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Weirdness in The City &
The City
time. Some of these ideas and themes include examining gender in the horror genre, by
subverting the age-old convention known as the
Final Girl trope as well as having not only
one survivor, but two. The main antagonist is not your typical grotesque slasher –killer, a
bloodthirsty maniac who carries
around an axe or chainsaw,
but an unintelligible entity, which
appears in our corporeality and mundanity and the physically established dimension in the
form of a little boy.
2.
Discussion
China Miéville’s
The City &The City is one of the modern examples of the weird fiction. As
mentioned before one of the famous pioneers of this genre is H. P. Lovecraft. Miéville speaks
of him as; “overwhelmingly prominent figure in the field” (2009, p. 510). On the other hand it
is suggested that Miéville is; “the most recognized writer of New Weird Movement”
(Simmons, 2013, p.8). That being the case if Lovecraft is the preeminent of Weird Fiction,
Miéville is the outstanding figure of the New Weird.
The New Weird is defined as;
...a type of urban, secondary-world fiction that subverts the romanticized ideas about
place found in traditional fantasy, largely by choosing realistic, complex real-world
models as the jumping off point for creation of settings that may combine elements of
both science fiction and fantasy (Vandermeer, 2007, p. xvi).
Miéville chooses some realistic models and settings in
The City &The City. Apart from
Miéville’s former novel
The City&The City is more familiar to real world. The world in
The
City &The City is not a fantastic, imaginary world that hosts supernatural creatures. It is a real
but weird world. “It takes place in our familiar world, a post-Soviet locale which draws on
string theory for its ideas and conventional experience for its story” (Moorcock, 2009).The
ordinariness of the setting does not hide the profound weirdness of the novel. What makes
The City &The City unfamiliar and weird is the life style of the citizens and structure of the
two cities. Their life style is not determined by their free will. They are compelled to live
under certain sanctions.
The City &The City is written as a crime fiction, however; rather than
the story the weirdness of the cities attracts the attention. The reality and the weirdness are
hand in hand with each other.
The world and the life in
The City &The City is realistic except the structural
abnormalities of the two cities which are named Beszel and Ul Qoma. The behaviours of the
citizens cause a surreal environment in these two cities. The two cities have a nested structure.
Actually, they are intertwined but they are supposed to be strictly separated. They share
common geography, streets, buildings but they are two different cities. Miéville defines the
common places as crosshatched. In addition to such a weird city structure, the citizens of each
city are supposed to ignore, in other words to unsee the citizens, streets, buildings, cars of
other city. In order to succeed unseeing the neighbouring city all citizens are required to be
trained. "The early years of a Bezs (and presumably an Ul Qoman) child are intense learning
cues. We pick up styles of clothing, permissible colours, ways of walking and holding
oneself, very fast. Before we were eight or so most of us could be trusted not to breach
embarrassingly and illegally, though licence of course is granted children every moment they
are in the street"(Mieville, 2011, p.80). There is an intense training starting from childhood to
avoid citizens from breaching. Each city has its unique style and citizens concentrate on their
own styles. In this way, they ignore the colours, behaviours, styles other than theirs. This is a
lifelong process. Despite the strict training, they sometimes break the rule unwillingly and in
some cases willingly.