This Census-Taker

At some point, there was a war.

Despite the sharp pointing finger of its title, China Mieville's This Census-Taker is, in fact, exceptionally vague.  We appear to be on earth, but at an indefinite time in the past, there was a war (semi-apocalyptic?) that destroyed a lot of advanced technology; nevertheless, there are still things like generators for electricity, rifles, typewriters, and so forth.  At the same time, there is either superstition or actual magic at work, in the form of the narrator's father's "keys," which are apparently enchanted in some way (or, at least, are believed to be so).  There still are "immense foreign wars" (loc. 339), but it is not clear where they are, or why anyone is fighting.  Some nations appear to have held on to more of their technology than others, as indicated by the "neon" lights of the city where the narrator writes (loc. 277).  People have journeyed from place to place, although it's not clear if they're always refugees or not.  Our narrator grew up speaking one language, yet tells us that he is writing this narrative in a different one, the language of his father (loc. 1332), which he only learned as an adult from the eponymous census-taker (although it's a double title: the narrator becomes a census-taker himself).  The eponymous census-taker had a previous trainee who disappears for reasons he claims have to do with skulduggery on her part, but this story is never verified.  The reader does not know what languages anyone speaks, although the narrator hears his father's language as "ugly baying gibberish" (loc. 1339).  The reader does not know why the narrator's father left his home, although his habit of killing things is certainly a hint.  Nor, indeed, does the reader ever learn why the narrator is under guard; for that matter, the reader does not know the narrator's name, or the names of his parents.  Reading the novel is a long exercise in negative capability.  

But instead of regarding the novel's setting as vague, we could also regard it as hyper-focalized, constrained by the limitations of the narrator's childhood gaze and consciousness.  For, as is frequently the case with Mieville's fiction, this story is in part about the problem of narration.  It opens, in fact, with a child seeking an audience for a frightening story: "A boy ran down a hill screaming.  The boy was I" (loc. 76).  This splitting of the narrative voice frequently occurs when the narrator tries to represent moments of great emotional trauma, attempting to dull pain by severing the phases of the self through language.  (Similarly, he cannot recognize his mother's own writing, despite having witnessed her doing it; the action and its result drift apart from each other.)  Such trauma also manifests itself in the narrator's reversal of the act that galvanizes most of the plot.  "My mother killed my father!" (loc. 98), he cries, even though the opposite has happened:  "Still now if I consider the thing I saw in my house that day what comes back to me first is my mother’s hands: her calm expression, the sight of her braced and striking, her hands coming down hard, a knife, my father’s eyes closed, a glimpse of his mouth, his mouth full of blood, blood on the pale flowers of the walls, and the boy has to think all that, first, I have no choice, I can’t think around it, and every time it takes me a moment to reflect and prepare to say that no, that’s not what it was, surely, that the face of the person being hit was hidden, or certainly that it wasn’t my father’s"  (loc. 134-38).  From nearly the very beginning, his memory overwrites the act of violence, transforming the glimpsed fragments of the event into a coherent declarative statement that, after all, turns out to describe the very opposite of what happened.  The true(r) memory only comes later, but always remains in the shadow of what he did/did not initially see.  Each time he tries to tell his story, he finds himself foundering on this moment of brutality, which momentarily wrests his language out of control.    

The narrator's troubling, problematic memories contrast sharply with two other forms of making sense on offer, neither of which allow for any ambiguity at all.  The first is the law, administered locally by amateurs and treated with almost scriptural reverence ("It would be a young schoolteacher with a faintly scarred face who would interpret the books of law" [loc. 693]).   It is hardly a shock that, ordered to tell a neat story, the narrator is instead puzzled by the prospect of identifying "what the beginning was" (loc. 684).  The law can do nothing to prosecute the boy's father; nor does the law protect him when he tries to run away, for "the law had said I was his and they had a lot of respect and fear for the law in that town" (loc. 1132).  Despite the need for "interpretation," the language of the law is treated in quasi-fundamentalist fashion, running roughshod over individual cases.   The law's organizational function finds its echo in that of the census, which takes "people and things" and puts them into "sets" (loc. 1478).  Census-taking is a response to the ill-defined wars, past and ongoing; the census-taker specifically tries to place each member of his own "polity" (loc. 1478), which includes the boy's father, within the proper set, so that by a joint effort everyone can be properly located.  The outcome of this project is not specified--in fact, the adult narrator ruefully notes that his "first book," the coded census book, is "for everyone, though almost no one wants it or would know how to read it" (loc. 294).  Like the law, the census classifies and arranges relationships; unlike the law, the census seems to have no actual audience (despite its official government purpose) beyond the census-takers themselves.   Moreover, even though the language of "sets" and "counting" suggests transparent clarity in the name of control, pinning down those people who have moved, there is no sign that a national government exerts anything in the way of effective surveillance or power over the country's inhabitants.  This is, as it were, a form of census theater.  The census-taker certainly feels free to enact justice on his own account, as we see near the end, but there is a strange lack of bureaucracy behind him.  

There is, however, yet another pattern, a found pattern, which is the "rhythm" of his father's killings.  The boy first realizes that his father is attacking someone--who turns out to be his mother--when he "heard a rhythm" (loc. 136); he and his mother hear a "rhythm," a "methodical thudding," when his father kills an annoying client (loc. 639); and he detects a "growing beat" as his father kills an animal (loc. 1270).  At one point, this rhythmic brutality converges oddly with the act of writing, when the census-taker, explaining the "second book" to the narrator--the second book is the book for dialogue, the third for secrets--points out that even though the second book is written for an audience, one can still convey hidden meanings through, among other things, "arrangements and rhythms" (loc. 301). Rhythm may or may not be spontaneous, and may or may not have intentional signification; unlike the codified languages of the law and the census, its status as a bearer of meaning remains permanently unclear.  We tend, after all, to turn repeated sounds into rhythms.  This instability carries over to the father's violence, in which the boy finds a rhythm that, nevertheless, completely fails to explain what is going on, or why his father feels driven to kill.   Like so much else in the plot, the mystery of his father's behavior remains unspoken to or by the narrator, although the census-taker coolly informs him that "I know" the reason the father left his original home (loc. 1491). 

At one end, the census-taker bears most of what passes for knowledge; at the other end, there is the figure for the unknowable, which is the rubbish hole.  All things wind up in the hole, so deep that whatever is dumped into it simply "tumble[s] into silence" (loc. 254-55).  The boy witnesses his father kill a dog and then throw it into the hole; later, he thinks that his father "was feeding only the darkness" (loc. 576), endlessly hurling corpses into a hole that cannot be filled.  When he attests that his mother, too, has been murdered and thrown into the hole (along with rather a lot of other people), he finds that his witnessing is useless--nobody can verify his claims, given the hole's depths.  For the narrator, this hole proves to be the limit point of what can and cannot be represented.  By contrast, when presented with the hole, the census-taker, MacGyver-like, simply pulls out the necessary equipment to climb in. "“Yes, well, I have a job,”" he calmly explains, "“I have to count. I have to track everything”" (loc. 1529).  And yet, emerging from the hole, he says nothing about what he saw--although the novel implies very clearly that he executes the boy's father in retribution for whatever it was.  The ongoing presence of this literal and figurative gap in the boy's consciousness is in stark contrast to his "catechism," written in dialogue with that of the census-taker's previous trainee, which both promises absolute clarity--"The Hope Is So: Count Entire Nation. Subsume Under Sets. - Take Accounts. Keep Estimates. Realize Interests. So Reach Our Government’s Ultimate Ends" (loc. 1782-84)--and yet defers it endlessly.  A hope, not an accomplishment; ultimate ends, not goals immediately in sight.  The promise of knowledge, but knowledge that is never quite entirely within one's reach. 

 

 

Comments

[J M]

"The Hope Is So: Count Entire Nation. Subsume Under Sets. - Take Accounts. Keep Estimates. Realize Interests. So Reach Our Government’s Ultimate Ends"

"THIS CENSUS TAKER IS ROGUE"