"The Future Historical Perspective": Miéville's Queer Durée

What would a history of capitalism that is not a history of secularization look like? This is a question that structures the best of contemporary fantasy fiction, a genre in which uncannily modern plot points —the technologies of total war, the kaleidoscopic spread of corporations —are typically played out on ensorcelled landscapes by trollish figures from an enchanted past. Such chromatic combinations have seemed to code fantasy as a permanently adolescent genre, recoiling from industrialization's hard facts to nest with wizards, religion, and other chimeras of modernity. Far from a reactionary shudder, however, the saturation of fantasy by magic represents a commitment to history without secularization: a commitment to suspend not only the a priori success of secularization but —much more radically —to delink secularization from historicism itself. The best of such fantastic histories might be China Miéville's Iron Council, a fiercely nonsecular allegory of British imperialism and capitalist development. A queer hermeneutics of Iron Council, furthermore, apprehends this allegorical history as a complex narrative of desire. To do so embeds the question of the lost object at the heart of the problematics of secularization and asks: what is forgotten or foreclosed in converging a history of capitalism with that of secularization? To pry apart these false identifications, to restore a history of capitalism that does not merge with a secularization narrative, is, for Iron Council, an anamnesis of magic.

Iron Council narrates a semifailed revolution led by two focalizers, one of whom is bisexual, the other irrecoverably gay. The novel is driven by these characters' desire: for social transformation, for recognition, and for love. But despite these queer details, Iron Council is of greatest interest because it casts a queer history. Here I mean queer in its saliently arcane sense: as an intensifier that adds emphasis to what follows. This is a nineteenth-century queer, the adverbial adjective signifying "extremely" or "very."¹ As an intensifier, a "queer history" means a very historical history, and this is a queer that has itself passed into the dustbin of history, perhaps because, like all adverbs, it signals a delayed linguistic adolescence, complete with the exuberant, totalizing tendencies of the young. Yet it is precisely this totalizing exuberance that makes Miéville's novel a queer history of British imperialism. It is so because it intensifies the problematic of history itself.

This intensification of history recalls Fredric Jameson's "future historical perspective."² In fantasy's hypersaturated future histories, the more alienating the world, the more the reader recognizes it as simultaneously an allegory of the past and a hazy utopian portent. In Iron Council's Bas-Lag —an uncanny world of unionized frogs, shape-shifters, golems, and heroic, animate plant life —the collective V-effekt of these impossible bodies restages aspects of history that have been secluded from view. Against fantasy's most insipid reading as developmentally delayed, these creature-worlds are anything but blueprints for a silly parallel universe; in their impossibility, they are diagnostic, negative images of both an actual history and a possible reality yet to come.

Iron Council functions as one such massive negative image. The novel's narrators each search for a lost object. In the opening section, Cutter —a melancholic junk-shop owner and ambivalent revolutionary —leads a band of rebels across Bas-Lag to rejoin with Judah Low —his lover, a powerful wizard, and the movement's leader. This section traces Cutter's quest and concludes with their reunion, which tumbles toward Judah's beatific refusal to express desire: "Cutter kissed him, with an urgency that always came when he did. . . . Judah responded as he always did —with something like affection and something like patience" (104). "When Judah did it," the irrecoverably gay Cutter meditates, "sex was not sex any more than anger was anger or cooking was cooking. His actions were never what they were, but were mediated always through otherworldly righteousness. Cutter was an invert but Judah was Judah Low" (128). Cutter's desire to...