the City’. Surveillance & Society, 11(3), pp.222–236.
Miéville, C. (2000). Perdido Street Station. London: Macmillan.
——. (2002). The Scar. London: Macmillan.
——. (2004). Iron Council. London: Macmillan.
——. (2007). Un Lun Dun. London: Macmillan.
——. (2009). The City & the City. London: Macmillan.
——. (2011). Embassytown. London. Macmillan.
——. (2012). Railsea. London: Macmillan.
——. (2016). The Last Days of New Paris. London. Picador.
Pecher, D., and Zwaan, R.A., eds. (2005). The Grounding of Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Philip, G. (2011). Colouring Meaning: Collocation and Colligation in Figurative Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Schimanski, J. (2016). ‘Seeing Disorientation: China Miéville’s The City & the City’. Culture, Theory and Critique, 57(1), pp.106–120.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Cave, T. (2018). Weird Collocations: Language as Infrastructure in the Storyworlds of China Miéville. In: Boehmer, E., Davies, D. (eds) Planned Violence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91388-9_17
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91388-9_17
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-91387-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-91388-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)