The Literary Psychogeography of London: Otherworlds of Alan Moore, Peter Ackroyd, and Iain Sinclair [1st ed.] 9783030529796, 9783030529802

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xiii
Infinite London: The London-ness of London (Ann Tso)....Pages 1-28
The Disintegration of London in Alan Moore’s Psychogeography (Ann Tso)....Pages 29-57
Peter Ackroyd’s Sensuous Detective Method in Hawksmoor (Ann Tso)....Pages 59-80
Writing Psychogeography, Writing London Through a Screen Darkly: White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (Ann Tso)....Pages 81-106
London-ness: A Marriage of the Literary and the Psychogeographical (Ann Tso)....Pages 107-110
Back Matter ....Pages 111-116

Citation preview

LITERARY URBAN STUDIES

The Literary Psychogeography of London Otherworlds of Alan Moore, Peter Ackroyd, and Iain Sinclair Ann Tso

Literary Urban Studies

Series Editors Lieven Ameel Turku Institute for Advanced Studies University of Turku Turku, Finland Jason Finch English Language and Literature Åbo Akademi University Turku, Finland Eric Prieto Department of French and Italian University of California Santa Barbara, CA, USA Markku Salmela English Language, Literature & Translation Tampere University Tampere, Finland

The Literary Urban Studies Series has a thematic focus on literary mediations and representations of urban conditions. Its specific interest is in developing interdisciplinary methodological approaches to the study of literary cities. Echoing the Russian formalist interest in literaturnost or literariness, Literary Urban Studies will emphasize the “citiness” of its study object—the elements that are specific to the city and the urban condition—and an awareness of what this brings to the source material and what it implies in terms of methodological avenues of inquiry. The series’ focus allows for the inclusion of perspectives from related fields such as urban history, urban planning, and cultural geography. The series sets no restrictions on period, genre, medium, language, or region of the source material. Interdisciplinary in approach and global in range, the series actively commissions and solicits works that can speak to an international and cross-disciplinary audience. Editorial Board Ulrike Zitzlsperger, University of Exeter, UK Peta Mitchell, University of Queensland, Australia Marc Brosseau, University of Ottawa, Canada Andrew Thacker, De Montfort University, UK Patrice Nganang, Stony Brook University, USA Bart Keunen, University of Ghent, Belgium

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15888

Ann Tso

The Literary Psychogeography of London Otherworlds of Alan Moore, Peter Ackroyd, and Iain Sinclair

Ann Tso Lethbridge College Lethbridge, AB, Canada

ISSN 2523-7888 ISSN 2523-7896 (electronic) Literary Urban Studies ISBN 978-3-030-52979-6 ISBN 978-3-030-52980-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52980-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: I-Wei Huang/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

John Reppion attested to psychogeography’s popularity in 2016, when he published a collection of short stories entitled Spirit of Place. “Spirit of place” is genius loci in Latin, a phrase referring to the sacred and “transcendental” presence attached to the land. I hope to raise the possibility that in literary representations of the land, the spirit of a place may manifest itself as what Viktor Shklovsky calls a quintessential literary quality; that genius loci is in fact the “literariness”—or the disjunctive style— unique to the London psychogeographies of Alan Moore, Peter Ackroyd, and Iain Sinclair. In keeping with the overall goal of the Palgrave Macmillan Literary Urban Studies Series, The Literary Psychogeography of London explores the literariness of urban studies, though it uniquely does so by examining the city-ness of a specific literary city, namely, the London-ness of London. Each chapter argues that “city-ness” is as estranging a quality as Shklovsky’s literariness; to this end, each introduces a literary psychogeography that defamiliarizes London for the purpose of laying bare its London-ness. This project marks an initial attempt at considering psychogeography as something other than an offshoot of the Situationist movement and perhaps as a localizable urban expression, one having served the Situationist Guy Debord as well as others after him. In making this argument, I remain faithful to the interpretive openness upon which Debord had insisted. But I also entertain the possibility that psychogeography has acquired a life of its own, and that psychogeography may possess v

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some generic traits attributable to urban writing. Specifically, this monograph celebrates literary urbanisms which have resisted the modern urban panopticon: a surveillance mechanism consisting of perfectly aligned streets and buildings; a universal blueprint for modern urban living reminiscent of those discussed in Gyan Prakash’s Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City (2010). I wish to suggest that one could sense one’s way out of the panopticon (in a phenomenological vein), as Reppion suggests as much when he calls it his mission to penetrate the surface of Londonscape; to feel the “stories…embedded in the world around us—in metal, in brick, in concrete, and in wood” (Spirit of Place 2016, Kindle Locations 113–115); thus, to presuppose the existence of a London invisible but nevertheless palpable. Since the London-ness of London is an uncanny presence elusive to any coherent, all-too-touristic visions of London, elucidations thereof shall privilege the sensuous rather than the rational—i.e., Cartesian subjectivity, the “I think,” the cogito. To put it less abstractly, the disintegration of the British Empire toward the end of the twentieth century has triggered a worldwide fascination with the idea of a homogenous English experience: an idealized Englishness. London has likewise been rebranded as the exemplary English city, every street corner of which celebrates “English Heritage” in a self-congratulatory fashion. The Literary Psychogeography of London explores a certain literary quality—a certain London-ness of London— which compels Moore, Ackroyd, and Sinclair to see London in incoherent fragments. These disintegrating visons reveal an implosive quality extrinsic to the order of global capitalism and so liquify the boundaries set around Heritage London. Lethbridge, Canada

Ann Tso

Acknowledgments

I was highly appreciative of the opportunity to pursue my Ph.D. studies at McMaster University. Because of the generous funding package provided by the Provincial Government of Ontario, I had the privilege to read broadly—and dare I say somewhat aimlessly? It was through reading about Romantic visionaries, speculative fiction, and historical fiction that I stumbled upon the subject of psychogeography. I had the good fortune of meeting Catherine Grisé, Jeffrey Donaldson, Nicholas Serruys, Elizabeth Ho, and Anne Savage, who involved themselves in a project about “Blakean visions in contemporary London”—a project based only on my meandering thoughts at the time. I do not know how “pleasant” this intellectual vagueness was for my mentors, but it did materialize into a dissertation and now a monograph, thanks to their astute criticism. I am no less grateful to the editors and reviewers at Palgrave Macmillan for their advice, and, given my interest in literary urban studies, I am excited to be making a contribution to the Palgrave Macmillan Literary Urban Series. I am eager to learn the directions that Association for Literary Urban Studies (ALUS) will take in the future. I want to thank my colleagues at Lethbridge College for their friendship and support. My family in Hong Kong and my friends also have my gratitude: thank you for inspiring me to read, think and write passionately.

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Praise for The Literary Psychogeography of London

“Ann Tso’s The Literary Psychogeography of London provides an intriguing reformulation of psychogeography, one foregrounding ‘labyrinthine London’ as a disruptive and palimpsistic space—or literary property— undermining attempts to secure it for purposes of national identity or trade. Tso astutely charts the shadowy fluid and fractal nature of ‘Londonness’ in provocative readings of Gothic-inflected texts by Alan Moore, Peter Ackroyd, and Iain Sinclair.” —Ryan Trimm, Professor of English, The University of Rhode Island, USA “The Literary Psychogeography of London offers fresh readings of Ackroyd, Moore, and Sinclair that reveal their distinctive renderings of a literary London-ness. Tso is attuned to the idiosyncrasies and insights of each of these writers and she identifies new possibilities for psychogeography as a critical and creative practice.” —Nick Bentley, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Keele University, UK

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Contents

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1

Infinite London: The London-ness of London

2

The Disintegration of London in Alan Moore’s Psychogeography

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Peter Ackroyd’s Sensuous Detective Method in Hawksmoor

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Writing Psychogeography, Writing London Through a Screen Darkly: White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

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London-ness: A Marriage of the Literary and the Psychogeographical

Index

107 111

xi

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 1.2 Fig. 1.3

The Ten Bells Christ Church Spitalfields: the work of Nicholas Hawksmoor “A Spitalfields Institution 1666”: a view of Spitalfields market from inside The Ten Bells

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CHAPTER 1

Infinite London: The London-ness of London

Abstract The disintegration of the British Empire toward the end of the twentieth century has triggered a worldwide fascination with the idea of a homogenous English experience: an idealized Englishness that is now a fashionable commodity. Various touristic and financial considerations have also caused London to be rebranded as the City of Heritage. But literary London is not nearly as palatable a construction for writers who, like William Blake and Virginia Woolf, have long characterized it as whimsical, erratic, and palimpsestic. Now, in the twenty-first century, literary psychogeographers have subjected London to a sort of conceptual disfigurement whereby London is more a web of fantastical and historical associations. This chapter defines the literary psychogeography of London by establishing its fragmentary and incoherent qualities, the lineage of which is traced to Viktor Shklovsky’s idea of literariness, André Breton’s surrealism, and Guy Debord’s Situationism. Keywords Vision · Surrealism · Situationism · Thatcher · Flâneur

London is an assemblage of visions. Most commonly ascribed to London is the image of the urban sprawl unfolding just below Christopher Wren’s St. Paul’s Cathedral; or the panorama of landmarks encompassing the Thames, the Tate Modern, the Globe Theater, and the Tower Bridge © The Author(s) 2020 A. Tso, The Literary Psychogeography of London, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52980-2_1

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(the last often mistaken for London Bridge). Some visitors inspect every London street, expecting to discover the aftermath of Hogarthian carnivals, remnants of A Harlot’s Progress or The Rake’s Progress. Others desire the ultimate steampunk experience: is it still possible to explore Whitechapel, the setting of BBC’s Ripper Street ? These disparate impressions—cinematic, pictorial, literary—accentuate the city’s many inconsistencies, its whimsicality, and its contradictoriness, all amounting to a certain vitality, a certain London-ness of London. The quality of “London-ness” has trickled through not a few wellknown London novels to infect literary psychogeographies of the present; its characteristic dissonance destabilizes London and unravels its ties to other global financial hubs, all hinged together by rapid cash flows and steady streams of tourist-consumers. London-ness is especially palpable in Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World, which begins with the future uncertainty young Shakespeare once had to confront. For the budding playwright, seventeenth-century London was the very Wheel of Fortune that could have spun his future in many possible directions. To enter the filthy and plague-ridden city, Shakespeare had to board a vessel that was going to travel “downriver” to the Tower of London (Greenblatt 164), and just like other newcomers, he suppressed any thoughts of The Tower’s eerie resemblance to Dante’s Gate of Hell, the very sight of which warned visitors to abandon hope (“Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch entrate” [Abandon hope, all ye who enter]). The Traitor’s Gate in particular compelled these travelers to remember Thomas More, Thomas Cromwell, and Guy Fawkes—Fortuna’s most notable victims. Thomas More’s confinement to this Dantesque locale in London may have given a dystopian aftertaste to not a few utopian dreams, and London’s dystopian potential still grips the modern imagination. This dystopian thread certainly did worm its way into the nineteenth century and into the mind of Charles Dickens, whose Barnaby Rudge (1841) reveals a fascination with incidents of unrest in the city. The novel offers an account of the Gordon Riots of 1780: a protest against the Catholic Relief Act of 1778 which later escalated into a series of general political movements. The violence began in Westminster but spread to Welbeck Street, Wapping, and Spitalfields. Westminster was also the setting of the Gunpowder Plot, whose goal was to “install a Catholic government that could have countered the Protestant persecution of the Catholics in the early modern British state” (Croteau 95). The movement’s mastermind Guy Fawkes embodied an anarchic force implanted right in the

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Tower of London, the foundation of England’s law and order. In Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta (2005), codename “V”—Guy Fawkes’ successor in anarchy—ensures the unrestrained proliferation of chaos in subterranean London. V is intent on systematically attacking Westminster, London’s political heart, in order to “clear its clogged arteries.” London’s persistent flirtation with the dystopian, the anarchic and sometimes the apocalyptic means that its identity has never been stable: futuristic, apocalyptic visions of London are necessarily enjoined with histories of political plots dating as far back as to the early modern period. However, if London was once the picture of disorder, it was also a city of regulated trade and material indulgence Eighteenth-century London captivated writers as a mechanism of “new production and marketing techniques” (McKendrick 1); a regulator of consumer habits put in place by the Industrial Revolution and the “consumer revolution” to follow. In A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, Daniel Defoe observes that “the present encrease of Wealth in the City of London […] spreads itself into the Country, and plants Families and Fortunes, who in another Age will equal the Families of ancient Gentry, who perhaps were Bought out” (60; italics in the original). Once again London is imagined as the arbiter of fortune, this time meting out wealth to families in England and other parts of the British Isles. Then came the Romantic poet William Blake, who grew up in a neighborhood once known as a “token of early eighteenth-century urban gentility” but later deemed fit only for “painters and cabinet-makers” (Ackroyd in Blake 30): Golden Square. Beyond these grounds London was not quite the picture of wealth of Defoe’s description. Rather, Blake saw filth and chaos: “[t]he heads of the condemned were still rotting on Temple Bar, the stocks were still a great public spectacle, and soldiers were lashed on the streets” (Ackroyd in Blake 31). He saw London from a prophetic vantage point that was granted him for having been “in a world that ignored him” (Ackroyd in Blake 35). This outsider perspective, being rooted in the margins of London, seems to have cast Blake in the role of the flâneur, someone unperturbed by “the commercial forces that will eventually destroy him” (Benjamin qtd. in Coverley 64). The flâneur’s perspective is discreet but openly, unmistakably subversive whereas Blake’s is rather more “transcendent.” It was perhaps never Blake’s intention to resist the system of consumerism from which he had felt disengaged from the start. He was never quite a cog in the machine because London never presented itself to him as a mere machine, or a

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mere function within a broader economic system. In The Book of Urizen, Blake concedes that “sight and the visual image” may “hold a central function” in the act of creation (Piccito 195), and that such visions may represent London as a spectacle with a focal point and a defining center: a London-ness to hold all London visions in place. Nevertheless, so-called London-ness is not truly an essence (esse) inherent in a vision but only a destabilizing element, a part of a creative process whereby “Urizen’s children burst into life through the elements to make spectacular visual entrances” (Piccito 195). His fantasy of Jerusalem—of London and its London-ness—constitutes only a narrative centerpiece branching off into radically dissimilar, sometimes contradictory visions. London-ness is that which reveals the multiple centers of various London otherworlds, and as such it cannot maintain either the unity or the structural integrity of any rational London epic. Blake never achieved a coherent portrayal of the London-ness of London insofar as it was never a subject concrete enough for sustained contemplation. The focal point in question merely reflects the presence of the mystical in the rational, or the other in the self. The concept of London-ness therefore reinforces Arthur Rimbaud’s sentiment that “I is Another” (“Je est un autre”): in seeking to capture the Londonness of London, London writers defamiliarize what lies in plain sight, sometimes with the bold ambition to extricate themselves from what is by all appearances a spectacle of consumption. To put it another way, Blakean London is situated not in the center of a consumer revolution but in the mystical margins, where free-flowing visions uproot the city from any established foundation of understanding. London-ness, the energy emanating from these mystical regions, routinely assert its presence while giving London writings beyond Blake’s time a whimsical flair. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dolloway (1925), London is the very picture of incongruities, where— the business part of the city people were not eternally occupied with trivial chatterings, but with thoughts of ships, business, law, administration, while the atmosphere was at the same time so stately, gay, and pious. In this unknown part of London Elizabeth [the heroine] feels the thrill of a pioneer, the excitement of someone on tiptoe exploring a strange house by night with a candle, on edge lest the owner should suddenly fling wide his bedroom door and ask her business, nor did she dare wander off into queer alleys, tempting by-streets, any more than in a strange house open doors which might be the bedroom doors, or sitting-room doors, or lead straight into the larder. (206)

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Even institutions of economic reason and legal judgment serve as portals to otherworlds where realism and romanticism converge, the one layered on top of the other to give the cityscape depth. Depth—the depth of a palimpsest—is an aesthetic property distinct to London; a token of “London-ness” in literary depictions of London. What I mean by the “depth” of London-ness is precisely this meeting (but not quite the merging) of a wide range of perspectives: the commercial, the realist, the romantic, the Dantesque, the English, the diasporic, and so on. London—London lifestyle, the whims of London—may well contribute to many a study of English culture, but the London-ness of London is too paradoxical, too erratic a quality to describe plainly without any contextual references. Peter Ackroyd only calls this city of extremes “infinite.” Considering that “infinite London” comprises “London of all times and all periods” (Ackroyd 33), we may imagine London-ness as an amalgamation of experiences elongated well into infinity, so that experiences of London-ness would be infinite in length and fathomless in-depth. London-ness negates and estranges in its conception any ready visions of the city with well-defined focal points, the city having been subject to such a wide array of literary examinations. London has been written by born-and-bred London writers including John Betjemen, Bernardie Evaristo, John Keats, Andrea Levy, Will Self, Zadie Smith, Peter Ackroyd, Evelyn Waugh, and Virginia Woolf. Depictions of (post-)colonial London as a migration hub are also aplenty: J.G. Ballard, Charles Dickens, Wilson Harris, Doris Lessing, Colin MacInnes, Katherine Mansfield, V.S. Naipaul, and Iain Sinclair are only some among the countless London writers who were born in other parts of Britain, if not in other parts of the world altogether. Many of these literary Londons interweave perspectives of different times and so lay bare London’s “depth,” launching London into infinity. The early modern period asserts its presence in the futuristic London where V for Vendetta is set; Moore’s apocalyptic prophecy echoes the plot of Dickens’s 1841 Novel; furthermore, the twentieth-century London of Woolf’s description simultaneously evokes Defoe’s business hub and Blake’s Romantic visions. This synchronization of various times in literary London mirrors the many random appearances of ancient relics in actual London. For example, Bermondsey Abbey—where King John officially endorsed the Magna Carta in 1215—was discovered by chance between Paddington and St. Pancras, during a construction project in 1904. London-ness is that which unifies these various impressions of London,

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and as such it is the meeting point between drastic differences—from that between the literary and the actual, to that between the past and the present. The literary psychogeography of London represents an attempt to map out all such seemingly coincidental connections.

Psychogeography and Literary London Before I explain psychogeography’s Situationist imputation, I will first examine interpretations popularized by Ackroyd, Moore, and Sinclair. Beginning in the 1950s, not a few British writers have set upon themselves the task of detecting London’s proliferating histories, weary as they were of certain reconstruction schemes that erased “whole areas” of “historical legacy” (Hubble and Tew 3) for the sake of making the city a key player in an American-led global economy. The consequent surge in property prices has meant a mass exodus from the London core to the suburbs and beyond. The redevelopment of the Docklands has also uprooted the working classes in a neo-colonial fashion. The M25 ringroads—constructed to “facilitate fast-flowing traffic” (Hubble and Tew 5)—have encouraged Londoners to commute to the city only on business days, causing these commuters to grow estranged from the interlocking visions that constitute London. Nick Hubble and Philip Tew have described the same obscure constitution as follows: [w]hat constitutes the city at a human level experientially, and whether the urban identities and cultures in London, including traditional cultures, variously, at both an individual and collective level, are capable of resisting, interrogating, incorporating, or even subverting the processes of the global economy that some see as the major contributing factor in reshaping the city. (2)

This bundle of contradictions—the traditional and the modern, the individual and the collective, the global and the domestic, the inclusive and the exclusive—prevents London from being too compatible with any particular episteme, that of the global economy included: this, I will argue, is London-ness made manifest. Literary psychogeography is as much concerned with global capitalism as with other prevalent social anxieties. Annalisa Di Liddo has attributed the following priorities to the following authors: Angela Carter is dedicated to “reversing class and

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gender roles through performance” (169). Sinclair is interested in “the image of London over the centuries,” eager as he is to put together and “do justice to all the London voices he can hear” (Roz Kaveney qtd. in Di Liddo 170). Michael Moorcock is equally intrigued by the notions of intertextuality and performativity in his “consideration of otherness [gender, ethnic, class double] and its contribution to the evolution of the UK” (Di Liddo 172). Moreover, China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun raises environmental concerns overlooked in London but readily confronted in subterranean London, an otherwordly “London- below,” while Ackroyd suggests in London Under that the Underground (the Tube) can be “seen as an oppressive system, part of the worktime nexus of contemporary capitalism” (159). The emphasis inevitably falls upon the vortex of images and voices which has given London its palimpsestic constitution, and which I will call “London-ness.” The notion of London-ness is derived from Victor Shklovsky’s idea of literariness (literaturnost ), the latter being “neither the only pertinent aspect of literature, nor merely one of its components, but a strategic property informing and permeating the entire work, the principle of dynamic integration […]” (Erlich 198). Literariness is what makes a literary text a unified concept distinct to the mind. Shklovsky has famously maintained (literary) art as a technique dedicated to “mak[ing] objects ‘unfamiliar’ by increasing the difficulty and length of perception”: “the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important ” (Shklovsky 12; italics in the original). Literariness may therefore be viewed as a cognitive difficulty which gives the text length and depth: a three-dimensional personality that the reader cannot grasp at first glance. Those engaged in writing London-ness feel no less disoriented in London than the reader, since London-ness, much like literariness, defamiliarizes familiar things to “lea[d] us away from their ‘recognition’” (Shklovsky’s phrase 19). The London-ness inherent in London writings likewise alienates writers and readers alike. The connection asserted between Russian Formalism and urbanism is far from arbitrary. As Victor Erlich reminds us, the “‘urbanism’ of the Futurist poets” can be branded a “revolution in poetic vocabulary” by virtue of having introduced new and unorthodox word-combinations (Erlich 195) relating to cities. What this monograph concerns are London writings that discover new vocabulary alongside new voices—writings whose divided narrative voices already suggests that “I,” the Londoner, is

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another. London-ness is the very alterity within “I,” impelling “I” to envision alternative universes, thus to write “London otherworlds” through the lens of psychogeography. London-ness is here the city’s whimsicality (mentioned earlier in reference to Defoe and Greenblatt), the very character trait that Ackroyd celebrates in his seven-hundred-page biography on London. The same characteristic fickleness once caused Urizen’s children—otherworldly Londons—to burst into existence before Blake’s very eyes, and since then it has compelled Angela Carter, Michael Moorcock, China Miéville, Maureen Duffy, J.G. Ballard, Sinclair, and Moore (among others) to envisage other fragmented Londons. Many of these London writings owe their infinite playfulness to the conception of London-ness, so much so, that the one can hardly be considered independently of the other. A few words on the political situation that confronted Britain in the late twentieth century may shed further light on this revived interest in London’s volatile personality. The fear that London would become a mere cog in the global capitalist machine had much to do with Margaret Thatcher’s growing friendship with Ronald Reagan in the 1960s, which, for some, signaled the United Kingdom’s undue submission to American influence. Owing in part to Thatcher’s indoctrination, the British public became especially fixated with notions of national harmony and “unity,” or “the British way of life” (Hall 23), in the 1980s. Thatcherism saw the revival of a British traditionalism, which emphasized duty and responsibility to self and family, but self-interest and competitive individualism in relation to society at large (Hall 48). Thatcher was decidedly neoliberal. She “Americanized” Britain to make it a more competitive capitalist state. Locally, she “Los-Angelized” London, encouraging the practice of “private renting” on the one hand, and the existence of gated communities on the other (Colombino 62–4). The “great American passion for city planning” infected London so heavily that the city was “applied to the task of redrawing the map of our capital in straight lines” at the risk of being “banali[sed]” (Coverley 76). In brief, Thatcherite traditionalists were neoliberals who held dear individualistic economic principles that justify exploitations of the urban poor, and the inadequacies of the welfare system in tandem. It was assumed that individuals will thrive even without welfare, so long as they remain

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competitive in the market economy.1 Indoctrination of this kind upheld for Thatcher a social order grounded on an “authoritarian populism,” which counted on the masses to support, in a patriotic fervor, a reactionary state (Hall 35, 42) supposedly dedicated to making the nation as competitive as possible.2 To cultivate this patriotism, Thatcher reminded Britons that they were the proud descendants of the Victorians: she took care to reserve “entrepreneurial capitalism” for bourgeois men, and the Victorian notion of domesticity for women (Hall 85). “Extreme social factions” (youths, immigrants, ethnic minorities) she condemned as disreputable, therefore un-British (Hall 70). In 1982, Thatcher even went so far as to further Britain’s imperial tradition in the Falklands, consequently “advanc[ing] steadily towards the past” (Hall 70); she was remodeling the nation into a synchronic universe wherein present and past (Thatcherite and Victorian Britain) aligned to ensure historical continuity. Her fiction ipso facto concerned Britain’s inheritance of a Victorian greatness, from its progressivism to its imperialism. Thatcher celebrated the British tradition of greatness while her successors have striven to turn this national greatness into “heritage,” a lucrative business best known through some well-known BBC reproductions of Victorian classics, or nostalgic TV shows like Downton Abbey, Victoria, and The Crown. Encouraging cultural homogeneity and competitive individualism, “Heritage” seems to be an answer to the twinned threats of Americanization and global capitalism—in short, the appropriate blueprint for London’s redevelopment schemes. Here I shall refer to Hawksmoor’s edifice in Whitechapel in order to elaborate on the meaning of Heritage. Whitechapel is now known as the “home” of Jack the Ripper, an English icon who figures prominently in Moore’s and Sinclair’s works. At present, Whitechapel is a touristic

1 Edward Soja argues that neoliberalism per se is a simulacrum. Neoliberalism has simulated (if the word is taken to mean “to pretend to have what you do not have”) myriad international crises—e.g., the Cold War, social unrest instigated by black criminals—in the course of modern history (346–7). Ready solutions (e.g., “images of economic recovery and job growth”) (Soja 346–7) are then engineered to “solve” these problems, creating a perfect sense of causality, a perfect order otherwise known as a simulacrum. 2 Bob Jessop, Kevin Bonnett, Simon Bromley and Tom Ling have jointly disputed Hall’s reading of Thatcherism, which questions neither “the rule of the dominant classes,” nor the structural underpinnings of the class system (115). These scholars call for a leftist counterpoint to Thatcherite parliamentalism more effective than Hall’s, namely one that promotes a “legitimate representation of the people” (117).

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area pandering to the desire for Heritage, selling memories of Jack the Ripper at every street corner where he might have lurked. For a fee of ten pounds, tourists are guided through the neighborhood and shown the infamous crime scenes where they are invited to touch the doors and walls the Ripper just might have touched. After the tour, visitors are advised to take a break at The Ten Bells where the Ripper and his victims just might have frequented. The pub is conveniently located beside Christ Church, the area’s landmark (Fig. 1.1). Sinclair has said the following of Christ Church: “Christ Church, in the person of a representative of the Spitalfields Trust, was the only Hawksmoor Church that charged us to climb the tower” (Lights Out 126). He adds that on the day of his visit, a “documentary was being shot in which Alan Moore realigned the church and its fellow East London leviathans according to some dangerous occult prescription. Nicholas Hawksmoor’s flagship had willingly rented itself out as a set for Clive Baker’s history of horror” (Lights Out 126) (Fig. 1.2).

Fig. 1.1 The Ten Bells

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Fig. 1.2 Christ Church Spitalfields: the work of Nicholas Hawksmoor

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Christ Church Spitalfields is then the epicenter of the Ripper’s labyrinth, the Heritage business in which Sinclair says Moore is complicitous. Moore’s vision of the London urban sprawl might have helped inspire the redevelopment of Whitechapel or of Spitalfields, as the Heritage institution names it. The official goal here is to give visitors a chance to feel the chill the Ripper inspired in the hearts of Victorian women (and some others) who wandered around the infamous East End in the thick of the night. Establishments such as The Ten Bells are preserved to enhance the experience, to render the area a portal into the past (Fig. 1.3). Christ Church, now the flagship of the Spitalfields heritage institution (circa. 1666, as indicated in the photograph above), is especially guilty of making the area a cheap thrill for tourists: it has offered up its heights to opportunists (like Moore, writes Sinclair) who set out to

Fig. 1.3 “A Spitalfields Institution 1666”: a view of Spitalfields market from inside The Ten Bells

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commodify views of London from high above.3 Anyone who pays to climb the tower could enjoy a bird’s-eye view of London, a sprawling but highly functional, structurally coherent cityscape. Spitalfields touts London’s agedness alongside its political authority, as do the Thames and the Docklands. The whole of London consequently embodies an English history too coherent, too perfect to be true. Sinclair nonetheless prophesies that imperfect parts will emerge to ruin this perfect whole, and he facilitates the process by calling attention to these incoherent parts in his writing. It is likely that Sinclair writes psychogeography to recover the forgotten parts of English history: Writers like Sinclair himself and Alan Moore, among others, hoping to “rescue” the past or reclaim “dead ground,” will have to grapple with such “pressure groups” as “developers, clerks, eco freaks, and ward bosses” (146) who are hoping to curtail or erase the remaining traces of historical change in order to remove disruptions and destabilizing “lived” elements from official versions of the past. Psychogeography becomes both a potential countermovement and a commentary on the way English space is produced as heritage, for example by drawing attention to the violence and trauma out of which sanitized tourist locations are forged. (Ho 109)

Heritage is history after it is purged of elements that disturb the quotidian everyday dreamt up by said “developers, clerks, eco freaks, and ward bosses”; it is a seemingly cogent, self-congratulatory rereading of Englishness which seems to find vindication in every street corner around London. According to Elizabeth Ho, Moore and Sinclair mean to “rescue” a history that might yet be retrieved “downriver”—although psychogeographers may not choose to articulate this purpose so coherently: the two write psychogeography to communicate a loss of meaning, after all.

3 Sinclair might have vilified Christ Church because of its longstanding history as an instrument of political repression. Many Anglican church-buildings were built in London after the Tories passed The Act of Parliament in 1711, “in response to the clergy’s fears that the non-conformist sects that had played such an important part in the revolution of the previous century were now flourishing in the East End” (Ashford, n.p.). Then, in the eighteenth century, when “French refugees living in Whitechapel protested […] at the decline in their trade, the troops that crushed the uprising were barracked in Christ Church” (Ashford, n.p.). To this day, “Hawksmoor’s churches continue to project this illusion of state control – blamed in contemporary psycho-geographical literature for crimes resulting from the state’s failure to prevent economic and societal breakdown […]” (Ashford, n.p.).

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Moore portrays English history itself as a spectacle falling into pieces, or a broken-down whole not immediately comprehensible. By contrast, Sinclair has far less faith in “the whole” in that he does not believe that alternate London realities should proliferate within the confinement of a framework. Sinclair is more interested in parts that bear no apparent relation to one another. This absolute incompatibility between parts leads Sinclair to believe that the whole will not hold, no matter how perfect it appears. Still, it is not incorrect to call psychogeography a rescue mission or a mission impossible, since it is in fact the rationally inconceivable that these literary psychogeographers want to capture. As writers of Ripperology, Sinclair and Moore both wish to detect the “original” Whitechapel because it is all but gone, the area having been “regenerated” by the government. To quote Ho again, That Ripperature and psychogeography coalesce around the East End is deliberate: the area has received the most attention from Thatcher’s efforts at regeneration through investment capitalism and contains many diverse political elements and identities that can be considered as anti-Thatcher. From Hell ’s 1998 appendix, set in what remains of Whitechapel, reminds us that reclamation and regeneration as a kind of colonization, masked as New Labor’s modernization, continues. (Ho 115)

London has become the microcosmic representation of Thatcherite Britain, an ultrarational totality prioritizing a “competitive and hence exploitative exercise of power” (Moylan 185) over economic prosperity and employment. Moore (for one) equates regeneration with homogenization. If the government “regenerates” Whitechapel by downplaying, or worse, covering up, its historic political diversity, then Moore will explore its depths to prove Heritage a lie, and he writes about the above/below dialectic precisely to resist draconian forms of rationalism. Dystopian visions bolstered by connotations of dereliction, sometimes utter destruction, are consequently integral to these literary psychogeographies; psychogeographical representations of London are often shockingly discontinuous, and its dystopian tendencies often impossible to rationalize. Much like utopian and dystopian writings that envision “otherworlds,” the genre of literary psychogeography:

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1. foregrounds ostensible irrationalism and private paranoia, corroding any appearance of social uniformity (“cultural harmony”) from within; 2. ruptures spatial continuity and confuses reason in what one may call a Blakean fashion; 3. inspires multiple interpretations of London and its history, contra official propaganda. According to Colombino, psychogeography transforms London, otherwise marked by “grim industrial wastelands and tower blocks,” into the home of “eccentrics and bohemians,” those considered “dynamo[s] for cultural ferment” (18). The implicit purpose of literary psychogeography is to deconstruct all understandings of London that seem too self-evident—too easily justifiable within a “neoliberal anti-utopia [long] sustained by transnational capital” (Moylan’s expression 184) and rationalized exploitation. London-ness here serves as a means to explain the elusive property of estrangement which lies (as I have so far contended) at the core psychogeographical London writings. London-ness per se is distinct for its infinite length and palimpsestic depth. However, any further commentary on these aesthetic qualities must be founded on the psychogeography’s tie to Situationism, since the imperative to see the cosmopolis incoherently is common to both.

The Situationist Movement: ˆ Question Empiricism and the Flaneur The beginning of Situationism marked a divide between literary aesthetics and empirical expression, though neither side was any less devoted to subverting urban capitalism. The flâneur and the empiricist both prioritize the experience of being in the city despite their avowed differences. They both distrust urban experiences based on what is visually evident, and both dwell in the city in hopes of intuiting the city in its true and noncommercial form. To understand the notion of empirical psychogeography, further consideration must be given to the “classical notions” to which Guy Debord refers, and to the flâneur whom he so distrusts. The flâneur, as Coverley explains, is—

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a composite figure—vagrant, detective, explorer, dandy and stroller—yet, within these many and often contradictory roles, his pre-dominant characteristic is the way in which he makes the street his home and this is the basis of his legacy to psychogeography… soon the mental traveller, immortalised by Blake, was to make a comeback […]. (65; my italics)

William Blake, Daniel Defoe, Thomas DeQuincey, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Walt Whitman, and Walter Benjamin were some forbearers of psychogeography who formed striking mental impressions of the city wherein they wandered (see Coverley 11–20). Benjamin himself describes the flâneur as a writer who, on entering the market space, “look[s] around as if in a panorama” (66) to gather “a store of information” (67). This information can be compiled into a “panoramic literature” (Benjamin’s expression 66) of sorts. Some empiricists may decry the impressionistic, unempirical fashion in which this information is gathered, though, ironically, some early flâneurs did consider themselves empirically inclined. Flânerie, says Walter Benjamin, “went back to the physiognomists of the eighteenth century” whose claim to empiricism went in tatters when they “assured people that everyone could—unencumbered by any factual knowledge—make out the profession, character, background, and lifestyle of passers-by [in the city]” (70). The premise of universal objectivity, thus imposed on “everyone,” finally made failed empiricists of these flâneurs . Be that as it may, some flâneurs remained committed to their so-called empirical cause. Counted among them was Charles Baudelaire, who saw empiricism as his defense against “the daily shocks and conflicts of civilization [the microcosm of which would be the city of course]” because he was convinced that “the dangers of the forest and the prairie” would pale in comparison to those of the city (Baudelaire qtd. in Benjamin 71). The compact space of the city “intensif[ied]” the “struggle for survival,” says Baudelaire, brought out the worst in human nature and caused individuals “to make an imperious proclamation of [their] interests” (Benjamin 71). Baudelaire only trusted flâneurs to have acumen enough to detect the “conspirator[s]” in the crowd, to reason and “play detective” (Benjamin’s expression 72) amid the madness of the city. Baudelaire would therefore call flânerie an exercise in reason as Debord would psychogeography. The flâneur’s problem lies with his assumption that he could observe the city from within and still judge it impassively: why is he alone impervious to the city’s compromising influences, and how is it that he could study the crowd (of which

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he is a part) with intellectual detachment enough to differentiate crooks from innocent citizens? Can these detached visions capture the length and depth that characterize cities such as London? Debord objected to these impressionistic depictions of the city—to the “playful practices of the Dadaists” (Coverley 88), specifically—for achieving nothing more than “continuing an ongoing process of mergers and splits in a bizarre parody of corporate institutions to whose overthrow they were dedicated” (Coveryley 88). Debord felt that these parodies of corporate institutions were lacking a specific political purpose, since they never presented any “data from which serious scientific research could progress”; their playfulness even seemed to be an indication of insufficient “theoretical rigo[r]” (Coverley; italics in the original 88). He tried to “remed[y]” the “whimsical excesses” (Coverley’s expression 88) of early urban explorers when he published A Critique of Urban Geography in September 1955 so as to announce Situationism’s political turn. Psychogeographers, says he, should only “investigate…the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals” (Debord qtd. in Coverley 88, 89). Debord defined “geography” as that which “deals with the determinant action of general natural forces, such as soil composition or climatic conditions, on the economic structures of a society, and thus on the corresponding conception that such a society can have on the world” (Debord qtd. in Coverley 88). Psychogeography does not “contradict the materialist perspective of conditioning of life and thought by objective nature” (Debord qtd. in Coverley 88) but only emphasizes that nature is integral to society and, by extension, the world. Since society is nature in a civilized form and the world is an aggregate of societies, the rules of nature should hold sway in any society, any part of the world. Debord saw psychogeography as a scientific inquiry into the city’s affective influence on city-dwellers, one predicated on geography, an empirical field of study. He meant to continue in the Dadaist project of “overthrowing” urban corporatism but only with more pragmatic caution. Nevertheless, psychogeographical reenvisionings of the commercial city will not be any less creative, for even the empirical affects everyone differently and can be represented in many different ways. Urban empiricism can only be articulated in terms that “retain a rather pleasing vagueness” (Debord qtd. in Coverley 88, 89), as a consequence,

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and, for Debord, no adjective has more of this quality than “psychogeographical.” Moreover, this “pleasing vagueness” empowers psychogeography against the commercial city which, as Henri Lefebvre argues in The Production of Space (1991), sees the power of state distributed among “various aspects of social practice—legislation, culture, knowledge, education,” and so the city as a whole is “an accumulation of capital,” the source of the state’s oppressive power (Lefebvre 280, 281). That is to say, free-market economy corrodes social structures in the city that are the geographical markers of social unity and welfare, although a semblance of order has been projected onto this corrosion to conceal it from urbanites as they go about their day-to-day lives. The order in question is panoptic, and the city itself is a panopticon that regulates every movement and every (consumerist) desire for the generation of capital. In this respect, urban living is an exercise in conformity toward which psychogeographers feel ambivalent, while psychogeography is a rejection of the capitalist economic model/order that the city represents. The view that psychogeography is a scientific attempt to develop an effective method of resistance, namely that of the dérive, is uniquely Debord’s. The dérive forces psychogeographers not only to be dimly aware of the city’s “psychogeographical effects,” but also to respond actively with a display of “playful-constructive behaviour” (Debord’s phrases qtd. in Coverley 96) in the city. Being the culmination of empirical reason, the dérive is an objectively effective weapon against state power in the city; it is supposed to benefit everyone the city oppresses— quite unlike flânerie, which, as Debord is anxious to add, originated in “the classical [by which he means ‘dated’] notions of the journey and the stroll” (Debord qtd. in Coverley 96). These “classical” notions Debord denounces as a cluster of aesthetic ideals envisioned through the whims of a few, indeed the “sort of game [that] is obviously only a mediocre beginning in comparison to the complete construction of architecture and urbanism [i.e., psychogeography and the dérive] that will someday be within the power of everyone” (Debord qtd. in Coverley 91). He goes on to say that psychogeography should not be an ideal “subordinat[ed] to randomness,” but rather the empirical understanding of a “complete insubordination to habitual influences” (Debord qtd. in Coverley 91). Classical psychogeography was said to be subordinated to “randomness” for its lack of a clear purpose: such assertions imply that only as a scientific endeavor could psychogeography be purposeful—not “random” but “complete,” “habitual,” in other words helpful to “everyone,” universal

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(Debord qtd. in Coverley 91). That is also to say, psychogeography discovers its purpose only when it becomes a science pertaining to truth a priori while exposing the falseness of the city as a state apparatus. Seen in this light, psychogeography does not seem any less reliant on the cerebral power of a few than flânerie: even Debord’s revolution would require the initiation of those especially attuned to the city’s psychological effects, for Debord, too, had supposed that these keen observations alone were worthy of the body of science dedicated to “the complete [re-]construction of architecture and urbanism” (Debord qtd. in Coverley 91). What are these observations if not idiosyncratic perceptions expressed in a language of reason, purposed to expose some urban practices as unreasonable? Each group makes its judgment the basis of a science, an empirically “correct” way of thinking, and in this way both groups are emphatically individualistic. This privileging of the “I” compels us to reconsider the writer’s relation to the city. Are idiosyncratic impressions of the city quite the same as alternate visions thereof? How may these writerly impulses underscore the city’s own defamiliarizing qualities, the very city-ness of the city—or, in the context of literary London, the London-ness of London?

Aesthetics and Subjectivity; Literariness and Surrealism The many voices within the urban writer evince fleeting and incoherent impressions of the city, and, in this respect, the urban writer is our conduit to a city’s city-ness. For those more artistically inclined, traveling or the mere act of walking is a mental feat so “contrary to the spirit of the modern city” that it necessarily presents “political opposition to authority” (Coverley 12). But the amount of mental effort these artistic pursuits require would likely strike Debord as self-indulgent, excessive, thus not quite subversive enough to give rise to alternate urban visions: would not a “mental” traveler like Baudelaire, who was a flâneur, solipsistically withdraw into himself and so reject the reality of state oppression? Coverley himself raises a similar objection when he observes that in literature, “the rigorous and scientific approach of the situationists will be offset by the playful and subjective methods of the surrealists” (11). A statement like this juxtaposes politics with aesthetics in such a way that Debord’s psychogeography emerges as the more “rigorous” strategy of resistance, i.e., one

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that is not a mental exercise waylaid by individual whims even as it claims to engage in the all-serious affair of a collective resistant movement. Within this debate, the word “collectivity” evokes a universal perception of reality, if not objectivity per se. Should such reality turn oppressive, the purpose of resistance would become clear to everyone. This privileging of a common, tangible reality the surrealist André Breton cannot help but find oppressive. The favoring of the “waking state,” says he in the Manifestos of Surrealism, is “a phenomenon of interference [on the part of the state]” (Breton 12), a “harsh discipline of the mind” for which Hegel was “primarily responsible” (Breton 181). Breton lays much of the blame on Hegel, whose dialectical method he understands to mean negation, and negation to mean careless dismissal.4 Breton elaborates: [I]t seems impossible to me to assign any limitations – economic limitations, for instance – to the exercise of a thought finally made tractable to negation, and to the negation of negation. How can one accept the fact that the dialectical method can only be validly applied to the solution of social problems? (140)

Common sense, apropos of economics, for example, induces the mind to falsely negate a part of its awareness as a logical contradiction, to the effect that a full cogitation of the world becomes impossible. Breton judges any kind of reason derived from the dialectical method or, relatedly, negation to be lackluster, since the reason of this order offers nothing better than a relative truth founded on exclusion, which therefore “exists only slightly, as in a comparison” (Breton 37). To rectify what is purportedly Hegel’s mistake, Breton introduces surrealism as the discovery of a new sense, a “particular light” having sprung “from the fortuitous juxtaposition of the two terms” (Breton 37). Writing is a rational exercise, but unmediated writing—automatic writing—is at once rational and irrational. Surrealists and automatic writers alike are privy to a superior, transcendental truth because they 4 What Breton does not address is that for Hegel, dialecticism is a “concrete and active process of positive negation” (94), such that “negation” is not quite synonymous with “rejection.” According to Michael Inwood, the word aufhebt is derived from aufheben, and is “used pregnantly by Hegel to mean both ‘cancel’, ‘annul’, and ‘preserve’, ‘fix in mind’, ‘idealize’” (93). The most common rendering of aufheben “is ‘sublate’, coined from the irregular past participle, sublatus, of the Latin verb tollere, which has a similar ambiguity (‘ raise up, elevate’ and ‘uproot, destroy’)” (Inwood in Hegel 193).

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alone are able to rule as possible any “association of ideas” (Breton 37); they alone write to imitate “everything” in the workings of the mind (Breton 39). One may argue that the splendor of this same truth has inspired Sinclair and other like-minded psychogeographers to write automatically, that is, to put together “such a welter of seemingly unrelated elements […] and yet, amongst this mélange of ideas, events and identities, a number of predominant characteristics can be recognised” (Coverley 12). This writing method enables the writer to defamiliarize controlled perceptions of the city for the greater goal of rejecting urban capitalism, and in this way the literary psychogeographer may shed light on the city-ness of a city.

Reading London-Ness in Context To write psychogeography is to highlight the spectacular in an urban space that has otherwise grown familiar; to render overlooked parts of the city visually striking, spectacular. For the purpose of writing London-ness, psychogeographers offer us their impressions of the land, establishing all the while their respective positions in labyrinthine London. These experiences of London are held together in a discontinuous series of visions (like those outlined at the beginning of this chapter), at the heart of which is the alienating city-ness of a city, the London-ness of London. Psychogeographical writings of London are often truncated in style because the subject of their depiction—London-ness—is detected only fleetingly, discontinuously, and when it is finally detected, it gives one a glimpse into the “foreboding labyrinth” (James 70) or the “mélange of ideas” which has made London infinite. Ackroyd has chosen to represent this vision of infinity through an “implosive” (James 70) literary style that should complement the “psychogeographic strategy of excavating [forgotten] urban histories” (James 71)—one undertaken by Ackroyd as well as by Sinclair, Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard, and Maureen Duffy. Among these writers, Sinclair shares Ballard’s interest in estrangement most keenly. Being a science fiction writer, Ballard is naturally more attuned to the effects of defamiliarization. Sinclair is not a science fiction writer, and yet he agrees that “familiar worlds should always be presented as the least real” (James 71). He accordingly chooses to defamiliarize London in the role of “a Blakean poet” (Larrissy 12), while producing in Lud Heat —

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a map of London which shows certain nodal points of malignant power, mostly Hawksmoor’s churches, linked by sinister lines of force. Sinclair finds traces of Egyptian forms, such as pyramids, […] for in Blake Egypt is evil, reflecting a venerable Christian typology. (Larrissy 12)5

Blake was an influence for not only Sinclair but Ackroyd and Moore as well. Not all of these literary psychogeographers are heralded as London visionaries, the successors of Blake, however. A visionary sees beyond the evident; in this vein, a writer interested in the visual marks of history on Londonscape, say, someone like Ackroyd, could be suspected of being an “antiquarian.” Antiquarian models of psychogeography are at base “conservative,” for antiquarian writers do not write the “magical” (Coverley’s word 126) but instead attribute magical qualities to the mundane everyday, inventing illusions of possibility in an otherwise oppressive urban environment. The literal and nostalgic readings of the city which they venture are “diametrically opposed in both spirit and practice to Debord’s [original] conception” (Coverley 126)—in truth rather too compatible with the Heritage agenda. Ackroyd for one has been accused of allowing a “Catholic religious sensibility” to guide him in reflecting on some eminent characters in the English cultural canon (e.g., Thomas More, Nicholas Hawksmoor, William Blake, Thomas Chatterton). Having identified Catholicism as the “mystical sense of eternal stasis” inherent in English literature, Ackroyd is thought to have served the Heritage Industry well (see Coverley 126–7). Yet eternity does not here refer to an essentialist reading of culture— an ideology armed with distinct characteristics—for when Ackroyd speaks of English culture, he rather has in mind well-known London characters (both fictional and historical) who are key players in London’s biography. For Ackroyd, London consciousness, the London-ness of London, consists of every historical lens that has ever been placed on London. He adds in elaboration that “Dasein is not subjective” in that it “manifests itself in the beings that surround us; it is not concealed as an ‘essence’ or inner cause since it lies in the act of existence itself” (69). 5 Colombino reads psychogeography rather differently because she is first and foremost

preoccupied with Lefebvre’s theory of space. For her psychogeography is a narrative practice whereby body is space, such that the urbanscape of London ipso facto expresses its subjectivity through the flâneur. That is to say, the Londoner’s body “replicate[s] internally the external conditions of political and social struggle” (Colombino 1), while multiple Londoners embody the “phantasmagoria” (Colombino 13) of the London streets.

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In Notes for a New Culture, he readily admits that he is fascinated with “Englishness” because he too often idealizes the Englishman, but in an exercise of caution, he hastens to point out that the paradigmatic English writer is the writer of “counter-mythology” and “anti-writing” like Blake, John Bunyan, or James Joyce. Ackroyd considers these writers the first to rebel against the modernist language of reason, which ignited the English passion for the “continuous, plain, familiar, simple, solid, sensible” (Ackroyd 13). These were the first writers to want to break away from an English modernist tradition entrenched in the belief that the rational “man” gives language “unity” (Ackroyd’s word, 31) and coherence—the very kind T.S. Eliot extolls in his celebrated essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919) (see Ackroyd 31). If Ackroyd ever did interest himself in London-ness as the essence of London, he had only represented it as dis-unified, insensible, abstract— all qualities attributable to London’s whimsicality. As Julian Wolfreys observes, Ackroyd experiences London as a site where “memories and echoes of endless voices merge without coalescing, the seventeenthcentury architect’s [Hawksmoor’s] design jostling for attention with the etchings of Dickens’ illustrator” (173). By contrast, Sinclair resists even “the logic of ordered representation, historical accuracy, or even factual detail” (128). It should not come as a surprise that Sinclair and Ackroyd are here mentioned in the same breath, for despite their differences, both have written about the many-sidedness of London. Sinclair is all too aware of this perceived connection between himself and Ackroyd, and he tells his readers as much in Dining on Stones (2004), where one of his characters reviews another novel Downriver (1991) thus: “After some early success, as a latecomer to the school of Ackroyd and Moorcock, his adjective-heavy style with its verbless sentences passed into disfavour and critical neglect” (Sinclair qtd. in Moshenska, n.p.). I again attribute the disfigured aspect of these London writings to a general interest in London-ness—which one may visualize as a web of associative, arbitrarily connected visions reaffirming Julian Wolfreys’ contention that “London is nowhere” (173). Sinclair and Ackroyd both write disjunctively to reveal a dis-unified consciousness in tandem with fragmented and incomplete visions of London. London-ness is, in this sense, the connecting point for all reimaginings of London that are spectacularly incoherent; a pattern emerging from within Londonscape. London is nowhere precisely because it does not—and in fact should not—possess any defining, essentialist qualities.

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Sinclair especially believes that emerging patterns can reveal, to the trained eyes of a psychogeographer, the many layers of London. Furthermore, any psychogeographer presented with this “evidence” must perform upon it “a series of incisions—in [Lud Heat ] through time and mystification” (Larissy 135), if they are to examine the infinite length and depth that Londonscape has acquired over time. What these psychogeographers are trained to appreciate are precisely London’s palimpsestic appearances, its multifaceted identity, and, as a consequence, the Londonness of London. Bound together by their visions, these London writers frequently allude to one another’s works. Psychogeography they often speak of as a network of artistic associations and influences. To give yet another example: in reference to his 2016 novel Jerusalem, Moore once admitted that he was not able to “move out from under Iain’s [Sinclair’s] influence at least quite so evidently” (Moore qtd. in Talbot, n.p.). Up until he wrote Jerusalem, Sinclair’s Lud Heat (1975) was said to have “catalysed something within” Moore and caused him to become increasingly “preoccupied with landscape, particularly the landscape [he] was living in”: Sinclair’s collection of poetry discharges an “electricity” that can compel anyone to engage with the land on “the most microscopic level of meaning inherent in any place on any street corner” (Moore qtd. in Talbot, n.p.). We may therefore imagine London-ness as an electric current running through the episodic visions of Ackroyd, Sinclair, and Moore. Even when conceived of as a unified whole, psychogeographical London seems to contain within itself multiple otherworldly visions, their incohesion being their one unifying element. These new-age Blakean visionaries—whom I call “literary psychogeographers”—are united by their determination to bond with their urban milieu by means of walking within it. This bond which one may likewise attribute to psychogeography is palpable only to those who choose to view the city as an erratic text to be composed by anyone traversing it. Walking, according to Michel de Certeau, is analogous to speech, since to wander is to introduce new meanings into the urban grid such that “the possibilities of a spatial signifier” multiply (de Certeau 98). The city text, delineated in the form of a grid, confines urbanites, anticipating, and manipulating their gaits at every turn. The grid epitomizes a sort of totalitarianism, a panopticism spawning “technical rationalities and financial” (de Certeau 107). But the urbanite tears his environs asunder from within. He hopscotches and detours to inculcate ellipses (asyndeton) in the authorized urban grammar. In this

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manner, he engenders ambiguities, lapses, and lacunae that synecdochically bespeak the whole (de Certeau 101, 102, 107). Edward W. Soja calls the synecdochic part “the fractal city,” the microcosm whose autonomy attests to this resistance against the authoritarian underpinnings of urban planning (282, 283). It is London-ness that renders London’s appearance palimpsestic and fractal, while imparting to London writings a disjunctive style. However paradoxical it may seem, the same stylistic disruptiveness serves the function of uniting the London writers whom I have identified throughout this chapter: Defoe, Blake, Dickens, Woolf, Moore, Sinclair, Ackroyd, and so on. Having given London depth and length, these literary voices have made London a city deserving of psychogeographical reflection. As Wolfreys argues, words written about London convey “the process” one undergoes to be “translated by the city, so that, as being, our being-inthe-city serves as a singular map, a decentred guide that gives access in singular fashion to any future writing of the city” (Wolfreys 8). Wolfreys’ analysis reaffirms much of the groundwork I have laid for the present study: the future as Wolfreys sees it is derived from the notion of beingin-the-city, in other words from cogitations and decenterings of the city. His philosophy of mapping offers a reading of the milieu posited to be negated, but its purpose cannot be clear because it pertains to a future advent. Wolfreys also alludes to the hermeneutical aspect of London writing, which, he says, must begin in media res , narratives of London having neither a beginning nor an end: “one can never get to the bottom of an abyss, particularly when the abyss is meaning or identity” (Wolfreys 4). Wolfreys’ reading of psychogeography also privileges being and the cogito, though it is not altogether clear in what shape one would find the cogito if its surroundings are entirely fluid: how might being-in-afluid-city be distinguished from being-in-the-world? Could London be psychogeographically conceived, say, as the continuous stretch of water that is the Thames, when Debord always intended psychogeography to mean the “debunk[ing] […] of the continuity of space” (Colombino 16)? It is with Lefebvre’s assertion that a parallel exists between space and body in mind that I raise these questions (and the first one in particular). For Lefebvre, a body projects its sense of “symmetries and asymmetries” into the surrounding space (173) to establish the relation of being-in-the-world. In psychogeography, however, the city is an abyss devoid of meaningful structures such as symmetries and asymmetries.

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What then defines being-in-London?6 To these questions this book offers the following answer: London-ness, being anti-ontological, alienates being-in-London, such that “I” is fated to be another much in the same way London otherworlds are inherent in London. London-ness is a literary aesthetic evocative of a fractal city; an unraveled whole abounding with conflicting local folklores and urban legends. Within the context of literary London, psychogeography is our means to retrieve the layers of alternate London realities at the street-level, all of which estrange the oppressive urban everyday in fantastical/neo-Bleakean terms.

References Ackroyd, Peter. 1996. Blake: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ———. 2012. London: The Concise Biography. London: Vintage Books. ———. 2011. London Under: The Secret History Beneath the Streets. New York: Doubleday. ———. 1976. Notes for a New Culture, ed. Anne Smith. Los Angeles: Vision Press Limited. Ashford, David. 2013. The Mechanics of the Occult: London’s Psychogeographical Fiction as Key to Understanding the Roots of the Gothic. The Literary London Journal 10.2. http://www.literarylondon.org/london-jou rnal/autumn2013/ashford.pdf. Accessed 22 March 2020. Benjamin, Walter. 2006. The Flâneur. In The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, ed. Michael W. Jennings, 66–96. Trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingston, and Harry Zohn Howard Eiland. Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Blake, William. 1978. The Book of Horizon. New York: Random House. Breton, André. 1972. Manifestos of Surrealism. Trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Colombino, Laura. 2013. Spatial Politics in Contemporary London Literature: Writing Architecture and the Body. New York: Routledge. Coverley, Merlin. 2006. Psychogeography. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials.

6 Lefebvre uses the body of a spider as an example: when weaving its webs, a spider projects its sense of “symmetries and asymmetries” and thus “extends” its body into the surrounding space (173, 174). Similarly, most human beings in Western cultures use words and signs to “facilitate metaphorization,” “transport the physical body outside of itself” (203) to make a “representational space” (Lefebvre 203).

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Croteau, Melissa. 2010. London’s Burning: Remembering Guy Fawkesand Seventh-Century Conflict in V forVendetta. In The English Renaissance in Popular Culture: An Age for All Time, ed. Greg Colón Semenza, 89–102. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Debord, Guy. 2008. Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography. In Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings, ed. Harald Bauder and Salvatore EngelDi Mauro. Kelowna, British Columbia: Praxis (e)Press. http://hdl.handle. net/10214/1798. Accessed 22 March 2020. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Defoe, Daniel. 1978. A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, ed. Pat Rogers. London: Penguin. Dickens, Charles. 2003. Barnaby Rudge, ed. Gordon W. Spence. London: Penguin. Di Liddo, Annalisa. 2009. Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Downton Abbey. 2010–2015. TV. London: ITV. Erlich, Victor. 1965. Russian Formalism: History—Doctrine. London, Paris, and The Hague: Mouton Publishers. Gaiman, Neil. 2013. Neverwhere. Toronto: HarperCollins. Greenblatt, Stephen. 2016. Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. New York: W. W. Norton. Hall, Stuart. 1988. The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left. London and New York: Verso. Hegel, Georg. 2004. Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, ed. Michael Inwood. Trans. Bernard Bosanquet. London and New York: Penguin Books. Ho, Elizabeth. 2006. Postimperial Landscape: ‘Psychogeography’ and Englishness in Alan Moore’s Graphic Novel From Hell: A Melodrama in Sixteen Parts. Cultural Critique 63: 99–121. www.jstor.org/stable/4489248. Accessed 22 March 2020. Hubble, Nick, and Philip Tew. 2016. Introduction: Parallax London. In London in Contemporary British Fiction: The City Beyond the City, ed. Nick Hubble and Philip Tew, 1–15. London: Bloomsbury. James, David. 2008. Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space: Style, Landscape, Perception. London and New York: Continuum. Larrissy, Edward. 2006. Introduction: Blake Between Romanticism, Modernism and Postmodernism. In Blake and Modern Literature, 1–17. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Miéville, China. 2007. Un Lun Dun. New York: Del Rey. Moore, Alan, and David Lloyd. 2005. V for Vendetta. New York: Vertigo.

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Moshenska, Joe. 2005. The Energy of the Walker, the Absorption of the Passenger. Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London 3.2. http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/septem ber2005/joe.html. Accessed 22 March 2020. Moylan, Tom. 2000. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Piccito, Diane. 2015. Blake and the European (Pre) History of Melodrama: Beyond the Borders of Time and Stage. In British Romanticism in European Perspective, ed. Steve Clark and Tristanne Connolly, 193–209. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Shklovsky, Victor. 1965. Art as Technique. In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Trans. Lee T. Lemon. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Sinclair, Iain. 2005. Dining on Stones. London: Penguin. ———. 2004. Downriver (Or, The Vessels of Wrath): A Narrative in Twelve Tales. London: Penguin. ———. 2003. Lights Out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London. London: Penguin. ———. 2012. Lud Heat: A Book of the Dead Hamlets. Cheltenham, Gloucestershire: Skylight Press. Soja, Edward. 2000. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Talbot, Nick. 2014. ‘A Funny Kind of Relationship’: Alan Moore on Iain Sinclair. The Quietus. http://thequietus.com/articles/15462-alan-moore-int erview-iain-sinclair. Accessed 22 March 2020. The Crown. 2016–present. TV. London: Left Bank Pictures. Victoria. 2016–present. TV. London: ITV. Wolfreys, Julian. 2004. Writing London, Volume 2: Materiality, Memory, Spectrality. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Woolf, Virginia. 2016. Mrs. Dolloway. London: Penguin Classic.

CHAPTER 2

The Disintegration of London in Alan Moore’s Psychogeography

Abstract Alan Moore’s psychogeography represents a steadily disintegrating vision with a notable implosive quality. In From Hell, every act of murder makes Jack the Ripper ecstatic, granting him a transcendent perspective from which he can see fragments of history simultaneously as they coalesce into English Heritage, a cultural commodity integral to the global capitalist order. Moore’s idealization of spatial coherence is colored, however, by a contradictory fascination with possible spatial disintegrations such as the kind depicted in Jerusalem (2016). Offering this dialectical pairing, this chapter establishes esse—the city-ness of a city, the London-ness of London—as an ideal posited and estranged in one stroke. Here “literary psychogeogeaphy” refers to the dissociative writing style appropriate for the dissecting of the city-ness of English cities; or, to an internal probe for otherworlds untethered to the free market envisioned by Jack the Ripper, a popular antihero in the literary psychogeography of London. Keywords Palimpsest · Northampton · Jack the Ripper · Dissociation · Implosion

© The Author(s) 2020 A. Tso, The Literary Psychogeography of London, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52980-2_2

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Alan Moore once admitted to finding psychogeography “problematic” as “all labels will probably do[,] given enough time. Perhaps, for want of a better phrase, a pre-occupation with landscape had started to emerge from a number of different sources at around the same time” (Moore qtd. in Talbot, n.p.). These interpretive variances may contradict the initial call for psychogeographers to posit “the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment” on “the emotions and behaviour of individuals” (Debord qtd. in Coverley 88), but Moore maintains that even imprecise effects can be corporeal, perhaps as distinctly so as the “electricity” (Moore qtd. in Talbot, n.p.) percolating through not only Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat (1975) but literary psychogeography in general. Moore sees the land’s corporeal appeal as “the most microscopic level of meaning inherent in any place on any street corner” (Moore qtd. in Talbot, n.p.), assuming, as he does, that all lands deserving of psychogeographical attention should be analyzed as specimens of “fractal mathematics” (Moore qtd. in Talbot, n.p.). In his own literary psychogeography, Moore envisions nothing short of the complete fragmentation of lands, for example the fractal London in which From Hell (2006) is set, or the idyllic non-place which, in Jerusalem (2016), represents a crumbling ultranationalism: the parts having proliferated rather too rapidly on their own, the geographical whole no longer seems—from Moore’s psychogeographical vantage point—the sum total of its parts.

From Hell: English History as Jack the Ripper Tells It The “hyper-visual” and “hyper-descriptive” (Di Liddo 17) medium of the graphic novel is then quite well suited for Moore’s literary psychogeography. In From Hell, historical trivia coalesce to give shape to a palimpsestic city: a nineteenth-century London with the cultural ambience of both the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries. Moore himself is wont to include “visual quotations” (Di Liddo 450) of eighteenthcentury cultural artifacts such as William Hogarth’s The Reward of Cruelty (see From Hell, Chapter Nine), while his antihero, Jack the Ripper, is one to flaunt his erudition in matters of the long eighteenth century, from its literati—William Blake, Alexander Pope, and Daniel Defoe—to its architectural ideal, which the works of Nicholas Hawksmoor supposedly exemplify. From Hell showcases the Ripper as an “accumulation of symbolic capital within specific neighbourhoods that contribute to the

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production of marketable narratives for estate agents and property speculators” (Downing 40)—thus as an English icon that has encouraged the fetishization of so-called London Heritage. Having retained the physical marks of Jack the Ripper’s “handiwork,” the Whitechapel neighborhood has shown itself especially adept at fanning the nationalistic nostalgia so crucial to the city’s gentrification. Moore’s contribution to Ripperology came at a time when the Ripper was becoming evermore “English,” for the eerie ambience of nineteenth-century Whitechapel has been preserved well into the present for the benefit of thrill-seeking tourists who still wish to “experience the Ripper.” Pseudo-time-travel of the sort delineates a linear vision of time that strings together some incompatible episodes of London history, some Blakean visions alongside some well-documented spectacles of Whitechapel horror. In From Hell, the murderous savant, surnamed Gull, traverses London to discover remnants of the eighteenth century that are supposed to transport him from the nineteenth century to other times. Gull holds London to be “a literature of stones, of place-names and associations/where faint echoes answer back from off the distant ruined walls of bloody history” (Moore Loc 89), while London history a unified whole projected from deep within the “slums of Hackney” in the form of a “prophetic vision” (Moore Loc 90). Nineteenth-century London is believed to have preserved within itself the London of all times, an eternal London that is the city’s genius loci: the London-ness of London. In eternal London, any visionary traveler may follow Blake’s footsteps and encounter “Milton’s ghost, or the Apostle Paul” (Moore Loc 91). But Gull has the far greater ambition of “discovering” London-ness from within his own preconceptions of English culture and history. His narrative of discovery is one of projection and conquer, one where the long stretch of eternity unrolled across Londonscape is colored by Anglocentric biases. In relation to Ripperology, linearity evokes an ultranationalistic consciousness which I shall call “Englishness”—although this does not mean that Moore’s portrayal of London assumes the same linear structure. Despite Gull’s best efforts, the distinction between London-ness and Englishness is one to be maintained as insistently as it is in From Hell. Whereas London-ness is dissociative in appearance, disintegrating, and in this way palimpsestic, Englishness is coherently organized to the extent of seeming binaristic, rigidly categorical. Structurally speaking, palimpsestic visions impute to London an obscure fourth dimensionality, but Gull’s

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claims apropos of “discovering London-ness” neatly divides time into the distinct linear categories of past, present, and future. These linear narratives authenticate a sentimental insistence on the inherent greatness of Englishness, which will presumably assert itself at the end of time, in the realm of eternity. Unlike London-ness, Englishness is an essentialist representation of heritage that inspires in Gull a resolute determination to elide the divides of time and harmonize all London memories. Gull is a “heritage maker” whereas Moore is not, since From Hell is rather a parodic reflection on nationalistic pedantries about unity, what with its ironic ascription of Englishness to the Ripper’s ravings. Most appropriate is Moore’s decision to recount the Ripper’s search for Englishness in London through the medium of a graphic narrative, a unified narrative form first introduced by Hogarth in the eighteenth century. Here a brief overview of some eighteenth-century graphic art would aid us in understanding the Ripper’s vision of a unified London time that would supposedly exemplify Englishness. Hogarth’s paintings were hailed as revolutionary in the eighteenth century because they “linked together moments [episodes of the London everyday] in a dramatic way that allowed an original story to be told in pictures” (Petersen 46). Here the original story concerns the London-ness of London—i.e., phenomena concerning London whose facticity remains apparent even when taken out of context; when “bracketed” in a phenomenological fashion. A Harlot’s Progress, for example, depicts a “whole array of seemingly ordinary events” in London which accentuates a connection between socials morals and feminine virtue (Petersen 45). These fragments of the London everyday, now placed along a timeline different but nonetheless linear, reveal a significance evident to any appraiser of the painting, for they seem to convey some popular impressions of London life, now unfolding horizontally in graphic form. The painting is able to breathe life into an otherwise two-dimensional representation of the city because its execution required a bold positing of meanings concerning the behaviors of Londoners and the ways of London: the London-ness of London. Horizontal depictions of London essentialize the London character and so “bracket” London-ness as the esse of London; the evident linear progression of time thereby gives form to something as abstract as London’s genius loci. Hogarth’s vision of connecting disparate moments within a unified frame—this act of bracketing—gave rise to a blueprint for “modern sequential graphic narratives” (Petersen 47).

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In the early nineteenth century, Blake became the first to create “hybrid word-pictures” unifying the visual with the symbolic (Petersen 56). In Jerusalem (1804–1820) for instance, “Blake shows himself as a miniature scribe writing backward [in the manner of a visionary prophet] on a scroll which unfolds across the lap of the sleeping giant Albion, who represents both England and all humankind” (Petersen 57). This notion of prophecy implies the continuity of time, which here expands across the lap of a divine figure in whom the English and the rest of humanity are one. Time stretches onward continuously and expansively as though to attest to the union of England and the rest of the world, in a fashion overtly imperial. One could make sense of this patriotic reading of Londonscape with reference to Benedict Anderson, who argues that “nationality, […] nation-ness, as well as nationalism, [are] cultural artifacts of a particular kind” for any nationalist who sees the nation as “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (Anderson 4, 6). Boundaries—physical or metaphorical, geographical or cultural—give shape to a nation and so render it a conceivable whole, a sovereign entity with a cultural esse to recommend it. From Gull’s perspective, a city as old as London necessarily possesses memories and cultural treasures which converge to form a coherent and unified structure, namely, Englishness: an enduring greatness evidently spreading across Londonscape, not unlike the scroll of Blakean prophecies unrolling across the lap of Albion. London seen through Gull’s romantic lens resembles a frieze wherein time is depicted as continuous, linear, diachronic. By the same token, the Blakean notion of unity is distorted into a vision of cultivated cultural greatness, or a celebration of linear progression. What then is psychogeography, and, conversely, to what extent has this faux-psychogeography substantiated nationalistic fantasies like Gull’s? Elizabeth Ho has read From Hell as a psychogeographical narrative composed of the “reverberations of the past and its percolations into the present” (105)—an attempt, that is, to explain apparent randomness and propagate an “emphatic pedagogy of all-encompassing vision and randomness” (119). From Hell leaves Seamus O’Malley with the similar impression that psychogeography refers to “the exchangeability of time and space” (172), or some “historical resonances inherited from the past” (Julia Round qtd. in O’Malley 172). Jason B. Jones adds that psychogeography stifles all impressions of temporal passage to reveal the “monstrosity” of a historical episode that seems an uncanny repetition

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of current social problems (6). The consensus seems to be that psychogeography is a subjective reinvention or a privatization of time projected onto a large, continuous space, and, in From Hell, an interpretation of heritage is indeed superimposed onto Londonscape. This interpretation is not an abstract thought, however, but is rather impersonated—signified—by Jack the Ripper, who not only narcissistically implants himself in the heritage imaginary but also fashions himself as the face of London, the manifestation of the London-ness of London. Bracketed in the Ripper’s London is the narcissistic spirit hoping to extend its influence from London, the heartland where it has taken root, in a horizontal direction. Gull longs for the fourth dimension, the center of history from which all London times and memories derive relational meaning; he wants to prove that Englishness is the esse of London: that is, the fulcrum to reconcile all contradictions for the creation of a unifying national consciousness. This single-minded insistence on “discovering” Englishness at the heart of London epitomizes a faux-psychogeography which favors structures, from geographical centrality to temporal linearity. That is to say, Gull’s study of London is not truly psychogeographical insofar as it is far too structured to accommodate the city as “an experimental site for a radical transformation of subjectivity and social relations” (Downing 38). Structure blinds him to the unraveling, palimpsestic appearance of London-ness but instead preoccupies him with vainglorious fantasies about the fourth dimension: a coherent and unified vision of English Heritage which he hopes to attain, with the blood of five women. But by a stroke of irony, Gull is driven mad by nothing if not his obsession with rational edifices such as linearity and centrality, and indeed Moore portrays Gull the Ripper as an ill-fitting part of the narrative of Englishness, or the compromising part foretelling the wholescale disintegration of the identity-affirming project that is the Heritage Myth. In Moore’s depiction of Victorian London, there exists a villain named Gull, who acts—murders—in the hope of giving shape to his thought and vision, to present to London a cartography of his mind. Gull is a faux-psychogeographer with a keen interest in one question: “What is the fourth dimension?” (Moore Loc 29) The fourth dimension makes manifest the architectural layout of history, explains Gull to his fellow medical practitioner Hinton in Chapter Two, “A State of Darkness.” The fourth dimension is the “chamber of echoes” where past, present, and future “co-exist in the stupendous whole of eternity” (Moore Loc 41). Whoever discovers the fourth dimension will acquire a superhuman awareness of

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a unified time and will become the “architect of humanity” (O’Malley 174). At stake here is a “diachronic explanation of human development” which will “fill the vacuum left [in history] by the Christian tradition and its political structures” (O’Malley 174). Seekers of diachronic explanations (whom O’Malley calls “speculative historians”) will put together “the fragments of life” to discover “the secret of history’s shape” and “the hidden blueprints to human events in the wake of modernity” (O’Malley 174). But Gull is a speculative historian distinct from any other in that he is his own visionary: he believes himself the only legitimate narrator of English Heritage because he sees himself everywhere in London, the supposed center of England. Throughout Moore’s graphic novel, a speech bubble that asks “what is the fourth dimension?” appears against a completely darkened panel whenever Gull reflects on the metaphysical nature of history, or on how time passes more generally. The impenetrable darkness that infuses this panel deprives readers of the privilege of sight, and consequently of their aptitude for spatial navigation in what is presumably the fourth dimension. In this instance, the speech bubble is “a point of anchorage, an obligatory passage” to direct the practice of reading (Groensteen 79, 80). By raising the rhetorical question of what the fourth dimension is, Gull offers to be the reader’s guide in an otherwise inaccessible, unreadable space. He then limits the reader’s role in imagining the narrative world that is here the fourth dimension, the so-called stupendous whole of eternity where all times coalesce but only to make the Ripper the axis of diegetic meaning. One can expect any graphic novel to present “maddeningly vague” fragments of the depicted reality in order to “trigger any number of images in the reader’s imagination” (McCloud 86); in turn, every reader will construct “whole images based on these fragments” (McCloud 87) and imagine the same narrative world differently. This freedom in interpretation—and the consequent supposition of “the existence off screen of an element that has become invisible” (Groensteen 41)—we may call “closure.” The darkness of the fourth dimension as it appears in From Hell can likewise trigger the desire for closure, though Gull’s voice unfailingly pierces through the darkness, as though it were the only source of light and meaning. Remarkably, the protrusion of Gull’s meaning into the obscurity of the fourth dimension occurs beyond the panel described above; it first takes place in Chapter Two, where Gull foresees that the phallus is the key to the fourth dimension, his London vision in fetal

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form. He sees that an obelisk, bathed in sunlight, pierces the darkness of the fourth dimension. Scalpel-wielding, Gull believes himself this piercing light, the means to access eternity (Moore Loc 29). The phallus is his ideological modus operandi with which he spills female blood to connect all times and writes his unorthodox version of English history. The phallus maximizes Gull’s control over his victims’ bodies as well as the reader’s freedom to achieve closure, since it gives him the means to make London the transitional realm between the human and the superhuman. Having transcended (or, rather, repressed) the raw sexuality of the prostitutes, humankind would, according to this rewriting, ascend toward the fourth dimension and become superhuman. Since darkness must descend before meaning can be attained and transcendence achieved, Gull repeatedly spills female blood to induce darkness—to start with a “clean slate,” so to speak. We grasp the symbolic significance of female blood for the first time when Gull and his wife Susan first engage in coitus. These moments of intimacy unfold across the page horizontally, from left to right, to imitate the linear movement of time. These panels are immersed in a darkness that is eventually punctured by Susan’s announcement that “there is blood” (Moore Loc 39), after which Gull “ma[kes] a little sound” (Moore Loc 39) to signal both this spilling of blood and his sexual ecstasy. Gull’s inspection of Christ Church Spitalfields immediately follows, unfolding horizontally across the page as a linear sequence of events, as though the inspection chronologically succeeded the sex scene above. The first panel in the inspection sequence is not only lighted but also elongated, much like the phallic outline of Christ Church Spitalfields, one of the architects Nicholas Hawksmoor’s masterpieces. Here sex in utter darkness and Gull’s visit to Christ Church Spitalfields in broad daylight constitute a non sequitur, whereby female blood and the phallus become connected through a horizontal, associative narrative logic. The tenuous connection drawn between the darkness of blood and the brightness of the phallus functions as a kind of cognitive trigger: any time blood trickles across and darkens the panels, Gull will experience an ecstasy which will inspire him to create meaning, and which he will signify by making a “little sound,” causing a speech bubble to appear and dispel the darkness of unknowing. Gull, as narrator, is then the “connector” which attributes meaning to Englishness; he is the synecdochic representation of Englishness, that is, the connection, the esse, to harmonize visions of so-called Englishness, however disparate they may appear. The non sequitur triggered

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by the spilling of Susan’s virginal blood certainly seems to succeed in guiding Gull toward a Dionysian meaning, which Hawksmoor had supposedly foreseen before Gull. Hawksmoor, who oversaw the construction of St. Paul’s Cathedral alongside his mentor Christopher Wren, belonged to “a secret fraternity of Dionysus cultists, originating in 1000 B.C., [who] worked on Solomon’s temple” (Moore Loc 41). Gull says that “Hawksmoor cut stone to hold shadows” (Moore Loc 41); that Hawksmoor constructed this chamber arresting every slippery truth, every shadow on the walls of Plato’s cave. Hawksmoor’s Dionysian architecture expresses an omniscience which sees connections everywhere and therefore knows no ambiguity. In a similar vein, Gull interprets the fourth dimension as that which tells of one true, originary English history to the exclusion of all other historical speculations. The episteme of London, the city that is the heart of England, is a vision realized through murder— the most effective way to silence others. In Chapter Eight, Gull raises his victim Kate Eddowe’s body parts in one hand and his scalpel in the other (Moore Loc 267). He, a Victorian man, looks upward at a modern high-rise, the elongated form of Hawksmoor’s church tower, another “Dionysian” phallic symbol in the graphic novel. The phallic structure bridges Victorian and contemporary times to complete Gull’s notion of eternity, thus realizing a dimension of existence that precludes all other speculations about time. It is, once again, a non sequitur—a contrived connection—which causes the fourth dimension to materialize: Gull’s butchering of Eddowe’s body gives rise to a bloodbath that darkens the panels, but when this act of violence reaches its climax, Gull finds himself immersed in light rather than in the darkness of blood. This occurrence again unfolds across the panels from left to right in a linear direction: Gull looks away from the corpse because he saw that his shadow was bathed in light. He then looks back toward the light, rubbing his eyes in disbelief, smearing blood across his face as he does so. What Gull finally discovers is the possibility of making further horizontal connections that will establish once and for all that time is linear. The shock brought on by the discovery is conveyed in a full-page depiction of a luminous high-rise. Every drop of blood that Gull spills with his scalpel is supposed to bring about a moment of ecstasy and enlightenment: the high-rise symbolizes the prophetic insight that shines upon Gull, much in the same way Christ Church Spitalfields earlier penetrated the darkness of Susan’s virginal blood to evoke Dionysus. Once

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again, the phallus—the scalpel, Christ Church Spitalfields, the high-rise— emerges from a sea of darkness to offer connection and meaning in the form of a unified vision. Gull now believes that he has witnessed, through Dionysus’ eyes, the triumph of progress and industry, as well as the ambition in the mid-nineteenth century to subdue nature and the passage of time itself. The ritualistic aspect of these violent outbursts shows that Gull is too keen on reproducing the “rigorous geometrical structure” (Di Liddo 77) which he already foresaw on Londonscape; that, ultimately, any such reproduction supports nothing but his “hallucinatory relationship with time” (Di Liddo 77, 79). Sarah E. Maier even goes so far as to call Gull’s psychogeography a “cohesive self-narration,” which “contain[s] only randomness with recurrent motifs and stories either borrowed or unfinished that haunts the detective […] and the reader/audience with the desire for impossible closure” (Maier 203). However, I am inclined to think that Gull’s self-narration coheres as a result of his rantings on Blake, the fourth dimension, and Masonic history, which all culminate in his London vision wherein enshrined a unique but universal Englishness: that is, an esse whose horizontal expansion will overcome all national boundaries and will remain pure despite global capitalism, the threat of which has subjected Londoners and Britons alike to “mean-spirited and ugly” (Moore Loc 475) mass-produced furniture, among other things. To quote O’Malley, what Gull calls “the architecture of history” reveals exactly his conceit that he has “unlocked the secret to history’s shape and purpose” (163), as though “history ha[d] a shape intelligible to some sort of human investigation[,]” and “the narration of the past, whether it be in words or stone, serves as a mere reflection or symbol of a deeper underlying shape of world history” (176, 177). In his vanity, he assumes that if he turns over enough stones, each of which holds a shadow, a withheld truth, he will be able to discern the contours of history where all times supposedly parallel. Equally vain is his supposition that Englishness arises from his desire to organize history into a universal doctrine; that it is his sworn purpose to organize history into a star-shaped circuit connected throughout by “luminous filaments” (Moore Loc 469), themselves reminiscent of mutilated body parts. One might ask if Gull’s feat of narrative completion finally imparts to Moore’s fiction a proper conclusion. After all, From Hell is a “melodrama in sixteen parts” foretelling Britain’s degenerative destiny: for whom is the graphic novel a melodrama and for whom is it realism, however? Gull is

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invested in a universal realism which Moore merely mimics and renders a melodrama. While Gull single-mindedly pursues the fourth dimension, Moore writes the fourth dimension from Gull’s point of view merely to taunt Gull. As O’Malley argues, Moore’s subtitle of a melodrama reveals that Gull is “a talented story-teller rather than a visionary who has access to universal truths” (180). Moore narrativizes and so invalidates Gull’s psychogeographical revelations. Gull has absolute faith in the existence of a unified English history, and yet he is characterized in From Hell as someone who, however unwittingly, casts Queen Victoria as the mastermind of the infamous Whitechapel murders. Moore ironically makes Gull, who esteems himself a Dionysian visionary, the basis of a historical rumor. Of course, Victoria’s involvement amounts to no more than a conspiracy theory, one might even say a groundless speculation. Such paranoid re-readings of the past merely fuel Britain’s rapidly expanding heritage industry, whetting the modern Briton’s—and not only the Ripper’s—appetite for a grand national narrative or a work of patriotic speculative fiction, in a manner of speaking. From Hell may seem to appeal to the common, if inappropriate, interest in the Ripper. Testaments of Victorian progressivism—medicine, photography, and the newspaper, just to name a few—are put toward building the cult of a deranged misogynist. Moore makes the effort to parallel the Ripper’s cult then and now. In Moore’s imagination of Victorian times, Gull’s first murder incites an unseemly excitement among many Londoners. The street where Gull butchered his first victim Polly becomes a site for revelry. A cameraman even gives the revelers instructions to parody the victim’s horror: “If you could clasp you hands over your, er, bosom, a-and, look horrified” (Moore Loc 178). The nineteenth-century media is here seen directing the people’s attention toward the Ripper’s violence in a tone of celebration rather than one of condemnation. Moore cannot level this charge more squarely at his reader when he shows a couple viewing a film about Jack the Ripper in the final sequence concerning Gull’s ascension to the fourth dimension: a woman leans toward her romantic partner for a kiss, though the man in question only urges her to “give it a rest” and leave him in peace to contemplate the “handywork of Jack the Ripper” (Moore Loc 475) portrayed on screen. This behavior reaffirms Gull’s assertion that he is a “syndrome” (Moore Loc 478), that, by remaining intrinsic to English life, he has finally transcended space-time and has become the London-ness of London.

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Gull’s assertion is far from baseless, given that the media today still fans nostalgia, or so Ho has suggested: “Today Jack the Ripper is undeniably English [because,] [i]n the British heritage industry today, Whitechapel, Spitalfields, and the East End in general are promoted through advertising associated with Jack the Ripper” (Ho 103, 104). But while the heritage industry is referential to English exceptionality, London landmarks such as St. Paul’s—which Gull also celebrates in From Hell —are no less so even when considered independently. We, the English, the Britons, or simply tourists from all over the world, revere this architectural testament to English heritage certainly no less than Gull, all of us prompted by a conservative political climate wherein an “identity-preserving, identityenchanting, and identity-transforming aura lingers” (Ian Baucom qtd. in Ho 114). What remains eternal—what the fourth dimension forever safeguards, supposedly—is the ideality of Englishness that has united the “forwardlooking” Victorian middle-class man and the backward-looking, nostalgic English subject of the postwar era: Gull’s nationalistic fervor conjures before him England in the late twentieth century, the point in time when Thatcher likewise endeavored to “put the Great back into Britain” (Ho 106). The pair look into history to search for the “Victorian ideals of morality, global dominance, nationalism and myths of progress—financial, technological, social” (Murray n.p.), all of which are thought to have survived into the twentieth century to preserve the empire, as though empire were, to borrow Anderson’s words, a token of a prized “antiquity in the eyes of nationalists” (5). Moore is not the only literary psychogeographer to have noticed the problem of heritage, for in Downriver, Sinclair likewise presents the following criticism of Thatcher’s conservative politics and, relatedly, her part in the heritage business: “Let the Prince have his Palladian toy around St. Paul’s … It was a sideshow … serviceable for Royal Weddings, which could be timed to coincide with unconvinced byelections” (Sinclair 288). St. Paul’s then represents lineage to the English past; as backdrop to celebrations of the Royalty, the cathedral attests to the blossoming of an exceptional Englishness and the continuity of the English bloodline. As Gull freely admits, “St. Paul’s is in the centre./We [he and his coachman Netley] are at the centre of [the] pattern now… our story’s written, Netley, inked in blood…” (Moore Loc 116, 117): Englishness is as much inked in “our” blood as St. Paul’s is erected upon Londonscape; St. Paul’s is the physical manifestation of “our” English

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core, of Englishness as well as London-ness. The de facto fairy-tale landmark in what could only be called a propagandistic fantasy, St. Paul’s also seems a chamber of eternity where the English present and the Ripper’s optimistic reading of nineteenth-century England coexist. Here St. Paul’s is a symbol of the hyperreal, a sign that the fourth dimension has been attained indeed. The esse of London is not, however, a sign of pure sameness that overcomes and possesses “the people”; rather, it is a network of shadows, ambiguities, and paradoxes—a palimpsest. Similarly, London-ness is not a unified history but is rather more reminiscent of a Dionysian energy, or “the involuntary nature of image, of metaphor” (Moore Loc 373). Esse— the fourth dimension, the originary English truth—must reveal itself in a tempest, “a depth of happiness in which the most painful and gloomy things appear, not as an antithesis, but […] as a necessary color within such a superfluity of light” (Nietzsche Loc 369). London-ness—the axis of the heritage narrative—should possess the dualistic, tempestuous character of a metaphor in order to hasten London’s disintegration, and it will therefore always elude the non sequiturs that will force all times to manifest themselves horizontally—linearly—across the page. It follows that the practice of psychogeography is predicated upon dualisms and fragments that deconstruct one-dimensionality, continuity, linearity and the like. Psychogeography reinforces the plurality of time which provokes the most contradictory historical speculations, the very ones which Gull’s faux-psychogeography precludes. From Hell constitutes no more than a conspiracy theory, a paranoid interpretation of the past, but, as such, it detracts from any narrative of one glorious England. Moore’s contribution to psychogeography is that he has turned the Ripper into an alternate world narrative and the Ripper himself the embodiment of an unofficial history, an envisioning of the past that is a critique of the present. In Monika Pietrazak-Franger’s words: Jack the Ripper has been, over and over, associated with different signifieds. Julie Sanders recognises this changeability of myths and their adaptability […] Thus while the archetypal Jack the Ripper as a serial killer serves to divulge stories of timeless evil, his specific anchoring in the nineteenth century opens a space where he can be given new relevant context, as illustrated by Thatcherite and Blairite engagements. (Pietrazak-Franger 169, 170)

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So suspended between the past and the present, Gull, as the Ripper, is a malleable neither-nor, a mythical entity of service to the heritage industry: he is in fact the fourth dimension, the myth-engendering agent through which anyone might speculate about the nineteenth century and its link to the present. This contrived connection is in and of itself a speculative fiction, which, in From Hell, shapes not only the character of Gull but also the panels for the retelling of English history. Barish Ali reminds us: “The gap between comics panels is equivalent to, or a moment of, the Lacanian Real, which Judith Butler summarizes quite succinctly as ‘that which resists and compels symbolization’” (Ali 611). The Ripper is an unrepresentable fragment of Englishness, but for this precise reason, Moore speculates about him to speculate about Englishness and to stress, above all, that all such speculations are fabrications. Falsified, Gull’s vision disintegrates to reveal further possibilities, and this disintegration gives the final time travel sequence in From Hell a framework vertical rather horizontal. In the end, Gull can wield no control over time because his transcendental vision is out of sync with the chronological progression represented upon the page. At this climactic moment, Gull climbs up an obelisk to “go up into the gold” and realize “[his] ascension, his becoming,” though the divine beings he encounters at the elevated plane of eternity “insist” that he “descend” (Moore Loc 483) once more. This encounter with the divine triggers in the minds of Gull and of the reader a set of loose associations, which, at this narrative moment, materialize as a series of unrecognized, unremembered flashbacks. Gull descends into Ireland in the early nineteen-hundreds to see a woman calling after her children, all named after Gull’s victims. He then wonders why he is shown a vision of Ireland that bears no causal relation to his criminal enterprise, and, in any case, the woman’s existence cannot be the logical culmination of his “vision.” That Gull’s psychogeography is a lost cause becomes all the more apparent when, finally, the woman rests her eyes on Gull and asks him to “clear off back to hell and leave us be”: this vision strikes Gull as “perplexing” (Moore Loc 484), although it is in truth an associative twist, an intrusion, or an involuntary turn of event which drags Gull down from the vantage point of unified English history—and indeed all the way down to hell. Even though Gull fashions himself as the cultural quintessence that connects Victorian and modern times, he is finally brought down, figuratively speaking, because of his inability to clear all confusions. As such, he is no more a perplexing vision and a fragment of time than the

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woman. Insofar as his true identity remains a mystery, the Ripper is a conscious fabrication, thus an idiosyncratic reading of time that is far from universal. Moore’s “conspiracy theory” about the Ripper may well be a redundant puzzle piece which has no place in official English history. However, in reimagining history, From Hell also opens up the myth of the Ripper, for it mythicizes the Ripper to encourage further speculations about the Ripper, who “appeals to the unifying abilities of heritage and its own wholeness instead reveal its internal tensions and fissures, the gaps between all the exemplars it would purportedly being together” (Trimm 14). Furthermore, the “fragmentation, mutilation, and cutting up witnessed in From Hell —not only manifested in the gaps between the panels, but also in the incisions of the murder victims represented”—will always inspire speculations about the Ripper, since Moore created this “hybrid” alternate world narrative precisely to inflict “a mortal wound on history” (Ali 611). Moore means to save his work from “becoming a teleological narrative with an underlying meaning” (Ali 611), though, ironically, his tale about one obsessed with narrative completion offers no ending but rather inundates us with narrative possibilities. Moore only needs to spread rumors about Gull, the captor of time, to free time. Conspiracy theories and alternate histories alike will reinvigorate the flow of a time quickly diverging while spiraling downward: a rapidly disintegrating edifice that estranges London and London-ness in tandem, in a psychogeographical spirit.

Jerusalem: The Quest for the Fourth Dimension, Continued Moore asks once again in Jerusalem: what is the fourth dimension if it is not linear time? If indeed a spatial visualization of time—a time unfolding vertically, palimpsestically—the fourth dimension should fit Gull’s description of a vantage point, should it not? It is important to keep in mind that Moore’s psychogeographical vision is unlike Gull’s, for the former, unlike the latter, does not pretend to have the fourth dimension at its center. For Moore, esse—Londonness or Englishness—does not hover above London, the putative center of England, but rather evokes the idea of structural collapse, spatially conceived as “Jerusalem.” Jerusalem finds representation in actual cities which are parodies of Heritage London, for example in its neighboring city, Northampton, the setting of Moore’s 2016 novel. Northampton’s

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fissured landscape forms a stark contrast to London’s creaseless surface, but this difference does not make Northampton less formidable a trace of esse—that is, of Englishness and “Jerusalem.” Now Moore is to imagine Jerusalem as the city-ness of English cities (like London and Northampton), and city-ness as an evocation of structural disintegration: Northampton’s otherworldliness vis-à-vis London mystifies Englishness while transforming the English “I” into another. In the midst of these analyses of London writings, Northampton asserts its relevance by offering itself as the distended reflection of London, thereby as a rejection of Gull’s faux-psychogeography, his narcissistic rendering of London as a coherent urban spectacle. In Jerusalem, Northampton reveals London-ness not as a quintessence but as a meaning perpetually strange, perpetually undiscovered—the author in question having shown a keen interest in the unraveling of the prototypical English city, and the possible unearthing of Englishness thereafter. Moore’s otherworldly English city is a dizzying psychogeographical composition which presents microcosms within microcosms, each complete with its own center. This depiction of the industrial English city is a tribute to Blakean cosmology, where divinity itself is an abstraction always needing to be re-envisioned, while whatever is bracketed as esse is invariably rejected for its apparent hollowness. In “And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time,” Blake himself reveals that Jerusalem is Englishness: “the green and pleasant land,” “the clouded hills,” and “the dark Satanic Mills” trodden “in ancient time[,]” now imprinted with the marks of all times. Englishness is then the genius loci made up of the temporal traces upon the English landscape, and it inspires its seekers with “arrows of fire.” Because it holds all times, Blake’s Jerusalem can only be a loosely unified structure, a “divine vision in which each being is said to contain in itself the whole of the intelligible world” (Ferrara 21). Mark S. Ferrara explains, “[f]or Blake, the Divine Vision must be immediately apprehended, not through adherence to social and moral codes, which Blake associates with the rational and tyrannical laws of Urizen, but through self-annihilation” (27). In other words, meaning—dialectical meaning— breeds within a familiar sight insofar as it has always inhered in what is widely known. The whole consists of parts; yet, when observed through this imploding lens, the whole ceases to be the mere sum of its parts, for its parts, having bled into each other, are no longer autonomous and individually identifiable. These amorphous parts hasten the collapse of the unified whole on the one hand, and the emergence of palimpsestic visions

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on the other. Esse is precisely the stimulant triggering the disintegration of the false consciousness fostered by the likes of Gull. The critical reception that Jerusalem received makes it even more impossible to ignore Moore’s Blakean references. In early reviews of the novel, critics invariably take note of Moore’s ambition to invent a neoBlakean cosmology. Not everyone took kindly to his ambitions, however. Stuart Kelly of The Guardian writes: Jerusalem contains a great many inventive and instructive cosmologies. Let me offer my humbler own. Most cultures describe an aboriginal chaos, and into this plenitude intervenes a figure—call it God, Demiurge, Artificer, Urizen—who gives it form, distinction, coherence, elegance and even meaning. An equally good synonym might be Editor. (n.p.)

Kelly nevertheless concedes that Jerusalem is not entirely lacking in structure: “The final chapter gives us Alma’s [an artist] exhibition, where the titles of the paintings correspond with the titles of the individual chapters in another one of the crisscrossings found throughout the novel” (n.p). The ending, then, is where Urizen exercises his rational influence and amasses the different narrative strands, while Jerusalem is where Moore imagines chaos and fragmentation in order to discover the center of meaning, or the esse embedded in paradigmatic English cities, from industrial Northampton to Heritage London. To put it another way, esse is something to be discovered in the otherworldy, concerning which Robert J. Wiersema of The National Post has written the following: The notion of Northampton as a kind of holy city, a “Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark Satanic Mills,” as Blake would have it, reveals itself as Moore explores the cosmological world beyond that blasted half-mile, from the galleries of the Upstairs (the world of the Builders) to the grey spectral worlds of the recently departed – all of time accessible, forward and back, a world of hidden staircases, time storms and strange fauna. It’s a world not of faith, but of physics, of folded space and tubular time. (n.p.)

If the divine—i.e., the transcendental meaning which no structure can possibly capture—is beyond ideology, the only way to surpass ideology would be to imagine the divine in vain. In this sense, psychogeography is the endeavor to envision the divine—esse—as an un-mappable space, or a

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utopian non-space like Jerusalem. Jack the Ripper’s failure in From Hell lies precisely in his determination to read geography on the surface level, as though form were meaning, when in fact esse is a center which will not hold and will give rise to other centers and other worlds. As the cultural paradigm on which popular perceptions of London are based, Jerusalem is realized only to be deconstructed, psychogeographically. Jerusalem may well be Moore’s vision of a palpable self-negating esse, possibly the “electricity” that he first caught through Sinclair’s poetry (as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter). Jerusalem itself must break apart before it can engender London otherworlds which will foil the heritage essentialism implanted in London, supposedly the English city par excellence. In the novel Jerusalem, esse rather reveals itself through the unreason of the Vernalls, the clan of visionary psychogeographers who establish themselves in Northampton to envision an alternate Englishness. Here psychogeography is a deconstructive project which the Vernalls undertake across generations, and which manifests itself in the conceptual spectacle of the dome of St. Peter’s Cathedral in Northampton. It is not by coincidence that the novel opens with Alma Vernall’s report of an ongoing construction project overseen by her family. The Vernalls must ensure that rising lines converge in the dome of St. Peter’s, an iconic Northampton landmark. The dome, Alma thinks, “meant something similar to ‘come together’, so she could imagine that it was perhaps an octopus-armed junction such as she supposed you might get up inside a wooden church dome, bringing all the curving, varnished beams into a clever knot there at the middle” (Loc 203). In other words, the lines proliferate inward, finally organizing themselves around the center that is the church dome. The center gathers and so relates something otherwise unrelated. The church is an architectural structure, as such a product of the mind and a vindication of its expressive ability; it is an organ extended from the mind to its chaotic surroundings. In this way, chaos is fitted into this architectural design where all the lines—all tangents of disparate thoughts—are arbitrarily held together to form a meaning regarding the surrounding space, the city of Northampton. A maddening knot of lines is now bracketed as the cityness of the city (that is, something reminiscent of the divine in the Blakean sense): the city-ness of Northampton, the other paradigmatic English City. So ridden with contradictions is this bracketed city-ness that it seems to constitute “everything,” although “everything” is here no more

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than an indeterminate something, and as such it is—unlike the essentialist identity central to Gull’s heritage fantasy in From Hell —nothing in particular. In Jerusalem, esse, be it city-ness or the Englishness of the English city, is an unsignifying thing, as such an absence threatening to Urizen’s sphere of rational meaning. The Vernalls take on the burden of furthering Blake’s visionary work by gleaning alternate worldviews from unraveling wholes, for instance from an amorphous Englishness, a potent meaning whose presence is marked, strangely enough, not only in the linear narrative of Heritage London, but in the disintegrating landscape of industrial Northampton too. From the vantage point of the dome, the Vernalls can observe the difference separating the equally English cities of London and Northampton: their psychogeography, then, is the transcendental vision of a whole which unravels because of its incompatible parts, each of which contests for its own epistemology and reason. Each assumes independence as a complete unit of meaning which nonetheless does not find wider application; each, as such, is entirely restricted, fallible. From the dome, the Vernalls also discern that the esse called “Jerusalem” is a pattern emerging from these fragments of meaning. An angel speaks to the first visionary Vernall, Ern Vernall, in a dissociative language while he is restoring a painting upon the dome of St. Paul’s. Ern is said to have “struggled to absorb the content bound in this exploded sentence, the mere noise of it unraveled him […] Every note of it seemed to be spiraling away in countless fainter and more distant repetitions, the same tones at an increasingly diminished scale until these split into a myriad still smaller echoes” (Loc 1149, 1152). This dome of meaning is not unlike a punctured screen: it is very true that one cannot see beyond one’s horizon, but precisely because it is so, one hopes to “expand one’s horizon” so as to see Jerusalem better, perhaps through the widened holes on the screen of a dissociative language. The angel offers Ern a glimpse of this disharmony as he stands near the dome of St. Paul’s, and, from this elevated angle, Ern sees plainly that “Lambeth was adjacent to far-off Northampton if both were upon a map that should be folded in a certain way, that the locations although distant could be in a sense conceived as being in the same space” (Loc 1232, 1234): Lambeth of London and industrial Northampton are aligned in Jerusalem, whose emergence depends on the overriding of differences, both geographical and socioeconomic. The city-ness of Northampton and of Lambeth need not be in harmony in order for the two to exude the same esse, the same

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Englishness alluding to Jerusalem’s covert presence: the angel’s indecipherable utterances already challenge Ern to stretch the limits imposed by reason and to “divine” Jerusalem, i.e., the esse which intermittently leaks through to the conscious mind, and which reveals itself only where lucrative but essentialist understanding fails, as if its purpose were to alienate. Here Jerusalem is a palimpsest littered with repetitions and echoes, each reiterating a familiar structure of understanding (one long bracketed within the dome as esse) but only to magnify some imperfection within. In Jerusalem, the onus of deciphering all such riddles and antinomies falls upon members of the Vernall family, a family of visionary architects. No other characters can embody the lapses in rational neoliberal meaning quite as well as them, who are precisely the ghosts coldly disregarded by neoliberals. The family’s deep-rooted ties with Northampton already render them invisible: Michael Vernall works at a factory, and his ancestor Snowy Vernall had a “slum accommodation at the end of Green Street, where some decades later he would end his days hallucinating, sat between parallel mirrors in an endless alley of reflections, eating flowers” (Loc 605). This accommodation at the end of Green Street fosters a madness, a defiant indifference to the coldly rational calculations of the capitalist apparatus. One as mad as Snowy escapes the five invisible fingers of the free-market mechanism because the layers of his consciousness multiply alongside his reflections on reality. This multiplicity of perceptions culminates in a mad “I” disruptive to order, particularly the neoliberal calibration of capitalism underlying Heritage London. In Book Three of Jerusalem, Alma Vernall presents what might be called a portrait of the English economy at work in a public art exhibition in Northampton. The painting portrays a banknote which, as Alma’s brother Michael perceives, accumulates “more absurdist details as he studied it” (Loc 26462). Chief among his discoveries is that the “vaguely amphibious looking” face of Adam Smith—the eighteenthcentury Scottish philosopher and economist, the “capitalist visionary” (Loc 26429)—forms a fragment within the banknote. From Michael’s perspective, Alma’s artwork depicts an internal breakdown which compels him, the viewer, to look within the image for elements belonging to the “self-regulating mechanism” (Mayr 5) of modern capitalism: a “system of natural liberty” (Mayr 12) correcting the injustices of mercantilism and slavery, according to Smith in Wealth of Nations. Smith figures in Alma’s representation of the English economy only as prominently as he does on the £20 note. The Bank of England announced

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in 2007 that the banknote was to feature a portrait of the economist, who, even now, is celebrated for having uncovered the libertarian tenets of English capitalism. Smith called for the abolition of slavery, specifically, on the grounds that slave labor was expensive: A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible. Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance, can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own. (Smith qtd. in Temperley 107)

Supposedly sustained by the “natural” forces of individual interests (property ownership one among them), capitalism is said to function best in the absence of human interference. Capitalism naturally ensures “free competition between the participants of the economy” (Mayr 6) for the sake of “social justice” (Mayr 6), and for whose sake it must reject the unfreedom that is slavery: “freedom meant prosperity; freedom meant progress; freedom meant having willing workers as opposed to unwilling ones” (Temperley 109). The British were believed to have “attained a higher degree of wealth” (Temperley 108) than the rest of the world and enjoyed “a larger measure of liberty than other people” (Temperley 108) in the eighteenth century; they were therefore in a position to recognize that human interference with the capitalist machine could only be “harmful” (Mayr 2); that such interference would be adverse to the natural forces of capitalist liberty. The idea of an enlightened, liberal capitalism could not have seemed more British for one as assured of Britain’s economic superiority as Smith. When the Bank of England began embossing its banknotes with Smith’s portrait, the notion of a liberal capitalism even appeared to have been granted some sort of official “English” status.1 Smith’s liberal doctrine 1 “British liberalism” also implies that capitalism justly rewards those and only those who labor. From Smith’s perspective, capitalism is a word “commonly used [firstly] to describe the workings of a free market economy - buying low, selling high, investing private capital and effort wherever they will produce the most profit. Secondly, it is used to describe the ideology or system of beliefs of those who believe in the encouragement of such activities. Associated with it we commonly find notions about minimal government, a common system of law, the promotion of individual self-interest and the removal, so far as the proper maintenance of social order will allow, of all restrictions which might prevent men from benefiting themselves and, incidentally, benefiting society, by making free use of their capital and labour” (Temperley 106). Mayr similarly has suggested that “the

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of free competition becomes neo-liberal, however, when it is taken to mean that “[y]ou don’t need to regulate the banks or the financiers when there’s an invisible five-fingered regulator who’s a bit like God to make sure that the money-looms don’t snare or tangle” (Loc 26867). That is, naturally, the system’s profiteers would concern themselves with matters of social justice and shudder at the thought of exploiting, say, the factory workers in Northampton—though, as Howard Temperley argues, the rise of neoliberalism has merely exposed capitalism as a “ruthless commitment to rational calculation, to the control of and, above all, to the pursuit of profit” (95). In Jerusalem, Michael tells us that this meticulously run mechanism all too often overlooks issues of exploitation, as though no actual labor was employed to enhance the competitiveness of so-called free competitors, and no energy was needed to set the wheels of capitalist reason in motion. As far as Michael is concerned, Ronald Regan and “that middle-class dunce Margaret Thatcher” both were possessed by the irrational, “mystical” belief that factories were “run by ghosts” (Loc 26859), so much so that both “cheerily deregulated most of the financial institutions” (Loc 26871). Michael recalls Regan, Thatcher, and the concepts of “class” and “deregulation” by association. By the same associative logic, Michael identifies one cluster of problems within the capitalist framework that in fact has much to do with neoliberalism or rather its blatant disregard for the welfare of the laborers on whom it has for so long depended. For the generation of profit, neoliberalism has justified the exploitation of the working class in Northampton if not elsewhere as well, while rewarding the privileged for defending the status quo. To put it simply, neoliberalism has finally distorted Smith’s teachings to validate the prejudice that class privileges, too, are accorded on the basis of individual merit. This train of associative thoughts becomes derailed when Michael finally detects some supernatural (i.e., irrational ) elements in this radical rationalism integral to Englishness, consequently to the city-ness of Northampton. A figure of the Enlightenment as preeminent as Smith is said to trust in some magical existence beyond for financial regulation,

total sum of the contributions of a worker (defined broadly to include risk, costliness of training, etc.) and of his rewards (material and ideal) must be the same for all occupations in a given community if no restrictions exist” (Mayr 6) that, “this equality is maintained by a feedback system” (Mayr 6). The word “liberal” here connotes “justice,” for it is here assumed that one only reaps what one deserves from Smith’s capitalist machine.

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whereas his neoliberal acolytes—Thatcher and Reagan—are said to have left the factories in the hands of ghosts. At this very moment, meaning bleeds out of the banknote which stands for essential meaning of capitalist rationale. The place which causes “I” to break apart in this fashion is Jerusalem, where new, antithetical meanings emerge from within established structures such as twenty-first-century capitalism. This method of gaining knowledge can be described as “aporetic,” aporia being a thought process that is “always plural, dissolving into other aporias, heretically” (Ross 298). As a consequence, the agent of thought—the Cartesian subject, the cogito—is a unity shattered into infinite differences. Thought is infinite insofar as it is aporetic, dissolvable and breakable, and it similarly pushes “I” to the breaking point of self-destruction. The wellspring of the Vernalls’ visionary madness as well as the heart of civic disorder, Northampton is for Moore the natural setting for the unfolding of Englishness and the unraveling of the English “I.” Moore suggests as much through Alma, who identifies Northampton as the center of England: “…Hitler’s planned invasion of the British Isles had ended with the capture of Northampton, as if once the center of the country had been taken then the rest was a foregone conclusion” (Loc 18307). Nat Segnit of The New Yorker similarly reminds us that Northampton is the center of England owing both to its location and its “provincialism”: “As he [Moore] has noted, Northampton has long been a center of political and religious heterodoxy. From the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, radical groups like the Lollards, the Levellers, and the Antinomians gravitated there in their search for sanctuary—for a new Jerusalem. These days, its reputation for post-industrial gloom only makes it all the more hospitable to dissent. It’s easier to be odd when the culture has its back turned” (n.p.) Dissent arises from the gloom that is the general consequence of capitalist exploitation. Northampton is a new Jerusalem in juxtaposition to, say, the suburbs of London, since Northampton is home to the underclass, in other words those neither “skilled” nor wealthy enough to live in the London suburbs, especially in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1950s (see Forrest 209). Northampton is outside of privilege, geographically, but it is nonetheless home to England’s many factories and its laborers—all vital parts of the “free” market unaccounted for in neoliberalism, particularly in neoliberal London’s transformation into the water city (see Chapter 3). Being so at odds with the capitalist machine which Segnit calls “culture,” Northampton becomes the muse for psychogeographers.

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Northampton, as these psychogeographers can see, is unraveling aporetically to engender countercultures and alternate realities. Northampton is able to offer access to Jerusalem unlike other places because in its postindustrial gloom, it alone has shattered an otherwise unambiguous, rational neoliberalism and has accommodated the shadows and ghosts of the underprivileged. It follows that Northampton is Jerusalem: the context wherein neoliberal capitalism must confront what it has exploited, marginalized and cast off as spectral, insubstantial. Psychogeographers are inhabitants of Northampton, who push “from the darkness underground into the sunlit world above,” stubborn and unruly like “green blades” (Loc 271). These psychogeographical spirits insist upon their presences in the sunlit world above, like shadows which color the appearance of the earth despite their putative immateriality. They are germane to chaos in that they are naturally elusive and unpredictable. One cannot speak of shadows, specters, and chaos without making a reference to V for Vendetta. The Vernalls and V are shadows housed in their respective Shadow Gallery: Northampton, like the dystopian setting of V for Vendetta, consists of layers of English meaning. In Book Three of the novel, Alma informs the reader that Northampton contains many “a neon tumour styled by Fabergé,” like the hotel and the “attendant” entertainment complex raised upon the site of the demolished Barclaycard headquarters, previously an endearing tangle of small businesses and hairline alleyways, Pike Lane, Quart Pot Lane, Doddridge Street and long before that a royal resident that governed Mercia and with it most of grunting Saxon England. There weren’t ghosts here; there were fossil seams of ghosts, one stacked upon another and compressing down to an emotive coal or oil, black and combustible. (Loc 499, 502)

Alma is a member of the working class, a proud member of the neighborhood who has seen the effects of privatization. She has witnessed the eradication of small businesses in favor of big corporations. As psychogeographer, Alma is also able to see that neoliberalism has remodeled Northampton into a tumor, a whole constituted of layers of “emotive coil” ready to combust. The artist in Alma cannot help but notice the beauty of this privilegewrought tumor: the very name “Fabergé” implies privilege and art, Farbegé being the artisan who famously designed luxury Easter eggs for

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European royal families. It would seem that the privileged have painted Northampton with neon colors and given it a kind of lethal beauty layered with “combustible” ghosts. When these ghosts do combust and show themselves above, these Northampton layers will collapse. Alma foresees that the pervading postindustrial gloom will elicit a Northampton-wide catharsis. Inevitably, those who cannot repress their resentment any longer will assault the offensive system in the style of the anarchist V. Vehement resentment will disrupt the veneer of calm capitalist beauty, while the irrational will emerge from within the rational. Transposed to the setting of Northampton, V’s anarchist stunt appears especially aporetic: the rational, having birthed that which threatens to negate it, causes one to wonder what truly is rational. The psychogeographer in Alma responds by depicting this introspective quest for knowledge or this relearning of what is familiar through art. In Book Three, she speculates about the aftermath of V’s anarchist combustions in the form of a “scale reproduction of the mostly vanished neighborhood as it had almost definitely never been. Just over four-foot square, its tallest structures only inches high, his sister’s [Alma’s] diorama juxtaposed the Borough’s choicest features, irrespective of chronology” (Loc 25695). This artwork is Northampton seen from the vantage point, where the past materializes to reconstitute the present and the future. Specifically, modern capitalism will be reclaimed by the Northampton history it had to erase to gain prominence. For a complete mapping of English time, places that were demolished for town development and other capitalist investments will rematerialize, and they will invoke memories that are currently no more than “fossil seams of ghosts” (Loc 501). The fate of these ghosts is tied to that of the vanished neighborhood, for the ghosts are memories that define the space. Collectively, these ghosts are the genius loci of Northampton, the city-ness of the English city likewise present in London: these spectral presences are the very arrows of fire and the sleeping swords that beget Jerusalem, an otherworld where Lambeth was in the vicinity of Northampton, as Ern once saw plainly. The palimpsestic clashes of local histories, spectrally evoked, thus eradicate the distance between Heritage London and industrial Northampton: what enables this elision is the spectral, which is the city-ness, the esse, pervasive in English cities as distinct from one another as London and Northampton. This convergence will not happen in a comprehensive fashion, for nothing combustive and emotionally charged ever can be prone to

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order. The city-ness in question, or the genius loci, causes any rational progression toward the future to be deferred; it delays, as well, the completion of Alma’s psychogeographical vision, as emotionally charged spaces from the past sporadically reveal themselves in order to redefine the present. A psychogeographer like Alma takes a glimpse of the chaos unfolding around Northampton (as a consequence of disputing an absolute rationalism like Smith’s) and records what she briefly sees, although she knows that her vision will become obsolete even while she records it. More ghosts and vanished neighborhoods always venture forth to forestall the completion of her psychogeographical vision, which consequently is neither a future ideal to be realized, nor a true present that has inherited the entirety of the past. If each ghost is to revise a heritage-centered Englishness, Alma will have to make her peace with an esse so elusive that it would seem to signify nothing in particular. In Jerusalem psychogeography is the discovery of a new awareness within the self, projected outward into the milieu. Psychogeography also betrays a divided consciousness, whose relationship with its surroundings is also multifaceted. Since each divided self relates to the milieu differently, a new body—space relationship is formed each time a new fragment of the self comes into being. In this vein, each psychogeographical narrative offers a new view of the world, a vision gleaned from unraveling wholes such as the self and the milieu. By way of conclusion, let us consider the monk in Jerusalem who, while searching for the center of England in Hamtun, finds that Hamtun is less “a territory to be paced than like a stranger he had joined in conversation” (Loc 2834, 2837). A psychogeographer such as a monk learns of the overarching structure (the fourth dimension, that is) while he interacts with his surrounding space, like one atom with another. Being the part of the self which thus converses with space, the psychogeographer is privy to a new understanding of Jerusalem, consequently of Englishness as such. These continual dialogues and these perennial revisions in atomic relations expand his perception of reality (his horizon, his knowledge) so radically that the gaps within are also enlarged. These gaps are the psychogeographer’s approximations of Englishness, some of which are made manifest in Jerusalem as the disharmonious relation between heritage and labor, London and Northampton. Nevertheless, these gaps are the only frames through which one may glimpse esse, here presences undetected by rational understanding, like the supernatural (irrational) elements Michael identifies in Alma’s painting of the banknote.

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Conclusion: Parochial Psychogeography In Moore’s psychogeographical cosmology, the city-ness penetrating London and Northampton is a vacuum which draws chaos and contradictions into itself for the creation of new meaning; it is a phenomenological bracket wherein old knowledge begets new knowledge, the rational the irrational. Esse is not a substantial thing but rather a dialectical process unfolding internally so that new meaning may present itself from further within. Psychogeography gives Moore the means to represent this cityness as a thought structure—one abstract enough to manifest itself either as Jerusalem or the fourth dimension, as Northampton or London. These spatial conceptions reveal not only the architecture of the mind but also the limits of the mind. That is to say, the mind makes only limited sense. If sense is to develop, it must endure the assaults of the nonsense within. Psychogeography is similarly a fractured thought pertinent to many places, many histories, many times, and many spirits all at once. From Hell is an alternate world narrative (an alternate reading of history) that frees time. The prison of time is of course Gull’s vision of the fourth dimension, a teleological narrative which compels narrative closure. The fourth dimension is also a closed circuit of meaning, the spatial materialization of a nationalistic feeling; it is Gull’s vision and psychogeography—the assumption of English exceptionality gives it its genius loci, and the workings of the patriotic mind its geography. Gull spatially conceives of Englishness for a unifying purpose, but those it seeks to unify may or may not affirm it. Moore, for one, reinterprets Gull the Ripper and in so doing, he writes his own English story, his own alternate history which defies any rational ordering of history, so that speculations about the past will yet be possible.

References Ali, Barish. 2005. Violence of Criticism: The Mutilation and Exhibition of History in From Hell. The Journal of Popular Culture 38.4: 605–631. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0022-3840.2005.00132.x. Anderson, Benedict. 1995. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Revised Edition). London and New York: Verso. Blake, William. 2020. Milton: And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time. RPO Representative Poetry Online. Toronto: University of Toronto Libraries. https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/milton-and-did-those-feetancient-time. Accessed 23 March 2020.

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Coverley, Merlin. 2006. Psychogeography. Harpenden: Pocket Essentials. Di Liddo, Annalisa. 2009. Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Downing, Hendersen. 2016. Probably Psychogeographical in Love: Iain Sinclair and the City of Disappearances. The Literary London Journal 13: 37–51. http://www.literarylondon.org/londonjournal/spring2016/dow ning.pdf. Accessed 7 February 2018. Ferrara, Mark S. 2011. Blake’s Jerusalem as Perennial Utopia. Utopian Studies 22.1: 19–33. https://doi.org/10.1353/utp.2011.0021. Forrest, Ray. 1991. Privitization and Housing under Thatcher. Journal of Urban Affairs 13.2: 201–219. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9906.1991. tb00248.x. Groensteen, Thierry. 2007. The System of Comics. Trans. Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Ho, Elizabeth. 2006. Postimperial Landscape: ‘Psychogeography’ and Englishness in Alan Moore’s Graphic Novel From Hell: A Melodrama in Sixteen Parts. Cultural Critique 63: 99–121. www.jstor.org/stable/4489248. Accessed 22 March 2020. Jones, Jason B. 2010. Betrayed by Time: Steampunk & the Neo-Victorian in Alan Moore’s Lost Girls and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. NeoVictorian Studies 3.1: 99–126. www.neovictorianstudies.com/past_issues/31%202010/default.htm. Accessed 25 August 2016. Kelly, Stuart. 2016. Jerusalem by Alan Moore Review—A Magnificent, Sprawling Cosmic Epic. The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/15/ jerusalem-by-alan-moore-review#comments. Accessed 2 December 2016. Maier, Sarah E. 2012. Chasing the Dragon: Bangtails, Toffs, Jack and Johnny in Neo-Victorian Fiction. In Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence and Degenration in the Reimagined Nineteenth Century, ed. Christian Gutleben and Marie-Luise Kohlke Gutleben, 197–220. Amsterdam and New York: Radopi. Mayr, Otto. 1971. Adam Smith and the Concept of the Feedback System: Economic Thought and Technology in 18th-Century Britain. Technology and Culture 12.1: 1–22. https://doi.org/10.2307/3102276. McCloud, Scott. 1993. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Kitchen Sink Press. Moore, Alan. 2016. Jerusalem. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation. Moore, Alan, and Lloyd, David. 2005. V for Vendetta. New York: Vertigo. Moore, Alan, and Campbell, Eddie. 2006. From Hell: Being a Melodrama in Sixteen Parts. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf Productions. Murray, Alex. 2005. Exorcising the Demons of Thatcherism: Iain Sinclair and the Critical Efficacy of a London Fiction. Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London 3.2. http://www.literarylondon.org/ london-journal/september2005/murray.html. Accessed 15 December 2016.

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Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2003. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin. O’Malley, Seamus. 2012. Speculative History, Speculative Fiction: Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell. In Graphic History: Essays on Graphic Novels And/As History, ed. Richard Iadonisi, 162–183. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Petersen, Robert S. 2011. Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels: A History of Graphic Narratives. Santa Barbara, Denver, and Oxford: Praeger. Pietrazak-Franger, Monika. 2009. Envisioning the Ripper’s Visions: Adapting Myth in Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell. Neo-Victorian Studies 2.2: 157–185. http://www.neovictorianstudies.com/past_issues/Win ter2009-2010/default.htm. Accessed 25 August 2016. Ross, Stephen David. 1989. Metaphysical Aporia and Philosophical Heresy. Albany: State University of New York Press. Segnit, Nat. 2016. A Party in a Lunatic Asylum: on the Mundane Mysticism of Alan Moore. The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/culture/personsof-interest/a-party-in-a-lunatic-asylum. Accessed 2 December 2016. Sinclair, Iain. 1975. Lud Heat: A Book of the Dead Hamlets. London: Albion Village Press. Sinclair, Iain. 2004. Downriver (Or, The Vessels of Wrath): A Narrative in Twelve Tales. London: Penguin. Talbot, Nick. 2014. ‘A Funny Kind of Relationship’: Alan Moore on Iain Sinclair. The Quietus. http://thequietus.com/articles/15462-alan-moore-int erview-iain-sinclair. Accessed 22 March 2020. Temperley, Howard. 1997. Capitalism, Slavery and Ideology. Past and Present 75: 94–118. http://www.jstor.org/stable/650442. Accessed 8 March 2018. Trimm, Ryan, 2018. Heritage and the Legacy of the Past in Contemporary Britain. New York and London: Routledge. Wiersema, Robert J. 2016. Alan Moore’s Long Anticipated Jerusalem Is a Thousand-Page Doorstop That You Can’t Stop Reading.” National Post. http://news.nationalpost.com/arts/books/book-reviews/alan-moores-longanticipated-jerusalem-is-a-thousand-page-doorstop-that-you-cant-stop-rea ding. Accessed 2 December 2016.

CHAPTER 3

Peter Ackroyd’s Sensuous Detective Method in Hawksmoor

Abstract If the “water city” of London once enabled Britain to dominate the world in trade and later through imperial rule, the Thames and the Docklands may well have been the originating points from which its colonizing culture had spread. Is London—London-ness—truly a constant truth firmly rooted in Londonscape, however? In Hawksmoor, Peter Ackroyd envisions a labyrinthine London suffused with shadows emerging from the margins to encroach upon the city center, once the heart of the empire. Assuming the figures of local vagrants and wandering children (all migrants in a manner of speaking), these shadows wander about London to assert their presences beyond the space-times allotted them. These silhouettes constitute the metaphorical coast of a remade London—a new point of connection that will pave the way for unforeseen encounters, thus for radical reinterpretations of London-ness. Psychogeographical London is made of shadows whose movements generate friction and thereby heat, the sensing of which would foreground what was originally marginal while displacing “Englishness” with an imperial connotation. Keywords Detective fiction · Uncanny · in media res · Labyrinth

© The Author(s) 2020 A. Tso, The Literary Psychogeography of London, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52980-2_3

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Ports are sites of rehearsed encounters: as early as in 1203, sailors who docked their vessels along the English shoreline expected to pay customs—their financial dues to the Crown—in exchange for their rights to venture inland. Records of all such transactions served the meaningful purpose of explaining foreign presences on the land where English civilization had taken root. The prospect of financial gain gave the locals no choice but to brace themselves (in a spirit of “hospitality” of course) for any cultural shocks that may come their ways through these ports, the sightings of which seemed to forebode possible discomfort ahead. In this way, port cities like London have always prepared the locals for encounters with foreigners, and yet the two have remained divided by this prepared-ness. An interested receptiveness toward the Other is what London, a historic port city as we now see it, still inspires: toward the end of the twentieth century, London’s historicity was exoticized for the benefit of foreign visitors, it having been advertised as an aura, a quintessence akin to the London-ness of London. We may even begin to visualize the fluidity of this quintessence upon considering Reginald Ward’s comment that “forthcoming developments have come to Docklands not despite but because of its waterscape topography” (119); that is, money will propel the currents of the waterways vigorously enough to refashion London into a water city to rival Venice, Amsterdam and New York (126). A “new tourist route” (Ward 121) shall be the lifeline of this vision; a railway trail of cultural grandeur—one linking Docklands with world-renowned architectural emblems such as the Tower of London and Greenwich—shall spare tourists glimpses of quotidian local life, and London’s “water” quality shall become all the more pronounced in their eyes. The unbroken stretch of water also spares Londoners the threat of the foreign; specifically, the inconvenience of having to venture beyond their lair, their parts of the city, their cultural habits and customs. Now, to elaborate on the paradox of a waterscape: water gives shape to the reductive space of a seamless urban vision, where only what is commonly encountered—seen and “visible”—is considered real, as if seeing were quite literally believing. Travel-guide images are projected onto touristic non-spaces whose “Other-ness” is affirmed by behaviors that the locals have long learnt to associate with foreigners. These nonspaces are the foils which give space meaning, while “seeing is believing” is, from the local perspective, the raison dêtre for disavowing any needs of transgressing into non-spaces and encountering Others. In its seamlessness the water city is insulated from all cultural impurities, and so it is

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liable to absolve its denizens of any need to disembark from their ethnocentric myopia, their vessel of solipsistic reason. Thus, limpid though water should be, the London waterscape differentiates the foreign and the local in a fashion so unrelenting as to have ritualized all possible encounters. Is Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor a contribution to this water vision— this sanitization of historic London? To navigate the London of Ackroyd’s percept, one is prompted to interpret as signposts his allusions to London writers across the generations, from William Blake to T.S. Eliot. The “recurring, reiterating phrases, images, motifs, and tropes” (4) which Ackroyd extracts from the canon and infuses into his own works are what Jeremy Gibson and Julian Wolfreys first mentioned in Peter Ackroyd: The Ludic and Labyrinthine Text. For Gibson and Wolfreys, these graftings, while “imperfect and improper” (3), still impart to the Ackroyd novel “the fluid architecture of the labyrinth” (19), fluidity being a token of “connection and continuity” (19), or “the conduit between generations” (3) of Londoners. These recurrences and repetitions familiarize readers with aspects of London, for instance with the Blakean, the mystical, the uncanny, so that all may converge in the labyrinthine city text and give shape to an urban quintessence. Labyrinths lend the impression of connection and continuity, however intricate and twisted their passageways. Hawksmoor has intricacy enough to bring together iconic London writers of various time periods, as though different times could meet in Ackroyd’s literary city, a labyrinth whose labyrinthine quality is derived from the uncanny, the Gothic, or, more generally speaking, the literary. Labyrinthine London is the inverted image of the seamless water city, and as such it is an otherworld. While recalling ideas of culture and tradition. Ackroyd’s literary London nonetheless does not possess the unencumbered continuity—the seamlessness, or the palatability—distinctive of the water vision. In fact, a perception of heritage that appears labyrinthine at first glance does not grant one— complete possession of oneself, for one seems to take charge even of things for which one is not responsible—which preceded one’s existence— allowing one to get behind one’s own thrownness. However, without such knowledge, without this known legacy, the inheritance gives rise to one’s being is unknown, an obscurity situating one’s origin outside one’s knowledge and control. The self is thus formed, possessed by the unknown is other than what it thinks it is. (Trimm 199)

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Ryan Trimm’s reference to “possession” reflects the relevance of the hauntological approach to reading literary cities. Here, the spirit of place—the ghost in possession of the city, the city’s genius loci, the city-ness of a city, or the London-ness of London—is not a unifying core radiating through all Londoners to make one seamless entity of them, for a quintessence of this nature would instead be an immanent inheritance, in other words something untouchable, intangible, but nevertheless palpable to all insiders. The words central to Trimm’s description of the genius loci are “outside” and “unknown,” and his example of a cultural music shows that thoughts and utterances inspired by the genius loci are spasmic: uncontrollable, incomprehensible. If, as Trimm argues, heritage—“a process, an encounter with the past opening the problem of what one has found and claimed” (Trimm 198)—is passed down to fabricate intergenerational ties, fears of disintegration are just as likely to have struck the inheritors, hard pressed as they have been to discern and defend the esse/immanent meaning of “heritage.” What then is the city-ness of a city? In Hawksmoor, heritage manifests itself as a literary city, as such a diegesis with “semantic connections” (Onega 47) scattered across its various parts, some set in London of the eighteenth century while others the twentieth century. Ackroyd’s intentionally flawed imitation of the eighteenth-century writing style makes ineffectual any temporal distance he pretends to sow between the eighteenth-century Occultist-architect, Nicholas Dyer, and his reincarnation in the twentieth century, detective Hawksmoor (see Onega 47). Together, Dyer and Hawksmoor invoke Nicholas Hawksmoor, the eighteenth-century architect who once lived to shape London; this inexplicable meeting of the temporal twain calls to mind the architect who oversaw “London-making.” Hawksmoor, I want to argue, is a London narrative par excellence dedicated to revealing some such process of making and unmaking: unexpected convergences unmake (and indeed defy) causal reason, but this act of unmaking also makes (i.e., fabricates) narratives of literary heritage like Hawksmoor. The literariness of Ackroyd’s novel makes possible the most unexpected of encounters, which, when interwoven, fabricates labyrinthine London: the inverted episteme into which the reader is cast in media res . The consequent alienating effect constitutes Ackroyd’s percept of London, if not exactly the London-ness of London, which is logically unattainable but nonetheless intimately, sometimes threateningly, palpable. The quality in question may manifest itself as any glaring incongruity in the familiar, or as an

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element of dis-continuity that will, ultimately, unravel the water vision from within. Thus, to revise an earlier statement: Hawksmoor can be considered a London narrative par excellence not because it possesses a transparency that exposes the foreign, as though seeing were truly believing, but rather because it appeals to the senses drawn upon far less readily by the mind in order to destabilize ultrarational, neoliberal visions. London-ness is the flux of sensations plunging us into the core of a fathomless obscurity, namely, that of a psychogeographic non-space where, to gain traction, one needs to take heed of, firstly, the London music that continuously titillates the senses; secondly, the lud heat emanating from below the layer of dust scattered across London by walkers seeking affirmation for their commonsensical, if not to say clichéd, views of the city. In the first instance what exists by virtue of its audibility alone has the ability to cross the boundaries—visual, spatiotemporal, and ideological—that have long divided interiority and exteriority, or the boundaries distinguishing London from the world beyond. In the second instance, the dispossessed in London—vagrants, poverty-stricken families, and their children—attach themselves in tandem with their vitality, their heat, to the city’s walls. Their heat alerts us to what the surface obfuscates, specifically to the possibility of space and non-space overlapping, exhausted though it is by the rigorous policing of the difference between self and other in the water city. Sensuous detection eradicates the cognitive barrier between self and other while triggering a score of foreign, sometimes abject, sensations: and so the twain shall meet in the otherworldly nonspace of non-London, the inheritance imposed upon Londoners in order to possess them and to force them to undo the very tracks that they had stitched onto Londonscape with their every regulated movement. London-ness is then a context disorienting by virtue of its invisibility as well as its palpability, its heat, and its audability, all of which qualities are thresholds into the many alternate Londons (or non-Londons) which neoliberal reason fails to lay waste.

The Water City: Commodifying Linear Time Antithetical to London’s otherworldliness is the water ideal, the water city being a spectacle of English Heritage which explains and codifies the city’s worth for local residents and foreign visitors alike. Insofar as the water city’s cultural-economic value is attributed to its historical breadth,

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the water city is quite often regarded as being “indebted” to the past. The water vision subject to psychogeographical critique is a product of a linear reasoning which I shall describe here at the beginning, so as to lay the groundwork for later critiques of commodified urban visions. In Hawksmoor, the notion of indebtedness—and linear time, concomitantly—is a matter of obsession for the self-proclaimed detectives, who are interested in identifying a causal development of events that interlock past, present, and future. Those as partial to this pseudo-Humesian branch of empiricism as our eponymous detective and proto-rationalist would go so far as to argue, “If I knew the end, I could begin, couldn’t I? I can’t have one without the other” (139). A beginning gives rise to an end much in the same way a plot thickens to culminate in a resolution. The thickening of the plot is a moment of transition that departs from a beginning point in the past so that an end can be hatched. Detective reasoning serves to trace these moments of radical change, which will then enable the detective to experience not only the causal connections among all things, but, fundamentally, the structural coherence of the world he inhabits as well. This moment of change connecting beginning and end—the middle as it is called—ensures the linear unfolding of time, validating as it does so what Christopher Wren, the novel’s proto-rationalist and architect, calls “Enlightenment”: the “Rationall Experiment and the Observation of Cause and Effect” (173), or the conception of reason as a realm where all things become related. This relatedness is precisely that which, in conjuring up the impression of seamless fluidity, consolidates the water vision of London. It is linear time that gives the water city its veneer of causal reason, a texture heavily fetishized and commodified. However, a sensuous detective would know to trace time not only horizontally—that is, from left to right, from past to present—but also vertically, for he would recognize sensuous time as something layered palimpsestically. The substance of Hawksmoor’s investigative work can also be understood in light of its rationale: a curious elision of Humesian rationalism and sensuous detection. The latter part of Hawksmoor’s detective rationale may be understood vis-à-vis his very own observation regarding the continuity of time, the supposed linearity of London history. Hawksmoor and Wren, both being rationalists, are tasked with the detection of ties that will validate Hume’s suggestion that “[a]ll reasonings concerning matter of fact seem to be founded on the relation of Cause and Effect. By means of that relation alone we can go beyond the evidence of our memory and senses” (19). Reality is not

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therefore founded on a singular event that occurred at the beginning of time, for the foundation of reality is rather the spark of comprehension that ties the mind to its surroundings. To put it another way, conscious understanding gives rise to reason, while reason, being “it self […] a perfect peace of Work from the Hand of the Omniscient Architect […]” (118), branches out into various categories of knowledge, from architecture to anatomy. Wren tells us in Hawksmoor that the Omniscient Architect personifies the axis of reason to which all universal facts and principles relate. The sensuous detective Hawksmoor discerns, by contrast, that the rhizomic growth of these relations gives the impression not of fluidity but rather of entanglement, perhaps the kind to dispel illusions of seamless continuity. To suit his own detective purpose vis-à-vis the water city, Hawksmoor’s eponymous hero overstates a tenet in Humesian Reason whereby sensuous experiences may furnish us with the means to infer the relations among all things; consequently, to “discover” reason as the foundation of linearity and, to this end, of Heritage.1 Of course, Hume does not believe that the senses can exceed reason in significance; for him, the senses often confuse reason, which is the esse inherent in every intelligible truth. Nonetheless, Hawksmoor attributes particular significance to the word “dis-cover” so as to suggest that truths are covered up by layers of illusions to misguide the sight. To “dis-cover” is therefore to follow a vertical path leading toward a vision’s innermost recess, where truths are presumed to have laid hidden. In this vein, Hawksmoor likens detective labor to the “rubbing away [of] the grease and detritus which obscured the real picture of the world, in the way that a blackened church must be cleaned before the true texture of its stone can be seen” (156). No act is more satisfying, he finds, than that of setting his gaze upon a tangible beginning, a foundation of the present moment as concrete as stones. Dirt gathers on stones—the beginning, the foundation of reality—as a consequence of time’s passage, indicating thus how much time has elapsed 1 In Hume’s own words: “I shall venture to affirm, as a general proposition, which admits of no exception, that the knowledge of this relation is not, in any instance, attained by reasonings à priori[;] but arises entirely from experience, when we find, that any particular objects are constantly conjoined with each other. Let an object be presented to a man of ever so strong natural reason and abilities; if that object be entirely new to him, he will not be able, by the most accurate examination of its sensible qualities, to discover any of its causes or effects. […] causes and effects are discoverable, not by reason, but by experience […]” (19, 20).

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before the advent of the present. One may say that dirt is the material manifestation of causal, rational progression insomuch as its thickness is perceived as directly proportional to the amount of time elapsed. But Hawksmoor does not consider dirt to be merely a token of the passage of time and of causal reasoning since it is, above all, truth’s veneer, a tactile object which, when “ru[bbed] away” (156), will bring a sensual “hardness” to the touch. Whereas Wren (as Ackroyd portrays him, that is) imagines reason as an all-encompassing structure that is imperceptible, omnipotent, divine, Hawksmoor immerses himself in the sensuous gratification of making rational discoveries. The anticipated appeal of “hardness” stirs Hawksmoor into motion and compels him to rub the dirt from the coarse texture of reason. Now to put sensuous detection in context and to elaborate on the substance of Hawksmoor’s investigation: what gives Hawksmoor cause to “caress reason” are, initially at least, the uncanny deaths of several boys in the Whitechapel area. When asked to investigate the vagrants who allegedly murdered these children, Hawksmoor was confident that he would deduce the ties between the vagrants and the murdered boys, since reason dictates that any event experienced is a part of a chronological, coherent sequence of events. It should follow that causality is the very grammar of time, although a “post-modern mystery” (Richter’s expression 108) like Ackroyd’s follows no such template of reason. In Hawksmoor, a serial murder— serves to break up […] the narrative’s diegetic flow, the sense of linearity, of a movement between beginning and end. In the process, of course, the serial victims become even more anonymous than they are in the standard mystery written by Wolfe or Sayers: the corpses become random targets rather than individualized persons. That too subverts any mimetic function the deaths might have: we read the blood only as a code, an exercise in spatial form. […] (Richter 108)

The ability to retrace the causal development of events in the course of (linear) time is an exercise in rational manipulation, and yet the unexpected emergence of an unknown pattern may inspire irrational feelings of helplessness. Insights derived from Hawksmoor’s investigative efforts are in fact neither sensible nor reassuring: the homicides, he finds, follow an ancient ritualistic pattern whereby London of the present mirrors a London past in its development, as if the one were the mere echo of

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the other. Linear reason does not then apply to these ritualistic murders, which nullify cumulative logic and render time non-linear and disjointed. Heedless of linear structure and context, this coinciding of times seems uncanny, much like a narrative unfolding in media res . In Hawksmoor, this disjunctive connection is eternal London, whereby “eternity” is the counterpoint to water visions and Heritage spectacles alike; and, insofar as Ackroyd’s London is the site of temporal disjointedness and eternal incoherence, Hawksmoor is the London narrative par excellence. Disjunctions and entanglements anticipate unexpected encounters, and in Ackroyd’s London they conjure up the labyrinthine and therefore the literary. Made up of temporal mix-ups and tales heedless of contexts, literary London is what brings turbulence to cherished ideals of linear time and heritage on which the water vision rests. While a causal connection binds two distinguishable entities together, a sensuous pattern (as manifested in every psychogeographical narrative of London) comes into place wherever differences organically overlap and, in this vein, reiterate one another. For detective Hawksmoor (and in Ackroyd’s novel, broadly speaking), psychogeography is precisely the ability to feel the impact produced by the convergence of different London times: the impact of eternity as it were. In Hawksmoor, these convergences have left indelible marks on the “cracked and discoloured” (190) bricks of St. Mary Woolnoth, the edifice of which was said to have been “licked by flame” (190) during the Great Fire of 1666. Detective Hawksmoor follows these palpable cues and eventually discovers that the wooden door of St. George’s, Bloomsbury, feels “unnaturally warm” (236): so Hawksmoor’s investigative journey— that is, his sensuous psychogeography—guides us to St. Mary Woolnoth, to the doorsteps of St. George’s, Bloomsbury and ultimately to Dyer. On entering the latter cathedral, Hawksmoor meets its architect Dyer, a London man of the eighteenth century who should have died two centuries ago—but only logically speaking. To be sure, Dyer is more than a historical figure in that he is Hawksmoor’s very “own Image” (270)— in point of fact his doppelgänger. There Dyer sits “beside [Hawksmoor], pondering deeply and sighing” (270), while implanting his presence in the future of the twentieth century. The alter ego’s meaningful looks and sighs—all signs of physical yearning—send Hawksmoor “shudder[ing]” (270) in shock but eventually cajole him into letting go of himself. When Hawksmoor finally speaks again, he finds that he and Dyer speak “with [the] one voice” (271) of a “they.” In effect, Hawksmoor is undone

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the moment “he [Hawksmoor] touche[s] them [Dyer],” or rather “they touc[h] him[,]”; “[t]hey were face to face, and yet they looked past one another at the pattern […]” (271). Dyer is the ineffable “pattern” that Hawksmoor eventually detects by touch; not merely a Londoner living in the eighteenth century but a trace of the uncanny as well, he is the first (and the last, if one were to follow the narrative chronology) of many uncanny coincidences which Hawksmoor encounters as he investigates the Whitechapel murders. London’s incoherence finally prepares its denizens for sensuous time: a temporal palimpsest where all times occur simultaneously rather than linearly, vertically rather than horizontally; or, a psychogeographical dimension where Dyer and Hawksmoor can touch each other and speak with one voice. Wren likewise finds himself reincarnated there as Walter, a detective apprentice and a new-age rationalist to cast aspersions on Hawksmoor’s judgment, much in the same way Wren once criticized Dyer’s occultist tendencies. Even the Omniscient Architect that is divine reason reappears in sensuous time as a computer put in charge of the safety of “the whole of London” (151). These entities cross paths in a London where the divides of time are in this way eradicated, or indeed in an eternal London where all names are, to use Julian Wolfreys’ expression, “resurrected” (166) to take possession of the contemporaries, as though past and present were reiterations of the same. These reiterations disjoin linear time so that local memories can serve as tangible pathways leading away from the water city and toward otherworldly Londons.

London in Sensuous/Psychogeographic Time That Ackroyd’s eternal London can be touched (in the same way that Hawksmoor touches Dyer), heard, and seen is something Wolfreys has long established alongside others. Barry Lewis has similarly described eternal London as a pattern: “the conjunction of light with shadow” (44) when seen; that of “sound with echo” (44) when heard. Lewis adds that eternal London possesses the quality of the “Gothic,” specifically that of the “evil [which] transcends the limitations of space and time but which manifests itself recurrently in a local habitation and name” (44). This recurrence would appear to be as much Gothic as it is “psychogeographical,” particularly if the latter term is taken to mean the routine synthetization of all beginnings and all end—or, in Hawksmoor, the pattern which, by forestalling the linear development of events, induces

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the sight to blur light with shadow, and the touch to detect traces of the forgotten within popular accounts of heritage. This pattern owes its tangibility to its Gothic quality, while the fact of its tangibility, or its material presence in London, serves the purpose of psychogeographical detection: the sensing of a palpable incongruity in a too-congruent water city. Now to steer closer to this monograph’s key concern: Ackroyd’s psychogeographical project detects the London-ness of London, i.e., the pattern responsible for bringing together local folklores, those remembered alongside those forgotten. Dyer explains in Hawksmoor that a psychogeographer-cum-detective (a detective with recourse to sensuous methods) is tied to eternal London by “the Thread of […] History” (6), “the trew Musick of Time” (22). Eternity replaces causal reason as the regulating axis and inspires in all Londoners a general feeling of accord mingled with uncanny premonitions. Uncannily, all Londoners (Wren, Walter, Dyer, and Hawksmoor, to name but a few) discover a strange resonance in the London-ness of London, the unknown which has manifested itself differently in different times (here in the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries), and which unifies all the marginalized presences that have ever inhabited London. With regard to the Whitechapel murders in Hawksmoor, “London-ness” is embodied by eternal Londoners, by wanderers who, like the tramp Ned, stray into “the open fields” (90)— fields of labyrinthine paths—because of their befuddled sense of direction. Hawksmoor follows Ned, whom he suspects of involvement in the murders, into an open field and chances upon a bonfire event well attended by London’s many vagrants. For reasons unknown to outsiders (including the reader of course), attendants at these bonfires like to dance to the following tune: “A Wheel that turns, a Wheel that turned ever,/A Wheel that turns, and will leave turning never” (81). This wheel, this symbol of eternity and of eternal London, is described in the most repetitive terms. Eternity is said to be a repetitive motion forever monotonous, and it will never not be so. Perhaps no words can evoke eternity or its connotation of constancy better than “ever” or “never”: as Ned observes, eternal London can only be imagined as a “Capitol of Darknesse” (56) with “no beginning [,] no end” (90), since eternal London can never assume a recognizable form. Those familiar with Ackroyd’s writings will immediately recognize the vagrants’ performance as a rendition of the song to which Ackroyd dedicated his 1992 novel, English Music. Here a brief digressive remark on this other novel will help explain Ackroyd’s emphasis on the audibility of

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London-ness. So-called English music is an implicit part of the national education curriculum, while English heritage in general is the “[…]‘the song of Albion[,]’ a multi-voiced ensemble of soloists working in unison” (22), as Adriana Neagu has observed. The cadences of Englishness represent to Ackroyd—and to the proto-rationalists so far discussed— a seamless continuity “not just in literature, but in all forms of English culture” (Neagu 218); in point of fact a water vision, a “sacred home[,]” into which “the Briton, Saxon, Roman, Norman [are] amalgamate[ed]” (Neagu 22). This “most poetised transposition of Englishness” (Neagu 22) is, supposedly, something of a transcendent spirit that encourages unity in the form of a “dialogue […] between individual and collective memory[,]” while “invit[ing] reflection on England in the European imagination, combined with continental Europe’s idea of Englishness” (Neagu 219). The exclusivity (or quite plainly the Pan-Europeanism) underlying Ackroyd’s message of unity seems unmistakable. As Ryan Trimm has noted, music intended only for English ears may well privatize the notion of inheritance as if Englishness were a sworn secret, as such a token of the intimate, potentially essentialist, connection between generations of English people. Trimm is no less quick to point out, however, that a well-kept secret also precludes careless understanding: a transcendent “[s]ecrect characteriz[es] relations between past and present, something unknown outside of those connected through such transmission[…], for neither past nor present is aware of what is transmitted through inheritance” (201). Having attributed to Englishness an aura of transcendent mystique, Ackroyd is said to have discouraged any confident positings of definitions vis-à-vis Englishness. Nonetheless, even something formless can appear concrete if it is impactfully heard, much as eternity’s impact is experienced by generations of Londoners as the “Thread of […] History” (6), “the trew Musick of Time” (22). Equally impactful—tantalizing and sensuous—in Hawksmoor is the London-ness of London, a palpable communal spirit whose “authenticity” (or transcendent quality) prevents it from being anchored anywhere in causal and linear time. London-ness is the inheritance “situating one’s origin outside one’s knowledge and control” (Trimm 199), or the context into which Londoners are haplessly cast. That is to say, London-ness is the otherness into which the self—“I”—is born, so that “I” is forever another. In this way, the esse which makes kindred spirits of all Londoners had long anticipated uncanny encounters such as the one between Hawksmoor and Dyer. The overlap of two distinct periods is uncanny, and the acuity

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of its impact lies in its ritualistic aspect, or in the determination that “the self is […] formed,” as any self, any inheritor, is willy-nilly “possessed by the unknown, is other than what it thinks it is” (Trimm 199). This ineffability gives “eternity” the uncanny (Gothic) pattern that characterizes London-ness: here a non-reason so antithetical to the fluidity of linear time that it can force even the proto-rationalist Hawksmoor to embrace self-abandon through an encounter with Dyer. Where Dyer and Hawksmoor are concerned, “reiteration”—or rather “reincarnation”— has become synonymous with “inheritance,” connected as the two have been through London-ness, the symbolic token of which is the aforementioned sexual tension, or, here, the wheel around which the city’s vagrants sing and dance. To return to the spectacle that Hawksmoor witnesses as a consequence of following Ned: eternal London may be formless as an open field, monotonous as an ever-turning wheel, but it is distinctly hot. The wheel imagery is vivid not because of what it is seen to be doing but rather because of the palpable heat it radiates. Eternal London is a heat to be sensed or sensuously detected, since Hawksmoor is after all a (postmodern) detect-ive narrative. The wheel’s eternal movement enables us to visualize eternal London, although the wheel’s movement is so repetitive, dull, if not to say soporific, that it must diminish the vividness of the eternal ring, which the vagrants delineate with their ritualistic movements. However, what highlights eternity’s mundaneness in the vagrant’s rhyme is a vivid action verb, namely, “turn.” “A Wheel that turns, a Wheel that turned ever,/A Wheel that turns, and will leave turning never” (81): the word “turn” compels the reader to imagine the wheel as being in motion, thus as the source of an energy, a heat comparable to the bonfire toward which eternal Londoners such as the vagrants gravitate; which, moreover, causes them to converge and give expression to London-ness through their ritualistic dance, their celebration of the ring of eternity. Eternity is here the kernel of the London community—that is, an obscure thing alienating to the senses but nonetheless palpably felt. The eternal Londoners in question are united but only in feeling disoriented, despondent. It would seem that London identity is built only upon a general sense of unease, or a pervasive feeling of alienation agitated by the sentiment that “I is another” (which also orchestrated Hawksmoor’ fateful union with Dyer). Ackroyd specifically portrays eternal London as disfigured but appealing to the senses. He recognizes eternal London as something

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amorphous, something that “grows more Monstrous, Straggling and out of all Shape: […] we [the Londoners in the novel] are tyed to the World as to a sensible Carcasse” (56). Oddly enough, the very ones who call London home fail to recognize it save as a shapeless monster, a sight more shocking than comforting; an idea of home more ominous and tension-proving than harmonious. To describe eternal London as a growing and sensible carcass is to refute the commonplace understanding that what is eternal must be unchanging and therefore static. In the form of a growing carcass, Londonscape shows that even death cannot bring time to a standstill. Also attributed to the land is the adjective “sensible,” which has its etymological root in Anglo-Normal and Middle French, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In old French, the word was a reference to a nerve, specifically to that which provokes “the faculty of sensation” and is then “acutely felt” (“sensible, etymology”). A tension that never subsides, however, would so over-stimulate the senses that calmness itself would become inconceivable, and under its influence even the most aggravating of tensions will seem numbing. Simply put, eternal London is a sensible carcass because, despite its eternal form, it is never recognizable, for “eternity” signifies the unexpected meeting of opposites, as a result of which even what was once familiar now becomes the shapeless, unrecognizable, alienating thing that is an urban quintessence, the London-ness of London. The most contradictory qualities are thereby attributed to the fantasy of eternal London, where “eternity” signifies not so much continuity but rather a sort of dis-continuity manifesting itself as a vortex of surprises. For Ackroyd, eternal London is a place alienating insofar as it is discovered out of context—in media res ; as such it is a place capable of rousing the liveliest of sensations. Any intense sensuous experience is nevertheless enfeebled when prolonged, since in this instance the very state of normalcy need be reimagined. The London-ness of London never ceases to over-exert the senses; it alienates any established view of London(scape) so that the need to re-understand London is now always urgently felt, since London is perpetually a foreign context into which one is thrown in media res . London in its true form is shapeless, but this is not to say that the city—or rather its heat—cannot be felt eternally, by dwellers dedicated to visualizing and sensing eternal London’s growing carcass. No episteme can remain unchallenged in eternal London, where our overstrained senses fail us and invalidate what we have always assumed to be true. Eternity is especially alienating when ascribed to London, where

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“the common sort of People gasp at the prodigious Rate of Building and exclaim to each other London is now another City” (56; italics in the original). The remark that “London is another city” should similarly convey excitement, but even this sentiment becomes commonplace should it prevail too long—as indeed it does in Hawksmoor, where London is now always another city. The word “now” should refer to a distinct moment, perhaps a watershed moment in history, whereas “always” a state of perpetuity. “Now” and “always” should cancel each other out in meaning when placed side by side together, but “now” and “always” coexist in the eternal London of Ackroyd’s imagining: the growing, sensible carcass of eternal London is the paradox whereby death is yet capable of arousing the liveliest of sensations. London is at once dead and alive, therefore eternal. In Hawksmoor, “eternity” carries the sinister connotation of spectrality: a dead past still dwelling in or tethered to the present. Hawksmoor who is trailing behind Ned has in this way steered us beyond empirical space-time and into psychogeographical territories. The very nature of his investigation is psychogeographical, for his interest in imagining London as recurrent, transcendent, and therefore eternal is shared by not a few London writers (those Ged Pope cites below, for example). The pattern of eternity embedded in Londonscape, now a subject of general intrigue, sheds new lights on the meaning of vagrancy and on its connection to the Gothic and the transcendent. In the novel “tramps” are those “abused or assaulted by gangs who used the excuse of ‘the child murderer’ to express their resentment at harmless wandering men” (247); they are the city’s homeless, those dehumanized and reduced to being no more than “an emblem of all that was most depraved and evil” (247). The label of evil, which signifies the Gothic and the eternal as mentioned earlier, is in this way unjustly assigned to the homeless. The stigma of poverty is not one “London’s piecemeal modernisation” (Pope, n.p.) can mitigate, for it is in truth a pattern long woven into London’s history. Ged Pope elaborates: Contemporary London presents a curious mix of new developments (landmark buildings, corporate zones, redevelopments) mixed with remnants from a different age. Canary Wharf abuts low-rise council housing; seventies housing estates are in-filled with remnants of Victorian terracing; urban motorways expire into clogged suburban high streets; the City of London retains medieval guild structures. Furthermore, as Wolfreys argues, London has always challenged its representation, has always approached sublimity,

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been ineffable. Since the mid nineteenth century, its massive unplanned growth, its rapid spread toward the countryside, its sudden populousness, its commercial and industrial expansion, has all worked against any simple representation. It has proved disruptive of traditional narrative, Wolfreys argues, ‘challenging the classical efficacy of mimetic, hegemonic, representation’ (Wolfreys, 196). London, then, has a need for gothic writers sensitively attuned to the ghostly reminders of a half-buried past. Luckhurst names Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd as the contemporary exemplars of the London Gothic, along with novelists, such as W G Sebald, Will Self and Michael Moorcock, and urban commentators such as Stewart Home and Patrick Wright. (n.p.)

London’s symbols of affluence—its corporates zones, deluxe housing, historical monuments, and suburban high streets—have multiplied steadfastly partly for the purpose of hiding the shadows of marginalization, the uncanny presences inhibiting the city’s core. The task of remembering—of remembering the parts of the city that “have been radically emptied of collective memory, through extensive rebuilding, commercial development, and gentrification, alongside projects of community relocation” (Wolfreys 166)—consequently falls upon London’s writerscum-psychogeographers. For his part, Ackroyd remembers by remaining “sensitively attuned to the ghostly reminders” (Pope, n.p.), the Gothic incongruities which are the London-ness of London. Those he places under the sensuous and psychogeographic scrutiny of Hawksmoor are none other than the vagrants who are the prime suspects in the aforementioned murders. Here I should emphasize that psychogeographical detection, like any labyrinthine London narrative, is based on a dysfunctional reason: in Ackroyd’s particular vision of London, a destabilizing, Gothic element has found representation through “vagrancy”—a word which, according to the OED, strikes a curious accord with “vagary,” i.e., with any “unexpected change in someone’s behavior,” thus with any alienating discoveries in the world-renowned skyline of London the water city. The vagrancy in Hawksmoor represents the vagaries of London, given that those displaced by the water vision refuse to have their presences eradicated. They then become the contradictions submerged in the heartland of English Heritage and Tradition; the oddities entrenched in a London vision that should consist of continuities and linear, causal connections. It is therefore vagrancy that lends London-ness a destabilizing influence and so causes London to disintegrate from within: London-ness is not here an

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essentialism but a pattern of contradictions which stunts growth. Thus has Susan Onega observed that Hawksmoor, what with its “shocking reduplications of names, events, actions, and even identical sentences uttered by characters who live two centuries apart” (46), forces us to conclude that “nothing progresses in time” (47). A London in temporal limbo is eternal and true, so much so that it seems to be “the totality of everything, containing all good and evil and reconciling all opposites” (Onega 54). Whoever vying to sense eternal London, the London-ness of London, willy-nilly aspires to “know all to become godlike” (Onega 54). Those implicated in what Richter calls “the ritual strangulation of a series of pathetic children and child-like men” (109) in Hawksmoor are sacrificed precisely for this ideal of a divine eternity. Death is not here the end of life but an “additive elemen[t]” (Richter 108) injected into linear time so that logical causality will derail, as will any project of “growing” London. In effect, marginalized characters in the novel— the “pathetic” and the “child-like” if you will—are eternity’s specters, the Gothic presences evocative of the London-ness of London. In the labyrinth of London, the “mobile and fluid city” “constantly […] re-built and vandalized” (Ackroyd and Wolfreys 108), “eternity” is a metaphor for the vagaries of the London streets, in other words the “process of change” that will erase gentrification and make the clean “shabby again” (Ackroyd and Wolfreys 109). The children and the child-like tramps are the “shabbiness” always borne along the city’s temporal fluxes, such that repressed presences in a city where “nothing stays the same” will resurface, always unfailingly. Implanted in the web of London time, these repressed but resurgent figures are eternal, and as such they may present themselves in various forms, sometimes as vagrants but other times as boys, as though the murderer and the murdered (to recall Hawksmoor’s reading of the events) were one and the same. Temporal flux of the sort exemplifies the psychogeographical movements which Ackroyd tries to imitate in his writing through repetitions: the recurring conflation of causal and sensuous reasons, the structurally repetitive descriptions of the vagrants’ mystifying rituals, the consistently tense tone in which he speaks of inharmonious unions such as that of Dyer and Hawksmoor. The esse regulating these recurrences and fluxes is precisely the much-stressed idea of vagrancy as vagary, whereby “vagrancy” is the continuous spewing of contradictions: or, the continuous flow of changed perceptions and discontinues that leave the water city quite disfigured, the latter having been purged of its distinction

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as a token of authentic heritage, of a cultural inheritance purified in (linear) time. Conflations of this sort overcome the divides of reason so that differences, including that of boyhood and adulthood, of self and other, become fluid and reconcilable. The quintessence of London is precisely the resurgence of what was erased in the process of urban redevelopment, the uncanny memories foisted upon the walkers of London, eternal Londoners from all walks of life, including, of course, Dyer and Hawksmoor, as well as the vagrants and the boys they purportedly murdered. Dyer remembers eternal London as a sequence of “impressions that cannot be removed,” impressions formed when his mind was still “in Infancy, like the Body in Embrio” (12). Reflecting on his childhood in this vein, Dyer concludes that he was “placed in the Extremity of the Human State: even now, a Crowd of Thoughts whirl thro’ the Thorowfare of my Memory for it was in that fateful year of the Plague that the mildewed Curtain of the World was pulled aside…” (12). Infancy and boyhood should mark the beginning of a lifetime and therefore of linear time. However, the spirit of the child—or rather his extreme sensitivity to trauma, specifically his distinct memory of the plague—possesses Dyer so completely that he cannot help but see his childhood etched into his surroundings. For Dyer, London is forever what he remembered as a child, since his ties to London were forged precisely then, when his sensitivity was at its keenest: the thoroughfares of his childhood memories and of actual London are necessarily enmeshed together in his mind’s eye. But Dyer’s sense of London extends beyond his mind and remains in the cityscape to haunt the boys who invariably plunge down to their deaths from the apexes of the masonic artifices in Hawksmoor. Among them the precocious one named Thomas resembles Dyer most strikingly. Chronologically speaking, Thomas cannot be farther apart from Dyer. The former was born into the late twentieth century whereas the latter the seventeenth century. Thomas is the heir of Dyer’s awareness and sensitivity, however, and is distinguished by virtue of this very inheritance. Thomas is first drawn toward his death, thereby toward Dyer, when he discovers the heat emanating from a pyramid in the front yard of Dyer’s church. He likens the artifice to “an open fire” above which “the air itself quivered, and now he always associated that movement with heat. The pyramid was too hot, even if he himself could not feel it” (30, 31). Most notably, the boy does not feel but only see that the pyramid is too hot. In a moment of extremity, his mind foregrounds the movement of a

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natural element seemingly caused by a London part. In “his extremity[,]” Thomas often wanders through “the streets of London, repeating words or phrases under his breath[,] thinking of the past and of the future” (43); Dyer had likewise been “born onward” along the streets of London while reflecting that his “Churches will indure,” that by building churches he effectively refuses to live “for others, like the Dog in the Wheel” any longer (8). In the one instance, Thomas is borne toward the pyramid’s revelation and ultimately toward Dyer; in the other, Dyer was on his way to claiming the title of “Tyrant of [his] own Land,” whose divine abilities include that of altering time’s “Posture and, as Boys do turn a looking-glass against the Sunne, so I will dazzle you all” (8). Thomas’ behavioral resemblance to Dyer marks him as an archetypal Boy who mischievously uses a mirror to redirect the sunlight, to dazzle and blind those near him. Here the archetypal embodies yet another uncanny recurrence that patiently and ritualistically distends the waterscape: boyhood is not an indication of age inasmuch as a boy is here anyone who, in “the gathering darkness[,]” moves “towards the small pyramid, place[s] his hands upon it as if to warm them, but in that instant […] fe[els] a wave of disorder” (24). Boyhood is here so generalized that it is thought to be an existence extrinsic to the wheel, or a vantage point at which one manipulates the wheel’s movements and consequently feels the friction and the heat it generates. Any vagrant who dances around a wheel of fire “with the smoke clinging to his clothing and then wrapping him in mist” (244) likewise adopts the role of the mischievous but dazzling Boy, someone tired of being a dog within the wheel, the wheel being the centrifugal force of development, of the economy exerting influence on Londonscape as defined by its current market value, on London of the now. The Boy, as a sensuous detective, can liberate time from the tyranny of a linear chronology and, in this manner, render London spasmic, eternal, psychogeographical. There is eternal London, the sun “burn[s]” before the child Dyer so brilliantly that he begins to see “the Shape of [his] Father crossing and crossing againe in front of [the House] so that he seemed a meer Shaddowe[,]” and the boy was “like Adam who on hearing the voice of God in the Garden wept in a state of Primal Terrour” (9). The sun then illuminates a chronology of a world formerly immersed in darkness. Dyer retraces the steps of linear time to encounter his father’s shadow and, finally, Adam’s experience of primal terror as per the Book of Genesis. At first glance, the time that the child Dyer

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delineates seems linear and causal: Dyer’s parents gave birth to him; therefore, he exists. Adam grew afraid of God because he had broken his promise and committed the Original Sin; Adam experienced primal terror which was the consequence of the divine father’s wrath; Adam bequeathed this terror of the father to all his male descendants; Dyer, as Adam’s direct descendent, is fated to dread his father’s very shadow. Especially remarkable is that the Boy’s chronology does not have the same beginning as the rationalist’s. Hawksmoor, as a rationalist, intends for his deduction to bring him to a concrete foundation of reality, but the Boy, the rationalist’s arch-nemesis, expects to see beginnings of shadows such as the primal terror (of the belligerent father), an emotion far too extreme to have any place in the tangible world of Heritage London. The rationalist idealizes an absolute truth whereas the heretic desires to dazzle all into blindness, consequently into a palpable murkiness where the senses run amok and reason combust in the face of growing contradictions, of paradoxes whose formation are at once expected and alienating. Both the rationalist and the heretic enlighten and detect light, though the latter alone uses light paradoxically to obscure (causal) reason in order to point toward an eternal London-ness, which is a situation unfolding in media res (not unlike Trimm’s conception of inheritance). Boyhood is then an ideal whereby time is unwound, an alternative method of detection that produces much friction and heat: the Boy feels the London heat just above the pyramid, and from there he exerts his influence on all Londoners, regardless of their temporal stations.

Conclusion Thus the sensuous psychogeographer—the rationalist who believes in fate, the Boy who defies growth—engages in a dialectical deadlock with Humeian rationalism. Hawksmoor, for one, embraces the linear sequence but only to hasten its disintegration. He seeks connections, the many middles and centers that elucidate a rational order, though they invariably redirect his desire toward the paradox of a “discontinuous essentialism.” The London-ness of London is not therefore a quintessence that ensures coherence in an identity, but rather a Gothic fatalism whose shadows linger in the present in the form of an inheritance incomprehensible owing to its own richness. Such legacies possess their heirs while also eluding them, and so inheritance is in point of fact a matter of spiritual possession, something pertinent to Wolfreys’ hauntology. London-ness is

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an otherworldly, transcendent spirit that inspires dialogues, polyphony, heteroglossia, and, to this end, the kind of neurosis that implants a discordant voice into a suspiciously pan-European consciousness, or into the swine song dedicated to an Englishness now supposedly threatened. An Englishness pure, quintessential enough to be defended accordingly is a treasure attainable nowhere but in Albion, the London that Mary Poppins herself drifts into as she surveys “key Albion landmarks – Parliament, St. Paul’s, Tower Bridge – on a cloud of goodwill. It is a London bereft of squalor and full of cheeky sweeps, bankers in bowlers and bobbies” (Ritchie 35). The spatial manifestation of Englishness, Albion is of course a Hollywood commodity that offers instant gratification for any nostalgic yearnings, but its dimension is delimited by the circularity of late capitalism. As Marisa Lerer and Conor McGarrigle have pointed out: “Crises have always been part of capitalism, including the Railway Panic of 1873, the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and the largest single day market crash in history, Black Monday of 1987” (1). Eternal London, or the London-ness of London, is nonetheless beyond the roundness of the Wheel of Fortune. The genius loci detected through the senses is an unwelcomed imposition rather than a graspable object of desire. Albion, the London-ness of London, is a cursed inheritance that gives off the evermore unsettling odor of the unsavory, in particular of poverty, vagrancy and arrested developments: all of which will only devalue London.

References Ackroyd, Peter. 1992. English Music. New York: Knopf. ———. 2013. Hawksmoor. London: Penguin Books. Ackroyd, Peter, and Wolfreys, Julian. 1999. Imagining the Labyrinth: A Conversation with Peter Ackroyd. Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 1.1: 97–114. www.jstor.org/stable/41201146. Accessed 24 March 2020. Gibson, Jeremy Gibson, and Wolfreys, Julian. 2000. Peter Ackroyd: The Ludic and Labyrinthine Text. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hume, David. 2007. An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (Oxford World’s Classics). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewis, Barry. 2007. My Words Echo Thus: Possessing the Past in Peter Ackroyd. The Columbia: The University of South Carolina Press. Neagu, Adriana. 2017. Continental Perceptions of Englishness, ‘Foreignness’ and the Global Turn. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

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“sensible, adj., n., and adv.” 2020. OED Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://www-oed-com.libaccess.lib.mcmaster.ca/view/Entry/175971? redirectedFrom=sensible#eid. Accessed 24 March 2020. “vagrancy, n.” 2020. OED Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https:// www-oed-com.libaccess.lib.mcmaster.ca/view/Entry/221039?redirecte dFrom=vagrancy#eid. Accessed 24 March 2020. Onega, Susan. 1999. Metafiction and Myth in the Novels of Peter Ackroyd. Rochester: Camden House. Pope, Ged. 2008. Deep in South London. Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London 6.1. http://www.literarylondon.org/ london-journal/march2008/pope.html. Accessed 24 April 2017. Richter, David. 1989. Murder in Jest: Serial Killing in the Post-Modern Detective Story. Journal of Narrative Theory 19.1: 106–115. http://www.jstor.org/sta ble/30225238. Accessed 15 December 2016. Trimm, Ryan. 2018. Heritage and the Legacy of the Past in Contemporary Britain. New York and London: Routledge. Ward, Reginald. 1986. London: The Emerging Docklands City. Built Environment (1978) 12.3: 117–127. www.jstor.org/stable/23286692. Accessed 24 March 2020. Wolfreys, Julian. 2004. Writing London, Volume 2: Materiality, Memory, Spectrality. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 4

Writing Psychogeography, Writing London Through a Screen Darkly: White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings

Abstract Traces of the otherwordly have long inhered in day-to-day perceptions of London Urban oddities such as the mostly disappeared St. Mary Matfelon and the nameless edifices in the yard of St. Anne’s Limehouse only await psychogeographical detection. These mysterious landmarks whose memories are only half-remembered are the gaping wounds upon Londonscape; or, the dark blotches upon the London waters that are conveying material wealth into the pockets of the most “deserving” laborers. Sinclair’s literary psychogeography emphasizes the incongruities inherent in the water vision, and in pursuing this endeavor, “Sinclair,” as narrator, acquires a divided consciousness and a disjointed writing style in tandem. Psychogeography consists of the alienating voices emanating from within “Sinclair,” the prototypical Londoner, on the one hand, and the absences buried in Londonscape, on the other. The implosive brute force in question is precisely the London-ness of London. Keywords Hauntology · Literary chiaroscuro · Detective fiction · Jack the Ripper

In White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, Iain Sinclair specifically tells us that reason is a myth, and narrative the thread connecting subjectivity to space.

© The Author(s) 2020 A. Tso, The Literary Psychogeography of London, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52980-2_4

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Because the spirit of place is that in relation to which “I” becomes a meaningful notion, the London-ness of London is comprehensible strictly in relation to known London identities. To put matters differently, so long as the city’s identity remains chimerical, London-ness will be the fodder of irrational myths which will unhinge all-too-coherent tales of the water city and its heritage. A palpable mystical talisman, London-ness is like an electrical current (especially so in Lud Heat ; see Chapter 1) wading through the depths of the water city, illuminating within it a destabilizing strangeness that distances heritage from Adam Smith’s liberalism (see Chapter 1) as well as the Humesian emphasis on cause and effect (see Chapter 2). This disquieting disconnect that characterizes London-ness provokes in the literary psychogeographer a desire to discover radical beginnings. Writing from Jack the Ripper’s perspective in White Chappell, Sinclair pretends to speculate about God’s originary design across a linear timeline—divinity being always already; an entity having presided over creation since the beginning of time. Our psychogeographer-cum-firstperson-narrator writes psychogeography in London, a city with a history supposedly traceable to a god figure, so as to de-escalate England’s existential crisis amid cries for rapid globalization. In the face of a crippling loss of purpose, stories of some cultural quintessence—an “inquiry into the centrifugal force” (120) of history—will need to be told, even if only in terms abstract and imprecise, relative and contradictory. “Sinclair” (as a character in the novel) exists in late twentieth-century-London as a literary psychogeographer, a writer of detective fiction and a detective of genius loci: here a multi-temporal dimension marrying the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Before I place Sinclair’s novel in any particular genre, I shall summarize scholarly readings which may explain my interest in psychogeographical time. That Sinclair’s literary psychogeography is a critique of the extreme capitalism is hardly an original idea. As Wilhelm Emilsson observes, “at the time Iain Sinclair published his novel the results of Margaret Thatcher’s laissez-faire surgery on Britain’s welfare system were making the country appear more Dickensian everyday” (278). An undermined welfare system would make the impoverished still more impoverished, to be sure, although spectacles of decay merely prompted the government to intensify the city’s gentrification for the preservation of so-called English Heritage, the risk of extraditing the poor from the city notwithstanding. Max Dupperay describes the Dickensian everyday as a perennial feature of twenty-first-century London, where

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racial and class tensions continue to run rampant (see Dupperay 171). He further adds that urban poverty is Sinclair’s chief concern in White Chappell, and that the Victorian reference of Jack the Ripper gives the novel a fitting “psychotic echo” (Dupperay 183). Within this spectacle of the Dickensian every day, time itself is disjointed and Sinclair’s London a “timeless limbo” (Dupperay 184) imaginable only in reference to Blake’s prophetic poems, “as well as fantasies like the Royal and masonic conspiracy” in oneiric directions (Dupperay 184). Robert Bond similarly believes that the past has assumed the physical form of London to entrap Sinclair who, in response, writes with the “overriding impulse […] to cut through [the] secrec[ts]” (Bond 95) of late capitalist London so as to decipher the “traces of the city’s history” (Bond 91). The Dickensian has not so much been erased as it has been enshrouded in secrecy, since the water city’s perceived resplendence originates not in purity but in the concealment of its taints, whose absences render the water vision incomplete if not unnatural or visually dissatisfying. So conspicuous have these absences grown that Sinclair, as a literary psychogeographer, feels compelled to rewrite London and reclaim what London has lost to the veil of secrecy, namely, the London-ness of London. White Chappell was written to acknowledge the inadequacy of what is known, and, in this sense, to impair coherent understanding. By reporting supernatural interferences, Sinclair’s novel presents a detective method whereby articulation demonstrates neither one’s clarity of mind nor one’s reason. The writer of psychogeography must be understood alongside the writing thereof, and to understand either, one must ask: why would one write (psychogeography) to reject the rationalism— “the triumph of Victorian positivism” (Tani 18)—that has shaped many a classic British detective novel, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes ? In all his “cerebral performances,” Holmes cuts the figure of an invincible rationalist who always discovers “neat solutions” (Tani 23). Detection in the Holmesian sense suggests a clearing of vision or a sharp narrowing of focus, such that to detect is to bring to light the most relevant details. However, to write psychogeography is to refuse to focus, if not to renounce a unified consciousness altogether. “Sinclair” writes for the sake of detecting local revenants, although what he detects maims his language so that he struggles to maintain mastery over his own language. A possessed writer like “Sinclair” writes but inarticulately, while the “inarticulate” style of writing called psychogeography discloses

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nothing more than the descent of obscurity on logos , consequently on the cerebral power celebrated from the early- to mid-twentieth century by Doyle’s upper-middle-class readership (see Tani 18, 21). Unlike the conventional detective, “Sinclair” suffers to have his thoughts invaded so that the very act of thinking threatens confusion rather than offers clarity. In this vein, the literary psychogeographer assumes the role of a “rational visionary” who demonstrates his brand of “scientific mythology” in the most theatrical, hyperbolic fashion: The theatre is a site for autopsy, the division and opening of the human body. The recurrent use of the word ‘autopsy’ (as in Slow Chocolate Autopsy) and the word ‘forensic’ in Sinclair’s writings [suggest] a medicoscientific approach to myth and culture. The etymology of ‘autopsy’ also signifies another recurrent motif in Sinclair’s texts, one indicated in the passage quoted above: vision. Autopsy derives from ‘optics’, from the Greek words opsis (‘vision’ or ‘sight’) and autoptos (‘seen by oneself’, a compound of autos and optos). An autopsy, then, as defined by Sinclair himself in Lud Heat , is ‘the act of seeing with one’s own eyes’. The autopsy is an act of witness as well as a spectacle, emphasising the personal connection between spectator and event, between seeing and knowledge. (Baker, n.p.)

Brian Baker establishes that for Sinclair, to see is to identify. To see but not to identify, however, is a scientific act whereby the self observes the performance of an autopsy upon its own body. A self thus dis-unified gains a heightened (“scientific”) awareness of itself and of the event of the autopsy, but the integrity of its thought is sacrificed to London’s spectral voices in the same stroke. In White Chappell, “Sinclair” writes to liberate these specters, but in doing so his own voice becomes disembodied, implying a disharmony in the individual consciousness. His very prose appears to have been “dictated” in “automatic ‘spasms and random leaps’” (Bond 97), and this irrational mode of writing should realize— the utopian hope […] that by granting attention to the past, for instance with an act of retrospective prophecy, the status quo of the given past may be transfigured into the not-yet-happened. Crimes are not to be denounced […] so much as re-defined or re-imagined, as if they were focal points of a historical energy that is to be redirected along a more positive course. (Bond 106)

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His assumption that time is linear—that any positive energy infused into the past will carry forward to a utopian future—notwithstanding, Bond is quite right to emphasize the spontaneity that characterizes not only Sinclair’s writing style but also its utopian drive to envision London otherworlds, wherein consumer culture does not prevail.1 Sinclair writes London in order to envision otherworldly, utopian dimensions which Dupperay has called “oneiric” and Brian Baker “cosmic” (n.p.). For Baker particularly, “cosmic time and limited human time” have converged on Sinclair’s diegetic “canvas,” his “psychogeography and myth” (Baker, n.p.). Sinclair’s psychogeographical time does not then represent an isolated continuum but rather a “temporal co-presence, or perhaps multipresence” (Baker, n.p.), a conflation of times alienating and mystifying enough to be an approximation of London-ness. Coherent reason will escape any writer caught in this psychogeographical “multi-presence,” in relation to which space is palimpsestic and the writing consciousness (the first person “I”) dis-unified.2 Ideas of infinity and impossibility are thereby interwoven into the structure of literary psychogeography. In Sinclair’s oeuvre, words initially serve the purpose of tapping into divine wisdom, its talons extending far into the bottomless pit of infinity. If this hyperbole is to be continued, literary psychogeography may be described as an ensemble of failed attempts at realizing a discourse of reason on a par with biblical language. The literary psychogeographer (“Sinclair”) penetrates the depths of Londonscape to trace unspoken histories, particularly the repeated failures of Enlightened thinkers to protect exploited laborers such as Jack the Ripper’s victims. The prize of Sinclair’s psychogeographical quest is absence, i.e., the darkness extracted from Londonscape, which has

1 It would be helpful to take into account Martin Heidegger’s definition of ‘being’:

“Dasein tends to understand its own being [sein] in terms of the being [Seienden] to which it is essentially, continually, and most closely related—the ‘world’” (16). Being exists in relation to the world, such that being-in-the world is the “constitution” of Dasein, in other words the basis of our conscious existence (53). Being is not possible independently of the world, since being-in-the-world “stands for a unified phenomenon” (53). 2 Baker thinks that Sinclair’s reading of time is quite similar to Moore’s in From Hell.

There is nevertheless a difference: Sinclair, unlike Moore, imagines that he sees London from a position above. This statement is fairly accurate. As I argue in the previous section, Moore does imagine a transcendental position through the lens of, say, Gull the Ripper. But Moore inevitably returns to the level of the local, i.e., the part of a transcendental vision of London.

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become, by now, the lighted tableau that is the water vision (discussed in Chapter 2). In writing White Chappell, Sinclair has invented a “literary chiaroscuro” that preserves the London-ness of London by coloring the water vision in darker hues. Here the inharmonious writerly consciousness manifests itself as a prose-style whose very unintelligibility suggests a dissatisfying lack inherent in the water city, in spite of its evident prosperity. A style intended to confuse evokes an alienating eeriness tied to London-ness, revealing in this way London’s multi-temporal reach from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from frivolous fascination with “Victorian Heritage” to memories actually erased by the Heritage Industry. Put another way, “Sinclair” writes psychogeography to dispel literary illuminations, ultimately to reinvent traditions to which the English literary canon owes its stature. White Chappell, in particular— reverse[s] the conventions of detective fiction, where a given crime is unravelled, piece by piece, until a murderer is denounced whose act is the starting point of the narration. Our narrative starts everywhere. We want to assemble all the incomplete movements, like cubists, until the point is reached where the crime can commit itself. [...] That is why there are so many Ripper candidates, so many theories: and they can all be right. (61–2)

To reverse this particular strand of literary tradition, “Sinclair” takes on the role of detective but declares a blatant lack of purpose—a postmodern feat he accomplishes by inventing simulacra of the most celebrated literary personages. White Chappell is a detective novel only because Sinclair identifies himself right from the beginning as “the Late Watson,” the “secret hero who buries his own power in the description of other men’s [cerebral] triumphs” (15). Psychogeographical labor is necessarily performed in retrospect by “late” detectives who are the unoriginal, uninspired reincarnations of a couple of well-known Victorian fictional characters: Sherlock and Watson. Despite it being the subject of psychogeographical probing, London also seems a lackluster replica of its nineteenth-century self. Greenland Dock and the Limehouse area are now known only for “track[s] of rubbish, waste, [their] old streets tipped-in to dull its meaning”; or for pubs where “understudy villains orde[r] up cocktail froth” to better assimilate into a city that holds “the memory of what it was[,]” “an event […] [t]he Marshalsea trace, the narrative mazetrap that Dickens

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set” (62–3). When Sinclair wrote the novel by the end of the twentieth century, the Dickensian echo has sounded so loudly in London that contemporaneity per se meant precious little, and every Londoner seemed to have been typecast into a Dickensian novel. It is this Dickensian backdrop that has made literary psychogeography relevant: the literary psychogeographer writes in the hope of shedding light on alternate London histories that rise above the predictability of Victorian fictional archetypes, consequently on possible otherworlds that London can become, even when “[d]etached from th[e] shadow” (63) of the past. Sinclair, assuming the Late Watson’s voice, writes to explain the reasoning of an archetypal Sherlock, a Late Sherlock who appears as three different characters in the novel’s three main narratives. The first such character is Nicholas Lane, the bookdealer, an “icicle of pure intelligence” who “functioned directly on head energy” because “[n]othing could get into his intestine” (12); the second is James Hinton, the nineteenthcentury physician-cum-philosopher whose singular belief is that “some greater intelligence” shall commandeer his mind and body for reasons unknown and divine (92); the third is Joblard, who, having “no past” (114), can aid “Sinclair” in “cultivating” the “pieces of the immediate that can still be reached” (114). The immediate is here a celebration of temporal progress and the possibility of gaining insights into a different London, perhaps an estranging London-ness . Supported by a cerebral energy unperturbed by affect, this trinity of intellect chooses to privilege the head above all else—their body parts, their surroundings, and their community. The three are visionaries unassimilated into material London, secluded as they are in the abstractness of their thoughts, their contemplations of London’s otherworldly London-ness. Since London-ness would become a nothing-ness were it not immediately acted upon, and the impulses it inspires not duly documented in writing, the three thinkers are paired with their respective enactors/writers. Late Watson is always either “wait[ing], what else” (43), or “decid[ing] to follow” (89), ostensibly to perfect his descriptions of Late Sherlock’s (Lane’s) intellectual labor. “Sinclair” is the writer whose “ramblings” Joblard has to “suffe[r…] graciously” (197). Hinton’s vision “would have been nothing” had not William Gull, alias Jack the Ripper, “the literalist, made act, made complete, did” (113). These writers see to it that something is made of nothing; that words can conjure up London otherworlds which, being detached from the shadows of nostalgia, are radically original. In written form, psychogeography is a medium for

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divining the London-ness of London, while the literary psychogeography of London is “[d]ictation” at a speed “so fast and so deep that [one] writes it [the Event] before it happens, and by writing it he [the writer, whoever it may be] causes it to happen, a fate game that allows the unconscious no release” (61). When so dictated, London is invigorated by the energy of movements, by developments and future happenings: Sinclair/Watson/Gull is not the detective, the logician par excellence, but rather the writer, the voice of reason. Words enable reason and the master of words becomes the means through which the reader navigates his fictional universe. If White Chappell celebrates detection and articulated reason, it celebrates the writer above all else. The writer envisions all mysteries and knows all the explanations thereof. Logos is the beginning of reason, the beacon penetrating all detective mysteries. Words demystify and enlighten. Words illuminate. Much like the writer of detective fiction, the writer of reason must demonstrate a high level of linguistic competence to those he wishes to enlighten. The detective writer articulates one coherent, unifying rational framework that validates the intellectual prowess of an exceptional individual. By contrast, the literary psychogeographer (say, “Sinclair”) produces multifarious testaments of otherworldly presences in London, each time in a different voice as if possessed, as if he had borrowed the reason of another. Sinclair’s literary psychogeography captures the disparate voices that speak of different Londons, and they have, collectively, given form to London’s otherworldliness: an alienating London-ness. Sinclair’s quest therefore targets the city’s many inexplicable absences—for example, the Elephant Man, the nineteenth-century “sideshow freak” who “enter[ed] the stones” as he died, so that his absence can be used to “describe the rim of the missing church of Mary Matfellon. A taint in the colour of the hops” (110); or William Gull, whose final resting place “at the back of Guy’s Hospital, between Newcomen and Snows-field, at the corner, in Great Maze Pond[,] is [now] a red brick building, coded with roses and with fruits, once a private ward, now a gym” (196). Individual deaths—absences—are in this way transubstantiated into place, every one of them a layer of Londonscape mesmerizing to the urban wanderer. Through his search for absences potentially tied to London’s otherworldliness, “Sinclair” discovers William Gull in Whitechapel; as a consequence, “Sinclair” becomes possessed by Gull. In Sinclair’s voice, Gull

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introduces himself to the reader of White Chappell as London’s prophet— one well versed from a young age in “the Classics, in the revealed word of our Lord, in the observation and description of flora and fauna, both local and general, in the peregrinations of heavenly bodies […] the choicest effusions of the finest poets of the day, such as Sir Walter Scott” (48). His literary felicity is said to be a privilege attached to his “evident, and inherited, promise” (48) as the writer of London’s genesis. When still a boy, he already foresaw that his father John Gull’s passing was opening up a path before him, one “winding from the waterside, circuitously, to Beaumont, through many trials and dangers, both moral and physical, many tests of will, to the great world” (48). William Gull was destined to inherit the water city of London, a global trading port or an urban microcosm, whose profound global importance is inscribed on the very surfaces of its waters. Gull tells us (through Sinclair) that he is the writer par excellence—in fact none other than the inscriber of God’s word: “‘I can write. I can make a testament, like the Old’” (29). With evident false humility, Gull claims that while his “testament” is only one among many, it is also the oldest. Gull thinks that he has recorded the first of God’s words, whereby God explains His reason, here His design for London to prosper. Through the act of transcribing these first divine words, Gull declares himself the beginning of language and reason. Not only the first human being but also the first Englishman God enlightens, Gull embodies London’s future possibilities. His relationship to London is that of a drop of water to the Atlantic. If we are to draw from Holmes’s idea in “The Book of Life” that “[f]rom one drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic” (Doyle’s Holmes qtd. in Sinclair 58), we would imagine Gull as a water droplet that implies a potential as immense as an ocean. The very testament he has written reaffirms his family’s contribution to London since the beginning of time and consequently justifies its esteemed status in London. His self-styled genesis begins with the Gulls (of course), who perch upon a vessel reminiscent of Noah’s Ark: “The morning lightened, it was time to work. The sea was in the river and the river over the land. […] His house was an upturned boat. […] We are the first ones, the chosen. This is our Ark. The world is water. […] We are his Gull” (28). Here the Gull family witnesses the end of a water apocalypse and the emergence of London immersed in a wonderful brightness. The morning sun illuminates the London sky and the endless stretch of water below it. The survivors in the Ark, the

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first human beings after Adam and Eve, are to follow this light and steer London toward a future of trade. God appears to have granted the Gulls their personal river valley civilization—though it might be more accurate to say that Gull has “written his family’s presence into” (i.e., projected his self-conceived significance onto) the bodies of water that are, evidently, the conduits of wealth into London. In this way Gull takes “the [city’s] buildings into the blood: as salt. This is his vision. The man becomes the building, the building floats free, shattering into other older structures, into fields of uninterrupted water” (104), and this corrupt water flows “from Hamford Water to the City of London,” where John Gull once transported “the fruits of the fields, by barge, […] measures of wheat, measures of barley […]” (45). The current bears the bounties of Mother Earth, intended for William Gull— the Messiah, the New London Man—and all Londoners to come. London will remain prosperous so long as these waters continue to flow, says Gull in his reading of the London waters. Perhaps not coincidentally, Gull’s psychogeography echoes some popular historical accounts of the Thames such as the one Peter Ackroyd offers in London. According to Ackroyd, London’s prosperity has always depended upon the Thames, “the river of commerce” (455): [c]opper and tin were transported along [the Thames] as early as the third millennium BC (455) and— as trade and commerce increased, so did the significance of the river. It has been estimated that the volume of business grew three times between 1700 and 1800; there were thirty-eight wharves on both sides of the river […] Within the river’s banks sailed tea and china, as well as cotton and pepper, from the East Indies; from the West Indies came rum and coffee, sugar and cocoa; North America brought to the Thames tobacco and corn, rice and oil, while the Baltic states offered hemp and tallow, iron and linen. (Ackroyd 457)

Barley and wheat are the world’s first offerings to enter London via its rivers, and exotic items like tea and cocoa were swift to follow. William Gull’s father John Gull, the recipient of these initial offerings, was the first among all London tradesmen to take advantage of the rivers and consequently transform the city into a major capitalist cosmopolis, a lucrative water vision. These rivers are imagined as the traces of an Atlantic visible to the Gulls when they inspected the city upon their Ark. Gull who thus translates God’s words and writes in His tongue is reason, which is

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precisely what Sinclair/Watson must trace and record. Having “written himself into” the waters of London, Gull offers himself to Sinclair as the genius loci, the London-ness of London. He who has seen the beginning of London ostensibly has the right to be God’s interpreter, in which role Gull then informs Sinclair—the Late Watson; the conduit between the abstract and the material—of God’s will for London to be prosperous by means of its waters. If the beginning of London is traced to Gull’s writing, the reader must entertain the idea that Gull is a writer who detects God’s reason. In White Chappell, the desire to express one’s understanding of divine will is reason enough to write psychogeography. The writer, here the literary psychogeographer, sacrifices the Holmesian emphases on logic and intellectualism in favor of mere beliefs: Sinclair detects and transcribes only Gull’s reason, derived though it is from his faith in God’s partiality to London. Surely God has no motive to illuminate the waters of London so that its trade and the Gull family business would prosper—if such is divine will, it is not only most mysterious but also most irrational. But Sinclair transcribes Gull’s genesis for the reader precisely to illuminate incoherent lapses in what is ostensibly coherent. In the same vein, Joblard studies the conspicuous absence that Gull left in London to detect and tear apart, through his “well-earthed intelligence[,]” the “uninvited monologues” (111) that constitute Gull’s vision of London-ness, a sort of divine esse that has supposedly inhered in London since the beginning of time. Joblard’s intellectual contribution lies in his adeptness in returning “some fragments of his own, precise and accurate tales, seemingly unconnected, but burning the time until it is gone, the poison absorbed. He has the gift of turning nouns into verbs. He makes them move” (111). Reinventing Gull’s “originary” vision—from its content down to its grammar—Joblard has proven that even the divine word is not impervious to extraneous influences, certainly not to external efforts to reenvision London. The notion of “return”—reciprocation—is bound to influence the process of writing psychogeography and deny the literary psychogeographer any hope for radical originality. As he wanders around Whitechapel, “Sinclair” willy-nilly contracts Gull’s obsession with beginnings alongside his wish to be God, to be possessed by God. To be possessed by God is not the same as being haunted: this is the premise on which I will distinguish my reading of White Chappell from Julian Wolfreys’. Wolfreys explains his “hauntological” reading of Sinclair’s psychogeography as follows:

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The leakage of which Sinclair speaks is undoubtedly also readable as that hauntological flow that disrupts temporally distinct moments, and serves in its transgression of boundaries to offer one more graphic image as the contemporary urban writer addresses London. The revenant just is the phantom-graphic, barely discernible and yet in its return demanding to be read. A trace not to be confused with the object for which it might stand, this passing ruin, in alluding to a text that can never be read in full, invites imaginative concatenations that in turn generate alternative histories and histories of the other. (n.p.)

Wolfreys argues that the urban writer has no choice but to further his communication with the (historical) revenant, which will not desist from haunting him so long as he strives to (re-)read the likewise haunted place. But the novel further suggests that the only way to separate place from spirit is to transcribe all spectral voices in vain and so bring absences to light: “[t]here is no need to rub out the inscription on the stone, for as soon as it has been read, it fades from before your eyes” (199). In the role of the Late Watson, the literary psychogeographer faithfully recites the words through which local revenants have implanted themselves in Londonscape—in Gull’s case to curse it with his unitary water vision, his writing, his genesis. Sinclair does not consider such recitals to be thoughtless reiterations but rather opportunities to “act over,” when undoing the harm that Gull the Ripper inflicted on the Whitechapel women is not possible: “Exorcism merely confers status on the exorcist: who claims, falsely, that he has the power to unmake. […] Erasure acts over, is a discretion. Joblard’s performance in the warehouse erased itself so that the voices were set free. They wound back the memory of the future” (199). Sinclair’s literary psychogeography therefore has a dramatic aspect, its chief assumption being that reenactments necessitate reinterpretations. Having invoked Gull, Sinclair is in a position to misrepresent Gull’s prophetic words about London—or, better still, to scramble his narrative while imputing to the narrator a divided consciousness whose incoherence sets free a host of other voices, each describing a specific otherworldliness—a London-ness—attributable to a different London. As Colin Davis explains, “hauntology [a word Derrida coined in Specters of Marx (1993)] supplants its near homonym ontology, replacing the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive” (373): since meaning, having been

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emptied by ghosts, is no longer “a determinate content to be uncovered” (Davis 377), any desire for fulfilled meaning in the form of the cogito (i.e., being and presence) can only be frustrated. In place of meaning ghosts offer secrecy, that is, “a productive opening” (Davis 377) for rumors and groundless speculations. Every attempt at meaning production is an exercise in creativity that these secretive specters inspire, although meaning as artificially conceived as this could be no more than an idea, that is, the hint of a presence rather than presence itself. Meaning thus conceived is hauntological in that it is an absence whose presence is palpably felt but never wholly understood. An absence of this sort is to be interpreted ad infinitum by interested literary psychogeographers, none of whom can claim sole authorship over London’s script—its prescribed past, present, future.3 Subject to this interpretive act are the inscriptions scattered across a London heavy with absences. These inscriptions, when read aloud, invariably reveal London’s polyvalent composition, in other words the very many incongruities that culminate in the London-ness of London. As Sinclair readily confesses in White Chappell, “he” who writes is really a “we” who are “not logicians”: “We darted, snapped, disbelieved ourselves” (58). When investigating the senseless beating of Hymie Beaker of Buxton Street, “we” chance upon “an identikit portrait of a man seen lurking, talking: horror hybrid, the features of myself and Joblard, blended. Cut and put together. Gone out of the human range. Where two men are” (97). The culprit lurking in Buxton Street, malevolent and wraith-like, possesses Late Sherlock and Watson when they visit the crime scene. Even a senseless criminal such as he could sound the voice of reason, his presence having been sedimented into the land that the Late Watson treads. In possessing—becoming one with, making a “horror hybrid” of—Sinclair and Joblard, the spirit of Buxton Street has turned White Chappell into a catalogue of disjointed expressions about the otherworldly. To write psychogeography is then to accept the assault of the genius loci upon reason. This potency of words means 3 Derrida borrowed the idea of hauntology from the psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok—for whom the phantom (as opposed to Derrida’s ‘specter’) signifies “the presence of a dead ancestor in the living Ego, still intent on preventing its traumatic and usually shameful secrets from coming to light” (Davis 374). For the two psychoanalysts, the useful distinction between the living and the dead defines the word ‘haunting’; for Derrida, however, haunting is a phenomenon contingent upon the erasure of all such distinctions.

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that the literary medium can give rise to a new episteme on which an otherworld will be founded, thus to the London-ness of an otherworldly London. In Sinclair’s literary psychogeography, language is the instrument of reason only insofar as it serves the purpose of alienating readers: because the meaning of reason is so ambiguous in White Chappell, its significance is quite often debated in the way Emilsson and Bond have done. Whereas Emilsson argues that “reason, the guiding light of traditional sleuthing, is a hindrance to Sinclair and Joblard” (280), Bond insists that Sinclair is not irrational. In Bond’s opinion, Sinclair draws upon Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes Series precisely to show his commitment to “typically rational processes of uncovering” (103): “Sinclair is not inverting rationalist detection and providing us with exemplarily irrational detectives. But he is questioning the validity of methods that claim a surety of detection of causes” (104). When Bond calls Sinclair a rationalist, he might have in mind what Emilsson calls traditional reason, according to which a cause must precede an effect, and a causal sequence of events must in this way unfold across linear time. Bond assumes that one is either rational or irrational in this traditional sense, but Sinclair is neither. “Sinclair” needs not perform too much detective labor in order to present White Chappell as a work of detective fiction, for he is a writer/inventor of reason, a rationalist in his own right. Psychogeographical detection, Sinclair has said, “dive[s] into magical primers” where “writers are ‘the mirrors of gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present,’” after Rimbaud and Poe (131). Is it not futile to expect a mirror to reflect shadows as opposed to the light projected onto it, or writing to capture obscurity? However, otherworldly visions are immersed in obscurity, and the esse at their core (here the London-ness of London) is “gone out of the human range./where two men are” (97). The sentence “where two men are” (97) finds its completion elsewhere in the novel, when Sinclair and Joblard are at a bar which “has its own sense of what it should be,” and which has walls “soaked with earlier tales, aborted histories” (64). The site absorbs its own history and so becomes a pure historicity utterly inaccessible, in other words an aborted history much more obscure and speculative than the Dickensian spectacle from which twentieth-century London has been unable to detach itself. The barman is the medium, the genius loci which Sinclair calls “the third man.” Sinclair says of the barman: “Where two men are gathered, a third is always present. Without us he would not be here: without him we could not have come” (65). The third

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man is the trace of an unmanipulated past in the present simulacrum, where it does not belong; as such, it/he is the ideal object for Sinclair and Joblard’s psychogeographical study, perhaps even a trace to the pure difference or otherworldliness that puts London-ness “beyond the human range”—certainly beyond material London. The third man is then the mystical in the psychogeographer’s (“our”) snapped psyche and mutilated body; or the London-ness which, upon detection, becomes a part of “us.” “We” write as Late Sherlock, Late Watson, and the third man, the object of our detection, all at once.4 Having originated in this kind of immaterial space, London-ness now threatens the purpose of language to enlighten by rendering it a “horror hybrid.” In the figure of the third man, London-ness butchers and blends the words the two men (Sinclair and Joblard) use to signify it, and so psychogeography is the sort of writing that disowns (“orphans”) its writer by giving voice to an absolute reason which, ironically, fails even the staunchest rationalists.5 Joblard is the face Sinclair projects into the beyond to translate/write the histories which, having been “aborted” from Gull’s genesis for “clarity’s” sake, are unknowable, impossible, alienating, otherworldly. In order to divine these otherworldly perspectives of which London-ness consists, Joblard must let himself be possessed by the third man, the barman who is Whitechapel’s genius loci. In his turn, the third man alienates Joblard from Sinclair: “the third man remains vaporous and loose faced” (58), while Joblard’s orphan face, lacking any hint of genealogy, is no less so. Thus one writes psychogeography in the most paranoid fashion and with the most contrived and contradictory logic, as though one were possessed. In White Chappell, the psychogeographer is the holy trinity 4 “The third man” is an allusion to a 1949 detective film directed by Carol Reed and written by Graham Greene. The film, too, is about a corruption of the mind; specifically, it was a commentary on “the conflict between a post-war European World, wearied and bloodied by the experience or the cynicism which defines it, and American innocence or illusions, that are neither remedy nor refuge but instead are dangerously destructive and doomed” (Palmer and Riley 15). 5 The psychogeographic third man evokes the ominous presence of a third in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, where the persona tells his companion that “there is always another one walking besides you,” though “there are only you and I together.” For Eliot the Third Man is only as “unreal” as the “falling towers” of “Jerusalem Athens Alexandria/ Vienna London”—all fulcrums of civilization fated to crumble and become immaterial, unreal, in time. A testament to human wisdom and the advancement of civilization, language will become mangled as it once did in the event of the collapse of the Tower of Babel.

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of Sinclair, Joblard, and the third man. The third man, being the genius loci, derives his existence in the human range from the words of the other two, although logos also yields to the third man’s influence and becomes the means through which the third man undermines Sinclair and Joblard’s capacity to reason. As Baker argues, the third man is “connected […] to a kind of occult birthing caused by the psychic connection between Joblard and Sinclair and the forces immanent in Whitechapel. Images of birth are recurrent in Sinclair’s texts, as we have seen with regard to Suicide Bridge, and here they achieve a demonic otherness” (n.p.). The forces of Whitechapel, the bar(man) for one, create in Sinclair a demonic otherness even as Sinclair struggles to “divine” Gull’s genesis, his account for the beginning of London, the London-ness of London. It is as Sinclair tells us: Joblard is the “orphan” whose face is “firmer and better known to me than my own” (55). Joblard embodies the warped reason with which the third man (Whitechapel) infects Sinclair, and it is this violent other who has bent Sinclair’s literary psychogeography out of shape. Sinclair’s literary lineage to Gull is especially evident when he writes about Farringdon Road. Eating sausages with the blue-collar workers on 94 Farringdon Road (“to show solidarity” [103]), Sinclair looks upon a water canal which he imagines at the moment as a line of power, aligned, for once, with the drift of the city. Down with the water, from the ponds, the caves of Pentonville, rush with the Fleet, beside its ditch, swept with the dead dogs towards Thames. The domes of Old Bailey’s and St. Paul’s, the hulks of tenements. The office hulks. Everything in the end floats to Farringdon Road, deaths and libraries, sacks and tea-chests, confessions, testaments. The mysteries are shredded and priced. They are offered to the guided hand. (103)

Sinclair’s portrayal of the river line not only reaffirms parts of Gull’s “Testament” but also evokes Eliot’s vision of London as the paradigmatic urban wasteland.6 Sinclair brings the almost surreal tediousness of the

6 Eliot and Sinclair both see the Thames as a steady flow of garbage, a dispiriting representation of modern life. Eliot even calls the Thames an “unnatural” river that “sweats/ Oil and tar” while “barges drift/With the turning tide” and “wash/Drifting logs/Down Greenwich reach/Past the Isle of Dogs.” As Stephen Medcalf puts it, the river puts on display a “profoundly disturbing stream of images” (226) that the poet, yet desiring narrative unity, struggles to construe as “continuous stories (a journey down the Thames to the sea, a journey from the city through a desert)” (226). Eliot watches the

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Thames to the fore in White Chappell. Centuries of effective administrative labor (“the office hulks”) seem to have wrought London its wealth and have ensured its accretion of power symbols (the domes of Old Bailey’s and St. Paul’s) along the river line. It would also seem that Gull is right to read London’s waters, its channels of wealth and power, as tokens of divine providence. For London to continue prospering, those eating sausages on Farringdon Road must toil harder, albeit that they have always labored out of their respect for Gull’s genesis: “There are the workers, who have always been workers. For them it is time out. Manac. ‘What doth the Lord require?’” (51). Work generates wealth, and wealth, as Gull says, means life: “Work was life, life was work. ‘Blessed is he who has found his work.’ The weak must serve the strong, and be protected, as children served their parents, as women served men, as men served God: that savage and wonderful darkness” (27; italics in original). Later Sinclair and Joblard discover that Gull’s words have marked many a corner of the city. Near “the dwellings on the south side of the Jewish Burial Ground [which] have been evacuated by keyholders,” for instance, an “openair chapel” remains available to the literary psychogeographers as “the geology of time” but only “now, at this moment, this afternoon, and will be gone, will be forever unreachable. Unredeemed.” (52). This geological specimen—an “unattended god trap” (53)—has preserved memories of John Gull through its resemblance to a “dockside” (52) and, by association, to the waterways which had brought wealth to the Gull family. Even now its walls commemorate the Gulls: “On the right: ‘Labour/is life/blessed is he/who has found/his work.’ The work that was short was life. Soon finished. Crushed. On the left: ‘Whatsoever/thy hand/findeth to do/do it with/thy might’” (53). Now placed next to one another, these truncated sentences establish a tenuous connection between the value of labor and the transience of life: a short

City Man—the stereotypical London clerk on his way to work—as he “wander[s] through the unreal City, […] from the ‘hyacinth garden’ passage to the arrival at the mysterious chapel” (Day 286), and the man’s journey down the Thames ineluctably calls to his mind Dante’s “descent into Hell” (Day 286). The London Man will never stray far from the Thames, the “English Wall Street” that “contains modern London’s financial district and most of England’s mercantile and monetary power” (Day 286); he will experience isolation in the midst of the urban crowd, for his human contact will always only comprise “sights, sounds, conversations overheard in snatches” (Day 286). London is the “tiny nightmare Odyssey” (Day 286) that keeps the City Man uninspiring, “dul[l],” and “conservative[e]” (Day 286).

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life dedicated to hard work will contribute to the greater good, namely the realization of the water vision as prophesied in Gull’s genesis. Sinclair also finds this conceit reasserted architecturally through the Red Tower, a cathedral located across St. Thomas Street; “a threading of fruits, cornucopic horns, standing off the subdued brick,” reminding us that “‘[t]he interest of the poor/and their duty/are the same’” (63). These various landmarks are supposed to attest to the “prophecy” that the water vision is founded on the worker’s readiness to uphold the “virtue” of hard (exploitative) labor. Eerily reminiscent are Gull’s words of Thatcher’s “rhetoric of improvement, embodying the Victorian ideals of morality, global dominance, nationalism and myths of progress—financial, technological, social” (Murray, n.p.). Thatcher specifically said, “I was brought up to work jolly hard. We were taught to live within our income, that cleanliness is next to godliness. We were taught self-respect. You were taught tremendous pride in your country. All those are Victorian virtues” (Thatcher qtd. in Murray, n.p.). While Thatcher merely shared her understanding of the traditionally “good character” of the English (putatively a Victorian inheritance), Gull advertises his understanding as a variation of the Old Testament to be passed on like a nursery tale. The Gulls read London waters to explain the greatness of the English in causal terms: God gave “us” an advantage in trade through the waters, so “we” worked to make trade the basis of “our” affluence. The water reflects both the cause (God) and the consequence (human labor) of trade, giving Londoners a straightforward reason to “take pride in [their] country.” God has blessed “he who has found his work” since the beginning of London time; London is blessed because God has given it work in the form of trade. Because these waters are said to have consecrated a pact between God and he who has found his work, they are celebrated—commodified—in England’s “burgeoning heritage industry” (Martin’s phrase 4). If neoliberalism has “shaped and unshaped” the London landscape since the 1970s (2) as Neil Martin claims, the Thames should be one of neoliberalism’s greatest achievements yet. A satisfying story of growth and heritage endorsed by God—who of course is Reason itself—is inscribed upon the bright surface of its water. Although Sinclair cannot reject the influence of Gull’s creed, he can rewrite (“re-enact”) it for the express purpose of mutilating it. Toward the end of Sinclair’s disjointed narrative, “shredded mysteries” (103)

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such as dead dogs, deaths and libraries, sacks and tea-chests, confessions, testaments are said to float to Farringdon Road. Sinclair chooses these muddy waters as the setting of White Chappell, a work of literary psychogeography intended to make a horror hybrid of Gull, the “possessive” writer-god. Any mention of the shredded mysteries downriver will extinguish the rational light of Gull/God, resulting in the orphaning of “us,” the heirs of Gull’s prophecy. The beginning this Gull/God signifies likewise is annulled as Joblard gains prominence in Sinclair’s narrative. An orphan without genealogy or origin, Joblard signifies the death of Gull/God and the loss of jouissance, i.e., “the pleasure of self-presence, pure auto-affection, uncorrupted by any outside, […] accorded to God” (Derrida Loc 7188), all fantasies of the originary. He could even supplant Gull/God because he is no one and therefore everyone. Sinclair describes Joblard as follows: “I [Sinclair] turn from the light to Joblard. […] He is white, bearded in shadows. It is the face of my father. The Father of Lights” (138). Joblard, as divine father, is an orphan who can be anyone: he can be either Sinclair or Gull, and, quite possibly, he is also Sinclair’s father, the father of lights, the father of writing and reason. Joblard represents a God immersed in light but “bearded in shadows”—a God erased and alienated in this synthetic turn-of-phrase, a literary chiaroscuro.7 Gull writes of water because he only wants to reflect light; he writes to reflect the clarté of reason (like a mirror) because he believes that doing so will enable him to capture the full presence of God, ideally to become God. However, “detection,” “omniscience,” and “beginning” are all words that distance God, unable as we are to trace pure light. Based on the contrast between light and darkness, Sinclair’s psychogeographical language already erases any possibility of detecting pure reason and achieving jouissance. Differences enable meaning but necessarily erase meaning in its purest form, the signified as such. Erasures therefore constitute the foundation of reason and language. Derrida argues, “The trace, where the relationship with the other is marked, articulates its possibility in the entire field of entity [étant ], which metaphysics has defined as 7 Manon Plante argues that “the term ‘clair-obscur’ attributed to inversion does not merely refer to a painterly technique but is also a rhetorical–philosophical syntagm in which [Étienne Bonnot de] Condillac’s clair-obscur is the ‘clair’ of linkage of ideas, which encounters the ‘obscur’ of sentiment (which obscurity is represented in language by the rearrangement of words in a sentence)” (481). In seventeenth-century thought, even the language of reason must embrace the “darkness” of “passions and sensations,” which had a lower status than the ‘clear and distinct ideas’ discussed by Descartes” (Plante 481).

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the being-present starting from the occulted moment of the trace” (Loc 2847). The trace promises us only the possibility of jouissance (“the entire field of entity”), which hints at a divine presence without revealing it in all its purity. The trace represents jouissance to re-/de-flect its meaning and significance, while meaning is necessarily relational and differential: “[…] without the trace retaining the other as other in the same, no difference would do its work and no meaning would appear. It is not the question of a constituted difference here, but rather, before all determination of the content, of the pure moment which produces difference. The pure trace is différance” (Derrida Loc 3189). Any constituted difference may refer to the full presence in which meaning originates, such that it carries meaning for us only as “the other in the same,” the identity of “I” (i.e., conceptions of “the same”) being inherent in “my” imagination of the other but never pure otherness or otherness as such. In this sense, meaning is an indication of the distance between the detective and the pure trace—call it God as such, esse, or London-ness. Palpable to the imagination it may well be, London-ness is never materially realizable because the very language that gives it form alienates it, consequently erasing its presence from the water city, which is the fruition of Gull’s genesis. In his literary psychogeography, Sinclair at once constitutes and corrodes London-ness, whose pure form (the Atlantic as such) is erased whenever its trace—the water droplet, Gull—presents itself. The difference between the water droplet and the ocean gives us a sense of the immense otherworldliness that London-ness represents: in White Chappell, writing is our means to detect London-ness and attribute meaning to it, but in doing so, we also pave the way for its “occultation.” Gull, for one, loses sight of London-ness the moment he conceives of it as pure splendor and light, since utter darkness would suffice to dispel the vividness of any such visions. By the same token, Sinclair only needs to invoke darkness to “act over” Gull’s genesis; to plead ignorance and to discover what London-ness is not, in an apophatic fashion. To immerse all such resplendent images in dark waters is to annihilate the water city alongside the writer of its genesis, its “god.” “Sinclair” therefore writes psychogeography to imagine London-ness through Joblard and as Joblard, the Father of Lights with a beard steeped in darkness—clair-obscur, a constituted difference enabling erasure; a trace of the otherworldly but not the otherworldly per se. In the role of Dante’s Beatrice, Joblard guides Sinclair’s “descent” into the city, “from the obelisk of St Luke, Old Street, to the demolished obelisk

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of St John, Horseydown, by way of the extinguished Church of Mary Matfellon” (137). The disappeared city the pair seeks is “extinguished,” immersed in the darkness below. Sinclair, as psychogeographer, must plunge (“descend”) into this darkness to visit the demolished obelisk of St. John, Horseydown. The Church of Mary Matfellon (which no longer exists in London) is a landmark that will guide his way. Joblard’s task as the psychogeographer’s medium is to show the way “[b]eyond the door of light – the skin of the local is shaken. […] We go down towards the sky” (138). London in its visible form is superficial as skin because it has not yet “extinguished”; it is merely the “door of light” Sinclair must trespass to venture into the beyond, the sky underground. The sky/the underground, the above/the below: these differences converge in the oxymoronic expression “the sky underground” to undermine Gull’s genesis, the foundational which Gull has sought to impose on London. Joblard, as medium, embodies the distance between the literary psychogeographer and the object of his quest, the London-ness of London. Any act of erasure Joblard performs only enshrouds literary psychogeography in darkness, for the distance he resurrects pertains to histories aborted, now unrecognized and disorienting, otherworldly. So defiant is London-ness of material meaning that not even disappeared London landmarks (obscurité) can signify it. The demolished obelisk of St. John, Horseydown, for example, is not truly the goal of Sinclair’s quest but rather a reminder of “Hawksmoor’s obelisk, St Luke’s, white beacon, Nile finger [possibly a reference to Cleopatra’s Needle, which stands beside the Thames]” (90). This cluster of unrelated obelisks signposts a deferral of meaning which, for Sinclair, is an associative detective logic. Sinclair’s psychogeographical detection is an unending process, whereby meanings multiply by association so that “the final solution” is endlessly deferred as well. Halfway through his pilgrimage, Sinclair feels obliged to confess to the reader that “[i]n our deranged state there is no interest in following detail or making logical connections; we know it all. We shut our eyes: Masons, Clarence, Druitt, conspiracy, asylum […] Three men, Sickert the Painter, Netley the coachman, Gull the doctor. If the equation is neatly made, then it is true” (54). The prerequisite of psychogeographical detection is blindness but not reason in the Holmesian sense. A beam of light will always penetrate the sea of darkness behind the eyelids. This light is the raison d’être of psychogeography; it is

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no more than a resolute faith in magic, a fragile sanity amidst Sinclair’s less than rational—alienating—depiction of an otherworldly London Under. Because the sacred number of three signifies God, the psychogeographer-cum-detective (Sinclair/Joblard/Gull) believes in anything befitting the equation of three: Sickert the Painter, Netley the coachman, Gull the doctor; Sinclair, Joblard, and the Third Man; clair, obscur, clair-obscur; thesis, antithesis, synthesis. The dialectical tendencies underlying Sinclair’s method of detection already erase London in the originary so that it will always remain “occulted” and require further psychogeographical probing—and yet, through a contrast of clarté and obscurité, Sinclair has conjured up the possible, the not-yet-existent, the otherworldly. In White Chappell, the London-ness of London is manifested through Joblard’s synthetic characterization, or through the obelisk associating Hawksmoor with St. John in Sinclair’s mind. Like a finger, St. Luke’s points out the connection between the existent and the extinguished, and in this way it has revealed London-ness. These phallic structures “make light, not reflect it” (90), and so they illuminate for Sinclair/Joblard trails of still inchoate meanings—trails that materialize for the reader as words. Shadows that become meaningful when contrasted with light—reason, logic, language—are nonetheless meaningful references to the occulted London-ness, since they are the divine traces guiding Sinclair into the unfathomable abyss of an invisible London, the sky underground. Sinclair follows Joblard there to erase the water vision transcribed onto Londonscape by Gull and the inheritors of his reason, for instance advocates of so-called English Heritage. According to Sinclair, Joblard is pursuing the invisible. ‘I want to make tracings of unseen acts. To flood locked rooms with chemicals that trap the slightest movements of light. To cover all the marks of my own complicity. I want erasures. Weak illumination of ink. Shaded bulbs hung over parchment. The word “whisper” in some unknown language. I want the acts to repeat. I want to measure the force of decay in bread, the glow in the bones of mackerel. To erase time and to bend its direction of flow.’ (148)

Joblard and Sinclair partake in the psychogeographical movement to retrace and repeat the past as it was lived by Gull, this time to discover the particles of darkness suppressed by the water city’s unnatural gleam.

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However, the formulation of any prose passage resembles the continuous flow of water: one needs motivation to write, and the continuity of the written prose already proves this motivation unhampered. No writer, not even the writer of psychogeography, can resist “pursuing the invisible,” the satisfaction of discovering a unifying vision that would reclaim the fragments, the sacks and the tea-chests excised from Gull’s genesis. When Sinclair says that the trail to the sky underground is shaped like an obelisk, “white beyond white” (137), he in fact acknowledges his complicity in irradiating subterranean shadows and in seeking to bring literary London to light—thus his failure in un-writing Gull’s writing. However, writing is erasure, and literary psychogeography in particular is a “weak illumination of ink” that presents to the mind aborted histories and possible futures in order to taunt it for its limitations, especially its vast distance from the vantage point. In writing White Chappell, Sinclair recalls the ineradicable distance separating the writer of reason from esse in its purest form, but this very distance makes it possible to detect London-ness—a darkness emerging from within Gull’s water vision, causing it to unravel itself. Writing the prose-style of the possessed, “Sinclair” concedes his inability to divine London-ness as such while discrediting his writerly self in tandem with his inheritance, a nationalistic allegiance embedded in the London scenery, familiar like the Old. White Chappell is a work of literary psychogeography which serves as Sinclair’s admission of defeat, for rather than discovering London-ness, it merely highlights its distance from the prototypical Londoner, in this case “Sinclair.” Who then is “Sinclair”? “Sinclair” embodies a psychogeographical becoming, a writing consciousness eager to discover the originary, esse, the London-ness of London—all names for the beginning of history. His literary psychogeography exemplifies an incoherence symptomatic of self-erasure, and White Chappell especially rejects Gull’s writerly narcissistic impulse to discover God as such in himself. Gull, unlike “Sinclair,” does not realize that writing precipitates a process of withdrawal into the self, and that the act of writing merely distances the writer from the object of his quest. Gull writes his genesis to detect London-ness, but his decision to do so in the material terms of trade, labor, and capital already reveals the limits of his “detective” ability: the Thames water in which he has shown such keen interest carries is simply too fixed in its course to flow toward the originary, which exceeds not only being but time itself. This steady flow of water symbolizes a

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narrative whose nationalistic significance is too potent to pertain to an esse that transcends any invention of differences and meaning. If Sinclair continues Gull’s writing enterprise in White Chappell, he does so only to “divine” that which is meaningful only when instilled into the dark recesses of the mind: suggestions of the water city’s possible annihilation is perhaps what he seeks. “Sinclair” follows the waters which—according to Gull—wrought London its wealth downriver and encounters the obscurité of madness, the flotsam downriver which recalls other London stories, particularly the stories of the exploited sex workers “purged” from Jack the Ripper’s Whitechapel. White Chappell discovers, in this manner, that the clarté of reason (clear as water) in fact flows into obscurité and gives rise to a synthetic god figure. As a literary conception, London-ness itself is synthetic—comprised of both clarté and obscurité, both being derivatives of pure esse. Since every word in literary psychogeography contains the trace of its opposite, the writer-cum-medium could be said to have inherited a divided consciousness, concomitantly with the impulse to erase London-ness as such by describing it in relative terms, or in the form of a literary chiaroscuro. Each word that is written to describe the beginning references some other idea of the originary, and yet another interpretation of London’s genesis to disrupt all notions of sequentiality. Every rereading of White Chappell, on the other hand, marks the reader’s attempt to reaffirm the impossible idea that time, being continuous, progresses linearly, and yet readers cannot fully identify with the writer-psychogeographer, whose consciousness—which is manifest in his writerly voice—is fractured by every word he writes. The literary psychogeographer’s “nonsense” distances and alienates the readers, though this distance already serves as tangible evidence that otherworlds beyond the framework of recognition can exist; that, as a consequence, every incomprehensible word written by “Sinclair” is a trace of London-ness: the possibility for London to be other than what it is.

References Ackroyd, Peter. 2012. London: The Concise Biography. London: Vintage Books. Baker, Brian. 2007. Iain Sinclair. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bond, Robert. 2005. Iain Sinclair. Cambridge: Salt Publishing.

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Davis, Colin. 2005. Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms. French Studies 59.3: 373–379. https://journals.scholarsportal.info/details/00161128/v59i0003/ 373_hsap.xml. Accessed 18 April 2018. Day, Robert A. 1965. The ‘City Man’ in The Waste Land: The Geography of Reminiscence. PMLA 80.3: 285–291. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/ 461276. Accessed 25 May 2018. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Doyle, Arthur. 1986. The Complete Sherlock Holmes: All 4 Novels and 56 Short Stories. London: Bantam Classics. Dupperay, Max. 2012. Jack the Ripper as Neo-Victorian Gothic Fiction: Twentieth-Century and Contemporary Sallies into a Late Victorian Case and Myth. In Neo-Victorian Gothic: Horror, Violence and Degeneration in the Re-imagined Nineteenth Century, ed. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben, 167–196. Amsterdam and New York: Radopi. Eliot, T.S. 2011. The Waste Land. In The Waste Land and Other Poems: A Broadview Anthology of British Literature Edition, 63–83. London and New York: Broadview Press. Emilsson, Wilhelm. 2002. Iain Sinclair’s Unsound Detectives. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 43.3: 271–288. https://doi.org/10.1080/001116 10209602185. Heidegger, Martin. 2010. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York Press. Martin, Neil. 2015. Noise, Neoliberalism and the Matter of London. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Medcalf, Stephen. 2010. The Spirit of England. London: Routledge. https:// www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351540407. Accessed 25 May 2018. Moore, Alan, and Campbell, Eddie. 2006. From Hell: Being a Melodrama in Sixteen Parts. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf Productions. Murray, Alex. 2005. Exorcising the Demons of Thatcherism: Iain Sinclair and the Critical Efficacy of a London Fiction. Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London 3.2. http://www.literarylondon.org/ london-journal/september2005/murray.html. Accessed 15 December 2016. Palmer, James W., and Riley, Michael M. 1980. The Lone Rider in Vienna: Myth and Meaning in ‘The Third Man.’ Literature/Film Quarterly 8.1: 14– 21. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43796124?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents. Accessed Web 3 November 2017. Plante, Manon. 2014. The Art of Chiaroscuro Writing: Condillac and the Question of Word Order. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 37.4: 473– 485. https://journals.scholarsportal.info/details/17540194/v37i0004/473_ taocwcatqowo.xml. Accessed 15 December 2016. Sinclair, Iain. 2002. Lud Heat & Suicide Bridge. London: Granta Books.

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———. 2004. White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. London: Penguin Books. Tani, Stefano. 1984. The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction. Carbobdale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press. Wolfreys, Julian. 2005. Londongraphy: Iain Sinclair’s Urban Graphic. Literary London: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Representation of London 3.2. http://literarylondon.org/the-literary-london-journal/archive-of-the-lit erary-london-journal/issue-3-2/londonography-iain-sinclairs-urban-graphic/. Accessed 15 December 2016.

CHAPTER 5

London-ness: A Marriage of the Literary and the Psychogeographical

Abstract This chapter further juxtaposes the water vision with the literary city of London, the former a vision of urban social Darwinism to be displaced and de-structured by the latter’s city-ness, which is an implosive quality extrinsic to the order of global capitalism. Literary psychogeography amalgamates the vagueness of Situationism with the defamiliarizing aspect of literature, and its lens is trained upon the layers of darkness below the waterscape of London; specifically upon the voices silenced to bring the narrative of English Heritage coherence. Owing to its palimpsestic structure, the literary psychogeography of London is impossible to take in at first glance. Keywords City-ness · Visionary · Implosive · Fluidity · Postcolonial

Residues of London histories still lie dormant in the modern imagination. The Industrial Revolution had cultivated liberal capitalism in England while cementing London’s status as a global trading port, and later the coordinating center of empire. This series of successes has justified claims of lineage which are made all the more pressingly toward the end of the twentieth century, in the wake of the British Empire’s dissolution: it was (and still is) inconceivable that centuries of progression should derail and abandon the original imperative to succeed, that is, to compete and win, © The Author(s) 2020 A. Tso, The Literary Psychogeography of London, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52980-2_5

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politically as well as financially. Tangible proof is now needed to validate the lineage which has supposedly elevated England—Englishness—and so proof was created from the city situated in the center of England, where the impacts of trade and empire were most evident. Now, in the twenty-first century, London is not only an international trade hub but also a symbolic token of the nation’s “heritage,” its profound national traditions and global (i.e. colonial) impacts: the water city of London is a commodity recommended on the merit of its structural coherence, the culmination of centuries of relentless progress. Twenty-first-century London is supposed to have shown England and the rest of the world the heights, if not to say the vantage point, of human advancement. Thus has London become an ideal whose literary representations cannot be any less prone to hyperboles. With a lineage traceable to the Romantic poet William Blake, literary London has become a vortex of otherworldly visions largely incompatible with the material reality of the port city. Literary London is the direct inversion of the water vision, which was shaped by the ultrarational dictates of the free market, a system rewarding the privileged while punishing the rest for not lifting themselves out of their social disadvantage through “hard work.” Capturing the literariness of London entails the unquantifiable labor of envisioning a timeline parallel to—and therefore apart from—that of Heritage. Central to the visionary labor of psychogeography is the futile desire to detect the foundation of time (time free of ideological interferences; the originary), concomitantly with the idealistic but crucial aspiration to represent it through the literary medium. Here the literary is a manifestation of literariness, the latter the organic, unostentatious, originary condition in which the former is discovered. Specifically, the literary condition distends—defamiliarizes—the familiar view of the water city while ascribing to it the “pleasant vagueness” of Guy Debord’s psychogeography. Literary psychogeography, then, is the curious admixture of the vague in psychogeography and the defamiliarizing in literature. My analysis of the literary psychogeography of London has foregrounded an esoteric search for London-ness, a quality vaguely conceived as a literary implosive of sorts. Up until now, Alan Moore has envisioned the disintegration of Heritage London by following the principles of fractal mathematics: any vision, however coherent it may first appear, will betray infinite incongruities if stretched to the extreme. In a state of extremity, incongruities—visions of London-ness arising from the nagging suspicion that London is not as it seems—will naturally reveal

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themselves. In the same vein, the vague recognition that London is other than what it is pervades in Peter Ackroyd’s labyrinthine writing, where accidental discoveries, once detected through the senses, will transfigure the Londoner or being-in-London (to borrow from Heidegger’s notion of “being-in-the-world”). Every new awareness represents an otherworldly London: piecing together these moments of reckoning, Iain Sinclair, like Ackroyd and Moore, has written into existence a disintegrating London, whose crevices mirror the state of being a Londoner (being-in-London) and that of the English subject by extension. “I” is a unity of differences, and the narrative voice evidence of a divided consciousness. Literary psychogeography—a marriage of literary formalism and revolutionary politics—realizes not so much unity but more so breakage, fragmentation, thereby the possibility of replicating the city’s palimpsestic characteristic in writing. By dint of its readiness to inspire literary visions always discovered in media res and therefore without contexts, literariness is able to serve as a catalyst for the psychogeographical project, whose primary aim is to expose the capitalist urbanscape as the fortress defending laissez-faire neoliberalism. The psychogeographical technique of literary chiaroscuro, for example, leaves exaggerated blotches on the widely fetishized waterscape of opportunities, causing the city to implode with the voices of vagrants—most notably those of the Whitechapel sex workers, Jack the Ripper’s victims—all of which culminate in a polyphony, a palimpsest. As a microcosm of England, London exudes an incoherent, polyphonous identity that characterizes Englishness vis-à-vis the unraveling of the British Empire, while psychogeographical London heralds the beginning of the postcolonial era. By way of conclusion, I shall identify a series of questions which I have yet to address, chiefly because of my focus on the formal qualities of the aforementioned London writings. In what ways do the literary psychogeography of London and the broader genre of literary psychogeography overlap? How may the London-ness of London be distinguished from the city-ness of a city? Do the deconstructive tendencies discussed in this monograph also appear elsewhere, say, in literary psychogeographies based on other cities and other forms of city-ness? In lieu of a ready answer, I shall make the observation that not a few global cities—for instance Hong Kong, London, Catalonia, and Beirut—share a revolutionary synergy, a “pleasantly vague” connection sparked in recent years by the emergence of authoritarianism; the upsurge of nationalism

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(examples including Boris Johnson’s romanticization of Britain without the European Union, Donald Trump’s America First campaign, and Xi Jinping’s One China Principle); increasingly fierce economic rivalry among world leaders who prioritize their respective national interests above all else; and, ultimately, the climate crisis disregarded by the very same “patriotic economists.” The world’s major cities are now bound by what Jack Shenker calls a “wave of global protest” distinct for its “be water” mobilization tactic, which was originally adopted by Hong Kong protesters seeking to defend themselves against police brutality and legal injustices. Particularly noteworthy is the influence Hong Kong is now perceived to have on London: once the center of the British Empire, London epitomizes an urban ideal that, during colonial times, was transposed to colonized cities such as Hong Kong, whose Victoria Harbor was intended as a prime specimen of Heritage, as such a realization of the Water Vision elsewhere in the empire. Curiously, the underlying city-ness now uniting Hong Kong and London—beyond the colonial framework, that is—is also likened to water, an element elusive to the clutches of discredited systems, be they legal, financial, or political. This indescribable city-ness has enabled bilateral rather than unilateral influences to pass between the former colony and London, making the one the other’s equal. The Tube Protest of London in October 2019 reaffirms this leveling of power, or this proclivity for subversion perhaps intrinsic to the city-ness of cities. It would seem that “city-ness” owes its pleasant vagueness to a different fluidity, now a globally pervasive disillusionment which has tapped into London’s subterranean energies and liberated the city from the ennui, or the unnaturally still pastures, of English Heritage.

Reference Shenker, Jack. 2019. This Wave of Global Protest Is Being Led by the Children of the Financial Crash. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/com mentisfree/2019/oct/29/global-protest-children-financial-crash-hong-konglondon. Accessed 13 April 2020.

Index

A Absence, 47, 49, 83, 85, 88, 91–93 Adam Smith’s liberalism, 82 Aesthetic, 5, 7, 15, 18, 19, 26 Albion, 33, 70, 79 Alienating, 21, 62, 71, 72, 74, 78, 85, 86, 88, 94, 95, 102 Alienation, 71 Alter ego, 67 Alterity, 8 Alternate history, 55 Alternate London histories, 87 Alternate world narrative, 41, 43, 55 Antiquarian, 22 Antithesis, 41, 102 Apocalyptic, 3, 5 Aporetic, 51, 53 Aporia, 51 A priori, 19 Ascension, 39, 42 Association of ideas, 21 Associations, 24, 42, 50, 97, 101 Aura, 40, 60, 70

Automatic writing, 20 Axis of reason, 65 B Become, 39, 99 Becoming, 31, 42, 43, 93, 103 Blake’s prophetic, 83 Blakean, 4, 15, 21, 24, 31, 33, 44–46, 61 Bracketed, 32, 34, 44, 46, 48 C Capitalist rationale, 51 Causal, 42, 62, 64, 66, 69, 70, 74, 75, 78, 94, 98 Causal reasoning, 66 Cause and effect, 64, 82 Center of England, 35, 43, 51, 54, 108 Cerebral, 86, 87 Cerebral power, 19, 84 Chaos, 3, 45, 46, 52, 54, 55

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 A. Tso, The Literary Psychogeography of London, Literary Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52980-2

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INDEX

Christ Church, 10, 12 Christ Church Spitalfields, 11, 12, 36, 37 City-ness of the city, 19, 21, 46, 62, 109, 110 Cogito, 25, 51, 93 Competitive individualism, 8, 9 Conceivable whole, 33 Connection and continuity, 61 Connections, 6, 7, 23, 32, 36–38, 64, 70, 73, 74, 78, 96, 97, 101, 102, 109 Consumption, 4 Continuity, 9, 15, 33, 41, 72, 103 Contrived connection, 37, 42 Convergences, 53, 62, 67 Corporeal, 30 Culture, 5, 6, 18, 22, 45, 51

D Defamiliarize, 4, 7, 21, 108 Depth, 5, 7, 14, 15, 17, 24, 41, 82, 85 Dérive, 18 Destabilizing element, 4 Detection, 69, 74, 78, 83, 88, 94, 95, 99, 101, 102 Detective fiction, 82, 86, 88, 94 Detectives, 64, 86, 94 Diachronic, 33, 35 Dialectic/Dialectical, 14, 20, 44, 78 Dialectical process, 55 Dialectical tendencies, 102 Dickensian, 82, 83, 87, 94 Differences, 6, 15, 23, 47, 51, 67, 76, 99, 101, 104, 109 Dionysian, 37, 39 Dionysian energy, 41 Dis-continuity, 63, 72 Discontinuous, 14, 21, 78 Disfigured, 23, 71, 75

Disharmony, 47, 84 Disintegration, 34, 41, 42, 44, 45, 62, 78 Disjointed, 67, 83, 93 Disjointed narrative, 98 Disorder, 3, 51 Disoriented, 7, 71 Dissociative language, 47 Dis-unified consciousness, 23 Divided, 7, 54, 60, 63 Divided consciousness, 54, 92, 104, 109 Divine, 33, 42, 44–46, 48, 66, 77, 78, 85, 87, 89, 91, 95–97, 99, 100, 102–104 Divine esse, 91 Divine eternity, 75 Divine reason, 68 Divinity, 44, 82 Docklands, 6, 13, 60 Doppelgänger, 67 Dystopian, 2, 3, 14, 52 E Ecstasy, 36, 37 Electric current, 24 Electricity, 24, 30, 46 Empire, 40, 107 Empiricism, 15–17, 64 Empiricist, 15, 16 Energy, 4, 50, 71, 84, 85, 87, 88 English core, 41 Englishness, 13, 23, 31–34, 36, 38, 40, 42–44, 46–48, 50, 51, 54, 55, 70, 79, 108, 109 Enlightenment, 37, 50, 64 Episteme, 6, 62, 72, 94 Epistemology, 47 Erasing , 100 Erasure, 92, 99–103 Esse, 36, 38, 41, 43–48, 53–55, 62, 65, 70, 75, 94, 100, 103, 104

INDEX

Essence (esse), 4, 22 Essentialist, 22, 23, 32, 47, 48, 70 Esse of London, 32, 34 Estrangement, 15, 21 Estranges, 5, 43 Estranging London-ness , 87 Eternal, 40, 67, 75, 77 Eternal London, 31, 67–69, 71–73, 75–79 Eternal Londoners, 69, 71, 76 Eternity, 22, 31, 32, 35–37, 41, 42, 67, 69–73, 75 Evident, 15, 22, 32, 86, 89, 96 Exceptional Englishness, 40

F Facticity, 32 Faux-psychogeography, 33, 34, 41, 44 Flâneur, 3, 15, 16, 19 Fluidity, 60, 61, 64, 65, 71, 110 Fourth dimension/Fourth dimensionality, 31, 34, 35, 37–43, 54, 55 Fractal, 25, 26, 30, 108 Fragmentation, 30, 43, 45, 109 Fragmented/Fragments, 8, 23, 32, 35, 41, 47, 91, 103 Free market, 48, 108 Free-market economy, 18

G Genesis, 89, 91, 92, 95–98, 100, 101, 103, 104 Genius loci, 31, 32, 44, 53–55, 62, 79, 82, 91, 93–96 Gentrification, 31, 74, 75, 82 Ghosts, 48, 51–54, 93 Gothic, 61, 68, 69, 71, 73–75, 78 Gothic incongruities, 74

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H Harmonize, 32, 36 Hauntological, 62, 91, 93 Heat, 63, 71, 72, 76–78 Heritage, 9, 10, 12–14, 22, 34, 43, 46, 54, 61, 62, 65, 67, 69, 82, 108 Heritage industry, 22, 39, 40, 42, 86 Heritage London, 43, 45, 47, 48, 53, 78, 108 Hermeneutical, 25 Hogarthian, 2 Horizontal expansion, 38 Humesian, 64, 82 Humesian rationalism, 64 Humesian reason, 65

I Idiosyncratic, 19, 43 “I is Another” (“Je est un autre”), 4, 71 Impressions, 2, 5, 16, 19, 21, 32, 33, 76 Incoherence, 67, 68, 92, 103 Incongruities/Incongruity, 4, 62, 69, 93, 108 Indebtedness, 64 Individual, 6, 8, 16, 17, 20, 70, 84, 88 Individualistic, 8, 19 Infinite, 5, 8, 15, 24, 51, 108 “Infinite London”, 5 Infinity, 5, 21, 85 Inheritance, 9, 61–63, 70, 71, 76, 78, 79, 103 In media res , 25, 62, 67, 72, 78, 109 Introspective quest, 53 Invisible, 35, 48, 50, 102 Irrational, 20, 50, 53–55, 66, 82, 84, 91, 94

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INDEX

J Jerusalem, 4, 43, 44, 46–48, 51, 52, 54, 55 Jouissance, 99 L Labyrinthine city text, 61 Labyrinthine London, 21, 61, 62, 74 Lack, 18, 86 Layers, 24, 26, 48, 52, 53, 65 Light, 8, 19–21, 35–37, 64, 73, 78, 83, 94, 99–102 Linear, 31–33, 37, 64, 66, 74, 76, 78, 85 Linear development, 68 Linearity, 31, 34, 41, 64–66 Linear reasoning, 64 Literariness (literaturnost ), 7 Literary, 2, 6, 7, 61, 67, 108 Literary chiaroscuro, 86, 99, 104, 109 Logical causality, 75 Logos , 84, 88, 96 London Heritage, 31 London music, 63 London-ness, 43 London-ness of London, 2, 5, 22, 24, 31, 32, 34, 39, 60, 62, 69, 70, 72, 74, 78, 79, 82, 83, 86, 93, 109 London otherworlds, 4, 8, 26, 46, 61, 85, 87, 109 London realities, 14, 26 Londonscape, 22–24, 31, 33, 34, 38, 40, 63, 72, 73, 77, 85, 88, 92, 102 Lud heat , 21, 24, 63, 82, 84 M Madness, 16, 48, 51, 104 Manipulation, 66 Market economy, 9

Medium, 87, 94, 101, 104, 108 Melodrama, 38 Microcosm, 16, 25, 44, 89, 109 Microscopic, 24, 30 Middle, 64, 78 Multi-temporal, 82 Mystical, 4, 50, 61, 95

N Narcissistic, 34, 44, 103 Narrative chronology, 68 National consciousness, 34 Nationalists, 40 Negates, 5 Neo-Blakean cosmology, 45 Neoliberalism, 50–52, 98, 109 Neo-liberals, 8, 50 Non-sequitur, 36, 37, 41 Non-space, 46, 60, 63 Northampton, 43–48, 50–52, 54, 55 Nostalgia, 31, 40, 87

O Old Testament, 98 Original, 14 Originary, 37, 41, 91, 99, 103, 104, 108

P Palimpsest, 5, 41 Palimpsestic, 7, 15, 24, 25, 30, 31, 34, 43, 44, 53, 85, 109 Palpable, 2, 24, 46, 62, 67, 70, 78, 82, 100 Panopticism, 24 Panopticon, 18 Paradigmatic English cities, 45, 46 Paranoid, 39, 41, 95 Parts, 3, 13, 14, 21, 30, 44, 62, 87 Pattern, 23, 40, 47, 66, 68

INDEX

Perception, 7, 75 Perspectives, 5, 95 Pleasing vagueness, 17, 18 Port cities, 60 Ports, 60 Possessed, 50, 61, 71, 83, 88, 91, 95, 103 Possesses, 33, 41, 63, 68, 76, 93 Possession, 61, 62, 68, 78 Poverty, 63, 73, 79, 83 Presence, 4, 5, 47, 52–54, 60, 67, 69, 74, 75, 85, 88, 90, 92, 93, 100 Prophecy, 5, 33, 84, 98, 99 Prophetic, 37, 92 Prophetic vantage point, 3 Psychogeographical, 14, 18, 21, 24, 25, 30, 33, 34, 39, 43, 44, 68, 73, 77, 85, 109 Psychogeographical vision, 43, 54 Q Quintessence, 42, 44, 60–62, 82 Quintessence of London, 76 Quotidian, 60 Quotidian everyday, 13 R Rational, 4, 20, 23, 34, 44, 45, 52, 53, 102 Rationalism, 14 Reagan, Ronald, 8, 51 Realism, 5, 38 Reason, 19, 47, 81 Recurrences, 61, 75 Re-enactments, 92 Re-envisionings, 17 Repetition, 61, 75 “return”—reciprocation, 91 Revenant, 83, 92 Ripperology, 14, 31 Rituals, 75

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Russian Formalism, 7 S Seamlessness, 60, 61 Self-destruction, 51 Sensuous detection, 63, 64, 66 Sensuous detective, 64, 65, 77 Sensuous pattern, 67 Shadows, 37, 52, 78 Shklovsky, Victor, 7 Situationist, 6 Spasmic, 77 Spectacle, 4 Specters, 52, 75 Spectrality, 73 Spectral voices, 92 Speculations, 42 Speculative fiction, 39 Street-level, 26 Structurally repetitive, 75 Surfaces, 89 Surrealism, 20 Synthesis, 102 Synthetic, 99 T Tangibility, 69 Temporal fluxes, 75 Temporal linearity, 34 Thames, 1, 13, 90, 97, 98 Thatcher, Margaret, 8, 9, 14, 40, 50, 51 The Episteme of London, 37 The Waste Land, 95 The Water city, 51, 60, 61, 63–65, 68, 74, 75, 82, 86, 89, 100, 102, 104, 108 “The whole”, 14 Three-dimensional, 7 Trace, 44, 64, 68, 69, 85, 90, 95, 99, 100, 102, 104

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INDEX

Transcended, 36, 39 Transcendence, 36 Transcendent, 3, 70, 73, 79 Transcendental, 20, 45 Transcendent spirit, 70 Traveling, 19 Truth, 19

U Ultra-nationalistic consciousness, 31 Uncanny, 33, 61, 66–70, 76, 77 Unified whole, 24 Unifying rational framework, 88 Unitary water vision, 92 Unity, 4, 8, 23, 32, 33, 51, 70, 109 Universal, 16, 18, 20, 38, 39, 43, 65 Urbanism, 7, 18, 19 Urban quintessence, 72 Urban spectacle, 44 Urban visions, 19, 60, 64 Urban wasteland, 96 Urizen, 4, 44, 45

V Vagrancy, 73–75, 79 Vantage point, 43, 53, 77 Vessels, 60 Victorian fictional archetypes, 87 Victorian ideals, 40 Victorian reference, 83 Visible, 60, 90, 101 Visionary, 22, 31, 33, 35, 39, 46, 47, 108 Visions, 1, 4–6, 14, 23, 24, 94, 100, 108, 109 W Walking, 24 Water apocalypse, 89 Waterscape topography, 60 Whitechapel, 2, 9, 12, 14, 31, 39, 40, 66, 68, 69, 88, 91, 92, 95, 96, 104, 109 Wren, Christopher, 1, 37, 64–66, 68, 69 Writing consciousness, 85, 103