Rhetorics of Fantasy. Farah Mendlesohn

not carry authority. People find it difficult or undesirable to keep the past organized unlike the Scholastic and impermeable histories passed down in many quest fantasies. Tratsin, a carpenter, does not wish his memories of a suppressed rebellion to be to passed to his child; memories such as these are restrictive, not empowering. A lost battle in the past is not an incentive to fight more in the future. A fallen empire, its monasteries and courts emptied, will not suddenly spring up, revived. Knowledge must be invented, not found in old books. This fantasy world is built looking forward, not backward. Yet it is still built using the same components we have seen elsewhere.

      The narration of fantasyland when done poorly is often didactic, but even the most creative writers find it difficult in this form to avoid impressing upon the reader an authoritative interpretation of their world. An interesting test case, because it is so otherwise divorced from the usual quest fiction, is the work of China Miéville. The Scar (2002), in which the protagonist is running away from her own society, while as elegantly written as Perdido Street Station (2000: see chapter 2, this volume, where is it discussed as an immersive fantasy), requires that much more be explained. Bellis Coldwine, the protagonist, acts as our guide to the world, whereas there is no such role in Perdido Street Station, and the descriptions are of what is seen, rather than what is. The result is that The Scar is less baroque; because the baroque functions best in the taken for granted, the immersive: while overdescribed in the quest fantasy, its function is to create landscape rather than tone.

      In The Scar, these intense moments of description are almost always employed when either Bellis Coldwine, or Tanner Sack, the protagonists, see something new. They are moments of alienation, rather than impressions of familiarity. But they are marked for us: “Later, when she thought back to that miserable time, Bellis was shaken by the detail of her memories” (7–8). Reverie here is a device that deliberately impresses memory onto the traumatized; Tanner, at moments of stress, is told in the first person: “All black on black but still I can see hills and water and I can see clouds. I can see the prisons on all sides bobbing a little like fishermen’s floats. Jabber take us all I can see clouds” (17). This is not the smooth, narrated reverie we have seen elsewhere. Miéville uses these moments to demonstrate the fragmented nature of observation; to demonstrate that what we see is not a painting, but abstracted, a personal construct.

      Alienation is one of the keys to what Miéville achieves. In most quest and portal fantasies, the process of the novel requires the protagonist to become ever more comfortable with the fantasyland that she has entered. Yet Bellis Coldwine never does. Her alienation is expressed; explicitly; her culture shock is profound (see page 78 for an example). This alienation enables Miéville to give to Bellis the role of describing the world she can never take for granted because she cannot engage with it. Thus we never see Armada through the eyes of Shekel, who has adapted, become immersed, but predominantly through the eyes of Bellis, who learns much of what she knows through books (predigested, reported, alienated description); and secondarily through the eyes of Tanner, whose own understanding is distorted by gratitude. It means Miéville can mostly avoid the conversations that explain the landscape or the politics of Armada (although he does have two, one with Carianne, and another with Uther Doul) and instead present it in negatives, the things that Bellis encounters and is repelled by or does not understand.

      Consequently it is those scenes in which neither Tanner Sack nor Bellis Coldwine appear that are written most like those of the classic quest fantasy. For example, “Below the waist, the crays’ armoured hindquarters were those of colossal rock lobsters: huge carapaces of gnarled shell and overlapping somites. Their human abdomens jutted out from above where the eyes and antennae would have been” (41). Here Miéville has no choice but to simply describe, to pause the action while the characters are outlined. He has no one in place to mediate for him. In contrast, when Bellis observes the inhabitants of Armada, the Cray are simply “sluggish on their armoured legs” (79). We see what she notices, and only what she notices. Yet Miéville manipulates this rhetoric. Much later, he uses a moment of removal, a moment where there is no observer with whom we are identified, to deliver vital information. As Captain Sengka hefts a box containing a message, we are told of “the worthless little necklace that justifies the jewellery box; and beneath that box’s velvet padding … a heavy disk the size of a large watch”: the compass that will guide New Crobuzon to Armada. For a moment, Miéville breaks the illusion that we hear this tale from Bellis. We know more than she; it is a classic moment of recognition, but one that is denied to the “hero.”

      For at the center of The Scar might be, but is not, our protagonist, Bellis Coldwine. Miéville has created a protagonist who is almost entirely marginalized from what is actually happening. Much of this marginalization is achieved by the careful construction of one of the most solipsistic “heroes” since Thomas Covenant. The construction of the lengthy missive—recipient unknown—that punctuates this tale, is a focus of this solipsism. Sent to a reader in New Crobuzon, it would have maintained the internal integrity of the club story. Presented to Carianne, however, to another witness, it becomes, in the end, one of many challenges to the impermeable narrative of the quest fantasy.

      But before all this, Bellis must rethink her own place in the narrative. As Covenant believed that his own fevered brain generated a world around him, Bellis seems incapable of believing that it is not her story being told. Her anger at Johannes Tearfly when she realizes that her ship was hijacked in order to collect him, is in part a result of her sense of displacement from the center of the narrative (96).

      Whether New Crobuzon is invaded, whether the Armada turns around—all are rephrased in her mind in terms of saving her city, and how far she will be taken away from home. She is incapable of abandoning a map of the universe that places New Crobuzon at the center even while she is capable of admitting its flaws and self-delusions (in a moment that reminds us that at least an element of this world is known to Bellis). We cannot understand “The accounts of the Money Circle and the Week of Dust,” because Bellis does not explain it nor does she receive an explanation. For a moment we are estranged twice: once from the world of Armada; second, and more conclusively, from the fantasy in which Bellis is immersed, her personal frame world of New Crobuzon.

      Only reluctantly does Bellis ever admit the concerns of others, and she never admits that hers is one of myriad political interests. Miéville is not the first to attempt constructing a quest fantasy from the point of view of a minor character: Robin Hobb, for example, tries this in the Farseer trilogy where her protagonist is precluded by birth from ascending the throne. But somehow Fitz contrives to be at the center of the action. The quest is his even if he does not reap the reward.³⁵

      Bellis’s solipsism allows Miéville to undermine the other cardinal rule of the quest fantasy: what one is told, is. As Bellis herself acknowledges at various points within the novel—but without notable effect—her understanding of the world causes her to misplace herself within conversations. She is repeatedly manipulated by those who tell her stories. It is not a coincidence that the longest delivered speeches in the book are those of Silas Fennec, the spy (126–128, 164–167), nor that he is one of the few people to actually use the word “trust,” to imply that he is grateful that Bellis should trust him. Bellis knows that he is lying; the “maggot of doubt” that Droul plants in her mind wriggles because it is meaningful. But Bellis’s understanding of the world makes this nagging doubt of little relevance. She has chosen to believe, “caught up in it” as Doul points out (473), and we, instinctively, believe with her, because the pattern of quest fantasies has taught us to do just that. We too are caught up in the passion and belief of the moment; we insist that there must be a quest, a goal, and that those with whom we travel are part of that cozy conspiracy of companionship.

      As an (ignored) reminder that such structures are deceptive, what Bellis learns from Shekel is delivered in the past tense, as reported speech: “Shekel told Bellis about Hedrigall the cactae aeronaut. He told her about the cactus-man’s notorious past as a pirate merchant for Dreer Samher and described to her the journeys Hedrigall had made to the monstrous islands south of Gnurr Kett, to trade with the mosquito-men” (100). In defiance of the conventions of the quest fantasy, diegesis is both more accurate and