The city and the city. Posthumous fantasies in the short narrative of Samuel Beckett and China Miéville

Abstract

Since the turn of the millenium, critical approaches to the work of Samuel Beckett –a leading figure of literary modernism– in the light of cultural materials regarded as marginal with respect to ‘serious’ literature have shown a significant expansion. Among other critical interventions, some possible connections have been made between Beckett’s writings and certain branches of speculative fiction, thus challenging a regime of hierarchies and differences a certain (post)modernist mythology has posited in terms of a ‘Great Divide’ (Huyssen) between high art and mass culture. From the opposite side of the divide, the name of China Miéville –an author commonly related to ‘New Weird’ fiction– has been going through a process of canonisation that highlights some aspects of his work, while strategically handling others, for the sake of his recognition as a ‘literary’ writer. These crossings are exampled by the inclusion of both Beckett and Miéville in a canon of slipstream writings, as American author Bruce Sterling has named an ‘emergent genre’ capable of expressing the strangeness of today’s experience. The subgenre known as ‘posthumous fantasy’ will let us articulate the close reading of the materials with some of the great totalizing fictions that have shaped the ‘theoretical’ debate in the UK and America since the 1980s. By means of this ‘middlebrow mediation’ (a term whose Modernist ancestry dates back to figures such as Virginia Woolf, Dwight Macdonald, and Clement Greenberg), we intend to delve into the premises and the methodological, hermeneutical and conceptual effects the comparative analysis of the texts will help us visualize. By focusing on the urban aesthetics developed by the two authors, this paper not only assesses the potential of some recent perspectives on Beckett, but also the limitations of a supposedly ‘non-canonising’ approach to the work of the great Irish author.