THE CITY & THE CITY & The Kitty
I recently started China Miéville’s The City & The City. I’m still in the early going, so the best description of the book I can offer is that it’s a sort of absurd police procedural set in two cities – Ul Qoma and Besźel – which happen to occupy the same physical space. It’s not that the cities “share” the space (at least, that doesn’t seem to be the right verb, to me). Rather, citizens of Ul Qoma and Besźel live on the same streets but are banned from openly acknowledging one another. If by chance a citizen of Besźel happens to glance at an attractive citizen of Ul Qoma passing by, he has to take efforts to “unsee” this person.
In a recent interview with The Guardian Miéville has referred to The City & The City as his “least fantastic” book. It certainly doesn’t match up with our traditional notions of the fantastic – many of which seem to focus on questions such as “What if there were different species of intelligent life that were bipedal and humanoid, but somehow different? Maybe quite a bit shorter than us, with great, big feet – or perhaps, instead, disgusting, with pig-like facial features?” Or, “What if the world worked in such a way that you could find a secret, magical door to a different reality where lions talked and witches could turn people to stone?” Or, “What if there was a little boy who remained five years old forever?”
The stories insinuated by these sorts of “what ifs” are easily identifiable as fantasy (perhaps because they demonstrate a departure from reality manifested in an entity or a set of entities – talking, messianic lions, for example; or a departure manifested in a cause-and-effect reaction or set of cause-and-effect reactions woven into the laws of nature – magic wands, flying brooms, etc.). I’ve been wondering, though, if The City & The City might not be just a different sort of fantasy. I’m suggesting the possibility that books like The City & The City fall clearly into the realm of fantasy (no pun intended) by virtue of their depiction of human behavior that could never actually occur.
I’d argue, even, that this sort of fantasy – which I’ll refer to as behavioral fantasy, for lack of a better phrase – may represent an extremely important thread in fantasy’s history and future. Characters who can never actually exist, worlds and physical reality that can never actually exist – these are both matters that are (in some way) external to us. These sorts of fantasies imply repercussions for the reader, but mostly by way of symbolism or allegory. Behavioral fantasy, on the other hand, confronts us with a sort of “uncanny valley” experience. We’re confronted with human characters who, biologically, could exist in the world. And everything about their world – the physical, external details – could likewise exist. Yet either their behavior (as an individual) and/or the behavior of various groups and political entities is enough at odds with the way people actually behave that it pushes the story into the fantastic.
After starting The City & The City, I also started reading some Kafka and found his work in “The Judgement: A Story for F.” and “In The Penal Colony” to fall into this same category of fiction. These stories are behavioral fantasies. “In The Penal Colony” isn’t a science fiction story, even though the story would fall apart in the absence of the machine that executes the death sentence. It’s not the machine itself that disturbs the reader, but rather the individual and social human behavior that led to the machine’s invention in the first place and, even more, the individual and social human behavior that follows the machine’s invention.
After reading those two Kafka stories, I started to think of the work of other authors I’ve read – such as Brian Evenson – whose work also seems to fall into this category. Typically, we refer to this sort of fiction as absurdist, but I think that to do so might unintentionally ignore the commonality it shares with other fantasy fiction.
But this is just a hypothesis I’m sharing here on my blog. I’m interested in having some discussion regarding this. I’m well aware that to many this sort of discussion is too boring to entertain, since its unlikely to bear any practical result (the phrase “mental masturbation” comes to mind). But I’m interested in the relationship between the absurd and the fantastic, and would love to explore this with others who likewise find it worth thinking about.
