Londonography: Iain Sinclair's Urban GraphicJulian WolfreysThe most notable thing that struck me as I walked across this landscape for the first time were these run-down churches, and I suddenly realised, there's this one here and that one there, and maybe there's some connection. Iain Sinclair, The Verbals ... an over-complicated collision of antiquarian retrievals ... and hysterical satire ... Iain Sinclair, Dining on Stones I. Graphic <1> In this essay, I wish not to offer a reading of any one text of Iain Sinclair's, so much as to suggest an alternative mode of perception for Sinclair's reader grounded in an appreciation of the radically graphic nature of Sinclair's modes of composition. Seeking to illustrate this matter briefly with reference to a range of Sinclair's publications, it is necessary to begin by considering what is meant by the term graphic, and how in its own etymological and semantic resonances, it might best be appropriated for the present purpose. The Oxford English Dictionary offers the following: Graph: a kind of symbolic diagram in which a system of connexions is expressed; -- graph: written, that which writes, portrays or records, drawing or writing; graphic: of or pertaining to drawing or painting; producing by words the effect of a picture; of or pertaining to writing; fit to be written on; an appearance of written or printed characters; pertaining to the use of diagrams, linear figures or symbolic curves; of a geometrical proposition; concerned with position and form, not measurement. Following the prescriptions of the OED, what text -- understanding this word to refer both to written and pictorial forms, whether drawn, painted, or printed -- would not be graphic? To address the ontology of the graphic in a manner which does not take into account, however fleetingly or by allusion at the very least (as is here the case), the etymologies, genealogies, histories and fortunes of the term graph, the suffix -graph, or the word graphic would leave us open to a number of possible errors. However, the field of inquiry already anticipated is vast, covering, at the very least, everything encompassed under the heading text, addressing everything implied or signified by and in that name. It would, from the outset, require that we ask a question akin to the one already posed: what would not be textual? <2> One must therefore necessarily, albeit violently, delimit the fields in which we will find ourselves as we seek to address and chart the terrain, the topography and tropography of the graphic, so as to express a system of perhaps occluded connexions. The system of connexions herein being adumbrated has to do with the relation between the provisional constitution of dissonant identities of the millennial or apocalyptic city and its recurring histories of power and violence. To define more narrowly still the focus of attention: that which is to be understood apropos the graphic will be refracted through the text of Iain Sinclair. Sinclair's London poems and narratives have arrived from the experience of walking the city and perceiving the flows of energy, as well as the immanence of invisible, yet forcefully marked patterns. He acknowledges as much in the interviews published as The Verbals. Such being the sources, the particularly graphic aspect of how to handle such material arrived for Sinclair from other sources, influenced by Stan Brakhage's material manipulation of film: 'I wanted to use lino cuts, very vivid colours and images, between each section [of unpublished book, Red Eye], and the sections mixed this earlier mode of domestic recording with a real mapping of London'.[1] Such techniques, adapted to writing and the representation of London, inform all of Sinclair's major publications, whether presented exclusively the presentation of words in prose or poetry, or whether accompanied with

photographs, photomontages, or illustrations produced by a number of media. Sinclair's text is inescapably graphic. More than this appreciated and apprehended as graphic, Sinclair's texts force on the reader the necessity of an evaluation concerning what is meant by graphic text and what forms it might come to assume apropos the city. <3> In being graphic, Sinclair's texts evade analytical approaches grounded solely in narrative or thematic concerns. They demand to be taken on the one hand as modes of encrypted historiographical topography and chorography (see below), and, on the other, in being encounters with and experiences of London, are singular events, rather than merely narratives in any straightforward or conventional sense. Hence Suicide Bridge's commingling of what Sinclair calls a 're-animat[ed] Blakean mythology ... [and] the low life of East London' (V, 99). This is particularly true not only of either Lud Heat or Suicide Bridge, with the Egyptian hieroglyphs and the interweaving of heterogeneous locations ('From Camberwell to Golgotha'[2]), but also of many of the poems, in which stark temporal and cultural mappings confront the reading subject with the inefficacy of any direct approach. More fundamentally and formally, words are gathered into shapes, such as the arrow in Lud Heat (105); otherwise there are the sudden graphic interruptions in both poems occasioned by words or entire phrases spelled out in upper case letters. In somewhat more normalised or mystified fashion, what goes for the poetry goes also for the novels, the essays, and the journalism. Such events are, I wish to argue, graphic interruptions that mark and write the city topographically and historically. From certain aspects, the form of the so-called graphic novel is particularly well suited to respond to the darker aspects of the city, for it allows for textual productions that can simultaneously, or nearly simultaneously, open location and narrative moment to the various historical and material oscillations that resonate in any place in the city, as it brings together writing, photography, drawing, and other textual marks. In this, one possible reading of the graphic text is that which understands it as a chorographical discourse. <4> Acknowledging the difficulties with which we are confronted by so vast an area of inquiry, the topography of which is unmappable as we have admitted, this essay will examine only a few strands from Sinclair's output that map and construct London symbolically through what I would like to describe as pictorial and narrative acts of phantastry (to which term I shall return). To anticipate in a telegraphic manner certain of the issues to be raised in more detail, allow me to refer briefly to Slow Chocolate Autopsy.[3] Neither simply a novel in the conventional sense nor solely a graphic novel or comic book, Slow Chocolate Autopsy is an uneasy, edgy, and excessive hybrid of both in its yoking together of urban violence, that incorporates the historical through invented projections of Christopher Marlowe's death and the murder of Jack "the Hat" McVitie at the instigation of the Kray Brothers in the 1960s. Such a text, it may be argued, engages in a performative violence as the expression of its being an event. It is clearly readable as a series of responses to the recurrent patterns of violent power that write London, and which become in Sinclair's writing a graphic reiteration of the patterns of power that take place historically across London's topography as, for Sinclair, in his desire to resist acceptable appropriations of London into heritage-culture narratives, fundamental determinants of London's identity. <5> What I want to describe provisionally, and solely for the purposes of the present consideration as Sinclair's Londonography, is the way that mode of representation effects its disquieting force, not through 'illustration' in a pictorial rather than a written sense, but via synchronous revelation. Sinclair's graphic mode "does violence" to the eye, as well as to the language, in its multiplicity of signs irreducible to any calm order or linear narrative logic. It offers something akin to a performative speech act in the excess of its simultaneity, in that the form of the graphic --

we might say the graphic form of the graphic -- in being irreducible to a single order of signs architectonically arranged, does not merely describe or narrate an event, it effectively stages that event through the multiplicity of signs configured as the simultaneous transmission (and, in principle, reception), of any single page. <6> I am speaking here of a simultaneity by which the pages' spatiality confounds the temporalities of reading and narrative, and thereby announces as an analogous correlative to the mystery of the crime depicted, the undecidability that lurks at the heart of any act of analysis or autopsy (an important word in Sinclair's lexicon). Such simultaneity and its impossible or at least unjustifiable disentangling operates according to what Jacques Derrida calls, in speaking of the photo-novel, "the order of the series or temporalities," the movements of which announce "the space of the labyrinth and the simultaneity of the [checker] board," and the possibility to "traverse or cross through the narrative sequences in several directions."[4] At any moment in any novel or, indeed, poem, by Sinclair, one may read the opening of different temporalities, narrative trajectories, and other potential lines of flight from the subject's encounter with or experience of location. The London locus for Sinclair is always the imminent site of graphic excess, a ground teeming with innumerable traces. Thus the graphic text of Iain Sinclair graphically (as it were) simultaneously presents and dismantles the simultaneity of presentation and representation, re-presentation of the presentation within representation. II. Chorography [khora + -graph][5] <7> Though given relatively recent attention in the work of Gregory Ulmer, and bearing a passing resemblance to the Situationist International's concept of psychogeography, chorography is an Early Modern discourse relating frequently to cartography, one of the most famous extant examples being Michael Drayton's self-styled "topo-chrono-graphical" poem, Poly-Olbion, printed in 1613.[6] While the term chorography has been superseded by the terms geography and topography, the use of the word is suggestive for the reading of Sinclair in ways that neither topography nor psychogeography are, because of the interwoven temporal, cultural and ideological ramifications that accompany and inform the discursive practice. The purpose of chorography for Elizabethan intellectuals was to map the various historical, folkloric, and cultural resonances which could be unearthed in one location, specifically at the county level, as a means of producing a mythical and ideological identity that acknowledged the singularity of place while showing analogically the resonance, both temporally and spatially, between local and national identity. <8> It was also, often, an act of writing aiming to generate complex and unanticipated relations in the reading of place, thereby performing vertiginous dislocations from within undifferentiated ideologies in the service of cultural mythologization and mystification. Furthermore, early modern chorography offers a symbolic alternative to the construction of identity, thereby countering chronicle histories, such as that of Geoffrey of Monmouth, which assert the hegemonic imperatives of family and dynasty related in a linear, progressive narrative at the expense of place and the cultural memory of location. The writing of chorographical texts, such as John Stow's Survey of London (1598), involve the recording of detail gathered in the act of walking through a location such as the city. In this implicitly graphic and iterable process of walking-as-mapping, and writing as the memory of motion, the chorographic text anticipates the interactions, the motifs and motivations, which inform the multilayered tracing of resonances in any one of Sinclair's publications. While Stow's Survey tends to support dynastic hegemonic claims, other texts such as Drayton's Poly-Olbion unearth counter-hegemonic narratives and events peculiar to local identities of place, so that there is at work a form of

counter-memory, from which broader notions of alternative identities are formed. <9> In effect, this is what is at stake in the contest over the identities of London, both the city and certain of its forgotten or marginalized inhabitants, in texts as disparate as Rodinsky's Room, Radon Daughters, or Slow Chocolate Autopsy. Anamnesiac 'afterimages' of site and event are generated, graphic mappings of 'collective historical memory, haunting images ... that ha[ve] the capacity for a social reawakening'.[7] Thus, Sinclair's urban graphics, in their chorographical articulation, have the potential to call up forgotten memories. Additionally, location does not merely call up memory. It can be figured as a materialised and encoded medium of anamnesis through which writing re-marks what is already there. As Sinclair has it in London Orbital (a title perhaps deliberately mimicking and yet resisting all that is implied in the London Eye and its erection), ring roads are 'pastoral memory rind[s] at the edge of things'.[8] Here as the figure of the ring road duplicates in prose the graphic demarcation of the building of such a road, edge operates in at least two ways. On the one hand, it names boundary, liminal interstice. The city becomes 'zoned' by the material presence. On the other hand, the association of the road with the conceit of memory's rind intimates another liminal locus -- that of what is forgotten and what is recalled. On the edge of memory and the city, the mark left by the road mediates, as mnemic trope in Sinclair's prose, between observation and the recollection or recovery of the historical determination of distinctions between the urban and the suburban. <10> Such a practice should not be mistaken as some kind of pseudo-mystical act of communing filtered through a post-Situationist sensibility. As Sinclair has remarked, his work is intended to have a 'bit more bite ... than the whole ley-line thing which is ... [a] bit soggy' (V 75). Describing how he writes he acknowledges that it is shaped by '[p]atterns and lines and ways of moving' (V 75). In the revenance that is made possible in Sinclair's writing, whereby the experience of the city is translated as the textual event, as writing takes place it also gives place. It promises to reinscribe location with a ghostly palimpsest that traces an event is temporally both before and after: already having occurred it returns in the graphic refiguring of Sinclair's text, but is never there as such. Thus when Sinclair comments in Dining on Stones that walking is in effect 'cutting into an historic landscape' (DS 13), he is being more than metaphorical. The walk only comes to be known after it has taken place, once it is re-marked in the novel or documentary text. That which the subject enacts, thereby invoking the already-present, though immaterial 'patterns, lines and ways of moving' is a momentary graphic intervention, which itself recedes simultaneously with its occurrence, only to return in a retraced manifestation of itself in another medium. <11> Retention and protention, then, and always the graphic trace without any presence whatsoever. <12> To consider this in a different context, and taking what is perhaps Iain Sinclair's most sustained meditation on the relation between subject and memory, and the textual grafting of a forever-absent subject through anamnesiac invention onto the city, Rodinsky's Room moves between identity, subjectivity, the uncanniness of the abandoned domicile and the city.[9] There is never a David Rodinsky, only graphic reminders that he is a ghost, themselves to be reiterated in other's hands, and coming to pass between the remainders of his past that serve as so many ruined aides de mémoire, and the 'futurity' of projection implied in the writing of the text. Rodinsky becomes inscribed onto the city that he has already passed through, and from which he has disappeared. <13> Sinclair acknowledges and enacts this doubling temporal simultaneity and displacement often in disconcerting manner throughout his writing. In presenting to the gaze the multiplicity of textual and therefore graphic

signs, all of different orders, the graphic condition of representation as reconceived in this essay invents radically. At the heart of both the city and the writing of it for Sinclair is 'the belief that something ... happens in a place [that] permanently affects that place ... There are these acoustic chambers in the city, voices and echoes ...' (V 76). While the truth of this will be familiar to the Sinclair reader, what is interesting to note is the relationship between the line and the echo, between the material tracing, and subsequent retracing, and the invisible, amaterial resonance or echolalia, which leaves its acoustic-graphic imprint on London as the city's spectral imprimatur. Sinclair forces the relationship further, when in Dining on Stones he observes, in relation to the admission that 'all composition is memory' that the city is informed by 'visible echoes' (DS 417; emphasis added). What is invisible, intangible becomes visible. More than this, not only does it become visible, it leaves its mark on the subject, graphically so. With regard to the graphic gesture that charts the secret histories of the city, such invention is readable as the most apposite of textual analogies with regard the very condition and identity of the city, especially as the text addresses matters of myth, alternative history, power and violence as being constitutive elements in the identity of London. <14> Thus the graphic text's response to London is read as being one that is markedly faithful to the ineradicably temporal and textual condition of London, in all its graphic and material excesses and distortions; its faithfulness is witnessed in its ability to convey the ways in which 'certain streets or neighbourhoods carry with them a particular atmosphere over many generations'.[10] Such communication marks the reader with the permanent 'sense of strangeness in London'.[11] It is with such strangeness that the texts of Sinclair confront us, inviting us to consider the grammar and syntax of the abyss. Such a process of writing is, moreover, urgently necessary. For, as Sinclair has it in Dining on Stones '[h]istory has ended. It was (and remains) a TV channel' (DS, 361). Like the representational televised image, official history has only the ability to reproduce the false, and to limit one's apprehension to the immediate transparency of that which mimetic representation can accommodate. Instead, a radical graphics of representation can, like the churches of Nicholas Hawksmoor to which Sinclair (and others) have been repeatedly drawn, impose on the eye compounded, simultaneous, yet heterogeneous marks of 'different ears, piled one on top of the other (but staying, miraculously, vertiginously, in balance)' (DS, 396). Although Sinclair is describing Christ Church, Spitalfields, is he not also, in effect, confessing to his own modes of construction, to the architextural in his Londonography? III. Londonography <15> In the words of Norton, Iain Sinclair's seemingly ubiquitous narrator, 'stick any two postcards on a wall and you've got a narrative' (SCA 88). Line, graphic trace, emerges out of visual encounter, not as a direct or mimetic representation of what is seen directly in that experience. The observation of conjunction and its power to produce a trajectory provides a fitting aphorism to define those graphic modes of production that interrupt and exceed the linearity of conventional narrative, with which the reader of Sinclair will be familiar. Such a mode of literary production admits the possibility, or at least the illusion of randomness and chance occurring in the encounter with the city as that becomes enacted in writing. It admits of changes in direction, an open passiveness to the arrival of future unexpected directions in which narrative of London might at any moment travel. Equally significantly, Norton's post-card theory of imagistic construction announces the very violent intrusion that just is the graphic, whereby the work of the hand causes to appear that which was hitherto invisible. Of course the graphic mark is violent in another way. For the lines of flight it delineates, in being decided on, necessarily exclude every other possibility. However, in the chorographic text the reader is at

least offered visions of potential other clews to trace, narrative weaves to unravel, in a manner that exceeds any present moment. <16> What arrives has the power to produce an uncanny effect therefore; though, we must remember, it is not an example of the uncanny in and of itself. Sinclair often toys with the motif or trope of the ghost, perhaps nowhere more insistently than in Lights Out for the Territory, the very title of which plays historically and topographically on a certain haunting instability, between an idiom of Mark Twin's and what amounts to a political diagnosis of Thatcher's London. That there is a relationship between the urban and the uncanny is inescapable. For, in order for there to be some haunting, there has to be a place, spatial, topographical, architectural, in which the event of the spectral and one's experience of that can take place. Thus At this point on the map we are all Estuary Egyptians: like the Victorian cemetery designers, we want to dabble in a more exotic iconography. The white obelisk of St Luke, to the south across the City Road basin, is an hieratic intention botched by unplanned industrial development. That glyph of sun/water/stone remains securely in the mind's eye.[12] Arguably, what is uncanny in this representation is precisely its understanding, its apperception of a multiplicity of simultaneous times being traced in one location. The subject responds to and relays to the reader in particularly graphic terms, the confluence of different myth systems, different semantic and epistemological networks, and differing historical frames of reference. Noticeably, there is a sense of a phantom-graphic impression, registered through that acknowledgement of the glyph remaining in the mind's eye. Clearly then, the uncanny in this 'taking place' is not simply the condition of the locus, even though the site is a necessary precondition for the urban subject to experience the uncanny. As Anthony Vidler suggests: 'The "uncanny" is not a property of the space itself nor can it be provoked by any particular spatial conformation; it is, in its aesthetic dimension, a representation of a mental state of projection that precisely elides the boundaries of the real and the unreal to provoke a disturbing ambiguity, a slippage between waking and dreaming'.[13] Thus, in the chorographical writing of the city, Sinclair registers graphically the motions of the amaterial trace, and so focuses the reader's attention on that phantom-graphic oscillation, as can be witnessed here, from Radon Daughters: 'Spasms of language, ameliorated by the random collisions of the city'.[14] As with innumerable occasions in Sinclair's prose, there appears here the ghost of self-referentiality, as if he were writing about his own writing, and through that opening for the reader a glimpse of the uncanny urban experience, as it leaves its incision on the self. Slightly displaced, perhaps unhinged, in the shadow of London's many absences, the graphic condition of the text enacts location and event in an uncanny series of sequential and simultaneous displacements and dislocations in lieu of the city, offering the reader of Sinclair so many phatic snapshots, postcards, by the arrival of which the city is announced, however indirectly. The relationship between the elements of a structure translates as those elements transmit. <17> Thus locus or structure as realised topography and chorography -- the structurality of structure -- has, implicated within the formal presentation that seems merely synchronous, a number of temporalities; having to do on the one hand with the times, if not the untimeliness, of communication and reading -- even when all the signs appear to be there in the same frame, or as the structural elements comprising that frame (for even the most apparently formal element is not only a base or support but also, in principle, an articulation, however silent); and concerning, on the other hand, the traces of the material, of a site or text's historicity. Despite the material and historical dimensions at work here, what returns is immaterial and yet is capable of producing a material effect. The multiple temporalities immanent within any frame or complex of

graphic traits facilitate and yet interrupt the subject's consciousness in the event of reception and in response to the event of perception. As Husserl remarks, the now of apprehension, in this case the perception of the city in the graphic texts with which we are concerned, has about it a sense of belatedness. One gathers, in apprehension, what Husserl terms 'earlier now-points of the motion', which are, themselves, apprehensions of, and marked by, still earlier now-points.[15] Only a few signs are gathered, beyond which lies an unmappable topography composed from the ineffable totality of diachronic and synchronic lines of flight in endless intersection. <18> The megalopolis often emerges in Sinclair's writing as necropolis (as the passage just cited from Lights Out should make apparent). Yet in being a city of the dead, Sinclair's graphic manipulations of time, place and confluence offer London as being uncannily alive, after a fashion. Neither quite living nor dead, the city arrives as so many liminal sites and crossings, animated through intermittent pulsations of so many heterogeneous marks and signals, phantasmic flows that are disembodied, barely present (if at all), either to sight or hearing. Synchrony and anachrony, framing and disjointing as well, all are intimately entwined with one another, as is clear in the various narrative-temporal-historical loops of a novel such as White Chappell, Scarlett Tracings. The sites of any Sinclair novel are connected by the passage of the narrative that reads significance and pattern onto aleatory motion in a redrawing of the map. This is apprehended most immediately in the charting of the pentagram overlaid as the psychic topography punctuated by Nicholas Hawksmoor's churches, the V traced through London in the first essay of Lights Out, or indeed, the orbital line, perhaps reminiscent of the dentated serpent circling the Tradescant tomb, that emerges through its historical and mythical counterpoints as pursued in London Orbital. Sinclair's punctuations sketch invisible relations, and thus open onto other histories, to specific events often irrelevant to that historical event on which the narrative latches initially. <19> It is as if the energy of the city is so forceful that, in being relentlessly dragged by London's energy fields, the narrator in Sinclair will catch hold of almost anything from the confusion of signals in order to be able to discern in the graphic re-tracing a narrative ground, some figural motif to economize on the abyss. Such instances of the graphic figure in their now-time [Benjamin's jetztzeit] of presentation and staging an instance of chorographical perception, retaining in the conjoined relation of presentation and perception 'the past ... which is to say absence', or what Husserl has termed the retention of now-points [jetztpunkt], as we have already remarked. Neither simply narrative nor image then, the city is marked symbolically, that is to say graphically (to recall the definitions from the OED), and in the apparent synchrony of the frame presentation takes place 'by virtue of this retention [of the invisible shape] constitutive of the act of perception as "a single continuum that is continuously modified".'[16] This continuum, called by Husserl a Heraclitean flux, is what both enables and disables; and it is in the articulation of this impossible simultaneity that the graphic text shows itself as a singularly appropriate medium of response to the uncanny structures of the city's spatial and temporal identities. IV. Slow Chocolate Autopsy <20> Dave McKean's images from Slow Chocolate Autopsy map and project such circuits tellingly. In a number of montages that gather together photographs, film-stills, fragments of type, pen and pencil drawings, maps and etchings, McKean projects uncanny chorographical forms that serve to figure London and particular strands from the history of its discomposed identity. In the various acts of yoking together the heterogeneous fragments and traces, McKean illustrates how the work of the graphic artist is to provide the autopsy, to demonstrate how 'history [is] that which has

passed away' as Elissa Marder remarks,[17] and which is therefore, only ever available as the projection of assembled graphic elements having to do with place and event. In one such image from Slow Chocolate Autopsy, (SCA, 87) we witness road-signs, surveillance cameras, scraps of text, a Hawksmoor church, a distorted image of an obelisk, the head of a gargoyle a barely discernible, shadowed face superimposed onto an arched window, a cartouche, and projection lines offering some kind of mapping the purposes of which are undecidable. Everything floats, a near simultaneous gathering of graphics irrecuperable into any single form or identity, other than that which might be signalled in the name London. <21> Each image, each piece of text, performs as a kind of memory-fetish of the city; bearing no connection to any one temporal moment, each trace can be read as serving as 'a kind of memory trace of a mode of inquiry that does not simply obey the dubious temporality'[18] of linear narrative, narrative presentism, or historical 'progress'. McKean's illustrations realize the immanence of Sinclair's prose. They enact the gathering and concatenation of random now-points, where the narratives are only ever immanent or implicit, or they can chart or imply violent events or narratives through inventions of identity and memory that traverse time. The graphic produces, as it performs, snapshots of history, snapshots of sites and locales, topographies and cultural memories, in the single, and therefore uncanny, location of the frame or panel as the instantaneous autopsy of a 'series of relayed looks'.[19] In addition, the graphic makes possible the merest chance that what Françoise Dastur describes as the 'silent event of the encounter'[20] come into ghostly being in the relation between apperception and the multiplicity of the trace. There is thus presented to the gaze -- and in this presentation there is also a demand that one bears witness -- to an iterable relay of passing moments, oscillating between one another as analogous, ghostly figures of each other, and through the passage of time. This is to be witnessed in another illustration from Slow Chocolate Autopsy (60). <22> The illustration in question, part of the title page to Chapter Two of Slow Chocolate Autopsy, involves a multiple projection: there is a map of London's East End, first published in the 1880s, a film still, and a handmade mark on the image. The chapter itself, "No More Yoga of the Nightclub," offers the reader an imaginative reinvention of the murder of Jack "The Hat" McVitie, in 1967, as witnessed by Sinclair's time-travelling narrator, Norton. A member of the Kray Brothers' gang (who, along with the Richardson family, controlled much of organized crime in London's East End, South London, and Soho during the late 1950s and 1960s), McVitie was killed by Tony and Chris Lambrianou at the order of the Krays, for which murder, along with that of associate George Cornell, they were imprisoned. In Sinclair's version, McVitie is described as 'memorising the geography of an event which had not yet happened' (SCA 66). He has visions of London architecture in the 1990s (68). In this world 'boundaries warped' (75), and 'London settled on its proper axis' (67). Sinclair's narrative relies for its effects on disruptions of temporality and space, on alignments in the force field of the city, and McKean's montage figures such effects analogously, in its combination of film still and map. The still is taken from John Mackenzie's The Long Good Friday (1979), a story of the decline and fall of gangland London. In the image, we see gang boss Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) to the right of the car (a Jaguar, de rigueur in London gang mythology). The scene from which this still comes is shot in London's Dockland. The location on the map included in the illustration is Whitechapel, the district infamous for the Ripper murders as many will know, but also the site of one of Nicholas Hawksmoor's churches, Christ Church, Spitalfields. <23> McKean's montages figure an impossible simultaneity, the possibilities for the analysis of which are, in principle, endless. The emphasis, as already remarked, is on difference rather than identity; what disturbs in

the montage is the reliance on a knowledge of particular East End histories of different orders, so that there is implied an iterable revenance of violent events in close proximity, and with multiple intertextual and discursive resonances. With its immediate citation of film and topography, and from there to other discourses and narratives (myth, architecture, paganism, freemasonry), the image promises an opening from within and yet beyond, as well as in excess of its immediate presentation. And then there is that obviously graphic intrusion, which might be read as either a ladder or a strip of film stills or negative frames. McKean's singular image is fascinating: for, in figuring the different times of one particular location in London, along with events of differing orders and different modes of presentation, it bears in it the burden for bearing witness to history in inventive ways that open rather than foreclose acts of reading, whereby chorography and autopsy are caught up in a potentially infinite relay. <24> This can be expanded upon in the following manner. While 'every history' is 'incontestably unique, [and] contains structures of its own conditions of possibility', as Reinhart Koselleck comments in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, the 'finitely delimited spaces' in which historical events take place have the possibility of changing 'with a speed other than that of the events themselves'. Every event is thus marked by a 'temporal multilayeredness'. Such temporal layering and spatial iterability define the ways in which the chorographically inclined graphic text functions. History, Kosselleck avers, 'proves to be the space for possible repeatability; it is never only diachronic, but, depending on how it is temporally perceived and experienced, it is also synchronic'.[21] We might add to this that the effect of possible repeatability is a translation effect, from the materiality of history to the materiality of the letter (or, indeed, any graphic mark), and that history is in principle translated into historiography. The multilayered surface of an illustration such as McKean's-and, indeed, any given passage from Sinclair's writing-renders visible that which is already suggested in the map, the locus, and by the topography and history of the city's sites, laying bare as it were the occluded chorography beneath its more familiar 'dermis'. <25> The radical, phantom-graphic negotiation of which I am speaking effects a mediumistic communication. The passage as prose or poetic montage, along with the montage image call together in the act of making visible the ineffable forces that inform the city. Uncannily, the refusal of a single time, whereby every moment is opened in the now-time of reading, of looking, of experience, suggests that the reader is drawn into this matrix, even as the subject-position exceeds the frame reciprocally in a moment of disturbing temporal passage. For the reader's gaze assumes the position of the narrating subject's eye, and thus we are simultaneously figured, implicated in the moment of the frame and in our own time of reading; ours is the eye observing a hand both ours and not ours. Furthermore, we are implicated in what Derrida has referred to as le plus-de-vue, 'the (no)-more-sight ... the visionary vision of the seer who sees beyond the visible present, the overseeing, sur-view, or survival of sight'[22] (it is this which is registered in Jack McVitie's visionary apostrophes, and Dave McKean's montages). In this one moment -- a moment that is both more and less than one moment, irreducible to a single instant, a sole now-point -- the past is never quite past, over or done with; in the double moment of autopsy, analysis and/as the act of seeing with one's own eye, the pasts of London overflow the frame, the image, the page, so that we are called to trace the connections and bear witness to only a few of the chorographical resonances. Inscription promises to trace, after the event, the immanent trait, the invisible graphic, a not-yet visible structure that will never be present, as we have said. At the same time a graphic heterogeneity is admitted. It is a heterogeneity, as Derrida

explains, 'between the thing drawn [in this case the traces of historical narratives] and the drawing trait [that] remains abyssal .... This heterogeneity of the invisible to the visible can haunt the visible as its very possibility'.[23] And so perception is solicited uncannily, as the force of what can never be witnessed traverses the field of vision in the reception and retention of the graphic in all its multiple motions. <26> In the images from Slow Chocolate one possible configuration for the otherwise unmappable chrono-topography of a monstrous megalopolis unveils itself. One possible projection of the city as graphic text, as chorography, has the chance of crossing the invisible. Graphic intersections generate the possibility of an image, a phantom site or narrative from within the materiality and history of the city. At stake therefore is the manifestation of the relationship between a certain haunting, uncanny persistence of violence and the idea of the millennial or apocalyptic city, as this can be expressed through the graphic novel. Implicit in this is a two-fold concern: on the one hand, with the ways in which the material environment, the materiality of site and its histories might be understood to determine or to impose itself graphically on writing and image, and, on the other, to explore ways in which writing, in the broad sense of all forms of graphic mark, shapes itself through singular responses so as to attune its representation most faithfully to the call of the city. V. Phantastry <27> Something is clearly at work here, having to do with the visionary evocation of what we are tempted to describe as the spirit of London. If Sinclair's texts can be read as manifestations of chorographic discourse, they are also receivable in another manner. For what should by now be clear is that the graphic, as I am defining its operation in Sinclair, operates through serial and iterable processes of visualization, of making visible the invisible, giving momentary material or graphic articulation to the phantasms of the city's histories, myths, to what are perceived as the capital's recurrent psychic forces; or, to articulate this a little differently, the graphic text gives visibility to the invisible traits that write the city in particular ways. In this, every passage figures the work of every other passage, in a graphic iterability of the very condition of the graphic itself: to project momentarily 'an encounter with the dead, with the ghostliness of ancestral voices and intertextual hauntings',[24] and thereby re-mark the trace of endless, illimitable flux. <28> The graphic inscription of such fluxions we designate, in concluding this essay, phantastry, a term serving to signify the phantasmic performative of phantom-graphic modes of production. This word, phantastry, is now almost wholly forgotten. In being nearly invisible -- though materially there on the page, it nonetheless resists revelation of any certain meaning -- it comes to have its chance in the analysis of the graphic manifestation of what Iain Sinclair has described as the 'sticky webs of memory' that trace the city (DS 102). Taking the image above as our immediate example of phantastry, we comprehend an instance of single, fragile synecdoche, a singular semi-fluid figure serving in this essay as a mediation of the 'conduit for the spirit of place'[25] as that which takes place in the work considered here. Phantastry's simultaneous materiality and hieratic exclusion does double service in fact; for it figures both the graphic text's ability to draw our attention to the self-replicating and dividing limits of iterability and un/readability, and the abyssal, untotalizable text that is London. <29> Appearing to admit of a relation, obviously, both to fantasy and phantasy, and being, we might say a long-lost relative, phantastry's strangeness materializes, for me at least, that which passes graphically, and thus silently, between phantasy / fantasy; it traces a movement for me between lyrical, possibly non-rational, composition inimical to the drive and tyranny of narrative and psychic projection. The trace of that spectral

apparition or phantom that haunts this particular family of words arrives, having to do with what comes to light, and what brings with it illumination. This somewhat dusty term signifies a fantastic display or performance, marked by ostentation or affectation. Proposing, finally, a strong reading of the word, one might understand it as one possible manifestation of what might otherwise be called a trope or a conceit. Moreover, phantastry also refers to a visionary delusion, the projection or phantasm of a fevered or disoriented imagination, perhaps even that particular delusion described by Sinclair as "the madness of seeing London as text. Words. Dates. Addresses. No brick that has not been touched, mentioned in a book" (DS 100). <30> If there is a madness in seeing London as a text, it is an instability contracted from the city's chorographic identities, which arrive unexpectedly to leave an indelible, graphic trace on the subject. This is traced nowhere more completely, more graphically, than in the following passage from Dining on Stones: The man whose magnum opus the Mare Street woman was promoting, peddling around town, had cultivated a massive brain tumour, which pressed angrily on his optic nerves. He had X-rays of the intruder -- which he superimposed over a map of medieval London, the walled City. He walked the shape of his pain, his unlanguaged parasite, into the map. His tiny script, pages of it, was hardy to read than my own. But I caught the drift. I didn't want to be suckered into another malign fiction, in which his story became my story, my reading of his cuneiform text. (DS 13) The attempted resistance to urban possession is of course already too late for Norton/Sinclair, as we know. The city grows, malignantly, with every walk that stalks and cuts, but only causes a process of excessive, graphic metastasization. Even the Situationist pun -- I caught the drift -- suggests the passage from one sufferer to another. There are moreover suggestive transferences from Radon Daughters, echoes not only of Sileen's addiction to X-ray exposure, but his fear of the horror-story 'drift', that phantastic 'contamination' between subject positions, between 'He/I' (RD 12), which 'arbitrary shift' exemplifies in its turn the image of '[f]riable pages of text reeling across the cobbles' (RD 12). In the passage from Dining on Stones, transference between 'he' and 'I' is already ghost-accommodated in the subject's response to the city. <31> To read the work of haunting, both in and of the urban environment, and to see the oscillation of the spectral as an uncanny countersignature to, and emerging from within, cultural space, is to perceive, through that reading, a disquieting disruption. As Sinclair says in acknowledgement of the persistence of ghostly motion, 'facts kept leaking into my fictions, the borders were insecure' (DS 115). 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 stands, 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. <32> The graphic condition of Sinclair's phantom-graphic interventions disturb the boundaries and ontologies of genre and of aesthetic ideology, where matters of value are related to questions of cultural significance in the maintenance of particular heritages. There is a sense that Sinclair's writing, conceivable as so many singular acts of mediumship (or, as Sinclair himself might prefer, shamanic activity), acknowledges if not a political then perhaps an ethical responsibility. Additionally, to write of environment, location, cultural space as haunted, and thereby to liberate occluded or forgotten narratives, intimates what Nicholas Royle has described as 'an encounter with the dead, with the ghostliness of ancestral

voices and intertextual hauntings'.[26] Yet any location is undoubtedly overdetermined by countless, excessive traces. All resonate simultaneously, all vie for attention, whether we recognize them or not. Sinclair admits as much in Radon Daughters, when it is realised, in a moment of Swedenborgian epiphany, that the lost rivers of London -- Black Ditch, Walbrook, Neckinger, Effra, Tyburn -- affect[s] all surface life .... They were our unconscious. Somewhere in that drifting unfocused world the link was to be found. A door would open on the mysteries of life and death, being and non-being, good and evil. (RD, 139) <33> Indicative of an invisible network beneath the streets of the city, the catalogue of rivers offers a instance that is tempting to read as intertextual haunting, resonating as it does (via the considerations of Swedenborg that contextualize the revelation of the passage) with catalogues of London location that are to be found in Blake's Jerusalem, Of course the intertextuality resounds multiply, producing not an echolalalia but what we might call a graphalalia, a disorienting, abyssal condition (named in this essay phantastry). Such lists can be found throughout Sinclair's writing, disjointed and possibly hieratic co-ordinates, signifying an absent, encrypted, and quite possibly unmappable topography. The desire is for an other London to arrive, but this is not necessarily a London that will, one day, be present. The graphic text may be read as articulating, making visible through its excessive and phantastic representations the seemingly Rosicrucian apprehension that a sign can be simultaneously transparent, available, unequivocal, and encrypted. London is composed of such signs, secrets that are all at once in plain sight and yet which remain withdrawn. Thus there is to be acknowledged in the phantom-graphic a 'fundamental aesthetic experience that always mediates spirit and sense ... in the formation of judgement'.[27] Recognizing this therefore, how one mediates, writes, and reads the city's flux, its play of phantom-voices and traces, in which one glimpses the 'hieratic imposing on demotic' (DS 63), comes into focus. If writing, as a response to cultural space or environment, to topography, and event is to acknowledge its ethical responsibility in its encounter (however impossible the demands of that responsibility might be), what modes of representation, we have to ask, might be appropriate? Perceiving the graphic in the writing of Sinclair, in all its processes of montage and temporal multi-layeredness offers one possible answer, however seemingly delusional or encrypted such a response might be. Endnotes[1] Kevin Jackson and Iain Sinclair, The Verbals (Tonbridge: Worple Press, 2003), 97. Hereafter given parenthetically as V. [^] [2] Iain Sinclair, Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge (1975, 1979) (London: Granta, 1998), 77. [^] [3] Iain Sinclair and Dave McKean, Slow Chocolate Autopsy (London: Phoenix House, 1997); reference to Slow Chocolate Autopsy will be given as SCA; Iain Sinclair, Dining on Stones or, The Middle Ground (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2004). All references are given parenthetically as DS. [^] [4] Jacques Derrida and Marie-Françoise Plissart, Rights of Inspection, (1985) trans. David Wills (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1998), n.p. [^] [5] For a brief, informative discussion of the significance and practice of chorography in Early Modern England, see Bruce McLeod, The Geography of Empire in English Literature 1580-1745 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 95-99. [^] [6] William Camden, Britain (1610). For a reading of chorographical texts and their ideological function, see Richard Helgerson, 'The Land Speaks', in Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 107-47. [^]

[7] Jonathan Crary, 'Spectacle, Attention, Counter-Memory', in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 455-67; 460. [^] [8] Iain Sinclair, London Orbital: A Walk Around the M25 (London: Granta, 2002), 71. [^] [9] Rachel Lichtenstein and Iain Sinclair, Rodinsky's Room (London: Granta, 1999). [^] [10] Peter Ackroyd, London: The Biography (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000), 504. Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot's biographer, (T. S. Eliot [London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984]) appears a couple of times at least in Martin Rowson's The Waste Land, once as a cab-driver, and another as a barman in 'The Fire Sermon'. [^] [11] Ackroyd, London, 503 [^] [12] Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory (London: Granta, 1997), 155. [^] [13] Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 11. Vidler's contention is given in the text box on this page. [^] [14] Iain Sinclair, Radon Daughters: A voyage, between art and terror, from the Mound of Whitechapel to the limestone pavements of the Burren (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994), 12. Hereafter RD. [^] [15] Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917), trans. John Barnet Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991) §11, 32. [^] [16] Françoise Dastur, Telling Time: Sketch of a phenomenological chrono-logy, (1994) trans. Edward Bullard (London: Athlone Press, 2000), 29. [^] [17] Elissa Marder, Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert) (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 68. [^] [18] Marder, Dead Time, 9. [^] [19] Marder, Dead Time, 68. [^] [20] Dastur, Telling Time, 71. [^] [21] Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner et al., Foreword Hayden White (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 75 [^] [22] Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, (1990) trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 47. [^] [23] Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 45. [^] [24] Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (London: Routledge, 2003), 147. [^] [25] Iain Sinclair, Landor's Tower or, the Imaginary Conversations (London: Granta, 2001), 15. [^] [26] Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (London: Routledge, 2003), 147. [^] [27] Koselleck, Practice of Conceptual History, 197. [^] http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/september2005/julian.html

The Ghost in the Machine: Psychogeography in the London Underground 1991-2007 David AshfordAt every Underground stop, people climb to the surface, emerge into the light of day, but the train goes on, the circulation continues, the Circle Line providing a visual and conceptual magnet for the way the city stays alive by pumping flows of energy around the system. At the end of the line this fiction dissolves; it is not only people but the place itself that releases its grip on the idea of the city as a closed system. – Rod Mengham, ‘End of the Line’ (2003)[1] <1> Turning away from the rationalisation of time and space represented by the Tube Map, Rod Mengham and photographer Marc Atkins set out to chart the region where this pattern most obviously unravels. In their photo-essay ‘The End of the Line’, termini on the Central, District, Metropolitan and

Jubilee are shown to burrow into other organisations of space, or even into entirely different times, ‘portals into something other than the idea of the city we automatically link them with’.[2] At the western extremity Uxbridge is entombed in a future remembered by all who were teenagers in the 1960s.[3] Stanmore is paralysed at a fixed point in the history of the Underground’s development: ‘Passengers climbing up and down the hill traverse the strata of transport archaeology, with the prehistory of railway heritage’.[4] And in Richmond, there is a peculiar overgrown patch of ground between the buffers and the end of the track: ‘This small deposit of neglect, with its little pockets of chalk and the different-sized gravels, has accumulated indifference at specific moments of alteration and redefinition: it is a transport midden, a municipal burnt mound; by-product of energies that were focused elsewhere’.[5] Mengham concludes that this overlapping of materials, constantly revised by the superimposing of new layers, provides an even better insight into the historical process than the more striking anachronisms at Uxbridge and Morden: ‘the evidence of powerplay is not enshrined in the canonical details of a metal-framed clerestory, or an abstracted Egyptian façade; it is preserved in a pile of detritus’.[6] <2> This emphasis on the marginal aspects of a place is a feature of psychogeography. The term was invented by the Lettrists, forerunners of the Situationist International, to describe the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment on the emotions and behaviour of individuals, and gained currency in the early nineties through work by London-based writers Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd. Originally a reaction to the renovation of Paris in the post-war period, it is no coincidence that the psychogeographical project should have resurfaced in London in the wake of the urban regeneration initiated in the Thatcher Era.[7] As Phil Baker observes, psychogeography represents a last-ditch attempt to resist the erasure of place by space: ‘It accompanied an alienation of an almost unprecedented kind from the built environment, responding to anxieties perhaps definitively expressed in Marc Augé’s book Non-places.’[8] This is why psychogeography takes refuge in interstitial zones of private meaning and esoteric knowledge, privileging aspects of place that are not reducible to economics: to maintain a psychic investment in the street. ‘Its overlap with histories and myths of place is a further way of gaining a purchase on the inhospitable environment of the metropolis. People want to inscribe marks and find traces in the city, like the stories they used to tell about the stars and constellations, in order to feel more at home in an indifferent universe.’[9] <3> In practice this means that writers must have recourse to the trope of the uncanny. ‘Only ghosts, after all, can walk through walls, breach the boundaries of the increasingly privatized zones of the city, and shimmer impossibly between past and present Londons’, writes Roger Luckhurst.[10] According to architecture historian Anthony Vidler the more ruthless the modern speculative transformation of the city, the more likely it is that suppressed history will return as the uncanny in the wasted margins and surfaces of post-industrial culture: ‘in contemporary architecture, the incessant reference to avant-garde techniques devoid of their originating ideological impulse, the appearance of a fulfilled aesthetic revolution stripped of its promise of social redemption, at least approximates the conditions that, it Freud’s estimation, are ripe for uncanny sensations’.[11] Recent interest in the uncanny as a metaphor for our fundamentally unliveable urban condition may therefore result from the fact that ‘within many of the projects that pretend to a radical disruption of cultural modes of expression, there still lurks the ghost of avant-garde politics, one that is proving difficult to exorcise entirely.’[12] <4> Perhaps this is why the network is so often featured in psychogeographical material. As one of the earliest modernist spaces, the London Underground is a prominent symbol of urban alienation – but one that

remains peculiarly open to forgotten places with tremendous myth-making potential.[13] As Mengham points out, there are forty ghost-stations in the city-centre alone: ‘repositories of gloom, amplifying the distant vibrations, allaying the slight breezes that pulse through the labyrinth, to decelerate as they get further and further away from the rushing air of tunnels where the trains still run’.[14] Resisting the panoptic rational pattern embodied by the Map of the Underground, these abandoned stations excite our imagination because we see in them the working of forces hitherto unsuspected in the modern city, but which we are aware of in some remote corner of our own being: they speak to our condition as ghosts in the machine, our sense that we haunt rather than inhabit the modern city.[15] This essay will suggest that the primary theme in millennial film and fiction set on the London Underground is the possibility that there may be some power in our status as Unheimlich. <5> The possibility that other times and places might exist somewhere in the darkness between stations is the premise of the fantasy television-series Neverwhere (1996). Based on an idea by comedian Lenny Henry, with a script by novelist Neil Gaiman, music by Brian Eno, opening titles by artist Dave McKean, and performances from Laura Fraser, Hywel Bennett, and Paterson Joseph, the series is surely one of the most unusual ever produced by the BBC.[16] ‘There are little bubbles of old time in London, where things and places stay the same, like bubbles in amber,’ explains one character. ‘There’s a lot of time in London, and it has to go somewhere –- it doesn’t all get used up at once’.[17] Astonishingly, most of these bubbles of old time in the city are entirely real. According to Gaiman, the producers were simply making the most of a low budget. Unable to build large sets, they were compelled to film in striking subterranean locations never seen before on screen. Serpentine’s dinner-party, for instance, takes place on the platform of the ghost-station at Down Street; and the miniature tube-train in which Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar hunt down the unfortunate Varney is on the former Post Office Railway. The series itself is an object lesson in how easily such forgotten places in the capital can be taken over by the Unheimlich. <6> Having fallen through the cracks over millennia, these fragments of time have entered the subterranean realm of the lost and forgotten, called London Below. Invisible to the surface-folk, its citizens are divided into rival baronies and fiefdoms, haunted by rat-speakers, vampires, and a solitary angel. Significantly, these mythical creatures are, for the most part, inspired by names from that pre-eminently rational space, the Tube Map: there is an order of black friars, and there is an earl’s court (which moves about in a tube-train, feasting on coke and chocolate snatched from vending-machines whenever his baronial hall happens to stop at a station). Gaiman has exploited the fact that these richly resonant names, cut loose from whatever they once signified, have been rendered potentially uncanny by the clinical whiteness in which they float: ‘an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced,’ Freud observed, ‘as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes’.[18] <7> Significantly, the protagonist enters this uncanny realm by becoming homeless. Richard Mayhew lives a boring but comfortable existence with his fiancée Jessica until the night he sees a young homeless girl bleeding to death on the street, and stops to help her. This act of charity costs Richard his life. He wakes up on Monday morning to find that no one can see him –- his friends cannot remember him, his credit cards do not work, his flat is repossessed. Richard seeks help from the homeless girl he saved, but learns that she is in trouble herself, hunted by an engaging pair of psychopaths, called Mr Croup and Mr Vandemar. Richard is now a non-person, one of the ‘people who fell through the cracks in the world’.[19] In order to win his life back he must obtain a magical key for an angel called

Islington, reputed to live at the heart of the labyrinth of alleys and roads and corridors and sewers that have fallen into the world of the lost and forgotten over millennia: and the key can only be taken by one who passes though an Ordeal.[20] <8> Having fallen this far into wonderland it is a tremendous shock to find that the Ordeal is nothing other than reality. Richard sees his reflection in the window of a tube-train in Blackfriars Station: ‘He looked crazy; he had a week’s growth of beard; food was crusted around his mouth and in his beard; one eye had recently been blackened, and a boil, an angry red carbuncle, was coming up on the side of his nose; he was filthy, covered in black, encrusted dirt which filled his pores and lived under his fingernails; his eyes were bleary, his hair was matted and snarled. He was a crazy homeless person, standing on a platform of a busy Underground station, in the heart of the rush hour.’[21] In a savage sequence of jump-cuts, freeze-frames, fast-forwards, and flash-backs, Richard is told by a doppelganger who claims to represent whatever is left of his mind, that this is the closest to sanity he has been in a week, pointing out just how ludicrous the story-line has become by this point. Undercutting the suspension of disbelief slowly engineered over the course of the previous episodes, Gaiman breaks the one rule of the fantasy genre: and the result is devastating. ‘I wandered, alone and crazy, through the streets of London, sleeping under bridges, eating food from bins and skips’, intones the other Richard. ‘Shivering and lost and alone. Muttering to myself, talking to people who weren’t there ...’.[22] Kicked and buffeted by commuters in the London Underground, Richard’s profound alienation, his status as a non-person, is forcibly impressed upon him by the space itself. <9> Then the Underground tempts him with the promise that he can once again belong. His former fiancée calls to him from a poster over the track; his former best-friend throws one of the plastic trolls Richard used to collect onto the third-rail; ‘if he could only get the troll back, perhaps he could get everything back’.[23] The viewer is suddenly aware that all the posters in the tube-station are telling Richard to commit suicide: ‘HAVE A FATAL ACCIDENT TODAY’. Crawling to the platform’s edge, Richard realises he wants to belong again, even if that means becoming ‘an incident at Blackfriars station’.[24] ‘The train was coming towards him, its headlights shining out of the tunnel like the eyes of a monstrous dragon in a childhood nightmare. And he understood then just how little effort it would take to make the pain stop –- to take all the pain he ever had had, all the pain he ever would have, and make it all go away for ever and ever.’[25] Richard is ultimately saved by the memory of the heroism displayed by a homeless girl. Refusing to accept the logic of a consumer-society that says he has no right to exist, Richard holds fast to his condition of alienation: and thereby wins ‘the key to all reality’.[26] <10> This is a recurring theme in subsequent material set in the London Underground. Homelessness is invariably the key to the uncanny realm. For instance, in the movie Creep (2004), Franka Potente is pursued through the uncanny spaces beneath the capital by a mutant raised in a long-forgotten government institution (perhaps the vengeful ghost of the botched welfare state? an aborted Blitz Baby?) soon after encountering a homeless couple in the tube-station at Charing Cross. In the final shot of the movie, Potente is herself mistaken for a homeless girl by a commuter, as she slumps exhausted on the platform by a stray dog.[27] According to Julian Wolfreys, ‘the Freudian uncanny relies on the literal meaning and the slippage of, and within, the German unheimlich, meaning literally “unhomely”’.[28] Perhaps the homeless represent, in its most extreme form, the unhomely condition of the modern capital. As Marc Augé said of beggars in the Paris Metro, ‘All moorings broken and with their only link to the world the scribbled text at their feet (sometimes written directly on the ground), they symbolize by way of negation and to the point of dizziness the whole social order, terribly concrete and terribly complete –- black holes in our

daily galaxy’.[29] The homeless are the human-resources that the state and market cannot use. They are the End of the Line. They are the point from which we can survey our society in its entirety and the gap within the structures we mistakenly believe to be unities, complete, whole, and undifferentiated.[30] They are the representatives of ‘the gods and the dead’.[31] In offering alms we simultaneously acknowledge our kinship with them and reinforce our sense of separation, paying off the powers that rule this space so that life can continue. Thus in Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle (2006), the poet offers alms to secure safe passage through earth scarred by recent terrorist atrocities:

I’d trigger and untrigger a hot coin Held at the ready, but now my gaze was lowered For was our traffic not in recognition? Accorded passage, I would re-pocket and nod, And he, still eyeing me, would also nod.[32] <11> Perhaps the most skilful portrayal of the homeless as a portal to the urban uncanny is Tobias Hill’s Underground (1999). The protagonist Ariel Casimir is a Polish immigrant who works in the London Underground because he believes that there is a feeling of control in the tunnels and halls, ‘their light and air and even life rationed out’, which enables him to feel that the darkness in his own history is under control –- ‘It is something he needs, the control’.[33] The Underground starts out perfect. At first it isn’t like the city above it because it is conceived all at once. Everything must be created, heat and passage of air. For the engineers and architects it begins as a perfect technical form. Then years go by –- decades. Cross-tunnels are found to be unnecessary, so they are bricked up. Deeper tunnels are added by the government, then closed down. Limestone comes through the concrete as if it were muslin. Up above, communications die out. Stations are abandoned. ... The Underground becomes a reflection of the city above –- organic, not perfect. Full of small animals and weak plants. Good hiding places, and places that are dangerous.[34] <12> These hiding places are soon occupied by those sheltering from the cold or the police. Their graffiti and posters cover the walls, their music echoes in the empty tunnels. Casimir can sympathise with them: ‘he knows homelessness in himself, years old, still felt as if the bones are indelibly stained inside him?’[35] But he knows only too well that the tunnels can be an unsafe hiding place: ‘There is always the way the Underground can contain things, trapping them in its corners, hiding them, making them stronger’. Against his better judgement, Casimir is drawn to this souterrain, ‘all snickets and pope-holes’.[37] Fascinated with a beautiful white-haired homeless girl, Casimir tracks her through neglected cross-passages to the abandoned station at South Kentish Town, where rows of tiny stalactites hang from the platform’s lip: ‘Now it feels more like a great natural cave than a place dug and built’.[38] The girl is called Alice, and she sleeps here underground, ‘Like something from a children’s story or folk tale’.[39] Casimir thinks of the mythical Ohyn, ‘babies stillborn with cauls and teeth, who come back at night to eat their grieving parents’, and in her parting words Alice herself seems to echo the folk-tale of Eurydice, ‘Don’t look back’.[40] <13> As in Neverwhere the homeless girl is being hunted down by a monster in the dark. There is a serial-killer in the tunnels who pushes young, white-haired women onto the third-rail, and his true target is Alice. Hill builds on this trope in an inventive manner, eventually revealing that the serial-killer is Alice’s former foster-carer, and that Casimir’s confrontation with this perverse father-figure is the symbolic resolution of the character’s own long-standing conflict with his monstrous father in Poland. In chapters that alternate with those set in the present, it is revealed that Casimir’s mother is Jewish and his father a vicious anti-

Semite, and that this secret has cast its shadow over Casimir’s earliest memories, filling them with images of subterranean darkness. It is in an underground den, that Casimir imagines making love to a local Jewish girl called Hanna, and it is here that he hurls a squirrel in a cage down a shaft into deep water. Killing the squirrel is an act of violence against Hanna, whom Casimir both loves and fears because he suspects that he might be Jewish too: like Hanna, ‘It is a beautiful thing, but it scares us too’.[41] The crisis takes place underground. Hanna gives Casimir an amber lion as a gift, a symbol of the secret name given to him by his mother, Ariel, which, she tells him, means Lion in Hebrew. Angry and upset, Casimir throws her gift down the shaft into water, to join the drowned squirrel.[42] Hanna’s revelations raise awkward questions that Casimir long refuses to confront. And when he finally can bring himself to ask about his parents, the facts are even worse than he might have expected. In spite of loving his wife, Casimir’s father participated in a pogrom that killed forty-two members of the Jewish community returning from Buchenwald: ‘You see how it is now? Your father hated the Jews, and married a Jew. ... Myself, I always thought he hated Anna too. Hated loving her. And now there’s you. I wonder if he hates you too.’[43] <14> Casimir’s outrage is compounded by the revelation that his father earns money selling nerve-gas to terrorists. Significantly, the moment he turns against his father is marked with images of submersion and eclipse: A shadow is coming across the sea towards us, racing across the flat water. It is the shadow of the moon. It is as big as Poland. It makes no sound as it swallows us, a cold mouth without language. I look up, head right back on my shoulders. Straight up into the sun’s black death mask.     ‘Casimir? Casimir?’     I look back down for my father, but my father has gone. Behind me stands nothing but an evil man.[44] <15> This is why Casimir has taken to places where the darkness seems to be under control. ‘He is here because the dark is here, because he will not run away from it. He has never turned away from what scares him. Because the fear is too great for him to ever turn his back.’[45] But as his belief in the ordered nature of the tube-network begins to fade, the space starts to facilitate the return of the family history he has repressed. In his nightmares Casimir imagines the rattle of the squirrel’s cage coming at him in the Underground; and when he at last confronts the killer, the latter’s broad, moon-like face clearly recalls the solar eclipse that marked the beginning of Casimir’s homelessness. ‘It reminds Casimir of his father, and he tries to picture him. A weak man, twisted by amorality and a brutal, simple nationalism.’[46] In this novel, homelessness is thus rendered the key to the psychological as well as the architectural Unheimlich. The father comes back to insist upon a relationship that Casimir and Alice have both sought to suppress, and proceeds to haunt them with violence until he is acknowledged. <16> Hill also imparts this pattern with political significance. The protagonist’s struggle to forgive his father echoes the problematic relationship of citizens across Eastern Europe to Communism, for which so many atrocities were committed by the USSR. At one point Hill even likens the Underground to ‘Joe Stalin’s railway, where one bloody worker died for each sleeper’.[47] In order to rescue the homeless Alice, Casimir must first break with the crimes of the past, and this means acknowledging that he is his father’s son: ‘He remembers Anna’s voice: There is good in you that comes from him.’ In the final act of the novel, Casimir remembers how strong his father was, and wonders whether [he] would have used his strength for this: ‘Casimir thinks that perhaps he would’.[48] <17> In thus aligning communism with the uncanny, Hill is building on an important theme in China Miéville’s fantasy novel King Rat (1998). In this story the protagonist, Saul, is compelled to flee his home after the murder of his foster-father, an old-fashioned Marxist, by an unknown assassin.

Saul finds that he is in truth the son of the Rat King, and that he is being hunted by an Enemy who represents the consumer-capitalism his foster-father warned him against: the supernatural piper of Hamelin, who can summon tube-trains with his flute to crush opponents.[49] Sleeping rough in the sewer-system, Saul opens himself to an urban voodoo that enables him to defeat the piper and the financial Gormenghast of the City: ‘He had defeated the conspiracy of architecture, the tyranny by which the buildings that women and men had built had taken control of them, circumscribed their relations, confined their movements.’[50] In the last chapter, Saul is said to inhabit an abandoned tube-station, where he incites his army of rats to revolution: ‘let’s put the “rat” back into “Fraternity”’.[51] <18> This curious insistence on the uncanny power of Marxist Theory in the renovated, overly-determined cityscapes produced by international consumer-capitalism may reflect the enormous huge impact that Jacques Derrida’s historic lecture on Spectres of Marx (1993) has had on so much psychogeographical fiction set on the London Underground. It is interesting to note that Nicholas Royle, the man who has literally written the book on the Derridean Uncanny, decided to set much of his novel The Director’s Cut (2000) in the forgotten spaces of the London Underground. His avant-garde film-director Frank Munro is said to haunt the ghost-station at Wood Lane and rides the Hammersmith & City Line, roaming from carriage to carriage with a cut-throat razor in his pocket, killing those passengers who fail to make the ‘final cut’. In the course of the novel it emerges that he is the double of another Frank Munro (whom he killed), and that has assumed another alter-ego in order to conceal his crimes, reflecting the emphasis Derrida placed upon the iterability of the spectral.[52] Speaking in that period when the West first started to implement capitalism in what had recently been the Eastern Bloc, Derrida insisted that the end of history declared by the American political theorist Francis Fukuyama, was yet another, inevitably unsuccessful, attempt to exorcise the spectre of Marx: ‘Hegemony still organizes the repression and thus the confirmation of a haunting’.[53] Derrida observed that Marxism had in fact never been anything other than a spectre -- a revenant –- a memory that comes back. ‘A spectre is haunting Europe –- the spectre of communism’, wrote Karl Marx in the Manifesto of 1848.[54] Contrary to what good sense might lead us to believe, the spectre therefore signals toward the future. It is a legacy that can only come through that which has not yet arrived. ‘Repetition and first time, but also repetition and last time, since the singularity of any first time makes of it also a last time’.[55] The revenant is a staging of the end of history, and calls for a hauntology, or logic of haunting, larger and more powerful than an ontology, or a thinking of Being, which would harbour within itself the discourse of the end, and the opposition between to be and not to be.[56] ‘Hamlet already began with the expected return of the dead King. After the end of history, the spirit comes by coming back [revenant], it figures both a dead man who comes back and a ghost whose expected return repeats itself, again and again.’[57] <19> The logic of haunting is a key theme in Conrad Williams’ London Revenant (2004). In this novel the protagonist, Adam Buckley, is propelled into lost pockets of magic in the rotten heart of the city, where he becomes increasingly aware that his own past is honeycombed with the forgotten. He seems to recognise people he has never met, at parties to which he cannot remember being invited. He cannot help thinking that he somehow knows the person who is pushing people under tube-trains in the rush-hour. He slowly begins to understand that all his haunts in London are governed by the ‘dirty magic’ of the Underground.[58] There were thirty or forty of these limbo stations beneath the city. Lonely platforms, dead staircases, gutted lift shafts. Places that had once known thousands of feet a day now knew none, none that were human at least, beyond the plod of staff, or the occasional guided tour. This is how it used to be. This is how we were. How many more souterrains were there? How

many more secrets could a city keep before it collapsed under the weight of them all? How strong could a city built on a honeycomb be?[59] Eventually it is revealed that Adam was once one of the ‘Missing’ in the Big Issue.[60] Some years earlier, Adam was captured by a community of troglodytes inhabiting the forgotten Fleet Tube, and made to work on the excavation of a portal into the mythical subterranean city of Beneothan.[61] He has now been returned to his previous life in order to track down the serial-killer in the tube-network, a renegade from the world below: Here we know him as Blore. We need to stop him, and the handful he has recruited, bent to his will, or he will reveal us. And that must not happen. ... There are religions down here, philosophies born of the earth. If knowledge is observation, we have all the wisdom we’ll ever need to survive here. Up Top, we’d be dust.[62] As the Queen of the Underworld speaks, thick furry coats of grime move against each other like wads of iron filings in the field of a magnet, and it occurs to the protagonist that she is dust already.[63] The serial-killer, on the contrary, is a vital incarnation of the capital’s repressed history, willing to tap the potential of the Unheimlich. It is revealed that he is the descendant of a workman killed in a particularly gruesome accident while excavating the earliest tube-railway in 1887.[64] As the protagonist observes, he is the Tube’s history, all its energy and desperation, its blood and sweat, its disease, its tears: ‘Blore was somehow a link, the connective tissue between topside and Underground. He was London made flesh, a cipher between the living and the dead.’[65] And this revenant is entirely aware of his role as a force that can shock people out of themselves and into new selves: I never intended to kill anyone. Death isn’t the point to all this. Life is. One I pushed, she lost an arm. I read about her. She was a data inputter for a law firm in the City. She was suffering from RSI, she was paying through the nose for a tiny flat in Holborn. Now she’s looking after sheep on an island in the Hebrides. She’s happier now than she ever was.[66] <20> As a revenant himself, Adam’s perception of the Tube is very similar to that of Blore. ‘I didn’t like the way some people appeared down there, as though they’d left their brains behind before leaving for work,’ he says, ‘or were this far away from snapping and massacring everyone in the carriage. Nobody wore an expression worth the name in the tube. Nobody laughed, and there was no reason why they should.’[67] Adam watches people climbing out of Warwick Avenue station and notes that they emerge staggered, as if even a short period away from daylight rendered them amnesiac to everyday sights: ‘I had seen young men halt at the top of the flight and look around, blinking like owls while the man holding a wad of Big Issues tried to break their catatonia’.[68] It is surely no coincidence that the reaction of the commuters in this passage so resembles that of the ‘pit-ponies’, compelled to excavate the portal to Beneothan, when they are set free later in the novel: ‘Spilling out of the rent in the earth came a torrent of naked, malformed bodies. Picked out by the sun, they were anaemic, pathetic figures, so thin that I could see the flutter of their organs through transparent skin.’ Adam and Blore pause for a moment mid-fight to watch these ‘phantoms’ stagger around, their faces upturned, smelling the air, their useless eyes now darkish nubs in their heads: Some were too weak to continue their trek beyond the rim of a world they had believed they would never see again. Undernourished but muscular, their limbs deformed or stunted, they panted on all fours, too exhausted or frightened to move. They were free. They were back in the city they had once known. But every one of them was still missing. Would they ever truly return?[69] Blore’s objective is to alert everyone else to the quiet, creeping dangers that he fell foul of –- to provide a wake-up call to the people who are letting their daily routine grind them into the dust of the Underworld.[70]

As Adam observes, ‘On the Underground, time becomes this vampire that attaches itself to the back of your neck, tapping you of energy and the ability to relate space to movement.’[71] Because there’s nothing to look at, people immerse themselves in fiction or Metro, trying to keep hold of a place that is normal and human, using the immutable ink in much the same way that they use the handgrips that dangle from the ceiling. We fear the swift glide into tunnels, the jarring and jolting, MIND THE GAP and platforms choked with commuters, like rats congregated on a sewer ledge. Descending: it is not something we look forward to really, perhaps because we step nearer the place we ultimately wish to stay away from. It’s a constant reminder of burial.[72] It is revealed that the revenant is rehearsing for a catastrophe that will herald the end of history: according to Adam, Blore is aware that a violent earthquake is about to hit London.[73] An intense flare of fire lifted into the sky towards Shepherd’s Bush. Smaller explosions thudded around me as the ground discovered fresh levels to settle into and gas pipes ruptured and ignited. A great chasm yawned nearby, sucking in cars, lorries and a Hammersmith & City Line Tube train. The lights went out everywhere. As they did so, a great tide of sound rose from beneath my feet, like a rush of gritty air forced through tunnels. It took me a while to realise that what I heard, but did not see, was a crowd of people cheering. A while longer and it dawned on me that I was making the same noise.[74] <21> The catastrophe is followed by the long-delayed combat between Adam and Blore. Blore is caught in a huge explosion: and the project of building a modernist utopia begins anew, but this time renovation will leave no possible space for the Unheimlich. ‘The Underground had been damaged beyond repair. It was decided that it should be completely sealed off and tenders sought for a new overland transportation system.’[75] The earthquake is even said to have been a blessing in disguise: ‘The designs that had already begun to be considered for the centre would see the streets completely pedestrianised, with plenty of green spaces instead of road choked by taxis and buses. Shuttles that clung to tracks on terraced buildings would provide transport around the heart of the capital. The government pushed for people to get their bikes out. Adverts for cheap microlite aircraft began cropping up.’[76] But, as in a trashy horror flick, every time Adam thinks he has finally slain the monster, Blore comes back, and comes back. The outcome of their last combat, in which it looks as though Adam might achieve victory, remains beyond the scope of the novel. It would seem that, while the uncanny must return after the end of history, the human imagination cannot pass beyond the extirpation of the Unheimlich. <22> This may suggest that the uncanny is in fact part of the viral onslaught on rationalised time and space examined by Jean Baudrillard in The Transparency of Evil (1990). London Revenant cannot pass beyond the elimination of the uncanny because it is precisely this uncontrollable, unknowable component in the machine that constitutes the essence of what it means to be human. According to Baudrillard, it is thanks to the ‘vital resistance’ offered by the viral that we shall not be going straight to the culminating point of the development of information and communication, ‘which is to say: death’.[77] As cultural-geographer Lewis Mumford once observed, the processing that has become the chief form of metropolitan control cannot stop with production, prices, and movement, but must finally make over the human personality: ‘So complicated, so elaborate, so costly are the processing mechanisms that they cannot be employed except on a mass scale: hence they eliminate all activities of a fitful, inconsecutive, or humanly subtle nature –- just as “yes” or “no” answers eliminate those more delicate and accurate discriminations that often lie at one point or another in between the spuriously “correct” answer.’[78] The final result,

Mumford predicted, would be the triumph of the de-humanised homunculus he called ‘Post-Historic Man’.[79] He will look remarkably like a man accoutred in a ‘space-suit’: outwardly a huge scaly insect. But the face inside will be incapable of expression, as incapable as that of a corpse. And who will know the difference?[80] According to Baudrillard, the extreme phenomena which periodically afflict the closed system of our society may be an attempt on the part of the human to survive such a culture of total transparency: ‘the actual catastrophe may turn out to be a carefully modulated strategy of our species –- or, more precisely, our viruses, our extreme phenomena, which are most definitively real, albeit localised, may be what allows us to preserve the energy of that virtual catastrophe which is the motor of all our processes, whether economic or political, artistic or historical’.[81] <23> These themes are central to Geoff Ryman’s remarkable internet-novel 253 (1998). Set in a tube-train heading south on the Bakerloo Line from Embankment Station on 11 January 1995, the novel has two-hundred and fifty-three characters and takes place in the seven and a half minutes it takes for the tube-train to travel to the Elephant and Castle. Ryman provides each character with one page of exactly two-hundred and fifty-three words, the characters are numbered, and their personal information divided into the following ‘helpful’ sections, ‘So that the illusion of an orderly universe can be maintained’.[82]

Outward appearance: does this seem to be someone you would like to read about? Inside information: sadly, people are not always what they seem. What they are doing or thinking: many passengers are doing or thinking interesting things. Many are not.[83] The passengers are thus pigeonholed, numbered, and regulated in the grid of the train in a manner which serves to recall Certeau’s claim that the railway car is a perfect actualisation of the rational utopia: ‘A bubble of panoptic and classifying power, a module of imprisonment that makes possible the production of an order, a closed an autonomous insularity’.[84] In a spoof online-advert, Ryman promises the reader powers of surveillance that he terms ‘Godlike’. He promises that the ‘253 description code’ will enable the reader to ‘categorise people’ more effectively, so that we can spot the criminals in our midst with ‘professional’ acumen. This theme is important in a work in which most characters are observing other passengers or are being observed. No.145, for instance, works for a company that offers image enhancement to video surveillance systems. A visit to Scotland Yard is said to have left him exhausted. He has watched cameras follow a man the operators didn’t like around a department store, warn the other stores by radio after he leaves, follow him down the street with further cameras, watch him board a bus, and then video the interior of the bus to make sure the man does not get off. ‘The whole country is wired’, he reflects; ‘The English live in 1984 and don’t know it.’[85] The internet-novel replicates this situation, presenting the reader with a database composed of passengers, their personal information structured by a numerical grid. In fact, the process of reading 253 is an experience that resembles nothing so much as the use of other web-based data-retrieval systems, such as Wikipedia. In his choice of form, content and medium, Ryman has come as close as possible to presenting the reader with the spectacle of that total transparency of data feared by Mumford. <24> But, as Baudrillard predicted, totalitarian surveillance produces its own opposition. Seeking to eliminate external aggression, integrated and hyper-integrated systems secrete their own internal virulence, their own malignant reversibility: when a certain saturation-point is reached such systems undergo this alteration willy-nilly, and tend to self-destruct: ‘A world purged of the old forms of infection ... offers a perfect field of operations for the impalpable and implacable pathology which arises from

the sterilisation itself’.[86] According to Baudrillard, virulence takes hold when a network rejects its negative components and resolves itself into a system of simple elements: ‘It is because a circuit or a network has thus become a virtual being, a non-body, that viruses can run riot within it’.[87] The triumph of transparency must render the machine itself immaterial and thus peculiarly open to the vengeance of the ghosts it has created along the way. As Baudrillard concludes, virtual and viral go hand in hand.[88] <25> Passenger 83, for instance, works at the NHS Tabulation and Processing Agency.[89] She wants the institution to have an ISO standard quality accreditation: a process that involves plying ‘ambulance customers’ with a questionnaire intended to ascertain whether they think the vehicle comfortable, the driving of a safe but speedy quality, the staff polite and informative. She overlooks the fact that someone in need of an ambulance is not very likely to want to provide feedback. The form intended to improve the customer’s experience can only frustrate its own end. Effective surveillance must fail to take the human into account –- and must thereby eliminate its very reason for being. Traces of this terrible omission assume an uncanny significance. Within the restrictive numerical and structural grid imposed on each character-sketch humanity re-surfaces, a revenant, beyond the panopticon’s comprehension or control. To read Ryman’s internet-novel is like watching a brilliant escape-artist emerge, without apparent effort, from two hundred and fifty-three seemingly inescapable cages. The story of the first passenger, Valerie Tuck, perfectly illustrates the procedure of the novel as a whole.[90] After a theft of computer chips from her office Valerie, with the rest of the work-force, has been compelled to wear a photo-pass with an unflattering blue photograph, on a badge held by a clip or chain. We learn that she is writing an article on how to wear the photo-pass stylishly. ‘Try hanging it down your back from its chain. This is simple, elegant, and less nerdish than clipping it to your front pocket.’ She recommends spraying the badges lightly with gold nail polish, ‘to neutralise the ice-blue, just-arrested look’, and suggests that ‘Younger staff members into punk may wish to clip badges to ears or run the chains through nasal piercings.’[91] <26> However, this inherent unpredictability in the machine comes at a huge cost. Consider the fate of Steven Workman, inventor of a satellite-navigation system that can provide every driver in the country instant information on where they are, the best way to reach a destination and the traffic problems en route by tapping into Scotland Yard’s traffic monitoring unit. On exiting the tube-car Steven catches his watch in the frazzled hair of Angie Strachan and is carried on to the Elephant –- where the tube-train smashes into the barriers in a catastrophe that wipes out all but three of the thirty-eight passengers still on board. In the space of just seven pages, each little community formed in the previous seven and a half minutes is annihilated. It’s like watching a society vanish. And though the carnage in each tube-car is dealt with in exactly two hundred and fifty-three words, the effect is not to impose order but rather to undermine the idea that numerical systems can maintain the illusion of a controlled universe. In line with the theories of Baudrillard, the catastrophe is brought about by the human component at the heart of the machine. The driver, Tahsin Celikbilekli, has hung his jacket on the Dead Man’s Handle (the device which should automatically stop a tube-train in the event of a driver being incapacitated), and fallen asleep. As the tube-train is flattened, Tahsin dreams of golden letters in the ancient language of his home-land: Love, Freedom, Peace.[92] <27> Significantly, this final section in Ryman’s novel is called ‘The End of the Line’. As in the essay of the same title by Mengham, this is a place where our belief in the power of rationality to order and control our lives, our belief in the closed system, breaks down. The terminus is literally the portal into another order of time and space. The passengers

in Car 6, for instance, shoot forward to the New York Metro, to the shimmering towers and bullet holes of Lebanon, to a limbo of vengeful cabbies, to the Monkey-God Hanuman, and ‘away from the illusory which exfoliates like stone, towards the airy real’.[93] The perspective imposed by ‘The End of the Line’ imparts every passenger’s tiniest thought and action with a significance the various surveillance systems featured in the text have failed to comprehend. Harold Pottluck, the market-researcher, for instance, is invited to dance with an elderly lady moments before he is killed. Though he is moved by her appeal, he chooses to finish his report. The old lady pleads that they have so little time –- ‘This is a matter of life and death’.[94] In the light of the coming crash, Harold’s refusal to embrace this utopian moment becomes nothing less than a tragedy. In this astonishing text, humanity seems to haunt the margin between total control and catastrophe, an immortal ghost that is compelled to return after the end that each should impose. Rising up from the mangled carriage, Passenger 253 takes the list Harold has compiled of people who do not travel on the Underground: the unemployed, the sick, the retired and elderly, the mentally subnormal, prisoners, pre-school infants, nuns, children driven to school, housewives: ‘It is the list of useful people who will survive’. Murmuring the kaddish for the dead, Passenger 253, the now immortal diarist Anne Frank, walks up the tunnel to the light: ‘She wanders and bears witness. She cannot forget them, nor can she die.’[95] <28> Ryman’s internet-novel suggests that recent psychogeographical interest in the urban uncanny has its roots in cultural anxieties that animate the theoretical discourse on the death of man and the end of history. In each instance, theorists and psychogeographers are following the lead of Marx, Freud and Lacan in rejecting the belief in a natural human essence that manifests itself in political structures and social relations, situating our being instead in the repressed, the viral, the Unheimlich. ‘I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think’, claimed Lacan, reformulating the classic equation of humanity with reason. ‘I think of what I am where I do not think to think’.[96] As Neil Badmington observes in Posthumanism (2000), it is evident that the crisis in humanism is no longer confined to critical theory but is manifesting itself in popular culture too.[97] According to Badmington, as a result we are witnessing the triumph of a hybrid literary form that Maurice Blanchot termed ‘fictive theory’.[98] This innovative mixture of fiction and theory is the format for Christopher Ross’s Tunnel Visions (2001), a text that interweaves reflection on the posthumanist condition into an account of a life spent in travel that has gone to seed in the London Underground. <29> Ross explains he had begun to understand that even an action-packed and eventful life is mostly a series of nothings, of things we cannot and do not notice, because we hardly perceive them at all, and this realisation causes him to become very interested in the idea of heightening focus on the ordinary, to see what happens when nothing is happening. Reasoning that the best way to achieve this is to do something mechanical over a long enough period to wear out the novelty, something not too challenging so as to free up enough energy to perform the experiment well, Ross becomes a Station Assistant in the London Underground.[99] In the course of the book, nothing is revealed to be nothing less than surreal. There is a woman who walks her fox in the rush-hour. Another woman carries a baby chimp about in a nappy. Tropical mosquitoes unknown to western science thrive in the humid tunnels. And having helped an elderly blind man to a train, Ross finds himself marvelling at a pale white butterfly that hovers momentarily in the place where he had been standing: ‘I noticed that no one looked up and it passed unseen until I too lost sight of it’.[100] <30> According to Ross, this failure of vision is endemic and it has enslaved urban man. ‘How many times did someone say to me “I cannot find the way out. Why are there no signs?” There were eighteen Way Out signs on or near my platform, but they might as well have been invisible. What they

were asking for was to be shown or led out by someone who knew the way. And to be soothed and reassured that it was indeed impossible to get out alone.’[101] Ross suggests that we are prisoners who have evolved a language in which it is nearly impossible to describe accurately life outside the prison, or to approach the question of escape.[102] He insists that only by becoming aware of the forces operating in any situation, which may be removing the volitional, can we begin to understand what it means to be free.[103] In order to do so, we must revive our perceptive capacities, must manufacture a space in the mind to sift for the truth: ‘By pacing and performing work which, once I knew what to do, made few demands on me, I had, I realised, and quite by accident, begun to clear a space for serious reflection’.[104] This express commitment to freedom within, rather than without, the system is entirely in line with posthumanist thought, which rejects recourse to a timeless utopia: ‘It seemed germane that certain means of transport, such as the passenger car and even more so the train, could go only where road or rails had gone before them. Freedom to travel by such means then is only the freedom to choose between existing routes. No train traveller carries rails to lay down a new track as they go along, to blaze a trail.’[105] <31> But the transition to this new way of seeing is shown to be far from straightforward. In one long section Ross describes how a homeless youth steps out into the path of a tube-train while the rest of the city is Christmas shopping. The young man has gazed for a while at a poster in which a beautiful girl sells something for £19.99 and realised that he should ‘just do it, like the Nike ad’. Ross returns to the spot again and again the following day, trying to surprise a clue as to why someone might choose to die in this place, but there is nothing there to see, except the litter produced by another big brand: ‘I thought I could see a trace of blood, but it was only a KitKat wrapper’.[106] Measured exclusively by his potential to enhance economic performativity, the young man, neither a producer nor a consumer, is nothing more in this subterranean bubble of consumer-capitalism than waste. According to Ross, far too few people ever have the time and space necessary to contest this inhuman criterion: ‘Life in a city is so fast that in general we fill our minds with so large and so continuous a flow of sensory impressions that there is only time to process it –- yes or no, and-gates and or-gates –- so that most mental processes are mechanical and unable to benefit from the slow stroll of reflection’.[107] <32> The short-comings of this blinkered outlook are particularly evident in the training program in People Management, which Ross defines as ‘Pop psychology filleted and applied to produce happy workers in an ever more efficient enterprise, joyously interfacing with optimistic and sated customers who just couldn’t get enough of our services’.[108] Ross is subjected to a psychological system called Transactional Analysis. He must respond to a series of sixty questions loaded with value judgements, choosing from answers that will be classified as childish, adult and parental. Ross observes that something about this type of test forces him to adopt a persona not his own, and suggests this is one reason why market surveys always seem to be wrong. ‘The questioner may make adjustments of a percentage point or two –- a so-called margin of error –- but should instead wonder whether cultural factors mean that all the answers are “errors”’.[109] Based on the false humanist premise that mankind is a rational animal, these attempts at surveillance produce ghosts in the machine the very moment they appear to achieve a total transparency of data. Having failed to comprehend humanity, the material produced by people-management is inevitably riddled with the mechanical errors that bear witness to this terrible oversight. Another test produced by People Management states that it will enable you to ‘Identify who your customer are (sic)’, and remind you to think: ‘Customer,\ People (you), Business’.[110] The phrase seems to have been automatically generated by a computer.

It would appear that those involved in People Management have completely forgotten how real people think. <33> Ross intimates that such a failure of imagination could easily bring about catastrophe. He is ‘comprehensively briefed’ on bomb threats for instance by means of the following slogan:

Beware Observe everything Maybe it’s nothing But don’t take a chance Still inform the following –     * Line Controller     * British Transport Police (Auto 999)     * Station Supervisor Remember: Bombs can come in all SHAPES and sizes[111] Ross notices how the first letters of the catchy slogans spell BOMBS, and expresses sarcastic admiration for the author of these notes: ‘It was really helpful to remember the words Beware and Observe, although Maybe, But and Still were, I thought, of less real value’.[112] The full extent of the potential risk represented by such training-material becomes fully apparent when there is a real bomb-alert at the end of the book. ‘Fragments of concrete and metal –- the plaster on the platforms was fixed over a grille of wire, like chickenwire, and any explosion would immediately convert this material into shrapnel, superheated segments of wire that would julienne strip anyone caught in the blast –- rushing towards you at hundreds of feet per second’.[113] <34> In the light of the bomb-threat, the socio-economic significance of the non-time Ross has spent in the Tube is shown to have been horrifically slight. In the three minutes it takes him to clear the station, he earns nearly 40p: ‘Less than the price of a Mars Bar. Was that, then, the price of my life in the situation I had voluntarily got myself into?’[114] Ross recognises that his psychogeographical project must appear futile to the people more fully immersed in this value-system, the very people he has written his book to help. In a subsequent flash-back, his attempt to warn passengers of the impending catastrophe is frustrated by their inability to perceive the Unheimlich. I run through the tunnels shouting at the thousands of people swarming along, each intent on his or her thoughts, lost to the world around them, separately enclosed. Rank upon rank of faces surge forward like waves in a human sea. I shout at them, but there is no sound. I wave my arms to attract the attention of the group closest to me. They do not see me, do not hear me. In fact, they walk right through me – and then, only then, do I realise I am a ghost, insubstantial, not real to them, beyond any sense register they can experience or credit as existing.[115] This momentary lapse of faith is certainly unfounded. This essay has demonstrated the extent to which the uncanny spaces in the London Underground have fascinated writers since the early nineties. This essay has established that the posthumanist vision of humanity revenant is a recurring theme in one branch of psychogeographical material that manages to be very technically innovative while retaining its broad popular appeal. The writers considered in this essay have chosen to assert the imaginative potential of the uncanny in the face of our renovated, overly-determined cityscapes, and their work proves that modern space can be haunted by the human imagination at least, if not inhabited. ‘Beneath the discourses that ideologize the city, the ruses and combinations of powers that have no readable identity proliferate’, observes Certeau; ‘without points where one can take hold of them, without rational transparency, they are impossible to administer’.[116] The salient fact is neither alienation nor its negation but the negotiation that each of us conducts every day –- the construction of the sense of the individual life from the limited number of

routes possible in the virtual spaces of the modern world: ‘Except for a few cultural details and a few technological adjustments, every society has its subway,’ remarks Augé, ‘and imposes on each and every individual itineraries in which the person uniquely experiences how he or she relates to others.’[117] The material considered in this essay confirms this impossible haunting: our monstrous but vital movement within the Machine. Endnotes [1] Rod Mengham and Marc Atkins, ‘End of the Line’, London: From Punk to Blair, eds. Joe Kerr and Andrew Gibson (London: Reaktion Books, 2003), p.199. [^] [2] Ibid., p.199. [^] [3] Ibid., p.201. [^] [4] Ibid., p.204. [^] [5] Ibid., p.208-209. [^] [6] Ibid., p.209. [^] [7] Guy Debord, ituationist International: Anthology, trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley, California: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981), p.5 [^] [8] Phil Baker, ‘Secret City’, Kerr and Gibson, p.332. [^] [9] Ibid., p.326. [^] [10] Roger Luckhurst, ‘Occult London’, Kerr and Gibson, p.337. [^] [11] Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1992), p.x, p.14 [^] [12] Ibid., p.3, p.14. [^] [13] See Plates 8.1 and 8.2. [^] [14] Mengham, p.199. [^] [15] This is how Freud explains the uncanny effect of epilepsy and madness: ‘The layman sees in them the working of forces hitherto unsuspected in his fellow-men, but at the same time he is dimly aware of them in remote corners of his own being’. –- Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, Vol. XVII, 1917-1919 (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), p.243. [^] [16] Neverwhere, dir. Dewi Humphreys (London: BBC, 1996). [^] [17] Neil Gaiman, Neverwhere (London: Hodder Headline, 1996), p.235-236. All subsequent references are to the novelisation. [^] [18] Freud, p.244. [^] [19] Gaiman, p.128. [^] [20] Ibid., p.318. [^] [21] Ibid., p.318. [^] [22] Ibid., p.254. [^] [23] Ibid., p.256. [^] [24] Ibid., p.255. [^] [25] Ibid., p.258. [^] [26] Ibid., p.357. [^] [27] Creep, dir. Christopher Smith (UK Film Council, 2004). [^] [28] Julian Wolfreys, Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2002), p.5 [^] [29] Marc Augé, In the Metro, trans., Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), pp.47-49. [^] [30] This is how Wolfreys’s defines the Unheimlich in Victorian Hauntings, p.6. [^] [31] Augé, pp.47-49, p.65. [^] [32] Seamus Heaney, District and Circle (London: Faber, 2006), p.17. [^] [33] Tobias Hill, Underground (London: Faber, 1999), p.8. [^] [34] Ibid., p.136. [^] [35] Ibid., p.6. [^] [36] Ibid., p.45. [^] [37] Ibid., p.8. [^] [38] Ibid., p.67. [^] [39] Ibid., p.164. [^] [40] Ibid., p.62, p.149. [^]

[41] Ibid., p.111. [^] [42] Ibid., p.120. [^] [43] Ibid., p.199. [^] [44] Ibid., p.215. [^] [45] Ibid., p.62. [^] [46] Ibid., p.239, p.246. [^] [47] Ibid., p.87. [^] [48] Ibid., p.247. [^] [49] China Miéville, King Rat (Basingstoke and Oxford: Macmillan, 1998), pp.170-180. [^] [50] Ibid., p.288 [^] [51] Ibid., p.420. [^] [52] Nicholas Royle, The Director’s Cut (London: Abacus, Little Brown, 2000). [^] [53] Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, trans. Peggy Kamuf, ed. Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p.37. [^] [54] Ibid., p.50. [^] [55] Ibid., p.196, p.10 [^] [56] Ibid., p.10. [^] [57] Ibid., p.196, p.10 [^] [58] Conrad Williams, London Revenant (London: The Do-Not Press, 2004), p.113, p.46. [^] [59] Ibid., p.184. [^] [60] Ibid., p.274 [^] [61] Ibid., p.299. [^] [62] Ibid., p.83. [^] [63] Ibid., p.83. [^] [64] Ibid., p.327. [^] [65] Ibid., p.239. [^] [66] Ibid., p.288. [^] [67] Ibid., p.26. [^] [68] Ibid., p.29. [^] [69] Ibid., p.289. [^] [70] Ibid., p.88. [^] [71] Ibid., p.39. [^] [72] Ibid., p.39. [^] [73] Ibid., p.286. [^] [74] Ibid., p.262. [^] [75] Ibid., p.307. [^] [76] Ibid., p.308. [^] [77] Jean Baudrillard, ‘Prophylaxis and Virulence’, Posthumanism, ed. Neil Badmington (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), p.39. [^] [78] Lewis Mumford, The City in History (1961; New York: MJF Books, 1989), p.542. [^] [79] Ibid., p.4. [^] [80] Ibid., p.542. [^] [81] Baudrillard, p.40. [^] [82] Geoff Ryman, 253 (London: HarperCollins, 1998), p.2. Unless otherwise specified subsequent references are to the print-version. The original internet version of the novel is still available at: <>, (18/01/2008). [^] [83] Ryman, the website. [^] [84] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (London: University of California Press, 1988), p.111. [^] [85] Ryman, p.202. [^] [86] Baudrillard, p.35. [^] [87] Ibid., p.36. [^] [88] Ibid., p.36. [^] [89] Ryman, p.121. [^] [90] Ibid., p.12. [^]

[91] Ibid., p.12. [^] [92] Ibid., p.10. [^] [93] Ibid., p.350. [^] [94] Ibid., p.351. [^] [95] Ibid., p.340 [^] [96] Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977), p.166. [^] [97] Badmington, pp.8-9. [^] [98] Ibid., pp.8-9. [^] [99] Christopher Ross, Tunnel Visions: Journeys of an Underground Philosopher (London: HarperCollins, 2001), p.7. [^] [100] Ibid., p.67. [^] [101] Ibid., p.81. [^] [102] Ibid., p.80-81. [^] [103] Ibid., p.142. [^] [104] Ibid., p.153. [^] [105] Ibid., p.22. [^] [106] Ibid., p.85. [^] [107] Ibid., p.152. [^] [108] Ibid., p.17. [^] [109] Ibid., p.30 [^] [110] Ibid., p.40. [^] [111] Ibid., pp.48-9. [^] [112] Ibid., pp.48-9. [^] [113] Ibid., pp.173-4. [^] [114] Ibid., pp.173-4. [^] [115] Ibid., p.177. [^] [116] Certeau, p.95. [^] [117] Augé, pp.69-70. [^] http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/september2008/ashford.html

Postface: Reflections on The Literary Thames: River, City and Chronotope Steven BarfieldI: Introduction <1> The Thames, as the contributors to this special issue of Literary London have made clear, is an ubiquitous and major strand of London’s cultural life and one that has persisted throughout the existence of the city. It functions in part as a kind of screen onto which a wide range of dreams, nightmares, anxieties, hopes and desires have been and are projected by London’s varied inhabitants, as well as by those who imagine the city from outside of London’s limits. The river can also act as a means by which writers envision change and transformation and revisit the half-forgotten traces of London’s past, just as much as somewhere that ordinary Londoner’s have used for work, pleasure and recreation. London, after all, has been since the eighteenth century at least, one of the cities that outsiders have most often dreamed about, particularly those who once belonged to Britain’s far-flung Empire. Contemporary Londoners appear obliged to continue with this wealth of representations, their anxiety recently sharpened by the fact the river, supposedly tamed finally by the Thames Flood Barrier, may once gain come to be seen as the enemy within that threatens London’s survival, due to rises in sea level caused by global warming. Simultaneously, the dreams/fantasies of government for a new ‘Linear City’ suggest that London may be expanded and extended along the Thames estuary to the sea itself, swallowing up a stretch of the Thames that has until now, been perceived as being outside of even Greater London. If this were true, then the Thames might have an even better claim to the suggestion of the title of Jonathan Schneer’s recent history of the river: The Thames: England’s River. <2> It is all too easy for Londoners to forget that, as Alexandra Warwick explains in her introduction, London is the Thames’ city and not vice

versa: the Thames rises in the countryside long before London and flows through the city, via its large estuary into the sea. One Victorian music-hall actor, Dan Leno, liked to humorously remind his fellow Londoners: ‘London is a large village on the Thames where the principle industries carried out are music halls and the confidence trick.’ It was the fording of the Thames that determined the positioning of the original Roman settlement, and the city’s simultaneous expansion towards West and East followed the river’s course. The Thames has always been both inside and outside of London simultaneously, a major means by which the city communicated with the world through most of its history and also the aqueous highway by which the outside world entered London: the London docks in particular signalling the great flow of commodities that anchored London’s predominant position as the linchpin of an emerging global market during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. London was always a city whose importance depended upon trade. The docks themselves and their associated warehouses, functioning as storehouses for the world’s goods, were often singled out as one of the marvels of London by contemporary observers (Porter 1994: 188-190). These marvels of engineering and trade were also where immigrants to London often first made landfall and the Thames’ docks, were for many new arrivals, the first of London they saw. Such docks included Victorian ‘super-docks’ further down river such as Tilbury (built 1886, 26 miles down river) as well as the original earlier docks. <3> When the S.S. Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury in 1948, bringing the first of many Caribbean immigrants to the then still imperial metropolis to aid the rebuilding of a war ravaged Britain, the youthful Trinidadian Calypsonian Lord Kitchener was filmed for the newsreels, upon his disembarkation from the ship (Sandhu 2003: 316-7). He was prompted to sing a calypso, ‘London Is the Place for Me’ to a new audience, some of whom were Londoners, suggesting how an imaginary London was central to his and others dreams. As Murray Fraser remarks in his essay, it is easy to forget that before the hotchpotch of recent urban development that has produced a kind of mini-Manhattan trading under the name of Docklands, London had possessed the most extensive and impressive series of docks of any world city to welcome newcomers to the delights of its Imperial grandeur. The river’s existence however, has always been able to blur boundaries and rupture demarcations between the entrenched conceptual oppositions on which a city like London is inevitably founded: the inside and outside of London; the domestic and the foreign: the city and the countryside; the natural and the urban. II: Early Modern Pastoral Perspectives <4> Early modern literary depictions of the Thames often focused on its rural, quasi-pastoral nature, extolling its virtues as the main river among many, rather than a qualitatively special case because of its complex relationship to the city built on its banks. Michael Drayton (1563-1631) refers in a Sonnet from the sequence Idea (published 1594) to the Thames: ‘Our floods' queen, Thames, for ships and swans is crown'd’. However apart from this first line, the Thames features as no more than the ‘queen’ of English rivers in Drayton’s poem and the poem moves on speedily to describe a 13 line list of English rivers for its remainder. London the city is not mentioned by Drayton in his poem. A similar treatment of the Thames can be found in The Compleat Angler (1653) by Izaak Walton (1593-1683); his celebrated account of how to fish in fishponds, rivers and estuaries (208-9): The chief is THAMISIS, compounded of two rivers, Thame and Isis; whereof the former, rising somewhat beyond Thame in Buckinghamshire, and the latter near Cirencester in Gloucestershire, meet together about Dorchester in Oxfordshire; the issue of which happy conjunction is Thamisis, or Thames; hence it flieth betwixt Berks, Buckinghamshire, Middlesex, Surrey, Kent and Essex: and so weddeth itself to the Kentish Medway, in the very jaws of the

ocean. This glorious river feeleth the violence and benefit of the sea more than any river in Europe; ebbing and flowing, twice a day, more than sixty miles; about whose banks are so many fair towns and princely palaces, that a German poet thus truly spake: Tot campos, &c.      We saw so many woods and princely bowers,      Sweet fields, brave palaces, and stately towers;      So many gardens drest with curious care,      That Thames with royal Tiber may compare. Although at first sight Walton’s gaze lingers on the capital’s river and its banks rather more than Drayton’s, this is in fact a view of the Thames placed in a much grander geographical and nationalist frame than just its London bound section alone would have allowed. The Thames is compared to the Tiber in Walton’s quotation, as the former is England’s main river and as Walton therefore implies is possessed of a classical glory akin to the river of the Empire of Rome. Walton’s is not therefore a view of the river confined within London’s perimeters and he emphasises a grand Arcadian setting for the Thames, rather than a simpler pastoral one (‘about whose banks are so many fair towns and princely palaces'). The Thames’ tidal relationship to the sea is also integral to Walton’s ambitious description of the special qualities of the Thames, as are the river’s ample length and magnitude a measure of its significance. Walton may have been a Londoner shopkeeper for much of his working life, as well as a writer of angling literature (albeit one born in Staffordshire), yet he still does not feel that London’s stretch of the Thames is really different from either the rest of the Thames, or indeed, other large English rivers. <5> Even Edmund Spenser (c.1552-1599), while born a Londoner, does not perceive the Thames as London’s river in particular. Spenser penned the most famous English Renaissance poem about the Thames, ‘Prothalamion’ (1596), with its iconic, often quoted refrain, repeated as the last line of each stanza: ‘Sweete Themmes runne softly, till I end my Song.’ However, it is only in stanza 8 (l.127), that his ‘two Swannes of goodly hewe’ (Elizabeth and Katherine Somerset, the two daughters of the Earl of Worcester and soon to be married), actually arrive in their river journey at ‘mery London’. The greater part of the poem before that is taken up with imagery of their journey by barge from the tributary Lee to the Thames, which is drawn from the pastoral and classical tradition, rather than direct observation, or else concentrates its attention on extravagant praise of the brides to be. When Spenser’s poem does eventually reach the Thames it is striking to the modern reader how little description of the actual city there is, despite a striking image of the old London Bridge (149-150):

     At length they all to merry London came,      To merry London, my most kindly nurse,      That to me gave this life’s first native source,      Though from another place I take my name,      An house of ancient fame.      There when they came, whereas those bricky towers      The which on Thames’ broad aged back do ride,      Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,      There whilom wont the Templar Knights to bide,      Till they decay’d through pride:      Next whereunto there stands a stately place,      Where oft I gained gifts and goodly grace      Of that great lord, which therein wont to dwell,      Whose want too well now feels my friendless case:      But ah! here fits not well      Old woes, but joys, to tell      Against the bridal day, which is not long:

     Sweet Thames run softly, till I end my song.

     Yet therein now doth lodge a noble peer,      Great England's glory, and the world’s wide wonder,      Whose dreadful name late through all Spain did thunder,      And Hercules’ two pillars standing near      Did make to quake and fear:      Fair branch of honour, flower of chivalry,      That fillest England with thy triumph’s fame,      Joy have thou of thy noble victory,      And endless happiness of thine own name      That promiseth the same;      That through thy prowess, and victorious arms,      Thy country may be freed from foreign harms;      And great Eliza’s glorious name may ring      Through all the world, fill’d with thy wide alarms,      Which some brave Muse may sing      To ages following,      Upon the bridal day, which is not long:      Sweet Thames run softly, till I end my song.

     From those high towers this noble lord issuing,      Like radiant Hesper, when his golden hair      In th’ ocean billows he hath bathed fair,      Descended to the river’s open viewing,      With a great train ensuing.      Above the rest were goodly to be seen      Two gentle knights of lovely face and feature,      Beseeming well the bower of any queen,      With gifts of wit, and ornaments of nature,      Fit for so goodly stature,      That like the twins of Jove they seem’d in sight,      Which deck the baldric of the heavens bright;      They two, forth pacing to the river’s side,      Receiv’d those two fair brides, their love’s delight;      Which, at th’appointed tide,      Each one did make his bride      Against their bridal day, which is not long:      Sweet Thames run softly, till I end my song. <5> It is tempting to say that this limited representation of the city was because London before the Eighteenth century was relatively smaller, enclosed within city walls and really meant the City of London alone. It thus impacted much less on the Thames and the way the Thames was perceived. Between the various aristocratic palaces near the Court of Westminster and the City of London itself, there was open country, meadows and such like, which made a recourse to pastoral convention more natural. The river Thames in the poem is more important as a means of communication than as a London setting and matches what we know about the Thames as the principal means of travel between the city proper and the Court at Westminster. Watermen and their boats were one of the most common means of transport in London before the nineteenth century. But while there was certainly less to see from the river in the sixteenth century when compared to later periods, it was never quite as little as poets such as Spenser suggested. In particular there is little sense of how by 1596, London had begun to develop its compacted physical identity in line with its increasing population and to overspill its city walls, nor of the development of grand commercial buildings such as Thomas Gresham’s The Royal Exchange, opened by Elizabeth I in 1570. In fact, contemporary panoramic maps of London such as Braun and Hohenberg’s Civitates Orbis Terrarum of 1575, show how much was there to be seen and

described (Porter 1994: 59). In 1632, Donald Lupton (Porter 1994: 138) described the Thames memorably: always in motion: he seems something like a carrier, for he is still either going or coming, … Merchandise he likes and loves, and therefore sends forth ships and traffic to most parts of the earth; his subjects and inhabitants live by oppression like hard landlords at land, the greater rule, and many times devour the less; the city is wondrously beholden to it, for she is furnished with almost all necessaries by it. <6> The answer seems to be that for Spenser and other literary writers, the city and the river were still not conceptually associated with one another in the way that they were to become in later periods. Although the movement of the river is clearly integral to the structure and sound of ‘Prothalamion’, and the two subjects of the poem are travelling by barge with the river’s flow, there is as with Drayton and Walton, little feeling that it is specifically London’s stretch of the Thames that concerns Spenser. Spenser’s details of London are limited to where Elizabeth and Katherine will arrive in London, a description of the Temple and of the nobility of Leicester House, as well as ruminations upon the poet’s own losses and potential gains through patronage, one that is matched by praise of important future and existing patrons. If anything, the part of London that most interested poets such as Spenser was the area of Westminster, where the monarch and the court resided, rather than the overcrowded and merchant governed City of London. The situation of the Thames and its literary depiction had not changed much by the time of John Milton. As Rachel Falconer argues, Milton followed Epic models in using the general image of a river in Paradise Lost, but it is his minor poem Mansus that links the Thames and swans (poets) singing. It does so, however, by locating this pleasant conjunction outside of London proper: ‘where the silver Thames pours her green tresses from shining urns and spreads them wide among the swirling currents of the ocean.’ (Milton cited in Falconer 1997: 270-271).[1] III: Wordsworth and the Thames Chronotope <7> Literary responses to the Thames grew increasingly ambivalent and complex towards the river, as the city grew, prospered and expanded through trade and immigration from the seventeenth century onwards and began to change its relation to the Thames. The population of the city and greater London had risen considerably from probably about 180,000 in 1603, to perhaps 675,000 in 1750 and to 900,000 by 1801, when the first official census was taken (Porter 1994: 131). In 1807, the poet Robert Southey (cited in Porter 1994: 93) remarked of a plan of London: ‘I [was] dismayed at the sight of its prodigious extent.’ Jack Lynch (2006) has usefully analysed how and why Alexander Pope’s poetry represents two opposing traditions at different moments of his career in a published paper originally given at the 2006 Literary London conference held at Greenwich University. One strand is the type of pastoral tradition of representing the Thames that stems from the work of poets such as Spenser (discussed above) and which maintains a similar conceptual divorce of city and river. The other which is more satirical stems from comic tradition that satirise such pastoral depictions of the Thames and that represent the growing pollution of the river in the area of the city. The old London Bridge’s restriction of the current alongside a mushrooming population was the primary cause of such unsavoury sights and smells , as well as of the Frost Fairs when the Thames froze over and this more robust ‘anti-tradition’, often associates physical pollution and stagnation with moral and political corruption. While the second of these traditions is not wholly absent from the early Modern period, if never dominant, it not surprisingly gathers pace through the seventeenth and eighteenth century as London grows as a city and pollution increases. As Lynch explains, one of the originators of this frequently scatological tradition is the Elizabethan waterman poet, John Taylor (working in Southwark 1590-1625) and John Dryden’s MacFlecknoe

(1682) is another more memorable instance of the city’s Thames depicted as sewer, complete with bobbing turds: ‘About thy boat the little Fishes throng,/ As at the Morning Toast, that Floats along’. <8> However, for Wordsworth and other Romantics, depicting the Thames seems to involve modifying both traditions simultaneously. At once they are conscious of the pollution of the river and increasing industrialisation, while viewing the river as still able to bear something of its traditional redemptive and pastoral powers. Though that was perhaps, already starting to be threatened with being overwhelmed by the city’s growing influence and effluent. William Wordsworth’s celebrated sonnet on London, ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’, chooses to play out its dislike of the rapidly industrialising and pollution filled metropolis on one of the few bridges then located across the banks of Thames (550). Westminster Bridge was upriver from the older city and the water was therefore likely to be clearer than downriver. In addition, the bridge was much more modern and less restrictive of the flow of the Thames, while Westminster also had fewer inhabitants than the city. As Wordsworth’s title suggests, the poem is based upon what he can immediately see of the London stretch of the Thames from Westminster Bridge (built in 1750), itself an example of the key bridge building that did much to promote London’s urban expansion by linking the north and south banks of the Thames (previously there had only been London Bridge).

     ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’

     Earth has not anything to show more fair:      Dull would he be of soul who could pass by      A sight so touching in its majesty:      This City now doth, like a garment, wear      The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,      Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie      Open unto the fields, and to the sky;      All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.      Never did sun more beautifully steep      In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;      Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!      The river glideth at his own sweet will:      Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;      And all that. mighty heart is lying still! <9> It would seem that only at the special and liminal time of daybreak (‘the very houses seem asleep’), can London appear once more as non-polluted (‘glittering in the smokeless air’), and the Thames therefore fulfil its traditional poetic function of beckoning towards the possibilities of pastoral return, (‘open unto the fields, and to the sky’). It is important here than Wordsworth is making his observation and producing his poem, when London is accelerating its dramatic expansion and process of industrialisation. As the eighteenth century city grew into the nineteenth century metropolis, it was effectively determining the Thames to be principally London’s river. As William Blake remarked in ‘London’ (1794), from Songs of Experience, the Thames was fast becoming mapped, legally defined and portioned out to commercial interests (the chartered companies): ‘I wander thro’ each charter’d street, / Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.’ A succession of commercial docks were being built by private interests, in the latter part of the eighteenth century to replace the insufficient system of existing river wharves (Porter 1994: 136-139): West India Docks, 1802; London Docks, 1805, East India Docks, 1806, Surrey Docks, 1807. These were attempts, like the setting up of the Marine Police in 1798, to deal with the extreme overcrowding of the existing wharves along the Thames, but they simultaneously helped to regulate the landing of goods and people. Such work on the Thames matched

the similar eighteenth century property construction boom that had and continued to produce so many new ‘charter’d streets’ from pre-existing aristocratic estates. <10> London and the Thames that ran through it was becoming a map, as its open fields were being turned into regulated streets and squares of various degrees of social exclusivity and its previously tumbling, motley collection of quays and jetties into the docks that were being cut into the banks of the Thames. Wordsworth is perhaps more conscious of this change in the perception of the Thames in relation to London’s own development than he is often given credit for. But, whether we agree with Wordsworth’s view or not, which seems to suggest that only a dreamlike, perhaps deathly London can be perceived as beautiful: it is significant that the Thames and what is immediately around it should play such a central part in his poem, (‘ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples’). Yet, while the Thames of 1802 was very different because of Londoner’s activities than the Thames of 1596, the Thames still seems able to escape the city’s attempts to reign it in, (‘the river glideth at his own sweet will’), much like Spenser’s earlier portrait of the free-flowing, unimpeded river. This in turn suggests how easily in Wordsworth’s outsider’s vision, London’s may be transformed from bustling commercial metropolis to rural retreat, running deliberately against the grain of what was actually happening to London and its river. The real city in 1802 is not so much, ‘open unto the fields’, as in fact, inexorably gobbling the fields and river up, replacing it with a ‘mighty mass of brick, and smoke, and shipping’ as Byron described the city in Don Juan. Wordsworth’s poem imagines that the city of the much earlier eighteenth century (or perhaps even earlier than that) still exists because thinking of the river itself can transport us back to earlier times. <11> The Thames functions for Wordsworth and later writers as an imaginative chronotope, as Bakhtin defined it originally with relation to the novel, leading contemporary perceivers back to the river’s and the city’s past existence. (Wordsworth, values rivers as part of the rural, poetic landscape, for example, consider his description of the Derwent in The Prelude.) The chronotope is a figure that is simultaneously temporal and spatial, creating not only the pattern of the plot or argument of a text, but also the main symbolic structuration of that particular text. As Bakhtin argues, the chronotope materialises ‘time in space’, as well as the embodying the ‘abstract elements’ of the text (Bakhtin 250) Falconer has argued very persuasively that the river is a dominant chronotope in Epic literature and my discussion of the term owes much to her original essay, although the Thames within London seems less dominant and specific an image in Epic poetry than it does in other literary forms and genres. The Thames is a therefore a consistent feature and trope in cultural and literary depictions of London that wish to measure or relate the past to the present, or what is outside the city to what is inside, and a strategy which comes to exist because the city, the river and the city’s relationship to the river have all changed so radically. Yet as Wordsworth suggests in his poem, there is still something sublime about even a Thames that is being so altered by human activity, and it nonetheless seems to escape the orbit of the city that would own and control it. In large part this is because until the building of the embankments that Stuart Oliver describes in his essay, there was still a demonstrable wildness to the river in terms of regular flooding. IV: T.S.Eliot, Fred D’Aguiar and the Intertextuality of the Thames <12> As David Skilton suggests in his article, Victorian poetry also uses the river to comment on the present, past and future. The Thames as an imaginative structure prompts that kind of reflection through inherent juxtaposition between its periods, its fluctuating chronotope providing a resource that can be reused for irony and critique. As London continued to grow exponentially in the nineteenth century, the few green spaces that remained were garden and parks, so it was one of the last examples of what

was natural the city itself, even after being tamed by the embankments. In within this sense, when T.S. Eliot (1888-1865 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              1888-1865      end_of_the_skype_highlighting) deploys an ironic/ satirical citation of the lines from Spenser’s ‘Prothalamion’ (‘Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my Song’) in ‘The Fire Sermon’ section of The Waste Land, he is following a tradition of representing the Thames in part established by Romantics and Victorians. The Waste Land is more continuous with earlier traditions of literary representations of the Thames than it might first appear, though it is resolutely Modernist in the manner of its abrupt, fragmentary, unfinished presentation of previous literary representations. Eliot repeats the line from ‘Prothalamion’ twice and a third time in varied form (1005): ‘Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long’.

     The river’s tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf      Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind      Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.      Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.      The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,      Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends      Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.      And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors;      Departed, have left no addresses.      By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept . . .      Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,      Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long. <13> Eliot as many commentators suggest, is using the quotation from Spenser to compare socially alienated, spiritually diminished twentieth century London and its river, to the historical fullness of the river of Spenser’s imagination. As Eliot's poem develops , Katherine and Elizabeth Somerset’s progression to London by barge that is depicted in Spenser’s ‘Prothalamion’ becomes transformed into a retelling of an anecdotal story about Queen Elizabeth I and her favourite Leicester (one of Spenser’s patrons), who are also travelling upon a river barge. Whitworth (1998) considers Eliot’s strategy of allusion in more depth than I have space for in the present article. However, if ( as could hardly be true in reality), the Thames bears no minor pollution tracing the amours of ‘summer nights’ (‘no empty bottles, sandwich papers,/ Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends.’), then Eliot implies it hosts something rather worse, the by-products of London’s continuing industrialisation: ‘The river sweats/ Oil and tar’ (1008). Eliot’s strategy can be considered an extension of the kind of work Wordsworth was already using the Thames to do in his earlier poem, juxtaposing the present of the river against the past, though while Wordsworth’s use of the Thames as chronotope succeeds in offering up a transformed city, Eliot’s use ends in failure and alienation: London remains the ‘Unreal City’ (1006) that it was earlier in the poem, beyond the redemptive affects of its river. The inhabitants of Eliot’s The Waste Land ( the lost souls that flow over London Bridge), are reminiscent of the people ideologically remade by London’s industrialisation that Friedrich Engels had so memorably described in 1844 (1987:68 ): And still they crowd by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one another, and their one agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his own side of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance. <14> Eliot is perhaps also alluding to the passage at the beginning of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness her, in his image of the drifting barges with ‘red sails’; Conrad’s image is discussed later in my essay. Eliot’s description and use of the Thames in The Waste Land is complex, in juxtaposing an Elizabethan Thames against its modern counterpart, The Fire

Sermon section of the poem goes on to point to the abjection of the present that has even overwhelmed the upriver riverside suburbs of the upper middle classes (Richmond and Kew). Hence the semi-personification of the Thames as a female voice (an ironic river nymph) telling us in her own voice of mechanical, passionless, perfunctory sex: ‘Richmond and Kew / Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees./ Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.’

     The river sweats      Oil and tar      The barges drift      With the turning tide      Red sails      Wide      To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.      The barges wash      Drifting logs      Elizabeth and Leicester      Beating oars      The stern was formed      A gilded shell      Red and gold      The brisk swell      Rippled both shores      Southwest wind      Carried down stream      The peal of bells      White towers                Weialala leia                Wallala leialala      ‘Trams and dusty trees.      Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew      Undid me. By Richmond I raised my knees      Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.’ <15> The story regarding Eliot’s use of Spenser, however is not completely over. As Michael Chanan’s essay on William Raban’s Thames Film suggests, Eliot’s own method of intertextual citation and historical discontinuity is reused in a different type of chronotopic representational space and as part of a different representational medium. Raban’s film ends as more celebratory than Eliot’s poem and also disinters and render explicit the complex history of the river within the urban city. In this respect we should also note the work of the contemporary Black British poet, Fred D’Aguiar, for whom imagining the Thames becomes a reflection on his personal history as a lyric poet who grew up by the river in London, as well as a way of commenting on past, present and future. The Thames helps to fund D’Aguiar’s mapping of connections between the discontinuities and continuities of the experience of being Black and British, in turn relating this to how the history of the river is a metaphor for London’s changing communications with the world outside and inside of itself. As John McLeod (2004: 173-4) has argued, poems such as ‘Dread’ ‘Greenwich Reach’ and ‘Domestic Flight’ in D’Aguiar’s poetry collection British Subjects (1993), dwell on the possibilities of the river as a space that allows investigations of what it means to be British, now and in the past, and where the Thames points to the possibility of London’s transformation to a multi-cultural city. However, if the Thames and T.S.Eliot’s description in The Waste Land is alluded to in poems such as ‘Greenwich Reach’, then there is a more direct and sustained encounter with the history of literary representation of the Thames in the poem made for television in 1992, ‘Sweet Thames’. As Sukhdev Sandhu (2003: 311-328) informs us, this is a collection of stories, which attempt to reclaim the history of the river from the point of view of colonised and racially defined subjects and

narrators (these include Olaudah Equiano, the passengers of the Windrush), whose lives intersected with the Thames at various points in the city’s long history of immigration and work. D’Aguiar’s Sweet Thames even includes the newsreel footage of the youthful Lord Kitchener singing ‘London Is The Place for Me’, as well as archive footage of Enoch Powell’s notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. For example, the real Equiano apparently never learnt to swim, but was pushed into the Thames in 1760. In D’Aguiar’s magical realist re-narration of the incident he is saved by a transformation that reminds us of how the Black community in London has transformed itself (the film shows footage of contemporary Black children swimming happily). In ‘Sweet Thames’ the fictional Equiano recalls :

     When those boys pushed me in      It was for good or dead or both.      That’s why when the water      Quick time cover my head      I summoned Legba, dahomey,

     Shango and their God too      Customised into mine.      With so many gods to my rescue      I was laughing all the way to the bottom of the Thames <16> ‘Sweet Thames’ is unlike Eliot’s poem in terms of emotional tone and is perhaps more like Wordsworth in that respect: it is a poem that looks to the possibility of personal and cultural transformation through London’s river. [2] Despite the many problems that the various narrators of the stories speak about in their attempts to belong to a grudging British society, and against barriers of official and unofficial racism, D’Aguiar’s poem is finally celebratory, perhaps even Utopian in its optimistic gesture towards London. It looks to the successes of London’s Black and Asian arrivants in a communal transformation of the city, rather than dwelling on the problems they faced. In this sense the poem is more optimistic about the present and the future than Eliot’s The Waste Land, which after all is set after World War I, though in both cases the poems work through similar poetic techniques such as montage, citation/quotation and a polyphonic array of different character voices. Eliot’s influence on D’Aguiar is more at the level of form than of intention, despite the employment of the Thames as an effective chronotope in both poems. This perhaps suggests how much the view of the river as a reminder of social alienation, melancholy, disaffection and despair for T.S. Eliot (one consistent with how the river and its docks seemed to nineteenth and twentieth century observers who were not simply bowled over by its industrial wonder), had been erased because of the way the riverscape itself has itself altered, as riverside industry had departed and the docks were remade. Significantly in this sense, D’Aguiar in ‘Sweet Thames’ associates the Thames Flood Barrier, meant to finally protect London from the threat of flooding, with the barriers that protect London equally from immigration and new ways of thinking. For D’Aguiar the chronotope of the Thames allows the present to redeem the past, whereas for Eliot the same chronotope points to a critique of the present. V: Dickens and the Victorian Thames <17> This function of the Thames as a kind of emotional locus and source of fascination for Londoners and non-Londoners, is perhaps not so very different from the similar role that all rivers upon which cities were founded seem to play in their respective cities imaginary lives; usually an inland city only exists because of its river’s initial importance. Yet for all the prosperity that such waterways as the Thames brought to the table through trade and communication with what is outside the city, as well as the water which resourced so much bank side industry, they also brought with them a myriad of fears concerning the ungovernability of these river,

the dangers of pollution and disease and anxieties over what was foreign to the city, whether in the form of immigrants or culture. Stuart Oliver argues in his article that the nineteenth century was the scene of the epic battle between the Thames and London’s government, as embankments were built to domesticate and subdue its power. While as Alexandra Warwick suggests, the Victorian period was also the time when Londoners learnt to fear the increasingly abject river Thames; the city itself had turned the river into a source of pollution and disease. This malodorous reality is sometimes reflected in nineteenth century representations of the river as a place of moral and political degradation. Lynda Nead in Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain as shown that the river was associated with the figure of the fallen woman, as a cheap (and in the view of some Victorians) wholly appropriate place for such women to end their decent into sin with a watery suicide. In contrast, Charles Dicken’s Great Expectations portrays the Thames as offering the possibility of another kind of far more positive escape, for Pip and his convict benefactor Magwitch, despite the fact that the river appears at first much more like a chaotic, rubbish dump than a navigable waterway to freedom (431); Dicken’s description a measure of how despite the docks built in the early part of the nineteenth century, London’s Thames is still positively overflowing with shipping and trade. Again among the tiers of shipping, in and out, avoiding rusty chain-cables frayed hempen hawsers and bobbing buoys, sinking for the moment floating broken baskets, scattering floating chips of wood and shaving, cleaving floating scum of coal, in and out, under the figure-head of the John of Sunderland making a speech to the winds (as is done by many Johns), and the Betsy of Yarmouth with a firm formality of bosom and her nobby eyes starting two inches out of her head, in and out, hammers going in shipbuilders’ yards, saws going at timber, clashing engines going at things unknown, pumps going in leaky ships, capstans going, ships going out to sea, and unintelligible sea-creatures roaring curses over the bulwarks at respondent lightermen, in and out - out at last upon the clearer river, where the ships’ boys might take their fenders in, no longer fishing in troubled waters with them over the side, and where the festooned sails might fly out to the wind. <18> This begins as an image of an escape at speed from a river that is the polluted by-product of Victorian London’s working practices and which exists only as an extension of the city; one just as crowded (with flotsam and jetsam, congested ships and busy people), as are the teeming streets of London itself. The fourfold fold repetition of the phrase ‘in and out’, culminating in the final ‘- out at last’, rhythmically structures Dicken’s breathlessly long sentence, suggesting the physical exertion and emotional strain of the act of rowing out of the river into the open. The Thames is so jam-packed that shipping is tiered, as if in layers in a crate like those from far off locations the ships are depositing at the London docks, and the river seems a semi-solid impediment that their small boat must literally force its way through. The situation is much as a person might discover in having to force their way through mud or marshy ground, looking for firmer footing and recalls the gloomy, viscous Kent marshes in which Pip was raised. Samuel Beckett (Beckett 1999: 29) remarked in an aside on Dickens in an essay on James Joyce: ‘We hear the ooze squelching all through Dickens’ description of the Thames in Great Expectations’.[3] At last, with Pip’s gasp of success and surprise, he and Magwitch reach ‘the clearer river’, perhaps alluding to earlier literary descriptions of the Thames, such as Spenser’s as a flowing waterway, one fit for pescatory adventures. Here sails, boats and even fishing nets can operate freely and they can hope to catch the steamer that will take them to continental Europe, where Magwitch may avoid the gallows for breaking the terms of his original sentence of transportation to Australia. Dickens reminds us that it is the fact that the Thames itself escapes London which allows it to

serve as a means of escape from London. This is why the same river, although a long way outside of London, also serves as the backdrop for Jerome K. Jerome’s later escapist and humorous novel, Three Men in a Boat (1889). <19> The Thames and what stands and happens beside it can work (and does work) in both ways however. It does not just go out to the sea and to what is foreign, but also leads in to London from the sea. Keith Wilson, in his essay reminds us of the way the riverside setting of Conrad’s The Secret Agent in maritime Greenwich, dramatises the relationship between late Victorian Imperial Britain and its others, in this case foreign anarchists who threaten both Britain’s stable ‘democracy’ and British ‘democratic’ traditions. The river as Imperial and world-city gateway was always a site of anxiety, contestation and opposition, until in more recent times, air travel, the Kent ports and the ubiquitous lorry have replaced the river’s previous role in the British and non-British public imagination and the tabloid newspapers. As John McLeod argues in his essay on MacInnes’ work, MacInnes attempted to change representations of the Thames as the vital heart of London, in order to contest and alter the way the river was linked to the dangers of immigration and especially to that of immigration from the Caribbean. A linkage that became retrospectively epitomised by the arrival of the S.S. Empire Windrush (1948) and its Caribbean passengers and all that they would come to stand for. Unintentionally, perhaps, MacInnes is refuting the trope that connect rivers such as the Thames ( that bring ‘outsiders’ to London and thus Britain) with the adverse affects of immigration, a connection that was later crystallised in Enoch Powell’s notorious ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech of 1968 (that redeployed an image from the Aeneid of ‘the Tiber foaming with blood’). While MacInnes’ deliberately positive representations of the exciting world of a multi-cultural and Bohemian London revolving round the river might seem stereotypical and therefore problematic in some ways, as McLeod argues. These representations nevertheless suggest parallels with later writers such as Fred D’Aguiar’s more politically nuanced reading of the relationships between the Thames and London’s post-colonial identity, as well as the complex and changing identities of London’s first and second generation immigrant communities. In 2006, the Docklands Museum, which is housed in No. 1 Warehouse, West India Quay, Canary Wharf (http://www.museumindocklands.org.uk/English/), held an exhibition, Unquiet Thames: Photographs by Crispin Hughes. The exhibition which explored the world beneath London’s bridges and quays at low tide, was accompanied by a sound track produced of sounds found and recorded at the locations where the panoramic photographs were taken by Hughes. The exhibition reminds us in visual and aural fashion how the Thames and London still have hidden and obscured locations, many of them forgotten by contemporary Londoners. One of these hidden passages which the museum has to its credit included in a new exhibition launched in 2007, Sugar and Slavery, is the fact that London’s general expansion and the West India Docks in particular were both built upon the proceeds of the Atlantic slave trade. VI: The Thames and Heart of Darkness <20> Although it might seem a curious place to finish this perusal of the literary Thames, because none of the novel’s action actually occurs within the river’s London portion, nonetheless Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is a novel which depends upon the weight of previous literary representations of the river. The novel’s famous opening is not set in the world of the Thameside docks, but downriver in the Thames Estuary, alluding ironically to earlier representations of the river where it was not overshadowed by the city that it had given birth to, or as in the case of Dickens, was capable of signifying escape from the city. The Nellie, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and

being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide (31). The Thames’ tide is therefore at its highest point and in the absence of any appreciable wind, the Nellie is becalmed. Waiting for the turn of the tide is therefore the only option for a boat, as in this case, heading seaward. The Thames is after all as Drayton told us ‘our floods' queen’ and as Wharton suggested is a powerful estuarine river: ‘ [a] glorious river [that] feeleth the violence and benefit of the sea.’ The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth (31). <21> More complex a passage than it first appears, Conrad reminds the reader that the Thames is indeed an interminable waterway, one that stretches if not to the ‘uttermost ends of the earth’ (32), then ranging at least to the ends of the British Empire, thus effectively joining the world to ‘the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth’: London. The use of ‘town’ is odd here, and helps set up the later sense of the description of the river moving Marlow and the reader back into London’s past when London was more commonly referred to as a town. The city itself, the first ‘heart of darkness’ of the novel, is capable of overshadowing with it’s ‘mournful gloom’, any pastoral thoughts implied by the story being set outside of London’s apparent grasp. Unlike Dickens’ description of the river after Gravesend, Conrad’s report is of a river empty, gloomy and without any suggestion of freedom: the Nellie is stopped, the wind dead calm. Forthwith a change came over the waters, and the serenity became less brilliant but more profound. The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth. We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs for ever, but in the august light of abiding memories. The tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea (32). <22> The text here unpacks the Thames as an explicit chronotope, which takes us and the narrator and his companions back to the much earlier history of the ‘the race that peopled its banks’ and the Thames as London’s traditional maritime gateway. It is a history, however, not of peaceful trade, nor of immigration from elsewhere, but instead is one of bloody struggle, exploration, conquest and ‘glory’. Unlike Dickens description of the Thames in Great Expectations, which begins much closer into the city and which emphasises trade, such as the ships bringing coal from places such as Newcastle in order to fuel the great city; Conrad locates the Nellie in the Thames estuary largely because it becomes easier to think about the river as Imperial London’s gateway to the world. The next passage makes this theme much clearer: It had known and served all the men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and untitled--the great knights-errant of the sea. It had borne all the ships whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time, from the Golden Hind returning with her rotund flanks full of treasure, to be visited by the Queen’s Highness and thus pass out of the gigantic tale, to the Erebus and Terror, bound on other conquests-- and that never returned. It had known the ships and the men. They had sailed from Deptford, from Greenwich, from Erith --

the adventurers and the settlers; kings’ ships and the ships of men on ‘Change; captains, admirals, the dark "interlopers" of the Eastern trade, and the commissioned "generals" of East India fleets. Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires (32). <23> This is a fine piece of stately description by Conrad, deliberately Elizabethan in its balance and poise, as well as its examples: ‘Sir Francis Drake … the Golden Hind returning with her rotund flanks full of treasure’. The Thames is equal to, if not surpassing Rome’s Tiber (to recall Wharton’s description), not because of what the river actually is, but because of the masculine deeds the river has allowed: ‘the ships whose names are like jewels flashing in the night of time’, that ‘all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire.’ In the context of other writing on the Thames it becomes obvious that this passage ( and indeed the novel) is not remotely interested in the Thames’ domestic role, but only in the Thames as a waterway to the building of Britain’s Empire, which is ‘the gigantic tale’ that the text refers to. While it is possible to read this passage as optimistic about the progress and process of Empire’s ‘ growing greatness’, and perhaps Marlowe is indeed carried away in thinking about past adventures at this point, we should not forget that London was initially figured by the text as the centre of a ‘mournful gloom’ and ironically reduced in stature to a ‘town’ in his earlier description, while the phrase ‘hunters for gold’ recalls that the Elizabethan privateers were exactly that. The Thames chronotope allows Marlow’s sudden shift in time and tone, which parallels the original building of the Roman Empire in Britain with Britain’s own Empire building in countries such as Africa (33). ‘ “And this also,” said Marlow suddenly, “has been one of the dark places of the earth.” ‘ This is often read straightforwardly as stating that ancient Britain was like nineteenth century Africa, to be regarded as a place of darkness to which light must be brought by force. The text continues this line of argument by suggesting that the Roman Empire was morally deficient compared to its British successor in Marlowe’s view: It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind -– as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. The conquest of the earth, which mostly means taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. <24> However, we should bear in mind a number of issues before concluding that the text expects us to take these lines at face value. The chronotope of the Thames points backwards as much as forwards, its very temporal instability is hard to curtail, and had often been used to criticise the present in texts written from the Romantic period onwards. Second, the subsequent parallels that the text constructs between both the Congo and the Thames, as rivers, as well as the atrocious and ivory-led behaviour of the Europeans that Marlow meets in the Congo, would suggest that European colonisers are just as rapacious as their Roman equivalents were (according to Marlow). We should perhaps more easily read Marlow’s comments as an ironic and sardonic commentary on the similarity between the Roman and British Empires and the accompanying motivations of their respective Empire builders. Rivers like the Thames are, Conrad seems to be suggesting, not just trade routes which communicate between the city and what is outside, but also the means by which countries exert force and dominate one another in the name of culture as opposed to nature. The Thames’ history is such and London which is never seen except at a distance at the beginning ( and perhaps the end) of Conrad’s novel, is shown to be a product of what the

river allowed people to make it, for better or worse. Trade, empire and a belief in the value of their civilisation were what brought the original builders of the first London settlement from overseas and that same complex historical conjunction was to be repeated in different ways throughout London’s and the Thames’ subsequent history. Rivers of course can lead both ways, and when Heart of Darkness returns to the crew of the Nellie with the close of Marlow’s tale, it is to reaffirm the Thames’ connection to darkness, but whether this is the darkness of London or the darkness of what is elsewhere, or perhaps both, is more difficult to determine (105). ‘The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky -– seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.’ Endnotes [1] I am grateful to Rachel Falconer for pointing this poem out to me and for initially suggesting the connection between river and chronotope. [^] [2] It is a great shame that ‘Sweet Thames’ is not available commercially from the BBC. The film and script are available for watching and reading at the archives listed below. [^] [3] Samuel Beckett, ‘Dante … Bruno .Vico … Joyce’ was originally presented as part of a collection of essays on Joyce’s Work in Progress, which later became Finnegan’s Wake: Our Examination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (1929). [^] Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. ‘Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel: Notes Toward a Historical Poetics’ in The Dialogic Imagination, (ed.) Michael Holquist, (trans.) Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. (University of Texas Press, 1981), 82-258. Beckett, Samuel. ‘Dante … Bruno .Vico … Joyce’ in Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment, (ed.) Ruby Cohn. (Grove Press, 1999) Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness in Heart of Darkness & Other Stories, (intro.) Gene M. Moore. (Wordsworth, 1999) 29-106. D’Aguiar, Fred. British Subjects (Bloodaxe Books, 1993). D’Aguiar, Fred. Sweet Thames. Broadcast BBC2, 3July 1992. Video available for consultation at the British Film Institute, programme no. 1 146F/71X. Script held at BBC Written Archive Centre, Caversham, Reading. Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations, (ed.) Margaret Cardwell (intro.) Kate Flint. (Oxford University Press, 1994). Engels, Friedrich. The Condition of the Working Class in England, (ed.) Victor Kiernan (Penguin Books, 1987). Falconer, Rachel. ‘Bakhtin and the Epic Chronotope’ in Face to Face: Bakhtin in Russia and the West, (eds.) Carol Adlam, Rachel Falconer, Vitalii Makhlin, and Alastair Renfrew. (Sheffield Academic Press, 1997) 254-272. Hughes, Crispin. Unquiet Thames: Photographs. Exhibition details available online at: http://www.museumindocklands.org.uk/English/EventsExhibitions/past/unquietThames.htm. Date accessed: 10 March 2007. Lynch, Jack. ‘Pope’s Thames’, 14 July 2006. Available online at: http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Papers/popethames.html Date accessed: 10 March 2007. Kitchener, Lord. ‘London is the Place for Me’ (audio track recording on CD), London Is The Place For Me: Trinidadian Calypso In London, 1950-1956 (Honest John 2003). McLeod, John. ‘Millenial Currents: David Dabydeen, Fred d’Aguiar, and Bernadette Evaristo’, in Postcolonial London: Rewriting the Metropolis (Routledge 2004) 158-188. Nead, Lynda. Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (Blackwell, 1990). Porter, Roy. London: A Social History (Hamish Hamilton, 1994).

Sandhu, Sukhdev. London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City (Harper Collins 2003). Schneer, Jonathan. The Thames: England’s River, New Ed. (Abacus, 2006). Spenser, Edmund. ‘Prothalamion’ in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Third Edition (eds.) Alexander W. Allison et al. (W.W.Norton and Company, 1983) 146-150. Thornbury, Walter. ‘The River Thames: Part 2 of 3’, Old and New London: Volume 3 (1878), 300-11. Available online at: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.asp?compid=45154/ , republished electronically by the Centre for Metropolitan History, London. Date accessed: 10 March 2007. Walton, Izaak and Charles Cotton. The Compleat Angler, (ed.) John Buxton, (intro.) John Buchan. (Oxford University Press, 2000). Whitworth, Michael. ‘ “Sweet Thames” and The Waste Land’s Allusions’, Essays in Criticism, 1998, XLVIII, (1): 35-58. Wordsworth, William. ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’, in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Third Edition (eds.) Alexander W.Allison et al. (W.W.Norton and Company, 1983) 550. http://www.literarylondon.org/london-journal/march2007/Barfield.html

Maps of the London Underground: Iain Sinclair and Michael Moorcock’s Psychogeography of the cityBrian Baker<1> On the back cover of the dust-jacket of Iain Sinclair’s Dark Lanthorns (1999), a book designed to mimic the look of a late 1960s London A-Z streetmap, there is a reproduction of a map of the London Underground system. This design classic, a rounded rectangle at the centre of a system of arteries and veins, is faded, the ink blurred with damp. The print, blue-black on white (rather than the now more familiar colour reproduction), is indistinct, the lines receding beneath surface like veins below the skin, the names of the stations lost. The basic shape, if not the stations themselves, is legible, however, and indicates one of the ways in which Londoners (and visitors to London) orient themselves. The first maps of the underground followed lines of geography; the current design is geometrical, space and distance compressed, London given comprehensible form in one diagram. This London Underground, an abstraction of the network of tunnels and stations that make up the transport system, is not a ‘true’ representation of the city, but allows the traveller to see a totalised (and therefore entirely comprehensible) map of its design. <2> London has, particularly over the last 150 years, been the site of repeated attempts to comprehend the physical, social and economic fabric of city life through exercises in cataloguing and mapping. These mapping exercises render the city legible, and articulate its spaces in textual form. Henry Mayhew’s four-volume work London Labour and The London Poor, the first three of which appeared in 1851 and the fourth, ‘Those that will not work’, published in 1862, was the first of the great Victorian investigations of London. Mayhew's nod to sociological rigour is to offer a taxonomy of London characters, but his methodological emphasis is on personal witness through a series of visits to key areas of the city. To locate the ‘types’ which constituted London’s underworld, Mayhew conducted ‘A Visit to the Dens of Thieves in Spitalfields and its Neighbourhoods’, one of which included Whitechapel. In another excursion, Mayhew took in the notorious Rookery of St. Giles. In a particularly illuminating title, Mayhew is accompanied (usually by large friends or policemen) on ‘A Ramble among the thieves’ Dens in the Borough’ (240). The idea of the ‘ramble’ is central to Mayhew’s attempt to encompass London life, as is the identification of criminal activity (‘thieves’ dens’) with place or space. It is important to note the component of surveillance in these ‘rambles’, and the extent to which his method may be compromised by the presence of the policemen themselves. The aim of understanding the city collapses onto

controlling the city: ridding London of its crime becomes synonymous with ridding it of its ‘rookeries’. <3> Charles Booth's Life and Labour of the People of London (begun in 1886) was the next great exercise in mapping the city, which used information from the 1881 census, reports from London School Board visitors, and door-to-door interviews to collect data for a wide-ranging survey on the condition of London. Booth’s method involved a taxonomy of social class, rather than Mayhew’s types. Of the 900,000 people living in the East End, 314,000 were, by his taxonomy, 'poor' (xxvii). Most importantly, he then coloured a series of maps of London with the information gathered about the predominant social type found in each street, spatializing the economic stratification of the city itself, making visible patterns of wealth and poverty, advantage and disadvantage. Booth’s maps make legible, but also fix, the spaces of the city. The maps attempt to articulate city space, not only in its topographic form, but as a social and economic cartography, but its view of London is ultimately from above, implicating the reader in a powerful spectatorial position, able to read the economic life of the city at a glance. <4> Franco Moretti, in his 1997 book Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900, analyses Booth’s maps. This book, which offers an entertaining and illuminating set of analyses of novels and stories of the nineteenth century, is illustrated by and generated by maps. He writes, as a theoretical justification for his project: [W]hat do literary maps allow us to see? Two things, basically. Firstly, they highlight the ortgebunden, place-bound nature of literary forms: each of them with its peculiar geometry, its boundaries, its spatial taboos and favorite routes. And then, maps bring to light the internal logic of narrative: the semiotic domain around which the plot coalesces and self-organises. (5) The maps in Moretti’s book are fascinating in what they reveal, but his cartographic method is compromised. As Ania Loomba notes, ‘Maps claim to be objective and scientific, but in fact select what they record and present in specific ways, which are historically tied with colonial enterprises’ (78). For ‘colonial enterprises’, here, I would suggest the operation of economic and ideological power more generally. As an analytical tool for the literary critic, maps must be treated with caution, as a translation of a text into these terms will impose its own discursive limits. Maps are not neutral, neither as a literary/ critical tool, nor as a way of explaining and exploring the spaces of the city. With this note of caution, however, it is interesting to look at Moretti’s use of the maps that Booth created. A section of one map is reproduced, in colour, in Moretti’s book. The maps illuminate the processes by which narratives incorporate, or perhaps interpellate, the spaces of city life. Moretti points out that there are two ordering systems present in the maps: on a macrocosmic scale, poverty is concentrated in the East End, while wealth resides in the West. However, on a microcosmic, street-by-street level, the highest class (coloured gold) and the lowest (coloured black) exist within two or three streets, or two hundred metres, of each other. This, Moretti argues, expresses the ‘confusion evoked with fear and wonder by most London visitors’ (78, Moretti's emphasis); but what this map does is make the spatial orderings legible, readable. Moretti’s project in his book is to analyse how narratives and novels make urban spaces legible through a process of journeys, and in turn make the spatial apparatuses of the narratives legible by rendering them as maps or diagrams. <5> Here we must pause to interrogate further the relationship between the city space and how it is perceived and represented. In ‘Walking in the City’, taken from his The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), Michel de Certeau contrasted the ‘panoramic’ view from above with the ‘practices’ of city life as it is lived by its inhabitants. Looking from the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center, then serving as a ‘prow’ for Manhattan, the

viewer is able to take in the whole of New York in their gaze. This view from above, however, like the map, while organizing the city through the look of a ‘totalizing eye’ [sic], ‘construct[s] the fiction that creates readers, makes the complexity of the city readable and immobilizes its opaque mobility in a transparent text’ (128). This legibility is a fiction, ‘a "theoretical" (that is, visual) simulacrum’ which obscures the true nature of the city space as it is lived (128). Opposed to this, de Certeau offers the idea of ‘practices’ of life, conducted every day, which undermine and oppose a totalising view of the city: The ordinary practitioners of the city live 'down below', below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk -- an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers, Wandersmänner, whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it. (128) De Certeau’s emphasis is on the ‘practices that are foreign to the 'geometrical' or 'geographical' space of visual, panoptic, or theoretical constructions’ (128). The ‘geometrical space’ is material, lived physical space made into a diagram, an abstraction: a map. The map becomes an organized illusion of the totality of the city, a totality incomprehensible in the everyday lives of its citizens. The walker, through her/his everyday practices of life, resists the organizing power of both the gaze and the map. The city is produced every day, inscribed with her/his journeys, journeys that create the city but ‘elud[e] legibility’. <6> In this essay I am going to investigate two books which try to represent the experience of living in the city of London, particularly in Iain Sinclair's Lights Out for the Territory and Michael Moorcock's Mother London. Iain Sinclair's London fictions are closely connected with those of Moorcock. Sinclair, whose contemporary texts deploy figures who are both wanderers and witnesses, self-consciously inherits the tradition of London as city and London as text. Poet, novelist, former book-dealer and savant of London’s histories, Sinclair often uses the East End of London as the backdrop for his fictional and journalistic investigations into the city. His Lights Out for the Territory is subtitled ‘9 Excursions into the Secret History of London’ and is dedicated to Michael Moorcock. Following de Certeau’s distinction, Sinclair is certainly on the side of the territory rather than the map, the fragmentary impressions of the walker rather than the totalised vision of the cartographer. In Lights Out, London’s secret history is uncovered or discovered in urban topography, graffiti, underground publications, crime, and marginal artistic endeavours. The ‘excursions’ in Lights Out are metaphorical but also physical: Sinclair and his photographer march from Hackney to Greenwich to Chingford, from St Pancras to Vauxhall bridge, from St Dunstan’s-in-the-East to St Paul’s. His rationale is spelt out on the first page: I had developed this curious conceit while working on my novel Radon Daughters: that the physical movements of the characters across the territory might spell out the letters of a secret alphabet. Dynamic shapes, with ambitions to achieve a life of their own, quite independent of the supposed author. Railway to pub to hospital: trace the line on the map. These botched runes, burnt into the script in the heat of creation, offer an alternative reading -- a subterranean, preconscious text capable of divination and prophecy. (1) The conception here is the city as text, a system of signs. Reading these signs reveal the hidden or ‘subterranean’, that which, in de Certeau’s terms, is ‘below the threshold’ of visibility. Walking in the city, then, makes the invisible legible. Sinclair, like de Certeau, deploys the metaphor of vertical space to suggest the culturally hidden or ‘invisible’. The characters in his novels, and ‘Sinclair’ himself in Lights Out, reveal a symbolic (and repressed) underground, the latent and true face of the city. The mode of investigation used by Sinclair is ‘psychogeography’, a pseudo-science of occulted urban symbols, lost or erased spatial

configurations, and the semiology of London’s cultural marginalia. Chris Jenks describes it thus: A psycho-geography, then, derives from the subsequent ‘mapping’ of an unrouted route which, like primitive cartography, reveals not so much randomness and chance as spatial intentionality. It uncovers compulsive currents within the city along with unprescribed boundaries of exclusion and unconstructed gateways of opportunity. The city begins, without fantasy or exaggeration, to take on the characteristics of a map of the mind. (154) Notice the insistence on the collapsing of city and subject in this discourse, one that is mirrored in Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography (2000). ‘Psycho-geography’, as the hyphenation in Jenks’s usage indicates, treats the city as a psychological entity. In his first novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), Sinclair insistently deploys metaphors of the city as a body, and the map on the back cover of Dark Lanthorns repeats this connection. Perhaps we can suggest a Cartesian binary metaphor at work here: if the city is a body, then as Jenks suggests, the map is a figure of the city’s mind. The materiality that de Certeau insists upon as part of the practice of ‘walking in the city’ (rather than the visuality of the map or panorama) finds its analogue in the city represented as a body. If the city is a body, psychogeography attempts to recover a materiality lost in the abstracting process of mapping. <7> Sinclair’s use of psychogeography is derived from the writings of the Situationist International, and their idea of derive, ‘drifting purposefully’ in Sinclair’s own terms, which takes up the flâneur of the late nineteenth century and applies it to the conditions of late twentieth century life. The pedestrian (as psychogeographer) is witness to the true histories and spaces of city life, through derive or, in Sinclair’s texts, long ‘excursions’ across the city. Walking or drifting reveals the ‘psychogeographic’ space of the city, one which is identical to that of London but which is culturally subterranean. The intuited patterns of ancient London, its topographies and hidden or forgotten pathways, for Sinclair provide an occluded map of the real city, one only accessible by the adept. Psychogeography, in Sinclair’s earlier writings particularly, assumes the form of urban magic, an invocation of hidden histories to indict the metropolitan system of power and control. The secret or occluded knowledge that psychogeography symbolises is a reflection of the histories of London which these texts suggest can be found, by the flâneur or urban magus, in the physical spaces of the city. Whether psychogeographers are neo-Gnostics or semiotic guerillas, the accessibility of this occluded knowledge remains problematic. <8> Early in Lights Out, Sinclair writes: Walking is the best way to explore and exploit the city; the changes, shifts, breaks in the cloud helmet, movement of light on water. Drifting purposefully is the recommended mode, tramping asphalted earth in alert reverie, allowing the fiction of an underlying pattern to assert itself. To the no-bullshit materialist this sounds suspiciously like fin-de-siècle decadence, a poetic of entropy -- but the born-again flâneur is a stubborn creature, less interested in texture and fabric, eavesdropping on philosophical conversation pieces, than in noticing everything. (4) The flâneur moves with the crowd but is separate from it, city life becoming a spectacle to be consumed. Although Sinclair, in the above quotation, seems to mark out the ‘born-again flâneur’ as different from the fin-de-siècle decadent, his appropriation does bring with it political and spectatorial problems. While the flâneur has been a recurrent touchstone for cultural theory over the last decade, its construction of a distinctly masculine subjectivity, and its concern with the aestheticization of the city and the crowd, has troubled some critics. It is perhaps no coincidence that Chris Jenks’s revaluation of the flâneur, which he suggests offers a ‘creative attitude of urban inquisition’ (156), begins in the East End, at the Blind Beggar pub in Whitechapel made famous by the execution, by Ronnie

Kray, of George Cornell. The flâneur offers the not only a fantasy of unseen agency, privileged knowledge and voyeuristic power, but also a fantasy of possible violence and sexual domination. Judith Walkowitz, in City of Dreadful Delight, critiques the flâneur, suggesting that ‘the fact and fantasy of male bourgeois exploration had long been an informing feature of nineteenth-century bourgeois male subjectivity’ (16). The fantasy involved is of experiencing the city ‘as a whole’, the diversity of London’s districts and locations made coherent through the unifying gaze of the male subject. It is also a fantasy of sovereign desire, the male desiring subject freed from social, economic and spatial constraints. In his most recent book, London Orbital (2002), Sinclair has gone some way to repudiate his former use of the flâneur, and instead calls up a walking subject who does so in a state of fugue, a rather less problematic figure. <9> In Lights Out for the Territory, Sinclair’s flânerie both decodes and calls into being the signs of the ‘real’ city, the ‘fiction of an underlying pattern’. Sinclair’s city is a sign-system of accretions, a palimpsest. As in Moretti’s critical text and Booth’s maps, his ‘readings’ make the city legible, but there is little attempt to bring these into a single, totalised vision. The first excursion in Lights Out begins by describing the layering of ‘tags’ sprayed by graffiti artists on the walls of East London. The city is itself inscribed by language, but its linguistic materiality and legibility is invoked by the presence of the drifting subject. Mayhew’s ‘rambling’ observer, Booth’s cartography, or the contemporary flâneur all organise the city into a legible space. In all of these cases, the subject who witnesses or sees is not simply a transcriber of the ‘truth’ of city life, they are also readers, and their presence creates the readings. As in de Certeau’s formulation, ‘the fiction . . . creates readers’ (128). They are active agents in, and participant creators of, the social and topographic space they describe, and this extends to the languages and discourses they use to articulate the city. <10> Sinclair’s city is an accreted, occluded fabric of language and signs (literal and semiotic), a ‘tangled skein’ of cultures, narratives and histories. Michael Moorcock’s 1988 novel, Mother London, to which I will now turn, also re-imagines London as a web of linked fragments and identities, brought into vibrant being by the babel of London’s voices. It attempts to encompass London in all its massive diversity. The narrative concentrates upon the experiences of three people, the writer David Mummery, theatrical Josef Kiss and former coma sufferer Mary Gasalee, who are all to some extent telepathic. All three are explorers of London’s streets. Josef Kiss, stage magician, telepath and Falstaffian celebrant of life, compulsively walks the city, tracing out its patterns. Mary Gasalee, however, more explicitly re-imagines London. 'Dreaming' in a self-willed coma, she walks the streets of a magically transformed London in the company of Merle Oberon. The text is regularly punctuated by italicised paragraphs of ‘other’, unmediated voices, which signify the Babel/babble that is London’s linguistic multiverse: ‘Four-in-hand cutting a dash monkey never gobbled no bad bananas, sold up to do it I’ll never know why’ (120). These narrative foci channel the voices and experience of Londoners throughout the post-war period. Each of the protagonists struggles to deal with the cacophony that is the life of the city, each of them spending time in hospitals and on medication because the city is not occluded but too present. Language, unfiltered by speech and social discourse, is not a sign system to be decoded, but a multivalent, fluid and ultimately painful perpetual presence. <11> The novel begins with the voice of David Mummery. He writes: ‘All great old cities possess their special myths. Amongst London’s is the story of the Blitz, of our endurance’ (5). The Blitz, then, the myth of the East End and endurance against the odds, is appropriated and re-invented by Moorcock. The Blitz becomes the central event in London’s recent history, a crucible out of which the present has been formed. Images of fire and of

(re-)birth find a conjunction in the figure of Mary Gasalee, one of the three main characters of the novel. 'Ordinary life' comes to an end in 1940, when her house and her husband are obliterated in the bombing. Mary is downstairs in a Morrison shelter, and her escape is one of the enigmas of the book, one of the means by which the fantastic enters its structure. We, and she, do not find out the ‘truth’ of her history until later in the novel, when she meets a fireman on duty that night. He had seen Mary, clutching her baby daughter, walk unharmed through an inferno. Mary, like London, is re-born through fire, but she cannot face the significance of her own survival. In two chapters we find Mary, in the 1950s, inhabiting a self-willed coma, existing in a Land of Dreams within her own head. In a telling complication of the space of the book, Mary’s inner world is a mise-en-abyme London peopled by the film stars from the late 1930s: Ronald Colman, Olivia de Havilland, June Havoc, and Greer Garson. This is another London underground, a symbolic and conscious/unconscious zone of escape. <12> Mother London has a concentric structure, and the narrative moves from 1980s London back in time to the Blitz of 1940, and thence back to ‘present’ time again. The novel begins with a chapter titled ‘The Patients’, then ‘David Mummery’, ‘Mary Gasalee’ and ‘Josef Kiss’; it ends with ‘Josef Kiss’, ‘Mrs Gasalee’, ‘David Mummery’ and ‘The Celebrants’. Between are four parts, each of six chapters. Parts two and five are mirrored and have chapters that are identified by the names of London pubs; part two begins in 1957 and ends in 1985, and part five begins in 1985 and works back to 1959. The three central characters not only focalise the narrative but are exemplary figures in their creative relationships to London (and each of them find their telepathic power diminished by distance from the city). Like Mayhew, Moorcock characterises his London in terms of ‘character’ and place. Josef Kiss is life writ large, one of the Falstaffian figures that recur in Moorcock's fiction. Kiss takes his mind-reading powers onto the stage -- only to find that the truth, and his honesty, are detrimental to the success of his act. Ironically, Kiss’s sister, Beryl Male, is the antithesis of Kiss and also London’s spiritual nemesis. A politician in Thatcher’s cabinet, Beryl is ashamed by Kiss’s excess, by his exuberance, by life lived and celebrated. Kiss is both an expression of what should valued from London’s past, and a rebuke to London’s commodified, materialist present. The two central parts, three and four, focus in upon two central chapters set in 1940, the only two in the novel to act as sequential narrative, ‘Late Blooms’ and ‘Early Departures’. The two central chapters show Kiss, half deranged by London’s babble, impersonating a Fire Warden and attempting to defuse an unexploded bomb with a pair of garden shears. (He succeeds). Moorcock replaces heroism with madness, self-delusion and the theatricality of Kiss, but his act becomes another kind of heroism, a reminder of a forgotten history of courage and communal action. Kiss uses his ability to ‘hear’ the mental voices of others, the text reveals later, to find buried victims of bombing raids. The Blitz, the myth of London’s survival, and one that is used to obscure class conflict and foster a coherent sense of British nationhood, is appropriated by Moorcock to reaffirm communal feeling but countermand sentiments of ‘national pride’. <13> Perhaps most interestingly, Moorcock relocates the mythic epicentre of the Blitz spatially across London. Where the East End, the docks and warehouses were the target for much of the Blitz, and the myths that grew up around it, the canal-side cottage which harbours the UXB is in North Kensington, in the West. Moorcock has long been identified with the imagination of western London. He famously spent much time in the 1960s in Ladbroke Grove, and his Cornelius novels feature this area as the crucible of the counterculture.[1] West London is also the location for Mother London’s most celebratory chapter, ‘Variable Currents 1970’. Moorcock has written: ‘I started Mother London with a wish to write about my own experience of the world in my own city, and I wanted it to be a celebration

of that city’ (Death Is No Obstacle 101). This chapter is at the end of part four, where the characters come together just as the 60s and the counter-culture is disintegrating, to ride a carousel at a London fair. ‘The Gypsy Baron' gives way again to 'The Emperor' and Time does not so much stand still as reach and then repeat its apotheosis. If they could they would all gladly live this instant forever.’ (371). Kiss, Mary Gasalee, even the twitchy Mummery are at home in this moment, the last expression of freedom and love. As the novel closes, the ‘celebrants’ of the last chapter congregate to toast the coming together of Josef Kiss and Mary Gasalee at Bank Cottage. This seems like a retreat for the last of London, but marriage is a fitting resolution, and signifies that Mother London should be considered, amongst other things, as a comedy. <14> Moorcock’s conception of the space and time of the city is represented in the form of Mother London itself. Just before the bomb lands for Kiss to defuse, Beth and Chloe Scaramanga, whose canalside cottage it descends upon, feel time standing still in the summer heat: They heard nothing from the gasworks, nothing from the canal, no traffic in Ladbroke Grove, no trains from the other side of the gasholders . . . Time itself might have stopped, save that Chloe, experimenting, saw her fingers move and knew that if she wished she could easily get up, while the lapping of the water from the canal meant that too was unaffected. Or was Time moving backward? (227). This is the still centre of the novel, around which its structure revolves. Though the structure of the novel is concentric, it does not narrate time flowing linearly towards and from 1940. Rather, the events of the Blitz are like a stone dropped into the canal, and the ripples of its significance move forwards to the present and back again. Chloe, like ourselves, cannot be sure whether time is linear, is fragmented, has stopped, or is running in several directions at once. In the chapter which immediately precedes the events of 1940, Kiss indulges himself in a recurring reverie: It is as if the rest of the nation is perpetually in motion on the city’s periphery, as if London is the hub around which all else revolves, the ordering, civilising, progressive force which influences first the Home Counties, then the entire nation, ultimately the Empire and through the Empire the Globe itself: a city more powerful than all cities before it, perhaps more powerful than all cities ever will be. (221) Though this is Josef Kiss’s reverie, not Moorcock’s, and is in part a parodic version of Imperial dreams, is Moorcock sentimentalising the city here? Careful to separate London and Londoners from the rest of Britain (and even its suburbs: Kiss fulminates against middle-class suburbanites who displace older city dwellers), the metropolis is, nonetheless, the heart, head and centre of Britain, one which supports ‘British’ identity while retaining a sense of difference. Mother London is also a class-based vision, one which invests the celebratory heart of the text in the figures of the dominated and the marginal, and it is here that Moorcock finds the things of value: memory, community, and love. <15> That twelve chapters of the text are named for London’s pubs, centres of communal life, is essential to the representational economy of Mother London. The public house is a public space which yet escapes the ordering principles of state or official culture. Pubs are also central to Sinclair’s texts, and as we have seen, Chris Jenks’s article on the flâneur begins at the Blind Beggar in Whitechapel. As this showed, the pub is also the epicentre of a masculine culture of territorial violence. This underside of London is represented in Mother London by John and Reeny Fox, gangsters, promoters and panders, but their defeat comes when Kiss abandons them to night terrors in the sewers of the city. Mother London’s signposts attempt to replicate the physical materiality of the city itself. As Sinclair notes, Moorcock ‘shift[s] and re-arrang[es] co-ordinates until the city conforms to his reading of it’ (LRB 33). It articulates the histories of the city not through linear time experienced by human protagonists and

readers, but through space. Mummery’s vision of the city expresses Mother London’s design: ‘I believe Time to be like a faceted jewel with an infinity of planes and layers impossible to map or to contain’ (486). These are Mummery’s last words, his moment of insight, and in the chapter that follows (‘The Celebrants’) we are told of his death. Time for the city co-exists in space. History is not an accretion of layers, a palimpsest of symbols and names and signs, to be decoded by the drifting subject. It is an expression of the human lives that exist within it, eternal but ever-changing. If Time is a faceted jewel, so is the space of the city. <16> Though Mummery is himself fascinated by London’s lost histories, and is, as Moorcock has himself suggested, like Josef Kiss an autobiographical character, he is capable of misperception. Mummery is the only protagonist in Moorcock’s Mother London to function as a first-person narrator, albeit a rather unreliable one, and he is the one who is sacrificed to the city. Mummery is a play on motherhood, the Mother London who nurtures the three protagonists but which is brought into being by them. It also signifies Mummer’s plays, whose subject matter is characterized by death and resurrection: Mummery had himself been saved from death by the ‘Black Captain’ during the bombing. Punningly, Mummery also recalls ‘memory’, and as Iain Sinclair has suggested of Mother London, ‘[i]ts status as one of the novels by which a substantial portion of London memory can be recovered is restored’ (LRB 32). Importantly, Mummery is a writer, a small-press author who has charted and stored a repository of London marginalia and myth. However, his own search for a ‘London underground’ is subtly ironized: In 1964 I was working on a peculiar book about the city’s ‘lost’ tube lines whose maps only exist in Masonic libraries. There are many tunnels under London, some containing complete lengths of line, some with platforms, ticket offices and all the paraphernalia of an ordinary London Transport stop. There are, too, older tunnels, begun for a variety of reasons, some of which run under the river, some of which form passages under buildings . . . I discovered evidence that London was interlaced with connecting tunnels, home of a forgotten troglodytic race that had gone underground at the time of the Great Fire, whose ranks had been added to periodically by thieves, vagabonds and escaped prisoners, receiving many fresh recruits during the Blitz when so many of us sought the safety of the tubes. Others had hinted of a London under London in a variety of texts as far back as Chaucer. (Mother London, 343-4). Mummery’s attempt to impose the hierarchy of the surface/ underground binary is self-deluding. His quest for this lost tribe under London, which he attempts to contact by leaving gifts and notes on lost Underground platforms, ends as he peers out of a manhole cover at two schoolboys who flee in terror. There is a clear suggestion that this ‘lost tribe’ have been indulging in the ancient London practice of fleecing the gullible. <17> Mother London is, then, an attempt to bring into being the ‘lost’ or ‘underground’ London perceived and channelled by its three central characters. It offers the reader an attempt to construct an order upon the multiplicity of London life, just as Mummery does, even if this version may be incomplete, or mistakes the true nature of the city. The non-chronological narrative, all récit, can be recomposed by the human subject who reads Mother London. Récit becomes histoire, fragments become history, through reading and narrative. Where Sinclair, in Lights Out for the Territory at least, suggested the flâneur can decode the signs of the city through derive, significance ‘swimming to the surface’ of the palimpsest through an indirect gaze, Mother London encourages the reader to reimagine, recombine and reconstruct London itself. Reading becomes not an act of interpretation but one of creation. Both Moorcock’s and Sinclair’s texts attempt to articulate London’s spaces in textual form, but theirs is an anti-mapping, resisting totality and celebrating diversity. In both, the project of reinvesting the city with the magical and fantastic is apparent,

and the deadened surface of everyday life is revivified not only through walking in the city, but through reading and writing and through imagination. Endnote[1] Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius began life as a James Bond parody in New Worlds magazine, edited by Moorcock in the 1960s. He quickly became a means by which Moorcock could playfully, and affectionately, satirise the pretensions and excesses of the counterculture. He appeared in four novels of increasing sophistication and complexity, The Final Programme (1969), A Cure for Cancer (1971), The English Assassin (1972) and The Condition of Muzak (1977). Cornelius, like Moorcock, had a 'pad' in West London's Ladbroke Grove. [^]

Works Cited

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