On Thursday I happened to look at the always fascinating BLDGBLOG and the first thing I saw proved the value of that site consummately: an interview with brilliant weird-fiction writer China Miéville, on the design and construction of his imagined cityscapes. Miéville is easily my favorite writer, and the following quote proves why. In his novel The Scar, Miéville describes a city built of pirated ships bound together and floating across oceans:
They were built up, topped with structure, styles and materials shoved together from a hundred histories and aesthetics into a compound architecture. Centuries-old pagodas tottered on the decks of ancient oarships, and cement monoliths rose like extra smokestacks on paddlers stolen from southern seas. The streets between the buildings were tight. They passed over the converted vessels on bridges, between mazes and plazas, and what might have been mansions. Parklands crawled across clippers, above armories in deeply hidden decks. Decktop houses were cracked and strained from the boats' constant motion.
Miéville is a masterfully descriptive writer, and here he really evokes the sublime in architecture evolved through accumulation and repurposing. I haven't read The Scar in a few years and that was only once so I didn't recognize the quote immediately, but I was shocked to realize how much of an influence the world of this book (as well as everything else I've read by him) has obviously had on my main conceptual interests. I suppose I'm trying to do with images what he does with imagery in text: create imagined settings that possess their own histories, colliding or adapting into a strange new point in time.
Much of the interview has to do with his more recent novel The City and The City, which I haven't yet read, so I reluctanltly skimmed over some parts because I didn't want anything to be given away. I did however read his comment on allegory in fiction which I found quite interesting. I do agree with him that using allegory in art implies that there is a single, direct reading of the work, and that limits the imaginative potential of the work for the reader/viewer. The way I see it is like this: if you have a world that has been created by the artist specifically to comment on events and realities in our world indirectly, you have little incentive to delve into the intricacies of the imagined setting that don't relate to the main allegory. Allegory is certainly very important in rhetoric, but from a fictive perspective any worldbuilding present in the work merely serves to redirect the reader's gaze to that which it refers to; it's the vehicle that takes you to real-world issues without stopping to ponder the possibilities of the imagined scenery passing by.
I'm much more interested in being able to see something in fiction and visual art and imagine what else it might entail and refer to within the constructed setting itself. A work that respects the reader/viewer's desire to explore the imagined world is much more open to possibilities of interpretation and ultimately longer lived, I think. That doesn't imply the work should be escapist fantasy, either. The key is to be able to get lost in the countries of the imagination and to bring back knowledge gained from that journey to our world.
Joe D! - Armada (2010)