From Genre to Political Economy_ Miéville’s The City

8/13/2019 From Genre to Political Economy_ Mivilles The City

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From Genre to Political Economy: Mivilles The City & TheCity and Uneven Development

Carl Freedman

CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 13, Number 2, Fall 2013,pp. 13-30 (Article)

Published by Michigan State University PressDOI: 10.1353/ncr.2013.0013

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From Genre to PoliticalEconomy

Mivilles The City & The City and Uneven Development

C a r l F r e e d m a nLouisiana State University, Baton Rouge

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FROM THE BEGINNING, CHINA MIVILLES WORK HAS BEEN CHARACTERIZEDby the combination of a wide range of generic kinds. Weird ction, his own preferred term for his work (appropriated from H. P. Lovecraft), is in fact anomnibus category that inpractice has included elements fromsuch arealisticforms as science ction, world-building fantasy, horror, surrealism, andmag-ical realism. This list is not exhaustive, of course, and Miville has also com-binedweird ctionasawholewithgenresthatcannotbeconsideredarealisticin quite the same way. To consider, for example, the three volumes of Mivilles massive Bas-Lag trilogy, his largest and, almost certainly, his mostmemorable achievement to date: Dickensian urban satire is prominent in Perdido Street Station ( ); The Scar ( ) owes a good deal to the tradi-

CR: The New Centennial Review , Vol. 13, No. 2, 2013, pp. 1330. ISSN 1532-687X. 2013 Michigan State University. All rights reserved.

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tional seafaring narrative as developed by Melville and Conrad; and in IronCouncil ( )for me his nest novel of allthe Western has an importantgeneric presence (Zane Gray is appropriately listed on the acknowledgments page among the writers to whom Miville expresses a special debt).

In this context, Mivilles novel The City & The City marks a signi -cant and even a radical departure from his earlier work. Here, the entireelaborate machinery ofweird ction ismostlyor, as I will argue, completely,or almost completelydispensed with; what little (if any) remains of it isfused with a quite different generic cluster, one composed of such overlap- ping, though by no means identical, genres of crime ction as noir, the police procedural, and (above all) the hardboiled detective narrative. The genericcomposition of the novel is further overdetermined by the kind of negativeutopia invented by Yevgeny Zamiatin in his groundbreaking We ( ), andin uentially developed by Zamiatins two most important British followers, Aldous Huxley in Brave New World ( ) and George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four ( ). In addition, the nearly unclassi able in uence of Kafka

(who is explicitly thanked on the acknowledgments page) faintly but unmis-takably haunts the text as a whole.

The most salient difference betweenThe City & The City , on the one hand,and the weird ction of Mivilles earlier novels and stories, on the other, isnot, however, a matter just of different genres being in play. It is also aquestion of fundamental generic orientation. To invoke a distinction that Ihave explored elsewhere,the genres that compose weird ction are, for the

most part, fundamentally in ationary in tendency: which is to say that they incline, in various ways, to suggest reality to be richer, larger, stranger, morecomplex, more surprisingand, indeed, weirderthan common sense would suppose. Weird ction necessarily insists on going beyond the mun-dane, and (especially in its science ctional version) may, thereby, createspecial opportunities for what Ernst Bloch calls the utopian functionofartby showingaworldbeyondtheprivationandviolenceoftheactualtobenotonly

conceivable but concretely imaginable.This utopian function is, indeed,exercised with rare brilliance in Iron Council . Yet, even when not so overtly utopian, Mivilles weird ction, above all as instanced by the Bas-Lag novels,displays its in ationary forceits transcendence of the actualalso by the

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nearly unprecedented fertility and three-dimensionality of its arealistic world-building. Constructed from the ground up, as it were, in seemingly endless detail and withcarefulattention tovirtually all major forms ofhumanactivity (e.g., economic,political,military, legal, artistic, intellectual, religious,sexual, interpersonal), Bas-Lag attains a solidity and a concretely plausible presence that make even Tolkiens Middle-earth seem at and impalpable by comparison. So in ationary can weird ctionbecome in Mivilleshands that we accept the (alternative) reality of a whole inhabited planet of which no onehad ever before heard.

By contrast, the genres of crime ction, and especially hardboiled detec-tive ction, tend to be de ationary (and opposed to the idea of utopia). Espe-cially since Dashiell Hammettthe undisputed founder of hardboiled detective

ction and still, arguably, its greatest exponentthe main tendency of crimection has been to assume that there is generally less, rather than more, to

reality than may rst meet the eye. In the world of the crime narrative, themost ordinary, familiar, unsurprising, discreditable, and petty of human mo-

tives are usually the mostconsequential.Trueenough, a certainkindofhonoris sometimes shown to be possible, though dif cult and rather uncommon of attainment: paradigmatically, the professional code of the jobholder upheldby the detective himself (or, much more rarely, herself). In general, though,human beings are assumed to be driven mainly by simple material greed.Sometimes sexual lust is added toavarice as a motivationofhuman behavior,especially in lm noir, which can be understood as, to some degree, the

cinematic equivalent of hardboiled crime ction (from which lm noir partly derives). Little in crime ction is presented as fundamentally new, strange, ordifferent, even (or especially) in those not uncommon instanceswhere some-thing beyond the mundane at rst seems to be suggested, only to be demysti-

ed with a de ationary shrug as irredeemably ordinary after all. Thoughcrime ction indulges in overt sociopolitical speculation far more rarely than weird ction, especially science ction, its default theoretical assumption is

normally that nothing very much better (or very much worse) than the mun-dane world we see around us is ever likely to come to pass.Closely related to the disjunction between weird ction and crime ction

is the way that The City & The City represents a major departure from

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Mivillesearlierworkonthestylisticlevel.Theripein ationaryfullnessoftheBas-Lag trilogy corresponds,stylistically, toa baroque,voluptuous richnessof syntax and diction. Words often seem to be enjoyed, at least partly, for theirown sake, as they cascade over one another in frequent hypotaxis and enor-mous variety.TheMivilleof thesenovelsemploys whatmightconceivably bethe largest vocabulary among all novelists currently writing in English; and itis certainly one of the largest, even without counting Mivilles neologisms, whichare abundant.Bycontrast, inTheCity&TheCity we nda far leaner andmore stripped-down prose that appears heavily indebted to Hammett him-self. Sentences are shorter, parataxis is more syntactically dominant, andleaving aside a modest number of Mivillian neologisms employed to helpestablish the basic donne of the novelistic situationdiction tends to befairly ordinary and everyday. It is the sort of style often associated with policeandprivatedetectivesincrime ctionandcinema,andtypicallyexpressesthesardonic world-weariness of one who has seen it all and has little reason toexpect anything fundamentally surprising to happen. It is a generally mini-

malist style that corresponds to the de ationary bleakness of crime ction inmuch the same way that the far more opulent style of the Bas-Lag novelscorresponds to the in ationary fullness of weird ction.

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The City & The City is set in the twin city-states of Beszel and Ul Qoma. They

exist, not in an alternative universe like that containing Bas-Lag,whichseems to intersect at no point, either spatially or temporally, with the actual world we know around usbut very much on our own planet during the rstdecade of the twenty- rst century. Their exact location, however, is never precisely speci ed.Mostof theclues point towardEasternEurope.Thevocab-ulary of the dual languages spoken in the two cities sounds at least vaguely Slavic,especiallyinthepropernames;thearchitectureandgeneralurbanlook

of the citiesrecall the formerSovietbloc; and the real-world placesmentionedas evidently being within easiest traveling distance of Beszel and Ul Qomatend to be eastern European. Though one might maintain that there are also very faint clues that seem to argueagainst aneasternEuropeansettingmost



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notably thatEurope isoccasionally referred to ina way that could be taken tosuggest that Europe as a whole is elsewhere from the twin citiesit seemsreasonably safe to infer that Beszel and Ul Qoma are to be found somewhere,say, between Austria and Asia Minor. But the irreducible margin of indeter-minacy is, as we will see, itself a novelistic fact of some importance.

In what has been argued to constitute the novels one major element of weird ction, the two cities are located in precisely the same place. A distin-guished commentator has suggested that this situation is a science- ctionalone derived from the avant-garde physics of string theory: Playing off thecurrent theoretical physicists notion that more than one object can occupy the samephysicalspace,Mivillehelp[s] us tohangontothe ideathat the city of Beszel exists in the same space as the city of Ul Qoma. Citizens of each city can dimly make out the other, but are forbidden on pain of severe penal-ties . . . to notice it (Moorcock ). Yet, this ingeniousconnection betweenthe two cities and modern physics does not, I think, completely stand up toclose scrutiny. For the space of the cities, inmerely physical terms, appears to

be perfectly ordinary andNewtonian. Beszel and UlQomaare coterminous inthe sense that their borders are the same. But particular objects within thecitiescars, buildings, human beingsare solid in just the way that real- world objects are, and are equally incapable of occupying the same spaceduring the same time. Beszel and Ul Qoma share the space within theircommon borders mainly by dividing it between them, some territory belong-ing to one city and some to the other; and even in, say, the case of major

thoroughfares that are shared by both cities, Besz and Ul Qoman motoristshavetobecarefulnottocrashintooneanother.Moorcocksassertionthatthecitizens of each city can dimly make out the other city is a bit misleading because he seems to imply that the dimness has some physical or technicalorigin. In fact, it is wholly psychological and learned; that is to say, wholly constructed in the minds of the Besz and UlQoman citizens. Mark Bould andSherryl Vint, in their ne recent history of science ction, make the crucial

point succinctly. Though they conclude their chronological survey of thegenre with The City & The City , they admit that the novel can be regarded asbeing beyond the genre of SF, since its bizarre, alternative geography is the product of ideological rather than material difference (Bould and Vint ,



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; emphasis added). In this way, The City & The City can be understood tohave left weird ction completely behind.

Or, perhaps, almost completely behind: for the ideological operations at work are so extreme as to constitute something like the generic ghost of weird ction in the form of partially arealistic but, as we will see, deeply de ationary satire. Once the donne of the copresence of the two cities isestablished, the implications of it are worked out with a lucidly strict andformally perfect logicbut a logic that is objectively insane in the way thatonly logic in the service ofan inhuman extreme can be (the in uence ofKafkais surely detectable here). Beszel and UlQomaregardone another withsuspi-cionand low-intensity dislike.The two citieshave, atvarious times inthe past,supported opposed sides in military con icts, including the Second World War; and they have even, incredibly, been at war with one another. During thetimepresentofthenovel,theycoexistinakindofcoldpeace.Asmall,despisedminority of left-wing uni cationistswhose organizations resemble thekindofneo-Leninistparties on the British far Leftwithwhich Mivillehimself

has been involveduphold the banner of socialist internationalism (and of commonsense), doing what little they can toagitate for the merging ofBeszeland Ul Qoma into a single social and political entity. But the vast majority of citizens are ercely, madly patriotic, and intensely proud of each citys dis-tinct identity. They take for granted the importance of keeping Beszel and UlQoma as completely separate as possible.

Such rigorous separation requires citizens to act, and even to think and

perceive, as thoughthecitieswerenot grosstopicallythatis,inthetermsof actual, physical, Newtonian spacecoterminous. From early childhood, ev-ery Besz and every Ul Qoman must learn to unsee the people, buildings,streets, motor vehicles, and everything else that the other city contains. Un-seeingthe central ideological operation required to be a conventional, law-abiding Besz or Ul Qoman citizenis a maddeningly complex and indeedself-contradictoryprocess that seemsdirectly indebted to Orwells in uential

concept of doublethink. In Nineteen Eighty-Four , loyalty to the ruling Party requires the ability to think doubly, that is, to hold mutually exclusive beliefsin ones mind simultaneously, and to believe propositions that are intrinsi-cally and self-evidently falsewithout undue strain and even with genuine



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enthusiasm. One must, for instance, be able to give over ones mind withoutreservation to the three of cial Party slogans, War is Peace, Freedom isSlavery, and Ignorance is Strength. Somewhat similarly, in The City & TheCity , unseeing requires the ability not to see, or to see only in the dimmest,most tentative way, that which is very plainly before ones eyes. Since it is notalways immediately evident whether what one is looking at is Besz or UlQoman, one must always be prepared to unsee that which one has just seen.Even worse, maintaining some degree of seeing what one has just unseen issometimes an urgent, life-or-death necessity, as when Besz and Ul Qomanmotorists must avoid colliding with one another. To make matters morecomplex yet, the ruling authorities of the two cities must consult one anotheron certain unavoidable practical matters, such as shared infrastructure andintercity smuggling. It is even possible to travel between the cities lawfully through the extraterritorial Copula Hall, whose name might be taken as asubtle of cial admission that the two cities are, in some sense, identical afterall (since a copula, in grammar, is a verb that identi es the predicate of a

sentence with its subject). But any unauthorized and deliberate failure tounsee when unseeing is called for, that is, any transgression of the mentalbarriersbetween BeszelandUlQomaanybreach,asitiscalledisacrimeof the utmost seriousness. Such crime is severely punished by a shadowy andunimaginably powerful police agency named Breach that (like OrwellsThought Police) exists apart from, and superior to, the ordinary security forces of both cities.

Despite this mad relationship between Beszel and Ul Qoma, the citiesmaintain fairly normal relations with the rest of the world, through commer-cial trade, diplomatic embassies, international phone calls, air travel, theinternet,andthelike.Thoughtourismissubjecttocertainrestrictionsthosefrom elsewhere in the world wishing to visit either of the twin cities arerequired to pass an examination that certi es their ability to unsee the othercity tolerably well, even if not so well as a native Besz and Ul Qomanthe

relative frequencywith whichforeigners, especiallyNorthAmericans, turn upinbothBeszel and UlQomahelps toemphasize the this-worldlynature of thecities. And, aside from the constant possibility (and hence the constant fear)of committing breach, everyday life in the two cities, especially Beszel, does



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not seem to differ greatly from the mundane post-Soviet eastern Europeanstatus quo. People go about the various aspects of their lives, from advancing intheirjobstoformingeroticattachments,inmuchthesamewaythattheydoin the everyday world around us, and, especially, in the predominantly realis-tic crime narratives that descend principally from Hammett.

Likesomanytalesofcrime,TheCity&TheCity beginswithanunusualandstartling murder. A young American graduate student who had been doing archeological research in Ul Qoma is found cut to death in Beszel, her body stripped almost naked and deposited in a drab eld. The case is assigned tooneTyadorBorl, the novels protagonist.Thougha seniorpolice investigatorof Beszels Extreme Crime Squad, Borlin his toughness, his general intelli-gence,hisurbanstreetsavvy,hisbasicdecency,hisstaunchindividualism,hissexual charisma, and his sad essential lonelinessresembles less the of cialinvestigators of police procedurals than the private detectives of the hard-boiled line.Hemostspeci callyrecallsone ofthe greatestofall the toughprivatedicks, Philip Marlowe, the chief creation of Raymond Chandler, who was Ham-

metts immediate successor and is all but unanimously regarded as comparableinimportanceonlytoHammettamonghardboileddetectiveauthors(Chandlerisone of the writers thanked in the acknowledgments to The City & The City ). AsMarlowe typically does, Borl spends the entire book proving himself the soleinvestigator capable of cracking a baf ing case in which the solution to one problemoftenleads toanotherandthenyetanother;and,againaswithMarlowe,the details of the investigation are, on the whole, less memorable than the per-

sonal qualities of the detective and, even more, the unfolding revelations aboutthe environment through which hemoves.

Yet some of the investigative details are important. Mahalia Geary, themurdered student, had been doing research into the early history and prehis-tory of the twin cities, notably into the little-understood period before theirseparation;andatmanypointsitseemsasthoughshemayhavemetherdeaththrough becoming mixed up in the strange politics that dominate the rela-

tionsbetween BeszelandUlQoma.MahaliamadesomecontactsamongBesz

uni cationists, and there are right-wing Besz nationalists (of the True Citi-zensofBeszel)whoassumehertohavebeenauni cationistherselfor,even worse, an Ul Qoman spywho got exactly what she deserved. But the uni ca-



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tionists do not regard her as one of their own. They have come to believe thather apparent interest in themwas basednot onpolitical sympathybut justonthe scholarly desire to have access to their extensive library of historicaldocumentsandthatshewasmoreadangertothemthananythingelse.Asinone of Chandlers Marlowe novels, various hypotheses about Mahalias lifeand death are considered and eventually discarded in the course of Borlsinvestigation. By far the most intriguing possibilityconcerns thehypotheticalexistenceofathird city,namedOrciny.Thoughthesubjectisnotconsidereda

t one for reputable academic scholarship, Mahalia, like many others, hasbeen fascinated by rumors of this third city that not only existed during thedistant pastofBeszelandUlQoma,butthatalso,insomeaccounts,still existsduring the time present of the novel.

Orcinyissupposedtomaintainitselfintheintersticesbetweenthetwincities,occupyingareasassumedbytheBesz tobeUlQomanandbytheUlQomanstobeBesz. Its inhabitants, it is said, manage to conduct themselves in plain view,because they are taken by the citizens of each of the twin cities to belong to the

other, and thus, are unseen by all as quickly as possible. Orciny is credited withawesome powers, comparable tothose ofBreach itselfto which somebelieve itto be identical, though others regard the two mysterious forces as archenemies.The chief source of purported information about Orciny is a disreputable,borderline-illegal, butfor some readerseagerly soughtvolume titled Betweenthe City and the City , by a Canadian scholar named David Bowden. But Bowden, whose academic career has been almost completely ruined by his authorship of

the work, has repudiated the latter, and, during the time present of Mivillesnovel,insiststhattheexistenceofOrcinyisamerefable.Therearethose,however, who believe Bowdens recantation tobedisingenuousandmotivated notonly by the wish to regain scholarly respectabilitybut alsobydire threats fromthe shad-owy powers that control the third city.

Generically, the chief signi cance of Orciny is that it appears to open upin ationary vistas of weird ction in the middle of Mivilles de ationary

hardboiled crime novel. The very name of the third city recalls the world of Tolkienianfantasy:mightOrcinyinfactbethehomeoftheOrcsfromTheLord of the Rings ( ) and The Silmarillion ( )? Then too, that Bowdensbook existswithin Mivilles ownand that its title is nearly identical to, and



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yet a bit longer and certainly stranger than, that of Mivillesmight be takento suggest that the relatively mundane environment depicted in The City & The City is not, after all, the whole story. As readers, we are teased to imaginethat Mivilles narrative of murder, detective routine, bureaucracy, and poli-tics may ultimately open up into a much stranger sort of story, one in whichmore than this-worldly powers are in play. Will the killing with which thenovel opens ultimately be revealed to be something quite different from anordinary murder, something to which the standard investigative techniquesof Borl and the Extreme Crime Squad are hopelessly inadequate? Might,indeed, Mahalia have been murdered, for some reason, by the agents of the weird third city? Did she, perhaps, in her capacity as an eager, energetic, andunconventional young scholar, learn more about Orciny than the Orcinians wishedtobeknown,andtherebyinadvertentlybringaboutherowndestruction?

The answer to all these questions turns out to be no. So far as anyone cantell,thestaid,conservative,academicviewistheprecise,unproblematictruth:Orcinyis,evidently, a mere gmentof theimagination, itssupposed existence

completely unsupported by any sort of factual evidence. Neither TolkienianOrcsnoranythingelseatallweirdorstrangehadanythingtodowithMahaliaGearys murder. Instead, the force behind the killing transpires to be theentirely mundane one of material greed: Mahalia was killed to cover up and protect an illegal commercial scheme of the sort that would have been per-fectly familiar to Philip Marlowe (or to Hammetts Sam Spade or his Conti-nental Op). As Borl discovers by the end of the novel, Mahalia, without

exactlymeaningto,hadbecomeinvolvedwiththecriminals;and,inoneofthenovelsmoreelegantplottwists,itbecamenecessaryforthemtoeliminateher when she concluded for herself that, her longstanding suspicions to the con-trary notwithstanding, Orciny never existed after all. The apparent in ation-arypossibilitydoubtless the in ationary hope formany readers, particularly those who come to this China Miville novel with the entirely reasonableexpectation of nding weird ction to be in playthat there is much strange

and excitingand even fantastic tobe learned about Orciny is cancelled withashrug.The familiar and de ationary truth is thatpeopledonot, asa matter of fact, get killed to prevent the existence of uncanny forces from becoming widely known. People get killed so that other people can make money: a point



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of decisive generic signi cance. For the apparent nonexistence of Orciny means that the overdetermination of genres inThe City & The City ultimately enacts nothing less than the de ation of fantasy in particular and of weird

ction in general by the ordinary everyday verities of crime ction. The simi-larity between Bowdens and Mivilles book titles establishes a clear parallelbetween the invented author and the real-world one; one might almost say that Bowdens repudiation of Between the City and the City rhymes withMivilles de ationand, within the pages of The City & The City , his effectiveabandonmentof the weird ction with which he had been identi edthroughout his entire career to that point (and with which he would later beidenti ed again).

As we have already begun to see, however, the de ationary force of TheCity & The City derives not only from the comparative realism of the hard-boiled detective narrative, but also from other and rather more arealisticelements within the novels generic overdetermination. Like the negativeutopias of Zamiatin and Orwell, and like the somewhat different nightmare

socialvisions ofKafka,The City& The City isonone level anarealistic politicalsatire. But Mivilles target is notprimarily the totalitarianism satirized inWeand Nineteen Eighty-Four , or the less clearly de ned but even more terrifying bureaucratic tyrannies represented in The Trial ( ) and The Castle ( ).Instead, the chief satiric object of The City & The City is xenophobic national-ism.Theconceitthatthetwincitiesoccupyidenticalphysicalspacefunctionsas an estranging device (similar to Swifts division of the Lilliputians into Big

Endians and Little Endians) that highlights the absurdity and the inherentemptiness of the nationalistic oppositions over which human beings fre-quently tear out their lives. The divided city is in real history often an espe-cially pointed example of political futility; and post- Jerusalem and pre- Berlin are explicitly cited in the novel (though Borl does not regardeitherasatrueanalogtoBeszelandUlQoma).ButMivilleconstructsa gureof xenophobic division that is rendered chemically pure, so to speak, by being

shown to be completely formal.It is not just that, as we gradually become aware, there do not seem to beanysigni cantmattersofethnicityorreligionorpoliticaldoctrineoverwhichthe twin cities are opposed. To throw the madness of the mutual antagonism



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between Beszel and Ul Qoma into yet sharper relief, there is not even any geographical distinction between the cities. The barriers that separate themmust, as we have seen, be constructed in the minds of both sets of citizens: sothat theseparation exists simplyandsolelyforseparationssake. Nonetheless,and despite the patent absurdity of the process, peopledo construct these sepa-ratingmentalbarriers,whicharestrongenoughtosupportanelaboratesystemof repressive state apparatuses and an entire ideological way of life. Some people,liketheTrueCitizensofBeszel,areevencapableofspeciallydevotingtheir lives tothe reaf rmation of the substantively empty divisions between the twin cities.Miville himself would certainly be an uni cationist if he lived in Beszel or UlQoma. But, by portraying the uni cationists as marginalized and ineffective, heunderlines the insane power of pathological nationalism. In this way, the de a-tionary tendencyof The City & The City that isprimarily enforcedbythe compar-atively realistichardboiled detectivenarrative is reinforced, ina differentway, by the more arealistic negative satire; and, as suggested above, this satire, in itsrelative arealism, can be regarded as the ghost of the weird ction that it is the

project of The City& The City to extinguish.

I I I .

We need, however, to examine the politics of the two cities a bit more closely to appreciate just how de ationary The City & The City really is. The politicalhistory of Beszel and Ul Qoma is in fact dif cult to reconstruct in complete

detail. The probable (though not quite certain) eastern European locationsuggests both city-states to have once belonged to the now dismantled Sovietbloc or possibly to the equally defunct Yugoslavia. Soviet history seems tosurvive in, for example, the Besz term commissar that, however, is not used inUl Qoma, where the word has a distinctly foreign ring, and where, during thetime present of the text, there are no legally permissible socialist (or otheroppositional) political parties. There are hints, though, that Ul Qoma may

nevertheless have once had the more radically socialist tradition; for at one point we learn that, during the s, it was, along with Castros Cuba andMaos China, a favorite destination for expatriated American radicals. Evenso, it ishard to see why Ul Qomashouldstill, in the present time,besubject to



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economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. Department of State, while Beszelmaintains normal (if not particularly close) relations with Washington. It isalso dif cult to see why, given this geopolitical situation, Beszel should, morethanUlQoma,retainboththedrabindustriallookstereotypicalofSoviet-blocurban geography and the concomitant relatively low level of technology:Washington loves us, and all weve got to show for it is Coke, as Borlcomments bitterly in conversation with an Ul Qoman colleague (Miville

, ). UlQoma, by contrast, looks and feels considerably more modernin the way made possible by the presence of Western consumer capital.

Why all the unanswered questions?Mivillesgrasp of modern geopoliticsis as rm as that of any novelist at work today (not for nothing is he a leading Marxist scholar of international law), and he could certainly have made thesematters crystal clear if he had intended to. But the deliberate scantiness of detail serves an aspect of the texts de ationary satiric tendency. BernardShawperhaps the greatest of British satiric writers since Swift and anotherofMivillesownnumerousprecursorsfoundthefoiblesofthesmallnations

of eastern Europe to provide, in their pettiness and inherent inconsequenti-ality, an especially rich subject-matter for the mockery of nationalist politicsand national self-importance; and there is a real echo of Arms and the Man( ) in The City & The City . If it is dif cult to be totally clear about all thedetails of Shaws Balkans or Mivilles invented cities, this is because thedetails are not really worth bothering about. They are so petty as to be negli-gible from any genuinely geopolitical perspective. Yet, the Irish-born Shaw

hardly regards the Balkan characters of Arms and the Man with self-satis edEnglish jingoism; and the satiric target of the play is not only the nationalismofBulgariaor Serbia, but also that ofBritain and the British Empire itself.Theabsurdity of a dwarf is particularly easy to see and convenient to ridicule; butit is not essentially different (save by being a good deal less dangerous) fromthe absurdity of a giant.

The giant global power to which Beszel and Ul Qoma are contrasted and

compared is, of course, not the mostly defunct British Empire, but the U.S.-dominated multinational capital; and, unlike the Shavian precedent,Mivillesnovelmakesthecontrastfullyexplicit.Asusualwiththisauthor,thetext is structured not only on an overdetermined hybridity of genres but, at a



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deeperlevel,onproblemsofpoliticaleconomy.Indeed,thegeneralphilosoph-ical project of the Miville oeuvre as a whole is the use of the in ationary resources of weird ction to examine and interrogate various aspects of theMarxist theory of society. InThe City & The City , however, Miville shows thatsuch interrogation can also be undertaken through the de ation of weird

ction by crime ction and political satire.In this novel, the chief socioeconomic problem tobeconsidered is uneven

development. As this extraordinarily complex concept has been theorizedfrom Marx and Engels through such later thinkers as Lenin, Trotsky, ErnestMandel, Walter Rodney, and David Harvey, it refers not merely to the empir-ical and apparently contingent fact that some social formations enjoy a moreadvanced stage ofeconomic development thanothers: as, for example, Beszeland Ul Qoma seem to, much to the considerable envy of a Besz character likeBorl. Far more important is that uneven development functions as a motorof capital accumulation, and thus, that developmental unevenness is notnecessarily a contingent byproduct of the capitalist mode of production, but

can be structurally integral to the latter. The very title of Rodneys classicstudy, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa ( ), with its novel and deeply meaningful use of underdevelop as a transitive verb, makes the point suc-cinctly. Underdevelopment, as Rodney puts it:

expresses a particular relationship of exploitation : namely, the exploitation of one country by another. All of the countries named as underdeveloped in the

world are exploited by others; and the underdevelopment with which the world is now pre-occupied is a product of capitalist, imperialist, and colonial-ist exploitation. African and Asian societies were developing independently until theywere taken overdirectlyor indirectlyby the capitalistpowers.Whenthat happened, exploitation increased andtheexportof surplus ensued, depriv-ing the societies of the bene t of their natural resources and labor. That is anintegral part of underdevelopment in the contemporary sense. (Rodney ,

; emphasis in original)

Uneven development, in the sense that Rodney here describes it, was rstconceptuallyformulatedwithfullclarity,oftenundertherubricofunevenand



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combined development, by Trotsky.For Trotsky, as later for Rodney, unevendevelopment most consequentially characterizes the global machinery of capital accumulation during the imperialist phase of the capitalist mode of production. In the absence of imperialist exploitation, those nations that lag behind on the path of capitalist development may actually enjoy certaineconomic advantages, for instance by being able to appropriate at a stroke,and with the newest physical and technical resources, those advances morelaboriously and more imperfectly arrived at by the nations that began todevelop earlier. Savages throw away their bows and arrows for ri es all atonce, in Trotskys arresting example, without traveling the road which lay betweenthosetwoweaponsinthepast( , ).Thusitwasthat,duringtheopening decades of the twentieth century, Germany and the United Statesmanaged to outstrip Great Britain and France as capitalist powers. But fornations subjected to imperialism (whether formal as in Rodneys Guyana orinformal as in Trotskys Russia), the situation is altogether different. In thesesocial formations, uneven development manifests itself as a combination of

development and underdevelopment (hence Trotskys uneven and com-bined development). The only segments of the national economy that arefully developed are those that can enrich the foreign masters (through theexport of surplus noted by Rodney in the passage quoted above) and, often,an indigenous comprador bourgeoisie as well. Resources are thus divertedaway from the (especially industrial) domestic sectors that, if developed,could raise the standard of material consumption for the mass of the popula-

tion. The latter are, accordingly, to be left by imperialism in a state of more-or-less permanent underdevelopment.

The nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialism satirized by Shaw and analyzed by Rodney and Trotsky is not, however, the latest theater in which uneven and combined development can operate.The City & The City issetintheworldoftoday,whereimperialisminitsolderformshasbeenlargely superseded by Empire, in the sense given that term by the important work of

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Hardt and Negri argue that, with thedecline of formal imperialisms like those of the British and French empires,andwiththecontemporarydeclineoftraditionalnationalsovereigntiesastheglobalization of capital accumulation has gathered increasing force, a new



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type of sovereignty hasarisen: a decentered anddeterritorializingapparatusof rule that works to take the entire planet as its domain without being at allcentrally anchoredas the British Empire was inLondonor the FrenchEmpirein Paris. This new sovereignty is what they call Empire. Though the UnitedStates is certainly privileged within this new imperial system, even New York and Washingtonare but two ofthe manypointsfromwhichEmpirewhich isnot American imperialismoperates: Empire manages hybrid identities,

exible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command. The distinct national colors of the imperialist map of the worldhave merged and blended in the imperial global rainbow (Hardt and Negri

, xiixiii; emphasis deleted). Mivilles novel illustratesin some waysmore clearly, I think, than Hardt and Negri themselves dohow uneven andcombined development continues to function in the age of Empire.

For this theme is sounded again and again throughoutThe City& The City .In the opening chapter, for instance, we are casually informed that the in-creasingly aggressive and salacious tone of the Besz press is the work of

newspapers started, inspired and in some cases controlled by British orNorth American owners ( ). Relatively early in his investigation, Borl ndsthat somehigher authorities heneeds toconsult may be unavailable for a few days while they are attending to commercial matters, and, as a police col-league informs him, they are not going to shunt off business meetings and whatnotlike theywouldvedoneonce.Whoringit for theYankeedollar ( ),replies Borl with perfect understanding. While in Ul Qoma on of cial busi-

ness, Borl notices how the traditional architecture of the city is being im- pinged upon and often destroyed by the newer styles of multinational nancecapital: curlicued wooden roo ines next to mirrored steel. Ruefully, he re-

ects, Like all Beszel dwellers, I had become used to shopping in the foreignshadows of foreign success ( ). Uneven development is visible even in thesmallestdetailsofeverydaytwenty- rst-centurylife,aswhenBorl,intheof ceof theUlQomancolleaguewithwhomheisworking, ndstheUlQomanpoliceman

athis computer, using hismore up-to-dateversion ofWindows ( ).But the underdevelopment of Beszel by the Empire of global capital isemphasized to greatest effect at the end of the novel in connection withBorls ultimate success in solving the murder of Mahalia Geary. It turns out



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thattheschemewithwhichsheinadvertentlybecameinvolved,andforwhosesake she was killed, was devoted to the illegal sale of ancient Besz artifacts toa giant multinational corporation. In a particularly nice irony, which illus-trates the formation and deformation of ideology by uneven and combineddevelopment, several True Citizens working with this criminal operation arerevealed to be, despite all their professed Besz patriotism, just a fence forforeignbucks( ),asBorlputsit(and,inaparallelirony,aprominentBesz politician working closely with the reactionary True Citizens is a social dem-ocrat, whose ideological type is shown to be as despicably hypocritical as theLeninist tradition has always maintained). Yet even Borl, for all his shrewd-ness, does not fully appreciate the comicalone might almost say Shaviangulf in stature that separates anything in Beszel or Ul Qoma from the truemasters of the universe. When, at the end of The City & The City , Borl, now working for Breach, confronts one of these mastersan evidently Americanexecutive of the corporation that has been buying the artifactshe expectsthat the fear and awe with which Besz and Ul Qomans hold Breach will carry

thedayforhim.ButtherepresentativeofEmpireissimplyamused:Youthink anyone beyond these odd little cities cares about you? . . . What do you think would happen if you provoked the ire of my government? Its funny enoughthe idea of either Beszel or Ul Qoma going to war against a real country. Letalone you, Breach ( ). The executivewho is the man ultimately mostresponsible for Mahalias murdertakes off in his corporate helicopter andescapes scot-free. Beyond the de ationary generic conventions of crime c-

tionbut by no means unrelated to themlies the most powerful de ation-ary force in our world structured by uneven and combined development: the Yankee dollar.

N O T E S

. See Carl Freedman ( , , especially ).. See Ernst Bloch ( ).. See, for instance, Leon Trotsky ( ), especially chapter , Peculiarities of Russias Devel-

opment, pp. .



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R E F E R E N C E S

Bloch, Ernst. . The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays , trans. Jack Zipesand Frank Mecklenburg. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bould, Mark; and Sherryl Vint. . The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction. Londonand New York: Routledge.

Freedman, Carl. . Marxism, Cinema, and Some Dialectics of Film Noir and ScienceFiction. In Versions of Hollywood Crime Cinema: Studies in Ford, Wilder, Coppola,Scorsese, and Others , . Bristol, UK and Chicago: Intellect Books.

Hardt, Michael; and Antonio Negri. . Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Miville, China. . The City & The City. New York: Del Rey.Moorcock, Michael. . The Spaces In Between. The Guardian , May . http://www.

guardian.co.uk/books/ /may/ /china-mieville- ction (accessed November , ).Rodney, Walter. . How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Bogle Louverture

Publications.Trotsky, Leon. . The History of the Russian Revolution , trans. Max Eastman. London: Pluto

Press.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/30/china-mieville-fictionhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/30/china-mieville-fictionhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/30/china-mieville-fictionhttp://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/may/30/china-mieville-fiction

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From Genre to Political Economy_ Miéville’s The City