Abstract
The paper considers China Mieville’s novel The City and The City from the point of view of geography of space suggesting that the capital is the dominating force that shapes urban reality. The novel builds on the traditional Victorian Gothic ideas of the city as a place of dual existence and exploits the topoi of the noir, but instead of focusing on the individual and the issues of psychological doubling and existential plights of a detective, it is more concerned with the modes of production and the way that capitalism continuously re-invents itself by its use of space without making itself known. The plot elements and aesthetics of film noir add to the mystery of murder, of the twin cities’ identity, and highlight the false consciousness of the masses which enables the ideology’s effectiveness.
Highlights
This article considers China Miéville’s novel, The City and the City, from the point of view of geography of space, suggesting that capital is the dominating force that shapes urban reality. The novel both builds on the traditional Victorian Gothic ideas of the city as a place of dual existence and exploits the topoi of detective fiction, but instead of focusing on the individual and the issues of psychological doubling and existential plights of a detective, it is more concerned with the modes of production and the way that capitalism continuously re-invents itself by its use of space without making itself known
Miéville's urban Gothic dystopia continues the tradition of both Victorian Gothic and detective story in that it is very much concerned with the complexities and mysteries of urban life
From the point of view of human geography and its interest in how the interaction between the space and human activity shapes the human environment, the novel shows that urban Gothic is a very political genre, which is made clear by its dystopian view of human existence as totally controlled by the invisible power of capital
Summary
Miéville contends that the old form of the urban uncanny – for example, the back streets and forgotten shops – is being replaced by new uncanny or forgotten places such as: “the kind of large warehouses that have been built in the late Eighties at the edge of an industrial estate next to a McDonalds [sic]” (Schmeink 28). The total influence of capital is further underlined with the use of the Ul Qoman neologism glasnostroika, which designates “an end to restrictive thinking” [161], and represents a reference to the famous Soviet perestroika, which entailed the reform of the economic system in line with the (world’s) markets as opposed to the government’s central planning Two such heterogeneous and yet similar cities, or the double identity of what in reality is one urban entity, reflect the nature of capital, the city’s underlying schizophrenic current, which is, according to Deleuze and Guattari, a “motley painting of everything that ever was believed” and “a strange hybrid of the ultra-modern and the archaic” (Deleuze and Guattari 34, Fisher 6). By highlighting the difference of the Other, the novel reiterates the fact that “the absolutely other is inextricably within” and that breach “was statement of both crime and identity” (Dollimore 182, Miéville 237)
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