Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 November 2014
Summary
It was . . . hard to observe borders, to see and unsee only what I should, on my way home. I was hemmed in by people not in my city, walking slowly through areas crowded but not crowded in Besźel. I focused on the stones really around me – that I had grown up with. I ignored the rest or tried. . . .
. . . Unseeing, of course, but I could not fail to be aware of all the familiar places I passed grosstopically, the streets at home I regularly walked, now a whole city away, particular cafés I frequented that we passed, but in another country. I had them in background now, hardly any more present than Ul Qoma was when I was at home. I held my breath. I was unseeing Besźel. I had forgotten what this was like; I had tried and failed to imagine it. I was seeing Ul Qoma.
—china miéville, The City & the CityIn The City & the City, a novel by China Miéville, the cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma exist side by side. At points, areas of the cities overlap and interweave, so the same street, albeit with a different name, can belong to both. Although no wall separates the two cities, the people of Besźel must have no visual or physical contact with the people of Ul Qoma: in the terms of the novel, they must not “breach.” Thus, two people may “live, grosstopically, next door to each other . . . , each in their own city, . . . never breaching, never quite touching, never speaking a word across the border” (134). From childhood, the inhabitants of each city learn the key signifiers of difference in order to see only the buildings, people, animals, and vehicles in their own city and to un-see everything in the other city. Yet, as a weary Inspector Tyador Borlú of Besźel makes clear, un-seeing takes effort because nothing but “unseeing others with care” or “polite unsensing” separates the sights and sounds of his own Besźel from those of the supposedly alien Ul Qoma. And when Borlú officially crosses over to Ul Qoma, he must see what he has always un-seen and un-see what he has always seen.
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- The Material Life of Roman Slaves , pp. xiii - xviPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014