Balancing the Body Politic
As a young gay man in Margaret Thatcher's Britain, Barker took the then-radical step of centering “In The Hills, the Cities” around two gay men without making their homosexuality the source or object of the horror. Nonetheless, it was a choice with thematic resonance. As cisgender men, Mick and Judd share the isomorphic symmetry of Popolac and Podujevo; there is no way the story can be read in terms of the tired metaphor of the "battle of the sexes." But they are also almost mirror opposites of each other: Mick is a journalist who "was obliged to have an opinion on everything under the sun. Especially politics; that was the best trough to wallow in." The dance instructor Judd, to Mick's horror, is somehow both "to the Right of Attila the Hun" and infuriatingly uninterested in politics--all he wants to do is see the endless procession of holy virgins who decorate the infinite supply of churches in the Yugoslav countryside. Yet the incompatibility of their world views only inflames their passion, leading them to have intensely satisfying sex in that very same countryside. Their relationship is an obvious parallel to the intimate, fundamentally physical antagonism of Popolac and Podujevo, who are obliged to let off steam every decade.
Barker's story rests on a familiar, almost Freudian connection between eros and thanatos, or, more specifically, sex and violence. Two sets of male bodies are in conflict: Mick and Judd, and Podujevo and Popolac, and each chooses between the two options most conventionally available for male bodies: fighting and fucking. We know far more about what divides Mick and Judd than we do about the longstanding grievances of Podujevo and Popolac, and, tellingly, they are both personal (their general disposition) and political. Mick gravitates more towards the fascist side of the spectrum, but (if you should excuse the expression in this context) passively. Judd is a leftist who needs to engage. With Mick dead, Judd makes the odd, but consistent choice, to join Popolac. Mick needs to be part of a larger (political body), while Judd's body is left by the wayside, wrecked and ready for decay. [1]
As a work of fiction, "In the Hills, the Cities" reminds us of what should be obvious, but is easily forgotten: the fundamentally imaginary nature of the nation, the country, the state, and the people. We treat them as both bodies that move and subjects that have agency. What does Russia "want"? Where is it (or, worse, "she") going? Consider the only recently abandoned British habit of referring to entire peoples as if they were a single person: in two world wars they were fighting "the Hun." Both Barker's and Mayakovsky's extended metaphors place these imaginary constructs in a simulation of space, to fascinating results. They involve a metaphor whose slipperiness I wish to acknowledge upfront: proprioception. Proprioception generally refers to an individual's sense of how their body both takes up space and moves within it.
Good proprioception is what allows us to move about in the world without constantly looking at everything around us, and allows us to dodge obstacles because we know (or think we know) precisely how much space our bodies occupy. Proprioception's relationship to our actual physical bodies is not as straightforward as one might think, because it is a sense that can extend beyond the corporeal. Anyone who (successfully, comfortably) drives a car knows that we relax behind the wheel when we know just how big our vehicle is, allowing us to turn it and park it. When a car runs into ours, we might say "That car hit me," because the car has become a proprioceptive extension of our self. All it takes to become acutely aware of proprioception's role is to start driving a moving truck after years of owning a subcompact: initially, it feels as though our body (our vehicle) has become a stranger.
To speak of a country's proprioception is, on the face of it, absurd: countries are not bodies, and they do not pick up and move about. But we personalize geopolitical entities all the time, especially when they are an object of strong emotional attachment. When we imagine Russia as a bear, when we talk about a country "faltering," or "overreaching," in its military adventures, when Russia "grabs" land from a neighbor, tries to gain a "foothold," or "tramples" borders, we are not actually that far off from Mayakovsky's depiction of Russia as a kind of folksy, peasant version of the monsters from Attack on Titan. If Russia (or any country) "strides confidently" across the world stage or if it "stumbles," we are attributing a metaphorical proprioception to an imaginary body. And an imaginary body can be immobilized.
Sorry, wrong movie
Note
[1] Four decades later, Barker's choice of setting looks inspired, if not prophetic: there is no such town as Popolac, but Podujevo is a real city located in Kosovo, the Albanian-majority region Serbs consider central to their national identity. Now known by its Albanian name of Besianë, the town, according to a recent report on the Serbian television program "Pravo na sutra," is entirely Serb-free. On the subject of Popolac, "Pravo na sutra" is predictably silent. The Serbian/Albanian framework is both anachronistic and overdetermined. On the one hand, even though the Wars of Yugoslav Succession started several years after the story saw print, the Serb/Albanian conflict was not exactly new. On the other, Barker makes no explicit reference to it, nor is there any reason to expect he knew anything about it. The animosity between Serbs and Albanians to disinterested Westerners is just as obscure as the battle between Popolac and Podujevo is to Mick and Judd. It is conflict distilled down to essence, shorn of historical conscious while gesturing to a historical stereotype (the intramural feuds that plague the Balkans).
Next: Phantom Limbs