Here Be Dragons (29 page)

A final example of how nature, magic, and alternative culture intersect is not a bubble of wilderness but a bubble in the social structure. In Newford, art spans the three subjugated domains. A vast majority of the protagonists and recurring characters belong to the city's artists: musicians who subsist on busking and occasional small live performances, painters who work as waitresses to subsidize their art, and more or less well-published poets and writers—true artistic creation, the text repeatedly suggests, has magical properties. Minor bubbles defined primarily by art have already been mentioned (such as the Kelledys' home and Rushkin's studio), and others are prominent in various stories, for instance the Tree of Tales.
⁶³
A bubble of art that clearly presents the connection between art, magic, and wild nature is the artists' colony Kellygnow in
Forests of the Heart
. The rambling old house and the surrounding cottages are inhabited by sculptors, painters, and writers, whereas the properties around the colony belong to representatives of city culture and city control: “stockbrokers and investors, bankers and the CEOs of multinational corporations, celebrities and the nouveau riche” (11). In the forested grounds of the house, there are even huge, towering oaks that “were thought to be part of the original growth forest that had once laid claim
to all the land” (12). At Kellygnow, a variety of people and spirits belonging to Newford's magical domain converges: in one of the cottages lives a woman who never ages; the house is protected by a genius loci, a protective spirit, fled from Ireland;
⁶⁴
a pack of homeless genii loci regularly haunts the grounds; a
curandera
, or magic healer, from Arizona models for the artists and supplies them with amulets; and it is there that the Green Man is eventually conjured forth. Through the bubble of wilderness that is the Kellygnow estate, characters even pass, intentionally and unintentionally, into the Otherworld. The artists' colony becomes a focal point for the domains that challenge the mundane “day people” society.

The Newford stories make clear how the hegemonic culture in Newford contains its own opposites. Bubbles of wilderness abound in the city—areas of nature that culture cannot control, or of which it has relinquished control. An alternative culture of “night people”—the homeless and abused, as well as the artists and musicians—ekes out a living hidden and unseen. Similarly unseen and unwanted, fairies and spirits, ghosts and magicians try to withstand the ravages of a blind culture. Rather than being a city surrounded by wilderness, as is Minas Tirith, Newford turns the image around and presents an internal wilderness of alternative culture, magic, and nature within the city, a wilderness that is both portrayed as a threat to culture and presented as its ultimate hope of survival.

BLURRED BOUNDARIES: CONFLUX IN NEW CROBUZON
⁶⁵

Perdido Street Station
(2000) is China Miéville's second novel and the first to be set in the world of Bas-Lag. The novel's setting is reminiscent of a mid-nineteenth-century industrial city that is, according to Miéville, “clearly analogous to a chaos-fucked Victorian London” although it also “contains other cities—Cairo in particular.”
⁶⁶
Steam provides the main source of power, but advanced mechanics, chemistry (chymistry), and magic (thaumaturgy) play important parts in the technological makeup of the society. The city, New Crobuzon, is also the setting of the short story “Jack” (2005) and—partly—of Miéville's fourth novel,
Iron Council
(2004), while his second Bas-Lag novel,
The Scar
(2002), is set mainly in the floating city of Armada.

In Miéville's stories, categories mix and dissolve. The publication of
Perdido Street Station
sparked a discussion about how it blurred the boundaries between fantasy, science fiction, and horror, and critics have explored other ways in which Miéville's texts have mixed categories.
⁶⁷
Rich Paul Cooper observes how styles, and thus voices, as well as generic elements blend in the Bas-Lag novels.
⁶⁸
Christopher Palmer points out how, in Miéville's descriptive language, opposing qualities meet only to interact or overlap, rather than remaining opposites.
⁶⁹
Joan Gordon investigates the notion of hybridity in
Perdido Street Station
.
⁷⁰
Whichever categories we turn to, the Bas-Lag stories have found a way to conflate, blur, or mix them up. The texts not only refuse generic description, they reject the very notion of clear-cut categories. As has already been pointed out, a city is a place where nature and culture meet. At the same time, a city is a place of cultural control. The city limits provide a clear demarcation between the wilderness outside and the controlled inside. In New Crobuzon, any meeting between the two domains calls their separation into question.

Waste is a constantly recurring theme in the description of New Crobuzon's environment, becoming a brutal demonstration of the city as a culturally dominated place. When Yagharek, a garuda (eagle-man) exiled from the desert, enters the city in a small boat in the prologue to
Perdido Street Station
, it becomes clear that New Crobuzon is a city radically different from the clean, white sterility of Minas Tirith or the modern, social space of Newford. To the former desert dweller, the dirty, industrial metropolis is “a vast pollutant, a stench, a klaxon sounding” where “[f]at chimneys retch dirt into the sky” (
Perdido
1).
⁷¹
His entry into the city is described in terms that call to mind the descent into a polluted hell, employing imagery of death and disease to describe the urban decay. The garuda travels on a Stygian river, through a foul-smelling warren of rotting buildings and slime-besmirched brick banks. The water “reflects the stars through a stinking rainbow of impurities, effluents and chymical slop, making it sluggish and unsettling” as it carries along the waste of the vast population (
Perdido
3). Although this view of the city as a hellish place of pollution, sewage, and waste is emphasized especially in the parts narrated by Yagharek (who is the first-person narrator of the prologue and epilogue and of the brief interludes between the novel's eight parts), it informs the portrayal of New Crobuzon primarily throughout
Perdido Street Station
and also to some extent in
Iron Council
.

In New Crobuzon, pollution is the most obvious sign of how culture invades and dominates the natural domain. As the megalopolis is about
the size of present-day London,
⁷²
and given that New Crobuzon's technology for cleaning industrial and household waste and sewage is on a par with London's in the heyday of English industrialization, it is hardly surprising that the metropolis suffers from elevated levels of air and water pollution. As we have seen, the portrayals of the city more than acknowledge the pollution; they foreground it, turning it into one of New Crobuzon's most conspicuous features. Frequent descriptions, powerful imagery, even evocative names help place the focus on how culture's waste products dominate the physical environment. The two rivers that meet in the city center are called the Tar and the Canker, clearly indicating how polluted and pathogenic they are. These are rivers filled with floating trash, their riverbeds a sludge mixed with rusting metal (
Perdido
298). Appropriately, the black waters of the Tar, on which Yagharek enters the city, are said to trickle rather than flow (
Perdido
19; see also
Perdido
606).
⁷³
The Canker is somewhat cleaner, but its name, too, is a telltale sign of how the river is changed by the city; when the water is subjected to chymical and thaumaturgical effluence from the Scientific Quarter, the arcane and chymical slop mixes randomly into “bastard elixirs” that can change, enchant, or kill those who encounter them (
Perdido
24, 607). The Scientific Quarter is also a source of airborne pollutants; but the New Crobuzon air is mainly polluted by the many factories whose smokestacks puncture “the membrane between the land and the air” and disgorge “tons of poisonous smog […] as if out of spite,” and by the smoke of millions of household chimneys that turns the air above the rooftops into a stinking haze (
Perdido
64).

There is never any doubt that the air and water in the city are turned into an unclean, unpleasant, unnatural “second nature.” A constant flow of waste resulting from the customs, behaviors, and material objects that the members of New Crobuzon's society use to cope with their world (to return to Bates's definition of culture) maintains the changes even in these fluid elements, turning them into a vivid demonstration of cultural domination. At the same time, the negative connotations of the language used to describe this “second nature,” not so much tamed as cowed and bullied into submission, reveal how undesirable this domination is. Pollution is not a necessary, if regrettable, by-product of an industrial, urban lifestyle; it is a disease deliberately passed on, “as if out of spite,” to the environment. Even when nature escapes cultural control, it cannot easily recuperate from this disease. The image of disease keeps recurring even when nature reclaims parts that culture has lost or relinquished control
of, as in the case of the abandoned, dilapidated docks that have become “massive stinking troughs of malarial slime” (
Perdido
129). In the city, even nature becomes part, to some extent, of this ambience of filth and disease. Trash is whipped into the air by the wind (
Perdido
58); slimy, mold-encrusted sewers, ecosystems in themselves, empty the waste of millions of people into the rivers (
Perdido
419–20, 425); garbage is piled into dumps that have grown to a geological scale. The “second nature” of pollution is not nature changed according to the desires of culture; it becomes its own domain of waste and trash, neither culture nor nature but a disease that affects both, a dirty smear that hides the border between them.

The two domains are even less distinguishable when examined in terms of the shape of the land itself, as the natural and cultural landscapes shift into and imitate each other. The natural landscape, a result of geological, meteorological, and biological factors, is changed by the city into a cultural landscape as “[t]he natural inclines of the land [are] all forgotten by New Crobuzon” (
Iron
59). This cultural landscape, or cityscape, is sometimes reshaped, in turn, into another sort of landscape, a land in whose shape the cultural and natural merge. The clearest example is that of the “trashscape” (
Perdido
446). The rubbish dump of the factories and docks along the river Tar has become a “landscape of ruin and refuse and industrial filth […] in a speeded-up parody of geological process” where the “rejected matter settled and shifted and fell into place, affecting some shape, mimicking nature. Knolls, valleys, quarries and pools bubbling with fetid gas” (
Perdido
314). The natural landscape, the plain on which New Crobuzon is situated, has been transformed and fallen under cultural control, but has then escaped that control in a “parody of geological process” that has reconfigured the land into a trashscape with its own canyons, caverns, and reefs of rubbish (
Perdido
446–47). Neither nature nor culture is the agent behind this reshaping; it is the refuse itself, culture's
rejected
matter, that forms the trashscape.

The portrayal of the trashscaping process accentuates how the rejected matter becomes something separate from both nature and culture. At first, the matter only settles passively; but for each subsequent verb in the description, there is an increase in both agency and purpose until the matter
affects
a shape and finally
mimics
nature. Rejected by culture and only mimicking nature, trash—like air and water pollution—comes to occupy an indistinct position somewhere between nature and culture, blurring the boundary between them. The land it shapes becomes
a haven for feral nature in the form of various tenacious weeds, as well as for
wild culture
; the latter is most clearly represented by the Construct Council, the artificial sentience sprung from discarded difference engines. This renegade culture lies at the center of one of the six plots identified by Farah Mendlesohn in
Perdido Street Station
: “the threat that the city's constructs (robots) have achieved sentience.”
⁷⁴
The trashscape of the dump is thus portrayed as a distorted mirror image of a wilderness, superimposing cultural landforms on natural ones and vice versa.

Layers of trash and ubiquitous pollution are not the only manifestations of the blurred border between nature and culture. The city as a whole is portrayed as a complex topography of urban strata, “a palimpsest of gusting trees and architecture and sound, ancient ruins, darkness, catacombs, building sites, guesthouses, barren land, lights and pubs and sewers” (
Perdido
673). All the parts of the city flow together, rendering the boundaries between opposites indistinct; light and darkness, ruins and building sites, catacombs and pubs, trees and architecture all meet as aspects of the city. The various layers, possible to arrange spatially, with architecture on top of catacombs on top of sewers, and temporally, with barren land turned into building sites turned into guesthouses and pubs, in fact form their own totality. New Crobuzon is not a neat succession or orderly layering but a chaotic blend, in which other layers are always co-present. The earlier landscape has been scraped off and replaced; the “tons of concrete and tar that [constitute] the city [cover] ancient geography, knolls and barrows and verges, undulations that [are] still visible” (
Perdido
63).

The natural landscape exists as part of the cultural, in and underneath it, a conflux further emphasized by the employment of natural imagery to portray New Crobuzon's architecture. Not only is the “architectural landscape” referred to as a “townscape” or “roofscape,” the cultural and the natural are brought together in the many metaphors and similes with which the text is rife: the city itself is a fen of buildings with concrete forest slums and quagmire ghettos, where the Parliament building is an inselberg of architecture, tower blocks rise like weeds, and the streets run like watercourses between the buildings (
Iron
71, 442;
Perdido
96, 145, 129). Occasionally, the imagery moves from the metaphoric to the concrete. The gargantuan proportions of Perdido Street Station itself gives it characteristics generally associated with a natural landscape. There seems to be a cultural triumph in the “chaotic majesty” of Perdido
Street Station as it outdoes even the “magnificent and portentous” foothills west of the city, but the massive edifice is geographical rather than architectural. The station building has spread like waves of lava over the surrounding cityscape, a mountain with its own foothills and hillocks, and its roof has a little wilderness floored with scrub and dead, thighhigh grass. Covering the small eponymous street is an architectural sky (
Perdido
615–21;
Iron
382, 479–80).