UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM
REWRITING BORDERS
Kafka, Miéville and Anzaldúa
Sofía Ibáñez Badenes
Student Number: 11312912
MA Thesis Comparative Literature
TABLEOF CONTENTS
Introduction 2
Chapter One: Another Brick in the Wall 7
An (Im)penetrable Wall 8
(B)ordering Society 12
The Wall of the State 17
Conclusions 20
Chapter Two: I Walk the Line 21
The Walls of Perception 22
Policing Split Cities 27
Bridges and Breaches 32
Conclusions 37
Chapter Three: No Soy de Aquí ni Soy de Allá 39
Contextualising Borderlands 40
This Wound We Call Home 44
Crossing Linguistic Borders 47
Conclusions 51
Conclusions 53
INTRODUCTION
“God said, 'Let there be a vault through the middle of the waters to divide the waters in two.' And so it was.”
New Jerusalem Bible, Genesis 6
“The idea of a simple definition of what constitutes a border is, by definition, absurd: to mark out a border, is, precisely, to define a territory, to delimit it, and so to register the identity of that territory, or confer one upon it. Conversely, however, to define or identify in general is nothing other than to trace a border, to assign boundaries or borders… The theorist who attempts to define what a border is is in danger of going round in circles, as the very representation of the border is the precondition for any definition.”
Étienne Balibar, Politics and the Other Scene
The genesis of order began with creating distinctions, with separating one thing from the other. The Bible tells how, first, God isolated two identical bodies of water by placing a vault: he constructed a barrier. Subsequently, he assigned distinct meanings to each entity through language: “sky”, “sea”, “earth”, each word becoming a barrier of its own. As Balibar points out, to define something is to give it a finis, an end, a limit. Because we are inscribed in a world of language, we also live in a world of boundaries. That is not to say that everything is a border, but simply that borders exist wherever there is a demarcation process; which makes borders ubiquitous in nature.
Borders are a complex social phenomenon as it is their multiplicity and plurality that characterises them: borders are multidimensional, multi-layered, multifarious. The conception, often found in current political, usually right-wing populist, discourses where borders are presented as static and hermetic technologies, which not only delimit the nation-state, but also secure it, is a deceitful one. To start with, borders are not simply the material structures that divide nation-states. This is an obsolete idea that neglects to consider the symbolic, abstract, metaphorical borders that shape and order
social reality, as well as the essential role of collective imagination in the conceptualisation of borders. Secondly, there is nothing static, fixed, and unchangeable about borders. Not only do they experience physical changes: borders decay, collapse, go through reconstructions, territorial contestation, etc.; but also their meaning shifts over time, and from individual to individual, from society to society. From this approach then, the question that I deem more adequate to pose when addressing the concept of borders is not so much “what is a border”, but rather, “what does it do”, “how does it do it”, “how did it come to be”? These questions already point out towards the fact that each border has to be individually studied, interpreted, and discursively deconstructed.
The previous considerations lead me to vehemently claim that the aim of this thesis is not to provide a definition of what a border is, but to explore, through three literary objects, their multiple facets and how they order and constrain territories and people alike, sowing contradictions and interpretative challenges. I turn to these texts because I attempt to see how these narratives can elucidate the complexities and contradictions that borders generate. I am interested in the different configurations of borders that these texts offer: material, spatial, ideological, epistemological, linguistic… each raising a different set of the questions and problematics, and diversely articulating these issues. One of the main concerns of my analysis will be the poetics of borders, that is to say, the workings of the literary construction of borders. The selection of texts for my analysis— Franz Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China”, China Miéville’s The City &
The City and Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza—a short
story, a dystopian novel and a collection of poems, essays and interviews respectively, shows how the concept of borders migrates across literary genres, and the different possibilities that each provide in formulating borders.
I situate my thesis within theories that conceptualise borders as dynamic processes, as systems of interaction, as shifting, socially and politically constructed entities. More specifically, I will recurrently engage with Thomas Nail’s Theory of the
Border, where he established a theoretical framework for the analysis and understanding
of the different structures and functions of material borders, which he coined as
kinopolitics: the politics of movement. Nail’s “critical limology” aims at describing and
explaining the “conditions, forces, and trajectories of their historical emergence [of borders] and coexistence in the present from the perspective of its bifurcating motion” (17). Because Nail’s theory looks at the border as a “regime or set of relations that organize empirical border technologies” (13) and defends the influence of kinetic processes in the configuration of borders, it overcomes the problems of statism and reductionism that considerations of the border as a mere geopolitical demarcation entail. Furthermore, his focus on the specific conditions, relations and interactions that constitute each material border is a method of analysis that can be extrapoled and tested when turning to the borders portrayed in the texts of my analysis. The fact that Nail conceptualises the border as a regime sustains my reading of these texts where I also look at them as systems that respond to a certain organisation. If we understand borders as “spaces of mobility and uncertainty” (Konrad 3), that prompts the question: how do we write about such shifting, fluctuating and obscure technologies? This thesis will explore how these texts interact and dialogue with such theories, as well as with secondary conceptual sources that reinforce my analysis. It is also worth clarifying that taking into account the fictional nature that both Kafka’s story and Miéville’s novel share, as well as some similar concerns and problematics, I will often compare one another, while I will abstain from such comparative analysis on the last chapter, which
deals with Anzaldúa’s book, as it does not prompt such connections and contrasts with the other two texts.
Now that I have introduced the specific approach and theoretical framework that I will use for the analysis of my objects of study, it is now necessary to briefly outline some of the concerns that these three texts raise, along with an explanation of the rationale behind this selection and organisation of literary objects. In the first place, Kafka’s text deals with the foundation of a border, and more concretely, it consists of the fictional account of the construction of the Great Wall of China. Thus, the first object of my analysis addresses a material structure of division, a defensive wall, a state apparatus. The text explores the forces that sustain and enforce the building of such a structure, and how the wall serves as a state device for controlling and ordering a nation. Through parables, paradoxes and contradictions, Kafka constructs a tale on the inescapability of borders. Secondly, in Miéville’s novel, while borders remain mechanisms of discipline, its scope moves towards the psychological and the conditions of visibility: the borders on the mind, the borders of perception. Miéville explores the fractures, the breaches, the splits that borders produce. The bordering process becomes something negative that results in a subtraction, a denial of space, visibility and awareness. In his novel, the focus is not on the border as a material object, but on the effects that it has on an urban space and its inhabitants; on the practices that emerge from navigating split cities and what opportunities arise. His novel represents an epistemological quest that promises to lead towards a partial freedom from the coercion of borders. Finally, Anzaldúa’s compilation of texts envisions the border between Mexico and the United States as a metaphor for all other kinds of boundaries (racial, sexual, cultural…) that engender a relation of oppression and marginalisation. Both the essays and poems present in her book depart from her personal experience in what she
describes as the borderlands, a space of collision between two worlds. Anzaldúa’s voice challenges our understanding of borders and reclaims the borderland as a space of contestation, heterogeneous identities and the articulation of new forms of expressions that fit this ambiguous zone.
The trajectory of this thesis is marked by a widening frame, which moves from the material to the abstract, through which to read borders and their multiple configurations, meanings and functions. Although all three texts address how borders generate a tension between the physical and the metaphysical, the sequencing of my objects of analysis moves towards an increasing diffusion of borders, as well as towards an opening of opportunities for re-mapping borders and possibilities of border crossing, either literally or symbolically. Furthermore, I argue that all three texts present borders as a form of constraint and oppression, an idea that is variously articulated and which also intensifies from the first to the last text. I conjecture that this intensification in the representation of borders as systems of confinement relates to the role that awareness has to play in the texts, which establishes an obvious relation between knowledge and agency.
ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL
“The Great Wall of China” is a story about construction and destruction. That it is a story about construction is made patently evident in its original title in German: Beim
Bau der Chinesischen Mauer (which could be translated as “during the construction of
the Chinese wall”), which quickly reveals that the focus of the text is the foundation and development of the structure, or, in other words, the bordering process. However, it is also a story about destruction in the sense that by giving an account of the building, the text reveals the fabric that forms this structure by exposing its discursive and symbolic meaning. It exposes the intricacies, obscurities, contradictions and different perceptions and practices that the wall gives place to.
In the prologue to the Spanish edition of Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”, Borges, who was one of the first persons to ever translate Kafka into Spanish, said that of all his stories “The Great Wall of China” was the “most memorable” one. A story where “the infinite is multiple: to stop the course of infinitely distant armies, an emperor who is infinitely remote in time and space orders that infinite generations raise an infinite wall to encircle his infinite empire” (10). What motivates and perpetuates this circle of repetitions, this incessant construction of an apparent futile structure? What are the forces that sustain the construction of a defensive wall, if both the enemy and the government are infinitely remote? What is it that can overcome vastness, invisibility, absence?
In this chapter I read Kafka’s short story as a text that brings to the surface the complexity and obscurity of walls by representing a border from the angle of the contradiction and the inaccessibility; qualities that are also manifested in the institutions that produce the wall. Firstly, I will expose the contradictory nature with which Kafka
constructs his representation of the Great Wall, and how such incongruities facilitate the mystification of the wall and the impossibility of apprehending it. Secondly I will elucidate both the dividing and cohesive functions of the wall, which are sustained by a desire of closure produced by a deliberate flawed construction method, and mass education. I argue in this section that the wall is a state control mechanism that orders society. Finally, I will conclude this chapter by dealing with the Chinese institutions that enforce the construction of the wall by interpreting the parables present in the text, which suggest that the government, like the wall that it produces, is, or rather, has to be, obscure and unreachable.
An (Im)penetrable Wall
The first line of the story announces that “the Great Wall of China was finished off at its most northernmost corner”, to immediately after mentioning that due to the method used for its building, the piecemeal construction,
many great gaps were left, which were only filled in gradually and bit by bit, some, indeed, not till after the official announcement that the wall was finished. In fact, it is said that there are gaps which have never been filled in at all, an assertion, however, that is probably merely one of the many legends to which the building of the wall gave rise, and which cannot be verified, at least by any single man with his own eyes and judgement, on account of the extent of the structure. (Kafka 253)
In this manner we encounter the first incongruity of the text: is the wall complete or is it not? Or rather the question should be: can a wall still be a wall if it has multiple holes, and therefore it can be easily penetrated? In the Theory of the Border Nail defines walls as “a junction of rocks, metal, and wood harnessed together into a relatively fixed
vehicle whose drivers are mounted at its checkpoints fixed on its survey towers, or surveying its perimeters in a patrol vehicle” (18). However, Kafka chooses to depict the Great Wall not as a continuum but as a disjointed wall, which, as I will show later on my analysis, will have great significance in the text. The narrator swiftly tries to dispel this doubt as a probable mere “legend”, whose veracity cannot be proven due to the magnitude of the wall. Thus, to the individual man the wall is incommensurable and therefore inapprehensible. Yet, to the narrator, the “incorruptible observer”, it is obvious that such a faulty method was deliberate: “the command, if it had seriously desired it, could have overcome those difficulties” (Kafka 258). The only evident conclusion to the narrator is that a flawed method, and, in consequence, a flawed wall was desirable. But under what criteria would it be considered flawed? Only under the assumption that a wall is only effective when it is completely hermetic, since “how can a wall protect if it is not a continuous structure?” (Kafka 253). Kafka seems to be purposely disclosing what may seem as a weakness, both a literal and metaphorical fissure in the wall, to later on reveal a deeper, hidden meaning that is not easily accessible to the common man.
There is a constant counterpoint in the text between assumptions and beliefs, and factuality. For example, the narrator remarks that “the wall was intended, as was universally proclaimed and known, to be a protection against the peoples of the north” (253). However, the reader has already been prompted to question the infallibility of the wall in account of its discontinuities, which suggests that what has been “universally proclaimed and known” is not only inaccurate, but deceptive. In other words, there has been established a semiotic system between the wall, the signifier, and protection, the signified: the wall has been turned into a sign. In this sense, Kafka’s literary representation of a wall exemplifies, and anticipates, the way in which some scholars have approached the border in the past few decades. For instance, in his article
“Nationalizing everyday life: individual and collective identities as practice and discourse”, Paasi argued that boundaries are “...institutions and symbols that are produced and reproduced in social practices and discourses” (669), on which Sidaways later drew by proposing that “a border may be read as a semiotic system, a system of images and imaginations” (191). What Paasi and Sidaways are arguing here is that boundaries, even when we are referring to physical structure like walls or fences, are also socially and politically constructed: they are given meaning, symbolic value, a specific narrative. Therefore, a border would not have a unique function and meaning, but could be interpreted differently depending on who is considering it: borders are ontologically elastic.
This also relates to the notion of “aspect-seeing”, coined by Wittgenstein, and later used by Bauder to conceptualise the border as a multidimensional and polysemic object, as it would have as many meanings as individuals, or groups of people, who perceive it (Bauder 1127). In Kafka’s text the collectively accepted narrative is that due to a possible invasion by northern tribes, the appointed enemy of the Chinese nation, a wall that will act as a protective barrier needs to be built. Therefore, in this case the meaning of protection and security is attributed to the wall (while obviously, seen by the northern tribes this very wall would have different connotations). Furthermore, this narrative which creates an enemy also creates heroes and saviours of the nation: both the government that takes action and plans a solution (the wall) to the problem (invasion), and the individual citizens who take part in the actual construction of the wall.
The second incongruity, however, arises when the narrator (and let’s not forget that he gives voice to a self-proclaimed Chinese mason involved in the construction of the wall) asserts that such enemy is in fact not a menace: “we have not seen them [the
people of the north], and if we remain in our villages we shall never see them”, and, even if they did invade the country, “the land is too vast and would not let them reach us” (259-260). By this point, the conviction of the first line with which it was claimed that the wall was complete has totally dissipated. The wall as a defensive structure is useless: not only it is a vulnerable structure, but more importantly, there is virtually nothing to defend the empire from since the enemy is absent. Newman affirmed that “the essence of a border is to separate the “self” from the “other.” As such, one of the major functions of a border is to act as a barrier, “protecting” the “us insiders” from the “them outsiders”” (14). Following this idea, a border does not only entail a physical barrier, but it is also a metaphysical one, “protecting” the values and practices of the insiders from being merged by outside influences: it preserves the purity of the nation. However, in Kafka’s text we find this notion to only work as a discursive tool, rather than to confirm it as the actual the function of the wall, which rather than securing a nation, it seems to confine it and circumscribe it to an endless wheel of labour as I will disclose later on.
Kafka appears to suggest that the enemy’s invisibility does not suffice to dispel this myth of security, a security that is both physical and spiritual, and this process of Othering that has been internalized by the citizens of China; not even if some are aware of the fact that this invented enemy is not the cause for the construction of the wall: “Unwitting peoples of the north, who imagined they were the cause for it! Honest, unwitting Emperor, who imagined he decreed it! We builders of the wall know that it was not so and hold our tongues” (Kafka 260). Once again, the “universally proclaimed and known” is contested by occasional sparkles of awareness at other possible meanings or functions of the wall. Despite that, later on there are multiple instances where scepticism at the possibility of shedding some light on the unique obscurity of the
Chinese political institutions and their decisions and intentions seems to prevail: the “eternal truth remain[s] eternally invisible in this fog of confusion”; or, “one hears a great many things, true, but can gather nothing definite” (Kafka 261). Although the wall could be potentially penetrated by the enemy, if it would ever materialise, by contrast it turns out to be an impenetrable entity to the nation that is building it. Kafka presents us with a wall wrapped in a Socratic paradox: the only truth attainable is that truth is unattainable.
(B)ordering Society
Although Kafka does suggest that truth is unavailable to the individual man, he makes his narrator undertake a historical inquiry to “seek for an explanation of the system of piecemeal construction which goes farther than the one that contented people then” (Kafka 259). This almost detective role where he pursues to see the unseeable, collides with his character as an insider: he took part, and was part, of that which he is trying to elucidate. That certainly brings to the surface issues of unreliability concerning the narrator’s account. However, this dual role of both insider and outsider serves to enhance the constant dichotomy in the text between knowledge and ignorance. A dichotomy that is embodied in the wall: an insurmountable structure that represents the impossibility of understanding the mechanisms of the state.
As expressed in the previous quoted line, the core of the narrator’s inquiry is to identify the causes that led to the choice of a system of construction that produced a discontinuous and therefore imperfect and inexpedient protective wall. At first, the narrator takes a stance as an enforcer of the discourse of perfection in order to justify the piecemeal construction: to achieve a perfect wall, the “most scrupulous care”, the “application of the architectural wisdom of all known ages and peoples” and an
“unremitting sense of responsibility in the builders” are said to be “indispensable prerequisites for the work” (Kafka 254). This very desire for perfection establishes a direct and intimate connection between builder and building as expressed in the following passage: “They were masons who had reflected much, and did not cease to reflect, on the building of the wall, men who with the first stone they sank in the ground felt themselves a part of the wall” (Kafka 255). This level of engagement, it is later noted, also produces great impatience at the completion of the wall. Since such desired completion by the builders can never be fulfilled “even in the longest lifetime” (Kafka 255) on account of the magnitude of the project, it is necessary to dispel the despair and hopelessness that emerge from working on something you will not be able to witness finished by creating an illusion of closure. The system of the piecemeal construction produces micro-representations of a finished, perfect wall. The different gangs of workers are in perpetual circulation, erecting small lengths of the wall to later be transferred to begin other segments, leaving multiple disjointed pieces of the wall. But it is during those journeys towards other neighbourhoods where they see “finished sections of the wall rising here and there” which provides “the confidence with which the simple and peaceful burgher believed in the eventual completion of the wall” (Kafka 256). It is after those visions of finished sections that the builders “like eternally hopeful children” commit again to the eternal labor of building an infinite wall since “the desire once more to labor on the wall of the nation became irresistible” (256). A fish that bites its tail, a perfect circle: hope and desire (of an eventual closure) which are the emotions that emerge in consequence of the system of piecemeal construction are also the perpetuators of this method. The lack of completeness assures a desire for it.
Besides this longing for closure, the story notes that there is another essential element that enforces the construction of the wall: a sense of a community.
They set off earlier than they needed; half the village accompanied them for long distances. Groups of people with banners and streamers waving were on all the roads; never before had they seen how great and rich and beautiful and worthy of love their country was. Every fellow countryman was a brother for whom one was building a wall of protection… Unity! Unity! Shoulder to shoulder, a ring of brothers, a current of blood no longer confined within the narrow circulation of one body, but sweetly rolling and yet ever returning throughout the endless leagues of China. (Kafka 255-256)
At the beginning of the Theory of the Border, Nail argues that a border is “a process of social division. What all borders share in common, following this definition, is that they introduce a division or bifurcation of some sort into the world” (2). For Nail the border is a continuous process, rather than a static object; it is a technology of division that continuously includes and excludes by redirecting and redistributing flows of people or things. But in this key passage of the text, Kafka emphasises, quite on the contrary, the bonding process that the building of the wall provides; there is no division, but union; no distribution but junction. This notion also illustrates the fact that the effects of the wall are, throughout the text, always internal, intramural, national: the wall is made by and for the nation. Parallel to the construction of the border, a very strong sense of national identity also emerges. To convey this, Kafka uses a language that is imbued with border imagery: like a wall, the nation is a circular structure, a “ring of brothers”, that contains a shared flow of blood. This representation imagines the citizens as a continuum; their bodies forming a continuous and homogenous barrier. The construction of the material wall creates, simultaneously, another symbolic border made of bodies, of human material, that also delimits the nation-state. In other words, the nation’s work is to build the wall that produces the idea of the nation.
Moreover, this circular imagery, which evokes movement, circulation and repetition, reinforces the idea that a border is a dynamic process. Newman remarks that “it is the process of bordering, rather than the border line per se, that has universal significance in the ordering of society” (15). Like other border scholars discussed in this thesis, Newman highlights here that borders, either territorial lines or other sorts of metaphysical boundaries that divide social reality have little or no meaning at all by themselves: it is the bordering process, that is to say, the ways in which those boundaries rearrange, reshape and reorganise space and bodies, the agents behind those processes and their goals, which shed light into the significance of borders as organisers of space and people. That is the relevance of approaching borders as processes, rather than objects (in the same way that Nail does): it widens the scope of inquiry; it moves passed beyond ontological questions into questions of utility, functionality, performance and agency that actually tell more about the multidimensionality of borders.
How that this work in Kafka’s text? To what an extent does he present the wall as an instrument for ordering society? In the first place, he proves that the wall does not need to be completed, or hermetic, or simply effective in order to alter and greatly impact the lives of the Chinese citizens. Secondly, the project to build a wall determines and limits individual aspirations or skills, tracing a line between what is it useful and worthy. It orders society establishing a hierarchy of abilities: the “ignorant day laborers from the populace” on one side, and the “expert versed in the art of building” (Kafka 254) on the other. The citizens are first divided into fit or unfit to work on the construction, to later be categorized into ranks according to their knowledge and capacities, to finally be grouped into the western or eastern team, each also split into gangs of limited number of workers. Going back to Nail’s theory, he later refines his previous statement regarding the dividing nature of borders, by adding that “the border
is not only in between the inside and outside of two territories, states, and so on, it is also in between the inside and the inside itself: it is a division within society” (3). In Kafka’s text, this tension between internal segmentation and cohesion seems to be essential in the creation of the nation.
The story also notes the relevance of education in the ordering of society. The narrator states that “fifty years before the first stone was laid, the art of architecture, and especially that of masonry, had been proclaimed as the most important branch of knowledge” (254), that is to say, the project of building the wall makes necessary to “change the structure of knowledge” (Whitlark 237). The narrator also tells a personal anecdote, to depict the “spirit of the time”, in which children are ordered to build “a sort of wall out of pebbles” that later is knocked down by the teacher (action that is accompanied by severe scolding) on account of the “shoddiness of our work” (254). This anecdote illustrates the indoctrination to which children are exposed to, engraining in their psyche from their youngest years the desire for construction and the ideal of perfection. As Paasi highlights, “[education has] a crucial meaning in the construction and reproduction of the (imagined) national community” (13). Paasi is undoubtedly invoking Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, where he defined a nation as
an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign. (…) It is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings. (6-7)
Anderson’s words take special relevance when we take into account that vast numbers of workers died during the actual construction of the Great Wall of China. Large numbers of human remains have been discovered throughout the years at the foundations of the wall by archaeologists, which led to the wall be accompanied by the epithet of “the longest cemetery in the world”. Kafka, who certainly knew about the conditions under which the real Wall of China had been constructed, used this knowledge for his own construction of a satire on the building of a nation. Blood and sweat are the real bricks of the walls of the state. The concept of fraternity can also become a form of constraint through the imagination of the “ring of brothers” (the circular shape suggest that there is no way of escaping from this flow), which compels citizens to work for a communal project on account of a so-called sense of comradeship. Kafka’s wall, through the method of the piecemeal system, first divides the Chinese citizens, to later order and assemble them into “armies of labor” (Kafka 253), and, just like an army, it becomes a homogenous mass deprived of all singularity that has internalized that there is only one aim, one common purpose.
The Wall of the State
It is now clear that the promise of the wall is what makes it effective as a political device that operates the nation. But how does Kafka characterise the leaders of such nation? Just like the wall, the high command, the highest Chinese authority in the text, and its motives are inscrutable. At the beginning of my analysis I have given an account of the many instances where the wall is depicted as unknowable, ambiguous and obscure, but there are as many that depict the high command in the same way. The narrator mentions a maxim of the time of the construction that ran:
Try with all your might to comprehend the decrees of the high command, but only up to a certain point; then avoid further meditation (…) but not because it might be harmful; it is not at all certain that it would be harmful. What is harmful or not harmful has nothing to do with the question. (Kafka 259)
This ironic use of a conduplicatio, the incessant repetition of the word “harmful”, makes clear that a considerable degree of ignorance is fundamental for the stability of the system. Not only that, but there is an evident threat being made: an attempt to cross the boundaries of what it is allowed to be known will be punished with violence. Just like the wall’s actual function, the state gears must remain veiled.
To further emphasise this idea, the narrator uses the parable of the river. In this parable, the flow of the river corresponds to the Chinese population. As long as the current follows “its own course until it reaches the sea, where it is all the more welcome because it is a worthier ally” (Kafka 259) then everything is fine, that is to say, under control. The problems arise when the river
overflows its banks, loses outline and shape, slows down the speed of its current, tries to ignore its destiny by forming little seas in the interior of the land, damages the fields, and yet cannot maintain itself for long in its new expanse, but must run back between its banks again, must even dry up wretchedly in the hot season that presently follows. (Kafka 272)
Here we can see how the wall of the state “define[s] the limits and transition points of human flows” (Nail 16). The narrator points out to the vulnerability and precariousness of the “outline” and “shape” of the human flow, which can “ignore its destiny”. Hence the need for a discipline that sets a path and prevents the “overflow”. As Foucault says, “discipline fixes; it arrests or regulates movements; (…) it establishes calculated
distributions” (208-9). In that manner, Kafka describes a form of government that first of all produces an idea of destiny, which in this case would be the construction of the wall, and then it displays a system for enforcing that alleged destiny. We could also say that authority acts like a limit, establishing where the boundaries are.
Furthermore, the narrator also explains that, just like there are gaps in the wall, there also exists a gap between the administration and the population. This is mostly represented by the anonymity of the Emperor. The figure of the Emperor is surrounded by a veil of mystery in the text, to the extent that the narrator claims that “if (…) anyone should draw the conclusion that in reality we have no Emperor, he would not be far from the truth” (Kafka 278). This is further exemplified in the text by yet another parable, in which the Emperor himself sends a message to an ordinary subject. However, the story notes that the arrival of the message is impossible due to the vastness of the capital, described as an insurmountable labyrinth; an endless succession of chambers, courts, palaces and gates. This stress in the lack of communication between the centre, the imperial capital, and the peripheries of the state, is what is been presented as one of the causes for the implementation of the wall that works as a physical icon. This building seems to be then a way of compensating for the indefiniteness or the altogether absence of the Chinese figures of authority. In a state that is marked by its vastness and where both the rulers and the enemies remain out of sight and reach, eternally remote, to the common man, the wall becomes the lighthouse of the empire, a visible waving flag in an infinite land.
Kafka really highlights the inescapability of such technologies that govern, shape and order society when the narrator asserts that he believes that “the high command has existed from all eternity, and the decision to build the wall likewise” (Kafka 260). The text suggests then that the wall and the State are ontologically
coetaneous, both emerging at the same time, producing each other, existing in reciprocity. As Nail points out, “the border is both constitutive of and constituted by society” (3). In sum, what Kafka constructs in this text is a wall that is a parable of the invisible walls that constitute society.
Conclusions
Kafka’s literary representation of the Great Wall elucidates the complex relationship between a border and the nation that constructs it. By focusing on the bordering process, the text explores the polysemic nature of walls, how they are perceived, what practices and imaginations they generate and who and how operates them. In the text, the wall works as a national symbol and, above all, a promise; a promise that allows perpetuating an illusion of unity and of common purpose. The desire for the eventual completion of the wall has an ambivalent effect since it is used to indoctrinate and subjugate the citizens but it also produces hope and faith in the future, even if they are based on a deceitful projection. The wall needs to be infinitely uncompleted since its building is what sustains the wall of the state, providing the possibility of a cohesive and organised nation. For Kafka, the concept of the wall, as well as the state mechanisms that sustain this concept, are inherent to society, suggesting that we are eternally bound to their construction.
I WALK THE LINE
If in Kafka’s story we had a narrator undertaking a historical inquiry on the construction of the Great Wall, and during that process he decoded the multiple meanings and functions of the wall, similarly The City & The City also deals with the solving of a mystery, a truth quest. Miéville’s dystopian novel starts like an apparently normal who-dunnit: a corpse is found, and a subsequent investigation is launched. It is during the course of this detective work that Inspector Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad will unravel the fragility of an apparently inescapable urban labyrinth.
Miéville’s novel presents a very particular urban setup: the fictional cities of Besźel and Ul Qoma occupy exactly the same geographical space, however, they are ordered and lived as two different political and social territories. This artificially created alterity is enacted by both the governments of the two cities and their citizens, who comply to acknowledge an invisible, psychological border that manages to divide social space through the practice of “unseeing” (i.e., consciously ignoring the “twin” city and its citizens). This spatial dichotomy is also enforced by Breach, a threefold term in the novel since it means at the same time the crime of trespassing this factitious border of the sensible (either by occupying the alter urban space or by seeing it), the obscure entity that polices the divide, and finally a third-space where this peculiar police dwells. The novel depicts the cracks and the falling downs of this status quo and at the end of the novel the protagonist achieves to effectively breach the border(s) and inhabit that no man’s land in between.
During an interview, when asked to what extent the urban setup of the novel had been inspired by “real-life border conditions”, Miéville said that his intention had been
to derive something hyperbolic and fictional through an exaggeration of the logic of borders, rather than to invent my own magical logic of how borders could be. It was an extrapolation of really quite everyday, quite quotidian, juridical and social aspects of nation-state borders. (BLDGBLOG)
It is precisely this unique “logic of how borders could be” that constitutes the focus of my analysis for this second chapter. I will therefore begin by exploring how Miéville formulates the mechanics of this network of both material and metaphysical borders and how this relates to Rancière’s concept of the distribution of the sensible. In the second section I will continue dwelling on the conditions of visibility and how they connect with the instruments of control and surveillance that enforce the respect for the (re)produced lines that divide the sensible and the spatial in the novel. Finally, I will turn to the possibilities that the novel offers in terms of border-crossing and breaching and how they manifest the cracks, failures and ruptures of this system of self-discipline and border terror. I will argue that instances of border resistance and liberation can be found in The City & The City, where a visual and spatial reconciliation is achieved through an epistemological quest. Invisibility and ubiquity will be key features of the borders that operate in the novel, which will open room for discussion on recognition, acknowledgement, visualization and the division and perception of space.
The Walls of Perception
The borders that divide the cities of the novel are more diffuse, more complex, and certainly harder to recognise than the one in Kafka’s text. Although the wall that Kafka depicts has a powerful symbolic value, after all it is a material, perceivable structure. It is this very physicality of the wall, the process of building it, that creates the sense of a
defined nation. That is not the case in The City & The City, where the perception of the border between the cities is a work of imagination.
The narrator of the novel, Inspector Borlú, like Kafka’s narrator has a dual and contradictory function: as a Besź dweller, he has to participate in this convoluted border system, which implies purposely failing to perceive certain spaces and bodies; while as a detective, his job is to see that what is hidden, to have total vision. Thus, the novel develops in a constant dichotomy of the visible and the invisible, the accessible and the inaccessible; which also very much resonates with Kafka’s text. However, in Miéville’s novel the citizens are aware of the system in which they take part and it is taken for granted that things have to be this way, that these cities have to be lived in this fashion; unlike in Kafka’s text where there is no awareness of the way in which the wall operates.
Most of the first part of the novel deals with the description of this urban labyrinth, where the difficulties of navigating the city, with their citizens always at the edge of trespassing a border line, are clear: “Always the question of how to get through the city (…) ignoring, unseeing, the shinier fronts of the elsewhere, the alter parts” (Miéville 53). The need for the practice of unseeing, and in general cancelling all perception of the other city and its citizens, emerges from the nature of the division between the two cities, which is not a clear-cut line that gives place to two well defined city-states. All urban space in the novel is distributed into “alter”, “total” or “crosshatched” zones. The total areas are the freely accessible zones to the inhabitants of each city: they totally belong to that city-state and do not share space with the other. The alter areas, on the other hand, belong to the neighbouring city and therefore they are restricted areas: they are inaccessible and must be not only avoided but ignored. The crosshatched areas are were the “threatening geography” (Miéville 21) truly manifests,
as they are shared urban space, that is to say, they can be accessed by the citizens of both cities, but the citizens are only allowed to occupy the space without acknowledging each other, i.e. seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling each other.
Inspector Borlú gives multiple testimonies of this reality. For instance he says that “their voices [from Ul Qoman citizens] were muted to me, random noise” (Miéville 54); or he mentions that he must unsee a colour because “the shade called Besźel Blue [is] one of the colours illegal in Ul Qoma” (Miéville 65). He also gives account of how smelling can become a trespassing act: “the scents of Besźel Ul Qomatown are a confusion. The instinct is to unsmell them, to think of them as drift across the boundaries, as disrespectful rain (Miéville 66). Thus, although there are some spaces where the citizens of both cities are included, there is no shared sensorial space. I understand this partition of space and perception in the novel to function in similar ways as to what Rancière called the “distribution of the sensible”,
the system […] that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it. A distribution of the sensible therefore establishes at one and the same time something common that is shared and exclusive parts. (13)
For Sayers, “this distribution of the sensible sets the divisions between what is visible and invisible, sayable and unsayable, audible and inaudible. It functions like a Kantian categorial framework that determines what can be thought, made or done”. The implications of a social order based on this distribution of the sensible are that it sets stiff, and apparently unchangeable, patterns for what it is included and excluded: who is allowed to participate where and in what; it determines possibilities of each individual by demarcating spaces of agency and belonging. However, the realisation, the
recognition of this operating distribution of the sensible that foments inequalities and asymmetrical perceptions and experiences of social reality, allows for reconfigurations of this system, for openings and eventual redistributions. Rancière’s distribution of the sensible constitutes a productive concept for my analysis, as it explores the relation between space, agency and visibility, a constellation of elements that take especial relevance in Miéville’s novel. As Martin points out, Miéville’s novel
remind us of the functional segregation, at once intricate and strict, insistent and fuzzy, that structures every urban environment, whether in formalised zoning policies or the unwritten rules governing eye contact in certain locations. Beyond this functional level it also reminds us of the social production of space: that the cities we live in are shaped as much by perceptions of gender, race, age, socio-economic group, sexual orientation, cultural affiliations and religious belief as by their material dimensions. (713-714)
Miéville problematises this urban segregation and partition of social space through his exaggeration of the logic of borders. This is so because the mechanics of borders can be compared to this distributive system in the sense that borders also order space establishing who is allowed where, who is included and who is excluded, who has access to certain spaces and who is denied access. A border regulates the course of a flow (as Kafka visually expressed with the parable of the river in “The Great Wall of China”) of people, or capital, or ideas, and, in Miéville’s novel, also sensations; tracing the line of accessibility and the ability to perceive.
How is this distribution of the sensible specifically manifested in the novel? The most obvious evidence of it is the practice of “unseeing”, a continuous awareness of otherness and the subsequent cancellation of that Other, following the maxim of that
what I do not see/acknowledge does not exist. Ironically, in order to make the Other disappear, to make it invisible, first the citizens of each city must recognise each other as the Other. The novel notes how a meticulous training since early childhood is essential for this constant work of recognition of alterity; therefore stressing, like Kafka’s text, the notion that discipline is a cornerstone in the implementation of borders: “The early years of a Besź (and presumably an Ul Qoman) child are intense learning of cues. We pick up styles of clothing, permissible colours, ways of walking and holding oneself, very fast (Miéville 80). The training is not only mandatory for the residents of the cities, but also for visitors or immigrants who would not be aware of this system. Therefore they are also obliged to learn
key signifiers of architecture, clothing, alphabet and manner, outlaw colours and gestures, obligatory details and, depending on their Besź teacher, the supposed distinctions in national physiognomies – distinguishing Besźel and Ul Qoma, and their citizens. (Miéville 93)
Furthermore, this explanation of the mandatory training illustrates what I meant in the beginning when I characterised the borders of the novel as ubiquitous and diffused. In Kafka’s text there was a single, yet multi-layered and polysemic border; while here we find multiple borders. In the novel, bodies act as limits themselves, adopting markers of alterity (gestures, clothes, colours, mannerisms, etc.) and learning to recognise the respective markers of their neighbours. This also implies that there is an on-going bordering process, that there is not a single instance of division, but an infinite number of divisions that occur continuously as bodies move around the city/es, encountering and cancelling each other. Miéville envisions a continuous process of bordering through the body, and more concretely through gazing and recognising, which creates distinct nationalities.
Policing Split Cities
But how are these invisible borders sustained in the novel? Who enforces this peculiar system that splits the cities? In Kafka’s text, the perpetuation of the wall is ensured by positive feelings: hope, desire of completion, togetherness, national pride. Remarking again Whitlark’s idea, the “structure of knowledge” in “The Great Wall of China” is changed by the state, crowning masonry as the most important branch of knowledge. In Miéville, it is a change in the structure of law what will protect the network of invisible boundaries. Functioning as two separated city-states, Besźel and Ul Qoma have, naturally, two different jurisdictions: each city has its laws, its own government, its own police. But no matter under what juridical realm the citizens are living, there is no worse criminal offense than the act of breaching (either physically crossing a boundary, or simply acknowledging the existence of the other city or its citizens). The punishment has to be proportional to the “atrocity” of breaching. The failure to respect the boundaries of the cities entails the disappearance of the person who committed the infraction, suggesting that there is no life possible outside the system.
This also illustrates the problematics of judicial borders, which are especially manifested in the character of Inspector Borlú. His duties and responsibilities are split just like the cities. During his quest for justice and truth he is torn between doing his job as an inspector, therefore protecting the law and his own city, while also respecting a supreme authority, even when that implies bypassing his duty as a policeman and his own moral code:
…it would be far worse than illegal for me to pursue it, not only illegal according to Besź codes – I would be in breach. (…) I would do my job, though
doing it meant breaking a code, an existential protocol more basic by a long way than any I was paid to enforce. (45-46)
This dispute of allegiances evidences the tensions of navigating split cities, as their divided geography and jurisdiction also results in torn individuals with fragmented lives in terms of visibility, mobility and morality.
Breach, the force that makes the split possible, is also the force that prevents unification. Breach acts as a sort of a “border patrol” that polices transnationally; it is “the observing power” (Miéville 75) whose only function is to punish one violation: “the existential disrespect of Ul Qoma’s and Besźel’s boundaries” (Miéville 134-135). It is impossible not to invoke Foucault again as we are clearly in the domain of discipline, punishment, control and surveillance. What is interesting about Breach is that although its “major, if not exclusive, function is to assure that discipline reigns over society as a whole” (Foucault 216) it is not, however, a “state apparatus”, but on the contrary it is described as an “alien power, (…) a shadow over which we have no control” (Miéville 78). What is surprising is that although Breach complies with Foucault’s definition of police in the sense that its sole purpose and function is to exert discipline in order to preserve social order in both cities, or rather, to maintain the order that creates two cities instead of one, it complicates the notion of the state, and by extension of a state apparatus, as it is described as an independent organization that is out of the state’s control: something that comes from elsewhere, from outside the polis. Therefore, the force that imparts discipline is indisciplinable and ungovernable by the city-states, and that is precisely what makes it a terrifying power. Breach operates independently of the cities, and yet it owns the cities, its control over them is total as well as its mobility around them. The totality of its powers emerges from its total vision that results in total accessibility. Breach watches everything and everyone, but no one
can watch it: “Who sees it? But we know it’s there. Watching. Any excuse… we’re gone” (Miéville 63).
Breach’s relation of visibility with respect to the citizens can be compared to the Panopticon, Bentham’s system of observation where the subjects whose behaviour “needs” to be reformed or reshaped (prisoners, patients, schoolchildren, madmen, workers…) are reduced to a “state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault 201). While Bentham’s idea is embedded in an architectural form: a circular building divided into cells with a tower in the middle, and through a special lighting arrangement the individuals in the cells are permanently visible, while the supervisor in the tower remains invisible, and thus his presence is unverifiable; the mechanics stay the same in Miéville’s novel. The totality of the fictional urban space becomes a “field of visibility” and each citizen of either city, who is aware of his exposition to permanent scrutiny, “assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection” (Foucault 202-203). It is interesting to notice how Miéville’s novel reflects on Bentham’s architectural idea and Foucault discursive analysis of it by introducing in his text a sort of panoptic logic that is both discursive and visual. In the novel, because the citizens know themselves to be subjects of continual observation, they assume on their own the imposed limits on their experience of space. This system of asymmetrical visibility (Breach observes, but no one observes Breach), which assures a high level of self-discipline in the citizens, allows for the perpetuation of the split between the cities without the usage of any material technology or physical force, except for when Breach intervenes. In order to ensure the respect for the borders there is only need of the menace of a possible intervention, the promise of a
severe punishment, the shadow of a correctional institution, personified in Breach. In these panoptic cities, while the citizens are always identifiable and traceable, Breach remains anonymous, invisible and unverifiable. When Breach appears to control and contain an “area of intrusion” by “organising, cauterising, restoring” (Miéville 81) people see nothing more than “shapes, figures” (Miéville 81). By contrast, its powers are unequivocal: “the powers of Breach were always wrathful and as Old Testament as they had the powers and right to be” (Miéville 64); “the powers of the Breach are almost limitless. Frightening” (Miéville 83). Thus, it is safe to say that what Miéville describes is a system a seemingly total control through total surveillance.
In the book Global Surveillance and Policing: Borders, Security, Identity Marx argues that surveillance in some cases can be used as a technique of “boundary maintenance” since
Surveillance serves to sustain borders through defining the grounds for exclusion and inclusion. (…) Surveillants (…) serve as gatekeepers, compliance inspectors, social-essence definers and guardians, assessing aspects of individuals to determine who they are, what categories they fit into and how they are to be treated. (13)
Therefore, according to Marx, surveillant agents reproduce the mechanics of borders in the sense that they categorise, limit, differentiate and order bodies. Following this idea, it could even be argued, as Nail does, that the police patrol is in itself a border as it also establishes a “process of a general management of social circulation” (119). Observation is essential in this regulation of social movement, as in order to establish who is allowed to go where and what behaviour is appropriate, it is necessary to first identify the category, group and identity that people belong to. However, while Nail
claims that the police patrol not only needs to effectively watch over the population but that its aim is “to make itself visible in order to deter crime” (122), in Miéville’s novel Breach remains an invisible surveillant that only makes itself visible when it needs to intervene, once the crime is committed. There is no need for a dissuasive presence as precisely “this invisibility is a guarantee of order” (Foucault 200). If in Kafka’s text it was hope and desire what perpetuated the construction of the wall; in Miéville’s novel is fear what enforces the compliance with the network of borders: “The fear (…) that Breach freeze, that obedience reflex shared in Ul Qoma and Besźel” (Miéville 326). The cities, with their infinite borders and their imbedded technologies of control, institute a mechanism of self-correction, of self-discipline in their citizens.
Furthermore, in Kafka’s story the state was contingent on the construction of the wall, while in Miéville’s story there is an interdependent relationship between the border patrol Breach and the cities: “The two cities need the Breach. And without the cities’ integrities, what is Breach?” (Miéville 84). This means that the very existence of the cities depends on the custodians that defend the borders that produce the cities. But more importantly, the novel notes that it is the citizens themselves the ones who continuously (re)produce the divisions that conceive two cities, and not just one:
‘It’s not just us [Breach] keeping them [the cities] apart. It’s everyone in Besźel and everyone in Ul Qoma. Every minute, every day. We’re only the last ditch: it’s everyone in the cities who does the most work. It works because you don’t blink. That’s why unseeing and unsensing are so vital. No one can admit it doesn’t work. So if you don’t admit it, it does. But if you breach, even if it’s not your fault, for more than the shortest time… you can’t come back from that’. (Miéville 370)
If bodies act as borders in Miéville’s novel is because the citizens accede not to acknowledge something they know is there: it only works if you do not admit that it does not. In his paper “Unacknowledged cities” Martin compares Miéville’s “conceptual topology” with that of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. He states that “‘thoughtcrime’ identifies an era where the state sought to control belief, while breach identifies precisely the perception that for all intents and purposes, belief is irrelevant to contemporary mechanisms of social control” (715). This is clearly manifested in the practice of unseeing, where in order not to breach the citizens must ignore something they know to be there. And it is precisely this knowledge, the certainty of an alter presence that makes it possible to unacknowledge it, as it is not possible to refuse to see something if you did not know it was there in the first place. Therefore, Martin points out that in Miéville’s novel social control is exerted through an imposed cancellation of knowledge, and not through the manipulation of belief. The novel stresses that being aware of the mechanisms of the system does not suffice to refuse to take part in it or try to modify it. Despite this, unlike in Kafka’s text, Miéville does show cracks, breaches, in this system of apparent total control and surveillance, thus providing with examples of border resistance.
Bridges and Breaches
So far I have talked about Breach in terms of “border patrol” and although I have extensively mentioned the intricate network of imagined, reproduced, invisible boundaries that cut and intersect the urban space of the novel, I have not yet addressed the only physical border that both separates and connects the fictional cities: Copula Hall, “like the waist of an hourglass, the point of ingress and egress, the navel between the cities. The whole edifice a funnel, letting visitors from one city into the other, and the other into the one” (Miéville 85-86). Just like the name of the border-building,
Miéville uses here a series of metaphors that emphasise the connecting value of the border, characterising it as a place of passage. If Copula and navel plainly symbolise union, the hourglass and the funnel more concretely depict an instrument that filters and channels a substance. And that is essentially the function of Copula Hall: through a system of checkpoints, it grants or refuses permission to leave or enter either city; it sets the conditions of accessibility, redirecting the “steady current” of “pedestrians and vehicles” (Miéville 85). Copula Hall is not just the only perceivable border, it is also the only porous boundary: “There, uniquely at that convergence, we could look across a simple physical border and see into our neighbour” (Miéville 156). If in Kafka’s text, the gaps between the fragments of the wall called into question its efficacy as a protective structure, here the situation differs greatly. Copula Hall represents the only opportunity of legal border-crossing; not only it performs the function of a gate, but it also offers an opening on the distribution of the sensible that I described earlier. Thus, Copula Hall is both a door and a peephole to the forbidden “other side”:
From this position [entrance of Copula Hall], this ventage angle, for the first time in a long time we did not have to unsee the neighbouring city: we could stare along the road that linked Ul Qoma to it, over the border, the metres of no-man’s-land and the border beyond, directly into Besźel itself. (Miéville 277) Although Kafka’s Great Wall and Miéville’s Copula Hall are both national, material borders, it is clear that they both have very different functions and likewise are perceived differently by the citizens that they wall up. In Kafka’s text the wall’s supposed completeness and impenetrability produced a sense of security and community; whereas in Miéville’s text, Copula Hall represents the only official opening, even if it is subject to a scrupulous selective process. Copula Hall bridges the imagined and reproduced gap between Besźel and Ul Qoma.
However, no border is exempt of leakages and Copula Hall is no different. The novel provides with alternative border-crossing: unofficial, illegal breaches that consist in instances of disorientation, failures to comply with the distribution of the sensible or “perforation[s] of the boundary” (Miéville 64). These breaches will expose the cracks of an apparent inviolable system.
To begin with, the whole labyrinthine urban setup lends itself to multiple confusions. It is not always easy to be alert to the signs that mark the perimeter of either city: “So late, it was harder to tell who was local and who foreign and so unseeable in the day: the colours of clothes were obscured by streetlamp lights and the huddled quick night-walking blurred body language” (Miéville 215). Inspector Borlú acknowledges in several occasions not being able to discern between one city and the other; therefore having to choose, to assign a place, instead of actually seeing and locating it: “I took in her clothes and could not tell which city she was in. That is a common instant of uncertainty (…) And my alarm did not subside, it grew, as her locus refused to clarify” (Miéville 238-39). Not only does he recognise the fact that these moments of disorientation and uncertainty are a “common instant”, but he also reveals the fundamental irony in the practice of unseeing: that in order to unsee, first you must see, you must recognise that place or person as something or someone belonging to the other side, out of your reach and gaze, in order to quickly cancel that vision.
However, there are other moments where Borlú intentionally trespasses the borders of the visible and decides not to unsee:
I turned back to that night-lit city, and this time I looked and saw its neighbour. Illicit, but I did. Who hasn’t done that at times? There were gasrooms I shouldn’t see, chambers dangling ads, tethered by sketetal metal frames. On the streets at
least one of the passerby – I could tell by the clothes, the colours, the walk – was not in Besźel, and I watched him anyway. (Miéville 49)
Right after this scene, Borlú sees an Ul Qoman passing train and looks into the eyes of the passengers, not only doing something illegal again, breaching, but also making the passengers accomplices of his crime as some of them look back at him. Just a “brief crime” that is not enough for Breach to intervene, but that reveals Borlú’s curiosity for the other city and its inhabitants; his desire of full visibility: “I always wanted to live where I could watch foreign trains” (Miéville 49).
In the case of Mahalia, the murdered woman that is discovered at the beginning of the novel and that launches the whole police investigation, her murder already announces the price of this desire: “She went everywhere. All the underground. Both sides, must have done. She wanted to go everywhere because she needed to know everything” (Miéville 43). The idea here presented is that the borders that divide the cities are also epistemological borders, and that only by transgressing them, by choosing to ignore the dividing lines, truth can be gained. Those who overcome the fear of punishment, like Mahalia, are moved by a pressing desire. This desire is not so unlike the one we find in Kafka’s text as, in the end, it is the desire for wholeness. In Kafka’s text that wholeness was embodied by the completion of the physical wall and by the feeling of togetherness among the nation. In Miéville’s novel, the idea of wholeness has to do with the urban space itself: there is a will to reclaim a space that has been fragmented and made partly inaccessible. The novel only provides with two instances of spatial reconciliation and ownership: the escape of professor Bowden and Borlú’s stay at Breach.
On the one hand, Professor Bowden realises that in order to escape the cities and their borders, the order of actions has to be the opposite as what Mahalia thought: first he needs to know everything in order to go everywhere: “He could do it, walk out. How expert a citizen, how consummate an urban dweller and observer, to mediate those million unnoticed mannerisms that marked out civic specificity, to refuse either aggregate of behaviours” (Miéville 354). Bowden’s escape, or his own practice of border resistance, consists then in refusing to choose, and instead live in a constant “ambiguous and hybrid orientation, what we might call a post-orientation, a life on the borderline (Schimanski 118).
On the other hand, Borlú’s sentence to live in the Breach —that is his punishment for having breached— supposes, ironically, the ultimate emancipation of all physical and metaphysical borders. The space Breach, which is defined as the “third place, that nowhere-both, that Breach” (Miéville 306) is where the homonymous border patrol inhabits. However, this space does not exists outside of the two cities, but it exists within, in between them. It seems pertinent to bring again back to the discussion Nail’s theory of the border, where he points to this very in-betweeness of the border as one of its essential characteristics:
The border is not only its sides that touch the two states; it is also a third thing: the thing in between the two sides that touch the states. This is the fuzzy zone-like phenomenon of inclusive disjunction that many theorists have identified as neither/nor, or both/and. (2)
Although the space Breach is not entirely a border, it fits in Nail’s notion of in-betweeness. Furthermore, this space is characterised by the reconciliation of space and the senses, a re-junction of that which was disjointed. Ironically, only those who make
the split possible and maintain it are the ones who can enjoy this unification. Borlú, who is used to a fragmented life, to inhabit a fenced reality and a split space, he must learn who to navigate the in-betweeness of Breach: “Everything I had been unseeing now jostled into sudden close-up. Sound and smell came in” (Miéville 304).
However, for Martin, Borlú’s life at the Breach is rather a sign of exile than of liberation:
His experience of Breach teaches Borlú the elementary lesson of postmodernity: questioning the social fiction leads not to an understanding of truth, but to the disappearance of the social being; it does not result in the discovery of new worlds, but the discovery the truth of exile. (715)
It is undeniable that Borlú’s epistemological quest leads him to a life in exile, where a return home is denied to him as he cannot come back after having experience the unification of space. Despite this, the novel’s last line, “I live in the interstice yes, but I live in both the city and the city” (Miéville 373) seems to celebrate Borlú’s freedom within imprisonment, as the emphasis seems to lay in the conjunction “and” also present in the title. Borlú involuntarily breaks away from the binary urban realm and end ups inhabiting in the conjunction of space.
Conclusions
While “The Great Wall of China” dwelled on the building process of a border and its uniting function, The City & The City turns to the effects and routines that emerge from inhabiting and navigating split territories. It exposes the fragmented realities and perceptions that entail living between and within lines. In Miéville’s fiction nationalities can also become a form of confinement. The emphasis is on the division, on artificial
