The Long and the Short of It: Approaching the (Un-)Representable in China Miéville’s “The Tain” (2002) and “The Condition of New Death” (2014)

Abstract

AbstractHow can the genre of the short story accommodate the ‘inflationary tendency’ of weird fiction (Carl Freedman)? This article will trace how a very long and a very short story by China Miéville establish their respective weird elements in order to function as ‘placeholders for the unrepresentable’ (China Miéville). As will be shown, “The Tain” frames the weird in an elaborate and intricatenarrativeconstruction which is clearlyliterarywhile “The Condition of New Death” is basicallyexpositoryand partly relies on thenon-literarygenre conventions of the academic report and the manifesto. In both instances, however, there is a reflexive turn which insists on the text itself not only in its representational but also in its performative (telling stories, writing) and material (print, paper, screen) dimensions as a constitutive part of what makes reality real for human beings. The article concludes with a brief placing of the New Weird short story in the wider field of (post-)modern(ist) literature and fiction and in the conceptual shift from deconstruction to more recent theoretical approaches like Actor-Network-Theory and the New Materialisms.