by Stefan Ekman
The portrayal of the trashscaping process accentuates how the rejected matter becomes something separate from both nature and culture. At first, the matter only settles passively; but for each subsequent verb in the description, there is an increase in both agency and purpose until the matter affects a shape and finally mimics nature. Rejected by culture and only mimicking nature, trash—like air and water pollution—comes to occupy an indistinct position somewhere between nature and culture, blurring the boundary between them. The land it shapes becomes a haven for feral nature in the form of various tenacious weeds, as well as for wild culture; the latter is most clearly represented by the Construct Council, the artificial sentience sprung from discarded difference engines. This renegade culture lies at the center of one of the six plots identified by Farah Mendlesohn in Perdido Street Station: “the threat that the city’s constructs (robots) have achieved sentience.”74 The trashscape of the dump is thus portrayed as a distorted mirror image of a wilderness, superimposing cultural landforms on natural ones and vice versa.
Layers of trash and ubiquitous pollution are not the only manifestations of the blurred border between nature and culture. The city as a whole is portrayed as a complex topography of urban strata, “a palimpsest of gusting trees and architecture and sound, ancient ruins, darkness, catacombs, building sites, guesthouses, barren land, lights and pubs and sewers” (Perdido 673). All the parts of the city flow together, rendering the boundaries between opposites indistinct; light and darkness, ruins and building sites, catacombs and pubs, trees and architecture all meet as aspects of the city. The various layers, possible to arrange spatially, with architecture on top of catacombs on top of sewers, and temporally, with barren land turned into building sites turned into guesthouses and pubs, in fact form their own totality. New Crobuzon is not a neat succession or orderly layering but a chaotic blend, in which other layers are always co-present. The earlier landscape has been scraped off and replaced; the “tons of concrete and tar that [constitute] the city [cover] ancient geography, knolls and barrows and verges, undulations that [are] still visible” (Perdido 63).
The natural landscape exists as part of the cultural, in and underneath it, a conflux further emphasized by the employment of natural imagery to portray New Crobuzon’s architecture. Not only is the “architectural landscape” referred to as a “townscape” or “roofscape,” the cultural and the natural are brought together in the many metaphors and similes with which the text is rife: the city itself is a fen of buildings with concrete forest slums and quagmire ghettos, where the Parliament building is an inselberg of architecture, tower blocks rise like weeds, and the streets run like watercourses between the buildings (Iron 71, 442; Perdido 96, 145, 129). Occasionally, the imagery moves from the metaphoric to the concrete. The gargantuan proportions of Perdido Street Station itself gives it characteristics generally associated with a natural landscape. There seems to be a cultural triumph in the “chaotic majesty” of Perdido Street Station as it outdoes even the “magnificent and portentous” foothills west of the city, but the massive edifice is geographical rather than architectural. The station building has spread like waves of lava over the surrounding cityscape, a mountain with its own foothills and hillocks, and its roof has a little wilderness floored with scrub and dead, thighhigh grass. Covering the small eponymous street is an architectural sky (Perdido 615–21; Iron 382, 479–80).
Tame nature, nature controlled by culture but not dominated by its waste products, is rare and disregarded. Another architectural sky arches over the New Crobuzon cactacea (cactus people), who live under the glass and iron girder dome of the Glasshouse, the immense construction that encloses their artificial environment. The constructed desert landscape and gardens, where even sand dunes are carefully sculpted to mimic the ripples made by the never-present wind, is the largest and best-described patch of tame nature to be found in New Crobuzon. Tame nature also occurs in a number of minor parks, gardens, and tree-lined avenues, many of them located in the various uptown areas. In the shadow of Perdido Street Station lies BilSantum Plaza with parkland at its center (Perdido 615), and the Piazza della Settimana di Polvere is “a trimmed garden of fox-rose and tall stones” in an area where willows “softened each corner” (Iron 301). Other parks are occasionally mentioned in passing, equally scantily described, sometimes only as “insignificant parks” or even “small apologetic parks” (Perdido 211, 575). All but ignored, these pockets of tame nature give the impression of being exceptions, exotic places visited briefly if at all by the characters.
Even in this place of overwhelming cultural control, the natural domain finds ways back to the wild. The largest of the parks, and the only one described in some detail, is Sobek Croix, where the scientist Isaac and his companions visit a fair in Perdido Street Station. Most of this park is tamed to the point of oppression: the grass and paths are “sticky with spilt sugar and sauce,” bushes and tree boughs are decorated with paper bunting, and people of various races crowd the paths (Perdido 83). It is a park of flower beds, controlled by culture and surrounded by an iron fence; but there are also acres of untended growth inside (Perdido 83, 17). Unlike the primeval wilderness deep in Newford’s Fitzhenry Park, but like all natural wilderness found in New Crobuzon, the untended land in Sobek Croix is feral nature, freed from cultural control. A similar lack of control can be seen in the smaller garden that lies at the bottom of the huge concrete rectangle of the Mandragorae Wing. It is “an unkempt garden, overgrown with darkwood trees and exotic woodland flowers,” and it is likened to “moss at the bottom of a well” (Perdido 276; my emphasis). The “rude gardens,” with their “mutant apple trees and wretched brambles, dubious compost, mud and broken toys” (Perdido 675), through which Isaac and the others flee also signal a lack of cultural control. In all three cases, nature is going or has gone feral. Cultural control is slackening, disappearing, enabling the tame to turn wild again. This loss of control can also be identified elsewhere. Feral nature springs up all over the city, intermingling with tame nature as well as with culture. The Griss Twist dump, abode of the Construct Council, is “the size of a small park, though infinitely more feral” (Perdido 445; see also 446, 600–601); but incursions of feral nature are generally smaller and more obviously melded with the surrounding city culture. A weed-choked yard and ancient, moldering tables sit outside a pub (Perdido 24), and rusted station doors are anchored against the wall by ivy (Perdido 130). Empty lots have become “little wildernesses of concrete-splitting bramble and cow-parsley, wildnesses [sic] for the insects” (Iron 556). The railway arches sprout a “microforest of mould and moss and tenacious climbing plants” that “[swarms] with lizards and insects” (Perdido 596). Where there are gaps in the city culture, opened by decay, destruction, or disregard, nature can escape cultural control and turn feral; but rather than establishing a city wilderness, these pockets of feral nature emphasize how they remain part of the cultural surroundings.
The pockets of feral nature suggest a meeting between nature and culture in which the location rather than the boundary is important. There is no transition from one domain to the other, just occasional dots of nature in the cultural surroundings. However, transitions are a central theme in New Crobuzon. In her discussion of the city as hybrid, Gordon cites the crime lord Mr. Motley, whose body incorporates parts from enough creatures to fill a medium-sized zoo: “Transition. The point where one thing becomes another. It is what makes you, the city, the world, what they are. […] The zone where the disparate become part of the whole. The hybrid zone” (Perdido 41). Gordon turns her attention to the hybrid dimension of New Crobuzon itself,75 but a hybrid zone also exists where the city meets the world outside—where its culture meets the surrounding nature. Unlike both Minas Tirith’s clear-cut boundary and the gradual but obvious transition between Newford and the surrounding wilderness, New Crobuzon’s boundary is porous. Like the allegorical (but biologically inaccurate) frog that will remain in boiling water, rather than jumping out,
if the temperature is raised slowly enough, visitors to New Crobuzon do not notice the city as they enter it—until they suddenly find themselves there. To the returning Iron Council, there is a sensation of suddenness in their arrival: “Still empty land, only a few half-kept orchards, a few groves of temperate fruit-trees. There was a moment of transition. They were in the wilds, in unsafe lands, and then with a suddenness and a strange anticlimax they were in domesticated country. They knew they were close” (Iron 519). The Councilors cannot see the city limits as they approach; they only realize their position when they have already passed the point of no return, when it is too late for them, as for the unfortunate amphibian, to jump out. Where Thomas Morningstar observes how the landscape changes in stages as he leaves Newford, the Councilors experience only “a moment of transition” between wilderness and tame lands. Yagharek’s impression is similar: he observes how New Crobuzon grows around him as he approaches it, but there is still a sense of abruptness when he suddenly finds himself there. “How could we not see this approaching?” the garuda asks himself. “What trick of topography is this, that lets the sprawling monster hide behind corners to leap out at the traveler?” (Perdido 2).
Parts of the city limit crumble before, or are permeated by, the surrounding wilderness. An attempt to extend New Crobuzon to the south, into Rudewood forest, fails, and the forest reclaims the train tracks and the railway station (Perdido 96, 143). Between the forest and the city proper lies Spatters, a shantytown that is not really part of the metropolis but has simply attached itself to it. While the limit between Spatters and Rudewood is only defined by the random outlines of the shantytown, the city is clearly demarcated from Spatters by a narrow park of grass and trees, and an eight-foot ditch filled with a mixture of polluted water and human waste (Perdido 144–46). Similarly to Minas Tirith, New Crobuzon protects itself from the wilderness outside by tame nature, the narrow park and the Pelennor skirting their respective cities. Instead of a protective wall like the Rammas Echor, however, only a trench and its disgusting contents serve as final protection. It is hard to say whether the trench is even part of the shantytown wilderness from which the city and the people of the closest city district try so hard to separate themselves. The wilderness of Spatters is a cultural wilderness, however, which segues into the natural wilderness of Rudewood. The interface between the culture of the city and the natural wilderness outside is not tame nature but wild culture.
The region between the city and the sky above it is another example of how the boundary between New Crobuzon and the world outside is porous. While the sky would generally be assumed to be an aspect of uncontrolled, wild nature, or at least strongly associated with it, the air above the metropolis is controlled (or intended to be controlled) by culture through aeromorphic engines run by meteoromancers (Perdido 205; see also Perdido 231). Flying insects, lizards, birds, and wyrmen share the urban skies with aerostats, cable-held militia-pods, and trains that traverse the air on their various levels above the rooftops. Highrising buildings thrust upward, and smokestacks and chimneys breach “the membrane between the land and the air” (Perdido 64). An alternative, improvised street network stretches from rooftop to rooftop. It is through this interstitial realm that Jack Half-a-Prayer runs on his “Steeplechase” escape from the militia, with skies all fuzzy with airships and wyrmen (“Jack” 207). The air and the skies above New Crobuzon, wild once the city is left far enough behind, are controlled, tamed, and used in the city’s vicinity. The city bubbles up into the sky, its boundary as indistinct as those boundaries indicated by the crumbling walls whose “bricks [seem] to effervesce into the air” (Iron 91).
The conflux of nature and culture inside the city, and porous boundaries between the city and the wilderness outside, that is found in New Crobuzon can also be detected in The Scar. Its central setting, the pirate city Armada, is considerably smaller than New Crobuzon, only about a square mile. It consists of several hundred ships and craft of all kinds and sizes, tied together and facing all directions (Scar 79). The wilderness that surrounds the city is the open sea, empty from horizon to horizon and well beyond, and it is through this desolate wilderness that the city constantly travels, tugged (initially) by the “cloud” of tugboats that surrounds it. Like the airborne crafts and vehicles of New Crobuzon, these ships extend Armada’s sphere of control beyond the city proper into the wilderness, blurring the boundary between sea and city. The surrounding water flows constantly in between the numerous vessels, through the pores of Armada’s boundary. In other words, even as the city moves through the surrounding wilderness, the wilderness flows into and moves through the city and, in doing so, becomes part of Armada, coming under the city’s control, if only for a while and to some extent. The multitude of canals between the vessels prevents the water from forming waves even during storms (Scar 364) and offers a measure of control over what, outside the city, is wild nature. This control or taming of the wilderness is not enough to make storms safe, however, only less dangerous.
The porous boundary is found above and below Armada as well. In the water under the city, divers, dolphins, seawyrms, and cray (who are part human, part lobster) work with and live in various submerged structures, and “a constant drool of trash” billows from Armada into the sea (Scar 75). The air above the city is
full of craft. Gondolas swayed beneath dirigibles, ferrying passengers across the angling architecture, descending between close-quartered housing and letting down rope ladders, cruising past much larger airships that hauled goods and machinery. […] Masts were mooring posts, sprouting aerostats of various shapes, like plump, mutant fruit. (Scar 84; see also Scar 235)
The pirate city has no definite limits. On the surface, it dissipates into a cloud of tugboats, letting the ocean in between its component vessels; underneath, Armada citizens of various species and extraction mark the water as a part of the city by living and working there. Even the air is a space claimed by Armadan culture, just as porous and penetrable as the skies above New Crobuzon.
The boundary in Armada is so porous that one wrong step on the slippery bridges that connect the vessels is enough to slip out of Armada into the sea that permeates the city (Scar 89); but the half-tame sea is not the only tame nature to occur inside the pirate city. Among the countless naval architectures that make up Armada can be found a remnant of nature, now transformed by cultural usage, in the form of “a barge carved from the ossified body of a whale” (Scar 79). Agriculture and animal husbandry are found inside the city, and the large Croom Park is spread across a war-shattered steamer and some smaller ships. For obvious reasons, most manifestations of terrestrial nature give a highly artificial appearance to Armada’s decks, hulls, and holds. As in the cactacean Greenhouse, nature has been patiently created. The rusted hull of the steamer has been filled with stolen soil, burying the coke in the coal bunkers and creating an artificial seam of coal in the process (Scar 162). But over the centuries, the artificial, controlled nature of the park has become less tame. In Armada, tame nature has been allowed to go feral: “There were cultivated flowerbeds on the Curhouse gunboat, but on the steamer’s corpse the woods and meadows of Croom Park were wild” (Scar 163). But whereas the sea is an unconditional necessity of the pirate city’s existence, wild terrestrial nature could easily be kept in check. Feral nature is accepted, and, should the need arise, possible to bring back under control. The same is generally true for most of the wilderness that intermingles with the city’s culture—the tribes of wild animals that roam the city and the greenery that makes the masts look like ancient trees, to name a couple of examples. Just as unlucky citizens can slip into the water and out of the city, however, the wilderness outside can slip in through the porous boundary, for example when predatory fish attack the city’s divers from the dark depths (Scar 187). Whereas New Crobuzon is a city where culture is as wild as nature, the ever-present wilderness of the surrounding sea is a constant threat in Armada.
The commune of the Iron Council, w
hile much smaller than Armada and New Crobuzon, displays much the same pattern of blurred borders between nature and culture as the larger cities. The rebellious rail workers and prostitutes of the Council cut off the train from the main tracks that stretch back like an umbilical cord to New Crobuzon. No longer tied to the city, “the perpetual train” goes wild and, with it, the Iron Council escapes along constantly reused tracks into the wilderness. When Judah Low returns to the Iron Council after several years back in New Crobuzon studying “the arcane end of golemetry,” he finds a utopia, where the train has “gone feral” (Iron 338). Its culture is now wild and has flowed together with nature. The old structures of the Council’s train are still present, but have been changed and are “crenellated, baroque and topped with dovecots.” Some carriages are “thickened with ivy and waxy vines”; two flatbeds are filled with herb gardens and another two with grassy graveyards. One of the new carriages is built with resincaulked driftwood (Iron 338–39). Rather than attempting to bring the wilderness under cultural control, culture is subjugated to nature or at least mixed with it. This conscious bridging of the border between nature and culture is most clearly visible in the ornamentation of the front engine, which is decorated in order to make it zoomorphic:
Its headlamps were eyes now, predictably, bristling with thick wire lashes, its cowcatcher a jawful of protruding teeth. The huge tusks of wilderness animals were strapped and bolted to them. The front nub of its chimney wore a huge welded nose, the smokestack ajut from it in nonsense anatomy. Sharpened girders gave it horns. (Iron 339)
What was patently a cultural artifact has hence been remade into an effigy of a living creature. Still very artificial, it has been given eyes, teeth, nose, and horns, blending nature and culture. In this attempt to mimic nature, the only part of the engine that still betrays a clearly cultural origin is the smokestack, nonsensical in the blended anatomy.
