The City and the City

The citizens of Besźel and Ul Qoma are conditioned from a very young age to “unsee” their sister city, its inhabitants, its architecture, indeed, its very existence. While Miéville never explains the reasons for this prohibition—implying the reasons are not as important as the prohibition itself—the practice of unseeing is thoroughly integrated into his characters’ daily behavior. They simply take it for granted that they must look away when an image from the other side crosses their sight. That no one questions why such an arbitrary and bizarre rule exists is a comment on the human ability to follow even the most absurd order if it’s backed up by a powerful enough threat. In this case, violating the law—breaching—results in the intervention of Breach, an amorphous secret police force that swoops in and handles the situation by disappearing the guilty party. Breach is a speculative allusion to secret police everywhere—the Soviet NKVD, the Gestapo, East Germany’s Stasi—and while Breach is perhaps not as brutal as its real-world antecedents, it inspires enough fear to keep most citizens of the two cities in line. Breach is also not above bending the law for its own ends. When Borlú asks Ashil how Bowden could be in Breach custody when he never committed breach, Ashil casually responds: “Maybe we’ll push him into Besźel and pull him back into Ul Qoma. If we say he breached, he breached” (369).

Fear of Breach aside, the narrative suggests that human beings have a startling capacity to ignore that which is uncomfortable or runs counter to a particular worldview. A classic real-world parallel of this “willful blindness” is Nazi Germany. Germans living right next door to concentration camps claimed they had no idea what was happening behind the walls. Part of that denial may have been fear of reprisal by the Gestapo, but certainly some people had an inkling that genocide was occurring in their backyards. For the citizens of Besźel and Ul Qoma, the fear of breaching requires them to constantly distract themselves from the obvious—ideal conditions for a powerful ruling class to enrich itself at the people’s expense.

Beyond the fear of Breach and of being disappeared, however, lies another dynamic of unseeing: the social isolation of being cut off from one’s neighbors, a paradoxical phenomenon in which city dwellers, packed into their environment like sardines, nevertheless feel alone, adrift without a social support network. Trained to ignore their neighbors, citizens of both cities know they cannot rely on those with whom they share the same physical space. Fear of seeing ultimately leads to a population moving through the world with heads down, unaware of their surroundings, and existing in their own small social bubbles. Trained to unsee his entire life, Borlú misses key details of the crime scene (Geary is not a sex worker as he had first assumed). As long as he conducts the investigation within the insulated environment of Besźel, he comes up empty. However, as a visitor in Ul Qoma, he sees the world with fresh eyes, and that novel viewpoint opens his mind to other possibilities. Further, untethered from the limits of his home city, he is free to collaborate, to rely on others with different perspectives. Despite his occasional turf battles with Dhatt, having a small community to depend on—Dhatt, Corwi, Ashil—allows him to see the disparate pieces of the case as a coherent whole.

The extent to which this isolation blinds its citizens is evident in the climactic final scenes. The bus crash that triggers the short-lived unificationist uprising spills groups of refugees—those not trained to unsee and therefore seeing everything—into the streets. Not only does the rampant breaching occupy Breach’s attention, but it also poses a threat to the established order. It takes refugees with their fresh eyes to see what indoctrinated citizens cannot—the corruption right under their noses. Miéville makes an implicit comment about immigrants’ valuable ability to constantly upend the social status quo. They reinvent the old, they churn the cultural soil, and they reinvigorate society. This cannot happen, however, when the status quo is rigidly maintained through willful blindness.