One of the most intriguing divisions that fantasy literature enables us to rethink is that between the domains of nature and culture. Many scholars maintain that the principal cause of today’s many environmental problems, from ozone depletion to the proliferation of genetically manipulated organisms, is the way in which Western society perceives there to be a difference between nature and culture.1 While nature and culture are terms that are both well-known and slippery to define, our cultural relationship with nature is dominated by problems of delimitation as well as of conflicting traditions: Where exactly do we draw the line between nature and culture? Is there even a line to be drawn? Are we not of natural origin and therefore part of nature ourselves? In that case, how can things we do be anything but natural? In the actual world, these questions have become relevant parts of the debate about how to deal with environmental issues; and through the fantasy genre, they may be approached from any number of new directions.
Cities may seem a typically cultural phenomenon, but they are actually among the most interesting, and certainly the most distinct, interfaces between nature and culture. They provide a limit or boundary that is or is not transgressed or permeated, a locus where both sides of the relation can be studied. This is just as true of cities in fantasy fiction. There may well be, as Brian Attebery claims, some “archetypal green world that underlies all fairyland”;2 but generally speaking, the city in fantasy is neither connected to fairyland nor to any archetypal green world. Its magic is of a different kind, less predictable and straightforward. By investigating the relationship between nature and culture, it is possible to understand what function that relationship has in the imaginary cities, but also to see what fantasy cities can tell us about alternative ways of exploring this important and familiar yet complex duality.
Defining “nature” is an undertaking fraught with complications. In Thinking about Nature, Andrew Brennan reflects that given the variety of ways in which the term nature is used, a case could even be made for dropping it from descriptions.3 Kate Soper, in What Is Nature?, remarks that the term is “at once both very familiar and extremely elusive.”4 A quick glance in the Oxford English Dictionary shows us a term that has accumulated a considerable number of only vaguely related meanings. Nature can, for instance, mean “[a] malleable state of iron” and “[a] class or size of guns or shot” (both meanings now obsolete). It is a word that can denote anything from bodily functions in need of a handy euphemism (related to, for example, excrement, urine, semen, and menstrual discharge) to the characteristic disposition of a person. It can even mean the entire cosmos.5
For the purpose of discussing the relation between nature and culture, the most suitable definition in the OED is that of nature as “[t]he phenomena of the physical world collectively; esp. plants, animals, and other features and products of the earth itself, as opposed to humans and human creations.”6 The last clause brings to mind Soper’s point of departure, namely that “[i]n its commonest and most fundamental sense, the term ‘nature’ refers to everything which is not human and distinguished from the work of humanity.”7 It is further helpful to consider Brennan’s outline of the distinction between broad and narrow (or absolute and relative) notions of “the natural.” The basis for his broader notion is that human behavior is natural insofar as we find the same behavior naturally in other animals (particularly higher mammals), and that human management, production, and interference make events and products unnatural.8 Brennan and Soper are in general agreement with philosopher Keekok Lee, who starts off her list of seven senses of “nature” with what she terms naturenh (non-human). She defines naturenh as opposed to culture, which “involves human agency and its products.”9
“Culture” can have almost as many meanings as the word nature. Depending on which discipline we turn to, definitions will vary. It has, for instance, been suggested that “culture” is “a class of phenomena conceptualized by anthropologists in order to deal with questions they are trying to answer.”10 In their 1952 investigation of literature in (mainly) the social sciences, anthropologists Alfred L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn include nearly three hundred different definitions of the term.11 In “Classic Conceptions of Culture,” Peter Worsley describes the two main ways in which “culture” is used outside of the natural sciences. The first, oldest, and here least relevant way is to use the term more or less synonymously with “the fine arts.” The second usage “is the idea of ‘culture’ as a way of life” which at the broadest level may refer to “almost anything that distinguishes human beings from animals.”12 This is obviously the usage that primarily opposes Lee’s naturenh as well as Brennan’s and Soper’s views of nature and the natural. Daniel G. Bates attempts to define culture in slightly more detail. According to him, culture is the “system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors and material objects that the members of a society use to cope with their world and with one another,”13 a definition that is useful for my discussion.
The duality nature—not-nature (or culture—not-culture) has some drawbacks, however. The first, and most obvious, is that if nature is that on which human management, production, and interference—“the work of humanity”—has had no impact whatsoever, then precious little nature is left in the actual world. Through the greenhouse effect and depletion of the ozone layer, humanity has affected the entire biosphere.14 Humanity’s history is one of large-scale changes to its habitats; for millennia, entire landscapes have been artificially changed as the result of human intervention. Historian Lynn White, Jr., points out that the upper valley of the Nile would have been a swampy jungle were it not for some six millennia of irrigation; and both he and Frederick Turner remark on the deforestation and overgrazing that occurred in antiquity, which left the hills of the Mediterranean basin in the state they are in today.15 As recently as twelve hundred years ago, the first Maori settlers began the process that would soon turn the deep forests of New Zealand into today’s rolling hills of tussock grass. The second drawback is that even if there is something left to call nature once we have removed everything on which humans have had any impact (and, in fantasy literature, there might well be), the duality allows for no shades of gray. It is strictly binary. It would seem reasonable to add nuance to this duality. In De Natura Deorum (On the Nature of the Gods), Marcus Tullius Cicero writes that “we sow cereals and plant trees; we irrigate our lands to fertilize them. We fortify river-banks, and straighten or divert the courses of rivers. In short, by the work of our hands we strive to create a sort of second nature within the world of nature.”16
A “second nature” created by human labor would not qualify as natural according to Lee’s naturenh or Soper’s and Brennan’s nature without human impact. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to consider Cicero’s “second nature” not only in terms of culture. A garden, for instance, could be considered to occupy a position between nature and culture.17 In a garden, apple trees, roses, and lawns grow according to natural principles, and if they were not picked, trimmed, and pruned, they would grow out of control. It is the gardener’s control that makes the garden what it is; and without control, the garden, as garden, would sooner or later cease to be. Rather than discussing nature only in terms of human impact, we can usefully look at nature in terms of human—or cultural—control as well.
Most people would agree that primary rainforest is part of nature but that shopping centers are not, and that a car is not natural but that an ancient oak is. But when it comes to bonsai trees, wheat fields, and pedigree dogs, there is not the same certainty. The difference between the former and latter examples is that the bonsai, wheat field, and dog have been subjected to human control. Their natural behavior has, in varying ways, been checked or changed, turning them into examples of Cicero’s “second nature.” The rainforest and the ancient oak are (presumably) not culturally controlled but are what I term wild, part of a wilderness.18 Once nature comes under our control, we tame it. We force the bonsai, the field, and the dog to develop and behave in ways that fit our culture. Gardens, parks, potted plants, agriculture, and pets are all examples of tame nature, nature under culture’s control.19 If that control were to cease, their tameness would give way to another state. The bonsai would grow larger leaves and branches, other plants (“weeds”) would mix with the wheat monoculture, and the dog’s behavior, if not its appearance, would adapt to a life in the wild—and its offspring a few generations of uncontrolled breeding down the line would certainly no longer be pedigree animals. As culture’s control ceases, wildness (re)asserts itself. This shift to a state of wildness and, eventually, wilderness is not restricted to borderline cases such as the ones just mentioned; brownfield land at former industrial sites exemplifies this process, as do the continual battles between gardeners and the invading forces of moss and weeds. If tame nature is not sufficiently controlled, it will not behave according to human wishes. It will go wild. That wildness which manifests itself when nature is no longer controlled is here termed feral nature. Over a year, a decade, or a century, wilderness returns, and even though traces of human impact may remain, control is gone; nature is again wild.
The relation between nature and culture varies from society to society. In the actual world, whether the two are even opposed is open to question. According to Darwin and the theory of evolution, humans are the result of a natural process. To cut a long argument short, if we come from nature, and have developed through a natural process, then why should anything we do be unnatural? Or anything we make?20 Or is there a sliding scale between nature and culture? Are entities and behaviors more or less natural, more or less cultural? Then there is another notion, namely that humans are in some sense superior to the rest of the (natural) world. In Western society, this notion stems primarily from the Judeo-Christian tradition.21 Genesis tells us that we “have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”22 The contemporary, and secular, view of Homo sapiens as standing “highest in a natural order of ‘lower life forms’” comes to us from the scriptures and from the concept of the scala naturae or “ladder of nature,” which was originally conceived by Aristotle and later brought into Christian learning.23 Two impulses thus compete in the Western view of how we and our culture are supposed to relate to nature. From a Darwinian perspective, we are a product of nature, not its masters, while religious tradition positions us above the rest of creation. This contradiction is one of the foremost reasons for our problematic relation between nature and culture.
In fantasy, and particularly in fantasy set in secondary worlds, neither Christian thinking nor Darwinism is a compulsory ingredient. Writers are free to construct their own relations between nature and culture. Tolkien thus uses a Christian foundation when his world, Arda, is explicitly created as the dwelling of the Children of Ilúvatar (elves and humans):
[T]he Ainur saw that [the creation] contained things which they had not thought. And they saw with amazement the coming of the Children of Ilúvatar, and the habitation that was prepared for them; and they perceived that they themselves in the labor of their music had been busy with the preparation of this dwelling, and yet knew not that it had any purpose beyond its own beauty. For the Children of Ilúvatar were conceived by him alone.24
The nature of Middle-earth is thus clearly separated from the cultures of elves and humans. In Aslan’s creation of Narnia (C. S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew [1955]), humans are even more external, as they come from outside the world. In both cases, a reading that sees culture as separate from nature is not only possible, it is imposed by how the worlds are created. Other works present other approaches. In David and Leigh Eddings’s The Dreamers series (2003–2006) and Terry Pratchett’s Eric (1990), the world is created by divine labor, but its life develops through evolution. The fantasy genre offers alternative ways of relating to the nature–culture duality, including not regarding it as a duality at all, just as it offers alternative ways of dealing with and relating to any other concepts. When examining the construction of this duality in fantasy literature, my point of departure for each reading was that nature and culture formed separate domains; but as the four following examples demonstrate, that is not necessarily the case.
Returning to Bates’s definition of culture, we find that he includes artifacts or “material objects.” The most palpable material object, or accumulation of material objects, that “the members of a society use to cope with their world”—that is, to control their surroundings—is the city. The division of labor developed in cities made possible the economies of specialization that led to the urban accumulation of capital (just as agriculture and food preservation allowed for a shift away from hunting and gathering), resulting in a society of specialist professions.25 In Occidental society, the city has become the locus of cultural interchange and could be considered the pinnacle of culture. The city limit is an obvious meeting point of nature and culture, of outside and inside; but it is also a boundary that, in various ways and in either direction, can be transgressed, permeated, or penetrated. It is a boundary in physical as well as nonphysical terms, and it is a boundary that confines as much as it protects.
Two points need to be made regarding the selection of the four cities discussed here: no assumptions as regards the relation between nature and culture found in them were made when they were chosen; and they were picked for their distinct differences rather than for any similarities they might have shared. It could even be argued that apart from belonging to the same literary genre, all they have in common is that they are imaginary cities. That trait is central to the discussion, however, because a study of the relation between nature and culture in works of fiction is by necessity a study of settings. If a story is set in (a version of) a city from the actual world, such as London or New York, no matter how fictionalized, the relations between nature and culture in the fantasy city could be influenced by circumstances in its actual-world counterpart. As this book aims to examine the relation in fantasy, such an admixture is undesirable. The four cities are thus all imaginary, even in the case of Newford, which is set in a primary world. Apart from that, the four cities have very little in common. Tolkien’s Minas Tirith is set in the portal–quest fantasy of The Lord of the Rings, in a culture that corresponds somewhat to early medieval Europe. Newford is a city that could well exist somewhere in today’s North America. While Charles de Lint’s many stories cover a wide range of fantasy, they are mainly of the intrusive type. New Crobuzon appears in immersive-fantasy novels, even though China Miéville’s works also contain aspects of both quest and intrusion, and the industrial city is mainly based on Victorian London. Patricia McKillip’s Ombria, finally, is a clearly immersive fantasy reminiscent of Renaissance Italy.
The quartet of cities I have selected thus demonstrates some of the many shapes and flavors that fantasy cities come in. In fantasy literature, we find cities scattered in the path of the questing hero, urban oases in the wilderness providing succor before the dangers of the road are braved again. Others are complete settings in themselves, not places to be visited but environments to be explored.26 Some are beautiful and pleasant; others are dark and oppressive. Some are empty and deserted, others are teeming with life. The vast majority are in some way perilous, threatened or threatening, and, as John Clute observes, “a city in fantasy tends to be a place where the action converges.”27 By looking at the relationship between the city and nature in various texts, we can discuss the relation between nature and culture in those texts and see how the nature–culture division is presented in these places of converging action.
THE RETURN OF THE TREE: BRINGING NATURE BACK INTO MINAS TIRITH28
The people of Middle-earth live in a wide variety of dwellings, from the comfortable hobbit holes of Hobbiton to the vast underground halls of Khazad-dûm, from Bree with its friendly inn to Edoras with its goldroofed Meduseld; but very few of these dwellings are called cities. Certainly, Khazad-dûm was once a light and splendid place, the realm and city of Dwarrowdelf;29 but when the Fellowship passes through, the place has long been called Moria, the Black Chasm. It is a ruin or ghost town rather than a city, inhabited by orcs and run by a dreaded balrog. Caras Galadhon, the capital of the Galadhrim, is a city of trees and lawns, and while it does not conform to traditional ideas of urbanity, contemplating it offers some interesting insights into an alternative relation between culture and nature. The elven city is therefore briefly examined at the end of this section. Apart from Khazad-dûm and Caras Galadhon, however, most of the communities mentioned in The Lord of the Rings are villages or small towns.
The only city proper that the reader encounters in Tolkien’s novel is Minas Tirith, the Tower of Vigilance, main city of Gondor after the fall of the original capital, Osgiliath. The city’s central importance is stressed by the capital C that has been bestowed upon the word City whenever it refers to Minas Tirith in the text. There is what Tolkien calls a “basic opposition” between Minas Tirith and the Dark Tower of Barad-dûr,30 noticeable from the first time the city is mentioned at the Council of Elrond (FR, II, ii, 238). Minas Tirith is a city that defends itself, most manifestly from the forces of Mordor but also from the wilderness. Onionlike, the cultural center of the city, the great hall of the rulers of Gondor, is surrounded by ring upon ring of defenses. With each ring closer to the center, wild nature is further removed and the superiority of culture affirmed; and at the middle, in front of the hall, sits what must have been the ultimate symbol of a culture devoid of nature for Tolkien: an ancient, dead tree. Inside the hall, another symbol of similar meaning appears: a throne under a flowering tree—carved from stone.
Minas Tirith is set in a wilderness that is kept from the city by its outermost defense work and by the tame nature of the Pelennor fields. To the south are the mountains and vales of Lossarnach, and to the north lie Anórien and the Druadan Forest. The text indicates that Lossarnach has been slowly tamed over the years and partly turned into farmland; but it is still a forested country, and Minas Tirith’s citizens plainly associate it with wilderness (RK, V, i, 754; viii, 845–46). The Druadan Forest, on the other hand, used to be under Gondor’s control but has now gone feral. The wain-road running through it has been forgotten and overgrown, a road known only by the woses who live there (RK, V, v, 814–816). The woses offer a mirror image of the cultural Gondor citizen. Paul H. Kocher points out that Faramir refers to the woses as the lowest class of human civilization—the Wild Men, or the Men of Darkness—in a scale on which the men of Gondor are at the top.31 If, as it seems to Merry, the woses are indeed related to the Púkel-men statues at Dunharrow that they so much resemble, they have lived unchanged in this part of Middle-earth since the Years of Darkness, more than six millennia earlier (RK V, v, 813–14, 816; iii, 777–78; Appx B 1058). In other words, they have lived in this area longer than the people of both Gondor and Rohan (the “High” and “Middle” Men of Faramir’s taxonomy) who are now its masters. The forest is clearly the true element of the woses; clad in grass skirts, they move silently and almost invisibly through it, a part of their natural surroundings. Their willingness to aid the Riders of Rohan despite having been dehumanized and hunted as beasts by the Rohirrim adds the woses’ voices to Treebeard’s in defense of the wilderness (RK, V, v, 815). From that position, the woses also function as criticism of Gondor’s society. The men of Gondor, who style themselves as High, have forgotten their own history (the old wain-road); moreover, they have forgotten to live with nature in their City, which the woses refer to as the “Stone-houses.”
Letting the wain-road be forgotten along with the woses of the Druadan Forest is part of shutting the wilderness out, a role more palpably played by the outer defense wall. When Pippin arrives at Minas Tirith, his first encounter is not with the city itself but with Rammas Echor, the twenty-league-long wall that surrounds the Pelennor townlands. This great structure is part of the defense of Minas Tirith, although it actually slows down the enemy forces by less than a day (RK, V, iv, 799–800). What the encircling wall does, however, is surround the urban center with tamed nature. All around the city, apart from right at its back, the land is “rich, with wide tilth and many orchards, and homesteads […] with oast and garner, fold and byre” (RK, V, i, 734). Control over the land is evident from the list of features that tame—or imply the taming of—the natural land, from the growing of crops to animal husbandry. The havoc caused to this farmland by Sauron’s armies recalls the ravaging of the gardens of the entwives in an earlier war (see TT, III, iv, 465) and foreshadows the destruction that the hobbits face on their return to the Shire.
Tame nature goes no farther than the Minas Tirith city walls, however. These walls are meant to keep the enemy out; but only nature at its wildest could breach them, and it is implied that even furious wilderness stands no chance of tearing them down. While the city and the Tower of Ecthelion that crowns it are built of white stone, the outward face of the outer defense walls is hard, dark, and smooth. The strength of Minas Tirith’s walls is such that it would require “some convulsion that would rend the very earth on which [they] stood” to cast them down (RK, V, iv, 804). The walls’ power to withstand enemies from Mordor parallels their ability to withstand natural assault. The black surface recalls a very similar substance that covers Orthanc,32 and during Treebeard’s attack on Isengard, the hard surface even defeats the might of the enraged ents. In her insightful article “Taking the Part of Trees,” Verlyn Flieger observes that “[w]hat happens at Orthanc is not merely like the work of great tree roots, it is the work of great tree roots”33—but even when those roots can tear up rock like bread crust, they can do no more than scratch and chip the black surface of Orthanc’s walls (TT, III, x, 553; ix, 563). Minas Tirith’s walls share this imperviousness to even the wildest nature with the tower of Isengard.
Inside the walls, the city is portrayed as a place of cultural supremacy. To hobbit eyes, it is vast and beautiful but mainly made of stone, giving the impression of being “carved by giants out of the bones of the earth,” an image echoed by the leader of the Wild Men, who explains that Gondor’s founders “carved hills as hunters carve beast-flesh” (RK, V, i, 734; v, 814). Not only physical “carving” brings the hills under cultural control. In the descriptions of the city, Mindollouin, the mountain on whose side it is built, is anthropomorphized, with metaphors giving it not only body parts like head, knee, face, and heart but also garments such as skirts, helm, and cloak (RK, V, i, 734–36, 743). Rather than encountering the mountain as a feature of the natural landscape, the reader is asked to consider it in terms of the human and artificial. Minas Tirith thus becomes further distanced from the surrounding wilderness even when that wilderness is, in fact, a mountainside to which the city clings like an artificial outcrop of white stone. In this respect, Minas Tirith is markedly different from the capital of Lothlórien. While both cities are strong and beautiful, and while their building material is repeatedly remarked upon by narrator and characters, the elven city is not distanced from the nature surrounding it. It is a city of trees, organic and “weightless,” likened to a green cloud (FR, II, vii, 344), whereas the stone city is heavy and artificial.
In Minas Tirith, what little of the natural domain is present only emphasizes its general absence. Given the differences between elven and human cities, Legolas’s first observation when he and Gimli enter the city is hardly surprising. “They need more gardens,” the elf observes. Through him, we are presented with a city consisting of dead houses and lacking things that, as he explains to Gimli, grow and are glad (RK, V, ix, 854). In the white-paved court at the very heart of Minas Tirith, a fountain plays under the branches of a withered tree. The bright green lawn that surrounds the fountain and sets off the tree’s stark deadness is one of only three lawns that the characters come across in this city of stone. The only garden the reader is told of belongs to the Houses of Healing (RK, V, vii, 837). It is an empty garden, indeed, and far from the verdant profusion of Lothlórien, Ithilien, or even the Shire. During their stay, Faramir and Merry once walk across grass; once they sit under a tree. Nature, then, is evoked by its absence as much as by its presence: when the Ring is destroyed, the reader is told that neither birdcall nor rustle of leaf is heard (RK, VI, v, 940–41), enhancing the impression of sterility and a place in want of things that grow and are glad.
The separation of wild nature and culture is bridged by Aragorn. He comes to Gondor as chieftain for the rangers from the northern wilderness, and one sign of his rightful claim to Gondor’s throne is that the herb athelas has healing properties in his hands (RK, V, viii, esp. 842, 844). Aragorn thus becomes a symbol of nature rather than culture, especially in opposition to the steward of Gondor, who sits at the center of a stone city, behind a dead tree and in front of a tree of stone. The ranger comes from the wild lands and can heal with an herb that the city’s herb masters think has no healing properties (RK, V, viii, 847). Aragorn’s use of athelas powerfully and positively evokes both wild and tame nature. When he uses it to heal Faramir, Éowyn, and Merry, the herb’s fragrance is described in similes that conjure the wonders and beauty of nature; it is, for instance, likened to “the scent of orchards, and of heather in the sunshine full of bees” (RK, V, viii, 851). The intensity of these descriptions, forcefully brought out by the use of the herb to combat the deadly affliction caused by Sauron’s servant, links Aragorn to a pristine, natural life-force. The fragrance evokes impressions not just of nature but of nature undefiled, the very antithesis of evil. The vibrant descriptions contrast sharply with the terms employed to describe the fragrance of athelas when Aragorn uses it in the wilderness. There, its smell is simply strong and refreshing, not evocative of unsullied nature (FR, II, vi, 327; I, xii, 193). The powerful connection with nature that comes with Aragorn’s application of the herb in the culture-dominated Minas Tirith suggests that the ranger’s accession to Gondor’s throne closes the divide between nature and culture in the White City.
Aragorn’s ascent to the throne removes the barrier between the domains and provides the city with more tamed nature. Flowers are brought into the city for the coronation (RK, VI, v, 944); and Legolas makes good on his promise that if Aragorn comes into his own, the elves shall bring “birds that sing and trees that do not die” to the city (RK, V, ix, 854; VI, v, 947). As a final step toward healing the city, the dead tree is uprooted and replaced by its scion. A living tree grows at the center of the city, brought from the wilderness high on the slopes of the mountain, just as Aragorn, a ranger from the wild, assumes his position at the very center of Minas Tirith’s culture.
The separation of nature and culture maintained in Minas Tirith is thus brought to an end by the return of the king. The return of nature in the city’s culture also signifies the healing of the long-divided people of Númenor. The wilderness that was once the kingdom of Anor, and the rangers who represent it, are brought together with the culture of Gondor, as represented by the city and people of Minas Tirith. The proper order of things, it is implied, not only involves the rightful leader but also a closeness and mixture of nature and culture. This implied order is confirmed by the only other city that is described in any detail in The Lord of the Rings, the capital of the Galadhrim. The elven city, similar to Minas Tirith in that it is defended by a wall, is not as markedly cut off from the surrounding nature. The defenses that are mentioned are a moat spanned by a bridge, a circular wall, and, where the wall’s ends overlap, tall, strong gates hung with lamps (FR, II, vii, 344). Unlike the defenses of Minas Tirith, which are given great attention, Caras Galadhon’s walls are mentioned in passing (and the moat can be inferred only by the presence of the bridge). Instead, this is a city where nature and culture are woven together.
The predominant reason for the nature–culture interweaving of the elven capital is the way in which elven culture is defined by a close relationship to its natural surroundings. Cultural adaptation to the natural environment is one of the main elven traits, not only in The Lord of the Rings but also in the other Tolkien works set in Arda. It thus becomes problematic to say whether the mallorn forests of Lothlórien are tame or wild, as well as to identify where the Galadhrim’s adaptation to their natural surroundings ends and their control of those surroundings begins. The land’s forests are suffused with the power of Galadriel, and the elves have built platforms in the mallorn trees. Whether the capital and the surrounding forests of the Naith of Lórien differ by anything but degree cannot be determined, as the Company is blindfolded for much of its journey from the Silverlode to the capital. The city, however, gives the impression of being a well-tended forest or parkland. In Flieger’s words, it is “a city that is its own garden”;34 among the trees, there are paths, stairs, and green lawns, and in the middle of the city, a fountain from which flows a stream. Even the halls of the rulers of Minas Tirith and Caras Galadhon stand in sharp contrast to each other. The lord and lady of Lothlórien sit in a hall in a tall mallorn tree, with their backs to the bole and the crown of the living tree spreading its boughs over their thrones (FR, II, vii, 344–45). In the great hall of Minas Tirith, a crowned helmet of white marble is set over Gondor’s throne, with only a carved image of a tree behind it (RK, V, i, 738). Whereas a cultural artifact canopies the center of power in Minas Tirith, nature canopies the elven rulers.
With rightful rulership in Middle-earth follows a blending of culture and nature. Galadriel and Celeborn are certainly the rightful rulers and, in fact, the founders of the realm. In their city, culture and nature flow into each other, blending seamlessly, a condition toward which Minas Tirith appears to move once Aragorn accedes to the throne. The ideal relationship between nature and culture in the cities echoes the ideal relationship between people and the natural world, a relationship expressed in terms of stewardship. Summing up their chapter on stewardship in Middle-earth, Matthew Dickerson and Jonathan Evans observe that “[a]s stewards and tenants, the Children [of Ilúvatar] are given authority over the world, but not to do with what they will. Rather, theirs is an authority accompanied by the responsibility to care for and nourish Ilúvatar’s good creation.”35 In The Lord of the Rings, the elves of Lothlórien are held up as good stewards of their land, and the brief description of the wonders, beauty, and peace of Caras Galadhon thus anticipates the changes that will occur in Minas Tirith once the rightful king displaces the failed steward. Good cities, the reader is told, must be ruled by the right people in the right way, allowing culture to mix with (tame) nature.
NATURE, MAGIC, AND MISFITS: WILDERNESS WITHIN NEWFORD36
Canadian writer Charles de Lint’s city of Newford is, according to the blurb of the collection Moonlight and Vines (1999), a “quintessential North American city,” seen as Canadian by some and as American by others.37 It is the setting for more than a dozen novels and several collections of short fiction. The stories are set under the looming shadow of social failures in Western urbanism: child abuse, homelessness, prostitution, and drug abuse. The fantastic elements range from the clearly impossible to the almost possible, from Faerie creatures and dreamworld journeys to vague suspicions and doubt.
The city culture in Newford is challenged in three ways: physically by the wilderness it contains but cannot control; ontologically by the existence of fairies, the Otherworld, and magic; and socially by an alternative culture that comprises those who, voluntarily or involuntarily, lead a life in contravention of social norms: criminals, prostitutes, and the homeless, but also artists, poets, and street musicians. The three sets of domains in Newford intersect and overlap, and de Lint’s stories are predominantly about people who find themselves on the border between one or more domains. Newford is a city dominated by culture rather than nature, by mundanity rather than magic, by those who fit into society rather than those who do not; but in the stories, these hegemonic domains are constantly challenged by their subjugated opposites. Rather than merely examining the relation between nature and culture, we can benefit from looking at the three divisions that cut through the city.
The first division is that between nature and culture. Just as with Minas Tirith, a clear distinction exists between wilderness and (cultured) city, with tame nature separating wild nature from culture. When police officer Thomas Morningstar drives up to the Kickaha reserve in From a Whisper to a Scream (1992), he observes how the landscape changes around him “from the crowded city streets to blocks of [industrial and commercial estates], the suburbs and finally farmland” and up into the hills, which are “heavy with pine, cedar and hardwoods.”38 The transition happens in stages from the center of cultural control, the crowded streets of central Newford, to the wild nature beyond the city’s periphery. The suburbs and farmland recall the tilth, orchards, and homesteads of the Pelennor. Although one need not pass through a wall in order to leave Newford, there is a distinct difference in feeling inside and outside the city. Having left the city behind, Thomas feels reborn; and to the artist Jilly Coppercorn, the most frequently recurring of Newford’s many characters, the air outside the city “tastes like it’s supercharged with oxygen and everything smells as fresh as a sweet Sunday morning.”39 The dominant picture of Newford is that of a city that keeps the wild at bay, outside and generally quite a distance beyond the city limits.
This external, wild nature is contrasted with the parks, gardens, and other pockets of tame nature that can be found within Newford. These places of controlled nature are few and mostly only implied or mentioned in passing. In this respect, Newford is similar to Minas Tirith. Unlike Tolkien’s city, however, Newford encompasses bubbles of wilderness. These bubbles appear all over the city and come in various sizes. The largest is a section of urban blight covering several blocks, but most are as small as a riverbank or a plot of bushes and weeds. Some, like the grounds of the artists’ colony Kellygnow in Forests of the Heart (2000),40 are untouched nature, wilderness left uncontrolled but contained by the city culture around it; but most are the result of parts of the city being released, ignored, no longer controlled. Nature is allowed to go feral—the wild percolates into the city.
Wilderness is also found beyond the city in quite a different respect, namely as part of the mostly mythical and always magical worlds accessible only to a few of the city’s inhabitants and created by even fewer. The existence of this Otherworld is just one of several indicators of the second division in Newford: the division between the domain of everyday life, very much like our primary world in its mundanity, and a domain of magical places, beings, and events. In Widdershins (2006), one of the magical characters explains how Newford is “built on a nexus of time and spirit zones, which means the spiritworld rubs shoulders with this one more than it normally would otherwise[,]” and that this accounts for the great number of unusual events in the city.41 In the stories, the magical domain actually consists of two settings: the multifarious Otherworld, where time and space behave quite differently from the mundane world, but to which some characters can travel;42 and the magical part of Newford’s reality, sharing time and space with the domain of everyday life. Various human users of magic, who can straddle the border between the domains of magic and mundanity, appear frequently in the Newford stories. The two largest and most prevalent groups of the magical domain’s denizens, however, are the native animal people, who can change between human and animal shape, and the various Faerie beings of the Seelie and Unseelie courts, who arrived with the European settlers. Both groups belong to a category of magical beings that have their origin in myth and legend, a category that in Newford also includes, for instance, a few vampires, Bigfoot, a unicorn, and the Devil. Other inhabitants of the magical domain include: spirits that find new abodes (including the powerful entity in Spirits in the Wires [2003] that takes up residence in the Wordwood literature website, and the so-called numena that take on physical life through Isabelle Copely’s paintings in Memory and Dream [1994]); personifications of abstract concepts (for instance, the spirit of the city itself as the eponymous Tallulah and a character’s Jungian shadow come to life); and ghosts of dead people that have not yet passed on.
The magical domain and its inhabitants are often perceived as an ontological threat by the citizens of the mundane domain. In “Ghosts of Wind and Shadow” (1990), for instance, fifteen-year-old Lesli’s ability to see fairies brings her into conflict with her mother, Anna, who adamantly refuses to acknowledge fairies and magic as part of the real world. Anna’s final realization that magic beings are real destroys her worldview and forces her into drug-induced oblivion.43 Not everyone is as disturbed by the magical domain as Lesli’s mother, however. In “The Stone Drum” (1989), Jilly is given evidence that magic and Faerie creatures are real as a punishment. Like Lesli, Jilly is excited by her ability to experience the magical domain, and her wonder at the magical aspects of reality turns the curse into a blessing.44 The reactions of the majority of Newford’s citizens when confronted with the Faerie domain place them somewhere between Lesli’s and Jilly’s sense of wonder, on the one hand, and Anna’s dread, on the other. Most people push the out-of-the-ordinary from their minds and forget what they have experienced.45 Like the natural domain, the magical domain cannot be controlled and is therefore unseen, invisible. Invisibility is also a key concept when looking at the third way in which Newford is divided.
The final division cuts across the city’s social space. While Minas Tirith is defined mainly by its defenses, Newford is defined by its inhabitants, and architecture tends to become a backdrop to human interaction. Although descriptions of the urban environment are allowed comparatively more space in a few stories (in, for instance, Trader [1997] and “Tallulah” [1991], the old part of the area called “the Market” is described; and “Pal o’ Mine” [1993] includes a description of a number of buildings and their gargoyles46), Newford is portrayed predominantly through descriptions of what its inhabitants do, say, and dream, not of the physical structures of houses, streets, and parks that constitute the city’s architecture. It is an environment defined by relations, social as well as physical, where the street grid and the complex web of personal connections can be mapped, but where houses are very seldom described. Unlike Minas Tirith, and New Crobuzon and Ombria (as discussed later), this city is almost entirely described as a social and mental space—a collection of people, not a collection of buildings.
In this web of relations, the border between the last two domains stands out sharply. It is a social division, the nineteen-year-old squatter Maisie muses in “But for the Grace Go I” (1991), that is not as simple as dividing the city between the haves and the have-nots. “It’s more like some people are citizens of the day and others of the night. Someone like me belongs to the night. Not because I’m bad, but because I’m invisible. People don’t know I exist. They don’t know and they don’t care.”47 The same mechanism is at work when the domiciled members of the city’s hegemonic culture relate to the magic domain as when they relate to the “night people”: like the magical domain, unwanted people are pushed out of the mind, made to disappear. Thus, invisibility is also frequently used to refer to Newford’s homeless and outcasts, just as it is used in other works of urban fantasy as a form of social criticism,48 linking the metaphorical invisibility of the “night people” to an actual and therefore magical invisibility of the inhabitants of the magical domain. In “The Invisibles” (1997), the narrator sees people no one else sees, and his friend explains a fundamental Newford tenet to him: “Magic’s all about perception. Things are the way they are because we’ve agreed that’s the way they are. An act of magic is when we’re convinced we’re experiencing something that doesn’t fit into the conceptual reality we’ve all agreed on.”49 Be they urban fairies or “night people,” such figures are made invisible through the same mechanism of denial.
“Night people” is not synonymous with “homeless,” however. “Everybody who spends most of their time on the streets isn’t necessarily a bum. Newford’s got more than its share of genuinely homeless people,” Maisie explains in a later story, but “it’s also got a whole subculture, if you will, of street musicians, performance artists, sidewalk vendors and the like.”50 This subculture, or alternative culture, consists of people who do not accept the majority’s view of what a proper way of life should be, people who at least to some extent do not subscribe to the consensual reality. It is to this subculture, or to people closely associated with it, that many of the Newford stories’ central as well as minor characters, such as Maisie, belong.
Despite the attempts of the mundane society to ignore its opposites, those opposites remain. Together with domains of alternative culture and magic, the penetration of wilderness challenges Newford’s city culture from within. One of the numerous epigraphs to the stories illustrates how de Lint weaves together the three domains: “There are seven million homeless children on the streets of Brazil. Are vanishing trees being reborn as unwanted children?”51 This quotation from the “Poet Laureate of Deep Ecology”52 links environmental concerns about deforestation to social concerns about street children. In a fantastic context such as de Lint’s urban fantasy, the link between social and environmental issues—the transformation of trees into children—also suggests something magical. In “The Forest Is Crying” (1994), a social worker is asked to consider how the spirits of cut-down trees might literally turn into children, and evidence of the world’s magical nature eventually persuades him not to dismiss that possibility (“Forest” 68–76). He is made to accept a basic premise of Newford: nothing should be dismissed as impossible simply because it has always been considered as such. If spirits or fairies are living in the trees, it would be equally plausible that the felling of a tree would result in yet another unwanted child on the city streets. Such is the reality of Newford, where the changing world kills spirits with concrete, polluted air, and poisoned water (see, e.g., Forests 253). The epigraph thus highlights the links between the three domains that are so central to the Newford stories.
The intersections of the three domains create “bubbles” in the hegemony, free from and thus undermining cultural control. In such bubbles, the links between domains are readily identifiable but are brought out in different ways. Four prominent bubbles of wild nature are considered in the following discussion, of various sizes and relations to the city culture. Stanton Street and All Souls Cemetery are both fairly small, contained areas. The former is a quiet residential street and as such seemingly a part of Newford’s social hegemony, the latter a cemetery deserted by that hegemony. Both offer impressions of wilderness and prove to be associated with the magical domain as well as with alternative culture. The two largest bubbles in Newford, for their part, do more than give the impression of wilderness—to a great extent, they are wild: Fitzhenry Park, although linked to city culture along its edges, is wild at heart, a place of wild nature where the magical and alternative cultural domains have the upper hand. The Tombs, finally, is in many ways the park’s opposite. The wilderness it contains is feral without any hint of cultural control. It serves as a reminder that the denizens of the subjugated domains are also dangerous, be they magical creatures or social outcasts.
The oak-lined Stanton Street runs through the urban center. On the surface, the avenue looks tame; and certainly, trees lining a street offer little of the imagery that can be expected from wilderness. Some descriptions of the oaks along Stanton Street approach the wild, however. As the street narrows, the hundred-year-old oaks give the impression of a tunnel rather than an avenue. The “two once-tidy rows of manicured shade trees [are] enormous now, and [have] more or less gone feral.”53 When Kerry Madan first arrives in Newford in Someplace to Be Flying (1998), the quiet of the street makes her uneasy:
There was something claustrophobic about walking under this long row of enormous oaks. The trees were too big, their dense canopy almost completely blocking the sky. They threw deep shadows against the tall houses and the shrubbery collected against their porches and brick walls, throwing off her sense of time. It no longer felt like the tail end of the day. It was too much like late evening now, a time when anyone could be out and about, watching her, waiting in the shadows for her to step too close. Anyone, or anything. (93)
Noticeable in both quotations is that the oaks are described as “enormous,” and to Kerry, they seem “too big”—too big to belong in the middle of a city. Controlling a tree means keeping its size in check, and such control has been relinquished in the case of the Stanton Street oaks. Instead, it seems to Kerry as if the trees control their surroundings. Their shadows obscure the houses, hiding the city’s architecture, emphasizing the sensation of wilderness. Kerry feels as if she is walking somewhere dangerous where anyone or anything might confront her, and it is not “the usual dangers of a big city” that worry her. Instead, she imagines “other threats, nameless things, creatures with hungry eyes and too many teeth” (93). Her impression is of a place that does not follow the rules of consensual reality, a place of magic. And she is right: Stanton Street is a haunt for a number of inhabitants of the magical domain. Kerry is on her way to the Rookery, where Raven—creator of the world and a being of great mythological importance—lives together with a group of animal people. In Spirits in the Wires, numerous Faerie creatures are observed under and among the boughs of the oaks (151). Furthermore, on Stanton Street lies the residence of Cerin and Meran Kelledy,54 a commonly recurring setting that is a rambling house surrounded by oak trees, “a regular forest of them larger and taller than anywhere else in the city, each one of them easily a hundred years old” (“Buffalo Man” 104; my emphasis). Although not every description of the oaks around the Kelledys’ house is as explicit, their extraordinary size is stressed, just like the size of the other trees along the street. The implied explanation of the immensity of the trees is that Meran Kelledy is the oak king’s daughter. When Meran visits a bookstore, the house fairy there sees her as a “piece of an old mystery” and “an old and powerful spirit walking far from her woods”;55 but to most people, she and her husband are simply a duo playing traditional live music. It is also in a coach house off Stanton Street that the troll-like Rushkin teaches Isabelle the art of the numena paintings that can provide spirits with physical bodies.56 Similarly to the Kelledys’ home, Rushkin’s studio is flanked by an oak tree, and the Rookery has an immense elm shading the lawns behind it (Memory 32; Someplace 86).
Stanton Street, in other words, is a locus where feral nature and the Faerie domain intersect; it is also touched by the alternative culture. While the Kelledys and Rushkin are domiciled, they are not fully part of the “day people.” The Kelledys do not have regular employment but make money from their gigs and from teaching music. The deformed artist might be extremely successful, but he is a recluse who shuns society. Still, Stanton Street remains a part of the city, cutting through its center. Other wilderness bubbles are left deserted, pushed to the edge of the city, if not physically then at least socially and mentally, and in Newford, with its social/mental focus, that is highly relevant.
One such deserted bubble is the disused All Souls Cemetery, which provides a central setting for “Held Safe by Moonlight and Vines” (1996) and is also briefly described in The Blue Girl (2004). In this novel, a ghost likens it to “something out of a Southern Gothic novel, full of dead and dying trees, old-fashioned mausoleums and crypts, with paths of uneven cobblestones winding narrowly between them.”57 It is a scary place, even to a ghost, a place no longer part of society. Here, the trees formerly under cultural control have not grown to the immense size of the Stanton Street oaks; instead they, along with the mausoleums and crypts, underscore that this is a place of death. Only the rosebush by a particular grave has grown wild again (252). The graveyard is a desolate wilderness, but it still links the magical domain to feral nature. The descriptions in “Held Safe by Moonlight and Vines” match that of The Blue Girl (including the dead and dying trees and the rosebush58); but in the short story the domains of wild nature, “night people,” and the magical intersect even more clearly. It is a place where only drug dealers and junkies come, according to the male narrator, Alex. Everyone else, he claims, “likes the idea of making a place gone wild safe again” (116). By “wild,” however, Alex does not simply mean that the nature in the graveyard has gone feral. What scares people, he suggests, is that “a piece of the night” bides there, “thinking about them” (116). Lillie, the female narrator, dismisses any dark, dangerous wildness but suggests a more noticeable intersection with the magical domain. She explains how, when she has spent time in the cemetery, it changes into a different place, a garden, walled but wild, with a “tangle of bushes and briars, trees [she has] got no name for and vines hanging everywhere” (118). This wild place is the dreamed-up sanctuary for an abused child, a young Alex of several years previously (130), and the notions of time travel and a dreamworld combine with de Lint’s pervasive theme of child abuse in this bubble of wilderness.
The popular Fitzhenry Park, Newford’s equivalent to New York’s Central Park and Toronto’s High Park, and one of the most frequently used settings in the Newford stories, is also, counterintuitively, a prominent bubble of wilderness. On the surface, the park seems to be a place of tame nature, or possibly even just a cultural construct. Maisie’s description of the park almost exclusively defines it in terms of the social (human) interactions that take place there:
[Fitzhenry Park is] close to the Combat Zone, so you get a fair amount of hookers and even less-reputable types drifting down when they’re, let’s say, off-shift. But it’s also close to the Barrio, so the seedy element is balanced out with mothers walking in pairs and pushing strollers, old women gossiping in tight clusters, old men playing dominoes and checkers on the benches. Plus you get the lunch crowds from the downtown core which faces the west side of the park. (“Waifs” 34)
The impression is of the park as a totally cultural space, an impression common to almost all Newford stories. Like the rest of the city, Fitzhenry Park is a place of social interaction, not of flora. There is a lawn or the odd shrub or tree, insofar as any vegetation is mentioned at all. The major exception to this portrayal occurs in Trader, where the park is one of the novel’s central settings and the text includes descriptions of more than just a bush or two. When Max Trader, who has woken up in the body of the unpleasant and irresponsible Johnny Devlin, finds himself homeless and penniless, he walks deep into Fitzhenry Park, where there are woods that, like those in the Kellygnow grounds, might be untouched from the days of the first settlers (Trader 67). Feeling that he has no other option, Max makes the park his home, only to discover that the wooded tracts are much larger than he has previously believed and that quite a few of the city’s homeless are squatting there with him (74–77). Like Max, the various point-of-view characters repeatedly draw attention to the wooded areas of the park, often setting it apart from the surrounding city and associating it with the wilderness outside the city. Max is most explicit about this:
I lie back again, stare at the sky, the stars, feel the warm length of the dog pressed up against my side. The city seems impossibly far away. I can’t hear it, can’t see it except for a hint of its glow refracted in the boughs of the trees. We could be on a camping trip, up in the mountains behind the city, or out along the lake in cottage country. (85)
Forced into the domain of the homeless and the magical, Max’s perception also shifts as regards the natural domain; he now sees wilderness where he previously saw only controlled nature. The tame nature has shifted into wilderness in Max’s mind, and the park has become a natural rather than a cultural space. The impression that the city is “impossibly far away,” that Max could be outside the city rather than in its center, is emphasized, linking the wilderness in Fitzhenry Park with the external wilderness. A similar dissociation between park and city is experienced by the strip dancer Nita as she follows a (possibly) suicidal vampire into the park. “They could have been a thousand miles away, a thousand years away from this time and place,” Nita ponders, echoing Max’s sensation of being “impossibly far away” in a forest predating the first (European) settlers.59
The dominant impression is of Fitzhenry Park as a city location, however, where nature is tame, under culture’s control—something that is not the case with the other subjugated domains. Through numerous stories, it is made clear that the homeless are not the only “night people” to be found in Fitzhenry Park. The location is apparently well suited to criminal activity—from reasonably mild offenses, such as tagging and unlicensed vending, to teenage gang confrontations and murder. Runaway Lesli is nearly recruited by one pimp and then kidnapped by another (“Ghosts” 204–6). Buskers and fortune tellers work the crowds. In the controlled natural environment of the park, hegemonic culture has lost control, not of nature but of the subjugated domain of alternative culture. Similarly, several stories link the park to the third subjugated domain, that of magic.
Fitzhenry Park is a center of magic in the midst of city culture. Widdershins mentions how fairies need to “replenish” themselves from wild nature, which they call “the green and the wild” (Widdershins 40); and one of the novel’s main plot threads concerns the animosity that has arisen between the fairies and the animal people who refuse them access to “the green and the wild” outside the cities. When the two parties are in need of a common ground for a meeting, the obvious choice is Fitzhenry Park because, as the Faerie queen’s captain explains, it is “in the city, so we have access to it, but there’s enough of the wild and the green in its borders for the green-brees [animal people] to feel comfortable” (Widdershins 365). The explanation makes the connection between the magical domain and wild nature perfectly clear, and even if it is not as explicit as in Trader, it illustrates how the park is not all tame nature. Other stories similarly describe how the magical and natural domains intersect in Fitzhenry Park, mainly through the variety of magical beings that live in or frequent the park. Bodachs, a kind of Celtic Faerie creature, help identify the pimp who has taken Lesli (“Ghosts” 211–12); gemmin, genii loci that safeguard a place’s happy memories, have been seen dancing there (“Winter” 161–62); and the park is a haunt for Bones, a recurrent character and an animal person. He and his girlfriend Cassie can be found there telling fortunes; but it is also in the park that Bones imparts knowledge of the magical domain to Max, and it is from the park that he sends Max’s friends to the Otherworld (Trader 137, 245, 252 et passim).
An intriguing example of how the three subjugated domains overlap in Fitzhenry Park is provided through the part of the park called Silenus Gardens:
Deeper in the park, centered around a series of statues depicting a satyr lipping a syrinx and three dancing dryads, was a small hilltop surrounded by cherry trees in full blossom. The area […] had been funded by a rich Crowsea patron of the arts in honor of the poet Joshua Stanhold. The benches here were marble—the same stone as the statues—and the air was sweet with the heady scent of the blossoms.60
From this description, the gardens seem to be a case of tame nature, under the control of culture’s hegemony. There is a link between Silenus Gardens and the magical domain, however. In The Dreaming Place (1990), Cassie tells a friend how she feels hidden away from the world there, and how no one has ever been mugged or hurt in that part of the park. “There’s magic places in the world,” she continues, “places where I figure whoever’s in charge […] decided that there was only going to be good vibes and this is one of them.” She finishes by adding that Newford is lucky to have two such places, the other being an “old house in Lower Crowsea” (Dreaming Place 24). The gardens thus combine the notions of magic, nature, and art, not only through their statues, the dedication to a poet, and Cassie’s observation that the place is magic, but also through the association to the “old house on Lower Crowsea.” It is not clear from the context in The Dreaming Place, but the house she refers to is the Kelledy residence, another location where art (in this case, music), magic, and nature meet. It is a place to feel safe and happy.
Where Silenus Gardens is a magic place of good feelings, the largest bubble of wilderness is, at least superficially, quite the opposite. Nowhere in Newford does the intersection of the three subjugated domains become as obvious as in the Tombs, the haunt of runaway children, street people, and drug addicts as well as a wide range of beings from the magical domain. The Tombs is part of a large area originally intended for gentrification, but the investors pulled out, leaving “a mess of empty buildings and rubble-strewn lots.”61 Maisie acknowledges that Fitzhenry Park might give some people a sensation of countryside, but to her it is the Tombs that is “just like a wilderness”: it is “like a piece of the city gone feral, the wild reclaiming its own,” a reversal of the tamed greenery of the park (“Waifs” 15–16). Although the Tombs is “about as far from the green harbor of Fitzhenry Park as you could get in Newford,”62 both the blight and the park suggest a connection between culture and wilderness. In the park, wild nature predates city culture, whereas the Tombs was once under cultural control—part of the city—but has now turned into wilderness. There are also connections between the two bubbles in the magic domain. While there are gemmin in the Tombs as well, they are forced to leave because of the area’s negative memories (“Winter” 162); but other fairies live there, like the bogans that nearly start a war between fairies and animal people in Widdershins, and even though they work in Fitzhenry Park, Bones and Carrie have their squat in the Tombs.
There are also several notional links between this area of feral nature within the city and the wilderness outside Newford. In the winter, the snow is left undisturbed on the ground until it melts in the spring, something common only outside cities (“Winter” 153). The area has derived its name from serving as the dumping ground for old car wrecks (“That Explains” 109), and cars are not the only things people dump there. Packs of feral dogs once thrown from passing cars hunt at the Tombs; the reader is told how unwanted dogs are “returned to nature” in the same way both in the Tombs and in the countryside. Even the descriptions of the Tombs link it to the wilderness outside. Not only is the area frequently referred to as a wilderness or jungle; unlike the rest of the city, the physical architecture in this part of Newford tends to be more fully described. Streets, dilapidated buildings, squats, even empty lots are described as having a physical presence that is just as important as the people there. The same applies to the wilderness outside the city—its physical locales are described in detail. The Tombs is a bubble of wilderness, of feral nature, within the city’s culture.
This scene of urban blight attracts the more sinister inhabitants of the magical domain, such as the monstrous couple who kidnap Harriet in “Pity the Monster” (1991) and the murderous Rushkin and his equally malicious numena in Memory and Dream. The dark spirit in From a Whisper to a Scream is particularly associated with the Tombs: it is there that the pedophile Teddy Bird is killed, only to return from the grave driven by the need to sexually abuse his daughter. A voodoo priest attempts to exorcise Bird’s spirit at a crossroads among the deserted lots, and it is in one of the derelict houses that the final confrontation between the spectral Bird and his daughter takes place. Among the benevolent spirits from the Tombs can be found the ghosts encountered in “Waifs and Strays” (1993) and “Dead Man’s Shoes” (1993), and numerous other representatives of the magical domain appear among the “night people” there in a great many of the stories. The resulting portrayal is not one of bleak slum but of true wilderness, with predators as well as prey, a place of great variety that contains good as well as evil and beauty as well as ugliness.
A final example of how nature, magic, and alternative culture intersect is not a bubble of wilderness but a bubble in the social structure. In Newford, art spans the three subjugated domains. A vast majority of the protagonists and recurring characters belong to the city’s artists: musicians who subsist on busking and occasional small live performances, painters who work as waitresses to subsidize their art, and more or less well-published poets and writers—true artistic creation, the text repeatedly suggests, has magical properties. Minor bubbles defined primarily by art have already been mentioned (such as the Kelledys’ home and Rushkin’s studio), and others are prominent in various stories, for instance the Tree of Tales.63 A bubble of art that clearly presents the connection between art, magic, and wild nature is the artists’ colony Kellygnow in Forests of the Heart. The rambling old house and the surrounding cottages are inhabited by sculptors, painters, and writers, whereas the properties around the colony belong to representatives of city culture and city control: “stockbrokers and investors, bankers and the CEOs of multinational corporations, celebrities and the nouveau riche” (11). In the forested grounds of the house, there are even huge, towering oaks that “were thought to be part of the original growth forest that had once laid claim to all the land” (12). At Kellygnow, a variety of people and spirits belonging to Newford’s magical domain converges: in one of the cottages lives a woman who never ages; the house is protected by a genius loci, a protective spirit, fled from Ireland;64 a pack of homeless genii loci regularly haunts the grounds; a curandera, or magic healer, from Arizona models for the artists and supplies them with amulets; and it is there that the Green Man is eventually conjured forth. Through the bubble of wilderness that is the Kellygnow estate, characters even pass, intentionally and unintentionally, into the Otherworld. The artists’ colony becomes a focal point for the domains that challenge the mundane “day people” society.
The Newford stories make clear how the hegemonic culture in Newford contains its own opposites. Bubbles of wilderness abound in the city—areas of nature that culture cannot control, or of which it has relinquished control. An alternative culture of “night people”—the homeless and abused, as well as the artists and musicians—ekes out a living hidden and unseen. Similarly unseen and unwanted, fairies and spirits, ghosts and magicians try to withstand the ravages of a blind culture. Rather than being a city surrounded by wilderness, as is Minas Tirith, Newford turns the image around and presents an internal wilderness of alternative culture, magic, and nature within the city, a wilderness that is both portrayed as a threat to culture and presented as its ultimate hope of survival.
BLURRED BOUNDARIES: CONFLUX IN NEW CROBUZON65
Perdido Street Station (2000) is China Miéville’s second novel and the first to be set in the world of Bas-Lag. The novel’s setting is reminiscent of a mid-nineteenth-century industrial city that is, according to Miéville, “clearly analogous to a chaos-fucked Victorian London” although it also “contains other cities—Cairo in particular.”66 Steam provides the main source of power, but advanced mechanics, chemistry (chymistry), and magic (thaumaturgy) play important parts in the technological makeup of the society. The city, New Crobuzon, is also the setting of the short story “Jack” (2005) and—partly—of Miéville’s fourth novel, Iron Council (2004), while his second Bas-Lag novel, The Scar (2002), is set mainly in the floating city of Armada.
In Miéville’s stories, categories mix and dissolve. The publication of Perdido Street Station sparked a discussion about how it blurred the boundaries between fantasy, science fiction, and horror, and critics have explored other ways in which Miéville’s texts have mixed categories.67 Rich Paul Cooper observes how styles, and thus voices, as well as generic elements blend in the Bas-Lag novels.68 Christopher Palmer points out how, in Miéville’s descriptive language, opposing qualities meet only to interact or overlap, rather than remaining opposites.69 Joan Gordon investigates the notion of hybridity in Perdido Street Station.70 Whichever categories we turn to, the Bas-Lag stories have found a way to conflate, blur, or mix them up. The texts not only refuse generic description, they reject the very notion of clear-cut categories. As has already been pointed out, a city is a place where nature and culture meet. At the same time, a city is a place of cultural control. The city limits provide a clear demarcation between the wilderness outside and the controlled inside. In New Crobuzon, any meeting between the two domains calls their separation into question.
Waste is a constantly recurring theme in the description of New Crobuzon’s environment, becoming a brutal demonstration of the city as a culturally dominated place. When Yagharek, a garuda (eagle-man) exiled from the desert, enters the city in a small boat in the prologue to Perdido Street Station, it becomes clear that New Crobuzon is a city radically different from the clean, white sterility of Minas Tirith or the modern, social space of Newford. To the former desert dweller, the dirty, industrial metropolis is “a vast pollutant, a stench, a klaxon sounding” where “[f]at chimneys retch dirt into the sky” (Perdido 1).71 His entry into the city is described in terms that call to mind the descent into a polluted hell, employing imagery of death and disease to describe the urban decay. The garuda travels on a Stygian river, through a foul-smelling warren of rotting buildings and slime-besmirched brick banks. The water “reflects the stars through a stinking rainbow of impurities, effluents and chymical slop, making it sluggish and unsettling” as it carries along the waste of the vast population (Perdido 3). Although this view of the city as a hellish place of pollution, sewage, and waste is emphasized especially in the parts narrated by Yagharek (who is the first-person narrator of the prologue and epilogue and of the brief interludes between the novel’s eight parts), it informs the portrayal of New Crobuzon primarily throughout Perdido Street Station and also to some extent in Iron Council.
In New Crobuzon, pollution is the most obvious sign of how culture invades and dominates the natural domain. As the megalopolis is about the size of present-day London,72 and given that New Crobuzon’s technology for cleaning industrial and household waste and sewage is on a par with London’s in the heyday of English industrialization, it is hardly surprising that the metropolis suffers from elevated levels of air and water pollution. As we have seen, the portrayals of the city more than acknowledge the pollution; they foreground it, turning it into one of New Crobuzon’s most conspicuous features. Frequent descriptions, powerful imagery, even evocative names help place the focus on how culture’s waste products dominate the physical environment. The two rivers that meet in the city center are called the Tar and the Canker, clearly indicating how polluted and pathogenic they are. These are rivers filled with floating trash, their riverbeds a sludge mixed with rusting metal (Perdido 298). Appropriately, the black waters of the Tar, on which Yagharek enters the city, are said to trickle rather than flow (Perdido 19; see also Perdido 606).73 The Canker is somewhat cleaner, but its name, too, is a telltale sign of how the river is changed by the city; when the water is subjected to chymical and thaumaturgical effluence from the Scientific Quarter, the arcane and chymical slop mixes randomly into “bastard elixirs” that can change, enchant, or kill those who encounter them (Perdido 24, 607). The Scientific Quarter is also a source of airborne pollutants; but the New Crobuzon air is mainly polluted by the many factories whose smokestacks puncture “the membrane between the land and the air” and disgorge “tons of poisonous smog […] as if out of spite,” and by the smoke of millions of household chimneys that turns the air above the rooftops into a stinking haze (Perdido 64).
There is never any doubt that the air and water in the city are turned into an unclean, unpleasant, unnatural “second nature.” A constant flow of waste resulting from the customs, behaviors, and material objects that the members of New Crobuzon’s society use to cope with their world (to return to Bates’s definition of culture) maintains the changes even in these fluid elements, turning them into a vivid demonstration of cultural domination. At the same time, the negative connotations of the language used to describe this “second nature,” not so much tamed as cowed and bullied into submission, reveal how undesirable this domination is. Pollution is not a necessary, if regrettable, by-product of an industrial, urban lifestyle; it is a disease deliberately passed on, “as if out of spite,” to the environment. Even when nature escapes cultural control, it cannot easily recuperate from this disease. The image of disease keeps recurring even when nature reclaims parts that culture has lost or relinquished control of, as in the case of the abandoned, dilapidated docks that have become “massive stinking troughs of malarial slime” (Perdido 129). In the city, even nature becomes part, to some extent, of this ambience of filth and disease. Trash is whipped into the air by the wind (Perdido 58); slimy, mold-encrusted sewers, ecosystems in themselves, empty the waste of millions of people into the rivers (Perdido 419–20, 425); garbage is piled into dumps that have grown to a geological scale. The “second nature” of pollution is not nature changed according to the desires of culture; it becomes its own domain of waste and trash, neither culture nor nature but a disease that affects both, a dirty smear that hides the border between them.
The two domains are even less distinguishable when examined in terms of the shape of the land itself, as the natural and cultural landscapes shift into and imitate each other. The natural landscape, a result of geological, meteorological, and biological factors, is changed by the city into a cultural landscape as “[t]he natural inclines of the land [are] all forgotten by New Crobuzon” (Iron 59). This cultural landscape, or cityscape, is sometimes reshaped, in turn, into another sort of landscape, a land in whose shape the cultural and natural merge. The clearest example is that of the “trashscape” (Perdido 446). The rubbish dump of the factories and docks along the river Tar has become a “landscape of ruin and refuse and industrial filth […] in a speeded-up parody of geological process” where the “rejected matter settled and shifted and fell into place, affecting some shape, mimicking nature. Knolls, valleys, quarries and pools bubbling with fetid gas” (Perdido 314). The natural landscape, the plain on which New Crobuzon is situated, has been transformed and fallen under cultural control, but has then escaped that control in a “parody of geological process” that has reconfigured the land into a trashscape with its own canyons, caverns, and reefs of rubbish (Perdido 446–47). Neither nature nor culture is the agent behind this reshaping; it is the refuse itself, culture’s rejected matter, that forms the trashscape.
The portrayal of the trashscaping process accentuates how the rejected matter becomes something separate from both nature and culture. At first, the matter only settles passively; but for each subsequent verb in the description, there is an increase in both agency and purpose until the matter affects a shape and finally mimics nature. Rejected by culture and only mimicking nature, trash—like air and water pollution—comes to occupy an indistinct position somewhere between nature and culture, blurring the boundary between them. The land it shapes becomes a haven for feral nature in the form of various tenacious weeds, as well as for wild culture; the latter is most clearly represented by the Construct Council, the artificial sentience sprung from discarded difference engines. This renegade culture lies at the center of one of the six plots identified by Farah Mendlesohn in Perdido Street Station: “the threat that the city’s constructs (robots) have achieved sentience.”74 The trashscape of the dump is thus portrayed as a distorted mirror image of a wilderness, superimposing cultural landforms on natural ones and vice versa.
Layers of trash and ubiquitous pollution are not the only manifestations of the blurred border between nature and culture. The city as a whole is portrayed as a complex topography of urban strata, “a palimpsest of gusting trees and architecture and sound, ancient ruins, darkness, catacombs, building sites, guesthouses, barren land, lights and pubs and sewers” (Perdido 673). All the parts of the city flow together, rendering the boundaries between opposites indistinct; light and darkness, ruins and building sites, catacombs and pubs, trees and architecture all meet as aspects of the city. The various layers, possible to arrange spatially, with architecture on top of catacombs on top of sewers, and temporally, with barren land turned into building sites turned into guesthouses and pubs, in fact form their own totality. New Crobuzon is not a neat succession or orderly layering but a chaotic blend, in which other layers are always co-present. The earlier landscape has been scraped off and replaced; the “tons of concrete and tar that [constitute] the city [cover] ancient geography, knolls and barrows and verges, undulations that [are] still visible” (Perdido 63).
The natural landscape exists as part of the cultural, in and underneath it, a conflux further emphasized by the employment of natural imagery to portray New Crobuzon’s architecture. Not only is the “architectural landscape” referred to as a “townscape” or “roofscape,” the cultural and the natural are brought together in the many metaphors and similes with which the text is rife: the city itself is a fen of buildings with concrete forest slums and quagmire ghettos, where the Parliament building is an inselberg of architecture, tower blocks rise like weeds, and the streets run like watercourses between the buildings (Iron 71, 442; Perdido 96, 145, 129). Occasionally, the imagery moves from the metaphoric to the concrete. The gargantuan proportions of Perdido Street Station itself gives it characteristics generally associated with a natural landscape. There seems to be a cultural triumph in the “chaotic majesty” of Perdido Street Station as it outdoes even the “magnificent and portentous” foothills west of the city, but the massive edifice is geographical rather than architectural. The station building has spread like waves of lava over the surrounding cityscape, a mountain with its own foothills and hillocks, and its roof has a little wilderness floored with scrub and dead, thighhigh grass. Covering the small eponymous street is an architectural sky (Perdido 615–21; Iron 382, 479–80).
Tame nature, nature controlled by culture but not dominated by its waste products, is rare and disregarded. Another architectural sky arches over the New Crobuzon cactacea (cactus people), who live under the glass and iron girder dome of the Glasshouse, the immense construction that encloses their artificial environment. The constructed desert landscape and gardens, where even sand dunes are carefully sculpted to mimic the ripples made by the never-present wind, is the largest and best-described patch of tame nature to be found in New Crobuzon. Tame nature also occurs in a number of minor parks, gardens, and tree-lined avenues, many of them located in the various uptown areas. In the shadow of Perdido Street Station lies BilSantum Plaza with parkland at its center (Perdido 615), and the Piazza della Settimana di Polvere is “a trimmed garden of fox-rose and tall stones” in an area where willows “softened each corner” (Iron 301). Other parks are occasionally mentioned in passing, equally scantily described, sometimes only as “insignificant parks” or even “small apologetic parks” (Perdido 211, 575). All but ignored, these pockets of tame nature give the impression of being exceptions, exotic places visited briefly if at all by the characters.
Even in this place of overwhelming cultural control, the natural domain finds ways back to the wild. The largest of the parks, and the only one described in some detail, is Sobek Croix, where the scientist Isaac and his companions visit a fair in Perdido Street Station. Most of this park is tamed to the point of oppression: the grass and paths are “sticky with spilt sugar and sauce,” bushes and tree boughs are decorated with paper bunting, and people of various races crowd the paths (Perdido 83). It is a park of flower beds, controlled by culture and surrounded by an iron fence; but there are also acres of untended growth inside (Perdido 83, 17). Unlike the primeval wilderness deep in Newford’s Fitzhenry Park, but like all natural wilderness found in New Crobuzon, the untended land in Sobek Croix is feral nature, freed from cultural control. A similar lack of control can be seen in the smaller garden that lies at the bottom of the huge concrete rectangle of the Mandragorae Wing. It is “an unkempt garden, overgrown with darkwood trees and exotic woodland flowers,” and it is likened to “moss at the bottom of a well” (Perdido 276; my emphasis). The “rude gardens,” with their “mutant apple trees and wretched brambles, dubious compost, mud and broken toys” (Perdido 675), through which Isaac and the others flee also signal a lack of cultural control. In all three cases, nature is going or has gone feral. Cultural control is slackening, disappearing, enabling the tame to turn wild again. This loss of control can also be identified elsewhere. Feral nature springs up all over the city, intermingling with tame nature as well as with culture. The Griss Twist dump, abode of the Construct Council, is “the size of a small park, though infinitely more feral” (Perdido 445; see also 446, 600–601); but incursions of feral nature are generally smaller and more obviously melded with the surrounding city culture. A weed-choked yard and ancient, moldering tables sit outside a pub (Perdido 24), and rusted station doors are anchored against the wall by ivy (Perdido 130). Empty lots have become “little wildernesses of concrete-splitting bramble and cow-parsley, wildnesses [sic] for the insects” (Iron 556). The railway arches sprout a “microforest of mould and moss and tenacious climbing plants” that “[swarms] with lizards and insects” (Perdido 596). Where there are gaps in the city culture, opened by decay, destruction, or disregard, nature can escape cultural control and turn feral; but rather than establishing a city wilderness, these pockets of feral nature emphasize how they remain part of the cultural surroundings.
The pockets of feral nature suggest a meeting between nature and culture in which the location rather than the boundary is important. There is no transition from one domain to the other, just occasional dots of nature in the cultural surroundings. However, transitions are a central theme in New Crobuzon. In her discussion of the city as hybrid, Gordon cites the crime lord Mr. Motley, whose body incorporates parts from enough creatures to fill a medium-sized zoo: “Transition. The point where one thing becomes another. It is what makes you, the city, the world, what they are. […] The zone where the disparate become part of the whole. The hybrid zone” (Perdido 41). Gordon turns her attention to the hybrid dimension of New Crobuzon itself,75 but a hybrid zone also exists where the city meets the world outside—where its culture meets the surrounding nature. Unlike both Minas Tirith’s clear-cut boundary and the gradual but obvious transition between Newford and the surrounding wilderness, New Crobuzon’s boundary is porous. Like the allegorical (but biologically inaccurate) frog that will remain in boiling water, rather than jumping out, if the temperature is raised slowly enough, visitors to New Crobuzon do not notice the city as they enter it—until they suddenly find themselves there. To the returning Iron Council, there is a sensation of suddenness in their arrival: “Still empty land, only a few half-kept orchards, a few groves of temperate fruit-trees. There was a moment of transition. They were in the wilds, in unsafe lands, and then with a suddenness and a strange anticlimax they were in domesticated country. They knew they were close” (Iron 519). The Councilors cannot see the city limits as they approach; they only realize their position when they have already passed the point of no return, when it is too late for them, as for the unfortunate amphibian, to jump out. Where Thomas Morningstar observes how the landscape changes in stages as he leaves Newford, the Councilors experience only “a moment of transition” between wilderness and tame lands. Yagharek’s impression is similar: he observes how New Crobuzon grows around him as he approaches it, but there is still a sense of abruptness when he suddenly finds himself there. “How could we not see this approaching?” the garuda asks himself. “What trick of topography is this, that lets the sprawling monster hide behind corners to leap out at the traveler?” (Perdido 2).
Parts of the city limit crumble before, or are permeated by, the surrounding wilderness. An attempt to extend New Crobuzon to the south, into Rudewood forest, fails, and the forest reclaims the train tracks and the railway station (Perdido 96, 143). Between the forest and the city proper lies Spatters, a shantytown that is not really part of the metropolis but has simply attached itself to it. While the limit between Spatters and Rudewood is only defined by the random outlines of the shantytown, the city is clearly demarcated from Spatters by a narrow park of grass and trees, and an eight-foot ditch filled with a mixture of polluted water and human waste (Perdido 144–46). Similarly to Minas Tirith, New Crobuzon protects itself from the wilderness outside by tame nature, the narrow park and the Pelennor skirting their respective cities. Instead of a protective wall like the Rammas Echor, however, only a trench and its disgusting contents serve as final protection. It is hard to say whether the trench is even part of the shantytown wilderness from which the city and the people of the closest city district try so hard to separate themselves. The wilderness of Spatters is a cultural wilderness, however, which segues into the natural wilderness of Rudewood. The interface between the culture of the city and the natural wilderness outside is not tame nature but wild culture.
The region between the city and the sky above it is another example of how the boundary between New Crobuzon and the world outside is porous. While the sky would generally be assumed to be an aspect of uncontrolled, wild nature, or at least strongly associated with it, the air above the metropolis is controlled (or intended to be controlled) by culture through aeromorphic engines run by meteoromancers (Perdido 205; see also Perdido 231). Flying insects, lizards, birds, and wyrmen share the urban skies with aerostats, cable-held militia-pods, and trains that traverse the air on their various levels above the rooftops. Highrising buildings thrust upward, and smokestacks and chimneys breach “the membrane between the land and the air” (Perdido 64). An alternative, improvised street network stretches from rooftop to rooftop. It is through this interstitial realm that Jack Half-a-Prayer runs on his “Steeplechase” escape from the militia, with skies all fuzzy with airships and wyrmen (“Jack” 207). The air and the skies above New Crobuzon, wild once the city is left far enough behind, are controlled, tamed, and used in the city’s vicinity. The city bubbles up into the sky, its boundary as indistinct as those boundaries indicated by the crumbling walls whose “bricks [seem] to effervesce into the air” (Iron 91).
The conflux of nature and culture inside the city, and porous boundaries between the city and the wilderness outside, that is found in New Crobuzon can also be detected in The Scar. Its central setting, the pirate city Armada, is considerably smaller than New Crobuzon, only about a square mile. It consists of several hundred ships and craft of all kinds and sizes, tied together and facing all directions (Scar 79). The wilderness that surrounds the city is the open sea, empty from horizon to horizon and well beyond, and it is through this desolate wilderness that the city constantly travels, tugged (initially) by the “cloud” of tugboats that surrounds it. Like the airborne crafts and vehicles of New Crobuzon, these ships extend Armada’s sphere of control beyond the city proper into the wilderness, blurring the boundary between sea and city. The surrounding water flows constantly in between the numerous vessels, through the pores of Armada’s boundary. In other words, even as the city moves through the surrounding wilderness, the wilderness flows into and moves through the city and, in doing so, becomes part of Armada, coming under the city’s control, if only for a while and to some extent. The multitude of canals between the vessels prevents the water from forming waves even during storms (Scar 364) and offers a measure of control over what, outside the city, is wild nature. This control or taming of the wilderness is not enough to make storms safe, however, only less dangerous.
The porous boundary is found above and below Armada as well. In the water under the city, divers, dolphins, seawyrms, and cray (who are part human, part lobster) work with and live in various submerged structures, and “a constant drool of trash” billows from Armada into the sea (Scar 75). The air above the city is
full of craft. Gondolas swayed beneath dirigibles, ferrying passengers across the angling architecture, descending between close-quartered housing and letting down rope ladders, cruising past much larger airships that hauled goods and machinery. […] Masts were mooring posts, sprouting aerostats of various shapes, like plump, mutant fruit. (Scar 84; see also Scar 235)
The pirate city has no definite limits. On the surface, it dissipates into a cloud of tugboats, letting the ocean in between its component vessels; underneath, Armada citizens of various species and extraction mark the water as a part of the city by living and working there. Even the air is a space claimed by Armadan culture, just as porous and penetrable as the skies above New Crobuzon.
The boundary in Armada is so porous that one wrong step on the slippery bridges that connect the vessels is enough to slip out of Armada into the sea that permeates the city (Scar 89); but the half-tame sea is not the only tame nature to occur inside the pirate city. Among the countless naval architectures that make up Armada can be found a remnant of nature, now transformed by cultural usage, in the form of “a barge carved from the ossified body of a whale” (Scar 79). Agriculture and animal husbandry are found inside the city, and the large Croom Park is spread across a war-shattered steamer and some smaller ships. For obvious reasons, most manifestations of terrestrial nature give a highly artificial appearance to Armada’s decks, hulls, and holds. As in the cactacean Greenhouse, nature has been patiently created. The rusted hull of the steamer has been filled with stolen soil, burying the coke in the coal bunkers and creating an artificial seam of coal in the process (Scar 162). But over the centuries, the artificial, controlled nature of the park has become less tame. In Armada, tame nature has been allowed to go feral: “There were cultivated flowerbeds on the Curhouse gunboat, but on the steamer’s corpse the woods and meadows of Croom Park were wild” (Scar 163). But whereas the sea is an unconditional necessity of the pirate city’s existence, wild terrestrial nature could easily be kept in check. Feral nature is accepted, and, should the need arise, possible to bring back under control. The same is generally true for most of the wilderness that intermingles with the city’s culture—the tribes of wild animals that roam the city and the greenery that makes the masts look like ancient trees, to name a couple of examples. Just as unlucky citizens can slip into the water and out of the city, however, the wilderness outside can slip in through the porous boundary, for example when predatory fish attack the city’s divers from the dark depths (Scar 187). Whereas New Crobuzon is a city where culture is as wild as nature, the ever-present wilderness of the surrounding sea is a constant threat in Armada.
The commune of the Iron Council, while much smaller than Armada and New Crobuzon, displays much the same pattern of blurred borders between nature and culture as the larger cities. The rebellious rail workers and prostitutes of the Council cut off the train from the main tracks that stretch back like an umbilical cord to New Crobuzon. No longer tied to the city, “the perpetual train” goes wild and, with it, the Iron Council escapes along constantly reused tracks into the wilderness. When Judah Low returns to the Iron Council after several years back in New Crobuzon studying “the arcane end of golemetry,” he finds a utopia, where the train has “gone feral” (Iron 338). Its culture is now wild and has flowed together with nature. The old structures of the Council’s train are still present, but have been changed and are “crenellated, baroque and topped with dovecots.” Some carriages are “thickened with ivy and waxy vines”; two flatbeds are filled with herb gardens and another two with grassy graveyards. One of the new carriages is built with resincaulked driftwood (Iron 338–39). Rather than attempting to bring the wilderness under cultural control, culture is subjugated to nature or at least mixed with it. This conscious bridging of the border between nature and culture is most clearly visible in the ornamentation of the front engine, which is decorated in order to make it zoomorphic:
Its headlamps were eyes now, predictably, bristling with thick wire lashes, its cowcatcher a jawful of protruding teeth. The huge tusks of wilderness animals were strapped and bolted to them. The front nub of its chimney wore a huge welded nose, the smokestack ajut from it in nonsense anatomy. Sharpened girders gave it horns. (Iron 339)
What was patently a cultural artifact has hence been remade into an effigy of a living creature. Still very artificial, it has been given eyes, teeth, nose, and horns, blending nature and culture. In this attempt to mimic nature, the only part of the engine that still betrays a clearly cultural origin is the smokestack, nonsensical in the blended anatomy.
The Iron Council even becomes a part of the landscape through which it moves. The train travels, perpetually, on an ellipse of tracks through miles of gardens, cropland, and fields that, beyond the rails, were “dissipating and merging with wild flora.” Tame and wild nature merge around the railway tracks, which describe the path of a wheeled town “neither sedentary nor nomadic” (Iron 340–41). Again, there are no clear borders, only a hub where culture and nature have blended together and around which there is a porous boundary where tame and wild nature flow into each other.
In the palimpsestic cityscape of New Crobuzon, among the fettered Armadan ships, and on the perpetual train, culture and nature meet—in different ways, to be sure, but always blurring the boundaries between the domains or even making the concept of separate domains indistinct. Around each of the three cultural centers, there is a fuzzy “hybrid zone” where the centers become part of the world and the world part of them. This indistinctness is also present in other meetings between nature and culture in New Crobuzon. The cultural oppression constituted by the pollution and waste creates a diseased “second nature,” a liminal zone situated between the domains, not natural (at least not in the sense of Keekok Lee’s naturenh) but also rejected by culture. The city landscape is not either natural or cultural but both, architecture and trash turning into landscape, landscape becoming part of city culture; and the cultural domain is dotted by nature, tame and feral, not quite separate from but melding with the cultural domain. The urban sprawl has turned into a cultural wilderness, just as wild as the natural wilderness that surrounds it, and the natural wilderness is brought together with the cultural. In Armada, the wild sea is a nonnegotiable fact of the city’s existence. That the tame, terrestrial nature that has been artificially created on the many vessels sometimes becomes wild is accepted and allowed; the small pockets of feral nature pale in comparison to the surrounding wilderness of the sea. The Iron Council, on the other hand, actively moves toward wilderness, turning the cultural artifact of the “perpetual train” into a blend of the natural and the cultural.
Ultimately, the blending of nature and culture constitutes an example of the central concern in Miéville’s texts. On every level, blending takes place, from the meeting and mixing of genres to the various hybrid species that populate the world. The blurring of categories lies at the very heart of these stories. When Mr. Motley stresses that the chaotic aggregate that is his body “is not error or absence or mutancy,” his words are also a comment on the hybridity, blurring, and palimpsests that make up Miéville’s texts—and the world of Bas-Lag. And Motley’s emphatic point is as true of his impossible collection of features as of the three cities, where culture and nature flow into each other through porous boundaries: “This is totality” (Perdido 115).
GROWING SOMEWHERE IN-BETWEEN: LIMINAL NATURE IN OMBRIA76
Patricia A. McKillip’s Ombria in Shadow is set in the city-state of Ombria. Technologically and politically, the setting draws on the Italian city-states of the Renaissance, and the novel bases its plot on the political and personal conflicts that follow the ruthless regent Domina Pearl’s rise to power. The protagonists must negotiate a complex web of forged and broken loyalties to survive in their struggle against the cruel regent.77
The story and its characters move through four clearly demarcated physical zones located between two poles. At the top and center of the city, Domina Pearl and the dark doorway form the duality of the first pole, she representing the city’s despair and the doorway its hope. Surrounding them is first the zone of hidden rooms, stairs, and passages of the secret palace, then the zone of the public palace beyond. Outside and beneath the palace lies the zone of the city streets, and under Ombria, furthest toward the periphery, lies the undercity. In this lowest and most peripheral zone, the second pole resides, the sorceress Faey. The crossing from zone to zone is central to the plot structure, something that is reflected in how nature is constructed as a liminal phenomenon in Ombria.
On the surface, Ombria seems to encompass nature–culture relations that are very similar to those already identified in the cities discussed thus far. A closer analysis reveals a different pattern, however. As in Minas Tirith, very little nature is present in McKillip’s city; but on the other hand, what nature there is can be found inside the city—whatever wilderness or tame nature exists in the countryside surrounding Ombria is only referred to obliquely. Small patches of both tame and feral nature appear in the city, suggestive of the incursions of feral nature found in New Crobuzon, and the streets in Ombria certainly share some of the larger city’s wildness (for instance, the nightmarish gauntlet that the old prince’s mistress, Lydea, is forced to run through the dark streets of Ombria, while accosted by anonymous street people [10–11]). Unlike the situation with regard to New Crobuzon, however, no blurring occurs in Ombria; culture dominates the city without blending with nature. While Ombria shares this clear cultural domination with Newford, McKillip’s city sees no challenge from subjugated nature, nor is there any clear connection between nature and any of the city’s zones.
Instead, nature appears where one zone is exited and another entered. At the borders between Ombria’s four zones, and especially where these borders are crossed, nature tends to turn up, wild or tame or—a common occurrence in the palace—as cultural representation. While this last type of nature is really an aspect of culture, the carvings, paintings, and drawings of flowers in particular are often brought metaphorically to life. On the walls, birds fly overhead and roses open, while doors grow gardens (79); and the painted irises on the black gate’s posts twine and bloom (32; also 288). These cultural representations fit the pattern of nature as a liminal phenomenon, suggesting a desire for the natural in a city where nature is largely if not completely absent. This desire for nature also comes across in Ducon’s drawings of what might be found beyond the dark portal. His drawings contain “fantasies of airy palaces, endless woods and frothy seas” and “a city that might have been Ombria, if […] the windows overlooking its twisted streets were filled with flowers” (213). Through his images, Ducon expresses a yearning for a world better than his own yet similar, surrounded by and adorned with nature. At the same time, these drawings reinforce the liminality of nature by associating it with the dark portal and thus with the border between Ombria and its shadow.
Entering the innermost zone often constitutes a search for hope at the risk of finding despair. The prevalence of culturally represented nature is suggested already when Ducon first enters the secret palace with the five-year-old prince Kyel after the death of the boy’s father. Although he has used some hidden corridors to get away from Domina Pearl and her guards, it is not until they have passed through “three hinged panels limned with carved roses” (28) that he and Kyel are safe and free to talk. By entering the room behind the panels, they have reached what Ducon hopes is, and Kyel believes to be, a safe space. This feeling of safety and Ducon’s love for his younger cousin are further emphasized by the roses carved on the panels. Whereas the roses are only mentioned in passing at this point, the rose has already been introduced as a recurring symbol of safety and love. When Lydea is thrown out of the palace after the old prince’s death, her father’s tavern, the Rose and Thorn, is her only safe haven, and while, at the beginning, Lydea’s hope for her father’s love is tainted by despair, mutual if grudging love finally wins out. It is thus from the tavern that she takes her name when reappearing masked as Mistress Rose Thorn; and as Mistress Thorn, Lydea brings comfort to Kyel, who calls her his own secret Rose (215). While love remains strong if not powerful, the safety symbolized by the rose is never uncompromised in Ombria. When Ducon returns to the public palace to find himself at the mercy of Domina Pearl, it is into the old nurse’s room he has taken his young cousin. Their passage back leads through a secret door that, rather than being associated with safety, is connected to Domina Pearl’s superiority, to a place of despair. Kyel’s nurse, Jacinth, has been banished by the Black Pearl, leaving only a scent of violets in her former room (35). In this room, Kyel is taken into custody and Ducon himself is warned not to interfere, first directly and then indirectly through the dead body of a courtier and conspirator, Hilil Gamelyn. It is also here that Kyel leaves the drawings that express the child’s own despair. Still, traces of nature linger around this crossing between zones, in the traces of Jacinth’s scent as well as in the palm leaf that has been placed over Gamelyn’s dead face.
The palm leaf is echoed in the palms in the conservatory, where Ducon leaves the body. Apart from the palm leaf that covers the dead man’s face, this is the only place where the border between the secret and public palace is explicitly linked to actual nature. The secret door is hidden behind “a fan of giant fern leaves” (87), and the conservatory contains potted palms as well as representations of nature on its walls. While part of the zone of the public palace, it is a place seldom occupied and thus a suitable meeting place for the older courtiers, including Gamelyn, who are plotting against Domina Pearl. It is a place of transgression, of the border between the two zones, but also of Domina Pearl’s power as regent. Here, the courtiers attempt to persuade Ducon to change sides, to make him cross another border. Eventually, they fail in this effort just as they fail to keep their plot from the attention of the regent.
The door through which Faey’s protégée Mag sees Ducon disappear in the hallway is a safer door than both the door in Jacinth’s room and the one in the conservatory. As on the panels, the rose symbol is employed here: Mag finds that pressing a small rosette in the wall opens a door into the secret palace, allowing her to enter it (125). At this point, she has already fallen in love with Ducon (although she does not understand it herself) and searches for him to prevent his death. Again, the rose symbol is linked to safety and love; but this time Mag fails in her quest. The same door also saves Lydea from the guards, bringing her from certain capture in one zone to an uncertain chase in the maze of another (259). In both cases, the women’s attempts are nearly frustrated by Domina Pearl; Mag is locked into the regent’s secret library but escapes with the help of Kyel’s tutor, and Lydea, rather than accepting capture, leaps through the dark doorway. The rosette that marks the way across the border into the secret palace does not ensure uncompromising safety, but it does not signify any ultimate failure, either.
The most noticeable threshold guardians are found at the palace’s west gate. Although some gardens are mentioned, and these might be construed as marking the border between the zones of the palace and the streets of Ombria, these gardens are there in name only. Lydea thinks back on her time as the old prince’s mistress, recalling “a view of the gardens and the sea” (193) from high up in the palace. The impression of the gardens as a border phenomenon is reinforced when Ducon uses a passage “beneath the back gardens to the street” (216) to get into the city, which lies between the palace and the sea. In both cases, the gardens remain empty, featureless, and devoid of description; but they confirm that nature is a liminal phenomenon. That pattern becomes more distinct at the palace’s west gate, which is the main crossing between the zone of the palace and that of the city streets. There grows “the gaudy patch of sunflowers […] that did nothing all day long but turn their golden-haired, thousand-eyed faces to follow the sun. The Prince of Ombria […] never bothered with what stood outside his iron gates on their graceful, gargantuan stalks and sometimes peered over his wall” (15). Metaphors transform the flowers to animals or even people. The imagery focuses on the sunflowers as spectators of the drama that takes place in the palace and at its gates, seeing that which is hidden to Ombria’s citizens. When Lydea is expelled by Domina Pearl after the prince’s death, the sunflowers “[hang] their heavy heads like mourners” (8) and seem to watch the proceedings with “[t]heir great, strange faces, all eyes” (9). Even the sunflowers fail to see all the dark dealings that go on, however. When Mag delivers the death spell to Domina Pearl, the flowers droop by the gate, their eyes picked out by birds (24); and once the change has been carried through and a new Ombria has been established, the ersatz witnesses are no longer needed. When Lydea passes through the west gate in what is the novel’s final crossing from palace to city streets, only a “crop of blind, withered sunflowers” is left (297). The palace is no longer hidden from the view of the citizenry; there is no more need for watchers at the gate.
The one other entrance into the palace unwatched by the sunflower spectators is still associated with them. Mag has found a way that passes under the flowers, and on both occasions when she ventures into the palace it is (explicitly) under the sunflowers she has to go (73, 122). They remain, in the text, the boundary markers that must be passed in the crossing from one zone into the other. To Mag, however, the chamber under the sunflowers is also the only meeting point of Faey’s and Domina Pearl’s dominions. Neither sorceress can venture into the city streets of Ombria. Although nothing seems to prevent the regent from leaving the palace, she never goes farther than the west gate, whether to expel the unwanted mistress or to receive a charm from Mag. Her information comes from spies, and the only mention of her moving into the city streets (apart from a vague hint that she rides to the old prince’s funeral in a carriage) is when the Black Pearl escapes from the forces that come through the portal. She might have vanished, it is suggested, “into the streets of Ombria, where she would find no opening door that would save her, and no bed except her last” (287). Nor are the city streets, or any zone other than her own, accessible to Faey. When she leaves the undercity, and then only to go to Domina Pearl’s timeless sanctum in the secret palace, the balance between Ombria and its shadow shifts (278). Like Domina Pearl, she needs an intermediary to act in the no man’s (or, rather, woman’s) land between them that is Ombria’s streets.
Numerous doors between the street zone and the undercity are mentioned in the narrative, most of them merely in passing. The door under the patch of sunflowers has already been discussed, but two other crossings are described in the text in detail. When Lydea searches for Mag, she enters through an old, dilapidated shop from which Faey takes her to an illusory chamber on the bank of the dark river. Not only are its walls “sprigged with painted violets,” the chamber is filled with potted plants (108). These plants become emblematic for the room, recurring in the text during Faey and Lydea’s discussion there until, eventually, the sorceress disbands the illusion. During their conversation, Faey fans herself with leaves from the plants, nibbles them, and finally lets them wither when the illusion is removed (110–12, 132). Constantly, the reader’s attention is drawn back to the plants until they disappear, once Faey has made up her mind to let Lydea enter her house. In this way, the plants become associated with the liminal nature of the “leafy chamber” (131), highlighting Lydea’s crossing from the street zone to the zone where Faey resides.
The tutor encounters a different border marker during his crossing with Mag. They meet
in a small, leaf-choked courtyard surrounded by empty buildings. A century ago they had been an inn and its stables and carriage house. Now, roofs were sunken under the weight of moss and rain; […] Those who needed Faey made their way through drifts of leaves and shadows and fallen roof beams to the cupboard door beneath the stairs. (203)
While probably not the most convenient of doors to Faey’s undercity, it certainly suits the tutor’s passion for history. The dilapidated buildings show the ravages of time; nature has gone feral, “choking” the courtyard and weighing down the roof. It is a place on the border between the zones, situated in one but only visited by those people who have business in the other.
Across the four zones, a field of power stretches between the two poles. Christine Mains remarks on how a split occurs between positive and negative power in Ombria. Domina Pearl wields power from the top of the palace above the city, just as Faey does from her mansion in the undercity. Mains observes how the two women are a catalyst-figure split in two: even if the regent has preserved the same appearance for generations and Faey changes hers several times a day, they are in many ways similar.78 Taking Mains’s observation further, we can examine how their realms mirror each other. These two locales are “edifices,” a type of fantasy setting that dominates its landscape and to which there is always more than meets the eye.79 In Ombria, one edifice towers above the city, another lurks below, each hiding a labyrinth at its heart. Faey occupies the border between the city’s present and its past; the Black Pearl can be found on the border between Ombria’s present and its future. This future is split into the despair caused by the cruel regent and the desperate hope offered by the dark doorway at the top of the secret palace. The impenetrable gate cannot be opened through most of the novel, acting as a terminus rather than a border—the only future available remains one of despair. Through the doorway, Lydea springs into “nowhere” with Kyel (266); and when Ducon is cornered there, Domina Pearl offers him the choice between the “quick predictable death here, or the long fall into the unknown or the palace cellar, whichever rises to meet you first” (283–84).
Once Ducon opens the gate to Ombria’s shadow, the unknown becomes known; the terminus becomes a border across which Ducon’s father arrives with his forces to save the city from the oppression of the Black Pearl. This border is similarly associated with nature. The doorway is “distinguished by painted irises twining up the carved wooden posts. One post was cracked, bent under the shifting weight of the ceiling, the paint long warped away. The other still bloomed irises in delicate greens and purples” (32; see also 212, 288). The differences between the doorposts hint at differences between the two worlds on either side of the gate. The shadow city is not simply a copy of Ombria, it is something other. Through the narrative, we are led to suspect that this other place is, in fact, better, and the similarity between Ombria and umbra suggests that real and shadow are not absolutes—the cities are shadows of each other. “The shadow world is your hope,” Ducon’s father tells him. “When you no longer despair, you no longer need us” (286). The cracked and bent post signifies an Ombria troubled by Domina Pearl’s misuse of power, while the delicate green and purple irises represent the hope of the shadow city. This tie to nature through representation is further strengthened by other sensations experienced at the black opening. Through the gate, Ducon hears the sound of rain, bird-cry, and wind soughing through tall trees, and sometimes the air on the threshold smells of grass, slow rain, and lavender (212, 32; see also 285). Just as the fragrance of athelas is used to evoke nature in Minas Tirith, the smells coming through the gate evoke nature in Ombria. It is not primarily the shadow city that is associated with nature in this way, however, but the doorway itself. The irises decorate the doorposts, and it is on the threshold that the fragrance of nature reaches Ducon (32).
Of the four cities examined in this chapter, Ombria is the most self-contained. The setting is concentrated on the city’s four zones, with a city limit or surrounding wilderness barely present. Brief mentions are made of farm-and forestland around the city, but the focus is on the land’s value as productive units (85, 219). The sea is of some importance to trade, and Domina Pearl’s upsetting that trade—through piracy and, later, legislation—constitutes a minor plot element. The border between city and sea is down by the port, with its rotten piers, rough docks, and (implied) prostitution. From beyond the sea, strange plants and animals with magical or poisonous properties come to Ombria, and they are used by both Faey and Domina Pearl (40, 142, 253). Moreover, it is to the distant islands that the tutor is banished when his powerful ally has been destroyed (296). The sea is also invoked as part of the scenery outside the city, but left just as nondescript as the palace gardens. In Ombria in Shadow, the sea is not even a backdrop against which action takes place; it is what Clute refers to as water margins, the “unmapped and ultimately unmappable regions which surround a central empire” and which “fade indefinitely into the distance.”80 The sea, to all intents and purposes, lies not beyond the city limits; it is the city limit.
When the enemy has been vanquished in The Lord of the Rings, the rightful ruler takes the throne in Minas Tirith. Aragorn as King Elessar introduces more nature into his capital, making it a meeting place of nature and culture. Just as in Gondor’s capital, nature is wanting in Ombria. When Ducon lets his charcoal imagine what lies on the other side of the dark portal, it draws him endless woods and streets lined with flower-decked windows. Ducon considers these pictures to be wishes or dreams of a “prosperous, perfect world, a city of ceaseless delights” (213), suggesting that Ombria, without forests and flowers, is imperfect. The shadow city, the embodiment of hope, also embodies the hope for something better than the real city, something with more nature. In that respect, however, Ombria is never “transformed into its shadow” in the way Mains suggests.81 Certainly, the city now has a place for those characters who, in Mains’s words, “existed precariously on the margins”; but even when hope is fulfilled, Ombria remains a city dominated by culture. Ducon is more concerned with repairing the piers, making the streets safe, and catching, feeding, and educating the street urchins (293) than in any way bringing nature into the city, the way Aragorn does. Rather than being an interface between nature and culture, Ombria remains a place where nature leads a liminal existence. This is particularly true in the palace, where the thresholds between the zones—shadow/real, hidden/visible, palace/city—are in various ways linked to nature, but it generally holds true throughout the city. It is nature that is controlled, tame, or just a set of cultural representations, and it exists not outside, inside, or with culture but somewhere in between.
• • •
Minas Tirith, Newford, New Crobuzon, Ombria—four fantasy cities with four different relations between nature and culture have been examined in this chapter. The range of differences suggests a great variety of relations between the two domains. Although Minas Tirith and Newford suggest a binary opposition, favoring nature, none of the cities implies that equating one domain with good and the other with evil would be possible. In New Crobuzon and Ombria, no opposition even exists between the domains; in Miéville’s city, the domains flow into each other, and neither is promoted in relation to the other. In McKillip’s case, nature is not even a domain—the cultural domain is all that matters.
What the four cities all have in common, though, is that with each, the nature–culture relation mirrors some central concern. In The Lord of the Rings, the pervasive theme of stewardship and how to relate to the natural environment is reflected in the way in which the rightful king introduces nature to the sterile, cultural environment of the city. The Newford stories show nature linked to two similarly marginalized domains, those of social outsiders and magical beings, and the three domains are brought into focus in the various texts. New Crobuzon and other Bas-Lag cities blur the borders between nature and culture in the same way that Miéville’s texts blend and dissolve other categories, mixing humans, animals, plants, and machines, treating science as magic and magic as science, and erasing the borders between fantasy, science fiction, and horror. The plot in Ombria in Shadow is centered on the passage between the various zones that structure its urban setting, each crossing in some manner associated with the natural world.
Investigating the relation between nature and culture, as we can see from the four examples in this chapter, offers insights into what lies at the core of a work or world. The obvious question is, why? What is it about this particular relation that appears to be so intimately connected to such basic aspects of works?
As has been observed, one could argue that there is no way to separate nature and culture, that they do not stand in any opposition to each other.82 However, for ten thousand years, ever since humans first decided that the plants on this plot of land were worth protecting and, eventually, worth replacing once they had been harvested—in short, ever since we started farming—we have seen the world in terms of “nature” and “culture.”83 In the beginning, it might have been only in terms of “our garden” versus “the thieving birds” and “the annoying weeds,” but over the ages, the idea that we control some things and not others has become deeply ingrained as well as quite complex. Today, it has become part of the way most people see the world, especially in “Western civilization.” We may consider there to be a difference, and an opposition, or we may believe this opinion to be a fallacy and the reason behind our environmental problems.84 In either case, we accept that the nature–culture opposition is a dominant and deep-seated view in our society.85 As such, it is hardly surprising to find this opposition expressed in works of fiction.
Nor is it surprising that the expression is rooted at the heart of the works’ respective worldviews. Miéville’s world is one of ubiquitous hybridization, where dichotomies are deconstructed, theses and antitheses synthesized, polarities mixed, and borders blurred. On every level in his world, opposites meet, combine, become something greater than the sum of their parts. Blending nature and culture and turning them into new, impossible, and thus fantastic settings spring from the same underlying thrust that drives the Bas-Lag novels. Miéville offers a thought experiment that, if accepted by his readers, takes them to a world that is radically different from the actual world, as most of us are used to perceiving it. If Tolkien is right that fantasy brings “recovery” and allows us to see things clearly, “freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity,”86 then Miéville’s thought experiment allows us to see the world in terms of combinations rather than oppositions.
The Newford stories offer a very different kind of recovery. Rather than ridding the fantasy world of opposites, these stories force the reader to shift focus, to pay attention to the part of the duality that is discriminated against. Like Miéville, de Lint creates a distinct worldview; but it is distinct in what we are looking at, not how we look at it. His world-view is politically motivated, and the recovery it offers is an awareness of how we, who are part of society and of culture, treat our opposites. These opposites are, in Newford, social outsiders and the natural world. The link between their domains and the domain of magic, fairies, ghosts, animal spirits—in short, of the fantastic—turns fantasy into social critique and social critique into fantasy, and the nature–culture relation thus becomes part of the political core of the stories.
In The Lord of the Rings, the narrative constantly returns to the question about the “proper” relation between nature and culture, and the answer is invariably stewardship. The natural world is subordinated to culture, whether hobbit, elven, human, dwarven, or entish; but culture is obliged to care for nature. Nature put to cultural use and kept under cultural control—tame nature—is the ideal; both wilderness and environmental degradation are problems that must be solved, faults that must be rectified. The central battle between good and evil thus becomes a conflict between responsible stewardship and its absence. That this central theme expresses itself in a nature–culture relation that associates the right ruler with natural restoration simply goes along with the more obvious environmental themes, according to which evil means uglifying and destroying the environment (in Isengard, Mordor, or the Shire).87 Middle-earth may seem to offer a wilderness to explore, but the beauty it recovers for us is the beauty of a park or a garden, an orchard or a field of golden corn.
Where Middle-earth is largely a world of nature, the world of Mc-Killip’s Ombria in Shadow is one of culture, and its conflicts are played out on this cultural stage. In the power struggle, the characters move between the city’s zones, their transitions marked by the use of natural imagery. Where the three other authors offer new ways of perceiving the nature–culture duality of the actual world, McKillip takes it to an extreme where nature as a domain is omitted altogether. Her world is the world of urban culture, a social space where nature performs on the edges. It is a world that may yearn for the natural but does not need it; nature is just a representation—for transition, for hope, even for itself—not absent, only symbolic and, ultimately, ornamental.
Each of the four cities offers a new world to its readers, and as an integral part of each world we find an alternative to the traditional nature–culture opposition of the actual world. Even so, they have one thing in common with the actual world: they maintain a division between people and their environment. This division is not necessarily unbridgeable in fantasy worlds, however, and that is the subject of the following chapter.