The City and the Autumnal City by Sage Hunter
I’ve heard, recently, in a few discussions of China Miéville, people assert that the conclusions of his novels are generally incompetent. The City and the City, particularly, has been pointed out to me as a novel lacking any sort of satisfying resolution.
There’s a convention, in discussion of science fiction, to assume that it’s meaningless. Science fiction is entertaining, spectacular, imaginative, and it can sometimes even be thought provoking. But science-fictional explorations of worlds beyond our own, whether they’re ‘art’ or ‘entertainment’, inevitably lack any capacity to represent, or to reflect on, the experiences of real human beings in the world.
This attitude can be demonstrated very easily by looking at reviews of science fiction movies. Erik Kain’s review of Dune: Part Two for Forbes calls the film ‘gorgeous, awe-inspiring, and hollow.’ He praises the film’s ‘superb and distinct’ aesthetic, criticises it on the basis of its fidelity to Frank Herbert’s novel and finally suggests different directions Villeneuve could have taken his adaptation. The ‘hollowness’ Kain identifies is, it turns out, the film’s long runtime, its lack of easy resolution and the failure to centre ‘big action stuff’ in the second half. ‘It’s truly a sight to behold,’ the review concludes, ‘you could watch the whole thing without dialogue and it would still be worthwhile just for the spectacle alone.’ While this is obviously intended as a compliment for the various departments responsible for the film’s visual effects, it reads, to me, as a scathing self-indictment of the assumptions we bring to a review of a science fiction film. The ‘spectacle’ is enough. Why go looking for meaning? Why judge the work of art by any sense of its relation to reality, its relevance to real human lives as anything more than a distraction? It’s science fiction, after all. Juvenile stuff about spaceships and laser guns. If we get our jollies that’s enough, and makes the film worth however many millions of dollars it cost.
But Villeneuve is a director with some pretension to art. Debates about the boundaries and function of art are endless and insoluble. This isn’t the place to present an aesthetic theory, or to define art with any sort of rigour. I am, for the purposes of this essay, content with the definition implied above. Art, as opposed to the popular term ‘media,’ attempts a genuine relation to reality.
Items of media are imprisoned in a language of consumption; artworks in a language of reception and construction. Art is something which is worthwhile to take seriously, and to which it is worthwhile to apply our highest standards of critique. Items of media are things recommended, often algorithmically – as Kain’s review was to me – and then consumed. Media can get away with a lot that art can’t, in the same way a science fiction novel can get away with a lot which a novel aspiring to ‘realism’ or ‘literature’ cannot.
Media and science fiction can get away with not bothering to take things seriously. With not bothering to grow up, or to observe the world in anything but its crudest outlines. The complaint can be made that a science fiction film is lacking in ‘big action stuff,’ because within the specific criteria of film media, ‘big action stuff’ is all that is really required, all its audience is told to expect. Art or literature, making some claim to meaning in its assumption of the name, has stricter, subtler criteria.
The purpose of this preamble is to argue that reading China Miéville’s novels as anything less than art, as anything less than a genuine attempt to understand and represent human experience in the 21st century, is to do them a disservice. The City and the City is an entertaining novel, but to judge it by the standards of written media, with the language of written media, is to neglect a novel which is, like all art, incomparable, and which demonstrates the unique artistry of science fiction writing – demonstrates, in short, how deliberate misrepresentation of the world is a valid means of striving to understand it.
So, to understand The City and the City, I’ll first need to understand something about my own experience. The novel is set in a city that is two cities. The inhabitants carefully train themselves to ‘unsee’ half of the city they live in. Citizens of Beszel and Ul Qoma live side by side without even noticing one another, conditioned to ignore the strange architectures and costumes of their other half. The mysterious organisation known as Breach polices the boundary. This strange city, expertly constructed by Miéville so that its plausibility never seems particularly relevant, becomes the setting for a detective story. A murder is committed; an investigator must follow it from one city to the other; the city’s history is questioned, and a third city called Orciny is alluded to; Breach is involved, who may be Orciny, or may be its rivals. Our protagonist finally joins Breach.
The metaphor is not difficult to pick up on. Michael Moorcock described it for The Guardian: ‘Subtly, almost casually, Miéville constructs a metaphor for modern life in which our habits of “unseeing” allow us to ignore that which does not directly affect our familiar lives.’ The prostrate homeless man, head against the ground and cup held up, blindly begging from the endless stream of financially active humanity. The Marxists, Christians and DoorDash advertisers who stand on street corners and press fliers into your hand as you walk past. The thousands of advertisements we’re forced to ignore every day in order to accomplish basic tasks with any sort of economy or regularity. The thousands of other advertisements we’re forced to ‘unsee’ if we want to maintain any sort of mental equilibrium.
To represent or reflect on this universal experience of urban modernity is a much higher ambition than telling a detective story with enough sci-fi elements to keep Miéville’s particular market happy. It’s an ambition which begins with a direct and sensitive observation of the world, and which is then developed through the forms and potentials of science fiction writing, finally allowing us, through ironic misrepresentation of reality, to think about reality, perhaps even to see it, a little more clearly.
But the metaphor, as I’ve described it above, and as Moorcock and others describe it, is largely negative. It is, it would seem, a political point about the various ways that capitalist society has taught us to unsee its abuses. The novel in this political reading might frame an argument similar to that reiterated by Roland Barthes throughout his Mythologies: that we are taught, subtly and insidiously, to see the City as natural rather than historical, to ignore all that which would, if we only bothered to notice it, upset all of our assumptions about the basic rightness of our way of living and our society’s.
This is a valid enough argument, and I think it is contained within the book, but leaving Miéville’s metaphor at this negative, political dimension is, again, doing him a disservice. The establishment of the initial metaphor is a small part of Miéville’s novel. The construction of an astute and well-spoken political statement, while it is much more than many writers achieve, is far from the extent of Miéville’s ambitions. The detective story which some readers find unsatisfying for reasons of plot is not really constructed for its plot; it primarily serves the function of enhancing the central metaphor, recontextualising it and presenting it at different angles, through different refractions.
In 1975 Samuel Delany published the novel Dhalgren, destined to become a favourite of writers like William Gibson and Kim Stanley Robinson, and of academic critics like Carl Freedman, for whom it represents one of the most substantial mergers of science fiction and Modernist literature. Like Miéville’s novel, it is about the City. In Delany’s novel the City is called Bellona; it is the recombinant city, the inescapable city, the autumnal city whose burning reflection squats on the waters at its outskirts. It is a city of gangland freaks, of inexplicable technology and inconceivable celestial transformations; a city, perhaps, as diverse and inscrutable as the real City, wherever it’s found. It is a city where a hero without a name can enter on a quest without an object, amid a calamity the nature of which never really becomes apparent. At one point our hero reflects: ‘You meet a new person, you go with him and suddenly you get a whole new city… you go down new streets, you see houses you never saw before, pass places you didn’t even know were there. Everything changes.’ And his companion, his new friend, responds: ‘Sometimes it changes even if you go the same way.’
This quote, outside of its context, might not seem particularly profound. In a novel, however, which contains, to pick just one example, a garden-party of almost Proustian length in which the hero and his main love interest must cultivate polite conversation between a criminal gang and the middle-class people who make up the other half of their social circle, it emerges as a primary statement of theme or message. To live in the City is to live in the interstices between not just two or three different worlds, but between hundreds, their boundaries overlapping and constantly, imperceivably shifting.
I don’t know which interstices my readers live within, so for a moment they’ll have to follow me. In Melbourne a line of dive bars on Johnston Street is one of the main locations for metal and punk gigs. On any given Friday or Saturday night a dozen or more different pubs host three or four screaming guitar and drum bands. Occasionally I notice a more experimental or idiosyncratic group, or one which caters to my tastes more, and incorporates, for example, acoustic guitars which remind me of Agalloch and Drudkh, or the soaring effects-pedals influenced by the ‘black-gaze’ music of Alcest and Deafheaven. The crowds at these sort of events could probably be described as ‘mixed.’ They are mostly but far from exclusively male, ranging from their second decade to their seventh or eighth. Some are dressed in a showy goth-punk outfit, black with spikes and chains and that sort of thing. Older metalheads typically wear ‘battle jackets’ with dozens of patches sewn on. Younger metalheads tend to wear black band shirts advertising their particular taste in abrasive screams. There are, usually, a few guys in their 40s or 50s who look less like metalheads than office workers, but nod to the music along with everyone else. The bartenders are a community in themselves, and are different at each venue. One has a group of queer punks culled from the bands they book, another has a group of low-energy uni students sullenly waiting for the ends of their shifts. The few bars around the CBD with a late, 6 or 7 am closing time serve as a meeting place for wasted metalheads who picked different gigs, who can catch up and compare notes and play one or two protracted games of pool before they’re finally kicked out of the extremely late-night bar ‘Last Chance,’ summoning a first-generation immigrant to drive them home at a relatively cheap fair.
A lot of these people have full-time jobs, some of them in very professional areas. Some of them maintain their lifestyle with a cocaine habit. Some of them seem like permanent fixtures in the nights I’ve just described, utterly immune to hangover. Some of them are rare, peripheral presences, appearing from different communities, from different cities, to briefly form a sympathy with people outside the world they usually see. I’m an English student; my other social communities are at university, in the speculative fiction group I’m writing this essay for, in friendships maintained from places like that. When I go to one of these gigs, I talk about metal and punk bands most of my readers have never heard of, rather than about Proust and Joyce and Marx, or Samuel Delany and Denis Villeneuve and China Miéville. I talk about the shared cultural and historical moments of this community; the church burnings of the early Norwegian Black Metal bands, or the rare and coveted Australian tours of obscure international groups. It is not uncommon for philosophers in the modern world to deny any consistency of self throughout time. Each morning we wake a different person, our passions, obsessions, modes of thinking and modes of speaking undergoing a constant process of recreation. We are no more the same person in two different communities than we are on two different days.
But what else do I see on Johnston Street, when I stumble out of one of my dive bars, ears ringing, making for the bottle-o which serves cheap drinks between sets? I see wine bars with table service, waiters wearing shirt and tie. Couples and groups of friends, if I had to guess more often female than male, sit at well decorated tables and share conversation about… what? Conversation which to me, because of the angle I view it from, and the clothes worn by those who speak it, seems as though it should be described as ‘polite’, as though it represents some middle-class community, more readily commercialised than those I understand.
How much about me would need to change, I ask myself, to step into one of those expensive, well-dressed wine bars? Not much, certainly. A change of outfit, a few mildly embarrassed hours learning the social expectations of a new environment, a new friend to bring me to a new place. It has happened to all of us, at some time or another, and I’m sure, and glad of the fact, that it will happen to me again at some point, whether it leads me to the wine bars on Johnston Street or not.
But how different the conversation, the style, the manner, the assumptions about everything which goes into building a social community, a shared environment! And how close, a few steps only, to cross a barrier which seems to me the barrier between two worlds, their inhabitants utterly incongruous. And, finally, how many other worlds might I discover, if I only bothered to open my eyes?
Miéville’s novel concludes with a line which sticks in my head. Our hero, recruited into the mysterious ‘Breach,’ now guarding the boundary between Beszel and Ul Qoma, tells us:
We are all philosophers here where I am, and we debate among many other things the question of where it is that we live. On this issue I am a liberal. I live in the interstice, yes, but I also live in both the city and the city.
This is what the novel is about. To analyse The City and the City as a detective story which demands a satisfying conclusion in the realm of plot is fine, but it ignores the novel’s art. It ignores Miéville’s attempt at a genuine relationship with reality, his attempt to observe, understand and represent a real experience which so many of his readers have gone through, although perhaps not noticed as they were doing so. When we learn, for example, that Beszel and Ul Qoma have different archaeological histories, I think of the different histories which define real communities; my community of metalheads is a small part of the history of musical styles, and of the different social classes those styles appeal to. To most communities that history is entirely irrelevant, as in the mists of time the history of Beszel is severed from the history of Ul Qoma.
Miéville’s novel, whatever failures it might have, reveals to its reader something of the world that they live in. To treat it as media, to respond to it on the level of plot or action, with criteria culled from the sci-fi adventures and hard-boiled detective stories which form its most obvious generic inheritance, and from the committee-made film and TV which currently forms our most broadly discussed cultural production, is to collapse the potential of art to something less than it is, or at the very least to ignore, as so many have since its initial emergence into maturity in the 1960s, that science fiction is a form which can aspire to art. Inundated as our society is in discourses which lump the highest achievements of literary storytelling together with formulaic and mammon-infected re-adaptations of children’s comic books, under the name ‘media’, and at the same time grace the most banal and commercialised manufacturers of pop music with the name ‘artist’, it seems necessary to argue, explicitly and discriminatorily, that there remain places where the highest ambitions of art have not been subsumed at the altar of profit or jettisoned in the name of mass appeal. For anyone looking for such a place in 21st-century science fiction, The City and the City is indispensable, a novel where misrepresentation becomes representation, where irony becomes verisimilitude, where the interstices and peripheries become the centre, and are understood a little more clearly.