The Slow versus the Spectacular:

Abstract

“Polynia” and “Covehithe” are two short stories from China Miéville’s 2015collection Three Moments of an Explosion. Present in both is an “ecosystem” ofspectacular violence that the author builds through, first, the graphic descriptionof violence, second, the encapsulation of eye-witnessed violence in visual objectsthat resemble what the Marxist philosopher Guy Debord terms “spectacles” and,third, the manipulation of textual spectatorship. To construct a chilling and eerieatmosphere for his narratives, Miéville can be said to have drawn heavily on HPLovecraft’s weird tales. Nonetheless, behind the spectacles of violence representedin “Polynia” and “Covehithe” is not the cosmic horror typical of Lovecraft buta different kind of horror, heavily anchored in our reality, possessing new andincreasing urgency: the horror of global warming and environmental degradation,or, as in the words of Rob Nixon, of “slow violence.” Consequently, there happensin “Polynia” and “Covehithe” what is similar to an act of translation, of the slowinto the spectacular. I argue that this translation provides a potential answer toNixon’s pressing question about how to surmount the representational challengescreated by slow violence in order to render it more urgent and engaging. Thisargument is furthermore related to broader discussions about the relationshipbetween literature and the media, fiction’s engagement with the environmentalcrisis, as well as the differences between Old Weird and New Weird.