A Mosaic in Mutation: The Divergent and Transgressive Grotesquerie of China Miéville

This paper seeks to explore China Miéville's use of the grotesque in his New Weird novum. Through Miéville's literature, we shall study the grotesque as a tool of affective mutability and difference. Without being subservient to fairy-quest logics, his work rejects the rigid structural compressions and challenges the traditional narratology of the fantastic. Miéville's materialist radicalization of the grotesque, present throughout his divergent worldbuilding, enables him to create a polymorphic teratology of molecular becoming. We intend to theorize the transmutability of heterotopic geographies as possibility spaces of co-existential indeterminacy; they produce events that agitate our onto-epistemological understanding of the monstrous. Miéville's fractalization of the monster proper is potentialized with a heterogeneous expressivity that refrains from constructing rigid and totalizing benchmarks, thereby posing a non-conformist challenge to genre-conforming models in fantasy. Estranging from his precursors, especially those who trailed the Lovecraftian vein, Miéville addresses the overuse of stock archetypes and the demarcation problem that made the monster unintelligible and immobile, and experiments with the shifting potential of genres and subgenres without getting subjected to classifiable categorizations. With a special focus on his King Rat (1998) and Kraken (2010), our objective is to address this elastic breathability in Miéville's transgressive and creative grotesquerie, to interpret the grotesque as a heuristic tool of extreme potentialities, and to conceptualize his abcanny as a revitalizing agency of dissension intrinsic to his literature with which he effectuates a teratocultural shift and confronts the stagnancy perpetuated by his ancestors of the fantastic.

關鍵字

China Miéville ； New Weird ； H. P. Lovecraft ； Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari ； grotesque ； polymorphic teratology

並列摘要

我們的論文探討了柴納．米耶維在他的新怪異小說中對怪誕的運用，以及作者如何試圖通過對身體性的徹底再啟動來重塑奇幻的怪誕風格。通過研究米耶維的文學作品，我們將探討怪誕作為一種情感變異和差異的工具。他的作品摒棄了對童話探索邏輯的依附，拒絕了僵硬的結構壓縮，並挑戰傳統的奇幻敘事學。我們認為，米耶維對怪誕的唯物主義激進化貫穿於他構建的歧異世界，使他能夠創造出一種分子流變的多態畸形學。我們將異質地理的可轉換性理論化，視其為共存不定性的可能性空間，從而激發我們對怪物本體認識論的理解。米耶維對怪物本身的分形化是以一種異質性的表達方式來實現的，它避免了構建僵硬的和總體化的基準，是一種對奇幻類型模式的非從屬挑戰。與他的前輩，尤其是那些追隨洛夫克拉夫特脈絡的作家不同，米耶維試圖擺脫典型形象的濫用以及導致怪物難以理解和固化的界限問題。因此，他試驗了類型和子類型的變化潛力，使其不受可分類的歸類限制。我們的目標是著重研究他的《鼠王》（1998）和《克拉肯》（2010），以探討米耶維的創造性怪誕風格當中的彈性，將怪誕視為一種具有極端潛力的啟發式工具，並概念化「異樣」作為一種振興歧異的能動性。通過這種內在於他的文學中的能動性，他實行了一場怪物文化的轉變，並直面作家前輩的裹足不前。

並列關鍵字

柴納．米耶維；新怪異；洛夫克拉夫特；德勒茲與瓜塔里；怪誕；多態畸形學

參考文獻

Noys, Benjamin, and Timothy S. Murphy. “Introduction: Old and New Weird.” Genre, vol. 49, no. 2, July 2016, pp. 117-34. Duke UP, https://doi.org/10.1215/00166928-3512285.

Smith, Daniel. “What Is the Body without Organs? Machine and Organism in Deleuze and Guattari.” Continental Philosophy Review, vol. 51, Feb. 2018, pp. 95-110. Springer Link, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-016-9406-0.

Wight, Linda, and Nicole Gadd. “Sublime and Grotesque: The Aesthetic Development of Weird Fiction in the Work of H. P. Lovecraft and China Miéville.” Abusões, vol. 4, no. 1, 2017, pp. 291-321. Abusões, https://doi.org/ 10.12957/abusoes.2017.27428.

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