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FROM GENRE TO POLITICAL ECONOMY: MIÉVILLE’S THE CITY & THE CITY
AND UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT
By Carl Freedman
From the beginning, China Miéville’s work has been characterized by the combination of
a wide range of generic kinds. “Weird fiction,” his own preferred term (borrowed from H. P.
Lovecraft) for his work, is in fact an omnibus category that in practice has included elements
from such arealistic forms as science fiction, world-building fantasy, horror, Surrealism, and
magical realism. This list is not exhaustive, of course, and Miéville has also combined weird
fiction as a whole with genres that cannot be considered arealistic in quite the same way.
Dickensian urban satire, for example, is prominent in Perdido Street Station (2000); The Scar
(2002) owes a good deal to the traditional seafaring narrative as developed by Melville and
Conrad; and in Iron Council (2004)—for me his finest novel to date—the Western has an
important generic presence (Zane Grey is appropriately listed on the acknowledgements page
among the writers to whom Miéville expresses a special debt).
In this context, Miéville’s 2009 novel The City & The City marks a significant departure
from his earlier work. Here the entire elaborate machinery of weird fiction is mostly—but not
totally—dispensed with, and what remains of it is fused with a quite different generic cluster,
one composed of such overlapping though by no means identical genres of crime fiction as noir,
the police procedural, and (above all) the hard-boiled detective narrative.
The generic
composition of the novel is further overdetermined by the kind of dystopia invented by Zamyatin
and most famously exploited by Orwell, while the nearly unclassifiable influence of Kafka (who
is explicitly thanked on the acknowledgements page) faintly but unmistakably haunts the text as
a whole. Many readers have noticed that the novel stands strikingly apart from the author’s
earlier work on the stylistic level: the voluptuous richness of syntax and vocabulary that
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characterizes the best of Miéville’s earlier novels and stories is here replaced by a far leaner and
more stripped-down prose, which appears heavily indebted to Dashiell Hammett, the chief
founder of hard-boiled detective fiction. Yet it seems to me that the uniqueness of The City &
and The City is manifest even more consequentially on the level of genre.
It is not a matter just of different genres being in play, but of fundamental generic
orientation. To invoke a distinction that I have explored elsewhere, the genres that compose
weird fiction are all fundamentally inflationary in tendency: which is to say that they all, in
various ways, suggest reality to be richer, stranger, more complex, more surprising—and indeed
weirder—than common sense would suppose. Weird fiction necessarily insists on going beyond
the mundane, and (especially in its science-fictional version) may thereby create special
opportunities for what Ernst Bloch called the utopian function of art by showing a world beyond
the privation and violence of the actual to be conceivable; this function is, indeed, exercised with
rare brilliance in Iron Council. By contrast, the genres of crime fiction tend to be deflationary
and opposed to the idea of utopia. Especially since Hammett, the main tendency of crime fiction
has been to assume that there is generally less, rather than more, to reality than may first meet the
eye, and that the most ordinary, familiar, unsurprising, and petty of human motives are generally
the most consequential. Though crime fiction indulges in overt socio-political speculation far
more rarely than science fiction, its default assumption is normally that nothing very much
better—or very much worse—than the mundane world we see around us is ever likely to come to
pass.
The City & The City is set in the twin city-states of Besźel and Ul Qoma, which are
located in a this-worldly though never precisely designated area of eastern Europe: somewhere,
it appears, between Austria and Asia Minor. In the novel’s one major element of weird fiction,
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the two cities are located in precisely the same physical space. How this is possible is never
made explicit, though one commentator has taken it for granted that the avant-garde physics of
string theory must provide a cognitive justification. In any case, once this donnée is established,
the implications of it are worked out with lucidly strict logic. Besźel and Ul Qoma regard one
another with suspicion and low-intensity dislike. The two cities have, at various times in the
past, supported opposed sides in military conflicts, including the Second World War; and in the
time present of the novel they co-exist in a kind of cold peace. Though a small, despised
minority of left-wing “unificationists” disagree, the vast majority of citizens are intensely proud
of each city’s distinct identity and take for granted the importance of keeping Besźel and Ul
Qoma almost completely separate. Such rigorous separation requires citizens to act as though
the cities were not “grosstopically” coterminous, and from early childhood every Besź and every
Ul Qoman must learn to “unsee” the people, buildings, streets, motor vehicles, and everything
else that the other city contains. The authorities of the two cities must consult one another on
certain practical matters—shared infrastructure, for example, and intercity smuggling—and it is
possible to travel between the cities lawfully through the extraterritorial “Copula Hall.” But any
unauthorized and deliberate transgression of the mental barriers between Besźel and Ul Qoma—
any “breach,” as it is called—is a crime of the utmost seriousness. Such crime is severely
punished by a shadowy and unimaginably powerful police agency named Breach that (like
Orwell’s Thought Police) exists apart from, and superior to, the ordinary security forces (of both
cities).
Despite the weird relationship between Besźel and Ul Qoma, the cities maintain fairly
normal relations with the rest of the world, through commercial trade, diplomatic embassies, the
internet, international phone calls, air travel, and the like.
And, aside from the constant
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possibility (and hence the constant fear) of committing breach, everyday life in the twin cities,
especially Besźel, does not seem to differ greatly from the mundane post-Soviet eastern
European status quo. Like so many crime narratives, The City & The City begins with a strange
and startling murder: a young American graduate student who had been doing archeological
research in Ul Qoma is found cut to death in Besźel, her body stripped almost naked and
deposited in a drab field. The case is assigned to one Tyador Borlú, the novel’s protagonist.
Though a senior police investigator of Besźel’s Extreme Crime Squad, Borlú—in his toughness,
his general intelligence, his urban street savvy, his basic decency, his staunch individualism, his
sexual attractiveness, and his sad essential loneliness—is strongly reminiscent of one of the
greatest of all hard-boiled private dicks, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe (Chandler is one
of the writers thanked in the acknowledgements). As Marlowe typically does, Borlú spends the
entire book proving himself the sole investigator capable of cracking a baffling case in which the
solution to one problem often leads to another and then yet another; and, again as with Marlowe,
the details of the investigation are sometimes less memorable than the personal qualities of the
detective and, even more, the unfolding revelations about the environment through which he
moves.
Yet some of the investigative details are important.
Mahalia Geary, the murdered
student, had been doing research into the early history and prehistory of the twin cities, notably
into the little-understood period before their separation; and at many points it seems as though
she may have met her death through becoming mixed up in the strange politics that dominate
Besźel and Ul Qoma.
Mahalia made some contacts among Besź unificationists, and there are
right-wing Besź nationalists (of the “True Citizens of Besźel”) who assume her to have been a
unificationist herself—or, even worse, an Ul Qoman spy—who got exactly what she deserved.
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But the unificationists do not regard her as one of their own. They have come to believe that her
interest in them was based not on political sympathy but on the desire to have access to their
extensive library of historical documents—and that she was more a danger to them than anything
else. Various hypotheses about Mahalia’s life and death are considered and eventually discarded
in the course of Borlú’s investigation. By far the most intriguing—and certainly the one that
most seems to open up vistas of weird fiction—concerns the possibility of a third city, named
Orciny. Though the subject is not considered a fit one for reputable academic scholarship,
Mahalia, like many others, has been fascinated by rumors of this third city that not only existed
during the distant past of Besźel and Ul Qoma but that, in some accounts, still exists during the
time present of the novel. Orciny is supposed to maintain itself in the interstices between the
twin cities, occupying areas assumed by the Besź to be Ul Qoman and by the Ul Qomans to be
Besź; its inhabitants, it is said, manage to conduct themselves in plain view, taken by the citizens
of each of the twin cities to belong to the other, and thus “unseen” by all as quickly as possible.
Orciny is credited with awesome powers, comparable to those of Breach itself—to which some
believe it to be identical, though others regard the two mysterious forces as arch-enemies. Might
Mahalia have been murdered by the agents of this weird third city? Did she, perhaps, learn more
about Orciny than the Orcinians wished to be known, and thereby inadvertently bring about her
own destruction?
The answer is no. The staid, conservative academic view—that Orciny is a mere fable,
its supposed existence unsupported by fact—turns out to be the truth. The force behind Mahalia
Geary’s murder transpires to be the entirely mundane one of monetary greed: she was killed in
order to cover up and protect a perfectly ordinary illegal commercial scheme of the sort that
would have been quite familiar to Marlowe (or to Hammett’s Sam Spade, or his Continental Op).
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Without meaning to, Mahalia had become involved with the criminals, and, in one of the novel’s
more elegant plot twists, it became necessary to eliminate her when she discovered for herself
that, her longstanding suspicions to the contrary notwithstanding, Orciny never existed after all.
The apparent inflationary possibility—doubtless, for many readers, the inflationary hope—that
there is much strange and exciting and even fantastic to be learned about Orciny is cancelled
with a deflationary shrug. People do not, as a matter of fact, get killed in order to prevent the
existence of uncanny forces from becoming widely known. People get killed so that other
people can make money: a point of decisive generic significance. Though the “grosstopic” coexistence of Besźel and Ul Qoma remains an irreducible element of weird fiction within The City
& The City, it is ultimately overmatched by the ordinary everyday verities of crime fiction.
This is not to deny the genuine importance that weird fiction does possess in the novel’s
generic overdetermination. Like the great dystopias of Zamyatin and Orwell, The City & The
City is on one level a political satire; but Miéville’s target is less totalitarianism than xenophobic
nationalism. The conceit that the twin cities occupy identical physical space ultimately functions
as an estranging device (similar, in its way, to Swift’s division of the Lilliputians into Big
Endians and Little Endians) that highlights the absurdity and the inherent emptiness of the
oppositions over which human beings frequently tear their lives out. The divided city is in real
history often an especially pointed example of political futility; and Jerusalem and pre-1989
Berlin are explicitly cited in the novel (though Borlú does not regard them as true analogues to
Besźel and Ul Qoma). But Miéville constructs a figure of xenophobic division that is rendered
chemically pure, as it were, by being shown to be completely formal. It is not just that, as we
gradually become aware, there do not seem to be any substantive issues of ethnicity or religion
or political doctrine over which the twin cities are opposed. There is not even any geographical
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distinction between the cities, and the barriers that separate them must be constructed in the
minds of the inhabitants. It is separation simply and solely for separation’s sake. Nonetheless,
people do construct these separating mental barriers, which are strong enough to support an
elaborate system of repressive state apparatuses and an entire ideological way of life. Some
people, like the True Citizens, are even capable of specially devoting their lives to the reaffirmation of the substantively empty divisions between the twin cities. Miéville himself would
surely be a unificationist if he lived in Besźel or Ul Qoma. But, by portraying the unificationists
as marginalized and ineffective, he underlines the insane power of pathological nationalism.
We need, however, to examine the politics of the two cities a bit more closely in order to
appreciate just how deflationary The City & The City really is. The political history of Besźel
and Ul Qoma is in fact difficult to reconstruct in complete detail. The eastern European location
suggests both city-states to have once belonged to the now dismantled Soviet bloc, or possibly to
the equally dismantled Yugoslavia. That history seems to survive in, for example, the Besź term
commissar—which, however, is not used in Ul Qoma, where the word has a distinctly foreign
ring, and where, during the time present of the text, there are no legally permissible socialist (or
other oppositional) political parties. Ul Qoma, however, may have had the more radically
socialist tradition, for at one point we learn that, during the 1960s, it was, along with Castro’s
Cuba and Mao’s China, a favored destination for expatriated American radicals. Still, it is hard
to see why Ul Qoma should still, in the present time, be subject to economic sanctions imposed
by the US State Department, while Besźel maintains normal relations with Washington. It is
even harder to see why, given this geopolitical situation, Besźel should retain the drab industrial
look stereotypical of Soviet-bloc urban geography, and the concomitant relatively low level of
technology (“Washington loves us, and all we’ve got to show for it is Coke” [194], as Borlú
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comments bitterly in conversation with an Ul Qoman colleague); while Ul Qoma, in contrast,
looks and feels considerably more “modern” in the way made possible by the massive presence
of Western consumer capital.
Why all the unanswered questions? Miéville’s grasp of modern geopolitics is as firm as
that of any novelist at work today (not for nothing is he an important Marxist scholar of
international law), and he would certainly have made these matters crystal clear if he had
intended to. But the deliberate scantiness of detail serves an aspect of the text’s satiric tendency.
Bernard Shaw—perhaps the greatest of British satiric writers since Swift and one of Miéville’s
own numerous precursors—found the foibles of the small nations of eastern Europe to provide,
in their pettiness and inherent inconsequentiality, an especially rich subject-matter for the
mockery of nationalist politics and national self-importance; and there is, I think, more than a
whiff of Arms and the Man (1894) in The City and The City. If it is difficult to be totally clear
about the details of Shaw’s Balkans or Miéville’s invented cities, this is because the details are
not really worth bothering about: they are so petty as to be negligible from any genuinely
geopolitical perspective.
Yet the Irish-born Shaw hardly regards his characters with self-
satisfied English jingoism; and the real satiric target of Arms and the Man is not only the
nationalism of Bulgaria but that of the British Empire itself. The absurdity of a dwarf may be
particularly easy to see and convenient to ridicule; but it is not essentially different (save by
being a good deal less dangerous) from the absurdity of a giant.
The giant global power to which Besźel and Ul Qoma are contrasted and compared is of
course not the long-defunct British Empire but US-dominated multinational capital; and, unlike
the Shavian precedent, Miéville’s novel makes the contrast fully explicit. As usual with this
author, the text is structured not only on an overdetermined hybridity of genres but, at a deeper
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level, on problems of political economy; and here the chief problem is uneven development. As
this extraordinarily complex concept has been developed from Marx and Engels through such
later thinkers as Trotsky, Ernest Mandel, Walter Rodney, and David Harvey, it refers not merely
to the empirical and apparently contingent fact that some social formations enjoy a more
advanced stage of economic development than others: as, for example, Besźel and Ul Qoma
seem to, much to the considerable envy of a Besź character like Borlú. Far more important is
that uneven development functions as a motor of capital accumulation, and thus that
developmental unevenness is not a contingent by-product of the capitalist mode of production
but is structurally integral to the latter: the very title of Rodney’s classic study, How Europe
Underdeveloped Africa (1972), makes the point succinctly. The formal imperialism that Shaw
satirized and Rodney analyzed amounts to one theatre in which uneven development can operate.
But The City and The City tackles uneven development in the contemporary world where
imperialism has been for the most part superseded by Empire (in the by now canonical Hardtand-Negri sense).
This theme is sounded throughout the novel. In the opening chapter, for instance, we are
casually informed that the increasingly aggressive and salacious tone of the Besź press is the
work of newspapers “started, inspired and in some cases controlled by British or North American
owners” (11). Relatively early in his investigation, Borlú finds that some higher authorities he
needs to consult may be unavailable for a few days while they are attending to commercial
matters: and, as a police colleague informs him, they are “not going to shunt off business
meetings and whatnot like they would’ve done once.” “Whoring it for the Yankee dollar” (57),
replies Borlú with perfect understanding. But the dominance of Besźel and Ul Qoma by the
Empire of global capital is emphasized to greatest effect at the end of the novel in connection
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with Borlú’s ultimate success in solving the murder of Mahalia Geary. It turns out that the
scheme with which she inadvertently became involved, and for which she was killed, was
devoted to the illegal sale of ancient Besź artifacts to a giant multinational corporation; and, in a
particularly nice irony, several True Citizens working with this criminal operation are revealed to
be, despite all their professed Besź patriotism, “just a fence for foreign bucks” (285), as Borlú
puts it. Yet even Borlú, for all his shrewdness, does not fully appreciate the almost comical gulf
in stature that separates anything in Besźel or Ul Qoma from the true masters of the universe.
When, at the end of The City & The City, Borlú, now working for Breach, confronts one of these
masters—an evidently American executive of the corporation that has been buying the
artifacts—he expects that the fear and awe with which Besź and Ul Qomans hold Breach will
carry the day for him. But the American is simply amused: “You think anyone beyond these
odd little cities cares about you?. . . .What do you think would happen if you provoked the ire of
my government? It’s funny enough the idea of either Besźel or Ul Qoma going to war against a
real country. Let alone you, Breach” (287). The executive takes off in his company helicopter,
and the man ultimately most responsible for Mahalia’s murder escapes scot-free. Beyond the
deflationary generic conventions of crime fiction—but by no means unrelated to them—lies the
most powerful deflationary force in our world structured by uneven development: the Yankee
dollar.