The City & the City - China Mieville [139]
RHRC: Some readers and critics will no doubt be tempted to see this novel as an allegory of the relations between the West and the Muslim world, due to the resemblance between the city name of Ul Qoma and the terrorist group Al Qaeda. And many other allegorical readings are possible based on various political, social, and sexual divisions and/or cross-hatchings. Do you have any sympathy with such readings?
CM: Personally I make a big distinction between allegorical and metaphoric readings (though I’m not too bothered about terminology, once we’ve established what we’re talking about). To me, the point of allegorical readings is the search for what Fredric Jameson calls a “master code” to “solve” the story, to work out what it’s “about,” or, worse, what it’s “really about.” And that approach I have very little sympathy with. In this I’m a follower of Tolkien, who stressed his “cordial dislike” of allegory. I dislike it because I think it renders fiction pretty pointless, if a story really is written to mean something else—and I’m not suggesting there’s no place for polemical or satirical or whatever fiction, just that if it’s totally reducible in a very straight way, then why not just say that thing? Fiction is always more interesting to the extent that there’s an evasive surplus and/or a specificity. So it’s not saying there are no meanings, but that there are more than just those meanings. The problem with allegorical decoding as a method isn’t that it reads too much into a story, but that it reads too little into it. Allegories are always more interesting when they overspill their own levees. Metaphor, for me, is much more determinedly like that. Metaphor is always fractally fecund, and there’s always more and less to it. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that in no way do I say some of those readings aren’t valid (though I must say I have very little sympathy for the East versus West one, which is explicitly denied in the text more than once), but that I hope people don’t think the book is “solved” by that. I don’t think any book can be so solved.
RHRC: Of course, you go much further than simple cross-hatching and actually enter into the spaces between Beszel and Ul Qoma, as well as the spaces disputed by them, into what I’m going to call “territories of superposition,” after the principle of quantum superposition. Here we’re in the realm of the Breach and also of the invisible city of Orciny, which may or may not be a myth. Were the Breach and Orciny always part of the novel, or did you only become aware of their existence, so to speak, through circumstantial evidence as you were writing about the two “visible” cities?
CM: Breach was always part of it, because the two main cities presumed their borders, which presumed the policing. Orciny sort of emerged later. There was no reason to stop there. Once you’ve realized you can do a shtick about more and more hidden cities in more and more interstices, you’re into a potential mise-en-abyme, and I could have had fourth, fifth, sixth rumored cities, etc., at ever-decreasing scales.
RHRC: The Breach and Orciny are similar in many ways—indeed, at one point, the possibility is raised that they are the same thing—but in the end, readers are taken into the Breach, while Orciny remains unknown. What’s striking to me about this process is that the revelation is a bit deflating. And not only here: again and again in this novel, when you come to a revelatory moment, at which a more traditional fantasy would open outward, into the unreal or the supernatural, you bring things back to the real, in all its harsh particularity. In that sense, couldn’t this novel be considered an antifantasy?
CM: By all means. There’s a long and honorable tradition of anti -fantasies, of which some of the most invigorating,