Horrors of capitalism

The Weird of Globalization: Esemplastic Power in the Short Fiction of China Miéville

Mark Williams

Most of the [science fiction/fantasy/horror] I'm interested in is about the numinous, the transcendent erupting out of the everyday, and ironically, horror does that particularly well (though it's concerned with the Bad Numinous). [….] For me, the horrific, in the shape of the dark uncanny, the monstrous, the unholy, is one of the most fascinating aspects of fantastic literature, and it's for that reason, I think, that though I'm not normally thought of as a horror writer, I'm a writer of SF and fantasy heavily influenced by the weird, grotesque horror tradition.

—China Miéville.(1)

This article concerns the poetics and politics of ‘the transcendent erupting out of the everyday’ as it appears in China Miéville’s short fictions. I will argue that Miéville uses techniques familiar to the Romantic poets to create a Gothic of contemporary globalisation in his stories ‘Go Between’, ‘Different Skies’ and ‘Foundation’.

The technique Miéville uses is one which the Marxist-Trotskyist writer and theorist Ben Watson discusses in another context in his book Art, Class & Cleavage.(2) Watson borrows from S.T. Coleridge’s notion of ‘esemplastic power’ ‘a term he coined to mean “shaping into oneness”, [which] elevated imagination into a mystical transcendence of time and space: a vision only available to the select’.(3) Despite objecting to its apparent overtone of ‘elitist mysticism’, Watson sees this as an important means for bringing the globalised interrelationships of social structures to consciousness. ‘Esemplastic power’ is found in texts which demonstrate a ‘[s]ynoptic transparency of social relations’ typically through the use of fantastic or anti-realist techniques to imaginatively join-up things which are actually related but are thought of as distanced, or even distinct from one another, by history or geography.....

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