The City and the City is set in two city-states—Besźel and Ul Qoma—that occupy a single geographic space. The two cities are doubles, each with its own police force, university, fashion, language, and cuisine, although acknowledging these doubles is usually a serious crime, as this involves disrespecting the border that separates the cities. Simply acknowledging the other city, a crime known as breach, is the most serious offense that a citizen of Besźel or Ul Qoma can commit. Yet through its depiction of these double worlds, the novel indicates that borders are arbitrary, violent, and needlessly harmful inventions. Violating borders is necessary for various reasons, and doing so is a vital part of Inspector Tyador Borlú’s pursuit of justice. In the novel, doubles serve as a reminder of the ultimate meaninglessness of borders, illustrating the fundamental similarities and connections that exist between separated worlds.
The novel is set in a double place—a geographic area where two separate city-states exist at the same time—and this duality is created by a strict border, a fact that highlights the connection between borders and doubles. Although they occupy much of the same physical space, residents of Besźel and Ul Qoma must interact only with the city in which they live and ignore the presence of the other city. Of course, if this rule were not in place, then Besźel and Ul Qoma would function as a single city (even if it was one that contained more than one language, style of architecture, religion, culture, and so on). The border between the two cities is the only thing that makes them a double rather than single unit.
Because the split between Besźel and Ul Qoma is such a prominent aspect of life for residents of both cities, doubles are an important part of the culture in each place. Yet each set of doubles that appears in the book ends up reinforcing the fundamental connection between two apparently separate entities. For example, early in the novel the main character, Tyador Borlú, describes a traditionally common establishment in Besźel called a DöplirCaffé. These cafes are dual spaces containing separate Jewish and Muslim kitchens that prepare Kosher and Halal food, respectively. However, while patrons buy their food from the kitchen belonging to their own religion, the café itself is mixed, such that Jewish and Muslim customers sit and eat together. Borlú explains, “Whether the DöplirCaffé was one establishment or two depended on who was asking: to a property tax collector, it was always one.” The ambiguity over whether the café is actually two places or one clearly reflects a similar uncertainty about the status of Besźel and Ul Qoma. The cities may be strictly separated by a border, but they nonetheless remain intimately connected to each other, and thus exist as both two places and one at the same time.
The book also shows how the historical unity between two entities can be obscured over time, thereby creating a false sense of separateness. This is most clearly illustrated by another double: the two languages spoken in the cities, Illitan and Besź. On the surface, there is again a strict “border” or distinction between these two languages: they do not sound similar, and they are written in different alphabets. Yet as Borlú points out, Illitan and Besź are in fact “closely related—they share a common ancestor, after all.” Illitan and Besź may not superficially resemble each other now, but they emerged from the same root language. After making this observation, Borlú admits that “It feels almost seditious to say so.” This serves as a reminder that borders are political inventions, not just in the sense that they are enforced by government authorities, but also because they rely on the erasure of history—particularly if that history points to an original unity.
The main way in which the novel explores the artificial nature of borders is through the crime known as breach, which involves illegally acknowledging or interacting with whichever of the two cities a person is not officially inside. Citizens of Besźel and Ul Qoma are trained to ignore the other city in order to avoid committing breach. In this way, the border ends up living inside each person, enforced by all the residents of both cities on a daily basis. This makes the border extremely powerful and distracts citizens from the fact that it is an arbitrary invention. Its power operates through the fact that (almost) everyone acknowledges and respects it, yet if everyone suddenly stopped doing so, it would cease to exist, and the two cities would become one.
The socially constructed nature of the border separating Besźel and Ul Qoma becomes even more pronounced through the contrast between illegal border violations (breach) and the official point at which the border may be crossed. Traveling between the two cities is possible (as long as one has permission from the authorities) but must take place at the official border in Copula Hall. The arbitrary and even ridiculous nature of this rule is emphasized by the fact that the two cities occupy the same area, which means it is physically possible to cross back and forth between them almost everywhere. Yet officially traveling between the two places requires bureaucratic approval as well as a journey via a single, specific place.
The novel’s exploration of the arbitrary nature of borders through two double cities has significance beyond the fictional setting of Besźel/Ul Qoma. The status of Besźel and Ul Qoma as two distinct city-states that occupy the same place might seem unique, surreal, and even fantastical, but the novel shows that similar arrangements actually exist in the real world as well. Several real divided cities are mentioned in the narrative, and at one point Borlú recalls attending a conference in (what at the time was) West Berlin on “Policing Split Cities.” The conference’s focus on Berlin, Budapest, Jerusalem, and Besźel/Ul Qoma reminds the reader that double cities are not unique to the world of the novel. Each of these real cities is or was split by the presence of a border, a social invention that, as the novel shows, creates a false and unnecessary divide within what would otherwise be one entity.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Borders and Doubles ThemeTracker
Borders and Doubles Quotes in The City & the City
A common form of establishment, for much of Besźel’s history, had been the DoplirCaffé: one Muslim and one Jewish coffeehouse, rented side by side, each with its own counter and kitchen, halal and kosher, sharing a single name, sign, and sprawl of tables, the dividing wall removed. Mixed groups would come, greet the two proprietors, sit together, separating on communitarian lines only long enough to order their permitted food from the relevant side, or ostentatiously from either and both in the case of freethinkers. Whether the DoplirCaffé was one establishment or two depended on who was asking: to a property tax collector, it was always one.
It was, not surprisingly that day perhaps, hard to observe borders, to see and unsee only what I should, on my way home. I was hemmed in by people not in my city, walking slowly through areas crowded but not crowded in Besźel. I focused on the stones really around me—cathedrals, bars, the brick flourishes of what had been a school—that I had grown up with. I ignored the rest or tried.
My informant should not have seen the posters. They were not in his country. He should never have told me. He made me accessory. The information was an allergen in Besźel—the mere fact of it in my head was a kind of trauma. I was complicit. It was done.
Anyway whether in its original or later written form, Illitan bears no resemblance to Besź. Nor does it sound similar. But these distinctions are not as deep as they appear. Despite careful cultural differentiation, in the shape of their grammars and the relations of their phonemes (if not the base sounds themselves), the languages are closely related—they share a common ancestor, after all. It feels almost seditious to say so. Still.
A political irony. Those most dedicated to the perforation of the boundary between Besźel and Ul Qoma had to observe it most carefully. If I or one of my friends were to have a moment’s failure of unseeing (and who did not do that? Who failed to fail to see, sometimes?), so long as it was not flaunted or indulged in, we should not be in danger. If I were to glance a second or two on some attractive passerby in Ul Qoma, if I were to silently enjoy the skyline of the two cities together, be irritated by the noise of an Ul Qoman train, I would not be taken.
Here, though, at this building not just my colleagues but the powers of Breach were always wrathful and as Old Testament as they had the powers and right to be. That terrible presence might appear and disappear a unificationist for even a somatic breach, a startled jump at a misfiring Ul Qoma car.
Very occasionally a young Ul Qoman who does not know the area of their city that Ul Qomatown crosshatches will blunder up to ask directions of an ethnically Ul Qoman Besźel-dweller, thinking them his or her compatriots. The mistake is quickly detected—there is nothing like being ostentatiously unseen to alarm—and Breach are normally merciful.
A Besź dweller cannot walk a few paces next door into an alter house without breach.
But pass through Copula Hall and she or he might leave Besźel, and at the end of the hall come back to exactly (corporeally) where they had just been, but in another country, a tourist, a marvelling visitor, to a street that shared the latitude-longitude of their own address, a street they had never visited before, whose architecture they had always unseen, to the Ul Qoman house sitting next to and a whole city away from their own building, unvisible there now they had come through, all the way across the Breach, back home.
Okay I need to be a little bit careful here, Inspector, because honestly I never really, not really, thought he did believe it—I always thought it was kind of a game—but the book said he believed it […] A secret colony. A city between the cities, its inhabitants living in plain sight […] Unseen, like Ul Qomans to the Besź and vice versa. Walking the streets unseen but overlooking the two. Beyond the Breach. And doing what, who knows? Secret agendas. They’re still debating that, I don’t doubt, on the conspiracy theory websites.
“Yorjavic didn’t breach, Borlú. He shot over the border, in Copula Hall. He never breached. Lawyers might have an argument: was the crime committed in Besźel where he pulled the trigger, or Ul Qoma where the bullets hit? Or both? He held out his hands in an elegant who cares? “He never breached. You did. So you are here, now, in the Breach.”
I could imagine the panic of bystanders and passersby, let alone those innocent motorists of Besźel and Ul Qoma, having swerved desperately out of the path of the careening vehicles, of necessity in and out of the topolganger city, trying hard to regain control and pull their vehicles back to where they dwelt. Faced then with scores of afraid, injured intruders, without intent to transgress but without choice, without language to ask for help, stumbling out of the ruined buses, weeping children in their arms and bleeding across borders. Approaching people they saw, not attuned to the nuances of nationality—clothes, colours, hair, posture—oscillating back and forth between countries.
Smuggling’s not my department; take what you want. I’m not a political man—I don’t care if you mess with Ul Qoma. I’m here because you’re a murderer.
Ul Qoma’s government announced a new campaign, Vigilant Neighbours, neighbourliness referring both to the people next door (what were they doing?) and to the connected city (see how important borders are?).
It’s not just us keeping them 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 most of the 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.
