The City and The City however makes no attempt at hammering any truth. It is not a parable. If anything, it works as a metaphor of itself.
For Borlù, truth comes as a revelation, the removing of a veil: there is a before, there is an after. As Rousseau-like as this might sound, there is a fondamental difference between Mieville's novel and La Nouvelle Héloïse. For Rousseau, there are degrees in revelations. The first revelation denounces the subjectivity of mistakes. It shows the face of the statue behind the veil. But it does not propose anything to replace the illusion it destroys. The reality this first revelation highlights is nothing but another subjectivity. The face so suddenly exposed does not have more to do with some objectivity of the world. "Things", "objects", "facts", whichever word we might use to designate what is not us, are nothing more than a framework on which we base our vision. It does not matter which degree of lucidity we think we reach, this first degree revelation only peals another layer of an illusion which seems to have no core.
Mieville does not go further than this. To go further would be, like Rousseau did, to dive into the inner being, to open to this being, to enjoy its immediacy as a truth. The doxa of twenty-first century Europe, to which Mieville belongs, goes against the mysticism of a Rousseau. We fought -we are still fighting- to get rid off it. There is no truth. There cannot be any truth. There is just the Pealing -and then death.
From this basis, Mieville draws a fascinating picture. Since there is no truth, since there is only the endless pealing of illusion, then everything we know for certain is a mere understanding of the world (this is much more in line with the Zeitgeist). This understanding, in turn, shapes our perception. To us the world is like these pictures which can be seen two ways (a vase or two profiles looking at each other; a landscape or the face of an old man): it is almost impossible to see both at the same time. Our brain seems to allow one and block the other, as if there was a one-way switch to it. Here I am reminded of Pratchett's idea of belief and how most people cannot see what they do not accept: only a handful of "happy few" can see the Gods, or Death, all entities created by human faith and roaming around us. The rest of us is blind to anything we think unacceptable.
The story of The City and the City is this: a man, brought up to "unsee", learns to de-unsee. Some event in his life forces him to unveil the statue and look into its grinning face. But what is the meaning of this face? What is the meaning of the world suddenly jumping to Borlù's eyes? Mieville's story does not answer this. Its ultimate conclusion is that, once the veil has been lifted, once the light we shed on the world has changed, it is impossible for us to come back to what we were.
And this is where The City and the City works as a metaphor of itself: once you close the book after reading the last page (2), you start looking for what you usually unsee -what you have been taught to ignore, to believe to be impossible, non-existant, meaningless, albeit being in front of your eyes. It takes humility to undertake such a task. More importantly, it takes courage. For there is one thing to say about the kind of enlightenment Borlù goes through: it isolates and it hurts.
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(1) See Jean Starobinski, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, la transparence et l'obstacle, Gallimard, Tel, Ch IV, 1971, p.92
(2) A friend recently told me that she had contracted the habit of not finishing the books she reads. "Nowadays I tend to stop reading a book ten or twenty pages from the end. I've always found the endings pointless anyway. What's really interesting is the build-up. After that it's always the same story".
