The City and the City explores people’s sensory perception of the world, mostly focusing on a single sense: sight. Through depicting a world in which people’s perception is strictly policed, the novel shows that perception of the world depends as much on active seeing as it does on selective unseeing. Not only that, but what a person sees and doesn’t see is shown to be shaped by their culture, environment, and politics. Furthermore, in the novel’s setting in the twin city-states of Besźel and Ul Qoma, citizens’ perception is itself policed by a mysterious, invisible system of surveillance (Breach). Breach watches what the citizens are watching, and “disappears” them if they breach—that is, see the wrong thing. (The term “breach” refers to the crime, the authority, and the space in which this authority resides.) In this way, the novel shows that perception is a form of power, and reclaiming one’s perception from systems of surveillance can be a significant method of resisting unjust authority.
The City and the City challenges the idea that perception is natural and automatic, instead showing how it is influenced by cultural and political factors. Like everyone, residents of Besźel and Ul Qoma function within their environments by relying on their perception of their surroundings. Yet unlike others, in order to effectively orient themselves these citizens must also deliberately unsee the city in which they are not officially present. This is not a capability that these citizens naturally possess, but rather one that they acquire over time. Children are taught to unsee the city they are not in, and new immigrants and visitors undergo training courses designed to help them get used to seeing one city but not the other. Similarly, when a citizen of Besźel or Ul Qoma officially travels to the other city, they must undergo an acclimatization course in order to reverse the training they have received in their home city. The novel’s protagonists, Tyador Borlú, describes the profound disorientation this process produces, which is due to the fact that it requires “unseeing all their familiar environs, where we lived the rest of our life, and seeing the buildings beside us that we had spent decades making sure not to notice.” Perception can be trained, manipulated, and adapted, although this process of manipulation has bewildering and even traumatic effects.
Yet while unseeing may be a phenomenon that seems unique to Besźel/Ul Qoma, the novel indicates that it is actually a rather common feature of urban life in general. Being in a city is an overwhelming experience; there are so many sights, sounds, and smells that if a person doesn’t exercise control over their sensory perception, they will not be able to properly orient themselves. Yet what a person chooses to “unsee” is not random or neutral, but rather influenced by social and political factors.
The political nature of seeing and unseeing is made especially obvious by the fact that in Besźel and Ul Qoma, people’s perception is controlled by a system of surveillance—Breach. Citizens of the two cities do not unsee the other city voluntarily, but rather, they do so because they know they are constantly being watched by the mysterious government authority that remains unseen itself. The existence of Breach and the significant influence over people’s sight that it possesses shows that people’s perception is not really under their control. Instead, perception is dictated by the social, cultural, and political norms of one’s environment.
Breach exercises control by dictating what citizens see and don’t see, yet an equally important source of its power is the fact that it remains invisible itself. Citizens of Besźel and Ul Qoma know that they are being surveilled constantly, yet the fact that they do not really understand the source or nature of this system of surveillance only increases its power. Borlú describes Breach as the “observing power that must, surely, invisibly have watched.” This description shows that Breach makes itself extremely powerful by watching without being watched in return, an asymmetrical relationship that instills a sense of paranoia in citizens. Indeed, this paranoia emerges in Borlú’s use of the words “must, surely, invisibly,” which shows how Breach intimidates people by remaining somewhat mysterious. If Borlú and others had a clearer understanding of how Breach works, then they would likely feel some control over it and might thereby feel empowered to resist it. But through functioning as a kind one-way mirror, Breach retains near-total control of the perception of citizens while remaining largely untouchable itself.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Seeing vs. Unseeing ThemeTracker
Seeing vs. Unseeing Quotes in The City & the City
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.
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.
“Of course it’s ludicrous, like you say. Secret overlords behind the scene, more powerful even than Breach, puppetmasters, hidden cities.”
“Crap.”
“Yeah, but the point is that it’s crap a bunch of people believe. And”—I opened my hands at him—“something big’s going on, and we have no idea what it is.”
“I’m getting paranoid,” I said.
“Oh no, they’re really watching you.”
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.
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.
