Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature : Writing Architecture and the Body 9781136777882, 9780415624800

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Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature

Epistemologically adventurous, insightful and rigorously researched, this highly original, nuanced and always readable study is written with panache and an originality of argument and depth of insight that puts this volume at the head of such studies. —Julian Wolfreys, Loughborough University, UK The author combines methodologies and theoretical models with ease, and the interdisciplinary nature of the book is both necessary and refreshing. — Letizia Modena, Villanova University, USA Laura Colombino’s intelligently researched and concisely written book provides timely and essential reading for anyone interested in contemporary ctions of London. —Nick Hubble, School of Arts, Brunel University, UK

This book analyses the spatial politics of a range of British novelists writing on London since the 1950s, emphasizing spatial representation as an embodied practice at the point where the architectural landscape and the body enter into relation with each other. Colombino visits the city in connection with its boundaries, abstract spaces and natural microcosms, as they stand in for all the conicting realms of identity; its interstices and ruins are seen as inhabited by bodies that reproduce internally the external conditions of political and social struggle. The study brings into focus the ction in which London provides not a residual interest but a strong psychicphenomenological grounding, and where the awareness of the physical reality of buildings and landscape conditions shape the concept of the subject traversing this space. Authors such as J. G. Ballard, Geoff Dyer, Michael Moorcock, Peter Ackroyd, Iain Sinclair, Geoff Ryman, Tom McCarthy, Michael Bracewell and Zadie Smith are considered in order to map the relationship of body, architecture and spatial politics in contemporary creative prose on the city. Through readings that are consistently informed by recent developments in urban studies and reections formulated by architects, sociologists, anthropologists and art critics, this book offers a substantial contribution to the burgeoning eld of literary urban studies. Laura Colombino is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Genoa, Italy.

Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature

1 Literature After 9/11 Edited by Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn 2 Reading Chuck Palahniuk American Monsters and Literary Mayhem Edited by Cynthia Kuhn and Lance Rubin 3 Beyond Cyberpunk New Critical Perspectives Edited by Graham J. Murphy and Sherryl Vint 4 Criticism, Crisis, and Contemporary Narrative Textual Horizons in an Age of Global Risk Edited by Paul Crosthwaite 5 Food and Culture in Contemporary American Fiction Lorna Piatti-Farnell 6 Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Approaches to Cormac McCarthy Borders and Crossing Edited by Nicholas Monk with a Foreword by Rick Wallach 7 Global Issues in Contemporary Hispanic Women’s Writing Shaping Gender, the Environment, and Politics Edited by Estrella Cibreiro and Francisca López

8 Trauma and Romance in Contemporary British Literature Edited by Jean-Michel Ganteau and Susana Onega 9 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature Writing Architecture and the Body Laura Colombino

Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature Writing Architecture and the Body Laura Colombino

NEW YORK

LONDON

First published 2013 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2013 Taylor & Francis The right of Laura Colombino to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Colombino, Laura. Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature : Writing Architecture and the Body / By Laura Colombino. pages cm. — (Routledge Studies in Contemporary Literature ; 9) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. English literature—History and criticism. 2. Human body in literature. 3. Space (Architecture) in literature. I. Title. PR149.B62C65 2013 820.9'358421—dc23 2012039788 ISBN13: 978-0-415-62480-0 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-55341-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by IBT Global.

For Pino, Franca, Barbara and Michael

Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction 1

2

3

4

ix xi 1

Modular Bodies and Architecture as Skin: J. G. Ballard (1956–1975)

24

Human Ruins and Architectural Spectres (the 1980s and Beyond)

62

Part I: Insubstantial Bodies and the City’s Organicism— Peter Ackroyd, Geoff Dyer and Michael Bracewell Part II: Ruins and Memory—Michael Moorcock and Iain Sinclair

68 86

Traumatized Subjects and Chaotic Substances: Iain Sinclair (the 1990s and the Millennium)

99

Corporeality within Abstract Space (from the 1970s to the Post-Millennial)

132

Part I: Islands and Rifts—J. G. Ballard and Geoff Ryman 134 Part II: Stages and Intersections—Tom McCarthy and Zadie Smith 150 Coda

178

Bibliography Index

181 191

Illustrations

I.1 I.2 1.1

Rachel Whiteread, House. Richard Rogers, Lloyd’s building, London, 1979–84. Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter and Alison Smithson (known as Group 6), Patio and Pavilion. 1.2 David Greene, Living Pod. 1.3 Peter Cook, Plug-In City. 2.1 Norman Foster, 30 St. Mary Axe, London, 2001–2003. 2.2 Mark Atkins, Tree Angel. 3.1 Coop Himmelb(l)au, Project: Town Town—Erdberg Office Tower, Vienna (2000/2010–).

10 23 25 31 40 65 97 107

Acknowledgements

I owe debts of gratitude to many who have contributed to my efforts in preparing and completing this book, particularly in terms of responses to my academic papers, useful suggestions in informal discussions and reviews of the project, and the recommendation of creative and critical texts. I am especially grateful to Barrie Bullen for helping me fi ne-tune the book proposal; A. S. Byatt for our live and email conversations on architecture and chaos theory; Iain Sinclair, who was kind enough to answer my questions after his talk on London Orbital at the 2008 Literary London conference in Uxbridge; Nick Hubble for his invaluable suggestions and comments on the project and extensive parts of the book. I would also like to thank Jeanette Baxter and Andrzej Gasiorek for their appreciation of parts of this work in its early stages, and Guy Mannes-Abbott, Alan Munton, Daniela Daniele, Martin Dines, Riccardo Duranti, Valentina Guglielmi, Emiliano Ilardi and Francesco Marroni for their bibliographical suggestions. Furthermore, I’m particularly thankful to Elizabeth Levine, my commissioning editor at Routledge, for recognizing the potential of the project and Eleanor Chan for overseeing the whole process. The illustrations of this book owe their appearance to those people and art galleries that generously allowed me to reproduce their works. Other individuals will recognize their own part, and I remain grateful for their willingness to offer encouragement or various amounts of their time in support of my efforts. In this context, I must mention Maria Rita Cifarelli, Luis Dapelo, Anna Giaufret, Barbara Sadler, Michael Sadler, Giuseppe Sertoli, Luisa Villa and especially Sara Dickinson. I’m indebted to the following people for the services they rendered me at their institutions: Claudio Farello, Franco Reuspi and Nadia Risso, librarians at the Department of Foreign Languages and Cultures in Genoa, and the staffs of the British Library and the University of London Library. I also want to thank my parents and parents-in-law for their extraordinary moral and material assistance. Finally, I’m especially grateful to Ilaria and Andrea, who helped me in more ways than I can enumerate: without them there’d scarcely be any point to it all.

Introduction

Central to any discussion of the city is the question of the body, claims Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space (1991, p. 162). Urban dwellers can be analysed as members of classes, economic units or social monads but fi rst of all they are embodied beings and their knowledge of the city is always pre-eminently a physical one. In contemporary discourse space has taken on the qualities of lived experience, an embodied practice performed at the point where the built environment and the body enter into relation with each other. This book brings out ways in which such an essential interaction produces, in contemporary British literature, a poetics as well as a politics of urban subjectivity, showing how the physical spaces of the city— which mirror and materialize specific political and social conditions— shape the concept of the self traversing the metropolis. The nexus of spatial and ideological approaches to the urban body plays—so I argue here—a crucial role in postmodern narratives of the city, and the aim of this study is to pursue major articulations of this connection through a focus on contemporary London writing. According to Lefebvre, bodies generate space with their gestures, movements and spatial relations. Through their perceptions and affects they make sense of a tactile and emotive terrain; through their imagination they recreate built environments as ‘loci of passion, of action and of lived situations’ (1991, p. 42). In turn bodies are produced by the urban space they inhabit. This prescribes or proscribes gestures, routes and distances to be covered; with its arrangement—which, in the contemporary city, is moulded by the power of capital and capitalism—it influences the organization of bodies, from the construction of high-rises to the geographical distribution of labour. Since the post-war years and particularly after the advent of postmodernism, the relationship between the body and the built environment has formed the material for the reflections of intellectuals and the practices of architects, artists and writers. Increasingly, as architectural critic Anthony Vidler contends, the city’s ‘contours, boundaries, and geographies are called upon to stand in for all the contested realms of identity, from the national to the ethnic; its hollows and voids are occupied by bodies that replicate internally the external conditions of political and social struggle,

2

Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature

and are likewise assumed to stand for, and identify, the sites of such struggle’ (1992, p. 167). The most recent production of neo-Situationist performers and body artists such as Marina Abramović point to the recentring of experience around corporeality, often as a strategy to halt, if only temporarily, the rhythms dictated by urban life. Contemporary literature offers further evidence of this tendency. A recent fictional exploration of the theme in American literature, for example, is Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003)—adapted for the screen by David Cronenberg in 2012—where the protagonist’s crossing of New York, whose traffic is equated metaphorically with the flow of fi nancial information, is interrupted by a performance of three hundred naked bodies lying on the street and filling a whole intersection (see DeLillo, 2004, pp. 172–76). In this episode DeLillo offers a neonaturalist description of bodily abjection, which points to the retrieval of a creatural, cosmic dimension in contrast with the increasing abstraction of economy and fi nance. All these cultural instances of a return to the real (see Foster, 1999) lend special urgency to a critical investigation of the forms that this pervasive fascination with the body has taken in postmodern literature on the city. From the mid-1980s, the emphasis on corporeality in architectural and urban studies has been mirrored in sociology and other related disciplines by a veritable explosion of interest in the body, ‘reconstructed and reimagined as a privileged site where a special kind of meaning is created and enacted’ (Schabert, 2001, p. 87). Various explanations of this interdisciplinary phenomenon have been advanced. The most widely accepted is the reaction against the pervasiveness of bodiless things—of media, telepresences and digital worlds—which has characterized the turn of the millennium, causing Arthur and Marilouise Kroker to call the last decade of the twentieth century ‘the flesh-eating 90s’ (1996, passim). Equally significant, though, is the interpretation of the concern with corporeality as a protective move against the attack at the wholeness of the self levelled by deconstruction: ‘if personal identity is reasoned away, one might like to take refuge in the body’ (Schabert, 2001, p. 112). In the context of social studies, Bryan Turner offers a further insight—which has proven vital and consequential for my analysis—relating this cultural turn to ‘the rise of a “somatic society”, by which he means “a society within which our major political and moral problems are expressed through the conduit of the human body”’; this is ‘imagined as something capable of language, and of translating abstract meanings into material signs and symbols’ (Fraser and Greco, 2005, pp. 2 and 21). Similarly, in Bodies that Matter, Judith Butler shows how signifying practices are embodied practices: the state of being in the body, she claims, is a way of acting out discursive meanings, and she calls this ‘performativity’ (1993, passim). As we will see, contemporary literature provides potent indications of this propensity for embodied knowledge. Suffice it to mention the example offered by Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), an inaugural text of British postmodernism: the pivotal conceit of

Introduction

3

the novel, which is set at the time of India’s attainment of autonomy from Britain, is that the protagonist’s corporeality becomes the site where larger political, social and ethical struggles are enacted: the body of Saleem, its narrator, and one of the children born on the midnight hour of Independence, begin [sic] to somatise the splits and schisms of the new independent state. [ . . . ] The fragile and disintegrating body is conflated with the emerging ‘unrepresentable totality’ of the new post-colonial and globalised worlds of the late twentieth century. (Waugh, 2010, p. 117) But this call for renewed attention to the body cannot be separated—and on such a conjunction this book is premised—from the contemporary spatial turn so widely discussed in the burgeoning field of urban studies. ‘What are [ . . . ] the connections between this concern with the body as an object of analysis and our understanding of the global and the city?’, wonders John Rennie Short (2006, p. 141). As shown in the following in this Introduction, Michel Foucault, Marshall McLuhan, Fredric Jameson and particularly Lefebvre have all provided invaluable insights into these relations. For now, it is sufficient to stress that their common starting point is the acknowledgement of a weakened sense of historicity in the present epoch and the attendant increasing predominance of the concepts of space, simultaneity and globalization. As Edward Soja claims in Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, ‘we are becoming increasingly aware that we are, and always have been, intrinsically spatial beings, active participants in the social construction of our embracing spatialities’ (1996, p. 1). The recognition of this new paradigm has led some intellectuals to carry out an analysis of spatial biopolitics, that is, the exertion of individual and social control over bodies through techniques such as the privatization of public space, territorial mapping and surveillance. Others have produced radical critiques where alternative, more liberating forms of spatial politics are propounded. Combining critical debate over the return of the body in architectural and literary production with studies focusing on the individual and social production of space, this book interrogates the relationship—largely neglected by literary critics—between corporeality and urban architecture, in a field, that of contemporary London fiction and non-fiction, which has recently drawn increasing attention. In some circles of academia, scholarship on the literature devoted to the British capital city is thriving, as evidenced by myriad journal articles, papers, theses and dissertations. Since 2003, Literary London Annual Conferences have been hosted by a range of London universities, boasting high attendance numbers and inviting readings of the city also in cognate disciplines, including architecture, urban sociology and painting. In British and American universities, there are masters in contemporary writing and culture which concentrate on British works

4

Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature

sometimes with a special emphasis on London; architecture masters with an interdisciplinary scope including literature can also be found, such as the MA Architectural History, Theory and Interpretation at the London MET, which devotes sections of its course to different notions of the relation between literature and architecture, explored through the works of Louis Kahn, the Smithsons, Daniel Libeskind and Coop Himmelb(l)au, but also Walter Benjamin, Homi K. Bhabha, S. T. Coleridge, John Ruskin, James Joyce, Iain Sinclair and Patrick Wright. The impressive bulk of creative works on the capital city, both past and present, guarantees an enduring interest in London literature for ages to come. Yet it makes any attempt to engage in wide-ranging discussions all but prohibitive. Even narrowing the scope to the last decades, we are faced with, and bewildered by, an unmanageable variety of texts: the urban theme recurs so frequently in so much of recent British writing that any endeavour to reach a comprehensive view is bound to failure. Hence my choice to concentrate specifically on some significant and illustrative authors and texts where the placement of the geographic or spatial involves more than a descriptive act or a mimetic attempt to transcribe our lives. The aim is bring into focus and investigate primarily the fiction in which London provides not a residual interest but a strong psychic-phenomenological grounding and where the awareness of the physical reality of buildings and landscape conditions shape the concept of the subject traversing the city. A range of authors and texts will be considered, those commonly cited alongside others usually neglected, to map the relationship of body, architecture and spatial politics in contemporary creative prose on the capital city. The writers analysed include J. G. Ballard, Peter Ackroyd, Geoff Dyer, Michael Bracewell, Michael Moorcock, Iain Sinclair, Geoff Ryman, Tom McCarthy and Zadie Smith, but their urban visions will stimulate significant comparisons also with other authors such as Ford Madox Ford, Will Self, Virginia Woolf, Patrick Wright and the fi lm director Patrick Keiller, to name but a few. Each of the main writers brought into focus is given a different emphasis according to his or her importance in the context discussed: the richness, idiosyncratic quality and significance to the field of Ballard and Sinclair account for the chapter-length analyses of their works; the relevance of the other novelists to the defi nition of the wider tendencies of an epoch, or to the investigation of themes transversal to more decades, justifies their juxtaposition and comparison within single chapters. According to Short, ‘the full exploration of the relationship between bodies and cities has yet to be achieved’ and ‘remains one of the more alluring possibilities for future urban theorizing’ (2006, p. 141). Capitalizing on the idea of the return of the body (often abject, traumatized or dismembered) in late twentieth-century culture, this book broaches the idea that through the observation of the body–space relation and the interrogation of its ideological underpinnings, a meaningful analysis of contemporary London literature can be attempted. Previous studies published in the field of

Introduction

5

late twentieth-century writing on the capital city differ substantially in their contents, aims and methodologies. Lawrence Phillips’s London Narratives: Post-War Fiction and the City (2006), for example, has a historical and sociological perspective. Compared with Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature, it is wider in scope, in that starting from the Blitz, but provides no in-depth analysis of works by writers such as Sinclair or Ballard (with the exception of High-Rise), because psychogeography and spatial politics in general are not its foremost concerns. Slightly closer in scope, Julian Wolfreys’s Writing London, vol. 2 (2004), has a distinctive textual and Derridean perspective; writers discussed include Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Maureen Duff y, Ackroyd, Sinclair and Moorcock. More compact, Merlin Coverley’s Psychogeography (2006) offers a bird’s-eye view of psychogeography’s Anglo-French origins and only a brief survey of its later London developments in Ackroyd, Ballard, Sinclair, Self and Stewart Home. Yet the contemporary London context sketched in the last chapter of Coverley’s book is a useful starting point, and my aim is to elaborate and expand upon his premises, widening the field of observation to other authors while offering close readings of significant novels, short stories and travelogues. Finally, Sebastian Groes’s The Making of London: London in Contemporary Literature (2011) traces a major shift from the writers’ shoring up of London’s myths against the ruins of the social fabric in the long Thatcher– Major years to the retrieval of more factual narrations in the urban writing at the turn of the millennium. What differentiates my analysis from previous studies is, fi rst and foremost, the methodological approach, which is interdisciplinary in various ways. Firstly, this book interrogates the transformations of London’s urban texture from post-war redevelopments to millennium architecture, to consider their ideological import and defi ne their impact on the contested realms of identity as it unfolds in literary texts. Secondly, the book explores the influence of architectural and artistic theories and practices on the writers discussed. Thirdly and finally, it is consistently informed by recent developments in urban studies and reflections on spatial politics formulated by architects, sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers and art critics. In this respect, the intent is to sustain and foster cross-pollination of various disciplines and particularly of literary and architectural studies. Ballard was the initiator of the interest in the relationship between architecture and the body in contemporary British literature. Chapter 1 is, as far as I know, the fi rst sustained consideration of how his representation of post-catastrophic dwellings was influenced by the Londonbased architectural avant-gardes of the 1950s and 1960s. The aim is to interrogate the impact on his fi ction of Archigram’s fantasies of biotechnological responsive environments and of contemporary theoretical ideas on dwelling and the city (as found in McLuhan, Reyner Banham and others). But the chapter also illustrates the continuities of his spatial poetics with major concerns of existentialist philosophy related

6

Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature

to dwelling, authenticity and the unhomeliness of the world. A strong emphasis is placed on the key architectural concept of modularity—introduced by the Bauhaus and inherited by Brutalist architecture and Pop Art—which is shown to inform transversally Ballard’s representation of corporeality, the mind and the city. Capitalizing on the fi ndings of this analysis, the chapter moves on to consider how such ideas of habitation and the city apply to three early London novels: The Drowned World (1962), where his indebtedness to British Pop Art ‘as found’ poetics is explored; Crash (1973), seen in relation to modularity and Eduardo Paolozzi’s industrial mythologies; and High-Rise (1975), investigated with reference to the posthuman and Archigram’s environments. Finally, the chapter closes by interrogating the continuities between the grammar of urban modularity and Ballard’s views on the artist’s re-invention and transcendence of reality. Part I of Chapter 2 focuses on the 1980s. In search of a Zeitgeist in the spatial politics of the London literature of this period, I have chosen to focus on three fictional works as diverse as Ackroyd’s novel Hawksmoor (1985), an illustrative example of historiographic metafiction; Dyer’s novel The Colour of Memory (1989), a celebration of lowlife in Brixton; and Bracewell’s novella on a terrorist architect Missing Margate (1988). After reconstructing the transformations of London’s urban texture in the Thatcherite era, the chapter traces the journey of these writers through the ruins of the city’s changing landscape. In their works the vagrancy caused by high unemployment rates and the pervasive rubble of the daily destruction of council houses become—so I argue here—powerful literary metaphors for the impermanence of the human condition and the voracious metabolism of the city. The sense of estrangement from an increasingly unrecognizable and alienating urban landscape is shown to redouble uncannily in the representation of the subject’s estrangement from its own body. The chapter tackles the riddle of the intensely masochistic or nihilistic drives shared by the three works, trying to make sense of their insistent representation of the body’s incorporation into the formless substance of the capital city as well as their protagonists’ craving for some kind of mystic or surreal transfiguration. The second half of the chapter considers the overcoming of this sense of impotence through the regenerative powers of the writer’s memory and imagination. Illustrative works by Moorcock and Sinclair are analysed, where bodies and minds, strained or even in pain, pursue the aim of embodying the complex but intensely poetic forces of the city. In this connection, the impact of chaos theory on both writers is interrogated. Chapter 3 is devoted to Sinclair’s major fictional and non-fictional works. It investigates the interaction between two spatial modes: a capitalist and alienating London reminiscent of Jameson’s postmodern hyperspace and a cosmic capital city conceived as organic substance. The two modes imply a redefi nition of the writer’s identity as both the

Introduction

7

subject of trauma and the conductor of the chaotic natural dynamics of the city. One of my contentions is that Sinclair transforms politics into a highly individual, psychophysical experience, where corporeal trauma and abjection function as tangible evidence of the hostile forces of the city—fi nancial, political, religious. My investigation aims at disclosing the reasons behind this redefi nition of the subject (and its solitary politics) under the auspices of trauma and the motivations of this knowledge of the landscape through its somatization. Sinclair’s voracious walks, the images of visceral bodies as well as the opposed ones of ghostly insubstantiality are discussed in relation to the issues of urban surveillance, complexity and informational overload. The fi nal section of the chapter proposes a psychosomatic reading of Sinclair’s love of the arcane, analysing its anthropological and shamanistic aspects with reference to Marc Augé, Mircea Eliade and Marcel Mauss. Chapter 4 brings together an update of developments, circling back to Ballard. The accounts of Ryman and McCarthy reveal how 1970s concerns with the ‘non-places’ (Augé, 1992) of modern cities—which, for the early Ballard, were synonymous with post-war functional architecture—morph, at the turn of the millennium, into concerns with the city reimagined through information technologies and reconfigured by globalization. A path is charted from Ballard’s early representation of London as a ‘machine for living in’, in Le Corbusier’s celebrated definition (1924, p. 151), to McCarthy’s post9/11 understanding of the capital as part of global dynamics and traumas, a point on a grid. Questions are raised concerning the body’s negotiations with abstract spaces in these writers. Why do Ballard’s Concrete Island (1973) and Ryman’s 253 (1996) need to enact violent chance transgressions of the system through islands of being wedged within it? And what is the significance of McCarthy’s intensely physical and gruesome urban theatres of alienation and ritual embodiment in Remainder (2005)? The chapter devotes its energies to the interrogation of physical pain as an instrument these writers use to attain the rematerialization of bodies and space. The spatial politics enacted in these works are further illuminated through a comparison with analogous practices in art and architecture, from Georges Bataille’s anti-architecture to Peter Eisenman and Jacques Derrida’s project for the Parc de la Villette in Paris, from Archizoom’s No-Stop City to experiments in performance, body art and constructed situations such as those by Abramović and Tino Sehgal. The end of Chapter 4 brings to a close the exploration of abstract spaces, this time considered in relation to Smith’s novel White Teeth (2000). Her treatment of the postcolonial city is placed in the context of millennium London and its architecture. The main focus is on her deconstruction of the neutral spaces produced by the liberal discourse of multiculturalism, which are revealed to be instrumental in concealing and justifying exclusion. But an equal attention is devoted to her emphasis on the semantic significance of circumscribed spaces and fixed locations—houses in particular—whose importance takes over from the effects of drifting predominant in contemporary London literature.

8

Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature

Smith’s domestic focus suggests that any treatment of the interaction between the body and the built environment entails questions about the inner and the outer. For this reason, my exploration of contemporary London literature will acknowledge not only new conceptions of corporeality and the urban space, but also the changing relationships between private and public spaces, interiors and exteriors. As we will see, houses and other enclosed spaces are often conceived as sensitive membranes, where exchanges take place between the inside and the city outside; but they can also work as metaphors of the body itself or, alternatively, as microcosmic projections of the larger metropolis.

GASTON BACHELARD AND MARSHALL MCLUHAN In The System of Objects (1968), Jean Baudrillard claims that post-war interior design determined a fundamental shift in the way home was conceived. Prior understandings of furniture and decoration, he argues, had revolved around the haunting human ‘presence’ they seemed to emanate, the sense of the domestic space as moulded by a certain lived experience and hence replete with unique symbolic overtones: Such furniture, Baudrillard suggested, was characterized by its permanence and monumentality, arranged almost theistically to facilitate the rituals of orthodox daily life. It was a solid reflection of the patriarchal structures of the family that it served, while at the same time it embodied those relationships as an organic extension of the bodies that dwelled there. Ultimately, argued Baudrillard, the traditional interior was understood as a form of material reification, an organic ossification of certain domestic practices that embedded daily life within a complex structure of affect and experiential depth. (Hornsey, 2010, p. 212) Le Corbusier’s modernist project proposed to consign to oblivion these cluttered interiors, with their moral resonance and overburdening sense of the past: ‘if no cranny was left for the storage of the bric-a-brac once deposited in damp cellars and musty attics, then memory would be released from its unhealthy preoccupations to live in the present’ (Vidler, 1992, p. 64). In Earth and Reveries of Repose, which appeared in French in 1948, Gaston Bachelard is adamant in his rejection of Le Corbusier’s modern apartments: ‘I do not dream in Paris, in this geometric cube, in this cement cell, in this room with iron shutters so hostile to nocturnal subjects’ (cited in Vidler, 1992, p. 65). In an age of so much homogenized space, Bachelard wants to demonstrate that interior places can and should be poetry, and he does so by writing one of the most appealing and lyrical explorations of home, The Poetics of Space, published in French in 1958. The book shows that our perception of domestic spaces, from cellar to attic, shapes our thoughts,

Introduction

9

memories and dreams. For him, we do not live in the uniform and empty space postulated by the existentialists but in one thoroughly tinged with qualities and possibly thoroughly imaginative as well. In a lecture titled ‘Of Other Spaces’, delivered in March 1967 and published in French in 1984, Michel Foucault summarizes Bachelard’s spatial concept as follows: The space of our primary perception, the space of our dreams and that of our passions hold within themselves qualities that seem intrinsic: there is a light, ethereal, transparent space, or again a dark, rough, encumbered space; a space from above, of summits, or on the contrary a space from below of mud; or again a space that can be flowing like sparkling water, or space that is fixed, congealed, like stone or crystal. (1986, p. 23) The house is not just the functional container conceived by Le Corbusier but, more profoundly, a shelter for imagining. As we will see, Bachelard’s intense focus on the poetry of domestic intimacy will be superseded by other influential conceptions of space, from the almost contemporary psychogeography of Guy Debord, with its interest in the larger affective terrain of the city, to the constructed and anonymous spaces of postmodernity later described by Jameson. But although abandoned by spatial theorists altogether, Bachelard’s conception of space continues to exert its influence on literary imagination. In particular, his poetics of the elements, especially water, inspires the liquidity and dreaminess which guide Sinclair’s transfigurations of London’s landscape. Even more to the point, at the end of the Thatcherite era, the interest in imaginative domesticity resurfaces in works such as Michael Moorcock’s Mother London (1988), as a response to the alienating experience of modern high-rise living. Yet, in this new historical context, the image of the house is retrieved in the desiccated form of few survived, highly symbolic objects, ruins of a disappeared past which function as powerful devices of collective memory. Vidler helps us grasp the sense of this transformation: this housecleaning operation produced its own ghosts, the nostalgic shadows of all the ‘houses’ now condemned to history or the demolition site. Once reduced to its bony skeleton, transformed out of recognition into the cellular fabric of the unité and the Siedlung, the house was itself an object of memory, not now of a particular individual for a once-inhabited dwelling but of a collective population for a neverexperienced space: the house had become an instrument, that is, of generalized nostalgia. (1992, p. 64) In this connection, artist Rachel Whiteread’s sculpture House (Figure I.1) is an excellent case in point. This controversial work (realized in October 1993 and destroyed only three months later) was located in the East End of London to commemorate the previous demolition of local Victorian terraced houses and, with them, of a whole community. Erected in the same

10

Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature

place where the original building stood (193 Grove Road), House was the concrete cast of one of the disappeared houses and materialized the trace of its interior. In Vidler’s view, the sculpture was illustrative of postmodernism’s tendency to replace the past with ‘the signs of its absence, perhaps, in the process, engendering a house more truly haunted than that of modernism, but, for all this, hardly a more comforting or stable entity’ (1999, p. 66).

Figure I.1 Rachel Whiteread, House. © Rachael Whiteread. Photographed by Sue Omerod 1993.

Introduction

11

But let us return to Bachelard. His emphasis on domesticity as the condition for the essence of the human being to unfold is questioned by McLuhan. Inspired by Lewis Mumford, who, ‘in his The City in History, considers the walled city itself an extension of our skins, as much as housing and clothing’ (McLuhan, 2001, p. 51), he makes a strong case that an organic relationship connects people to their living spaces. Mumford believes that, in the physical design of cities, economic functions should be secondary to the relationships with the natural environment; he propounds the idea of the city as a product of the earth and a fact of nature, deriving this notion from the village measure prevalent in Ancient Greek cities. A theorist of communication, McLuhan bends this organicist principle to his own purposes, claiming that ‘This biological approach to the man-made environment is sought today once more in the electric age’ (2001, p. 106). Traditionally, he argues, the city has been regarded as ‘a collective shield or plate armor, an extension of the castle of our very skins’ (p. 374). This membrane—be it the house, the city or even clothing—is constantly engaged in negotiating potentially stressful stimuli, from within and without: ‘the city was formed as a kind of protective hide [ . . . ] at the cost of maximized struggle within the walls’ (p. 107). In this connection, he resorts to the biological metaphor of the organism’s attempt to maintain equilibrium in conditions of inner or outer stress or trauma. The inhabited space is a like a biological entity which, he suggests, ‘responds to new pressures and irritations [ . . . ] always in the effort to exert staying power, constancy, equilibrium, and homeostasis’ (p. 107). He is persuaded that technological tools play a major role in strengthening our power to counteract stressful stimuli: ‘it was amidst such irritations that man produced his greatest inventions as counter-irritants. These inventions were extensions of himself by means of concentrated toil, by which he hoped to neutralize distress’ (p. 107). Technologies (such as radio and television) establish long-distance connections for the potentially immobile individual of the new electric age; a subject conceived pre-eminently as a ‘central nervous system’ (p. 4) connected through communication technologies to the electronic global village (see McLuhan, 1964, p. 517). According to McLuhan, this new condition implies that the human being is now capable of transcending and expanding the confi nes of his or her body in space: The immediate prospect for literate, fragmented Western man encountering the electric implosion within his own culture is his steady and rapid transformation into a complex and depth-structured person emotionally aware of his total interdependence with the rest of human society. (2001, p. 56) As we will see, this sense of the psychophysical relationship with the whole of humankind and the biological approach to the man-made environment exert a powerful influence on contemporaries such as Ballard, but a lasting impact can also be detected in later writers such as Sinclair.

12

Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature

(POST)MODERNIST INTERIORS AND THE CITY Equally consequential, although not ascribable to him alone, is McLuhan’s questioning of the traditional view of the house as a screen used to frame personal memories, a physical barrier between the interior and the exterior. As Lefebvre points out, we have been accustomed to presume that ‘the sphere of private life ought to be enclosed, and have a fi nite, or finished, aspect. Public space, by contrast, ought to be an opening outwards’ (1991, p. 147). In the disruption of this spatial truism, though, lie the very foundations of the postmodern experience of the built environment. To bring into focus this transformation I will contrast it with the modernist treatment of the relationship between domesticity and the city. An intriguing early twentieth-century exploration of the theme and fi ne example of modernist fl ânerie can be found in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’ (fi rst published in 1927; a revised version was printed posthumously in 1942). The essay opens with the description of the bourgeois interior of the protagonist and narrating voice, a space redolent of her history and ‘the secrets of [her] soul’ (1993, p. 71). So much so that her own self-defi nition seems to depend upon the familiar objects and indelible traces of the past that surround her—from a burnt ‘brown ring on the carpet’ (p. 71) to the Italian ‘china bowl’ (p. 70) on the mantelpiece—as if the self, too tenuous and fl imsy, were in need of material items (exhaling immaterial memories) in order to confi rm its existence. In stark opposition to this interior, the urban adventure signalled by the title consists in venturing outside the furnished space of the inner world and into the urban environment: But when the door shuts on us, all that vanishes. The shell-like covering which our souls have excreted to house themselves, to make for themselves a shape distinct from others, is broken, and there is left of all these wrinkles and roughnesses a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye. How beautiful a street is in winter! (p. 71) In the city the soul can ‘become part of the vast republican army of anonymous trampers’ (p. 70), delving—temporarily and fleetingly—into the abysses of the physical and psychological miseries of other souls or, even more dangerously, encountering past (dead) versions of itself through powerful dislocations in time. Yet the essay circles back reassuringly to the original domestic space with the protagonist’s return to her house—‘it is comforting to feel the old possessions, the old prejudices, fold us round’ (p. 81), she suggests—so that the integrity of her self will fi nally be regained. The safe abode of interiority (the comforting and stabilizing furniture of idiosyncratic personality) is always there to return to after the ramble has split the observer prismatically and perilously into multiple selves. Indeed, this conclusion seems to confi rm Jürgen Habermas’s claim in ‘Modernity—An

Introduction

13

Incomplete Project’ that in spite of the avant-gardes’ daring experimentations with fragmented visions, a deep nostalgia for the lost coherence and wholeness of vision traverses modernism (see 1985, p. 5). In Woolf’s essay the modernist drifter leaves not just her identity but also her own corporeality behind to turn into an ‘enormous eye’ (1993, p. 71) with its decarnalized perception (the haunting suggested by the title), so that, rather than venture into physical involvement, her adventure may stay within the confi nes of perception while her investigation revolves preeminently around epistemological issues (contrariwise, in Brian McHale’s view, ‘the “dominant” of postmodernist fiction is ontological’ [Elias, 1993, p. 12]). In the essay the entropy and misery of life, and the unattractive human substance incarnated by ‘the humped, the twisted, the deformed’ have been ‘given [ . . . ] the slip’ (Woolf, 1993, pp. 74 and 71) and safely subsumed in the mesmerizing phantasmagoria of the street. After all, the fl âneur is ‘a mirror as vast as the crowd itself’ (Baudelaire, 1995, p. 10), where even the subject is reflected as part of the spectacle. If we turn now to postmodern spaces, we fi nd that the separation of the inner and the outer found in Woolf is thrown into disarray. Baudrillard testifies to this major change in The System of Objects: ‘The rooms and the house themselves now transcend the traditional dividing-line of the wall, which formerly made them into spaces of refuge’ (2005, p. 19). Lefebvre’s remarks are unequivocally in the same vein: Volumes or masses are deprived of any physical consistency. [ . . . ] all partitions between inside and outside have collapsed. [ . . . ] Thus the sense of circumscribed spaces has gone the same way as the impression of mass. Within and without have melted into transparency, becoming indistinguishable or interchangeable. (1991, pp. 146–47) It is well known that one of postmodern architecture’s subversive strategies is to place exterior elements into the interior and vice versa. The American artist Gordon Matta-Clark, for example, has created disorienting spaces by turning the inside out and conceiving the walls of domestic space as permeable and shifting. His maze-like architectures open outward to the natural and urban world and simultaneously inward to the mysterious detritus of the human interior, the scanty remains of the richer and reassuring furniture of interiority which still swathed the modernist individual. Tellingly, the essence of the subject, deprived of its protective and constitutive architectural shell, often appears in contemporary art works as evacuated from the domestic theatre. Consider, in this connection, Giuliana Bruno’s remarks on Whiteread’s House: the stories of the house constantly unfold on the wall/screen. They are sculpted in the corporeality of architexture, exposed in the marks of duration impressed on materials, inscribed on fragments of used brick,

14

Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature scratched metal, or consumed wood, and, especially, in the non-spaces. They are written in the negative space of architecture, in that lacuna where the British artist Rachel Whiteread works, casting the architectural void of everyday objects, and the vacuum of the domestic space. (2007b, p. 183)

Domestic architecture is seen as endowed with the power to capture the material trace of the dweller’s physicality and interiority, so that the disappearance of the experiential self (the form of subjectivity described by Woolf) is accompanied by its uncanny, ghostly reappearance on the very skin of architecture. Human life has been literally subsumed into space and turned into its attribute; and this transfusion is what triggers postmodern emphases on the biological (McLuhan) and intensely sensorial, haptic qualities of the built environment, both domestic and urban. This acquires that sensorial and even affective quality of which the postmodern subject, as Jameson contends, seems to have been deprived. As we will see with Ballard, the corporeal and psychic dimensions (the neural system) tend to be dislocated outside the subject who, consequently, can ‘wear’ a range of different selves by inhabiting different experiential spaces (or ‘skins’). Furthermore, far from envisaging the possibility of a reassuring shelter for the wanderer to return to, the postmodern condition condemns the fl âneur to perpetual homelessness. In so doing, it often commits his or her body to alienating or even traumatic exchanges with the city. In other words, the urban subject’s very essence is put at stake: the postmodern urban self is inescapably implicated in ontological issues, in the problematic relativity of its being, whose autonomy is repeatedly questioned by the constant, unsettling interactions of the body with the physicality of the urban scene. As Daniela Daniele claims about Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), the postmodern drifter abandons the mode of the melancholy monologue which characterized the fl âneur to experience a sort of corporeal dissolution into the space of the city, testifying to the loss of the interiority which both Charles Baudelaire and Benjamin still regarded as the observer’s separate stance and defensive space against modern reification (see Daniele, 1994, pp. 29–30). Indeed, we are not wide of the mark if we see the combination of physical involvement and self-estrangement as a main underlying motif in many of the works analysed in this book. The collapse of the barriers between the body and the city can be variously inflected. Ballard’s promiscuity of forms, for example, postulates a body whose essence can be secured and stabilized only through crystallizing collisions with the city’s architectural geometries. For Ackroyd, the reappropriation of the body from which the subject feels dissociated is enacted through its petrifaction, its absorption into stern and brooding historic buildings. Finally, Sinclair provides further examples of this

Introduction

15

unsettling interaction through both traumatic encounters and forms of surreal osmosis where urban architecture and the body are more than metaphorically conjoined.

PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY IN PARIS AND LONDON In 1654, to accompany her novel Clélie: histoire romaine, Madeleine de Scudérie published a map of her own design, the celebrated Carte du pays de Tendre. This ‘map of the land of tenderness’ is the topographic and allegorical representation of amorous conduct and visualizes, in the form of a landscape, the possible developments of a love affair. Key geographical features are presented, through pathetic fallacy, as moments of affect (e.g., the ‘lac d’indifférence’ or ‘la mer dangereuse’), inviting the users of the map to chart possible itineraries of emotion and choose their own. Significantly, the map is cited in the anonymous article ‘L’urbanisme unitaire à la fi n des années 50’ (1959), published in the journal Internationale situationniste, as an antecedent to Debord’s 1957 map of Paris entitled The Naked City (see McDonough, 2004, p. 243). The latter was produced by fragmenting the most popular map of the French capital city, the Plan de Paris, and assembling a collage of selected portions; these areas, described as ‘unities of atmosphere’ (McDonough, 2004, p. 243), appear on a blank background as distanced, discrete sections of urban landscape linked by schematic directional arrows. In McDonough’s view: The act of ‘laying bare’ the social body through the city’s architectural symbols is implicit in the very structure of the map. Freed from the ‘useful connections that ordinarily govern their conduct’, the users could experience ‘the sudden change of atmosphere in a street, the sharp division of a city into one of distinct psychological climates; the path of least resistance—wholly unrelated to the unevenness of the terrain—to be followed by the casual stroller; the character, attractive or repellent, of certain places. (2004, p. 245) Situationism mobilizes the concept of space which both Bachelard’s phenomenology and, in a diff erent way, Martin Heidegger’s Existentialism conceive in relatively static terms. For the latter space is a ghastly chaos in the Greek sense of the term, an inhospitable and inchoate wasteland—somehow imbued with inter- and post-war anxieties—against which the inhabited space stands almost as an act of resistance. But the increasing circulation of commodities generated by economic recovery at the end of the 1950s produces a more dynamic sense of space and triggers transformations also in the concept of inhabiting. As a result, Lefebvre, like Debord, chooses to study ‘the tendencies of the urban

16

Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature

units, their inertia, their explosion, their reorganization, in a word, the practice of “inhabiting”, rather than the ecology of the habitat’ (cited in McDonough, 2004, pp. 252–53). With its opening up, the dwelling place no longer screens the existentialist body from the external void nor does its space envelop the images and imagination of Bachelardian interiority. Rather, it explodes into dispersed, open and loosely connected areas; each one corresponding to the emotional response it generates while together they compound the varied haptic and emotive terrain traversed by the psychogeographer. Thus inhabiting itself is transformed from a condition spatially fi xed and given into a process generated by and coextensive with the subject’s physical movements through the city. Walking is a way of measuring distances through the conduit of the body—through its energy and fatigue, and the tension or ease of its stride—while eavesdropping conversation pieces or imagining other people’s lives, and all this in a constant solicitation of the senses (see Diasio, 2001, pp. 36–37). The publication of The Naked City was among the last actions of the International Movement for an Imagist Bauhaus, one of the many postwar artistic groups with radical political interests which originated in the wake of surrealism; the movement was soon to join with the French Lettrist International—of which Debord was the most significant leader—and the English Psychogeographical Society of London, in order to form the more lasting and influential Situationist International (SI). The poetics of this group revolved around the concept of psychogeography, a term coined by Debord to defi ne the movement’s field of investigation: the impact of the urban environment on the behaviours and emotions of the individuals traversing the city. These spatial practices took inspiration from the fl âneur described by Baudelaire and Benjamin—both locate the inception of this figure in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Man of the Crowd (1840)—and inter-war surrealist wanderers such as André Breton and Louis Aragon (see Coverley, 2006, pp. 57–65 and 72–79). Debord’s movement aimed at transforming the experience of the city, increasingly predicated in the post-war years upon Corbusian functionalism, by wandering off the beaten track and exploring marginal areas usually neglected by inhabitants and tourists alike. The passage through various ambiances and the experience of idiosyncratic trajectories were named dérive, and since the city had grown hostile to pedestrians, this random, ‘purposeless drifting at odds with the commercial traffic’ (Coverley, 2006, p. 43) became an act of subversion. From its very inception the psychogeographical project has been committed to debunking the various myths of the continuity of space. By recomposing sections of the most popular map of the French capital in a quasi-illegible way, The Naked City disrupts the panoptic illusion that the city can be presented from a totalizing perspective and offered to full view. As McDonough contends:

Introduction

17

The Paris of the Plan exists in a timeless present; this timelessness is imagined spatially in the map’s (illusory) total revelation of its object. Users of the map see the entire city laid out before their eyes; however such an omnipresent view is seen from nowhere: ‘it is in fact impossible to occupy this space. It is a point of space where no man can see: a no place not outside space but nowhere, utopic’. (2004, p. 246) From the early 1990s, partly in the wake of Augé’s theory of non-places, the blank spaces left out of the psychogeographical territories (the ‘unities of atmosphere’) have often been sensed and portrayed as rifts in the space-time continuum which is instead vouchsafed by the act of drifting. This is nowhere better expressed than in Sinclair and Chris Petit’s fi lm London Orbital (2002), where the M25 motorway is described as a sort of antimatter, producing trance-like and amnesiac states. A similar view is propounded in Self’s Psychogeography (2007), where the Heathrow– JFK fl ight interrupting the continuity of his walk from central London to Manhattan induces a state of psychophysical disconnection: ‘I was certain I would be the fi rst person to go the whole way, with only the mute, incurious interlude of a club class seat to interfere with the steady, two-mile-an-hour, metronomic rhythm of my legs, parting and marrying, parting and marrying’ (Self, 2007, p. 13). If, during the fl ight, his ‘mind reaches a vanishing point as it negligently orbits the planet’ (p. 13), his walk joining the two sides of the Atlantic seems to respond to an opposite bodily demand ‘to heel with [his] feet’ (p. 18) the vacuous rift in between. The aim, he contends, is ‘to suture up one of the wounds in my own, divided psyche: to sew together my American and my English flesh’ (pp. 13–14). Till the mid-1980s, the interest in Situationism was a minor affair in England. Among the few practitioners was Ralph Rumney. An active member at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) meetings, he is best known as the co-founder of the SI, which he joined on behalf of the London Psychogeographical Committee he had just founded. Barry Miles underscores that: In 1952 [Rumney] was one of the few voices to oppose Professor’s Buchanan’s plans for rebuilding London; a scheme which gave precedence to the car and involved cutting roads through residential neighbourhoods and building monolithic high rise blocks. Rumney wanted to apply Situationist ideas to London planning. Instead of destroying communities, he wanted a London made up of pedestrian zones: ‘I would have liked it to become a grouping together of different districts, as it was in the beginning. I thought that the main roads should be built on the periphery of the villages that made up London’. [ . . . ] In the fi fties and sixties ‘developers’ tore down the majority of the beautiful eighteenthcentury houses that had survived the Blitz. It was to be expected; this

18 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature is the nation that bulldozed Nash’s Regent Street in pursuit of money. (2010, p. 63) The revival of psychogeography at the turn of the millennium manifests itself as a literary trend with London at its centre, gaining an unprecedented impetus from the renewed assault on the architectural and social fabric of the city launched by Thatcherism. At the time of the Docklands redevelopment, when broad areas of historical London buildings were razed to the ground, the artists’ focus was placed on the East End. The grim industrial wastelands and tower blocks of the area became inhabited by eccentrics and bohemians, turning into a dynamo for cultural ferment. Phil Baker evokes the re-emergence of psychogeography and its subversive strategies at this crucial time: it flared into a higher profile at the end of the 1980s, with Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (1989) and the Situationist retrospective of 1989 at the ICA and the Pompidou Centre in Paris. The two streams of psychogeography, Situationist and Earth Mystery, fused with the founding of the London Psychogeographical Association (LPA) in 1992. [ . . . ] Essentially a far-left post-Situationist group with a penchant for pranksterism and disinformation, the LPA claimed to believe in the wilder reaches of esoteric psychogeography, from ley lines outwards. Slippery and prickley, their stance on these things was a tongue-incheek strategy against ‘recuperation’ (compare Debord’s covering his Mémoires in sandpaper) designed to make academia keep its distance. ‘We offer no attempt to “Justify” or “rationalise” the role of magic in the development of our theories; it is sufficient that it renders them completely unacceptable.’ (2003, p. 327) A prolific producer of pamphlets and novels, as well as performer of avantgarde activities, Stewart Home has retrieved the provocative spirit of the Situationists. In a set of letters and texts on Neonism called The House of Nine Squares (1997), he expresses his delight that the deadpan epistles produced by ‘the London Psychogeographical Association have been mistaken as products of “an occult group”: “This type of misunderstanding makes it much easier for us to realise our real aim of turning the bourgeoisie’s weapons back against them”’ (cited in Baker, 2003, p. 338).

THE URBAN BODY FROM LEFEBVRE TO THE DIGITAL TURN In The Production of Space, Lefebvre identifies three different but interlocking conceptions of the built environment: the space of material

Introduction

19

production (of goods and objects, and of exchange) which is ‘dictated by blind and immediate necessity’ (1991, pp. 137–38); the conceptualized space of scientists, planners, urbanists and social engineers; and fi nally the lived space (or spaces of representation) of inhabitants and users, but also and especially of artists, because the creative apprehension of the city ‘contains within itself the seeds of the “reign of freedom”’ (p. 137). This third dimension of personal, social and artistic experience—which shares the playfulness of Debord’s dérive—is twice liberating. On the economic level, it allows the body to escape the determination of production. On the experiential level, it eschews the decarnalization of the body produced by a conceptualized space which conceives the subject and the landscape as mental things. Lefebvre’s strategy, therefore, is to oppose the lived to the conceived, the physical to the metaphorical. Anticipating what would become a key issue in contemporary cultural studies, he places the body, with its spatio-temporal rhythms, fi rmly at the centre of his concerns. Lamenting the traditional betrayal and abandonment of corporeality in Western philosophy, which he sees as subdued to ‘the reign of King Logos’, he asserts confidently that a new critical theory has fi nally ‘re-embraced the body along with space, in space, and as the generator (or producer) of space’ (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 407). He makes a strong case that: Architecture produces living bodies, each with its own distinctive traits. The animating principle of such a body, its presence, is neither visible nor legible as such, nor is it the object of any discourse, for it reproduces itself within those who use the space in question, within their lived experience. (p. 137) His contention is strongly reminiscent of the thesis expounded by Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life (see 1984, pp. 91–110): drawn by the solicitations of the terrain, the subject escapes imaginary visual totalizations and instead chooses a creative and liberating opacity and illegibility. It is through this experience that recesses of ‘heightened perception’ are engendered, ‘spaces which fi rst and foremost escape mortality: enduring, radiant’ (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 137); where, it goes without saying, radiance implies the attributes of value, originality and unique event. As Soja contends in his appreciative analysis of Lefebvre’s thought, ‘Clearly an attempt is being made here to retain, if not to emphasize, the spatial unknowability, the mystery and secretiveness, the non-verbal subliminality, of spaces of representation; and to foreground the potential insightfulness of art versus science’ (1996, p. 67). But there again the secret glow of opaque spatial practices is a recurrent topos also in contemporary London writing, and the alternating fortunes of this concept will form a considerable part of my analysis. In the fiction of the 1980s, for example, we will see how the loss of radiance (of creative,

20 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature liberating energies) is often mourned, in that felt as irrevocably stifled by the bleak prospects of a body and space entirely encoded in the inauthentic language of design and fashion (see my discussion of Bracewell in Chapter 2). In the 1990s the subject’s reaction to such alienating cultural circumstances unfolds as a struggle to re-appropriate corporeality: physical hardship and pain restore the dense, opaque presence of the body, yet often confi ning experience (or event) within the limits of invisible patches in the urban environment. Radiance, then, is reinstated, yet conceived in a more subdued fashion compared to the playful one envisaged by Debord and Lefebvre: the inexorable presence of pain or abjection gives it a melancholy touch which was unknown to their homo ludens. According to Lefebvre, ‘Capitalism and neocapitalism have produced abstract space, which includes the “world of commodities”, its “logic” and its worldwide strategies, as well as the power of money and that of the political state’ (1991, p. 53). One of the most resonant images of this postmodern spatiality is John Portman’s Westin Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, which Jameson describes in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). Bonaventure’s misleading and disorientating structure is deliberately conceived to thwart our spatial expectations. Entrances to the building, for example, are all lateral or backdoor affairs: through the gardens in the back, the sixth floor can be accessed, while the main entrance admits visitors to the shopping mall on the second floor, compelling them to take an escalator to get to the registration desk. Jameson makes a strong case that Portman’s labyrinthine structure is a continuation of the baffling urban texture outside: ‘I believe that, with a certain number of other characteristic postmodern buildings, such as the Beaubourg in Paris or the Eaton Centre in Toronto, the Bonaventure aspires to being a total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city’ (2003, p. 40). As a projection of the external environment, the Bonaventure throws traditional architectural distinctions into disarray, enacting a mutual contamination of closed and open spaces but also of rational organization and the chaotic sprawl. The building is the avatar of urban ‘hyperspace’, which ‘transcend[s] the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself’ (p. 44); the decentralized, dispersed quality of this space which cannot be reduced to a map or made sense of appears to be beyond our sensory and cognitive abilities. This effect is confi rmed by the frequent use of reflective outer surfaces in postmodern buildings. As Jameson contends: the glass skin repels the city outside, a repulsion for which we have analogies in those reflector sunglasses which make it impossible for the interlocutor to see your own eyes and therefore achieve a certain aggressivity toward and power over the Other. [ . . . ] it is not even an exterior, inasmuch as when you seek to look at the hotel’s outer walls you cannot see the hotel itself but only the distorted images of everything that surrounds it. (p. 42)

Introduction

21

The Bonaventure represents the city as the space of anonymous transcendence: to walk through the fabricated worlds and glass surfaces of the contemporary urban reality is to become intensely aware of the disconnection between body, space and time, and the alienation of the self from the places it inhabits. Jameson describes the Bonaventure in terms of spectacle, as a huge machine where ‘like great Japanese lanterns or gondolas [escalators and elevators] ceaselessly rise and fall’ (p. 42): the visitors which technology moves through this space are part and parcel of the entertainment they enjoy; so their experience is strangely redoubled, as they are both protagonists within and viewers outside. In this connection, they become ‘docile bodies’ (Foucault, 1995, p. 135) in the biopolitics of the building, because the predetermination of their physical trajectories deprives them of the possibility to generate their own paths and stories. As Jameson contends, the Bonaventure represents the death knell of the fl âneur’s ‘narrative stroll’: We know in any case that recent architectural theory has begun to borrow from narrative analysis in other fields and to attempt to see our physical trajectories through such buildings as virtual narratives or stories, as dynamic paths and narrative paradigms which we as visitors are asked to fulfi l and to complete with our own bodies and movements. In the Bonaventure, however, we fi nd a dialectical heightening of this process: it seems to me that the escalators and elevators here henceforth replace movement [ . . . ]. Here the narrative stroll has been underscored, symbolized, reified and replaced by a transportation machine which becomes the allegorical signifier of that older promenade we are no longer allowed to conduct on our own. (2003, p. 42) The Bonaventure contemplates only the possibility of being inhabited by virtually immaterial bodies which are both passive objects and active viewers of the architecture-as-spectacle. Towards the end of the 1980s, though, urban projects testify to a ‘return to the bodily analogy by architects as diverse as Coop Himmelblau, Bernard Tschumi, and Daniel Libeskind, all of them concerned to propose a reinscription of the body in their work, as referent and figurative inspiration’ (Vidler, 1992, p. 69). Admittedly, since the 1980s architecture has assimilated the results of digital animation into its theories and practices (Peter Eisenman is the most exemplary case), but at the same time: The body, in its anatomical corporeality, together with all its prosthetic accoutrements, still obstructs total virtuality; architectural space, in its role as a stimulator of mental introjection (memory) and physical and psychical projection (event), still retains its primal power to capture the body. (Vidler, 2007, p. xi)

22

Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature

We should not fail to notice, though, that bodies are no longer seen as producing space primarily through the rhythms of their everyday or artistic practices, no longer committed to a serene, ludic appropriation of the urban space. Rather, they are fighting back on the alienating and disorienting postmodern battleground described by Jameson, the simulacra theorized by Baudrillard and the decarnalized virtual spaces of an increasingly digital culture. Symptomatically, corporeality is often presented as in pain or violated, bearing tangible evidence of its traumatic encounter with the powerful energies of the city. If the Situationists conceive the built environment as a landscape of atmospheres and affects (that is, mirroring the subject’s psychophysical states rather than its outer appearance), these architects display a different extension of corporeality outside itself, proposing a biomorphic city where the body appears in pieces, fragmented and mutilated. Confronting the architecture of Himmelb(l)au or, less spectacularly, of Tschumi, we feel the integrity of our anatomy is placed under threat and almost eviscerated: We are contorted, racked, cut, wounded, dissected, intestinally revealed, impaled, immolated; we are suspended in a state of vertigo, or thrust into a confusion between belief and perception. It is as if the object actively participated in the subject’s self-dismembering, reflecting its internal disarray or even precipitating its disaggregation. (Vidler, 1992, pp. 78–79) As I will argue, Sinclair’s biomorphic urban landscapes of the 1980s and 1990s, whose architectures and natural features often appear as so many body parts, clearly respond to the same Zeitgeist and are symptomatic of the same desire found in Himmelb(l)au to blur the boundaries and merge the body completely with architecture and its context. Such a literal, visceral organicism is akin to similar but less disquieting concepts of the urban and technological landscape found, in the 1960s, in McLuhan’s writings or in the science fiction utopias of the British avant-garde architectural group Archigram (which believed that modern architecture should be premised upon complete symbiosis with human biology). This tradition is perpetuated in Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano’s Beaubourg, where the building is turned inside out, its skeleton made visible with all its guts and nerves exposed to view, displaying a sense of exhibitionism which has never been surpassed, aside from Rogers’s Lloyd’s building (1986; Figure I.2) in London, perhaps. Truly, the utopianism of these constructions—which are the culmination of Archigram’s city-as-machine—has completely disappeared in Himmelb(l)au’s more uncanny projects. Still, the awareness of this continuity enables us to establish connections between the culture that produces Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, which appeared in 1970, and the feelings of trauma and abjection which trigger Sinclair’s autopsies of the capital city at the turn of the millennium.

Introduction

23

Figure I.2 Richard Rogers, Lloyd’s building, London, 1979–84. Photographed by Andrea Ronconi 2011.

1

Modular Bodies and Architecture as Skin J. G. Ballard (1956–1975) I was joking about taking walls too seriously, but in fact the sort of architectural spaces we inhabit are enormously important—they are very powerful. If every member of the human race were to vanish, our successors from another planet could reconstitute the psychology of people on this planet from its architecture. The architecture of modern apartments, let’s say, is radically different from that of a baroque palace. (Ballard, ‘Interview with Graeme Revell’, 1984c, p. 44)

POST-CATASTROPHIC, EXISTENTIALIST DWELLINGS In 1956, the year Ballard published his first short story ‘Prima Belladonna’, the Pop Art exhibition This Is Tomorrow was staged at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, by a loose aggregation of artists, designers and writers known as the Independent Group and assembled at the Institute of Contemporary Art. The exhibition consisted of a dozen stands, each one the collaboration of a different team. The construction put up by sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi was realized with the external collaboration of architects Alison and Peter Smithson, photographer Nigel Henderson and his anthropologist wife Judith Stephen. The installation, titled Patio and Pavilion (Figure 1.1), comprised a sort of small and temporary storage room made of recovered wooden boards with a corrugated plastic roof. On top, inside and outside, there were stones, bricks and found objects gathered on the roads around Bethnal Green in London’s East End. As architect Andrea Branzi suggests: Hence the English artists, architects and intellectuals in the post-war period looked courageously at the small objects washed up on the roadways of generic outskirts by the tidal shift of a world that was ending while another was being born, and they all found themselves to be denizens of those outskirts. Eduardo Paolozzi’s pavilion was an almost heartfelt acceptance of this transition and showed an extraordinary cheerfulness for this new empty space. The ‘great hopes’ of modernity, the megaprojects, the new cathedrals no longer exist; in their place lies an opaque territory of objects, of temporary storehouses, but also the courage of a great vitality. (2004, p. 439)

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Figure 1.1 Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi, Peter and Alison Smithson (known as Group 6), Patio and Pavilion environment designed for This Is Tomorrow exhibition held at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1956. © Tate, London 2012.

The installation was a tangible meditation on the demands of the habitat and a warning against the technocratic fetishism of urban planning. As Claude Lichtenstein and Thomas Schregenberger suggest, ‘Paolozzi called the source of his fascination a “metamorphosis of rubbish”’ (2001, p. 59), an affi rmation of the messiness of everyday life challenging modernist abstract formalism and search for perfection.

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From the late 1950s, Ballard would associate with art circles including artist Richard Hamilton; architectural critic Peter Reyner Banham, best known for his sympathetic study of Los Angeles; and Paolozzi himself. So it is no accident that the description of a pavilion similar to Paolozzi’s should be found in Ballard’s London novel Concrete Island, where the shack built by Proctor, a space of debris enacting the reversal of capitalist society through the apotheosis of its residue, is presented as ‘at least as good as most of the speculative building that’s going up these days’ (Ballard, 1994a, p. 163). In the autobiography Miracles of Life, reminiscing about his visit to the 1956 exhibition, Ballard foregrounds the striking impression he received from Paolozzi’s installation: Recently I told Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate and a former director of the Whitechapel, that I thought This is Tomorrow was the most important event in the visual arts in Britain until the opening of Tate Modern, and he did not disagree. [ . . . ] Another of the teams brought together the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, and the architects Peter and Alison Smithson, who constructed a basic unit of human habitation in what would be left of the world after nuclear war. Their terminal hut, as I thought of it, stood on a patch of sand, on which were laid out the basic implements that modern man would need to survive: a power tool, a bicycle wheel and a pistol. (2008b, pp. 187–88) In Ballard’s works, too, urban dwellings are often, either explicitly or implicitly, post-catastrophic and display a return to primordial conditions. This again is particularly true of the pavilion in Concrete Island, which denotes the same anti-technocratic architectural discourse and the same poetics of found industrial materials which featured so prominently in This Is Tomorrow. This obscure urban landscape of technological debris was regarded by Pop artists as the new natural environment human beings were meant to inhabit while, as artist Joe Tilson writes in his book and print artwork The Software Chart Questionnaire (produced in 1968 and displayed at the Centre for Modern and Contemporary Art in La Spezia, Italy), men and women of the post-war world were ‘the primitives of a new civilisation’. In Miracles of Life, while reconstructing the encounter with what would become his privileged sources of inspiration—psychoanalysis, surrealism and, to a lesser extent, fi lm—Ballard drops the remark that in the late 1940s he was ‘prone to backing up an argument about existentialism with a raised fist’ (2008b, p. 135). Negligible as it may seem, this passing statement acquires prominence if seen in relation to his later interest in architectural projects influenced by Pop Art. In fact, a major element that inspired the art works of Henderson, Paolozzi and William Turnbull during the late 1940s was precisely the existentialist philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. In the catalogue of This Is Tomorrow (1956), the defi nition of architecture as ‘A

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particle [ . . . ] snatched from space, rhythmically modulated by membranes dividing it from surrounding chaos’ (Crosby, 1956, sec. 7, n. p.) is clearly symptomatic of this legacy. The existentialist sees the human being as confronting in anxiety the chaotic void into which we are thrown, struggling always to build new islands of being into nothingness. Human beings are not the measure of the world, nor have they the power to enact the law they deem good; rather, we are committed to pulling together whatever can be managed for extreme need and distress. A rickety shack reflecting uncertainty upon itself, the Patio and Pavilion installation evokes a problematic relationship with the chaotic forces of nature, the primitive abode providing only a tenuous protection from the unknown and potentially hostile space outside. Existentialism was very much in the air at the time; thus it comes as no surprise that Ballard was enticed by its theories. Yet hardly any attention has been paid to the subject (with the notable exception of Roger Luckhurst [1997, pp. 62–69]) and certainly none to how Sartre and Heidegger influenced Ballard’s concept of dwelling. Therefore, this will be closely investigated here to reveal the overlapping in Ballard’s work of existentialist concerns and responses to contemporary architectural practices and theories. The aim is to disclose the importance for him of the fantasies of bio-technological responsive houses propounded by Archigram, but also to interrogate the imbrications in his fiction of such fantasies with contemporary philosophical ideas of dwelling and unhomeliness. His preference for claustrophobic spaces, even in a novel of compulsive traversals of the city like Crash, calls for a detailed consideration of his concept of habitation before moving on to investigate his depictions of London. Later in the chapter, his views on architectural spaces will be related to both his notion of the body and, notably, his representation of introvert urban forms in Crash, The Drowned World and High-Rise. In Being and Nothingness, published in French in 1943, Sartre defi nes dwelling in terms of the accessibility of surrounding objects: ‘To be there is to have to take just one step in order to reach the teapot, to be able to dip the pen in the ink by stretching my arm, to have to turn my back to the window if I want to read without tiring my eyes’ (2003, p. 514). Home is an arbitrary contour: my being-there is a pure given, he argues, a space on hand whose protective isolation is proportionate to the ‘coefficient of utility and of adversity’ (p. 364), and the amount of resistance that surrounding objects offer to the projects of the self. With its narrow confi nes and tight ring of essential items, Sartre’s concept of inhabited space is strikingly reminiscent of Paolozzi’s terminal hut (as Ballard defi nes it) but also of the form of habitation described in the section of Miracles of Life which details Ballard’s recollections of his internment in Lunghua Camp during the Second World War: ‘In the G Block a boy [ . . . ] constructed a cubicle like a beggar’s hovel around his narrow bed. This was his private world that he defended fiercely’ (2008b, p. 69). Elsewhere in the text we read:

28 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature ‘Perhaps the reason why I have lived in the same Shepperton house for nearly fifty years [ . . . ] is that my small and untidy house reminds me of our family room in Lunghua’ (p. 80). The room to which they were assigned was a broom cupboard; of this space in later life Ballard ‘remembered every scratch, every chip of paint. It was Lunghua, not Amherst Avenue, which felt like home’ (Ballard cited in Baxter, 2011, pp. 103–104). As Heidegger argues in Being and Time published in 1927, ‘“Being” [Sein], as the infi nitive of “ich bin” [ . . . ] signifies “to reside alongside . . .”, “to be familiar with . . .”’ (2005, p. 80), while the fundamental aspect of dwelling, as he explains in his 1951 essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ (see Heidegger, 1977, pp. 319–40), is staying with and taking care of things. This care is predicated upon the circle of familiarity (of objects and relationships) constructed out of the estranging chaos and unhomeliness of the world. The line drawn around one’s place is what lets things belong to that place and, therefore, be released from the disquieting space outside. Heidegger argues that the phenomenological essence of such a place depends upon the concrete, clearly defined nature of its outer limits, for, as he puts it, ‘A boundary is not that at which something stops, but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its essential unfolding’ (1977, p. 332). Dwelling ‘as “residing alongside . . .” and “Being familiar with”’ (Heidegger, 2005, p. 233) allows the escape from the anguish of unhomeliness, the indefi niteness of the world into which we are thrown. Yet, for the early Heidegger of Being and Time, it is precisely ‘the existential “mode” of the “not-at-home”’ (p. 233) which constitutes the condition for human beings’ recognition of their authentic selves. This sense of the unhomely as our genuine destiny is one of the elements which compose Ballard’s presentation of inhabited spaces, especially in his early fiction. Here characters are often marooned, stranded in the narrow confines of their place where they become committed to the strenuous but futile passive resistance to the chaotic destruction looming over their enclosed space. The surreal short story ‘The Garden of Time’, published in 1962, is emblematic in this connection: the whole story is about waiting for an end felt as inevitable and in the same move its deferral through the taking care of homely things. A ‘high wall [ . . . ] encircled the estate’, writes Ballard, whereas outside, ‘dull and remote’, the surrounding plain was a ‘drab emptiness emphasising the seclusion and mellow magnificence of the villa’ (2006a, p. 405). While attending to his daily routines and taking care of familiar objects with their comforting ‘presence-at-hand’ (Heidegger, 2005, p. 168), when polishing the pictures in the portrait corridor or tidying his desk, Axel, the protagonist, deceives himself into thinking no threat is impending on the encircled world he shares with his wife. In these moments of oblivion, he lives not, as Heidegger would have it, as ‘the authentic Self’ but as the ‘they-self’, that is, as society prescribes ‘the world and Being-inthe-World which lies closest should be interpreted’; complying with such a prescription ‘brings tranquillized self-assurance—“Being-at-home” with

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all its obviousness’ (2005, pp. 167 and 233). So, reassuringly ‘shielded by the pavilion on one side and the high garden wall on the other, the villa in the distance, Axel felt composed and secure, the plain with its encroaching multitude a nightmare from which he had safely awakened’ (Ballard, 2006a, pp. 409–10). At other times, though, the couple’s existentialist strain seems fully fledged: ‘[his wife’s] use of “still” had revealed her own unconscious anticipation of the end’ (p. 409). Anguish is the emotive situation which, for Heidegger, accompanies the attainment of authenticity, because it reveals, in the form of anticipation (a crucial term in Being and Time), our beingfor-death. In Ballard’s short story, the advancing throng will soon bring the couple face to face with their genuine destiny: the final triumph of the chaotic world outside is accomplished when the impending inchoate and ‘ceaseless tide of humanity’ (p. 412) fi nally overcomes the villa. Ballard’s later short story ‘Motel Architecture’, published in 1978, is a further example of existentialist dwelling, but with the notable difference that here the cold, abstract, geometric forms of the modern city apartment are themselves the avatar of our mortal destiny (see Ballard 2006b, pp. 502–30): modernism is an ‘architecture of death’, he asserts in the newspaper article ‘A Handful of Dust’, and in this respect, its style is existentialist (2006a). So the usual connotations of interior and exterior are turned inside out in ‘Motel Architecture’, and the estrangement of Pangborn, the protagonist of the story, is produced by his very enclosure within the confi nes of his apartment. His alienation is not fled from but fully embraced and probed in search of a more authentic condition: in ‘the immaculate glass and chromium universe of the solarium’, which he has never left over the last twelve years, Pangborn embarks, along with the imaginary intruder haunting his flat, ‘on their rejection of the world and the exploration of their absolute selves’ (Ballard, 2006b, pp. 503 and 512). Finally, it can be argued that in ‘Motel Architecture’, as well as in ‘The Garden of Time’, space and its architectural arrangement are used to express, in fully existentialist terms, the anguished condition of being-in-the-world: this is a potent ontological intuition which will remain subsumed implicitly within the rest of Ballard’s production and even in his late London novels of sociological analysis such as Millennium People (2003) and Kingdom Come (2006e).

REGRESSIVE AND RESPONSIVE TECHNOLOGICAL ENVIRONMENTS With its existentialist transitoriness, Paolozzi’s pavilion seemed an ontological reflection on the post-catastrophic environment left by the war and appeared to mark the end of a period, the breaking away from the old theorems of modernism and its megaprojects. However, in continuity with that very modernism, a significant phenomenon was soon to emerge. It was one which, denying this toning down of architectural experimentation, embraced the idol of technology and grasped the new excitement

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around modern dwelling spaces. In the 1950s the British architectural style of New Brutalism produced a resurgence of ‘creative thought on the certainties of modern architecture, which via Reyner Banham would lead to Cedric Price and Archigram’ (Branzi, 2004, p. 440), an architectural group founded in 1961 and including Warren Chalk, Peter Cook, David Greene, Michael Webb, Dennis Crompton and Ron Herron. These architects operated in the research field of metropolitan utopia, promoting highly technological houses which drew inspiration from the media world. What is striking about their urban projects is that—in contrast with the Situationists’ territorial knowledge and appreciation of existing urban environments—all sense of locality is lost, but the idea of place is reintroduced in a regressive guise through the dwelling. This process can be observed in a number of architectural projects such as Cook and Greene’s Spray Plastic House Project (1961), a proposal for customized cave-like dwellings formed by excavating spaces from large polystyrene blocks, and Chalk’s Capsule Homes (1964), ‘the ultimate in self- existent, conditioned mini-environment with man as extension of machine’ (Greene cited in Steiner, 2009, p. 138). Similarly, Greene’s Living Pod (1966; Figure 1.2), where Archigram’s curvaceous (organic) vocabulary is particularly prominent, was ‘designed to resemble an organism, complete with infl atable “womb” seat’ (Steiner, 2009, p. 140). Ballard’s urban space, especially in the novel Crash (1973), with the car as a narrow habitat, is clearly reminiscent of the claustrophobic, responsive mini-environments experimented by Archigram: the car becomes a mobile dwelling space (‘which may be “worn” for transport and unpacked for occupation’ [Archigram, 2010]) altogether similar to the Cushicle and Suitaloon designed by Webb in 1966–67 as extreme expression of the group’s autoenvironment concept. This interest in the construction of environments that might control psychophysical responses can be found also in some Situationist researches on ambience. In his ‘Formulary for a New Urbanism’ (1953), for example, Debord’s Lettrist comrade Ivan Chtcheglov, as Phil Baker reminds us, ‘was at the forefront of the Lettrist interest in the affective environment, and the construction of emotionally determinant ambiences by décor. There would be “rooms more conducive to dreams than any drug, and houses where one cannot help but love”’ (2003, p. 324). Yet, more generally, by placing its emphasis firmly on claustrophobic, introvert spaces, Archigram signalled its distance from Debord’s dérive, the ‘transient passage through varied ambiances’ aimed at studying ‘the specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviours of individuals’ (Coverley, 2006, p. 93). With the rapid growth of mass media, the contested realm of the city became evacuated for Archigram, which favoured the individual over the collective viewpoint, indicating a turn from environments at the urban scale to the isolation of individual bodies in their technological houses. This vision of the built space marked

Figure 1.2

David Greene, Living Pod, Sketch Section. © Archigram 1966.

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a most significant departure from earlier, modernist urban theories as well as contemporary Situationist ones predicated upon the artist’s intervention in the social and political dynamics of the city. First radio, then television were regarded as the conduits for society’s attempts to domesticate fantasy; and with the rise of technologies for controlling the domestic interior, the street became increasingly irrelevant, qualifying as a mere artistic attraction. As Steiner claims about Alison and Peter Smithson’s project House of the Future, displayed at the ‘Ideal Home Exhibition’ held at Olympia in 1956: Entertainment was piped in, reinforcing the introversion. At the Smithsons’ request, the television in the House of the Future looped a tape of underwater adventure. Immersion, visually and aurally, reinforced the suggestion of autonomy that in this case was provided by the disconnection of the social space from the public domain. Closed in every way to the outside, the interior was the heart of social space. (2009, p. 124) This insight is shared by Ballard in the short story ‘Motel Architecture’: ‘What would once have been called the “real” world, the quiet streets outside, the private estate of hundreds of similar solaria, made no effort to intrude itself into Pangborn’s private world’ (2006b, p. 506). Environments’ sensorial response was a central objective in many of these designs. An illuminating example is Archigram’s project Living 1990, where surfaces, electronically adjustable to suit the changing needs of the inhabitants, can turn from hard to soft at the push of a button or a spoken command. It is no accident that technology ‘began to insert itself more and more into the biological equation’ (Steiner, 2009, p. 14): the Bauhaus photographer and designer László Moholy-Nagy, who had a strong appeal to the post-war London-based alternative art scene, ‘had long argued that the speed of modern life required biological adaptation’ and ‘that a fully realized modern architecture required symbiosis with human biology’ (pp. 18–19). A driving force on the London scene of the time, Banham reports enthusiastically on his experience of Archigram’s reactive and adaptive pneumatic structures so similar to organic shapes: Every slight change of state inside or out—even a heated conversation— brought compensating movement in the skin, not through the expensive intervention of a computer, but by direct variation of curvature under balance of pressures. For the human occupant it was a kind of partnership relation with the enclosing membrane, each going independently but sympathetically about its business. [ . . . ] a blow directed at the enclosing skin would produce a flurry of reproachful quivering and creaking, quickly dying away as the even tenor of its normal breathing ways was resumed. I like that. (Cited in Steiner, 2009, p. 162) In Understanding Media (1964), Marshall McLuhan describes the ideal of the house as skin as the logic outcome of the experimentation with space

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capsules, air jets and buildings with walls and floors that can be moved at will. ‘Such flexibility’, writes McLuhan, ‘naturally tends toward the organic. Human sensitivity seems once more to be attuned to the universal currents that made of tribal man a cosmic skin-diver’ (2001, p. 138). ‘Housing as shelter’, he states, ‘is an extension of our bodily heat-control mechanisms—a collective skin or garment’ (p. 133). The psychotropic (PT) houses imagined in Ballard’s short story ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ (1962), which react and adjust to the movements and feelings of dwellers and visitors, are further evidence of the early impact of architectural avant-gardes on Ballard. Borrowing Hal Foster’s words, it could be said that Ballard’s PT houses envisage ‘technology as a prosthetic extension of the human sensorium’ and share Archigram’s ‘imperative that architecture and design not only express but engage contemporary technologies, however blunt or delirious the effects might be’ (2002, p. 14). So the house becomes hypersensitive in ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’, absorbing and responding to the psychophysical reactions of every new owner. Ballard’s descriptions echo Banham’s visionary response to Archigram’s projects and articulate it narratively: ‘He put his hand on the wall behind us. The plastex swam and whirled like boiling toothpaste, then extruded itself into a small ledge. Stamers sat down on the lip, which very quickly expanded to match the contours of his body, providing back and arm rests’ (2006a, p. 416). In the modern electric age the whole humanity is our skin, according to McLuhan, and houses are themselves extensions of that skin. This sense of total complicity between the subject and the world is predicated on the assumption that dreams, fears, obsessions and perversions are no longer lodged exclusively in the individual mind but also and primarily outside, in the mass unconscious, and, even more significantly, that they fi nd a material and spatial extension in the inhabited environment. This is a pivotal concept for Ballard, too, and is most clearly shown in ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’, where the social unconscious and the architectural interior conflate to produce a single psychophysical membrane around the subject. In this respect, Ballard’s concept of dwelling differs from the unique, intimate chez soi conceived by Bachelard in The Poetics of Space, a place of introspection which still implies, in McLuhan’s terms, the old bourgeois subject with its individualism. Conversely, the dwelling described by Ballard (and McLuhan) is one where nothing is any longer intimately and exclusively one’s own. As he writes in the short story: Many medium-priced PT homes resonate with the bygone laughter of happy families, the relaxed harmony of a successful marriage. It was something like this that I wanted for Fay and myself. In the previous years our relationship had begun to fade a little, and a really well-integrated house with a healthy set of reflexes—say, those of a prosperous bank president and his devoted spouse—would go a long way towards healing the rifts between us. (2006a, p. 419)

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This passage—in which the qualities of interior design are believed to produce healthy family instincts—could be read not merely as a departure from the bourgeois interior with its reassuring furniture but also as an ironic and dystopic reversal of post-war utopian visions of the modern technological home. According to Hornsey, in the late 1940s and the 1950s, interior design was ‘a useful means by which ordinary private life could be made amenable to indirect forms of public social management’ (2010, p. 203) meant to propound specific family ideals. The Furnished Rooms at the Britain Can Make It exhibition, for example, conveyed the visitors the idea that ‘only by appreciating expert design principles and systematically applying them to their own domestic setups could a stable and modern family be secured’ (p. 203). With reference to the immediate post-war years, Hornsey also looks at urban planners’ organicist visions of London’s future developments: New images produced by the microscope and telescope ‘revealed’ how the natural world was characterised by a common set of structural forms that were apparently replicated across all spatial scales. Planners already schooled in the organicist principles of Patrick Geddes began to suggest that rebuilding the built environment in adherence to these forms would create a harmonious symbiosis between mankind and nature, and ensure the optimum functional order for society’s future. (p. 70) Clearly, Ballard’s ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ reverses this organicist utopianism of post-war architectural thought into an uncanny, dystopian version of built environments inspired by biological principles. In the same vein, his insistent characterization of fictional architects—in this short story as much as in the novels High-Rise and Concrete Island—as domineering or even fascist subjects, is at the furthest possible remove from the model figure of the British post-war architect as the key cultural agent of renewal—not just of the urban environment but, by extension, of civic life itself (see Hornsey, 2010, p. 17). Finally, it should be noted that ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ is also a modern reassessment of the gothic uncanny, in that it revisits the tradition of the ghost story through the theme of the haunted house where a murder has been committed. Traditional gothic narratives were informed with the threat of a profane resurrection of the body, and so is Ballard’s short story. Yet here the return of the dead does not come under the customary guise of a ghost, the phantom of an outward human appearance, because for Ballard the real essence of the subject is fi rmly located elsewhere, in the neural system. So the spectre loses its human outline to disperse as refl exes and instinctual responses, frissons and nervous pangs, bodily smells, breathings and heartbeats, all of them emanating from the dwelling. This is also true of ‘Motel Architecture’, where Pangborn ‘could hear the intruder’s pumping lungs and feel his

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frightened pulse drumming through the floor into the arms of his chair’ (Ballard, 2006b, p. 515). Ballard’s redefi nition of the revenant can be further illuminated if seen in relation to the idea of transcendence vividly expressed in Miracles of Life. Recounting his experience as a medical student in Cambridge, he associates dissection with the re-emergence of personality: Once, searching for the senior laboratory assistant, I strayed into the preparation room beyond the DR on the last day of term, and found a large table set with a dozen metal platters, each bearing its tagged remains of the doctors who had bequeathed their bodies, a mysterious banquet in which I had taken part. I felt, and still feel, that in a sense they had transcended death, if only briefly, living on as the last breath of their identities emerged between the fi ngers of the students dissecting them. Although they were identified only by number, each of the cadavers seemed to have a distinct personality—the girth and general physique, the profi le bones of the face coming through the skin and reasserting themselves, the scars and blemishes, odd anomalies such as extra nipples and toes, residues of operations, tattoos, inexplicable blemishes, the story of a lifetime written into the skin, especially of the hands and face. Dissecting the face, revealing the layers of muscles and nerves that generated expressions and emotions, was a way of entering the private lives of these dead physicians and almost of bringing them back to life. (2008b, pp. 143–44; emphasis added) In the PT houses, these surface signs of personality succeed in transcending death because they are elements migrated from the body to achieve a new, independent existence of their own as constituents of a dwelling; they can be worn like a second epidermis and are—it could be said, modifying Ballard’s words in the last quotation—‘the story of a lifetime written into the [house-as-]skin’.

MODULAR BODIES AND MINDS Ballard’s and Paolozzi’s awareness of the enormous impact of industrially mass-produced objects is testifi ed by their interest in the principle of modularity. As Ballard states in Miracles of Life, apropos of Paolozzi’s pavilion, ‘If the future was to be built of anything, it would be from a set of building blocks provided by consumerism’ (2008b, p. 189). Wieland Schmied’s remarks on Paolozzi’s use of modular composition, which would equally apply to Ballard’s literary practice, help us unravel the structural and philosophical meanings that the sculptor attached to this architectural concept:

36

Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature In the same way, it was not until Paolozzi was an adult that he began to appreciate the toys he had longed for but never had in his childhood. [ . . . ] When he fi nally came to toys, Paolozzi made a highly structured use of them, he took them apart and found in their insides the oracle of new games. Whatever he took up became a toy to him and the toy became philosophy and led to Wittgenstein’s word games. [ . . . ] he came on the trail of serialised order mechanisms which corresponded exactly to the material they so attractively offered. [ . . . ] he discovered the principle of ‘computerising’ such material, locking it up in smallest informational units, which could then be re-constructed into new formations. In relation to similar objective details, these then become abstract, and in the repetition of geometrical elements they can combine and often lead to associative legibility. Contour and inbuilt structure carry on a complex game: as if the tattoos of civilisation had achieved their own independent being. [ . . . ] Reality appears molecularised and broken down into standardised building blocks. (1976, pp. 23–24; emphasis added)

From the 1930s to the 1950s Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus’s study of prefabrication problems led not so much to the adoption of the objectstandard as a module but to the theoretical defi nition of the moduleobject; this was an ideational tenet, a virtual form premised exclusively on structural rules and compositional needs. From the 1950s, the correctness of a modern apartment’s interior became a matter of grammar and depended on the appropriateness and coherence in which—like a linguistic sentence—its various component elements had been syntagmatically arranged. In The System of Objects, Baudrillard clarifies the nature of this change: These objects are no longer endowed with a ‘soul’, nor do they invade us with their symbolic presence [ . . . ] Traditional good taste, which decided what was beautiful on the basis of secret affinities, no longer has any part here. That taste constituted a poetic discourse, an evocation of self-contained objects that responded to one another; today objects do not respond to one another, they communicate—they have no individual presence but merely, at best, an overall coherence attained by virtue of their simplification as components of a code and the way their relationships are calculated. (2005, pp. 19 and 23) For Paolozzi and Ballard, this abstract grammar is a constructive principle autonomous from its infi nite possibilities of concretization and capable of traversing, combining and reshuffl ing the constituent elements of objects, spaces and, notably, even bodies. Such a transcendence is what endows this abstract grammar with a philosophical status and an ontological significance. It is no accident that Paolozzi equates his art to the

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word games theorized by Wittgenstein, who ‘rearranged the structure of language to create new philosophical truths’ (Spencer, 1976, p. 19). But reference should be made also to McLuhan in this connection. As Reinhold Martin states: [McLuhan], too, sees a virtualization of the physical environment through the application of a linguistic hypothesis [ . . . ]. For McLuhan, the theorist of media, language is a medium of communication embedded in the material substrate (that is, the communication systems) through which it circulates. [ . . . ] In Perspecta McLuhan observes the necessity for what he calls ‘pattern recognition’ as a new form of environmental awareness. Among its instruments would be language, held together by invisible relational patterns (what McLuhan calls in his title the ‘invisible environment’). (2010, p. 60) Having achieved their independent being, these relational structures can be oracles of ever-new games, ready for an infinite number of interchanges and combinations; these, as William Burroughs contends in his ‘Preface’ to Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, are ‘relationships so lunar and abstract that people will become mere extensions of the geometries of situations’ (Ballard, 1990, p. 7). In the novel Ballard suggests that ‘junctions, whether of our own soft biologies or the hard geometries of these walls and ceilings, are equivalent to one another’ (1990, p. 56). The recognition of hidden patterns, that is the awareness of the transversal codes encapsulated in human and architectural entities, may even be conducive to the prediction of the subject’s destiny: the ‘series of giant geometric models, like sections of abstract landscapes, had made [Travis] uneasily aware that their longdelayed confrontation would soon take place’ (p. 10). In its illimitability, modularity furnishes our outer and inner landscapes as if they belonged to the same spatial extension: In the perspectives of the plaza, the junctions of the underpass and embankment, Talbot at last recognized a modulus that could be multiplied into the landscape of his consciousness. The descending triangle of the plaza was repeated in the facial geometry of the young woman. (p. 23) Ballard fully embraces the idea of the postmodern disappearance of the individual, seen as a nostalgic holdover, a residue of bourgeois culture. His subject is not a Bergsonian accumulation of past, unique experiences; rather, it shares the modular principle of the city and is capable of recreating itself freely through the infinite, unpredictable combinations of the same preexisting building blocks. ‘Modern architecture’, after all, as the catalogue of This Is Tomorrow suggests, ‘is frequently the sum total of a number of possible permutations’ (Crosby, 1956, sec. 1, n. p.), so if his characters are ‘architectural portraits of individuals’ (Ballard, 1994a, p. 103), it is precisely

38 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature in the sense that their body, conscience and even imagination are themselves informed by a modular grammar. Ballard’s description of a female cadaver observed when he was a student in medicine and recalled in Miracles of Life is revealing in this connection: ‘One day I found her dissected head in the locker among the other heads. The exposed layers of muscles in her face were like the pages of an ancient book, or a pack of cards waiting to be reshuffl ed into another life’ (2008b, p. 144; emphasis added). To this rearrangement of the selfsame building blocks Ballard entrusts the only possible imaginative recreation of ourselves; a regeneration which often verges on a spiritual rebirth. For him within—the neural system—very much coincides with beyond, in that the body can be conducive to transcendence: ‘through my study of biology [I] had even found a strain of scientific mysticism in my imagination’ (Ballard, 2008b, p. 136). The rearrangement of the same codes often entails the idea of resurrection. In Ballard’s autobiography, for example, the mysterious passage from death to life is echoed in the vivid account of his daughters’ birth: ‘they seemed immensely old, their foreheads and features streamlined by time, as archaic and smooth as the heads of the pharaohs in Egyptian sculpture, as if they had travelled an immense distance to find their parents’ (2008b, pp. 182–83). Finally, for Ballard the miracles of life are mirrored by those of true art: the artist deciphers the system of codes, detects ontological structures and celebrates their uncanny rebirths, their multifarious reincarnations across time. Just as the features of Egyptian sculpture are mysteriously renewed in those of Ballard’s newborn daughters, so, he recalls, Hamilton and Paolozzi ‘teas[ed] out the visual connections between Egyptian architecture and modern refrigerator design, between Tintoretto “crane-shots” and the swooping camera angles of Hollywood blockbusters’ (2008b, p. 216). Indeed, Ballard’s concept of art and imagination is at the furthest possible remove from Ezra Pound’s ‘make it new’ poetics: the romantic and modernist idea of imagination as synonymous with originality and inspiration is thoroughly disavowed in favour of a pattern of repetition and infi nite restructuring which, nevertheless, is conducive to a form of mysticism, as we have seen. Furthermore, it is in the very same language of architectural modularity that Ballard couches both his idea of artistic (specifically surrealist) imagination and the Freudian concept of displacement in dreams. Both are assumed as premised on the rearrangement of predetermined schemas: I’ve read research about people who were learning to steer their dreams in certain directions. [ . . . ] I remember one instance: an ocean liner came into view and I started playing around mentally with the design: I sailed a succession of versions of the Queen Mary, but in different architectural styles so that I had (I remember this vividly) a classical Parthenon-like superstructure. Then I had a baroque Marienbadpalace superstructure with funnels with curlicues, and then I even had

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a half-timbered version of the Queen Mary. None of this was deliberate, I wasn’t saying, ‘Let’s try out a half-timbered version’. These extraordinary images, some of them rather witty in a bizarre way, were purely the result of a normal separation that the brain maintains between certain characteristics of things, e.g., ships and architectural styles. [ . . . ] The normal separation which the brain maintains in its good housekeeping had broken down, and it was just a conflation taking place on a basic neural level. [ . . . ] When I think of works of the imagination by the Surrealists, for example, they aren’t all that extraordinary [ . . . ]. Even Alice in Wonderland is not so strange, perhaps. Its just a slight shifting of grids that’s taking place. (2005b, p. 192) As we will see at the end of this chapter, with the assumption of preexistent structures as an inescapable destiny, the artist’s margin of intervention in contemporary society is confi ned within the available system of codes and bound to oscillate between, on the one hand, their ironic mimesis in the tradition of Dada and, on the other, their surrealist reshuffl ing which throws cultural conventions and customary spatio-temporal coordinates into disarray.

CRASH: THE MODULAR CITY As Jonathan Crary reminds us, the use of standardized and interchangeable units was central to Archigram’s urban philosophy: If Fuller, Doxiadis and Soleri attempted in vain to rationalize or contain the phenomenon of the urban sprawl, at another extreme the British group Archigram sought to emulate and participate in the ‘irrationality’ of the capitalist city. Borrowing from earlier machine aesthetics, Archigram envisioned the city as ‘a kit of parts’, in which standardized industrial elements could be playfully deployed according to the dictates of individual desires. (1986, p. 160) Archigram’s Plug-In City project (1964; Figure 1.3), for example, offered a new vision of the city of the future as made up of components plugged into networks and grids. The high flexibility of the urban system, combined with the fantasy of a responsive environment capable of feedback, was symptomatic of the 1960s belief that the city could be rendered adjustable to the changing needs of its inhabitants. This adaptability put into question the very externality of body and architectural space to one another, producing the imaginary collapse of any distance between them; to the extent that dwellings and the urban environment were often conceived by contemporary architects and intellectuals as a continuation of our biological and sensorial systems.

40 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature

Figure 1.3 Peter Cook, Plug-in City, Overhead View, Archigram Magazine, Issue Number 4, Page 17. © Archigram 1964.

Ballard was intrigued by this re-emergence of the belief in the certainties of modernity as well as determined to investigate the impact of the new architectural syntax on people’s imagination. In this respect, it should be noted that the influence of modularity on his urban landscape has already been recognized to some extent by Crary, even if only in relation to Crash. His argument is that Ballard’s use of Archigram’s

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fantasies is predicated on a mutual deterritorialization of body and city which is taken to such limits that anything can conjoin with anything: ‘it is not difficult to see Crash as a convulsive consummation of Archigram’s Plug-in City—Ballard’s paroxysm of functionalism in which city and body form one visceral aggregate of technical systems and organs’ (1986, p. 160). Indeed, Archigram’s vision of the urban space as made of standardized and interchangeable building blocks is widely employed in Ballard’s urban narratives of the 1970s but also and most remarkably in ‘The Concentration City’, published in 1957 (see 2006a, pp. 30–50). A dystopian anticipation of Plug-In City, this short story offers a treatment of the urban landscape as an introvert space: its modular construction, where every development appears as just more of the same in a mammoth undifferentiated conurbation, is synonymous of entrapment; a prison the protagonist fails to escape in the attempt to conquer a chimerical free space beyond the city limits (as Lewis Mumford was soon to acknowledge in the influential The City in History, ‘the sharp division between city and country no longer exists’ [1961, p. 618]). One should not fail to notice how in Ballard the influence of Archigram’s unrealized metropolitan utopias runs parallel to that of the post-war capital city. Pringle rightly contends that in ‘The Concentration City’, as in Ballard’s other urban short stories, ‘in many ways it is the actual landscape of contemporary London and its suburbs that Ballard describes’ (1984, p. 132). In The Inner Man: The Life of J. G. Ballard, John Baxter specifies that in the early 1950s: West London indelibly marked Jim and his work. The concept of ‘inner space’, in one sense grudging, in another recalling Christopher Marlow’s ‘infi nite riches in a little room’, was born of the bedsit. Such images became part of the mental furniture he ceaselessly rearranged to create new fictions [ . . . ]. The claustrophobia of Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove and the bad dreams it engendered fed Jim’s fantasies of cities devouring whole planets and people living in closets. (2011, pp. 71–72) Ballard’s specific mixture—found in ‘The Concentration City’ but also present in his other urban narratives—of the unfulfilled promise of escape and the obsessive investigation of claustrophobic environments was certainly reinvigorated by the developments of London’s landscape in the 1960s and 1970s. As many of the architects involved with the ICA, Ballard believed in the Los Angelization of London, a process which gained momentum with the construction of the Westway. This section of the A40 route in West London, which cut through Notting Hill, implied the clearance of large sections of Little Venice and Paddington Green, while new highways were forced through Tower Hamlets. John Baxter recalls Ballard’s response to the construction of this motorway:

42

Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature In particular, [Ballard] relished the Westway, the three-mile stretch of dual carriageway leading west out of London that opened in 1970. He spoke of the road and its forest of concrete supports in terms of sculpture and dream, mostly as a fragment of futurism emblematic of frustration and disappointment, both in the way it foreshadowed the Americanised city that London never became and its promise of an escape that petered out before it really began. Concrete Island begins with his protagonist crashing his car at the point where the Westway drops back to earth and plunges into a tunnel, a metaphor for the way Ballard viewed his life. (2011, p. 72)

For Ballard, the new structure became a symbol of the unfulfi lled Americanization of London (as well as a metaphor of the human condition as one of entrapment); and in this respect, too, his poetics is in tune with British Pop Art strategy to deal with American imagery as an unattainable dream for a virtually bankrupt Britain (see Miles, 2010, p. 66). But let us turn now to the representation of this motorway environment in Crash, to appreciate its continuities with the tenet of modularity. In the novel London is a dispersed city whose sprawling is traversed by nomadic characters on the dérive; a landscape cognate with the Paris described by the contemporary French Situationists. Or so it seems: in fact, Ballard’s London differs from the Paris of Debord, in that for the visionary of Shepperton drifting does not entail an ever-new, unpredictable production of space but revolves around the obsessive repetition of the selfsame patterns, a set of constant and unswerving geometries. As we have seen, these urban architectural patterns fi nd a counterpart in the imaginative ones structuring human psychology, which Ballard, interviewed by Sinclair in the latter’s essay Crash, defi nes as ‘the secret module that underpins who we are’ (Sinclair, 2008, p. 42). In Ballard’s Crash the acceptance of this essential kinship as one’s destiny crystallizes around the union of psychophysical modules and their architectural counterparts; a marriage which is celebrated in the act of death. Symptomatically, in the novel the geometry of each car accident—its specifi c modalities and the spatial features of the place where it occurs—reveals the peculiar nature of the pathology of the victim: ‘Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences’, claims Ballard (cited in Sinclair, 1999, p. 31). In this sense, such collisions are acts of revelation disclosing the unknown inner self, moments of intense fulfi lment in which characters embrace the truest realization of their secret geometry. It is in this light that we can read the deeper sense of Ballard’s interest ‘in the gauge of psychoarchitectonics’ (Ballard cited in Sinclair, 1999, pp. 29–30), his commitment to work out and classify the most accurate combinations between the inventory of obsessions and the inventory of urban modules. The most striking example of this is offered in the following passage of Ballard’s Crash—notoriously saturated with brutalities which

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have guaranteed its controversial status—through the voice of his homonymous narrator: I think of the crashes of psychopaths, implausible accidents carried out with venom and self-disgust, vicious multiple collisions contrived in stolen cars on evening freeways among tired office-workers. I think of the absurd crashes of neurasthenic housewives returning from their VD clinics, hitting parked cars in suburban high streets. I think of the crashes of excited schizophrenics colliding head-on into stalled laundry vans in one-way streets; of manic-depressives crushed while making pointless U-turns on motorway access roads; of luckless paranoids driving at full speed into the brick walls at the ends of known culsde-sacs; of sadistic charge nurses decapitated in inverted crashes on complex interchanges; of lesbian supermarket manageresses burning to death in the collapsed frames of the midget cars before the stoical eyes of middle-aged fi remen; of autistic children crushed in rear-end collisions, their eyes less wounded in death; of buses filled with mental defectives drowning together stoically in roadside industrial canals. (1995, p. 15) In the novel Vaughan, the dark angel of the highway who enacts compulsive navigations of the city to photograph the scenes of car accidents, is heir to the nineteenth-century fl âneur, whose obsessive drifts produced collections of mental, written or photographic images (as Benjamin suggests, the fl âneur enjoyed the spectacle of production, the processes of the industrial city that would eventually annihilate him [see Coverley, 2006, p. 65]). It is no accident that the novel’s theme of the society of the spectacle, which Vaughan so thoroughly incarnates, has been recognized, widely investigated and debated since the publication of Baudrillard’s celebrated essay ‘Crash’ in 1974. His analysis of Ballard’s novel as an impassive hymn to the death of affect has been subscribed to by a number of critics, whilst others have offered an opposite ethical interpretation of the novel as a cautionary tale. Yet both readings are only partial and, therefore, unsatisfactory: Vaughan’s gruesome photographs are the unconscious attempt of a mind deprived of affect in a world drained of all emotion ‘to restore a lost compassion of some kind’ (Ballard, 2008a, p. 221). Vaughan (or rather Ballard through Vaughan) immortalizes casualties as an extreme, pathological way of reclaiming them from the blank catastrophe of feeling produced by spectacularization.

NEW URBAN MYTHOLOGIES In New Brutalism and Archigram’s appreciation of objects and materials for their inherent qualities ‘as found’ (Lichtenstein and Schregenberger, 2001,

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passim), Foster diagnoses an attempt to counterbalance modern obsolescence. As he writes in ‘Expendabilia. Reyner Banham’: This world is imageable in both senses mentioned above, at once expendable and memorable, and this double meaning is crucial to Banham: it is his updating of the Baudelairean dialectic of modern beauty—that it be ephemeral and eternal in equal parts. The expendable eats away at the memorable yet also calls out for it, and Banham sensed that a contemporary beauty might be wrested from this old dialectic. (2002, p. 15) The artists of the Independent Group could elicit a mnemonic dimension from expendabilia: ‘Sculpture used to look “modern”; now we make objects that might have been dug up at any time during the past forty thousand years’ (Crosby, 1956, sec. 1, n. p.). Their sculptural pieces are contemporary yet mysteriously enfolded in the patina of age. Paolozzi and Ballard turn their archaeological gaze towards a present landscape of debris as if observing it from the future: through the effects of an imaginary time lapse, these ephemeral objects become contemporary fossils and as such they are restored to an ontological realm of being which would otherwise be lost in the flux of media images. In Crash the urban landscape often displays this strategy of time freezing as the attempt to counteract the amnesia and lack of recognition inherent in expendability. The vertigo of speed and circulation, which evoke postmodern dynamics often described by Paul Virilio and Baudrillard himself, is compulsively interrupted in the novel by small crystallized deaths; these are like archaeological fi nds looked at as if from the future, a backward gaze which grants them ontological significance: At my feet lay a litter of dead leaves, cigarette cartons and glass crystals. These fragments of broken safety glass, brushed to one side by generations of ambulance attendants, lay in a small drift. I stared down at this dusty necklace, the debris of a thousand automobile accidents. Within fi fty years, as more and more cars collided here, the glass fragments would form a sizable bar, within thirty years a beach of sharp crystal. A new race of beachcombers might appear, squatting on these heaps of fractured windshields, sifting them for cigarette butts, spent condoms, and loose coins. Buried beneath this new geological layer laid down by the age of the automobile accident would be my own small death, as anonymous as a vitrified scar in a fossil tree. (Ballard, 1995, pp. 56–57) Changing our perspective on such images produces an effect of estrangement whereby objects look, in Spencer’s defi nition, ‘familiar-unfamiliar’ (1976, p. 15). In ‘the iconography of the present’, Paolozzi makes a strong claim that the artist should no longer render a ‘fresh optical perception

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of the traditional landscape’, as in Van Gogh and Cézanne, but promote a new look on today’s ‘mental landscape’ (1976a, p. 29), which is most needed given our general inability to recognize the symbolism of today’s imagery: ‘Because the iconography of our everyday life is over-communicated, not only does it seem impossible to analyse but it has become difficult to apprehend as well’ (p. 33). The difficulty of retention and symbolic appreciation of images quickly disposed of makes it necessary to collect them in an archive (an extension of memory) on which the artist and the cultural historian will draw, acting as archaeologists of the present and near future. Collecting, isolating and cataloguing such images is a way of subtracting them from the flux of passive perception; but it is also a way of ascertaining their deeper imbrications, claims Paolozzi, and in this connection he makes the example of aviation design: ‘the decorations on the side of aircraft are full of military significance, but they also have a number of social and political implications’ (p. 29). This poetics, which uses elements of industrial production, interprets the landscape of consumer debris as a new environment deeply and mysteriously encoded. At a more sophisticated level, these ready-mades are invested with totemic qualities: ‘In Paolozzi’s display, the power tool laid on the post-nuclear sand was not just a portable device for drilling holes but a symbolic object with almost magical properties’ (Ballard, 2008b, p. 189), one from which new myths can originate. In this respect, Paolozzi’s comments in an interview with Hamilton are illuminating: Early forms of society worshipped an image or a symbol which represented some dominant force, and I see something related to this today when one does a precise or specific image which represents in a small way the kind of man-made forces which contribute to certain manmade articles I am involved with. In a way it refers to the idea that all sculpture really is man-made objects, so that whatever you make in a sense must refer to other experiences. There is this other word too with a capital M—Mythology, not Mathology. (1976b, pp. 39–40) In a post-apocalyptic landscape where traditional epistemological instruments are blunt—because, as Ballard writes in his introduction to Crash, ‘the past, in social and psychological terms, became a casualty of Hiroshima and the nuclear age’ (1995, p. 4)—new myths are felt necessary to make sense of a world running too fast and short of interpretative keys. To let these secret dominant forces emerge into consciousness and to mythologize the ephemerality of the modern landscape is paramount for him. In Crash the sidereal junction of the body and the urban environment fulfils this function by turning these deaths into archival objects ready for future unearthing. Their fossilization transforms them into familiar/unfamiliar objects of the present/past where cryptic mythologies are embedded: ‘In his vision of a car-crash with the actress, Vaughan was obsessed [ . . . ] by the

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image of windshield glass frosting around her face as she broke its tinted surface like a death-born Aphrodite’ (Ballard, 1995, p. 8). The London of Crash is an endless rehearsal of death scenes, a repeated rewinding of the tape, countering the meaningless expendability of life through meaningful, ever-lasting collisions. In Sinclair’s view, expressed in his critical study Crash, ‘By their deaths they will be integrated with the geography of London, elevated into “the parthenon of auto-disaster victims”’ (2008, p. 43) as new myths symbolizing the neuroses of our civilization, the hidden, dominant forces underpinning who we are.

IS THIS LONDON? THE CITY-FOSSIL OF THE DROWNED WORLD If Crash is the landscape of auto-disasters, Ballard’s earlier novel The Drowned World (1962) is one of climatic and architectural catastrophe, celebrating the union of buildings and water. In the twenty-fi rst century, ice caps have melted and seas have risen as a consequence of the fluctuations in solar radiation; unbearable tropical temperatures have forced the population to move northward, leaving behind a flooded Europe. The novel is set in London, where an expedition is recording the new flora and fauna, and is noticeable for its brilliant descriptions of the metropolis inundated by a primeval swamp whose ecology has reverted to the Triassic. Kerans, the protagonist, is irrationally enticed by this marine realm which triggers regressive fantasies of intrauterine existence and draws him to an engulfi ng space both motherly and uncannily destroying. To borrow Sigmund Freud’s words, ‘This unheimlich place, however, is the entrance to the former Heim [home] of all human beings, to the place where each one of us lived once upon a time and in the beginning’ (cited in Vidler, 1992, p. 55). With its streets, shops and cars lying at the bottom of the sea, the drowned city has turned into a huge fossil and an imaginary catalogue of dead architectural styles: from Georgian terraced houses to ‘the drowned bulk of a Gothic building’ (Ballard, 2000, p. 11), from modern office blocks to neoclassical colonnades; all of them lying jumbled, as it were, in an expanse of sea which stands for the unconscious memory of the past, both recent and remote. London is made unrecognizable by the flood, freely redesigned by a surrealist catastrophe which rearranges usual spatial codes. Symptomatically, if Ballard entertains the idea that his swamp may be seen as symbolic of the Collective Unconscious (see Luckhurst, 1997, p. 53), he also forcefully reminds us that the Jungian concept is framed for him in the usual terms of modular assemblage: ‘I accept the collective unconscious—I don’t think it’s a mystic entity, I think it’s simply that whenever an individual is conceived, a whole set of operating instructions, a set of guidebooks, are meshed together like cards being reshuffled’ (Ballard, 1984c, p. 45).

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He often insists that modern cities, especially their suburbs, tend to resemble each other and, in its peculiar way, The Drowned World could be said to play on the very same idea: ‘had it once been Berlin, Paris or London?, Kerans asked himself’ (2000, p. 9). Yet John Baxter is persuaded that the novel is rooted in Ballard’s experience of the capital city, and that, in particular, it was the claustrophobic atmosphere of Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove which proved inspiring for him: ‘Streets flooded after a rainstorm suggested the images he conjured in The Drowned World, and he used the London Planetarium on Marylebone Road as the setting for its most vivid episode, “The Pool of Thanatos”’ (2011, p. 72). Much of the attraction of the setting derives precisely from its being almost unrecognizable but not quite: its beauty is wrestled from the sense of the contemporary mysteriously shrouded by the patina of age. To create the ambiguous effect of London as a familiar-unfamiliar ‘as found’ setting emerging from the sea, Ballard juxtaposes the city’s non-identity with itself, rendered through Kerans’s perception, with Bodkin’s far more accurate topographic memories: ‘Part of it used to be called London; not that it matters. Curiously enough, though, I was born here. Yesterday I rowed over to the old University quarter, a mass of little creeks, actually found the laboratory where my father used to teach’ (pp. 75–76). Although Ballard repeatedly disavows the influence of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness on the writing of The Drowned World, claiming, as he does in Miracles of Life, not to have read Conrad’s works till later (see 2008b, p. 192), the London he describes clearly evokes Conradian settings and concerns. Ballard’s capital has reverted to the swamp it once was (the primeval landscape also conjured up in the opening pages of Heart of Darkness), and this reversion of geological time has generated a geographical implosion, causing the imaginary displacement of the exotic periphery to the centre of the former empire. Of course, at the core of his analysis is the relationship between the subject and the landscape, and in this respect the comparison with Heart of Darkness reveals that the aims of the two writers are wide apart: if Conrad uses the colonized black as the mirror image of the white man’s dark, primitive side, for Ballard the reflection of this inner darkness is the jungle city itself. A further Conradian touch in Ballard’s novel is the absurd clinging of the white man to the habits and tenets of the civilized world, ideals which the primitive setting so blatantly undermines. In Heart of Darkness, the tendency becomes paramount in the impeccable appearance and obsessive bookkeeping of the Company’s chief accountant, ‘devoted to his books’ while ‘everything else in the station was in a muddle,—heads, things, buildings’ (Conrad, 2007, p. 21). In The Drowned World, the idea is differently inflected, couched in Ballard’s characteristic language of psychoarchitectonics with the aim to represent the catatonic stupor of ‘dying recluses unable to separate their own identities from the cities where they had spent their lives’ (Ballard, 2000, p. 12). Kerans himself is trapped in

48 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature his environment, unwilling to leave his Ritz apartment, which functions as an enveloping comfort zone, protective but stupefying: ‘the air-sealed suite with its constant temperature and humidity, its supplies of fuel and food, were nothing more than an encapsulated form of his previous environment, to which he had clung like a reluctant embryo to its yoke sac’ (pp. 146–47). The art nouveau atmosphere of the apartment, where he lives in luxurious leisure and apathy, is reminiscent of both twentieth-century capitalism (‘the suite had originally been designed for a Milanese fi nancier, and was lavishly furnished and engineered’ [p. 10]) and fin-de-siècle aestheticism. In the early stages of the story, Kerans is a modern Des Esseintes, the sickly and indolent aesthete of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature, published in French in 1884, who, surrounded by the paraphernalia of his sumptuous apartment and unable to muster the energy to walk the streets, stumbles upon the advantages of mental travel. If Ballard reveals his debt to this tradition of domestic travel, it is because, as the story develops, his protagonist’s journey, too, is through an inner landscape. Or, more to the point, the story unfolds only by creating circumstances for the character not so much to move physically as to shift from one stage set to another: the apartment, the Planetarium, the drained city, the fi nal tropical wilderness which foreshadows the paradise of the sun.

HIGH-RISE: THE VERTICAL CITY AS BIO-TECHNOLOGICAL MONSTER Inter-war architects such as Theo van Doesburg, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier, were the advocates of a modernist aesthetic of bare and neat geometries and materials (such as steel, plate glass and reinforced concrete) used for the realization of utopian dwelling spaces so functional as to resemble ‘machines for living in’. Modernist public housing estates expressed the utopia of a normalization of the biophysical environment based on the parascientific discourse that these buildings would provide the space, light and air that human beings need as much as bread or a place to sleep. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the house was invested with an even greater significance in Europe. Predictably, in the Blitzscarred London of the late 1940s, an efficient response to the malfunctioning home disrupted by the war became alarmingly urgent, and the domestic space acquired an unprecedented prominence (see Hornsey, 2010, p. 202). A strong emphasis was placed on the modernization and functionality of apartments through the standardized forms of design proposed at the Britain Can Make It exhibition in 1946 and the South Bank Exhibition, which was part of the celebrated Festival of Britain of 1951. Modernist tower blocks spread as a result of the 1956 Housing Act, which ‘provid[ed] fi nancial incentives for all buildings over five floors,

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and several thousand high-rises were launched skywards between the 1950s and the 1990s’ (Gasiorek, 2005, p. 121). Driven by the post-1945 welfare state, the construction of cheap public housing estates, deemed affordable and egalitarian, was at the heart of Labour’s reformist agenda and a fundamental feature of urban regeneration after the large-scale destruction of British cities during the war. The building of standardized, poor-quality tower blocks was meant to respond to the problem of high-density urban living, but the experience of residing in these shoddy, malfunctioning and alienating buildings proved a social catastrophe. As Gasiorek points out, ‘In the 1960s and 1970s the problems associated with high-rises became a regular feature of the national press, and despite the hysteria that accompanied this reportage, the problems were genuine’ (2005, p. 121), ranging from vandalism to maintenance costs and social isolation. Tower blocks continued to be built into the 1970s, even if the suitability of high-rise living had been contested by social commentators and architects from at least the early 1960s. But the ruination of the modernist utopian enterprise would soon become evident, already signalled by the partial collapse in 1967 of Ronan Point, a housing block in the East End. Bracewell expresses the ensuing sense of the failure of the modernist project, the feeling of psychological and social dead end, in his evocation of Croydon in the 1970s. The scenery he depicts is uncannily reminiscent of the ruins of the space age which often form the backdrop of Ballard’s short stories: Seen from the flyover at dusk, the modernist office blocks—built during the Space Race in the late 1960s, and named accordingly, ‘Zodiac House’, ‘Apollo House’, ‘Lunar House’—had a paradoxically Soviet air, their featureless windows, concrete and glass, like punk itself, timelessly modern, expressing modernity reaching critical mass—the modern as a worn-out thoroughfare. (2003, p. 303) More dramatically, it was the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1972—Ballard mentions it in the article ‘A Handful of Dust’ (2006a)—which sounded the fi nal death-knell of the modernist architectural ideal; or, in Martin’s words, ‘the becoming-spectral of a utopian future that, by the time the project was completed, was already identified with the past’ (2010, p. 15). As for Britain, the ambitious demolitions of unwanted housing stock would steadily increase in the 1970s and 1980s. There is no ambiguity as to the fact that Ballard’s High-Rise was inspired by the real experience of high-rise living in England. His choice to set the novel ‘in a mile-square area of abandoned dockland and warehousing’ (Ballard, 2006d, p. 8) of the East End suggests that the novel is more London-based than his frequent statements on the universal character of his contemporary locales would have us believe. (In fact, his

50 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature claims of this tenor are often a way of distancing himself from the topographic drive of psychogeography and maintaining his grasp of a more universal human condition embodied by global architectural tendencies.) Nevertheless, a purely London reading of the novel’s setting would be misguided. Undeniably, Ballard is also referring to a wider, international phenomenon, catching the signals of the demise of the Corbusian project on both sides of the Atlantic. Certainly, the novel is rooted in London’s East End social experiments and the ghastly ‘streets in the sky’ concept for urban housing, whose style was described as New Brutalism. But it is equally true that, by having middle-class, young professionals inhabit his imaginary building, Ballard is commingling the social connotations of high-rise living in America, where height denoted wealth, and the social catastrophe of council tower blocks in England. It is probably on the premise of this visionary confl ation between the American dream and the British dead end that he constructs his tale of the ruins of the modernist utopia in the near future. In High-Rise Ballard is adamant that the failure of these structures was not only a question of deterioration or obsolescence but fi rst and foremost the consequence of their alienating abstract and rectilinear forms, an aesthetic and philosophical concern which features prominently from the very fi rst pages of the novel. The joint forces of existentialist nihilism and New Brutalism are active in the conception of this ‘vertical city’ (p. 10), whose ‘appeal lay all too clearly in the fact that this was an environment built, not for man, but for man’s absence’ (p. 25). If Le Corbusier deemed that his housing units would produce ‘des rapports émouvants’, touching relationships (Sbriglio, 1992, p. 5), in ‘A Handful of Dust’, Ballard contends that the opposite was true. Modernism was an inhuman and unemotional style ‘whose dark ghosts haunted the brutalist architecture so popular in Britain in the 1950s’ (2006c): Out of favour now modernism survives in every high-rise sink estate of the time, in the Barbican development and the Hayward Gallery in London [ . . . ]. We see its demise in the 1960s kitchens and bathrooms, white-tiled laboratories that are above all clean and aseptic, as if human beings were some kind of disease. (2006c) Brutalist housing units ‘lacked mystery and emotion’, he suggests, and were ‘a little too frank about the limits of human nature’ (2006c); in existentialist terms, they expressed our Heideggerian being-for-death. Significantly, in an interview included in Sinclair’s Crash, Ballard equates modern structures with instruments of meditation and points to the unconscious awareness on the part of architects and builders of the psychological danger inherent in their abstract geometries. This was a threat they tried to camouflage through a mild decoration meant to blunt the users’ realization of the nihilist potential of these structures:

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There are an enormous number of multi-storey car-parks in Watford, I discovered. It’s the Mecca of the multi-storey car-park. And they’re quite ornate, some of them. They played a special role in The Atrocity Exhibition. They were iconic structures. [ . . . ] The multi-storey carpark and its canted floors, as a depository for cars, seemed to let one into a new dimension. They obviously decided they had to beautify these structures. They covered them in strange trellises. It was a bizarre time. (Sinclair, 2008, pp. 29–30) Ballard is fascinated by the fact that an honest recognition of our mortality exudes from these architectures. Yet, to borrow T. S. Eliot’s words in Four Quartets (1935–42), as any other human being Ballard ‘cannot bear very much reality’ (Eliot, 1974, p. 190), and this accounts for the ambiguous attitude to the modernist movement he expresses in ‘A Handful of Dust’: ‘I have always admired modernism [ . . . ]. But I know that most people, myself included, fi nd it difficult to be clear-eyed at all times and rise to the demands of a pure and unadorned geometry’ (2006c). In ‘Motel Architecture’, Ballard shows some admiration for Pangborn’s search for an ultimate, authentic self; a condition he achieves through his confi nement in the chilling, ‘anonymous rectangles of blank skin’ (Ballard, 2006b, p. 516) which form his modernist apartment. The same fascination seems implicit in the depiction of Pangborn’s existentialist anticipatory decision: ‘Eager now to merge with the white sky of the screen, to fi nd that death in which he would be rid forever of himself, of his intruding mind and body, he raised his knife to his happy heart’ (p. 516). Yet, ambiguously, what the protagonist is so anxious to dispose of, ‘the intrusive fact of his own consciousness’ (p. 516), is also what Ballard propounds in his introduction to Crash and elsewhere as ‘the one small node of reality left to us’ (1995, p. 5) which alone will be able to counteract the nihilist forces of modernity. For him, architectural forms are the foreclosure of a given culture’s own imaginary. As such, they are a ground of both projection and recognition: they materialize the subject’s image of itself and, in the same move, generate our need to imaginatively remake ourselves so as to adjust, physically and psychologically, to that projection. In High-Rise Ballard suggests that ‘a new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool unemotional personality’ (2006d, p. 35), and this physical and psychological transformation is sensed by Laing, the protagonist, as occurring right under his epidermis, in the muscles and nerves which generate expressions and emotions: ‘He touched the tender skin, prodding the musculature as if searching for another self, the physiologist who had taken a quiet studio in this expensive apartment building six months earlier’ (p. 34). Environmental adaptation (the most Darwinian feature in Ballard) produces human beings’ quick adjustment to the lines and forms provided by specific spaces; which implies that narration itself originates precisely from this process of adaptation to the transformative power of architecture. The protagonists’

52 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature fi nal destiny, unknown to them, is already inscribed in the autonomous, cryptic geometries of the places they inhabit: ‘Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?’ (Ballard, 1984b, p. 149), Ballard wonders in a collage published in Ambit in 1967. His high-rise is a modern city unto itself: an early example of gated community but also, most intriguingly, a vertical reproduction of urban spatial dynamics made of centre and periphery, vagrants, neighbourhoods and social climbing. The vertical city dwellers have a fairly uniform psychology, as standardized as its rectilinear living spaces, but these also replicate the social structure outside: What angered Wilder most of all about life in the apartment building was the way in which an apparently homogeneous collection of highincome professional people had split into three hostile camps. The old social sub-divisions, based on power, capital and self-interest, had reasserted themselves here as anywhere else. (Ballard, 2006d, pp. 52–53) Class division is introduced in the initial conception of the building: the upper-class inhabits the top five floors, the large middle class resides between the tenth and the thirty-fi fth, the lower class in the fi rst nine. The tenth and thirty-fi fth floors, set aside for amenities, are physical borders which work as psychological buffer zones meant to sustain the fiction of social division while promoting a psychological cohesion among the three classes under the auspices of consumerism and entertainment. But the democratizing abstraction of the architecture exerts a far greater force, taking over from traditional hierarchies; in the neutral lines of the high-rise lies the potential of a new desert, where the social kit inherited by centuries of civilized dwelling in culturally and socially overloaded cities becomes a useless vestige of the past to be disposed of, so that a new social experiment may take place and constitute ‘a model of all that technology had done to make possible the expression of a truly “free” psychopathology’ (p. 36). Applied to the abstract, modernist space of the mega-structure, the obsolete concept of class is nothing but a fi ction entrusted to arbitrary boundaries. The standardization brought about by consumerism tends to blunt aspirations of social climbing, which, consequently, are largely neglected as a narrative device to set the plot in motion. Undoubtedly, the story develops around Wilder’s journey to the top of the building, but such an ascent is less the result of his social ambitions than a way for him to face the physical challenge posed by the building and relieve the psychophysical pressure it produces on him: ‘He was constantly aware of the immense weight of concrete stacked above him, and the sense that his body was the focus of the lines of force running through the building, almost as if Anthony Royal had deliberately designed his body to be held within their grip’ (p. 48). Clearly, the confrontation between Wilder and Royal is predicated on an existentialist

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rather than social motivation. The beast (Wilder) will kill the master, Royal, but only to embrace his own death at the hands of the matriarchate which takes over in the end and represents the minotaur of the labyrinth into which the high-rise fi nally turns. Again, the pressure produced by inhabited spaces is the driving force behind narrative action as well as the element that allows the urban gothic tale to return uncannily in the geometrical spires of the modernist vertical city. This, rather than the oppositional alter ego of the traditional gothic tale, is the real limit of the self for Ballard: it is on the heroic confrontation with the high-rise that Wilder relies to defi ne himself. But let us return to architecture’s dual activity of mirroring and generating. This reciprocity is premised on the idea that built forms are the codes and traces of the cerebral activity which produces, and in turn is produced by, them. In High-Rise ‘the ragged skyline of the city’ centre which Laing had left to choose the rectilinear space of the modern block of fl ats, ‘resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis’ (p. 9). Similarly, ‘The cluster of auditorium roofs, curving roadway embankments and rectilinear curtain walling formed an intriguing medley of geometries—less a habitable architecture, [Laing] reflected, than the unconscious diagram of a mysterious psychic event’ (p. 25). Constructional modules are signs on the collective skin of the city (‘tattoos of civilisation’, as Paolozzi would have it [Schmied, 1976, p. 24]), which have migrated from our unconscious into the outer world to achieve their own independent being and uncanny ontological existence. This process has already been investigated in my discussion of ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ but is worth exploring further and fi nally in relation to High-Rise. Indeed, the novel could be seen as an urban gothic tale where the Corbusian unité d’habitation features as a bio-technological monster: [Mrs. Steel] referred to the high-rise as if it were some kind of huge animate presence [ . . . ]. There was something in this feeling—the elevators pumping up and down the long shafts resembled pistons in the chamber of a heart. The residents moving along its corridors were the cells in a network of arteries, the lights in their apartments the neurons of a brain. (Ballard, 2006d, p. 40) In tune with Ballard’s association of modernist mega-structures with fascism in ‘A Handful of Dust’, the apartment building is a place of regimentation whose small dictator, the architect Anthony Royal, is a man of science in his way, in that he uses the high-rise monster he has created as a social laboratory. Fascist architects and architectures are recurrent in Ballard’s production: in ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’, the designer of Vermillion Sands, an exclusive and fully automated desert resort, appears in photographs:

54

Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature glowering out of 1950-ish groups with Le Corbusier and Lloyd Wright, stalking about some housing project in Chicago or Tokyo like a petty dictator, heavy-jowled, thyroidal, with large lustreless eyes, and then the Vermillion Sands: 1970 shots of him, fitting into the movie colony like a shark into a goldfish bowl. (2006a, p. 427)

Ballard’s architects usually conceive of themselves as omnipotent. ‘Will modern technology provide [them] with hitherto undreamed-of means for tapping [their] own psychopathologies?’ (Ballard, 1995, p. 6). Modernist utopias’ realizations are of very varied nature for Ballard, going from fascist regimes through ‘the styling of Mercedes cars, at once paranoid and aggressive’ (Ballard, 2006c), to Le Corbusier’s machine for living in. But whichever the shape, for Ballard the materialization of twentieth-century dreams of social control have always slipped into catastrophe; in this sense, he is in accord with the postmodern master narrative that claims that all modernist utopias, and particularly high-density housing developments, lead to the camps (see Martin, 2010, p. 25). Rosi Braidotti’s discussion of today’s technologies for artificial insemination is useful in connection with Ballard’s idea of the architect as a fascist scientist who generates posthuman monsters. She makes a strong case that: the test-tube babies of today mark the long-term triumph of the alchemists’ dream of dominating nature through their self-inseminating, masturbatory practices. What is happening with the new reproductive technologies today is the fi nal chapter in a long history of fantasy of self-generation by and for the men themselves—men of science, but men of the male kind, capable of producing new monsters and fascinated by their power. (Cited in Weiss, 1999, p. 107) This lure would be the result of their fear of woman’s natural generative power: her ‘excess, her “monstrosity”, the monstrosity of (Deleuze’s) becoming-woman, a becoming that has made her a site of fascination and horror’ (p. 107). Braidotti’s central contention is that contemporary biotechnologies ‘give us an illusory sense of control over the monstrous/maternal, domesticating our horror and fascination, but, in so doing, create new monsters, nonmaternal, cybernetic monsters who may end up controlling us’ (Weiss, 1999, p. 109). My aim is not a feminist analysis of Ballard’s High-Rise, but Braidotti’s remarks are worth considering all the same, in that they are singularly applicable to his novel, which explores both the male fantasy of generating a bio-technological creature and a female gender related to primitive monstrosity. Ballard’s fascination with the topic is confi rmed by his representation of woman’s procreative power as inversely proportional to man’s physical strength in his 1961 short story ‘Mr. F is Mr. F’ (see Ballard,

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2006a, pp. 345–61), where the gradual growth, extending throughout the tale, of a wife’s womb corresponds to her husband’s increasingly retreating figure; so that, in the climax, the baby’s birth coincides with the man’s death. But let us return to High-Rise. Of course, as Weiss argues, eventually the scientist never succeeds in eliminating the maternal monster (1999, p. 110). So the novel ends suitably with men succumbing to the new, powerful matriarchy of a ‘group of outcast wives’ (Ballard, 2006d, p. 133), who, as a consequence of the shortage of food, practise cannibalism to breed their children. The uncanny kindness of women lies in their fi nal annihilation of the wicked male power through their dismembering and physical incorporation of male bodies. But even more to the point, this regressive fantasy of a destructive return to the womb is mirrored by the parallel transformation of the inhabited spaces in the high-rise. The imposing housing unit, with its bio-technological armature and orthopaedic totality, is itself dismembered into what Jacques Lacan would describe as a morcelated body (2001, p. 5), fragmented into mini-environments which recall Archigram’s uteruses in which to live. Hastily raised barricades and claustrophobic shanties are womb-like, devouring spaces which constantly threaten to engulf the male protagonists: Almost everything movable in the apartment, however small, [his wife] had added to the barricade, at times threatening to entomb them for good. [ . . . ] Once Wilder woke to fi nd that she had incorporated part of his left leg. Often it would take him half an hour to dig his way out of the apartment. (2006d, p. 124) With the gradual demise of the imposing building, which yields to threatening uterine spaces, the aseptic flats of the vertical concentration city, ‘dovetailed into each other to minimize space’ (p. 9), revert to post-catastrophic dwellings constructed out of found materials and industrial objects. Reminiscent of the pavilion Ballard observed at the ICA exhibition in 1956, these abodes are no more than dens carved out of a hostile and primitive technological environment: in the high-rise, Laing ‘would build his dwelling-place where he was, with this woman and in this cave in the cliff face’ (p. 99).

DADA, SURREALISM AND THE ARTIST’S SPATIAL POLITICS In Miracles of Life, commenting on an event he staged at the ICA in the 1960s, when stripper Euphoria Bliss was hired ‘to perform a striptease to the reading of a scientific paper’, Ballard states that ‘it still seem[ed] in the true spirit of Dada’ (2008b, p. 210). Along the same lines, Spencer defi nes Paolozzi’s sculptures as an evolution of the ‘familiar-unfamiliar ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp’ (1976, p. 15), while in ‘The Iconography of the Present’, Paolozzi suggests Dali and Picabia as predecessors of his techniques

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(see 1976a, p. 27). According to Schmied, we must regard Paolozzi’s works as art irrespective of whether he ‘produced a collage, shifted the emphasis or whether he accepted a source of ready-made material, because it seemed to him to function artistically without further alteration’ (1976, p. 23). As the assistant editor of Chemistry and Industry, a journal published by the Society of the Chemical Industry, Ballard himself performed his Dadaist experiment by producing a series of text-based collages entitled Project for a New Novel (1958), which consisted of four double-page spreads, whose typeface was borrowed from the American magazine Chemical and Engineering News. Interviewed by Martin Bax, he describes the work as ‘sample pages of a new kind of novel, entirely consisting of magazine-style headlines and layouts, with a deliberately meaningless text, the idea being that the imaginative content could be carried by the headlines and overall design’ (1984d, p. 38). For Ballard, the collection of information becomes central to the artist’s activity and even more so in a capitalist society where objects and images are quickly disposed of, calling for adequate technological means of access and storage of data. In ‘Speculative Illustrations’ he contends that: Technology may make it possible to have a continuous feedback to ourselves of information. But at the moment I think we are starved of information. I think that the biggest need of the painter or writer today is information. I’d love to have a tickertape machine in my study constantly churning out material: abstracts from scientific journals, the latest Hollywood gossip, the passenger list of a 707 that crashed in the Andes, the colour mixes of a new automobile varnish. [ . . . ] It’s always struck me that Eduardo’s studio is lavishly equipped with photographic and recording equipment of various kinds. [ . . . ] And it struck me that the information system Eduardo has designed for himself comes very close to the sort of information-retrieval systems that a scientist has. (Paolozzi, 1971, p. 143) Ballard’s idea that creative imagination should be fed on information was common amongst the London avant-gardes of the time: Archigram artists regarded themselves as ‘a kind of “seismograph”, documenting and processing new developments’ (Steiner, 2009, p. 26) occurring in the media, urban and technological environments. But in his works Ballard is equally interested in gauging the information provided by the landscape of the body; in this respect, his recognition that a number of biological processes still evades capture goes hand in hand with his fi rm belief that in time chemistry and technology will provide an increasing amount of information from within and, along with it, means to extend our sensory possibilities. The still elusive ontology of bodies is a recurrent topos in his fiction: in The Atrocity Exhibition, for instance, describing the look of a patient, Travis suggests that ‘for some reason the planes of his face

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failed to intersect, as if their true resolution took place in some as yet invisible dimension, or required elements other than those provided by his own character and musculature’ (1990, pp. 9–10). The ontological issue is also suggested in Ballard’s 1994 ‘Foreword’ to Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell. The book, which lies ‘in the border zone between religion, art and science’, is praised for its ability to dismantle the limitations inherited by millennia of evolution, which have trained our brain ‘to screen out all those perceptions that do not directly aid us in our day to day struggle of existence’ (Ballard, 1994b, n. p.). In Ballard’s view, Huxley is committed to probe into the mystic wonders of life, revealing the extent to which they are deeply embedded in our still basically unexplored neural system, in the ‘neurotransmitters in our brain’ (n. p.). The aim is to look at ‘the way in which these chemical messengers control our view of ourselves and the world around us’ (n. p.). Hence, for Ballard, both the inner and outer landscapes are the substantial objects of scientific measurement as well as elusive entities variously mystic and oneiric. In ‘Speculative Illustrations’ he claims that in the contemporary media environment it is no longer necessary for us individually to dream because reality has turned into an all-inclusive fantasy; it ensues that for him pathologies are inherent to all matter. In the contemporary landscape, the foreclosure of the immaterial unconscious leads to its spatialization and materialization, its Cartesian extension in space; in the process, the ineffable, theoretical codes described by psychoanalysis as governing mental workings become quantities, intensities, geometries. ‘After Freud’s exploration within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which must be quantified and eroticised’ (Ballard, 1968, p. 150). To make sense of this new environment, adequate information-retrieval systems must be devised and employed. Unlike Sinclair, for whom, as we will see, the artist-shaman has his own innate sensors responding to and activating every fragment of the city—‘For Sinclair, the narrative starts everywhere because sensory experience starts everywhere’, states Alex Murray (2007, p. 59)—Ballard’s writer-scientist is constantly ‘looking at the landscape, testing, putting sensors out, charting various parameters’ (Paolozzi, 1971, p. 136). His way of disclosing the mythologies and dreams produced by the urban and media landscapes is by working from within the technological discourse and using its instruments. In Miracles of Life, he writes that together with psychologist Christopher Evans, he published for Ambit ‘a remarkable series of computergenerated poems, which Martin [Baxter] said were as good as the real thing. I went further: they were the real thing’ (2008b, p. 211). In his use of mimetic strategies, Ballard was along the same lines as Paolozzi, who ‘[put] on paper the colourful appeal of American consumer goods and their advertising slogans. It was neither praise nor criticism; his fascination was not so much for the things depicted as for the mechanisms for depicting

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them’ (Lichtenstein and Schregenberger, 2001, p. 59). In the early 1970s, which saw his most avant-garde phase, Ballard was prone to contend that, when applied to a meaningless text or artwork, design can in its own right produce imaginative content, working as an autonomous and transcendent tattoo of civilization. So it is almost as if the only virtue the artist could then lay claim to were the mere procedures of selection and composition. Art becomes the interrogation and conscious use of codes and, in the true spirit of Dada, their arrangement into ‘patterns of irony’ (Paolozzi, 1971, p. 137). This, indeed, is the margin of the artist’s intervention for Ballard, the only viable strategy for him to have an impact on the consciences of his contemporaries. Hence to the old question asked of the Independent Group and Pop Art alike—critical or complicit?—the answer given by artists like Paolozzi and Hamilton, or Ballard for that matter, is both, and intensely so. It is through an art which is analytical and ironic at the same time that they hope to countermand people’s passive absorption and docile reproduction of the abstract grammar provided by the urban and media environments. Ballard clarifies the unique imaginative nature of the new survivalist challenge posed by contemporary society: Although our central nervous systems have been handed to us on a plate by millions of years of evolution, have been trained to respond to violence at the level of fi nger-tip and nerve-ending, in fact now our own experience of violence is in the head, in terms of our imagination, the last place where we were designed to deal with violence. We have absolutely no biological training to deal with violence in imaginative terms. And our whole inherited expertise for dealing with violence, our central nervous systems, our musculature, our senses, our ability to run fast or to react quickly, our reflexes, all that inherited expertise is never used. We sit passively in cinemas watching movies like The Wild Bunch where violence is just a style. (Paolozzi, 1971, p. 137) Yet he is persuaded that in time our inadequate response to this novel, fictional environment will develop into a more sophisticated one. And in this respect his position is reminiscent of, and probably influenced by, McLuhan’s, for whom the human being should be trained to the recognition of hidden grammar patterns so as to promote his or her integration into the media ecology (see Martin, 2010, p. 61). Addressing the issue of design in ‘The Invisible Environment: The Future of an Erosion’, McLuhan argues that a manipulation of external conditions will be required ‘to program the environment in such a way that we can learn a second language as we learned the mother tongue’ (1967, p. 167). Intriguingly, in ‘Speculative Illustrations’ Ballard goes so far as to conjecture that, through training, eventually middle-class professionals involved in technological changes will evolve suitable ways of responding to imaginative stimuli and even develop the ironic skills which are now exclusive to the imagination of artists:

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One can almost visualise a time when the sort of separate role of the painter or sculptor is no longer necessary, when the engineer of a Boeing designs a new airliner and the shape he chooses for an engine may itself contain all the ironic and imaginative comments on itself that the specialized imagination of people like Eduardo now provide. (Paolozzi, 1971, p. 138) An illuminating example of this can be found in High-Rise. At the beginning of the novel, the picture window fractured on the fortieth floor by the mysterious fall of a resident becomes the enigmatic comment through which the utopian modernist high-rise, as if a creature endowed with its own will, signals its being ‘an architecture designed for war’ (Ballard, 2006d, p. 10): ‘The broken pane had not been replaced, and the asterisk of cracked glass reminded Wilder of some kind of cryptic notation, a transfer on the fuselage of a wartime aircraft marking a kill’ (pp. 42–43). Ballard seems to entertain the persuasion that urban spaces produce their own designs autonomously through the traces bodies leave in their impact on, or intersection with, architectural and technological surfaces. In Crash the casualties of car accidents contribute unawares, through their modular conjunction with architectural elements, to compose the transcendent overall design of the urban disaster scene. And a similar process is staged in High-Rise, where tenants gradually cover every exposed wall of the building with graffiti, to the point where ‘these complex acrostics [ . . . ] turned into a colourful but undecipherable mess, not unlike the cheap wallpapers found in launderettes and travel agencies which the residents of the high-rise most affected to despise’ (pp. 43–44). Not only does the extensive decoration of the vertical city achieve its ontological autonomy, it also and most importantly conveys, in the fashion typical of Dada and the Independent Group, its imaginative and ironic comment on the tenants’ upper-class pretensions. We rarely associate the Independent Group, much less Pop Art, with political commitment. Yet the architectural fervour and utopian drives of the early post-war period appear in continuity with the aims of the historical avant-gardes, whose attempt, whether manifestly nihilist as in Dada or futurist as in Constructivism, was to control history and guide the future. Ballard’s penchant for surrealist avant-garde strategies prompts us to consider how he relates to such narratives of progress and whether he envisages for the intellectual the possibility of social intervention in contemporary historical processes through the implementation of subversive spatial politics. Interviewed by Vale in 2004, Ballard still holds to the belief that ‘maybe one should infiltrate the power structure—go to work for the Disney corporation, go to work for some big advertising agency, work for a Hollywood studio, get into the citadel and see if you can subvert it from within’ (2005c, p. 29; emphasis added). Yet he has grown more sceptical about both the artist’s capacity of predicting and provoking change, and the ability of the intellectual class of salaried professionals to develop a potential

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for irony. This disillusionment, voiced in the interview with Vale, is the result of what he feels as the increasing irrelevance of the cultured middle class in contemporary society: .

It’s obviously unsettling, to put it mildly, because, of course most rational and literate and educated people are left out of the equation. They no longer ‘intercede’ as members of the professions (lawyers, doctors, schoolteachers, intellectuals) between the political leadership of a society and the bored mass of people. The political leadership now leaps over them and directly plugs into the deep limbic system of the mass psyche where emotions alone rule, and where fear can be stimulated with pinpoint accuracy. (p. 23) The theme is explored in Millennium People (2003), where the revolutionaries of Chelsea Marina, failing to breach the continuum of politics and mass culture, betray weaknesses and inconsistencies whose ironic potential Ballard fully explores. Published three years later, Kingdom Come reinforces the sense that, in his late novels, he is less concerned with the mystic ontology of the urban scene—found in Crash, High-Rise and The Atrocity Exhibition—than with the city as the site of both political manipulation and (failed) surrealist strategies of subversion. Pearson, the advertising man of Kingdom Come, is a true Dadaist artist: breaking away from a traditional advertising practice that promotes recognizable contents, he reconceives commercials as an art form whose meaning is constituted by design alone. In the suburban citadel of consumerism depicted in the novel, he is the perfect model of the infi ltrator who tries to subvert the system from within, yet his motives and intentions remain ambiguous, and dangerously so, preventing us from embracing his surrealist strategies as those of a moral guidance. In a 2003 interview with Graeme Revell, Ballard suggests insistently that we are living in a new Dark Age where the mass responds to media events and political ideologies on a purely instinctual basis (2005a, p. 53). Our blind psychosomatic responses are bound to take the upper hand in an ‘entertainment landscape’ (p. 58) where ‘there’s almost a deliberate program, especially in America, to keep the population under-educated’ (p. 53). His understanding of contemporary humanity is on a purely emotional, biological and stimulus-response basis: ‘You sense the human race’s brain is now exposed, and all kinds of nasty little electrodes are being inserted into its depths’, he claims in his interview with Vale (2005c, p. 23). In this context, Ballard regards minor surrealist actions as generating a positive delirium of the senses by virtue of their origin in individual consciousness rather than in beliefs induced in the mass by religion or the media: ‘I think everyone has to carry out a meaningless act—paint up a portion of the sidewalk, or invent an imaginary flag and fly it from one of the telegraph poles—anything! Announce meetings that will never take

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place, rediscover the old Surrealist attempts to undermine bourgeois society’ (p. 30). This accounts for his belief that ethics lies in individual rather than in class consciousness: ‘Each of us is a kind of ethical Robinson Crusoe building a replica of civilized society from the sort of debris washed up on the beach—on our own beach. [ . . . ] the obligation is to think for ourselves, and to think ethically for ourselves. Because no one else is going to do it for us’ (p. 34). The decline or unreliability of overarching social ‘ethical systems’ calls for the reconstruction of a sense of responsibility on a wholly individual and ‘piecemeal basis’ (p. 34). This is symptomatic of the fact that, as late as 2004, Ballard is still thinking in terms of the ‘as found’ philosophy of Paolozzi’s existentialist pavilion, with this powerful, persistent metaphor now applied to the moral realm. The ethical environment is itself a post-catastrophic one which follows the contemporary dismantling of moral sensibility. In such a disheartening context, Ballard still appeals to the humanist ‘small node of reality left to us’ (1995, p. 5), as he writes in his introduction to Crash, urging us to create our tiny ethical shelter in the surrounding devastation: ‘It’s as if there’s a storm’, he suggests, ‘and we each put up an umbrella and that’s our little micro-climate’ (2005c, p. 34).

2

Human Ruins and Architectural Spectres (the 1980s and Beyond) My body is everywhere: the bomb which destroys my house also damages my body insofar as the house was already an indication of my body. (Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 2003, p. 349)

There is ‘no such thing as Society’ (O’Sullivan, 2006, p. 223), Margaret Thatcher notoriously asserted in a 1987 interview, and the repetition of this mantra determined that in due course British people began to lose respect for socially defi ned goods. In the late 1980s, Britain began to take on some of the more unpleasant features of the American model that the Iron Lady so admired. Services that remained in public hands were starved of resources, whereas signifi cant fortunes were amassed in the ‘emancipated’ sectors of the economy; notably in the City of London, where investment bankers and stockbrokers benefited greatly from the Big Bang of 1986, when Britain’s fi nancial markets were deregulated and opened to international competition. Private affluence was accompanied, as so often, by public squalor: common spaces fell into neglect; petty crime and delinquency rose in line with the growing share of the population caught in permanent poverty. European modernist urban planning—conveniently associated with 1930s fascist Europe—was replaced by the concrete managerialism of international developers and the Docklands enterprise zone. One of the fi rst acts of the Conservative government elected in 1979 was to legislate against the building of social housing, so that municipal intervention was severely diminished—‘from the tower block of the early seventies to the litter bin, street-cleansing machine, or heritage bollard’ (Wright, 2002, p. 478)—largely as a consequence of the abolition of the Greater London Council. The GLC had antagonized Thatcher through a series of actions and in particular by publicly posting a billboard of London’s rising unemployment fi gures on the side of its headquarters, County Hall, facing directly the Houses of Parliament. It is no accident that the GLC was soon to be dissolved by the Local Government Act passed in 1985. Increasingly, urban texture was reduced and violated: deprived of memory and rendered comparatively uniform, a kind of non-place, by the privatization of public space and a ‘development boom which produced

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much that was mediocre, characterless and transparently designed with a fast buck in mind’ (Powell, 2003, p. 10). Under Thatcher’s rule the previously highly regulated property-development arena was opened up to speculative ventures. Consequently, in the second half of the decade, London witnessed the largest office building boom in its history. Much of the new development appeared in the heart of the capital: ‘By 1992 a recession was biting hard, yet it was reckoned that, by the end of the following year, half of all the office space in the City would have been rebuilt as a consequence of the Big Bang’ (p. 7). The decade was marked by Londoners’ self-doubt and despondency, the feeling that unashamed commercial architectural practices were threatening the city’s identity with the destruction of its physical and social fabric. In this period of rapid redevelopment: The general public, special interest groups, the media and built environment professionals and, most influentially, the Prince of Wales all entered the debate about the rapidity and scale of change in Central London, the loss of cherished townscape and local communities, and the quality of the new architecture. (Punter, 2005, p. 54) ‘“Is London dying?” asked the Evening Standard in August 1991: “fi lthy, clogged and dangerous streets”, and a population “increasingly homeless, unemployed and desperate” refl ected its crisis’ (Powell, 2003, p. 7). Within London the social variety was enormous and economic disparities were exacerbated by the fact that, unlike in other European cities such as Rome or Paris, much of its poverty was centrally located, so that some of the poorest and some of the wealthiest communities were closely juxtaposed. Such a contrast was particularly striking in certain areas: in Docklands, for example, the affluence and dynamism of Canary Wharf and technological luxury housing stood alongside some of the worst, dilapidated housing estates (see Thornley, 2005, p. 3). As Andrew Gibson states, the collapse of socially minded London was also ensuing from: what, alluding to the John Major years, Keiller calls suburban national government. It has been suburban in the sense that, for more than twenty years, middle England has been doing its best to dictate its unimaginative terms to the metropolis. It remains suburban partly because, as Keiller again points out, to such a large extent the city’s human resources are pumped from the suburbs in the morning, and pumped back to the suburbs at night. Do people still care for civic space? Are they even still aware that they share it, as they obviously are in Stockholm or Tokyo? Too few, it seems, or too little: Keiller’s fi lm describes a world in which the

64 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature concept of the public amenity has defi nitely come under threat. (2003, p. 294) Cuts in government housing expenditure and the brutal marketization of the private rental housing sector under Thatcher’s rule meant that money and capital flowed exponentially into the hands of developers. As Bracewell reminds us, this was also the age of a feverish property speculation which rapidly expanded towards London’s suburbs: Buy in Hackney before it goes through the roof! Too late! Buy in Oval whilst it’s still stable. Too late again! Ever thought of the Home Countries? Henley, perhaps, or St. Albans? Anticipate the spread of the commuter belt, wait for the waist-line of London to bulge out a little more in the direction of cheaper property. Wait for it, then wait for it, then— Coronary Now! Big Bang! (1988, pp. 26–27) In ‘Occult London’ Luckhurst points out that ‘in post-modern urban theory [ . . . ] it is usually the sprawl of Los Angeles or the ribbon-developments of Phoenix that are the focus’ (2003, p. 336). One of the main features and advantages of the American scene as an incubator of postmodernism is that its built environment is a constantly transforming one, an incessantly restructuring urban space dominated by vast, flat expanses and commercial billboard semiosis. In the seminal Learning from Las Vegas (1972), architect Robert Venturi advocated architecture’s incorporation of consumer culture with its ideas of planned obsolescence and amnesia; in the wake of his theories, the Los Angelization of cities was soon to become the aim of architects exhausted with the aesthetic formalisms of late modernism. Yet in London this process was incomplete—for Ballard, heralded and simultaneously brought to a dead end by the completion of the Westway—and it is this sense of suspension that Gasiorek detects in High-Rise and Concrete Island: a pair of fictions ‘belong[ing] to a particular socio-cultural period, the interregnum between the end of the “old Labour” project begun in 1945 and the beginning of the Thatcher era in 1979. An air of stasis hangs over these works’ (2005, p. 107). In spite of the massive redevelopments that were to follow in the Thatcherite decade, London has remained far from conducive to the kind of amnesia which Venturi found so enticing. Different historical sites, expressive of their periods, often lie cheek and jowl on the high streets, and if the twentieth century has accelerated the speed of development, the urban space of the British capital remains largely a palimpsest of historical layers. As Luckhurst contends, discussing the return of the urban gothic in contemporary London literature, if the capital city ‘is different, and conjures spectres in its “crisis”, it is because the creative destruction of its modernity is peculiarly hide-bound—haunted, one might say—by the ancient commands and ancestral inheritances that live on amidst the mirrored glass and cantilevered concrete’ (2003, p. 336; see Figure 2.1).

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Figure 2.1 Norman Foster, 30 St. Mary Axe, London, 2001–2003. Photographed by Andrea Ronconi 2011.

For its setting and structure—which alternates between early eighteenthcentury London and its modern counterpart—Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (1985) is the fictional work which best epitomizes this incongruous postmodern juxtaposition, where ominous ancient buildings stand alongside the

66 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature spectrality of springing office towers, newly spurred by the rampant finance and consumer culture of the 1980s. On the novel’s contemporary scene, in the shade of imposing old facades and brooding mirror surfaces, moves the burgeoning number of the homeless and unemployed who populate the filthy and dangerous streets of the capital city; they are the embodiment of the social catastrophe produced by monetarist economy and the dismantlement of the welfare state. As E. J. Evans suggests, ‘If an unofficial “poverty line” is drawn at half the average national income, the numbers in poverty increased from 5 million in 1979 to 14.1 million in 1992’ (1997, p. 117). In Ackroyd’s novel this new desperation is paralleled with another critical time in London’s history: the Black Death in 1665 and the Great Fire in the following year. Ackroyd suggests unsuspected continuities between the two eras and uncanny returns; in particular, his focus on vagrancy in present and past London presents homelessness as a mysteriously inescapable existential (even more than social or historical) condition. In The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely, written in the midst of the early 1990s economic recession, Vidler muses on the topicality of destitution, associating it to his theory of the architectural Unheimlich. He makes a strong case that ‘the resurgent problem of homelessness, as the last traces of welfare capitalism are systematically demolished, lends, fi nally, a special urgency to any reflection on the modern unhomely’ (1992, p. 12; emphasis added). Aware that, ‘Faced with the intolerable state of real homelessness, any reflection on the “transcendental” or psychological unhomely risks trivializing or, worse, patronizing political or social action’ (p. 13), he insists nonetheless on the centrality of the concept to late twentieth-century culture. ‘Estrangement and unhomeliness have emerged as the intellectual watchwords of our century’ (p. 9), he suggests, a metaphor for the inherently unliveable condition of post-industrial cities, and he turns to Heidegger in support of this insight: as the German philosopher wrote in his celebrated ‘Letter on Humanism’ in 1947, ‘Homelessness is coming to be the destiny of the world’ (cited in Vidler, 1992, p. 8). Old and new fl âneries are intimately associated with redesigned cities and the sense of loss and displacement they generate. It is well known that the Baudelairean fl âneur originated in the 1850s, when emporiums and arcades, the environment of the dandified stroller, were destroyed to give way to boulevards in the newly replanned Paris of Baron Haussmann (see Coverley, 2006, p. 63). Similarly, London psychogeography gained momentum in the 1980s, after the massive redevelopments produced by the Big Bang. In this connection, it is not wide of the mark to see the London psychogeographer as related not just—as it is usually recognized—to the need to witness and document the dramatic changes of the city in the era of Thatcherism but also and more subtly to a new sense of homelessness. Journeying through the ruins of a changing landscape, urban wanderers feel dispossessed, their condition inextricably bound to the debris of a disappearing world. As we will see, the vagrancy caused by high unemployment

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rates, on the one hand, and the pervasive rubble of daily council houses destruction, on the other, become powerful, uncanny metaphors in the literature of this period: they represent the impermanence of the human condition and the voracious metabolism of the late capitalist city. This chapter is subdivided into two parts. The fi rst analyses three fictional works diverse for genre and social concern: Ackroyd’s historical novel Hawksmoor, Dyer’s novel on Bohemian lowlife in the capital The Colour of Memory (1989) and Bracewell’s novella on a terrorist fashionable architect of the City Missing Margate (1988). Their comparison will bring into focus unexpected common traits, revealing specific spatial politics and a shared Zeitgeist. In particular, the three works suggest a similar vision of the body as replicating internally the external conditions of the contemporary ideological, social and economic contexts. The characters’ sense of alienation and homelessness—literal or metaphorical—in an increasingly unrecognizable urban landscape tends to redouble uncannily in the estrangement they experience from their own body. Repeatedly, in these works the corporeal frame is portrayed as unstable, verging on detachment or dissolution— destined to be transfigured into stone ruins (Ackroyd), dispersed into the rubble of demolished buildings (Bracewell) or visually merged into the environment (Dyer). The fundamentally unalterable and uncontrollable processes of the Thatcherite voracious city trigger in the subject a series of self-destructive impulses (variously melancholy or violent in nature) and the sense of being physically subsumed within a grinding system of growth and decay. What is staged is always and insistently the body’s assimilation into the formless, organic substance of the city, accompanied, as we will see, by a longing for some kind of mystic transfiguration which should stem from this very absorption. Unsurprisingly, the three works share intensely masochistic or nihilistic drives: their common trait is the subject’s anxiety over and desire for bodily undoing into the physical entity of the city as a way of repossessing, on a mystic or surreal plane, an urban landscape from which the self has been estranged. If Ackroyd’s and Bracewell’s mysticisms are surreal solutions to the impasse of a ghostly body craving for rebirth (it is no accident that both writers are influenced by T. S. Eliot), a worldly, human form of regeneration is instead to be found in the works of Moorcock and Sinclair to which the second part of the chapter is devoted. For them the paradigm of the subject’s masochistic inclusion in the substance of a voracious London is no longer viable. The landscapes of ruins and bodies in pain they present overcome the sense of impotence and entrapment through the regenerative, creative powers of the city. When asked with ironic intentions whether he could see anything positive in the contemporary capital city (he had just concluded a talk on his somewhat apocalyptic London Orbital at Brunel University in Uxbridge, London, in 2008), Sinclair’s answer was that he had confidence in London’s ability to absorb everything and heal, in time, the traumas inflicted on its organism. As we will see, in both Moorcock and Sinclair,

68

Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature

the subject’s memory and imagination replicate the city’s healing processes and contribute to the magic recreation of its wounded body. *

*

*

PART I: INSUBSTANTIAL BODIES AND THE CITY’S ORGANICISM— PETER ACKROYD, GEOFF DYER AND MICHAEL BRACEWELL

Homeless and Unhomely: Hawksmoor Ackroyd’s novel has a strictly bipartite structure whose odd and even chapters alternate between two parallel narratives in the eighteenth century and the 1980s, respectively. The book opens with Nicholas Dyer (clearly a pseudonym of architect Nicholas Hawksmoor) who, as the assistant to Sir Christopher Wren, builds seven London churches in the extensive project of the reconstruction of London following the Great Fire. After the traumatic experience of the Great Plague in 1665, where he loses both parents, Dyer comes into contact with an occult sect whose spiritual dictate he reflects in his architectures: each houses the terrible secret of a human sacrifice and is designed to cast a mysterious energy over the city. He sees every construction of his as deriving its structural and spiritual strength from the corpse lying in its foundations, and this establishes an indissoluble link, explored throughout the book, between birth and death, darkness and creative potential. In the second chapter we are introduced to the spiritually exhausted Nicholas Hawksmoor, a senior detective who, in contemporary London, investigates a series of gruesome murders on the sites of the same churches. His belief in the infallibility of rational investigation is challenged increasingly by the incongruity of the evidence he collects. The two narratives gradually lose their autonomy to intertwine inextricably towards the end of the novel where, finally, the two protagonists seem to join in a dimension of mysticism or dream. Reminiscing about the genesis of his novel, Ackroyd recounts his psychogeographical walks in the most derelict and forlorn streets of the city: Since childhood, I had been interested in the less salubrious areas of London—Wapping, Spitafields, Limehouse—and in the air of dilapidated gloom which they embody: if there is such a thing as the landscape of the imagination, then these darker parts of the city represented mine. Their history, too, fascinated me and it seemed, as I walked from St Anne’s Limehouse, to St George’s-in-the-East, Wapping, that each street was an echo-chamber of the past in which contemporary voices mixed with those long dead. (2002b, p. 378) As he claims in ‘London Luminaries and Cockney Visionaries’, he is interested in the narrative harmonics of particular London sites, in the ‘patterns

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of habitation, and patterns of inheritance which seem to emerge from the very streets and alleys of the capital’ (2002a, p. 343). By virtue of its ability to retain the vestiges of bygone centuries, each part of London is inhabited, for him, by a genius loci of its own, which tends to reproduce its pattern cyclically through time and exert a magnetic force over its inhabitants. In Hawksmoor the two protagonists and the many desperate who populate the fi lthy, dangerous streets of the East End gravitate compulsively around the churches where the murders take place, as if they were centres of gravity. No sooner do they enter the (un)homely womb of the stone churches than these vagrant, restless souls seem to achieve a longed-for condition of stasis: a centripetal force has drawn them to the dead point at its centre, where their mystic as much as material conflation with the building takes place. This fusion is signalled visually by the impression of their merging with its construction materials: ‘anyone who came upon [Ned] unawares might think he had been metamorphosised into stone, so still he seemed’ (2010, p. 94). The destiny of the victims is complete with the sacrificial subsumption of their body into the stones of Dyer’s churches: by petrifying, they become continuous with the earthly immortality of his architectures. The paradox is not hard to see: it is the unhomely (Dyer’s occult architectural settings) which, by providing a sense of stability, however deadly it may be, offers a sense of homeliness to the homeless and wandering soul. But even more intriguing is the fact that the novel extends the concept of vagrancy beyond spatial coordinates to suggest its temporal dimension through the figures of Dyer and his double Hawksmoor: more or less unconsciously, throughout the novel they are wandering in search of each other, pursuing across time an impossible reunion which the epilogue alone fi nally achieves. The uncanny returns of the same settings at the end and beginning of successive chapters signal that Dyer and Hawksmoor’s mutual recognition is prevented by their looking at each other from different temporal planes. The theme of the double is obviously central to Ackroyd’s novel, and in this respect he is clearly indebted to late nineteenth-century gothic fictions, such as Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae (1889), where the two halves of the split self engage in a mutual chase, or The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), where they alternate on the scene. But clearly Ackroyd’s use of the alter ego derives also and primarily from his interest in the postmodern deconstruction of identity. As he writes in Notes for a New Culture, ‘Even the “I” is open to doubt and to sudden transformation’, and he quotes John Ashbery in this connection: ‘I have an intuition that I am that other “I” with which we began’ (1993, p. 131). Far from being an abstract linguistic construction subject to textual play, though, Ackroyd’s precarious self is one which needs to be defi ned in relation to the material conditions of the setting it inhabits; because, of course, one cannot fail to notice Ackroyd’s intense commitment to physicality, his concerted effort to convey the sensory elements of his locales. As Susana Onega contends, a key to the understanding of his work is the passage from his

70 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature early ‘language poetry’ (related to the purely modernist poetics and deconstructionist views expressed in Notes for a New Culture) to the ‘poetry of things’ (1998, p. 16), the call of the physical which characterizes his later production: the echoes and smells, the fi lth and dust of the streets, the warmth of the earth and coldness of the stone. In London the Biography, the capital is depicted as a huge organism: ‘The byways of the city resemble thin veins and its parks are like lungs. In the mist and rain of an urban autumn, the shining stones and cobbles of the older thoroughfares look as if they were bleeding. [ . . . ] London is a labyrinth, half of stone and half of flesh’ (Ackroyd, 2001, pp. 1–2); sublimely mysterious, it exceeds our ability to grasp the amplitude and power of its body. Its magnetic force drives us ineluctably to yield to such magnitude and inscribe ourselves physically into its organism: It was a spring morning, and when [Ned] walked into Severndale Park he felt the breeze bringing back memories of a much earlier life, and he was at peace. He sat beneath a tree and looked up at its leaves in amazement—where once he might have gazed at them and sensed there only the confusion of his own thoughts, now each leaf was so clear and distinct that he could see the lightly coloured veins which carried moisture and life. And he looked down at his own hand, which seemed translucent beside the bright grass. His hand no longer ached, and as he lay upon the earth he could feel its warmth beneath him. (Ackroyd, 2010, p. 91) In Notes for a New Culture, Ackroyd drops a passing but revealing remark, worthy of attention, on ‘the return to a conventional view of human nature in certain forms of art (“earth art” and “happenings” were once in vogue)’ (1993, p. 138). Landscape art (or earth works)—whose major artist was Robert Smithson—is a meditation on our contact with elemental forces, which interrogates their power to overwhelm our senses. Tellingly, earth works are often designed to be ephemeral and slowly reabsorbed by the environment. An illuminating example is David Nash’s Black Dome (1986) in the Forest of Dean, England: this installation is ‘a protruding dark mound made from the charred ends of nine hundred larch poles and installed in a hole’ in the soil; ‘the work has been built to slowly rot back into the ground, leaving only a slight alteration on the forest floor’ (Boetzkes, 2010, p. 5). What is staged in these earth works is the slow reversion of form into formless nature; the subject has disappeared altogether from the scene, except as a conscience certifying the ungraspable, boundless nature of the environment. Amanda Boetzkes contends that ‘through the withdrawal from representation, in gestures that mobilize a fundamentally recessed subject, artists create the conditions of possibility for the earth to appear at the limits of intelligible form and to deliver a sense of it at the point at which it overflows the field of perception’ (2010, p. 4). To a considerable extent,

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the spatial strategy found in Hawksmoor replicates this process, by performing the absorption and disappearance of the subject into the larger, ungraspable body of the urban environment; a yielding whereby the self returns to the motherly womb of London-as-nature in a strangely powerful celebration of the subject’s will to lose power. This is reminiscent of artist Cindy Sherman’s contemporary photographs, in which she pictures herself almost buried in littered soil: in her works the body becomes ‘the primary site of the abject [ . . . ], a category of (non)being defi ned by Julia Kristeva as neither subject nor object, but before one is the former (before full separation from the mother) or after one is the latter (as a corpse given over to objecthood)’ (Foster, 1999, p. 149). But, of course, London’s sublime excess unfolds in time even more prodigiously than in space for Ackroyd. The elusive ontology of the past and the impossible achievement of historical truth are, after all, well-known postmodern topoi which Ackroyd, along with other equally prominent postmodern authors of the historical genre, has contributed to establish. Yet in Hawksmoor (unlike, say, in A. S. Byatt’s novel Possession) the search for the ungraspable truth and essence of foregone times is not the real issue. Rather, the focus is on the fact that Detective Hawksmoor, along with other characters, is the unaware agent of a metaphysical reality which is London itself and that paradoxically such a reality is embedded in a dimension of intense materialiality. In Chatterton, for example, discussing the library in which Philip Slack works, Ackroyd suggests both the mystic unknowability and the imposing material presence of the city’s overwhelming cultural memory: It was now with an unexpected fearfulness that [Philip] saw the books stretched away into the darkness. They seemed to expand as soon as they reached the shadows, creating some dark world where there was no beginning and no end, no story, no meaning. And if you crossed the threshold into that world, you would be surrounded by words; you would crush them beneath your feet, you would knock against them with your head and arms, but if you tried to grasp them they would melt away. (1988, p. 71) If, as we will see, Sinclair conceives cultural memory as a product of conscience, for Ackroyd it is fi rmly located outside the subject and substantially ungraspable. London-as-memory, the material homely from which we have been alienated, is the great undetectable we stumble upon unawares and cannot access unless by inscribing ourselves physically within it. In this way, Ackroyd counters two notions of history: the idea that we can aspire to a conscious spiritual continuity with the past and the instrumental view which seeks to possess the past through the trivialized appropriation of cultural heritage. In this respect, my interpretation differs somewhat from Murray’s. His contention is that Ackroyd’s representation of history as characterized by

72 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature inescapable cyclical returns is coextensive with Thatcher’s ideological celebration of British past greatness and her belief in the endurance of such greatness in the present. Furthermore, Ackroyd’s suspect (and inherently conservative) insistence on the legacy of the past would be close to the commodification of history produced by the burgeoning heritage industry: in Chatterton the protagonist’s portrait found in a shop, claims Murray, is indicative of the consummation of the fantasy of the past through the fetish of the historical object (2007, p. 28). In this connection, he contrasts Ackroyd’s accessible use of history—which has allowed him to maintain his place within the contemporary cultural marketplace—with Sinclair’s more complex narratives of the past: the latter ‘explicitly uses history as the basis for an assault on the historiography that helped to maintain the hegemonic nationalism of Thatcherite rhetoric. [ . . . ] not to keep the game going as in Ackroyd’s model, but to deliver us from the path of history that has led to repeat pain’ (p. 15). Murray’s reading is certainly insightful but calls for subtler distinctions. Ackroyd’s gloomy existential vision, for example, is at odds with Thatcher’s triumphalist ideology of (cultural) consumption; furthermore, in Hawksmoor his ironic representation of heritage tourism at the beginning of the second chapter is a criticism of precisely the trivializations of cultural industry. Ackroyd’s profusion of biographical work may well tap the interest in heritage, yet, as Wolfreys states in his interview with him, Ackroyd’s ‘is a very different kind of reverence, a different kind of remembering, from various governments’ heritage projects’. Ackroyd confi rms this interpretation in the same interview: ‘Absolutely, it’s innate and ineradicable, there’s an extraordinary sense of what went before on the part of the people who live here, who write themselves into this memory’ (Wolfreys, 1999, p. 106); an inscription which, in the novel, is signalled by their physical absorption into the city’s material, architectural past. Furthermore, in the novel the spectacle of consumerism appears markedly bleak and surreal: ‘Thomas stopped suddenly and pretended to look into the window of a record shop, although the bright posters and the glossy photographs shining in the neon light now seemed to him as strange as any objects brought up by a diver from the floor of the ocean’ (Ackroyd, 2010, p. 44). The 1980s vision of London as a world of all-night partying and opportunity is itself evoked in gloomy tones: And as [the tourists] looked at the site of the plague fields, they saw only the images on the advertising hoardings which surrounded them: a modern city photographed at night with the words HAVE ANOTHER BEFORE YOU GO glowing in the dark sky above it, an historical scene in washed-out sepia so that it resembled an illustration from an old volume of prints, and the enlarged face of a man smiling (although the building opposite this poster cast a deep shadow, which cut off the right side of the face). (p. 29)

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In the urban literature of the Thatcherite decade, Tew sees ‘a world seeking either an existential place, or, if not, some sense of election, even if this is an act of faith and self-delusion’ (2007, p. 99); in this divide Ackroyd’s search for the reunification of a bewidered self with the eternal city cannot but be included in the former tendency. But what is the connection between the intensely physical organism of the city, excessive and overwhelming, and the flimsiness of the postmodern deconstructed self represented by the Hawksmoor–Dyer pair? How does the city’s material permanence relate to an identity open to doubt and baffling shifts of persona? Clearly, the relationship between the subject and urban architecture differs from the one found in Ballard till the mid-1970s. The visceral aggregates of technological systems and biological organs can no longer function as a viable metaphor: the new decade is too dominated by the fear of social and sexual promiscuity to entertain such fantasies and see them as replete with liberating potential. Unemployment, dejection and criminality; the return to class struggle in Thatcherite Britain; and the worldwide scourge of AIDS mean that the terror of contagion becomes the dominant form that corporeal and social discourses acquire. Indirectly, the detailed representation of the plague in Hawksmoor and Ackroyd’s dwelling on scenes of social dereliction and filth may well be symptomatic of these new concerns. But more subtly indicative of this anxiety about the infection and corruption of live bodies is the insistence of the novel on the transfusion of the bones—our most enduring, architectural and nonvisceral parts—of dead Londoners into the constructive materials of the city. Bones ‘are static, and therefore “stable, visible, legible” in a way that live, active bodies are not’ (Fraser and Greco, 2005, p. 20). Ackroyd’s strategy is somewhat reminiscent of the one found in Michèle Roberts’s historical novel Impossible Saints (1997). Set in an imaginary southern European country in a fantastic past, this novel narrates that after her death, Saint Josephine’s corpse is cut up into relics and her bones, mixed with those of many other saints, are used as material to construct a chapel. Boxes of bones are stacked one upon the other like stones for walls; selected single bones form fantastic shapes, lines, rosettes and mandalas, and are worked into a mosaic forming a dome, comprising ‘massed tibias, fibulas and femurs, with here and there a skull and crossbones for added decoration’ (Roberts, 1998, pp. 2–3). Commenting on the novel, Ina Schabert argues that this strategy represents a state of being in the body and that its peculiar form is ascribable to Roberts’s Roman Catholic education: ‘I take it as one of the symptoms of the late 20th century’s return to the body that the medieval cult of relics as well as cannibalism’ in archaic societies ‘have become prominent themes in both anthropological research and creative literature’ (2001, p. 103). Ackroyd’s peculiar blend of religiosity and the macabre as ineluctable components of his vision of the city’s huge organism is symptomatic of a similar Catholic background and specifically of a cult of relics which fi nds an equivalent in Dyer’s attempt to immortalize dead

74 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature Londoners by infusing their bones into the construction of his churches. The religious motif is epitomized in the very overture of London: The Biography: ‘The image of London as a human body is striking and singular; we may trace it from the pictorial emblems of the City of God, the mystical body in which Jesus Christ represents its head and the citizens its other members’ (Ackroyd, 2001, p. 1). As we have seen, in Hawksmoor the response of the subject to the overwhelming city is the corporeal dissolution into its labyrinthine organism. This undoing comes at the end of a process where the wanderer (always a male figure, child or adult) experiences an increasing sense of alienation from his physical being. A hiatus seems to separate the character’s ghostlike observing conscience from a body perceived as if from the outside and sensed as an almost insubstantial appendix ready to detach itself. But if Ackroyd’s restless, vagrant soul feels at odds with its inconsequential corporeal frame and habitation, a possibility of reinhabiting the body under the guise of London-as-body is offered through the transfusion of the subject’s bones into the city’s buildings. Ledbetter makes a useful distinction between two aspects of corporeality: the body sensed (touched, smelt, etc.) and the body sentient (observing and perceiving). In Ackroyd these categories are applicable respectively to London and the subject. The latter tends to be conceived as a disincarnated seer divorced from his ephemeral body (‘[Ned’s] body had become a companion which seemed always about to leave him’ [Ackroyd, 2010, p. 93]), whose uncertain physicality is quickly sacrificed on the altar of London’s material eternity. As if by way of compensation, London tends to acquire the quality of a body sensed. In his 1994 novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, for example, Ackroyd describes Limehouse Reach in these terms: ‘It reeked of dampness and old stone, but it also possessed a stranger and more fugitive odour which was aptly described by one of the residents of the neighbourhood as that of “dead feet”’ (2007, p. 5); similarly, in Hawksmoor Ned ‘was close to [the city] always, following its smells, sometimes pressing his face against its buildings to feel their warmth’ (2010, pp. 100–101). If the human figure who roams the streets appears forever divorced from its body sensed, London is instead a powerful physical entity, ‘a past which still touches us’ (Ackroyd, 2002b, p. 379). In this connection, an enlightening comparison with Patrick Süskind’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (1985) can be drawn. As Ackroyd writes in his 1986 review of the novel, Süskind’s ‘is a book of smells—the odours of history, in fact—and on the fi rst page eighteenth-century Paris is anatomized into its component stinks. In its most fetid spot, beside a mephitic cemetery and beneath a fi sh stall, the hero of Perfume, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, is born’ (2002c, p. 394). As an adult, Grenouille kills several young girls to strip them of their bodily scents and leave them as odourless corpses. In so doing, he vampires that physicality (the body scent) of which he has been deprived since his birth. Ackroyd points out that:

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[Grenouille’s] sole ambition is to become the greatest perfumer of all time; in order to conceal his own lack of odour he creates a perfume that ‘did not smell like a sent, but like a human being who gives off a sent’. He can even manufacture perfumes that create an exhalatory illusion, a phantom object lingering in the air. (p. 394) Ackroyd praises the novel as representative of a new realism, which overcomes ‘the constrictions of conventional naturalism without falling into the trap of a self-conscious “experimentalism” or “modernism”’ (p. 396). In Ackroyd’s case, metafictional elements and sophisticated formal devices are indeed being used ‘while yet managing to reconnect the readers to the world outside the page’ (Onega, 1998, p. 21). Historically, this new form of realism acknowledges both the crisis of referentiality—the nineteenthcentury idea that outer reality and society can be stable objects of observation and shared knowledge—and the demise of the experiential self still found, however fragmented, in modernist writers such as Marcel Proust or Virginia Woolf. From this double starting point Ackroyd’s postmodern realism aims at recreating an elusive referent—London’s past and enduring material essence—by conjuring the illusion (the ghost) of its sensory exhalation: ‘Mr Süskind is a perfumer of language’ (Ackroyd, 2002c, p. 396), just as Ackroyd is a perfumer of the indistinct mass of past lives (absent human referents) which compound the body of London. Intriguingly, this sensorialism is a prominent feature in late twentiethcentury literature, as testified by novels such as Clare Clark’s The Great Stink (2005), also based in London, and Süskind’s Perfume itself. Taking refuge in the sensorium, as these novels do, can be read as a protective move against the deconstruction of identity in postmodern thought (see Schabert, 2001, p. 112). At the same time, it is a reaction against the ubiquity of bodiless things, of media and disembodied intelligence: symptomatically, computers feature prominently in Hawksmoor as the ghostly representatives of a contemporary belief in rationality which Ackroyd is at pains to undermine, by portraying Hawksmoor’s constant inability to come to logic conclusions in his investigations. Of course, the corporeal trope acquires further significance in the historical context chosen by Ackroyd, in that it was during the early Enlightenment that the neat opposition of body and mind was conceptualized along with ‘the Cartesian distortion that makes the body a secondary consideration in what it means to be human’ (Ledbetter, 1996, p. 11). In the novel this Cartesian tradition is represented by Sir Christopher Wren’s praise of rationality (the period in which the story is set, around 1715, was one in which rationalism and science were gaining ground in British and Western culture), whereas Dyer’s emphasis is firmly placed on both corporeality and irrationality. It is no accident that if Wren tends to see the body as the object of scientific discourse, Dyer’s attitude is rather that of a co-sufferer, a traumatized self experiencing pain and death vicariously as a macabre way of participating in the other’s body: ‘I

76 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature survey’d the woman’s Face, flinching as if my own Body had felt the Blows she endured, and then I saw what she had seen [ . . . ] And I saw the fi rst Blow and suffer’d the fi rst Agonie of her Pain’ (Ackroyd, 2010, p. 120). He knows through empathy: the victim’s undoing is his own undoing, the enactment of his own fantasized death through the other’s body. Furthermore, a complex relation links trauma and co-suffering with architecture, as can be evinced in the following passage: But then they came out into the Spittle-Fields and, as I was running besides them now in my Wonder or Delirium (I know not what), of a sudden I saw a vast Pitte almost at my very Feet; I stopp’d short, star’d withinne it, and then as I totter’d upon the Brink had a sudden Desire to cast myself down. But at this moment the Cart came to the edge of the Pitte, it was turned round with much Merriment, and the Bodies were discharg’d into the Darknesse. I cou’d not Weep then but I can Build now, and in that place of Memory will I fashion a Labyrinth where the Dead can once more give Voice. (p. 15) The loss of contact with his own body produces Dyer’s desire to retrieve in death the promiscuous relationship with other bodies which in life he eschews in disgust. Indeed, his two main activities, murdering and constructing, could be read in this light: he is a man who kills and builds in order to feel and reappropriate his body sensed. For him, these are forms of empathy and substitutes for weeping: acts of pity and ways of restoring a lost compassion.

‘Look Back in Ongar’: Memory as Museum Installation in Geoff Dyer In his 1989 novel The Colour of Memory, Geoff Dyer offers a highly photographic rendition of late 1980s London atmospheres through a sophisticated use of light and shadow. His tableaux of street life present a humane vision of those inner-city areas which the national culture of the time seemed unwilling to bring into focus except as sinks of depravity. He depicts the experience of low-life in the city, of begging, mugging and living on the dole: ‘the fraying strands of state support had to be twisted, tugged and woven together in a secure fi nancial safety net’ (Dyer, 1997, p. 45). The Colour of Memory shares the social and existential concerns of contemporary novels by James Kelman (The Bus Conductor Hines, 1984), A. L. Kennedy (Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains, 1990) and Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting, 1993) which, as Tew indicates, ‘offer a narrative of ordinariness, and of the threat to it by the pathological and the criminal, an environment of potential failure and neglect’ (2007, p. 117). Dyer’s characters appear doomed, committed to a life of passive adaptation, a condition which, in the descriptive passages of the novel, is often visualized pictorially as the partial fading of the characters into

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the urban background. Their bodies display mimetic proclivities: they resemble the newly introduced ‘scag squirrel’ which thrives in the inner city because ‘capable of living off dustbins and the dried blood from old syringes, its graffiti-patterned coat enabling it to blend in perfectly with its natural habitat of windswept tower-blocks and crumbling window sills’ (Dyer, 1997, p. 28). As a whole, the novel conveys feelings of inexorableness mingled with half-hearted attempts at redemption. The backward numeration of the novel’s chapters itself is meant to mime the feeling of inaction and the countdown to the inevitable catastrophe, while no serious attempt is made to force change into this hopeless stillness. Indeed, the novel typifies that sense of relative impotence which Tew detects in most urban narratives of the late 1980s, such as Bracewell’s novella Missing Margate, where ‘Max is fighting what became the unconscious doubt of this generation, its universal inconsequentiality despite the images, the myths and the excesses of consumption’ (Tew, 2007, p. 109). Symptomatically, anxiety grows dominant in The Colour of Memory, fed by fears of pub knifi ngs and racist tensions but also urged by the failure to address existential questions. Walking through the streets of Brixton, the characters try to wrestle a vision out of formless matter, wondering at possible epiphanies contained in graffiti’s cryptic signs, with no real hope of being able to decipher them: ‘You see something like that sprayed on a wall and suddenly it looks like some kind of prophesy. You wonder if you know what it means’ (Dyer, 1997, pp. 23–24). Dyer’s is a purgatorial landscape craving for transfiguration. Anxiety mingles with nostalgia in this ‘late urban romantic’ (p. 225) novel about a lost generation somehow comparable to the 1950s angry young men: Freddie writes ‘a memoir of life at the eastern end of the Central line. I’m calling it “Look Back in Ongar”’ (p. 66), he claims. In spite of its Bohemian and low-life concerns, a traditional vein runs through The Colour of Memory, whose languid fascination for fleeting stillness (‘people bustled past, our breath forming momentary tangles of sculpture’ [pp. 121–22]) contrasts with the beautifully chaotic atmospheres of Moorcock’s contemporary Mother London and Sinclair’s later liquid urban narratives. Through sculptural metaphors Dyer depicts bodies vaguely searching for a way out of their condition of incompleteness like unfi nished Michelangelo sculptures: ‘the wind skated across the adventure playground and chiselled away at our faces’ (p. 85). Dyer has a penchant for memorializing the present, contemplating it as if it were a sculptural installation, where life is magically ‘held in a single moment’: ‘Steranko frozen in his running, his feet barely touching the grass; Carlton bent down tying his shoe, the breeze rippling his shirt [ . . . ]. And everything around us: the crease of the corner flag, the wind-sculpted trees, the child’s swing at the top of its arc’ (p. 90). Deprived of the ‘good brave causes’ (p. 68) of the 1960s, Dyer’s 1980s generation is a fl imsy bohemia who can only aspire to become substantial by freezing in a photographic or sculptural installation.

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Unsurprisingly, the novel touches also on the truism of Victorian and generally ancient London architectures as awe-inspiring presences ‘built to last [ . . . ] but also to impress’ (p. 117), opposed to the consumer ideals and disposable culture incarnated by impermanent modern buildings. Significantly, at the end of the novel Dyer transfigures the short-lived council flat into a future museum exhibit: There was a stillness about the interior that made it look like one of those installations in museums showing rooms and furniture from different periods of history. It was easy to imagine a small discreetly printed placard just below the window-sill: ‘Young Woman’s Bedroom, Council Flat, South London: Late Twentieth Century’. What will survive us? (p. 245) The memorializing of present existence is a keynote of Dyer’s novel but lacks the far-reaching effects the characters hope for: the sample room of the Brixton council flat is empty of life, and they are unable to determine whether this architectural object will bear any meaning to future generations. Redeeming the voices of the excluded in an urban landscape of debris and wreckage is the commendable social thrust behind the novel. Yet its memorializing strategy which turns the council flat into a melancholy museum object—whose authenticity is validated by being ‘showcased’ and gazed upon—betrays ambiguous ideological continuities with the Thatcherite packaging of heritage and the cult of nostalgia nourished in the 1980s. According to Andreas Huyssen, ‘The success of the museum may well be one of the salient symptoms of Western culture in the 1980s: ever more museums were planned and built as the practical corollary to “the end of everything” discourse. The planned obsolescence of consumer society found its counterpart in a relentless museummania’ (1995, p. 14). Further evidence of the sense of anxiety pervading the novel is the frequent depiction of the crowd. This has nothing to share with either the disquieting formlessness (even at times monstrosity) of the mob of Victorian literature or the thrilling and kaleidoscopic nature of its modernist counterpart. Rather, Dyer’s Londoners are a typically late twentieth-century paranoid mixture of anonymities and unexpected intimacies, variously moving or threatening: ‘The human figures in his paintings were anonymous and indistinct except for some detail [ . . . ] that made them instantly recognisable’ (Dyer, 1997, pp. 200–201). The novel seethes with visual metaphors where human relationships in the vast city are presented as an anxious play of specular images. Crowds appear ‘like passengers on the Titanic rushing at a cruel mirror’ (p. 41), while disquieting exchanges take place: ‘The distinction between foreground and background collapses; the subject is usurped by his surroundings, by the momentary pattern in the clouds, by other faces in the street; his shadow is lost in a blur of others—the shadows cast by accidental gestures’ (p. 182). Extending beyond the limits of the

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text, such processes are taken into a shocking encounter with the readers themselves. A virtual mirror is held up, as it were, so that our outer perspective on the story may be reversed, forcing us, who stay at its margin, to get involved and enter the picture (and the suggestion is that we will do so at our peril): We stray into each other’s lives. In the course of any day in any city it happens thousands of times and every now and again it is caught on film. That is what is happening here. Look closely and maybe there, close to the margin of the page, you will fi nd the hurried glance of your own image: queuing at the bar, hurrying for the bus, drinking beer on a roof, bleeding on the floor of the tube (I wanted to help you but was too frightened; I’m sorry, I really am). (p. 181) This paradigm of intimacy in anonymity will be a keynote feature also in Ryman’s 1996 Internet novel 253 but in the altogether changed context of sustained economic growth coupled with a relatively swift fall in unemployment. In a fast-growing Great Britain more confident in its future development, history and national heritage will lose their central role: the knowledge of London’s past and monuments will be fragmented into small informational units, presented as a series of options amongst many others offered to the Internaut. In the virtual world of 253 which defies the traditional concepts of genuineness and authority, the sense of a great past incarnated by London architecture and regarded as a guarantee of Britishness will cease to be felt as essential.

Resisting the Branding of Identity: Bracewell’s Terrorist Architect Art Nouveau, also known as Style 1900, was a fin-de-siècle pan-European movement which propounded the idea of a ‘“total work” of art and crafts, in which everything from architecture to ashtrays was subject to a florid kind of decoration’ (Foster, 2003, p. 13). Such a pervasive presence of ornament down to the smallest detail was seen as a triumph over the human being’s limits, the symbolic transcendence of our fi nitude through the union of life and the immortality of art. The Art Nouveau aesthetic was notoriously attacked by the Viennese architect Alfred Loos in his fierce polemic ‘Ornament and Crime’ (1908), where, endorsing the ‘modernist mantra’ of anti-decoration, he condemned ornate design as inimical to the ‘path of civilization [ . . . ]: thus his notorious formula—“the evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects”—and his infamous association of “ornament and crime’’’ (Foster, 2003, p. 14). In Art Nouveau the pervasiveness of decoration ‘commingles subject and object: “the individuality of the owner was expressed in every ornament, every form, every nail”. For the Art Nouveau designer this is perfection: “You are complete!”, he exults to the owner’ (p. 15). Yet, for Loos this very

80 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature completion is like ‘living “with one’s own corpse”’, because with its lack of ‘running-room’ this plenitude entails the end of ‘all future living and striving’ (p. 15); which, for a modernist like him, is provided instead by the abstract, minimalist forms of the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier. In his polemical account of contemporaneity entitled Design and Crime (2003), Foster claims that turn-of-the-century changes in the cultural status of architecture and design call up those occurred at the fin de siècle with the debate around Art Nouveau. At the turn of the millennium, with the pervasive presence of design, he argues, we have witnessed a phenomenon similar to the decadent penchant for omnipresent ornamentation. The major difference is that in Art Nouveau, the artist’s struggle ‘to impress his subjectivity on all sorts of objects [ . . . ] was a way to resist the advance of industrial reification somehow’ (p. 13), whereas now art and life are perversely reconciled under the auspices of the market, from spectacle-architecture to the marketing of culture and even the branding of personality. The designers of late capitalism lay claim to the power of ‘“producing identity” and “channelling attention” for “business value”’ (p. 23); and this prompts Foster to formulate the concept of the designed subject as the supersession and devious evolution of the constructed subject of postmodernity. Related to this is a major cultural turn of the late 1970s: architecture steps away from functionalism—which by then has lost its Corbusian utopian teleology to be appropriated by corporations—into a new aesthetic of formal autonomy. This stylistic self-referentiality is meant to release architecture from capital and, in the theoretical arguments of Venturi and Scott Brown, offered as a strategy to redress the most disruptive effects produced by modernity (see Martin, 2010, p. 3). The new exuberance of stylistic experimentation is symptomatic of a retreat from the social and political fields: it marks what Manfredo Tafuri diagnoses in ‘Les cendres de Jefferson’ (1976) as architects’ failure to countermand capitalist development at the urban scale along with their abandonment of the project of a rational organization of everyday life. But even more to the point, as Martin contends, this new art for art’s sake is stage-managed to conceal the ingestion of architectural practice by the capitalist logics of signature and branding: This overlooks the fact that corporate capitalism had, by then, expanded into the aesthetic realm to such a degree that architecture’s claims to formal autonomy played right into the demand for a maximum of spectacularization (in what is now called ‘signature architecture’) that even Guy Debord might have had difficulty imagining. In a world in which ‘signature’ signs a private language in the attentive presence of the mass media, architecture reenters the culture industry through the back door, as autonomous form. (2010, p. xx) These highly topical issues are all at the core of Michael Bracewell’s novella Missing Margate, which spotlights a city of consumers and affluent

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arrivistes, stylists and retailers. The late 1980s were a time when London was shaken by a triumphalist Thatcherism and the post-war settlement, with its welfare and communal ideals, was in its last days. It was a decade of ‘design’ when retailing was felt as the answer to all social problems: ‘Big Bang! A nation of shop-keepers and stylists’, writes Bracewell (1988, p. 27). In the inflation of images and design, the branding of a product name becomes ‘fundamental to many spheres of society’ and ‘all the more important when the product is not an object at all. This became clear during the massive mergers of the Reagan–Thatcher years when new megacorporations appeared to promote little else than their own new acronyms and logos’ (Foster, 2003, p. 20). Bracewell’s protagonist is the affluent Max de Winter, London’s trendiest and most controversial architect, who suffers from an enervating malaise: ‘A sickness [ . . . ] and a dread of the work he had done and the role that it played in New England as the kinky dungeon of London Style City and the Money Brothel of Britain’ (Bracewell, 1988, p. 73). While Arabella, the section editor of the emergent lifestyle magazine Designate, vainly tries to interview him for an in-depth feature on his personality and buildings, Max comes face-to-face with the meaninglessness of his life and sets out to blow up all his architectural creatures with the aim to erase his designer label from London’s skyline, his ‘name, [his] signature on the horizon’ (p. 38). Bracewell is aware that, in the late-capitalist consumerist world, ‘everything from jeans to genes’ (Foster, 2003, p. 17), from spaces to behaviours, is shaped and manipulated by style, and that design has become the privileged way through which an object or a subject declares itself within an environment. Such an insight is instrumental to his satire of the greed of this generation of quasi-automata, whose clothes and behaviours are empty tribal signs and rituals designed to strengthen the sense of social belonging and adaptability: ‘[Arabella] shook her henna’d ringlets and Soviet ceramic ear-rings by way of a token genuflection to ward off the evil spirits of Marketing Doubt and Product Insecurity’ (p. 17). Functional to his satirical aims, Bracewell’s creation of a metaphoric subject–space continuum is predicated on property and business value: ‘If Arabella’s business ego were to grow any larger as the result of her working breakfast in Soho’, he muses sardonically about the editor, ‘it would have to apply for planning permission’ (p. 30). ‘Design seems to advance a new kind of narcissism’, claims Foster, ‘one that is all image and no interiority—an apotheosis of the subject that is also its potential disappearance’ (2003, p. 25). And it is precisely this demise which turns Bracewell’s characters into ‘well dressed corpses in rusting company Saabs’ (p. 27), late-capitalist versions of T. S Eliot’s ‘Hollow Men’. The relatively more substantial humanity Bracewell concedes to de Winter and his wife Rebecca lies less in the moral superiority or authenticity of the two than in their self-loathing and awareness of inner emptiness.

82 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature When he depicts the reifi cation that aff ects these two problematic characters, Bracewell is at the height of his imaginative powers. His way of figuring the foreclosure of their emotive dilemmas and existential anxieties is to crystallize these psychological states into elements of architecture and interior design: ‘He knew that he had treated Rebecca badly. His moods had hung around on the street corners of her life [ . . . ]. Whilst never losing touch of her beauty, Max de Winter had sat in the swivel chair of confusion with his elbows fi rmly planted on the desk of paradox whilst he contemplated her personality’ (p. 89). In a similar vein, Rebecca is represented as ‘lying on the mysteriously uncomfortable emotional fouton that she begrudgingly accepted as her mind’ (p. 109). The inside–outside ambiguity is meant to foreground the alienation and uncertain essence of the subject. Stranded outside the self and reified in architectural objects, existential quandaries turn to the subject questioningly, as if waiting for a meaningful answer to the enigma they represent: ‘All of Max de Winter’s buildings in London, the five that crowned his success, seemed to be forming a circle around him in the hope of discovering a truth. They were like inquisitive journalists, and there was shoving at the back’ (p. 34). If environments were reassuringly responsive for Archigram or uncannily reactive for Ballard, in Bracewell they become enigmatically mute. In a material world where the body and soul have been substituted by the objects of design and architecture, these fail to mirror and symbolize (as they did, albeit cryptically, in Ballard), and instead become impenetrable like the surfaces of the new office buildings: ‘The dusty offi ces were blind to Max’s illicit presence, the mirror-glazing of the de Winter building keeping any onlookers out’ (p. 69). Similarly, de Winter is puzzled by the paradoxical opacity and incommunicability of London’s overlit realm of the media: ‘The City towered over Max. He was standing alone in the street [ . . . ]. Thousands of miles of telecommunication systems surrounded him, yet still he couldn’t make himself clear’ (p. 83). Max’s bewilderment and his bitter disappointment with contemporary urban life, which has failed to fulfil its promise, commingles with the nostalgia for an idealized past, an Arcadian wonderland: ‘he had wanted his buildings to glorify the fi nancial centre of the UK. [ . . . ] their design offsetting the virtues of a green and pleasant land, their aesthetic references intended to echo a proud and historic legacy of English tradition’ (p. 73). This utopia is a perfectly English reaction to global postmodernization: the pastoral mood, which persists under the cool surfaces of the postmodern UK, is a nostalgia mode stripped of all signs of modernity and conceiving an alternative ‘real’ cliché of deep England unravaged by capitalism. As he reveals in an interview with Richard Marshall, Bracewell has always been drawn to the idea of the dual experience of the ‘fi rst generation middle class suburbanite’ (as Max de Winter is) who, in the years of London’s convulsive suburban expansion, feels irredeemably ‘split between a sentimental

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attachment to the pastoral district and the tug towards the glamorous centre of the city’ (Bracewell, 2001). The former tendency can be better appreciated by looking at Patrick Keiller’s fi lm London (1994). Robinson, the protagonist, is described by the narrating voice as ‘a materialist, his vision of the universe that of Lucretius’. Turning the city into a quasi-pastoral setting is the epistemological strategy at the basis of his quest and his way of wrestling meaning out of the urban scene. He is persuaded that he can ‘transform the city by looking at the landscape’, practising a mesmeric, ‘materialist’ stare (often close-ups of natural elements, such as ripples on the water surface or flowered hedges); ‘Robinson believed that if he observed close enough he could cause the surface of the city to reveal to him the basis of historical events’ (Keiller, 1994). At the same time he is enticed by a Baudelairean proto-modernist fascination with public spaces and the crowd thronging the market in Spitalfields. Therefore, English suburban pastoral and continental urban romanticism combine to transfigure London into the location of an imaginary memory (cultural and literary), the ideal setting ‘to see oneself as if it were in a romance’ (Keiller, 1994). Thus, we are made to wonder, ‘Is London, then, just state of mind? [ . . . ] has it now become an attitude or a set of predilections?’ (Ackroyd, 2001, p. 793). As Phil Baker contends, the ‘recent fetishization’ of personal, idiosyncratic mappings of the city: has accompanied a post-consensus, post-societal sense that society as a whole (famously declared not to exist in 1987) offers no salvation, only one’s own routes and places. Its overlap with histories and myths of place is a further way of gaining a purchase on the inhospitable environment of the metropolis. People want to inscribe marks and fi nd traces in the city [ . . . ] in order to feel more at home in an indifferent universe. (2003, p. 326) Keiller’s London is deprived of a future, a city of unfulfi lled promises: shipwrecked and isolated (as testified for him by the 1992 election of the Conservative John Major) from both continental culture and domestic pastoral utopia; just as the ‘possibly dying’ and ghostly Robinson (he never appears in the fi lm) ‘is marooned (Crusoed) in a solidly built redbrick hulk in Vauxhall’ (Sinclair, 1994, p. 7). It is no accident that pastoral as desire and impossibility is also at the core of Bracewell’s novella. Despite its almost hellish urban setting of bleached surfaces and unbearable summer heat, scenes of natural lyricism abound in the text: not only in Max’s daydreams of the loved countryside but also in the urban scenes at dusk and dawn, when de Winter’s buildings, empty of the automata who inhabit them during the day, are ready for the transfiguration into forms of an unproblematic urban sublime. In these times of the day, the city seems to exude that fascination which has drawn the younger de Winter to ‘the inner London setting itself as the ultimate

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romantic road, the romantic route’, ‘the one point in the city that would reward [him]’ (Bracewell, 2001). When the city is silent and empty, Max’s buildings become architectural symphonies couched in a neo-romantic language (characteristic of the decade) with strong Whistlerian overtones: ‘Pacman hummed in the early morning stillness, its many floors and windows letting out a single tone’ (1988, p. 82). In this dreamy transfiguration, the urban and the rural seem to speak the same language, which points to their imaginary, mystic reconciliation. The monumental modern buildings of the city—the arrogant expression of a new imperialism—are often depicted on the brink of organic dissolution, ready to yield to nature’s law of mortality. ‘Just down the street’, writes Bracewell, ‘Max could see the grooved facade of the NatWest tower, and behind him—sinking, he felt, into the warm asphalt—stood the complex steel knitting of the new Lloyds Building, pods a-quivering in the desolate heat as though they were fruits getting ready to drop’ (p. 77) and yearning for decomposition. The actual physical destruction of the buildings at the hands of de Winter is aimed to create rifts within the pervasive political economy of design and signal the rejection of possession of both capital and false meanings. Pictorial abstraction and chaos are used as synonyms of this coveted condition, the hoped-for deliverance from the fake significations that a greedy generation has attached to contemporary architectures: ‘We ought to reject arrangement, thought Max, not wait for the abstract to make figurative sense’ (p. 81). ‘You have to bash out sense, hack it from chaos, that’s the trick—but even then. . . To build is to demolish chaos, therefore to demolish buildings is—thoughtful chaos?’ (p. 92). The fantasy of these mature buildings-as-fruits dissolving into the formless is coupled with Max’s own desire to turn into ruins, to undo himself by vanishing in the splinters of his last bomb attack. Estranged from his imperialist creations, he tries to inhabit them in this destructive way, sanctifying them through a sacrifice of their bodies and his; a ritual which may symbolically reunite the architect and his creatures in the inchoate matter of the city’s organic body (the abstract, pre-figurative condition he alludes to). This destiny seems more appealing than the existential void Max senses as his most intimate essence. As an introduction to the novella, Bracewell’s epigraph quotes Brandon Taylor on ‘the “new patient” of the post-modern period’ who ‘suffers from feelings of emptiness, isolation and futility, pre-Oedipal rage and primitive separation . . . which are masked by grandiose narcissistic fantasies’ (p. 12). If this quotation is a key to the understanding of the yuppie London figures despised by de Winter, it is no less instrumental in appreciating Bracewell’s ironic depiction of the protagonist himself: He felt like an advert for a course in decision-making; one hand resting on the passenger door of his car and the other holding a remotecontrol detonator unit. He was wearing a blue and white striped

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shirt, cement-coloured linen trousers and a pair of Italian shoes. His fringe fl icked elegantly over his dark glasses. During the campaign of violence he had got quite a tan. (p. 82) Max has lost touch with his self, which has turned into a designed entity, just as he is estranged from his built creatures, in that both fail to signify any truth. The disintegration of the inauthentic shell of his body and architectural bodies is de Winter’s ultimate attempt to revert them to a more authentic physicality under the guise of formless rubble (inchoate matter prior to its transformation into figure through design and false significations). This evokes the familiar motif of London’s organicism, the inchoate matter which endures through the infi nite transformations, destructions and regenerations of the city. Unsurprisingly, this substance is associated with the beggars who appear at the end of the story: ‘The vagrants quickly dismantled the sculpture [ . . . ] they harvested daily from the tidemark of rubbish that collected around the edges of the site’ (p. 120). These beggars are a metaphor for the stomach of the city, which digests and recycles everything and, therefore, generates that sense of amnesia pursued by the protagonist: what he longs for is obscurity and forgetfulness in a sun-bleached, vacuous world of appearances. Bracewell’s terrorist psychogeographer, who ‘roam[s] these streets with nothing but vandalism in mind’ (p. 57), insistently refers to himself as ‘a vagrant’ (p. 20). Assailed by the thought of ‘the perversity of his monied despair’ (‘true despair is supposedly the property of the dammed have-nots’ [p. 81]), this architect who destroys his own buildings is nonetheless a truly psychological homeless, who aspires to sublimate into a transcendental one, by dissolving into rubble and becoming part of the sublime, encompassing matter of London. Yet it is in connection with such a desire that Bracewell’s blend of mysticism and irony fi nds its true apotheosis: because if the rubble of Max’s destructions is the means to attain forgetfulness, it is also the instrument of the amnesiac machine of developers. His ‘explosives had been supplied by a noquestions man who demolished old council fl ats during the day’ (p. 63), writes Bracewell, and we are reminded of the contemporary increasing number of ambitious demolitions of unwanted housing stock, violent spectacles which always draw large, exhilarated crowds (see Kerr, 2003). Indeed, there is both despair and irony in de Winter’s creative acts of destruction: as a remodelling of the metropolitan skyline—that silhouette of the city which is the embodiment of power relations—they are an extreme but doomed attempt to impact on the symbolic language of London’s unrelenting vertical growth. Mockingly, the artist’s dramatic blowdowns—however experienced by the protagonist as gestures of individualist nihilism—are trapped in the very language of the society of the spectacle they are meant to resist. Indeed, Bracewell’s story is the melancholy statement of the double failure of the neo-romantic urbanite

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in his ‘struggle over the right to the city and the right to be diff erent, the urbanization of consciousness and the necessity for an urban revolution’ (Soja, 1996, p. 8). *

*

*

PART II: RUINS AND MEMORY— MICHAEL MOORCOCK AND IAIN SINCLAIR

Transcending the Human Scale ‘What then’, Scott Bukatman wonders, ‘has changed in the transition from the condition of modernity to postmodernity? Quite simply’, he argues, ‘through the shift in the experience and the defi nition of the city from centralized space to dispersed “nonspace”, the city has passed beyond the sensory powers of the individual’ (1993, p. 168). Going beyond the normal boundaries of one’s senses to encompass all the spaces and times of the city, as well as other people’s thoughts and perceptions, is one of the central features with which I will be concerned in the following pages. My field of observation will be a necessarily restricted sample of texts published from the late 1980s to the late 1990s: Michael Moorcock’s novel Mother London (1988), his short stories collection London Bone (2001a, 2001b, 2001c) and Iain Sinclair’s travelogues Liquid City (Atkins and Sinclair, 1999) and Lights Out for the Territory (published in 1997 but arranging materials gathered at the end of the previous decade). The aim will be to understand how their large, choral canvasses of London—its architecture and inhabitants—are motivated by the attempt to reconstruct cultural memory and retrieve a sense of commonality which the political ideology of the time was sweeping away; as rapidly as it was razing broad areas of historical London buildings to the ground. As Sinclair suggests: it was the period when the whole Thatcherite explosion in Docklands was taking place, and the back-story was being eliminated in front of my eyes. Buildings disappearing overnight, huge principalities being thrown up, and it couldn’t have been better for me . . . things were so bad that they were really great to write about. (Sinclair and Jackson, 2003, p. 121) Docklands was Europe’s largest ever urban regeneration project. The most significant physical change London had seen in centuries began to transform the run-down docks into gleaming new office and residential districts while residents were deprived of houses and entire communities destroyed. It is no accident that the idea of decay and ruin is pervasive in the documentary and psychogeographical writing of the early 1990s, such as Patrick

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Wright’s A Journey through the Ruins: The Last Days of London (1991), with its ironic dedication to Margaret Thatcher, or Sinclair’s terminally titled Lights Out for the Territory. The fact that, though far from being comparable, this was the largest destruction of London’s architecture since the Blitz may be the reason why the capital is represented by these authors as physically or metaphorically in ruins. Real or fantastic, remembered or reimagined, material or psychological, this wrecked scene is the trace of what they perceive as a violent discontinuity, a trauma in cultural memory. As Wright suggests, ‘In the 1980s, with all those changes going on, history came to seem weirdly disconnected. The old post-war machinery of “progress” had ground to a halt, and there was a morbid sense of ruin everywhere’ (2002, p. 491). Led by a ‘new gothic sensibility’ (p. 491), writers such as Wright and Sinclair depict London’s architecture as the avatar of a memory threatened, doomed or verging on dissolution. Such a vision—so I argue here—is strongly, if often covertly, influenced by the experience of the Blitz when ‘the very real—and readable—remains of the devastated architecture [ . . . ] form[ed] a new language of remembrance’: a ‘highly literal form of urban memorial’ which ‘can be witnessed universally—in Coventry, Dresden, and Hiroshima as well as in London’ (Kerr, 2002, p. 79). Indeed, the Second World War inaugurated an aesthetic vision of the ruin which was entirely new by comparison with classical, medieval or romantic examples: a damaged architecture whose major connotation was the physical and psychological trauma it represented. For Moorcock and Sinclair the present is an orphan of the past: an abandoned, gutted house, like the ones emerging from the Blitz, and a scar left on the body of the city like those produced by bulldozers of (predominantly American) speculative developers. These are one of the emblems of the age along with, as Sinclair reminds us, pit bulls and ‘Murdoch’s electronic ecstasy’ (where the loss of collective memory is replaced by mythologies inspired by the media): Satellite TV is a longdistance heart attack, incremental cancers: the narcoleptic trauma in which the dreams of the dog and the dreams of the man (lager, sport, steroids, blood and sawdust) meet and mingle. [ . . . ] Recycled imagery is pumped into your home, disbelief is given a general anaesthetic: you see dogs everywhere. Nerves frayed by envy, the urge to consume; we summon up the things we fear most. PIT BULLS. Everybody has their favourite pit bull story; yarns that pull the community together, like V2 myths in wartime. (2003a, p. 56) Similarly, Moorcock is critical of the consumer society of the time and portrays it as predominantly made of ‘confidence tricksters, modern witchdoctors, publicists, predators of myriad varieties’ (2004, p. 30). This is why, as Brian Baker rightly points out, ‘The Blitz, the myth of London’s survival, and

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one that is used to obscure class conflict and foster a coherent sense of British nationhood’ is ‘appropriated by Moorcock to reaffirm communal feeling but countermand sentiments of “national pride”’ (2003) and aggressive individualism. It goes without saying that, confronted with this society and dominant ideology, the practice of a counterculture inspired by the memory of commonality during the Blitz (as well as the recollection of the 1960s experience) cannot but be clandestine; suitably confined to marginal or marginalized beings. All of them, though differently in Sinclair and Moorcock, are ‘martyred by the agony’ (Atkins and Sinclair, 1999, p. 9) of a titanic task: sawing together, often down to the tiniest fragment, everything belonging to London’s human and architectural scene, so as to produce canvasses unimaginably comprehensive (Sinclair) and choral (Moorcock). Traversed by trajectories of different spaces, times and consciousnesses, these minds and bodies, strained or even in pain, are the unacknowledged sages of their time. They are Kiss, Gasalee and Mummery, the three psychopathic patients of Moorcock’s Mother London, and Sinclair himself, committed, in Lights Out for the Territory and Liquid City, to the exciting as much as exhausting activity of registering urban anarchy; always on the alert, for, sooner or later, the hidden pattern will reveal itself. All these subjects, ‘like powerful wireless receivers (Moorcock, 2004, p. 30) stubbornly pursue the same impossible aim of ‘procuring a perfect representation of chaos’ (Atkins and Sinclair 1999, p. 9) but also of the secret, intensely poetic order behind it. Their minds connect the near and the far in space and time: Mary suddenly wished she were making the trip alone. Her mind, not exactly wandering, was fi lling with all kinds of words and pictures. These often brought flashes of clarity, distinct memories, fresh as if she were living them, and she could hear many voices, some evidently nearby, from the bus and the street; others from the past. Within her mind time was no longer linear. (Moorcock, 2004, pp. 117–18) The scientific theories of complexity (the idea of a self-organizing, rather than merely entropic, universe), which came to the fore in the 1980s, had—so I argue here—a great impact on both Moorcock and Sinclair. As we will see, they provided them with a new language to express their longing for a commonality which national culture seemed to have left behind. This, therefore, is my double contention here: trauma and chaos, in the human and architectural cosmoses, are the alpha and omega of these urban texts; their means to remember and regain a more humane and collective vision of London.

Moorcock’s Intimate Spaces: The Mind, the House, the City, the Cosmos In Mother London the narration moves backwards and forwards between the Second World War and nowadays, enacting three traumatized psyches which strive to cope with London’s cacophony. Their ability to transcend the

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human scale and stitch together events, lives and consciousnesses belonging to the city’s different times and spaces allows these characters to reactivate cultural memory. For their mental explorations beyond the boundaries of the human senses and society’s received ideas, Moorcock’s psychopaths are the new heroes of contemporaneity. They certainly share the motherly quality announced by the novel’s title and featuring prominently in the fi rst epigraph chosen for the novel: Mervyn Peake’s poem ‘London, 1941’. Here a ruined house, the symbol of the city and its inhabitants, is portrayed with womanly traits and evokes the iconography of charity in traditional painting (a woman breast-feeding): Her breasts are crumbling brick where the black ivy Had clung like a fantastic child for succour. (Cited in Moorcock, 2004, n. p.)

‘The house is the first universe for its young children, the first cosmos’, argues J. R. Stilgoe in his foreword to Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, ‘shap[ing] all subsequent knowledge of other space, of any larger cosmos’ (1994, p. viii). In Moorcock’s magical realism, the Bachelardian intimacy of habitation is projected onto the larger urban scale. His London is a multitude of places— physical or mental—which, thanks to their magnified sensory powers, the protagonists are able to experience and hold dear as if they were their own: the voices and thoughts of Londoners which Gasalee and Kiss hear telepathically; the city’s underground secrets probed by Mummery; the surface architecture known by Kiss, who divides his time between his London ‘homes commanding all four points of the compass’ (Moorcock, 2004, p. 44). Kiss’s is not so much a psychogeography as a sort of residential nomadism, a mobile and extended territorialization which aims at holding everything together on a purely imaginative level. The intimate relationship he cultivates with so many different parts of London is a methodical as much as illuminating exercise: by spreading and multiplying across the whole city the sense of domestic space, Moorcock suggests the idea that, through this net of intimacy, the random and floating fragments of urban chaos can be sewn together. The city, for him, is like a natural cosmos governed by a sublime harmony of intricate force fields, energies and geometries: Frequently Mummery imagines the city streets to be dry riverbeds ready to be filled from subterranean sources. From behind the glass he watches his Londoners. This fabulous flotsam. They come from Undergrounds and subways (their ditches and their burrows) flowing over pavements to where myriad transports wait to divert them to a thousand nearby destinations. The mist has dissipated. A cold sun now brightens this eruption of souls [ . . . ]. As the bus passes a curved metal railway bridge and runs under a white flyover he thinks of the millions of predestined individuals driving or being driven in a

90 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature million directions, their breath, their smoke, their exhausts softening the sharpness of the morning air. Momentarily Mummery feels as if London’s population has been transformed into music, so sublime is his vision; the city’s inhabitants create an exquisitely complex geometry, a geography passing beyond the natural to become metaphysical, only describable in terms of music or abstract physics: nothing else makes sense of relationships between roads, rails, waterways, subways, sewers, tunnels, bridges, viaducts, aqueducts, cables, between every possible intersection. Mummery hums a tune of his own improvising and up they come still, his Londoners, like premature daisies, sometimes singing, or growling, or whistling, chattering; each adding a further harmony or motif to this miraculous spontaneity, up into the real world. Oh, they are wonderful like this, today. (p. 7) The principles governing the orchestration of this multifarious urban scene are provided by chaos theory. Its discovery, as Moorcock admits about some later novels of his, was particularly illuminating for him (see Moorcock, 2011). The studies of complex systems came on the scientific scene in the late 1970s with Ilya Prigogine (who was awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize in chemistry) and Isabelle Stengers, the authors of the popular Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (1984). Chaos theory claims that apparently random natural phenomena have a secret, implicit order. The movements of a dynamic system may escape us, due to its infi nite variations, yet—as recent developments in computer simulations of uncertain, complex trajectories have proven— these are invariably confi ned to more or less stable patterns, the so-called strange attractors. These studies generated a new interest in nature when all philosophies which had centred on it seemed long dead; the impact was notable on several scientifi c fields such as physics, economics, psychoanalysis, weather prediction, animal migration patterns and quantum mechanics. Hardly less prominent and documented are the forays of chaos theory—along with other, related scientifi c concepts such as complexity and fractals—into art and architecture. The aesthetic appeal of the theory comes from its revelation that the laws of the universe are complex and beautiful (as revealed by fractals) and that the cosmos is driven by creative forces rather than blind entropy. Their ‘miraculous spontaneity’, to borrow Moorcock’s phrase, derives from the selforganizing and self-regulating quality of the chaotic form. Signifi cantly, all these tenets pervade the long passage from Mother London I have already quoted. If, for example, ‘predestined individuals’ appear ‘driving or being driven’ in predetermined directions it is because the irreversibility of movement is conceived by chaos theory as a major source of order at all levels. Even the reference to people’s breath and car exhaust fumes mitigating the cold of the air is inspired by the law according to

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which in dynamic systems, in this case the weather, the fi nal state is heavily determined by even small differences in the initial condition (the so-called butterfly effect). ‘For some commentators, the city’s non-linear phenomena can be mapped like nature’s, from economic booms and busts to urban growth. Essentially culture is considered to work like nature’ (Hagan, 2000, p. 349). Fittingly, Moorcock’s Kiss becomes an ‘urban anthropologist’ (Moorcock, 2004, p. 5), who studies the dynamic patterns of human settlements and migrations within London’s natural–urban environment: ‘This afternoon I think we’ll stroll around Battersea to observe the migrated young of Chelsea who have crossed the river; the interloping tribe which has now claimed an entire border country, a wave of conquest familiar in history’ (p. 51). Moorcock, therefore, is thoroughly in tune with the anthropological or ethnographic turn described by Foster as the reaction, in the 1990s, to the infl ated paradigm of art-as-text in the 1970s and art-as-simulacrum in the 1980s. The shift, he contends, consists in ‘a return to the referent as grounded in a given identity and/or a sited community’ (Foster, 1999, p. xviii). If, in The Savage Mind (1962), Claude Lévi-Strauss famously prophesied the dissolution of man in the structural-linguistic reshaping of the human sciences, the anthropological emphasis of the 1990s tended to restore the subject as a material, physical entity, superseding also the simulacra reductions and commodity aesthetic of the 1980s. ‘However subtle it may seem’, argues Foster, ‘this shift from a subject defined in terms of economic relation to one defi ned in terms of cultural identity is significant’ (1999, p. 173). Summing up: in Mother London the new emphasis placed by anthropology and natural sciences on the physicality of bodies and places intersects with the collective memory of the Blitz to produce a renovated sense of humanism and community. The new laws of complexity, with their conception of the human being as part of a larger anthropological and urban– natural world, provide Moorcock with a contemporary language to revive the sense of commonality and urban/national identity experienced by Londoners during the war.

Blood, Bricks, Bones The theme of commonality is also at the core of Moorcock’s fully enjoyable short story ‘London Bone’, which narrates the exploitation of ‘old plague pits’ in the city, ‘where, the legend had it, still-living people were thrown in with the dead’ (Moorcock, 2001c, p. 127). The story is a parable of the late 1990s capitalist ‘cannibalism’ in the city: ‘It’s a turning world, the world of the international free market, and everything’s wonderful and cute and pretty and magical so long as you keep your place on the carousel’ (p. 113). Moorcock’s treatment of the permanent fair which is the city (‘London is markets. Markets are London’ [p. 108]) has a sardonic and complacent ring at the same time:

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Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature That’s not my city. That’s a tourist set. [ . . . ] We’re selling what everybody recognizes. What makes them feel safe and certain and sure of every moment in the city. Nothing to worry about in jolly old London. We sell charm and colour by the yard. [ . . . ] Without all that cheap scenery, without our myths and magical skills, without our whorish good cheer and instincts for trade—any kind of trade—we probably wouldn’t have a living city. (p. 109)

A bunch of archaeology students, made desperate by recent cuts to their grants, discover bones of unusual chemical and extraordinary aesthetic qualities in the field of a demolished Southwark housing estate. Defi ned as fragments of a primitive mastodon to begin with and then as the remainders of the old city’s inhabitants, this magical London Bone becomes widely merchandized by art dealers on a word-of-mouth basis. The protagonist has a leading role in the business. The stylized engravings found on some recovered pieces are ascribed to ‘the work of fi rst Londoners’ when the place ‘was still a swamp’ (p. 117). The story is reminiscent of the early Ballard: particularly The Drowned World for the evocation of a prehuman London and the short story ‘The Drowned Giant’ (1964) for the idea of bones metaphorically cannibalized by modern Londoners and literally ‘getting into the culture’ (Moorcock, 2001c, p. 122) of the city. The corpses are seen as circulating in the huge biological organism of London and its inhabitants: When I emerge from my reverie, I have looked out over the whole misty London panorama and considered the city’s complex history. I have thought about the number of dead buried there since, say, the time of Boudicca, and what they meant to the soil we build on, the food we still grow here and the air we breathe. We are recycling our ancestors all the time, one way or another. We are sucking them in and shitting them out. We’re eating them. We’re drinking them. We’re coughing them up. The dead don’t rest. Bits of them are permanently at work. (pp. 124–25) But at the same time Moorcock makes sure the symbolic and material strength of the London Bone may not finally be dissipated: ‘the deep fabric of the city [ . . . ] the real infrastructure, the spiritual and physical bones of an ancient city’ (p. 125) must be absorbed and yet, at the same time, magically preserved for future revitalizing resurgences of London. Moorcock’s characteristically optimist humanism prompts him to devise an anti-entropic ending to the story where magical realism and chaos theory somehow combine. The extant phosphorescent Bone is finally buried by the protagonist in his garden, making it bloom and radiating an inexhaustible ‘amber’ glow and ‘faint rosemary smell’ (p. 135). In the long run, the bone business has produced a revulsion in public feeling, and new moral and

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artistic aspirations pervade the metropolis, a rebirth reminiscent of those of its recent past: London hasn’t ‘known a buzz like it since 1967’ (p. 135), claims the protagonist. ‘The tolerance of the public for bullshit had become decidedly and aggressively negative. It was like the Bone had set new standards of public aspiration as well as beauty. My dad used to say that of the Blitz’ (p. 132). Old myths rise reborn from the ashes of traumatic destructions, be they physical or moral: Moorcock’s insight into the life of the city could be condensed epigrammatically in this act of faith that ‘London endures’ (Moorcock, 2004, p. 111) as shown by its recent history of alternate declines and resurgences. London’s many survivals are rooted in collective memory: ‘[London’s] stories endure. People’s demand for romance endures. And I retain confidence in human nature’, states Kiss (pp. 110–11). Geoff Dyer’s sentimental populism loses its nostalgia to become optimistic in Moorcock. Rooted in his transgenerational vision of London’s permanence, there is a sense of survival which is both a matter of genes (‘That’s London blood’) and of arbitrary myth-making: ‘If you don’t know what your original roots were, if they were lost somehow, you made up a set of rules and a history to go with them. Find them in a book. A novel. Anything. [ . . . ] You invented your ancestors if you didn’t have any. And those were the roots you kept alive and they kept you alive’ (Moorcock, 2001b, p. 15). In Moorcock’s magical realism, the fate of the city and its inhabitants is entrusted to generational continuity, which combines the sense of genetic transmission (‘That’s London blood for you. You can’t fi nd a gene pool like that any more’) and the sense of architectural legacy (‘the old bloodred brick of South London’ [p. 14]). His prose seethes dangerously with forms of essentialism—family, Britishness, architectural tradition—yet all his myths and archetypal figures are magically delivered from conservative ideological discourse by his faith in the regenerative power of common people’s imagination. This is inextricably connected with, and nurtured by, Moorcock’s predilection for the small-scale world of domesticity and his strong sense of the household as created by furniture. ‘Not much of the flat left now! Just the table the chair and her. The basics’ (2001a, p. 228), says the protagonist of ‘Furniture’; yet these few fittings found in many of Moorcock’s short stories acquire formidable dimensions and symbolic significances. In ‘London Blood’, for example, ‘Mum’s grieving chair’ is ‘an old-fashioned Victorian easy with dark flower patterns and enclosing wings. You could divide a chair like that into flats, these days’ (2001b, p. 9); in ‘Furniture’, ‘A Second-hand table saved [Mo’s] life in 1945’ (2001c, p. 227) when a V2 hit her house in Bacon Street and she used the table as a shelter. Symptomatically, Moorcock inflects his myth of the Blitz in domestic terms; a strategy which differs altogether from Ackroyd’s neo-gothic vision of the city during the war. In London: The Biography, it is another ‘dwelling’ space, the engulfing underbelly of the city, which is said to exert an irresistible fascination on Londoners (‘The lure of shelter underground [ . . . ] together with the fear of administrators

94 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature that London would breed a race of “troglodytes” who would never wish to come to the surface’ [2001, p. 740]). Ultimately, Moorcock’s evocation of the solid interiors of pre-war domesticity seeks to retrieve the ideals which preceded the modernization and ideological standardization of interior design in the 1950s. By positing its inhabitants as bodily abstractions, the modern apartment disrupted earlier understandings of how interior decoration and the arrangement of furniture could function as agents of moral stability and continuity of ‘popular, more organic, patriarchal conceptions’ (Hornsey, 2010, p. 204). ‘No longer an accreted residue of certain daily moral practices, the newly eviscerated post-war living room was positioned instead as an abstract space in which practices could be effectively predetermined’ (p. 219) and at the same time substantially deprived of their organic and authentically experiential qualities. Through the retrieval of older forms of the domestic space, Moorcock enacts the return to the poetics of the house as an intimate and symbolic space.

Iain Sinclair: Minds Plundering the Ruins I do not know how many tons of high explosives have been tipped out upon the gigantic target of London since the Battle of London began on August 24th, 1940 [ . . . ]. The people of London, having developed a technique of living in the face of repeated danger, now accept the preposterous, and what was until recently the incredible, as the normal background of existence. I often think that the ability to reduce the preposterous and the incredible to the level of commonplace is a singularly English gift. (cited in Moorcock, 2004, p. 3) This passage from H. V. Morton, used by Moorcock as an epigraph to Mother London, could apply also to the terrorist events in the capital city in 2005: ‘7/7 was markedly dissimilar to 9/11’, wrote a commentator in the aftermath of London’s bomb attack, ‘both because of the physical difference between the two disasters and because of the ineffable thing that is the British character’ (Lyall, 2005, p. 1). Is the ability to adjust to the outrageous a distinctive feature of Britons’ and especially Londoners’ temperament? Or, more to the point, is there something about contemporary London, which evokes the idea of an ever-present though somehow psychologically absorbed trauma? The connection with the Blitz is never made explicit in Sinclair’s travelogues. Yet, I think, we are not wide of the mark if we say that it functions as the ur-trauma—certainly juxtaposed with the recent demolitions of the Thatcherite era—behind his sense of architecture as physically and, even more, metaphorically wounded or wrecked. Everywhere, he suggests, ‘Broken sentences and forgotten names wink like fossils among the ruins’ (2003a, p. 3) and ‘terrifying memories of events’ appear ‘scorched into the stone’ (p. 129): all the memories, existences and texts (especially graffiti) inscribed within the city spaces are different scenes of the same destiny of traumatic interruption

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(fossils, in particular, stand for lives violently taken away, incorporated, and forever imprinted in solid matter). Despite this—or better, for this very reason—past existences still resonate to Sinclair’s ears from the London walls which have become imbued with their spirits; these are like restless ghosts that, murderously torn from existence, continue to haunt the scene of the crime. Yet, unlike Moorcock, Sinclair does not conceive trauma as a historical occurrence infi nitely reverberating through the multifarious folds of chaotic time: ‘Everything happens in the present tense. No history, no future’, he claims (2003a, p. 2). Past and present are coeval, equally radiant and activated by the writer’s traversal of space (which, therefore, becomes more momentous for him) so that his ‘narrative starts everywhere’ (Sinclair, 2004b, p. 51). His sense of simultaneous temporalities unfolding through the urban territory is meant to countermand the eternal present of nonplaces, their post-history as an irreversible process in our society. If the nineteenth century found its essential mythological resources in history— with its development, cycles and crises, and the sense of a past infi nitely accumulating—the present epoch, claims Foucault, will perhaps be above all dominated by the concepts of space, of simultaneity, the near and the far, the dispersed (see 1986, p. 22) (a weakening of historicity which, in Jameson’s view, coincides with the waning of Marxist historicism). It is no accident that a recurrent motif of the 1980s was the concern over the disappearance of cultural memory, the idea that amnesia might be the terminal illness of late-capitalist culture. The unquestionable waning of historicity and historical conscience, the end of history proclaimed in celebratory or apocalyptic overtones, all this has been accompanied over the last two decades of the twentieth century by an unprecedented explosion of interest in memory and an unrelenting drive to found museums and build monuments, in Europe and the United States in particular, as an attempt to ward off the spectre of the traumatic loss of collective memory. In Lights Out for the Territory, Sinclair presents memory crisis as a diffuse, ‘background’ phenomenon, scattered through the urban landscape; and, for that matter, assimilated by the distracted modern wanderer in homeopathic doses. These act as an immunization from the enlightening pain of memory: Memorials are a way of forgetting, reducing generational guilt to a grid of albino chess pieces, bloodless stalagmites. Shapes that are easy to ignore stand in for the trauma of remembrance. Names are edited out. Time attacks the noble profile with a syphilitic bite. These funerary spikes, unnoticed by the locals as they go about their business, operate a system of pain erasure; acupuncture needles channelling, through their random alignment, the flow of the energy field. (2003a, p. 9) The theme of pain is important, and I will return to it in the following chapter. Here, however, another element must be noticed: Sinclair’s overpowering impulse to register everything which looks on the brink

96 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature of disappearance. Whether real or supposed, presaged or just imagined, this sense of impermanence is absolutely central to Sinclair’s aesthetic. It is what turns the recording of every old building, funerary monument or neglected and unwonted part of the capital’s heritage into an intensely poetic experience. There is something methodical about this recording practice, which reminds us of Kiss’s pilgrimage from one home to the next: ‘As with alchemy it’s never the result that matters’, writes Sinclair, ‘it’s the time spent on the process, the discipline of repetition. Enlightened boredom’ (p. 5). His registering is both on paper and through the camera eye, with the two means intersecting or mingling indissolubly: ‘Armed with a cheap notebook, and accompanied by the photographer Marc Atkins, I would transcribe all the pictographs of venom’ (the graffiti) ‘that decorated our near-arbitrary route’ (p. 1). The role of photography is especially decisive in the defi nition of the memorial-as-ruin, in that it is partly responsible for the loss of memorializing power which Sinclair detects in the architecture of remembrance. In a similar vein, Roland Barthes contends that the advent of photography marked the very death of the monument: Earlier societies managed so that memory, the substitute for life, was eternal and that at least the thing which spoke Death should itself be immortal: this was the Monument. But by making the (mortal) Photograph into the general and somehow natural witness of ‘what has been’, modern society has renounced the Monument. (2000, p. 93) The capital’s recent history provides a cogent example of this. The only London monument commemorating the Second World War, Berthold Lubetkin’s Lenin Memorial (1942), was destroyed in 1948 as a result of the Cold War. Yet, the Blitz has been remembered over the ensuing six decades through photographs. They are the ‘lasting images that showed “London can take it”’, above all Herbert Mason’s celebrated photograph of 29 December 1940, ‘which showed the apparently undamaged St. Paul’s Cathedral rising stoically above the flames of incendiary bombs’ (Kerr, 2002, p. 77). Photographs, along with propaganda posters, served as powerful means of gathering consensus around a shared identity; a function which is usually entrusted to monuments. Returning to Sinclair, this sense of impermanence is reinforced for him by the current practices of site-specific art. Not only do these practices heighten the awareness of the material and temporal conditions of space, but, for their often ephemeral quality, they rely heavily on tangible forms of documentation, such as photography, written texts and fi lm. If architecture becomes an aide-mémoire only by being transformed into the ‘image précaire’ (Durand, 1990, p. 26) produced by the camera eye, it also ends up absorbing the very fragility and transience photography seems to entail: in Liquid City Atkins is ‘quick to notice vulnerable structures. He doesn’t want to photograph anything that will still be there

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tomorrow’ (Atkins and Sinclair, 1999, p. 66). Yet the emphasis is not so much on destruction as on ‘transformation’ (p. 178): crumbling sculptures and monuments appear magically overcome and transfigured by lichen and other growing vegetation (Figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2

Mark Atkins, Tree Angel, Photo. © Marc Atkins/panoptika.net 1999.

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A monument which proves particularly inspirational for Sinclair is Whiteread’s short-lived House (winning her the Turner Prize for best young British artist), which, he claims in Lights Out for the Territory, could aspire to the real life of the imagination only by physically disappearing and, therefore, withdrawing from official culture and the art establishment: ‘The sooner it was disposed of the better: only then could it work on memory, displace its own volume’ (2003a, p. 233). Memory can only be unofficial and marginal: Sinclair conceives museums and art institutions in Althusserian terms as pre-eminently ideological constructs, whose function is to serve ruling-class needs of legitimation and domination. In Lights Out for the Territory, for example, the ‘sponsored graffiti’ of Richard Makin’s site-specific installation at the University of Greenwich is described as an implausible appropriation of street-art spontaneity and a way of pre-emptying art’s revolutionary force. Sinclair’s is not merely a countercultural discourse: he believes that, as a living essence inhabiting human beings, memory cannot be encapsulated and preserved unchanged but must be constantly revitalized by our consciences. Liquid and shapeshifting like the city itself, it may subside but also be reactivated, unexpectedly and independently of predetermined spaces, rituals and meanings.

3

Traumatized Subjects and Chaotic Substances Iain Sinclair (the 1990s and the Millennium)

SPATIAL POLITICS AND THE TRAUMATIZED BODY The complex spatial strategies displayed by Sinclair’s works lie at the intersection of a number of ideological and aesthetic concerns which came to the fore during the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, his vision of urban space oscillates between a capitalist, alienating city reminiscent of Jameson’s postmodern hyperspace and a cosmic city conceived as physical substance and influenced by the theory of chaos. The former’s hostility to the subject is often countermanded by the latter’s benevolent nature and organicism capable of healing the wounds and alleviating the traumas produced by capitalism on the skin of the city. One stands for the traumatic erasure of memory and identity; the other integrates and absorbs in mysterious, inscrutable ways, producing liminal states where nature, the city, the human body and even poetry become intersecting, shapeshifting substances. The first section of this chapter investigates the interaction of these two spatial modes, trying to clarify how they imply a redefinition of the poet’s identity as both the subject of trauma and the conductor of the chaotic energies of the city. A key narrative of postmodern space is that of the ‘time-space compression as propagated by authors like Bauman, Harvey, Jameson, and Virilio’: they propound the idea of a ‘restless “space of flows”’, ‘full of intermediary machines which enable bodies to travel and communicate more swiftly, thus rewriting the horizons of experience, including notions of space’ (Crang and Thrift, 2002, p. 17). In The Lost Dimension, Virilio describes this new cybernetic space as follows: devoid of spatial dimensions, but inscribed in the singular temporality of an instantaneous decision. From here on, people can’t be separated by physical obstacles or by temporal distances. With the interfacing of computer terminals and video-monitors, distinctions of here and there no longer mean anything. (1991, p. 13) In Sinclair this dimension coincides with the abstract space of capitalism, the system of banks and business, highways, airports and information

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networks: an arrangement of the cityscape meant to increase production and reproduce economic and political power relations. These are sensed as all the more treacherous in that eschewing the individual’s attempt to recognize them: simple divisions between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic forces, power and disempowerment are no longer identifi able in modern capitalist cities. Proof positive of this new illegibility is the fact that ‘the urbanized division of labour within metropolitan areas, the division of labour in the smallest locality, factory, or household, these are not captured in their complexity by the coreperiphery structure’ because ‘a more complex and fi nely grained segmentation’ has taken over this traditional spatial division, so that ‘a core country or a core region within a country can become part of the periphery and an erstwhile periphery can become part of the core’ (Soja, 1989, p. 111). As Jameson reminds us, with the transformation of the city from centralized place to dispersed non-place, ‘the individual human body’ has lost its capacity ‘to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable world’ (2003, p. 44). Aptly, Brian Baker identifi es two significant echoes of Jamesonan hyperspaces in Sinclair’s London Orbital (see Baker, 2007, pp. 14–15). The fi rst is the Siebel building, which, as Sinclair suggests in his travelogue, ‘could be an illusion. A photo-realist hoarding. We walk towards the central tower, the bottle-glass Panopticon. And then we’re inside—with no memory of having passed through an automatic door. The building has no inside’ (2003b, p. 261). ‘The Siebel building’, states Baker, ‘symbolises a self-effacement which borders on virtuality’: in ‘the ideological construction of contemporary corporate organisation, the presentation of absence’ is ‘the most effective of ideological gestures’ (2007, p. 14). The second is the Bluewater complex at Dartford in Kent, which Sinclair depicts as a panoptic mall controlled by ‘security (discreet but fi rm)’ (2003b, p. 471). Quoting Sinclair, Baker notices that ‘the mall, where “only the fake is authentic”, induces trauma, “incubates rage” and the desire to flee’ (2007, p. 15); this idea of a negative psychophysical response is further reinforced by Sinclair’s remarks on the feeling of trance generated by ‘a few minutes trawling the overheated malls, losing all sense of direction’ (2003b, p. 468), while outside ‘you meet trembling humans who have lost their cars’ (p. 471). Shopping itself is presented as an instinctive, superstitious act through which consumers protect themselves from the overpowering, detrimental experience of the mall’s hyperspace: ‘buy and live’ (p. 472). The starting point of my analysis is precisely this psychophysical reaction to decentred spaces sensed as the unreadable and unmappable avatar of economic and political power. Signifi cantly, discussing Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Space, Coverley claims:

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Robinson seeks out the results of a particularly English form of capitalism, built upon invisible sources of wealth, whose only concrete monument is a nation of endlessly replicated retail parks and service stations. [ . . . ] In this realm, Robinson, the fl âneur, the psychogeographer falls victim to depression and paranoia as he becomes increasingly obsessed by the enforced secrecy that separates him from this environment. (2006, p. 135) Anonymous and dispersed, such powers—whose presence transpires only through its architectural incarnations—are sensed by Sinclair as secret; so much so that they tend to be associated metaphorically with mysterious, occult forces. (Sometimes these, combined with a strong sense of surveillance, encourage paranoia to play on half-serious allegations of conspiracy.) As Bond contends, Sinclair uses ‘occultist irrationality [ . . . ] to cast light on the irrational rationality of capitalism’ (2005b, p. 3). In a similar vein, Luckhurst foregrounds Sinclair’s equally vitriolic attacks to a cultural industry which exploits ‘“stinking heritage ghosts”, myths sustained “only to bleed the fund raisers”’ (Luckhurst, 2003, p. 338). In his assaults Sinclair deliberately resorts to the very same language of occultism: ‘The ambiguity is deliberately nurtured, for if “the occult logic of ‘market forces’ dictated a new geography” of London, Sinclair implies his project is a necessary counter-conjuration, a protective hex against advancing armies of speculators and fi nance capitalists’ (p. 338). Addressing the question of political engagement, Brian Baker presents Sinclair’s (and in general all) psychogeography as a spatialization of politics, its projection onto the urban space (see 2007, pp. 10–13); significantly, Baker underscores that the recent success of the geographical turn was the result of the realignment of politics after the perceived failure of the Left counterculture of the 1960s. In Brian Javis’s words, the process was determined by: the crisis in faith in the grand narratives of classical Marxist prophecy. It may be far from coincidental that the upsurge in interest in spatial politics follows rapidly on the heels of a series of devastating disappointments for the left on the historical stage: the failure of 1968 in France, the rise to politicocultural hegemony of the New Right since the late 1970s and the collapse of various communist regimes. (1998, p. 45) My contention is that in Sinclair this spatial displacement is closely associated with the transformation of politics into a highly individual, psychophysical experience, where the anonymous, dispersed and unreadable energies of the city impinge on and traverse the stalker’s body with traumatic effects. If, in the new illegibility of the urban space, the struggle

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to apprehend and counteract hegemonic discourses can no longer unfold along recognizable dividing lines between opposing geographical and ideological grounds, then the body traversing this fragmented space will become the new spatial referent, the travelling nexus—committed to anthropological fieldwork—which makes sense of this new complexity. The conceived space (Lefebvre) has become undecipherable—as the illegible urban network of fi nance and speculative development is for Sinclair—and this illegibility prompts Sinclair to abandon cognition and embrace affect as an interpretative key. The city is vehemently reclaimed as a lived space (Lefebvre), an ‘emotive terrain’ (Bruno, 2007a, p. 16) set in motion by the traveller’s imagination. This redefi nition of politics as a question of individual consciousness rather than of structural social change, in other words the passage from the collective politics of Marxist intellectuals to the politics of the self, is partly due to the crisis of ideologies and partly to Sinclair’s scepticism vis-à-vis counterculture political activities (see Baker, 2007, p. 11). This is testified by his confession, in the book of conversations The Verbals, that he participated as a mere interested observer in both the Grosvenor Square demonstrations against the Vietnam War and the Dialectics of Liberation Congress held in London in 1967 (see Sinclair and Jackson, 2003, pp. 56–57). The extent and eff ectiveness of his political commitment have been widely discussed by Baker (2007) and Alex Murray (2007) and will not be reassessed here. Rather, my investigation aims at disclosing the reasons behind Sinclair’s redefi nition of the subject (and its solitary politics) under the auspices of trauma and his presentation of its martyred body as a conductor of outer chaotic energies. This fascination with trauma is not Sinclair’s alone. Significantly, Foster goes so far as identifying it as a main cultural turn of the 1990s: To be sure, motives exist within art and theory. As suggested, there is dissatisfaction with the textualist model of culture as well as the conventionalist view of reality—as if the real, repressed in poststructuralist postmodernism, had returned as traumatic. Then, too, there is disillusionment with the celebration of desire as an open passport of a mobile subject—as if the real, dismissed by a performative postmodernism, were marshaled against the imaginary world of a fantasy captured by consumerism. But there are strong forces at work elsewhere as well: despair about persistent AIDS crisis, invasive disease and death, systemic poverty and crime, the destroyed welfare state, indeed the broken social contract (as the rich opt out in revolution from the top and the poor are dropped out in immiseration from the bottom). The articulation of these different forces is difficult, yet together they drive the contemporary concern with trauma and abjection.

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One result is this: for many in contemporary culture truth resides in the traumatic or abject subject, in the diseased or damaged body. To be sure, this body is the evidentiary basis of important witnessings to truth, of necessary testimonials against power. (1999, p. 166) This exhausted and almost dismembered body features prominently in Sinclair as the consequence of the titanic effort to represent the chaos of the city: the born-again fl âneur is a stubborn creature, less interested in texture and fabric, eavesdropping on philosophical conversation pieces, than noticing everything [ . . . ]. Walking, moving across a retreating townscape, stitches it all together: the illicit cocktail of bodily exhaustion and raging carbon monoxide high. (Sinclair, 2003a, p. 4) In the postmodern city, ‘Anxiety arises not so much from the traditional existential crisis of lack of meaning as from the postmodern sense of too much meaning’ (Short, 2006, p. 224). Interestingly, Sinclair defi nes his geography as psychotic (Sinclair and Jackson, 2003, p. 75), because it implies a mind in pain for the titanic effort to which it has committed itself. This is also in tune with Sinclair’s defi nition of poets as shamans driven by a ‘sickness-vocation’ and practising an ‘elective trauma’ (2003a, p. 240). Mircea Eliade, whose Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy is Sinclair’s acknowledged source (see Sinclair, 2003a, pp. 239–40), writes that the shaman candidate is said to undergo ‘initiatory tortures’ and ‘psychic isolation’, as well as the imaginary ‘dismemberment’ of his ‘body’ (1972, pp. 33–34). In Sinclair, too, this psychophysical strain is contemplated as absolutely crucial to the success of his psychogeographical enterprise. As he claims, ‘The business of dealing with these matters of London, saturating yourself with them, would mean that you were actually dooming yourself to fall apart’ (Sinclair and Jackson, 2003, p. 128). Yet this sewing, in an exhausting frenzy, all the defi ant bits of the immensely diverse patchwork will fi nally be rewarded: order behind chaos will unfold as a fleeting but undeniable epiphany, ‘that nanosecond when the pattern was revealed, before it vanished forever’ (Atkins and Sinclair, 1999, p. 8). But fi rst and foremost, this experience implies pain as the visible and tangible evidence that a traumatic encounter with mighty, damaging forces has indeed occurred, and that however secret and anonymous they may be, their actual existence is made unquestionable by the evidence of their physical impact on the subject. In this respect, Sinclair could be said to propound a paradigm of symbiosis, a knowledge of the

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landscape through its somatization. In London Orbital, for example, his slow driving along the congested motorway is registered as a stiffening of the body’s musculature: ‘I could drive around that south-east quadrant of the M25; an hour to Junction 6. The “shoulder” of the motorway, Bluewater to Brands Hatch, became my shoulder; frozen by traumatised muscles and tendons, clogged by weight of traffic’ (Sinclair, 2003b, p. 9). Here the body is conceived as a place of symbolic exchange with the urban environment, and in this connection it is reminiscent of the concept of corporeality expounded by Umberto Galimberti in Il corpo (The Body, 2008) with reference to Melanesian culture (Sinclair’s anthropological interest in primitive societies will be discussed in the following). He suggests that when a Melanesian says of a child’s arms that ‘they are water’, meaning they resemble watery tree buds which will later become hard and woody, they are not using a metaphor or identifying the arms with the watery buds. Rather they are employing the body as an infralanguage, an area where sense is generated by letting symbols circulate though the fluctuating signified of a body entrusted with the representation of the universe (see Galimberti, 2008, p. 37). In Sinclair, somatization is the strategy whereby the exhausted or damaged body becomes the tangible evidence of the derangement of the city. This is particularly true when it comes to his use of visceral imagery, especially prominent in White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987). At the beginning of the novel, Nicholas Lane’s humorously grotesque body is presented as inside out: with no introduction whatsoever, we are plunged straight into the ‘secret tides’ (2004b, p. 3) of his stomach and made to share in the tortures of his liver. The boundaries between the outside and the inside have collapsed, and the exposure of the latter fi lls the whole foreground. Foster defi nes this kind of description as ‘obscene’, that is, ‘a representation without a scene that stages the object for the viewer’ and ‘where the object’, deprived of a frame, ‘comes too close to the viewer’ (1999, p. 153). In Sinclair, this representational strategy is symptomatic of his reaction to a panoptic control felt and obsessively fi gured in his works as disquieting and pervasive. Staging the damaged, diseased or abject (visceral) body is the traumatized subject’s way of testifying against power by revealing its effects: the disclosure of inner organs speaks of the violent inspection and reification of the individual operated by the intrusive gaze of the society of surveillance. But the representation of trauma does not simply bear witness to the derangement of the city. In psychoanalytic terms, the repetition of the traumatic scene is fi rst and foremost an attempt to overcome and control it. It is no accident that the poet’s relationship with the city is often depicted in agonistic terms: in an interview entitled ‘City Brain’, Sinclair defi nes his stalking as ‘a raging bull journey against the energies of the city’ (2002a), a field of mighty, hostile forces generated, as Coverley contends,

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by powerful ‘fi nancial, political and religious institutions’ (2006, p. 119). Sinclair’s ‘fugue’, as he defi nes his walk in London Orbital (2003b, p. 147), is a highly individual, defi ant assertion: the ‘born-again fl âneur is a stubborn creature’ (2003a, p. 4), whose fiery determination gestures towards the mighty strength of the forces he confronts. And this is how he positions himself rhetorically, insisting that the subject can come to terms with the city only by competing with and even trying to supersede the irrationality of the late-capitalist urban scene. As he clarifi es in Dining on Stones: I started to embark on monumental walks; do it that way, I thought, work the gap between personal psychosis and psychosis of the city: the crisis of consciousness lives in faulty synchronization. Sometimes the city was crazier, sometimes my fugues leapt ahead: fi re visions, sunsets over King’s Cross gas holders. We are part of the madness. Monitor everything: weeds, green paint on a wooden fence in Maryon Park, swans hooked by Kosovans on the River Lea, the way an Irish barman in Kentish Town stubs out his Sweet Afton and scratches a cut that never heals on his right wrist. (Cited in Bond, 2005b, p. 182) Significantly, Bond suggests that here the narrator tries ‘to synchronize the experience of the over-informed spectator with the over-informed city’ as a way ‘to begin to heal “the crisis of consciousness”’ (2005b, p. 182). The concept of synchronization is a useful one which can be extended to include other features of the relationship between the subject and the city propounded by Sinclair. It is implicit, for instance, in the very idea of stalking as an evolution of Debord’s psychogeography. In The Society of the Spectacle (1967), the psychogeographer’s walk is presented as an implicit response to the circulation of goods and people informing the urban system in the age of consumerism (see Debord, 1994, p. 168). At the turn of the millennium, the perception of the increased, almost delirious speed of the society of information technology triggers the somatic response of the stalker and his voracious walk, an accelerated version of both the fi n-de-siècle fl ânerie and the playful dérive of the 1950s and 1960s. As Sinclair clarifies, ‘No time for the savouring of reflections in shop windows, admiration for the Art Nouveau ironwork, attractive matchboxes rescued from the gutter. This was walking with a thesis. With a prey’ (2003a, p. 75). Finally, one should not fail to notice that, occasionally, fantasies of physical abjection are projected outside onto the urban scene. In Lights Out for the Territory, for example, London turns into a corporeal entity on which the writer’s ‘walk’ acts as ‘a phantom biopsy, cutting out a sample of diseased tissue without anaesthetic’ (p. 4). Similarly, an unexpected bird’s-eye view

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afforded from ‘the tower of St. Bride, Fleet Street’ (p. 128), transforms the hyper-informed centralized power of the city into a bodily, visceral scene: The white spine linking the twin hemispheres—Whitehall and the City of London—was radiantly exposed. [ . . . ] The City is revealed as a naked brain, uncapped so that all its pulsing cells are offered for exploitation. The churches are needles, driven into the clay to bend the flow of current. Electrodes can be attached by any mogul with the price of a helicopter pad in his portfolio. (p. 129) Significantly, according to Vidler, in the last decades of the twentieth century architecture itself has seen the re-emergence of corporeal metaphors. Doubtless, the idea of the ‘monument as an embodiment and abstract representation of the human body, its reliance on the anthropomorphic analogy for proportional and figurative authority’, has long declined. Yet, in recent years corporeality has acquired a renewed appeal to architects as ‘a body in pieces, fragmented, if not deliberately torn apart and mutilated almost beyond recognition’ (1992, p. 69). Symptomatically, a prominent feature of today’s architectural uncanny, Vidler argues, is ‘the sense that the environment as a whole is endowed with bodily or at least organic characteristics’ which ‘embrace all biological existence from the embryonic to the monstrous’ (p. 70). He pursues this theme with reference to Coop Himmelb(l)au’s projects (Figure 3.1): they are seen as machines for the generation of a whole range of psychological responses that depend on our faculty of projecting onto objects states of mind and body. ‘We want . . . architecture that bleeds, that exhausts, that whirls and even breaks’, claimed Himmelblau in 1980 in conjunction with the ‘Hot Flat Project’, ‘cavernous, fiery, smooth, hard, angular, brutal, round, delicate, colourful, obscene, voluptuous, dreamy, alluring, repelling, wet, dry, throbbing. An architecture alive or dead. Cold—then cold as a block of ice. Hot—then hot as a blazing wing’. This uncomfortable body is subsequently stretched to include the entire city, a city that ‘throbs like a heart’ and ‘flies like breath’. ‘The Skin of This City’ (1982, Berlin) proposed a form whose ‘horizontal structure is a wall of nerves from which all the layers of urban skin have been peeled away’. (p. 75) In Himmelb(l)au the city is seen as bodily insofar as it represents, displaced and dispersed, a whole range of psychophysical states where sensations no longer belong to us but to the background out there, where they reappear as morcelated and dispersed. This liquid exchange and transfusion of one term into the other, especially under the auspices of corporeal abjection, will be the focus of my investigation in the following pages.

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Figure 3.1 Coop Himmelb(l)au, Project: Town Town—Erdberg Office Tower, Vienna (2000/2010–). © ISOCHROM.com, Vienna.

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AN INFINITELY ACCOMMODATING SUBSTANCE: CHAOS THEORY AND THE COSMIC CITY According to Short, before modernity seemed to constrain towns forever within the confi nes of the irreligious and the secular, cities (such as classical Athens, the Chinese Changan and Beijing and the Aztec Tenochtitlan) ‘reflected and embodied cosmologies. The earliest cities mirrored the world. Indeed, they were the world’ (2006, p. 10): In the West, the advent of the merchant city, the humanist city and the capitalist city all undermined the city as the site of cosmic narrative. [ . . . ] The city has become illegible as a religious document; it is no longer a religious artefact, a text for understanding the world, and even less is it a site for taking part in rituals of cosmic significance that tie together people and place, the sacred and the profane. (p. 11) Aptly, Sinclair’s anti-capitalist discourse entails precisely the retrieval of this wider view of the city and, along with it, the principle of a larger, cosmic logic traversing all the systems—human, natural, architectural, political, economic—compounding the city-as-cosmos. For him, this wide scope demands the investigation of liminal states where nature, the cityscape and the body become intersecting systems. In the essay ‘Crowning Glory: Michael Moorcock’s London’, he describes Moorcock’s prose as a ‘Mandelbrotian chaos’ (2000): a space-time continuum of man and nature where there is a constant change based on feedback; an open system where everything is related to everything else. As Sinclair suggests in Lights Out for the Territory, ‘The truth is that we’re in different stories. Atkins, Makin: the names begin to shapeshift. Each containing dominant elements of the other: kinship’ (2003a, p. 46). His prose aspires to the novelistic condition of Moorcock’s ‘multiverse’, in which, as glossed in Landor’s Tower, ‘alternate selves lived different lives, simultaneously’ (Sinclair, 2002b, p. 105). But the logic extends to all fields of the urban landscape. In Lights Out for the Territory Sinclair is ‘hopelessly attempting to “train” the shapes of chaos, to discipline hot-breathed things that creep and crawl between human and animal worlds’ (2003a, p. 12). A particularly fascinating aspect of this dynamic logic is that it includes the transformation of architecture into (human) nature and vice versa. As he writes in Liquid City: Forcibly exposed to the climate of London, [Atkins] shifts exterior into interior: broken statuary in a wilderness graveyard is revealed as stone furniture, skies are liquid ceilings becoming rivers of swift light. Pores of cracked plaster in an abandoned house breathe and sweat like tired skin. Grass is hair. (Atkins and Sinclair, 1999, p. 9)

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Similarly, in the incipit of White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, Nicholas Lane’s stomach and liver are a landscape in their own right, an organic and surreal aggregate of coral patches and peninsulas: There is an interesting condition of the stomach where ulcers build like coral, fibrous tissue replacing musculature, cicatrix dividing that shady receptacle into two zones, with communication by means of a narrow isthmus: a condition spoken of, with some awe, by connoisseurs of pathology as ‘hourglass stomach’. (2004b, p. 3) ‘Reality is an infinitely accommodating substance’, a constantly mutating, far-from-equilibrium system (Sinclair, 2003a, p. 25). Doubtless, chaos theory has a hand in the definition of this instability, as evidenced by Sinclair’s use of countless meteorological allusions (quite similar to the ones found in Moorcock): at Petrilli Terminus Café, he writes in Lights Out for the Territory, ‘We steam in the window, knees rattling the formica; affecting the biosphere with our transported weather systems’ (Sinclair, 2003a, p. 42). Such interchange and transfusion extend, for Sinclair, to include literature as a product of the city’s atmospheres. This is signalled in his introduction to Conductors of Chaos when he credits Michael Horovitz’s controversial anthology Children of Albion (1969) with having ‘justified chaos theory: a book that sustains the illusion of having spontaneously given birth to itself. One of nature’s paperbacks’ (1996, p. xvi). Sinclair’s appreciation of Brian Catling’s piece ‘The Stumbling Block Its Index’ offers further evidence of the centrality of the concept: Catling’s lines are ‘coded constructions synthesized from the chaos of the streets—to which, after exhibition, they will be returned’ (p. xx). Poetry is part and parcel of the fluid matter of London. Together with architecture, corporeality is often at the core of Sinclair’s aesthetic of chaos. In this connection, the martyred body can appear as turned into a quasi-liquid state, to some extent comparable to the surrealist informe, where the body seems to liquefy, pass to the other side of its senses and become the double of the space around. But Sinclair’s is never a quiet surrender to space. Rather, it implies torture, the body appearing twisted, almost dismembered: ‘Atkins’ is ‘as a manic ectomorph [ . . . ] in tortured poses on stumps of wood, lying in the dirt, head twisted, martyred by the agony of procuring a perfect representation of chaos’ (Atkins and Sinclair, 1999, p. 9; emphasis added). Sometimes Sinclair’s depiction of a suffering corporeality comes under the guise of a body pierced by the energies of the city, its lines of force. In Downriver, Arthur Singleton: Stood queasy and distempered, leaning breathless against the brass line of zero longitude. A pale stripe of virtue ran away from his navel and down Maze Hill, between the twin domes of Greenwich Hospital, across the river, and far around the red-splashed globe: to pierce, on its

110 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature return, his psychic body. A shocking, but unremarked, jolt in the lower spine. [ . . . ] Singleton felt a tingling in his palms; the sympathy pains of martyrdom [ . . . ]. He rested and fed all his doubts into a giant oak. The tree was a metaphor for the innings he would play. The roots were laid in the vision of the city, seen from the hill. The trunk was the slow build-up of confidence: ‘seeing’ the ball, before it left the bowler’s hand. And then the branching out, the flowering. The strokes all around the wicket, stretching the tree’s shape into the ground for ever’. (Sinclair, 2004a, p. 24) In this passage the tree is a metaphor for Singleton’s body (complete with his volition and actions), while the outstretching roots mysteriously coincide with a vision of the city. The spatial projection of the tree visualizes the man’s movements—real or imagined—in the form of directions, trajectories springing from the energy nexus of the body in a hallucinatory overlap between man and nature. The subject is the centre of a symbolic irradiation where everything can be exchanged: a cosmic body where, as Galimberti would have it, in the circulation of symbols, the individual fi nds not so much an identity as a place (2008, p. 33). Singleton, impaled, transfi xed by the zero longitude running away from the centre of his body, may well allude to Leonardo’s Vitruvian man, as suggested by the references to Singleton’s navel and the branching out of his arms and movements measuring the space around. Leonardo’s belief in the connection between the structure of the body and other patterns in nature derived from the architect Vitruvius: he asserted that the proportions of the human body should be used when designing buildings and that man is the model of the world. But for Sinclair, as architect Charles Jenks claims in The Architecture of the Jumping Universe, ‘man is no longer the measure of all things—the emergent cosmos is’ (1997, p. 21). Its wider, indifferent logic traverses all systems, tortures, martyrs them: Singleton’s body is transfi xed and with stigmata just as the skin of the sky is ‘bruised and purple’, ‘livid with threat and prophesy’ (Sinclair, 2004a, p. 24). As Sheppard contends, ‘Angela Carter grasps at the apposite analogy of the river to describe the phenomenology of reading this work: “Downriver is jam-packed with teasing little hints at possible plots [ . . . ]. These stories, flowing all together, form a river without banks in which you sink or swim”’ (2007, p. 54). But the analogy is suitable also in another way: in Downriver, stories or fragments within a single story are like small systems, independent yet, in unexpected ways, interacting between each other and with the whole biosphere of the river (and the book). Sinclair’s prose is unstable, like fractal forms suddenly shifting or bifurcating. Each shape holds together for a while till it is overcome by a small catastrophe and flows into a new system, another form: ‘This clapboard shanty has been sifted from the spoils of the river; nailed together out of drowned timber—spar

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set to mast, pegleg to oar—ramped out of chaos. World’s end, fin du globe’ (Sinclair, 2004a, p. 26). Sinclair’s characters are often the collectors of visionary degradation. In Downriver, we read, ‘Iddo Okoli progressed benevolently through the collapsed markets, smiling on chaos’ (p. 15); similarly, in Mother London, contemplating the spontaneous chaotic geometries formed by Londoners, Mummery exclaims: ‘Oh, they are wonderful like this, today’ (Moorcock, 2004, p. 7). ‘Nature’, states Jenks, ‘may indeed prune itself on warfare, may have a selfish force at work, but its self-organising drive is deeper, more benign, and gives an endless bounty of beauty, delight and energy’ (1997, p. 9). And in the architecture of the 1990s of Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind, he detects a new language of complexity, reflecting the processes of the universe: its energy, its growths and sudden leaps, its beautiful twists, curls and turns, as well as its catastrophes. If modernism often displays the epistemological and existential anxiety of anarchy and impermanence—‘These fragments I have shored against my ruins’, writes Eliot famously in The Waste Land (1975, p. 79)—Sinclair’s neo-modernism displays an ontological fascination with the creative beauty of London’s chaos thoroughly in tune with Jenks’s views. Echoing Eliade’s description, in Shamanism, Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, of the Australian shaman who ‘seat[s] himself astride the Rainbow-Serpent’ (1972, p. 132) in his ritual of initiation, Sinclair figures himself in Lights Out for the Territory as ‘joyriding the trail of the cosmic serpent’ (2003a, p. 5). When asked by Kevin Jackson in The Verbals about the ‘metaphysical side’ of his works, Sinclair asserts, in terms reminiscent of Moorcock’s multiverse, that he ‘believe[s] in the absolute life of the imagination, and the plurality of. . .everything’ (Sinclair and Jackson, 2003, pp. 58–59). In Jenks’s view, this spiritual element, too, is in tune with quantum physics and chaos science: the postmodern theories of complexity, he claims, ‘are rediscovering aesthetic and spiritual meanings of nature; meanings that were denied by modernity’ (1997, p. 23). In this connection, he refers to the English art critic Peter Fuller (to whose Modern Painters Sinclair contributed [see Bond, 2005a, p. 6]) who ‘foresaw some of the connections between a new science and a spiritual art’ (Jenks, 1997, p. 22). As Fuller claims in Theoria, Art and the Absence of Grace, ‘In the post-modern age, science is rediscovering the aesthetic and spiritual meanings of nature—and Ruskin’s dream of a natural theology without God is becoming a reality’ (1988, p. 234).

POETRY, TERRITORY AND THE CITY (MUST BE DIFFICULT) In White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, Nicholas Lane ‘knows that pain is life: every twist and bite flashes another synapse, a connection burns out, keeping his edge sharp’ (2004b, p. 16). In accord with Foster’s contention in The Return of the Real, that in contemporary culture truth is perceived

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as residing in ‘the diseased or damaged body’ (1999, p. 166), Sinclair is prone to stage bodily exhaustion as conducive to knowledge: ‘no blisters, no insights’ for the visionary poet, he claims (2003a, p. 33). Reiterated pain is the very discipline required by true forms of imagination (as opposed to the false, easy and comfortable ones provided by marketers and developers). If so, then suffering has to do with the very ontology of the subject: I imagine in pain, therefore I am. Readers themselves should experience strain, as Sinclair suggests in his introduction to the poetry anthology Conductors of Chaos. Referring to the poems collected in this volume, he states: If these things are ‘difficult’, they have earned that right. Why should they be easy? Why should not they reflect some measure of the complexity of the climate in which they exist? Why should not we be prepared to make an effort, to break sweat, in hope of high return? There’s no key, no Masonic password; take the sequences gently, a line at a time. (1996, p. xvii; emphasis added) An inherently religious paradigm of redemption through physical sacrifice seems at work here. Poetry demands physical hardships as much as stalking does. Of course, Eliot’s celebrated statement in ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ (1921) about poetry’s difficulty is echoed here but cast in Sinclair’s poetics of cultural space as a complex, chaotic climate. According to Eliot, ‘Poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refi ned sensibility, must produce various and complex results’ (1975, p. 65). In Sinclair, the ethics of difficulty is used to countermand the accessibility of both space (non-places) and meaning: ‘If it comes too sweetly, somebody is trying to sell you something’ (Sinclair, 1996, p. xvii). His insistence on poetry as a demanding experience is inherently Adornian, because it promotes the ethics of concentration and immersion in the artwork as opposed to the narcoleptic distraction of the mass (see Bond 2005b, pp. 169–70). Sinclair opposes both the idea of space-as-commodity promoted by developers and that of meaning-as-commodity, easily accessible and circulated in the marketable ideologies of contemporary ‘politics conducted as a branch of advertising’ (Ballard, 1995, p. 4). And along the same lines he tends to disdain mainstream literature and institutionalized art, which, he asserts, should be counteracted by the work of marginal writers and artists, the forgotten legislators of our time. Significantly, referring to underground poetry, he suggests: ‘I don’t claim to “understand” it but I like having it around [ . . . . ] The very titles are pure adrenalin’ (1996, p. xvii; emphasis added). Poetry is a climate (producing sheer physical reaction) as well as a symptom of the city-as-organic-cosmos: consider, in this respect, the cryptic graffiti at the beginning of Lights Out for the Territory, whose meaning, similarly, Sinclair cannot fully grasp and yet presents as

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momentous, not least of all because they are a measurement of the ‘city’s fevers’ (2003a, p. 25). In ‘Diving into Dirt’, his afterword to photographer Stephen Gill’s Archaeology in Reverse, he praises the photographer’s approach to his territory by means of ‘serial stalkings’ whereby he becomes familiar with the places he haunts, gradually gaining ‘invisibility’ (2007, p. 2). His territories become ‘loving retrievals’, ‘never possession’ (p. 2); and this is reminiscent of Bruce Chatwin—The Songlines (1986) are often alluded to in London Orbital—for whom nomads’ ethics lies precisely in their being unburdened of ownership. Indeed possession of territory and possession of meaning are always equated by Sinclair (and this should lead us to partly reassess the reasons behind his partial obscurity and inaccessibility). Sinclair likes to dilute textual meanings into atmospheres and climates, which can stick to the body, be breathed, perspired and freely circulated between the human, the natural and the architectural worlds. In this respect, his early involvement with poets associated with the British Poetry Revival is significant. His atmospheric conception of literature echoes strikingly J. H. Prynne’s description of language ‘as an all-embracing civic atmosphere’: Rhyme is the public truth of language, sound paced out in the shared places, the echoes are no-one’s private property or achievement; thus any grace (truly achieved) of sound is political, part of the world of motion and place in which language is like weather, the air we breathe. (Cited in Bond, 2005b, p. 12) Another interesting feature of Sinclair’s apprehension of the city is that it oscillates between loving tenderness and voraciousness. The former has to do with yet another form his city can acquire, which could be termed territory or anthropological place (as opposed to Augé’s non-place). This territory is known through frequent attendance, as Sinclair suggests in ‘Diving into Dirt’. Here he explains that by ‘haunt[ing] the places that haunt him’ (2007, p. 2), Gill creates and consolidates this connection. His reiterated, gradually enriching encounter with territory generates an intimate acquaintance and mimetic absorption into the environment. Space is produced (in the Lefebvrian sense of the word) through walking conceived as a loving practice: times and places are generated by the walker’s ramblings, rather than by framing his movements and experience. And it is Sinclair’s loved and familiar Lea Valley which often provides the ideal setting for this small-scale production of space: ‘The Lea is not the Mississippi, its folk tales are domestic’ (p. 3). For him, outer spaces can be intimate and cosmic at the same time. Yet the love of territory can easily turn from tenderness into voraciousness: in ‘Diving into Dirt’, the photographer’s are ‘the psychotic eyes of those who suffer from a compulsion to devour every inch of land that is not protected’ (p. 3). The co-presence of lovingness and cannibalism in

114 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature Sinclair’s appropriation of space is paralleled in writing by the intersection of the selfsame polarities. His prose is overabundant, greedy and insatiable—reproducing the informational overload and chaotic dynamics of the city—yet its difficulties and subtleties demand a caring, unhurried reading: ‘There’s no key, no Masonic password; take the sequences gently, a line at a time’ (Sinclair, 1996, p. xvii). The chaotic city described by Sinclair, former dealer in used books, often resembles an antiquarian bookshop—London is a ‘stone library, books read by statues’, he claims in Lights Out for the Territory (2003a, p. 40)—where books and ruins of past ages, recent or remote, are plundered, metaphorically but methodically, by the new purposeful walker. The covert violence behind Sinclair’s despoiling use, so to speak, of the urban scene is sometimes made explicit. In the following passage, for example, the city’s bibliophiles are imagined as turned into cannibals who, after having voraciously pillaged for years a book-dealer’s mobile shop, fi nally devour his own dead body: I like to imagine a Viking funeral: George laid out on the barrow on a cushion of Saturday-special books, a comfortably-fleshed mound beneath the roped tarpaulin. At a signal from his son or daughter, the biblio-cannibals would be let loose, elbowing, scratching and spitting, forced to devour the great procurer, down to the last knuckle and curl. They should carry him away in their distended bellies to the obscure rooms where they have stashed their dusty treasures. (p. 20) Similarly, the assimilation of the city’s organic body suff uses passages of White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings such as the following: To make this wide sky London workable and safe. To take it on and make it interior. Set it in rain jungle, swallow it in vegetation, break the stones that they emerge again as calcium in the teeth of carnivorous animals. To take the buildings into the blood: as salt. This is his vision. The man becomes the building, the building floats free. (2004b, p 94) According to Galimberti, cannibalism was a form of respect in primitive societies, in that it did not imply the exile of the dead body out of the city walls but its reabsorption within society, in the metabolism of the group (see 2008, p. 39). Here a comparison with Ballard seems apt, because in his 1964 short story ‘The Drowned Giant’, too, (see 2006b, pp. 100–110) the cannibalization of the colossal corpse stranded on the shore entails the idea of knowledge (the apprehension of the unknown) through the appropriation of the body. Yet this absorption has a more phantom-like quality in Sinclair, the fragments of the morcelated body usually appearing as either photographic reproductions or ghostly images in memory. In Lights Out for the Territory, his account of the short life of Whiteread’s sculpture House is particularly revealing in this respect. The building (equated with

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a dead body or a ‘sugar-dusted skull’ [p. 228]) is visited by ‘Night-trippers’ who ‘examine the corpse from all sides’ (2003a, p. 227): The enigmatic object was circumnavigated, probed, photographed. In the twilight, it was fed by flashbulbs. Convulsive therapy. The white ghost was seen in negative, printed. Thousands of different images, different readings from different heights [ . . . . ] Loss was multiplied. Loss, carried away, was confi rmed as a general condition. Professionals, archivists, chemist-shop casuals: they snapped and snatched and pondered. (pp. 226–27) The devouring eye can appropriate the urban body only as phantom. Organic life is always dislocated, in movement, graspable only in the ghostly trace it leaves behind: ‘Poets are never properly incarnated, trapped in their meat bodies. They are too canny to risk everything on a single system of time. It’s my conceit to imagine their spirit bodies whirling in a vortex as they anticipate the shape of traffic cones’ (p. 103). It is no accident that ‘the nature of Sinclair’s own project’ is recognized by Murray ‘as a personal investment that attempts to release, rather than to entrap’ (2007, p. 60). In White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, the chemical metaphor Sinclair uses to explain the denouement of a story and the resolution of a crime case is revealing in this connection: ‘A solution, according to my dictionary is “the act of separating the parts, specially the connected parts of any body”. Unfortunate that. “The dissolving of a solid in a fluid; release; deliverance”’ (2004b, p. 47).

THE THREEFOLD SUBJECT The inert body of Whiteread’s House is brought back to life through its physical dissolution, its sliding into memory as ghost. At the core of Sinclair’s spatial politics is the aesthetic of vanishing, a fundamental feature of the interrelatedness between memory, poetry and territory. We have already appreciated the pervasiveness of this concept: remembrance is the living trace of a disappearance; graffiti’s poetic strength lies in their invisibility, their being minimal adjustments to the skin of the city; Gill’s strategy as a photographer-archaeologist is one of mimetic fading into his territory. It follows that the body is intrinsically dual in Sinclair. He often foregrounds a corporeal, visceral presence, whose obscenity is meant to preempt society’s intrusive gaze by anticipating its scrutiny. Or, alternatively, he evokes the ghostly insubstantiality of past or deferred incarnation: an almost evacuated subject whose very invisibility is conceived as a survival tactic, a guarantee of escaping the panoptic control of the postmodern city and its predatory logic of possession. To be sure, these two are complementary responses to the selfsame political issues of the hypervisibility and privatization of late-capitalist society.

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But there is yet another facet of Sinclair’s subject which should be taken into account: the strong authorial identity of the poet as the denouncer and trenchant polemicist, the witness and testifier. One cannot but wonder how this assertive identity can fit in the same conceptual frame, which includes also the abject individual and the evacuated one. And yet, however diverse, these three personas do cohere in the multifaceted subject of trauma whom Foster has identified as emerging in the last decade of the twentieth century. His contention is that if trauma confi rms the critique of the subject propounded by deconstructive discourse, it also sees its re-emergence as authoritative witness to the traumatic experience: Across artistic, theoretical, and popular cultures (in SoHo, at Yale, on Oprah) there is a tendency to redefi ne experience, individual and historical, in terms of trauma. On the one hand, in art and theory, trauma discourse continues the poststructuralist critique of the subject by other means, for again, in a psychoanalytic register, there is no subject of trauma; the position is evacuated, and in this sense the critique of the subject is most radical here. On the other hand, in popular culture, trauma is treated as an event that guarantees the subject, and in this psychologistic register the subject, however disturbed, rushes back as witness, testifier, survivor. Here is indeed a traumatic subject, and it has absolute authority, for one cannot challenge the trauma of another: one can only believe it, even identify with it, or not. In trauma discourse, then, the subject is evacuated and elevated at once. And in this way trauma discourse magically resolves two contradictory imperatives in culture today: deconstructive analysis and identity politics. This strange rebirth of the author, this paradoxical condition of absentee authority, is a significant turn in contemporary art, criticism, and cultural politics. Here the return of the real converges with the return of the referential. (Foster, 1999, p. 168) What is still to be explained is how, in Sinclair, this assertive identity relates to the fluid matter of the cosmic metropolis. White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings is an excellent case in point. Viscosity, humidity, liquidity are privileged states in the novel, apt to occasion and convey transfusions of the inner and the outer which make them barely recognizable as separate: ‘You can climb up from the river through narrow passageways, where Dryfeld’s shoulders brush the algae from the damp walls, grey snow-melt leaking into Nicholas Lane’s paper-thin shoes; in spasm, through the secret intestines of the town’ (Sinclair, 2004b, p. 13). The survival of the subject’s physical integrity is merely a question of the propensity of the body to coagulate strenuously or dissolve enervatingly; to furiously head upstream against the currents of the city or simply drift downriver. Two main characters of the novel, Dryfeld and Nicholas Lane, are perfect identifications of these contraries and also point to the duality of Sinclair’s spatial politics. The former is always ‘forcing, rigid brow,

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battling on’: this ‘materialist’ (p. 58) character is the prototype of what Sinclair later defines as the psychotic stalker saturating himself with the matters of London while furiously raging against the energies of the city. The latter is the avatar of Sinclair’s evacuated subject, who finds his political force in disappearance, in the refusal of the capitalist logic which imposes hypervisibility and panoptic control. One subject responds to urban chaos through cannibalizing saturation. The other enacts a strategy of dissolution but also becomes sensitive to the minute characteristics of territory: Lane’s condition is described as ‘disembodied, and of great delicacy’, ‘more liquid, borderless, but’ significantly, also ‘rigorously exact in his attention to detail’ (pp. 58–59). Mutatis mutandis, just like identity, poetry itself is dual for Sinclair: it can be conceived as action (romantic in its heroic fury) or as contemplative marginality. The artist may resemble William Turner in the tempest who, ‘lashed to the mast, [ . . . ] conducted elemental chaos’ (2003a, p. 94), or a portrait of Martin Amis seen as a Magritte-like man-cloud, sitting at the window while mists ‘foul the glass. The writer’s reflection is erased. He’s part of it, a cirric pox printed across his profile. Looking up from outside, the journalist on the doorstep sees a clouded face: a thinker with an isobar problem’ (p. 96). In this connection, it is interesting to notice that critical interventions on London Orbital have mainly focused on Sinclair’s polemic attacks levelled at politicians and developers. What has largely been disregarded is his fascination with the contemplative beauty of liminal areas and their peculiar admixture of rus in urbe, which he fi nds enticing in spite of the neglect and degradation. Indeed, condemnation and allure, fury and aesthetic meditation, work side by side in this travelogue, with no clear-cut line of separation between the two. Furthermore, but on a different plane, the text propounds the polarization of two opposed visions: the hard, visionary epiphany conquered by the fugueur (in accordance with Sinclair’s ethics of difficulty) and the ‘easily accessed reverie’ produced by the non-places of the M25 (2003b, p. 7).

COMPLEXITY, IMAGINATION AND THE VISIONARY POET Modern metropolises have come to be regarded as increasingly complex. At the turn of the millennium, the city, physically defi ned 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 suggest: 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

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The composite dynamics of contemporary peripheries is particularly significant in this connection. As urbanists have pointed out, social exclusion is not necessarily confi ned to a geographically well-defi ned, homogeneous outer belt, but sometimes atomized into portions of territory: neither ghettoes nor large metropolitan areas, but rather 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. The 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 often made them impenetrable, while transforming public space into mere technical service (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 (1967), the breaking up of urban communities and their refashioning as the pseudo-communities of the housing and shopping developments are seen by 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. (1994, pp. 121 and 123) He contends that the age of communication, circulation and displacement has generated isolated and dispossessed souls who, orphans of 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. (p. 126)

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These urban nomads somehow accept and adjust to (synchronize with) 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 epitomized precisely this idea of an urban space inhabited by an imaginary community of creative nomads: ‘Constant’s idea’, as Branzi claims, ‘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”’ (2004, p. 440). Herbert Marcuse, who was widely read and discussed in the 1960s, was persuaded that ‘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’ (Short, 2006, p. 8). His contention is that social control over individuals is so dominant and pervasive as to prevent criticism and opposition. Given 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. In particular, art is envisaged as the only form of communication able to voice desire for freedom; the only one capable of counteracting the comfortable and reasonable non-liberty which 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 lays claim to a suspension of the sense of class belonging. In ‘Situationist Space’ (2004), Tom McDonough notes that the person on the dérive is, as much as the Baudelairean fl âneur: ‘already out of place’, neither bourgeois nor working-class. But whereas the fl âneur’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. (p. 257) Sinclair is heir to this tradition. Especially prominent in London Orbital, his criticism of the dominant neo-liberal politics and economics from Thatcher to Blair 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 creative imagination of the artist, whose

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elective marginality aligns him or her with other outcasts of society. Far from being imposed by an oppressive system, this is a marginality which, in the words of bell hooks, ‘one chooses as site of resistance, as location of radical openness and possibility’ (cited in Soja, 1996, p. 98). In ‘The contemporary London Gothic and the limits of the “spectral turn”’, Luckhurst analyses the considerable revival of gothic imagery in late twentieth-century novels on the capital by Ackroyd, Sinclair and Christopher Fowler, amongst others. Through their eerie evocation of the past, he states, these writers aim at ‘establish[ing] counter-memories’ which resist ‘the dominant coding of images and representations’ (2002, p. 532). They compel us ‘to create new memory walks through the city, new maps that help us to resist and subvert the all-too-programmed and enveloping messages of our consumer culture’ (p. 532). In broad outline, we may say that this spatial practice originated in the 1930s with the surrealism of the fl âneur; later it developed into both the Situationist dérive of the 1960s and Lefebvre’s idea of the body as matériel creatively generating space round itself. Recently, this tradition has revived with a strong emphasis placed on the ideas of originality, spontaneity and subjectivity in the apprehension of the urban environment. Of course, Sinclair’s works are emblematic of this resurgence, not least of all because they display a dense, mouldering prose long on evocation and mysterious in its depiction of an enthralling and unsettling walking through London’s sprawl. His writing is influenced primarily by Situationism but also revives the architecture of disorientation epitomized by Constant’s New Babylon artistic utopia. This is symptomatic of the fact that, from the 1980s, many writers and artists tried to counteract ‘the capitalization of culture and privatization of society under Reagan, Thatcher, Kohl, and company—even as these transformations made such intervention more difficult’ (Foster, 1999, p. 172)—precisely through the retrieval of Situationist strategies. These enable the reinscription of given meanings as well as the recognition in the cityscape of what Lefebvre defi nes as a ‘potential for playfulness’ and an extension of bodily ‘rhythms’ (1991, p. 211). For many British writers following this tradition, London turns into a palimpsest bearing traces of the subject’s corporeality and creativity which, in Lights Out for the Territory, are capable of transforming the cityscape into a sort of ‘action painting on a grand scale’ (2003a, p. 9). In other cases, the enrichment of given meanings implies the conjuring up of memories, hidden presences and past lives concealed in the urban text. By virtue of the ability to retain the vestiges of bygone centuries, each part of the city appears inhabited by a genius loci of its own and, in Lefebvre’s words, ‘a specific local temporality’ (1991, p. 137), as in Ackroyd’s London: The Biography. Commenting upon Sinclair’s love of the arcane and the related issue of his obscurity, Murray rightly contends that ‘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

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alternative expression that have been demanded by the politics of post-war England’ (2007, p. 51). Allegations of political disengagement, or ineffective commitment, sometimes levelled at him are implicitly based on the taken-for-granted oppositions of ‘aesthetic quality versus political relevance, form versus content’: polarizations which, ‘“familiar and unfruitful” as long ago as 1934’, ‘still plague the reception of art’ (Foster, 1999, p. 172). My contention is that in Sinclair, and 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 aestheticized, as it were, or, as Ballard has it in his introduction to Crash, redefi ned in terms of mere fiction (see 1995, p. 3). From the 1980s, urban regeneration has often been founded on consumption-oriented, image-led strategies, as Sinclair underscores 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. (2003b, p. 43) In David Harvey’s view, since the beginning of the 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’ (cited in Bianchini and Schwengel, 1991, p. 219). This leads Sinclair to confront late-capitalist urban culture precisely on the battleground of creativity and aesthetics. If developers’ malign illusionism exerts such a powerful hold on 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. As he suggests in Lights Out for the Territory: 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. (2003a, pp. 245–46) ‘Developers become poets of trespass’, he claims. ‘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’ (p. 209). The visionary power of developers is most evident in the

122 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature suburbs described in London Orbital, along the ‘asteroid belt’ of the M25 with its ‘debris bumping and farting and belching around a sealed-off city’ (2003b, p. 11). If the centre is steeped in history and bears its symbols, this suburban no-man’s-land is wholly available for developers’ reinvention: That was left to Tony Sangwine of the Highways Agency. The filmessayist 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’. (p. 5) Sinclair places a strong emphasis on the fictional character of the landscape around the M25. This is a feature identified significantly by Augé himself in his Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, where he underscores ‘the abstraction that corrodes and threatens’ non-places ‘as if the consumers of contemporary space were invited fi rst and foremost to treat themselves to words’ (2006, p. 83). Furthermore, he contends, ‘Certain places exist only through the words that evoke them, and in this sense they are non-places, or rather, imaginary places: banal utopias, clichés’ (2003b, p. 95). The Bluewater mall described in London Orbital is a case in point: ‘Virtual water, glass fountains and imported sand have replaced the tired Kentish shore as the favourite day trip for Cockneys. Bluewater is the new Margate’ (2003b, p. 468). Non-places are conjured up by the mere power of words (of politicians, estate-agents and developers): ‘No need for further explanation, the name is enough. Retail paradise’ (p. 468). The loss of the exclusive attachment to the territory produced by the spread of abstract spaces generates an increasing cultural amnesia, an issue extremely consequential to Sinclair’s understanding of London’s borderland. Compellingly, he shows how such an amnesia allows the modern architect to play with cultural significants: their eradication from any historical and territorial context makes them available for free interchange and turns them into mere simulacra freely circulating on the market of reality-as-fiction. In this connection, Sinclair’s musings on the restoration of the Victorian Holloway Sanatorium (rebranded as Virginia Park) are revealing: ‘“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’ (p. 289). Indeed, what makes London Orbital Sinclair’s most Ballardian work is—besides

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the obvious similarity of the peripheral, motorway location—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’ (1995, p. 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’ (Sinclair, 2003a, p. 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 aesthetic and not infrequently criticized 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). He explains his flights into the arcane as involuntary psychophysical responses: ‘Apparently occult acts are revealed as simple survivalist reflexes’, he suggests (2003a, p. 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; which also implies the belief in a continuum between creativity and our visceral nature. 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 or her imaginative powers: also and more importantly, it is through such reflexes that the new fl âneur or fl âneuse makes 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’ (2003a, p. 4)? The stalker’s imagination draws on a very wide range of documents and specialist knowledges but also ‘stitches it all together’ (p. 4), offering intuitive, sudden syntheses. Sinclair’s 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 provides him—so I argue here—with valid interpretative keys. It is interesting to notice, in this connection, that, in the midst of the implosion of fi nancial capitalism started in the winter 2008–2009, a return to the theory of complexity has been described as desirable by many commentators. Referring to and elaborating on an article by Edward Carr that appeared in Intelligent Life, Edmondo Berselli claims in ‘Il tramonto del tuttologo’ (‘The Twilight of the Polymath’) that a new mentality and new formulas are felt as 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 encouraged sudden intellectual short-circuits and

124 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature intuitive syntheses (2009, p. 51). In ‘The Last Days of the Polymath’, Carr claims that the increasing lack of ‘gifted generalist[s]’, due to the hyperspecialization which nowadays totalizes sciences and research, has had a negative impact on knowledge in general and on economy in particular. A generation of economists with a purely mathematical education lacked the will and the instruments necessary to read and understand Keynes’s warnings on the Great Depression and, therefore, incredibly failed to predict the crisis: ‘For decades’, states Carr, ‘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’ (2009). On the contrary, what he 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. And in some measure this belief is a legacy of the neo-modernist poetic school of Andrew Crozier, J. H. Prynne and Peter Riley: we can see the same concept encapsulated in Riley’s formula ‘the poem: Physiological Presence + Cosmological Range’ (cited in Bond, 2005b, p. 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 writing’s 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. (p. 13) Sinclair’s clearest allusion to this conception of writing is a passage from Landor’s Tower: ‘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?’ (2002b, pp. 30–31). Writers, for Sinclair, provide the nexus where specialist knowledges and cosmic 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. This high receptivity is also traumatic: ‘The will to continue, improvise upon chaos, could be defined as “intent”: a “sicknessvocation”, as Eliade has it, an elective trauma’ (Sinclair, 2003a, p. 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’ (p. 239). Sinclair’s anthropological defi nition of society and the poet as respectively a tribe and its unacknowledged shaman, which reveals a primitivist element in Sinclair’s urban poetics, is worth pursuing in relation to the issue of the psychogeographer’s imagination and his or her instinctive responsiveness to the environment. As Augé points out, according to Mauss, almost

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all human beings in archaic or primitive societies (he discusses in particular the Melanesian) display ‘a vulnerability and permeability to [their] immediate surroundings that specifically enable [them] to be defi ned as “total”’ (2006, p. 49) and identified ‘with the landscape in which [the ethnologist] fi nds them, the space they have shaped’ (p. 47). In his analysis of primitive communities, Augé questions the objectivity of Mauss’s contention, claiming that the idea of totality and localized society—‘everyone holds fast and everything stays together’ (p. 46)—is a delusion, ‘the indigenous fantasy’, shared by the ethnologist, ‘of a society anchored since time immemorial in the permanence of an intact soil’ (p. 44) and ‘maintained against external aggressions and internal splits’ (p. 46). Because of this seeming integrity, Augé argues, ethnologists promote such societies to exemplarity. But he is also ready to avow that, simplifying and illusory as it may be, this fantasy of consistency or transparency between culture, society and the individual does retain some cultural truth in that it promotes and sustains identitarian feelings. And yet obviously the same could hardly be said of Western civilization, where ‘class divisions, migration, urbanization and industrialization’ make culture, society and the individual far more complex and difficult to read (p. 49). So how acceptable is Sinclair’s primitivist anthropology of the contemporary city and notably his conceptualization of London’s people as a tribe and the poet as their shaman? Can the former term apply to the complexity of London’s society? Can the heir to the visionary seers 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. Firstly, by associating the contemporary poet with the subjects of archaic cultures living in anthropological places, Sinclair endows him or her with the same intuitive, instinctive knowledge of the surroundings posited by ethnologists. Secondly, this receptivity is sharpened by the powers of divination to which the poet lays claim. 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 the poet’s body and imagination allows the retrieval of a sense of cultural totality: his or her 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’ (2003a, p. 240). Galimberti’s reflections on the relationship between (mental) illness and society are significant in this connection. He contends that the segregation of patients in hospitals and mental asylums is counterproductive, in that they sever all

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contact with their environment, the place where their illness originated, to signal a disequilibrium in family relationships and conditions of life. In other words, the patient is removed from the very place which would allow us to read into the causes of his or her illness. Galimberti makes a strong case that when the symptoms of unease are removed from the control of the group, with which they can be exchanged, they pass from the social world to the pathological one (see 2008, p. 97) and the opportunity to understand is missed. It is no accident that symptoms of unease within the social body are precisely what Sinclair appears to seek out and interrogate: tellingly, in Lights Out for the Territory he refers to graffiti and forms of urban artistic expression as fevers that the poet reads as revelatory signs: somatic, instinctive reactions of the urban organism to the disequilibriums which cut across it.

RE-ANTHROPOLOGIZING THE MARGINS If Sinclair sometimes resorts to the postmodern jargon, as when in London Orbital he defi nes the city’s non-identity with itself as ‘pastiche’ (2003b, p. 45), the dynamics of chaos offer him—so I argue here—a far more meaningful interpretative key to London’s incongruous flux. In his organicist view, the urban landscape is a fluid substance, a matter in dynamic equilibrium, where the city’s complex systems interrelate, shapeshift and impact on each other. Emblematically, in London Orbital Sinclair quotes Paul Devereux’s view, in Re-Visioning the Earth, of spiritual tourism as ‘a complex but organic mode of active observation’ (2003b, p. 122; emphasis added). 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 the free interchange and osmosis between different states of matter and the mind: ‘Water was always a hinge for magicians, a means of switching modes of consciousness. Water was universal memory’ (p. 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. Sinclair is certainly not new to moments when order behind chaos unfolds as a fleeting but undeniable vision, ‘that nanosecond when the pattern was revealed, before it vanished forever’ (Atkins and Sinclair, 1999, p. 8). His works are scattered with such moments of revelation. They 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

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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, Thurrok, and Bluewater—set up their own impenetrable micro-geographies; traffic islands, loops, dead ends that mimicked the motorway system’ (2003b, pp. 11–12). Yet if modernist epiphanies are moments of positive revelation, the status of these patterns is more problematic, in that applied to the despised M25 inaugurated by Margaret Thatcher. Resorting again to the language of chaos, the motorway is presented, in Chris Petit and Sinclair’s film (2002) accompanying the book, 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 ‘noise and rush of traffic, twenty-four hours a day, has pushed “content” back’ (p. 16). The M25 is pernicious also in that ‘affect[ing] old alignments’: ‘Narrative fractured. Verbals didn’t stand up. Confessions wouldn’t cohere’ (p. 314). Yet, the motorway is far from being monolithically identified with a malign, energy-draining trench. Rather, it oscillates between a set of opposing ideas. At the beginning of the book, for example, we are introduced to the assumption that travelling along the orbital road is a meaningless experience, ‘a wearied return, hobbled, to the point of origin’ (p. 7). But the conceit is soon counteracted by Sinclair’s fascination with various early twentieth-century 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: 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. (p. 85) Seemingly, 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 (see Baker, 2007, p. 147). Yet, as I have already argued, in Sinclair there is no clear-cut separation between politics and aesthetics, commitment and visionariness, and my aim will be precisely to unravel these seeming contradictions while also showing how these polarities intersect fruitfully in his vision of the liminal city.

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In London Orbital the M25 appears split schizophrenically 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’ (2003b, p. 77): the experience of driving along the circular road ‘induce[s] rage and states of trance’ (p. 338), an abysmal ‘slid[ing] through layers of anaesthesia’ (p. 203). The intensely dual nature of the experience of the margins is summed up in the epigrammatic statement that ‘the fugue is both drift and fracture’, cosmic fluidity and the less reassuring ruptures of complexity; the spirit of the fugueur 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’ (p. 147). Sinclair is seduced by the reverie and repose provided by the perceptive flow of light and matter; at the same time, though, he is committed to a relentless, ‘neurotic narrative’ (p. 116) based on fragmentary documentation and replicating the ‘neurosis’ produced by the motorway’s ‘alternately speedy and sluggish microclimates’ (p. 171). In ‘Excavating the Unburied’, 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’ (1999, p. 194). In London Orbital, the River Lea performs this function of conveyance and escape: its waters, as a vehicle of liminality, ‘[remain], in [his] fancy, a messenger substance, linking reservoir with source; a dream hinge between city heat and Arcadian potentiality’ (2003b, p. 95). Fluid meditations and metaphors of liquidity aestheticize the quiet desolation of the rus in urbe, the intermingling of the city and the country which Sinclair prizes so much. By virtue of its imaginative import, this admixture is propounded as preserving our sanity and bodily equilibrium. 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’ (p. 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 defi ne an Edwardian sense of excursion, pleasure, time out. (p. 40) As rus in urbe, the city margin is the very epitome of matter’s transmutation caught in process, a figure of Sinclair’s privileged concept of London

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as an endlessly accommodating matter. His insistence on organicism and/as dreaminess is reminiscent of Bachelard’s suggestion in Water and Dreams (1942) that ‘one cannot dream profoundly with objects. To dream profoundly one must dream with substances’ (1983, p. 22). In fact, it is very likely that Bachelard’s conceptualization of imagination had an impact on Sinclair: in London Orbital ‘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’ (p. 515): of course, the book is infi nitely more enticing to Sinclair in that it appears to be unread. In this guise it can conspire with other elements to create an atmosphere and play freely on our imagination with no need for us to identify defi nitive meanings or specific philosophical influences. Sinclair’s atmospheric moments, his idea of culture as a climate, must keep the reader’s analytical intelligence at bay to exert their fascination. But even if the evidence of Bachelard’s influence provided by Sinclair is necessarily ambiguous, proof positive of his interest in the French philosopher is the description of stalking in Lights Out for the Territory as ‘tramping asphalted earth in alert reverie’ (2003a, p. 4), which closely recalls Bachelard’s idea of the vigilant awareness accompanying daydream. The concept is clarified in The Poetics of Reverie: 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 gives the impression of a fl ight 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. (Bachelard, 1971, p. 150) This ghostliness of the traveller is significant for Sinclair, too, and I will return to it at the end of the chapter. 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 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’ (2003b, p. 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 nonplaces 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 imagination 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

130 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature our fathers, our grandfathers’ (p. 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 reinvented as anthropological territories. Imagination and aesthetics are confi rmed, therefore, as the planes 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’ (p. 509). Sinclair suggests that the M25 ‘won’t make sense until it’s been abandoned, grown over’ (p. 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 in London”’ (Sinclair, 2003b, pp. 204– 205) published in 1909, the orbital road was a pure fantasy projected into the future. To become narration, that is, to become significant, non-places must be displaced from their unchanging present of forgetfulness, their status outside history; because narration either anticipates or follows, evokes the future or recalls the past. 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’ (2006, p. 57). Their conceiving and handling space as a network of abodes of ancestral presence implement the sense collectivities have of their own identity. Theirs is a ‘place which 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’ (pp. 54–55). 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 places by re-anthropologizing them. In the indigenous fantasy, Augé contends, collective identity is mirrored by the ritual network of the place, while the ethnologist reads primitive societies by reversing the route: ‘from space to the social, as if the latter had produced the former’ (p. 51). In London’s periphery, this mirroring is cracked, defaced to the point of non-recognition. The poet’s task, therefore, goes beyond the ethnographer’s: the writer aims at reconstructing old networks made illegible or reactivating imaginary ones (literary and pictorial); thereby, we read in Lights Out for the Territory, his ‘work is capable of re-enchanting place’ (2003a, p. 239), of conjuring up territory again.

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This naturally leads us, fi nally, to pose the question of the ontology of Sinclair’s liminal places. As he states in London Orbital, ‘You learn to empty yourself into the view. At privileged viewing points, the observer vanishes: the fictional residue’, that mixed substance of the real place and its narrative transfiguration, ‘remains, coheres. It’s there even when you don’t see it’ (2003b, p. 491) any longer, either because you (the stalker) have moved 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, whether something can exist independently of our perception of it, when the observer’s physical presence on the scene and his perception of it are only ghostly traces in memory. But there again, the very concept of imagination, which has been at the core of my analysis, refers precisely to the mind’s retention of the absent (see Ferraris, 1996, p. 7). Only by inscribing places into the realm of imagination and displacing them into narration, can we assure that they survive and 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 reality so that it may never disappear.

4

Corporeality within Abstract Space (from the 1970s to the Post-Millennial)

This chapter brings together an update of developments. It starts again from Ballard, this time focusing on the relationship between bodies and abstract spaces in his early work, then pursues the theme in later writers (and the mature Ballard himself), to chart its evolution over forty years or so. The overarching purpose is to reveal how 1970s concerns with the non-places of post-war modernist functionalism morph, in the following decades, fi rst into concerns with the city imagined as refashioned by information technologies and fi nally, at the turn of the millennium, with the city reconfigured by forms of globalization—world finance, global traumas and the abstract universality of multicultural discourse. The fi rst part of the chapter starts from the Corbusian functionalism of Ballard’s motorway landscape in Concrete Island (1973) then moves on to consider Ryman’s early Internet novel 253 (1996; the printed version appeared in 1998) set in the London tube. The abstract spaces of the motorway, underground and Internet, with their predetermined flows of people, goods and information, are perceived in these two novels as fundamentally pervasive, so that islands and interstices have to be imagined where a repressed real may re-emerge. Finally, Ballard’s London is further explored through the analysis of the later Millennium People, to suggest that in this work the abstract spaces of the city Ballard presents are no longer those of post-war concrete landscapes and modernist functionalism, where islands of authentic experience were still possible: now the city has turned into a fluid landscape where the stultifying fictions of the comfort zone seem to have the capacity for the instant repossession of what is left vacant. Hence any revolutionary, surrealist intervention on the urban scene falls short of creating permanent rifts within the social system. Ballard’s and Ryman’s London works investigated in this chapter are quite idiosyncratic with respect to the more widespread psychogeographical literature on the capital. Yet it is precisely through their comparison with this wider literary strand that we can cast light on their peculiarities. Their stance vis-à-vis the issues of the art–society and body–space relationships, for example, is totally different from the one found in London neo-gothic and psychogeographical texts, even, in many respects,

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deliberately antipathetic. Far from trying to counteract the predetermination of our commodity culture by means of secret knowledges potentially anti-democratic in their love of the arcane (see Luckhurst, 2002, p. 541), these novels posit the integration of the subject and the artwork right into the degraded, commonplace world of capitalist economy. But another significant difference should also be noticed. If Sinclair’s works visualize London as a text perpetually enriched whose meanings are enlarged by recollection and positively expanded by creativeness, Ryman and Ballard’s novels conceive the capital as a claustrophobic site of entrapment: the traffic island where the victim of a car accident is marooned for an indefi nite time; the underground train bound to crash; gated communities and terrorist targets. For the two novelists, modern society, which fi nds its avatar in the urban plan, is an architectural armature which imposes its enmeshing codes of signification and is fundamentally impervious to multidirectional artistic transformation. In this context, the subject is perceived as mainly integrated into the system and compliant with its requirements of functionality, planning and readability. A cogent example of this textualization and adjustment to the plan on the part of the individual is the fact that in 253 characters are presented as immobile and perfectly localizable signs. In the thoroughly organized cyberspace of Ryman’s underground novel, where each person is assigned a specific seat on the underground, ‘people become places’, as he writes in the 1996 Internet version of the novel, sites (or rather, their signifiers) on a map. McCarthy’s Remainder and Smith’s White Teeth, on which the second part of the chapter is focused, are equally alien to the literature of telepaths and imaginative nomads so pervasive in the London novels and travelogues of the 1980s and 1990s. Or more to the point, they are clearly dismissive of the essentialist tendencies prominent in Moorcock, Sinclair and Ackroyd. These writers’ ideas of the capital’s transcendent organicism and temporal continuity, as well as their faith in the city’s outcasts as repositories of its quintessence, are made problematic if not openly parodied in both Remainder and White Teeth: McCarthy pre-empts all claims to essence and authenticity through his protagonist’s downright nihilism, while Smith delights in debunking such myths through humour. As we will see, the fundamental dismissal (radical in Remainder, less dramatic in White Teeth) of the territorial concerns so widespread in contemporary London literature leave both writers to cope with an almost evacuated urban scene, virtually deprived of historical density and resonance. And, intriguingly, to make sense of this new abstract space, they both have to resort to the laws and paradoxes of physics. McCarthy’s novel looks at the unrepresentability of the computerized city, revisiting Ryman’s early electronic urban landscape in terms of the fluidity and increasing invisibility of today’s technological networks. Ballard and Ryman’s idea of the largely inescapable logics of the urban scene is central also to McCarthy, whose London is reduced to a dead landscape of

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abstract networks: the dry connectivity of global finance, flows of goods, information and people. Yet, in the context of this abstract space, clearly defi ned stages are imagined by McCarthy, where a fleshy and sensuous demand for embodiment (against the pull of the virtual) may be assuaged; this is certainly reminiscent again of Ballard and Ryman, with their chance transgressions or voluntary exiles on islands of being wedged within the system. Smith’s spatial politics differs instead from this model. On her urban scene, the return of the real entails no deliberate mise en scène; rather, it is occasioned by coincidental and unpredictable events. The urban (and international) space traversed by her postcolonial characters appears fraught with discontinuities and obstacles, which produce splits and collisions between bodies and places. All this is placed in contrast with the deceitfully smooth representations of identity and space offered by the discourses of globalization, multiculturalism and the society of the spectacle. *

*

*

PART I: ISLANDS AND RIFTS: J. G. BALLARD AND GEOFF RYMAN

The Crevice in the Plan: Concrete Island The suburbia imagined in Concrete Island, especially in the preface, is something of a sterile and perfectly functioning machine producing, as Ballard states in an interview, the modern ‘death of the soul’: the ‘future [is] going to be like a suburb of Düsseldorf’, a ‘strange and chilling’ ‘consumergoods paradise’ of ‘immaculate suites’ ‘with not a leaf out of place’ (1984c, pp. 14–15). In the motorway landscape of the novel, which ‘seems to anticipate every possible hazard’ (Ballard, 1994a, p. 5), individual experience— let alone of any daring or adventurous kind—seems forever abolished and banned. Ballard does not impute this deprivation only to late twentieth-century civilization. By defi ning Robinson Crusoe’s stay on a ‘desert island’— with regard to which Maitland’s experience in Concrete Island lays claim to some sort of lineage—as an ‘adventure holiday’ (p. 5), it is as if he were tracing the death of authentically risky, exploratory experiences back to the harbingers of capitalism. Defoe’s novel appears to Ballard as ‘a working replica of bourgeois society and its ample comforts’, ‘with its supplies-fi lled wreck lying conveniently on the nearest reef like a neighbourhood cash and carry’ (p. 5). The myth of an adventurous return to nature, false as it may be in Crusoe’s already capitalist island, could handily be located by Defoe at the margin of the already mapped world, in what was left of opacity and unknowingness. Yet, it goes without saying that this move is no longer viable for Ballard. As Branzi contends in his 1971 article ‘No-Stop City, Residential Parking, Climatic Universal System’, the contemporary world ‘eliminates the empty space in which Capital expanded during its growth

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period. In fact, no reality exists any longer outside the system itself’ (cited in Hays, 2000, p. 59). What Ballard perceives as the modern fully explored world (‘There’s nowhere to go. The planet is full’, he suggests in Millennium People [2004, pp. 54–55]) forcefully invites him to rethink spatial divisions of centre and periphery. This is why he entrusts the chance to prompt and generate events not to remote territories but to the patches of city waste ground which, being utterly neglected, remain irreducible to the closure of the plan. It is only through the crevice in the urban texture—in the case in point the nondescript traffic island onto which Maitland crashes—that the return of repressed physicality can bubble up to crack and defy the architectural will. Entering this unknown space entails the exit from the confi nes of calculation and the exposure of both body and mind to incalculable risks. This hazardous detachment from customary space-time parameters and social conventions provided by civilization is a central tenet in Ballard’s poetics. In his critical work Crash, Sinclair quotes Ballard’s words on this issue: Rather than fearing alienation, people should embrace it. It may be the doorway to something more interesting. That’s always been the message of my fiction. We need to explore total alienation and fi nd what lies beyond. The secret module that underpins who we are and our imaginative remaking of ourselves that we all embrace. (2008, p. 42) The achievement of this objective presupposes the realization of certain environmental conditions, namely, the abandonment of civilization, as in The Drowned World, or the disconnection of modern architectural space from the system, as in High-Rise. When non-places become unplugged from the machine of the great sleep (as McLuhan would have it), their brutalizing nature facilitates the subject’s dangerous but revitalizing reversion to its primitive instincts. The neutral, standardizing quality of these architectures (such as the shopping centre of Kingdom Come) engenders their gradual transformation into surreal landscapes, whose extreme conditions Ballard fi nds particularly energizing and replete with possibilities. Interviewed by Sinclair, he suggests the potential of these non-hierarchical places: ‘The normal civic structures are not there. So that people have more freedom to explore their own imaginations, their own obsessions’ (Sinclair, 2008, p. 84). In the novel the hero’s permanence on the concrete island is by no means the retrieval of a prior, mythic physicality, the primitiveness of the bon sauvage; rather, it implies a new corporeality inscribed in and subdued to the possibilities of urban architecture. Indeed, it is not wide of the mark to see Ballard’s solution in Concrete Island as foreshadowing the late-1990s architectural theory of ‘urban interstices’ described by Ian Borden: nowhere sites lying off the beaten track; deserted and, hence, unknown spaces which can transform themselves into places of

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experience and event (see 2002, pp. 183–94). This movement (move) towards originality—which counteracts Jameson’s postmodern vision of the city as the space of anonymous transcendence (2003, pp. 38–45)—is conceived by Ballard not in a belated modernist sense but only as partial and overtly conducted under the sign of negotiation. Nor does it entail for him the protean creation of new signs and the stratification of new meanings found in the psychogeographical and neo-gothic traditions: his tendency is to reduce rather than expand, to undo rather than increase. It is emblematic of this that in Concrete Island the concept of space should be governed by an entropic drive, which muddles and fi nally unmakes all existing signs and established codes of signification. Similarly, in Millennium People the utopia imagined at the end of the novel is described as ‘a unique republic, a city without street signs, laws without penalties, events without significance’ (2004, p. 294). At the same time the subject abandons the dromocratic (to borrow Virilio’s neologism in Speed and Politics [1986, passim]) and signalled environment of the highways—where constraints on the bodies of people tend to reduce their movements to a predetermined circulation—to rediscover the opaque and residual material substance of its corporeality.

Concrete Chora: The Unmaking of Meaning in the Penumbra of Culture The celebrated collaboration, initiated in 1985, between architect Peter Eisenman and philosopher Jacques Derrida for the Parc de la Villette in Paris was presented in terms of dysfunctional architecture; as a structure which, in some way, turns against itself. The project stemmed from Derrida’s meditation on the Platonic idea of chora found in the Timaeus. Chora is something Plato cannot easily assimilate into his bipartite thought since, as Derrida suggests in Chora L Works, it is ‘neither the eternal eidos nor its sensible copy but the place in which all those things are inscribed’ (Derrida and Eisenman, 1997, p. 9): ‘The Chora is the triton genos in the view of the two types of being (immutable and intelligible/corruptible, in the process of becoming and sensible)’ (p. 16). Furthermore, chora is conceived as an impossible surface where everything is erased as soon as it is inscribed. It is, therefore, a paradoxical place which reminds us very closely of Ballard’s concrete island; fi rst of all, in that it is ‘totally indifferent to what happens’ (p. 34), an ‘absolutely blank’ space on which ‘everything that is printed’ ‘is automatically effaced’ (p. 10). In fact, Maitland’s island remains virgin by deflecting any attempt on his part to leave some imprint, some inscription which could attract the attention of drivers speeding towards London Airport. This is the reason why the words he (or Proctor on his behalf) writes on the concrete surface are washed off by the rain, preventing any appropriation of the space by way of language. So true is this process of erasure that, perceived from the curious perspective of the island, even the

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elaborately signalled city outside, with its recognizable linguistic and iconic signs, seems to lose all familiarity and signification: the ‘illuminated route indicators rotated above [Maitland’s] head, marked with meaningless destinations’ (1994a, p. 49). Further, much like Derrida and Eisenman’s project of their park as partly impenetrable—and, therefore, contesting the taken-for-granted logic of architecture as a functional environment—Ballard’s concrete garden is ambiguously both visible from the outside and ‘out of sight’, overlooked by drivers and ‘surveillance cameras’ (1994a, p. 5). Likewise, it is both permeable and impermeable to the outer world, especially with regard to its consumer goods and litter, both accessible and inaccessible: we are kept uncertain whether Maitland is inescapably trapped or just reluctant to leave, forever bound to play over and over again his desire/unwillingness to escape. Indeed, the further the reading proceeds the more the cues of indefi niteness seem to multiply. To name but a few: although grass and garbage seem more pervasive, the title indicates the place is made of concrete; it is defi ned as an island, but the hero’s name deliberately suggests the idea of the mainland; and, fi nally, there are times when, through surrealistic similitudes, the island is imagined as a drowned world: ‘the grass rose and fell like the waves of a brisk sea’ (p. 40); climbing the embankment on the edge of the island, Maitland and Proctor ‘emerged from the grass, like swimmers coming ashore’ (p. 127). In short, every fi xed concept of space is turned inside out; every meaning is reversed and undone. Even some of the chapters’ titles, which should denote significant watersheds in the plot, seem to refer—in an intriguing play of presence and absence—more to the betrayed story of Crusoe than to the effective content of the chapters: there is no real ‘naming of the island’ much as there is no ‘escape’ at the end of the novel because Maitland’s experience as well as the reading of Ballard’s novel cannot be but open-ended. Maitland perceives his environment not through codified interpretations (the meaningful signs belong only to the world outside) but through his lived experience. It is no accident that the changing rhythms of his body and psyche determine a constant fluctuation and redefi nition of space and its boundaries. The island becomes an introspective palimpsest, the site of constantly renewed psychosomatic inscriptions. Fever, dejection, sudden outbursts of optimism, hunger, delirium and madness—regarded as the most powerful means to disrupt our sanitized, inauthentic existence and achieve a higher consciousness—are the independent variables of Ballard’s scientific experiments with Maitland’s perception of space. Any spatial knowledge overloaded with conventions and reassuring habits (‘the day-today business of crossing rooms, walking up staircases’ to which we adjust because, of course, ‘You can’t start off every second by saying, “What is this white structure beside me? Uh—it’s a wall”’ [Ballard, 1984c, p. 43]) can be unsettled by the dramatic amplification of ordinary psychobiological ranges. This intensification produces the reshuffling and dismantling of

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spatial and perceptive codes necessary to unveil the elusive ontology of both space and the body.

The Slaughterhouse and the Altar In Concrete Island space often seems to oscillate between the status of landscape-architecture and that of the psycho-organic portrait. Consider the following passage where, no longer a stable reality, the environment enters into games of exchange with Maitland’s body: As he tottered about, Maitland found himself losing interest in his own body, and in the pain that inflamed his leg. He began to shuck off sections of his body, forgetting fi rst his injured hip, then both his legs, erasing all awareness of his bruised chest and diaphragm. Sustained by the cold air, he moved through the grass, looking round calmly at those features of the island he had come to know so well during the past days. Identifying the island with himself, he gazed at the cars in the breaker’s yard, at the wire-mesh fence, and the concrete caisson behind him. These places of pain and ordeal were now confused with pieces of his body. He gestured towards them, trying to make a circuit of the island so that he could leave these sections of himself where they belonged. He would leave his right leg at the point of his crash, his bruised hands impaled upon the steel fence. He would place his chest where he had sat against the concrete wall. At each point a small ritual would signify the transfer of obligation from himself to the island. (1994a, pp. 70–71) This strategy for the appropriation of space is informed by Max Ernst’s ambiguous half-organic landscapes of which Ballard is so fond. Discussing Ernst’s The Elephant of Celebes and The Eye of Silence, in ‘The Coming of the Unconscious’ Ballard gestures towards his interest in the painter’s ‘palaces of flesh and bone that are the living facades enclosing our own subliminal consciousness’ (1984a, p. 103). His images of a ‘spinal landscape’ (p. 103) evoke a body whose disjointed parts are imaginarily dispersed throughout and engulfed by the environment in a chameleon-like way. The figure-against-ground paradigm of traditional, especially pictorial, representation is dismantled in Ernst’s paintings, to be rearranged as ground-against-ground: in other words, as the informe described by Georges Bataille (1985, p. 31). This strategy is what Ballard describes as the mimetizing—a crucial tenet in both Lacan and surrealists like Roger Caillois—‘of past traumas and experiences, the discharging of fears and obsessions through states of landscape’ so as to construct ‘architectural portraits of individuals’ (1984a, p. 103; emphasis added). Yet, I think, they would be better described as anti-architectural. In fact, what Maitland’s visceral body-place seems to point to is the possibility of a space anterior to the institutionalization of subjectivity by way of the built

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environment (not just a container but a producer of subjects and identities), which, in the novel, is represented by the functional and signalled landscape of the motorway. It is no accident that Maitland’s transgression, his yielding to things that are fatal and voluntarily uncontrolled, is condemned to take place hidden from society’s hegemonic, panoptic gaze: his ‘disappearance [ . . . ] can’t be officialized. It has to remain secret’ (Baudrillard and Nouvel, 2002, p. 16). The aesthetic of vanishing (as self-erasure from the world of signs) is an exception and an individual event whose meaning (or rather meaninglessness) cannot be taken in and appropriated by society. Maitland’s journey through the spires and up to ‘the dead centre of’ the island’s ‘maze’ (Ballard, 1994a, p. 63) implies his desire to get in touch with a looser subjectivity which, stripped of both ego and social architectural superstructures, becomes more intimate with one’s physical, animal being, ‘the benign minotaur of the labyrinth’ (Ballard, 1984a, p. 103). It is no accident that, in sheer opposition to society’s pathological need for cleanliness, as revealed by the immaculate suburbs which Ballard associates with our sterile near future, the island is the place of the excremental, fi lth and refuse repressed by society. This reminds us very closely of Bataille’s concept of dépense: ‘the need to believe’, as Denis Hollier suggests in Against Architecture, ‘that there is lost time’ (like the one Maitland spends in idleness on the island), ‘waste lands, unproductive expenditures, things one never gets over, sins that cannot be redeemed, garbage that cannot be recycled’ (1992, p. xiv), things not worthy of the light of day and better left unseen. Not giving themselves to being observed, they are more suitable to being touched: Proctor—Ballard’s version of Shakespeare’s Caliban in The Tempest and, much like his predecessor, the embodiment of primitive, innocent bestiality—is symptomatically half-blind and aware of his environment only through physical contact. But even more to the point, Ballard’s acquaintance with Bataille’s theory of dépense is in the former’s depiction of his dis/u-topia as a contaminated bio-technological garden littered with discarded objects. This landscape is probably reminiscent, aside from surrealist theories, of contemporary art. Sculpture, in particular, witnessed, in the 1960s and early 1970s, the proliferation of junk, often repulsive industrial materials while the artist’s skill was confined, as it were, just to their skilful assemblage. Consider, in this respect, the robots constructed by Ballard’s friend Paolozzi or else Lynn Chadwick’s balanced sculptures so similar to half-zoomorphic mobiles or metallic plants: it is apparent that they suggest the same sort of (in)organic concretions. But most influential of all must have been the exhibition This Is Tomorrow: like the installation Patio and Pavilion, Ballard’s island is a space of debris which enacts the reversal of capitalist society through the (at heart Dadaist) apotheosis of its residue, the embrace of its most degraded forms. The base materialism of junk and refuse in post-war art (see Bois and Krauss, 1997, pp. 51–62) is pervasive in Ballard’s novel: it goes all the way from the anal, scatological allusion of Proctor’s selfsame name, through his

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and Jane’s presentations as dehumanized social waste, all down to Proctor’s accidental slaughtering by a repair vehicle. This episode is set in a sort of sacrificial temple of the sun: ‘Shortly after dawn, the fi rst sunlight shone on to the traffic island through the concrete pillars of the overpass’ (1994a, p. 169). The description of Proctor as ‘trussed like a carcass in an abattoir’ (p. 172; emphasis added) brings us right back to Bataille, who devoted an article of his Documents to this architectural structure. Ballard’s use of the French-derived word, in preference to the Anglo-Saxon slaughterhouse, seems to confi rm the hypothesis of this ascendancy. According to the French surrealist, the abattoir is deeply connected to religion in that ancient pagan temples served simultaneously for slaughter and for prayer. But even more significant is that this pathological need for cleanliness has repressed the repulsive killing of the animal, by removing it from the centre of the community’s religious and social life to the slaughterhouse cursed and quarantined like a boat with cholera aboard (see Bataille, 1995, pp. 72–73). In so doing, humanity has refused to accept its unseemliness, its kinship with butchering; an association which instead Ballard seems to recapture complete with all its apparatus of architectural references and surrealistic visceral physicality.

253: Urban/Electronic Design and Commodity Culture In the aftermath of London 7/7 terrorist attacks, Raj Persaud, Gresham professor and consultant psychiatrist, wrote in The Independent: ‘Modern instant communications technology combined with a hyper-vivid media beaming intense eye-witness experience and testimony, means there is now a sense we have all journeyed on those buses and trains with the casualties and survivors’ (2005, p. 2). In Ryman’s print remix of 253, the combined emphasis on the travel and media networks, urban design and electronic system design, conveys precisely this sense of panoptism and architectural planning. The action is set on the Bakerloo Line tube train which carries 252 passengers. The driver makes 253. Each character has one page describing their appearance, thoughts and actions in exactly 253 words, and each page is a story in itself. The tremendously extensive human material at stake here—at least for the space of a novel—paradoxically amounts to an absolutely enclosed and predetermined structure. The ostensible randomness and fragmentariness offered to the reader seem conducive more to a sense of utter inescapability than to a liberating strategy. If on the one hand, the book profits from the supposed democracy of the net, which allows the free play of signifiers through the reader’s ability to erratically switch from one (web) page to another, on the other hand, it confi nes this game within an all-encompassing and perfectly arranged grid of control. This consists of a series of superimposed maps with their interconnected sites: the stations along the Bakerloo Line en route between Embankment and the Elephant and Castle; the places and architectures in London somehow related to the

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passengers; the novel’s pages and links; the characters neatly identified by their seats. It may be objected that this predetermination is counterbalanced by various elements of anarchy. One is the aforementioned rambling experience of the reader clicking around in the matrix. Another depends on the fact that every single passenger occupies a different standpoint within the architectonic whole and provides us only with his or her own idiosyncratic perception of the surrounding environment; this implies that our gaze, observing only through the protagonists’ eyes, is constantly forced to change viewpoint and, therefore, engage in a bewildering multi-perspective field. Finally, this disorientation is reinforced by our inability to mentally retain the images and stories of 253 characters and, consequently, by our impression of excess rather than containment (a feeling which Ryman strives to produce also in his 1989 novel The Child Garden). Yet, since the reader’s perception of overload and randomness is counteracted by the author’s utter control and arrangement of his matter, including its most baffling effects, the sense of the plan’s inescapability stays paramount. Nevertheless, such inexorableness is conveyed in a light-hearted, goodhumoured manner, and with all the aforementioned factors of partial compensation. This reflects how, in the mid-1990s new economy and Internet euphoria, the web ‘was emblematic of both control and freedom, the apotheosis of the surveillance society and the dream of anarchistic autonomy’ (Truscello, 2004, p. 2). Following a critical/complacent strategy, the novel mimes these optimistic, democratic hopes while, at the same time, it gives the lie to them by portraying the web-linked societal imagery of the time with ironic detachment. Though this strategy is typically postmodern, it ‘has several precedents in modernism. Benjamin detected an “empathy with the commodity” at work in Baudelaire, a homeopathic procedure by which bits of commodity culture were used to inoculate poetry against complete infection by market capitalism’ (Foster, 1999, p. 123). Similarly, ‘Sloterdijk saw “an irony of a bashed ego” at work in Dada, a hyperbolic procedure by which “the degradation of the individual” under monopoly capitalism was pushed to the point of a parodic indictment (the best instances are Hugo Ball in writing and Max Ernst in art)’ (p. 123). Stylistically, this game of complacency and ironic transgression is very fruitful in 253 because it allows imaginative intersections of avant-garde creativity and the mimicry of advertising and market research techniques. In this way high art ironically blends without resistance into the smooth polished surface of consumerism while Ryman virtually (I mean the pun) handles, packages, sponsors and even reviews his book with the care and professionalism of an experienced seller. So in an unnumbered opening advert page of the printed version, he winks at the consumers of his novel: ‘It’s reader friendly. Compare it with other novels. You’ll see the difference right away!’ And by self-avowedly turning his book into an enticing product, he uncovers our infantile need to be reassured and pampered by the impeccable cosmetics of our consumer goods. The selfsame carefully calculated but deliberately

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implausible numerology which governs the structural design of the novel is a case in point. The ‘comforting thing about numbers’, Ryman suggests, is that ‘however unlikely’, they ‘are always there for a reason’ (1998, p. 1): they serve the purpose of social anaesthetic by creating ‘the illusion’ that ‘an orderly universe can be maintained’ (p. 2). This infantile need for reassurance is equally revealed by Ryman’s vision of the relationship between contemporary architecture and society. Consider his depiction of the fictitious, purpose-built ‘underground city for Pall Mall employees’ fitted with all kinds of facilities: ‘a huge gym, with squash courts’, ‘an olympic-sized swimming pool’, ‘a supermarket and a cinema’ as well as ‘a bomb shelter, in preparation for nuclear war’ (p. 93). Here Ryman suggests that gated communities (a recurring theme also in Ballard’s novels) are dictated by fear rather than by a sense of belonging; which accounts for the arbitrariness of their spaces, their inability to reflect a specific social or cultural identity. This insight is reinforced by the description of the School of Oriental and African Studies: Scholars from vastly different disciplines and cultures who live in the suburbs and commute daily to discover at SOAS that they have nothing to say to each other. Proof positive that to have geography in common is to have nothing in common. In fact, SOAS has a lot in common with tourist group bus tours. Or perhaps a trip on London Underground. (p. 11) So we can infer that the selfsame narrow boundaries of 253 are meant to mime and parody the illusion of order provided by modern gated communities and other confi ned spaces. The idea of transforming the novel into a sort of closed and measurable architectural object has also an iconic motivation: the book is meant from the outset to be viewed as much as read so that some of its meanings might appear, as it were, discoverable at a glance by idly browsing through the novel’s pages. All this, Ryman ironically argues, for the ‘Ease and Comfort’ (p. 6) of the public unwilling to commit to consistent reading. Ryman’s modern reader is a tourist (symptomatically the book promises, in its opening page, to require ‘no special plugs to let you down when travelling abroad’) picking information here and there, delighting in the ample and playful choice of portraits. This is possible because the characters’ existences, thoughts and feelings are extremely compacted, squeezed into the inescapable pigeonhole of a fi xed number of words, which constitutes a sort of time-slot each traveller is allocated to have their story take off and land. Here Ryman is perfectly in tune with Ballard’s later representation of Central London in Millennium People as a non-place, a transit area expressive of an ‘airport culture’ (Ballard, 1984e, p. 14): ‘The city was a vast and stationary carousel, forever boarded by millions of would-be passengers who took their seats, waited and then dismounted’ (2004, p. 159). Each

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of them seems defi ned for Ryman by a standard, measurable interval of visibility. In the hypervisual regime dominating, in his view, today’s architecture of places and information, people’s existence often seems reduced to a transitory appearance. It can be the space of a person’s description on a web page; the fi lmed interval when the passer-by walks across the city surveillance cameras; or the short CCTV footage recording of four terrorists about to embark at King’s Cross.

The Rematerialization of Bodies and Places Even though both Concrete Island and 253 are based on an accident, their structures are fundamentally antipathetic. In the former the crash, which occurs at the beginning of the novel, allows the transgression of psycho-architectural boundaries. It constitutes a rupture in the otherwise close-knit system as well as a point of departure for a more authentic experience of the body. In the latter it is the point of arrival of the story and the unacknowledged object of desire to which the whole novel tends, envisaging it as the last chance to rematerialize a corporeality reduced to image, bit, information. This retrieval of substance coincides with pain or death; which accounts for the melancholy feeling suggested by the very last pages where the crash is described. This traumatic experience is different from what we imagine as the terrifying black hole swallowing the victims of London’s terrorist outrage. In the novel the ‘desert of the Real’, in Slavoj Žižek’s defi nition (2002), is somehow removed, barely hinted at and conveniently confi ned to an almost dreamlike dimension. ‘Every one of those people reached an important point in their lives. Some made key decisions. Some attained enlightenment. All except for the driver. He fell asleep’ (Ryman, 1998, p. 2): if this is a runaway train bound to collision, the out-of-control situation, however uncanny, affects us more with the sense of the human fragility it seems to entail than with the terror of its denouement. The overall note, even in the very fi nal moments of the casualties-to-be, is lyrical, almost anticipatorily elegiac: ‘To be clear’, Ryman warns us in the closing pages, ‘there was no crash on London Underground on this day. 11th January, 1995 is the day I learned my best friend not only had Aids, but would die within days’ (p. 354). In retrospect, the till-the-end hidden presence of this body in pain looms large on the technological landscape of 253 just as the moribund remembering Milena, visible only in the epilogue, secretly presides over The Child Garden. In the latter work, after wondering for over three hundred pages of spatio-temporal to and fro where exactly the physically present and narrating Milena really stands, we discover that her only incarnated being is the suffering, dying one of the last pages. The closing section of The Child Garden reveals that all the previous portraits of the protagonist and episodes of her life were but disarranged projections of her memory with no material substance, similar to the holograms she used to represent her comedy. These were images of her

144 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature body—rather than her body itself—representations on the brink between reality and dream. In 253, too, this half-surreality is absolutely prominent: it decorates the architectural spaces of the novel and defines the enveloping world of consumer culture, which will be shattered at the end. One may consider, in this connection, the advertisements with which the text is regularly interspersed, where the capitalist dreamworld plastering tube cars and stations’ interiors is reproduced. Here, ‘in the postmodern world of advanced capitalism’, as Foster contends in Compulsive Beauty, the ‘dissolution’ between ‘waking and dreaming, self and other’ which surrealism sought to achieve now ‘seems complete—but with its liberatory effects reversed’ in that serving the logic of ‘capitalism’ (2000, p. 210). (Along the same lines Ballard contends in ‘The Coming of the Unconscious’ that the ‘pervasiveness of surrealism is proof enough of its success. The landscapes of the soul, the juxtaposition of the bizarre and familiar, and all the techniques of violent impact have become part of the stock-in-trade of publicity and the cinema’ [1984a, p. 102]). In 253 this surreal fusion of antipathetic signs displayed by the media landscape is evident, for example, in footnote 143. Here Ryman describes a sort of Pop Art picture combining the portrait of Margaret Thatcher, the very epitome of conservatism, with that of Mick Jagger, the symbol of transgression. The two figures are seen as having the same facial features (‘The eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe’), the same ‘make-up and general air of warm androgyny’, even the same status of ‘sex symbols’ (p. 199). The conflation is completed by the closing hilarious pun which, hinting at the Iron Lady’s muscular politics, credits Jagger and herself with ‘a similar social and political message. “Calling out around the world are you ready for a brand new beat?”’ (1998, p. 199; emphasis added). Yet, this capitalist phantasmagoria of texts is ‘nowhere so consistent or so complete’ (Foster, 2000, p. 211) and an outside is still conceivable. Such a place is represented in the final section of the novel, ‘The End of the Line’, which is crucial in two ways. Firstly, in that the crash, triggering a temporal unfolding of the otherwise synchronic piling up of the characters, generates the only narrative portion of the novel. Secondly, and more importantly, because the body–space relationship is transformed into something opaque, ungoverned and unpredictable where repressed physicality is finally liberated. Here the architectural plan of people and/as places is unsettled. Bodies, finally unanchored, are set in motion, starting to vibrate, fluctuate, shoot forward, be swallowed or transfixed. Simultaneously, the train loses its quality of abstract textual space and pigeonhole design, where the characters sit ‘inside their fates like eggs in cartons’ (Ryman, 1998, p. 339), to undergo a series of transformations into forms of physical and biological matter. This, previously removed, returns now overpoweringly, ‘reconnecting, the derealized and disembodied’ subjects ‘with the force and power of the material world’ (Scarry, 1985, p. 128). The car, for example, ‘erupts like a volcano. The two men are lifted up as if on lava, and Anya surfs the buckling floor’

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(Ryman, 1998, p. 347) as though it were a wave; elsewhere the vehicle ‘blossom[s] like a flower in time-lapse photography. Its petals unfurl, sucking in the roof’ (p. 349). The train can even turn into a sentient being, showing a degree of intimacy with some characters: ‘Tom was feeling ill anyway, so he sits down. The car squats with him, to half its normal height, as if wanting to chat’ (p. 348). Similarly, ‘Milton Richards is enfolded in the steel arms of Jesus. They wrap him up, they cut him like knives’, while ‘Milton welcomes the pain, and the night, and the release’ (p. 346). Like the flesh spaceship ‘Bulge’ in The Child Garden (Ryman, 2005, p. 208), the crashing train is a snug and enveloping place, a womb-like bio-technological space that is protective (even in its violence). In this respect, it has much in common with some architectural projects devised by Archigram from the 1960s to the early 1970s (when the Canadian Ryman arrived in England). For this group of architects, the city was a pure interweaving of energy fluxes where all sense of locality was lost. Nevertheless, the idea of place was reintroduced in a regressive guise, as in the miniaturized capsule homes (Herron and Chalk’s 1965 Gasket Homes), the transportable artificial ‘uterus’ (Webb’s Cushicle mobile environment or his wearable house Suitaloon), and the hull in which to live (Greene’s Living Pod). Finally, one should notice that, as in Concrete Island, in 253 the retrieval of physicality is fostered by a sudden disfunctionality in the plan, namely, a disruption along the web/underground line. This disconnection releases images of a more material and natural world: Tom, we are told, ‘is permanently distracted, his access random. He sends out his thoughts like messages on the Internet, only to fi nd they get gummed up in his lack of band-width’ (Ryman, 1998, p. 348). While he walks down the tunnel after the crash, ‘the contents of the portfolio settle around him: forests in France, or an English cottage seen at rabbit-level amid lettuces. The pictures blow along the tunnel’: ‘a view of a hill on which a holy fool once sat’, visions of nature soaring through the air like ‘dancing birds’ or rope-walkers in ‘a circus’ (p. 348). Of course, these images are in stark contrast to how the underground is depicted before this fi nal section: a place of urban regimentation somehow reminiscent of the idea of urban imprisonment which lies at the heart of Ballard’s short story ‘The Concentration City’. This accounts for the fact that the last two characters in 253 are a ‘market researcher for London Underground’ who ‘has listed people on carriages by age, gender and racial background’, and an imaginary old Anne Frank who thinks ‘she is still on the train to Auschwitz’ (pp. 339–40). Yet, her surreal dance and the aforementioned visions of fl ight are all symptomatic of the fact that the liberation of the body does fi nally occur. The physical joyfulness many of these characters display on the verge of death—almost a gesture of defiance—is the same which characterizes the last instants of Proctor’s life in Concrete Island when the old acrobat performs ecstatically on the ‘trapeze’ (Ballard, 1994a, p. 169), the cradle of the repair vehicle which will kill him.

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Millennium People: The Fluid Metropolis and the Virus No-Stop City, the 1960s project created by Archizoom—a team of architects in many ways kindred to contemporary English Archigram—propounded the idea of the urban system as a self-regenerating organism, the expression of an ‘atomized economy, turbulent and ungovernable’ which ‘is realized’ ‘inside the slots, the interstices, the crawlways of a porous environmental reality’ (Branzi, 2004, p. 443). For Branzi, a co-founder of the group, the modern metropolis was a ‘large biotic pool’ (p. 443), witnessing, on the one hand, the death of the building as the public language of the exterior and, on the other hand, the compensatory constant renewal of interiors and materials. Undoubtedly, No-Stop City’s prophesy has largely materialized: today the language of design has in the main taken over from that of exteriors. The modern metropolis (such as Tokyo or Osaka) is essentially an introvert space where architecture has mostly dissolved into office and residential woods, places colonized by an extremely fluid plankton of objects, technologies and componentry. This conception of space as a liquid continuum is something which, in Millennium People, Ballard seems to grasp, conceiving it as the latest form of architectural organization. In the novel this fluidity of the plan can have economic connotations, as when the City of London is represented as ‘a stream of coded voltages sluicing through concealed conduits under the foreign exchange floors’ (Ballard, 2004, p. 180). But it can also take an ideological turn by showing the cityscape as perfectly permeable to a ruling social system which flows back into any empty interstice: ‘the infantilizing consumer society fi lled any gaps’ (like the revolutionary enclave of Chelsea Marina) ‘in the status quo as quickly as Kay had driven her Polo into the collapsing barricade’ (p. 234). What is even closer to No-Stop City is the emphasis placed on interior design, which becomes for Ballard the very mirror of modern conscience and society. In the interview with Revell, he states: I’m making a whole sort of Christopher Columbus–like discoveries about the nature of floors, windows, carpets, and the like. Because often, behind the most trivial things, lie enormous mysteries [ . . . ] the sort of architectural spaces we inhabit are enormously important—they are powerful. If every member of the human race were to vanish, our successors from another planet could reconstitute the psychology of the people of this planet from its architecture. The architecture of modern apartments, let’s say, is radically different from that of a baroque palace. (1984c, p. 44) It is no accident that Ballard’s millennium London is represented as a permanently refurnished space, a kind of extremely fluid and constantly renewed interior. Consider Markham’s fl ight across the city after the incendiary

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bomb at the NFT, whose ‘fi res lit the night air and seemed to burn on the dark waters of the Thames’ (Ballard, 2004, p. 123): he is driven past ‘shop windows fi lled with kitchen units and bedroom suites, office furniture and bathroom fittings, tableaux of a second city ready to replace the London that burned behind us’ (p. 128). The urban plan seems to have this capacity for the instant repossession of what is left vacant and not integrated. It is symptomatic of this that such a logic involves not only places but people, too: the learned revolutionaries of Chelsea Marina end up being reabsorbed by the very society against which they fight. If Lefebvre imagines an artistic rebellion for the intellectuals, his avant-garde rhetoric being of a romantic kind and implying the idea of social regeneration, Ballard differs from this position altogether. Firstly, in that he shows, according to a Dadaist strategy (the Chelsea Marina rebels are referred to as ‘Dada come to town’ [p. 205]) and with the deriving parodistic effects, the same conflation of complacency and transgression discernable in Ryman: ‘far from being on the fringe’, these likable revolutionaries soon become institutionalized, ‘part of the country’s civic traditions, along with the Lord Mayor’s parade, Ascot week and Henley Regatta’ (p. 38). Secondly, in Ballard’s view, art falls short of revolutionizing society because it has itself been ingested by the cultural/leisure industry (‘across the river were two more fakes, the replica of Shakespeare’s Globe, and the old power station made over into a middle-class disco, Tate Modern’ [p. 180]). At the turn of the millennium, London has become a ludic and tourist city, a place of entertainment, as epitomized by the London Eye, the Millennium Dome and other examples of iconic architectures. With the consolidation of the cultural and leisure industry, we have come very close to Andy Warhol’s prediction that all museums would one day become shopping centres and all shopping centres museums. Symptomatically, Ballard’s last London novels, Millennium People and Kingdom Come, focus precisely on these two types of architectural spaces, investigating them as instruments to render the middle class docile and create consensus (it is no accident, and perhaps a form of retribution, that Ballard wants both the Southbank in Millennium People and the Metro-Centre in Kingdom Come to end up on fi re). So, one may wonder, what is left to counteract this homogenizing fluidity of the system? To answer this question, another model, this time drawn from the architecture of informatics, is particularly useful: the virus. At the turn of the millennium, this has become, in the face of an increasingly controlled space of information, a forceful image energizing theoretical discourse on the Internet and replacing, as a form of anarchy, the 1990s dream of decentralization and openness of the web detected in 253. The interesting thing about the virus is that it has no given form but attacks its guest and forces it to reorganize itself; a readjustment which constitutes the termination (and fi nal failure) of the attack. To a large extent, the role played by the psychopath Dr. Gould in Millennium People can be read in these terms. Ballard’s disquieting terrorist is the only character who

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can still create a plot (an unsettling movement) in the otherwise pervasive immobility of the capitalist system as well as the only one capable of freely traversing its scene rather than being entrapped in its net. Gould is also the last subject still capable of producing a philosophic, comprehensive vision of a society which has millions of images but none of them able to represent it globally: ‘One’s entering into a paradoxical realm’, states Ballard interviewed by Revell, ‘where the psychopath is the only person who can imagine—who is capable of imagining—sanity, of conceiving what sanity is’ (1984c, p. 44). In the novel Gould tries (but, in the virus logic, eventually fails) to access ‘a parallel world’ (Ballard, 2004, p. 291) of anarchy and meaninglessness, a fourth dimension unaffected by the socio-cognitive structure which fi nds its avatar in architecture and design. Therefore, he acts as a virus attacking our system of meanings in the attempt to shatter the three-dimensional walls of our perception and promote a new form of awareness. This other universe of conscience which he tries to attain is a more profound spatio-temporal dimension, ‘a violent rift through time and space rupt[uring] the logic that held the world together’ (p. 182). If ‘we can’t see the road for all its signposts’, he claims, we should ‘clear them away, so we can gaze at the mystery of an empty road’ (pp. 249–50) and enjoy a ‘zone of silence like an urban nature reserve’ (p. 5). This new scenario is seen by the psychopath Gould as achievable through the ‘horror’ of the terrorist act which ‘challenge[s] the soft complacencies of day-to-day life, like a stranger stepping out of a crowd and punching one’s face. Sitting on the ground with a bloodied mouth, one realized that the world was more dangerous but, conceivably, more meaningful’ (p. 182). Physical trauma, therefore, is regarded here, once more, as the only means left to rouse an anaesthetized body, ‘a lazy physique softened by years of boarding lounges and hotel atriums’ (p. 5). Summing up, the novels analysed so far do suggest that some kind of transgression and authenticity is still viable, however doomed to invisibility or, eventually, to failure. This rupture does not appear in the form of the artist’s itinerant and diff use regeneration of the capitalist space but in terms of a difficult, sometimes tragic, negotiation with its ensnaring frames. To borrow a defi nition by Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel in The Singular Objects of Architecture, ‘complicity is the only guarantee that we’ll be able to push the boundaries’ (2002, p. 77). In Ballard and Ryman, this trespassing is conceived as a temporary or fortuitous rift in the network of cultural codes, a yielding or crack in the solidity of the system. In the ‘elaborately signalled landscape’ described in Ballard’s introduction to Concrete Island, which places us all under the ‘sight of the surveillance cameras’ (1994a, p. 5), there exist pockets of opacity and partial inaccessibility; folds which destabilize perfect transparency by opening up chances of transgression and real experience. This is why their novels look close to Baudrillard’s recent admission—in opposition to his previous belief in complete

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hypervisibility—that in ‘the penumbra of culture’ there can be architectural spaces radically other, ‘thwart[ing] the dictatorship of the smoothly visible and install[ing] an alternative perception, a “secret image”’ (Hays, 2002, p. xii). These crevices in the urban text(ure) allow the rematerialization of space and the body, as well as the transformation of their relationship into something ungoverned and unpredictable. It is no accident that Baudrillard and Nouvel’s defi nition of opaque architectural objects includes the reference to an ‘almost bodily recalcitrance (Barthes’s punctum is mentioned as a model)’ (p. xii). In Ballard and Ryman, this corporeality is presented as visceral, traumatized or injured (a body in pain, in Elaine Scarry’s phrase [1985]), as if to intensify the sense of its materiality. Yet the countless allusions to pain, lethal injuries and sometimes brutality found in the three novels do call for a fi nal explanation. In Ballard violence is explored as an instrument of knowledge of the self (body and psyche) and reality, as a way for the subject to reimagine itself and the world by penetrating the ‘skin’ of both; a move which is somehow common to Ryman, too, and even more so to McCarthy, as we will see. Undoubtedly, as Jeanette Baxter contends, Ballard’s staging of atrocity is a provocative move, which aims at unsettling our eroded critical and moral distance in the society of the spectacle (2009, p. 9). Miracles of Life encourages also an autobiographical explanation: a reading of Ballard’s obsessive investigation of the traumatized (injured, dead) flesh of the world as the compulsive act whereby he tries to control his war trauma. Ballard uses personal and historical pathologies as powerful instruments to confront and analyse modern society’s obsessions: as he writes in his autobiography, ‘In many ways my entire fiction is the dissection of a deep pathology that I had witnessed in Shanghai and later in the post-war world, from the threat of nuclear war to the assassination of President Kennedy, from the death of my wife to the violence that underpinned the entertainment culture of the last decades of the century’ (2008b, p. 145). Violence is governed by a highly cognitive intent in the three novels I have analysed. They suggest that, given the marked textualization, codification or numbness of the modern subject’s body, the only chance to reconnect it to the concrete substance of the world is by means of physical trauma. But this suffering has, ultimately, a visionary import. The violation of the body is meant to shatter our categories of perception and knowledge, and, in so doing, open a rift where all seeming dichotomies may be disarrayed and undone: space and time, cause and effect, matter and energy, life and death. All these oppositions fi nally conflate, pointing to a sort of noumenal reality behind cultural appearances and regimentations. In this mysterious dimension where space and time are overturned, anything can happen: we may experience a ‘gravity’ which turns ‘traitor’ (Ballard, 2004, p. 182), disrupting our sense of spatiality; or, in defiance of temporal distances, we may run into ‘William Blake’ walking unnoticed on ‘the platform of Lambeth North tube station’ (Ryman, 1998, p. 185). Lastly, one may say that,

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given the overturning of all categories, it is perhaps suitable that the tragedy from which this new dimension springs should also include images of joyful freedom. Symptomatically, in Ryman’s novel Anne Frank’s portrait ends in a blissful key, showing there can be something jubilant at the core of these visions of bodies in pain: A tall black woman stands up, joins her, demands, ‘Everybody!’ The young man approaches and bows. In the aisle he and Anne begin a sedate waltz. A Chinese woman shrugs, takes out one of her party favours and blows it, unrolling it with wheeze. Out comes a puppet of John Lennon that starts to pump its feet. Someone passes around the whisky. By Lambeth North, the car is having a party. (p. 340) Yet the question at the core of 253 remains and is one Foster formulates in The Return of the Real: ‘Is our media world one of generous interaction as benign as an ATM withdrawal or an Internet enquiry, or one of invasive discipline, each of us a “dividual” electronically tracked, genetically traced?’ (1999, p. 221). As Phil Baker writes in ‘Secret City: Psychogeography and the End of London’: It is harder to be lost now than it was when Walter Benjamin wrote: ‘to lose one’s way in a city, as one loses one’s way in a forest, requires practice’. Mobile phones offer ‘FINDme’, which will recognize your location anywhere in the country and provide information on services, leisure and tourism. And this is only option one: option two is McDonald’s Locater Line: ‘To fi nd the location of your nearest McDonalds, key 1501’. (2003, p. 330) But there is also another and fi nal question posed by Foster which Ryman’s novel addresses: ‘Is our media world one of a cyberspace that renders bodies immaterial, or one in which bodies [ . . . ] are marked, often violently, according to racial, sexual, and social differences? Clearly it is both at once’, Foster claims, and he defi nes this as a ‘new intensity of dis/connection’ (1999, p. 221). *

*

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PART II: STAGES AND INTERSECTIONS— TOM MCCARTHY AND ZADIE SMITH

Remainder: The Dissociated Subject and the City’s No-Space In the 1960s Banham sensed that the expendability of a commodified society was about to be combined with an even more anti-mnemonic element:

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the unrepresentability of the electronic world. The ‘computerised city might look like anything or nothing’, he wrote. ‘Most of us want it to look like something, we don’t want form follow function into oblivion’ (cited in Foster, 2002, p. 15). Over the last decade or so, with the coming true of his fear, or at least with the widely shared feeling that our culture is terminally ill with amnesia, as Huyssen contends (see 1995, p. 15), memory loss has become a crowded literary and cinematic terrain—whether this leads to worried, wistful proclivities or, when associated with traumatic events, to equally anxious explorations of the unpredictable consequences of amnesia. As Joyce Carol Oates suggests, ‘The attraction of waking not to the usual flood of memories and associations like dirty dishwasher but to a tabula rasa of infi nite possibility is obvious, especially in a debased political/cultural era: amnesia is “a floating metaphor” as Jonathan Lethem says in his introduction to The Vintage Book of Amnesia, “very much in the air”’ (2007, p. 47). McCarthy’s Remainder is obviously responsive to this new cultural climate. This highly praised work, defined by Zadie Smith (2009) as the novel of the future, is the story of an amnesiac thirty-year-old narrator. The nameless protagonist is said to have been a market research analyst in his pre-trauma life, but little is made of his employment or, for that matter, of his family and background, though by degrees he recovers some of his memory. We learn that the mysterious accident that nearly killed him—which involved something falling from the sky—has resulted in a phenomenal fi nancial compensation of eight and a half million pounds. But about the accident the narrator can say next to nothing, and what fleeting memories he retrieves he has come to doubt: ‘Who’s to say my traumatized mind didn’t just make them up, or pull them out from somewhere else, some other slot, and stick them there to plug the gap—the crater—that the accident had blown?’ (McCarthy, 2007, p. 5). Significantly, Oates notices that ‘Remainder is not a psychologically intimate novel about a person, but an allegory of a contemporary Everyman whose personal background, and his personality itself, is irrelevant to his story’ (2007, p. 49). In this connection, what Tew suggests about Carl, the protagonist of Alex Garland’s contemporary novel The Coma (2004), is also true of McCarthy’s hero: ‘his literal trauma renders him without tangible selfhood, that is without true consciousness’ (2007, p. 193). As a consequence of his arduous recovery of mobility through physiotherapy, McCarthy’s hero learns to appreciate and visualize in his mind the movements of bones and muscles involved in every single action of his, so that even the most simple act loses all authenticity and fluidity for him to become a conscious performance. This new awareness impacts on his consciousness of the world outside, sharpening his sense of other people’s untruth and the theatricality of their identity: as he wanders through the streets of London, he cannot but wonder which of the people he observes is the least formatted, the least unreal. Indeed, the only superiority he can lay

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claim to lies in his being consciously inauthentic while others are unconsciously so. The price of this knowledge is an existential alienation from the observed scene, a feeling of exclusion which, in the following view of the city, combines with the compensatory aggressive desire to repossess it through money: Now it was dusk. The city had that closing-ranks look, when it gathers itself up into itself but shuts you out. It was glowing, but it wasn’t heating me. As I sat there it occurred to me that I could go and stand on almost any street, any row, any sector, and buy it—buy the shops, the cafés, the cinemas, whatever. I could possess them, but I’d still be exterior to them, outside, closed out. The feeling of exclusion coloured the whole city as I watched it darken and glow, closing ranks. The landscape I was looking at seemed lost, dead, a dead landscape. (McCarthy, 2007, p. 48) Dissociated from life, he turns into a pure ‘voyeur’ (p. 51) and, as such, he is led by McCarthy to explore (or rather to ironically undo) the traditional topoi of urban fl ânerie. Significantly, like the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’, at some point McCarthy’s convalescent protagonist ends up in a cafeteria: not the suitably nondescript one of Poe’s short story but ‘one of those Seattle-theme coffee shops’ (p. 49) which represent late-capitalist anonymity. Sitting at a table, he, too, observes the movement of people outside. His attention is drawn by ‘a group of homeless people’: ‘After a while I started thinking that these people, fi nally, were genuine. That they weren’t interlopers. That they really did possess the street, themselves, the moment they were in’ (p. 56). The epiphany is certainly most welcome and reassuring, the confi rmation of a long-established literary truism. Over the last two centuries or so, outsiders and disreputable vagrants have inhabited English literature as pure souls endowed with mythopoetic qualities: the blind beggar in Wordsworth’s The Prelude, published posthumously in 1850 (see 2008, p. 483); the crone singing near Regent’s Park Tube Station in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (see 1976, pp. 88–90); the outcasts found in Moorcock and Sinclair in the 1980s and 1990s. But the myth of the authenticity of these figures is evoked by McCarthy only to be better exploded, and soon the narrator admits: The truth is, I’ve been making all this up—the stuff about the homeless person. He existed all right, sitting camouflaged against the shop fronts and the dustbins—but I didn’t go across to him. I watched him and his friends, their circuits down to his spot and back up to theirs again, their sense of purpose, their air of carrying important messages to one another. [ . . . ] They had a point to prove: that they were one with the street; that they and only they spoke its true language; that they really owned the space around them. Crap: total crap. They didn’t even come from London. Luton, Glasgow, anywhere, but somewhere else,

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far away, irrelevant. And their swaggering, their arrogance: a cover. Usurpers. Frauds. (p. 56) The novel is at the furthest possible remove also from other prevailing motifs of urban literature. For instance, trajectories and connectedness between people, places and events are still at the core of McCarthy’s vision of London just as they were in Moorcock’s, but they are no longer sustained by organicist assumptions, and the subject’s shamanic powers to relate to the authentic being of the city are dismissed and blatantly derided. This is especially true when, engaging in the impossible pursuit of his ideal building in the illimitable capital, the protagonist wrestles unsuccessfully with various techniques of psychogeography and divination: from I-Ching to mock forms of dérive, like moving surreptitiously and diagonally, following numerical or alphabetic systems. But he soon disposes of such practices and of all sense of the city as cosmos: ‘So much for the Wisdom of the Orient’ (p. 95), he concludes in a huff. And his dismissal is applied not just to the urban scene but also to the modern concept of global community: urged by his girlfriend to invest in development in Africa (‘Markets are all global; why shouldn’t our conscience be?’, she claims [p. 33]), he fi nds himself utterly numb to cultural and social difference; in a cold analysis, he reads her humanitarian ardour as the product of a mystification, an inauthentic feeling induced by multinationals to conceal their exploitation. His disconnection from reality (the death of affect anticipated by Ballard) is the symptom of a world where, as Foster contends, ‘social multiculturalism coexists with economic multinationalism’, and ethnic ‘difference’ loses significance for the subject to become ‘an object of consumption too, as mega-corporations like Coca-Cola (We are the World) and Benetton (United Colors) know well’ (1999, p. 212). The protagonist’s loss of communal feeling is further reinforced by the fact that the trauma he suffers is a non-event in itself, a ‘gap’ or ‘crater’ (p. 5) which shares none of the historical and identitarian relevance of the World War II shock suffered by the three heroes of Mother London. Moorcock propounds a fantastic organicism of the city (the liquid interrelatedness of people, places and events), relying on the capacity of the three protagonists’ minds to hold together London’s identity and post-war experience. By connecting Londoners through the nexuses of individuals endowed with supernatural abilities to hear other people’s thoughts, he creates one of those ‘imaginary communities’ used by authors associated with magical realism like Rushdie (see Phillips, 2006, p. 154). In Remainder the impulse to trace trajectories and establish connections still troubles consciousness, but the urban scenario has altered altogether along with the ontological postulates on which the individual is founded. Drained of its overabundant, liquid substance, the city has turned into ‘a dead landscape’ (McCarthy, 2007, p. 48), whose abstract networks are similar to the devitalized nerves and arteries of the protagonist’s body lying in a hospital bed at the beginning of the novel:

154 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature As I lay abject, supine, tractioned and trussed up, all sorts of tubes and wires pumping one thing into my body and sucking another out, electronic metronomes and bellows making this speed up and that slow down, their beeping and rasping playing me, running through my useless flesh and organs like sea water through a sponge—during the months I spent in hospital, this word planted itself in me and grew. Settlement. (p. 6) The city, the body, conscience and memory become ‘no-space[s]’ (p. 6) where vitality (the authenticity the protagonist is in search of) will have to be artificially injected: its flow mechanically regulated, intensified or slackened; meaningfulness planted in or unplugged at will, made to grow or let to lapse. In contrast to Sinclair’s synchronization with a complex (hardly bearable) totality, McCarthy’s subject can only aspire more modestly to random grasps on chunks of dry connectivity, sections of the abstract networks of global fi nance, airports and the underground, the flows of goods and information. How to wrestle a map and orientation from a world where reality shades into virtuality? Symptomatically, the town has turned into a formless non-being where the subject is adrift in search of any accidental link that may fulfil a generic ‘promise of connection’ (p. 16). The impossibility to attain it turns space (in this utterly coextensive with the body) into an ‘abject failure’ (p. 126): Later, as I sat inside the tube, I felt the need, like I’d done every time I’d taken the tube to Angel, to picture the terrain the hurtling car was covering. Not the tunnels and the platforms, but the space, the overground space, London. [ . . . ] More than that: my failure to get a grip on the space we were traversing had made me nauseous. I’d even thrown up in the ambulance. Riding to Heathrow on the tube, I experienced echoes of the same uneasiness, the same nausea. I kept them at bay by thinking that the rails were linked to wires that linked to boxes and to other wires above the ground that ran along the streets, connecting us to them and my flat to the airport and the phone box to Daubenay’s office. I concentrated on these thoughts all the way to Heathrow. (pp. 15–16)

Staged Presence Half way through the story, the amnesiac is jolted out of his numbness by a sudden experience of déjà vu. Fittingly, the vision is triggered by the most banal of images, a meandering crack in a plaster bathroom wall, bringing with it a flood of memory related to a building whose real existence, though, is never ascertained. This most significant recollection is so powerful that the amnesiac enters trancelike states and, like a deranged fi lmmaker, becomes obsessed with the reconstruction of the remembered setting along with the re-enaction of banal gestures and actions he recollects as having

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taken place there. As Oates suggests, ‘his Everyman condition, in a politically debased, media-hypnotized culture—has made it impossible for him to experience life at fi rst hand. He has become a performance artist with no interest in art or in preserving his laborious reconstructions on fi lm’ (2007, p. 50). The protagonist’s complex rituals of re-enactment in search for authenticity testify to a fleshy and sensuous demand for embodiment against the pull of the virtual: a drive countermanding his opposite nihilistic and abstract tendencies. Indeed, the novel might be said to present a new dialectic between the competing notions of experience economy and information economy. The former is conditioned and shaped by a series of post-millennial global traumas which, as Tew contends, ‘have together brutally asserted the material origins of experience, of ideas and conceptions, and the limits of a linguistic determination of historicity’ (2007, p. 202). The latter is enhanced by recent technological advances; in particular, it is related to the electronic manipulation of data, an element which informs the protagonist’s apprehension of reality, as revealed by the compulsive microadjustments he makes to the stages of his re-enactments. In this respect, he perfectly represents what Foster defines in Design and Crime as the latest evolution of the concept of the product (and the subject, by implication): the political economy of the product, characteristic of the fi rst Industrial Revolution, has been superseded, he claims, fi rst by the political economy of the sign (the paradigm of the simulacrum theorized by Baudrillard) and then by the political economy of design, based on the manipulation of the product as datum (see 2003, p. 22). In ‘The Geometry of the Pressant’, an homage to Alain Robbe-Grillet, McCarthy offers clues to unravel the complex relationship between experience economy and information economy. On the one hand, McCarthy presents the modern subject as a ‘blind spot’, the perfect counterpart of the nauseously void urban landscape dominated by informational networks. On the other, he praises the materialist pull of the French novelist’s oeuvre, which he deems ‘ultrarealist, shot through at every level with the sheer quiddity of the environments to which [it] attends so faithfully’ (2008, p. 392). Their strongly physical presence is ‘stultifying, obsessive, and persistent’, frozen in an eternal now: ‘what Joyce in Finnegans Wake, calls “the pressant”’ (p. 393). So strong is this focus on chosen spots that they appear to condense all sense of fleshy reality. Indeed, the subjects themselves seem to tie their entire (if quasi-inconsistent) existence inextricably to these bounded, hypnotic and sensuously overabundant locations: ‘What do they do when they are elsewhere?’, wonders McCarthy. ‘One is tempted to answer: nothing! Elsewhere they don’t exist’ (p. 393). Similarly, his protagonist exists only as the consciousness of a certain urban or architectural setting, as much as other characters make sense to him only when related to specific places. As Oates reminds us, McCarthy (born in 1969) has a background in the arts of the last decade: he ‘has been associated with conceptual and

156 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature performance art in London, having established the parody avant-garde International Necronautical Society as a sort of twenty-fi rst century Collège de Pataphysique’ (2007, p. 48). Significantly, his shrinking of the city to a limited number of theatrical sets where life unfolds only as defi nite site performances is a typically contemporary move, as testified by similar tendencies in the arts of the fi rst decade of the millennium. Specific choreography is usually a component of these pieces by artists such as Abramović and Sehgal, although it might not be visible: the performers of these ‘situations’ enacted in museums or other urban settings follow physical instructions, while the everyday movement of people and speech is allowed to merge with the performance, ‘masking artifice with quotidian contingency’ (Jones, 2010, p. 217). In the phantasmagorical reality they create, hide ‘both the fetish of presence’ and ‘the utopia of connection’ (p. 219)—the very same drives found in McCarthy’s stories. His performances are reminiscent of contemporary live art also in the way they differ from similar experiences of the avant-garde in the 1970s: today ‘the model of the nomadic artist dropping in to do a site-specific installation has easily slipped into that of the nomadic artist coming to program a carefully staged series of performatives’ (p. 219). Investigating recent experiments in body art and constructed situations, C. A. Jones grasps the paradox of embodiment and distancing at the heart of these proliferating public performances: This secularized, theatrical turn has two sides. If we continue to invoke Brechtian alienation effects on one, our willing entry into Huizingan play stands on the other. That is to say, we demand the reflexive awareness that earlier artists such as Acconci produced around and within their events. But we are also invited to displace the authoritative structure of artwork and artist in favour of our own embodied ‘experience’. (p. 216) McCarthy’s fleshy demand for embodiment entails coming to terms with boundaries and this is certainly reminiscent of Ballard and Ryman, and their chance transgressions or voluntary exiles on islands of being wedged within the system. Yet theirs is the negotiation with a textualized architectural system imposing the enmeshing frames of its myths and meanings or its pretence of order, whereas in McCarthy that system has turned into the no-space of oblivion, the impossibility of representation forecasted by Banham and due to the slipping out of the Symbolic into a meaningless chaos (in the classical sense found in Greek philosophers). ‘I’m a consciousness in a void’, thinks Carl in Garland’s The Coma (2004, sec. 3, chap. 7, n. p.), and McCarthy’s protagonist may well say the same of himself. It is no accident that he is obsessed with the actual meaning of certain words, which just happen to implant into his consciousness. The origin of these terms is impossible for him to locate: do they belong to his previous existence, his forgotten (perhaps more authentic) identity? The genuineness of

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these words as much as that of the visual and auditory memories creeping into his consciousness is simply impossible to establish: they come from that ‘no-space of complete oblivion’ which ‘stretched and contracted itself into gritty shapes and scenes’ (McCarthy, 2007, p. 6), that ‘yawning gulf or gap’, as John Burnet defi nes Greek chaos, ‘where nothing is as yet’ (1920, p. 7). Yet, as soon as they enter the spotlight, the magic circle of representation and awareness, these chunks of language or reality turn into mysterious, cumbersome presences (the ‘pressant’). ‘Beyond what is seen can only be absence, nonbeing’, McCarthy writes apropos of Robbe-Grillet’s La maison de rendez-vous (2008, p. 394), yet what happens to step onto the stage of visibility suddenly becomes eligible for being and significance, however problematic these may be.

Stabbing the Olive The fact is that, for McCarthy, the persistent quiddity staged in the magic circle is never simply given: in the ‘intense congress with the real’ it promotes, ‘we are made to navigate a set of duplications, modifications, and distortions that are at once almost impossibly complex and utterly accurate’ (McCarthy, 2008, p. 392). Significantly, the protagonist of Remainder is interested in the anomalies of physics and plays at expanding and seeing into matter and movement. Both are myopically scrutinized and obsessively reproduced to penetrate and get hold of their impossibly complex geometry: ‘slow time down, expand it, push its edges out and move around inside it’, suggests McCarthy in Remainder (2007, p. 223). There is a fin de siècle decadent taste in this nervous, pathological intensity of vision (symptomatically, McCarthy alludes to Huysmans in his review of two novels by JeanPhilippe Toussaint [2010, p. 27]). But this is no longer addressed to the overabundant, sensuous surface of matter impinging on the senses; rather it is directed at the inner structure of substances with its elusive geometry of trajectories: ‘we want angles, arcs and intervals; we want pattern. Structure is content, geometry is everything’ (p. 26). Remainder is shot through with the same hyper-real slow-motion probe into the optical unconscious which Benjamin describes seminally in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1968; originally published in 1936). To illustrate the withering of aura engendered by visual technologies, he uses the double analogy of the painter and the magician as opposed to the cameraman and the surgeon: whereas the former maintain a ‘natural distance’ from the model to paint or the body to heal, the latter ‘penetrate deeply into its web’ (1968, p. 233). But the protagonist’s call for a navigation of ‘modifications, and distortions’ (McCarthy, 2008, p. 392) is also a sign of the digital era: his probing into axes, flows and complex geometries, his tampering with time and space relations, chime with the researches into plasticity and mutation allowed by computers. These innovations have affected also the realm of architecture: Eisenman’s recent digital turn is worth mentioning in

158 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature this connection because of the architect’s interest in the ‘accurate picture of the complexity of moving forms’ (Garofalo, 1999, p. 59) allowed by recent innovations in visual technologies. But even more significant and in tune with McCarthy’s investigation of the architectural space is the emphasis Eisenman places on the transformation of vision into something more substantial and bodily: We must overcome our typical visual experience, replacing it by a tactile, emotional experience, which contains a strong realistic connotation based on bodily sensations, what Eisenman calls ‘destabilization’ or, better still, ‘body involvement’ in his architecture. [ . . . ] The essential process of this era consists in the dissolution of objects: they lose their materiality and are transformed into information that, having been processed, is translated into a new form of materiality, new objects. (p. 59) Of course, in Remainder this visual manipulation of space reinforces our sense of the flimsy, fluctuating identity of McCarthy’s protagonist, whose presence appears reduced to the disincarnated camera eye which intrudes into this matter; so, irredeemably we are left wondering whose glance, whose memory are we really dealing with? Yet a way to grasp this elusive identity is offered, after all, because this gritty, material reality (re-enacted, suspended and expanded in the attempt to get hold of its inner complexity) speaks of itself but also of the gaze engaged in its impossible apprehension. The obsessively scrutinized movements of matter return to us the movements of the observing conscience, its ‘course of thought’ (McCarthy, 2010, p. 27), and this is the place where the floating non-existent subject can fi nally locate itself. He or she can be physically present only in that conscience of a particular place, matter, event: ‘We exist and assume subjectivity to the extent that we occupy a spot on or traverse the grid’, states McCarthy (2010, p. 27). Hence the importance of architecture: commenting on the protagonist of Toussaint’s The Bathroom (2009), McCarthy notices that the character is not interested in painting, precisely because ‘pictures can’t be inhabited, unlike the neutral, unanimated surfaces and planes of corridors and door-frames’ (2010, p. 27). Of course, this pathological relationship with enclosed space aligns McCarthy with Ballard. Yet it entails no reshuffling of codes, no sensuous merging between the inner and the outer world; nor is authenticity fostered by the fortuitous disconnection from the system. This detachment has been superseded by McCarthy, by fencing in the stage where authenticity will be consciously, theatrically enacted again and again, in a disenchanted Brecht/ Artaud paradigm of alienation and ritual embodiment. Significantly, commenting on the recent ‘proliferation of public performance’ in art, Jones points out that ‘at any moment “ordinary life” may reassert its right either by an impact from without . . . or else from within

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[ . . . ]. To fend off such collapses, we invoke special temporal and spatial frames: [ . . . ] these frames allow ordinary life to be put “at a standstill”, but always in a willing and collective suspension of disbelief’ (2010, p. 214). In Remainder the geometry of this staged presence is constantly under threat of collapsing, menaced by a brute matter irreducible to geometric order: a material remainder clogging up the performance. The invisible chaos beyond the magic circle intrudes repeatedly, leaving a stain, a Barthesian blind spot, which mars and invalidates the painfully reconstructed smoothness of the mise-en-scene. Mutatis mutandis, in the theatre of the body, this disruptive remainder is also present, imagined as the ‘leftover fragment, a shard of detritus’, jamming the muscular and nervous systems: When my knee-cap had set after being shattered in the accident, one tiny splinter had stayed loose. The doctors hadn’t managed to fish it out, so it just floated around beside the ball, redundant, surplus to requirement; sometimes it got jammed between the ball and its socket and messed up the whole joint, locking it, inflaming nerves and muscles. (2007, pp. 9–10) On the urban stage, it is the technological hitch that disrupts the simulacral illusion of smooth circulation. In the underground station: I walked back towards the down escalator, but before I got there I noticed all these escalator steps that were being overhauled. You think of an escalator as an object, a looped, moving bracelet, but in fact it’s made of loads of individual, separate steps woven together into one smooth system. Articulated. These ones had been disarticulated, and were lying messily around a closed-off area of the upper concourse. They looked helpless like beached fish. I stared at them as I passed them. I was staring at them so intently that I stepped onto the wrong escalator, the up one, and was jolted into the concourse again. As my hand slipped over the handrail the black grease got onto my sleeve and stained it. I have, right to this day, a photographically clear memory of standing on the concourse looking at my stained sleeve, at the grease—this messy, irksome matter that had no respect for millions, didn’t know its place. My undoing: matter. (p. 17) But let us return to the magic circle that vouchsafes authentic experience. ‘The nouveau roman’s greatest legacy’, argues McCarthy, is ‘an understanding of what renders space meaningful. [ . . . ] In The Bathroom, as in The Voyeur, space is brought into its own, made present in the only true way possible: through acts of violence’ (2010, p. 27). Similarly, according to Oates: Remainder kicks into a higher voltage, Quentin Tarrantinoesque mode once the amnesiac loses interest in restaging his own memories and

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Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature decides to reenact scenes of violence (a drug-related assassination in a London street, a bank robbery), replicating his culture dependency upon violence as art and as entertainment. Here McCarthy is clearly indebted to that most luridly inventive of twentieth-century British novels, J. G. Ballard’s Crash (1973) [ . . . ]. McCarthy wisely makes no effort to evoke Ballard’s unique style, in which the clinical and the sensuous and sordid continually fuse. (2007, p. 50)

For the Markham of Millennium People, a man suddenly punching your face makes you realize the world can be a dangerous and, consequently, more meaningful place (see Ballard, 2004, p. 182). This awareness stems from an inherently masochistic process: the world’s impact on us makes both the world and ourselves retrieve the sense of presence and matter which a simulacral reality has obfuscated. Contrariwise, McCarthy’s almost disembodied protagonist turns into a sadistic machine, because by piercing the world to give it presence (by ‘Stabbing the Olive’, to borrow the title of McCarthy’s review of Toussaint), he can assume indirectly his own bodily existence, in that he is the one who penetrates and occupies that spot. So, at the end of the story, the protagonist commits a murder precisely to be able to penetrate deeply into the secret of a bodily matter from which, as a disincarnated camera eye, he has been estranged in the fi rst place: ‘I poked at his exposed flesh with my fi nger. It was a lot like Four’s flesh: it had the same sponge-like texture’ (2007, p. 277). Cinema possesses ‘a tactile quality’, writes Benjamin, that ‘hits the spectator like a bullet’ (1968, p. 238). Unquestionably, even the protagonist’s obsession with the body’s rarefaction, however contradictory it may seem with respect to his longing for the penetration of matter, is symptomatic of the selfsame disconnection with reality analysed so far. His ecstatic view of the dispersion of bodies in the explosion of an airplane clearly connotes him as a post-9/11 subject, tuned to a pathological public sense of trauma that exposes the victim as spectacle, ‘the meta-reality of major global events that have the power to displace and dislodge the previously prevalent notions of narcissistic victim-hood’ (Tew, 2007, p. 198). The character’s media-hypnotized imagination is our own: wired to spectacular traumatic events, simultaneously connected to psychotechnologically immediate events and physically remote from them. Doomed from the very beginning, his desperate quest for authenticity through endless re-enactments is reminiscent of Pat Barker’s description, in Double Vision, of his response to the World Trade Center catastrophe: ‘the television screen domesticated the roar and the tumult, the dust, the debris, the thud of bodies hitting the ground, reduced all this to silent images, played and replayed, and played again in a vain attempt to make the day’s events credible’ (cited in Tew, 2007, p. 203). Commenting on his reaction to the CNN broadcasts of the Gulf War and the explosion of smart bombs, Foster remembers feeling the ‘thrill of an imaginary dispersal of my own body, of my own subjecthood. Of course [ . . . ] my body did not explode.

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On the contrary, it was bolstered: in a classic fascistic trope, my body, my subjecthood, was affirmed in the destruction of other bodies’ (1999, p. 222). In its classical form, trauma is founded on an economy of belatedness as well as an immediacy coexisting with deferral. But increasingly, after the World Trade Center disaster, it seems to be differently inflected, manifesting a subject inclined to feel empathy with unknown victims: a mimetic compulsion where the sense of self both collapses and sustains itself in identification. It goes without saying that this empathy is the result of the same disconnectedness behind the re-enactments of McCarthy’s protagonist, the full-blown exhilaration he derives from anonymous yet emotionally intimate exchanges with strangers. In this respect McCarthy’s interpretation of violence seems to echo Ballard’s words in The Kindness of Women: Born out of an ecology of violence, acts of numbing brutality now ruled the imaginative spaces of their lives, leaching away all feeling and emotion. Perhaps, in their thoughtful communion with the crashed car, they were trying to come to terms with the televised disasters and assassinations that enfolded their minds, and doing what they could to restore a lost compassion. (Ballard, 2008a, p. 221)

Global Catastrophes and London’s Weather ‘In the 1990s, Iain Sinclair remarked that contemporary litterateurs divided London up between them like feral beasts—Carter in the south, Ballard in the western suburbs, Moorcock in west central, Ackroyd in Clerkenwell, himself in Hackney and the east (to which can be added, most recently, Smith in north-west London)’ (Gibson, 2003, p. 292). McCarthy’s post9/11 work seems to indicate that staking claims over territories has turned into an inconsequential activity: worldwide traumas have produced the impression of being in the midst of everything—and inescapably so. This calls for an understanding of London in global terms: as both a whole, huge system of its own and part of global dynamics. As McCarthy writes in the essay ‘Meteomedia; or, Why London’s Weather Is in the Middle of Everything’, an essay published in 2003, ‘all cities become London; London becomes all cities’ (p. 278). We ‘are all connected, part of one and the same system. [ . . . ] As Jankovic writes, “the meaning of locality changed from its status as an exclusive end of investigation to a specimen in a larger entity, a point on a grid”’ (p. 276). Eager to outdo the system, Sinclair’s (post-)Thatcherite agonistic stalker vied with powerful ideological and economic forces. McCarthy’s postmillennial one, deeply affected by unforeseen global traumas, is anxiously dependent on the short-term prediction, which makes the difference between life and death. In Remainder this anxiety to control events is enacted as the compulsive manipulation of the same incidents: their rewinding and replaying, meant to steer the course of events in the desired direction. But

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the theme is even more clearly pursued in the imaginative ‘Meteomedia; or, Why London’s Weather Is in the Middle of Everything’, where prediction— far from any sort of divination—takes the widely accepted form of the weather forecast: I live in a twelfth-floor central London flat. The flat has long, tall windows facing west and north. Talking to people on the phone, I stare across the city and the sky. The vista usually provides a backdrop to the conversation. Often, though, it’s the conversation’s subject: I tell friends what weather they will have in 20 minutes, warning those in Hackney that long, vertical walls of rain are gliding towards them over Islington and Dalston, or assuring those caught in a West End shower that the broad shafts of sunlight I can see sweeping northwards from Big Ben will hit them soon. [ . . . ] Weather and communication, weather and telecommunication: the tallest (and hence more weather-enveloped) building visible from my flat is the British Telecom Tower. [ . . . ] I like to fantasize that in its upper floors sit gods, or at least priests, who modulate all of the city’s sky flows, who set its pulse-rate, write its code and flip its switches. When London is studied centuries from now by alien Terrologists, this building and not St Paul’s will be identified as its religious heart, its spire. (2003, p. 273) The comparatively wide visual scope afforded to McCarthy from his tall flat allows him to connect two or more points in space (his friends on the phone in other parts of London within his view) and two or more points in time (the twenty-minute lapse between occurrences of the same event in different places). In other words, he delights in short-term prediction and short-distance connection; tellingly, both prophesies are ways of ‘warning’ and ‘assuring’, terms which bear emotional connotations related to danger. McCarthy observing London from his tall flat—along with his ‘fellows metametropolitans’ (p. 277)—is the very image of that failed transcendence which is at the core of his philosophical creed (the collapse of the idealist project in philosophy, art and literature). He is halfway between, on the one hand, the promise of transcendence, the bird’s-eye view of the hole grid of data transmitted down to us from the BT tower and the London Weather Centre (p. 275), and, on the other, the unseeing subjection to materiality (the unpredictable weather conditions) implied in ground-level existence. Atmosphere, too, has a dual nature: it carries data and meanings through telecommunications and yet it is meaningless, mute substance in itself. As such, it asserts unmistakeably the material origins of experience, which undermine any desire to transcend our condition of abjection through the utopia of connectedness predicated by information technology. We will never ascend from medium to media, unless we experience the disconnection, both exalting and degrading, provided by a traumatic spectacle. Suitably, the essay ends with an imaginary attack on the Telecom Tower:

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Since 2001, as the global climate heats up in more ways than one, London, caught at the confluence of systems moving over from the Unites States and from the Middle-East, fi nds itself even more in medias res. When storm clouds groan and rumble people scour the sky for airplanes flying too low. I track them from my windows, waiting for the day when one of them will hurtle like a meteor into the Telecom Tower, painting the sky a new blood-orange. If it happens it will be spectacular. Until then, we’ll continue talking about the weather. (p. 278)

Introducing White Teeth According to Andrew Gibson, ‘London will no longer be a predominantly white capital. Sinclair, Ackroyd, Ballard, Moorcock, even Keiller still imagine London as substantially a white city. [ . . . ] But, before very long, what these novelists call London will no longer be London at all’ (2003, p. 297). The current obsession with stories about the historic city is symptomatic of the fact that the capital ‘about which the stories are composed is rapidly being superseded by a multi-cultural one’ (pp. 292–93), and he foregrounds Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) as the epitome of this turning point. The book chronicles the life and histories of three families, the BowdenJones, the Iqbals and the Chalfens, across three generations, tracing their historical backgrounds in Jamaica, India and England, respectively. The fi rst chapters tell the story of the friendship and loyalty between the callow, insecure English Archie Jones and the vainglorious Samad Iqbal during the Second World War. They meet again later, in Britain, where Samad has emigrated. His twins, Magid and Millat, face the racism aroused by politician Enoch Powell’s 1968 speech on the dangers of immigration at the time when thousands of Asian British citizens expelled from East Africa migrated to Britain. Tormented by the negative, corrupting influence that Western culture may have on his offspring, Samad decides to send Magid to Bangladesh so that he may receive a pure Islamic education. Yet, contrary to Samad’s expectations, Millat’s British upbringing turns him into an Islamic fundamentalist; conversely, Magid becomes an atheist with a strong interest in the genetic engineering researches of scientist Marcus Chalfen, who works on the highly controversial FutureMouse© project. At the time of its publication, White Teeth was hailed by critics as a positive, almost rapturous description of multicultural Britain. ‘Whether this was a happy incident or not’, writes Sebastian Groes, ‘Smith and her novel went on to become the New Labourite dream model, a representation of how the multicultural society could triumph, at least in the imagination’ (2011, p. 222). But criticism has gone a long way since the initial acclaim for the novel as an enthusiastic endorsement of the liberal discourse of multiculturalism. In the aftermath of the World Trade buildings attack, some readings of White Teeth have reproached it for its naïve optimism and light-hearted treatment of fundamentalism. More intelligently, others have

164 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature underscored that, however benevolent and still untouched by the trauma and insecurity ensuing from September 11, Smith’s treatment of the postcolonial city is subtly ambivalent and undermines the assumption that liberal consensus underpins and guarantees the subject’s existence. In ‘Revisiting Postcolonial London’, John Macleod suggests that ‘Smith’s attention to the less soluble problems of post-colonial London [have] been overlooked— problems of identity crises and divided consciousness have not disappeared in the cheerful polyphony of the city. At the heart of Smith’s novel we fi nd a deeply perplexing, disorientating dynamic which is offered as the quintessence of contemporary London life’ (2005, p. 40). Yet, if the critical debate over the central theme of postcolonialism, of which Tew’s Zadie Smith (2010) offers a detailed account, has been intense, the question of how it is articulated through the city spaces has not received special attention as yet. Therefore, my aim here will be precisely to unravel the implications underlying Smith’s redefi nition of urban spaces, looking at the relevance to her spatial politics of certain theoretical and ideological contexts.

Rereading as Squatting (or, the Quest for Meaning) My first contention is that Smith’s sense of space can partly be grasped by looking at her views on literature and literary theory expressed in ‘Rereading Barthes and Nabokov’, a piece appeared in the collection Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays. Here Smith argues that ‘the novels we know best have an architecture. Not only a door going in and another leading out, but rooms, hallways, stairs, little gardens front and back, trapdoors, hidden passageways, et cetera’ (2009, p. 41). The statement may sound hardly original in itself, were it not—so I argue here—for the literally architectonic rather than solely structural significance Smith attaches to the metaphor. Literature, she suggests, is a space to be entered and inhabited through rereading: drawing from Barthes’s theory of ‘the death of the author’ (see Barthes, 1977)—which promotes the reader to a proper creator of the text at the expense of the author’s power to predetermine and circumscribe its meanings—Smith couches the readers’ frequent attendance of a favourite novel in terms of dwelling. Or, even more to the point, she figures it as the occupation of someone else’s place (the author’s framework of meanings) with the aim of redefining its layout: ‘rereaders [squat] in the houses of beloved novels, each with their own ideas of the floor plan’ (p. 41). Yet, Smith contends, there are authors who inhibit a Barthesian free appropriation and redefinition of their texts, posing them as unalterable spaces, which the reader may inhabit only subject to the writers’ rules. Nabokov is discussed as exemplary of this category and likened to Frank Lloyd Wright: I think of [Nabokov] as one of the last, great twentieth-century believers in the autonomy of the Author, as Frank Lloyd Wright was one of the last believers in the Architect. [ . . . ] they wove the restrictions and

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privileges of authorship into the very fabric of the things they built. For it’s true that each time I enter Pnin I feel its author controlling (via obsessive specificity) all my reactions, just as, in Wright’s Unity Temple, one enters through a small, low side door, forced to approach the magnificence of the interior by way of a series of awkward rightangled turns. There is extraordinary, almost overwhelming beauty in Nabokov—there is also an oppressive rigidity. You will live in his house his way. (pp. 50–51) This concept of (literary) spaces contrasts with Barthes’s equally appealing one of the text as, in his own words quoted in Smith, a ‘multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash’ (p. 43). The free-floating character of linguistic codes propounded by Barthes, which makes meanings unstable and undecidable, had a liberating quality for Smith, she recalls, when she was a university student in Cambridge, and we may infer that she felt Barthes’s project had a strong kinship with the condition of hybridity normally attached to the postmodern migrant subject. Significantly, in White Teeth, through the depiction of a playground in Willesden, North London, she gives human and spatial substance to Barthes’s textual theory, imagining a space where linguistic codes—children’s names and surnames reflecting their mixed origins—are freely reshuffled: ‘you can walk into a playground and fi nd Isaac Leung by the fish pond, Danny Rahman in the football cage, Quang O’Rourke bouncing a basketball, and Irie Jones humming a tune. Children with fi rst and last names on a direct collision course’ (2001, pp. 326–27). In her essay Smith suggests that for Barthes ‘the text was to be a free, wild thing, open to everyone, belonging to no one, refusing an ultimate meaning’ (2009, p. 56); ‘the scriptor’ (the reader as creator of the text), ‘merely “traces a field without origin—or which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which ceaselessly calls into question all origins”’ (p. 46). In the novel the school playground is the embodiment of Barthes’s conception of the text: the children are rereaders who reshuffle cultural codes and boundaries, by physically occupying and rewriting a space within which a multicultural democracy can be invented anew, released from the oppressive legacy of the past. But the liberating process which should ensue from the infusion of the qualities of linguistic codes into human beings is fraught with difficulties: ‘Names’ refuse to shed all traces of their origins and still ‘secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks’ (Smith, 2001, p. 326). Even more to the point, the free reshuffling/refurnishing of cultural spaces (in lieu of textual ones) generates uprootedness and homelessness, triggering the need to invent stable places to inhabit. As Rosemary Marangoly George contends, ‘the (re)writing of home reveals the ideological struggles that are staged every day in the construction of subjects and their understanding of home-countries. The search for the location in which the self is “at home” is one of the primary

166 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature objects of twentieth-century fiction in English’ (1996, p. 3). Symptomatically much of White Teeth is about the quest for secure meanings under the guise of elective homes (especially the Chalfens’) and homelands. If, for the proto-modernist Henry James, the house of fiction was a perceptive epistemological instrument, Smith’s postmodern one is a narrative home which responds, as she writes in ‘Rereading Barthes and Nabokov’, to the ‘old desire, to possess a novel entirely’ (2009, p. 42), to get hold of its stable, situated meanings by constructing semantic spaces to be visited and inhabited. And the moral of White Teeth may well be that no real place will assuage this thirst and that ours should be, as Smith suggests in her essay, neither a Nabokovian wholehearted acceptance nor a Barthesian ‘refusal of meaning, then, but a quest for it’ (p. 56).

(Meta)physical Spaces Critical reception has sometimes been suspicious of Smith’s engineered novel; with scepticism it has responded to the privilege that she accords to the complexities of structure over the construction and psychological introspection of rounded, life-like characters. Yet this strategy is entirely consistent with her belief, as she writes in the review of McCarthy’s Remainder, in the demise of ‘the old myths of [the] “depth”’ of subjectivity, one of the ‘credos upon which realism is built’ (2009, pp. 72–73). Is the ‘Balzac-Flaubert’ one ‘really the closest model we have to our condition?’, she wonders, noticing its endurance in contemporary fiction, ‘or simply the bedtime story that comforts us most?’ (p. 73). Significantly, what she values in Remainder—to the point of describing it as the novel of the future—is fi rst and foremost its complete and irrevocable dismissal of ‘the essential fullness and continuity of the self’, which, she suggests, was one of the ‘metaphysical tendencies’ of realism along with ‘the transcendent importance of form, the incantatory power of language to reveal truth’ (p. 73). Her rejection of essentialist views of identity combines with the centrality she accords to space, a dimension traditionally neglected by realism. In this connection, she fully underwrites McCarthy’s daring probe into spatial texture, patterns and arrangements: ‘[Remainder] forces us to recognize space as a nonneutral thing—unlike Realism, which often ignores the specificities of space. Realism’s obsession is convincing us that time has passed. It fills space with time’ (p. 95). And her argument is certainly reminiscent of Soja’s claim in Postmodern Geographies that a spatial perspective should replace the privileged position time and history have occupied in Western practical and theoretical consciousness (see 1989, p. 1). But even more in accord with Soja’s theories is her emphasis on spatial relations as a social and cultural product: And it’s precisely within Remainder’s newly revealed spaces that the opportunity for multiple allegories arises: on literary modes (How artificial is Realism?), on existence (Are we capable of genuine being?), on political discourse (What’s left of the politics of identity?), and on

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the law (Where do we draw our borders? What, and whom, do we exclude, and why?). (Smith, 2009, p. 96) These remarks provide an excellent starting point for an understanding of Smith’s spatial politics. Despite the obvious differences in contents, style and especially cultural and historical contexts (Remainder is remarkably a post-9/11 novel), both McCarthy’s and Smith’s novels seek to reveal, each in its own way, this fundamental intuition of space as multiple, disseminated with devious ideologies and forms of inauthenticity. At the same time, they reflect upon a number of fallacious discourses on the coherence and continuity of the self which inhabits or moves through this space. It should be noted, though, that the fable of our authentic being they set out to unweave is not just or primarily related to realism. Rather, it is detected fi rst and foremost in contemporary discourses predicated on, or implicit in, information technology and logistics (McCarthy), science and multiculturalism (Smith), and the media (both). With different emphases, the two writers reveal such narratives as both alluring and fake, finding a philosophical metaphor for them in metaphysics (Smith) or transcendence (McCarthy). My investigation focuses in particular on three tendencies Smith detects in mainstream contemporary narrations of self, society and cultural identity: genetics engineering, aimed at the seamless transmission of identity; media and/as fundamentalism (for the terrorist Millat, ‘Fate’, which he relates to the Islamic creed, is ‘very much like TV: an unstoppable narrative, written produced and directed by somebody else’ [Smith, 2001, p. 526]); and millennium architecture, which is seen in the novel as a neutral space through which the fiction of Britain as a ‘Happy Multicultural Land’ is promoted (p. 465). But the analysis of these elements presupposes the introduction of a central metaphor which Smith adopts to defi ne the spatio-temporal coordinates of her characters’ existential and ethical quests: Zeno’s paradoxes. The ancient philosopher claimed that movement (the spatial unfolding of time) and plurality (the extension of different forms in space) are illusory because infi nity is secretly hidden in both concepts. According to the most famous of his paradoxes, Achilles will never reach the tortoise because the section of space he should cover is endlessly divisible: his movement will fracture into infi nite sections increasingly smaller yet never null. In White Teeth Smith interrogates Zeno’s paradox thus: But what was Zeno’s deal here (everybody’s got a deal), what was his angle? There is a body of opinion that argues his paradoxes are part of a more general spiritual programme. To (a) fi rst establish multiplicity, the Many, as an illusion, and (b) thus prove reality a seamless, flowing whole. A single, indivisible One. Because if you can divide reality inexhaustibly into parts, as the brothers did that day in that room, the result is insupportable paradox. You are always still, you move nowhere, there is no progress.

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Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature But multiplicity is no illusion. Nor is the speed at which those-in-thesimmering-melting-pot are dashing towards it. Paradoxes aside, they are running, just as Achilles was running. And they will lap those who are in denial just as surely as Achilles would have made that tortoise eat his dust. [ . . . ] And yet still that paradox is alluring. The harder Achilles tries to catch the tortoise, the more eloquently the tortoise expresses its advantage. Likewise the brothers will race towards the future only to fi nd they more and more eloquently express their past, that place where they have just been. (p. 466)

Significantly, the metaphor of the movement at a standstill can also be found, and most literally, in the fi nal pages of Remainder, where the protagonist hijacks an airplane, causing it to turn ‘back and forth in mid-air’; an experience which gives him a gleeful ‘feeling of weightlessness, suspension’ and exhilaration at the thought that its ‘trail would be visible from the ground: an eight’, the symbol of the infi nite (McCarthy, 2007, p. 283). Here the indubitable allure which the imagined technological transcendence from spatio-temporal limits exerts on the protagonist is made to collide with his foregone conclusion (and closing remark of the novel) that the aircraft is bound to exhaust its fuel at some point. The abjection and fi nitude of materiality which the protagonist is at pains to disavow are bound to disrupt the illusory tale of continuity in stillness but not as yet, and the end of the novel allows the conscious delusion of paradoxical suspension to be held illimitably. In White Teeth Smith is less interested in technology and logistics than McCarthy but equally concerned with narratives of self and space which betray metaphysical tendencies. Smith’s way of signalling that space is not a neutral medium where ‘things click effortlessly into place’ (Smith, 2001, p. 526) is to disseminate it with obstacles, boundaries and crossroads. In Zeno’s geometric infi nite space, Achilles may not reach the tortoise, but physical entities in physical space do intersect, and even collide, as the recurrent motif of damaged body parts in White Teeth seems to symbolize: Clara’s broken teeth, Archie’s shrapnel in the leg and even Irie’s pregnancy appear as physical tributes paid to the discontinuity and multiplicity of their experiential space. But Smith confronts also the myth of continuity par excellence: memory. Specifically, she does so in a passage which describes Irie, who walks the streets of Willesden Green and ponders lyrically on the sense of belonging to a place and the Bergsonian durée that familiar urban tracks vouchsafe: ‘Irie stepped out into streets she’d known her whole life, along a route she’d walked a million times over. If someone asked her just then what memory was, what the purest definition of memory was, she would say this: the street you were on when you fi rst jumped in a pile of dead leaves’ (p. 458). That Smith should treat the theme of memory as inextricably bound to the experience of traversing the city is significant in itself, but even more so is her association of territorial continuity—the old-established ‘Mali’s

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Kebabs, Mr. Cheungs, Raj’s, Malkovich Bakeries’ whose names ‘she could reel [ . . . ] off blindfold’’—with the supposed durée of identity and Irie’s experience of ‘the odd Proustian moment’ (p. 459). Yet, characteristically, this illusion of sameness through time is soon dispelled, and Smith makes Irie aware that such continuities are none but ‘past-present fictions’ clashing with an irreducible and multiple real of ‘lives that [are] stranger than fiction, funnier than fiction, crueller than fiction’ (p. 459; emphasis added). In her exploration of urban lyricism, Smith tackles also the persistent topos of the city vagrant and deranged outcast as the repository of wisdom or authenticity: ‘the children knew the city. And they knew the city breeds the Mad. [ . . . ] They were properly mad in the Shakespearean sense, talking sense when you least expected it’ (p. 174). Smith’s reworking of the theme is in a postcolonial key: the homeless and insane truth-tellers are neither the bearers of territorial identity, as in Moorcock, nor the material manifestations of the mystic body of London, as in Ackroyd. Rather, one of them, Mad Mary, becomes the mirror image of Samad (‘they were from the same place [ . . . ] far away’), a figure of postcolonial displacement: like Mad Mary, Samad is ‘a walker-and-talker’ ‘who, if you push him far enough, will suddenly see sense’ (p. 178). But again, symptomatically, Smith partially undermines her own lyric and essentialist view of the traveller-prophet though humour: the mad ‘tell you who you are and where you’re going (usually Baker Street—the great majority of modern-day seers travel the Metropolitan line) and why’ (p. 174). Certainly, compared to McCarthy’s, her treatment of the theme is less nihilistic: as implicit in the essay ‘Rereading Barthes and Nabokov’, she is reluctant to advocate a wholehearted acceptance as much as a downright refusal of meaning; rather she is inclined to acknowledge its problematic nature and simultaneously engage in its tentative, anxious quest. Yet, on the whole, Smith’s characters are no city travellers and scenes of urban drift are rare. She is less interested in London as an anthropological or historical territory than in London as a conceptual space where her quasi-philosophical ideas of multiplicity may be charted. The novel displays a production of space, both metropolitan and global, as a complex cartography of existential and ethical routes, where bodies’ relation to the urban and international scene is made sense of through the use of the laws and paradoxes found in physics. Smith insists on the sense of the characters’ motion along existential routes, conceiving these as variably convergent or divergent, colliding or violently splitting, or else suspended between alternative choices. This last is especially the case of the suicidal Archie Jones, who tries to gas himself in his car at the beginning of the novel: He lay forward in a prostrate cross, jaw slack, arms splayed either side like a fallen angel; scrunched up in each fist he held his army service medals (left) and his marriage licence (right), for he had decided to take his mistakes with him. A little green light flashed in his eye, signalling

170 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature a right turn he had decided never to make. [ . . . ] Squeezed between an almighty concrete cinema complex at one end and a giant intersection at the other, Cricklewood was no kind of place. It was not a place a man came to die. It was a place a man came in order to go to other places via the A41. (p. 3) The scene may be a deliberate reworking of Chris Burden’s piece Trans-fi xed (Venice, California, 23 April 1974), a performance in which the American artist was nailed face up to the back of a Volkswagen, as if he were being crucified on the car. Or, more likely, Smith’s could be a humorous reworking of Ballard’s car crash victims (she regards The Atrocity Exhibition as ‘possibly the greatest British avant-garde novel’ [2009, p. 94]). Yet, far from accidental, his epiphanic collisions enact the meaningful embrace of architecture and the body whereas Smith is at pains to show that, as a place for Archie to die, Crickwood Broadway is an incongruous choice indeed. Here and elsewhere in the novel, her London locations are often shown to be at odds with the intentions of the characters who inhabit or traverse them, and this foregrounds a sense of disconnection from the scene somehow akin to the one observed in Remainder. Torn apart by opposite directions between which he is unable to choose, Archie crucifies himself at a road junction which both materializes and allegorizes his existential juncture. Interestingly, Smith fi nds a metaphor for his ethical condition in chaos theory, but her strategy of comic distancing blatantly deprives it of the lyricism and essentialism inherent in Moorcock’s visions: it is a fl ight of pigeons fouling the nearby Hussein-Ishmael butcher’s with their droppings that attracts the attention of the shop owner and saves Archie. And this leads Smith to speculate amusingly that perhaps ‘the flap of a tiger-moth’s diaphanous wings in Central Africa, a whole bunch of other stuff that Makes Shit Happen had decided it was a second-chance time for Archie. Somewhere, somehow, by somebody, it had been decided that he would live’ (p. 4). Significantly, Samad is conceived as Archie’s ‘Proactive’ (p. 496) counterpart: when placed ‘at a moral crossroads’ (p. 118) in his life, he does make his decision, separating his twin sons both geographically and culturally. Yet, borrowing in this case from Newton’s third law of motion, Smith makes the force of Samad’s action have an equal and opposite reaction on the part of the two brothers, whose personalities and beliefs end up reversing with mathematical precision the father’s plans and expectations. Another metaphysical narrative of identity, explored by both McCarthy and Smith, is the one moulded by the society of the spectacle. In Remainder Robert De Niro features as the celluloid embodiment of an imagined self, capable of fluid, faultless action: ‘We went to the Ritzy to see Mean Streets with Robert De Niro’, says the protagonist. What ‘struck me as I watched the fi lm was how perfect De Niro was. Every move he made, each gesture was perfect, seamless. [ . . . ] He doesn’t have to think about them because he and they are one. Perfect. Real. [ . . . ] “It’s not about being

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cool”, I told [Greg]. “It’s about just being. De Niro was just being”’ (2007, pp. 22–23). This narrative of continuity, ‘an imagined world in which logistical details and logical consequences are pursued with ease and precision’ (Smith, 2009, p. 86), is reminiscent of Millat’s quest for a smooth narration of his motivations but also his hope that the desired effects will logically derive from his intentions and actions; in short, what all the characters throughout the novel seem to be negated by vicissitudes and twists of fate. In the imagination of the young would-be terrorist Millat, the embodiment of this ersatz metaphysics of being is another American actor, Al Pacino, ‘in the fi rst Godfather’: ‘[Millat] remembers rewinding and freeze-framing and slow-playing that scene countless times over the years. He remembers that no matter how long you pause the split-second of Pacino reflecting, no matter how often you replay the doubt that seems to cross his face, he never does anything else but what he was always going to do’ (Smith, 2001, pp. 526–27). Paradoxically, Millat regards the actor’s performance as genuine, the perfect expression of that determination which Millat feels should characterize his terrorist act; so he reads terrorism in terms of spectacle, letting his Islamic fundamentalism stem problematically from Western cinematic myths. Two more elements reinforce the failure of identity to coalesce unproblematically: logistics and language. Due to an unexpected disruption along the line, Millat’s terrorist expedition by underground to the West End turns out less fluid and defi nite than he has fantasized, an uneven journey he deems unsuitable for a terrorist attack conceived as the manifestation of inexorable fate: ‘He had been more certain when he began, imagining the journey as one cold, sure dart on the Jubilee Line: Willesden GreenCharing Cross, no changing of trains, not this higgledy-piggledy journey; just a straight line’ (p. 503). Finally, his pretensions of genuineness are parodied by playing with language: his fundamentalist affiliation is called KEVIN (although its members are unaware of the name’s etymology from the Irish cóem ‘kind, honest and handsome’ and gein ‘birth’), whereas Joshua’s animalist association is named FATE (in which the Islamic Millat believes). Each boy’s fi rst name and the acronym of the organization he chooses appear on a direct collision course, producing an effect of ironic deflation of the two characters’ revolutionary instincts. Linguistic codes refuse to shed all traces of their origins, pointing to Smith’s prized postmodern concept of the impossibility of genuine being and showing the failed attempt of new generations to write history anew (to inhabit and therefore appropriate meanings whose origins reassert themselves beyond the characters’ control and even awareness). This is particularly evident in Millat, who races towards the future but cannot help expressing the past, and as such he is a figure of suspension. A similar condition is found in Archie’s daughter Irie. At the end of the novel, she is pregnant but will never know whether by Millat or his twin brother, Magid, since the two have been her lovers on the same day;

172 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature in this sense, implicitly she incarnates the failure of that other metaphysical narrative investigated in the novel which is genetics engineering: ‘She could not know her body’s decision, what choice it had made, in the race to the gamete, between the saved and the unsaved. She could not know if the choice would make any difference’ (p. 515). At the close of the novel, she is made to replicate the condition of the suicidal Archie in the opening pages: symbolically, her body is a space of paradox and undecidability, where two statements could be equally true; where two existential routes and irreconcilable moral extremes, allegorized by the twins, are made to collide. Significantly, she figures her son as one of ‘those elaborate fictional cartograms that folded out of Joshua’s old sci-fi books, his Fantasy Adventures. That is how the child seemed. A perfectly plotted thing with no real coordinates’ (p. 516). In this connection, a comparison with Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial theory seems apt. Referring in particular to Great Britain, Bhabha describes the liberal ‘entertainment and encouragement of cultural diversity’ as a form of ‘containment’ (1990, p. 208), an attempt to locate difference within the dominant cultural grid. Against this form of control he introduces the notion of hybridity: all forms of culture are continually in a process of hybridity. But for me the importance of hybridity is not to be able to trace two original moments from which the third emerges, rather hybridity for me is the ‘third space’ which enables other positions to emerge. This third space displaces the histories that constitute it, and sets up new structures of authority, new political initiatives, which are inadequately understood through received wisdom. (p. 211) Smith’s attitude to this issue is certainly in line with Bhabha: she debunks the illusion of multiculturalism and derides the supposed essentialism of cultural origins. But, unlike him, she is equally suspicious of the potential for renewal of cultural hybridity, or, at least, less confident that a ‘third place’ may indeed emerge. ‘We should remember that it is the “inter”—the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space—that carries the burden of the meaning of culture’, claims Bhabha in The Location of Culture (2005, p. 56). But Smith’s in-between spaces (including bodies themselves, conceived as micro-spatialities) are inescapably trapped in dichotomy, tension and paradox. In the 1980s and early 1990s, when the politics of identity dominated critical discourse, postmodern spatial feminism celebrated hybridization: ‘identity, sexual or otherwise, is unstable, shifting, multiplicitous, situational, refractory, hybridizable, always being negotiated and contested, never static or fi xed’, claims Soja (1996, p. 113). As Gillian Rose suggests, the foregrounding of this multiple difference—of class, gender and race— leads to the search for ‘spaces in the margins of hegemonic discourses,

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social spaces carved in the interstices [ . . . ] the space-off, the elsewhere, of those discourses’ (cited in Soja, 1996, pp. 111–12). So authenticity becomes for Soja and Rose what representation leaves out. But at the turn of the millennium, with the triumph of the supposedly colour-blind and liberal consumer society, different identities have been incorporated in the multicultural discourse of capitalism. Consequently, the city as a site of interstices where anti-hegemonic discourse is predicated tends to yield to the city as a dead or abstract landscape: the devitalized arteries of McCarthy’s London or Smith’s equally vacuous scene. As shown in the following, if the latter is occasionally punctuated by symbolic spaces, the authenticity of their meanings is revealed as ambiguous if not overtly questioned.

Multiculturalism, Millennium Architecture and the Demise of the Politics of Identity The end of the novel is made to coincide with the celebrations for the New Year’s Eve in 1992, during which at the Perret Institute, in the heart of the West End, the FutureMouse© project is to be presented by Marcus Chalfen and given media coverage. The last two chapters chart the convulsive, convergent movement of the main characters towards this narrative threshold replete with symbolic resonances. The closing of the year is charged with anxieties and expectations: in many ways the character’s rush towards the Institute is triggered by the fact that they see this moment as a threshold from ‘past-tense’ to ‘future-perfect’ (p. 18). In these chapters the domestic interiors which dominate most of the novel give way to iconic public London spaces, variously representative of past and present Britain. The former, the centre of the old Empire, coalesces symbolically around few, traditional monuments, buildings and institutions: 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 do love their false icons in this country’, said Abdul-Colin, with his old mix of gravity and satire, unmoved by the considerable New Year crowd who were presently spitting at, dancing around and crawling over the many lumps of grey stone. (pp. 503–4) It would be easy but misguided to judge Smith’s representation of these places as humdrum and stereotypical. Undoubtedly, Smith is no psychogeographer: as we have seen, there is a waning sense of territory in her novel, which estranges it from the predominant imprint of most London fiction from the mid-1980s onwards; she privileges static locations to urban dérives and has little sense of the psychosomatic responses elicited by the complexities of urban territories. This may induce us to think of White

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Teeth as scarcely a novel about the metropolis at all. Yet the void iconicity of these fi nal spaces is a point in itself, as we will see, and one from which significant conclusions can be drawn. If the novel disposes of the idea of urban spaces as territorial reservoirs of cultural authenticity and heritage, it is to offer them, too, as further failed narratives of genuineness. Their ossified, stereotypical forms are skeletal projections of imagined essences of Britishness that Smith’s postcolonial characters feel they should embrace or reject: from the BBC worshiped by Alsana to the statues in Trafalgar Square despised by Abdul-Colin. Smith’s urban cartography is a highly imaginary (meta)physical map, which traces the characters’ existential and ethical quest for their identity; and this is one which appears unable to defi ne itself unless by means of inclusions/exclusions and the drawing of borders. But let us move on to the iconic urban space which, at the end of the novel, Smith chooses as representative of contemporary Britain: the ‘Exhibition Room’. This is clearly a fictional example of London millennium architecture, as testified by its emphasis on technological blankness, lightness and transparency, especially characteristic of Norman Foster’s global style: ‘you can see it through a huge glass front if you walk by—the acres of protected vacuity and a sign with the prices per square foot of these square feet of space of space of space longer than it is wide and tall enough to fit [ . . . ] two huge matching posters, slick across two sides of the room like wallpaper and the text says MILLENNIAL SCIENCE COMMISSION’ (Smith, 2001, p. 518). In Non-Places Augé claims that ‘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’ (2006, p. 83). The design of the Exhibition Room and the television crews assembled for the event appeal to Archie’s naïve enthusiasm for modernity and spectacle. The neutral space also seems to work as a projection of Irie’s fantasies about her elective home, a modern technological house, comfortable in its amnesiac blankness and inhabited by imaginary conflict-free people (a condition she sees as denied to the postcolonial subject): ‘They open a door and all they’ve got behind is a bathroom or a lounge. Just neutral spaces. And not this endless maze of present rooms and past rooms and the things said in them years ago and everybody’s historical shit all over the place’ (p. 514). Symptomatically, the title of Chapter Eighteen evokes Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man—Smith mentions it in the McCarthy review (2009, p. 73)—which propounds liberal democracy as the ‘endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution’ (Fukuyama, 1992, p. xi). The American neoconservative philosopher ‘appeals here to the full and recognizable actualization, in liberal democracy, of something like human

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nature, over and above what others might call the “postmodern” morass of cultural relativism’ (Martin, 2010, p. 28). Smith deconstructs Fukuyama’s historicist perspective (grounded in Hegel’s dialectical historicism), by negating the metaphysical illusion of the achieved perfection of human progress and to do so she summons all her characters in the ‘Final Space’ of the Exhibition Room, where the tensions of their personal and generational histories accumulate and short-circuit. The abstraction of this space is especially designed to transcend the abjection of cultural inequalities through images of (multicultural) hope and positivity; a feeling echoed by Tony Blair’s words, pronounced on 1 January 2000, about the ‘real sense of confidence and optimism’ he could breathe (reported by BBC News). Yet the multicultural project implies the homogenizing of differences, the obliteration of origins under the auspices of an empty abstraction. As Slavoj Žižek contends in The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, ‘multiculturalist respect for the Other’s specificity is the very form of asserting one’s own superiority [ . . . ] the stain of particular roots is the phantasmic screen which conceals the fact that the subject is already thoroughly ‘rootless’, that his true position is the void of universality’ (1999, pp. 216–17). Smith’s more sustained attempt to visualize the problematic multiplicity (the simmering melting pot), which the utopia of multicultural oneness is at pains to obfuscate, is precisely by having it converge in and overcrowd the Exhibition Room, the imagined neutral space of modern Britain. Tellingly, this non-place of liberal multiculturalism betrays its contiguity and connivance with global capitalism: The fi nal space. A big room, one of many in the Perret Institute; a room separate from the exhibition yet called an Exhibition Room; a corporate place, a clean slate; white/chrome/pure/plain (this was the design brief) used for the meetings of people who want to meet somewhere neutral at the end of the twentieth century; a virtual place where their business (be that rebranding, lingerie or rebranding lingerie) can be done in an emptiness, an uncontaminated cavity; the logical endpoint of a thousand years of spaces too crowded and bloody. [ . . . ] because fortunately after years of corporate synaesthesia (salt & vinegarblue, cheese & oniongreen) people can fi nally give the answers required when a space is being designed, or when something is being rebranded, a room/ furniture/Britain (that was the brief: a new British room, a space for Britain, Britishness, space of Britain, British industrial space cultural space space); [ . . . ] they know what is meant by national identity? symbols? paintings? maps? music? air-conditioning? smiling black children or smiling Chinese children or [tick the box]? (pp. 517–18) Žižek’s analysis is worth quoting again for its historical grasp on the relationship between globalization and multiculturalism: ‘we are no longer

176 Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature dealing with the standard opposition between metropolis and colonized countries; a global company, as it were, cuts its umbilical cord with its mother-nation and treats its country of origin as simply another territory to be colonized’ (1999, p. 215). Historically, what comes after the phase of capitalism within the confi nes of the nation-state and the internationalist phase of colonization characterized by the subordination and exploitation of colonized countries? According to Žižek, ‘the fi nal moment of this process is the paradox of colonization, in which there are only colonies, no colonizing countries—the colonizing power is no longer a nation-state but the global economy itself’ (pp. 215–16). And it is under the auspices of this geographical abstraction of late capitalism that the liberal discourse of multiculturalism is predicated; a discourse which, Smith implies, is necessarily founded on the rebranding of subjects: the Exhibition Room is ‘guarded through the night by Mr. De Winter, a Polish nightwatchman (that’s what he calls himself—his job title is Asset Security Coordinator); [ . . . . ] Mr. De Winter (né Wojciech), renamed, rebranded’ (pp. 518–19). And indirectly here Smith seems also to suggest a continuity between the homogenizing tendencies of global capitalist culture and those of genetics engineering: the idea ‘that living organs should answer to design’ (p. 119). Last but not least, this space evokes by contrast the opening pages of the novel. The urban landscape of Archie’s attempted suicide is self-evidently one of Bataillean material abjection: the draining of blood from slaughtered animals evokes Jones’s personal plight as well as the massacres of the innocents elsewhere in the world (such as those in India, in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination later evoked in the novel); yet Smith’s postmodern strategy is to allow this strong, tragic symbolism to drown in the highly comic tone of the episode. The story’s fi nal stage is the antipathetic one of sterilization: a seemingly neutral space without exhibits, whose transparency obfuscates the ideological pressures fi lling its seeming void; similarly, this time it is irony that she deploys to ease the impact of her revelation. Smith’s strategy is to assure meanings remain ambiguous, elusive, the objects of a quest rather than spaces to be inhabited, and this in order to deny her (re)readers the illusion of a genuine appropriation. But one fi nal related question among those Smith poses in the McCarthy review is still to be answered: ‘What’s left of the discourse of identity?’ (2009, p. 96). Globalization has incorporated the gains of the postmodern politics of identity so that it may not disturb the smooth circulation of Capital. In White Teeth both the Chalfens and Poppy Burt-Jones, the teacher of the children of Samad and Archie, are the most eloquent representations of the multiculturalist attitude which, for Žižek, ‘from a kind of empty global position, treats each local culture as the colonizer treats colonized people—as “natives” whose mores are to be carefully studied and “respected”’ (1999, p. 216)—an attitude which implies a patronizing Eurocentrist distance. The Other becomes a self-enclosed ‘authentic’ community towards which a respectful distance can be established and maintained through the

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abstraction of a privileged multicultural stance, which is precisely the empty view point of neutral universality propounded by the Exhibition Room. Žižek makes a strong claim that the tacit acceptance of global capitalism as ineluctable (a resignation which only the economic crisis started in 2008 seems to have partly, perhaps only temporarily, shaken) is evident in the proliferation in the 1990s of campaigns for the rights of minorities, which transform ‘political struggle proper [ . . . ] into the cultural struggle for the recognition of marginal identities and the tolerance of differences’ (p. 218). And what is more marginal than the survival of a single mouse, the pretext which leads the animalist FATE group to try and disrupt Chalfen’s press conference on the ground that ‘the largest community of earth, the animal kingdom, were oppressed, imprisoned and murdered on a daily basis with the full knowledge and support of every government in the world’ (Smith, 2001, p. 481)? The postmodern discourse of minorities is just yet another narrative of authenticity Smith is committed to overthrowing with her humour and zest for paradox; the same which, in her review of Remainder, she uses to claim that the Oxbridge education of McCarthy and Joseph O’Neill has turned them into a cultural minority on the British literary scene, since authenticity is increasingly located by academic discourse in postcolonial writers.

Coda

For the writers analysed in this book London is, as Ackroyd would have it, ‘a state of mind’ (2001, p. 793). It is certainly so for Ballard, for example, who chooses to write from the slumbering suburbs of the capital: his Heathrow, Brooklands and other peripheral locations are nothing but impossible destinations featuring only on his mental map. Obsessively, he explores states of spatial and temporal transition: in High-Rise, with central London receding from both view and conscience (yet, as a necessary backdrop, never disappearing altogether), he imagines tower blocks like spaceships of modernity launched upwards towards a utopian future, and yet still anchored to the ground of dystopian degradation and ruin. His airport conscience is a borderland: suspended between central London’s history and civic values, on the one hand, and the unattainable dream offered by American imagery, on the other; between the (already doomed) future of the modernist project and the dim, archaeological remembrance of a defunct (un)familiar present. If there is such a thing as the landscape of the imagination, then these liminal parts of the city represent Ballard’s: the ruin of the modern project can nowhere better be expressed for him than by London’s periphery. A different kind of suspension between complementary mental states can be detected in Bracewell, where London is the ultimate existential route which should (but fails to) reconcile the two sides of the national conscience: deep England and the city. These polarities intersect in his spatial politics, which enacts a traumatized New Romantic sensibility attempting a dreamy transfiguration of modern urban alienation. Of course, the capital is a mental state for Sinclair, too: his writing testifies to the passage from sensibility to imagination as a more successful way of mastering the opposition of the country and the city. As for Self and Keiller, who came to success in the early 1990s, it is instinctive for Sinclair to embrace a city in permanent decline, portraying the fascinating decay and metamorphoses of the rus in urbe and acting as the collector of its chaotic visionary degradation. The desuetude and neglect of public spaces is literary and fi lmic for the London psychogeographer; unlike the surfaces of the new and rampant mirrored buildings—whose gothic potential Ackroyd fully

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grasps few years earlier—which remain impenetrable to literary and cinematic narration alike. Finally, London is a state of mind for Sinclair, fi rst and foremost because it represents the infi nity of consciousness and literary creation, and, as such, it can be endlessly reimagined. But the aim of the book has been to show that the contemporary city is also and most prominently a state of the body. The postmodern self, forever displaced from the identitarian/architectural shelter which protected its bourgeois and modernist counterparts, is corporeally and ontologically entangled with the materiality of the urban scene outside. Consequently, it has to contrive complex strategies for the body to reinhabit an increasingly alien urban landscape. As we have seen, changing material circumstances in London’s contemporary history have generated different paradigms of this reappropriation of space through somatization. In the years dominated by the cultural equation of architecture with biology, for example, Ballard enacts an economy of exchange: at a time of extraordinary economic growth and uncontrolled conurbation, he stages the free reshuffl ing of constructive codes between the city and the body to create a bio-architectural continuum. This continuity is the spatial politics which the Ballardian self uses to inhabit the modular expansion of the metropolis, however delirious the effects of this reappropriation of space might be. Of course, the modernist idea that bodies are moulded by the spaces they inhabit easily turns Le Corbusier’s and Archigram’s modern utopias into dystopias and the body–architecture infi nite continuity into entrapment. The 1980s were a decade of election and dejection, both psychological and material; a time when, acting with unprecedented force on the actual fabric of the city, economy revealed peremptorily its power of physical destruction and renewal. The demise of the welfare state—the sense of belonging to a common social project—produced morally failed bohemians and designers, inconsequential heirs respectively to the angry generations and the architects of the civic renewal of the 1950s and 1960s. How does the body, then, somatize the altered spaces of (post-)Thatcherite London and the specific political and economic conditions they materialize? How does corporeality testify to the voraciousness of the new, rampant city, by becoming itself a site of the social and political struggle? The answer is: through an economy of inclusion. The body enters the voracious metabolism of the city, by cannibalizing its infi nite complexity (Sinclair) or being cannibalized by its overwhelming and transcendent destiny (Ackroyd and Bracewell). In this context, the elsewhere, the pastoral dream, is variously turned into an elegiac impossibility (Bracewell), a constituent of the sublime and excessive organism of the city (Ackroyd) or an active ingredient of its imaginative regeneration (Sinclair). Finally, at the turn of the millennium, London is often identified with its iconic spaces of (cultural) consumption or, more cogently, with the split between the intangibility of virtuality and speculative fi nance, on the one hand, and the new materiality of terror, on the other. London is no longer

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the site of Ryman’s dystopic regimentation: the tube map dematerializes and street maps tend to atomize into chunks of circuit like those which McCarthy’s protagonist obsessively covers on foot at the beginning of Remainder. An economy of disconnection forces its way into the conscience of the urban subject. Anxiety over the dispersal of the body prompts the search for a material anchorage to the increasingly intangible grids of the city and a desire to force reconnection through acts of violent penetration of matter. Then, is London’s literature at the time of globalization heading for the substantial disconnection from territorial concerns and its long-term association with memory? The capital’s architecture has often functioned as a time machine in the writers who have described it. Ballard, for example, is interested in the archaeology of the present, modern buildings and technological objects of today, which appear ‘as found’ in the near future. For him, miming the amnesiac process generated by consumer obsolescence is a way of turning it against itself: forgetfulness is promoted, paradoxically, in order to remember (in the familiar–unfamiliar paradigm used by Paolozzi and the Independent Group). Obviously, Ackroyd contrives a different temporal displacement: the historical novel, he claims, is about the present as a forward projection of the past. Not only are previous centuries evoked through literary ventriloquism but also and notably through the materialization of history in the tangibility of architecture. This often appears as the only extant (often endangered) living form of an otherwise extinct world: ‘The disappearance of the old Victorian asylums’, suggests Sinclair, would be ‘like the disappearance of Victorian Gothic literature’ (Sinclair and Jackson, 2003, p. 134). Books have transfused into the solid matter of the buildings, so that narratives can spring as it were from the very walls of the city. There, it is as if past literature lay dormant, waiting for writers to reactivate its secret stories. In 1994, when visiting the Midland Grand (the old railway hotel in St. Pancras, London) British director Deborah Warner tellingly said: ‘I set about looking for a text to put in it, but, as I got to know the building, I began to realize that it was its own text’ (cited in McEvoy, 2006, p. 593). In 2005 McCarthy—like many contemporary artists—is still thinking in terms of site-specific performances, but the thread of historical continuity has been severed. Far from functioning as a Proustian petite Madeleine, the crack in the wall which triggers his protagonist’s recollections dismantles the very idea of architecture as a device of personal—let alone cultural—memory, because this has turned into a crater or a crevice in a blank surface. Just like Lucio Fontana’s cuts, which destroy the symbolic fiction of the pictorial space as continuous with the physical one, McCarthy’s crack demolishes the symbolic fiction of architecture as the durée which connects the present and the past.

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Index

253 (Ryman), 7, 79, 132, 133, 140–50

A Abramović, Marina, 2, 7, 156 Ackroyd, Peter, 4–6, 14; Chatterton, 71; Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, 74; and earth art, 70; ghostliness of the body for, 67, 74, 75; Hawksmoor, 6, 65–76; and John Ashbery, 69; London-as-body in, 74; London: The Biography, 74, 93, 120; ‘London Luminaries and Cockney Visionaries’, 68, 69; Notes for a New Culture, 69, 70; and the petrified body, 69; physicality in, 69, 70, 74; and psychogeography, 68 Against Nature (Huysmans) 48 Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (‘Foreword’) (Ballard), 57 alienation, 7, 21, 29, 67, 74, 82, 118, 135, 152, 156, 158, 178 amnesia, 17, 44, 64, 85, 95, 122, 130, 151, 154, 159, 174, 180 anonymity, 79, 152 Anonymous: ‘L’urbanisme unitaire à la fi n des années 50’, 15 Aragon, Louis, 16 Archigram, Plug-in City, 39–41; environments, 5, 6, 22, 27–33, 43, 55, 56, 82, 145, 146, 179 architecture: Bauhaus, 6, 16, 32, 36, 80; and demolitions, 9, 49, 85, 94; Coop Himmelb(l)au, 4, 21, 22, 106, 107; Millennium, 5, 167, 173, 174; modernist, 8, 12, 25, 32, 48–54, 59, 62, 79, 80, 132, 178, 179; monument, 8,

79, 84, 95–98, 101, 106, 130, 173; post-war, 48, 49; ruins, 6, 9, 49, 50, 62, 66, 67, 84, 86, 87, 89, 94, 96, 114, 178; as skin: 14, 20, 32, 33, 35, 51; Victorian, 9, 78, 122, 180. See also Brutalism Archizoom: No–Stop City, 7, 146 Art Nouveau, 79, 80, 106 Atkins, Mark, 86, 88, 96, 97, 103, 108, 109, 126 Atrocity Exhibition, The (Ballard), 22, 37, 51, 56, 60, 170 Augé, Marc, 7, 17, 113, 122, 124, 125, 130, 174

B Bachelard, Gaston, 9, 11, 15, 16; Earth and Reveries of Repose, 8; The Poetics of Reverie, 129; The Poetics of Space, 8, 33, 89, 129; Water and Dreams, 129 Baker, Brian, 87, 100–102, 127 Baker, Phil, 18, 30, 86, 150 Ballard, J. G., 4, 5, 7, 11, 14, 24, 73, 82, 112, 133, 134, 142, 153, 156, 158, 161, 163, 178–180; Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell (‘Foreword’), 57; and the Americanization of London, 42, 64; The Atrocity Exhibition, 22, 37, 51, 56, 60, 170; and base materialism, 139; ‘The Coming of the Unconscious’, 138, 144; ‘The Concentration City’, 41, 145; Concrete Island, 7, 26, 34, 42, 64, 132, 134, 143, 145, 148; Crash, 6, 27, 30, 40–46, 50, 51, 59–61, 121, 123, 135, 160; and Dada 39, 55–60, 139, 141, 147;

192 Index ‘The Drowned Giant’, 92, 114; The Drowned World, 6, 27, 46–48, 92, 114, 135; ‘The Garden of Time’, 28, 29; ‘A Handful of Dust’, 29, 49, 50, 51, 53; HighRise, 5, 6, 27, 34, 48–55, 59, 60, 64, 135, 178; and imagination, 38–40, 56–59; and Joseph Conrad, 47; and gothic uncanny, 34, 53; The Kindness of Women, 161; Kingdom Come, 29, 60, 135, 147; Millennium People, 29, 60, 132, 135, 136, 142, 146–48, 160; Miracles of Life, 26, 27, 35, 38, 47, 55, 57, 149; and modular bodies and minds, 35–39, 46, 59; and modular city, 6, 37, 40–42, 59, 179; ‘Motel Architecture’, 29, 32, 34, 51; ‘Mr. F is Mr. F’, 54, 55; mythologies in, 6, 43–46, 57; ontology in, 29, 36, 38, 44, 53, 57, 59, 60, 138; and skin, 14, 35, 51, 53; and surrealism, 38, 39, 46, 59, 60, 132, 138–140; ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’, 33, 34, 53; and transcendence, 6, 35, 36, 38 Banham, Peter Reyner, 5, 26, 30, 32–34, 150, 156 Barthes, Roland, 96, 149, 159, 164–66, 168 Bataille, Georges, 138–140, 176 Bathroom, The (Toussaint), 158 Baudelaire, Charles, 13, 14, 16, 44, 66, 83, 119, 141 Baudrillard, Jean, 22, 44, 155; ‘Crash’, 43; The System of Objects, 8, 13, 36; (and Jean Nouvel) The Singular Objects of Architecture, 139, 148, 149 Baxter, Jeanette, 149 Baxter, John, 28, 41, 47 Baxter, Martin, 57 BBC, 174, 175 Benjamin, Walter, 4, 14, 16, 43, 141, 150, 157, 160 Berkeley, George, 131 Berselli, Edmondo, 123 Bhabha, Homi, 4, 172 Bianchini, Franco, 117, 121 Big Bang, 62–64, 66, 81 Blake, William, 149 body: abjection, 2, 7, 20, 22, 102, 105, 106, 162, 168, 175; in body art,

2, 7, 156; bones, 35, 73, 74, 91, 92, 151; as conductor of urban forces; 7, 99, 102, 110, 124, 153; corpse, 68, 71, 73, 74, 80, 81, 92, 114, 115; dead, 12, 34, 35, 46, 49, 50, 64, 68, 69, 73, 74, 76, 90–92, 106, 114, 115, 127, 130, 149; and disconnection, 17, 21, 153, 158, 160–162, 170, 180; masochistic drives of, 6, 67, 160; in pain; 6, 7, 20, 22, 67, 72, 75, 76, 88, 95, 103, 110–112, 138, 143, 145, 149, 150, 159; and performance, 2, 7, 151, 155, 156, 158, 159, 170, 171, 180; and promiscuity, 14, 73, 76; and violence, 58, 85, 114, 145, 149–61; visceral, 7, 22, 41, 73, 104, 106, 115, 123, 124, 138, 140, 149; rematerialization of, 7, 143, 149; in ritual of embodiment, 7, 84, 155, 158; sadistic drives of, 43, 160; and virtuality, 94, 134 Boetzkes, Amanda, 70 Bois, Yve–Alain, 139 Bond, Robert, 101, 105, 111–13, 124 Borden, Ian, 135 Bracewell, Michael, 4, 20, 49; Missing Margate, 6, 64, 67, 77, 79–86 Braidotti, Rosi, 54 Branzi, Andrea, 24, 30, 119, 134, 146 Breton, André, 16 Britain Can Make It (exhibition), 34, 48 Brown, Scott, 80, 122 Bruno, Giuliana, 13, 102 Brutalism, 6, 30, 43, 50; ‘as found’ poetics, 6, 43, 47, 61 Bukatman, Scott, 86 Burnet, John, 157 Burroughs, William, 37 Bus Conductor Hines, The (Kelman), 76 Butler, Judith: Bodies that Matter, 2 Byatt, A. S.: Possession. A Romance, 71

C Carr, Edward, 123, 124 Certeau, Michel de: The Practice of Everyday Life, 19 Chalk, Warren, 30, 145 Chadwick, Lynn, 139 chaos, 15, 27, 28, 84, 156, 157, 159: modern theory of, 6, 88–92, 170. See also Sinclair, Iain Chatterton (Ackroyd), 71

Index Chatwin, Bruce: The Songlines, 113, 129 Child Garden, The (Ryman), 141, 143, 145 Children of Albion: Poetry of the ‘Underground’ in Britain (Horovitz), 109 Chtcheglov, Ivan: ‘Formulary for a new urbanism’, 30 city: as collective skin, 11, 53, 99, 106, 108, 110, 115, 149; and complexity, 6–8, 88, 90, 91, 99, 100, 102, 111, 112, 117–28 passim, 154, 169, 173, 179; as cosmos, 88–90, 108, 110, 112, 126, 153; and creativeness, 19, 30, 64, 67, 68, 85, 90, 111, 119–123 passim, 133, 141; hostile, occult and powerful forces of, 7, 16, 22, 52, 55, 101, 104, 105, 125; informational overload of; 7, 56, 57, 79, 105, 106, 114, 123, 141, 142; information flows and networks of, 2, 99, 119, 132, 134, 143, 147, 150, 154, 155, 158, 162, 167; as formless, 6, 67, 77, 78, 84, 85, 154; and functionalism, 7, 9, 16, 34, 41, 48, 80, 119, 132, 133, 136–139, 145; as nature, 11, 34, 70, 71, 84, 90, 91, 99, 108–11, 115, 134, 135, 145, 148; margins of, 117, 126–31, 134, 178; organicist visions of, 11, 22, 34, 85, 99, 126–129, 133, 153; planning of, 17, 25, 62, 81, 133, 140; postcolonial, 7, 163–65, 169; postmodern, 1, 86, 99, 103, 115, 136; unrepresentability of, 3, 133, 151, 156; and voraciousness, 6, 7, 41, 46, 55, 67, 71–73, 93, 105, 113–15, 138, 179. See also Ballard, J. G.; environment; London; space ‘City Brain’ (Sinclair), 104 Clark, Clare: The Great Stink, 75 Coma, The (Garland), 151, 156 ‘Coming of the Unconscious, The’ (Ballard), 138, 144 Community, 86–88, 91, 118, 125, 129, 140, 153, 176, 177; destruction of, 9, 17, 63, 86; gated community, 52, 133, 142; imaginary, 119, 153

193

‘Concentration City, The’ (Ballard), 41, 145 Concrete Island (Ballard), 7, 26, 34, 42, 64, 132, 134, 143, 145, 148 Conductors of Chaos: A Poetry Anthology (Sinclair), 109, 112, 124 Conrad, Joseph. See Ballard Constant, Nieuwenhuis, 119 consumerism, 35, 52, 57, 66, 78, 80, 81, 87, 100, 102, 141, 173; architecture and spaces representative of, 60, 64, 72, 78, 105, 120, 122, 134, 144, 146; debris and obsolescence of, 45, 137, 180 Cook, Peter, 30; Plug–In City, 40 corporeality. See body Coverley, Merlin, 5, 16, 30, 43, 66, 100, 104 Crang, Mike, 99 Crary, Jonathan, 36, 40 Crash (Ballard), 6, 27, 30, 40–46, 51, 59–61, 121, 123, 135, 160 Crash: David Cronenberg’s Post–Mortem on J. G. Ballard’s ‘Trajectory of Fate’ (Sinclair), 42, 46, 50, 135 Crosby, Theo, 27, 37, 44 Crompton, Dennis, 30 Cronenberg, David, 2

D Daniele, Daniela, 14 Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (Ackroyd), 74 Debord, Guy, 9, 16–20, 30, 42, 80, 119, 123–25, 129; The Naked City, 15; The Society of the Spectacle, 105, 118 Internationale Situationiste, 15 DeLillo, Don: Cosmopolis, 2 Derrida, Jacques, 7, 136, 137 design, 20, 33, 56, 58, 79–81, 84; designed subject, 80, 85, 176; interior, 8, 34, 48, 82, 94, 146, 174, 175; manipulation of the product as datum, 155; as tattoos of civilization, 38, 45, 58–60; urban and/or elecronic design, 11, 59, 66, 140–43, 146–48 dérive, 16, 19, 30 Diasio, Nicoletta, 16

194

Index

‘Diving into Dirt’ (Sinclair), 113 Doesburg, Theo van, 48 domesticity. See house Downriver (Sinclair), 109–11 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Stevenson), 69 ‘Drowned Giant, The’ (Ballard), 92, 114 Drowned World, The (Ballard), 6, 27, 46–48, 92, 114, 135 Durand, Regis, 96 dwelling. See house Dyer, Geoff, 4, 93; The Colour of Memory, 6, 67, 76–79

E Earth and Reveries of Repose (Bachelard), 8 Eisenman, Peter, 7, 21, 111, 136, 137, 157, 158 Eliade, Mircea, 7, 103, 111, 124 Elias, A. J., 13 Eliot, T. S., 67; ‘Four Quartets’, 51; ‘The Hollow Men’, 81; ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, 112; The Waste Land, 111 environment: biological approach to, 11, 14, 32, 34, 39, 58, 60, 73, 92, 137, 144; bio-technological, 5, 27, 139, 145; technological, 11, 21, 22, 26, 29–34, 52–59, 63, 73, 105, 132, 133, 140, 143, 146, 155, 157–62, 167, 168, 174. See also city; London; space Evans, Eric J., 57, 66 ‘Excavating the Unburied: Some London Writers’ (Sinclair), 128 Existentialism, 5, 9, 15, 16, 26–29, 50–52, 61

F Ferraris, Maurizio, 131 Festival of Britain, 48 fl âneurie, 13, 14, 16, 21, 43, 66, 101, 103, 105, 119, 120, 123 Fontana, Lucio, 180 Ford, Ford Madox, 4; ‘The Future in London’, 130 Foster, Norman, 174; 30 St. Mary Axe, 65 Foster, Hal, 2, 33, 44, 71, 79, 80, 104, 111, 116, 120, 121, 141 Foucault, Michel, 3, 9, 21, 95 Fraser, Mariam, 2, 73 Freud, Sigmund, 38, 46, 57

Fukuyama, Francis: The End of History and the Last Man, 174, 175 Fuller, Peter, 39, 111 ‘Furniture’ (Moorcock), 93

G Galimberti, Umberto, 104, 110, 114, 125, 126 ‘Garden of Time, The’ (Ballard), 28, 29 Garland, Alex: The Coma, 151, 156 Garofalo, Luca, 158 Gasiorek, Andrzej, 49, 64 Geddes, Patrick, 34 George, Rosemary Marangoly, 165 Gibson, Andrew, 63, 161, 163 Gill, Stephen, 113, 115 gothic, 64, 69, 87, 93, 120, 123, 132, 136. See also Ballard, J. G. globalization, 3, 7, 132, 134, 175, 180 The Great Stink (Clark), 75 Greco, Monica, 2, 73 Greene, David, 30, 145; Living Pod, 31 Groes, Sebastian, 5, 163 Gropius, Walter, 36

H Habermas, Jürgen, 12, 13 Hamilton, Richard, 26, 38, 45, 58 ‘Handful of Dust, A’ (Ballard), 29, 49–53 Hagan, Susannah, 91 Hawksmoor (Ackroyd), 6, 65–76 Hays, K. M., 135, 149 Heidegger, Martin, 15, 27–29, 50, 66 Henderson, Nigel: (and Eduardo Paolozzi, Alison and Peter Smithson) Patio and Pavilion, 24–26 Herron, Ron, 30 High-Rise (Ballard), 5, 6, 27, 34, 48–55, 59, 60, 64, 135, 178 historicism, 95, 175 Hollier, Denis, 139 home. See house Home, Stewart, 5; The House of Nine Squares. Letters on Neonism, Psychogeography and Epistemological Trepidation, 18 homelessness, 14, 63, 66, 67, 85, 152, 165, 169. See also unhomeliness Hornsey, Richard, 8, 34, 48, 94 Horovitz, Michael: Children of Albion: Poetry of the ‘Underground’ in Britain, 109

Index house, 6–14, 17, 18, 27–35 passim, 39, 43, 46–49, 62, 67, 68, 86–89, 93, 94, 96, 98, 108, 145, 164–66, 173, 174 House of Nine Squares. Letters on Neonism, Psychogeography and Epistemological Trepidation, The (Home), 18 Hume, David, 131 Huxley, Aldous, 57 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 157; Against Nature, 48 Huyssen, Andreas, 78, 151

I imagination, 1, 6, 9, 16, 68, 93, 98, 135, 160, 163, 171, 178. See also Ballard, J. G.; Sinclair, Iain identity, 1, 5, 6, 13, 91, 96, 99, 110, 117, 130, 134, 158, 164, 169, 174, 175; and authenticity, 156; branding of, 79, 80; cultural, 99, 142, 167; deconstruction of, 2, 73, 75; essentialist views of, 166, 170; and inauthenticity, 20, 85, 137, 152, 153, 167; politics of, 116, 166, 172, 175, 176. See also body Independent Group, 24, 44, 58, 59, 180 Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), 17, 18, 24, 41, 55

J Jackson, Kevin (and Iain Sinclair): The Verbals, 102, 111, 127 James, Henry, 166 Jameson, Fredric, 3, 6, 9, 14, 20–22, 95, 99, 100, 136 Javis, Brian, 101 Jenks, Charles, 110, 111 Jones, C. A., 156, 158 Journey through the Ruins: The Last Days of London, A (Wright), 87

K Keiller, Patrick, 4, 63, 163, 178; London (fi lm), 83; Robinson in Space (fi lm), 100 Kelman, James: The Bus Conductor Hines, 76 Kennedy, A. L.: Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains, 76

195

Kerr, Joe, 85, 87, 96 Kindness of Women, The (Ballard), 161 Kingdom Come (Ballard), 29, 60, 135, 147 Krauss, Rosalind, 139 Kristeva, Julia, 71 Kroker, Arthur, 2 Kroker, Marilouise, 2

L Lacan, Jacques, 55, 138 Landor’s Tower: Or The Imaginary Conversations (Sinclair), 108, 124 Le Corbusier (Charles–Édouard Jeanneret), 7–9, 48, 50, 54, 80, 179 Ledbetter, Mark, 74, 75 Lefebvre, Henri, 1, 3, 12, 13, 15, 18–20, 102, 120, 147 Lettrist movement, 16, 30 Lévi-Strauss, Claude: The Savage Mind, 91 Lichtenstein, Claude, 25, 43, 58 Lights Out for the Territory (Sinclair), 86–88, 95, 98, 105, 108–114, 120–126, 129, 130 Liquid City (Sinclair), 86, 88, 96, 108 London: Blitz, 5, 17, 48, 87, 88, 91, 93, 94, 96; Docklands, 18, 62, 63, 86; Los Angelization of, 41, 64; as metaphysical entity, 71, 90; and postmodernity, 64, 65, 82, 126; as a state of mind, 178; and Thatcherism, 62–64, 73. See also city; environment; space London (fi lm) (Keiller), 83 ‘London Blood’ (Moorcock), 93 ‘London Bone’ (Moorcock), 91–93 ‘London Luminaries and Cockney Visionaries’ (Ackroyd), 68, 69 London Orbital (Sinclair), 104, 105, 113, 117–22 passim, 126–31 London Orbital (fi lm) (Sinclair and Petit), 17, 127 London: The Biography (Ackroyd), 74, 93, 120 Loos, Adolf: ‘Ornament and Crime’, 79 Luckhurst, Roger, 27, 46, 64, 101, 120, 133 Lyall, Sarah, 94

M Macleod, John, 164

196

Index

marginality: 88, 98, 112, 117, 120, 177. See also homelessness; outcast; vagrant Martin, Reinhold, 37, 49, 54, 58, 80, 175 Master of Ballantrae, The (Stevenson), 69 Matta-Clark, Gordon, 13 Mauss, Marcel, 7, 124, 125 McCarthy, Tom: 4, 7, 133, 134, 149, 162, 163, 173–76; and city, 150–54; ‘Meteomedia; or, Why London’s Weather Is in the Middle of Everything’, 161, 162; physical presence, 155–58; Remainder, 7, 133, 150–61, 166–70, 177, 180. See also amnesia; physics McDonough, Tom, 15, 16, 119 McEvoy William, 180 McLuhan, Marshall, 3, 5, 11, 12, 14, 22, 32, 33, 37, 58, 135 memory, 6, 8, 21, 45, 46, 62, 68, 72, 90–100 passim, 114, 115, 120, 126, 130, 131, 143, 151, 154, 158, 159, 168; cultural, 9, 71, 86–89, 91, 93, 95, 180 ‘Meteomedia; or, Why London’s Weather Is in the Middle of Everything’ (McCarthy), 161, 162 Midnight’s Children (Rushdie), 2 Mies Van der Rohe, Ludwig, 48 Miles, Barry, 17, 42 Millennium People (Ballard), 29, 60, 132, 135, 136, 142, 146–48, 160 Miracles of Life (Ballard), 26, 27, 35, 38, 47, 55, 57, 149 Moholy-Nagy, László, 32 Moorcock, Michael, 4–6, 67, 95, 108, 109, 111, 133, 152, 153, 161, 163; essentialism in, 133, 170; ‘Furniture’, 93; ‘London Blood’, 93; ‘London Bone’, 91–93; Mother London, 9, 77, 86–91, 94; territorial identity, 161, 169 ‘Motel Architecture’ (Ballard), 29, 32, 34, 51 Mother London (Moorcock), 9, 77, 86–91, 94 ‘Mr. F is Mr. F’ (Ballard), 54, 55 Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), 152

multiculturalism (liberal discourse of), 7, 132, 134, 153, 163–177 Mumford, Lewis, 11, 41 Murray, Alex, 57, 71, 72, 102, 115, 120 mysticism, 6, 38, 46, 57, 60, 67–69, 71, 74, 84, 85, 169

N Naked City, The (Debord), 15 Nash, David, 70 neural system, 11, 14, 34, 38, 39, 53, 57, 58, 159 Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains (Kennedy), 76 Notes for a New Culture (Ackroyd), 69, 70 Nouvel, Jean (and Jean Baudrillard): The Singular Objects of Architecture, 139, 148, 149

O Oates, J. C., 151, 155, 159 Onega, Susana, 69, 75 O’Sullivan, Sean, 62 Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature (Prigogine and Stengers), 90 ontology, 71, 111, 112, 131, 153; and postmodernism 13, 14, 179. See also Ballard, J. G. outcast, 119, 120, 124, 133, 152. See also homenessness; vagrant

P Paolozzi, Eduardo, 6, 139, 180; and abstract grammar of constructional modules, 36, 38, 53; iconography of the present for, 44, 45, 55–59; and industrial mythologies, 6; (and Nigel Henderson, Peter and Alison Smithson) Patio and Pavilion, 24–29, 61 Peak, Mervin, 89 Petit, Chris, 122; (and Iain Sinclair) London Orbital (fi lm), 17, 127 Persaud, Raj, 140 Phillips, Lawrence, 5, 153 psychogeography, 5, 9, 16, 18, 50, 66, 89, 101, 105, 119, 123, 124, 178; Psychogeographical Society of London, 16 physicality, 1, 4, 7, 16, 74, 91, 135, 140, 144, 145; and adjustment

Index to the environment, 51; bodily movements through space, 20, 21, 48; dissolution of, 115, 116; as psychophysical relationship with humankind, 11, 12, 13; as repressed, 135, 144; trace of, in domestic architecture, 14, 33; of urban scene, 14, 19, 52, 63, 69, 70, 74, 85–87, 91. See also body physics: in Tom McCarthy, 133, 157; in Zadie Smith, 133, 168, 169 Piano, Renzo, 22 Poe, Edgar Allan: ‘The Man of The Crowd’, 16, 152 Poetics of Reverie, The (Bachelard), 129 Poetics of Space, The (Bachelard), 8, 33, 89, 129 Pop Art, 6, 24, 26, 42, 58, 59, 144 Portman, John, 20 postmodernity, 82, 102, 111, 141, 144, 166, 171, 172, 175–177; and architecture, 13, 82, 117; in literature, 2, 71, 75, 126; and subject, 80, 165, 179. See also identity; London; space Powell, Enoch, 163 Powell, Kenneth, 63 The Prelude (Wordsworth), 152 Prigogine, Ilya (and Isabelle Stengers): Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature, 90 Pringle, David, 41 Prynne, J. H., 113, 124 Psychogeography (Self), 17 Punter, John, 63 Pynchon, Thomas: Gravity’s Rainbow, 14

R Remainder (McCarthy), 7, 133, 150–61, 166–70, 177, 180 ‘Rereading Barthes and Nabokov’ (Smith), 164, 166, 169 revolution, 60, 86, 98, 102, 119, 132, 146, 147, 171 Roberts, Michèle: Impossible Saints, 73 Robinson in Space (fi lm) (Keiller), 100 Rogers, Richard: Lloyd’s building, 22, 23 Rumney, Ralph, 17 Rushdie, Salman, 153; Midnight’s Children, 2

197

Ryman, Geoff, 4, 134, 151; 253, 7, 79, 132, 133, 140–50; The Child Garden, 141, 143, 145

S Sartre, Jean-Paul, 26, 27, 62 Sbriglio, Jacques, 50 Scarry, Elaine, 144, 149 Schabert, Ina, 2, 73, 75 Schregenberger, Thomas, 25, 43, 58 Schmied, Wieland, 35, 53, 56 Schwengel, Hermann, 117, 121 Scudéry, Madeleine de, 15 Sehgal, Tino, 7, 156 Self, Will, 4, 5, 178; Psychogeography, 17 Sheppard, Robert, 110 Sherman, Cindy, 71 Short, John Rennie, 3, 4, 103, 108, 119 Sinclair, Iain: 4–7, 9, 11, 14, 17, 22, 42, 46, 50, 51, 57, 67, 71, 72, 77, 83, 86, 88, 94–131, 133, 135, 152, 154, 161, 163, 178, 179; anthropological aspects of, 7, 102, 104, 113, 124, 125, 127, 129, 130; and climate, 108, 112, 113, 129; and cannibalism, 113, 114; ‘City Brain’, 104; Conductors of Chaos: A Poetry Anthology, 109, 112, 124; Crash: David Cronenberg’s Post–Mortem on J. G. Ballard’s ‘Trajectory of Fate’, 42, 46, 50, 135; ‘Diving into Dirt’, 113; Downriver, 109–11; ‘Excavating the Unburied: Some London Writers’, 128; and imagination, 102, 111, 112, 119, 120–25, 129–31; Landor’s Tower: Or The Imaginary Conversations, 108, 124; Lights Out for the Territory, 86–88, 95, 98, 105, 108–114, 120–126, 129, 130; Liquid City, 86, 88, 96, 108; London Orbital, 104, 105, 113, 117–22 passim, 126–31; (and Chris Petit) London Orbital (fi lm), 17, 127; love of the arcane, 7, 120, 123; paradigm of symbiosis, 103; and shamanism, 7, 57, 103, 111, 121, 124, 125, 153; and territory; 95, 111, 113–18, 122, 129, 130; aesthetic of vanishing in, 115–17;

198

Index

(and Kevin Jackson) The Verbals, 102, 111, 127; White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, 104, 109, 111, 114–16 Situationism, 2, 15–18, 22, 30, 32, 42, 119, 120 Situationist International (SI), 16, 17 Smith, Zadie, 8, 134, 150, 151, 161; and durée, 168, 169; and politics of identity, 166, 172, 173, 176; quest for meaning in, 164–66, 167, 169, 171, 174, 176; rereading, 164–66; ‘Rereading Barthes and Nabokov’, 164, 166, 169; White Teeth, 7, 133, 163–77 Smithson, Alison and Peter, 4, 26, 32, 70; (and Nigel Henderson and Eduardo Paolozzi) Patio and Pavilion, 24, 25 society of the spectacle, 43, 85, 134, 149 Society of the Spectacle (Debord), 105, 118 Soja, Edward William, 3, 19, 86, 100, 120, 166, 172, 173 somatization, 2, 3, 7, 104, 105, 124, 126, 173, 179 South Bank Exhibition, 48 space: abstraction of, 2, 7, 20, 50, 52, 80, 84, 94, 99, 119, 122, 132–34, 144, 153, 154, 173–77; nonplaces, 7, 17, 62, 100, 112, 113, 117, 122, 130, 132, 135, 142, 174, 175; and surveillance, 3, 7, 101, 104, 137, 141, 143, 148; hyperspace, 6, 20, 99, 100; and hypervisibility, 115, 117, 140, 143, 149, 157; interstices, 132, 135, 146, 173; neutral spaces of multiculturalism, 7, 167, 174–76; postmodern, 6, 9, 10, 12–14, 20–22, 44, 64, 86, 99, 103, 115, 117, 118, 136; as psychophysical experience, 7, 11, 17, 22, 30, 33, 42, 52, 100, 101, 103, 106, 123; rematerialization of, 7, 143, 149; spatial politics, 3–7, 59, 67, 99, 101, 115, 116, 134, 164, 167, 178, 179. See also city; environment; London Spencer, Robin, 37, 44, 55 Steiner, Hadas A., 30, 32, 56 Stengers, Isabelle (and Ilya Prigogine): Order out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature, 90

Stevenson, Robert Louis: The Master of Ballantrae, 69; Dr. Jekyll and Mr., 69 Stilgoe, J. R., 89 ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’ (Woolf), 12–14 surrealism, 16, 26, 120, 144 Süskind, Patrick: Perfume. The Story of a Murderer, 74, 75 system, 39, 67, 82, 105, 133, 134, 135, 140, 143, 153, 159, 161, 163; transgressions of, 7, 60, 61, 132, 146–48, 156, 158

T Tafuri, Manfredo, ‘Les cendres de Jefferson’, 80 terrorism, 94, 133, 140, 143, 148, 167, 171; and architecture, 6, 67, 81, 84, 85 Tew, Philip, 73, 76, 77, 151, 155, 160, 164 Thatcher, Margaret, 9, 72, 73, 78, 81, 87, 119–21, 144, 161, 179; impact of her policy on London’s architecture, 5, 6, 18, 62–67, 86, 94, 121, 127 Thrift, Nigel, 99 Thornley, Andy, 63 Toussaint, Jean-Philippe, 157, 160; The Bathroom, 158 Tilson, Joe , 26 This is Tomorrow (exhibition), 24–27, 37, 139 ‘Thousand Dreams of Stellavista, The’ (Ballard), 33, 34, 53 Trainspotting (Welsh), 76 transcendence, 6, 11, 21, 35, 36, 38, 58, 59, 66, 79, 85, 88, 133, 136, 162, 166–168, 179 trauma: in city, 7, 87, 88, 93–95, 143; global, 132, 155, 160–64; passim; in subject, 4, 7, 11, 14, 15, 22, 67, 68, 75, 76, 88, 99–104, 116, 124, 125, 138, 148–53; passim, 178 Truscello, Michael, 141 Tschumi, Bernard, 21, 22 Turnbull, William, 26

U unhomeliness, 6, 27, 28, 66, 69 ‘urbanisme unitaire à la fi n des années 50, L’’ (Anonymous), 15

Index utopia, 119, 120, 122, 127, 130, 136, 139, 175, 178; Arcadian, 82, 83; in Archigram, 22, 30, 41, 179; of connection, 156, 162; modernist, 34, 48, 49, 50, 54, 59, 80

V vagrant, 6, 52, 66, 69, 74, 85, 152, 169. See also homenessness; marginality; outcast Venturi, Robert: Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Forms, 64, 80 Verbals, The (Sinclair and Jackson), 102, 111, 127 Vidler, Anthony, 1, 8–10, 21, 22, 46, 66, 106 Virilio, Paul, 44, 99, 136

W Water and Dreams (Bachelard), 129 Waugh, Patricia, 3 Webb, Michael, 30, 145

199

Weiss, Gail, 54, 55 Welsh, Irvine: Trainspotting, 76 White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (Sinclair), 104, 109, 111, 114–16 Whiteread, Rachel: House, 9, 10, 13, 14, 98 White Teeth, 7, 133, 163–77 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 36, 37 Wolfreys, Julian, 5, 72 Woolf, Virginia, 4, 5, 75; Mrs. Dalloway, 152; ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’, 12–14 Wordsworth, William: The Prelude, 152 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 54, 164–65 Wright, Patrick, 4, 62: A Journey through the Ruins: The Last Days of London, 87

Z Zeitgeist, 6, 22, 67 Žižek, Slavoj, 143, 175–77