Anti-Climacus

Article drafted and sent out to my readers* on Saturday, the rest of the weekend was devoted to various cultural distractions.

As an entirely tangental note, I rarely talk about my research here because I am in the awkward position of having developed a research agenda but not yet brought it into print. So I think I've made some headway in the interpretation of Grotius, early modern political theory, and the intersection of theory and international law, but saying too much would tip my hand. I will no doubt become an insufferable bore once I publish.

Read China Miéville's The City & the City. I attempted to outline its plot to a friend, over the phone, and after I got through the bare essentials, she asked, "so it's like a comic book?" Now, I will never claim to not have been a nerd. But it was very important in my youth that I was a nerd of a particular kind, and not a sci-fi/fantasy nerd. As a reflex I view genre fiction as 'lesser,' though I acknowledge the prejudice is based more on sentiment than reason. Very reluctantly, I admitted that yes, it was like a comic book.

The plot is very basic: it's crime fiction, and if you've ever seen a film noir you know approximately what will happen. It gains from its strange epistemological** conceit: the crime takes place in one of two cities that occupy the same physical space, yet are treated as distinct and non-contiguous entities. The book reads quickly and proceeds through the usual paces, but the epistemological conceit becomes more and more important, until the book ends as something quite else.

It does force the reader into an odd conundrum. I chose to ignore the clear political overtones of the plot, whose absence made the book enjoyable but not particularly substantial. I suspect this was the wise decision for my ability to enjoy the novel; genre fiction's political themes tend to be gross oversimplifications of complicated realities, either banal or too broad to be interesting. I suppose the epistemology is intended to stand in for segregation, or apartheid, or general urban apathy, but I can't imagine what conclusion any of those is supposed to draw from the reader. Segregation is bad? We deliberately structure our reality by choosing to 'unsee' things that are inconvenient? The book stands on its own quite without these difficulties.


* One of whom has already read it and sent back comments--thank goodness I'm friends with people who teach in writing programs.

** this is the sort of thing that usually gets labeled 'metaphysical,' but so far as I can tell, the simultaneous existence of both cities is not, in the end, a claim about the nature of the world, but about what people have agreed to see and believe.