Mieville's Kraken, metaphor & kute korrespondences

Robert Mahnke rpmahnke at gmail.com
Mon Sep 27 00:48:32 CDT 2010


In an on-line forum on his most recent novel, Kraken, China Mieville
describes it as a conversation with Pynchon: "which authors is this a
conversation with? The main one that I’m conscious of straight off the
bat was Pynchon, and it was largely a respectful homage to his notion
of ‘kute korrespondences’ – the economy of metaphor, that I wanted to
literalise as magic."

He adds:

"I’ve been very interested in metaphor for several years, and it’s
been cropping up in the books (and does in ones not yet out). I don’t
know that I can say that much super-rigorous about it, but basically I
got interested in, in distinction to some of my other ‘fantasy’
novels, the idea of magic as a literalised metaphor, which means that
it’s not subject to an external system of rules, but instead becomes
about a constant sense of making connections. The making of those
connections being the point, rather than the excavation of existing
ones. And I like that because it’s an exaggerated and literalised
model of what the human mind does all the time. Sympathetic magic is
the logic of simile – this is like that. Do something to this, it will
have an effect on that. Transformative magic seems to me metaphoric –
this becomes that. Sometimes these metaphors are very obvious – the
comb becomes the forest. Sometimes they demand a moment of decoding –
Achilles is a lion. and sometimes their lack of obviousness is the
point. However, for the most part, as they say in Kraken, given that
these work by persuasion (of the universe), their logic tends to be a
bit trite. And this kind of rather lumpen comparative logic seems to
me at the heart of much fantasy, in a literalised way, and also of
enormous wads of ‘literary’ fiction, though not literalised – instead,
at a plodding organisational formal level, in which activity X in the
book (often excitingly ethnic and othered) becomes, crash, ‘a symbol
for’ something else. Often the protagonists life, or whatnot. This is
what I think Pynchon was teasing with Kute Korrespondences, and it was
something I wanted to play with."

http://fdlbooksalon.com/2010/09/26/fdl-book-salon-welcomes-china-mieville-kraken/

I read the book and really liked it, but a Pynchon connection hadn't
occurred to me.

On Sun, Jul 25, 2010 at 4:54 AM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:
> Mieville is a wonderful speaker, if you ever get the chance to see
> him. Hugely passionate and full of original thoughts on genre and the
> value of anything beyond literary fiction. He likes a good fight, too,
> I think.
>
> If you want a quick, enjoyable read, find his Un Lun Dun for a
> satisfying subversion of the Harry Potter-style triumphalism of young
> adult fantasy. Will appeal to the Pullman fans, too.
>
> On Sat, Jul 24, 2010 at 11:43 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> The book’s starting point is the kraken (pronounced CRACK-en), or giant squid.
>> Huge scary squids have been an obsession of writers like Tennyson, Lovecraft,
>> and H. G. Wells for the last 200 years; “Kraken” is a homage to that tradition,
>> bolstered by the happy fact that the Natural History Museum in London has a
>> pickled one, which gets stolen in the book.
>>
>>
>> While the squid is a more “epically resonant creature,” Mr. Miéville says that
>> he is in fact “a partisan of the octopus.” (His earrings turn out not to be
>> totems of aggression at all, but silver casts of baby octopus tentacles, a gift
>> from his girlfriend, an American doctor. He also has some little octopus
>> figurines in his bathroom.)
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>



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