China Mieville on "anal-penetration panic"
Since there was some interest, I've transcribed the portion of China Mieville's recent interview in the March/April 2008 Weird Tales where he talks about phobic representations of anal sex in fiction. Spoilers for Dan Simmons's The Terror and Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow.

The sections in bold are the questions from interviewer Jeff VanderMeer.



I have a current theory that writers become so in love with their characters that they don't always recognize when they've written a sociopath, for example. And then their enthusiasm blinds readers who aren't careful and who go along for the ride, thinking, "Oh, this person is great."

Ah. It's an interesting question, and I've not thought of it in those terms. I've certainly been aware of the consideration of certain characters as admirable, or, in other ways, as despicable, when read from a different optic, they are not. I loathed Tess of the d'Urbervilles because I got the strong impression that Hardy and I disagreed about Tess. Similarly Simmons's The Terror, with several of his characters.

Did you like The Terror?

No. I kept wanting to find out what the giant polar bear was. When I discovered it was, indeed, a giant polar bear, I was deflated. I found it fairly page-turny, but I found it much too long, too bogged down with its historical research for its narrative, its disclosures and teratological money-shot too contingent to its narrative, and its embedded politics--particularly vis-a-vis homosexuality--offensive.

You don't believe these embedded politics were part of the historical research?

No, because I'm not talking about the politics of the characters, but about the politics of the text, as I read it.

At least he was honest. In that sense.

Specifically, the obsessive locus of the evil character's evil in the fact that he was an engager in anal sex. I know lots of people point to the fact that there's a "sympathetic" gay character too (who reads, incidentally, to me, very like someone invented because an editor said, "we really need a counterbalance to the evil gay") but that character is explicitly defined as a goody because he doesn't have sex on the ship. That's nothing to do with historical research or attitudes (and parenthetically, the idea that in a crew that size only two men would be fucking is ludicrous) but to do with the text's pathological Terror of anal penetration which is (spoiler!--hello The Sparrow) the usual way culture gets to have a deep-seated pathologising of gay sexuality alongide putatively liberal attitudes to desexualised gay men.

You've just ruined the innocence of perhaps 85 percent of Weird Tales readers.

Hurrah! My work here is done.

Please take a bow. I really liked the book, but I didn't catch the subtext you're talking about, in part, probably, because I was turning pages too quickly.

I'm very aware, by the way, that loads of readers of this may think I'm being a humourless or po-faced dick about it. This is how it reads to me, and I have a big problem with it. And I think arguments about "what the writer really means" or thinks are very point-missing, because this stuff isn't reducible to "intent."

True, but--and I'm not saying in this case--but in some cases, don't you have to be forgiving?

It depends of what. Give me an example?

For example, Philip K. Dick was a raging misogynist. But if you unravel the stuff about his work that is bad in that sense, you also unravel the good stuff. In a sense I'm playing devil's advocate because I do believe writers should think these things through, because it reflects on whether they've really created well-rounded characters as opposed to stereotypes.

This is not about pissing and moaning just because I disagree with the writer's politics--I love passionately Gene Wolfe's work, for example, far more than the writing of many people whose politics are more congenial to me. It's about saying that as a matter of reading, of literary response, when the politics or concerns or whatever of a paritcular text impinge on it in certain ways, make it pull in certain directions, interfere with other aspects of it, etc. etc., and in my opinion make it not just politically objectionable, but work less well as a text, then I feel perfectly free to criticise it on these (politico-literary) axes.

Sure--I mean, what you're saying about The Terror makes sense in that--does it make any difference whether the evil guy is gay or not? To the story? Not really. So then you have to ask yourself why it's there.

I don't think there's such a thing as "the story" disembarrassed of all the other stuff, basically. That's why I think about "texts" or works rather than the story, versus/and/or the writing, verus/and/or the characters, etc. In art these things are intertwined. Not reducible to each other, sure, but not little just-add-and-stir packets of sauce that you can choose one but not the other. Did I want to get to the end of The Terror and see the bear? Sure. Still, though. I stand by what I said, and I think there's no contradiction. I don't mind people disagreeing at all, of course, that's the point of debate. I do get frustrated when--and maybe it's my fault for not being clear--people take what I'm saying as "he doesn't like books by people he doesn't agree with." As the Lovecraft, Celine, Machen, Blackwood, Ewers, James, Cordwainer Smith, Blyton, et many al., on my shelves indicate, this isn't so. And it can operate the other way round too. For me, The Sparrow was a big thing there--that's obviously a book that intends to be very progressive about homosexuality, but in my opinion it, whatever Russell's beliefs and intents, is deep-structured by anal-penetration panic.

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