London in Contemporary British Fiction: The City Beyond the City 9781441190192, 9781474217224, 9781441191472

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgements
Contributors
Introduction: Parallax London
1. Exploring London in Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005): Trauma and the Traumatological, Identity Politics and Vicarious Victimhood
2. Seeing ‘The Empty Space’: Ali Smith’s The Accidental
3. Delineating the Liminal in Illimitable London: Will Self ’s The Book of Dave and the Cockney Visionary
4. The Changingman: Masculinity, Violence and Revenge in Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog
5. Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Sacredness of Space and Time
6. Viewing Art in London’s Museums: Ekphrasis in Selected Fiction by Julian Barnes, A. S. Byatt and Peter Ackroyd
7. Iain Sinclair: Complexity, Imagination and the Re-Enchanted Margins of London Orbital
8. Feeling London Globally: The Location of Affect in White Teeth
9. Agency and Conflict in Andrea Levy’s Polyphonic London
10. The Liminality of Underground London
11. The Un-, Ab- and Alter-Londons of China Miéville: Imaginary Spaces for Concrete Subjects
12. Common People: Class, Gender and Social Change in the London Fiction of Virginia Woolf, John Sommerfield and Zadie Smith
Index

Citation preview

London in Contemporary British Fiction

Bloomsbury Studies in the City Series Editors: Lawrence Phillips, Regent’s University London, UK; Matthew Beaumont, Senior Lecturer in English, University College London, UK. Editorial Board: Professor Rachel Bowlby (University College London, UK); Professor Brycchan Carey (Kingston University London, UK); Professor Susan Alice Fischer (City University of New York, USA); Professor Pamela Gilbert (University of Florida, USA); Professor Richard Lehan (University of California, USA); Professor John McLeod (University of Leeds, UK); Alex Murray, Lecturer (Queen’s University Belfast, UK ); Professor Deborah Epstein Nord (Princeton University, USA); Professor Douglas Tallack (University of Leicester, UK); Professor Philip Tew (Brunel University London, UK); Professor David Trotter (University of Cambridge, UK); Professor Judith Walkowitz (Johns Hopkins University, USA); Professor Julian Wolfreys (University of Portsmouth, UK). The history of literature is tied to the city. From Aeschylus to Addison, Baudelaire to Balzac, Conrad to Coetzee and Dickens to Dostoevsky, writers make sense of the city and shape modern understandings through their reflections and depictions. The urban is a fundamental aspect of a substantial part of the literary canon that is frequently not considered in and of itself because it is so prevalent. Bloomsbury Studies in the City captures the best contemporary criticism on urban literature and culture. Reading literature, film, drama and poetry in their historical and social context and alongside urban and spatial theory, this series explores the impact of the city on writers and their work. Titles in the Series: New Suburban Stories Edited by Martin Dines and Timotheus Vermeulen Irish Writing London: Volumes 1 and 2 Edited by Tom Herron London in Contemporary British Literature Edited by Nick Hubble and Philip Tew Salman Rushdie’s Cities Vassilena Parashkevova G. K. Chesterton, London and Modernity Edited by Matthew Beaumont and Matthew Ingleby Brooklyn Fictions: The Contemporary Urban Community in a Global Age James Peacock Iain Sinclair: Noise, Neoliberalism and the Matter of London Niall Martin

London in Contemporary British Fiction The City Beyond the City Edited by Nick Hubble and Philip Tew

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 Paperback edition first published 2018 © Nick Hubble, Philip Tew and contributors, 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN:

HB: PB: ePDF: ePub:

978-1-4411-9019-2 978-1-3500-5780-7 978-1-4411-9147-2 978-1-6235-6061-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Series: Bloomsbury Studies in the City Cover design: Eleanor Rose Cover image © Getty Images Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN

Contents Acknowledgements Contributors Introduction: Parallax London Nick Hubble and Philip Tew 1

Exploring London in Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005): Trauma and the Traumatological, Identity Politics and Vicarious Victimhood Philip Tew

vii viii

1

17

2

Seeing ‘The Empty Space’: Ali Smith’s The Accidental Susan Alice Fischer

3

Delineating the Liminal in Illimitable London: Will Self ’s The Book of Dave and the Cockney Visionary Sebastian Jenner

49

The Changingman: Masculinity, Violence and Revenge in Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog Nick Bentley

65

4

5

Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Sacredness of Space and Time Tomasz Niedokos

6

Viewing Art in London’s Museums: Ekphrasis in Selected Fiction by Julian Barnes, A. S. Byatt and Peter Ackroyd Doris Bremm

7

Iain Sinclair: Complexity, Imagination and the Re-Enchanted Margins of London Orbital Laura Colombino

35

83

95

111

8

Feeling London Globally: The Location of Affect in White Teeth Jung Su

127

9

Agency and Conflict in Andrea Levy’s Polyphonic London Anja Müller-Wood

145

vi Contents

10 The Liminality of Underground London Nora Pleßke

161

11 The Un-, Ab- and Alter-Londons of China Miéville: Imaginary Spaces for Concrete Subjects Mark P. Williams

177

12 Common People: Class, Gender and Social Change in the London Fiction of Virginia Woolf, John Sommerfield and Zadie Smith Nick Hubble

195

Index

211

Acknowledgements Some of these chapters are developed from papers given at the seventh annual Literary London conference, ‘Liminal London: Country/City, Work/ Leisure, Past/Future, and States Between’, organised by Brycchan Carey, Nick Hubble, Lawrence Phillips and Philip Tew; hosted by the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing (BCCW) and the Department of English at Brunel University from 2 to 4 July 2008 with financial support from the British Academy. We are grateful to the Literary London organisation and the British Academy for this support. We would like to thank all our contributors for their expertise, patience and generosity when responding to our queries and guidance as this book has gradually taken shape. We have enjoyed excellent support throughout from the editorial team at Bloomsbury, especially David Avital and Mark Richardson, who have been instrumental in bringing this book to fruition. We would also like to mention the staff at Brunel University Library, the British Library, the National Library of Wales and other research libraries who have provided support to the contributors to this volume. An earlier version of parts of Laura Colombino’s chapter first appeared in her book, Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature: Writing, Architecture and the Body published by Routledge in 2013.

Contributors Nick Bentley is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Keele University in the UK. His main research interests are in post-1945 British literature and literary and cultural theory. He is author of Martin Amis: Writers and Their Work (Northcote House, 2015); Contemporary British Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2008); Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s (Peter Lang, 2007); editor of British Fiction of the 1990s (Routledge, 2005), and co-editor of The 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction in The Decades Series (Continuum, 2015). He has also published journal articles and book chapters on Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Doris Lessing, Colin MacInnes, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, Sam Selvon, Alan Sillitoe, the city in postmodern fiction, fictional representations of youth subcultures and working-class writing. He is currently working on two books: Contemporary British Fiction: A Reader’s Guide to the Essential Criticism; and Making a Scene: Youth Subcultures in Postwar and Contemporary Fiction. Doris Bremm  received her PhD in Twentieth-Century Studies from the University of Florida. She is area coordinator for literature and culture at the Familienbildungsstätte Bonn, Germany. In her research, she specializes in contemporary literature, intersections between literature and the visual arts, and literary theory. Her publications include ‘Stream of Consciousness Narration in James Joyce’s Ulysses: The Flaneur and the Labyrinth in “Lestrygonians” ’ in The Image of the City in Literature, Media, and Society (eds Will Wright and Steven Kaplan, Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, 2003), and three chapters in The English Literature Companion (ed. Julian Wolfreys, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). Her book manuscript  Representation Beyond Representation: Reading Paintings in Contemporary Narratives considers contemporary literature about visual art as a new way to historicize postmodernism and the postmodern novel. She has won several teaching awards at the University of Florida and at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Laura Colombino is Associate Professor at the University of Genoa. She is the author of Ford Madox Ford: Vision, Visuality and Writing (Peter Lang, 2008) and

Contributors

ix

Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature: Writing Architecture and the Body (Routledge, 2013), winner of the AIA Senior Book Prize 2015. She has published articles and essays on a number of Victorian, modernist and contemporary writers, such as Thomas Hardy, Aldous Huxley, Ford Madox Ford, J. G. Ballard, Ian McEwan, A. S. Byatt and Iain Sinclair. Her interdisciplinary research interests include: the relationship between writing and the visual arts; the gaze in literature; contemporary architectural spaces and their embodiments; the interplay of trauma, cultural memory and the city. She is a member of the editorial board of the International Ford Madox Ford Studies and, since July 2015, of the Core Group of the Cultural Literacy in Europe project (http:// cleurope.eu). Susan Alice Fischer is Professor of English at Medgar Evers College of The City University of New York. She is Editor of The Literary London Journal (www. literarylondon.org) and Co-Editor of Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education (Taylor & Francis), both peer-reviewed. She has written widely on contemporary British authors, including the fiction of  Maggie Gee, Andrea Levy, Zadie Smith and Sarah Waters. Her edited volume, Hanif Kureishi: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, was published by Bloomsbury in 2015. Nick Hubble is Reader in English at Brunel University London, UK. Author of Mass-Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (Palgrave Macmillan 2006/10); co-author of Ageing, Narrative and Identity (Palgrave Macmillan 2013); co-editor of The Science Fiction Handbook (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013) and three volumes of Bloomsbury Academic’s ‘British Fiction: The Decades Series’: The 1970s (2014), The 1990s (2015) and The 2000s (2015); and also co-editor of special issues of the journals EnterText, Literary London and New Formations. Nick has published journal articles or book chapters on writers including Pat Barker, Ford Madox Ford, B. S. Johnson, Naomi Mitchison, George Orwell, Christopher Priest, John Sommerfield and Edward Upward. Sebastian Jenner is a part-time PhD Candidate at Brunel University London in addition to acting as Festival Producer for the Hillingdon Literary Festival. His thesis explores the ‘British Aleatory Novel, 1959–1979’ and the performance of chance procedures in the British avant-garde. This project corresponds to research interests that include the intersection of musicology and literature, multicursality, the mediation between continental avant-garde innovations and marginalized issues of Britishness, as well as the synthesis between chance

x Contributors

and order. In particular, his research explores the work of Brian Aldiss, Brigid Brophy, Alasdair Gray and B. S. Johnson, on whom he has contributed a chapter to B. S. Johnson and Post-War Literature: Possibilities of the Avant-Garde (2014). In addition to his research and event management, Sebastian has taught variously on critical theory and the Post-Millennial British Novel. Anja Müller-Wood Professor of English Literature and Culture at Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz (Germany). The author of Angela Carter: Identity Constructed/Deconstructed (1997) and The Theatre of Civilized Excess: New Perspectives on Jacobean Tragedy (2007), she has published extensively on early modern and contemporary English literature and culture, with a particular focus on reader and audience reception and the orchestration of their emotional responses. Much of her research is influenced by evolutionary psychology and the cognitive sciences (see her special issue of Studies in the Literary Imagination, co-edited with Katja Mellmann, entitled ‘Biological Constraints on the Literary Imagination’) and she has a long-standing interest exploring the interface between literary scholarship and linguistics. She is co-editor of the open-access International Journal of Literary Linguistics and editor of a special issue of the journal Language and Dialogue dedicated to this topic. Tomasz Niedokos lectures in English History and British Culture at John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland. His research interests include literary London, English Christian writers, psychogeography, memory and identity. He has recently published an essay on the ‘The Concept of English Culture in the Cultural Biographies of Peter Ackroyd’. Nora Pleßke is Senior Lecturer in Anglophone Literatures, Cultures, and Media at TU Braunschweig (Germany). She studied International Business and Cultural Studies at the Universities of Passau (Germany) and Leeds (UK) and holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Passau. Her thesis, The Intelligible Metropolis: Urban Mentality in Contemporary London Novels, published with transcript in 2014, was awarded the Helene Richter Prize by the German Association for English Studies. Beyond London literature, her main research interests include spatial and postcolonial theory, material culture and mentality. Currently, she is working on her second book, which explores discursive constructions of colonial objects during the long nineteenth century. A particular focus lies on urban exhibitionary spaces as well as metropolitan marketplaces.

Contributors

xi

Jung Su (蘇榕) is Associate Professor in the English Department at National Taiwan Normal University, in Taipei, Taiwan. She was editor of Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies from 2007 to 2009. She has published articles on the works of Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith and Maxine Hong Kingston in Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies, EurAmerica, Chung-wai Literary Monthly, Review of English and American Literature and other journals in Taiwan. Her recent interest focuses on urban literature, contemporary British fiction and ageing in literature. She is currently a visiting scholar at the Research Institute of the Humanities and Social Sciences, Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, working on a project entitled ‘Confronting Ageing: Literary and Cultural Perspectives’. Philip Tew is Professor in English (Post-1900 Literature), Director of the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing, Director of the Hillingdon Literary Festival, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a member of the Royal Society of Literature. Among Tew’s main publications are: B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading (Manchester University Press, 2001), The Contemporary British Novel (Continuum, 2004; rev. 2nd edn, 2007), Jim Crace (Manchester University Press, 2006) and, co-edited with Glyn White, Re-reading B. S. Johnson (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Tew is the founding Director of the B. S. Johnson Society; he is also currently joint managing editor of Symbiosis: A Journal of Transatlantic Literary and Cultural Relations. Recent books have included: Zadie Smith (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); a multi-authored policy report on ageing, Coming of Age (Demos, 2011); with Nick Hubble, Ageing, Narrative and Identity: New Qualitative Social Research (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Reading Zadie Smith: The First Decade and Beyond (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013); and, with Jonathan Coe and Julia Jordan, Well Done God! Selected Prose and Drama of B. S. Johnson (Picador, 2013). Mark P. Williams is currently a Teaching Fellow at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz. He has previously taught at the Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand) and the University of East Anglia (UK), and has also worked as a political reporter in the New Zealand Parliamentary Press Gallery. His research focuses on literature and politics in Science Fiction and Fantasy modes and avant-garde writing, especially the cultural innovations of the SF ‘New Wave’ and the New Weird. Recent publications include a literary history for The 1970s: A Decade of Contemporary Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2014), a critical survey of experimental fiction for The 1990s: A Decade of Contemporary

xii Contributors

Fiction (Bloomsbury, 2015), an analysis of Grant Morrison’s version of the Joker (UPM, 2015), and a contribution to China Miéville: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2015). In 2014 he organized a conference on ‘The Science Fiction “New Wave” At Fifty’ at the University of East Anglia, and he will be co-editing a special edition of Foundation based on the outcomes.

Introduction: Parallax London Nick Hubble and Philip Tew

City of paradox According to Saskia Sassen, using the familiar vocabulary that espouses the inevit­abilities of the transnational free market, London is one of three global cities (alongside Tokyo and New York) reshaped by a transnational global economy, as ‘The globalization of economic activity entails a new type of organizational structure’ (xviii), becoming one of the command centres of that economy. Certainly London is in the process of a constant evolution and reinvention. Despite its conception as ‘the historical palimpsest’ (3), Lawrence Phillips observes in defining how the capital might be interpreted as a contrary reality: ‘London is an ancient city by any measure and yet much of its fabric, geographical footprint and population level are a little over a century in age’ (1). Chris Hamnett insists: ‘During the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s London has strengthened its role as one of the major control centres for the global economic and financial system’ (4). However, economic determinism cannot offer anywhere near a full picture of the city and its life. Without seeking to overturn such influential realities, London is still home and a workplace for many millions, far from all of them working in finance, and it still serves as a hub for cultural and intellectual activity, as well as tourism and all manner of service industries, and a number of other hybrid forms, such as film production and computer gaming. Moreover, as J. G. Ballard reflects through his protagonist in Millennium People: The Thames shouldered its way past Blackfriars Bridge, impatient with the ancient piers, no longer the passive stream that slid past Chelsea Marina, but a rush of ugly water that had scented the open sea and was ready to make a run for it. Below Westminster the Thames became a bruiser of a river, like the people of the estuary, unimpressed by the money terraces of the City of London. The dealing rooms were a con, and only the river was real. The money was all on tick, a stream of coded voltages sluicing through concealed conduits under

2

London in Contemporary British Fiction the foreign exchange floors. Facing them across the river were two more fakes, the replica of Shakespeare’s Globe, and an old power station made over into a middle-class disco, Tate Modern. (180)

As John Eade and Michael P. Garapich note, the financial crises of recent times from the mid-1990s, which can be applied to the even more recent economic meltdown, exacerbate and reveal stark inequalities. ‘The most striking feature of the city’s socio-economic hierarchy is the cleavage between the global elite and professionals within the new service class, and those at the lower levels of the economic hierarchy, who were competing for poorly paid and insecure jobs or facing long-term unemployment’ (143). And, as Slavoj Žižek indicates in the Parallax View, with changes of contemporary urban space they often result from manipulation which is both exploitative and deliberate: ‘in today’s global capitalism, we are all too often dealing with actual “conspiracies” […] the same goes for many “tendencies” in today’s urban developments’ (375). Ironically both groups indicated above inhabit supposedly the same city, in both cases their lives are framed and animated by its rhythms and geographical realities, and yet their experiences seem utterly divergent, a version of a contradictory affinity, an example of what Žižek describes as ‘the occurrence of an insurmountable parallax gap, the confrontation of two closely linked perspectives between which no neutral common ground is possible’ (4). This is one of the very many paradoxes that constitute London. Despite the difficulty created by such divergences, indicated above, concerning the complexities of this capital city, one of our many starting points is to consider a range of literary narratives (which as scholars we regard as simultaneously serving as cultural ones too) concerned with what constitutes the city at a human level experientially, and whether the urban identities and cultures in London, including traditional cultures, variously, at both an individual and collective level, are capable of resisting, interrogating, incorporating, or even subverting the processes of the global economy that some see as the major constituent factor in reshaping the city. As Philip Tew says, ‘As a site of narrative and culture the city is mobile, existential and yet perversely monumental, combining in contemporary fiction the globalized economy with both the localized dynamics of intersubjectivity and a sense that culture always creates a sense of loss through its very ongoing adaptation, or evolutionary survival’ (94). There is also an overwhelming aspect from the individual perspective. As Peter Ackroyd admits, in London, ‘London is so large and so wild that it contains no less than everything’ (3), although there is always a supplementarity that is well



Introduction: Parallax London

3

in excess of the individual. London is never just its economy, cannot be reduced to the City of London, Westminster, or even to the present, that is, its current, condition. As Ackroyd’s volume serves to highlight, London has a legacy, an always available past and a literature, so, however powerful the impulse to do so, in contemporary times perhaps it can never be reduced to the globalized role Sassen outlines. Naturally, London has been geographically shaped in part by its particular economy within a global one, even when it served as an imperial capital, but as Ackroyd indicates it was equally and literally remodelled by conflict, with the Blitz and the flying bombs (600–8), and by policy which reshaped its post-war inner zones, since it was ‘the direct consequences of the Green Belt which forced Londoners to look inwards rather than outwards’ (612–13). Arguably, such a centripetal force has been reversed by massive rises in property prices and a centrifugal flow of its populace to places even well beyond the suburbs, the newly dispossessed following many of the working classes who left during a period of thirty years from the 1950s for developments beyond the route of what would become the M25 – various radial or ring-roads were already envisaged in J. H. Forshaw’s and Patrick Abercrombie’s County Plan of London (1943) to facilitate fast-flowing traffic – for satellite ‘utopian’ Garden Cities such as Stevenage, Harlow and Thamesmead, ironically with many of their inhabitants still commuting daily back into the centre of the capital on weekdays at least. As Ackroyd indicates, London has always been subject to the market and greed, saying of the supposedly ‘Swinging Sixties’ that capitalism encouraged and appropriated its energies (and people’s cash), as well as the city itself being subject to attacks on its historical legacy with the erasure of whole areas (and, at least in a hegemonic manner as to desired outcomes conspiratorially achieved, initiating a broadening of a parallax gap when defined experientially): The age of the boutique and the discothéque was also the age of the tower block, of public vandalism, and of increased crime. They are not unconnected. It was the age of the property developer, trading off development land to the LCC for permission to build on sensitive sites. Their names were legion – Centrepoint, London Wall, Euston Centre, Elephant and Castle […]. It was a form of vandalism in which the government and civic authorities were happy to acquiesce. (613–14)

As Ackroyd adds, the diminishment of the docks and industrial activity within London allowed ‘the development of Docklands [which] has opened up what has been called London’s “eastward corridor” ’ (617), which became part of the

4

London in Contemporary British Fiction

city’s ‘Big Bang’ in the 1980s with the deregulation of the financial markets, a force so strong that even the geographic bounds have altered (as well as the class composition of many of its area) so that, as Ackroyd concludes of the city, ‘the entire south-east of England has – willingly or unwillingly – become it’s zone of influence. Is London, then, just a state of mind?’ (617).

Arrivals and departures The ethno-cultural context is equally complex, with its inflow and outflow on a daily basis, as well as a transnational resettlement of various migrants and refugees that continues. All political indicators are that many still find such movements deeply troubling, but in the arts and humantities such concerns rarely surface in accounts of the city. Jago Morrison observes in a panoptic fashion that as a result of: [T]he wholesale repulsion of European colonisation, beginning with India/ Pakistan in the immediate post-war years and spreading across the entire globe over the next three decades. […] Vast processes of population migration across various axes around the globe have complicated parochial conceptions of ethnic and national identity […]. (13)

John McLeod talks of ‘One afternoon, in May 1955, [when] the anthropologist Sheila Patterson took a journey to Brixton in South London’ where, as McLeod explains, ‘there is another London being created here, one which admits the times and places of overseas to the supposedly humdrum heart of the aged British Empire […]’ (1), thereby implying a migration with a determinedly imperial legacy framed by its former colonial coordinates. Yet, in truth, as John Eade and Yordanka Valkanova note, further phases of migration have ‘encouraged an ethnic “superdiversity” which overlays the colonial heritage through the settlement of people which had no connection with the British Empire […]’ (2). If such commentators as Morrison seem to suggest such heterogeneity transforms and renews the city, and does so, by implication, always positively, others argue that such evolution has ever been in its nature, but the results remain potentially patchy (variegated with some made marginal and others displaced) and the supposed benefits contestable. And, as John Eade and Michael P. Garapich argue, ‘migration movements have always had their losers and winners […]’ (152); but this still represents a recognition of a reality of mass



Introduction: Parallax London

5

migration almost always elided or rejected by many left-liberal commentators, for, as Robert Ford admits, ‘[e]ven relatively moderate expressions of concern about the impact of immigration have become highly controversial’ (152). Moreover, in the field of aesthetic reflection upon urban London one could argue there are still two main categories of London’s inhabitants, ignored by most critics, their origins in part shaping their responsive vocabulary to the city: first, those who are born or arrive in infancy and are embedded for large tranches of life in the metropolis without recourse to comparison (such embeddedness one finds in writers such as John Betjeman, Bernardine Evaristo, John Keats, Andrea Levy, Will Self, Zadie Smith, Evelyn Waugh and Virginia Woolf); and, second, those others who are capable of recollecting and reflecting upon their arrival as a definitional landmark (with a potential epiphany and comparative perspective, whose examples would include J. G. Ballard, Charles Dickens, Wilson Harris, Doris Lessing, Colin MacInnes, Katharine Mansfield, V. S. Naipaul and Iain Sinclair, to name just a few). Might this possibly constitute yet another parallax gap, to again adopt and adapt Žižek’s terminology? To so categorize people is not intended to cast members of either group as insiders or outsiders, rather to indicate that such an immense geographic entity as London might well be apprehended differently according to this key factor, with certain of its characteristics assumed and taken for granted by the first category, but which may well take on a rather more remarkable configuration for the second. And this might be usefully extended to scholars considering the city, perhaps (and so, in terms of critics alluded to in this introduction, in the first category for instance would fall Nick Hubble, Lawrence Phillips and Philip Tew; whereas in the second would be John McLeod, Jago Morrison and Slavoj Žižek). Literature, and the novel in particular, has the unusual capacity to encapsulate an ideological, experiential framing undertaken by individuals of their environment, often as if in several snapshots, particularly with regard to the urban space (or spaces, more properly) that constitute(s) London. And this city has always been animated and reimagined by its new arrivals. For instance, Dickens writes of arrival in Great Expectations, but much later in the novel, a country boy, Pip has first encountered the two convicts, Miss Haversham, Estella and the antipathy of Orlick before in Chapter 20 he records: The journey from our town to the metropolis, was a journey of about five hours. It was a little past mid-day when the four-horse stage-coach by which I was a passenger, got into the ravel of traffic frayed out about the Cross Keys, Wood Street, Cheapside, London.

6

London in Contemporary British Fiction We Britons had at that time particularly settled that it was treasonable to doubt our having and our being the best of everything: otherwise, while I was scared by the immensity of London, I think I might have had some faint doubts whether it was not rather ugly, crooked, narrow, and dirty. (155)

Naipaul opens The Mimic Men with the following: When I first came to London, shortly after the end of the war, I found myself after a few days in a boarding-house, called a private hotel, in the Kensington High Street area. The boarding-house was owned by Mr Shylock. He didn’t live there, but the attic was reserved him; and Lieni, the Maltese housekeeper, told me he occasionally spent a night there with a young girl. ‘These English girls!’ Lieni said. She herself lived in the basement with her illegitimate daughter. An early postwar adventure. Between attic and basement, pleasure and its penalty, we boarders lived, narrowly. (5)

Immediacy of location is a human perspective, one that is rarely transcended, one of the limitations of the city dweller, one of that location’s paradoxes. In contrast to the above, although still insistently located, the London-born Smith’s White Teeth begins with a character unwillingly embedded in the city, one of its several protagonists, Archie Jones. Ironically, as the novel opens, he attempts to leave by committing suicide in his car in a nondescript area, which bid fails, creating a comic prelude to his second marriage: Early in the morning, late in the century, Cricklewood Broadway. At 06.27 hours on January 1, 1975, Alfred Archibald Jones was dressed in corduroy and sat in a fume-filled Cavalier Musketeer Estate face down on the steering wheel, hoping the judgment would not be too heavy on him. (3)

All of the above beginnings of being in London are situated through context and visceral coordinates, all determined by certain focal points, consisting of particular minutiae drawn from the almost limitless plethora of moments and aspects that constitute such a city. However, the first two explicitly evoke an arrival that correlates perspective, the first through awe and anxiety, the second cynicism and restriction. All three assume London as a totality well beyond the singular imagination, its immensity striking fear in Pip, whereas Naipaul conveys the limitations faced by its some of its inhabitants; while Smith captures its fears and the ennui the city can inculcate as well as a striking sense of failure. As Ballard said in an interview with Francesca Guidotti: You know what you can feel when you visit a strange city. Everything is very confusing, totally confusing. You can’t make sense of anything. Well, when you’ve



Introduction: Parallax London

7

lived in a place for a long time, you think: “How the hell did I find this place confusing? It’s so obvious!” It’s like London for me. I’ve been going there for nearly fifty years. I remember when I first came to London I was so amazed and now I’m no longer. But it is necessary to break through all those conventions. (32)

One might well conclude that London demands of its inhabitants and workers that they must partake of an innate process of discrimination by selecting from apparently multitudinous ranges of possibilities, yet, as Ballard indicates in his fiction, the enigma is that most of its inhabitants are still constrained. In many ways with Smith’s irredeemably suburban setting, her novel captures one of the centrifugal and social dynamics of contemporary London for, as Ian Watt says, ‘During most of the 20th century, suburbia represented a powerful image of the middle-class “good life” ’ (2874); but he points out that, as epitomized by J. G. Ballard’s work, it has instead become ‘characterised by latemodern anxiety, as in Ballard’s dystopian novel Kingdom Come set in London’s M25 orbital motorway periphery. Such anxiety arguably stems from increasing class and ethnic heterogeneity in the suburbs, including rising rates of suburban poverty’ (2874). Even from the 1940s, Central London has been subject in large areas to gentrification (Canonbury saw a few examples even during the Second World War, for instance, followed by Islington, Stoke Newington, London Fields, Shoreditch and so forth) and with an influx from the suburbs and provinces of a new bourgeois class of those who are either wealthy or who have access to family funds, a process that is ongoing. Houses that were slums in the 1960s and 1970s – and which would have proved virtually unsaleable had it not been for home improvement grants, a state subsidy for mostly middle-class house buyers – fetch prices of well over a million pounds. As Chris Hamnett observes in Unequal City: London in the Global Arena (2003): ‘It is possible to still find the traditional white working-class of yesteryear, but, it is necessary to look to some of the suburban areas like Barking and Dagenham or to some of the inner city council estates’ (2). The rapid fluctuations of the class make-up of the constituent citizens of an area are not driven only by finance, but these forces are critical. Since 2003, the right-to-buy and subsequent buy-to-let drain on council accommodation in central areas has accelerated such changes, even inner-city estates see former council flats being exchanged for huge sums, adding further to an ad hoc social apartheid. Housing affordability is at a crisis, but this simply exacerbates an existing problem, as Hamnett makes evident (155), and it has affinities to certain processes of selection. Watt identifies: ‘the concept of elective belonging to explain how the middle classes seek out places where they can cluster together with people “like themselves” ’ (2875).1

8

London in Contemporary British Fiction

The ‘Real’ London? While acknowledging the complexity outlined above, this volume charts the very liminality of London along these parallax gaps of economy, finance, past, future, home, workplace, country and city, and by so doing, radically refocuses the media images that have come to dominate representations of London in order to reveal glimpses of another London, which remains resistant to appropriation. Following Žižek’s arguments in The Parallax View, this London might be considered the ‘Real’ London, as long as the term is not misunderstood: The parallax Real is thus opposed to the standard (Lacanian) notion of the Real as that which ‘always returns to its place’ – as that which remains the same in all possible (symbolic) universes: the parallax Real is, rather, that which accounts for the very multiplicity of appearances of the same underlying Real – it is not the hardcore which persists as the Same, but the hard bone of contention which pulverises the sameness into the multitude of appearances. [emphasis in original] (26)

In other words, the ‘Real’ London is inherently paradoxical, and discernible only through its parallax gaps as an inscrutable presence always complicating any attempt to reduce the experience of the City to one of readily explicable cause and effect. Following the financial crisis of 2007–8, the difference of London has become more apparent. In 2015, for instance, London first voted for the Labour left in defiance of the national trends that saw a majority Conservative Government elected, and then became the epicentre of the (almost-Ballardian) campaign that saw the Islington MP Jeremy Corbyn against all expectation become the leader of the Labour Party. However, contemporary London writers such as Peter Ackroyd, J. G. Ballard, John King, Ian McEwan, Will Self, Iain Sinclair and Zadie Smith have been anticipating such shockwaves for years. While academic criticism has done much to catch up recently, what this volume offers is a comprehensive set of studies which, by superimposing the fractal radial fissures identified by these contemporary writers over the concentric zones that have emerged from the revived cultural and critical interest in the process of (sub)urban expansion, builds up a multi-layered socio-cultural map of London. Most of Greater London consists of sprawling areas such as Enfield, Bromley and Uxbridge with tiny, beleaguered residues of their rural origins preserved by the Green Belt that surrounds them; these represent Ballardian spaces which once had an independent existence but which have been relentlessly consumed



Introduction: Parallax London

9

by the outward sprawl of the city. These areas were locations with an earlier arterial development of commercial services that serviced the inward flow of travellers to the metropolis in the days of horse-drawn coaches, captured in the ‘snapshot’ of the case of impoverished maidservant Elizabeth Canning purportedly kidnapped in January 1753 from Bishopsgate Street in the City of London for the purposes of prostitution in Enfield Wash, presumably servicing the nearby coaching inns. Eventually the case involved London magistrate Henry Fielding, even though, as he wrote subsequently that year: ‘This Business I at first declined, as it was a Transaction which had happened at a distant Part of the Country […]’ (24). An anonymous account of the affair published as Canning’s Magazine states that the girl must have had ‘[s]trength sufficient left, not only to break her Prison, but to walk eleven or twelve miles to her Home’ (6), offering a reflection on what once constituted for Fielding distant parts, emphasizing the transition in historical, cultural consciousness of the city. As early as the 1820s, William Cobbett noted in Rural Rides: ‘When you get to Beckenham, which is the last parish in Kent, the country begins to assume a cockney-like appearance; all is artificial, and you no longer feel any interest in it’ (216). The boundary between City and Country was emerging as a twilight zone in which nothing was authentic or real. The possibility of such a nether region is parodied in P. G. Wodehouse’s Psmith in the City (1910), where the eponymous protagonist is sceptical about the very existence and location of a faux pastoral part of one of the city’s southern suburbs to where he is invited to hear a colleague talk publicly of their joint passion for socialism: ‘The first thing to do,’ said Psmith, ‘is to ascertain that such a place as Clapham Common really exists. One has heard of it, of course, but has its existence ever been proved? I think not’ (198). Despite Cobbett’s reservations and Wodehouse’s satirical dismissals, this zone enables new forms of living. Subsequently, Ford Madox Ford identified in these outer zones a parodic version of the ‘Country’ which allows the masses to partake in the cultured leisure pursuits of the gentry (see Hubble 2006: 151). Thus a trace of true individualism was preserved within modern mass society and, thereby, the possibility of a fulfilling utopian future kept tantalisingly open. However, this transition was never completed: Ford talks of romantic suburbanites doomed to ‘an always tragic death’ (5). And certainly other complexities abound, concerning such suburban space and living. As Kristin Bluemel says of Stevie Smith: ‘she does not naively celebrate or thoughtlessly excoriate the suburb. She uses her position as a suburban insider to describe and analyse more acutely than others the ambivalent role of the suburb in English life’ (96). As Bluemel indicates, Smith counters the private loathing of these areas expressed

10

London in Contemporary British Fiction

at least privately by many intellectuals in the inter-war years, embracing the multiple contradictions of the ‘geography’ that had ‘shaped Smith’s life’ (105). Naturally one might return to the insider/outsider perspective (or distinction) with its parallax gap where one can draw a distinction between the city’s presence from birth (or similar very early encounter) and conscious arrival. Forty years after Ford’s response, and despite his upbringing, largely in Oxfordshire, George Orwell reported in The Lion and the Unicorn (1941) that he had found ‘the germs of future England’ along the arterial roads ‘in Slough, Barnet, Dagenham, Letchworth, Hayes’ (68), but this utopian England has not so much appeared as become part of the landscape of the past. Iain Sinclair talks of West Drayton in this manner as an historical frontier in which ‘[b]icycle shops are a nostalgic recollection of the days when H. G. Well’s clerks took to the country roads’ (229). For J. G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come (2006), the implicit utopian nostalgia of the Cross of St George represents a longing for an English fascist past that never substantially thrived, despite in the contemporary period ‘too many St George’s flags flying from suburban bungalows’ (16). Since the millennium, liminal London has simmered with the threat of meltdown as all the partly digested historical essences ever consumed by the sprawl threaten to spew forth. There may never be a better time than the present to identify the constituent elements of London laid bare before us.

London themes and fictions The following chapters consider themes including: the relationship between the country and the city; the capacity of satirical forms to encompass the ‘Real’ London; spatio-temporal transformations and emergences; the relationship between multiculturalism and universalism; the underground as the spatial equivalent of London’s unconsciousness; the irreducible intersubjectivity of the city itself. As a consequence, the usual suspects – essentialized identities and cockney stereotypes – do not dominate proceedings, and the liminality and parallax gaps are not presented as the product of social and cultural fragmentation but rather revealed as pre-existing attributes of the city, consequences of London’s non-identity with itself, which is the only essential feature of a ‘Real’ London that can be known. In the first chapter, Philip Tew explores aspects of Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), including its key themes of fearfulness, trauma and revelation, its central London location, and the way in which it is structured around a



Introduction: Parallax London

11

series of confrontations mirroring Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). Tew discusses how the novel, set on Saturday 15 February 2003, the day of the mass demonstration against the imminent Iraq War, focuses on the disruption of the settled lifestyle of a successful, upper middle-class white male, undermining his apparent sense of balance, continuity and orderliness. However, Tew goes on to argue that this disruption is caused not by the historical events referenced in the novel, but rather by what he terms ‘vicarious victimhood’. Suggesting that Perowne identifies himself as a victim, thereby making his privileged London presence a site of vicarious victimhood, allows Tew to reveal the way in which apparent disturbances to the socialized collectivity of the capital are actually a consequence of the inability of individuals to comprehend such a complex space. Susan Alice Fischer’s chapter, ‘Seeing “The Empty Space”: Ali Smith’s The Accidental’, discusses how Smith examines both the intrusion of contemporary urban life into the country and the spaces between the worlds of city and country by exploring what happens to a London family summering in the Norfolk countryside when a strange woman, Amber, comes into their lives and shines a light on the hiatus between the public narratives of late capitalism and ordinary lives, first alluded to through Smith’s use of an epigraph by John Berger. Focusing on the novel’s central metaphor of photography and its framework of country and city, Fischer analyses how The Accidental leads its readers to question their understanding of contemporary London life and the gap between reality and simulacrum which structures it. The third chapter, by Sebastian Jenner, ‘Delineating the Liminal in Illimitable London: Will Self ’s The Book of Dave and the Cockney Visionary’, addresses the frequent recurrence of seemingly liminal localities throughout Self ’s oeuvre. In particular, in The Book of Dave, he focuses on the oscillation between past and future in order to argue that, by problematizing such liminal frontiers as the urban pastoral, psychosis in opposition to sanity and the contrived notion of Received Pronunciation, Self delineates a ‘Real’ London. Nick Bentley’s chapter discusses Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog with respect to how the trauma caused by violence leads variously to psychological regression to older forms of masculinity, to revenge and to the perpetration of violence on innocents. Bentley’s analysis of the spatial and cultural geography of the text identifies masculine and feminine spaces in contemporary London in relation to these issues of violence and criminality. He goes on to deal with issues of terrorism and ‘horrorism’ that reflect Amis’s concern with public issues on the international stage that encompass the representation and ‘meaning’ of 9/11. In Chapter 5, ‘Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Sacredness of Space and Time’, Tomasz Niedokos examines how Ackroyd’s spatial repositioning of the heart of

12

London in Contemporary British Fiction

London from Westminster to the City of London, the area where the ancient Londinium emerged between the three rivers of the Thames, the Fleet and the Walbrook, is also a temporal repositioning of London which shapes the writer’s vision of the city. By mapping Ackroyd’s delineation of London territory in terms of the sacredness of space and time, Niedokos shows how the author provides us with access to the pre-Reformation, medieval city which lies hidden beneath London’s modern guise as an international capital. Doris Bremm’s chapter investigates London’s museum spaces as represented in the works of Ackroyd and A. S. Byatt. By contrasting these writers’ different approaches, Bremm reveals London’s museums to be important liminal spaces between public and private spheres as well as between space and time. In Chapter 7, Laura Colombino shows how liminality is central to Iain Sinclair’s representation of London in works such as Downriver, Lights Out for the Territory and Liquid City. She demonstrates how, in line with the logic of chaos theory, ‘reality’, for Sinclair, is an infinitely accommodating substance, constantly mutating, a system resistant to any equilibrium. Jung Su’s chapter, ‘Feeling London Globally: The Location of Emotions in White Teeth’, addresses the important role emotions play in Smith’s comic yet sapient portrayal of a London where a new structure of feeling is emerging along with the gradual change of the city’s demographics. She shows how Smith, by looking from a female perspective at a London which has been hybridized by its post-colonial immigrants since decolonization, reveals the power relations underlying the apparent local realities of the city. The final intrusion of the female authorial voice, she argues, with its proposal of two possibilities for the prospect of a utopian future, suggests that Smith is concerned with the will of female immigrants to break free of patriarchal genealogy. Anja Müller-Wood’s chapter, ‘Agency and Conflict in Andrea Levy’s Polyphonic London’, investigates the structures of cultural conflict in Levy’s Small Island (2004). She argues that, instead of merely staging a confrontation of monolithic cultural blocks, Small Island is concerned with the contradictions that emerge on the level of character, resulting in a novel of echoes and mirrorings that plays on deep-rooted (human) continuities and similarities underneath which are far from static expressions of cultural difference. The scandalous insight of the novel, Müller-Wood contends, is not that human beings are culturally different, but that in fact they are humanly similar. She argues that Levy’s post-war London is an appropriately gargantuan setting for this almost universalist realization of shared humanity; an insight so disturbing it needs to be resisted through segregation, separation and the establishing of difference. In Chapter 10, Nora Pleßke



Introduction: Parallax London

13

examines the spatial and temporal liminality of Underground London in novels such as Tobias Hill’s Underground (1999), Conrad Williams’ London Revenant (2004) and Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (1996). Examining the subterranean city as a ‘lieu de mémoire’, or cultural memory for the metropolis and its inhabitants, Pleßke demonstrates how different temporal horizons interlace with each other. London underground is shown to be not only the archive of the metropolitan past but simultaneously an oracle for its future: the threshold between here and now as well as there and then. In Mark P. Williams’s chapter, ‘The Un-, Ab-, and Alter-Londons of China Miéville: Imaginary Spaces for Concrete Subjects’, he argues that Miéville’s fantasy cities, his un-Londons in King Rat or Un Lun Dun, the alter-London of New Crobuzon, and the ab-Londons of Looking for Jake and Three Moments of an Explosion are essentially modernist-inflected creations; attempts to come to terms in new ways with the place of the individual subject under contemporary modernity. Finally, Nick Hubble’s chapter analyses Zadie Smith’s NW (2012) in terms of its parallels with Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway and John Sommerfield’s May Day (1936), in order to identify a mode of representing the intersubjective nature of London that is dependent on working-class agency. By further contrasting NW with Sommerfield’s North West Five (1960), Hubble shows how the changes in post-war working-class experience and the related disjuncture in gender relations impact on Smith’s strategies for representing the intersubjectivity of London, which would otherwise remain hidden. Collectively, the readings here indicate a number of the ways in which the unique nature of London’s constitutive intersubjectivity derives from its inhabitants’ simultaneous status as individuals and as components of a greater mass: a truly liminal state which can only be resolved into fixed identities through cultural violence. It is hoped, therefore, that this collection will contribute a framework for new approaches to the representation of London appropriate to the anticipated social uncertainties of the coming years. Whatever may happen at local and global levels, London is likely to remain a location of interest, and writers remain unlikely to be able resist writing about it.

Note 1

Watt cites Mike Savage, who, with Gaynor Bagnall and Brian J. Longhurst, draws on qualitative data to observe and describe in a sociological sense an area in Manchester in terms highly appropriate to key areas undergoing or having

14

London in Contemporary British Fiction undergone embourgeoisement in London (Islington and Stoke Newington, for instance, come to mind): Actually this ‘very mixed’ population is comprised entirely of well-educated professionals and managers. There is a profound paradox at the heart of this liberal culture, which is that the celebration of diversity figures as a means of self-reinforcement, a form of self-congratulation for avoiding the narrowness of fixed lifestyles. While, at one level, difference is celebrated and welcomed, for instance with respect to diverse sexualities, family types and specific ‘middle-class’ occupations, this diversity also goes hand in hand with a liberal academic homogeneity. And indeed, alongside references to diversity, many respondents reported their sense that the local population was rather uniform, defined in terms of their common cultural capital, and espousal of a particular set of urban professional values. (43)

Works cited Ackroyd, Peter. London. London: Vintage, 2012 [2000]. Anon. Canning’s Magazine: or, a Review of the Whole Evidence that has been hitherto offered for, or against Elizabeth Canning, and Mary Squires. London: C. Corbett, 1753. Ballard, J. G. Kingdom Come. London: Fourth Estate, 2006. Ballard, J. G. Millennium People. London: Harper Perennial, 2008 [2003]. Ballard, James Graham and Francesca Guidotti. ‘Interview with James Graham Ballard (Shepperton, 21 January 1997).’ Spaces of Utopia: An Electronic Journal. 7. (2009): 15–33; http://ler.letras.up.pt Bluemel, Kristin. ‘ “Suburbs Are Not So Bad I Think”: Stevie Smith’s Problem of Place in 1930s and ’40s London.’ Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies. 3. (Fall 2003): 96–114. Cobbett, William. Rural Rides. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967 [1830]. Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. London: Collins, 1970 [1861]. Eade, John and Michael P. Garapich. ‘Settling or Surviving in London? The Experience of Poles and Other ‘A8’ Migrants in a Global City Borough.’ In Accession and Migration: Changing Policy, Society, and Culture in an Enlarged Europe. Eds John Eade and Yordanka Valkanova. Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT, 2009: 143–65. Eade, John and Yordanka Valkanova. ‘Accession and Migration: Changing Policy, Society and Culture in an Enlarged Europe.’ In Accession and Migration: Changing Policy, Society, and Culture in an Enlarged Europe. Eds John Eade and Yordanka Valkanova. Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT, 2009: 1–8. Fielding, Henry. A Clear State of The Case of Elizabeth Canning. Dublin: George Faulkner, Peter Wilson and Matthew Williamson, 1753. Ford, Madox Ford. England and the English. Manchester: Carcanet, 2003 [1907].



Introduction: Parallax London

15

Ford, Robert. ‘Who Might Vote for the BNP: Survey Evidence on the Electoral Potential of the Extreme Right in Britain.’ In The New Extremism in 21st Century Britain. Eds Roger Eatwell and Matthew J. Goodwin. London and New York: Routledge, 2010: 145–68. Forshaw, J. H. and Patrick Abercrombie. County Plan of London. London: Macmillan, 1943. Hamnett, Chris. Unequal City: London in the Global Arena. London and New York: Psychology Press, 2003. Hubble, Nick. ‘Beyond Mimetic Englishness: Ford’s English Trilogy and The Good Soldier’. In Ford Madox Ford and Englishness. Eds Dennis Brown and Jenny Plastow. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006: 147-62. Macleod, John. Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Morrison, Jago. Contemporary Fiction. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Naipaul, V. S. The Mimic Men. London: Penguin, 1969. Orwell, George. The Lion and the Unicorn. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982 [1941]. Phillips, Lawrence. London Narratives: Post-War Fiction and the City. London and New York: Continuum, 2006. Sassen, Saskia. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. 2nd edn. Princeton, NJ, and Woodstock, Oxon.: Princeton University Press, 2001. Savage, Mike, Gaynor Bagnall, and Brian J. Longhurst. Globalization and Belonging. London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004. Sinclair, Iain. London Orbital. London: Penguin, 2003. Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2000. Tew, Philip. The Contemporary British Novel. 2nd edn. London and New York: Continuum, 2007. Watt, Ian. ‘Living in an oasis: middle-class disaffiliation and selective belonging in an English suburb.’ Environment and Planning A. 41 (2009): 2874–92. Wodehouse, P. G. Psmith in the City [1910]. In The World of Psmith. London: Barrie & Jenkins, 1974. 141–262. Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2006.

1

Exploring London in Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005): Trauma and the Traumatological, Identity Politics and Vicarious Victimhood Philip Tew

This chapter will explore how Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) is structured around a series of confrontations and certain decidedly Woolfian elements mirroring (as numerous critics have noted) Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) with, variously: an intensification of key events compacted into a single day; a foregrounding of certain key themes, including fearfulness, trauma and revelation; and its geographic location in London’s central zones.1 McEwan’s initial setting itself evokes a traumatic history and several dimensions of London’s mythos. As I say of protagonist Henry Perowne’s home, in The Contemporary British Novel: ‘His house overlooks a façade reconstructed after wartime Luftwaffe bombing […] behind this evocation of past violence and trauma is a submerged awareness of a city shattered by the war, and of the Woolfian aesthetic reveries that conflict extinguished’ (199). Significantly, too, the narrative opens at dawn on Saturday 15 February 2003, when Perowne unconsciously anticipates London becoming the site of one in a series of worldwide anti-war protests coordinated across more than 600 cities seeking to stop the imminent Iraq War. Such imminence defines Perowne, mysteriously drawn to reflect upon a scene that will be transformed variously: first, briefly, into a symbolic aftershock of the terrorist attacks of 9/11; second, into a site of protest, with over a million protestors crowding into the capital; third, Perowne’s own residence becoming a space of threat and trauma; and finally, for a brief moment, the site of a Woolfian family dinner that Perowne abandons for an emergency operation. On awakening, Perowne moves involuntarily, standing naked before his Georgian window looking out at a jet flying low above the London skyline

18

London in Contemporary British Fiction

(this episode is analysed in detail below). Coming more to his senses, he runs through his previous days’ interventions as a neurosurgeon, recollecting his triumphs in detail, acting them out mentally, which implicitly hints at a suppressed narrative impulse subdued by his far more dominant rational inclin­ations. Yet, such an apparently logical, successful individual might easily be drawn into the irrational economies of trauma and pathology, remembering especially that these recalled medical interventions are already sites of trauma for some patients and their families. The distance travelled is not as great as one might anticipate. As Mark Seltzer indicates, in Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture, ‘The psychotic is one who takes things literally, acting out what others merely think, collapsing the distance between representations and things, private desires and public acts’ (266). Perowne’s evident hubristic pride and self-obsession are critical in positioning the novel ethically, for, as Tammy Amiel-Houser argues, unlike McEwan’s previous liberal-humanist stance of avowing empathy, ‘[t]he ethical vision expressed in Saturday, by contrast, seems to be based on the impenetrability of the Other, on the inability to step into another’s mind’ (129). As I indicated of this opening scene in The Contemporary British Novel (2007), Perowne’s euphoria is dispelled by a low-flying plane apparently on fire, possibly guided by terrorists. Specifically, he fears another terrorist attack: Thus, McEwan encapsulates and symbolizes the uncertain emergence of the present from the past in a narrative full of introspective self-absorption. Perowne’s nakedness conveys mankind’s vulnerability. […] Perowne’s notion of a penumbra of fear and uncertainty signifies a more general perspective, a postmillennial vulnerability and unease […]’. (199–200)

However, importantly his nakedness does not evince innocence, that quality being reserved for his daughter, Daisy – an attractive young poet about to taste her first substantial steps towards creative success in her chosen field – when she is made to strip by intruders towards the novel’s end, which state of undress closely links the two scenes as terminal points. For me, the opening is so startling and suggestive that as the novel progresses it impels the reader to return successively to its thematic emphasis and its curious dynamics. Perowne is all too certain of his status and success. ‘Henry can’t […] deny the egotistical joy in his own skills, or the pleasure he still takes in the relief of relatives when he comes down from the operating room like a god, an angel with glad tidings – life, not death’ (23). He appears smug, self-satisfied, and wealthy, ignoring the wider world, yet his confidence is revealed as hubristic. Essentially upper



Exploring London in Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005)

19

middle-class and conservative, he represents respectability, the establishment. As with the final home invasion, which emphasizes the potential vulnerabilities of the metropolis, other incursions that disturb his life appear to intrude from outside. However, I would argue that such ruptures actually stem from inherent qualities of Perowne’s identity and self-image, an unsettling unconscious self subtending the external image. These apparent threats to a supposedly settled domestic sphere are ironically actuated by his character and disposition, as with his prurient unease occasioned by the revelation of Daisy’s unplanned pregnancy.2 Perowne’s primary sense of selfhood derives from publicly mediated identities (which affluence and success represent), which he interprets egotistically as if he deserves such status, assuming his prominence represents an expression of self-evident, innate worthiness. As we shall see, a particularly traumatic and fractured circumstance acts as an external catalyst provoking certain pathological responses towards Perowne.3 The scale of war protest in London causes traffic delays during which Perowne finds time to admit: [I]t is in fact the state of the world that troubles him most, and the marchers are there to remind him of it. The world probably has changed fundamentally and the matter is being clumsily handled, particularly by the Americans. There are people around the planet, well-connected and organized, who would like to kill him and his family and friends, to make a point. (80–1)

Resisting a purely visceral response to the threat, Perowne considers such potential responses rather in terms of being examples of ‘pre-verbal language’ (81), emotionally charged. Thereby he reasons away the emotional register, yet still he seems uncomfortable, literally and conceptually seeking to avoid the day’s protest. His distraction in pursuing his thoughts occasion a seemingly ‘trivial’ (82) collision involving his own and another vehicle, which apparently mundane confrontation escalates, unexpectedly, producing a profound challenge to the apparent stability of Perowne’s life. Additionally, the previously apolitical Daisy is inspired to participate in the march against the conflict, enthused by the communal experience, subsequently arriving home to help prepare for her father’s family gathering. In both contexts, in effect the private and public worlds converge violently, in ways that seem almost inevitable in an urban location such as London, with all its plurality and contention. I would suggest that the novel’s underlying dynamics may be perhaps best understood by examining the terms of Mark Seltzer’s exposition in ‘Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere’ concerning contemporary trauma culture, and it is the traumatic to which Perowne is drawn, echoing his choice of profession:

20

London in Contemporary British Fiction The pathological public sphere is everywhere crossed by the vague and shifting lines between the singularity or privacy of the subject, on the one side, and collective forms of representation, exhibition, and witnessing, on the other. Along these lines, the trauma has surfaced as a sort of crossing-point of the ‘psychosocial.’ The very uncertainties as to the status of the wound in trauma— as physical or psychical, as private or public, as a matter of representation (fantasy) or as a matter of perception (event)—are markers, on several levels, of this excruciated crossing. The notion of trauma has thus come to function not merely as a sort of switch point between bodily and psychic orders; it has, beyond that, come to function as a switch point between individual and collective, private and public orders of things. (4–5)

As in much of contemporary culture, Saturday transforms the protest into one such transitional spectacle, characteristic of so much contemporary Western protest; doubly so, since the trauma McEwan references is perceived to be very largely implicit, marked by outrage, and vicarious, possessing a curious if at times displaced and highly salient immediacy, a type of collective psycho-drama (which I will examine further below). Such trauma is unlike that described by Cathy Caruth, who in Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (1996) insists that trauma represents ‘the narrative of a belated experience, [which] far from telling of an escape from reality—the escape from a death or from its referential force— rather attests to its endless impact on life’ (7). However, the threatened plane seems immediate enough to Perowne, for he observes: ‘Something is about to give’ (15), the event animating underlying fears. ‘In fact, the spectacle has the familiarity of a recurrent dream’ (15), although the narration adds ‘[t]hat is the other familiar element, horror of what he can’t see’ (16). Seltzer’s traumatic economy exudes, almost paradoxically, recurrence, propinquity and spectacular threat. Another dimension emerges from Seltzer’s implicit evocation of trauma’s lineage in pre-modern spectacles of torture, of brutality and evisceration; concerning such events one did not so much identify (or empathize), as recognize that they enacted a literal fear and associations of a deeper kind (hell, itself). Seltzer indicates that, on the Freudian account, trauma remains ‘a borderland concept between the mental and the physical’ (5 n.6). According to Seltzer’s account, the spectacle of trauma both offers contiguity and allows public perversity to permeate the domestic and personal domain, not just literally, but psychologically. McEwan’s novels are about such complex transformations, and Saturday extends such preoccupations, revolving around an economy of the traumatized subject, as I will illustrate below, understood vicariously, something initially denied Perowne, positioned by his status and his daughter’s dismissal of his stance as a patriarch.



Exploring London in Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005)

21

To further radically reconfigure an understanding of trauma and victimhood as represented in Saturday, one must reinterpret in a contemporary context not only the concept of trauma but also its changing sociocultural currency. For Cathy Caruth, for instance, trauma remains a matter of violent accident with individual victims, her concept drawn from Freud. In Caruth’s account one can see a lacunary blindness in not comprehending emergent traumatic identities, for recently a new sense of victimhood has prevailed that incorporates a kind of traumatic exceptionality, but which extends Roger Luckhurst’s usage of the term in ‘Traumaculture’ in terms of memoir (illustrated with examples that include those by John Diamond and about Iris Murdoch): ‘The experiential, if it was to gain a hearing, had to pass over certain thresholds that mark out traumatic exceptionality from the everyday’ (111).4 A more radical definition of the term can characterize practices whereby the traumatic subject is regarded as suffering in a more generic sense, by still being regarded as exceptional and a victim of culturally hegemonic practices: a paradoxical redefinitional context drawn from the strategies and deconstructive practices adopted by identity politics.5 From this field of struggle, a sense of such exceptional traumatic victimhood has spread to various protests targeting all kinds of perceived discrimination. Within this economy of dissent there has emerged on several levels an additional vicarious quality where violence against such subjects as members of a collective subset (a subtext for defining most kinds of oppression) is appropriated, witnessed and empathically incorporated. Certainly, as Luckhurst points out, simply witnessing or being adjacent to a traumatic event has come to be regarded by many as signifying a traumatic encounter, even if encountered by way of television. As Luckhurst observes, litigants in court have challenged proximity as being regarded as a limiting factor for compensation due to suffering trauma (34–5). Despite a certain judicial intransigence in Britain concerning such an extensive possibility of the traumatizing process, in the popular imagination, at least, victimhood and trauma seem to have entered into the public psyche as broad categorizations of the self. Luckhurst (drawing on Jurgen Habermas) makes claims as to ‘how specifically bourgeois journalism and the world of letters in England was co-implicated in the affective identifications around trauma in the 1990s’ (35). Such traumatic exceptionality has impacted upon the quotidian, with which many of McEwan’s narratives engage, marking out characters as defined by a sense of traumatic transformation.6 Again echoing The Child in Time and Enduring Love, Saturday focuses on a familiar pattern, the rupture of an apparently normative, settled London lifestyle of a successful, upper middleclass white male by seemingly a single event of a momentary duration, which

22

London in Contemporary British Fiction

undermines his apparent sense of balance, continuity and orderliness.7 Such confidence is the obverse of the uncertainty with which Woolf imbues Clarissa Dalloway, seeking something elusive and tentative in London which contrasts the illusory mastery with which McEwan’s protagonists tend to regard such territory. Although such a pattern of rupture recurs in Saturday, initially its disturbances seem to be driven more by a major set of historical events reflected upon explicitly in the narrative, but the narrative is inflected very specifically by a different vocabulary of trauma and an associated concept that might usefully be termed ‘vicarious victimhood’.8 In those two other, aforementioned, novels by McEwan loss and threat remain intensely personal; however, Saturday is permeated more by what in The Contemporary British Novel I termed the ‘traumatological’, a characteristic of the post-9/11 novel, which diverges radically from the kind of trauma described by Luckhurst (which I detail both above and below). If in a single day the experience of London is transformed, in Woolf ’s novel the catalyst is the party concerning which Clarissa’s uncertain anticipation of pleasure is hesitant and yet potentially self-affirming, whereas in McEwan it is the immensity of the visceral commitment to the anti-war protest that negates Perowne’s self-assurance, and animates vicariously Baxter’s later infraction. Rather than fully empathize, Perowne perceives those travelling on the plane he sees from his window at the beginning of the novel (over a Woolfian vista) in terms of the traumatological: ‘And whatever the passengers’ destination, whether they are frightened and safe, or dead, they will have arrived by now’ (19). Such a traumatological thread runs through the novel when periodically during the day a nervous Perowne follows the news story of the jet he had seen on waking, albeit coming to understand that the aircraft no longer portends a greater threat. The traumatological signifies not Caruth’s shocking ‘threat [which] is recognized by the mind one moment too late’ [emphasis in original] (62), but charts a logic of fear and apprehension as always imminent, with potential danger and injury, of threats to one’s life, while also incorporating an awareness of the potential for an increasing cycle of violence and perversity indicated by current and recent troubled events and the zeitgeist they shape.9 Perowne particularizes such awareness with regard to the plane in trouble, imagining ‘A man of sound faith with a bomb in the heel of his shoe’ (17). More generally, such traumatological apprehensions may be exhibited in an unconscious mood, a shifting economy of particular signs and metaphors expressing such potential. And in some senses the post-9/11 traumatology incorporates and supersedes Luckhurst’s traumaculture, displacing its often passive or oblique victimhood.



Exploring London in Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005)

23

Saturday exemplifies this shift, with literal, localized violence stalking Perowne as he grapples with his conscience over the impending Iraq war and the London protest that resists Blair’s imminent intervention. Consider, too, another characteristic of Perowne, his curious determination to account for himself in narrative fashion, despite an antipathy towards the arts and reading (an ironic rejection of his creator, McEwan, as author). Perowne abjures reading, especially fiction, opting rather for the apparent possibilities of material concretion, although interpretation of current events still clearly confounds him. He doesn’t want to spend his days off lying, or even sitting, down. Nor does he really want to be a spectator of other lives, of imaginary lives – even though these past hours he’s put in an unusual number of minutes gazing from the bedroom window. And it interests him less to have the world reinvented; he wants it explained. The times are strange enough. Why make things up? (66)

Unlike his shadowy precursor, Clarissa Dalloway, who is frequently hinted at, but only with allusive textual details, for Perowne individual leisure threatens him because it lies outside the framework defined by the successes of his bourgeois profession, where he can bully underlings and enjoy its associated social trappings. McEwan’s detailed accounts of the ephemera of Perowne’s life may be significant. Perowne imagines the panic of the victims of 9/11. Yet in attempting to resolve his underlying fears and panic he opts for a scientific model of the world, one typical of his training and career. He entirely dismisses any thought of the low-flying jet as a supernatural sign, and in doing so deploys terms highly suggestive in their peremptory dismissal of others and their value systems. He ponders, as the narrator indicates: ‘The primitive thinking of the supernatur­ally inclined amounts to what his psychiatric colleagues call a problem, or an idea, of reference. An excess of the subjective, the ordering of the world in line with your needs, an inability to contemplate your own unimportance’ (17). Of course ironically this is exactly how Perowne approaches the world, ignoring his own potential for error and misjudgement, his own inconsequence against a backdrop of a city full of many millions of activists and protestors. McEwan further recalibrates Woolf ’s Mrs Dalloway by shifting its emphasis to a masculinist perspective, and replacing the aspirant lower-class clerk Septimus Smith, whose insanity is reactive, instead featuring as an antagonist, Baxter, from the lower criminal classes, his malaise congenital and progressive. Perowne meets him after their two vehicles have collided and, according to Amiel-Houser, Baxter represents ‘a singular, enigmatic Other who has the power to shake the protagonist’s indifferent subjectivity’ (129).

24

London in Contemporary British Fiction

This key event, occurring about a quarter of the way into the narrative, is pivotal, followed by a palpable shift, the tone changing, as does Perowne’s mood and very gradually his sense of certainty. He later argues aggressively with his squash partner, Strauss (106–7), even realizing much later that he may be being followed (140). The car accident facilitates, first, Perowne’s diagnosis of Huntingdon’s Disease and his humiliation of Baxter, but, second, sets in train a sequence of events that culminates in Henry’s evoking his own localized sense of victimhood, a space he has previously been unable to inhabit empathically. Others, like Daisy, do so habitually as regards all kinds of victimhood and suffering, which the contemporary world commonly conflates, even though, as Anne Rothe explains, ‘The equation of victimhood and suffering constitutes a logical fallacy’ (25). In the light of the above reconsider once again, in detail, McEwan’s description of Perowne’s awakening at the beginning of Saturday, particularly its vocabulary and descriptive emphases: Some hours before dawn Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon, wakes to find himself already in motion, pushing back the covers from a sitting position, and then rising to his feet. It’s not clear to him when exactly he became conscious, nor does it seem relevant. He’s never done such a thing before, but he isn’t alarmed or even faintly surprised, for the movement is easy, and pleasurable in his limbs, and his back and legs feel unusually strong. He stands there, naked by the bed – he always sleeps naked – feeling his full height, aware of his wife’s patient breathing and of the wintry bedroom air on his skin. That too is a pleasurable sensation. His bedside clock shows three forty. He has no idea what he’s doing out of bed: he has no need to relieve himself, nor is he disturbed by a dream or some element of the day before, or even by the state of the world. It’s as if, standing there in the darkness, he’s materialised out of nothing, fully formed, unencumbered. He doesn’t feel tired, despite the hour or his recent labours, nor is his conscience troubled by any recent case. In fact, he’s alert and empty-headed and inexplicably elated. With no decision made, no motivation at all, he begins to move towards the nearest of the three bedroom windows and experiences such ease and lightness in his tread that he suspects at once he’s dreaming or sleepwalking. (3)

The impulsive beginning mirrors Mrs Dalloway, but its motive forces are more palpably unconscious, far less joyous. In situating McEwan’s use of Arnold’s poem ‘Dover Beach’ towards the end of the novel, it is important to note additionally both the centrality of Perowne, and the term ‘lightness’ in this curious opening vignette which offers another more oblique reference to Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, which work posits the notion that



Exploring London in Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005)

25

sweetness and light represent an ideal combination of beauty and intelligence which together form ‘the essential character of human perfection’ (23). In terms of this equation of worthiness, ironically, Perowne – who lacks any developed aesthetic sense or notion of the efficaciousness of beauty – is implicitly marked as an incomplete and challenged human being, despite his continued selfconviction about his worthiness. Much later, the narrator, playing with the same metaphor applied to the lights of cars queueing in a jam at twilight in which Perowne is stuck, makes his inadequacies of vision evident as compared to various Enlightenment thinkers and his family: All this teeming illumination would be wondrous if he could only see it through their eyes. But he can’t quite trick himself into it. He can’t feel his way past the iron weight of the actual to see beyond the boredom of a traffic tailback, or the delay to which he himself is contributing, or the drab commercial hopes of a parade of shops he’s been stuck beside for fifteen minutes. He doesn’t have the lyric gift to see beyond it – he’s a realist, and can never escape. But then, perhaps two poets in a family are enough. (168)

As the opening scene progresses it becomes evident that such lightness is not the tenor of the times, his temporary uplifting aberrational in terms of the wider zeitgeist he has already absorbed, for as the narrator specifies in a manner that mirrors Perowne’s thoughts in vaguely modernist fashion: ‘And now, what days are these? Baffled and fearful, he mostly thinks when he takes time from his weekly round to consider’ (4). From an even broader perspective with regard to the opening it is also clear that Perowne’s response to things, and his rational, detailed acts of narrative (despite his later resistance to aesthetic fictional acts) with their recursive recollection of life’s minutiae reflect the dynamics of the principle of trauma outlined by Seltzer, a kind of potential vulnerability: A sort of hypnotic mimetic identification is crucial to the understanding of the trauma. Trauma is, at least in part, an extreme expression of the mimetic compulsion—a photography at the level of the subject. But in this mimetic compulsion, I have argued, one detects a minimalist model of a sociality (the mimetic contagion of self and other as the basis of the social bond). One detects the model of a sociality bound to pathology. In short, the opening of relation to others (the ‘sympathetic’ social bond) is at the same time the traumatic collapse of boundaries between self and other (a yielding of identity to identification). (9)

Curiously, the literal threat and pathology of Baxter allows Perowne to incorporate a sense of traumatic exceptionalism so as to come to terms with a world conditioned and ordered by trauma, victimhood and the traumatological,

26

London in Contemporary British Fiction

which synthesise to create the underlying logic of McEwan’s novel. First, as Lisa Saltman and Eric Rosenberg comment in ‘Epilogue’, on the immediacy of 9/11 and its compression of narrative: What is distinctive here is the seeming disallowance of the deferral of experience. Trauma, however, in its classic formation, and […] remains dependent on an economy of belatedness that is the psychic space in which the overwhelming might be held. It is in the possibility of such a space that representation can emerge as some kind of version of the traumatic. Without representation, in all its deferral, trauma implies an absolute form that we would never know. In other words, the naming of trauma would be denied, and loss would be beyond any management. (272)

The incommensurability of ever-present peril creates a different scheme of injury, since it is ongoing anticipation that structures identity rather than survival and belatedness. Perowne precisely refuses Baxter such deferral when he confronts him with the hopelessness of his case, intervening professionally to dehumanize him by the use of medical terminology which makes of Baxter something objectified; and yet as a result of the ensuing conflict Perowne himself appropriates the status of victim (of the disease), combined with an implied heroism in overcoming the odds in the final struggle against Baxter. During the opening scene of Saturday it is evident that the pre-9/11 world for Perowne has been one of symmetry and proportion, still epitomized by his ongoing and relatively undisturbed perception of what he regards as his own patch of London: the Perownes’ own corner, a triumph of congruent proportion; the perfect square laid out by Robert Adam enclosing a perfect circle of garden – an eighteenth-century dream bathed and embraced by modernity, by street light from above, and from below by fibre-optic cables, and cool fresh water coursing down pipes, and sewage borne away in an instant of forgetting. (5)

He fails to foreground that such a corner screams in practice the wealth of its inhabitants, apart from the homeless women Perowne observes, and therefore acquires a disingenuous status. The very vocabulary and self-congratulatory assuredness of the initial scene subtly reflects his fundamental arrogance, a smug self-conviction, and complacency. Ironically, both his perspective and selfworth are predicated on an order that finds itself challenged by external events, whose importance he would rather diminish. Perowne’s preening self-reflection is found insufficient despite those clear successes he assumes can define his presence in the world. As one finds subsequently, a range of events disturbs and



Exploring London in Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005)

27

challenges such complacency. Prefacing later sets of disturbances, the opening scene in effect represents his reaching back for a pre-9/11, Arnoldian, sensibility, which is temporarily recovered in his euphoric mood (again appearing to mirror that of Clarissa Dalloway), but his sense of epiphany falters, countered by both the image of potential destruction and his innate fearfulness. If Saturday is centred upon the protests against the threatened AngloAmerican invasion of Iraq, McEwan stages a debate about the concomitant issues towards the end of the novel (but before its climax) between Perowne and Daisy. The latter, straight from the protest, berates her father, who equivocates about the issues and sees merits in the projected war. This undermines Perowne’s sense of the world, its ordered rational decision-making process, its utilitarian core, demanding ordered protests (implied rather than described). He responds to his daughter by alluding to Saddam Hussein’s regime of torture and repression: ‘He’s loathsome,’ she says. ‘It’s a given.’ ‘No it’s not. It’s a forgotten. Why else are you all singing and dancing in the park. The genocide and torture, the mass graves, the security apparatus, the criminal totalitarian state – the iPod generation doesn’t want to know. Let nothing come between them and their ecstasy clubbing and cheap flights and reality TV. But it will, if we do nothing. You all think you’re all lovely and gentle and blameless, but the religious Nazis loathe you. What do you think the Bali bomb was about? The clubbers clubbed. Radical Islam hates your freedom.’ [emphasis added] (191)

Their exchange supplies the other disturbing coordinate, alongside his earlier exchange with Baxter (even more unsettling because he cannot reduce Daisy in the way he has Baxter because of his illness). Despite his objection to, and rejection of, such contemporary performative protest as glib, Perowne appears to lose the argument, but this is not simply a polemical exchange where McEwan can reflect the takings of positions, the pros and cons. If one analyses Perowne’s sense of alienation and distance from the protestors as if it represented a generational difference, his response is in one crucial sense incorrect, in that the blinkered hedonism he clearly perceives, the singing and dancing, does not simply represent contemporary narcissism or blinkeredness. In complex ways, this archetypal ‘singing and dancing’ in protest against a whole range of issues, the gathering of a coalition of those responding to perceived oppressions and prejudices, represents the participants’ sense of themselves as ritualistically taking on, both collectively and – more importantly – individually, not only an

28

London in Contemporary British Fiction

objective sense of outraged protest, but – vicariously at first and by implication almost as if directly in an act of absorption (as if through acts of ventriloquism) – the actual (or potential) trauma of classes and groups of other people, a singular representation of subjectivity as alterity, a vicarious victimhood. The protestors do not simply identify with the other, but adopt the potential suffering as if about to be traumatized themselves by witnessing it from afar. And they partake, too, or extend the spectacle of the trauma and traumatology. As a way of responding to the world such appropriations have become widespread in contemporary culture, part of identifying oneself as if one were a victim, absorbing the status of victimhood. In a curious fashion Perowne will so identify himself, making his privileged London a site of deferred and vicarious victimhood. So what really has happened in the novel? The exchanges between Daisy and her father represent not just a family argument but an ideological staged set piece whose implications may be far broader, as well as serving to breach the familial context of Perowne’s assumed authority. Yet Perowne’s observation indicates a central theme and context for understanding the set of implicit ethical observations underpinning its narrative. As he subtly conveys through the conservative perspective of Perowne (for one wonders from where else could such an understanding have been articulated), McEwan comprehends exactly the absorption of suffering by the protestors to which Perowne objects, but by centring upon this ritualized activity he implicitly suggests that Perowne might feel excluded by such a process. It supersedes his rational, picking through of problems, of identity, and almost transcends his utilitarian logic. Despite Perowne’s objections, such acts of appropriation are intriguing, not least because, in a different context, it becomes clear that these are how he reassures himself. In his doubt, when that which is palpably larger or more extensive than he is – global, national events; terrorism; large-scale protests – unsettles his world (9/11, impending war) Perowne feeds his energies at least unconsciously into the confrontation with Baxter. Perowne takes on the status of a traumatized individual, that of his antagonist, in a double appropriation that is not an act of either empathy or real identification, but something more extensive. To be so vicariously traumatized is for an individual to engage in identification with the position of others publicly recognized as victims, and to narrativize oneself as a social agent who has similarly suffered or has the potential so to suffer. This applies even if this involves identification within an economy of celebrity and media representations. Such vicariousness is a dialectical process at heart: one sees oneself in the other, but this is transcended when one appropriates a culturally signified state of trauma, in effect displacing



Exploring London in Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005)

29

or mirroring the perceived victim. This works, too, with collective vicarious protest, the ritualized intervention with its spectacular, performative aspect that foregrounds the self as group participant among uncanny duplicates of oneself, and not truly celebrating the other. People overlay their own sense and appropriation of the perceived suffering and loss onto the often spectacular image (inhabited by themselves and not those suffering), which unlike Hollywood possesses apparent historicity, veracity, authenticity and mystery. With its often elusive sense of the regularized, or concrete, actuality, given the quality of the exceptionality of the day, a concept of the spectacular and the performative permeates Saturday, hinted at in Perowne’s self-regarding impulses. For Perowne there occurs a kind of reverse mirroring in the disruptions he encounters, given that external social forces have according to his account previously applauded him as socially significant, which conviction at the point of crisis is fundamentally challenged, with others including his daughter seeming less than supportive. His aura of conviction is subtly undermined. Subsequently, Perowne assumes the mantle of victimhood. Such underlying transformation demands recognition not only of vulnerability but of some limited sense of intersubjectivity. Just as Matthew Arnold is forced to recognize the philistine thug who (by his implied account) has pulled down the Hyde Park gates, leading Arnold to fear ‘the ways of Jacobinism’ (42), so McEwan’s protagonist faces an otherness that impinges, seems uncontrolled, and challenges his presumption of an ordered concord. Amiel-Houser sees another dimension, claiming that ‘Perowne is unable to decipher Baxter’s individuality: Baxter becomes not his foil, but an autonomous, irreducible and singular addressee’ (131). In part, but curiously in a reminder of Arnold, it is Daisy’s recitation of ‘Dover Beach’ acting somewhat improbably as a palliative, calming the situation, that allows Perowne to intervene medically, and thus restore Baxter to the role of subject in relation to Perowne’s status as neurosurgeon. McEwan’s view of bourgeois life remains essentially an Arnoldian one, but with profound underlying and unconscious doubts. The various subjectivities involved in the conflictual engagement of the home invasion participate in a transformative traumatic event, which subsequently allows them to define themselves, according an economy structured around vicarious victimhood. The terminal point of this fictional trajectory moves trauma in Saturday beyond Caruth’s sense of ‘belatedness and incomprehensibility that remain at the heart of this repetitive seeing’ (92) for various reasons. One is the literal or perceived ongoing and current threat; and another is the appropriation of victimhood which redefines one’s relationship to trauma as

30

London in Contemporary British Fiction

precisely spectacular and vicarious. At the novel’s conclusion, Perowne’s wife, Rosalind, expresses and feels anger, terror and vulnerability after the invasion of their home, feeling as if the intruders continued their presence (264–5). McEwan’s characters offer their own varied and gradually evolving responses to a shift in the cultural zeitgeist, for, rather than the vicissitudes of life having been dealt with and overcome, in the contemporary world, as Seltzer notes, there has been a ‘general inflation of the categories of trauma and abuse in a wide range of contemporary discourse’ (6), vicarious victimhood being a significant recent example. And the pathology of McEwan’s misfits like Baxter, both those found challenging and those being challenged, can be read as eruptions of private perversities into both the public and domestic domain of the city, with the socialized collectivity of the capital apparently disturbed, yet partly so because, as seems inevitable with such a complex space, always beyond individual comprehension or control its own true underlying relations are always already conflictual. The more collective vicarious victimhood of protests, such as the one that transpires in London, in effect take a notion of a unified conscience that conflates other locations within the collective experience of the city. Such apparently scrupulous yet illogical expansiveness of projected empathy with its atavistic rituals has rattled McEwan’s protagonist, as does Baxter, although by the end Perowne plans that ‘the system, the right hospital, must draw him in securely before he does more harm’ (278). Hence at the end of the novel Perowne has retreated already to his professional regularities, whereby he has ‘committed Baxter to his torture’ (278). Finally glimpsed beneath the apparently comforting images that appear to set the mood of the ending of Saturday, with Perowne comfortable in bed with his wife, is the image of sleep being akin to ‘falling towards oblivion […]’ (279), which allusion to death evokes a subversive quality, one that Woolf makes Clarissa sense at the end of Mrs Dalloway, for finally there lurks beyond the intolerabilities, the terror and ecstasies of life, what François Flahault calls ‘our inexorable end’ (38).

Notes 1 In The Contemporary British Novel (2007) I detailed such a comparison between Saturday and Mrs Dalloway (203); another Woolfian feature to the former is that this single day (Mrs Dallloway) leads to a large family party or celebration (Mrs Dalloway, The Years). 2 Such unconscious traits echo the propensities found in certain of McEwan’s other



Exploring London in Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005)

31

bourgeois male protagonists of such novels as The Comfort of Strangers (1981), Enduring Love (1997) and Amsterdam (1998). 3 Again this mirrors a pattern found in previous novels, The Child in Time (1987) and Enduring Love (1997). 4 Luckhurst may well have drawn the concept from Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun, where she describes of pre-modern beliefs: ‘this perception of melancholia as an extreme state and as an exceptionality that reveals the true nature of Being […]’ (7–8), adding, much later, that sadness seems ‘caused by internal or external traumas’ (21). 5 In essence this attitudinal and self-identifying protest derived from various contexts such as the Black Power movements in America responding to the legacy of slavery in the South, and subsequent descendant generations of blacks subject to violence and intimidation; or equally several generations of feminists reacting to women having traditionally been denied equal legal and social rights.   This emerges from the cultural ubiquity and permeation across a range of arts that Luckhurst identifies of trauma and identity, with a focus upon the self in the manner so typical of identity politics emerging in the 1960s, part of an overall abjuration of universalisms, involving a framing of the self that has suffered prejudice or requires liberation among others of similar affiliation or status. Such subjects collectively represent themselves as being radical, responsive to perceived slights, wounds and oppression. Clearly, for many this became an efficacious strategy, and by the 1990s such definitions of subjectivity were increasingly extended to those whose overall privileges were palpable, in a range of paradoxical categorizations. In this fashion, Perowne positions the protestors, their collective act one of self-identification. The wound or that which has been suffered is not literal, but more an appropriation of the psychological, symbolic or the attenuated suffering of the other. 6 Certainly McEwan incorporates in much of his fiction a sense of trauma, a characteristic that Luckhurst argues as having become dominant in the cultural and literary zeitgeist of the 1990s as ‘[a] new kind of articulation of subjectivity […]’ (28), which is paradoxical because, as Luckhurst observes: The idea of the ‘traumatic subject’ is, after all, held to disaggregate or shatter subjectivity; trauma is that which cannot be processed by the psyche yet lodges within the self as a foreign body dictating its processes and behaviour in opaque and alarming ways. (28)

However, in my view Luckhurst makes a fundamental error in his categorization. For despite his claims that the ‘gapped subject […] cannot remember itself to itself […]’, and that 1990s traumaculture ‘is also marked by processes of subjective and communal identification with or projection into the topography of the traumatic gap’ (28), nevertheless underlying his understanding of traumaculture

32

7

8

9

London in Contemporary British Fiction lies a particular type of subjectivity that – despite its cultural orientation, its intersubjective possibilities and its empathic possibilities – it is still predicated on the individual’s self-consciousness, self-fashioning, in radical opposition to what it dramatizes as oppressive, hegemonic forces. Such essentially bourgeois identity constructions mutate to apprehend egotistically, and appropriate more profoundly threatened traumatic identities vicariously. Mirroring the concomitant splintering of the personal relationships with their wives of the protagonists in The Child in Time and Enduring Love, significantly, Perowne falls out with his daughter for two reasons: 1. His wife seems a mere cipher in his life, a former patient he has manipulated; 2. Because Daisy with her resistance to his ideological views challenges his familial hegemony and undermines him more than does Baxter. Only by rescuing her, in conjunction with his son, in the final confrontation with Baxter, can his sense of order be seemingly restored, at least to Perowne’s satisfaction. In fact, going to retire alongside his compliant wife, he concludes: ‘This time there’ll be no trouble falling towards oblivion, there’s nothing can stop him now’ (279). I used this term and concept in an earlier version of this chapter entitled ‘Appropriating Trauma: Contemporaneity and Protest in Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005)’, delivered to the English Department staff-postgraduate research seminar series at Leeds University on 19 February 2009. Ann Rothe has used the term subsequently in Popular Trauma Culture: Selling the Pain of Others in the Mass Media (2011) to describe those appropriating the suffering of the Holocaust, whereby ‘it transforms the pain of others into the moral capital of the nonwitness […]’ (20). Although very largely not identified and categorized, certainly the traumatological precedes 9/11, mirrored in the fractured and troubling instabilities of J. G. Ballard’s fiction, but its significance is heightened and foregrounded after globally impactful and significant events such as these terror attacks.

Works cited Amiel-Houser, Tammy. ‘The Ethics of Otherness in Ian McEwan’s Saturday’. Connotations. 21.1 (2011/12): 128–57. Arnold, Matthew. ‘Dover Beach.’ In New Poems. London: Macmillan, 1867; http://www. poetryfoundation.org/poem/172844. Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism. London: Smith, Elder, 1869. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Flahault, François. Malice. Trans. Liz Heron. London and New York: Verso, 2003 [1998].



Exploring London in Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005)

33

Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York and Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1989 [1987]. Luckhurst, Roger. ‘Traumaculture’. New Formations 50 (2003): 28–47. McEwan, Ian. The Comfort of Strangers. London: Jonathan Cape, 1981. McEwan, Ian. The Child in Time. London: Jonathan Cape, 1987. McEwan, Ian. Enduring Love. London: Jonathan Cape, 1997. McEwan, Ian. Amsterdam. London: Jonathan Cape, 1998. McEwan, Ian. Saturday. London: Jonathan Cape, 2005. Rothe, Ann. Popular Trauma Culture: Selling the Pain of Others in the Mass Media. New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2011. Saltman, Lisa and Eric Rosenberg. ‘Epilogue’. In Trauma and Visuality in Modernity. Eds Lisa Saltman and Eric Rosenberg. Hanover, New Hampshire and London: Dartmouth College Press/University Press of New England, 2006: 272–75. Seltzer, Mark. ‘Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere’. October 80 (1997): 3–26. Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. New York and London: Routledge, 1998. Tew, Philip. The Contemporary British Novel. 2nd edn. London: Continuum, 2007. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. London: Hogarth Press, 1925. Woolf, Virginia. The Years. London: Hogarth Press, 1937.

2

Seeing ‘The Empty Space’: Ali Smith’s The Accidental Susan Alice Fischer

Opposite the title page of Ali Smith’s The Accidental (2005) – winner of the Whitbread Book Award and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize – is a black and white shot of a field and a single sheep from environmental photographer Fay Godwin’s Our Forbidden Land. This is no innocent pastoral. The sheep looks through the high metal fence and barbed wire, and two enormous pylons rise in the distance. The barrier not only pens in the countryside but also forbids access to the viewer. The pylons suggest that the urban, industrial world has encroached upon the countryside, but, perhaps even more, that the countryside is not the pastoral space away from the city and the rest of life so often imagined. Romantically linked with the notion of the ‘real’, or as it is called in the novel, ‘a quintessential place’ (11), the country is often constructed as the locus of authentic English life, while the city has been seen as an artificial superimposition upon this reality. Yet, as the novel shows, city and countryside are permeable, and these spaces and their concerns spill over and connect with one another. Unlike many Bildungsromane which follow the country-to-city trajectory in the quest for modern-day identity formation, Smith’s is a deconstructive novel that reverses that trajectory: the Smarts leave the city for the country and find upon re-entry to the city that their sense of who they are has been radically dismantled and that there are new ways to see the world which might guide how they subsequently live. The novel’s central metaphor of imagemaking and its focus on country and city begin with the photograph, and before the novel’s first words, thus making us question how we understand contemporary life and the gap between reality and simulacrum. The Accidental examines the intrusion of contemporary urban life into the country – and also the spaces between the worlds of city and country – by exploring what happens to an upper-middle-class London family summering in Norfolk when a strange woman, Amber, comes into their midst and shines a

light on the hiatus between the public narratives of late capitalism and ordinary

36

London in Contemporary British Fiction

lives, first alluded to through Smith’s use of epigraphs by John Berger and Nick Cohen. Berger writes: ‘Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous’ [emphasis added]. Cohen, on the other hand, reminds us: ‘Shallow uniformity is not an accident but a consequence of what Marxists optimistically call late capitalism’ [emphasis added]. Such grand narratives – ideological, intellectual, affective or sexual – give the Smart family the sense of who they are. Amber disrupts these narratives, forcing the Smarts – who are not as smart as they think – to recognize that the relationships they have with each other and the world preclude meaningful communication. Indeed, the Smart family will be forced to face the gap Berger mentions head on when, after their country holiday, they return, to the quite literally empty space of their London home, as their possessions have all disappeared. The need to see contemporary narratives for what they are and the gap between them and everyday life is introduced also with the epigraph from Sophocles, suggesting that Amber is a sort of modern-day Tiresias: ‘Many are the things that man / Seeing must understand. / Not seeing, how shall he know / What lies in the hand / Of time to come?’ The empty space allows for a reconceptualization of what truly matters, from personal relationships to environmental and political issues. The implication in the novel is that perceiving this empty space or gap offers a portal to consciousness. The epigraph from Jane Austen’s Emma – a novel about the failure to see clearly – concerning the entry of ‘gipsies’ into the countryside is related to Amber’s arrival and her purpose of making the Smarts see their lives critically. The setting for two-thirds of The Accidental is a quiet, rather dull Norfolk village, where nothing much seems to happen, yet, ironically, everything does. The Smarts have come here, away from their Islington home, for a particularly long summer holiday. Eve, mother of Astrid and Magnus and wife of the children’s step-father Michael, finds that the village fails to meet her expectations, and thinks it ‘murderous’ and a ‘swindle’ (189, 91): ‘Eve had imagined a picturesque place of big comfortable houses with recording studios in their barns, people summering on decking overlooking Norfolk’s legendary big open skies. Norfolk did have very nice skies. But one of the village’s two shops had a skull in the window with a plastic rat in its eyehole’ (83). The village thus fails to conform to the Smarts’ idea of what the country should be. Far from an idyllic haven where North London professional classes summer, this place takes on a sinister quality, that the Smarts do not realize they are unable to decipher until it is too late. Instead, Astrid refers to the village as ‘substandard’ and ‘a dump’



Seeing ‘The Empty Space’

37

(8, 7). The motorway cuts through the area and a fake weathervane sits atop the supermarket to signify ‘tradition’ rather than to tell which way the wind blows (110). The picnic spot that Astrid and Amber use after buying food at the supermarket ‘is a horrible recycling-bin place. They sit on the grass at the edge of the car park in the smell of old wine and beer from the bottle bins. Our recycling project, a sign says by the bins. Success. Environment’ (116). Chucking the core of an apple into the field (‘biodegradable’ (117)), they cross the dual carriageway and stop on the pedestrian bridge to ‘lean over and look at the view and the countryside again. It is beautiful. It is really English and quintessential’ (117–18). But what are they looking at? The cars below move ‘like a two-way river. The sunlight off the windscreens and the paint of the cars is flashy in Astrid’s eyes’ (118), thus highlighting the change to the landscape. What makes the ‘quintessential’ is something that the Smart family will realize only later. Like many urban dwellers, the Smarts believe that the country is a place where all is safe. Astrid notes: ‘Her mother and Michael keep saying how amazing it is to be in the country where you can trust people and leave your car unlocked and the doors of the house unlocked or even wide open’ (29), ironically underlining the fact that a stranger walks uninvited into their lives, despite Amber telling Eve ‘not to let folk over your threshold till you’re absolutely sure who they are’ (92) – a warning Eve and her family fail to heed because of their misreading of the landscape and of Amber. Indeed, the country presents many of the same problems as the city. The one Indian restaurant in the village is the target of vandalism in the form of graffiti. But despite Amber wondering how anyone could fail to miss this, the Smarts see almost nothing initially. Michael claims ‘demographics’ are different, which in part accounts for him and the others failing in varying degrees to see the racist vandalism, the surveillance, the exclusion of the ‘other’, in the form of the travellers and the working-class woman cleaner who ‘comes with’ the holiday rental, as well as the destruction of the landscape. The trajectory that the Smart family follow on their road to greater awareness of how their lives fit into the larger picture is laid out in three sections with deceptively prosaic titles, ‘The Beginning’, ‘The Middle’ and ‘The End’, which follow a brief prologue. With the exception of the prelude to the novel and the last part of each of the three main sections, all of which are narrated by a sort of disembodied first person that we can assume to be the mysterious Amber, the novel is narrated in third person limited point-of-view. Each of the three sections is further subdivided with one part in each allocated to the four family members, in the order of Astrid, Magnus, Michael and Eve; Amber’s narration follows Eve’s in each case.

38

London in Contemporary British Fiction

In the prelude, a first-person narrator, Alhambra, whom we come to recognize as a manifestation of Amber or the force she represents, details her genesis ‘in 1968 on a table in the café of the town’s only cinema’ (1), after which she is named. On view is Poor Cow, the film version of Nell Dunn’s 1967 novel about a young woman, Joy, whose lack of opportunities and poor life choices result in loss of self and near loss of her child who, she comes to realize, is the most important part of her life. Joy’s decisions also suggest those Alhambra’s mother makes. The coupling between Alhambra’s progenitors is prompted by screen-generated lust, underscoring the confusion between simulacrum and reality. The narrator tells us that the copulation takes place ‘[j]ust before the part where the filth get Terence Stamp and put him where he belongs’ (2). This timing suggests that misreading everyday images obscures recognition of the consequences of one’s actions. With these origins, Alhambra gets:‘[f]rom my mother: grace under pressure; the uses of mystery; how to get what I want. From my father: how to disappear, how to not exist’ (3), which reiterates the trajectory in Dunn’s novel. Indeed, Smith’s novel focuses extensively on the loss of parents. The prologue thus initiates a series of themes about projected ‘realities’ which are not what they seem, are misread and lead to unforeseen consequences, as well as about the ways people enter and affect one another’s lives, only to disappear. At the beginning of the novel the Smart family is in unspoken turmoil. Into this picture of dysfunctionalism walks a mysterious stranger of unclear intentions. Amber enters the family’s lives in unpredictable ways, which appear at first to benefit them. Symptomatic of the family’s lack of communication, both Eve and Michael think the other has invited Amber to the house, and neither has any clue about what the two children are going through. Before they know it, Amber worms her way into their lives and makes them see themselves and each other with new eyes. Her arrival explains in part the title of the novel. As Reich says: ‘In nature (say, bird-watching), Smith’s title evokes an unusual visitor showing up outside the range of its normal habitat. Amber is the accidental, the unexpected arrival; her name, the object of a great deal of word play, “means lamps lit in the dark” ’. Various critics have pointed out that Smith’s plot draws upon Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (1968) in which, as Nunez notes, ‘a beautiful and fantastically charismatic young man arrives out of nowhere to disrupt and transform the lives of a bourgeois family and their maid’ (11). Russo suggests Amber ‘may be just a phantasm, a projection of the other characters’ desires and fears’. She appears to understand the children and also to know what the adults need. As the novel develops, one begins to wonder just what Amber is doing.



Seeing ‘The Empty Space’

39

Laura Miller writes: ‘The stranger, with eerie cunning, locates the secret latch in each member’s psyche and flips it. Cherished secrets, squelched desires and nursed grudges burst forth. Relationships turn inside out and upside down. The stranger departs, leaving the family irrevocably changed’. The metamorphosis she produces suggests something otherworldly about Amber and her effect on the Smart family. Indeed, for Nunez, Amber ‘is less a human being than a force’ (11). That she is conceived in the cinema because her mother is so taken with Terence Stamp’s ‘numinousness’ reinforces the notion of a mystical, mythical or even godlike status (1). Her slippery quality may make one wonder to what degree she is a con artist, but also suggests that her meaning changes according to the needs of the person with whom she is interacting. This is apparent from the way no one can pinpoint her accent or origins. Astrid thinks she sounds American or Irish, while Michael hears Scandinavian tones in her voice, as she reminds him of a special time in his youth spent with two Scandinavians. Hearing the voice of her prematurely departed mother in Amber’s, Eve assumes Amber is Scottish, something the latter claims to be when she says she is descended from the MacDonalds of Glencoe. That we are to read Amber and her interaction with the Smart family allegorically is suggested by the characters’ names. Amber refers not only to shining a light in the dark, as already noted, but, as Reich notes, ‘Amber is the caution light’, and thus figuratively it is ‘an indication of approaching change or danger’ (‘Amber, n.1 and adj.’). Folklore notes the protective and curative powers of amber (Opie and Tatem), including when ‘rubbed on sore eyes’ (Simpson and Roud); it is also ‘used as an amulet to attract lovers’ (‘Amber, n.1 and adj.’). As Gode notes, in Sanskrit amber is associated with the sky (51), and Magnus thinks, ‘[m]aybe she is a whole surviving connected sky’ (139). Astrid and Magnus’s birth parents are Adam and Eve, obvious biblical references to the source of life. Michael’s name means ‘who is like God?’ (‘Michael, n.’), something which initially seems ironic, but less so later on, when he acquires an ascetic quality and becomes a father to them in Eve’s absence. Much is made of Magnus’s namesake, Saint Magnus the Martyr. He suffers greatly for his ‘sin’, and eventually thinks of joining a priesthood. Astrid derives from beautiful and god (Hanks, Hardcastle and Hodges) and generally relates to the stars, as Amber points out. Although Eve initially seems inappropriately named, as she is emotionally absent from her children’s lives, she will ultimately take on a different role. In the first part of the novel, Amber assumes Eve’s role as maternal guide and bearer of knowledge as at the beginning of their relationship Eve tosses Astrid an apple (31) that Amber ‘catches […] in the crook of her arm

40

London in Contemporary British Fiction

between herself and her camera’ (32), the phrase suggesting that the camera is hindering Astrid from seeing herself and her reality. (While with Amber, Astrid picnics not only on ‘apples called Discovery’ but on ribs (112).) Later in the novel, Eve is perhaps more true to her name as she morphs into an Amber-like force for the family whose life she enters in New York State, and comes to recognize the importance of her children. The almost cosmic focus on the need for clarity of vision is one of The Accidental’s main themes, and the difference between reality and illusion is partly played out through filmic metaphors. Reich writes that ‘from inspiration to execution, The Accidental relies on the prism of film and the mediation of the screen (Magnus: “wonders why the thing films are shown on is called a screen. What is it in front of?”) to deliver its perspective on contemporary values and culture’. Throughout the novel, each member of the Smart family mistakes simulation for reality, which, as Baudrillard indicates, ‘substitut[es] signs of the real for the real itself ’ (366). Recalling that very Baudrillardian of films, The Matrix (1999), the simulacrum masquerades in The Accidental as reality. As Baudrillard also states, simulation ‘is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal’ (365), and in the novel reality is often replaced by counterfeit image. This preoccupation with vision and image-making is seen most obviously with twelve-year-old Astrid, who sees life through the lens of her video-camera, and Astrid tries to capture the exact moment when night becomes day. She appears, that is, to be searching for that separation of origins – as well as for the truth that the light represents and the possibility of separating opacity and enlightenment – which is further removed from her because her camera distances her from reality. Nonetheless, Astrid is clever and perceives things that are invisible – as she generally is – to the rest of her family. Amber forces Astrid to see that, while she might be trying to capture the images of life around her, what is actually happening is that she, like the rest of society, is constantly under surveillance. In a series of scenes, Astrid comes to see that she is under CCTV surveillance, a major feature of everyday life in contemporary Britain. As young Astrid shops in a local supermarket, she ponders in a rather precociously Foucauldian manner the effects of surveillance, wondering if the effects of the Panopticon – not the word she uses – are still felt even when the cameras stop rolling: ‘when the woman gets home at night and sits at dinner or with a cup of coffee or whatever, does she realize she is not being recorded anymore? Or does she think inside her head that she still is being recorded, by something that watches everything we do, because she is so used to it being everywhere



Seeing ‘The Empty Space’

41

else?’ (114). Under Amber’s direction, Astrid begins filming the CCTV cameras in public spaces, such as the streets and the station. It is telling that this is what gets her into some trouble: these are the most ‘real’ images she captures, as they reveal the constant surveillance of contemporary society and also the slippage between reality and simulacrum. It is almost as if she is uncovering the Matrix. It is not until later in the novel that Astrid will understand the choice between fear and imagination that Amber offers to the belligerent and bewildered security guard. Astrid also films Amber, but those images will be lost forever when Amber pitches the video-camera from a pedestrian bridge on to the motorway, smashing it to bits. As Astrid astutely ruminates: Typical and ironic, no security cameras on the pedestrian bridge. Nobody saw it happen. Astrid can’t prove anything. (119)

This underscores the illusive – and elusive – nature of Amber and makes one wonder again who or what she really is. Astrid will come to realize that it is not possible to capture the truth; one must live it instead, and ‘[a]nyway she can remember quite a lot of things without having them on tape’ (226). Ultimately, she will recognize that ‘[h]er responsibility is different. It is about actually seeing, being there’ (227). Astrid’s brother, Magnus, is also caught up in the space between reality and simulacrum, between image and reality – and with how image-making can pervert reality, with dire consequences. He is suicidal because of the guilt he feels at having manipulated an electronic image of a schoolgirl into a highly sexualized object, which his classmates emailed to the entire school, thus driving her to suicide. After stopping Magnus from attempting to kill himself because of the role he played in this tragedy, Amber baptizes him anew in a scene in which she soaps and washes him. She also provides an extensive sexual initiation and a bizarre sort of sexual healing which takes place mostly in the village church. She refers to him as ‘Saint’ – a reference to St Magnus the Martyr – thus sending him on his way towards a more spiritual vocation. Magnus also comes to question the way the school authorities sweep ‘the matter’ under the rug and pretend the death never occurred (236). Although he is able to get on with his life, he is forever changed in a way that makes him more empathetic to the pain of others. We see this in the third section of the novel when he protectively watches two girls as they leave the cinema, and in his behaviour and feelings towards Astrid (particularly after his ‘confession’ to her – another part of his spiritual journey – through a barely cracked open door, reminiscent of a confessional).

42

London in Contemporary British Fiction

The children’s university professor step-father is also distanced from reality and acts in morally dubious ways without seeing the consequences of his actions. Michael collects postcards sent to him by all the female students he has seduced; the postcards mask the lack of authentic relationships. Smitten by Amber, Michael composes a series of sonnets about her. He tries to imagine having sex with her: ‘at the back of a near-empty cinema. But all he could see was the shaft of light from the projector above him, the movement of lazy dust in it as it changed with the frames, and ahead of him a stray pinpoint of light reflecting back off the screen where the screen had been tinily pierced’ (75). However, Amber’s ‘cure’ for him means refusing to engage with him sexually so that he is forced to see the people that he loves and the harm he does to his students, his family and himself. Once he is investigated by the university authorities and put on leave, he is relieved to be able to act in a different way and to feel his vulnerability. He becomes caring towards the children, a feeling they reciprocate. He feels all the physical symptoms of one suffering from ‘exposure’ to intense cold, including the danger of ‘heart failure’, and he needs the shelter, warmth, warm food and drink and ‘moral support’, which the children provide (279). The children’s mother, Eve, a writer, is also engaged in creating simulacra and distorting reality. She invents histories of those killed in the Second World War, accounts which give each individual ‘a voice – but a voice that tells his or her story as if he or she had lived on’ (81). Set in a sort of parallel universe, this ‘fictionalization’ is published in the ‘Genuine Article Series’ and has the morally questionable effect of smoothing over the cruelties of war (82). Eve consequently feels fraudulent, which is not helped by the fact that she knows something is wrong with her children, but fails to see them, and that she recognizes that her husband is philandering, even though she avoids confronting him. Although she assumes Amber is another of her husband’s conquests, Eve briefly considers that she could be a ‘freeloader’ or a ‘gypsy’ that just comes into people’s houses by making herself charming (98). Eve goes out during the night to check up on Amber – to make sure that, having refused the offer of a bed in the house, she is all right sleeping in her car – and Amber tells her she made a promise never to make a ‘home’ for herself after she accidentally killed a child on the road. Later, Amber seems to have forgotten all about this. The point seems to be more general: that Eve and others need to open their eyes to the way they live as a first step in recognizing their collusion with a corrupt system that is destroying the future which the children represent. Amber’s interaction with Eve has four main moments: Amber ‘take[s] Eve by the shoulders and shake[s] her hard’ (79), she rubs her knee and she kisses Eve



Seeing ‘The Empty Space’

43

on the mouth; as a parting gesture, she socks her in the eye. Each act seems to force Eve to wake up and see. Rubbing Eve’s knee in circles suggests both Amber’s healing abilities and her intention to turn Eve’s life round. That Eve will go on the road and insinuate herself into another family much as Amber has entered her own suggests that Eve, too, will be without a ‘home’ until she repairs her omissions; on the other hand, Astrid finds her departure a manifestation of ‘substandard parenting’ and ‘substandard responsibility’ (227). Through Amber’s ministrations, Michael loses interest in his dalliances with students, Eve is literally and figuratively ‘shaken’ by her, Magnus’s suicide attempt is interrupted and Astrid’s obsessive filming halted. Instead, during the first evening with Amber, there is a ‘strange air of celebration’ [emphasis in original] (89). Her arrival signals a change in the Smart family: ‘But Astrid, tonight? had cleared the plates and shared jokes with Eve like a normal daughter. Magnus? had almost looked his old self again’ (91). The novel’s focus on film, image manipulation and surveillance manifests itself through the extended metaphors of sight and blindness, light and dark. Early on, Astrid mentions having seen Oedipus Rex, and refers specifically to the moment when the protagonist blinds himself. She is blinded by the light when she first sees Amber, yet with similar irony starts seeing from that moment. When Astrid first perceives Amber, she ‘blinks’ from the brightness of her image: ‘There is the shape of someone on the sofa by the window. Because of the light from the window behind the person, and because of the flash of light still filling her own eye with reds and blacks, the face is a blur of light and dark’ (18). Shortly after, as Astrid peers at the apparently sleeping Amber, the latter startles her by opening an eye: ‘It is weird to look at someone. It is weird when they look back at you. It is really weird to be caught looking’ (21). Amber makes her ‘wideeyed. Her eyes have gone so wide open that she can actually physically feel how wide open they are’ (35). Related to this imagery of light and sight is the way Astrid rethinks the story of Icarus from the point of view of a girl her age. She believes she would know better than to get too close to the sun, and she ponders how long it would take for the sun to blind a person looking directly at it (25). This imagery continues with Magnus. In his despair over his classmate’s suicide, Magnus feels ‘far away, as if he is looking down the wrong end of a telescope’ (37) where he sees the boy he was before this unalterable event. He sees himself as a hologram: ‘created by laser, lenses, optical holders, a special vibration-isolated optical table. He is the creation of coherent light […]. He is a three-dimensional reproduction of something not really there’ (37–8). But his experience with reality – with the terrible consequences of his actions – has

44

London in Contemporary British Fiction

made him see himself differently. Also the notion of the division of day and night – which Astrid focuses on and concerns the moment of Creation – is picked up again by Magnus, who remembers that, before the tragic event, he had: ‘read […] about how the earth was a formless void. There was a deep darkness. God said let there be light. There was light. God used the light to divide the day from the night’ (50). In his despair, Magnus is about to commit suicide when Amber – whom he sees as an angel – intervenes in time and begins to bring light back into his world. Michael is also struck by Amber. Recalling the Icarus imagery used by Astrid, Michael compares the way that he is drawn to Amber with the way moths are inexorably attracted to a flame which they see as a ‘love-light’: ‘this one went straight to the flame and dropped on to the table with an audible thud’ (59). In a scene recalling Peter Walsh’s view of Clarissa Dalloway at the end of Woolf ’s novel, Michael thinks: ‘There she was now, in the doorway. Oh’ (78). It will take him a while to realize that it is not Amber, but life itself that he is seeing. Eventually: ‘[he opens] his eyes into what he knew was light, like a coma patient after years of senseless dark. He could see Eve. He could see Astrid. He could see his own hands like he’d never seen them. […] He had been lit, struck, like a match. He had been enlightened. […] He was leafy and new. He looked around him and everything he saw shone with life’ (77). By the end of the novel, when all his pretensions are stripped away and he is forced to face the ‘empty space’, Michael will be as shaky as a new-born. Amber departs, and the Smarts return to London to find that their Islington home has been burgled, the implication being that Amber has spirited away all their possessions. Nothing but the answerphone remains, even the doorknobs are gone – symptomatic of the emptiness of their lives and the Smarts’ need for a shift in consciousness. Their old life is wiped out, and they will have to find their way in the world anew. While Eve and Michael are outraged, the children find the emptiness of the house oddly wonderful and reassuring. Eve warns them never to mention Amber again, and Michael defines her as ‘a charlatan and a trickster and a liar’ conning people with her ‘remedies’ (230). Nonetheless, the family is irrevocably changed, and their experience of Amber and the empty space they now find themselves in have opened their minds to each other and to the world around them. The Accidental ultimately presents the need for a shift in consciousness much larger than that of the Smart family. In an interview with Louise France about the novel, Smith points out: ‘Although people won’t think this immediately, I think it’s a war novel. We lived through a war as though we were not at war



Seeing ‘The Empty Space’

45

in this country. We saw it on television but we saw a very different version of it which would be unrecognisable to people from elsewhere’. Set in 2003, The Accidental is framed by the war in Iraq. Astrid refers to the war when she sees the news, and Smith shows that it is reported on the same plane as a story in which ‘a woman in a tv studio talks for ages about what happened to her bowel movements since she started putting her food into special combinations’ (27). Significantly, Astrid also watches a video ‘about a girl […] reading a comic then the comic comes alive and she becomes part of the story’ (28). In blurring the distinctions between fiction and reality – and between the catastrophic and the trivial – Smith critiques contemporary reporting of the war and the way that what passes for reality becomes simulation. In so doing, the author explores the dire consequences of failing to see reality and to recognize that it has been manipulated. In suggesting that the novel’s discussion of the war and torture is one of the novel’s weaker points, Nunez perhaps underestimates the vital point Smith is making about the difference between illusion and life. Indeed, The Accidental suggests that the kinds of media image that constantly bombard us distort our ability to see reality. This is evident early in the novel when Astrid goes about filming everything rather than engaging directly in life. Amber performs a service to Astrid by making her look at life more directly, rather than through the lens of a camera. This connects to the part of the novel that shows that the media have desensitized our ability to perceive the cruelties of war. France writes, ‘So The Accidental becomes a book which is also about what is real and what isn’t; insiders and outsiders; who gets to tell who want [sic] to think’. Even more, the novel plays with the idea of whether we really know the difference between reality and fantasy. While Magnus genuinely regrets his part in contributing to the girl’s suicide, the society that surrounds him does everything to sweep the disaster under the carpet. This is akin to the larger social and political issues that the novel addresses, particularly those relating to images from the war. It is particularly in this regard that Baudrillard’s ideas of simulacra are signifi­cant. Because of ‘the generation by models of a real without origin or reality’ (365), we can’t always distinguish between the real and the simulated. Thus the continual presence of mass-produced images which either ‘mask’ and ‘pervert’ ‘a basic reality [or] the absence of a basic reality’ or which have ‘no relation to any reality [and] is its own pure simulacrum’ makes it difficult to see the atrocities of war. The Accidental similarly challenges its readers’ attempts to pin down meaning. On the one hand, as a power or a force, Amber seems to simulate divinity; on the other, she is created by a series of images from the

46

London in Contemporary British Fiction

big and little screens, popular culture and the political events of her time. More generally, the horror of war recedes to the background in a society where images are reproduced over and over to the point of meaninglessness. As Rivkin and Ryan point out, Baudrillard controversially asserted that ‘events like the Gulf War of 1990 “did not happen” ’ in the sense that ‘reality was so shaped by the media and so replaced by representations that the events might as well not have happened’; rather people ‘experienced’ them ‘through carefully controlled images’ (365). The difficulty with this proposition is that people directly affected by the war do experience it as all too real. Smith’s point seems to be that manipulated images remove us from the very real consequences of very real actions, and, like Magnus, we realize this when it is all too late. Baudrillard argues that ‘reality [i]s being increasingly replaced by sign systems that recodif[y] and replace […] the real’ as we live under a ‘series of simulacral regimes, ways of replacing the world with increasingly powerful regimes of signification’ (365). Ultimately, Baudrillard suggests, this leads to a contemporary culture in which, according to Rivkin and Ryan, ‘the referent disappears altogether and people come to live in pure simulations, replications of reality that resemble it in all respects save they are representations through and through’ (365). The replacement of reality with simulacra, however, does not mean that dangerous outcomes are lessened. On the contrary, The Accidental shows this distortion and its consequences on a smaller scale through individual lives, as we see with Astrid’s video camera, Magnus’s manipulated image of his classmate, Eve’s fake histories, Michael’s postcards in lieu of responsible human relationships, and the graffiti on the Indian restaurant, all of which point to the unseen violence that pervades everyday life and that even the countryside fails to smooth over. When the Smarts return to their empty house in Islington, they are shocked. Yet each member of the Smart family is also curiously relieved by the creation of this gap – this empty space – which allows them to see more clearly and to attain a new level of consciousness. Astrid seems to have emerged from under the weight of her biological father’s absence and to have chosen imagination over fear. Magnus has, through the ‘confession’ to Astrid of his ‘sin’, forgiven himself, yet has taken responsibility for his role in his classmate’s death. Michael is relieved to have sloughed off the role of seedy professor and is searching for something more authentic. Eve leaves her family to travel to various parts of the world, including the Grand Canyon, where she connects with the spirits of her dead parents. At the end of the novel, just before she tosses her mobile telephone into the Grand Canyon, Eve leaves a rambling message on her family’s answering machine in London, but the only words it picks up are ‘from here I



Seeing ‘The Empty Space’

47

can see’ [emphasis in original] (289). She has left the English countryside and the city for an extreme landscape which she describes as ‘a different planet’ (289), which ‘makes [her] think that every level pavement or road I’ve ever stood on was a kind of nonsense’ (288). Her absence from her family, however transitory it will be, at least represents a sort of authenticity. It is not entirely clear what Eve does see, though she seems to recognize the importance of her children in a way similar to the mother at the end of Nell Dunn’s novel, Poor Cow. At the close of The Accidental, Eve goes to the village in New York State where he father once lived, and she enters another family’s lives, becoming the kind of transformative agent that Amber had been. The novel leaves us with many questions. Smith has said, ‘I suppose I’m writing for a kind of reader who lets books ask questions […] questions about the language we and they use, about structure, the process of living and the process of narrative-making, what a book in your hands actually is and what it can do, the relationship between artifice and the real, in the very process of storytelling itself ’ (qtd Bochert, 1). We are left to ponder the gap between our ideas about city and country, reality and fiction, love and manipulation. By seeing the hiatus, we can at least recognize that the grand narratives don’t add up and thus begin to expand our consciousness about our relationships with ourselves, each other, the environment and politics. While not providing the answers, The Accidental urges us to see ‘the empty space’ that points the way to greater individual and collective responsibility.

Works cited Anon. ‘Amber, n.1 and adj.’ OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2015. Web. 15 June 2015. Baudrillard, Jean. ‘Simulacra and Simulations’. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd edn. Eds Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004: 365–77. Borchert, Paul. ‘The Best Books for Reading Groups 06: 25 titles for discussion & debate’. Kirkus Reviews. 74.5 (1 March 2006): 1. Dunn, Nell. Poor Cow. London: MacGibbon & Kee. 1967. France, Louise. ‘Life Stories’. The Observer 22 May 2005: n.p.; http://www.theguardian. com/books/2005/may/22/fiction.bookerprize2005. Gode, P. K. ‘History of Ambergris in India between about A.D. 700 and 1900’, Chymia. 2 (1949): 51–6. Hanks, Patrick, Kate Hardcastle and Flavia Hodges. ‘Astrid’, A Dictionary of First Names. 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006: n.p.; http://

48

London in Contemporary British Fiction

www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780198610601.001.0001/ acref-9780198610601. ‘Michael, n.’ OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2015. Web. 15 June 2015. Miller, Laura. ‘Who’s That Girl?’. The New York Times Book Review. 5 Feb. 2006: 14(L); http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/books/review/05miller. html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. Nunez, Sigrid. ‘More than a Tour de Force’, rev. Ali Smith’s The Accidental. The Threepenny Review. 105 (Spring 2006): 11–12. Opie, Iona and Moira Tatem. ‘AMBER cures/protects’, A Dictionary of Superstitions. Oxford University Press, 1996. Oxford Reference. 2003. Web. 15 June 2015. Reich, Tova. ‘Preoccupied with Celluloid’. New Leader. 88.6 (2005): 45–6. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 9 June 2010. Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan. Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd edn. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Russo, Maria. ‘Unhappy Together’, The New York Times Book Review. 25 January 2009: 15(L); http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/books/review/Russo-t.html. Simpson, Jacqueline and Steve Roud. ‘amber’, A Dictionary of English Folklore. Oxford University Press, 2003. Oxford Reference. 2003. Web. 15 June 2015. Smith, Ali. The Accidental. New York: Anchor Books, 2007 [2005].

3

Delineating the Liminal in Illimitable London: Will Self ’s The Book of Dave and the Cockney Visionary Sebastian Jenner

Will Self ’s construal of London is responsive to his formative experience of growing up in ‘the hinterland between a dull North London suburb called East Finchley and a rather tonier one called the Hampstead Garden Suburb’, as described in an interview with Noah Charney. Such seemingly liminal localities frequently resurface throughout his oeuvre, signifying a micro-texture of the broader complexities and contradictions that a representation of illimitable London demands. Liminal spaces of oscillation between oppositional dualities feature variously in Self ’s The Book of Dave (2006), which charts two alternating narrative sequences episodically. Subtitled ‘A Revelation of the Recent Past and the Distant Future’, the novel depicts a dystopian and monolithic reconstruction of London in the future, impelled by a new religious fundamentalism that is foreshadowed in the ‘recent past’. The protagonist, Dave ‘Tufty’ Rudman, is an emblematic London Black Cab driver and ‘Cockney’, who circumscribes a stereotypical and essentialized identity. Though frequently canonized by London writers, particularly by such psychogeographers as Peter Ackroyd,1 this Cockney exemplar is unrepresentative of Self ’s rambunctious tapestry of London. Dave’s embittered ramblings encompass the diametrically opposite view of what is most valued by the contemporary liberal world through which he passes in the period from 1987 to 2003. Ultimately, however, Dave is to be literally deified in a nightmarish future, his vitriolic words from the recent past forming a new fundamentalism adopted by a grotesque and emergent civilisation. In his novel, Self extrapolates and amplifies certain key contemporary concerns, such as racism, classism, gender equality and religious fundamentalism, bigoted views of which contribute to the harrowing post-apocalyptic

50

London in Contemporary British Fiction

society characterized by violence and oppression. This chapter will consider the novel’s navigations of oppositional dualities and the manifold social stratifications that Self scrutinizes, deployed within a complex range of liminal spaces and intersecting sociocultural instabilities. Self ’s liminal landscapes problematize contrived dualities, depicting the paradoxical universalism inherent in a new multiculturalism, the essentialization of identity politics, and the all-encompassing psycho-personification of an illimitable London. Self ’s delineations of variously configured liminal spaces offer fractal representations of a ‘Real’ London, to deploy a Žižekian concept,2 in the fictionalization of its seemingly infinite complexity. Dave Rudman’s monstrous and singular voice is held as simultaneously unrepresentative of the totality of London and yet paradox­ ically reflective of ‘every one of the billions of tiny undertakings its inhabitants engaged in, which, taken in sum, added up to chaos’ (347). Such unresolved spaces of conflict and inherent contradictions are variously depicted in the novel, allowing Self to reconfigure the city as a network of enclosures, areas of association and meaning for both Dave and others. Self ’s treatment of the city’s interzones, its spaces of oscillation between contrived dualities, proffers some potential for delineating a seemingly illimitable London. The novel’s two distinct narrative strands, in conjunction, highlight revealing parallels in their intercalated structure and kaleidoscopic thematic breadth, suggesting between them an articulation of London as comprehensibly illimitable. Self uses this very conceit to navigate and problematize the paradox of a labyrinthine and plurally voiced metropolis extricated and documented by a single voice: ‘There is no god but you, Dave, It whispered and you can be your own prophet …’ [emphasis in original] (345). A sequence of vignettes set in the ‘recent past’ charts the transmutations of the protagonist, responsive to socioeconomic and personal trauma. Such non-linear episodes act as illuminating snapshots of Dave’s individual interpretation, of his spatial experience, and of London shifting from its Thatcherite period through to the postmillennial one. Dave becomes increasingly deranged, suffering from gradual mental breakdown and eventual psychosis, after the separation from his wife, Michelle, and the ‘double’ loss of his child, Carl3. At his most unstable he inscribes a furious diatribe from the depths of his misogyny and megalomania. ‘[H]is Revelation, but also to his unique Doxology’ (348), is infused with a grotesque lexicon of ‘The Knowledge’ acquired by London cab drivers, printed onto metal sheets, and buried in the garden of his ex-wife’s Hampstead home. The analogous narrative sequence, with its dystopic vision of London after an eco-catastrophe, depicts the archipelagic and much-reduced remains of Britain after a global



Delineating the Liminal in Illimitable London

51

flood. The projected cartography, presumably the effect of global warming, is sketched in the maps provided and suggests a sea-level rise of about 80 metres. Mostly submerged, London is seemingly reduced to the Isle of Ham (originally Hampstead) on which the ‘Hamsters’ live, the island of Barn (recognisably Barnet), and the island of Nimar. To the north are spectres of the Chilterns, the M40, Birmingham and Nottingham, to where the characters of Self ’s distant future journey, arriving at the grotesque ‘New London’. This remodelled and ‘Toyist’4 city is erected on the island of Nott, realized from the: 320 routes that make up the Knowledge [which] are a plan for a future London. Between them and the points of interest at each starting point and destination they make a comprehensive verbal map of the city [...] That’s right, a city of Dave, New London. (280)

Raised from these remains, and patched together from traces of London brick, the new city forms a physicality of the draconian ‘dävine plan’ (307) that Dave’s Book demands, with its proponents exacting terrible punishments on apostates. In the recent past, the book produced by Dave is described tellingly by his new partner, Phyllis, as potently laying in wait ‘up on that hill, cast in bloody metal, screaming [...] screaming at the future’ (418). The pernicious text, with its dogmatic ruminations concerning the contemporary, is uncovered on the island of Ham and forms the essential basis of the future civilization. The social mores, religion, and fundamental foundations of knowledge thereby evolve exclusively from this isolated relic of the past; a remnant of London rendered incoherent and insane. Indeed, the cab driver’s ‘Knowledge’ is so deeply enfolded in his polemical offering that the ‘runs’ and ‘points’ of the cabbie’s encyclopaedic knowledge of London, in combination with the social response of his addled experience, take shape as an organizational principle of the internalized dispositions of what becomes engendered as ‘Ingland’ or ‘Ingerland’. The post-apocalyptic future narrative, overlapping with the episodic strands of the past, occurs between 509 and 524 ad, which, as Self footnotes, denotes: ‘Dating is from the purported discovery of the Book of Dave’ (1). In this dystopian and uncannily correspondent world, the character of Carl Dévúsh travels to ‘New London’ with his mentor, Antonë Böm, to discover the truth about Carl’s father, Symun Dévúsh. Symun had been arrested on a charge of ‘flying’, or heresy, for his preaching of a second Book of Dave that contradicts and repeals the doctrine of the first. Such heretical dissent from the ‘Dävinanity’ of their medi­evalized society attracts the routine yet horrific punishment of being broken on the wheel, having the tongue torn out5, and in Symun’s case exiled

52

London in Contemporary British Fiction

on the wild island of Nimar. This wilderness is tellingly foreshadowed by Dave Rudman’s recurrent retreat to the interzones around NIMR, a medical research institute on the outskirts of London. This is the same geographical location, transposed across time: He simply kept ending up here at Mill Hill, up on the Ridgeway, clambering over the fence opposite the National Institute for Medical Research, crossing the nursery-school playground, scaling a second fence, then standing staring towards the Hampstead massif, which rose like an island out of the evening traffic stream on the North Circular. (152)

Such liminal spaces on the periphery of London enable the broader complexities of the illimitable London to be fathomed and cognitively mapped. These interzones offer Dave a means of reclaiming his individual psyche and experience of place, transcending the city’s all-encompassing personification. Self ’s recurrent use of the Northern reaches of London as a compass point for examination is illuminated by Nick Papadimitriou’s explorations of this same fertile periphery in Scarp (2012). In explicitly acknowledging Papadimitriou in the dedication of The Book of Dave, Self perhaps suggests an alignment with the concept of ‘deep topography’ that is detailed by Papadimitriou in Scarp. Though published in 2012, this concept had formed part of Papadimitriou’s exploration of the ‘infrastructural unconscious of the northern reaches of the city’ (4) for many years, developed over psychogeographic walks featuring Self as an occasional companion. The ‘deep topographic’ exploration of the periphery of London ‘is concerned primarily with the experience of place, not its description. However, it is recognised that a complex and mutually reinforcing relationship exists between these two categories’ [emphasis in original] (253). As a cabbie, Dave offers an oddly unique description of the city which predominantly resounds with labyrinthine navigations of the central points and runs of the various urban enclosures of central London; encircled zones that are intrinsically ineffable even with his all-encompassing Knowledge. The city has been ‘[b] uilt up over centuries in concentric rings, like the trunk of a gargantuan tree, London districts derived their character from their ring’ (35). Dave’s experience, however, is characterized by a persistent retreat to the ‘right circle of the city, the one where he more or less belonged’ (35). The mutually reinforcing deep topographic delineation of his psyche is most viable in Dave’s Northern circle. However, the paradox of this zone being read as a microcosm of the broader, and seemingly illimitable, London is continued in the presentation of the overlapping rings that form radial fissures. Self ’s representation of such frontiers



Delineating the Liminal in Illimitable London

53

offers a potentiality in their chaotic thresholds, in their seemingly fractal (or iterative) nature. Variously, the sphere of Hampstead becomes a connective interzone for Dave, in which he can temper the noise and entropy of London and place his experience: ‘On the green ridge of the Hampstead massif, where oak and beech screened off the encompassing city, Dave could relax, and hear the swelling chords connecting him to his child’ (212). Self enables such navigations of complexity by way of the space between contradictory dualities of experience. The enfolded urban and pastoral sphere of Hampstead contains an extrication of the spiritual connection to place that one finds in the stereotype of rural life as a pastoral, in contradiction with the archetypal built environment and alienation of the city. The conflict between these perceptions establish Hampstead as an ‘interzone’, identified by Self in Psychogeography (2007) as a space ‘where country and city do battle for the soul of a place’ (154). Dave’s journeying through the city and his frequent pilgrimage to this locality reveal a means of achieving a ‘deep topography’ of experience in tracing such liminal spaces, enclosed by an urban mass. The variously articulated heterotopic spaces that pervade his understanding within this already liminal zone reflect the potentiality within such spaces of contestation and otherness. These heterotopic spaces, mirroring Michel Foucault’s ‘Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias’ (1984), are variously configured by way of: the Heath Hospital in which Dave is treated for his psychosis; the prison where he is detained after attempting to retrieve the Book; the very garden in which the first book is buried; the National Institute for Medical Research which Dave circumnavigates; the Jewish Federation Cemetery; but none more potently than the conserved wilderness of Hampstead Heath. Importantly, this space reconnects Dave with his son, Carl, for whom ‘the Heath itself was his confidante’ (161), and offers a recurrent means of comprehending his experience. Such localities within Dave’s ‘circle’, in which the urban and pastoral collide, provide potential for the perceived fabric of London to surrender itself to reinterpretation and renewal. Self ’s turn towards edgelands, interzones, and islands of synthesized urban and pastoral characteristics is furthered by the reconfiguration of the island of Ham as ‘a tapestry of naming, worked over again and again by the thousands of generations who had trod its leafy lanes and grassy paths’ (302). The recurrent conflict between two contradictory states in Self ’s navigation is exemplified by the urban pastoral interzone of Hampstead, and personified in the manifold internal conflicts of Dave himself. Dave, as superficially representative of white working-class masculinity, occupies a position that is increasingly perceived as operating at the fringes of

54

London in Contemporary British Fiction

London. Self ’s novel therefore depicts an essential reconsecration of the white working-class male, whose Cockney voice is less dominant in a persistently plural, polyphonic London. Despite this somewhat reductive manipulation of identity politics, Dave is Will Self ’s most comprehensive and nuanced character, particularly for an author whose oeuvre regularly resonates with J. G. Ballard’s surface-level characterization. Self ’s protagonist is depicted with atypical breadth and intricacy. Indeed, Dave’s complex navigation of the journey to self-awareness is treated with empathy, despite the character’s evident failings and warped world view: ‘there were no relationships of trust or intimacy. These were interactions he’d only ever witnessed in the rounded oblong of his rearview mirror – the heartfelt confidence, the stuttered confession’ (340). In this, Dave as the silent driver enables and animates such compassionate attempted interactions, yet is marginalized by the multiple voices of his passengers. His separation is encoded by the retractable screen that is both a literal and symbolic threshold of his exclusion from the current attitudinal framing of the city. As illustrated by Philip Tew’s The Contemporary British Novel (2007), it has only recently been acknowledged that ‘the bulk of cultural production in the British Isles [...] almost entirely excluded the working classes’ (xiii). There is, however, a case to be made for the working class, ‘Cockney’, voice as having typified the perfunctory notion of a model London voice. Conversely, this stereotype is increasingly recognisable in the contemporary sociocultural milieu by caricatures of misogyny and inherent racism, to which Dave conforms: ‘Fucking this and fucking that, fucking coons and fucking Yids, fucking young slappers and fucking old boilers’ (161). This is symptomatic, perhaps, of what Tew views as: ‘ [a] conceptual worldview based on liberal values and the cultural significance of the middle class. Concomitant to this sin of inclusion is a sin of omission that will be traced, the effective effacement or reduction to parody (at best) of the working classes’ (64). Such configurations of contemporary class perceptions are immediately apparent in Self ’s binary configurations of ‘Mockni’ and ‘Arpee’, the conflicting languages of the distant future that arise from Dave’s parodied lexicon. The notion of Received Pronunciation, reconfigured as ‘Arpee’, is a contrived and fanciful notion that has been largely taken as gospel, despite its obvious classist fabrication. The lingering idea of the British literary canon as a predominantly South East English vernacular, of middle-class and upper-class narrative, is an example of the traditional prejudiced power narratives, intellectualized and divorced from the reality of the marginalized literature that in fact characterizes the scope of British cultural output. The notion that these Received Standard



Delineating the Liminal in Illimitable London

55

English voices encapsulate the British novel has been problematized in recent years, and forms an embittered dialectic in Self ’s novel. The psychosocial evolution of language has palpable correlations with biological evolution, and of our perception of nature as a complex and adaptive system. Just as Received Standard English is divorced from the organic terrain of British dialect, and is fashioned by socio-political forces, the perception of the English countryside as wholly representative of ‘nature’ is just as circumspect. In an interview with Jo Mortimer, Self remarked of the nation’s fundamental consciousness of its anthropic landscape: ‘that’s embedded very deeply in the British psyche: the British know their country is completely anthropic. It means that the urban has psychic primacy. [...] The city is omnipresent’. Rather than dismissing the British countryside as unrepresentative of our psyche, Self identifies its synthetic and simulated nature. Such ‘pastoral’ areas are the product of centuries of human activity, of arable farming and woodland management, and are therefore inscribed by human production as much as the built environment. However, just as there are no longer any remains of ‘pristine wilderness’ in Britain, it is evident from the Land Cover Map detailed in Ackroyd’s London: The Biography (2001) that ‘over a third of London’s total land is semi-natural or mown grass, tilled land and deciduous woodland’ (361). While much of these semi-natural spaces consists of gardens and parks, and other such cultivated land, there is a theoretical movement towards the recognition of forgotten ‘true’ wildernesses at the ‘edgelands’ of cities, places of flux and constant change. Indeed, Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts identify that at their ‘most unruly and chaotic, edgelands make a great deal of our official wilderness seem like the enshrined, ecologically arrested, controlled garden space it really is’ (8). Even within London, therefore, one frequently encounters wild spaces, and nowhere more so than in the Northern reaches of the city. Indeed, walking these interzones with Nick Papadimitriou, Self remarks, in Psychogeography: ‘Along the banks great hanks of bramble are interspersed by the mighty umbels of Caucasian Giant Hogweed [...] This is the landscape at once of my childhood and the futuristic dystopia of Ham in my novel The Book of Dave’ (36). An understanding of the nature of city is increasingly surrendering itself to reinterpretation, and one must now reconsider the multivalent and manifold medium of the urban form. The natural environments that are enfolded in the edgelands of the traditional urban fabric are sites of potential and complex synthesis; what Farley and Symmons Roberts describe as ‘true pastoral [which] is more likely to be found in the edgelands, where our slipstream has created a zone of inattention’ (103). From such marginal spaces

56

London in Contemporary British Fiction

the chaotic flux of ‘Real London’ is perhaps most readily revealed, principally illuminated in Self ’s novel by way of the ‘Ferbiddun Zön’. This area, proscribed in the distant future, echoes the prohibited radius around Dave’s ex-wife’s house, from which he is forbidden entry by a court order. This zone is analogously considered off-limits by the people of Ham, yet it assumes the transformative space for the enlightened figure of Symun, where ultimately he discovers the Second Book: ‘This wild, overgrown place held no terror for him now that his revelation was complete’ (83). As the archetypal zone of inattention, therefore, the Ferbiddun Zön articulates a synthesis between the urban and pastoral stereo­types, of a sense of spiritual wilderness in combination with urban alienation. Just as with the preservation of contrived notions of Received Pronunciation, ecological and conservationist movements preserving ‘pristine wildernesses’ are centred on the impossible pursuit of pre-human eco-zones. In a scrutiny of this model, Emma Maris’s Rambunctious Garden (2011) proclaims the need to ‘temper our romantic notion of untrammeled wilderness and find room next to it for the more nuanced notion of a global, half-wild rambunctious garden, tended by us’ (2). Embracing the paradoxically anthropic, yet managed, wilderness is the most responsible and productive approach to ecological balance. Indeed, there is a burgeoning awareness that undoing the weight of human influence on botanical evolution is a contrived and reductive pursuit, the latter mirrored by attempts to maintain Received Pronunciation in language. In his approach to language, Self configures the binary conflict between organic evolution and human control by way of the clash between ‘Arpee’ and ‘Mockni’. This is revealed, for example, in the examination of Symun’s religiosity at the hands of the PCO: ‘– Beggin yer pardun, Reervú, thass juss ve wä we sezzit on Am. – Well, you aren’t on Ham now, my good fellow, this is London and in London you speak Arpee, and you call over the runs like a Londoner’ (186). Dave’s linguistic legacy, considered alongside his topographic and dogmatic scripture, suggests a parallel with what Peter Ackroyd terms the ‘Cockney Visionary’. From a revitalizing class perspective Will Self is perhaps sympathetic to the notion that ‘Real London’ is held in the experience of its ‘common’ inhabitants. Dave prophetically remarks: ‘I know it all – I hold it all. If all of this were swamped, taken out by a huge fucking flood, who’d be able to tell you what it was like? Not the fucking Mayor or Prime Minister – that’s for sure. But me, an ‘umble cabbie’ [emphasis in original] (33). Peter Ackroyd’s term for the visionary individualism of the archetypal London luminaries denoting the city at large, epitomized by William Blake and his articulation of ‘infinite London’, suggests a tendency towards the personification of London through these ‘Cockney



Delineating the Liminal in Illimitable London

57

Visionaries’. However, such voices are arguably subsumed into the canon and thereby either divorced from or already non-representative of their class origins. Self is therefore identifying a stultifying notion of the Cockney Visionary as a hollow stereotype, non-representative of the true working-class voice. The brutal civilization that forms from the caricature of Dave, in his extreme prejudice and vindictive tirades, amplifies the threat of such singular categories and their compartmentalizations. The caricature renders him unrepresentative of the city and of experience, in that he is seen to be performing the hollow stereotype of his social stratification: ‘he’d long since learned that just as he had to throw away his Hs, so he had to gather up the beautiful game. Dave didn’t give a shit about football’ (101). Dave’s reductive performance of the Cockney stereotype warps his world view, and distorts the sense of self that ultimately becomes the fundamental basis of the dystopian future. Dave’s ‘real’ cognizance is achieved by way of compromise and contradiction of the stereotype that haunts him. Ultimately, his second Book, as an artefact of his rejuvenation and well-being, is summoned from the interzone of his relationship with Phyllis: ‘The new Book’s composition was evidence of this harmoniousness, for its true author was Phyllis quite as much as Dave’ (420). In this, Self is perhaps acknowledging the fallibility of psychogeography in its attempt to chart the city entirely, mapping personal experience of place in what is typically limited to a solitary male-centric voice. Will Self, oft fêted as one of the principal proponents of the field, has candidly acknowledged, in Psychogeography, the male-centricity of the practice: do I believe that men are corralled in this field due to certain natural and/ or nurtured characteristics, that lead us to believe we have – or actually do inculcate us with – superior visual-spatial skills to women, and an inordinate fondness for all aspects of orientation, its pursuit, minutiae and – worst of all – accessories? Absolutely. (12)

Through this admission, Self can be seen to be wrestling with the problem of solipsism in combination with the desire to map and create a cartography of the plurally voiced city. Walking to Hollywood (2010), Self ’s narrativized account of his experience, sees the recurring character of Dr Zack Busner suggest to Self : ‘your obsessive-compulsive thought patterns appear to have become, um, engrafted in the external world’ [emphasis in original] (109). Aligned with the reverberations of psychosis and delusions of grandeur from which Dave suffers, such grandiosity suggests a telling thread of psychogeography as a potentially delusional account of ‘reality’, of the inherent aggrandising of the psyche. Peter

58

London in Contemporary British Fiction

Ackroyd’s London: The Biography perhaps marked the arrival of psychogeography as a mainstream literary production, a work already canonized for its turn to a ‘phrenology of London’. Arguably, there is a reductive perception of psychogeography that too readily homogenizes the multifarious conceptual terrain towards a hallowed delineation of London. Self ’s dystopian extrapolation of Dave’s singular perspective is perhaps a problematization of the homogenized voice of psychogeography, a caveat of such ‘absolute’ knowledge constructs serving as a principal model for reading London. In exaggerating the search for the magical beneath the mundane, the city as personification circumscribes the various individual socio-political positions of its inhabitants and of their structuring effect. Ackroyd’s representation of the Cockney Visionaries, for example, suggests a leaning towards the occult and to the distinct alienation from reality of those such as William Blake, with his call for a ‘New Jerusalem’ (which ambition ‘New London’ appears to parody). Yet, the overriding message in reading Ackroyd’s text is for Self, as stated in Psychogeography, ‘that while the physical and political structure of London may have mutated down the ages, as torrents of men and women coursed through its streets, yet their individuality is as nothing, set beside the city’s own enduring personification’ (11). Similarly, Iain Sinclair’s writing on London is entwined with aspects of mysticism and the quasi-religious mapping of folkloric and mythologizing resonance between local and national identity, meaning and memory. His incorporation of fantastical influence, and of ancestral hauntings, creates a sense of London echolalia. There are similarities to Sinclair’s position in Dave’s description of the M25, for example, as ‘the O-ring itself – a mighty orbital motorway of fluid coursing beneath the tarmac plain’ (218), a description that appears to nod towards Sinclair’s London Orbital (2002). In Psychogeography, Self, on the other hand, claims to have arrived at his own particular branch of psychogeography, through a sense of necessity, a need to challenge his alienation and connect to the physicality of his surroundings: ‘to underscore the seriousness of my project I like a walk which takes me to a meeting or an assignment; that way I can drag other people in to my eotechnical world view’ (69). His strategy, therefore, appears as a means of reconnecting the rupture between technology and man, between time-space and the extremes that in their polarizations actually make up personal psyche of place in correlation with journeying. This is perhaps why Self looks to the future in a Ballardian manner, unlike his contemporaries who typically turn to the past and to local histories. His writing is enfolded in the tradition of journey making, and the voyage between disparate points, mediated through walking.



Delineating the Liminal in Illimitable London

59

Psychogeography has various interpretations, ranging from the Situationist Dérive, and the aimless stroll, to the aleatory stipulation: ‘place a glass, rim down, anywhere on the map, and draw round its edge. Pick up the map, go out into the city, and walk the circle’, as identified by Robert MacFarlane in ‘A Road of One’s Own’ (2005). Yet, as explained in 2013 to Jacques Testard, Will Self ’s own configurations appear as personal strategies of exploring the particular sense of place and the physicality of his experience of London: arrived at quite haphazardly and tactically – not as a theoretical construct – and also as a result of having stopped taking drugs and having a lot more energy and getting out more. It also grew out of my growing alienation from the constant society of the spectacle and my alienation from the man-machine matrix.

Arguably, Self ’s psychogeographic strategy may have been influenced by personal experience of psychosis, in combination with having been so fiercely venerated. Self appeared on the literary scene in almost messianic fashion, lauded by many as the ‘new voice’ of the generation after the Granta ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ campaign in 1993.6 Just as the literary canon can be seen to readily adulate and deify, there is a tendency for Psychogeography to behave as a religious cult. The megalomaniac tendency of viewing Psychogeography as a doctrine and panacea for the modern urban condition can be aligned with Self ’s interpretation of the institutional responses to psychoses. In his foreword to Living With Psychosis (2012) Self refers to the theoretical models that compartmentalize treatment of psychosis and their limitations: over the centuries different cultures have come up with both explanations of, and therapies for psychosis that are wildly divergent. The voices of God or gods; the speech of the ancestors or their totemic representatives – we may now regard these characterisations of psychosis in societies separated from our own in time and place nowadays as being in themselves culturally determined, but in fact we indulge in such deterministic formulations when it comes to both diagnosing and treating psychoses in our own society. (4)

Self ’s comparison to the religiosity of such frameworks and their insufficiency in the application to the complexity of individual situation is echoed in Dave’s own traumatic experience of treatment. His psychiatrist, Anthony Bohm, acknowledges that ‘When Doctor, ah, Fanning prescribed Sexorat for you in 2001 I’m sure he did what he felt was the right thing. However, the facts are that a small minority of patients have bad reactions to the drug – psychoses even. Your book dates from this period’ (292). The problematic binary relation between psychosis and sanity is underscored by Self ’s recurring refrain of the

60

London in Contemporary British Fiction

redundancy of such distinct oppositional dualities. Self has revealed that as ‘a very disturbed young man I felt my sanity under threat and picked up on [Thomas] Szasz’s thinking and started to think as [R. D.] Laing did, that sanity was – a bit like the realist novel – a socioculturally determined construct’ (2015). Just as with the fabricated notion of Received Pronunciation, and with the contrived perception of the ‘natural’ countryside, psychosis is a construct of a reductive codification. R. D. Laing’s understanding of psychosis and of recovery is configured as a journey, of ‘going back through one’s personal life, in and back through and beyond into the experience of all mankind, of the primal man, of Adam, and perhaps even further into the being of animals, vegetables and minerals’ (126). Self ’s articulation of this sensibility, and the mirroring of psychogeography, is revealed in the theme of journeying, in which both Dave and Carl Dévúsh engage. Their travels represent a process of discovering the truth, and of ultimately surrendering themselves to a transformative experience. However, Laing’s notion of the metaphysical journey into the inner wilderness of the mind, in search of truth, is furthered by the image of the therapist as guide. Dave’s therapist, Anthony Bohm, is redrawn in the distant future as the shamanic Antonë Böm. Self has stated in Psychogeography that ‘The City of London is a bit of a nightmare for the psychogeographer; two thousand years of human interaction have worked over this tiny allotment of earth with savage intensity, digging into it, raising it up and covering over the very watercourses’ (138). However, in the future narrative, the figure of Antonë Böm appears to mirror psychogeographic approaches, and illuminates aspects of the potentiality of such pursuit in guiding the psyche through wilderness. Indeed, the quotation above informs Böm’s understanding of the isle of Ham: ‘The island was a tapestry of naming, worked over again and again by the thousands of generations who had trod its leafy lanes and grassy paths. Antonë Böm, with his inquiring mind, set himself to map the foetus-shaped island […]’ (302). Antonë’s status in ‘Ingerland’, as a ‘queer’ academic-minded, and desexualized outsider of the customs, affords him the freedom to undertake an examination of the psychic-phenomenological characteristics of the island. He is an outsider in Ham, exiled from the suburbs of New London, and divorced from the warped customs of the people. Antonë’s otherness, however, permits him to navigate the liminal spaces between the isolated factions of the future society and guide Carl Dévúsh on his quest for enlightenment. The journeying into the unknown wilderness, in search of ‘truth’, is a process mirrored by the psychogeographical metaphor of the ‘Northwest Passage’, traced



Delineating the Liminal in Illimitable London

61

to Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) and furthered by such psychogeographers as Iain Sinclair7. This metaphor depicts a transformative mental journey, one that reconfigures the banalization of London and summons the strange and intriguing. The Northwest Passage, drawn from the idealized pathway through the Arctic Ocean, is representative of the potentiality of space between two opposing positions. For Michel Serres, in The Troubadour of Knowledge (1991), this topology is transfigured as the path that leads between human sciences and hard science, of the journey between these binary oppositions and the potential of the ‘vibrating instabilities’ that is proffered between the two. Will Self ’s The Book of Dave, in its articulation of conflicting dualities, can be read as a configuration of this channel. His novel charts the liminal space of a chaogenous and paradoxical ‘true wilderness’ that is located between the thresholds of conflicting ideas. Self ’s grotesque of homogeneous constructs suggests an acknowledgement of the Serresian need to embrace the noise and oscillation between two poles. Interference is necessary in true knowledge, for Serres, as ‘knowledge is never cut up into crystalline continents, strongly defined solids, but is like a group of oceans, viscous and always churning’ (56). The mythical route of the Northwest Passage is thereby characterized by the process of summoning the flux and navigating the chaotic signal of the sea. This is offered topological potential in the borders and network of the archipelago that forms Self ’s projected ‘Ingerland’. Ultimately, just as Dave traverses the circles that make up his London, and finds solace in the ‘island’ of Hampstead, Carl Dévúsh and Antonë Böm undertake their voyage for the true ‘knowledge’ by way of traversing the islands of ‘Ingerland’ in search of Symun. In their transformative journey they ultimately uncover the ‘second Book screaming from the rocks of Nimar’ (434). This wild island off the shores of Ham, corresponding to Dave’s recurring therapeutic experience near NIMR, is a disorienting and hazardous island between the frontiers of ‘New London’ and Ham. In its chaotic nature, however, it offers a passage between what Michel Serres and Bruno Latour suggest in Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time (1995) to be: ‘shores, islands, and fractal ice floes. Between the hard sciences and the so-called human sciences the passage resembles a jagged shore [...] It’s more fractal than simple. Less a juncture under control than an adventure to be had’ (70). Evidently, the journey towards knowledge and illumination is not found in the exclusive topographies of isolated specializations, but by way of border crossings and passages, presenting an emphatic need for the subjective to assume multiple roots. Dave’s cognizance is finally achieved in his perception of the non-knowledge of his remote and dogmatic inscriptions, finding himself salvaged from the

62

London in Contemporary British Fiction

wreckage of trauma and psychosis by way of a journey through compromise and an internalization of connectivity. Dave’s first book is ‘a bundle of proscriptions and injunctions that seem to be derived from the working life of London cabbies, a cock-eyed grasp on a mélange of fundamentalism, but mostly from Rudman’s own vindictive misogynism’ (281). His second text, however, stands in direct opposition to the first. Dave’s resurrection from the abyss of megalomania and the warped stereotype of his Cockney position is pronounced by his relationship with Phyllis and in the intersection of his psyche with the innumerable passengers that together form the illimitable character of London: ‘When he looked in the rearview he saw that he had more passengers than he was licensed for. Far more – approximately seven million in fact’ (277). Through these numerously galvanising lines of influence, in their contradiction and complexity, Dave emerges as a fractal representative of liminal London. Yet, his arrival at such an interzone, characterized by the multiple, intersecting dynamics of contemporaneity, is punctuated by Self ’s decision to martyr Dave as soon as his revelation is complete. The murder of Dave at the hands of the Cockney-voiced Turkish loan sharks is treated as a suicide, and the funeral held outside London in a village ‘known for its two churches, which stood adjacent to one another, in a single churchyard’ (471). The protagonist’s death, leaving behind two contradictory ‘Books of Dave’, is therefore a final gesture of the various conflicts and binary oppositions that reverberate throughout the novel. In problematizing such liminal frontiers as the urban pastoral, of psychosis in opposition to sanity, and the contrived notion of Received Pronunciation, Self delineates a ‘Real’ London. The depiction of a city that is so readily personified, and yet evidently illimitable, assumes its potential in the vibrating instabilities between oppositional points. London as a city therefore becomes characterized by fractal frontiers; its liminal spaces articulated as rambunctious oscillations between the thresholds of binary contradictions.

Notes 1 See, for example, Peter Ackroyd. ‘London Luminaries and Cockney Visionaries’ in The Collection (2002), 341–51. 2 Slavoj Žižek’s oppositional rejoinder to the postmodern response, in Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002), is that ‘we should not mistake reality for fiction – we should be able to discern, in what we experience as fiction, the hard kernel



3 4

5

6 7

Delineating the Liminal in Illimitable London

63

of the Real which we are able to sustain only if we fictionalise it’ [emphasis in original] (19). Not only is the loss of Carl felt in the ‘breakup’, but it subsequently transpires that Cal Devenish (Michelle’s new partner) is in fact Carl’s biological father. ‘Toyist. Dave had taken the child’s coinage as his own. On good days only obvious fake things were toyist [...] on bad days almost everything could be’ [emphasis in original] (47). There are echoes here of Dave’s words in the recent past: ‘The PCO would have his badge, they’d fuck him over, they’d break him on the wheel and tear his fucking tongue out’ [emphasis in original] (264). Salman Rushdie proclaimed that ‘Will Self is already a cult figure’ after the GRANTA nomination in 1993. For example in Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire (2009).

Works cited Ackroyd, Peter. London: The Biography. London: Vintage, 2001. Ackroyd, Peter. ‘London Luminaries and Cockney Visionaries’. The Collection. London: Vintage, 2002: 341–51. Charney, Noah. ‘Will Self: How I Write’. The Daily Beast. Sept. 2013: n.p.: http://www. thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/01/09/will-self-how-i-write.html. De Quincey, Thomas. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Other Writing. London: Penguin Classics, 2003. Farley, Paul and Michael Symmons Roberts. Edgelands: Journeys Into England’s True Wilderness. London: Vintage, 2012. Foucault, Michel. ‘Of Other Spaces.’ Trans. Jay Miskowiec. Diacritics 16.1. (1984): 22–7. Laing, R. D. The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise. London: Penguin, 1976. MacFarlane, Robert. ‘A Road of One’s Own’. Times Literary Supplement, October 2005: n.p.: http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/reviews/literature_and_poetry/article750448.ece. Maris, Emma. Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011. Mortimer, Jo. ‘The Total City: An Interview with Will Self ’. 3am Magazine, May 2015: http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-total-city-an-interview-with-will-self/. Papadimitriou, Nick. Scarp. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2012. Rushdie, Salman. ‘Books / 20-20 Vision.’ The Independent. 17 January 1993. http:// www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books--2020-vision-the-bestof-young-british-novelists-campaign-has-met-with-sneering-condemnationfiction-isnt-what-it-was-say-critics-or-has-our-culture-become-one-of-cheapdenigration-1479072.html. Self, Will. The Book of Dave. London: Penguin, 2006.

64

London in Contemporary British Fiction

Self, Will. Psychogeography. London: Bloomsbury, 2007. Self, Will. Walking to Hollywood. London: Bloomsbury, 2010. Self, Will. ‘Foreword’. Living With Psychosis: A Report on Research Involving Service Users. Researching Psychosis Together series. London: Brunel University, Nov. 2012: 4. Self, Will. ‘Our Mob Mentality is Like a Bad Racket’. New Statesmen 26 March, 2015. http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2015/03/ our-mob-mentality-bad-orchestra-we-saw-away-same-tunes-and-ignore-racket. Serres, Michel. The Troubadour of Knowledge. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser and William Paulson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991. Serres, Michel and Bruno Latour. Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Sinclair, Iain. London Orbital: A Walk Around the M25. London: Penguin, 2003. Sinclair, Iain. Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009. Testard, Jacques. ‘Interview with Will Self ’, The White Review. July 2013. http://www. thewhitereview.org/interviews/interview-with-will-self/. Tew, Philip. The Contemporary British Novel, 2nd edn. London and New York: Continuum, 2007. Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso, 2002.

4

The Changingman: Masculinity, Violence and Revenge in Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog Nick Bentley

Martin Amis’s work in the early to mid-part of the first decade of the 2000s shows him exploring related themes of masculine violence, revenge and the dehumanizing aspects of political systems and contemporary culture.1 Looming over much of this writing is Amis’s response to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon of 11 September 2001, which occurred in the middle of Amis’s composition of what would become his 2003 novel Yellow Dog. What emerges from this period is a reassessment of his ethical approach to writing fiction, culminating in a move away from the postmodern playfulness of his earlier novels.2 Yellow Dog is Amis’s first novel of the twenty-first century, and it takes as its themes several cultural anxieties of the new millennium. Specific targets for its satire are the British tabloid press with its vulgar celebration of sex, sport and violence (both public and domestic), the porn industry and the way contemporary culture reflects a crisis of masculinity through the valorization of sex and violence. In this last context, it offers an exploration of masculinity in a post-feminist world, reflected most controversially in the critique of the abuses of patriarchal power through the theme of incest. As with much of Amis’s fiction, the novel is populated with a series of grotesques, for example, Clint Smoker, the stereotypically unscrupulous tabloid journalist, and Xan Meo, an actor, who suffers severe personality changes after being physically attacked by the henchmen of a London gangster with the unlikely name of Joseph Andrews. The novel sees a return to the physical environment of Money, London Fields and The Information, being set predominantly in London, and offers a symbolic patterning that matches the best in Amis’s writing. There is, however, a greater desire to establish a firm set of moral and ethical judgements in this book, something that was ambiguous in the earlier trilogy of London novels.

66

London in Contemporary British Fiction

By the prolific standards Amis established from the 1970s to the 1990s, Yellow Dog was a long time in the writing, and to date represents the longest period between novels; it was six years between the publication of Night Train (1997) and Yellow Dog (2003), an unprecedented gap in his fictional output. Such a hiatus was due to a number of factors, both personal and professional. Although there was no fiction produced, Amis’s autobiographical works Experience and Koba the Dread split this period; the former includes contemplation of an important aspect of his personal life at this time: the death of his father Kingsley Amis in 1995.3 Experience has much to do with Amis’s relationship with his father, both in childhood and adolescence and through to his coming to terms with his death. It is significant then that the working out of a father–son relationship is also at the heart of the plot of Yellow Dog in the relationship between Xan Meo and Joseph Andrews. Amis has also commented on how the events of 9/11 stalled the writing of the novel. In an interview with Gerald Isaaman, Amis explained that he decided to continue with Yellow Dog on 10 September 2001, but that the terrorist attacks forced him to put fiction aside for a while: I came back to it on September 10, 2001, and was settling down and finding it was marvellous freedom to be writing fiction again, and not to be limited by the truth or actuality as you are with a memoir. Then the event happened and, like every other writer on earth, the next day I was considering a change in occupation. (Isaaman 2003: n.p.)

Although the novel does not mention the attacks specifically, as several critics have noted and Amis has corroborated, 9/11 is a key point of reference. As I will discuss in greater detail later, Philip Tew cites the novel as indicative of the traumatological atmosphere pervading British and American culture in the period after the 9/11 attacks, while both Dominic Head and Gavin Keulks see the novel’s focus on masculine violence as partly coming out of the attacks (Keulks 2006; Tew 2006; Head 2008). James Diedrick sums up this general approach to the novel when he writes: ‘The novel is not directly concerned with the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, but the atavistic beliefs that Amis sees as having motivated them are everywhere apparent. The entire novel can be read as an anatomy of and defiant campaign against those forms of unreason that unleash the dogs of destruction’ (228). What I will argue in this chapter is that this narrative of atavistic decline allows Amis to dramatize an ethical debate between different models of retribution for injustice that examine aspects of masculine forms of violence. I will also



The Changingman

67

make the case that these themes are presented in the form of a revenge drama that uses characterization and plotlines based on psychoanalytic frameworks and that recollect classical and Renaissance literary models. However, this is also a satire of contemporary culture, and in this context Amis returns to his two favourite themes: the examination of gender roles and class structures in contemporary British society. Yellow Dog weaves together four coterminous plotlines. The main narrative centres on the experiences of Xan Meo, a successful actor, writer, musician and minor celebrity, who suffers brain damage and psychological change after being attacked in a bar. Alongside this main narrative, there are two subplots: the first, following Clint Smoker, a tabloid journalist, whose success lies in his ability to cater to the lowest desires of the male readership of the Morning Lark; the second, a blackmail plot revolving around Henry IX (the king in Amis’s alternative Britain), his advisor and old friend, Brendan Urquhart-Gordon (nicknamed Bugger), and his daughter, Princess Victoria. These three plots begin to overlap as the novel moves forward, interlinking characters from each. The fourth narrative acts as a separate overarching metaphor to the representation of male revenge and violence in the novel, and involves passenger plane Flight CigAir 101 on its turbulent trajectory across the Atlantic. The aircraft has on board Reynolds Traynor, and the coffined body of her recently deceased husband, Royce. The aircraft is piloted by Captain John Macmanaman, with whom Reynolds has been having an affair. As the plane encounters rough weather and engine failure, Royce’s coffin slip its ties and threatens to crash into hazardous materials in the hold and consequently blow up the plane, and Amis provides the coffined body with an uncanny reanimation: ‘In the hold, the corpse of Royce Traynor (full of wax and formaldehyde) was waiting with its teeth bared’ (88). This metaphor of male sexual revenge from beyond the grave ties together several of the themes in the other three plotlines. The main theme, of masculine violence and revenge, is established in the opening chapter, which describes Xan leaving his comfortable family home in north London and visiting a bar called Hollywood in Camden Town, where he is attacked by a group of thugs in what appears to be a case of mistaken identity, as they accuse him of ‘naming’ one Joseph Andrews. The attack is later explained by the fact that Xan has included a character called Joseph Andrews in one of his works of fiction. The ‘real’ Andrews is an octogenarian London gangster, who is on the run from the British police and now the head of a lucrative porno­ graphy business on the West Coast of America, and clearly does not like seeing his name in print. This appears to be an innocent mistake on Xan’s part, but his

68

London in Contemporary British Fiction

connection to Andrews is far more complicated than it at first appears, and this initial act of violence sparks a cycle of revenge. The head injury Xan sustains causes a profound personality change, from a contented, liberal ‘new man’ to an aggressive male with an intense desire for vengeance, increased sex-drive, and the development of incestuous feelings towards his young daughters. One later discovers that the trauma Xan suffers as a result of the attack recalls a halfremembered childhood incident, and that Andrews is Xan’s real father, opening up an Oedipal context to Xan’s revenge narrative. There is clearly a psychological context to this plotline, and Amis’s fiction has often used plot and character motivation developed from psychoanalytic models. He has frequently commented on the way the unconscious is a powerful concept for him in terms of the creative process; in Experience, for example, Amis notes that novels are: ‘messages from your unconscious history. They come from the back of your mind, not from its forefront’ (Amis 2000: 218). Yellow Dog is clearly working within this psychoanalytic framework, although by referring to medical sources Amis also attempts to provide a neurological basis for the personality changes that Xan suffers after the attack, and he lists the book Head Injury: The Facts by Dorothy Gronwell, Philip Wrightson and Peter Waddel in a page of acknowledgements at the end of the novel (Amis 2003: 340), a respected medical book primarily focused on the character changes that can be symptomatic of brain injuries. However, Amis stays closer to the psychoanalytic framework than to any strict veracity in regard to the neurological effects of the attack.4 The plotline is developed beyond a purely Oedipal revenge narrative, as the imposition of the Law of the Father at the moment of the attack is given greater cultural resonance by Amis in an attempt to comment on the representation of contemporary masculinities in a world after the gender revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s. Before returning to this Oedipal theme, I will first crucially examine the novel’s engagement with issues of gender and class. Amis makes great efforts to emphasize the ideal, gender-equal and perhaps even feminized world Xan occupies with his wife and family immediately prior to the attack. On his way to the Camden pub, Xan muses to himself, ‘I am the dream husband: a fifty-fifty parent, a tender and punctual lover, a fine provider, an amusing companion, a versatile and unsqueamish handyman, a subtle and accurate cook, and a gifted masseur who, moreover (and despite opportunities best described as “ample”), never fools around’ (5). The world Xan initially inhabits is conveyed as one of domestic bliss, being happily married to the academic Russia Tannenbaum for four years, and having established a suitably contented, upper-middle-class,



The Changingman

69

domestic lifestyle. He has two young daughters and a female nanny and feels comfortable in this female world. His journey out of this world occurs on the day of the anniversary of his divorce from his first wife, Pearl O’Daniel, a day on which he traditionally goes to a pub, has two drinks, smokes four cigarettes, and contemplates his sons from this first marriage. The trajectory here is clear: a move away from a domestic ‘feminine’ space into the ‘masculine’ and potentially dangerous urban space of the Camden pub. Symbolic weight is given to this journey, as it also represents Xan leaving his identity as a liberal, cosmopolitan Renaissance man to enter a space of older, pre-feminist machismo: an environment permeated with libido, testosterone and violence. His gendered trajectory is accelerated by the attack, initiating entry into a male-controlled underworld, and Xan’s descent into a pre-feminist sensibility reactivates older gender codes which adhere to the traditional notion of separate spheres for men and women.5 In contrast to his previous contentedness in the domestic sphere, Xan begins to inhabit comfortably the ‘savage pubs of Camden High Street and Kentish Town’ (143). Amis could be accused of deploying an antifeminist cultural metaphorics here; however, the novel is keen to show that the masculine world Xan enters is presented as psychologically sick and manifest particularly in the representation of tabloid journalism and pornography in the other two main plotlines of the novel. This re-masculinization of post-feminist society can in part be related to the increase in exhibition of male violence in the post-9/11 world. Alongside issues of gender, Yellow Dog also engages in another of Amis’s recurring concerns: how social class is at the heart of British culture. Amis has often been criticized for his use of working-class stereotypes in novels such as Money and London Fields, and in Yellow Dog he again deploys stereotypical notions of working-class masculinity as violent, misogynistic and libidinous (Thomas 2003; Tew 2006). As Xan succumbs to the psychological effects of the brain injury, his behaviour becomes increasingly embarrassing in the class circles in which he has moved since marrying Russia; at dinner parties he makes crass and inappropriate statements about politics and women, and finds it difficult to obtain acting work because of his changed personality. This ‘class-shift’ is registered as a cultural transformation that appears to be driven by his move towards Joseph Andrews as the central encounter of the text. The novel suggests that it is necessary for Xan to revert to his original working-class identity in order to face Andrews on equal ground, a theme used by Amis to signal the return to a repressed former self that Xan has been able to hold in check during his marriage to Russia. The return of uncouth, laddish behaviour

70

London in Contemporary British Fiction

is thereby presented as appropriate to the Oedipal conflict towards which he is heading. Amis’s class (and gender) politics are clearly compromised here; however, it is apparent that the target is primarily the cultural manifestations of popular working-class culture that are (perhaps paradoxically) put in place by the middle- and upper-class owners of the culture industry, namely the lurid and sexual discriminatory content produced in the tabloid journalism of Clint Smoker, and the genre of ghostwritten autobiographies of gangland thugs to which Andrews is in the process of contributing.6 The novel suggests that the rapid changes in gender politics achieved in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s are causing a resentful backlash in these popular accounts of male violence and misogyny, harking back nostalgically, it would appear, to a world prior to the successes feminism has achieved. Xan seeks to justify in a letter to Russia at the end of the novel: ‘It would be surprising if women weren’t a little crazed by their gains in power, and if men weren’t a little crazed by their losses’ (307). Xan’s regression sees him reverting to a former self, one that appears to have been at home in the violent, gangland context of his early life. A newspaper report on the attack notes that ‘in his youth Meo was convicted of a litany of minor offences including Actual Bodily Harm’ (89). It is clear, then, that the head injury does not initiate Xan’s aggressive nature but retrieves it from his past. However, Amis demonstrates how Xan’s particular situation is transferred to a universal concept of regressing masculinity. Russia is able to rationalize this process in a letter she writes to Xan, in a chapter ironically called ‘Epithalamion’: Your past is your past, and you escaped or evolved out of it. Over the years you wore down your prejudices and developed a set of rational contemporary attitudes – remember my saying that you were more feminist than I was? […] Then, after you were hit, I thought at first you’d slipped back a generation or two. I now think it’s more basic, more atavistic than that. If today, you were to show me around your past […] you wouldn’t be showing me Kropotkin’s clubhouse on Worship Street […] You’d be showing me your cave – or your treetop. (209)

Xan’s regression takes on evolutionary proportions here, and Amis shows, through Russia, that the kind of moral universe in which masculine violence is the dominating system is clearly anachronistic. The novel illustrates, however, that this type of regression finds corroboration in a range of contemporary cultural contexts. Amis is well known as a novelist who lays great emphasis on style, to the point where how something is said determines not only the meaning but the moral content of what is being said. As he explains in Experience, ‘I would argue



The Changingman

71

that style is morality: morality detailed, configured, intensified’ (Amis 2000: 121). Yellow Dog pursues its themes in its presentation of levels of language and syntax, and the moral and ethical standpoints of characters are established through the stylistic ways in which they speak and are described. Amis uses a number of social registers in his novels, often in the same sentence, and Yellow Dog is a good example of what Bakhtinian criticism would identify as a highly heteroglossic novel (Bakhtin 1981). The book also represents a contemporary version of the nineteenth-century condition-of-England novel in its attempts to be inclusive of social class, with characters ranging from the King to workingclass gangland thugs, and linguistic register is a crucial part of the representation of the rich fabric of contemporary British society for Amis. As noted above, one of the ways in which language maps this theme is in the gradual deterioration of Xan’s language. In effect, he descends the social registers as his brain injury takes hold, and, indeed, Xan is conscious of how his reversion to type is linguistically registered: ‘ “How’s me … how’s my English? […]. Thought I could feel my English going” ’ (101). In contrast, Clint’s sophisticated and financially profitable manipulation of language is evident, although made ironic in that he uses his linguistic skills to produce debased content and misogynistic ideologies.7 In this way he is representative of what the novel calls a ‘High IQ-moron’, an idea initially raised by Clint in response to the emails he begins to receive from a figure who signs herself ‘K8’, and who is representative of those who are ‘supercontemporary in their acceptance of all technological and cultural change – an acceptance both unflinching and unsmiling’ (73). K8, as her name indicates, writes exclusively in text abbreviation; however, Amis is not simply showing this as a debased form of language, and, in fact, the sophistication of the rendering of language into this form is a distinctive and comic feature of K8’s writing.8 It is not only working-class and contemporary forms of language that Amis explores; the King’s upper-class pronunciation is also parodied in a recollection by Brendan of the King on a visit to a Trade Union rest-house singing, ‘My old men’s a dustman, He wears a dustman’s het, He wears cor-blimey trousers and he lives in a council flet!’. The King’s outmoded speech patterns are indicative of his naivety as regards contemporary culture and help to explain his bafflement towards the blackmail he receives in a variety of new media forms. Xan’s descent into libidinal excess culminates in the onset of incestuous feelings towards his daughters, a desire that is averted by being displaced onto the character of Karla White (the pseudonym adopted by his niece, Cora Susan), who appears in the second half of the novel. Cora has been abused by her father, an experience that is suggested as the motivation for her move

72

London in Contemporary British Fiction

into pornography. The introduction of Cora contributes to the novel’s web of revenge as we learn that Andrews has set her up to lure Xan into an adulterous and incestuous relationship which will destroy his marriage. Cora, too, has motivations of revenge as she is, perhaps unconvincingly, prepared to commit incest with Xan because her father sexually abused her. Xan, her uncle, thereby becomes a surrogate target for her revengefulness. In what is the novel’s most disturbing scene, she also tries to convince Xan that he should have sex with his own daughter and ‘introduce her to the void’, because: ‘us victims, we’re not so frightened by the way the world is now: the end of normalcy. We always knew there was no moral order’ (236). Cora is clearly a problematic figure in the novel, and, as Gavin Keulks has noted, her construction and performance as Karla White makes her representative of the postmodern world epitomized for Keulks in this novel by pornography (Keulks 2006). Karla is not a ‘real’ person, but a cipher and a construct; however, the novel also suggests that Cora represents the real human behind the constructed Karla, and the motivation for the revenge on Xan comes from both sides of her identity. She is presented not as a victim, as such, but as emblematic of the inevitable outcome of the sexualization of children in contemporary Western culture. Her attempt to incite Xan to commit incest with his own daughter becomes unconvincing in this context, and her emblematic role as a target of the novel’s resistance to the ‘obscenification of everyday life’ undermines any sympathy the reader may have for her (335). The only hint of sympathy appears at the end of the passage in which she attempts to seduce Xan, when her mask appears to slip momentarily, and after initially claiming that victims of child abuse ‘ “get over it”, she rescinds: “No we don’t.” she said. “Obviously” ’ [emphasis in original] (298). This plotline dramatizes the cycle of violence and retribution with which the darker side of contemporary culture appears to operate: Xan is lured towards incest by a victim of masculine violence, and towards a culture of sexual exploitation that perpetuates that violence. According to Amis’s ethical critique here, Cora’s impulse is suggestive of the sickness that permeates society and which propels individuals towards such aggressive relationships. The moral order that Xan’s existence has before the attack is corrupted by the jaundiced (yellow) world of obscenification, pornography and aggressive sexuality to which he is partly attracted, and from which partly repelled. Amis would seem to be indicating that pornography as a cultural form is driven at base level by the ultimate taboo of incest, which plays itself out in a patriarchal society as a father–daughter relationship. He appears to draw this position from one of the other texts that he cites as a source of his research for Yellow Dog: Judith Lewis Herman’s book Father-Daughter Incest



The Changingman

73

(1981), in which she suggests that such incest is the extremity of a patriarchal family relationship, usually, however, identified only in cases where the father is not involved in the day-to-day rearing of the female child. This is certainly not the case in Xan’s situation prior to the attack. Amis, however, uses the head injury metaphorically to condemn Xan to a form of extreme patriarchy where incestuous thoughts begin to invade his psycho-sexual consciousness. Alongside the critique of contemporary culture, Amis also pursues a mythopoeic patterning that references classical works. When Xan is first introduced to Cora, in her guise as porn star Karla White, he recognizes something about her but attributes the fact that he cannot place her to his flawed memory. Karla-Cora plays on this uncertainty to suggest that they have already had a sexual encounter. However, the recognition is more psychological than sexual and contributes to the novel’s Oedipal theme. The phrasing of the recognition is insightful here: ‘He couldn’t place her. But the thing was that his body knew he had seen her before’ (232). What Xan recognizes in Karla-Cora is not a previous meeting but a general family resemblance, a psychological recognition of her features. Amis intimates that Xan’s subconscious connects this moment of déjà vu to his mother, thus emphasizing the Oedipal theme. When asked for a drink, Xan’s first thought is milk, suggesting the return of a maternal memory, and Amis plays on the idea that Xan and Karla are on a ‘blind’ date, recollecting the eventual fate of Sophocles’ Oedipus in Oedipus the King (233). As we have seen, the novel offers several examples of how Xan’s behaviour worsens as a direct result of his head injury. One of these is his increased libido. He is diagnosed as suffering from ‘Post-Traumatic Satyriasis’, which ‘had to do with the hypothalamus and the release of testosterone’, and which results in his ‘wanting to go to bed with his wife all the time [and] with all other women all the time too’ (138–9).9 He also develops an aggressive desire for vengeance; a symptom predicted by the psychiatrist that Russia consults immediately after Xan’s hospitalization. This base need for revenge is couched in the simplest of terms in Xan’s altered condition: ‘Whoever hurt me, he thought (all day long), I will hurt. Hurt more, hurt harder’ (40). These two symptoms, the heightened libido and the need for vengeance, are crucially linked in the novel: ‘Vengeance was the relief of humiliation. And so at night, when he invaded Russia, that’s what he was doing: seeking relief from it. More distantly, he felt that some historic wrong had at last found redress, as if his god, so inexplicably crippled, was once again more powerful than the god of his enemies’ (140). The move here is from the particularity of Xan’s need for revenge to something that is more fundamental in the human condition, or perhaps more accurately, for

74

London in Contemporary British Fiction

Amis, the masculine condition. Xan’s situation is therefore presented as an example of a universal psychological fact: ‘Every man sits on an anti-man’ (158). This conclusion is presented in a section of the narrative that deals with Clint; but that it is also appropriate to Xan, Joseph Andrews, Brendan and even the revivified corpse of Royce Traynor shows Amis’s intention to investigate the idea of vengeance as a shared male trait. This kind of essentializing is a feature of Amis’s writing generally, and makes it problematic to read him against specific historical contexts such as the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. However, it does seem that Amis is less equivocal in the ethical positions this novel reaches in comparison with his pre-2001 satires. In Money, for example, the culture that had produced the self-centred, obnoxious and excessive John Self is seen to have been a product of a society that embraced 1980s consumerism and individualism to the detriment of any social conscience, and thereby problematized any moral certainty upon his behaviour. In Yellow Dog, characters make moral choices that can be judged from a position of relative moral fixity. That Xan chooses not to sleep with his niece and that Brendan is able to transform his potentially paedophilic feelings for the Princess into a non-sexual form of love shows the possibility of transcending both the debasing aspects of contemporary culture and the anti-man within, giving the novel a positive conclusion about the human condition that Amis rarely concedes in his earlier satires. The examination of contemporary manifestations of masculinity is registered also in Clint Smoker’s tabloid objectification of women as a response to his own sexual inadequacies and in an impotent attempt to reclaim male power as a response to what he perceives as the rise of feminism. Clint is a debased figure, who carries much of the humour of the text, but in many ways he is similar to John Self in Money in that the novel allows him a certain amount of sympathy. This is generated primarily in the descriptions of his anxieties about sexual performance, which fears are themselves presented as a critique of contemporary constructions of masculinity. Clint’s misogyny represents in part an instinctive reaction to a culture that proscribes masculinity as undesirably virile and macho; paradoxically his previous rejection by former girlfriends for his lack of these very attributes suggests that, like a transformed Clint, these women have also accepted these gender constructions. It also makes him such a good journalist for the Morning Lark, with its central ethos being the promotion of misogyny and the objectification of women.10 Its editorial board is ‘[n]aturally […] all-male’, catering for a readership that is also exclusively male and referred to by all on the newspaper as ‘wankers’ (p. 24). Such an impotent, all-male culture is parodied by Amis as representative of a new powerlessness in male



The Changingman

75

expression. The emasculation of masculine power is represented by a reduction of any such residual power by making masturbation the prime area of male sexuality. This is most comically registered in Clint’s sexual inadequacies as brought out in the email exchange he has throughout the novel with K8. Clint’s bile is especially revealed in his journalistic pseudonym – the eponymous ‘Yellow Dog’. The reference here is to Jonathan Swift, whom Clint cites as a high cultural forerunner, to mask the low content of his journalistic output and thereby avoid litigation: ‘if anyone asks, we can say it’s satire and comes from Jonathan Swift’ (203). The reference to Swift also indicates Clint’s misanthropy, and the distaste for the human body, in particular, that permeates many of Swift’s satires.11 The novel makes it clear that Clint’s style of journalism implicitly supports the sexualisation of children, and in so doing acts as a counterpoint to Xan’s narrative. Clint’s journalistic pieces become increasingly dark, and represent the inevitable logic of this kind of journalism – the descent into ever-more shocking and debased attitudes. Towards the end of the novel Clint gets great enjoyment from writing his Yellow Dog pieces, as he finds his spiritual home in ‘Fucktown’, the centre of America’s porn industry, where he has been sent to interview various porn stars. Significantly, the trip does not result in Clint’s finding an actual sex life, but it does increase the yellow bile on which his writing feeds: ‘to release tension, he pounded out some more Yellow Dog’ (275). Clint is eventually fired when his pornographic (and paedophilic) tendencies result in his writing a piece on the fifteen-year-old Princess Victoria that goes too far even for Desmond Heaf, the jaded editor of the Morning Lark. In this context, it is significant that K8 identifies Clint’s ‘Yellow Dog’ articles as most revealing of his misogyny, and the suggestion is made that, like Joseph Andrews, Clint is repressing homoerotic desires.12 Towards the end of the novel it is revealed that K8 is a transsexual, who has ‘been under the nife. But not to destroy – 2 cre8! I’ve got tits and a 2l’ (327). Amis uses this transgendered figure as symbolic of Clint’s misogyny, in the sense that K8 despises both conventional images of women and the idea of macho men, as revealed in her criticisms of her previous boyfriend, Orl&do, but also in that she appears to be the perfect partner to accommodate Clint’s sexual hang-ups. Although it is unclear when K8 had the operation, the implication is that she has perceived a latent homosexuality in Clint’s misogynistic journalism. K8’s desire to pander to Clint’s sexual proclivities and anxieties has therefore resulted in her undergoing the operation. Beyond this, she is represented as a figure capable of critiquing contemporary constructions of masculinity, because she now has access to the inner thoughts of both male and female. She is able to lure Clint

76

London in Contemporary British Fiction

with the image of herself as being his ideal match, but, ironically, although he makes his living by exploitative aspects of the sexual revolution, he cannot cope with some of the freedoms in sexual identity that the revolution has allowed. The discovery of K8’s sexuality results in the removal of Clint’s fragile hold on sanity, and he tears off in his car, ultimately killing himself and Joseph Andrews, just returned to Britain, by crashing into the latter’s house.13 This conflation of Andrews and Smoker in mutual destruction neatly identifies where Amis sees the ultimate trajectory of the kind of misogynistic and violent masculinity that both characters represent, although in very different ways. In a kind of Ballardian con-tumescence their dying together signals the ironic conjoining of two men who have tried to use excessive macho culture to hide their repressed homosexual desire. This aspect of the novel returns us to Amis’s other writing on 9/11 where, as in Yellow Dog, violence is often linked to sexuality. In the article, ‘The Second Plane’, published a week after 9/11, Amis comments on the far-reaching effects of the attacks, on collective psychology: the most durable legacy has to do with the more distant future, and the disappearance of an illusion about our loved ones, particularly about our children […] The illusion is this. Mothers and fathers need to feel that they can protect their children. They can’t, of course, and never could, but they need to feel they can. What once seemed more or less impossible, their protection, now seems obviously and palpably inconceivable. (Amis 2008: 7)

The sentiment here is played out in Yellow Dog in Cora-Karla’s warped justification for encouraging Xan’s incestuous thoughts about his daughter: the underlying logic being that if you cannot protect your children, you may as well remove early on any sense of innocence they have. It is in this context that the narrative drive of the novel comes to reject this dark logic, and, rather, parental love triumphs over the incestuous feelings Xan finds in his psyche.14 The novel closes with Xan returned to his former state, where he contemplates the fragility of children and their need of protection. James Diedrick has commented on the unconvincing moralizing that Amis imposes at the end of the novel: ‘What is surprising is that a novel dedicated to decentring masculinity and male power should end with so much moralizing by the novel’s redeemed patriarch’ (Diedrick: 240). I am not sure that the Xan Meo that recovers from the effects of his head injury can any longer be called a patriarch; however, Diedrick makes an insightful point with respect to the awkward moralizing with which the novel ends. This is certainly not the ambiguous and postmodern satire often associated



The Changingman

77

with Amis in relation to such novels as Dead Babies, Money and London Fields, and it would appear that providing Yellow Dog with a clear ethical conclusion is connected to his response to the events of 9/11. Much of Amis’s critique of contemporary British and American culture, however, is overlooked in readings of the novel that focus on Amis’s writing on 9/11 and his critique of ‘Islamism’. Diedrick mentions in a footnote that the attack on Xan Meo: ‘reenact[s] at the personal and individual level the terrorist attacks of September, 2001. And his posttraumatic mental state – subrational – and violent – comes to represent what Amis has described as the mentality of terrorists’ (Diedrick: 280). This reading works to a certain extent; however, it must be stressed that the attack comes from within Western culture, and from the elements of Western culture that Amis perceives to be part of its illness. Joseph Andrews is immersed not in Islamic fundamentalism but, as representative of the dark underside of contemporary capitalism, in exploitative pornography and violent criminality. To read Yellow Dog as a novel that responds to the Islamism invoked in the 9/11 attacks underplays the cultural criticism it aims at aspects of Western culture. The commentary on male violence is a reflection of the impact of this kind of thinking in a post-9/11 world. Dominic Head, in particular, has read Yellow Dog as a novel that, albeit obliquely, comes to terms with an age of international conflict that has been precipitated by 9/11. The looming counter-narrative of the Flight CigAir 101 acts as an ominous reminder of the importance of planes and plane crashes in the new collective unconscious. This is paralleled with references in the text to aeroplane disasters and crashes. On the way to the Camden pub, Xan is subjected to an irrational fear when hearing a plane overhead (possibly Flight Cig-Air 101): ‘Sometimes a descending aeroplane can sound a warning note’ (10).15 This offers in part a portent of what is about to happen to Xan, but also represents a recognition of the how the symbolic weight of aeroplanes observed flying over an urban centre have fundamentally changed post-9/11.16 Xan’s fear is reflective of Philip Tew’s idea that a collective, traumatological sensibility permeated Western culture during that period. Tew is in part responding to an earlier account of the cultural popularity of art works by Roger Luckhurst recounting trauma in the 1990s.17 As Tew argues: ‘Aesthetically Luckhurst’s pre-millennial individual “traumaculture” is superseded by a broader post-9/11 traumatological culture, by a sociologically significant disposition that permeates both selfhood and artistic renditions of this perspective, a gradual process of transformation’ (2007, 199). The traumatological combines an individual and collective anxiety as a cultural symptom of the aftershock of 9/11.18 As Tew notes: ‘Everyone I knew was compelled to

78

London in Contemporary British Fiction

follow the television images of both the disaster and its consequences’ (XVII), thereby indicating a pervasive, cultural state of being, or Zeitgeist, that reflects broader cultural anxieties. Xan’s experiences in Yellow Dog, therefore, might be extended beyond the personal to be seen as representative of a symbolic rendering of an apparent ubiquity of anxiety related to unprovoked and unjust violence.19 As we have seen, the violence inflicted on Xan results in a regression to more aggressive forms of masculinity in the victim, who then re-enacts that trauma by subjecting other, innocent parties to his aggressive power. Ultimately, in the incident in the Hollywood bar, the innocent suffer from the unleashing of male violence: Russia, Billie, Sophie and, to a certain extent, Cora. An analogy can be made here to the irrational and misplaced ‘War on Terror’ that targeted Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as the object of retribution for the act of violence perpetrated on the World Trade Center and, symbolically, on the whole ethos of the free-market West. While one would not, of course, claim that Saddam was an innocent, the War on Terror was arguably an irrational, knee-jerk response to the traumatic pain caused by 9/11. Yellow Dog is a revenge drama, but one that evades the final tragedy of the classical and Renaissance models by allowing Xan to restrain his desire for revenge.20 Xan is referred to as a Renaissance Man, not just because of his ability to be successful in a number of different fields, but because, like Hamlet, he is the ground upon which two kinds of reaction to violence and injustice are played out. His initial trajectory towards destruction is formulated on older ideas of direct revenge for actions against the self, irrespective of the consequences. This possible outcome would end with his committing incest with his niece (as a stand-in for his mother) and killing his father, resulting in some form of pre-modern resolution, seeing the initial transgression cancelled out with an equal and opposite retribution. Xan, however, avoids this selfdefeating kind of justice and takes the modern route of restraint, allowing a higher form of justice to take care of the perpetrators. It is perhaps this kind of pre-modern context that Amis sees being played out in the contemporary situation relating to the conflict between the two fundamentalisms, as he has called them, of Islamism and the variety of mid-American neo-Conservatism that he identifies with George W. Bush.21 This is perceived, then, as an essentially anachronistic conflict where the logic of ‘whoever hurt me, I will hurt’ prevails (40). That Xan, and presumably all of us, are susceptible to this kind of logic is accepted; however it is the modernity of rational response and measured action that is seen to be necessary to bring Xan, and, by extrapolation, the international situation, back from the brink of self-destructive violence.



The Changingman

79

Notes 1

2

3

4

5 6

7

8

9

10

I refer here to Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002), Yellow Dog (2003), The House of Meetings (2006), and the various short stories, articles and essays that are collected in The Second Plane (2008). Although this move to a moral and stylistic realism can be seen to be a gradual transition, with the 1990s fiction tending to be more realistic than that of the 1970s and 1980s, for example, The Information. These substantial autobiographical texts in part defer Amis’s fiction, although a short story collection, Heavy Water and Other Stories (1998), also comes out during this period which includes several of Amis’s earlier works in this genre and ‘State of England’, a story that involves characters and themes that are developed in Yellow Dog. ‘State of England’ was first published in The New Yorker in 1996. I discuss in greater detail the contrast between psychoanalytic and neurological models of brain injury as they are deployed in Yellow Dog, and in contrast with Ian McEwan’s Saturday in Bentley, 2012. The definition of the separate spheres for men and women in its nineteenthcentury context is thoroughly explored in Shanley, 1989. In the second half of the novel, Amis provides several scenes in which Joseph Andrews records his violent past on a Dictaphone in readiness for publication. Amis is thinking here of the popularity of autobiographical narratives in the 1990s and early 2000s of real-life London gangland figures such as the ‘ “Mad-Frank” Trilogy’ by Frankie Frazer, and Tony Parker’s Life After Life. He cites these books as sources in the note at the end of the novel. Interestingly, this is the kind of criticism Amis’s own style has received in the past. Amis’s ‘style’, of course, is often filtered through a first-person narrative problematizing the relationship between the things that are said in an Amis novel and the level to which the author corroborates the sentiment expressed. It must be noted that Amis has produced a slight category error in k8’s language in that the text speech she uses is more appropriate to mobile phone text messaging, where the number of characters is limited due to the determining nature of the cost of transmitting the message, and not email, where the number of characters is not determined in this way. This does not detract however from what Amis is saying about the way language and therefore meaning adapts to technological change. Post-Traumatic Satyriasis is a ‘condition’ that Amis has invented to emphasize the metaphoric aspect of Xan’s regression to a primitive form of masculinity. There is no mention of it in any of the medical texts he cites as sources in the note at the end of the novel. The Daily Lark is modelled on a number of British newspapers (only slightly

80

11 12

13

14

15

16

17

18

London in Contemporary British Fiction exaggerated) such as the The Daily Star, The Sport and to a lesser extent The Sun, The Mirror and the now defunct News of the World. Indeed the phone-hacking scandal of 2011 that caused the closure of the News of the World in many ways vindicates Amis’s critique of the ‘Yellow’ press in Britain during this period. For a good examination of Swift’s misanthropy, and misogyny in particular, see Pollak 1985. Joseph Andrews is described by Cora as being ‘cryptogay’; this is presented as being instrumental in his use of violence: ‘He wants to have them so he does them. And then has their wives’ (305). The plot devices can be a little clunky in the novel. It turns out that He Zizhen, the King’s illicit love affair, has been hired by Joseph Andrews as an elaborate form of blackmail, so that Andrews can return to Britain to die without being arrested. He Zizhen is also the shadowy figure that appears in the footage of Princess Victoria bathing naked in the Yellow House. In this aspect of the novel, Amis, it would appear, is following the Dickensian convention of suggesting a society that is linked from top to bottom, and that corruption, pornography and violence contaminate all levels. Dickens adopts a similar scenario in Bleak House, in which the Baronet and Lady Dedlock are connected by way of Esther Summerson, the novel’s heroine, to Tom the road sweeper. The conduit for the connection is by a corrupting metaphor similar to Amis’s use of porn in Yellow Dog – that of cholera in Dickens’s case. Amis is equally keen to criticize the logic behind Bush’s ‘theological’ reasoning (or rather the irrational) for the invasion of Iraq as a form of masculine revenge. See ‘The Wrong War’ in Amis 2008. This phrase is repeated later in the novel (with different syntax) when Xan retraces his steps in order to try to remember the details of the attack (141). The use of repetition signals the importance of the aeroplane to Xan’s repressed memory of the attack . Ian McEwan also notes the symbolic alteration of aeroplanes post-9/11 in his novel, Saturday. As he writes, through the perspective of Henry Perowne on seeing a plane on fire crossing over London: ‘Everyone agrees, airliners look different in the sky these days, predatory or doomed’, McEwan 2005: 16. Luckhurst defines traumaculture as a trend in late twentieth-century Western culture for the exhibition of personal moments and experiences of trauma. He writes, ‘a new kind of articulation of subjectivity emerged in the 1990s organized around the concept of trauma […] overlapping psychiatric, medical, legal, journalistic, sociological, cultural theoretical and aesthetic languages’ (28). In the context of 9/11 as operating as a symbolic phenomenon, see Baudrillard 2002, and Žižek 2002. For a counterargument on rejecting the idea of 9/11 as a shift in the symbolic order, see Ranciere 2010.



The Changingman

81

19 Tew draws on Mark Seltzer’s work on what he calls ‘Wound Culture’, which, as Tew argues, represents: ‘another conflation of the public and private, a collapse of boundaries’ (Tew 2007: 198). Similarly, Seltzer refers to ‘the coalescence, or collapse of private and public registers’, which results in the meaning of trauma combining ‘the vague and shifting lines between the singularity or privacy of the subject, on the one side, and collective forms of representation, exhibition, and witnessing on the other’ (Seltzer 1997). 20 Alongside the references to Oedipus, Amis includes allusions to Hamlet, especially in the repeated use of ‘remember’ in phrases in the scene that details the attack. I discuss in greater detail the novel’s evocation of the Hamlet story in Bentley, 2012. 21 Amis pursues a comparison of the religious fundamentalisms of Bush and Bin Laden in ‘The Wrong War’, in Amis 2008: 21–9. This article was first published in the British newspaper The Guardian in March 2003.

Works cited Amis, Martin. Dead Babies. London: Jonathan Cape, 1975. Amis, Martin. Money: A Suicide Note. London: Jonathan Cape, 1984. Amis, Martin. London Fields. London: Jonathan Cape, 1989. Amis, Martin. The Information. London: Flamingo, 1995. Amis, Martin. Night Train. London: Jonathan Cape, 1997. Amis, Martin. Heavy Water and Other Stories. London: Jonathan Cape, 1998. Amis, Martin. Experience. London: Jonathan Cape, 2000. Amis, Martin. Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million. London: Jonathan Cape, 2002. Amis, Martin. Yellow Dog. London: Jonathan Cape, 2003. Amis, Martin. The House of Meetings. London: Vintage, 2006. Amis, Martin. The Second Plane: September 11: 2001–2007. London: Jonathan Cape, 2008. Bakhtin, M. M. ‘Discourse in the Novel’. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Eds and Trans. Carl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. 259–422. Baudrillard, Jean. The Spirit of Terrorism. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 2002. Bentley, Nick. ‘Mind and Brain: The Representation of Trauma in Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog and Ian McEwan’s Saturday’. In Diseases and Disorders in Contemporary Fiction: The Syndrome Syndrome. Abingdon: Routledge, 2012. Diedrick, James. Understanding Martin Amis. 2nd edn. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. Gronwall, Dorothy, Philip Wrightson and Peter Waddell. Head Injury: the Facts: A Guide for Families and Care-Givers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.

82

London in Contemporary British Fiction

Head, Dominic. The State of the Novel. Oxford and Walden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. Herman, Judith Lewis. Father-Daughter Incest. Harvard University Press, 1981. Isaaman, Gerald. ‘It’s a Mad, Mad World that Inspires Martin’. Camden New Journal. 30 September 2003. http://www.camdennewjournal.co.uk/archive/r301003_6.htm Keulks, Gavin. ‘W(h)ither Postmodernism: Late Amis’, in Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond. Ed. Gavin Keulks, Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. 158–79. Luckhurst, Roger. ‘Traumaculture’. New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/ Politics. Special Edition: Remembering the 1990s. Eds Joe Brooker and Roger Luckhurst. 50 (2003): 28–47. McEwan, Ian. Saturday. London: Jonathan Cape, 2005. Pollak, Ellen. Poetics of Sexual Myth. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1985. Ranciere, Jacques. ‘September 11 and Afterwards: A Rupture in the Symbolic Order’. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics Steven Corcoran. London: Continuum, 2010. Seltzer, Mark. ‘Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere’, October 80 (1997): 3–26. Shanley, Mary Lyndon. Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Tew, Philip. ‘Martin Amis and Late-twentieth-century Working-class Masculinity: Money and London Fields’. Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond. Ed. Gavin Keulks. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006. 71–86. Tew, Philip. The Contemporary British Novel. 2nd edn. London: Continuum, 2007. Thomas, Susie. ‘Posing as a Postmodernist: Race and Class in Martin Amis’s London Fields’. Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London. September 2003. http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/september2003/ thomas.html. Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. London: Verso, 2002.

5

Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Sacredness of Space and Time Tomasz Niedokos

The boundaries of Peter Ackroyd’s London are clearly delineated. Mapped on the contemporary layout of the Capital, its centre is shifted towards the East. The heart of Ackroyd’s London is not Westminster, but the City of London, the area where the ancient Londinium emerged between the three rivers: the Thames, the Fleet and the Walbrook, and which the writer himself places now within Bread Street, Cripplegate, Upper Thames Street, Lower Thames Street and Gracechurch Street (Gibson and Wolfreys: 250). This spatial repositioning of London is in fact also a temporal repositioning of London which to a great degree shapes the writer’s vision of the Metropolis. Shifting the perspective towards the oldest historical part of London and away from the centres of political power concentrated at Westminster allows Ackroyd to concentrate on the social rather than the political history of the Metropolis, viewed over an extended period of time, and look for ‘patterns of permanence’ or ‘lines of force’, as he calls those traits of London history that testify to the generally unchanging character of the City against the tide of time and change. Ackroyd is a strong believer in the genius loci – the spirit of place. To him the space is sacred or ‘enchanted’, holding the key to the communal memory of the Capital. A particular space: a house, a street, a square, is a ‘hole’ where time is ‘trapped’; where the city is renewing itself, where the same story is being retold over and over again throughout the centuries. As Ackroyd demonstrates in London: the Biography, nothing ever changes in London. Certain trades and activities are allotted to their places. Even when their continuity has been broken by fires, epidemics, or other types of cataclysm that have befallen the City in the course of its history, the spirit of the place has been restoring them to the old locations. The best example of this remarkable resilience was when Sir

84

London in Contemporary British Fiction

Christopher Wren’s plans for rebuilding the City on entirely new lines, with long avenues and piazzas, were discarded in favour of the old street pattern (238–9). And it is precisely the genius loci that nourishes the imagination of the people living at the place who, without even realising it, conform to the long-standing patterns of permanence. In his London writings Ackroyd is constantly seeking continuities, identifying the particular locations (zones, streets, addresses) where the genius loci has persisted, retaining the same kind of activity in a particular locality for several centuries, or bringing it back to the same spot

LOCATION

ACTIVITY

Bankside The site of St Bartholomew Church, Smithfield The site of St Bartholomew Hospital, Smithfield Bloomsbury Clerkenwell

Shakespeare’s The Globe religious worship

Covent Garden (New) Cranbourne Street Drury Lane The site of St Giles Church Endell St. Fleet St. The corner of Fournier St./Bricklane The corner of Leadenhill St./Fenchurch St. The corner of Leadenhill St./ Gracechurch St. The corner of Leadenhill St./Mitre St. Lincoln Inn’s Field Moorfields Seven Dials Smithfield Southwark High Street Spitalfields Square Mile The site of St Paul’s Cathedral St Thomas Street Tottenham Court Road Turnmill Street Whitechapel The corner of Wood St./Cheapside

medicine occultism 1. clockmakers 2. subversive political activity vegetable market jewellers theatre refuge for the poor and infirm public bath/sauna printing religious worship of foreign/ dissenting groups water pump maypole/Lloyd’s Tower burial ground homeless’ refuge Bedlam – ‘madhouse’ astrology meat market Chaucer’s The Talbot Inn weavers/dyers business religious worship operating theatre furniture trade prostitution Eastern (Jewish/Arab) settlement plane tree with shops beneath

Figure 1  Patterns of permanence in Ackroyd’s London (compiled by T. Niedokos on the basis of P. Ackroyd’s London: The Biography).



Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Sacredness of Space and Time

85

after a hiatus which, in some cases, may have spanned several centuries as well. He asserts that: ‘The enchantment is one of place and of time; it is as if an area can create patterns of interest, or patterns of habitation, so that the same kinds of activity (indeed often the same kind of people) seem to emerge in the same small territory’ (2002: 355). The table above (see Figure 1), compiled on the basis of Ackroyd’s London writings, contains the list of localities with the corresponding, enduring activities ascribed to them by the author. Represented spatially, the outline of Ackroyd’s London will take the following form:   occultism  poor refuge furniture trade    political subversion/clockmakers jewellers  vegetable market  prostitution  meat trade/religion/medicine   madhouse public bath Eastern settlement/religion astrology weavers/dyers homeless refuge tree theatre business burial ground/pump printing religion maypole The Thames

The Globe religion The Talbot Inn operating theatre

Figure 2  The spatial outlook of Ackroyd’s London (compiled by T. Niedokos on the basis of P. Ackroyd’s London: The Biography).

Granted, apart from continuities, Ackroyd also records change: the disappearance of fish and ironmongers, tallow chandlers and vintners from the City, some of those professions still recorded in the existing street names, the eastward movement of the news media, first from the Strand to Fleet Street, and hence to Docklands, the gradual decline of the traditional Port of London and so on (2001: 125, 549). He notices the apparent contradiction between the inexhaustible energy of the City, unrelenting movement and change, and the assumption about the unchanging nature of London. This paradox is explained by accommodating what at first glance appears to represent change within a larger, long-term perspective, a phenomenon that Ackroyd calls ‘topographical’ or ‘territorial imperative’ (2001: 401). For instance, Ackroyd describes in very vivid terms the Victorian period in London, which witnessed a particularly rapid and violent transition, when whole swathes of the City were levelled to

86

London in Contemporary British Fiction

make room for railway tracks and stations (1999: 246). Yet, continuity to him ‘is not simply the unchanging presence of the same … but constant resurfacing of particular traces’ (Gibson and Wolfreys 177). To give but one example, Ackroyd points out that, on the very same spot where once a famous maypole towered over the City, there now rises the tall and glittering Lloyd’s Building (the headquarters of the leading insurance company, designed by Richard Rogers) (671). It is true that Lloyd’s Tower is not exactly a maypole; yet at the time of its construction it was the most spectacular structure of its kind in the City of London, dominating the cityscape (it has since been superseded by Lord Foster’s famous ‘Gherkin’, the ‘Shard’, the ‘Heron Tower’ and the ‘Walkie-Talkie’). Ackroyd assumes a certain geographical and historical determinism in the working of the forces that contribute to the phenomenon described above as the ‘topographical’ or ‘territorial imperative’. It is only to a limited extent explicable in terms of the physical properties of the natural environment: the presence of the rivers and the geological features of the terrain. To reiterate the point, in his outlook it is the space that is sacred, holding the memories of its previous inhabitants and the past events, and eventually, in spite of the superficial change, determining the fate of future generations, completing a never-ending cycle. The past speaks through the place and always tells the same story regardless of time. Thus, the invisible, but overwhelming Ackroydian ‘territorial imperative’ will bring back a particular activity: religious observance, political subversion, meat trade or prostitution, to the place where it was practised for many centuries without the participants’ awareness of the connection. The two occurrences are neither connected causally nor connected temporally, as in the case of the return of the homeless to Lincoln’s Inn Field after an interval of 150 years (2001: 767) or the relationship between an intriguing white pyramid in St Anne’s Square in Limehouse and Charles Babbage’s ‘Analytical Engine’ – the prototype of the first ‘programmable’ computer constructed in a house nearby (1994: 123–4). The only possibility left to the reader is to establish a vertical connection, as was typical of medieval religious writing, of the prophesy-and-fulfilment kind rather than cause-and-effect. Where space is enchanted, determining the character of the particular locality and the mindset of the people inhabiting it in a unique, permanent way, time cannot simply progress and change everything with its sweep. Time therefore is not linear, progressing towards the future and leaving the past behind, but circular or cyclical, compared by the author to a ‘shining ring that is moving backwards as well as forwards’ (1999: 448). The mode of apprehending



Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Sacredness of Space and Time

87

time that transpires from Ackroyd’s work, ‘one that has no conception of history as an endless chain of cause and effect or of radical separations between past and present’, has been described by Benedict Anderson as being typical of medieval Christendom and predating the new era that came with the advent of print-media, and was characterised by entirely new modes of narration, which allowed for the filling of homogeneous empty time with simultaneous events, often connected by intricate cause-and-effect relationships (21–36). By contrast, Ackroyd’s conception is closer to that of the medieval mind, comprehending the simultaneity of past and future in an eternal present, and the relationships he is seeking are, more often than not, of the prefiguring-and-fulfilment type rather than cause-and-effect. Such an apprehension of time emanates, for instance, from the medieval representations of the Holy Family, where the Virgin Mary, Joseph and their company invariably bear the features of contemporary men (not infrequently the commissioning patron and his family) and wear contemporary clothes to stress the universal, not historical, character of the scene, which is re-enacted in an eternal present. This outlook on the world, the belief in the enchantment of space and time, is characteristic of the Catholic mindset, whereby particular localities, especially churches, shrines, chapels and so on, can be sacred, filled with objects and experiences which can be perceived as metaphors, linking the known reality to the supernatural, transcendent one. Likewise, the liturgical year maintains a circular time with its rituals: feasts, processions, pilgrimages, mystery plays, which suspend linear time in an eternal, ‘sacramental’ present. It is possible to discern this kind of thinking in Ackroyd’s writing in the frequent ‘sanctification’ of artefacts such as stones, sculptures, or common experiences of nature and the London environment (tree, weather, fog, darkness) (2001: 409–38), the conflation of ‘cityscape’ and ‘dreamscape’ (1999: 449). He has consistently recreated the patterns of thought that prevailed in pre-Reformation England, that particular frame of mind that has been most comprehensively described as ‘enchantment’ by Charles Taylor (25–76) and, under the term of ‘analogical’ or ‘enchanted imagination,’ by David Tracy and Andrew Greeley (5–21), a distinctly Catholic way of looking at the objects of everyday life which is so baffling to Ackroyd’s contemporary critics. His detractors, such as Noel Malcolm in The Daily Telegraph for instance, refuse to appreciate this perspective and point out that the connections established by Ackroyd lack real explanatory force, in the absence of a plausible chronological or logical (cause-and-effect) relationship between the two occurrences; or are, conversely, easily explicable in terms of artistic inspiration:

88

London in Contemporary British Fiction Ackroyd has many […] kinds of quasi-explanation; and all of them, unfortunately, are equally unsatisfactory. […] In other cases, where simple explanations are available, Ackroyd perversely avoids them. […] [He] is making patterns, linking together the themes and qualities and pictures and words that have accumulated in his head (and his heart). So long as the juxtapositions are pleasing, he does not seem to care whether the connection between one thing and the next makes chronological or explanatory sense. (Malcolm)

What seems incongruous or anachronistic today, however, appeared wholly natural to the eyes of medieval worshippers, as they embraced the sacramental, mythical, or Messianic idea of time, characterised by ‘a simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present,’ and as such lacked a sense of anachronism (Anderson: 22–4). In his monograph, aptly entitled Thames: Sacred River, the Thames running through London encapsulates all the aforementioned aspects of Ackroydian thinking about the sacredness of space and time. The river is treated not only as ‘a reflection of circumstances – a reflection of geology, or of economics’ (11) but, above all, as a powerful metaphor of the transcendence of space and the cyclicity of time, of continuity and change, ‘an emblem of both time and eternity’ (13). It is ever-flowing, in constant motion from its sources to the sea; yet it always looks the same, evoking a sense of being ‘suspended in time’ (15). ‘The river is the oldest thing in London and it changes not at all’ (14). By the same token, to Ackroyd the hydrologic cycle, from river to sea, from sea to river, symbolises the cyclicity of time and ‘poses a problem for those who exist in linear time’ (17). ‘The river contains its beginning within its end’, he concludes in a phrase reminiscent of T. S. Eliot’s famous verse from The Four Quartets (17). What is more, the Thames in London, being a tidal river, literally moves forwards and backwards, as in another Ackroydian metaphor of the shining ring, blending the past and the future into the eternal present of an onlooker standing by the river: The thoughts of anyone standing by the river, seem of necessity to go forwards and backwards; they may be guided by the flow of the water itself but there is also some quality of the river that encourages such contrary motion. […] It is the almost imperceivable motion of expectation and remembrance, poised between two worlds. And of course there are occasions when, if you gaze at one spot long enough, so that it seems to detach itself from the flow, then time stops. (15)

In a typically Ackroydian way, the sacred space by the river provides a gateway into the transcendent, where time is suspended, in line with the pattern of



Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Sacredness of Space and Time

89

thought, described by Anderson, prevailing in the Middle Ages. In this context, Ackroyd invokes the art of Sir Stanley Spencer, a painter who painted biblical scenes in the setting of the twentieth century Thames riverbank in the manner of medieval artists. He also points to ‘patterns of labour and habitation that persist beside the ever-flowing Thames’ (177). In spite of the decline of the London Docklands in the latter part of the twentieth century and its subsequent conversion to business and residential areas, ‘the most recent architecture of the Thames has chosen to pay homage’ to the enduring spirit of the place: There are apartment blocks that are in fact refurbished warehouses, but there are also buildings that have been designed to resemble the warehouses of the early nineteenth century. It might be called pastiche, but it might also represent a genuine emergence of the genius loci in a new guise. (216)

Once again, the space is enchanted, harbouring the communal memory of the inhabitants and conveying the truth about the place that transcends time, while simultaneously hinting at some eternal, sacramental dimension that can be accessed only through the enactment of ritual. The writer stresses the religious dimension of the river, not only as a place of religious rituals (baptisms, processions) but also as a site of numerous London churches and monasteries that were erected in the Middle Ages on its banks – for example, Westminster Abbey, Blackfriars Dominican Priory, Southwark Cathedral (formerly known as St Mary Overie, or over the river) – or, indeed on the river itself, as in the case of St Thomas à Becket Church, set upon the old London Bridge. Situated at the heart of a busy Metropolis, they sanctified the space, linking the sacred with the profane, the transcendent with the mundane. In Ackroyd’s view: ‘The Thames has created civilisation here. It fashioned London’ (9). Arguably, the religious dimension of London life – space consecrated by churches and shrines and time measures by cyclical religious rituals – is an aspect most conspicuously absent from the secularised reality of the Metropolis in the latter half of the 20th century and the first decade of the new millennium. Ackroyd finds two ways of dealing with this problem. In his historical writings, such as, for instance, The Clerkenwell Tales, a novel set in the London of 1399, he can, merely by virtue of the choice of setting, create a picture of the capital peopled by nuns and monks of the numerous convents and monasteries lining the banks of the river Thames and streets of the City in the Middle Ages; in these, Ackroyd is in his element, recreating his favourite scenery, a very sensual world of ringing church bells, frequent processions, the smell of incense,

90

London in Contemporary British Fiction

displays of false relics, stained glasses and statues; in short, pre-Reformation Catholic London. This enchanted outlook, however, so natural and becoming in the narratives set in the medieval period, is also projected by the author onto his post-Reformation historical writings, where it becomes less obvious, and depends on the reader’s willingness to suspend disbelief and accept a peculiarly Ackroydian take on magic realism. In the most recent novel, Three Brothers (2013), set in the London of the Swinging Sixties, a Camden Catholic convent housing a ‘miracu­lous’ statue of the Virgin Mary exists in a parallel supernatural reality, to which one of the eponymous brothers is vouchsafed access through the guidance of a symbolic artefact. Once again, a missing Catholic dimension is superimposed on the post-Reformation and, in the twentieth century, largely secular reality as a kind of phantom limb, a poignant reminder of a once constitutive but now ‘amputated’ part of London cityscape. The sisters of a convent adjacent to the Church of Our Lady of Sorrows in a fictitious Allington Street, Camden, enter the London scene literally ‘out of the blue’, distributing charity to homeless vagrants, of which there were always plenty in the streets and parks of the Capital (48–55). One might safely assume that, adding this mysterious ‘magic realism’ subplot, Ackroyd laments the demise of the monasteries after the Reformation, which played an important social role taking care of the poor and the needy: in the novel the sisters, apart from running a kitchen for the homeless, care for an ailing pickpocket and male prostitute (181). One of the three brothers is led to this convent by a levitating medieval stone, from which: ‘several ribs and pillars of stone, several arches and mouldings, began to exfoliate […] creating an intricate shrine or shelter of stone. All of this may have been the work of a moment or it may have taken many centuries’ (46). In the church, the character meets by accident his estranged mother, a convicted prostitute who left the family when he was a child. The woman is wearing a white raincoat and a blue scarf, a mode of dress matching the conventional manner of representing the Virgin Mary in popular religious art; and the statue of ‘Our Lady’ in the church, who, answering the character’s prayers, miraculously ‘puts her finger to her lips’ (47), is a realisation of that particular image. Once again, in line with Ackroydian thinking, the space once sanctified holds the key to the discarded heritage, the traces of that heritage are there to be found in the artefacts of everyday life or the enactment of ritual (prayer), time is suspended in an eternal present, and the supernatural reality can be conjured up to fill the void left by the disowned religion in the same



Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Sacredness of Space and Time

91

way that the Virgin Mary can compensate the hero for the absence of his own estranged mother. This consistent writing strategy and frequent recursion to pre-Reformation London demonstrates the author’s predilection to the medieval Catholic mindset. He has not yet, in a manner of speaking, come to terms with the Reformation and its impact on English culture in general and the life of the Metropolis in particular. One of his most acclaimed biographies, The Life of Thomas More, is in the same measure a portrait of the City as it is a portrait of the man. Ackroyd charts the life path of Thomas More from his birth in Milk Street, childhood in the shadow of St Stephen Walbrook Church, education at St Anthony’s school in Threadneedle Street, early service in the household of Cardinal Morton at Lambeth Palace, his stint with the Carthusian monks at Charterhouse, through his legal career at Lincoln’s Inn to his statesmanship prematurely ended by the trial and execution, all against the background of a vibrant City, which revelled in the spectacles of daily Masses and benedictions, feasts, processions and pilgrimages. The Life of Thomas More provides a close-up of that medieval City just at the moment of its passing. Ackroyd conjures up the scene of the priest holding up the host in one of the numerous churches when: At that instance candles were burnt and torches made up of bundles of wood were lit to illuminate the scene; the sacring bell was rung, and the church bells pealed so that those in the neighbouring streets or fields might be aware of the solemn moment. It was the sound which measured the hours of their day Christ was present in their midst once more and, as the priest lifted the thin wafer of bread, time and eternity were reconciled. The worshippers knelt down and held out their arms in adoration, since this was the sight for which they had come. There are reports of the people running from altar to altar to catch a glimpse of the consecrated host at different Masses, and one priest complained that people rushed away from his sermon to witness the elevation. (1998: 110)

In the same vein, the author evokes the scene of the annual Corpus Christi procession in the streets of the City: On Corpus Christi, then, when the sacrament was carried in procession down the main streets ‘wyth banners, copys, crosses, and sencers’, London is not only a physical community but also a host of angels singing ‘Holy, holy, holy!’ That consecrated wafer was surrounded in Cornhill and Cheapside by a hundred torches of wax and two hundred priests chanting. It is the genius loci, the meaning of the place where they stand. In the same spirit passion plays were performed at Clerkenwell and Skinners’ Well. The presence of relics, of shrines and of holy wells, in London and elsewhere, testifies to a sense of time utterly

92

London in Contemporary British Fiction at odds with the twentieth-century vision of the city as a quickly running mechanism or an endless flow of passing human beings. (1998: 111)

In The Life of Thomas More Ackroyd makes a point that his hero’s vehement opposition to the Reformation resulted not so much from doctrinal or ecclesiological reasons, since More himself was critical of scholastic philosophy and some popular manifestations of medieval piety, as from his acute awareness of the consequences of destroying the coherent outlook on the world, thus unravelling the whole fabric of Christian society and its culture. In his works both of fiction and of non-fiction, Ackroyd traces the latent Catholic inheritance in post-Reformation English culture on the assumption that ‘England has been Catholic for 1500 years and has only been Protestant for 400’ (Onega: 214). And he finds it, first and foremost, in his native London. He detects the legacy of the sensual side of Catholicism: bells, votive candles, incense, stained glass, vestments, medals, holy pictures, so vividly rendered in his works, in ‘the gothic, the pantomimic, the camp, and the theatrical aspect of the Cockney’ (Gibson and Wolfreys: 262), which to him represent ‘a sort of baroque extravagance […] related to a sort of Catholic inheritance which has sort of remained underground for four centuries’ (Gibson and Wolfreys: 240). He identifies a subconscious link to the City’s buried Catholic past in the spectacles of his favourite genres of urban ‘low culture’: fairground amusement (for example, Punch and Judy performances), music halls, vaudevilles, penny gaffes of the East End, and the spectacle that London itself is: in the vivid colours of advertising hoardings and graffiti, in the relentless din of the streets and the bright red colour of the London double-deckers, pillar boxes and some of the remaining Giles Gilbert Scott’s telephone boxes (2001: 217). The experiences of the ‘sensual’ London belongs in the same measure to the sphere of the sacred and the profane; in fact it is the common point of these two aspects of human existence. Ackroyd remarks of the deafening sound of London’s numerous churches: ‘The bells provided that sonority where sacred and secular time met’ (2001: 661). Ackroyd’s preoccupation with London (all his novels but one are set in the Capital, and most of his non-fiction work is related to the City), allows him to shed new light on English culture as a whole and to challenge two stereotypical and well-entrenched views about its character: first, the myth of a rural and pastoral England etched in the communal memory of the English people, not least through the efforts of wartime morale-boosting propaganda, and, second, the conviction about the generally ‘literary’ character of post-Reformation



Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Sacredness of Space and Time

93

English culture, resulting from the Protestant emphasis on the written word (sola scriptura) on the one hand and violent iconoclasm on the other, to the detriment of music and visual arts. Thanks to the peculiarity of his perspective (his tight focus on London and Catholicism), Ackroyd tells a different story, bringing to light the visionary and transcendental potential of the English imagination, with London playing the role of a laboratory in which various diverse influences are moulded into something specifically English, a unique ‘Cockney visionary sensitivity’, expressed in the works of the eminent artists hailing from the Capital, William Blake, William Hogarth, William Turner and Charles Dickens; or, as he calls them in his eponymous essay: ‘London luminaries and Cockney visionaries’ (2002: 341–51).

Conclusions In all his London writings Ackroyd looks beyond superficial change to seek continuities – ‘patterns of permanence,’ testifying to the unchanged character of the City. He finds them at particular localities, which, in his concept, have throughout the centuries attracted the same kind of people or the same kind of activity. This territorial determinism, or ‘territorial imperative’ to use the author’s term, invests the space with a ‘power’ to determine the human and material history of the City, and in so doing implicates a concept of time that is not linear or progressing, but cyclical or circular. As demonstrated above, such apprehensions of space and time are typical of the Catholic disposition in general and medieval Christendom in particular. In his novels, biographies and historical syntheses, Ackroyd evokes, first and foremost, those London localities that can remember the colourful City of the Middle Ages, with its customs, spectacles and rituals of the sacred and the profane, and where the memories of the time past can still be uncovered. His London is delineated more or less by the old city walls or the sound of the bells of St Mary-le-Bow, within which a true Cockney is born, and its heart is at Smithfield rather than at the political centre of Westminster or the London of John Nash – Trafalgar Square, Buckingham Palace, Oxford Circus and Regent Street, which today constitute the centre of the Metropolis. And it is precisely this delineation of the London territory combined with the sense of the sacredness of space and time that indicates pre-Reformation, medieval London as the author’s point of reference, the City which he can still detect beneath its modern guise as an international capital.

94

London in Contemporary British Fiction

Works cited Ackroyd, Peter. Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. London: Vintage, 1994. Ackroyd, Peter. The Life of Thomas More. London: Vintage, 1998. Ackroyd, Peter. Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination. London: Vintage, 1999. Ackroyd, Peter. London: the Biography. London: Vintage, 2001. Ackroyd, Peter. The Collection, edited by Thomas Wright. London: Vintage, 2002. Ackroyd, Peter. The Clerkenwell Tales. London: Chatto & Windus, 2003. Ackroyd, Peter. Thames: Sacred River. London: Vintage, 2008. Ackroyd, Peter. Three Brothers. London: Chatto & Windus, 2013. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Gibson, Jeremy and Julian Wolfreys. Peter Ackroyd. The Ludic and Labyrinthine Text. London: Macmillan Press, 2000. Greeley, Andrew, The Catholic Imagination. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001. Malcolm, Noel. ‘An Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’, A Review of Peter Ackroyd’s Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination. The Daily Telegraph. 6 October 2002, 25 March 2010: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/4728900/An-Anglo-Saxons-chronicle. html. Onega, Susana. ‘Interview with Peter Ackroyd’, Twentieth Century Literature. 42.2. 208–20. Taylor, Charles. The Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.

6

Viewing Art in London’s Museums: Ekphrasis in Selected Fiction by Julian Barnes, A. S. Byatt and Peter Ackroyd Doris Bremm

There is no rule against carrying binoculars in the National Gallery. (Julian Barnes Metroland: 11). No longer content to be styled as graveyards or department stores, museums now are cast as impresarios of meaning performances. They have become manufacturers of experience. (Hein: 65) In the museum, the living confront the dead, the present, the past. (Loizeaux: 34) London’s museums and galleries have fascinated many writers over the past century: the National Gallery features prominently in Henry James’ The Wings of the Dove (1902), Iris Murdoch’s The Bell (1958) and Julian Barnes’ Metroland (1980); the Tate Gallery is a central location in Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton (1987); and A. S. Byatt takes us to the National Portrait Gallery in The Virgin in the Garden (1978), the Royal Academy of Arts in Still Life (1985) and the Victoria and Albert Museum in The Children’s Book (2009). It is hard to imagine London without these museums, and the contemporary visitor may not realise that all of them are products of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century: the Royal Academy of Arts was founded by George III in 1768; the National Gallery opened in 1824 and the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1852, just after the Great Exhibition; the National Portrait Gallery was formally established in 1856, and the Tate Gallery opened its doors in 1897.

96

London in Contemporary British Fiction

These world-renowned galleries and museums teem each day with thousands of visitors from all over the world and rank among London’s most famous public spaces. Ekphrastic narratives1 set in museums like those mentioned here highlight the art works on display, but, more importantly, they draw our attention to the characters who visit these galleries, and their ‘museum experience’. Thus the private event of viewing the work of art becomes the focus. I posit that the heterotopic museum spaces in these works function both as private places of contemplation and self-discovery and as public places of gathering and social interaction. The texts stage the museum space as a setting for individual experience, a liminal public space where each visitor in a way ‘performs’ the works of art that he or she sees; hence the reader vicariously experiences this event, doubling the perceptive situation and creating the ekphrastic triangle (object, speaker, reader) that W. J. T. Mitchell describes in Picture Theory (164). I will show in a discussion of selected novels by Julian Barnes, A. S. Byatt, and Peter Ackroyd how the liminality inherent in museum spaces and the performative event of each attentive viewing allows for an albeit ironic and self-reflexive return to the mimetic modes of popular narrative belonging to Victorian literature, while at the same time addressing the limits of verbal representation. I argue that ekphrastic literature thus functions as a technology that enables, or models, ‘good looking’, and works against the ‘empty gaping’ that Barbara Stafford criticises in her ‘Manifesto’, in Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (1996). The concept of the museum is full of contrasting ideas: public and private, dead and alive, new and old. These contrasts are typical of places that Michel Foucault calls heterotopias, a term that he introduced in his essay, ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1984). Foucault calls the twentieth century the epoch of space and of simultaneity, of juxtaposition, the near and far, the side-by-side and the dispersed (237). Furthermore, he singles out museums and libraries as examples of heterotopias that ‘indefinitely accumulat[e] time’, and points out that while ‘in the seventeenth century […] museums and libraries were the expression of an individual choice’, now, they ‘are heterotopias that are proper to western culture of the nineteenth century’ (242). However, contemporary ekphrastic texts suggest that the loss of individual choice, that was once part of putting together a private collection, can be counteracted by the individual’s choice as to which works of art he or she will pay attention in a gallery or museum. The liminality inherent in museum spaces and the performative event of each attentive viewing portrayed in ekphrastic texts form in an important dialogue, with the current trends in museum studies focusing on individual



Viewing Art in London’s Museums

97

experience. Here, these inherently liminal museum spaces become the setting for performative events of such viewings of works of art and provide the perfect setting for this particular kind of attentiveness. As art historian Svetlana Alpers argues in her essay, ‘A Way of Seeing’ (1991): ‘The taste for isolating this kind of attentive looking at crafted objects is as peculiar to our culture as is the museum as the space of institution where the activity takes place’ (26). Ekphrastic novels simulate this peculiar way of seeing and thus ask the reader or viewer to re-evaluate his or her own ways of seeing. From their very inception in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century, public art museums did more than simply open private collections to a wider audience. According to Kenneth Hudson’s Museums of Influence (1987), ‘the items in the museums began to be organised in a systematic way and the general public was invited to participate in the world of art, as seen and analysed by the new race of art historians’ [emphasis added] (41). This organization by chronology and schools, still popular today, has an inherently didactic function. More importantly, this presentation was influenced by a certain ideology. Hilde Hein argues, in The Museum in Transition (2000), that these early museums were trying to ‘transform people into citizens by infusing them with a sense of cultural identity and shared patrimony’ (21). While the intent of politicians and museum curators to advance ideas of the nation may be reflected in some of the ekphrastic texts I will discuss, this ideology is counteracted by the foregrounding of the individual’s engagement with the works of art. While they allude to the history of London’s museums functioning as heterotopic and heterochronic spaces connecting and displaying London’s and England’s past with its present and future, they also highlight the individual’s museum experience as an important component of the educational purpose of these institutions. Ekphrastic narratives set in museums highlight the individual’s perception, and engagement with certain art works. One important aspect of the genre of writing about art central to my analysis is the concept of the ekphrastic encounter or event. Mitchell defines ekphrasis as having an important social structure, which includes three parties: the speaking or seeing subject, the art object, and the implied reader or audience (164). This social structure is crucial for the genre’s narrative forms because of the possibilities it opens up for characterization and plot. Doubling the perceptive situation with the character functioning as a surrogate reader within the text adds an important dimension of self-reflexivity to the ekphrastic situation. Readers become more attentive to the experience of perception and, in turn, are challenged to rethink their own self-perception and supposed unity.

98

London in Contemporary British Fiction

It is the reader or viewer, and not the work of art, who is enfranchised by being placed centrally in the argument, and by (re)presenting to them the manner in which their culturally and historically determined phenomenological response to a work is what gives art meaning. The ekphrastic novel deals with that which is unavailable in life, that which can to only be seen indirectly in writing, because it wants to teach people that they have the power to see but that they need to learn how to see again. Besides highlighting the ekphrastic encounter or event, the museum space in these novels functions as a liminal space of performance, as discussed by Carol Duncan in the context of the art museum: ‘Like most ritual spaces, museum space is carefully marked off and culturally designated as reserved for a special quality of attention—in this case, for contemplation and learning’ (10). This special kind of attention is ‘performed’ for the reader through the characters. Without the attentive perception, the paintings would function merely as allusions. Instead, in these novels, they come to live through the attentive perception of both the characters and the readers. So we can say that the experience of a work of art, aesthetic experience and ritual experience are always already liminal. Or to quote Duncan: ‘Museums are sites that ‘enable individuals to achieve liminal experience—to move beyond the psychic constraints of mundane experience, step out of time, and attain new, larger perspectives’ (12). Ekphrastic narratives represent such moments of liminal experience, during which the reader lives vicariously through the characters. In the aforementioned novels by Byatt, the first and second instalments of her Potter quartet, museums are the settings for the prologues. In introducing her main characters, Byatt takes advantage of the public nature of these spaces where characters gather who otherwise would not necessarily get together. At the same time, each of the prologues singles out the characters’ private contemplation of particular paintings: a portrait of Elizabeth I, known as the ‘Darnley Portrait’, in The Virgin in the Garden, and a series of paintings by Vincent van Gogh, in Still Life. Byatt uses these descriptive, or ekphrastic, passages to introduce both the interior perspective of her main characters and the recurring themes of representation and subjectivity. Even though The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life use the museum space only as the setting for their prologues, this choice has a purpose, not only in introducing the main characters and the way they are related to each other but also in establishing important themes for the novels, such as the role of art in society, and the role of the museum in the characters’ identity formation and for national identity.



Viewing Art in London’s Museums

99

Ackroyd’s Chatterton focuses primarily on two portraits of the eighteenth century poet Thomas Chatterton, famous for his forgeries of medieval texts and for his early death. These are Henry Wallis’s portrait, The Death of Chatterton, posed for by the poet George Meredith in 1856, and a fictional portrait that supposedly shows the poet at a much greater age, thus possibly proving that he had not died as a youth. In the context of this article, I will focus on Wallis’s painting, part of the Tate Gallery collection. I posit that Ackroyd takes the liminal, or threshold, function of the museum space even further than does Byatt, in making the painting function as a portal between the three different time levels of his novel. Both Byatt and Ackroyd explore London’s museums as important liminal spaces between public and private spheres, and in Ackroyd’s case between space and time. Before I look more closely at the texts by Byatt and Ackroyd, I would like to start my analysis with Julian Barnes’ Metroland. In the opening chapters of the novel, the main characters, Chris and Toni, roam the galleries of London’s National Gallery to ‘hunt emotions’ (29). While they find obvious emotions such as ‘weepy farewells and coarse recouplings’ at ‘railway termini’ and ‘vivid deceptions of faith’ in churches, the National Gallery becomes their ‘most frequent haunt’ because it gives them ‘examples of pure aesthetic pleasure’ (29). Or at least that is what they hope to find. To their chagrin, they discover that ‘outrageously often […] the scene was one more appropriate to Waterloo or Victoria: people greeted Monet, or Seurat, or Goya as if they had just stepped off a train—[…] I knew you’d be here, of course, but it’s a nice surprise all the same’ (29). In visits to any major museum, that is probably the behaviour most often observed. Many museum visitors go through the galleries ‘checking off ’ one ‘important’ work after another, without really engaging with the individual paintings. I posit that this habit of seeing or reading without really paying attention is what many ekphrastic novels work against. Through the characters, the reader experiences vicariously close attention being paid to a painting. Paintings are texts that demand to be read, but, like novels, more and more often they cannot find any readers. Chris and Toni want to find visible proof that looking at a painting changes a person in some way: ‘We agreed […] that Art was the most important thing in life, the constant to which one could be unfailingly devoted […]; more crucially, it was the stuff whose effect on those exposed to it was ameliorative. It made people not just fitter for friendship and more civilised […] but better— kinder, wiser, nicer, more peaceful, more active, more sensitive’ (29). The two boys subscribe to the humanist idea that ‘good art’ makes us better people. The

100

London in Contemporary British Fiction

problem that they address is that it doesn’t suffice simply to ‘perceive’ the work of art, in order for that to happen. The opening sentence draws attention to another problem, and at the same time opportunity, that museum visitors face: ‘There is no rule against carrying binoculars in the National Gallery’ (11). Why draw our attention to rules and to binoculars? This first sentence implies that certain rules exist in a museum. No talking too loudly, no carrying of pens, no food or drink, and so on. These are rules about behaviour. Current work in museum studies focuses on the ‘museum experience’, and hopes that ideally the visitors will somehow interact with the art and not just blindly walk through the rooms and check things off. Some aspects of technology, such as the ubiquitous and audio guides, may or may not help in achieving this goal. While someone with an audio guide may look in more detail at one painting that is not included and gain some contextual knowledge, often they look only at the works included in the audio tour and miss the opportunity to study the other works. The reference to binoculars draws our attention to a special kind of seeing, or, rather of looking at, something. I argue that Barnes introduces this technology as a reminder that we need ‘help’ to see certain kinds of thing that otherwise may not be visible, and that an alternative technology can allow us to see better: namely literature, and ekphrastic literature in particular. As we vicariously experience the characters’ encounters with paintings, we, in turn, become more aware of our own viewing habits. In his latest book, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art (2015), Barnes explains that looking and talking are inseparable: ‘Flaubert believed that it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another, and that great paintings required no words of explanation. Braque thought the ideal state would be reached when we said nothing at all in front of a painting. But we are very far from reaching that state. We remain incorrigibly verbal creatures who love to explain things […] Put us in front of a picture and we chatter, each in our different way’ (8). I argue that this human impulse to put the visual experience into words is celebrated, modelled and emphasised in ekphrastic texts. I analyse the ekphrastic moment as a verbal description of a singular ‘event of viewing’ a work of art, as an encounter with an aesthetic appearing, rather than as a description of a work of art in the traditional sense of the word ekphrasis. Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux attributes an attention to the experience of the museum, and self-consciousness about the site of viewing, to ekphrastic poetry. These characteristics are also crucial for ekphrastic narratives. In principle, any object that can be perceived with the senses can be an aesthetic object, but it also depends on the time and situation. In Aesthetics of Appearance (2005), Martin



Viewing Art in London’s Museums

101

Seel defines ‘aesthetic objects [as] objects in a particular situation of perception or objects for such a situation; they are occasions or opportunities to perceive sensuously in a particular way’ (21). Seel’s explanation of aesthetic perception also touches on what he calls ‘phenomenal individuality’: that every event of perceiving or encounter is singular, even if the same aesthetic object and the same observer meet again. Each encounter thus has a momentary character; all its characteristics appear simultaneously. Literary critics such as Derek Attridge and art critics such as Mieke Bal have argued that the event of the reading is what makes the literary text or the work of art come alive. Hilde Hein makes a similar argument about works of art in her study The Museum in Transition: As texts without readers are empty, so museum objects are bare receptacles without the agency of museum visitors. Like a literary text, an object represents a potential effect that is realized only in an act of apprehension equivalent to the act of reading. That act may concur with, but can also resist, the author’s act of writing or the judgment of a curator. Meaning is not ‘put into’ a text or object to be ‘taken away’ by someone who ‘finds’ it there, but comes into being through intersubjective participatory experiences. […] No longer is there a single treasure to be found under the guidance of an expert; rather, a multitude of performative encounters occur that have constituted the object, perhaps over many centuries. (63)

I agree with Hein when she ‘suggest[s] that objecthood, like textual meaning, results from multileveled acts of attention by individuals, social groups, and institutions’ (64). So what function do those extended descriptions of works of art in a museum play in these novels? The description of a work of art through the eyes of a character engages critically with issues of perception. However, the attentiveness to the text is often turned into an attentiveness to ourselves. Seel writes: ‘in perceiving the unfathomable particularity of a sensuously given, we gain insight into the indeterminable presence […] of our lives. Attentiveness to what is appearing is therefore at the same time attentiveness to ourselves’ (xi). Thus, ekphrastic texts show how important it is to be a careful reader, and that, in analysing the process of perception, we can see how by being attentive to an art object we are at the same time attentive to ourselves and thus learn something about ourselves in the process. I will show how the characters in these novels (in)form their sense of self through their encounter with an art object.

102

London in Contemporary British Fiction

The prologues of Byatt’s novels draw our attention to her interest in the tension-laden relationship between the visual and the verbal. Both prologues describe the different kinds of people who mingle and greet one another as they walk through the gallery. Others are shown looking at the paintings on display, but then they don’t really look closely, focusing on the label rather than on the artwork itself. The three characters also respond in different ways. Frederica, who will eventually work as a critic for the BBC, feels entirely at home in both the public space of the museum and the private space of contemplation. She is also the one who in both cases initiates the meeting with the two men. Daniel, on the other hand, seems distracted, never really sees the painting and is generally uncomfortable in the environment of the gallery. Finally, Alexander has accepted Frederica’s invitation rather reluctantly, but it is nevertheless through him that we experience most of the prologues. We see what he sees. Since each prologue takes the form of a flashforward, taking place years after each of the novels-proper, we feel the tension between the characters, but cannot yet explain the source or the reason for this tension. In The Virgin in the Garden, we enter the building of the National Portrait Gallery with Alexander. The event the characters are attending took place on October 3, 1968: a lunchtime reading on Elizabeth I given by the famous actress Dame Flora Robson as part of a series, ‘People, Past and Present’, that, according to Peter Funnell, attracted ‘capacity audiences’ (598). Until Roy Strong took over as director in 1967, the National Portrait Gallery had been a ‘rather quiet and scholarly establishment’ (Funnel: 598). In fact, Alexander remarks on this change: ‘The Gallery had changed since his last, not recent, visit. It had lost some of its buff and mahogany Victorian solidity and had acquired a stagey richness, darkly bright alcoves for Tudor icons on the stairway, not, he thought, unpleasing’ (8–9). Choosing this particular setting also introduces the question of the role that art and art museums play in society, and how they need to adapt to a changing public. Another function of the prologue is thus also to introduce the theme of the nation and identity. While one of the people invited by Frederica to this event had said that ‘the words National and Portrait were in themselves enough to put him off ’ (9), Alexander nevertheless has, himself, to consider these words. He thinks: ‘those words, once powerful, at present defunct, national and portrait’ (9). So the idea of portraiture is at the time not very popular as a genre of painting, while abstract painting was in vogue. He continues: ‘They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language, and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic



Viewing Art in London’s Museums

103

representation’ (9). Of course the focus on the ‘Darnley portrait’ of Elizabeth I unifies the two, since it portrays the individual and also stands for England as place, its language and history. In fact, the history of the art museum is closely related to the idea of nation, as mentioned earlier. Alexander, first, describes the many different groups of people – mostly young hippies – and their clothing,2 illustrating the changing audience of the museum. The longest description, however, is reserved for the Darnley Portrait, to which Alexander has a personal connection. The entire novel in a way revolves round this image, since it introduces how visuals and language inform the way we perceive an individual. The case of Queen Elizabeth I is particularly interesting, since her life is surrounded by myriad stories and images that contradict one another rather than forming a coherent picture. Thus, it is crucial that, in the very first descriptive or ekphrastic passage, we see the portrait through Alexander’s eyes, not through those of an omniscient narrator. Interestingly, he focuses not only on the Virgin Queen’s features but also on the strangeness of the painting. He thinks: ‘There were other ambiguities in the portrait, the longer one stared, doubleness that went beyond the obvious one of woman and ruler. The bright-blanched face was young and arrogant. Or it was chalky, bleak, bony, any age at all, the black eyes under heavy lids, knowing and distant’ (13). Instead of trying to create a clear visual image for her reader, by having her character focus on the ambiguities Byatt addresses the impossibility of doing exactly that. This description functions also as a tool for characterization. We get to know Alexander as someone who is trained to pay attention to detail, and through him the reader experiences vicariously this level of scrutiny. His perception, in turn is informed by the stories he knows about Queen Elizabeth I: he sees both the woman and the ruler. Alexander’s struggle to find himself is reflected in his thoughts about the portrait: ‘Elizabeth was not Elizabeth the Virgin Queen: she was a whore, of Babylon or London a clandestine mother, a man, Shakespeare’ (13). And of course we find out that Alexander has invented yet another story about her in his play, Astrea, which is performed in the novel-proper. Still Life begins with another ekphrastic passage, introducing the importance of the experience of viewing as a central theme. Here, the prologue is set in 1980 at an exhibition of Post-Impressionist art in the galleries of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. It is crucial in that, as well as Byatt’s focus on perception and language through ekphrastic passages, it once again sets up the tension between language and visual art. As in the previous novel, we first find Alexander, who functions as the focalizer for much of the prologue, looking at a painting. Here, it is a row of van Goghs, his Poet’s Garden in particular. Alexander sits down

104

London in Contemporary British Fiction

and looks at ‘a bifurcated path simmering with gold heat – round – and under the rising, spreading blue-black-green down-pointing vanes of a great pine, still widening where the frame interrupted its soaring. Two decorous figures advanced, hand in hand, under its suspended thickness. And beyond, green green grass and geraniums like splashes of blood’ (1). This early description features already all the problems that the writer-characters in this novel encounter. In order to put his perception of the painting into words, Alexander has to resort to metaphors, similes and synaesthesia, using such unusual word combinations as ‘blue-black-green’ and ‘gold heat’ as well as comparing the geraniums to ‘splashes of blood’. Byatt’s self-reflexive work addresses the crisis of verbal representation both explicitly, in authorial asides and intertextual references, and implicitly, through characters and dialogue. Throughout the novel, Byatt interrupts the narration to insert commentaries in the first-person. These commentaries work as Verfremdungseffekte, taking us out of the world of the characters for a moment and forcing us to think about the theoretical implications the asides evoke. For Byatt, ekphrasis thus becomes a device to help her to explore the limitations as well as the creative potential of verbal representation. The museum space, where people look at and talk about art, is the perfect space for her to start her meditation on art and language. She examines the relationship between perception and language, and how our knowledge of language informs our perception and vice versa, just as in Alexander’s description of van Gogh’s Poet’s Garden. Her novel is performative in that it requires its readers to read attentively, respond actively, and engage critically with issues of perception and representation. Rather than simply undermining the truthfulness of mimesis, like many other postmodern novelists, Byatt uses ekphrasis to foreground the power of language to bring to life a realistic fictional world. She juxtaposes Alexander’s careful perceptions with those of other museum-goers, and stresses the importance of private contemplation. In both prologues, Alexander focuses on a painting that he is familiar with, yet which remains strange to a certain extent. Here, the intrinsically uncanny nature of all art comes into play. However, to experience this uncanniness the viewer has to pay attention. Alexander is able to be in the public space of the museum and still experience a private space of contemplation. Byatt shows how meaning is created through such intersubjective participatory experiences, characteristic of the London experience but intensified in the museum context. In Chatterton, Peter Ackroyd explores a similar personal experience of a painting, one that is an even more vivid example of liminality. His novel deals



Viewing Art in London’s Museums

105

with forgeries, fakes and doubles, and in it, the portrait of the poet Thomas Chatterton stands for these central themes as a mis en abyme. This painting, associated by so many with the eighteenth-century poet, of course in reality depicts another poet, George Meredith, who posed for Henri Wallis. Ackroyd foregrounds this fact, and takes it one step further, because ultimately the painting comes also to represent Charles Wychwood. The painting interconnects the three time levels of the novel, with each one featuring poets and artists as central characters: Charles Wychwood in the twentieth century, George Meredith and Henry Wallis in the nineteenth, and Thomas Chatterton in the eighteenth century. In the microcosm of the museum space, Ackroyd highlights the temporal layering characteristic of London as a whole. He stages a world that shows that creation relies always on previous examples. Everything that is created in the novel is a version or adaptation of something that already exists. Chatterton is full of repetitions of images, of situations, of plots, but each repetition come with a difference. More than Byatt, Ackroyd depicts a fragmentation of the ‘self ’ and exposes it as a cultural and rhetorical construct that is configured differently in different situations. In Chatterton, Ackroyd stages the fragmentation through the representation of a painting. Instead of relying on the arbitrariness of language or other motifs of fragmentation to illustrate the disintegration of the unified subject, he displaces this fragmentation onto the characters’ experience of looking at a painting, and particularly a portrait, thus doubling and emphasizing the perceptive situation of the fragmented self. He presents how an encounter with the other in the form of a portrait involves an experience of looking that makes you look also at yourself. Rather than representing distorted realities, he incorporates experiences of fragmentation, liminality and singularity in the world of the novel, using the characters as surrogates for the readers. In Chatterton, the paintings function as uncanny sites that confuse reality and imagination. Readers experience the uncanny moment of fragmentation and re-formation vicariously through the characters and in turn start to reflect on themselves. The plot of the novel is set in motion with poet Charles Wychwood’s uncanny encounter with a painting, a painting that he comes to believe portrays the eighteenth-century poet Thomas Chatterton in middle age. From this moment on, he tries to prove just that, and sets out on a quest to ‘solve the mystery’, as he tells his son Edward (17). This quest leads him to Bristol, where he finds manuscripts that seem to corroborate his theory. He sets out to write a revised biography of Chatterton, but his efforts come to a sudden end when he dies of an undiagnosed condition from which he had previously been suffering.

106

London in Contemporary British Fiction

Henry Wallis’s well-known painting of Chatterton, also, has a profound and uncanny effect on Charles and his son, and functions as another connection between the three time levels. Charles and his son Edward go to see Henry Wallis’s painting at the Tate Gallery, and after this the novel enters the second storyline and stages the creation of the painting. In many ways, the painting functions as a portal between the different time levels of the novel. In the nineteenth-century timeline, Wallis has asked his friend, the poet George Meredith, to pose as the seventeenth-century poet Chatterton. In order to recreate the death scene as accurately as possible, Wallis has found ‘the lodgings in which Chatterton expired’ (136). Here, Wallis is rehearsing the part that Meredith is going to play, which is reproduced in Wallis’s painting, prefiguring Charles’s vision of his death and also his actual death, and, retroactively, becoming synonymous also with Chatterton’s death, even though nobody really knows how he was found in that room in Brooke Street. The copy becomes more important than the original. In the course of the novel, Henry Wallis’s painting of the death of Chatterton becomes a ‘mirror’ for Charles. When Edward and Charles go to the Tate Gallery to see the painting, it is as though they are ‘travelling’ back in time as they walk through the different rooms of the nineteenth-century collection. Edward is impatient and tells his father that they have to go further back. This ‘back’ could mean back in the museum, but also back in time. Charles doesn’t want to look at the body at first; when he does look at it, finally, he sees himself lying there instead of Chatterton (or Meredith). His ‘vision’ prefigures his own death scene, which echoes Chatterton’s. He wonders: ‘But was there someone now standing at the foot of the bed, casting a shadow over the body of the poet? And Charles was lying there, with his left hand clenched tightly on his chest and his right arm trailing upon the floor. He could feel the breeze from the open window upon his face, and he opened his eyes’ (132). When Charles actually dies his vision comes true: ‘Charles reached down with his right hand and touched the bare wooden floor’, and he touches ‘the torn fragments of the poem which he had been writing’ (168f). Charles seems to realise this mirroring of Wallis’s painting because he then shouts: ‘No! […] This should not be happening. This is not real. I am not meant to be here. I have seen this before, and it is an illusion!’ (169). Finally, after he gains consciousness one last time, ‘His right arm fell away and his hand trailed upon the ground, the fingers clenched tightly together; his head slumped to the right [...]’ (169). He has become another model for the painting. At the end of the novel, Wallis’s painting has become a lieu de mémoire for Edward. The public space of the museum is now a place where he can feel the presence of his father. He not only cherishes the memory of visiting the Tate



Viewing Art in London’s Museums

107

Gallery with his father; Wallis’s portrait of Meredith as Chatterton has become for him a portrait of his father, and visiting it is indeed a ritual. As, finally, he looks at the ‘man lying upon the bed […] he step[s] back in astonishment: it [is] his father lying there’ (229). He recognises his father and, oddly, the painting of him as a dead person promises Edward that Charles will never be really gone: ‘He had seen his father again. He would always be here, in the painting. He would never wholly die’ (230). Even more interesting is the fact that he probably sees his own reflection in the glass covering the painting, and thus sees his father in his own resemblance to him. In this liminal moment, Chatterton, Meredith, Charles and Edward are connected through the painting. The paintings in Chatterton are uncanny sights, and sites, that trigger experiences of liminality. They are echoed throughout the novel and reappear also as strange visions. Ackroyd stages the slightly different and ever-changing encounters with the paintings to show the power of storytelling and art to keep something alive. The characters and artworks thus live a life in death, as they are reborn in new forms, ‘the same, but not the same’. Ackroyd foregrounds the connections between past, present and future. In these novels by Barnes, Ackroyd and Byatt, experiencing somebody else’s perception of a work of art reminds us of the singularity of this event, and also influences the way we see these particular paintings. We enter the museum space through the characters and witness their perception of a given painting as the public space is turned into a private space of contemplation. Their view may change our perception, and the next time we see the Darnley Portrait, van Gogh’s Poet’s Garden, or Wallis’s Death of Chatterton our perception of them may have changed. We will, at least, associate them with the novels and their characters, or even see them through the characters’ eyes and share their private space. This experience is more important than reading the label and attributing a work of art to a particular time-period or school. In The Museum in Transition, Hilde Hein argues that museums are beginning to focus on providing experiences rather than on displaying objects. Increasingly, museums see their roles as stimulating inquiry, and understand their audiences to be diverse. Writers such as Barnes, Byatt and Ackroyd understand this change, and suggest that a personal approach can be more effective than a typical art historical narrative that emphasises artist, influence and school. Postmodern ekphrastic narratives counter the traditional role of the museum as establishing a cultural or even national identity; instead, reflecting changing curatorial practices, these authors stage the museum space as a place of individual experience, a liminal public space, where each visitor ‘performs’ the

108

London in Contemporary British Fiction

works of art that he or she sees. In their influential essay, ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argue: ‘The man with leisure has to accept what the culture manufacturers offer him. Kant’s formalism still expected a contribution from the individual, who was thought to relate the varied experiences of the sense to fundamental concepts: but industry robs the individual of his function. Its prime service to the customer is to do his schematising for him’ (144). Barnes, Byatt and Ackroyd are calling for a return to the individual as producer of meaning, as they are participating in the meaning creation in London’s museums. Their novels remind us of the important role that the viewer-reader plays in the meaning-making process. The choice of portraits of such iconic British figures as Queen Elizabeth I and Thomas Chatterton reflects the importance of museums as the keepers of a national history. However, without personal interaction with these works of art, the history represented remains lifeless. Hence, London’s museums need their visitors to perform and engage actively with the artworks on display; and Barnes, Byatt and Ackroyd remind us of that necessity by staging ekphrastic encounters in these liminal spaces that form an important part of the ‘Real London’.

Notes 1

2

Ekphrastic narratives feature extended descriptions of works of art. W. J. T. Mitchell defines ekphrasis as the ‘verbal representation of a visual representation’ (Mitchell: 152), and James Heffernan calls it the ‘the literary representation of visual art’ (Heffernan: 1). Alexander describes: ‘The crowd flowed between him and the paintings. It seemed to have overflowed from the steps of the National Gallery, variously uniformed, uniformly various. Grimy thronged feet under, silky, fluffy, matted beards over, sari and saffron robe. Military jackets from Vietnam and the Crimea, barely sprouted moustaches and poultry-thin necks popping out of gilded collars above tarnished epaulettes’ (10).

Works cited Ackroyd, Peter. Chatterton. New York: Grove Press, 1987. Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’. In Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. London: Verso, 1979: 120–67.



Viewing Art in London’s Museums

109

Alpers, Svetlana. ‘A Way of Seeing’, Exhibiting Cultures. The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Eds Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991: 52–32. Attridge, Derek. The Singularity of Literature. New York: Routledge, 2004. Barnes, Julian. Metroland. London: Jonathan Cape, 1980. Barnes, Julian. Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art. London: Jonathan Cape, 2015. Byatt, A. S. The Virgin in the Garden. New York: Vintage, 1978. Byatt, A. S. Still Life. (1985) New York: Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1996. Byatt, A. S. The Children’s Book. London: Chatto & Windus, 2009. Duncan, Carol. Civilizing Rituals. Inside Public Art Museums. London: Routledge, 1995. Foucault, Michel. ‘Of Other Spaces’. The Visual Culture Reader. Ed. Nicolas Mirzoeff. London: Routledge, 1998: 229–36. Funnel, Peter. ‘Display at the National Portrait Gallery, London, 1968–1974’, Art History. 30.4 (September 2007): 590–610. Heffernan, James A. W. Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1993. Hein, Hilde S. The Museum in Transition. A Philosophical Perspective. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000. Hudson, Kenneth. Museums of Influence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Loizeaux, Elizabeth Bergmann. Twentieth-Century Poetry and Visual Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008. Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994. Seel, Martin. Aesthetics of Appearance. Trans. John Farrell. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Stafford, Barbara. Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996.

7

Iain Sinclair: Complexity, Imagination and the Re-Enchanted Margins of London Orbital Laura Colombino

Complexity and the visionary poet Modern metropolises have come to be regarded as increasingly complex. The city, physically defined and crystallized within ordered hierarchies, has been shattered, and a new, highly diversified landscape has emerged: a scattering and dissemination of very varied but potentially complementary elements. As Franco Bianchini and Hermann Schwengel point out in ‘Re-Imagining the City’ (1991): There was, in other words, a shift from modernism to postmodernism not only in architectural style, but also in terms of attitudes towards space, which was no longer regarded as a totality to be shaped according to the needs of a wider social project. The 1980s city-centre developments tended to view the urban fabric as a collection of fragmented, discrete and autonomous spaces. (214)

The composite dynamics of contemporary peripheries also lend themselves to this interpretation. As urbanists have pointed out, social exclusion is not necessarily confined to a geographically well-defined, homogenous outer belt, but sometimes atomised into portions of territory (neither ghettoes nor large metropolitan areas): small zones, sometimes close to the centre or encapsulated in wealthy, residential areas. The diversity of local and micro-local situations, in other words, urban complexity, has made it difficult to identify generally valid interpretative keys. So-called ‘zoning’ has had a hand in this process. The fragmentation of the city territory into separate areas, each one established for a specific purpose and restricted to a particular type of building, enterprise, or activity, has determined the isolation of these areas and made them often impenetrable,

112

London in Contemporary British Fiction

while transforming public space into mere technical service areas (roads, car parks, pavements, central reservations and flower-beds). The fulfilment of single functions has produced a marked morphological poverty and reduced the concepts of collective and individual to those of public and private. In The Society of the Spectacle (1994), the breaking up of urban communities and their refashioning as pseudo-communities of housing and shopping developments are seen by Guy Debord as enforcing alienation and impairing the revolt of the proletariat: Urbanism is the modern way of tackling the ongoing need to safeguard class power by ensuring the atomization of workers dangerously massed together by the conditions of urban production […]. Meanwhile, instants of incomplete reorganization of the urban fabric briefly crystallize around the ‘distribution factories’ – giant shopping centers created ex nihilo and surrounded by acres of parking space; but even these temples of frenetic consumption are subject to the irresistible centrifugal trend, and when, as partial reconstructions of the city, they in turn become overtaxed secondary centers, they are likewise cast aside. [emphasis in original] (121, 123)

He contends that the age of communication, circulation and displacement has generated isolated and dispossessed souls who, orphaned from their previous sense of community and exclusive attachment to the territory, try to reinvent place through movement: By virtue of the resulting mobile space of play, and by virtue of freely chosen variations in the rules of the game, the independence of places will be rediscovered without any new exclusive tie to the soil, and thus too the authentic journey will be restored to us, along with authentic life understood as a journey containing its whole meaning within itself. (126)

These urban nomads somehow accept and adjust to the modern ineluctable logic of movement but reconceive it as a playful dérive: a ludic drifting meant to negate the functionalism behind the circulation of people, goods and information produced by an increasingly abstract and bureaucratic space. The New Babylon visual utopia (1974) of the situationist Dutch painter and sculptor, Nieuwenhuis Constant, epitomised precisely this idea of an urban space inhabited by an imaginary community of creative nomads: ‘Constant’s idea’, as Andrea Branzi claims, in ‘Architecture: A Different History’ (2004), ‘had always been to apply Marxist thought to art, not in the form of real socialism, but rather in the form of total spontaneism, in the unleashing of public and private creativity, bringing the “social revolution” into line with an “artistic revolution” ’ (440).



Iain Sinclair

113

Herbert Marcuse, who was widely read and discussed in the 1960s, was persuaded that, as John R. Short writes in Urban Theory (2006): ‘The tenacity of the capitalist system to survive shattered the Marxist belief in the inexorable dynamic of revolution’. His ‘One-Dimensional Man (1964) describes the process of introjection whereby the values of a capitalist society become embedded into an individual psyche’ (8). His contention is that social control over individuals is so powerful and pervasive as to prevent criticism and opposition. Given that the working class itself is fully integrated into the system, he argues, the only possibility of liberation is entrusted to social outcasts such as ethnic minorities or the unemployed, and, for that matter, artists themselves: groups and individuals utterly alien to society. In particular, art is envisaged by Marcuse as the only form of communication able to voice desire for freedom; the only one capable of counteracting the comfortable and reasonable non-liberty that pervades advanced industrial society, while also pointing to possible worlds other than the one in which we live. The apartness of the artist is also the concern of Debord, whose psychogeographer claims to suspend all sense of class belonging. In ‘Situationist Space’ (2004), Tom McDonough notes that the person on the dérive is, as much as the Baudelairean flâneur: ‘already out of place’, neither bourgeois nor working-class. But whereas the flâneur’s ambiguous class position represents a kind of aristocratic holdover (a position that is ultimately recuperated by the bourgeoisie), the person on the dérive consciously attempts to suspend class allegiances for some time. This serves a dual purpose: it allows for a heightened receptivity to the ‘psychogeographical relief ’ of the city as well as contributing to the sense of ‘dépaysement’, a characteristic of the ludic sphere. (257)

Sinclair is heir to this tradition. Especially prominent in London Orbital (2003), his criticism of the dominant neo-liberal politics and economics that originated under Thatcher and was entrenched by Blair’s New Labour does not primarily involve class discourse: along the lines of Marcuse, Sinclair conceives the opposition to late capitalist culture pre-eminently as a concern of the imagination of the artist (who aligns in this with other outcasts of society). As Alex Murray rightly contends in his Recalling London (2007), ‘Sinclair’s recourse to imagination and the fantastical needs to be considered not as a form of neo-Romanticism’, and by extension of escapism, ‘but as the necessary models for alternative expression that have been demanded by the politics of post-war England’ (51). Allegations of disengagement, or ineffective engagement, levelled at Sinclair are implicitly based on the taken-for-granted oppositions of ‘aesthetic

114

London in Contemporary British Fiction

quality versus political relevance, form versus content’: polarizations that reflect what Hal Foster observes in The Return of the Real (1999), ‘two oppositions that still plague the reception of art […] were “familiar and unfruitful” as long ago as 1934’ (172). My contention is that in Sinclair’s work, markedly in his investigation of the metropolis’s outer belt in London Orbital, these traditional oppositions are undermined by the awareness that, in Thatcher’s and Blair’s Britain, politics and urban development have been, as it were, aestheticized or, as Ballard has it in his ‘Introduction’ to Crash (1995), redefined in terms of mere fiction (3). From the 1980s, urban regeneration has often been founded on consumption-oriented image-led strategies, as Sinclair suggests in London Orbital: Grander plans, with the passage of time, required more complex financial structures, ‘partnerships’. Local authorities, UK government, Europe: more executive producers than a Dino de Laurentiis epic. The Lea Valley was a future spectacle. Water was the new oil. Housing developments required computer-enhanced riverscapes as a subliminal backdrop. (43)

Quoting David Harvey’s ‘Down Towns’, Bianchini and Schwengel note that since the beginning of 1980s the underlying purpose of development strategies has been to employ ‘every aesthetic power of illusion and image […] to mask the intensifying class, racial and ethnic polarisations going on underneath’ (219). This leads Sinclair to confront late-capitalist urban culture precisely on the battleground of imagination and aesthetics. If the developers’ malign illusionism exerts its power heavily over our imagination, the artist-shaman’s task will be to try and heal the harmful effects of their creativity by means of his salutary visionariness. So Sinclair suggests, in Lights Out for the Territory (1997): The sterility of the Isle of Dogs was questioned by the sculptor’s frantic acts, his predatory laughter. If the skyline was to be dominated by a crop of alien verticals, exclamation marks in mirror glass, then we must burrow like moles. We must eat earth. The life-force of the city is measured in the candlepower of its keepers, the activators of place whose follies must be as imaginative as those of the developers and despoilers. (245–6)

‘Developers become poets of trespass’, he claims in the same travelogue, ‘They are like possessed shamans. They “see” white gymnasium temples where the rest of us, pedants picking over our heritage maps, find nothing but serrulated blocks of poverty housing’ (209): their transfiguration of the fabric of the city is seen as acting first and foremost upon our minds and not just on our social or economic conditions. Their visionary power is most evident in the suburbs



Iain Sinclair

115

described in London Orbital, along the ‘asteroid belt’ of the M25 with its ‘debris bumping and farting and belching around a sealed-off city’ (11). If the centre is steeped in history and bears its symbols, this suburban no-man’s-land is wholly available for developers’ visionary reinvention: That was left to Tony Sangwine of the Highways Agency. The film-essayist Chris Petit and I spent a morning on the road with Sangwine. The man was a visionary, a landscaper and motorway horticulturalist. He realised that taking on the orbital loop was the contemporary equivalent of getting a Capability Brown commission. Motorways were the last great public parks. Sangwine knew every weed, every salt-resistant clump of grass. He spoke lovingly of roe deer and short-tailed voles. The Highways Agency had planted more broadleaf woodland around the M25 than anywhere else in England. ‘We have introduced the woodland flora you associate with ancient semi-natural woodlands’, Sangwine boasted. ‘Bluebells, dog mercury’. (5)

Sinclair places a strong emphasis on the fictional character of the landscape around the M25. This is a feature identified significantly by Marc Augé himself in his Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity: The craze for the word ‘space’, applied indiscriminately to auditoriums or meeting-rooms (‘Espace Cardin’ in Paris, ‘Espace Yves Rocher’ at La Gacilly), parks or gardens (‘green space’), aircraft seats (‘Espace 2000’) and cars (Renault ‘Espace’) expresses not only the themes that haunt the contemporary era (advertising, image, leisure, freedom, travel) but also the abstraction that corrodes and threatens them, as if the consumers of contemporary space were invited first and foremost to treat themselves to words. (83)

‘Certain places’, he adds, ‘exist only through the words that evoke them, and in this they are non-places, or rather, imaginary places: banal utopias, clichés’ (Augé: 95). Both Augé and Sinclair believe that some non-places are conjured up by the mere power of words (of politicians, estate agents, and developers, for Sinclair). Their common starting point is that the loss of the exclusive attachment to the territory produced by the spread of non-places generates an increasing cultural amnesia. This issue is extremely consequential to Sinclair’s understanding of London’s borderland. Compellingly, he shows how such an amnesia allows the modern architect to play with decontextualized cultural signifiers: their eradication from the territorial context makes them available for free interchange and turns them into mere simulacra freely circulating on the market of reality-as-fiction. In London Orbital, the example of the restoration of the Victorian Holloway Sanatorium (rebranded as Virginia Park) is particularly

116

London in Contemporary British Fiction

revelatory in this connection. ‘ “An enviable lifestyle on the grand scale”, says the brochure. […] The message, in the promotional photographs, is confused: Japanese minimalism (one blue and white vase), US hygiene fetishism, ersatz Regency drapes, Trusthouse Forte oil paintings’ (289). Indeed, what makes London Orbital Sinclair’s most Ballardian work – besides the obvious similarity of the peripheral, motorway location – is precisely the awareness that, as Ballard writes in his ‘Introduction’ to Crash: ‘We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising’ (4). I have already broached the idea that for Sinclair political confrontation comes under the guise of a conflict between contrasting forms of imagination. ‘Shamanism has developed its own realpolitik’, he states in Lights Out for the Territory (247): the infection of the capitalist logics affecting our minds is countered by the artist who, in his turn, infects the city with the positive virus of his own imaginative, redemptive folly. Of course, Sinclair’s love of the arcane is part and parcel of his concept of imagination. Hardly passed unnoticed by critics, his occultist penchant has been traced back to his gothic aesthetics and not infrequently criticised as anti-democratic. What criticism has failed to notice, though, is his insistence on the spontaneous nature of these elitist poses (as they may well appear). Sinclair explains his flights into the arcane as involuntary psycho-physical responses: ‘Apparently occult acts are revealed as simple survivalist reflexes’, he suggests in Lights Out for the Territory (247). So the artist’s gesture is explained in evolutionary terms as the instinctual adjustment and response to the challenges the new urban environment poses to his imagination. But the psychogeographer’s keen receptivity to the surroundings, already posited by Debord, is taken one step further by Sinclair. His stalker’s high receptiveness involves much more than the instinctive reactions of his imaginative powers: also and more importantly, his reflexes allow him to make sense of the overload and complexity of the urban landscape. What is ‘the relationship’, wonders Sinclair in Lights Out for the Territory, ‘between the brain damage suffered by the super-middleweight boxer Gerald McClellan (lights out in the Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel) and the simultaneous collapse of Barings, bankers to the Queen’ (4)? The stalker’s imagination draws on a very wide range of documentations and specialist knowledges but also ‘stitches it all together’ (4), providing intuitive, sudden syntheses. His idea of the writer’s instinctive grasp of urban reality as a complex network legible only through the intersection of a variety of different sciences has provided him – so I argue here – with valid interpretative keys. It is interesting to notice, in this connection,



Iain Sinclair

117

that, in the midst of the implosion of financial capitalism started in the winter 2008/2009, a return to the theory of complexity has been described as desirable. Referring to, and elaborating on, an article by Edward Carr which appeared in Intelligent Life, Edmondo Berselli claims in ‘Il tramonto del tuttologo’ (‘The Twilight of the Polymath’, 2009) that a new mentality and new formulas are felt to be necessary to reduce to order the new chaos of the worldwide economic crisis, and that help may come from the retrieval of complexity, the cultural totem of the 1980s, which called for sudden intellectual short-circuits and intuitive syntheses (51). In his article, ‘The Last Days of the Polymath’ (2009), Carr claims that the increasing lack of ‘gifted generalist[s]’, owing to the hyperspecialization that nowadays totalizes sciences and research, has had a negative impact on knowledge in general and on the economy in particular. A generation of economists with a purely mathematical education lacked the will and the instruments necessary to read and understand Keynes’ warnings on the Great Depression, and, therefore, incredibly, failed to predict the crisis. ‘For decades’, he asserts, ‘economists sweated over fiendish mathematical equations, only to be brought down to earth by the credit crunch: Keynes’s well-turned phrases had come back to life’. To the contrary, what Carr terms ‘intellectual polygamy’, that is, the awareness and command of complexity, is what makes poets the unacknowledged legislators of their time, Sinclair seems to suggest. Of course, in this connection, the influence of neo-modernism on him should also be recognized. This could be epitomized by poet Peter Riley’s formula, quoted by Robert Bond in Iain Sinclair (2005), ‘the poem: Physiological Presence + Cosmological Range’ (13), which points to the combination of somatic responses and an environment whose wide scope calls for a broad range of disciplines. As Bond suggests: Sinclair’s writing displays both elements of Riley’s equation; perhaps most notably on account of the writings visceral quality, the reader of Sinclair’s work has a strong sense of physiological presence, and Sinclair’s involvement with diverse areas of pre-history, anthropology and myth attests to his impulse to draw on a ‘cosmological range’ of specialist knowledges. (13)

This conception of writing is best exposed by Sinclair in a passage from Landor’s Tower (2001): ‘I left Landor in his box, crushed by an excess of Vaughans, Machens, Gills, Joneses, by maps and guides, geology, meteorology, picturesque excursions, rambles down the Wye. All of it to be digested, absorbed, fed into the Great work. Wasn’t that the essence of the modernist contract?’ (30–1). Writers, for Sinclair, provide the nexus where specialist knowledges and cosmic

118

London in Contemporary British Fiction

forces intersect; in other words, they become those he refers to, in the title of the poetry anthology he edited in 1996, as the Conductors of Chaos (1996). This high receptivity is also traumatic: ‘The will to continue, improvise upon chaos’, we read in Lights Out for the Territory, ‘could be defined as “intent”: a “sickness-vocation”, as Eliade has it, an elective trauma’ (240). This is enacted by the writer-shaman who, Sinclair states in the wake of Debord and Marcuse, is an outcast ‘estranged from the tribe’ (239). Sinclair’s anthropological definition of society and the poet as respectively a tribe and its unacknowledged shaman, which reveals a primitivist element in his urban poetics, is worth pursuing in relation to the issue of the psycho­ geographer’s imagination and his already noted instinctive responsiveness to the environment. As Augé points out, according to Marcel Mauss, ‘almost all men in archaic or backward societies’ (he discusses in particular the Melanesian) display ‘a vulnerability and permeability to [their] immediate surroundings that specifically enable [them] to be defined as “total” ’ and identified ‘with the landscape in which [the ethnologist] finds them, the space they have shaped’ (49, 47). In his analysis of primitive communities, Augé questions the objectivity of Mauss’s contention, claiming that the idea of totality and localised society – ‘everyone holds fast and everything stays together’ (46) – is illusory: ‘the indigenous fantasy’, shared by the ethnologist, ‘of a society anchored since time immemorial in the permanence of an intact soil’ (44) and ‘maintained against external aggressions and internal splits’ (46). Because of this seeming integrity, Augé argues, such societies are promoted to exemplarity by ethnologists (46). This simplifying fantasy of ‘consistency or transparency between culture, society and individual’ is not objective, he adds, but certainly retains some truth on a cultural and identitarian level. Yet, it could hardly be applied to Western civilization, where ‘class divisions, migration, urbanization and industrialization’ intrude, making culture, society and the individual more complex and difficult to read (49). Nevertheless, as we have seen, Sinclair often refers to London’s people in primitivist terms as a tribe and to the poet as their shaman. So, how can the former term apply to the complexity of contemporary London’s society? And how can the latter, the visionary seer of homogeneous tribal societies, make sense of modern urban anarchy? To answer these questions, one should begin by noticing that the artist’s apartness posited by Debord (and Marcuse) is thrice enhanced in Sinclair’s conceit of the writer as a modern shaman. First, by associating the contemporary poet with the subjects of archaic cultures living in anthropological places, Sinclair endows him with the same intuitive, instinctive knowledge of



Iain Sinclair

119

the surroundings posited by ethnologists. Secondly, this receptivity is enhanced by the powers of divination the poet lays claim to as shaman. Thirdly, if the shaman of primitive societies has control over natural forces and is the medium between the visible and the invisible, the modern urban shaman is likewise able to connect the near and the far, what is evident and what is secreted (occult) in information and places. But, even more to the point, the traumatic intersection of multifarious and chaotic cultural forces in his body and imagination allows the retrieval of a sense of cultural totality: his imaginative short-circuits alone can aspire to make sense of the complexity of urban space. Sinclair goes even one step further in Lights Out for the Territory, by suggesting that the very ‘health of the city, and perhaps of culture itself, seemed to depend upon the flights of redemption these disinherited shamans (there were women too, plenty of them) could summon and sustain’ (240).

Re-anthropologizing the margins If Sinclair sometimes resorts to postmodern jargon, as when in London Orbital, he defines the city’s non-identity with itself as ‘pastiche’; the dynamics of chaos offer him – so I argue here – a far more meaningful interpretative key to London’s incongruous ‘flux’ (45). In his organicist view, the urban landscape is an ‘infinitely accommodating substance’, as he states in Lights Out for the Territory (25): a matter in dynamic equilibrium, where the city’s complex systems interrelate, shapeshift and have an impact on each other. Emblematically, in London Orbital Sinclair quotes Paul Devereux’s vision, in Re-Visioning the Earth, of spiritual tourism as ‘a complex but organic mode of active observation’ [emphasis added] (122). In other words, it is only under the auspices of this holistic organicism (the city as a chaotic cosmos) that anarchic complexity can really aspire to be subsumed into totality. Symptomatically, ‘Water’, or more generally liquidity, features very prominently in Sinclair’s landscapes, always as a substance fostering free interchange and osmosis between different states of matter and the mind, water ‘was always a hinge for magicians’, he suggests, ‘a means of switching modes of consciousness. Water was universal memory’ (177). In the almost unmanageably various matters which constitute the massive narrative of London Orbital, the recurrence of circular patterns recalling the motorway shapes of ring roads and slip roads provides an element of synthesis, however temporary and fragile. This is not Sinclair’s first experience of those

120

London in Contemporary British Fiction

moments when the order behind the chaos unfolds as a fleeting but undeniable vision, ‘that monosecond’ described in Liquid City (1999), ‘when the pattern was revealed, before it vanished forever’ (8). His previous works are scattered with such moments of revelation. These are certainly reminiscent of modernist epiphanies, but their being couched in the language and imagery of chaotic systems makes it tempting to define them as strange attractors, the name used in chaos theory to define implicit patterns of order within seemingly random natural phenomena. Through these moments, Sinclair attempts, time and again, to attain a comprehensive view of London’s liminal territories. Significantly, in London Orbital the elusive quality of these spaces is sometimes made sense of by presenting them as innumerable fractal fissures of the orbital’s selfsame patterns: ‘These off-highway zones, on either side of the Dartford Crossing – Lakeside, Thurrock, and Bluewater – set up their own impenetrable microgeographies; traffic islands, loops, dead ends that mimicked the motorway system’ (11–12). Yet if modernist epiphanies are moments of positive revelation, the status of these patterns is more problematic, in that they are connected to the despised M25 inaugurated by Margaret Thatcher. Resorting again to the language of chaos, the motorway is presented, in Sinclair and Chris Petit’s film accompanying the book, also called London Orbital (2002), as a spatio-temporal dimension of its own, and specifically as a black hole, a ‘negative space’ drained of substance and significance. Similarly, in the book, Sinclair suggests that the ‘[n]oise and rush of traffic, twenty-four hours a day, has pushed “content” back’ (16). The M25 is pernicious also: ‘affect[ing] old alignments’: ‘Narrative fractured. Verbals didn’t stand up. Confessions wouldn’t cohere’ (314). Yet, the motorway in London Orbital is far from being monolithically identified with a malign, energy-draining trench. Rather, it oscillates between a set of opposing ideas. For example, the very assumption, introduced at the beginning of the book, of the meaninglessness of the experience of circular travel along the M25, ‘a wearied return, hobbled, to the point of origin’ (7), seems contradicted by Sinclair’s fascination with various early twentiethcentury utopian views and visionary maps of London’s suburban perimeter roads. Envisaged or planned by literary men and urbanists alike, these utopias are associated by Sinclair with ancient conceptions of the city as bearing cosmic meanings, both religious and profane, that tie together people and place. In other words, the language of organicism and anthropology, to which the motorway seems impervious, is precisely the one he draws on when recounting these prefigurements of the M25:



Iain Sinclair

121

Arthur Crow, also writing in 1911, went further; he wanted to connect ten ‘Cities of Health’ (Barnet, Bromley, Croydon, Dartford, Epping, Epsom, Romford, Uxbridge, Waltham, Watford). They would be joined by a ‘Great Ring Avenue’, a fantastic Egyptian or Mayan conceit, radiant settlements as outstations to a centre given over to public buildings, places of ceremony, commerce and worship. (85)

In Iain Sinclair (2007), Brian Baker makes a strong case that the marked utopian vein in Sinclair’s presentation of the margins – the Green Belt, the old dream of paradise gardens – runs counter to (and somehow impairs) the dystopian, apocalyptic, and by implication political import of the text (147). Yet, as I have already argued, there is no clear-cut separation between politics and aesthetics, engagement and visionariness in Sinclair, and my aim here will be precisely to unravel these seeming contradictions while also showing how these polarities intersect fruitfully in his vision of liminal London. In ‘Excavating the Unburied’ (1999), Sinclair states: ‘the London novelists I admire shift between dystopian visions of the city as an enclosed system, complex and treacherous, and open-field narratives that try to invent ways of escaping the pull of this gravitational centre’ (194). Significantly, referring to the River Lea he suggests in London Orbital that ‘Water’, the very vehicle of liminality for him, ‘remains, in [his] fancy, a messenger substance, linking reservoir with source; a dream hinge between city heat and Arcadian potentiality’ (95). The M25 itself appears schizophrenically positioned between two different viewpoints. ‘The road at night is a joy. You want to imagine it from space, a jewelled belt. As a thing of spirit, it works. As a vision, it inspires’. But, ‘shift from observer to client and the conceit falls apart’ (77): the road suddenly ‘induce[s] rage and states of trance’ (338), an abysmal ‘slid[ing] through layers of anaesthesia’ (203). The intensely dual nature of the experience of the margins is epitomised by his programmatic statement that ‘the fugue is both drift and fracture’, cosmic fluidity and the less reassuring ruptures of complexity; ‘the spirit of the fugueur’, he suggests, is the split experience evoked by Van Gogh, in The Painter on the Road to Tarascon: ‘The road shimmers. He is tracked by a distorted shadow’ (147). Sinclair’s artist is engaged, on the one hand, in the reverie and repose provided by the perceptive flow of light and matter and, on the other hand, in ‘the neurotic narrative’ (134) generated by the relentless rhythm of fragmentary documentation, which replicates the ‘neurosis’ produced by the motorway’s ‘alternately speedy and sluggish microclimates’ (171). Fluid meditations and metaphors of liquidity aestheticize the quiet desolation of the rus in urbe, the intermingling of the city and the country that Sinclair

122

London in Contemporary British Fiction

prizes so much. This admixture is propounded as preserving our sanity and bodily equilibrium with its imaginative import. As the avatar of the city’s non-identity with itself, London’s margins become a space available for the projection of fantasies where ‘the acceptance of the dream, the multiple world’ (534) leads to the imaginary conjunction of various concepts of the boundary, ideas of track and repose: ley, leisure, river, railway. Lea as ley, it always had that feel. A route out. A river track that walked the walker, a wet road. The Lea fed our Hackney dreaming: a water margin. On any given morning when the city was squeezing too hard, you could get your hit of rus in urbe. Hackney Marshes giving way to the woodyards of Lea Bridge Road, to Springfield Park; reservoir embankments, scrubby fields with scrubbier horses, pylons, filthy, smoking chimneys. […] Railway shadowing river, a fantasy conjunction; together they define an Edwardian sense of excursion, pleasure, time out. (LO 40)

As rus in urbe, the city margin is the very epitome of matter’s transmutation caught in process, of Sinclair’s privileged concept of London as an endlessly accommodating matter. His insistence on organicism and, or as, dreaminess is reminiscent of Gaston Bachelard’s suggestion, in Water and Dreams (1983): ‘One cannot dream profoundly with objects. To dream profoundly one must dream with substances’ (22). In fact, it is very likely that Bachelard’s conceptualization of imagination had an impact on Sinclair. In London Orbital he writes: ‘Renchi, so he says, is reading Gaston Bachelard: The Poetics of Space. This is a coincidence of sorts, because I’m not reading The Poetics of Reverie (by the same author); even though I have a copy by my bed. The title was appealing’ (515). Of course, the book is infinitely more appealing to Sinclair in that it appears to be unread. Unread, it can play freely on our imagination with no need to identify definitive meanings or specific philosophical influences; it can conspire with other elements to create an atmosphere. His atmospheric moments, his idea of culture as a climate, deliberately keep the reader’s analytical intelligence at bay. But even if the evidence of Bachelard’s influence on him is necessarily ambiguous, proof positive of his interest in the French philosopher can be found in Lights Out for the Territory, and specifically in the oft-quoted description of stalking as ‘tramping asphalted earth in alert reverie’ (4), which closely recalls the vigilant awareness accom­ panying daydream suggested in La poétique de la rêverie (1961): Put another way, reverie is an oneiric activity in which a glimmer of consciousness subsists. The dreamer of reverie is present in his reverie. Even when the reverie



Iain Sinclair

123

gives the impression of a flight out of the real, out of time and place, the dreamer of reverie knows that it is he who is absenting himself – he in flesh and blood, who is becoming ‘spirit’, a phantom of the past or of voyage. (150)

This ghostliness of the traveller is significant for Sinclair, too, and I will return to it below. What I would like to dwell on now is the distinctively anthropological quality of the fugueur’s reverie in London Orbital. This dreaminess is often associated with a vision of myth inspired by Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines. Sara H’s ‘paintings that look like maps, dreamings, motorway junctions’, writes Sinclair, resemble ‘Aboriginal art, songlines, Navaho sand paintings’: ‘Sara seems to have accessed that chaos map’ (295). Fractal, small-scale geographies of the M25 multiply throughout the travelogue: their reverberation works as a mantra endowed with mythopoetic qualities which try to make sense of non-places by re-enchanting them. Undeniably, the reinvention of territory can be achieved only through movement, as already posited by Debord. But no less important in this process of retrieval is the role of an anthropological, nomadic imagin­ ation à la Chatwin, which alone can reconstruct an emotional bond with forefathers, the repositories of a lost sense of community: ‘Part of our task in this circumnavigation of London is to become our fathers, our grandfathers’ (382). In other words: by increasing the sense of London’s borderland as the place of daydream, the margins can be delivered from the condition of fictional non-places and banal utopias producing cultural amnesia, and be re-invented as anthropological territories. Imagination and aesthetics are confirmed, therefore, as the plane on which late capitalism can be confronted, for Sinclair, and where a salutary visionariness may counteract false, marketable dreams. Literary or pictorial, historical or utopian, narratives can (re)create the soul of liminal lands. Applied to the now largely non-anthropological margins (where identity, history and relations appear uncertain traces at best), narration makes this borderland meaningful and legible, ‘giv[ing] structure to our amnesiac circuit’ (509). Sinclair suggests that the M25 ‘won’t make sense until it’s been abandoned, grown over’ (535), in other words, till it lapses into the past; just as it made sense (but utopian, rather than archaeological or pertaining to memory) when, in Ford Madox Ford’s ‘extraordinary essay, “The Future of London” ’ (204–5) published in 1909, the orbital road was a pure fantasy projected into the future. To become narration, that is, to become meaningful, non-places must be displaced from their unchanging present of amnesia, their status outside history; because narration either anticipates or follows, evokes the future or recalls the past.

124

London in Contemporary British Fiction

According to Augé, anthropological places are ‘geometric’ and can be mapped in terms of basic spatial forms such as ‘the line, the intersection of lines, and the point of intersection’, which concretely ‘correspond to routes, axes or paths […]; to crossroads and open spaces […]; and lastly, to centres of more or less monumental type’ (57). The sense collectivities have of their own identity is implemented by their conceiving and handling space as a network of abodes of ancestral presence. Theirs is a ‘place that the ancestors have built […], which the recently dead populate with signs whose evocation and interpretation require special knowledge, whose tutelary powers are awakened and reactivated at regular intervals dictated by a precise ritual timetable’ (54–5). This chimes with Sinclair’s ceremonial obsessions, such as his will to undo the malign spell cast by the Millennium Dome, by circumnavigating the M25 anti-clockwise. His ritual walks are meant to heal by re-anthropologizing place. In the indigenous fantasy, Augé contends, collective identity is mirrored by the ritual network of the place, while the ethnologist reverses the route: ‘from space to the social, as if the latter had produced the former’ (51). In London’s periphery, this mirroring is cracked, defaced to the point of non-recognition. The poet, therefore, goes beyond the ethnographer: he aims at reconstructing old networks made illegible or reactivating imaginary ones; in so doing, Sinclair claims, in Lights Out for the Territory, the writer’s ‘work is capable of re-enchanting place’ (239), of conjuring up territory again. This naturally leads us, finally, to pose the issue of the ontology of Sinclair’s liminal places. ‘You learn to empty yourself into the view’, he states in London Orbital. ‘At privileged viewing points, the observer vanishes: the fictional residue remains, coheres. It’s there even when you don’t see it’ (491) any longer: either because you (the stalker) have gone further or because it has been razed to the ground by developers. Here Sinclair is providing his answer to the old empiricist question, posed by George Berkeley and David Hume, of whether something can exist independently of our perception of it, when the observer’s physical presence on the scene and his perception are only ghostly traces in memory. But, there again, the very concept of imagination, which has been at the core of my analysis here, refers precisely to the mind’s retention of the absent, as Maurizio Ferraris reminds us in his 1996 book L’immaginazione (Imagination, 7). Sinclair believes that only by inscribing places into the realm of imagination, that is, only by displacing them into narration, can we assure they survive and that they gain an autonomous life of their own. The very ontology of liminal territories, therefore, is totally dependent on the poet’s evocative powers. Imagination is more real than reality itself; or, rather, it (re)creates it so that it may never disappear.



Iain Sinclair

125

Works cited Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Trans. John Howe. London: Verso, 2006. [1992]. Bachelard, Gaston. Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Trans. Edith R. Farrell. Dallas: Pegasus Foundation, 1983 [1942]. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos. Trans. Daniel Russell. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971 [1960]. Baker, Brian. Iain Sinclair. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Ballard, J. G. ‘Introduction’ to Crash. London: Vintage, 1995 [1973]. Berselli, Edmondo. ‘Il tramonto del tuttologo’, La Repubblica 51 (Wednesday 18 November 2009). Bianchini, Franco and Hermann Schwengel. ‘Re-Imagining the City’. In Enterprise and Heritage. Eds John Corner and Sylvia Harvey. London and New York: Routledge, 1991: 212–34. Bond, Robert. Iain Sinclair. Cambridge: Salt, 2005. Branzi, Andrea. ‘Architecture: A Different History’. Architecture & Arts. 1900/2004. A Century of Creative Projects in Building, Design, Cinema, Painting, Sculpture. Ed. Germano Celant. Milan: Skira, 2004: 437–44. Carr, Edward. ‘The Last Days of the Polymath’. Intelligent Life, Autumn. http:// moreintelligentlife.com/content/edward-carr/last-days-polymath. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone Books, 1994 [1967]. Ferraris, Maurizio. L’immaginazione. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996. Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real. The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1999. McDonough, Tom. ‘Situationist Space’, Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents. Ed. Tom McDonough. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2004: 241–66. Murray, Alex. Recalling London. Literature and History in the Work of Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair. London: Continuum, 2007. Short, John Rennie. Urban Theory. A Critical Assessment. London: Palgrave, 2006. Sinclair, Iain (ed.). Conductors of Chaos: A Poetry Anthology. London: Picador, 1996. Sinclair, Iain. ‘Excavating the Unburied: Some London Writers’, Waterstone’s Guide to London Writing. Ed. Nick Rennison. Brentford: Waterstone’s Booksellers, 1999: 193–5. Sinclair, Iain. Liquid City. London: Reaktion. 1999. Sinclair, Iain. Landor’s Tower: or The Imaginary Conversations. London: Granta Books 2001. Sinclair, Iain. Lights Out for the Territory. London: Penguin, 2003a [1997]. Sinclair, Iain. London Orbital. London: Penguin, 2003b [2002]. Sinclair, Iain and Chris Petit (dir.). London Orbital, 2002.

8

Feeling London Globally: The Location of Affect in White Teeth Jung Su

Published at the opening of a new millenium, Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth has attracted intensive critical attention1 mostly for its vibrant representation of an evolving, multicultural London. One of the earliest responses to the novel is that of Caryl Phillips, on 9 January of that year, in which he praises the young novelist’s acumen in ‘creating a dazzling complex world of cross-cultural fusion in modern-day London’, and ‘presenting postcolonial Britain with a problem of categorization’, by which he suggests the problem of defining the nature or meaning of this novel and, by extension, perhaps of today’s Britain. In the following years, scholars closely monitoring contemporary British fiction – including Philip Tew,2 Dominic Head and Peter Childs – continued to focus on the multicultural complexity of contemporary London. Thus, Head points out that ‘White Teeth, through its complex plot, its diverse range of characters, its broad post-war historical sweep, and its insistent and summative portrayal of a de facto hybrid cultural life, is artfully constructed as the definitive representation of twentieth-century British multiculturalism’ (106). In The Contemporary British Novel, Tew highlights the significance of hybridity and points out: Smith’s world is a suburban multicultural secularized London defined by oddities, incongruities and humour as her narrative follows the fate of the men’s two interlinked families. This symbolizes the hybridity which as a legacy of colonial migrations influences both the migrants and the former imperial cultures, especially in the lives of oppressed and ordinary people, the truly marginal. (158)

Childs likewise emphasizes White Teeth’s multicultural representation of Britain: ‘Smith’s narrative paints a generally optimistic view of multicultural Britain’ (210).

128

London in Contemporary British Fiction

Such an increased emphasis on the consequences of cultural hybridity, which for many critics represents a corollary to Britain’s imperial and colonial past, tends to obscure the novel’s nuanced characterization and its subtlety, therefore risking the danger of underpinning a superficial, essentialist reading. Recently, in ‘Samad, Hancock, the Suburbs, and Englishness: Re-reading Zadie Smith’s White Teeth’, Tew reappraised this first novel, pointing out that the book’s ‘reception was shaped very much by essentialisms concerning ethnic identity and hybridity’, while ‘Englishness, class, and paternal affinities’, the ‘strong currents in Smith’s sense of identity and creativity’ are inadvertently ignored (294–5). Other themes besides those of hybridity and multiculturalism have been explored, such as posthumanist concern and somatic seizure.3 Among the recent critical responses to White Teeth, a rarely discussed theme is that of postcolonial affect, perhaps most clearly represented by the emotional ups and downs of the central female figure, Irie. As early as 2000, Phillips detected the emotional weight lying behind the novel’s playful, indeed, comic façade, stating: ‘[t]here is nothing farcical about the pain of wanting to belong. In this respect, White Teeth is full of false smiles and contrived faces, masks that are repeatedly donned in order to better hide the pain’. However, Phillips does not probe very deeply into his point; he is content to note that Smith’s hilariously bitter characterization of the multiracial community may force the ‘ “mongrel” nation’ to ‘star[e] into the mirror’, to become more cautiously aware of its status quo – its own gradual readjustment to its steadily altered post-war demographic, its social and multicultural milieu. Indeed, we may see the ‘laughter’ of many apparently farcical scenes as being in a sense contrived, for in such scenes real emotion is adroitly hidden behind the story’s complicated plot and subplots. In this chapter, I intend to address the important role emotions play in Smith’s comic yet intrinsically painful presentation of the quotidian realities of contemporary London, where a new ‘structure of feeling’ is emerging along with the gradual changing of the city’s demographics. The anxiety over an emergent yet uncertain future – one that is especially uncertain for lower-class and ethnicminority characters like Irie – precisely embodies such a new ‘structure of feeling’. Thus, this chapter will first give a few examples of the real anxieties of some of these characters, and then turn to the issue of possible futures taken up by Smith – most conspicuously at the end of the novel. ***



Feeling London Globally

129

Head quotes from Homi Bhabha, in Nation and Narration: ‘the cultural construction of nationness [is] a form of social and textual affiliation […]’, and reminds us that Bhabha ‘describes a complex tension between two contradictory (but interacting) forces: the “pedagogic” tendency to assert an authoritative national identity and the “performative” process of reconstruction’ (110). According to Bhabha, in The Location of Culture, these forces of ‘social authority and subalternality emerge in displaced, even decentred, strategies of signification’ (145). As Bhabha adds, this is because ‘the exercise of power’ is not only ‘politically effective’ but also ‘psychically affective’ owing to the ‘discursive liminality’ of these forces, which provides ‘scope for strategic manoeuvre and negotiation’ [emphasis in original] (145). In analysing the tension of this ‘double narrative’, Bhabha emphasizes in particular the role of ‘the people’, of the double role they play through their everyday lives in re-signifying the formation of a national narrative. The people’s double role as both object of the pedagogical force exercised by the authority and subject of the performative force interpellated in the materiality of everyday life is given by Bhabha a regenerative power in its liminality, and in the liminal space of the national society it hence cultivates. The ambivalent term ‘liminal’, as noted by Head, indicates two important meanings: ‘inhabiting a borderland’, and ‘incipient’ or ‘just emerging’ (111). It is from this ambivalent or equivocal liminality that Head unfolds his argument about the interaction between the two forces manifest in the relationship between Samad Iqbal and Archie Jones. Head points out that the Samad-Archie and Magid-Millat relationships precisely reflect the mentalities and competing claims of both first- and second-generation immigrants, whose characterization is more or less replete with cultural and historical stereotypes (112). Although the complicated plotline does seem primarily to follow the friendship between Samad Iqbal, the first-generation Bangladeshi Muslim immigrant, and Archie Jones, according to White Teeth’s narration a man of ‘Good honest English stock’ (99), and also relationships associated with the white middle-class Chalfens, a more cautious reading of the novel’s three main families reveals something subtler than the question of ethnicities and national identity. The lifelong bond between Samad and Archie stems not just from their comradeship in the Second World War and the conscience displayed by Archie in the final scene, but from their working-class background. On this level of ‘class propelled by the idea of race’ the Chalfens have an edge over both the Joneses and the Iqbals. Moreover, although Smith focuses on her male characters, one cannot disregard the female characters, striving for recognition and social ascendancy.

130

London in Contemporary British Fiction

While Head concludes his interpretation with Smith’s vision, calling it ‘the quest for multicultural utopia’ (117), I would rather suggest that the inner voice hidden behind the contrived comic tone of White Teeth is in fact that of a teenage girl, Irie. A half-Jamaican, half-white, second-generation daughter of a migrant mother, Irie stands at the centre of the story, the character most capable of representing the subaltern female voice, perhaps even the voice of Smith herself. Throughout the novel, Irie is given a flesh-and-blood vividness and special emotional intensity. Her yearning for a better education (and hence a better job and higher social status), her extreme concern about her physical appearance, and her infatuation with the Chalfens – who are not so much realistic representations of the white middle class as tokens, in Smith’s critique of typical white middle-class values – are all common characteristics of London’s struggling young working-class black women, and probably a selfportrait of the author herself. In one episode Irie longs to have straight hair. This yearning, echoing that of Pecola in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, is a manifestation of her internalizing of white values and standards, wishing to rid herself of a characteristic ethnic feature, her curly hair. At the hairdresser’s Irie demands: ‘Straight hair. Straight straight long black sleek flickable tossable shakable touchable fingerthrough-able wind-blowable hair. With a fringe’ (273). Despite praise for her African hair, for its waviness and beauty, Irie still ‘screwed up her face’, saying: ‘I hate it’ (277). However, ironically, because Irie has failed to inform her hairdresser that the hair has just been washed, without the protection of dirt her scalp is corroded by the ammonia in the dye. Irie screams, faints, regains consciousness only to watch her hair falling out in clumps. This farcical scene is variously absurd, tragic and grotesque. Smith’s depiction of Irie seems less detached than that of Samad or Archie, combining the seemingly superficial, such as the glibness of her coiffurial preference, with genuine pain, real feelings of frustration and despair. Reading this adolescent protagonist in this light, Squires suggests convin­ cingly that, through her, ‘the anxieties of youth and immigrant communities are displayed’ (27). For Irie, or Smith, one can identify Raymond William’s claim made in Culture and Society: ‘the ladder is a perfect symbol of the bourgeois idea of society, because, while undoubtedly it offers the opportunity to climb, it is a device which can only be used individually: you go up the ladder alone’ (331). Consequently, the novel’s ‘undertone’ is one of real emotion, and not least the angst of a young second-generation immigrant girl as she faces a recognizable real-life context found in her longing for an autonomous future. Irie wants



Feeling London Globally

131

freedom from a paternalistic past (and maternal constraints) in order to more fully enjoy her life: Irie was about to become the first Bowden or Jones […] to enter a university. Her A-levels were chemistry, biology and religious studies. She wanted to study dentistry (white collar! £20k+!), which everyone was very pleased about, but she also wanted to take a ‘year off ’ in the subcontinent and Africa (Malaria! Poverty! Tapeworm!), which led to three months of open warfare between her and Clara. (376)

This exemplifies just how Smith’s light-hearted, ironic and perhaps slightly selfmocking tone belies or conceals Irie’s actual uncertainty, the intensity of her anxiety about the future. Such uneasiness about the future is closely tied to the longing for social ascendancy. It derives from the immigrants’ intuitive awareness of Britain’s colonial history and its imprint on the social space of postcolonial or postimperial London, which might be said to generate a new ‘structure of feeling’ in a British society that has gone through vast demographic change. Yet the force of this new emotional structure is felt by the original white community as well as by the more recently-arriving immigrant communities, and both are parodied by Smith in her sympathetic caricatures of Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal4 and in their lifelong friendship. In these, Smith connects the dimension of what one might call ‘postcolonial affect’ to location, locality, local space(s) in contemporary London. In one such scene Samad tells his sons how his thumb was sliced by the careless knife-stroke of an old waiter in a restaurant where Samad once worked. Initially, it was wrapped in a handkerchief to stem the flow of blood, he continues. However, the blood-soaked handkerchief meant the customers lost their appetites and he was fired by his boss. Frustrated, Samad walked towards Trafalgar Square, where, near the fountain, he first of all wrote the name ‘IQBAL’ on a bench, in blood, and, then, ‘in an attempt to make it more permanent, he [went] over it again with a pen knife, scratching it into the stone’ (505). He reflects: ‘A great shame washed over me the moment I finished,’ he explained to his sons years later. ‘I ran from it into the night; I tried to run from myself. I knew I had been depressed in this country […] but this was different. I ended up clinging on to the railings in Piccadilly Circus, kneeling and praying, weeping and praying, interrupting the buskers. Because I knew what it meant, this deed. It meant I wanted to write my name on the world. It meant, I presumed. Like the

132

London in Contemporary British Fiction

Englishmen who named streets in Kerala after their wife, like the Americans who shoved their flag in the moon. It was a warning from Allah. He was saying: Iqbal, you are becoming like them. That’s what I mean.’ [emphasis in original] (505–6)

This series of traumatic events demonstrates how postcolonial affect can be subtly connected to location or spatiality. An imperially symbolic space, Trafalgar Square, may symbolize Iqbal’s general sense of having been humiliated, even ‘sacrificed’, in his newly adopted country, but symbolize, also, his bold defiance. The connection of such postcolonial emotion or affect to location (Trafalgar Square) and through this also to (colonial, imperial) history is a recurrent theme of the novel. In ‘Walking the City’, Michel de Certeau sees perambulation itself as a ‘space of enunciation’; and to follow the spatial flows of colonial and postcolonial, privileged and lower-class, ‘affect(s)’ through the geographical area of London in Smith’s novel is also, in effect, to look at the temporal-historical changes in the everyday material life of the people, the slow, subtle changes taking place in this contemporary multicultural city (97–8). Here, one may picture the soft5 changes brought about through the commingling of variegated cultures, the subtle and sometimes invisible shifts in forms of language and patterns of thinking and behaviour, in hopes and dreams and illusions and nightmares, in ‘lifestyles’ in the most abstract sense. One can picture also the harder changes in physical location, modes of mass transport, and streetscapes. Such transformations figure in the everyday lives of the working class and the élite, third-world immigrants and ‘white Englishmen’ of whatever social class. How Smith portrays Willesden through Alsana’s perspective illustrates a particular sort of multicultural, ‘spatially-extended’, or ‘spatially-arranged’, affect, even if the string of shop names enumerated by Alsana may seem too contrived to be real: [T]hey all looked at her strangely, this tiny Indian woman stalking the high road in a mackintosh, her plentiful hair flying every which way. Mali’s Kebabs, Mr Cheungs, Raj’s, Malkovich Bakeries – she read the new, unfamiliar signs as she passed. She was shrewd. She saw what this was. ‘Liberal? Hosh-kosh nonsense!’ No one was more liberal than anyone else anywhere anyway. It was only that here, in Willesden, there was just not enough of any one thing to gang up against any other thing and send it running to the cellars while windows were smashed. [emphasis in original] (63)

White men like Archie represent a pressing need to survive in the material world of real suffering, rather than being shaped by any abstract discourse



Feeling London Globally

133

of race. In his relationship with Samad, race is even less of a determining factor in their destinies than is class. Race in this case does not hinder mutual understanding. Their common decision to locate their houses in working-class Willesden Green, where Archie can just afford a ‘heavily mortgaged, two-storey house’ (46), helps to solidify the bond between them. The spatio-temporality of such a cross-class, cross-ethnic-group, crosscity and cross-history (or trans-historical) affect emerges in a passage clearly expressing a note of caution, uncertainty and anxiety for the nation in its present-day state. Here is Millat, visualising the route his group will take to get to Trafalgar Square near the end of the novel; the other voice is that of a minor fundamentalist Muslim, Abdul-Colin: He had been more certain when he began, imagining the journey as one cold sure dart on the Jubilee Line: Willesden Green → Charing Cross, no changing of trains […] just a straight line to Trafalgar, and then he would climb the stairs into the square, and come face to face with his great-great-grand-father’s enemy, Henry Havelock on his plinth of pigeon-shat stone. […] Twenty minutes later the Bakerloo Line delivered them into the icy cold of Trafalgar Square. In the distance, Big Ben. In the square, Nelson. Havelock. Napier. George IV. And then the National Gallery, back there near St. Martin’s. All the statues facing the clock. […] ‘They have no faith, the English. They believe in what men make, but what men make crumbles. Look at their empire. This is all they have. Charles II Street and South Africa House and a lot of stupid-looking stone men on stone horses. The sun rises and sets on it in twelve hours, no trouble. This is what is left’. (503–4)

Clearly for certain immigrants the names and places from English imperial history take on a particular (often marginally negative) postcolonial affect – a special emotional resonance based both on the old, and still (if only by temporal-metonymic extension) somewhat oppressive, colonial sense, and on the newer, perhaps more parodying than oppressive postcolonial sense. The newer, less serious and potentially more subversive meanings resurface in the normal course of these characters’ engagement with the everyday material life of the city. If Trafalgar Square represents a space of conflicting ideologies and histories, Samad’s moving from Whitechapel to Willesden Green symbolizes the immigrants’ keen awareness of the need to survive. Owing to their lingering uncertainty about their real ‘position’ in the city, and their knowledge of the place their ancestors would have occupied in the older (prewar), more imperial,

134

London in Contemporary British Fiction

city, they work extremely hard in order to establish themselves and their families in a safer place to live: [The Iqbals] lived four blocks down on the wrong side of Willesden High Road. It had taken them a year to get there, a year of mercilessly hard graft to make the momentous move from the wrong side of Whitechapel to the wrong side of Willesden. A year’s worth of Alsana banging away at the old Singer that sat in the kitchen, sewing together pieces of black plastic for a shop called Domination in Soho (many were the nights Alsana would hold up a piece of clothing she had just made, following the pattern she was given, and wonder what on earth it was). A year’s worth of Samad softly inclining his head at exactly the correct deferential angle, pencil in his left hand, listening to the appalling pronunciation of the British, Spanish, American, French, Australian: Go Bye Ello Sag, please. Chicken Jail Fret See wiv Chips, fanks. (55)

For Samad, moving from Whitechapel to Willesden Green means moving towards a more liberal and presumably more secure space: The house was the matter. Samad was moving out of East London (where one couldn’t bring up children, indeed, one couldn’t, not if one didn’t wish them to come to bodily harm, he agreed), from East London with its NF gangs, to North London, north-west, where things were more … more … liberal. (59)

This sense of insecurity and the uneasiness about the hostile neighbourhood are also clear to Samad’s wife, Alsana: But all the same, she reflected, slamming the door behind her, it was true: it was a nice area; she couldn’t deny it as she stormed towards the high road, avoiding trees where previously, in Whitechapel, she avoided flung-out mattresses and the homeless. It would be good for the child, she couldn’t deny it. […] [A]nd in the Liberal tradition it was a park without fences, unlike the more affluent Queens Park (Victoria’s), with its pointed metal railings. Willesden was not as pretty as Queens Park, but it was a nice area. No denying it. Not like Whitechapel, where that madman E-knock someoneoranother gave a speech that forced them into the basement while kids broke the windows with their steel-capped boots. Rivers of blood silly-billy nonsense. (62–3)

Nevertheless Smith avoids direct narratorial mention of such political agendas as freedom of speech, anti-discrimination or immigration policy, although Alsana offers fleeting references to the Rushdie affair, with its Middle Eastern, fundamentalist-Islamic terrorist context, and Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. From Alsana’s complaints about the poorer Whitechapel (mattresses



Feeling London Globally

135

on the ground, political radicalism) and the more affluent Queen’s Park (fences with ‘pointed metal railings’, ironically suggesting perhaps knives or spears), one sees the subtle relationship between location, material life, economics, politics and history, and the special feelings the historical imprint of a specific location might well evoke in its inhabitants. Women in the novel, in particular subaltern female immigrants, struggle for a better future. Most, including Alsana, Clara, Irie and Neena, are more imperturbable than the men: Clara, who is physically stronger even than Archie; Alsana and Clara who seem more adaptable to new environments; finally Irie and Neena, who are more transgressive with regard to patriarchal models. Cultural differences seems less problematic to the women than to the men. The female immigrant characters seem more down-to-earth, pragmatic, and ready to accept any challenge or change. Feminist and lesbian issues hover in the background of White Teeth: (1) Neena (denounced by her relatives as ‘Niece-ofShame’) feels at ease with a relationship with her white lover and is indifferent to her family’s reproaches; (2) at the end of the novel, Irie falls in love with Joshua while keeping her little girl fatherless and feeling ‘free as Pinocchio, a puppet clipped of parental strings’ (541); (3) Smith, in an authorial voice, predicts that, on the historical night of 31 December 1999, Abdul-Mickey will finally open the doors of O’Connell’s to women. All these episodes seem to suggest the possibility of a more liberal, feminist space in the future. A familiar theme recurs, one mentioned frequently in discussions of racism: outward appearance and ethnicity are still implicitly linked to attitudes towards citizenship, nationality and belongingness. That Millat is asked by Joyce about where he comes from is another conspicuous case in point: Joyce to Millat: ‘you look very exotic. Where are you from, if you don’t mind me asking?’ ‘Willesden,’ said Irie and Millat simultaneously. ‘Yes, yes, of course, but where originally?’ ‘Oh,’ said Millat, putting on what he called a bud-bud-ding-ding accent. ‘You are meaning where from am I originally.’ Joyce looked confused. ‘Yes, originally.’ ‘Whitechapel,’ said Millat, pulling out a fag. ‘Via the Royal London Hospital and the 207 bus.’ All the Chalfens milling through the kitchen, Marcus, Josh, Benjamin, Jack, exploded into laughter. Joyce obediently followed suit. ‘Chill out, man,’ said Millat, suspicious. ‘It wasn’t that fucking funny.’ [emphasis in original] (319)

136

London in Contemporary British Fiction

Although ostensibly this is comic, beneath the farcical surface lie far more serious issues, with Smith deploying the ‘masks’ mentioned by Phillips, ‘donned in order to better hide the pain’. Irie, a spectator of this ironic scene, is able to feel Millat’s bitterness, and in this way she may be representative of subaltern women (even if they are young professionals) in the global city. Perhaps in London in particular, owing to its continuing engagement with its former colonies, one can witness what, in the introduction to Globalization and Its Discontents, Saskia Sassen calls the ‘sharp and perhaps intensifying differences in the representation of claims by different sectors, notably international business and the vast population of low-income “others”—African Americans, immigrants, and women’ (xxxiv). *** Raymond Williams’ idea of ‘the structure of feeling’ is useful in considering White Teeth’s convoluted mapping of present-day London in terms of the newly emerging social formations and the conflicts between different types of affect. In Marxism and Literature, Williams defines the structure of feeling ‘as social experiences in solution, as distinct from other social semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more evidently and more immediately available’ [emphasis in original] (134). Sean Mathews emphasizes that Williams’ ‘structure of feeling’ is a metaphor which is used ‘as a pointer to an area of interest, a not-yet-focused and not-quite-articulate means towards the resolution of difficulties and resistances in analysis’ [emphasis added] (183). Thus, according to Matthews a society’s structure of feeling ‘becomes evident in moments of transition, of change, and is evident in formal shifts in artistic practice’ (186). In setting the novel in a post-Second-World-War north London suburb, Smith develops an intricate plotline against the backdrop of the colonial history shared by Britain and its former colonies (India and Jamaica). Such a history unfolds along two axes – those of the Jones-Iqbals, and the Chalfens – with many subplots interwoven, and with Irie the Anglo-Jamaican girl, standing at the centre of the story apparently as Smith’s own mouthpiece. Smith deliberately pinpoints some historical markers that are important to Indian and Jamaican colonial history as well as to Britain’s imperial history: first, 1945, the end of the Second World War, whose aftermath, which Archie cannot escape, includes the decolonization of Britain’s many colonies and their imperial legacies; second, 1857, the year of the ‘Indian Mutiny’, which represents for Samad a heroic moment because he believes his great-great-grandfather, Mangal Pande, played



Feeling London Globally

137

a key part in that violent struggle; third, 1907, the year of the Jamaican earthquake, the one date of which Irie can be sure in her attempt to reconstruct her maternal family’s past. Each of these years marks a nexus, an entwinement of personal and monumental histories, serving as temporal markers, like those deployed by Salman Rushdie in Midnight’s Children. Near the novel’s ending, on the New Year’s Eve of the Millennium, at the fictitious Perret Institute on Trafalgar Square, there is a ‘final convergence’ of different social, religious and political groups, as well as of individuals. These include FATE, KEVIN, Marcus’s exhibition of the transgenic FutureMouse©, Hortense Bowden’s eschatological vision, Magid the Bangladeshi-British anglophile, and Irie, the young female witness, arguably the authorial observer of all events. Smith makes evident the clash of different values, or perhaps the discordances between and among ‘assemblages of affect’ in a post-war British society whose very mise-en-scène is London. By ending her story at the turn of the twenty-first century, with various competing conjectures about our collective human future, the author expresses her anxiety about how Britain’s colonial past will continue to impact on its ‘present’ and ‘future’. At the same time, Smith is showing us that heterogeneous types and even heterogeneous structures of feeling are gradually emerging along with London’s expanding ethnic population. The latter point is again reminiscent of Raymond Williams’ discussions of the ‘structure of feeling’. The notion of an indeterminate but just-emerging (or emergent) future being ‘still in solution’ fits with the anxiety, the structure of emotion, the affective pattern of characters like Irie, in the face of their own (individual, familial and urban-collective) futures. Indeed, the themes of a future both distant and immediately emergent, of uncertainty and chance, are interwoven or interplayed by Smith throughout White Teeth. The title itself suggests both universality (even ‘blacks’ have ‘white teeth’) and locality or particularity (perhaps even a certain priority to ‘clean’ and ‘civilized’ upper-class whites), both biological permanence – skeletons still have their teeth – and biological impermanence or fragility. The optimistic, convivial, multicultural London of Smith’s chaotic and farcical final scene thus symbolizes a critique of multiculturalist ideals, the conflicting feelings towards the dilemma of making choices, a ‘posthumanist humanistic’ concern for the human future, and an aspiration for a future, still uncertain, which may be free and open or may be somehow controlled by certain social-political forces. By scathingly caricaturing the impact history has on ordinary people, and perhaps even parodying the Nietzschean ideas

138

London in Contemporary British Fiction

of chance and contingency (Archie’s coin-tossing against Nietzsche’s dicethrowing), and repetition (Archie being shot by Dr. Sick twice), Smith expresses her complex or even contradictory feelings. She seems to suggest that, as Childs notes, ‘history is as inescapable as the here and now’ (211) – here one might think of the Nietzschean radical immanence of the moment implied by the eternal return – and thus that the course of the future could never be ‘controlled’ by special interests. Smith links past, present and future in a recurring (and again arguably Nietzschean) phrase of the novel, ‘past tense, future perfect’, and in her epigraph from Shakespeare’s Tempest: ‘What is past is prologue’.6 On the other hand, she also seems to attempt to liberate the human future (that of the second-generation ethnic immigrants in particular) from any sort of despotic, pre-determined will or scientific experiment performed by an individual or group, that is, from any form of religious (thinking more specifically of religious fundamentalism or extremism), social, discursive (racism for example) or genetic engineering. In this regard, Buchanan, in ‘ “The Gift that Keeps on Giving”: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and the Posthuman’, offers a perceptive observation of the novel’s intention, stating that it promotes the ‘unsettling truths’, including ‘the inescapability of roots and history in human lives, the impact of biology and the body on our sense of self, and the violence intrinsic to human affairs’ (36), all of which culminate in the novel’s final scene. The combination of Archie’s use of coin-throwing as a final resort and his coincidentally being shot twice by Dr. Sick together with Marcus’s geneticengineering experiment and Joyce’s horticultural metaphor suggest that the author is co-opting two antithetical forces, chance and reason, either of which may be thought to drive history. Gilles Deleuze summarizes Nietzsche’s view that ‘the universe has no purpose, that it has no end to hope for any more than it has causes to be known’ (27). Whether or not she incorporates such a view, Smith may seem to have complicated her emplotment in order to ponder the question of the future (of the next generation), the question of whether the future course of human history will be dictated by some autocratic power by means of scientific or discursive technologies. Considering the novel in this way, the seemingly contingent or chaotic events in White Teeth become coherent: the coincidental assemblage of all the social, religious and political groups, an assemblage deliberately arranged by the author, implies or predicts that Britain’s next generation will have the potential to cultivate new possibilities for its own future – be it ‘white’ or ‘black’. White Teeth’s obviously contrived plot design, its spontaneous employment of street language of young London toughs and the accented English of



Feeling London Globally

139

multi-ethnic groups, and its realistic yet ‘stereotypical’ representation of different social groups and their values (for example, KEVIN, FATE, FutureMouse©7) – all these are ways in which the novel may epitomize the emergent ‘affective turn’ in contemporary London. The characters’ use of accent, slang and characterization, reminiscent of Charles Dickens when put together with the multicultural scenes, demonstrate the influence of earlier British fiction as well as the author’s longing for self-expression in contemporary, ethnically inflected fashion. Hidden beneath the novel’s comic façade, the blending of styles and transformation of feelings can be described in Williams’ term, ‘in solution’, which implies new, not-yet-articulated or not-quite-articulate feelings and modes of expression rarely found in earlier British literary convention. Matthews’ interpretation of Williams’ term ‘structure of feeling’, below, might suggest a reading of Smith’s novel as an index of the gradual changes undergone by both British literary conventions and Britain’s social fabric : First, the term is used primarily to facilitate consideration of new and emergent elements in the social formation […] It is wholly defined in the context of the analysis of changes in society or culture. Second, the evidence of change, at the level of the structure of feeling, is consistently generated by the comparison in experience of new feelings or ideas with received conventions and forms of expression […] Third, the term is above all developed as a tool for the understanding and judgment of contemporary culture […] Fourth, the structure of feeling is intended to facilitate the study of whole societies or formations, providing a means by which greater varieties of evidence can be processed in analysis. [emphasis added] (189–90)

Smith’s new mode of literary expression and new subject, that of England’s emerging multicultural mass culture, might, to adopt Matthews’ terminology, be regarded as a ‘tool for the understanding of contemporary culture’ (190), one that is of interest to ordinary readers and to academia. What Smith describes as the ‘neutral’ (517) space of the big Exhibition Room – also called ‘the final space’ (491) in the novel’s final section title – in the fictitious Perret Institute on Trafalgar Square constitutes a liminal space wherein the author uses several dramatized events to incarnate the collision of different feelings and what Matthews has termed (see passage above) emergent elements in sociocultural formations. Here, historical legacies clash with the earnest aspirations for a more liberal future, and such conflict may presage change and the emergence of a new structure of feeling. Smith provides a mixture of deeply seated anxiety, distressed striving for recognition, eagerness for freedom, and the agitated refutation of any discourse that takes advantage of racism, anti-racism, fundamentalism,

140

London in Contemporary British Fiction

progressivism and liberalism, but the unpredictability of what will emerge from this chaotic mixture is clear in the author’s presentation – in a sort of omniscientpostmodern authorial voice – of different possible endings to the story, including the novel’s farcical final scene of the future mouse’s escape (541–2). Such a confusing proliferation of future possibilities in the present perhaps also implies the ethnic immigrant’s emotional need for more space, that is, for a more truly ‘multicultural’ Britain, where this means more multicultural space in the here-and-now.8 By the end of the novel, in its final scene or perhaps narrative ‘space’, Marcus’s science project is to be exhibited in a big ‘room’, and Smith plays with the various possible implications of such spatial terms: The final space: all these people are heading for the same room. The final space. A big room […] a room separated from the exhibition yet called an Exhibition Room; a corporate place […] used for the meetings of people who want to meet somewhere neutral at the end of the twentieth century […] the logical endpoint of a thousand years of spaces too crowded and bloody. […] (that was the brief: a new British room, a space for Britain, Britishness, space of Britain, British industrial space cultural space space) … [T]hey know what they want, especially those who’ve lived this century, forced from one space to another like Mr. De Winter (né Wojciech), renamed, rebranded, the answer to every questionnaire nothing nothing space please just space nothing please nothing space. (517–19)

Here the ‘room’ is the ‘corporate place’ – heart of the Empire perhaps – where a somewhat isolated group embodying British history and power meets secretly, whereas what the wider society requires is more openness or ‘room’ (more space). For, this ‘final space’ of the institute (and the novel) is not just a geometrical space but a social space infiltrated by historical imprints and emotional turmoil. In some way foreshadowing the final confrontation of conflicting ideologies, set also in Trafalgar Square, this episode acquires a certain ‘postcolonial affect’ from the symbolic meaning of its location. This square in the heart of London, each of whose monuments and statues contain layers of heterogeneous trajectories commemorating the past glory of the British Empire, is, in effect, the Empire’s centre or heart as well. But on Victory in Europe Day (8 May 1945), this was also where tens of thousands of British subjects gathered to wait for Winston Churchill’s announcement of the end of the war and the defeat of Hitler’s Germany, a country that had bombed London fifty-five years previously. Thus this space also signifies what will become the decline of British colonial power in the post-war period, and the dawn of Britain’s postcolonial era.



Feeling London Globally

141

Smith parodies the square’s various possible uses and meanings in the final scene of White Teeth, where this complex locus, in some ways like that of ‘White Teeth’ itself, seems to serve as a liminal space traversed by diverse historical narratives and new possibilities, a space where all the novel’s ‘episodes’ find a final point of convergence. All the statues and emblematic buildings (Big Ben, National Gallery, and so on), and all the interest groups’ confrontations at the exhibition of the FutureMouse©, come to seem less a utopian projection of a harmonious future multiculturalism than an emergent inter-class, inter-ethnic, inter-cultural conflict with no clear end in sight. *** In White Teeth, although the representation of the subaltern working-class immigrants in London might be partial and stereotypical – a kind of rapid overview by means of a series of brief sketches – these glimpses of the (mainly ethnic) characters’ struggle for survival somehow finally make clear what Sassen labels the ‘increasingly transnational element’ in global cities, and the emerging ‘politics of contestation embedded in specific places but transnational in character’ (xxxiv). The novel’s depictions of Samad working at a restaurant called ‘The Palace’, and Alsana working as a dressmaker for a shop called ‘Domination’, in Soho (55), are reminiscent of how Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and Senay (Audrey Tautou), in the film Dirty Pretty Thing, represent with ‘comic bitterness’ the global city’s complex array, indeed its chaotic conglomeration of subaltern perceptions, postcolonial affects. In conclusion, Smith’s fictional world centres around a young female, and it forecasts a future that is free from the constraints of patrilineality. If the novel includes or communicates past, present and future within its own moment, then here the advance of history is perhaps exploded, as Walter Benjamin says, by the ‘presence as now-time’ (2003: 397).

Notes 1

It is noteworthy that, in addition to its rapid success in the mass market, White Teeth has received academic attention both within and outside the Commonwealth. Owing to the fact that Taiwan has undergone periods of colonial rule, studies of colonialism and its impact on the post-colonial subject have always been of a strong interest to many in the academy in Taiwan, partly explaining why

142

2

3 4

5

6

7

8

London in Contemporary British Fiction White Teeth attracts Taiwan scholars. For further reference to the critical reception of White Teeth in Taiwan, see Chang and Tseng. For a full-scale analysis of Smith’s works, see Tew’s Zadie Smith (2010) and Reading Zadie Smith: The First Decade and Beyond (2013), which includes more recent approaches. See Buchanan (13–25) and O’Leary (39–52). According to Tew, in ‘Samad, Hancock, the Suburbs, and Englishness: Re-reading Zadie Smith’s White Teeth’, the two characters, particularly Samad, have been ‘drawn from her father, Harvey, whose obsession with Tony Hancock (the celebrated British comedian) Smith outlines and confesses to sharing’ (300). The idea of softness is inspired by Jonathan Raban’s Soft City, in which he emphasizes the city’s plasticity (its softness), its psychic dimension, and its contingency upon the citizen’s reactions to and interactions with it (3–4). As well as Shakespeare’s play, this epigraph might reference one of the four monumental statues placed by architect John Russell Pope round the National Archives Building. Designed and modelled by Robert I. Aitken, and carved by the Piccirilli Brothers Company, ‘The Future’ (1933–5) is a statue of a young woman who lifts her eyes from the pages of an open book and gazes into the future. Inscribed at its base is ‘What is Past is Prologue’, which the sculptor proclaims to be the source of his inspiration. Head has already pointed out that FutureMouse© is based on OncoMouseTM, and that Smith’s ridicule of Marcus’s project (115) represents more generally her criticism of genetic science and its current hegemony. Head also compares Smith’s and Donna Haraway’s opposite views on the project (115–16). Head comments: ‘This cultural space of migrant and post-migrant identity is, necessarily, an interactive site in which multiculturalism must be redeemed as an active, conflictual process’ (108). Such an ‘interactive site’ may again suggest liminality.

Works cited Aitken, Robert I. ‘The Future’. The National Archives. http://www.archives.gov/about/ history/building-an-archives/statues/statue-future.html. Benjamin, Walter. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Benjamin, Walter. ‘On the Concept of History’. Trans. Harry Zohn. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4: 1938–1940. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003: 389–400. Buchanan, Brad.‘ “The Gift that Keeps on Giving”: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and the Posthuman’, in Reading Zadie Smith. Ed. Philip Tew. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013: 13–25.



Feeling London Globally

143

Chang, Shu-Li. ‘Everyday Miracles in the Multicultural Carnival: Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and the Contingency and Exigency of the Ethical Act’. Review of English and American Literatures 16 (June 2012): 23–53. [In Chinese]. Childs, Peter. Contemporary Novelists: British Fiction Since 1970. New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 2005. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Deleuze, Gilles. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia UP, 1983. Head, Dominic. ‘Zadie Smith’s White Teeth’. In Richard J. Lane, Rod Mengham and Philip Tew (eds). Contemporary British Fiction. Cambridge: Polity, 2003: 106–119. Matthews, Sean. ‘Change and Theory in Raymond Williams’s Structure of Feeling.’ Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies. 10 (2). 2001: 179–94. O’Leary, Joanna. ‘Body Larceny: Somatic Seizure and Control in White Teeth’. In Reading Zadie Smith. Ed. Philip Tew. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013: 39–52. Phillips, Caryl. ‘Mixed and Matched’, review of White Teeth, The Observer (9 January 2000); http://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/jan/09/fiction.zadiesmith. Raban, Jonathan. Soft City. London: The Harvill Press, 1974. Sassen, Saskia. Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: The New Press, 1998. Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. London: Penguin, 2000. Squires, Claire. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum, 2002. Tew, Philip. The Contemporary British Novel. London: Continuum, 2007 [2004]. Tew, Philip. Zadie Smith. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Tew, Philip. ‘Samad, Hancock, the Suburbs, and Englishness: Re-reading Zadie Smith’s White Teeth’. In Reassessing the Twentieth-Century Canon: From Joseph Conrad to Zadie Smith. Eds Nicola Allen and David Simmons. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014: 294–309. Tew, Philip (ed.). Reading Zadie Smith: The First Decade and Beyond. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Tseng, Yung-shan. ‘Tooth as Root: The Question of Historical Continuity in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth’. MA Thesis. National Taiwan Normal University, 2008. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society 1780–1950. 1958. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Williams, Raymond and Michael Orrom. A Preface to Film. London: Film Drama, 1954.

9

Agency and Conflict in Andrea Levy’s Polyphonic London Anja Müller-Wood

When you look at family trees – anybody’s family tree, people’s individual histories, not the winner-takes-all history of nations – the question of identity becomes very complicated. (Andrea Levy 2000). Andrea Levy’s Small Island might appear like the kind of feel-good story designed for the middle-mind world of book clubs and late-morning talk shows, and the scant academic literature about the novel has done little to dent this uplifting image, with critics emphasizing its celebration of ethnic hybridity and what Richter terms ‘multiracial conviviality’. While Cynthia James claims that Small Island rewrites the official, all-white script of British national identity (para. 2), Maria Helena Lima suggests that the novel proposes ‘a more fluid “British” sense of self ’ (81) than that which the existing national narrative allows. For Susan Alice Fisher, London provides the utopian backdrop against which characters re-evaluate themselves and their place in the world (45–6), even if this reassessment is brought about by conflict and tension and ultimately remains precarious. She contends that in Levy’s novel London consists of ‘contested spaces’ for which the excluded, non-white characters struggle (36), and Virginia Richter acknowledges that its end is pessimistic, anticipating a ‘segregated’ multicultural society ‘based on separation’ (166). Nevertheless, both critics conclude on a positive, indeed an idealising, note, with Richter finding a ‘strong element of hope’ in Levy’s novel (166) and Fischer claiming that the characters, by navigating London and asserting their authority within the city, help to ‘redefine’ (41) their environment. By contrast, the responses of non-academic readers, as Anouk Lang has shown, hint at clichés and contradictions (126, 133) in Levy’s portrayal of her characters, offering an explanation of why it might be difficult to fully identify

146

London in Contemporary British Fiction

with them. Hence the reactions of members of reading groups discussing Small Island, in 2007, to mark the bicentennial of the Slave Trade Abolition Bill, indicated that the novel is rather more complex than academic criticism had so far acknowledged. The unease expressed by some of the participants, Lang suggests, indicates ‘that readers were simultaneously drawn to the central characters and yet kept from full identification with them by their less enticing characteristics’ (133). And she rightly points out that this ‘is something which is important to account for, if the text’s effect on its readers is to be understood, and which might potentially offer a new lens by which to understand the novel’ (134). Whatever caveats one might bring forward against Lang’s empirical research, the readerly discomfort to which it testifies hints at the possibility that Small Island might be less heart-warming than critics have tended to think, and raises important questions that I will address in this essay. What makes the novel’s characters so complex that non-academic readers react with unease, and what does this mean for future readings, including the manner in which one might interpret the function of London in Levy’s novel? The cue for my response is provided by the statement I have chosen as an epigraph to this essay, in which Levy distinguishes between collective (national or ethnic) and individual identity. Seen from an individual perspective, she points out, ethnic belonging is a complex issue – more complex than homogenizing notions of national identity would lead one to believe. In the subsequent sentence, however, Levy immediately backtracks from this statement, equating individual identity with ethnicity, thereby subsuming the individual under the collective: ‘It would be nice and simple if we were all pure. If we all came from where our parents, grandparents and beyond came from. If we all just took on our forefathers’ culture. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could say that all Africans are black and all English are white?’ (2000). Although ethnic and cultural belonging is an important aspect of identity, it surely is not its only determining factor, and while Levy’s narrowing of focus may chime with central concepts and concerns of contemporary criticism, it also leads her to reproduce their flaws. Particularly problematic is the paradigm of hybridity invoked by the author, and which is illuminated in Small Island: the novel culminates with the birth of an illegitimate child – the result of a brief affair between a London housewife, Queenie Bligh, and a West Indian soldier, Michael Roberts – and this baby has been described by Fischer as the hybrid symbol ‘of the redefinition and melding of both Jamaican and English identities’ (45). Yet hybridity is a more difficult concept than most critics using it seem to



Agency and Conflict in Andrea Levy’s Polyphonic London

147

acknowledge, as the ethno-cultural essentialism on which the concept inevitably rests potentially feeds the same racism that it seeks to defy, a point made by Kien Nghi Ha (107–8). In associating herself with this paradigm, Levy is more conservative than her own novel, in which the concept of ethnicity is also challenged from other perspectives. The black character, Gilbert Joseph – a Royal Air Force serviceman during World War II who returns to Britain on the Windrush and, as the most astute and sympathetic of the novel’s four narrator-protagonists, arguably the author’s (or implied author’s) mouthpiece – questions the whiteness fetish of Bernard Bligh, the bigoted husband of Gilbert’s landlady Queenie: ‘Your white skin. You think it makes you better than me. You think it give you the right to lord it over a black man. But you know what it make you? You wan’ know what your white skin make you, man? It make you white. That is all, man. White. No better, no worse than me – just white’ (525). Importantly, these words also implicate Gilbert’s wife Hortense, whose light skin has fed her sense of super­ iority over other – darker – West Indians throughout her life, undermining any simple division between black and white. Gilbert, by contrast, defines himself and his relationships with others according to a universal humanism beyond race and culture that is reinforced also by the novel’s structure. Small Island is a novel of echoes and mirrorings which, at the same time as depicting cultural difference, shows human beings to resemble each other across ethnic and cultural divides. Characters not only have physical resemblances – Gilbert is the spitting image of Hortense’s dashing cousin Michael Roberts, and scenes of misidentification caused by this similarity recur throughout the plot – but also behave and speak in similar ways. By setting up such links and connections between her four characters, Levy emphasizes their fundamental similarity, all cultural and ethnic differences notwithstanding: all of them are driven by and act on particular interests and ambitions, wishes and desires, and these are individual and human rather than ethnic and culturally specific. Levy avoids reproducing the comforting clichés about a common humanity with which the concept of human universals is often (and sometimes rightly) associated, emphasizing instead the discomfiting implications of her novel’s play of similarities. The personal and professional lives of Gilbert and Bernard are marked by squashed ambitions and thwarted desires. Both men have a penchant for hapless business endeavours (Gilbert sinks all his money in his cousin’s ill-fated beekeeping business, which foreshadows the pathetic rabbit farm that Bernard contemplates on his return to London) and both are only

148

London in Contemporary British Fiction

second, pragmatic choices for their wives, who (unbeknownst to one another other) secretly pine after Michael Roberts. For Gilbert, these similarities are effects of the war: There was something I recognised on the face of Bernard Bligh. I glimpsed it on that first encounter for only one second, two. But I know it like a foe. Come, I saw it reflected from every mirror on my dear Jamaican island. Staring back on me from my own face. Residing in the white of the eye, the turn of the mouth, the thrust of the chin. A bewildered soul. Too much seen to go back. Too much changed to know which way is forward. (445)

Bernard crystallizes an intimate otherness Gilbert knows himself. Yet this sense of bewilderment caused by the experience of cultural dislocation inevitably shapes our view of either character and frustrates our desire for a straightforward textual morality and unimpeded identification. The insufferable racist Bernard is indeed not beyond redemption – a point also made by Richter – (166), precisely because, somehow, he is like Gilbert. Still, Gilbert is not entirely right when he depicts Bernard and himself as psychological casualties of the war and its aftermath. As I will show, a sense of bewilderment shapes the lives of all the characters even without the traumatic trigger of war, and some of it manifests itself in the way Levy’s characters use language. This brings me to the category of polyphony, announced in my title, which I derive from the work of the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895– 1975). He uses the term as one of several to conceptualize the subversiveness of a certain type of novel; related – indeed, in many ways similar – concepts are ‘heteroglossia’ and ‘dialogism’. Polyphony indicates the presence of several languages, styles and speech types in a fictional text. In the dialogic novel that according to Wutsdorf constitutes both an aesthetic and a social ideal for Bakhtin (18) these may coexist freely in an incessant, open-ended play of voices (see Bell and Gardiner: 5–6; Bostad et al.: 1–2; Dentith ix: Wutsdorff: passim). Bakhtin introduces the concept of polyphony in his discussion of Dostoevsky’s dialogic aesthetics: Where others saw a single thought, [Dostoevsky] was able to find and feel out two thoughts, a bifurcation; where others saw a single quality, he discovered in it the presence of a second and contradictory quality. Everything that seemed simple became, in his world, complex and multi-structured. In every voice he could hear two contending voices, in every expression a crack, and the readiness to go over immediately to another contradictory expression; in every gesture he detected confidence and lack of confidence simultaneously; he perceived the



Agency and Conflict in Andrea Levy’s Polyphonic London

149

profound ambiguity, even multiple ambiguity, of every phenomenon. (Bakhtin in Morris: 91–2)

Such polyphony, Bakhtin emphasizes, is arranged spatially, not along a temporary or causal trajectory: its different voices stand alongside each other, reflecting ‘diversity in the cross-section of a given moment’ (Bakhtin in Morris: 92). The notion of synchronic diversity is underpinned by a broader, linguistic perspective: for Bakhtin, language is always polyphonic because any word is inevitably embedded in a context of other words whose interaction creates meaning in specific communicative situations (cf. Bakhtin in Morris: 77). One can see why literary and cultural criticism embraced Bakhtin’s ideas enthusiastically after the publication of his study Rabelais and his World (1968), quickly elevating him to a prophetic champion of subversion and transgression, as explored by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White. One can also see how Bakhtinian concepts might be applied to Small Island, whose fourtiered structure of independent narratives, each of which provides a singular perspective on the story, may be described as polyphonic. And yet Levy’s novel shows up the limits of the egalitarian side-by-side with which Bakhtin’s work has often been associated, highlighting implications of his purported ‘aesthetics for democracy’ (Ken Hirschkop) that critics tend to ignore. As Bakhtin himself points out, the different perspectives perceptible in Dostoevsky’s polyphony exist either in an ‘eternal harmony of unmerged voices or as their unceasing and irreconcilable quarrel’ (Bakhtin in Morris: 92). Since Bakhtin takes the self to be ‘an embodied entity situated in concrete time and space’ (Bell and Gardiner: 6), his interest is likely to be in the conflictual dimension of polyphony, although critics applying this concept have not always acknowledged this aspect. For Bakhtin, as Bostad et al. explain, ‘human actors are positioned both materially and symbolically in ways that both help and hinder’ (8). It is the hindering that is particularly relevant to my reading of Small Island. In tune with the title (and the general gist) of this collection, my concern is with how Levy’s novel portrays the ‘real London’ not as a place of harmony and convivial concord, but as a site of tension and conflict resulting from characters’ actions. Hence with this essay I wish to extend the existing critical discussion of agency in the novel by focusing on its as yet underexplored negative potential. Because agency is dependent on human action,1 it is always driven by individual interests, concerns and desires, and therefore any act of agency potentially encroaches upon another human being. As I will show in the following, in Small Island such acts of encroachment are illustrated not only by the way characters behave, but also in the way they use language.

150

London in Contemporary British Fiction

*** A key scene in Small Island shows Gilbert Joseph, one of the four characters whose narratives constitute the novel, at an emotional and social nadir: having returned in 1948 from Jamaica to ‘the mother country’ he had helped defend during World War II, he has been learning the hard way that this symbolic mother has no real interest in him, or indeed any of her Afro-Caribbean children. Gilbert’s painful cognizance of his rejection is exacerbated by the disappointment of his young wife Hortense – who had followed him to England – in the land of her dreams. Her frustration places a burden on their young relationship because she blames the failures of England on Gilbert and, rather than enjoying the wedded bliss of a newly married man, he finds himself burdened with a nagging crone. Pacing the streets of London after a particularly nasty tiff with Hortense, and pondering his disappointment, regret and frustrated desire, he is stopped by an enigmatic middle-aged white woman (‘forty, fifty, it was hard to tell in the street-lamp glow’ [327]) who offers him a cough drop from a bag of congealed sweets. For Gilbert, this surprise gift has an immediate and deep significance: How long did I stare at the sweet in my hand? Fool that I am, I took a handkerchief from my pocket to wrap it. I had no intention of eating that precious candy. For it was salvation to me – not for the sugar but for the act of kindness. The human tenderness with which it was given to me. I had become hungry for the good in people. Beholden to any tender heart. All we boys were in this thankless place. When we find it, we keep it. A simple gesture, a friendly word, a touch, a sticky sweet rescued me as sure as if that Englishwoman had pulled me from drowning in the sea. (328)

A victim of post-war England’s ubiquitous racism, Gilbert sees the woman’s spontaneous concern for his well-being and her unsolicited offer to share her confection as an act of human compassion and respect. It is tempting to equate his assessment of this brief encounter with the view of the implied author, that is, with the novel’s inherent ‘message’. It would be equally tempting to read the scene only symbolically, interpreting the bag of cough drops as a meeting ground where two ethnic groups (metonymically represented by the black and white hands scrabbling in the bag) interact in a mood of intercultural tolerance – a reading that would fit seamlessly into the standard critical narrative of Levy’s novel that I have outlined above. However, the scene’s symbolism also allows for a different interpretation. After all, the encounter it depicts is between individuals, not collectives. What



Agency and Conflict in Andrea Levy’s Polyphonic London

151

is suggested here is that in order to be shared (that is, result in communication based on mutual acknowledgement and respect) the ‘sticky hard lump’ (327) formed by the sweets must be broken up – the community it symbolizes must be separated into its individual constituents. At the same time as illustrating a vaguely conceived collective ideal (gluey like the sticky cough drops in the woman’s bag), the scene emphasizes that groups are made up of individuals, who not only deserve respect but who also have very concrete needs, interests and desires. On this level, to invoke Levy again, matters are more complex, putting in perspective the momentousness of this mysterious encounter as well as its epiphanic effect on Gilbert. Such being the case, the encounter differs from most other interactions in the novel, whose apparent mysteriousness is resolved either by characters (for instance, when Queenie explains to Gilbert that he is being followed by her father-in-law because ‘he thinks you’re someone else’, 170) or by the reader (who begins to realize in the course of the novel that the lives of all the characters – and the different narrative threads – run together in the person of Michael Roberts, as also Mullan observes (282) – the charming, seductive but ultimately inaccessible object of desire of the novel’s two main female characters Hortense and Queenie). In Levy’s London – this is the implication – there is no space for miracles and mysteries, as all events are the results of deliberate, intentional – and hence explicable – actions. The idea of the individual – notably an individual acting with conscious intentionality – is a contested notion in contemporary literary and cultural criticism2 (despite empirical evidence to the contrary3), and yet with regard to Levy’s novel such a perspective is inevitable. All four main characters demonstrate the wilfulness and determination of agency, although its force and implications are probably most evident in Gilbert’s wife, Hortense. When still in Jamaica, she is frustrated by the collapse of her high hopes and ambitions: instead of becoming a teacher at the exclusive Church of England college in Kingston, as she had long fantasized, she only just makes it into the far humbler Half Way Tree Parish School – and, adding insult to injury, even this petty success is only due to the intervention her friend Celia Langley (88–9). Yet rather than accepting her failure as a sign of the Lord’s mysterious ways – the explanation put forward, possibly tauntingly, by Celia (87) – she takes her life in her hands, even if this entails ruthlessly overcoming human obstacles along the way. Her actions provide the disillusioning counterpoint to the cough drop scene, which is at best a utopian exception to the principles according to which the novel’s characters otherwise behave. Their actions are rarely mysterious,

152

London in Contemporary British Fiction

but rational to the point of being calculating – and usually motivated by recognizable self-interests. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Hortense denies pursuing such interests. Her arrival at her new London home prompts her to recall her friend Celia’s fantasies of living in England, but she immediately denies having such dreams herself: ‘I did not dare to dream that it would one day be I who would go to England. It would one day be I who would sail on a ship as big as a world and felt the sun’s heat on my face gradually change from roasting to caressing’ (11). The insincerity of this claim to innocence becomes obvious in the course of the novel, and this sheds light on the strategic nature of this comment made by Hortense, whose main aim is to present herself (even, probably, to herself) as innocent, disinterested and a victim of circumstance. That Celia dares to entertain such high hopes challenges Hortense’s selfproclaimed sense of superiority. When Celia’s apparently unfounded hopes materialize, and her boyfriend Gilbert proposes to take her with him to London, Hortense takes the drastic step of disclosing Celia’s well-kept secret that her mother is mad. Her deliberate indiscretion successfully poisons relations between Gilbert and Celia and the next thing we know is that he and Hortense are planning their wedding. Again, Hortense feigns innocence, stating with a demonstration of naivety: ‘All seemed to be decided between [Celia and Gilbert] so I felt it important for me to ask, “But what about your mother, Celia? Am I to look after her too?” ’ (95). At the same time as vindicating her behaviour, Hortense’s presumed innocence emphasizes the vehemence with which Celia retaliates, although it might have the contrary effect of making the reader empathise with Hortense’s spurned friend: I was going to say something nice to Celia, I forget what but something condoling, when she lifted her face to me. There was menace in her eye. Her ample lips were pulled taut into a line of vicious glower. I did not see it coming – her fist. It came up from behind her and whacked me full in the head. So hard was the blow I nearly fell off my feet as I stumbled dizzy back. When my eyes could once again focus it was to discern my friend Celia walking haughty away from me at great speed. (96)

However, Celia is not the only collateral damage along Hortense’s road to success: Gilbert, too, is her victim, and perfectly aware that he is merely an instrument in her advancement: ‘My face distressed her, my jokes confused her, my tales of war bored her and talk of England made her yawn’ (210). He also understands that the loan she offers him to fund his passage to London is to be



Agency and Conflict in Andrea Levy’s Polyphonic London

153

paid for with a loveless marriage: ‘With no persuasion, with no fancy words, with no declarations of love, she let me know that I would have to marry her for the money. This woman was looking for escape and I was to be the back she would ride out on’ (210). Gilbert’s suspicion confirms the impression created by Hortense’s account of her first days in London, in which she refers to Gilbert only as ‘the man’ whose many failures are a constant cause for complaint. Granted, at the end of the novel, Gilbert seems to finally meet Hortense’s high expectations: For at that moment as Gilbert stood, his chest panting with the passion from his words, I realised that Gilbert Joseph, my husband, was a man of class, a man of character, a man of intelligence. Noble in a way that would some day make him a legend. ‘Gilbert Joseph’, everyone would shout. ‘Have you heard about Gilbert Joseph?’ (526)

Yet to read this sudden enthusiasm as evidence that Hortense and Gilbert ‘have grown together, each seeing the other more clearly’, as Fischer does (46), is to ignore that Hortense here repeats verbatim the fairy tales she has told about her father (37) – a man so embarrassed by his illegitimate daughter that he sends her off to be brought up by his brother. At the end of the novel, Hortense’s view of Gilbert is no more realistic or respectful than when they first meet. At that time, still under the spell of her cousin Michael, then presumed lost in action, Gilbert’s uncanny resemblance to her childhood idol, heightened by his first-hand knowledge of England, make him interesting, in fact highly eligible. There is more than a grain of truth in his joking comment, while out with Celia and Hortense, that ‘every man envy me. Them saying there is one fortunate man. Two pretty women. Him must have plenty something I have not got’ (93). London is crucial to Gilbert’s attractiveness and he titillates his female listeners with his yarns about the autumn leaves in the city falling ‘like golden rain’ (94) and covering the ground with a ‘blanket of gold’ (94). Like the myths of El Dorado that have accompanied migration for centuries, these images kindle Hortense’s desire to leave for London, but they also speak to and set off her ruthlessness regarding others. However, Hortense is not the only character to behave in this way: very similar calculations are evinced by her British counterpart, Queenie, and they, too, concern a man. Queenie is courted by the pale and rather repulsive Bernard Bligh, a clerk devoid of sex appeal but rich in unpleasant tics. However, when after the sudden death of her aunt Dorothy Queenie faces the loss of her comfortable London life and a return to the family farm, she chooses Bernard as the lesser of two evils:

154

London in Contemporary British Fiction

And I’m not sure if I said it out loud because my elocution teacher would have despaired, but I know I thought it – Not on your nelly, Mother! You’ll not get me back there. I looked over at Bernard, smoking in a huddle with Father and the other men. ‘No,’ I told her. ‘I’ve some good news for you. I’m getting married, Mother, to Bernard Bligh’. (258)

Just as Hortense takes Gilbert as a means to fulfil her aspirations, so Queenie instrumentalizes Bernard for a better life. Whatever ethnic difference may separate the two women, their strategies to achieve status are strikingly similar, and in this similarity they present the flipside of Gilbert’s optimistic universalism: being human does not inevitably mean being good. It might of course be argued that Hortense and Queenie are forced to act in this way by the social realities within which they exist, and that in a different world, also, their behaviour would be different. Yet the novel’s circular structure defies such notions of change and progress, and even the hybrid baby born at the end is less a utopian symbol of hope and change than an icon of stolid continuity. Entrusted to Gilbert and Hortense by his biological mother, Queenie, the baby promises to become yet another individual deceived about its origins, while a photograph of Queenie sown into the boy’s nappy hints at the possibility that his awareness of his true background might lead him to perpetuate a family myth not unlike the one Hortense tells herself. Furthermore, the infant’s presumed innocence is dismantled by less pleasant associations. When Hortense fantasises about the baby’s future, she not only sees herself holding him up ‘to look on a bird’s nest’ but also imagines him behaving with less goodnatured curiosity, imagining he might ‘torment spiders and dress up a cat’ (528). The latter image harks back both to Gilbert’s memory of rescuing his dog ‘from the smothering arms of my sisters, removing the baby’s hat from his head, the mittens from his back paws and returning to him his scruffy canine dignity’ (136), and to Hortense’s far less humane wish to ‘dress the goat in a bonnet and attempt to ride her like a horse’ (40). The birth of Queenie’s child not only projects such acts of imposing one’s will onto another creature into the future, it also promises the perpetuation of the ambiguity of agency: what for Hortense is an act of self-assertion, for Gilbert constitutes an expression of wilful malice. *** Such ambiguities are reflected also in the way Levy’s characters use language. This topic has attracted the attention of several commentators, who have applauded Levy’s stylistic authenticity, such as Phillips (n.p.), and her ability to



Agency and Conflict in Andrea Levy’s Polyphonic London

155

create characters with unique and distinctive voices, such as James (para. 12), Lima (76) and Mullan (131). However, as has also been observed, these distinct voices are an incongruent mix of registers and styles creating another order of polyphony within the novel’s polyphonic macrostructure. For John Mullan, this blend of language styles is not always entirely credible. He especially questions the voice of Queenie, ‘a butcher’s daughter from Nottinghamshire who has spent her adult life in West London’, whose voice he considers to be ‘confused’ by the elocution lessons paid for by her aunt: Her demotic omission of pronouns (‘Turns out she’d been walking along the pavement’; ‘Told me it wasn’t her husband’) and dated slang (‘Blinking heck’) make her use of words like ‘motley’, ‘bemoaning’, and ‘errant’ seem odd. Where would they have come from? Could an imaginable way of speaking include these elements? It is possible in life, but not quite convincing in a novel. (133)

This statement is puzzling to say the least. Why should what is possible in life be implausible in fiction, which, after all, takes life as its ultimate point of reference? From the Bakhtinian perspective that I have adopted, this kind of polyphony is not only feasible but, in fact, inevitable. For Bakhtin, real language always ‘lies on the borderline between oneself and the other’ (Bakhtin in Morris: 77) and may lead to ‘complex interrelationships, consonances and dissonances’ (Bakhtin in Morris: 76): Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that the speaker gets his words!), but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own. And not all words for just anyone submit equally easily to this appropriation, to this seizure and transformation into private property: many words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks them; they cannot be assimilated into his context and fall out of it; it is as if they put themselves in quotation marks against the will of the speaker. Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions; it is populated – overpopulated – with the intentions of others. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process. (Bakhtin in Morris: 77)

Because in real life not to be polyphonic is impossible, polyphony cannot be avoided in fiction. For Bakhtin, Pechey writes, the genre of the novel both uses and reflects upon ‘the social materiality of discourse’ (1989: 49) and hence the

156

London in Contemporary British Fiction

internal divisions of everyday language. One of the most important implications of these divisions, and of particular significance for a reading of Small Island, is that language users can never be reduced to uniform representatives of similarly uniform groups and their idioms. Simon Dentith summarizes: ‘The utterance remains a unique and particular occasion and not merely the reflection of the underlying base’ (14). For Bakhtin, Bostad et al. maintain, meaning is ‘always somebody’s meaning, and meaning for somebody’ [emphasis in original] (9), and these somebodies are complexly positioned within their world. By analogy, there are no uniform perspectives based on ethnic identity, but only the internally divided points of view of different individuals – who are both part of their communities and discrete persons within them. In Levy’s novel, similarly, language is characterized by an internal dividedness that undercuts ethnic and national belonging, as well as – as in Queenie’s amalgam of styles – class and gender identity. Even Bernard’s clipped, impersonal English – although it allows him to navigate successfully such diverse professional environments as Lloyds Bank and the army – ultimately is not uniform. The parenthetical comments with which his narrative is interspersed – affirming, expanding and commenting upon his other statements – suggest that this functionalist style leaves something to be desired. If we take this parenthetical information to be more personal than his other utterances, then Bernard’s language inverts that of Queenie, whose style is infiltrated by views and formulations from the outside world. While her mixed language might be seen as a marker of her growing selfassurance, Bernard’s undermines the public persona he likes to display, providing this otherwise not very attractive man with yet another redeeming feature. The internal divisions of language also challenge the linguistic propriety of which Hortense – who considers herself to be a better English speaker not only than other West Indians but also than most of the English she meets – claims to be the guardian. Tellingly, the one linguistic role model she finds in London is a patronising Englishwoman she encounters at the docks, whose drawl she is determined to emulate (15). Yet her desire to impress with the ‘accent that had taken [her] to the top of the class in Miss Stuart’s English pronunciation competition’ (16) is only partly the target of the parody directed at Hortense (James paras 12–13). Hortense is chided not for her eccentric pronunciation and stilted vocabulary but because she is blind to the complexities and contradictions that characterize life as well as language. In this way, she is probably the character closest to Bernard – a humourless literalist, blind to any ambiguities and halftones that might challenge a black-and-white world view that is no less prejudiced than that of Hortense’s white counterparts.



Agency and Conflict in Andrea Levy’s Polyphonic London

157

Levy’s rather merciless portrayal4 of Hortense undermines the notion that the novel should be read in terms of a culture clash, as well as the linguistic subversion that has been associated with it. Cynthia James detects examples of assertive parody in the novel, suggesting that in it a ‘low’ register is employed by the West Indian characters against the presumed superiority of the white ‘high’ register (para. 9). Despite the latent Bakhtinian echoes of this argument, relationships between the characters in Levy’s novel cannot be reduced in this way, as the example of Hortense shows; in fact, the very division between high and low is called into question, not least by her own stubborn clinging to it. True linguistic parody, by contrast, is rare in Levy’s novel, exemplified for instance when Gilbert, during his RAF training in England, salutes the obnoxious Sergeant Bastard behind his back ‘with the silent two-fingered symbol favoured by Churchill but, let me assure you, with its more vulgar meaning’ (136). This is not a clash between ‘high’ and ‘low’. Gilbert here deliberately exploits the linguistic ambiguity – the internal divisions that I have described above – of the English language. It is Gilbert’s awareness of the subtleties of language that allows him to undertake this act of intentional agency, revealing a linguistic competence that differentiates him from most other characters in the novel. As his example shows, language in Levy’s novel is a tool for people to position themselves vis-à-vis others and their world rather than an external framework that construes them, and however conflictual relationships among characters may seem, these conflicts are the results of clashing individual interests that language may channel, but which it does not create. What does all this tell us about the ‘real London’ in Small Island? Clearly, given that relationships in Levy’s novel cannot be reduced to the simple formula of black and white, London is no straightforward chessboard for rigidly choreographed moves either. Once we begin to think on the level of the individual, simple contrasts are no longer sufficient frameworks within which to conceptualize characters’ moves and tactics in particular situations – we need a finer, a more flexible grid, and one that takes into account the specific concerns that make individuals act in certain ways. Hence if Levy – in tune with her character Gilbert – foregrounds the universals that connect her characters, revealing them to share (and act upon) similar interests and concerns, this perspective is not necessarily reassuring. If anything, the turn towards a universal perspective, as exemplified by Levy’s underestimated novel, makes the idea of the ‘real London’ even more unsettling, violent and disruptive than we would like to think.

158

London in Contemporary British Fiction

Notes 1

2

3

4

I am here influenced by the sociology of Norbert Elias, who criticizes the notion (popular in sociology since Émile Durkheim founded the discipline) ‘that society is made up of structures external to oneself, the individual, and that the individual is at one and the same time surrounded by society yet cut off from it by some invisible barrier’ and proposes to replace this traditional sociological view by a more ‘realistic picture of people who, through their basic dispositions and inclinations, are directed towards and linked with each other in the most diverse ways’ (15). I am here thinking in particular of the work of Michel de Certeau, who despite his emphasis on (popular) practices, strategies and tactics in the handling of everyday life, rejects the concept of the individual, presumably axiomatic in traditional social studies. For him, ‘each individual is a locus in which an incoherent (and often contradictory) plurality of relational determinations interact’. As a result, his focus is not on ‘the subjects (or persons) who are [the] authors and vehicles’ of the practices that he describes, but on the ‘modes of operation or schemata of action’ that determine them (xi). The fundamental problem of this view is that, strictly speaking, it does not allow for agency outside a discursive framework. Interestingly, Lang uses de Certeau’s concept of ‘poaching’ to explain her real readers’ responses to Levy’s novel (132). See especially the discussions of the evolved reasoning underlying social interaction by evolutionary psychologists like Daly and Wilson (434) and Cosmides and Toby (206–9). Hence I find it difficult to agree with James that Hortense is the target of ‘light humour’ (James para. 8), or that her portrayal ‘is written with much compassion’ (James para. 17).

Works cited Bell, Michael Mayerfeld and Michael Gardiner (eds). Bakhtin and the Human Sciences: No Last words. London and Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1998. Bostad, Finn, Craig Brandist, Lars Sigfred Evensen and Hege Charlotte Faber. Bakhtinian Perspectives on Language and Culture: Meaning in Language, Art and New Media. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1988 [1984]. Cosmides, Leda and John Tooby. ‘Cognitive Adaptation for Social Exchange’. In The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. Eds Jerome



Agency and Conflict in Andrea Levy’s Polyphonic London

159

H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992: 163–228. Daly, Martin and Margo Wilson. ‘The Evolutionary Social Psychology of Family Violence’. In Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology: Ideas, Issues, and Applications. Eds Charles Crawford and Dennis L. Krebs. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998: 431–56. Dentith, Simon. Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Elias, Norbert. What is Sociology? New York: Columbia University Press, 1978. Fischer, Susan Alice. ‘Contested London Spaces in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and Andrea Levy’s Small Island.’ In Critical Engagements 1.1 (2007): 34–52. Ha, Kien Nghi. ‘Hybride Bastarde – Identitätskonstruktionen in kolonial-rassistischen Wissenschafts-Kontexten’. In Kulturelle Identität. Konstruktionen und Krisen. Ed. Eva Kimminich. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2003: 107–60. Hirschkop, Ken. Mikhail Bakhtin: An Aesthetic for Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. James, Cynthia. ‘ “You’ll Soon Get Used to Our Language”: Language, Parody and West Indian Identity in Andrea Levy’s Small Island’. Anthurium: A Carribean Studies Journal 5.1 (2007): n.p. 29 paras. Lang, Anouk. ‘ “Enthralling but at the same time disturbing”: Challenging the Readers of Small Island’. Journal of Commonwealth Literature 44.2 (2009): 123–40. Levy, Andrea. ‘This is My England’, Guardian. (19 February 2000): n.p.; http://www. guardian.co.uk/books/2000/feb/19/society1. Levy, Andrea. Small Island. London: Picador, 2004. Lima, Maria Helena. ‘“Pivoting the Centre”: The Fiction of Andrea Levy.’ In Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature. Ed. Kadija Sesay. Hertford, England: Hansib, 2005: 56–85. Morris, Pam (ed.). The Bakhtin Reader. 1994. Rpt. London, England: Arnold, 2002. Mullan, John. How Novels Work. Oxford, England: Oxford UP, 2006. Pechey, Graham. ‘On the Borders of Bakhtin: Dialogisation, Deconlonisation.’ In Bakhtin and Cultural Theory. Ed. Ken Hirschkop and David Shepherd. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 1989: 39–67. Phillips, Mike. ‘Review of Small Island.’ The Guardian 14 February 2004. http://www. guardian.co.uk/books/2004/feb/14/featuresreviews.guardianreview10 (5 August 2009). Ritcher, Andrea. ‘Andrea Levy: Small Island. Imagining Multiracial Conviviality in British Postwar Culture”. In: A History of Postcolonial Literature in 12½ Books. Ed. Tobias Döring. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2007: 155–68. Stallybrass, Petter and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgresion. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1986. Wutsdorff, Irina. Bachtin und der Prager Strukturalismus: Modelle poetischer Offenheit am Beispiel der tschechischen Avantgarde. Paderborn, Germany: Fink, 2006.

10

The Liminality of Underground London Nora Pleßke

Underground London Sizing a vertical cut or peeling back the surface of London, the multi-layered and widely spread system of Underground London is revealed. Next to basement flats and wine cellars this sphere encompasses the arteries that sustain the urban body, like water supply ducts, sewers, electricity and communication cables, gas pipes, channelled rivers, streams and tributaries. Most prominently the stations and tunnels of the oldest Underground railway in the world spread through the city – the London Tube with its cross-passages, ventilation tunnels, escalators, lifts and stairways, exits and entrances. The three-dimensional labyrinth of the urban subterranean system moreover covers archaeological remains of Roman temples, crypts, plague pits, cemetery catacombs, as well as deep-level shelters and various caves (Pleßke 2009: 185–6; Pleßke 2014: 225; Trench/Hillman 1985: 7–22).1 A replica of the metropolis above, the Underground mirrors the maze of London’s streets, alleys and lanes. But, owing to its enclosed and dark spatiality, the underworld is also opposed to the surface city. As both a familiar place and an unfamiliar space, Underground London forms a grey zone between light and dark, above and below – an interstitial sphere. For Angela Krewani, the system of the London Underground alone constitutes a decentred subterranean network (185). Alice Jenkins defines it as a ‘rhizomatic space’, a ‘dense, non-linear space of multiple connections’ (35). Subterranean London itself is characterised by idiosyncratic dichotomies and co-existing antagonisms, which overlap and create zones of interference. David Pike argues that Underground London is traditionally conceived of as a dirty, demonic, labyrinthine, unstable and female space, standing against the modern space of the Underground railway conveying a clean, bright, safe,

162

London in Contemporary British Fiction

well-ordered and masculine world (2006: 68–9). The sewers symbolize the sphere of the ‘down and out’, the socially or politically marginalized. On the contrary, the system of the London Tube has been actively semantisized, by ways of Henry Beck’s map, the Underground logo and architecture of stations, as an icon of modern urbanity. Being a social space of interaction, the Tube purveys urban balance and collectivity. As early as 1865 Henry Mayhew identified the Underground as the great unifier (15). Its tracks not only connected the East End with the West End but also bound suburbia-metroland to the centre. Furthermore, Underground London represents a liminal space between public and private: on the one hand open for everyone in the form of underground stations and trains, on the other hand closed for the majority regarding the sewers and many of the archives. However, Underground London is mostly a site of extreme intimacy, of deeply personal and singular impressions. As a multi-sensory space of experience (Krewani: 184), the subterranean world triggers anxieties like terror and claustrophobia as well as feelings of security and safety. Underground London has been associated with protection, a myth inscribed in the city’s cultural memory since the Battle of Britain (Trench: and Hillman: 9; Pike 2006: 174). Simultaneously ‘womb and tomb’ (Lesser: 13), the inner sphere of the earth is the realm of the dead as well as a shelter for the living. Consequently, Underground London has triggered ambivalent attitudes and has become a space of cultural negotiations (Döring 33). According to Pike, subterranean London is always caught between ‘antiquity and novelty’ (2006: 12), ‘ “old” superstition and “new” pride in technology’ (Lesser: 34, 81) or myth and utopian visions (Haupt: 518). Underground London encompasses both a topographic or physical space as well as a topological or mental space (Pike 2002: 107; Pleßke 2009: 196), ‘simultaneously and inseparably a concrete thing and an abstract notion’ (Lesser: 3). Underground London is a threshold, the liminal space of an illimitable metropolis where the real and the imaginary overlap.

Literary representations of Underground London On the threshold between reality and fiction, Underground London has become a major space of the metropolitan imaginary and one of the dominating tropes in contemporary London literature.2 In addition to the Thames and the labyrinthine streets of the metropolis, London Underground as an irrational



The Liminality of Underground London

163

three-dimensional maze is an important topos in London novels. The verticality of underground semantisations and its dichotomies offer narrative fiction various possibilities for crossing borders in the sense of Lotman’s spatial binaries (311–29; Pleßke 2009: 187). Owing to its stereotypically devised atmosphere as well as its alternative forms of perception and modes of representation, the subterranean city is especially employed in genre fiction (Pleßke 2014: 227–8). In crime stories or thrillers the notion of the criminal underground is taken up: ‘Speedy subways, dank sewers, empty basements, and buried storerooms make ideal settings for chase scenes, break-ins, criminal hide-aways, or the cornering of suspects’ (Lesser: 13). By convention, science fiction and fantasy make use of the underground in their utopian visions of the future, apocalyptic notions of urban catastrophe or fantastic dreamscapes. As Alice Jenkins has shown, ‘fantasy landscapes are riddled with tunnels, underground passages and caverns’ (28). Thus, the underground as a liminal space presents fiction with the opportunity to coincide mythical versions of the past with utopian possibilities of the future in a fantastic mode of the present. In more ways than one, the interstitial space of Underground London figures as a ‘thirdspace’ for the beyond (Bhabha: 3). This aspect especially becomes apparent in London Noir novels, where urban subterranean tunnels provide an equivalent to the dark caverns of country houses in Gothic novels. The spatial semantics of the uncanny are renegotiated for the urban. I would even go so far as to argue that, in its liminality, Underground London as a spatialized uncertainty has become the main setting for the uncanny in the postmodern literary metropolis.3 It is the urban realm where the homely can inadvertently turn unhomely, where the unknown other is identified as the repressed self, and the mirror to the space above reveals the underground itself as an anthropomorphized doppelganger. Since Plato, the cave has been understood as a place of self-knowledge, self-consciousness and self-recognition (Haupt: 505). It is a space where the protagonists struggle with threshold encounters with something alien, yet, intrinsically part of themselves. Often an odyssey through the subterranean city or a ride on the Tube is the trope of a descent to hell (Sergl: 526–7). Wandering on the threshold between life and death is to overcome personal struggles and a transgression of the self. London Underground as a space in-between is thereby associated with transitory identities, the transformation often shown through split personality or bodily metamorphosis. Thus, in more senses than one, the underworld offers psychological readings as it symbolizes the depth of the self with its unspeakable desires and fears or

164

London in Contemporary British Fiction

the unconscious itself (Jenkins: 29, 31; Lesser: 126). Buried personal memories and traumas are likely to re-emerge when the subject is underground. However, such traumas are not purely those of the individual: the alternative, hidden and repressed realities of the whole city may emerge from the subterranean space of the collective unconscious (Haupt: 530; Sergl: 522). More often, though, because the underground is material as well as imaginary, it symbolizes the dreamspace between consciousness and the unconscious; something in-between – an ‘oneiric space’ (Pike 2002: 110; Pike 2006: 113) – is opened up. Underground London, therefore, stands for the metropolitan unconscious. In the following analysis I will throw some light on the most extensive liminal space of the metropolis and its representations in contemporary London novels concerning the uncovering of London’s hidden state of mind. Offering close readings, especially concerning spatial and temporal constructions of Tobias Hill’s Underground (1999), Conrad Williams’ London Revenant (2004) and Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (1996), I will explore the subconscious spaces of personal and cultural memory, the oneiric spaces of metropolitan becoming, and the uncanny moments of time–space compression, to see beyond the mere mirror of the other city and reveal the collective unconscious.

Memory-scapes in Tobias Hill’s Underground In Underground by Tobias Hill, the London Underground system is called ‘a city under the city’ (101). The subterranean world changes, as the above ground reinvents its spaces over time: The Underground starts out perfect. At first it isn’t like the city above it because it is conceived all at once. Everything must be created, heat and the passage for air. For the engineers and architects it begins as a perfect technical form. Then years go by – decades. Cross-tunnels are found to be unnecessary, so they are bricked up. Deeper tunnels are added by the government, then closed down. Limestone comes through the concrete as if it were muslin. Up above, communities die out. Stations are abandoned. […] The Underground becomes a reflection of the city above – organic, not perfect. Full of small animals and weak plants. Good hiding places, and places that are dangerous. (136–7)

It is a social space used by ‘Hundreds of millions of people a year’ (101), an indistinguishable mass of a variety of people in flux. The only people that are acknowledged as individuals in the space of Underground London are the marginalized, dispossessed and socially discarded (100): immigrants, the



The Liminality of Underground London

165

homeless, drug addicts, criminals and the crazed. As one character in the novel poignantly puts it: ‘Force of gravity, […] All dirt ends up down here’ (7). The protagonist of Underground, Casimir, is a Polish immigrant working, like so many, in the London Underground. Owing to his work Casimir seems to know the Underground and its workings inside out (3, 96, 238). Consequently, the Underground initially stands for a sense of order, control and safety (8, 136, 148). However, Casimir notices more and more often that his map of the Underground is far from complete (40, 92, 86, 184), and he begins to recognize its darker side, the juxtaposition of being hidden and being trapped: ‘The Underground closes around him. Its dark presses against his face. It is safe as a locked room, it is terrifying as a locked door’ (162). Sometimes Casimir is overcome by a feeling of dislocation: ‘The stations give Casimir a sense of motionlessness. Each platform is the same blur of crowds, tiles and hoardings under London’s great squares and malls’ (92). While moving, the train experiences a slow-motion effect, as the ever-same perspective of an array of repetitious underground places figures a spatial and temporal standstill. According to Bakhtin, a chronotope features a specific instance of space–time – richness and density in time as a fourth dimension of space (7). Here, Underground London becomes a chronotope of simultaneous presents. However, it is not only places, people and the present tense that accumulate in the Underground but also sensitive echoes of the past. In Underground, the London Underground is represented as a great archive of sound (Döring: 44), with the sighs of tunnel air (3), the subterranean roar of the trains (38), the echo of voices underground (4, 59), the distant, muffled sounds of the city above (8, 220), and, finally, the stillness of darkness (117). Furthermore, it is a store of smells like ‘car exhaust and human hair’ (3), ‘stale city air’ (91), ‘sour smell of fruit’ (5), urine, the ‘smell of surface weather carried down through intervening clay’ (47), and the odour of London Underground limestone (74). For Casimir the collection of intensified smells and sounds becomes his memory bank. Whereas, as a child in Poland he perceived social status, morality and beauty through the colours of blue, red, green and yellow, the memories of his childhood are brought back to him in the pitch dark. The subterranean spaces denote the subconscious of memory. The ‘black stretches’ (Döring: 55) are refilled with instances of memory triggered by the archived senses (39, 123, 126, 130). Moreover, the spatialities of Underground London become one with the subterranean spaces of the Polish mines. Casimir, in the fashion of an underground flâneur, enjoys tunnel-walking during his night shifts, strolling along the tracks of the Underground. Thus, the traditional trope of flânerie has not only been transferred to an underground

166

London in Contemporary British Fiction

setting but its narrative function has been altered to symbolize an introspective exploration of the self. His subterranean contemplations become moments of intense memory as he gazes back at himself through time. The labyrinthine passageways of Underground London are what Krewani (194) calls ‘Gedächtnistopographie’ – a ‘topography of memory’. If layers of stone can be read as a chronology of the earth, the concept of time is spatialized (Haupt 514). Therefore, the vertical city can stand for a vertical time (Haupt: 507), which means to descend underground is to return to one’s past. The labyrinth of the underground is ‘a maze of memory’ (Pike 2006: 83) and the underground, already imprinted in the cultural memory, itself becomes a ‘place of memory’. Aleida Assmann has shown how ‘spaces of memory’ figure a storage room for unsolved traumatic experiences of a collective memory (258; Haupt: 505). In Greek mythology, Mnemosyne and Lethe denote memory and forgetfulness respectively, forming different topological stages on the threshold between above and underground. Both Casimir’s two female counterparts in the novel try to forget. His Jewish mother suffers from gaps in her memory, allegedly due to Alzheimer’s. Casimir interprets the gaps as wilful forgetfulness to cope with her traumatic experiences in a German concentration camp. Casimir fights his own (‘historical’) forgetfulness but also his mother’s: ‘She [his mother] is the woman who chooses to forget her past. And Casimir is the one who remembers for her, even when the remembering hunts him. Catches him in the dark, presses over him like the weight of London clay’ (103). Alice, the homeless girl he meets underground, tries to achieve some kind of obliteration in the dark of the Underground, fighting the memories of being abused as a child. Casimir attacks the embodiment of Alice’s trauma, her abusive father, who has come searching for her on the Underground. This battle for Casimir is to encounter the demons from his own past, both personal or familial and those arising from collective socio-historical trauma. Underground London changes into a personal contact zone between Casimir’s presence in London and his roots in Eastern Europe. However, owing to the mental spatialization of time in the dark Underground, Casimir becomes confused, not remembering which side of the tunnel he will come out of, the present of London or his past in Poland (247). However, in the space of memory, the past can only ever be revisited, never fully entered; nor can the present be left totally behind. In this threshold, different horizons of time overlap. Thus, the underground is a repository of the past but also the oracle of the future, enclosing times gone by and time to come. Finally, in the tunnel, Casimir decides never to look back to the dark spaces of his memories about



The Liminality of Underground London

167

Poland, but looks towards the end of the tunnel, the light and his future in London: ‘The light is behind her. He walks towards it, not looking back’ (248). His journey within the realms of the underground and his personal and cultural traumatic experience have finally brought him to the presence of London life. The mental spatialization of time in Underground London finds expression in a compressed chronotope that connects the metropolis of the past with that of the future. Repressed traumas and experiences are buried not only in the depth of the denizens’ memory-scape, but are collectively stored in the deep archives of the subterranean city, entrenched in its multi-sensory environment. In that respect London is a palimpsest of memories, some of which choose to resurface from below and transform the present make-up of the metropolis (Pleßke 2014: 304–52).

Dream-scapes in Conrad Williams’ London Revenant Conrad Williams’ London Revenant is an exemplar for the exposition of transformational processes triggered in the underground by way of a split personality. The novel’s protagonist, Adam Buckley, is a young man trying to find his way in London while trapped between ‘the Topside’ and ‘the Underground’. Because of his bouts of narcolepsy and periods of memory loss, the reality of the city is distorted, and it becomes harder for him to distinguish between dream and reality. In Sigmund Freud’s verticalization of different levels of consciousness, the id – the unconscious – is dug in the depth of the self. Adam’s trips in the underground in dreams and during wakefulness symbolize this trip to his unconscious. In Adam’s visions or violent nightmares he becomes Monck, a covert operative of a secret society that lives in the Underground. He fights an underground terrorist, ‘The Pusher’/Blore/H, who speaks of himself only as It and absolutely identifies with the subterranean space (53): ‘Here It can sit and feel London spin out around It and above It. The tunnels take all its weight; by extension, It takes it too, deep into It where it nourishes It, fills Its veins with heat. All the deadweight loads, vibration loads, soil and water pressure, the seismic activity. All the tons of gravel and aggregate and Portland stone, the oxblood tiles, the steel, the wire. Sumps, pumps, storm drains. Electrical distribution systems, switchyards, ventilation ducts, utility tunnels. It is it, and it is It. It is a machine. It is London’. (322)

168

London in Contemporary British Fiction

With the anthropomorphization of Underground London as It, the subterranean space is depicted as the psychological space of the id. Adam, at first, tries to avoid travelling on the Underground. He is repulsed by its whole environment: ‘I couldn’t stand it. It was too crowded and hot in summer and too crowded and damp in winter. I didn’t like the way some people appeared down there […] Down there, people acted differently’ (26). The Underground environment carries its very own atmosphere, and therefore triggers specific sensations. For Adam the stench of the Underground is ‘almost cloacal’ smelling of ‘the deep earth’, and ‘the air here seem[s] tired, coiling heavily in his lungs; tasting stale, slightly burned’ (81). The space, dominated by darkness and dust (221), enhances a sense of ‘stillness’ (182). However, the moving trains ‘suck air from the shaft’; they create a breeze and trigger a shrieking sound and ‘hum of electricity’ (221). The increasingly haunted landscape of Underground London accelerates even further Adam’s growing sense of dislocation. For Adam the Tube is his personal terror, especially owing to its alien parameters of space and time. ‘Like the way the Tube seems to warp London, make it less real. Less reliable than it already is. London shrinks. […] On the Underground, time becomes this vampire that attaches itself to the back of your neck, tapping you of energy and the ability to relate space to movement’ (39).

The Tube is an alien chronotope in which he is overcome by the notion of entrapment. He feels oppressed by the subterranean material density standing in opposition to the freedom he experiences above ground: ‘Down there was all about suffocation, enclosure; the compression of air, time and space. Then suddenly you found yourself thrown into the space of the big city, with the sky jetting off in every direction above you. I also felt slightly sick. I don’t like it. I don’t like it. The crush. The people breathing on you. The weight of the tunnels’. (157)

Adam perceives how the liminal space of Underground London intensifies his fragmented state of mind. Here it is so, less due to social interactions as to the interactions with the two spatialities of the vertical city, as such, which bring about the split urbanite personality. Adam experiences also a form of impersonation and dissolution of the self: ‘I was insubstantial as smoke, […] I lost all my shape and colour’ (161). Like the limbo Underground stations, his identity starts to disintegrate into a limbo-nothingness, as if he were a ghost.



The Liminality of Underground London

169

In the process of the unconscious taking over his self, Adam becomes aware of the ‘inbetween-ness’ (182), the liminality of Underground London. This liminality is not only spatial but personified by underground characters. The community of urban homeless people, themselves marginalised and unseen but in the centre of the metropolis, has ‘grown in spaces forgotten, or ignored’ (230). In the novel, tramps are sentinels keeping watch on the outside of Underground stations, on the threshold between the known and unknown spheres of the metropolis. They keep a lookout, that the secret of the clandestine race of underground people and the lost city of ‘Beneothan’ stay unknown to ‘Topside’ London (231). The community haunting the Underground could, as well, be ghosts or lost souls (271). This collective spectre of the city is mirrored in the title of the novel, London Revenant – that which returns and is resurrected. Time and space offer alternative realities in this allotopic space: ‘It’s so late, it’s early. It feels the tunnels radiating out like veins teased from Its body’ (17). Underground London is a space in-between, an oneiric space of horror and utopian vision, a space of liminal existence as ‘the revenant disrupts boundaries of time and space, and risks unravelling the confident demarcations of categorical thinking’ (Luckhurst: 337). When Adam’s narcoleptic leaps increase, his reality becomes more and more blurred by supernatural possibilities. Adam and his friends are able to walk through walls and on water, transcend the boundaries between past and present as well as the boundaries between seemingly real places and imagined Londons. Jacques Derrida, in Specters of Marx, defines the revenant as a personification of liminality (4–11) ‘somewhere between life and death, presence and absence, material and ethereal existence’ (Luckhurst: 337). Moreover, the revenant, for Derrida, describes the connection between modalized presents of past, present and future, opening the possibility of resurrection or reconstruction of the floating mass of the soul to a new identity (11, 149–50). Underground London in London Revenant is thus a space of transition to an ever-deeper being, and the real city beneath. The more Adam becomes accustomed to the alternative time–space compressions of the underside, the more he learns to appreciate the ‘womb-like protection of the underground’ (84), the security that this place offers as an enclosure (172). Finally, he even comes to relish the safety of being in the big crowd of the train (171). This change comes about because he is able to better place and map his experiences, and so slowly discovers the shape of the unknown subterranean entity. The secrecy of the places underneath, the unknown limbo stations that had mobilized his imagination, are revealed as ‘Inner Circle, The Web, Urbania’ (79). The formerly unknown is named, structured and mastered. Wachinger

170

London in Contemporary British Fiction

argues that reading the underground, like reading the city, is a means of stabilising one’s identity (271). Thus, being able to name the passages underground becomes a way for self-discovery. At the end of the novel, Adam’s perception of reality is literally turned upside down as an earthquake hits London: ‘The Underground was overground now’ (285). The topographical earthquake not only brings to light what has always been central to the metropolis but also initiates London’s resurrection as a green city. Adam, however, looks forward to a life in the alternate ‘Beneothan’ to stabilize his identity finally: ‘It felt as if I was returning home’ (331). The unknown becomes legible and the uncanny is rendered homely again (Pleßke 2009: 200). The unreality of the spatial-temporal structure of the subterranean city in London Revenant is shown as an oneiric space, a dreamscape of nightmarish irrationality. Underground London is semantisized as a state in-between which brings the self in contact with the unconscious and thus connects various states of being and becoming. Thus, the liminality of the Underground in London Revenant is the other necessary for the completion of a whole identity. Even more so, it symbolizes a reversal of inside out, emphasizing that the hidden realities of the urban unconscious are what really keep London and its denizens in motion. Uncertainty in the mode of the uncanny and the personification of the revenant stress the threshold existence of the urbanite being caught between the conscious material city above and a spectral urbanity below (Pleßke 2014: 264–9).

Time–space compressions in Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere includes characters named after London places like Ruislip, the Black-Friars, the Old Bailey and the Angel Islington, and casts from urban myths and history the Black Swine (boar) of London and the sewer folks. The novel’s protagonist, Richard Mayhew, accidentally enters a different space and social order: ‘London Below’. Although both ‘worlds exist simultaneously’ (Jenkins: 29), you can live only either above ground or underground (88). Once in contact with the other world, Richard becomes a ghost, ‘a non-person’ (62) to overground London, never able to return home (Jenkins 29). Underground London is ‘a maze of caves’ (262), an ‘endless network of underground vaults that smelled of damp and decay, of brick and stone and time’ (224). For Richard it is an ‘unreal mirror of the London he had known’ (122). It is the image created by the reflections of a convex mirror, expanding



The Liminality of Underground London

171

the possibilities of above ground London by intensifying density in the middle. London Below is a vast associative space, a sinister but carnivalesque travesty of people, times and spaces that ‘fell through the cracks in the world’ (126). The possessors live above; and the dispossessed below, in the tunnels of Underground London (96). Although Jenkins argues that the aesthetics of Neverwhere are rooted in the 19th century (39), the protagonist, Richard, notices that ‘time in London Below had only a passing acquaintance with the kind of time he was used to’ (108). The time frame becomes distorted under pressure, a few hours seem longer (210), and there is nothing to relate time to, neither distance nor light. Underground London is the materialization of time–space compression, encompassing all temporalities and spatialities. The chronotopic character of the novel is already obvious in the title: Neverwhere, being a non-place and non-time, at least according to the traditional categories of space and time. The black hole of Underground London sucks so much out of London above that it becomes saturated, rendering all indistinguishable and therefore invisible. As one of the inhabitants of London Below explains: ‘There are little bubbles of old time in London, where things and places stay the same, like bubbles in amber. […] There’s a lot of time in London, and it has to go somewhere – it doesn’t all get used up at once’ (229). Chronotopic time bubbles connect different London place-times, for example Roman soldiers still camping at Kilburn River, as well as an array of Elizabethan, Restoration and Regency sewers. The material space of Underground London is like an archaeological archive, filled with memories and therefore the ever-presence of bygone times (81, 96). Underground London compresses time, as Pike argues: ‘the underworld follows neither the standard rules of time – for it endures eternally and mingles every epoch in its depths’ (2006: 191–2). This notion is close to Foucault’s idea of the heterochronie which breaks with traditional time either by ‘indefinitely accumulating time’, or by being absolutely temporal (26). In liminal oneiric frequencies, Richard experiences an ever-repetitious nightmare where he fights the beast of London (29–30). Timelessness is created, as he was forever, and is repeatedly, killing this metropolitan Minotaur (216–7). The oneiric sequence is thereby just as much déjà vu as premonition. When he finally actually encounters the boar in the very depths of the city, this reality is distorted, like all his dreams before (317). A heterochronie is always connected to a heterotopia, which is a real as well as mythical place and acts as a ‘counter-site[…] in which the real sites […] are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted’ (24). The thirdspace of

172

London in Contemporary British Fiction

the heterotopia ‘is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are themselves incompatible’ (25). Underground London in Neverwhere assembles an array of heterotopias through its layers of past and alternative chronotopes. The place for negotiation of the diverse underground people is the so-called ‘Floating Market’, compared at one stage to a ‘fairyland’ (85), which takes place at Harrods or aboard HMS Belfast. The ‘House Without Doors’ is a hyperlink hub, a fabric of a house of forgotten rooms around London and scattered all over the Underside (80–1). The oldest place in London Below is the labyrinth situated in the deepest space of London (307). Owing to the time–space compression within the underground, various places and times are accumulated in one spot. ‘The labyrinth itself was a place of pure madness. It was built of lost fragments of London Above: alleys and roads and corridors and sewers that had fallen through the cracks over the millennia, and entered the world of the lost and the forgotten. The two men and the girl walked over cobbles, and through mud, and through dung of various kinds, and over rotting wooden boards. They walked through daylight and night, through gaslit streets, and sodium-lit streets, and streets lit with burning rushes and links. It was an everchanging place: and each path divided and circled and doubled back on itself ’. (308)

The labyrinth seems like a three-dimensional palimpsest of endless mazes within London. Underground London represents the chronotope of the threshold between all places and times and – as the protagonist of Neverwhere holds ‘the key to all reality’ (344) – spatial and temporal. Underground London, as a realization of time–space compression, goes beyond traditional notions of reality and fiction in the sense that it re-imagines all urban possibilities simultaneously in juxtaposition. The liminality of the subterranean city enhances the chronotopic character of the urban and generates the thirdspace of heterotopia. In oneiric frequencies, nightmares and visions, the metropolitan unconscious reveals the long-lost secrets of the city, which the urban body and mind constantly strive to unravel.

Subterranean liminality as metropolitan unconsciousness Underground London exists as an alternative sphere to the metropolis and, as a city within a city, offers a complicated spatiality that connects physical, social, mental and imaginary spaces. Owing to the coexisting dichotomies



The Liminality of Underground London

173

and antagonisms the subterranean city is mainly defined by its liminality. Contemporary London novels employ this idea of the interstitial in the context of time–space compression. Underground London is depicted as a dynamic space, adapting to changes above ground, carrying its very own character especially in terms of ‘rationalized space and time’ (Mengham: 199). The chronotopic character of London seems to gain depth in the underground. All the chronotopes Bahktin mentions – chronotopes of encounter, street, castle, threshold, mystery and crisis, and so on (192–200) – are simultaneously applicable to Underground London. As a consequence of its various forms of time–space compression the two entities intertwine and form ever new constellations. The subterranean city becomes the threshold between here and now as well as there and then because all three types of time (past, present and future) seem to coexist. The defining borders of spatial oppositions normally taken for granted are dissolved and made obsolete in this allotopic and heterogeneous space. The underground imaginary is the liminal space between, and of, antagon­ ising places. Consequently, the concept of heterotopia may well be applied to the liminality of Underground London. The contemporary novels analysed include the ‘crisis heterotopia’ (Foucault: 24), where questions of identity are negotiated, as well as the ‘heterotopia of deviation’ (Foucault: 25) as the place of urban otherness. The accessibility is initiated through rites, as in Neverwhere, or through illusionary visions of dream and memory, as in London Revenant and Underground. And it is exactly those liminal states of consciousness or unconsciousness, respectively, which are suspected to hold a greater truth for urban existence. The subterranean city is depicted as an archive where the past of the metropolis is preserved. It features a memory-scape, a personal memoryscape for Londoners, and the cultural memory of the metropolis. For Casimir, Underground London is like the sea (234), the ocean being another pool of memories. Foucault has called the ship – an interstitial place apart – the ‘heterotopia par excellence’ (27). In Underground London the Tube has become an alternative chronotopic capsule travelling back and forth and around different subterranean, not colonized but abducted, spaces (Pleßke 2009: 207). In the novels, memories, dreams and visions are consequently psychological chronotopes transcending space and time. In the subterranean space, sleep the alternative, hidden and repressed realities of the city, coming to light in the nightmarish visions and dreamscapes of London Revenant or the oneiric frequencies of Neverwhere. As a heterotopia, London Underground becomes

174

London in Contemporary British Fiction

a border of human perception. Something in-between the conscious and the unconscious is constantly on the verge of resurfacing. In the urban unconscious, repressed memories and traumatic experiences from the past are unearthed, adding to the multilayered collective history of the metropolis and opening possibilities of an uncanny beyond in the future of the city (Bhabha: 3–4). But not only are the space, as such, and the space of experience liminal, but the characters of underground novels possess threshold existences themselves, fragmented, other, and marginalized. Just as the subterranean space becomes the place where the self can be located, thus a space of self-recognition and conscious identity formation, the alternative side of the underground rather offers an uncanny view into the undefined space of man, namely the unconscious, the memory, and the mind of Londoners. The underground flâneur, the psychological archaeologist and the ghostly revenant seem all to haunt the in-between-ness of subterranean spaces. This highlights citizens’ liminal status both as individuals and as part of the urban collectivity. The collective unconscious is an integral component of the metropolitan mind. Entering London Underground shines a light on the unknown, unhomely, uncanny – namely, the repressed but also inherently central self. The dark spatialities of Underground London which render vision virtually senseless, momentarily throw the protagonists into a state of intensified disorientation and loss. The uncanny nature of their subterranean experiences highlights the uncertainty of their existence above ground. Their urban state of mind is exposed as unstable. Postmodern London mentality is thus depicted as a heightened uncertainty of the contemporary urban conditio humana, because the main metropolitan spheres have been rendered as uncanny interstitial spaces defying any traditional notions of space or time, reality or fiction.

Notes 1

This article has partly been published in German: in ‘London Underground. Der Grenzraum einer Metropole’ I explore the historio-cultural development of London’s underground since the nineteenth century and its mystification, mythologization, as well as accumulation of cultural meaning rendering the subterranean space liminal. Further, I, more generally, analyse how subterranean London has been semantisized in literature as a liminal space in contemporary fiction. In summary, I argue that London Underground as a liminal space in its concepts of space, time, cultural memory and identity defines London mentality,



2

3

The Liminality of Underground London

175

its non-conscious (Pleßke 2009). In addition, ideas from this article were integrated into the larger chapter on ‘Underground London’ of my monograph The Intelligible Metropolis. Urban Mentality in Contemporary London Novels (Pleßke 2014). This particularly concerns the sections on ‘The Metropolitan (Un)Conscious’ (Pleßke 2014: 251–7) and on ‘The Liminality of Underground London’ (Pleßke 2014: 260–4). A number of recent novels employ the London Tube as their main subject, for example: Matthew De Abaitua, The Red Men (2007); Keith Lowe, Tunnel Vision (2001); Andrew Martin, The Necropolis Railway (2002); China Miéville, King Rat (1998); Patrick Neate, City of Tiny Lights (2006); Nicholas Royle, The Director’s Cut (2001); Geoff Ryman, 253. The Print Remix (1998); Will Self, How the Dead Live (2000); and so on. For underground metaphors and ‘imaginary underworlds’ see Williams (1990). See David Ashford’s parallel argument in ‘The Ghost in the Machine: Psychogeography in the London Underground 1991–2007’ (2008), and for further explorations of the texts see his London Underground: A Cultural Geography (2013).

Works cited Assmann, Aleida. Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. München: Beck, 1999. Bachtin, Mikael. Formen der Zeit im Roman. Untersuchungen zur historischen Poetik. Ed. Edward Kowalski and Michael Wegner. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1989. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. Döring, Tobias. ‘Of Maps and Moles: Cultural Negotiations with the London Tube’. Anglia 120.1 (2002): 30–64. Foucault, Michel. ‘Of Other Spaces’. Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22–7. Gaiman, Neil. Neverwhere. London: Review, 2005. Haupt, Sabine. ‘ “Kryptopische” Zeit-Räume. Unterirdische und außerirdische Topographien als Reservate von Temporalität’. In Topographien der Literatur. Deutsche Literatur im transnationalen Kontext. Ed. Hartmut Böhme. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2005: 501–35. Hill, Tobias. Underground. London: Faber and Faber, 2000. Jenkins, Alice. ‘Tunnel Visions and Underground Geography in Fantasy’. Foundation 35.98 (2006): 28–43. Krewani, Angela. ‘“Mind the Gap” Die Londoner U-Bahn in Film, Literatur, Malerei und Design’. Kultur Poetik 2.2 (2002): 184–97.

176

London in Contemporary British Fiction

Lesser, Wendy. The Life below the Ground. A Study of the Subterranean in Literature and History. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987. Lotman, Jurij. Die Struktur literarischer Text. Trans. Rolf-Dietrich Keil. 4th. edn. München: Fink, 1993. Luckhurst, Roger. ‘Occult London.’ London from Punk to Blair. Eds Joe Kerr and Andrew Gibson. London: Reaktion Books, 2003: 335–40. Mayhew, Henry. ‘The Metropolitan Railway’. London Underground. Poems about the Tube. Ed. Tobias Döring. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003: 14–34. Mengham, Rod. ‘The End of the Line’. London from Punk to Blair. Joe Kerr and Andrew Gibson. London: Reaktion Books, 2003: 199–211. Pike, David. ‘Modernist Space and the Transformation of Underground London’. Imagined Londons. Ed. Pamela Gilbert. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002: 101–19. Pike, David. Subterranean Cities. The World beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Pleßke, Nora. ‘London Underground. Der Grenzraum einer Metropole’. Grenzen. Konstruktionen und Bedeutungen. Eds Dennis Gräf and Verena Schmöller. Passau: Stutz, 2009: 185–210. Pleßke, Nora. The Intelligible Metropolis. Urban Mentality in Contemporary London Novels. Transcript: Bielefeld, 2014. Sergl, Anton. ‘Katabasis als Metrofahrt’. Wiener Slawistischer Almanach. 31 (1992): 521–55. Trench, Richard and Ellis Hillman. London Under London. London: Murray, 1985. Wachinger, Tobias. ‘Stadträume/Stadttexte unter der Oberfläche. Schichtung als Paradigma des zeitgenössischen britischen “Großstadtromans”, ’ Poetica 31 (1999): 263–301. Williams, Conrad. London Revenant. London: The Do-Not Press, 2004. Williams, Rosalind. Notes on the Underground. An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1990.

11

The Un-, Ab- and Alter-Londons of China Miéville: Imaginary Spaces for Concrete Subjects Mark P. Williams

To the mediated and genre-varying extent that China Miéville’s fictions as a whole can be said to have an ‘essential’ core, I believe we might suggest that it is something akin to the following: the place of the socially constructed individual within social collectives, or, more abstractly, about multiplicity within singularity – and vice versa (of both). Or, perhaps we could say they are ‘really about’ how the fantastic can help us to understand how the above (and their reversals) work in reality. The present chapter charts some of the developments of radical characterization in China Miéville’s fictions by analysing the relationship of his characters to their environments, social and economic, natural and unnatural. Miéville’s fictions explore contemporary subjectivity in such a way as to allow him to link his aesthetic interests and political concerns. This is particularly strongly evident when we explore the relationship of the urban environment to characters in his fictions as models for the idea of the concrete subject. Miéville’s perspective on the contemporary social subject, particularly the inhabitant of the multicultural, sprawling metropolis is as complex and nuanced as the narratives they inhabit. Something that Miéville’s fictions make abundantly clear in both structure and style is that they enjoy a particular relationship with place, and especially with London. Even his most distinctive, most fully extended secondary world to date, Bas Lag, is intimately connected to London. The world of Bas Lag is a vast landscape filled with various sentient peoples and widely variant cultures living in multicultural city states. Examples of distinctive environments from this world include the recognizably Victorian-like New Crobuzon, filled with amphibious Vodyanoi, flying garuda and wyrmen, and semi-insectoid

178

London in Contemporary British Fiction

khepri, alongside a majority population of humanoids. Other cities include the amphibious city of Salkrikaltor inhabited by a majority population of Cray peoples who live part undersea and part above; the floating pirate city of Armada built from ships of varying origin; and the city of High Cromlech which is run by a dominant majority population of the dead with a minority of living humanoids to fulfil more complex labour tasks. All these environments are conceived of in terms of multicultural complexity which has parallels with London, but it is New Crobuzon that can properly be termed an alter-London. This secondary world comes to us primarily through the lengthiest novel set there, Perdido Street Station (2000), which has some very distinctive place names, evocative of historical and present locales in London: most particularly, ‘Ludmead’, suggesting the semi-legendary pre-Roman King Lud, and also Hope Mirrlees’ Lud in the Mist (1929) and Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat (1975);1 ‘Ketch Heath’,2 which takes its name from the (frequently fictionalised) London executioner Jack Ketch. Even ‘Bone Town’ seems to echo Brixton. The shape of the map of New Crobuzon, which takes up two pages at the opening of the novel, will be, to anyone who has caught the opening credits of Eastenders, instantly recognizable as an analogue of London, complete with a large dome just by the river (which becomes a space for a particularly brutal moment in the plot). New Crobuzon is the alter-London of Bas Lag, and its visored, strike-breaking and riot-charging police force is a disturbing analogue for historical London events from nineteenth- and twentieth-century London. When it comes to Miéville’s explicitly London-based fictions, the familiar metropolis undergoes potent transformations, as Miéville focuses his attention on the interstitial places and moments that characterise the abutment of one view of the capital with another. One recent narrative from Three Moments of An Explosion (2015), which performs this in a particularly striking way, is ‘Polynia’, where icebergs start to coalesce above London, becoming accepted as Mass 1, Mass 2 and Mass 3, and occasionally by colloquial names.3 One particular moment stands out for its balance between attention to the authentically idiosyncratic real of London and rigorous attention to the central cognitive estrangement of the story after a shard has broken off Mass 2: The berg had stopped above the common of Wormwood Scrubs. A line of police officers surrounded the grass. “You ain’t coming in,” one said to us. The dirty parkland stretched behind him, overlooking London. Above it was the ice. We shivered in its shadow. I could hear the screams of London’s feral parakeets freaking out in the trees. (Miéville, 2015: Loc. 92)



The Un-, Ab- and Alter-Londons of China Miéville

179

This passage places the weirdly suspended ice (contra to the expectations of physical laws) with its downdraught of freezing air (in accordance with physical laws) over another comparably incongruous image of tropical birds in London. As Miéville’s essay London’s Overthrow makes clear, these are real tropical birds which have taken to nesting on the common; he includes a passage discussing his meeting with ‘Urban Birder’ David Lindo, where they see this relatively recent parakeet population at dawn (Miéville, 2012: 63–4). In this story, the weirdly unreal and the weirdly real are brought together, as London youths uncover the real strangeness behind the already estranging phenomenon: that these new floating icebergs may actually be familiar; they are the return of lost ice, but that this secret may be barely a tenth of the full reality. Arguably, then, this is (at least one) core ‘message’ of Miéville’s approach to fantastic fiction: that reality is also predominantly hidden from our perspective and it takes weird cognitive estrangements to enable us to grasp how this affects our daily lives. I will use three terms that are separated in their relationship to the real London. ‘Alter-London’ will refer to cities set in secondary world fictions that demonstrate characteristics identifiable with London, primarily New Crobuzon from the Bas Lag novels. ‘Un-Londons’ (a slight adaptation of Miéville’s UnLondon from Un Lun Dun, 2007) refers primarily to urban fantasy fictions which posit hidden places under or unseen by the real London – such as King Rat (1998) and Un Lun Dun, and the short story ‘On the Way to the Front’, from Looking for Jake (2005) – which create a fantastic London located interstitially beneath or between the existing London. Un-Londons are para-cities in the sense of both parallel and, occasionally, parasite; while ‘Ab-Londons’ describe instances of London becoming estranged by means of something apocalyptic or transformative, and moving away from the familiar London and towards something definitively more estranging. In recent stories, such as ‘Säcken’ (2014–15), the un-London is part of a wider under-unseen world formed by the presence of arcane and brutal laws in the history of law; and, in that an obscure Medieval German punishment haunts its protagonist all the way back to London, it is similar to Miéville’s story, ‘Foundation’, which linked the burying-alive of Iraqi soldiers in the first Gulf War to the haunting of tower blocks in American cities. These are slightly different formulations of un-Londons, but still concerned with developing an understanding of the place of contemporary subjectivity in respect of the totality of the globalized world we live in.4 The distinction between an ab-London and an alter-London is one of the relationship of time to narrative: where a separation or cognitive novum has clearly already happened (alternative universe or future London), then the

180

London in Contemporary British Fiction

narrative is an alter-London; where (unsettling, weird) change is happening or has just happened we are in an ab-London, as we are in Looking for Jake. To further understand the political implications of these variations in representation of fantasy within London it is necessary to explore Miéville’s political commitments and theoretical background.

Literature and politics China Miéville is both an activist and a writer and scholar of international law, and understanding his Marxist commitment is important when seeking to comprehend two interlocking aspects of his work: his characterization of cities and his mapping of contemporary subjectivity. In 2001, Miéville stood as a parliamentary candidate for the Socialist Alliance, and in 2005 published his PhD thesis on jurisprudence: Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law. As a fantasy novelist, Miéville has won the Arthur C. Clark Award an unprecedented three times, twice for novels set in the immersive fantasy world of Bas Lag. Carl Freedman has commented significantly on the importance of Marxism to understanding China Miéville’s fictions, identifying a ‘Marxist urban sublime’ (Freedman 2003) in Miéville’s first novel, King Rat (1998), later comparing it with the image of revolution in his third Bas Lag novel, Iron Council (Freedman 2005). Pursuing Freedman’s theme, Rich Paul Cooper has directly related Miéville’s world-building techniques as a fantasy novelist to the Marxist concept of dialectical materialism (Cooper 2009). Taking this further, I read Miéville’s fantasy fictions as a whole in terms of the dialectical relationships between contemporary cities, London in particular, and contemporary subjects under the globalized regime of postmodernity (Williams 2010; 2011a), which I will here relate more specifically to his construction of London as an apocalyptic space. Miéville’s dialectical materialism incorporates the concepts of multiculturalism, hybridity, non-linear development and decentred identities as necessary parts of this environment; these are all things he finds in the early twentiethcentury aesthetic debates, and, earlier, in Marx’s core distinctions of labour. This differs from the assumption that the innovations of deconstruction are incompatible with classical Marxism (whatever that might be) and reclaims such practice within the framework of a Historical Materialist dialectic. An outline of the development of Historical Materialist dialectic by Raymond Williams in Keywords explains that ‘Hegel’s version of the dialectical process had made spirit



The Un-, Ab- and Alter-Londons of China Miéville

181

primary and world secondary’, but in Marxism ‘[t]his priority was reversed and dialectics was then “the science of the general laws of motion both of the external world and of human thought” ’ (Williams, quoting Engels, 1976: 107). Dialectical materialism is, broadly, the expression of such ideas in the material world; it is more typically termed historical materialism, emphasizing its refererence to human rather than natural processes. Miéville’s concept of dialectics adds the productive power of the imagination to Historical Materialism, emphasizing individual agency within historical moments. Miéville makes fantasy central to this, a gesture that marks a significant development of postmodernist theories of the individual within social networks – one reason why Miéville’s characters and monsters feature in Steven Shaviro’s conceptualization of the ‘network society’ (Shaviro 2003: 224) – a development that brings them back within the purview of classical Marxist thinking by way of the historical link between Surrealism and the dialectic. Marxist aesthetic theory asks whether the most appropriate aesthetic response to the commodity status of art under capital is to use the representational modes that are most favoured in the conditions of the world as they stand (the most popular and/or accessible, and typically realist), incorporating committed Marxist content into the form, or to use a more aesthetically defamiliarized form (such as Surrealism, Futurism or Modernism, or the fantastic) to resist existing forms of representation as being ideologically bound to capital. The debate is hardly new, but replays the position of Lenin on Socialist Realism (Lenin 1975: 677), and of Trotsky on Surrealism and Futurism (Trotsky 1991 [1924]). Because fantasy has been read alternately as wedded, on the one hand, to both whimsical, anti-realist representation, and, on the other, to the pure commodification of literature as escapism, Marxist fantasy occupies a particularly contested space. For Darko Suvin, fantasy takes part in the obfuscation of social relationships (it is complicit in the negation of social relationships under commodity capitalism) and he constructs Science Fiction (SF) as the negation of fantasy’s ideological estrangement; hence, for Suvin, the cognitive estrangement of SF operates as the ‘negation of the negation’ of fantasy: fantasy is inherently more ideological and SF is inherently more dialectically materialist. Miéville has put forward his revised concept of Marxism’s relationship with fantasy theory in interviews and essays for publications such as International Socialism (Miéville with Newsinger, 2000a), Historical Materialism (Miéville 2002a) and Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction (Miéville in Bould and Miéville 2009). Contra to Suvinian theory, Miéville’s understanding of fantasy assumes a historical materialist view of the fantastic at the basic level of its

182

London in Contemporary British Fiction

construction. Miéville achieves this in his fiction through his combination of metropolitan environments and postmodern subjects – that is, environments that host industrial and economic networks which determine the social activities of their inhabitants, and subjects who exist in worlds that are defined by globalized socio-political relationships at the level of trade and culture. The primary concern of China Miéville’s fictions is the place of the subject in the contemporary world: the person in the city – but also the city in the person as a construct of subjectivity (Williams 2011a). The fantastic is essential to this relationship. Mark Bould writes that fantasy is peculiarly distinctive among modes of literary production because of the extremes of contradiction that it contains conceptually within its boundaries. Because fantasy tells stories set in worlds that ‘are not only not true to the extratextual world but, by definition, do not seek or pretend to be’ they implicitly raise questions, about the nature of representation and the world, that are explicit in Modernism (Bould 2002: 81). For Bould, fantasy always has a radical potential, irrespective of how commodified it might be as a movie or video game tie-in, or as a comic book line being used to market a new toy, and always retains, at least potentially, the capacity to make space for a ‘hard-headed, critical consciousness of capitalist subjectivity’ (Bould 2002: 83–4). Fantasy as a mode insists on the validity of its non-Real space as if it were real, simultaneously with a constant implicit non-validity (refusing rationalization in its form). Surrealism is a significant element in the politicization of this undecidability. The most powerful innovations of Surrealism into the popular consciousness are based on a twin insistence: first, that the world we see around us is greater than the sum of the parts we employ for its representation, and, second, that this greatness is material even where it is intangible. Surrealism insists on the materiality of the imagination, and in that sense Miéville’s cities are properly Surrealist environments because, as he has said in interviews and public speeches, he considers writers and artists of the fantastic to be the ‘pulp wing of Surrealism’ (Miéville in Marshall 2003).

Living in alter-Londons and other Londons When we encounter Bas Lag’s London-analogue, New Crobuzon, for the first time we see it through the eyes of the outcast garuda (bird-man), named ‘Yagharek’ initially, but as an abstract place: we encounter its environs as a concrete reality only through the perspective of the khepri artist, Lin. Khepri are a partly-anthropomorphic-partly-insectoid people, and through



The Un-, Ab- and Alter-Londons of China Miéville

183

Lin’s compound eyes and ‘chymical’ senses we are introduced into the city ‘in a compound visual cacophony’ of a ‘million tiny sections of the whole’ where ‘[e]ach visual fragment, each part, each shape, each shade of colour, differed from its surroundings in infinitesimal ways that told her about the state of the whole structure’ (Miéville 2000: 20). In addition to which, Lin can ‘taste chymicals in the air’ and feel vibrations that allow her to ‘tell how many of which race lived in which building’ (Miéville 2000: 20). Lin’s perception is a subject-orientated vision of the city which is both sociometric and personal, of the psyche and of the human geography of the environment, which can relate intimate perception to general societal trend and can impart something of the feeling of material social interactions. Lin is an artist whose non-human perspective provides multiple and defamiliarized registers. Miéville’s characters move against the backdrop of lyrical descriptions of buildings and material structures which clearly synthesise imagery of Victorian London into the alter-London of New Crobuzon. In New Crobuzon architecture responds to its people as much as they respond to it, as an environment. Its changing historical nature is made clear by Miéville’s insistence on characterizing the areas where one age of building material buttresses another, meshing and differentiating ages as strata. Miéville’s balance between architectural scale and crowd-scale as dynamic interactions is clearest in the description of Perdido Street Station itself: Perdido Street Station was not discrete. Its edges were permeable. Spines of low turrets swept off its back and into the city, becoming the roofs of rude and everyday houses. The concrete slabs that scaled it grew squat as they spread out, and were suddenly ugly canal walls. Where the five railway lines unrolled through great arches and passed along the roofs, the station’s bricks supported and surrounded them, cutting a path over the streets. The architecture oozed out of its bounds [….] and spread like mould into the roofscape beyond, transforming the terrace at the north of BilSantum Street. In some places Perdido Street was open to the air: elsewhere it was covered for long stretches with vaulted bricks festooned with gargoyles or lattices of wood and iron. There in the shade from the station’s underbelly, Perdido Street was gaslit all the time. Perdido Street was still residential. Families rose every day beneath that dark architecture sky, walked its winding length to work, passing in and out of shadow. (Miéville 2000: 751–2)

Perdido Street Station in the above passage is almost fungal or amoebic; the houses that surround it have their structures made subordinate to it, and the lives of the residents of those houses are affected in turn, even down to the level

184

London in Contemporary British Fiction

of their bodily rhythm: the station will not allow them daylight; instead, the sky is ‘covered for long stretches, with vaulted bricks festooned with gargoyles or lattices of wood and iron’ (752). This is a building that behaves like a rainforest tree by forming a canopy and manipulating its ecosystem for its own benefit. In being ‘gaslit all the time’ it suggests a kind of simulated Victorian night, a permanent world of Victoriana, of Rippers and pea-soupers, which might describe the nature of this entire novel: the imaginary slums, like Spatters (154), which houses the bird-people known as Garuda, literalize the metaphor of the nineteenth century Rookeries. New Crobuzon is clearly related to the Darkest London of the Victorian imagination. It is a meta-London, a psychohistorical environment, or London of the mind, which represents the persistence of history within both the subjects of history and their environment. The un-London of Miéville’s 2010 novel, Kraken, is different. As Farah Mendelsohn’s Rhetorics of Fantasy has indicated, Miéville’s Bas Lag novels are ‘immersive fantasy’ novels, where the reader is cast wholly into a fantastic universe as if it were the ‘real’. Mendelsohn points out also that immersive fantasy can play host to another form of fantasy narrative, the ‘intrusion fantasy’, where a disruptive fantastic force enters the world of the novel – Miéville’s Perdido Street Station is an example of this specific hybrid form, since the plot involves an invasion by disruptive alien creatures called Slake-moths. Kraken is more like Miéville’s shorter fictions in Looking for Jake (2005), it is an intrusion fantasy, beginning in a realist idiom. When a London full of magic is revealed to exist in the interstitial spaces of the material London, it manifests through familiar metaphors used in mundane patterns of life and everyday struggles such as industrial relations. What Miéville’s fictions clearly demonstrate, in every universe he has written, is that he finds the symbolic to have a material quality as well as a material affect. In Kraken this interaction is termed a ‘psychopolis’(146) and a ‘Theopolitical’ landscape (231); it combines ideological and religious content with the material physical content in a dynamic system to form a fuzzy set of coherent underworlds. The basis of Kraken’s plot is that there are cults in London whose belief systems are interstitial, based on minor deities and chaotic organizations of symbols given radical new meanings. The stolen Archeteuthis Dux, or giant squid, which gives the book its title, is the centre of one sect among many others, ‘the Congregation of God Kraken’ (96), whose rivals intend to use the potential power of the preserved god-squid for their own ends. The terrain these cults contest is described by Miéville in terms derived from the Situationist International; a single paragraph late in the text describes



The Un-, Ab- and Alter-Londons of China Miéville

185

the environment of outer London as in a contest between different forms of liminality where the characters can take shelter: A space between concrete sweeps of flyovers. Where the world might end was turpe-industrial. Scree of rejectamenta. Workshops writing car epitaphs in rust; warehouses staffed in the day by tired teenagers; superstores and self-storage depots of bright colours and cartoon fronts amid bleaching trash. London is an endless skirmish between angles and emptiness. (2010: 357)

These small details embedded in the narrative of London are embedded notions of Miéville’s theory of fantasy in the dialectic; the concepts and metaphors within that paragraph could function within either a realist or a non-realist epistemology – they are radically undecided. The industrial filth and ‘scree of rejectamenta’ are the remnants, traces and relics of social activity which, in losing its original purpose, has been cut loose from its categorical moorings to become something revolutionary and new, caught between realism and fantasy. Miéville’s online repository for fragmentary ideas and images is called the ‘Rejectamentalist Manifesto: China Miéville’s waste books’.5 The name suggests two things which he spoke about in a keynote speech to the conference on ‘Globalisation and Writing’ at Bath Spa University in March 2007: the collective, radical character of discarded items, and their persistence outside their usefulness. At the conference he spoke about the concept of picking over the garbage heaps of culture, deliberately using discarded fragments in disjunctive ways, which he diverted into a discussion of garbage monsters that, in retrospect, foreshadowed the themes of Un Lun Dun; in that sense then, the picking up of discarded elements to create startling, provocative new concepts is precisely the aim of his unseen-unknown-under-Londons. Kraken reveals this more explicitly: in this novel Miéville presents a view of London’s streets and alleyways where the seemingly unused spaces of the city, between flyovers and other liminal spaces, are rich with symbolic value to the individual subject, even where they appear to have become valueless to the dominating forces of capital. The central principle of his overlapping Eastern European cities of Beszel and Ul Qoma, in The City and The City (2009), is that territory, space, is primarily subjectively defined – the separations between the two cohabiting cities are wholly cognitive; the whole populations of the two cities must constantly ‘unsee’ one another in order to maintain the separation (34). Thinking ‘grosstopically’ (64) they occupy the same physical space, but this does not mean that their distinctions have no concrete character; rather it is another argument for the materiality of subjective or immaterial experience. This version of the paradox

186

London in Contemporary British Fiction

appears to be more spectral than the physical boundaries of Bas Lag and the magical-non-magical separations of Kraken, but, functionally, it is more intimately based on Miéville’s work on international law than is any previous novel. In appearing to be Miéville’s least fantastical text, The City and the City makes a powerful argument for the place of fantasy, not just within realism, but within the Real, which feeds back into the literalized metaphors of magical ‘knacking’ in Kraken (Miéville 2010: 98) – that is performing magic through literalized metaphor (Williams 2015).

Subjectivity in {alter- | un- | ab-} Londons Miéville’s writing reveals the ideological content of categories as determinants of social relations signalled through the use of prefixes such as ‘un’, ‘ab’ and ‘re’, each of which corresponds to a social category and a mode of thought. Perhaps his most succinct expression of the significance of particular prefixes can be found in Un Lun Dun (2007), when the lead character, Deeba, is attempting to understand the distinction between the categories of things she knows and the categories of similar, fantastic things as she is presented with them. In the UnLondon of Un Lun Dun, any umbrella that gets broken is made a servant of a man named Brokkenbroll and becomes an un-brella, controlled by him: Deeba says: ‘Your umbrellas are broken’. He responds: ‘ “Your umbrellas are sticks” […] “My unbrellas are awake” ’ (Miéville 2007: 137). Mending the damage to one of these sinister un-brellas changes it into a re-brella, with a mind of its own, more like a benign pet, and not subject to the will of Brokkenbroll. ‘It’s not an unbrella any more. It’s something else. When it was an umbrella, it was completely for one thing. When it was broken it didn’t do that any more, so it was something else and that’s when it was Brokkenbroll’s. His slave. […] It’s something new. It’s not an umbrella and it’s not an unbrella. It’s…’ ‘What are you?’ Muttered Deeba. ‘A rebrella?” Whatever it is, she thought, it’s its own thing now’. [emphasis in original] (Ibid: 470)

Miéville’s point is that choices, and the autonomy to make them, create distinct differences in subjectivity. His texts propose ways in which this might then be expressed through a vocabulary of social categorization flexible enough to accommodate multiple perspectives: transformations in subjectivity are expressed through estranging prefixes, to draw attention to them as transformations that are both fantastic (ideological) and concrete (physical).



The Un-, Ab- and Alter-Londons of China Miéville

187

Miéville’s conceptualization of the effect of social transformation on subjectivity is performed most spectacularly and grotesquely in his Bas Lag novels by the Remade of New Crobuzon. The Remade are criminals whose sentence is to have their bodies permanently altered by being ‘thaumaturgically’ welded to animal, vegetable or mineral components, according to the whim of the ‘magister’ sentencing them. They are effectively transformed into monstrous chimerae to act as a frightening spectacle of the power of the judiciary through the ‘punishment factories’. Miéville creates a disjuncture between the ‘fitting’ of the crime and the punishment, which is expressed through the callous disjuncture between the bodies of the Remade and the parts welded to them; their bodies are effectively made useless to them and to society by their punishment (barring exceptional cases welded to industrial machines or suchlike so that work for the power of the state can form part of their punishment). Miéville’s most overtly radical characters are interstitial: Saul, in King Rat, who plays a balancing act between the supernatural heritage of his biological father and the cultural heritage of his adopted father; the more superheroic characters: the Robin-Hood-like fReemade Jack Half-a-Prayer (Perdido); warrior-philosopher Uther Doul (The Scar), combining elements of Sword & Sorcery with the weird realpolitik of being a vitae-minority in a thanatocracy; and Toro (Iron Council), an oddly fitting revolutionary knight for the micro-state metropolis of New Crobuzon, who has clear comic-book heritage combined with links to Iain Sinclair’s writing on ‘Mithraic Alignments’ in London. These are the more extreme manifestations, and Miéville uses them lightly, because it is not the (magic-inflected super-) power that interests him but the social subject, which carries the radical potential to transform into figures like these; something that his new comic-book series, Dial H, a revamp of ‘Dial “H” for “Hero” ’ for DC’s New 52, is explicitly concerned with: the powerless subject; the subject of power; and the subject reclaiming power as a radical, fantastic potential. The radicality of potential at the level of the individual subject is most explicit in the transformation from ‘Remade’ to ‘fReemade’. This dynamic subject movement from ‘Remade’ to ‘fReemade’ describes the movement from being defined objectively by someone else towards that of being subjectively defined in a (relatively) empowered way, autonomously. Hence the movement from Remade being indentured criminals, the objects of state power, to being fReemade, independent subjects who are outlaws (beyond or outside the state’s power). These have obvious corollaries with the use of revolutionary shifts in prefixes employed by Rastafarian and Black Muslim

188

London in Contemporary British Fiction

groups, as in ‘outformer’ for informer, or ‘overstand’ instead of understand, terms used to conceptually differentiate dominant social consciousness from the ‘double-consciousness’ of black liberation activism (see Paul Gilroy, 1987, 1993). The ‘Remade’ into ‘fReemade’ shift also suggests the steps towards taking back negative language characteristic of contemporary music and club cultures of the black diaspora, of which Miéville, as a fan of Hip Hop and Drum n Bass, is obviously conscious.6 The power relationships and transformative potential of language are also present at length in a distinctive London ‘club novel’ that Miéville has referred to in various interviews, Junglist (1995), by Two Fingers (Andrew Green) and James T. Kirk (Eddie Otchere). Junglist was one of the ‘Backstreets’ series of novels by different authors set in and around the Jungle music scene of early 1990s London. The ‘Backstreets’ texts play on analogies between musical sampling and mixing in Drum n Bass and the cultural interaction and the mixing of language registers from a predominantly black British working-class youth perspective influenced strongly by African-American music culture. In King Rat, Miéville alludes to the authors of Junglist by naming a character, Three Fingers, and again, more obliquely, in Kraken, by having the Egyptian strike-leader spirit Wati inhabit a small plastic model of James T. Kirk. The oppositional relationship of social groups with contradictory interests demonstrates their dialectical interaction with the social totality; it produces a dialectical materialist construction of society. This can be perceived in the persona and physiognomy of the criminal gang leader, Mr Motley, whose relationship with the city’s social structures is a microcosm of the political structure of the city itself. Motley stands for the central paradoxes of subjectivity which Miéville’s fictions return to; through his self-exposition, he connects the hybridity of Saul in King Rat with Miéville’s other fantastic hybrid characters. Motley is one model of the individual body as a dialectical unity: Scraps of skin and fur and feathers swung as he moved […] feelers twitched and mouths glistened. […] Tides of flesh washed against each other in violent currents. Muscles tethered by alien tendons to alien bones worked together in uneasy truce, in slow, tense motion. (Miéville 2000: 53)

The contrary parts of Motley’s whole are internally contradictory but nevertheless support the whole ‘in uneasy truce’. Motley’s body synthesises the characteristics of the criminal gangster; defying the similes of pulp fiction for a Surreal literalization, his animal-like qualities are shown using animal parts: he ‘returned [Lin’s] gaze with a pair of tiger’s eyes’ and ‘gesticulated vaguely



The Un-, Ab- and Alter-Londons of China Miéville

189

at his own body with a monkey’s paw’, saying: ‘[t]his is not error or absence or mutancy: this is image and essence […] This is totality’ (ibid: 140). As a crime lord, Motley supersedes the possibilities of punishment of New Crobuzon society; he is symbolically beyond the punishment of the law, because he cannot be Remade to become more grotesque than he is already; we later discover that he is also collaborating with agencies within the government and so is also literally beyond the law, validating his assertion that his body represents both ‘image and essence’. The khepri artist, Lin, only remembers him in arresting fragmentary images – ‘one hand terminating in five equally spaced crabs’ claws; a spiralling horn bursting from a nest of eyes’ (ibid: 94) – because that is what his totality is composed of: disjunctive parts such as might be grafted on to the body of a condemned man to make them a Remade. He has a dialectical view of himself as a totality of contraries which appear to be antagonistic to one another but actually form a unity. His body is a symbol for New Crobuzon as a multicultural city: not an undifferentiated mass in a melting pot but a composite of discrete characteristics pulling in diverse directions but clearly intimately connected to one another. The dialectic relationship of subject and city, individual and society, is clearest in the relationships Miéville creates between structure and plot through the perspectives and actions of characters; through them, the plot demonstrates the distinction between abstract and concrete individuals. In Jeff and Anne VanderMeer’s anthology, The New Weird, which includes Miéville’s Bas Lag story, ‘Jack’, the primary characteristic of the New Weird in fantasy is its conjunction of urban setting and hybrid characters standing for the culturally hybrid forms of contemporary modernity. Darja Malcolm-Clarke, contributing to the discussion section of the anthology, explicitly writes that ‘bodies and cities’ play a specific role in the ‘symbolic or visual vocabulary’ of the New Weird (Malcolm-Clarke in VanderMeer and VanderMeer: 337), which is a hybrid sensibility, combining Gothic and Science Fictional heritage (Williams 2011b). The precise nature of the hybridity in these fictions may be cultural, species specific, or more conceptual, but it stands in a particular symbiotic relationship to the urban setting. In Miéville’s short fictions in particular, we are presented with a rich variety of alternative Londons which exist as reflections of, or interstitial places within, London as a fantastic world itself. Miéville’s Londons burst out into the real London and overtake it, as we find in ‘Looking for Jake’ and ‘The Tain’; at other times they exist within the cracks of our London, occulted from ordinary view, as in King Rat and Kraken; while sometimes they exist in

190

London in Contemporary British Fiction

an uneasy tension with the real London, as in Un Lun Dun, officially denied but secretly acknowledged and mutually dependent. It is worth considering Miéville’s words on London as an interstitial or fantastic space in the work of a writer whose work has significantly influenced the development of his own aesthetic. Miéville’s introduction to M. John Harrison’s Things That Never Happen (Night Shade Books) takes a moment to consider the shift in Harrison’s aesthetic from the immersive fantasy world of Viriconium towards a more ambiguous fantastic that exists within the concrete real world. Commenting on Harrison’s near-identical stories: ‘A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium’ (Interzone #12, Summer 1985) and the revised version, ‘A Young Man’s Journey to London’, Miéville observes that the shift marks a realization, developed through lengthy diversions into genre fiction modes, that the truly fantastic elements that defined ‘Viriconium’ were present already in the concept of ‘London’ as a distant capital, viewed from an identity rooted in provincial England (Miéville 2003: 1–9). Miéville explains that the conflation and combination of the bleak, baroque fantasy land with the world of ‘London’ is no lesser an enfolding than that of Harrison’s previous ambivalent fantasy, or anti-fantasy (Egnaro, Pleroma); and, by extension, we can keep folding and refolding: London into Embassytown, into UnLondon, into New Crobuzon, New Crobuzon back into London. Equally, along the way, Miéville has given us signposts towards other folds which hint that any given world always already enfolds the worlds it has taken example from: the journey-space of the ‘Anamnesis’ section of Iron Council contains mysterious travellers called jugadores whose names echo the jugadores of Moorcock’s Fabulous Harbours, hinting at a multiverse like that which defines Moorcock’s fictions, existing just outside the perceptions of Miéville’s characters. ‘London’ is as ungraspable a totality as ‘universe’. This obdurate excess is present in the Londons of Looking for Jake. In the title story, the narrator comes to perceive the energy of London as most powerful when it is almost invisible to perception, on Bonfire Night: So I learnt to see the view from my roof in the garish glow of the fire-works, to hold it in the awe it deserved. That view is gone now. It’s changed. It has the same topography, it’s point for point the same as it ever was, but it’s been hollowed out and filled with something new. Those dark thoroughfares are no less beautiful, but everything has changed. (Miéville 2005: 7)

The mysterious investiture of … something, which has rendered the familiar streets de-familiarized to the narrator here, is just a corruption of the power of



The Un-, Ab- and Alter-Londons of China Miéville

191

the fantastic as it inheres in the mundane. The very next paragraph makes clear that the implicit energy of the city is its latent quality, not an alien intrusion: The angle of my window, the height of my roof, hid the tarmac and paving stones from me: I saw the tops of houses and walls and rubble and skips, but I couldn’t see ground level, I never saw a single human being walk those streets. And that lifeless panorama I saw brimmed with potential energy. The roads might be thronging, there might be a street party or a traffic accident or a riot just out of my sight. It was a very full emptiness I learnt to see, on Bonfire Night, a very changed desolation. (Ibid.)

This ‘changed desolation’, the ‘full emptiness’, predates the mysterious happening that has changed mundane London into unfamiliar London – that is a realization, a concretization of this potential energy – the fantastic potential expressed as a flaw in the surface of the world. This quality is present in Kraken in even stronger doses; subjecthood is granted to magical familiars, right down to ‘e-spirits’ on the electronic level (199); interaction with consciousness produces emulations of consciousness in non-conscious matter. This is a central metaphor for Miéville’s concept of historical materialism: material things have an immaterial content where they enter into the subjective space of consciousness – so London has as many un-Londons and ab-Londons (or meta-Londons) as it has Londoners. The overlaps and cross-hatches between subjects turn the real city of London into a kind of polyLondon, whose qualities are no less fantastic for being real than those of any of the alter-Londons of Miéville’s fiction. As the immaterial has a concrete content, which is made from lived experience being recombined within the imagination, so London’s liminal spaces are literally inhabited by immaterial potential whenever a subject interacts with them; subjects remake rejected space by interacting with it. Finally then, Miéville’s fantasy cities, his un-Londons in King Rat or Un Lun Dun (1998), the alter-London of New Crobuzon, and the ab-Londons of Looking for Jake (2007) and Three Moments of an Explosion (2015), are essentially Modernist-inflected creations; they are attempts to come to terms in new ways with the place of the individual subject under contemporary modernity. In important respects, master criminals like Mr Motley are Benjeminian revisions of Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’ – they are extreme attempts to adapt to (post)modernity, which serve as examples, but not necessarily as models, for adaptation. His more mundane figures, Billy Harrow, Deeba, Bellis Coldwine, Avice Benner Cho and even Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, who are forced to learn and to adapt to (post)modernity, are Miéville’s positive investment; they observe

192

London in Contemporary British Fiction

the extremes but, ultimately, do not follow them. Their flaws are human-sized, their lessons and adaptations fit for the polyvalent contemporary city we all live in, pass through, or journey to and from.

Notes 1

Miéville mixes registers in his conception of continuities between alter-London writers, as between Mary Gentle and Two Fingers and James T. Kirk in his speech ‘Visions of London’ at the Southbank Centre 2 June 2013. 2 See the biography of Jack Ketch http://www.britannica.com/biography/ Jack-Ketch 3 This short story is available to read in its entirety online separately from Three Moments An Explosion (London: Pan Macmillan, 2015). See http://extracts. panmacmillan.com/extract?isbn=9781447251972 4 See Mark P. Williams (2010) ‘The Weird of Globalisation’. 5 See http://chinamieville.net/ 6 Carl Freedman observes that Miéville’s attention to the multiracial interactions of Drum n Bass subcultures forms an important part of his ‘Marxist urban sublime’ in King Rat (Freedman, ‘Towards a Marxist Urban Sublime’, Extrapolation 44:4).

Works cited Bould, Mark. ‘The Dreadful Credibility of Absurd Things: A Tendency in Fantasy Theory.’ Historical Materialism 10.4 (2002): 51–88. Cooper, Rich Paul.‘Building Worlds: Dialectical Materialism as Method in China Miéville’s Bas-Lag.’ Extrapolation 50.2 (Summer, 2009): n.p.. Literature Online, http://lion.chadwyk.co.uk Freedman, Carl. ‘Towards a Marxist Urban Sublime: Reading China Miéville’s King Rat’. Extrapolation. 44 (4). Winter, 2003: n.p.. Accessed online: Literature Online, http://lion.chadwyk.co.uk Freedman, Carl. ‘To the Perdido Street Station: The Representation of Revolution in China Miéville’s Iron Council.’ Extrapolation 46.2 (Summer, 2005): n.p.; Literature Online, http://lion.chadwyk.co.uk Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (1993) London: Verso. Gilroy, Paul. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (2002 [1987]) London: Routledge Classics. Lenin, Vladimir. Letter to A. N. Lunacharsky, 6 May 1921. In The Lenin Anthology, Ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York and London: Norton, 1975: 677.



The Un-, Ab- and Alter-Londons of China Miéville

193

Malcolm-Clarke, Darja. In The New Weird. Eds Jeff VanderMeer, and Anne VanderMeer. San Francisco: Tachyon, 2008: 337. Miéville, China. ‘Fantasy and Revolution’, interview with John Newsinger. International Socialism 88 (Autumn 2000a): 153–63. Miéville, China. Perdido Street Station. London: Pan/Macmillan, 2000b. Miéville, China. Introduction. Historical Materialism 10.4 (2002a): 1–50. Miéville, China (ed.). Historical Materialism 10.4 (2002b). Miéville, China (ed.). ‘ “And Yet”: The Antinomies of William Hope Hodgson,’ introduction, In House on the Borderland and Other Novels. London: Gollancz, 2002c: vii–ix. Miéville, China. ‘The Future of British Fiction is Getting Weirder: An Interview with China Miéville’, with Gavin J. Grant. IndieBound.org: n.p.; http://www.indieBound. org/author-interviews/mievillechina Miéville, China. ‘The Limits of Vision(aries): Or M. John Harrison Returns to London and It Is Spring,’ introd. In Things That Never Happen. Night Shade Books: San Francisco and Portland, 2003: 1–9. Miéville, China. ‘The Road to Perdido: An Interview with China Miéville’, with Richard Marshall (2003) 3AM Magazine n.p.; http://www/3ammagazine.com/ litarchives/2003/feb/interview_china_mieville Miéville, China. Iron Council (2005 [2004]) Pan/Macmillan: London and New York. Kindle. Miéville, China. Looking for Jake. New York: Ballantine, 2005. Miéville, China. ‘Foundation’ in Looking for Jake and Other Stories (2006 [2005]) Pan/ Macmillan: London and New York. Miéville, China. Un Lun Dun. London: Macmillan, 2007. Miéville, China. ‘Cognition as Ideology: A Dialectic of SF Theory.’ In Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction. Mark Bould and China Miéville (eds). London: Pluto Press 2009: 231–48. Miéville, China. Kraken (2010) London: Macmillan. Miéville, China. The City and the City (2010 [2009]) London: Pan/Macmillan. Miéville, China. King Rat. (2011 [1998]) Pan/Macmillan: London and New York. Kindle. Miéville, China. London’s Overthrow (2012) The Westbourne Press: London. Kindle. (See also: http://londonsoverthrown.org/). Miéville, China. ‘Säcken’ in Three Moments of an Explosion (2015). Miéville, China. Three Moments of an Explosion: Stories (2015) Macmillan: London and New York. Kindle. Shaviro, Steven. Connected: What it means to Live in the Network Society. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Trotsky, Leon. Literature and Revolution. Trans. Rose Strunsky. London: Redwords, 1991 [1924]. Two Fingers [Andrew Green] and James T. Kirk [Eddie Otchere]. Junglist. London: Boxtree, 1995.

194

London in Contemporary British Fiction

Williams, Mark P. ‘The Weird of Globalisation: Esemplastic Power in the Short Fiction of China Miéville’. Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies (June 2010): n.p.; http://irishgothichorrorjournal.homestead.com/Mieville.html. Williams, Mark P. Radical Fantasy: A Study of Left Radical Politics in the Fantasy Writing of Michael Moorcock, Angela Carter, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison and China Miéville. University of East Anglia Thesis 2011a. Online: UEA Digital Repository; https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/19302. Williams, Mark P. ‘Radical Fantasy: A Study of Left Radical Politics in the Fanatsy Writing of Michael Moorcock, Angela Carter, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and China Miéville, 2011a. Williams, Mark P. ‘The Superheated, Superdense Prose of David Conway: Gender and Subjectivity Beyond The Starry Wisdom’. In Gothic Science Fiction, 1980–2010. Eds Sara Wasson and Emily Alder. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 2011b: 133–48. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana, 1976.

12

Common People: Class, Gender and Social Change in the London Fiction of Virginia Woolf, John Sommerfield and Zadie Smith Nick Hubble

Zadie Smith’s NW (2012) marked a return to the London setting of her first novel White Teeth (2000) and specifically to the North-West postcode area, in part of which Smith grew up and still lives when resident in Britain. While the novel is set in the present, its epigraph is taken from the sermon John Ball gave on 13 June 1381 at Blackheath, in the South-East of London, during the Peasants’ Revolt: When Adam delved and Eve span, Who was then the gentleman?

Smith’s choice of this class-conscious question, historically embedded at the heart of the ‘English radical tradition’,1 indicates a political subtext to the novel which might otherwise be missed by an unwary reader. As will be demonstrated in this chapter, the plot of NW ultimately turns on the radical indeterminacy of the class and gender relations raised by Ball’s question. In this respect, Smith consciously harks back to Virginia Woolf ’s modernist depictions of London, as can be seen from the clear parallels between NW and Mrs Dalloway (1925), which are considered in detail below. However, the correlations between Smith and Woolf invite comparison with a third London writer, John Sommerfield, who is best known for his experimental proletarian novel, May Day (1936), which also draws heavily on the structure of Mrs Dalloway in its representations of the intersubjective reality of London life. Through comparing these three texts, the first half of this chapter will assess the ongoing influence of Woolf on literary representations of London. Sommerfield was a Communist when he wrote May Day, but four years after leaving the Party as part of the mass exodus of its intelligentsia in 1956

196

London in Contemporary British Fiction

he published North West Five (1960), a story of the complications surrounding the growing love between a young white working-class couple, Dan and Liz. Despite the half century between North West Five and NW, the geographical disparity between the former’s Kentish Town setting and the latter’s Willesden and Kilburn locations, and the ethnic differences between the novels’ respective protagonists, there are nonetheless interesting correspondences between the two works. What strikes the present-day reader more than anything else about North West Five is its implicit faith in the future, which is related to electronics, telecommunications and Dan’s love of science fiction. In Smith’s NW, while such a science-fictional belief in the future does persist in the mind of one of the protagonists, Felix, it is brutally extinguished as he is stabbed to death in the street. Therefore, while Smith’s female characters, Leah and Natalie, represent the metaphorical descendants of Sommerfield’s Liz, a working-class girl who has qualified as a librarian, the equivalent masculine line of descent is rendered as dysfunctional in the progression between the novels. The second half of this chapter focuses on these disjunctions in gender and class experience, revealed both by and between the two novels in order to suggest that such social changes are key to understanding what has happened to London over the past fifty years.

Intersubjective exchange on the streets of London On the surface, NW appears to be a rambling narration following the stories of Leah, of Irish descent, and Keisha (who later changes her name to Natalie), of Jamaican descent, both from the fictional Caldwell housing estate, up to a point of crisis in their married lives. However, as Wendy Knepper explains, ‘the novel eschews chronology in favour of a spatially coherent account of events’ featuring its NW locations (117). Philippa Thomas describes this setting as claustrophobic and exhausting, referring to the brutality of Kilburn’s skyline and the cloying lower-middle-class ‘pretensions of the posher bits of Willesden’, before complaining that ‘we rarely get out of this two-mile square of the city for long’ (267). Yet in failing to see beyond these horizons, hemming in the characters, Thomas is unable to see the novel as anything other than a ‘counsel of despair’ (273). Rather, as Knepper argues, the sequence of seemingly random encounters serves to open up an otherwise hidden set of networks and connections that extend beyond the city’s surface appearance to an otherwise submerged intersubjective London, which might still harbour an historical agency that otherwise appears lacking in contemporary life:



Common People

197

In the first part of the narrative, Michel (Leah’s husband) views a television report about a stabbing which has taken place on Albert Road. The details about the man, named Felix Cooper, and his life in Garvey House project in Holloway and Kilburn do not concern him (80), but the outbreak of violence in the neighbourhood does because it bears on his own recent encounters in NW. This ‘minor’ event takes centre stage in the next section, entitled ‘Guest’, which tells the story of the events leading up to Felix’s stabbing. In ‘Crossing’, Natalie and Nathan meet a roadblock and are forced to detour because an unnamed man (Felix) has been killed on Albert Road. ‘Visitation’ reveals important information concerning the slaying of Felix, gained during her traipse through NW. The novel ends with a call to the police to identify the murderers of Felix. Because the novel buries its dead in spatial references and disrupted chronologies, the crime story is challenging to piece together on a first reading. The reader is therefore prompted to revisit the narrative: to navigate Smith’s revisionary late modernist aesthetic in order to make sense of the multiple routes that converge on the scene of the crime. (117–18)

This analytical summary reveals the series of links between Natalie and Felix which criss-cross the text. At the climactic moment of the novel, however, Natalie does not kill herself by jumping off the ‘Suicide Bridge’ over the Archway. Although, as will be discussed below, the resolution of the novel is more complex, on one level what happens symbolically in NW is that Felix dies so that Natalie can live. In this respect, Smith is drawing on the structure of Mrs Dalloway, in which it is the death of Septimus Warren Smith that allows Clarissa Dalloway to live: ‘She felt somehow very like him – the young man who had killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away while they went on living’ (158). Given that the same-sex desire between Natalie and Leah resonates with that between Clarissa and Sally Seton in the earlier novel, it is apparent that there are clear correspondences between NW and Mrs Dalloway. Sommerfield’s May Day also employs the structures and techniques of Mrs Dalloway by, for example, switching between different people seeing the same aeroplane to portray a cross section of London’s population across the rhythms of the three days leading up to May Day in an unspecified year in the 1930s. The novel begins with James Seton, a seaman returning from sea, and follows his progress up the Thames to London before segueing into the point of view of his brother, John, who is getting up in order to travel to work as a carpenter at Langfier’s factory. In the closing climactic scenes, following the factory workers’ walking out on strike and joining a huge May Day demonstration, James is killed by being struck on the head by a policeman while John becomes one with the revolutionary masses:

198

London in Contemporary British Fiction

The workers seethe around the base of the [Marble] Arch like an angry sea, and the noise comes up to the men at the top like the sound of a storm as James’s flag-draped body is held up and saluted by a hundred thousand clenched fists raised in the air, a hundred thousand shouts of ‘Red Front’. (240–1)

The implicit message of May Day might be taken to be that the individualism represented by James – the rootless sailor – has to die so that collective protest can take the class struggle forward. However, the two brothers can also be related to Sommerfield’s personal history. The son of a newspaper editor, he attended University College School in Hampstead as the contemporary of Stephen Spender and Maurice Cornforth. Unlike his peers, though, Sommerfield left school at 16 and worked variously as a carpenter’s labourer, a stage manager, and even in the financial offices of Wall Street, before going to sea in the late 1920s, working as a dish-washer for the United Food Freight Lines, sailing between New York, Buenos Aires, the West Indies and Liverpool. These experiences informed his first novel, They Die Young (1930), which ends as May Day begins with a sailor returning to London. Between the publication of the two novels, however, Sommerfield joined the Communist Party. Therefore, on one level, James, the sailor, may be seen to represent the individualistic tendencies of Sommerfield’s past, and his death at the end of the novel symbolizes the ascendancy of Sommerfield’s new collectivist outlook, embodied in the skilled, unionized factory worker, John. This type of fictional working-through of his own biography is a feature of Sommerfield’s oeuvre and, in fact, is foregrounded more self-reflexively in both They Die Young and his last novel, The Imprinted (1977) (see Hubble 2012). One could argue that the reworking of biography is common to many if not most writers, but the particular model of killing off one character, representing certain elements of identity, in order that another may live is rarer and, therefore, its recurrence across the three novels here does represent a significant point of comparison. As Thomas implies, NW is a working-through of Smith’s own complex background, even incorporating a parallel to her choice of changing her name from Sadie ‘to Zadie at fourteen’ (272). In the case of Mrs Dalloway, Hermione Lee notes that Woolf ’s thoughts, as recorded in her diary, switched immediately from the writing of the last words of the novel to Katherine Mansfield, who had recently died (see Lee 400), the implication being that the otherwise rather staid Woolf is liberated by being able to take on Mansfield’s bohemian and cavalier attitude to the streets of London as a site of liberation. Such freedom of the streets is registered through Mrs Dalloway’s depiction of the crowds of young workers going to the cinema in the evenings,



Common People

199

which, as I suggest in ‘ “The Freedom of the City”: Mansfield and Woolf ’, aptly demonstrates ‘how the emergence of a modern mass society had transformed Britain utterly by the 1920s: a “shift in the whole pyramidal accumulation which in [Peter’s and Clarissa’s] youth had seemed immovable” (Woolf 2000: 137)’ (para. 9). This emergence of a modern mass society, transforming fictional representations of London from a place described from the viewpoint of nineteenth-century bourgeois subjectivity to a space of limitless intersubjective possibility, is alluded to by Woolf ’s famous claim in Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown (1924) that ‘on or about December 1910 human character changed’ (4). In Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats (1995), Michael Tratner observes: Woolf ’s choice of December 1910 also alludes to a specific event in political history: that was the date of the last election won by the Liberal Party, the last election in which the Labour Party was only a minor third. Since there were two elections that year, the month is significant. The change in human relations she specifies includes, then, a quite precise change in political relations, a shift to a contest between Labour and Conservative rather than between Liberal and Conservative Parties: after 1910, the working class left its obscurity and began to read and write and exercise its own genius in public, in Parliament. The rise of the Labour Party was a major topic in the Woolf household while she wrote ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ in 1924 because that was the year the Labour Party (including her husband as an MP) had its first opportunity to organise a government. (54–5)

In this context of working-class agency having fully emerged in London, it was not surprising that a novel about London like May Day should eventually appear. In his January 1937 review of the novel for Left Review, Jack Lindsay suggested that ‘the real protagonist of the tale is the London working-class’ (quoted in Laing: 147). However, this is a reductive judgement in that it suggests that anyone not recognizably working class in the novel is an antagonist, whereas the tendency of the novel is actually to depict London as linking its inhabitants together. The novelist John King, who is one of the founders of London Books, an independent publisher which brought out the 2010 edition of May Day, has written about how the novel ‘has its roots in working-class east London, but it also shows the bosses in and around Hyde Park before dipping back into the humble streets of west London’ (King 2013: 113). King notes how following the First World War there was a movement across London where people from the East End moved across to the new houses being built in the west: I found this in the stories of older people I knew growing up, who were born in Hounslow in the 1920s, their parents coming from Hackney, Poplar, East

200

London in Contemporary British Fiction

Ham. So maybe east and west London aren’t as far apart as they have seemed in my lifetime, and this is reflected in the fact that one of the main characters in May Day, John Seton, lives near the Harrow Road but works at the Carbon Works. It is only really the power of the West End that divides these two sides of London. (ibid.)

Viewed from this present-day context, Sommerfield’s representation of the fluidity of London demonstrates how the city has the potential to function as the physical manifestation of a type of social being in which the traditional markers of class and gender cease to be of particular importance. In May Day there is a correlation between the actual London and an imaginary literary London in which the symbolic order is dissolved and reshaped: London extends itself round the grey-silver curling worm of the river like some sprawling monster. The million sounds of machinery and voices and laughter, of traffic and typewriters and hammers and saws, of dogs barking and the cries of birth and death, the sounds of music and bicycle bells and pigeons cooing, blend together and rise into the air, varying in tone from hour to hour, the monster’s breathing. The rhythm is unchanged; the face of things is unaltered: the ferment works within. Only in those invisible spider’s-web lines in time and space that mesh lives with material objects is there a change. It is the shape of these patterns that fashions and records history. (160)

This idea of an amorphous, intersubjective city that is in itself a living thing forms part of a wider tradition of London writing, including Woolf, Smith and also King’s own fiction. For example, Ruby, the working-class nurse protagonist of White Trash (2001), is able to evade police pursuit by merging into the classless, gender-less, intersubjective fabric of London: she’s out in the open on a main road and this is their last chance, if they can get a van down here now they’ll have her, but she’s moving through other shapes, she has no face, sex, age, the man on the monitor doing his best not to mix her up, and there’s three pubs up ahead with at least a hundred people standing outside drinking, and she goes into the first one […] it’s the pub across the road where she’s meeting the others, in half an hour, so she goes back out and strolls over, looking into the night sky as a police van passes at street level, packed with armour and frustrated police who aren’t about to steam into a busy pub chasing shadows, they probably think they’re after a young man with a shaved head, or a ponytail, one of the stereotypes, already people are waving at the van, things



Common People

201

are tense and they withdraw, the chopper peeling away, giving up, they’ve lost a dangerous criminal and Ruby’s safe with the masses, orders a drink that smells of raspberries and is laced with vodka, the bottle icy cold, the taste sweet on her tongue. (14–15)

The gender confusion in this extract from King highlights how participating in this intersubjective mass is a form of social being that does not prioritize either bourgeois or masculine viewpoints. However, as Ronald Paul argues in ‘ “A big change”: Intersectional Class and Gender in John Sommerfield’s May Day’: Despite this emphasis on the collective, there is nevertheless a concern with the development of individual consciousness, not least politically, in the novel. The combination of character voices is not amorphous; there is a tangible sense of conflicting personal interests, which, I would argue, is primarily associated with the female characters. They are the ones who form a connecting narrative throughout the story, which is characterised by their experience of having to live both under patriarchy and capitalism. It is, moreover, this complex intersectional web of gender and class, of action and reaction among the women that gives the novel its particular dynamic. (123–4)

Whether Sommerfield is writing of the young women workers in the factory ‘wasting away in metal peelings’ and doomed to be replaced at twenty-one ‘by a fresh bunch of schoolgirls’ (49), or the thousands of typists in the capital, he evokes the dreams and desires of otherwise ‘incommunicable private lives and thoughts’ (135). Even as he seems to imply that these lives will amount to no more than ‘drab, cheerless destinies’ (49), his narrative cuts to Ivy Cutford, the Communist, who will provide the ‘class leader[ship]’ that will transform those dreams and desires into ‘revolutions’ (50). It is Ivy who subsequently leads the deposition to the men that triggers the strike at the culmination of the novel. However, we also experience Ivy’s journey home from a political meeting to her ‘lonely little room [… and her] longing to be desired’ (111). As I have argued in ‘John Sommerfield and Mass-Observation’: Her private feelings of discontent are linked to those of another seven or eight million Londoners lying in their beds or looking out of their windows. May Day is interesting precisely because it does recognise the kind of individual dissatisfaction that features in modernist texts, like the early stories of Katherine Mansfield for example, but, unlike modernist texts in general, it seeks explicitly to relate the uncertain intersubjective relationships underpinning such dissatisfaction to the capitalist production process. (141)

202

London in Contemporary British Fiction

In this respect, Sommerfield identifies the same opportunities for liberation generated in London by the new twentieth-century working-class agency that are uncovered in Mrs Dalloway, but he goes on to demonstrate that it requires collective action in order to make those possibilities universal. As Stuart Laing argues, Sommerfield is unlike most ‘modern chroniclers of the city’ in that he is not trying to make his readers ‘share any sense of isolation or disconnection that the characters may feel’ but rather to make them aware of all the ‘connections and relations’ open to everyone (149). In this, he was continuing the example set by Woolf, by emphasizing a liberating shift from bourgeois subjectivity to an intersectional intersubjectivity. A similar structural approach persists in Smith’s NW, but, as discussed, here it is buried deeper in the text as a mystery to be unearthed by the reader, without which, as we have seen, the novel appears as little more than, in Thomas’s words, a ‘counsel for despair’. The second half of this chapter relates this changed state of affairs to a rise and fall in working-class agency across the post-war period.

Ordinary people in the future While Sommerfield embraced modernism is a default mode for representing the uncertainties of life after the First World War, it is clear that following his experiences with the Communist party – as well as subsequently in Mass Observation and the wartime RAF (see Hubble 2012) – he melded his style to the apparent certainties of the emergent collectivist sense of society that became the basis for the 1945 political settlement. This did not mean that he simply changed to a realist style. In fact, his work retains a tendency towards cinematic techniques of montage, framing and cutting between scenes. However, his perspective switched from writing as someone outside the dominant norms of society to writing as someone within a new, collective, society. Therefore, after 1945, he was not seeking to use experimental form to estrange a traditional, hierarchical order and highlight the possibility of rupture and change. Instead he was trying to normalize the new order and show that rupture is not needed for change because, to quote from his wartime story ‘The Worm’s-Eye View’ (1943), ‘the past was dead, the future would be as we made it’ (34). Despite having left the Communist party by then, Sommerfield still held to this normative post-war position at the time of writing North West Five, as can be seen from the opening of the novel, which transposes the wartime debate concerning how good things will be after the war to a group of men on National Service, including the novel’s main protagonist, Dan.



Common People

203

Dan is keen to get back home to London but he has to contend with the cynicism expressed by fellow squaddie, Jackson, as to whether society at home really is new and better: ‘being a chippy in the building trade’s pretty much of a dead loss, no-prospect type of job too, you know. But I don’t care, all I want is to be a civilian again and live like an ordinary human being’. […] ‘I never had much of that anyway,’ Jackson said. ‘I tell you something, Kentish Town on a wet Sunday afternoon looks a lot different from here to how it’ll seem when you’ve been back there a few months’. (7)

The fact that the novel ends with a defiant vision of Kentish Town on a wet Sunday afternoon that is linked to the protagonist’s happiness confirms that Sommerfield still believed at the beginning of the 1960s in the promise of post-war Britain as a state that could meet the needs and reflect the interests of the working class: Outside the rain came down steadily, pattering on the slates, spattering the window-panes, and gurgling in the gutters. Miles and miles of wet grey roofs gleamed dully under a low grey sky, and church bells were ringing. It was a wet Sunday in Kentish Town, London, N.W.5. (220)

However, the novel does not obscure the fact that there is a class struggle going on in post-war Britain, but rather suggests that this struggle can be won to enable continued progress. This is reflected in the following passage, in which Dan is talking to Liz, the librarian, whom he will court and then marry during the course of the novel: ‘How did you come to work in the library?’ ‘I got a scholarship and studied it. I’ve always been fond of books, ever since I was little.’ ‘I like reading, too,’ Dan said enthusiastically. ‘Space fiction,’ she said, in a voice that showed no respect for this type of literature. ‘Those I fetched back to the library were [my brother] Sid’s. But I do read space fiction, though …’ Planets, suns, constellations, whole galaxies circled inside his head; gigantic space-ships, products of a science compared with which our present-day knowledge seemed hardly out of the stone age, ripped through the cosmos, and their crew experienced fantastic vicissitudes on stars with nightmare landscapes and superhuman inhabitants. The perspectives of Welbeck Road, unearthly under sodium vapour lights, stretching ahead of them

204

London in Contemporary British Fiction

long and empty, led towards unknown worlds a thousand light years away. Liz didn’t know about any of this, however, and he found it hard to communicate his enthusiasm. (33–4)

Here, progress is represented in two ways. First, Liz’s attainment of the job of librarian reflects a post-war culture in which grammar schools and scholarships opened up possibilities for working-class children, especially girls, to move into professions requiring qualifications. Second, from Dan’s perspective, the future promises to change all the drudgery of everyday life and holds open the prospect of a utopian world to work towards. As long as he can successfully communicate this perspective to her it is possible for the pair of them to feel equal and to have an equal interest in future prospects despite the difference in educational achievement. Therefore, he continues the conversation by explaining that science fiction is not escapism but a way of imagining what life is going to be like for the working class in the years and decades ahead: ‘some of the best science fiction is about ordinary people in the future and what things will be like in a hundred years’ time’ (34). With the prospect of this technologically transformed world before them, Dan’s skilled labour is equivalent to Liz’s qualifications within the combined contexts of their shared working-class background and the collective values of post-war British society. One of the ways that Sommerfield represents this post-war context is in comparison to the insecurities of the 1930s known to older workmates of Dan, such as Slim, whom one imagines as perhaps having formerly worked at Langfier’s alongside John Seton in May Day: They had always managed somehow, and he had grown up without any experience of the sort of insecurity that Slim’s generation had known [...] Of course, there was a certain amount of violence about; people did get robbed, cheated, victimised and bashed up from time to time; every Sunday the News of the World proved how much cruelty and beastliness and suffering went on. But this didn’t alter the fact that most people in N.W.5. could rely for most of the time on not being robbed, raped, assaulted or unjustly treated. Also there was a lot of organisation to protect people – the National Health and the hospitals when they were ill, Trade Union agreements and shop stewards to see that working conditions were fair; and because times were good, getting the sack need not be a tragedy, there were other jobs to be found, and nobody need starve anyway because of the unemployment insurance. (153–4)

However, the point of the novel is not just that progress should be measured in terms of how far society has come but also that it needs to be considered in terms



Common People

205

of where it might be going to. Thus, Sommerfield criticises the Conservative slogan of ‘You’ve never had it so good’ that enabled them to remain in power throughout the 1950s and the early 1960s. Instead, he shows how much still needs to be done to progress society towards the future promised by science fiction, starting with the problem of inadequate housing: Number nine thousand, seven hundred and eighty-two on the list I’d be,’ Dan said. George looked wise and sympathetic. ‘D’you know how many new homes they’ve built in the borough since the war? Less than two thousand. Less than were blown up by the Germans. And places are falling down every year, a hell of a lot faster than they’re putting them up.’ ‘And another thing,’ Dan went on, as if anxious to prove something. ‘He said there’s about fifteen hundred families living in places that have been condemned, and they’ve all got to be moved out and houses found for them in the next few years.’ ‘But Mr Macmillan says we’ve never had things so good,’ Sid said. (159)

This is a deliberate political intervention by Sommerfield, who is keen to try and communicate the position of ordinary people caught between the ideologies of affluence and the discourse of social problems, such as youth culture, gambling or drinking. The result makes the novel read as prescriptively normative from the point of view of twenty-first century liberal sensibility: ‘People should take more notice of people like you,’ Slim said, his pale eyes screwed up with the effort of concentration. ‘But they don’t. You’ve got to be a juvenile delinquent before they bother. Dress up like an Edwardian ponce and start brawls and wave flick knives around and bust up café bars, then you’ve got problems and everybody takes notice. They write articles in newspapers, and geezers make speeches to say that flogging ought to be brought back, or it’s all a lot of psychology and everybody ought to have their heads examined. Or the world’s got to be arranged so that nobody’s frightened and lonely and then there’ll be no need to wear D. A. haircuts and kick old men in the ribs.’ (214)

However, the shared working-class values implied by Sommerfield are potentially open to all. Certainly, a similar statement of values voiced in response to the use of the loaded term ‘youth’ are framed as inclusive by Smith in NW when voiced by the white working-class socialist Phil Barnes to Felix, who is black: ‘Never the boys from the posh bit up by the park, they’re just boys, but our lot are “youths”, our working-class lads are youths, bloody terrible isn’t it?’ (99). However, the comment that ‘Felix had heard this speech many times’ alerts

206

London in Contemporary British Fiction

readers to the reality that such values no longer have much purchase in the contemporary London of the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, the fact that Felix is still happy to listen to Barnes would suggest that the fault lies not so much with the value but with the direction in which social change has taken place. While Smith’s Kilburn is a different environment to Sommerfield’s Kentish Town, there are a number of threads connecting the two novels, one being the proximity to Hampstead Heath, a curious interzone suggesting elusive pastoral possibilities. However, there is also an historical gulf lying between them caused by the collapse of the collective working-class culture that encapsulated post-war Britain in the decades immediately following the war. This lost culture haunts NW: ‘Growing up, Felix had imagined that the adult world would be full of men like Phil Barnes. That they were as common in England as wildflowers’ (NW, 94). In fact, in the twenty-first century world of NW, men like Phil Barnes are very much the exception. On one level, this is due to the collapse in the skilled manual jobs that sustained the social working-class culture of the post-war period. The sense of equivalence felt by Dan and Liz in North West Five has largely disappeared in the world of NW, as demonstrated by the gendered divergence in the fates of the kids from the local comprehensive school for the Caldwell estate. While Leah and Keisha go on to university, the boys become drifters and petty criminals. As a consequence of this gendered divide, however, the girls are also impoverished because, while like Liz in North West Five they grow up to have qualifications and careers, they have been sundered from the belief in collective progress that was supported by the steady improvement of living conditions for the working class that marked the immediate post-war decades. In NW Leah and Keisha cannot share their success with their community in the way that Liz was able to thirty years before them. They either have to abandon their community in order to achieve success beyond its bounds, as Keisha does by becoming Natalie, or sacrifice success for a role in the community, as Leah has. In contrast, Felix might appear to be aimlessly drifting through life but he does retain a science-fictional belief in the future: Still, he was glad he got to see the future. Touch and go for a while. A comicbook reader, sci-fi fan, it had always been obvious to Felix that the future would suit him. Hollywood had nothing on Felix when it came to imagining the future. He didn’t even have to go to the movies anymore, he could just walk down the street like this and see the whole damn spectacular playing in his mind. Script by Felix Cooper. Directed by Felix Cooper. Starring Felix Cooper. Anflex, my darling, how will you be getting home? Particle transfer. See you in a second, my dear Gracian. In a nanosecond. (119)



Common People

207

But, of course, Felix ends up being knifed in the street. So what is the purpose of the middle section of the book? As discussed earlier, if Felix mirrors the fate of Septimus Warren Smith as does Natalie that of Clarissa Dalloway, his death facilitates her survival too. But why does his life, of varied experience and professions, come to such an ignominious end? And what does this mean for his science fictional beliefs in the future? Later in NW, Natalie and Leah discuss why they have ‘survived’ and prospered. In thinking about what makes them different to that ‘poor bastard on Albert Road’ (292), Natalie suggests it is ‘Because we worked harder […]. We were smarter […]. We wanted to get out’ (293). There is some justification for this view, but at the same time it is very much the kind of story that people tell themselves in order to stay sane in the face of the randomness of the universe. In terms of understanding NW, though, the real problem with both agreeing with Natalie’s explanation and taking it as constituting the message of the novel is that, by the same token, such an interpretation requires reading Felix as the victim of a false belief in the future. However, that is not the sense that pertains in any careful reading of the middle section of the novel. Felix is by far and away the most sympathetic and fully realized male character in NW. It seems more appropriate, therefore, to read this section as a kind of counterfactual alternative history of post-war London, or, even, a history in which it is possible to see the traces of how the London of Sommerfield’s North West Five might have evolved differently to embrace NW’s version of the 1970s – represented by Garvey House and Felix’s childhood – by means of a world in which men like Phil Barnes would be as common as wildflowers and which would lead to the post-scarcity utopia imagined by Felix. These things never came to pass but the trace of that future which was promised to ordinary people is present in Felix’s outlook in a way that it is not in the world views of Leah, Natalie/Keisha or the boy they went to school with, Nathan Bogle. Such a utopian possibility contrasts the alienation of these two women, who, as Philip Tew indicates in ‘Will Self and Zadie Smith’s Depictions of Post-Thatcherite London: Imagining Traumatic and Traumatological Space,’ cannot find meaning in their lives: ‘Despite leaving the sink estate where they all once lived, both of these less than perfect women seem determined to test their relationships with their male partners by multiple acts of deceit, unable to name their acts or articulate the fears that animate them’ (n.p.).

208

London in Contemporary British Fiction

Conclusion NW describes a London and a Britain in which the agency of the working class which animated both modernist classics such as Mrs Dalloway and proletarian literature such as May Day has been hamstrung by the destruction of skilled male labour and the political organization that seems to have been consequent upon their continuation. While the dreams and desires of women, which were a crucial element of May Day’s revolutionary vision, are a still a societal force, as represented by the achievements of Leah and Natalie, in NW it seems starkly clear that there is no longer a common culture in which their dreams can be combined with those of men from the same background, as was the case in the early 1960s for Liz and Dan in North West Five. As Nathan points out to Natalie towards the end of their night-time traversal of the city: ‘I ain’t in your dream Keisha […]. My dream is my dream. Your dream is your dream. You can’t dream my dream’ (279). Without such a capacity for shared dreams and intersubjective exchange, modernity becomes just a sequence of moments which flit by with ever-increasing velocity, fragmentary and unsatisfactory as Leah and Natalie intuit. This alienated experience is reduced in NW to the numbered set of Natalie’s memories that constitutes the longest section of the novel, ‘Host’ (149–260). As she or, possibly, Smith reflects: At some point we became aware of being ‘modern’, of changing fast. Of coming after just now. John Donne was also a modern and surely saw change, but we feel we are more modern and that the change is faster. Even the immutable is faster. (225)

Ultimately, NW turns on the philosophical distinction between the ‘moment’, which is just the successive iterations of the now, and the ‘instant’, which encompasses all of the nature of the universe. Leah, bottle in hand, invokes Kierkegaard when discussing this at a party (176), but, later, Natalie googles the concept on her phone to discover: ‘such a moment has a peculiar character. It is brief and temporal indeed, like every moment; it is transient, as all moments are; it is past, like every moment in the next moment. And yet it is decisive’ (223). Natalie finally experiences an instant at the climactic moment of the novel, discussed earlier, when standing on the Hornsey Lane Bridge, looking out over London: ‘It was impossible to get any sense of the whole. [… ] The tower blocks were the only thing she could see that made any sense, separated from each other, yet communicating’ (281). It is a sudden, revealed vision of the intersubjective nature of the city which has become obscured over the closing



Common People

209

decades of the twentieth century. It puts Natalie back in touch with what Woolf once described in A Room of One’s Own as ‘the common life which is the real life and not of the little separate lives which we live as individuals’ (103). Felix dies, and they hand Nathan over to the police; but at the novel’s close Leah and Natalie – once again Keisha – are reconnected to the hidden intersubjective networks of London and the possibility that exists to build upon the foundation of the tower blocks which made them: ‘From this distance they had a logic. Stone posts driven into an ancient field, waiting for something to be laid on top of them, a statue, perhaps, or a platform’ (281).

Note 1 The tradition of English radicalism identified by English Communist scholars, such as A. L. Morton, as stretching from the Peasant’s Revolt through to the modern Labour movement (see Morton 1938).

Works cited Hubble, Nick. ‘ “The Freedom of the City”: Mansfield and Woolf ’. ‘Intermodern London’. Special Issue, Literary London, 7.1 (March 2009) n.p.; http://www. literarylondon.org/londonjournal/march2009/hubble.html. Hubble, Nick. ‘John Sommerfield and Mass-Observation’. The Space Between: Literature and Culture, 1914–1945. 8.1 (2012): 131–51. King, John. White Trash. London: Jonathan Cape, 2001. King, John. ‘John Sommerfield May Day’. In London Fictions. Eds Andrew Whitehead and Jerry White. Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications, 2013: 107–114. Knepper, Wendy. ‘Revisionary Modernism and Postmillennial Experimentation in Zadie Smith’s NW.’ Reading Zadie Smith. Ed. Philip Tew. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013: 111–26. Laing, Stuart.‘Presenting “Things as They Are”: John Sommerfield’s May Day and Mass Observation’. In Class, Culture and Social Change: A New View of the 1930s. Ed. Frank Gloversmith. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980: 142–60. Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. London: Vintage, 1997. Morton, A. L. A People’s History of England. London: Gollancz, 1938. Paul, Ronald. ‘ “A big change”: Intersectional Class and Gender in John Sommerfield’s May Day’. Nordic Journal of English Studies 11.2 (2012): 120–37. Smith, Zadie. NW. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2012. Sommerfield, John. May Day. (1936) London: London Book Classics, 2010.

210

London in Contemporary British Fiction

Sommerfield, John. ‘The Worm’s-Eye View’. Penguin New Writing 17. (April–June 1943): 15–34. Sommerfield, John. North West Five. London: Heinemann, 1960. Tew, Philip. ‘Will Self and Zadie Smith’s Depictions of Post-Thatcherite London: Imagining Traumatic and Traumatological Space.’ Études Britanniques Contemporaines 47 (2014): n.p.; http://ebc.revues.org/1886. Thomas, Philippa. ‘Zadie Smith NW’. In London Fictions. Eds Andrew Whitehead and Jerry White. Nottingham: Five Leaves Publications, 2013: 267–73. Tratner, Michael. Modernism and Mass Politics: Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Yeats. California: Stanford University Press, 1995. Woolf, Virginia. Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown. London: Hogarth Press, 1924. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own/Three Guineas. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993 [1929]. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. Oxford: Oxford University, Press 2000 [1925].

Index Abercrombie, Patrick 3 Ackroyd, Peter 2–4, 8, 11–12, 55, 56–7, 57–8, 62, 83–93, 96, 99, 104, 107, 108 Chatterton 95, 99, 104–7 Clerkenwell Tales, The 89–90 Life of Thomas More, The 91–2 London: The Biography 2–4, 55, 57–8 ‘London Luminaries and Cockney Visionaries’ 62, 93 Thames: Sacred River 88–9 Three Brothers 90–1 Alpers, Svetlana 97 Amis, Martin 11, 65–81 Dead Babies 77 Experience 66, 70–1 Information, The 65 Koba the Dread 66 London Fields 65, 69, 77 Money 65, 69, 74, 77 Night Train 66 Yellow Dog 11, 65–81 Anderson, Benedict 87 Arnold, Mathew 24, 29 Assman, Aleida 166 Attridge, Derek 101 Augé, Marc 115, 124 Austen, Jane 36 Emma 36 Babbage, Charles 86 Bachelard, Gaston 122 Bakhtin, Mikhail 71, 148, 149, 155, 156, 173 Bal, Mieke 101 Ball, John 195 Ballard, J. G. 1, 5, 6–7, 8, 10, 32, 54, 58, 114, 116 Crash 114, 116 Kingdom Come 7, 10 Millennium People 1–2 Barnes, Julian 95, 96, 99, 100, 107, 108 Metroland 95, 99–100

Baudrillard, Jean 40, 45–6 Beck, Henry 162 Benjamin, Walter 141 Bentley, Nick 11 Berger, John 11, 36 Bhabha, Homi 129 Blake, Willam 58, 93 Bluemel, Kristin 9 Bond, Robert 117 Iain Sinclair 121 Bould, Mark 182 Bremm, Doris 12 Buchanan, Brad 138 Byatt, A. S. 12, 95, 96, 98, 99, 102, 104, 105, 107, 108 Children’s Book, The 95 Still Life 95, 98, 102–3 Virgin in the Garden, The 95, 98, 102–3 Canning, Elizabeth 9 Carr, Edward 117 Caruth, Cathy 20, 21, 22, 29 Chatwin, Bruce 123 Childs, Peter 127, 138 Cobbett, William 9 Rural Rides 9 Cohen, Nick 36 Colombino, Laura 12 Cooper, Rich Paul 180 Corbyn, Jeremy 8 Cornforth, Maurice 198 Debord, Guy 112, 113, 116, 118, 123 Deleuze, Gilles 138 Dentith, Simon 156 Derrida, Jacques 169 Dickens, Charles 5, 93 Great Expectations 5–6 Diedrick, James 66, 76 Duncan, Carol 98 Dunn Nell 38, 47 Poor Cow 38, 47

212 Index Eade, John 2, 4 Eliot, T. S. 88 Evaristo, Bernadine 5 Fantasy 13, 122, 123, 163, 179–91 Fielding, Henry 9 Fischer, Susan Alice 11, 145, 146 Flahault, François 30 Ford, Ford Madox 9, 10, 123 Forshaw, J. H. 3 Foster, Hal 114 Foster, Norman 86 Foucault, Michel 53, 96, 171, 173 ‘Of Other Spaces’ 53, 96 France, Louise 45 Freedman, Carl 180, 192 Freud, Sigmund 167 Gaiman, Neil 13, 164, 170–2 Neverwhere 13, 164, 170–2, 173 Garapich, Michael P. 2, 4 Gilroy, Paul 188 There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack 188 Godwin, Fay 35 Greeley, Andrew 87 Guidotti, Francesca 6 Hamnett, Chris 1, 7 Unequal City: London in the Global Arena 7 Harris, Wilson 5 Harrison, M. John 190 Things That Never Happen 190 ‘Young Man’s Journey to London, A’ 190 ‘Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium, A’ 190 Head, Dominic 66, 77, 127, 129, 130 Hein, Hilde 97, 101, 107 Hill, Tobias 12, 164–7 Underground 12, 164–7, 173 Hogarth, William 93 Hubble, Nick 5, 13 Hudson, Kenneth 97 James, Cynthia 145, 155, 157 James, Henry 95 Wings of the Dove, The 95

Jenkins, Alice 161, 163, 171 Jenner, Sebastian 11 Keats, John 5 Keulks, Gavin 66, 72 King, John 8, 199, 200–1, White Trash 200–1 Kirk, James T. 188 Junglist 188 Knepper, Wendy 196 Krewani, Angela 161, 166 Laing, R. D. 60 Laing, Stuart 202 Lang, Anouk 145, 146 Latour, Bruno 61 Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time 61 Lee, Hermione 198 Lessing, Doris 5 Levy, Andrea 5, 12, 145–58 Small Island 12, 145–58 Lima, Maria Helena 155 Lindsay, Jack 199 Luckhurst, Roger 21, 22, 77 McEwan, Ian 8, 10, 17–32 Saturday 10–11, 17–32 MacFarlane, Robert 59 MacInnes, Colin 5 McLeod, John 4, 5 Malcolm, Noel 87 Malcolm-Clarke, Darja 189 Mansfield, Katherine 5, 198, 201 Marcuse, Herbert 113, 118 Maris, Emma 56 Rambunctious Garden 56 Marxism 36, 112, 113, 180–1 Mathews, Sean 136, 139 Mayhew, Henry 162 Mendlesohn, Farah 184 Meredith, George 105 Miéville, China 13, 175, 177–209 City and the City, The 185–6 Dial H 187 ‘Foundation’ 179 Iron Council 180, 187, 190 ‘Jack’ 189 King Rat 13 179, 180, 188, 189, 191

Index Kraken 184–6, 188, 189 London’s Overthrow 179 Looking for Jake 13, 179, 180, 184, 190, 191 ‘Looking for Jake’ 189 ‘On the Way to the Front’ 179 Perdido Street Station 178, 182–4, 187 ‘Polynia’ 178–9 ‘Säcken’ 179 Scar, The 187 ‘Tain, The’ 189 Three Moments of an Explosion 13, 178, 191, 192 Un Lun Dun 13, 179, 185, 186, 190, 191 Miller, Laura 39 Mirrlees, Hope 178 Lud in the Mist 178 Mitchell, W. J. T 96, 97 Modernism 111, 117, 181, 182, 199, 202 More, Thomas 91–2 Morrison, Jago 4, 5 Mullan, John 155 Müller-Wood, Anja 12 Murdoch, Iris 95 Bell, The 95 Murray, Alex 113 Recalling London 113 Naipaul, V. S. 5, 6 Mimic Men, The 6 Niedokos, Tomasz 11–12 Nieuwenhuys, Constant 112 Nunez, Sigrid 38, 39, 45 Orwell, George 10 Lion and the Unicorn, The 10 Papadimitriou, Nick 52, 55 Scarp 52 Paul, Ronald 201 Peasants’ Revolt 195 Pechey, Graham 155 Phillips, Caryl 127, 128, 136 Phillips, Lawrence 1, 5 Phillips, Mike 154 Pike, David 161, 162 Plato 163 Pleßke, Nora 12–13

213

Reich, Tova 40 Richter, Virginia 145 Rivkin, Julie 46 Rogers, Richard 86 Rosenberg, Eric 26 Rushdie, Salman 63, 134, 137 Russo, Maria 38 Ryan, Michael 46 Saltmen, Lisa 26 Sassen, Saskia 1, 3 science fiction 163, 181, 189, 196, 204, 205, 206, 207 Seel, Martin 100–1 Self, Will 5, 8, 11, 49–63 Book of Dave, The 11, 49–63 Psychogeography 53, 55, 57, 58, 60 Walking to Hollywood 57 Seltzer, Mark 18, 19, 20 Serial Killers 18 Serres, Michel 61 Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time 61 Troubador of Knowledge, The 61 Sinclair, Iain 5, 8, 10, 12, 58, 113–24 Conductors of Chaos 118 Downriver 12 Landor’s Tower 117 Lights Out for the Territory 12, 114, 116, 118, 119, 122, 123, 124 Liquid City 12, 120 London Orbital 58, 113, 114, 115–16, 119–20, 121–2, 123, 124 Smith, Ali 11, 35, 36, 38, 44–5, 47 Accidental, The 11, 35–47 Smith, Stevie 9–10 Smith, Zadie 5, 6, 8, 12, 13, 127–42, 195–7, 198, 200, 202, 205–9 NW 13, 195–7, 198, 202, 205–9 White Teeth 6, 12, 127–42 Sommerfield, John 13, 195–6, 197–8, 199–205, 206, 207 Imprinted, The 198 May Day 13, 195, 197–8, 199, 200, 201, 204, 208 North West Five 13, 196, 202–5, 206, 207, 208 They Die Young 198 ‘Worm’s-Eye View, The’ 202

214 Index Spencer, Stanley 89 Spender, Stephen 198 Stafford, Barbara 96 Stallybrass, Peter 149 Strong, Roy 102 Su, Jung 12 Suvin, Darko 181 Taylor, Charles 87 Testard, Jacques 59 Tew, Philip 2, 5, 10–11, 54, 66, 77, 81, 127, 128, 142, 207 Contemporary British Novel, The 17, 18, 22, 30, 54, 127 Thomas, Philippa 196, 198, 202 Tracy, David 87 Tratner, Michael 199 Turner, William 93 Two Fingers 188 Junglist 188 Valkanova, Yordanka 4 VanderMeer, Anne 189 New Weird, The 189 VanderMeer, Jeff 189 New Weird, The 189

Watt, Ian 7 Waugh, Evelyn 5 Wells, H. G. 10 White, Allon 149 Williams, Conrad 12, 164, 167–70 London Revenant 12, 164, 167–70, 173 Williams, Mark P. 13 Williams, Raymond 130, 136, 137, 139, 180 Culture and Society 130 Keywords 180 Marxism and Literature 136 Wodehouse, P. G. 9 Psmith in the City 9 Woolf, Virginia 5, 10, 13, 17, 20, 30, 195, 198–9, 200, 202, 209 ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ 199 Mrs Dalloway 10, 13, 17, 23, 30, 195, 197, 198, 202, 208 Room of One’s Own, A 209 Wren, Christopher 83–4 Žižek, Slavoj 2, 5, 8, 50, 62 Parallax View, The 2, 8 Welcome to the Desert of the Real 62