Hybridized Possibilities: China Mieville's The Scar and The Conjuring of Law

This essay presents a close reading of certain jurisgenerative threads within China Mieville's novel The Scar (2002). Mieville's work presents a host of dynamic characters who create and modify law by the force of their alternately compelling narratives and coercive actions. The Scar thus resonates on certain of the same frequencies as Robert Cover's and Stanley Fish's jurisprudential arguments concerning law as an amenable yet resistant medium whose fecund adaptability is checked by its inertial reluctance to change. It is this tension-filled dialectic between rhetoric and praxis that The Scar both celebrates and critiques. Furthermore, it is argued that this juxtaposition between legal theory and creative fiction enacts what Bruno Latour calls "matters of concern," those material threads which connect abstract concepts such as law and creativity to the actual everyday practices which make up our lives.