The Uncanny Detective: Gothic Space in Miéville's The City and the City

TY - CONF

T1 - The Uncanny Detective

T2 - Gothic Space in Miéville's The City and the City

AU - Stephan, Matthias

PY - 2025/5/10

Y1 - 2025/5/10

N2 - Detective Narratives, in particular the modernist mode exemplified by the police procedural (Stephan 2019), presents itself as verisimilar text, continuing in a mimetic, realist tradition (Chandler, Simple Art of Murder). China Miéville’s novel The City and the City uses this genre as a means of questioning the stability of such boundaries, whether they are national, social, or legal. By setting the reader up to have the expectations of realism, and the generic expectations of a police procedural, Miéville uses the imposition of the ‘othered space’ or ‘thirdspace’ both to produce an uncanny effect, making the text itself unfamiliar while familiar, and infusing the entire social space with a type of uncanny anxiety. By making it a Gothic space, laid bare across the city itself, on boundaries that are socially constructed and internally imposed, he destabilizes our perceptions of this realism invocating the nature of the uncanny (in Todorov’s terms), in which answers might fall within supernatural (marvelous) territory as easily as in the realistic world of the police procedural. This paper sets out to interrogate that sense of uncannny, one which I suggest depends on the use of space, Miéville’s specific presentation of liminal spaces which are in one sense simultaneously reinforced and transgressed, but which, in another sense, don’t ‘really’ exist at all. In so doing, it considers the role of detective fiction in (re)producing a stable underpinning to society. In so doing, it draws on Soja’s firstspace and thirdspace logics, Lefebvre’s trialectics, and Foucault’s notion of the heterotopia.

AB - Detective Narratives, in particular the modernist mode exemplified by the police procedural (Stephan 2019), presents itself as verisimilar text, continuing in a mimetic, realist tradition (Chandler, Simple Art of Murder). China Miéville’s novel The City and the City uses this genre as a means of questioning the stability of such boundaries, whether they are national, social, or legal. By setting the reader up to have the expectations of realism, and the generic expectations of a police procedural, Miéville uses the imposition of the ‘othered space’ or ‘thirdspace’ both to produce an uncanny effect, making the text itself unfamiliar while familiar, and infusing the entire social space with a type of uncanny anxiety. By making it a Gothic space, laid bare across the city itself, on boundaries that are socially constructed and internally imposed, he destabilizes our perceptions of this realism invocating the nature of the uncanny (in Todorov’s terms), in which answers might fall within supernatural (marvelous) territory as easily as in the realistic world of the police procedural. This paper sets out to interrogate that sense of uncannny, one which I suggest depends on the use of space, Miéville’s specific presentation of liminal spaces which are in one sense simultaneously reinforced and transgressed, but which, in another sense, don’t ‘really’ exist at all. In so doing, it considers the role of detective fiction in (re)producing a stable underpinning to society. In so doing, it draws on Soja’s firstspace and thirdspace logics, Lefebvre’s trialectics, and Foucault’s notion of the heterotopia.

KW - Gothic Space

KW - China Mieville

KW - Gothic fiction

KW - literature

KW - new weird

M3 - Paper

ER -