“This Fabulous Flotsam”: Michael Moorcock's Urban Anthropology In
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Prague Journal of English Studies Volume 4, No. 1, 2015 ISSN: 1804-8722 (print) '2,10.1515/pjes-2015-0004 ISSN: 2336-2685 (online) “This fabulous flotsam”: Michael Moorcock’s Urban Anthropology in “London under London” Christoph Houswitschka Michael Moorcock is often described as “one of the most prolific and varied writers working in Britain” (Malcolm 146). His success as a writer and editor of science fiction and fantasy literature is well established, but he is also the author of two novels about London, Mother London (1988) and King of the City (2000). Hardly known, Mother London by Michael Moorcock, offers itself to a variety of approaches that have been widely discussed in the context of studies on English literature during the Thatcher years, post-modernism, and psycho-geography. The novel resonates with the author’s own childhood in war-time London without being autobiographical. It tells the story of three Londoners who were traumatised during the Blitz. The following article focuses on the mysteries of subterranean London that represents the hidden and unconscious identities of its inhabitants in the post-war period. Keywords Subterranean London; underground; nostalgia; Blitz; trauma; war generation; Michael Moorcock; Peter Ackroyd; Iain Sinclair David Mummery, Josef Kiss, and Mary Gasalee suffer from what they had to go through during the war in the city they belong to, a city that accompanied them throughout their lives. Michael Moorcock offers no “redemption for the traumatized city”, as Luckhurst claims, but rather investigates in Mother London, as Groes holds against him, “the post-war inability of Londoners to make themselves heard” (55). Everything they had become was linked to London, the city that neither protected them nor helped them to cope with what they had experienced when they were young. All three are “absorbed” (52) by London. Moorcock “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” (Baker). London is like a mother they love and although the memories of even the most terrifying war years shaped their entire lives, their memories are 61 CHRISTOPH HOUSWITSCHKA “THIS FABULOUS FLOTSAM” full of nostalgia: “It’s nostalgia as much as anything, it really is. I loved it” to “the city’s counter-cultural heyday” (Crosthwaite 237), the devastation of the (Crostwaite 236). David Mummery’s statement in Mother London has been Thatcher years resonate with the earlier trauma of destruction and mutilation repeatedly quoted: Mother London had to go through. Ganteau finds in this a structure characteristic of a traumatic narrative that returns to a “moment of origin”: The bombs brought me security, sexuality, escape and adventure. We children of the Blitz are not to be pitied. We are to be envied. We are to [This] may be interpreted as allowing for the evocation of trauma, be congratulated because we survived; so if you must pity someone then individual and collective, as if the trauma of the Thatcher years pity the relations of the dead and the parents of my dead contemporaries, were a secondary moment in which the original effraction, that of my friends; but we were happier than any generation before or since. We wartime trauma, were re-activated, according to the most basic laws of were allowed to play in a wider world. (ML 172, Crostwaite 236) Nachträgligkeit [sic!]. (Ganteau 121) This double vision of the war years has also been observed by Sebastian Groes: Moorcock introduces us to the three main characters talking about the traces “what should also be noted is that the author recuperates these repressed voices the war left in their adult lives, the continuous presence of an inescapable precisely by positing the novelist and his writerly practice as an activity that absence as is manifested in the 14-year-long coma of Mary Gasalee or the presents voice as space” (55). Moorcock’s novel keeps coming back to a very hallucinations of Josef Kiss, who sees “crazed horsemen”, “naked giants”, and specific time and place in the history of London: the Blitz (the bombing raids the “beasts of the apocalypse” (ML 246, Crosthwaite 238). This psychological of September 1940 until May 1941) and the V-1 flying bomb and V-2 rocket Blitz condition modifies the realistic narration and suggests a perception of reality of June 1944 until March 1945. Moorcock tells the story of this historical period that is subjective and inseparably linked to the characters’ trauma: “He from the perspective of the post-war lives of three protagonists. Everything we groaned, less sure of reality than he had ever been, for this air-raid was itself learn about the war is remembered and goes through the very individual and unimaginable” (ML 246). subjective filter of these three traumatised characters. The war experiences also The urban lives of the three protagonists represent the psychological form the literary representation of what sociologists would call a collective memory condition of this generation of Londoners who suffer from survivors’ guilt. of the people. This belongs to a particular generation with very specific memories Their lives are intertwined with London’s cityscape that came to represent of shared experiences that were strong and devastating enough to give them their trauma. Whilst the psychological disorders in the troubled biographies common life narratives. It blurs the boundaries between the private and the of David, Joseph, and Mary are represented by the omnipresence of those war public. Crostwaite defines this generational belonging as “the capacity of aerial years in their material and physical lives, the city is attributed a metaphorical bombardment to unravel unified modes of consciousness” (236, see also 234) and equivalent of the protagonists subconscious. To this effect, London’s Ganteau speaks of Mother London as “a choral narrative” which emphasised subterranean realm and its inhabitants are explored. The subterranean world “the relations among the group” and “is a novel about individual as much is as undeniably present as the spaces that are occupied by war memories in as collective trauma” (117). post-war London. Nevertheless, the war memories are immaterial and unreal if Although everything the three characters have become reenacts the years of it comes to their visible presence. The metropolis has grown over the ruins of their war childhood, Moorcock tells stories that belong to the historical period the war as biographies have emerged from the war memories that still sustain from the war to the mid-1980s. These roughly 40 years are not coincidentally them and to which they keep returning. associated with the lives of three characters, who belong to Moorcock’s generation, Various aspects of traumatic narratives have been explored in Mother but emerge as a period that in the analysis of Moorcock’s novel has some common London. Crosthwaite shows how Moorcock uses the stream of consciousness features, distinctive characteristics that make this era recognisable and to a certain technique to expose the three protagonists’ schizophrenia, “a response to the degree even unique. While the 1960s and the 70s are presented as a dialectic swing experience and the legacy of the Blitz” (ML 241). Ganteau writes 62 63 CHRISTOPH HOUSWITSCHKA “THIS FABULOUS FLOTSAM” full of nostalgia: “It’s nostalgia as much as anything, it really is. I loved it” to “the city’s counter-cultural heyday” (Crosthwaite 237), the devastation of the (Crostwaite 236). David Mummery’s statement in Mother London has been Thatcher years resonate with the earlier trauma of destruction and mutilation repeatedly quoted: Mother London had to go through. Ganteau finds in this a structure characteristic of a traumatic narrative that returns to a “moment of origin”: The bombs brought me security, sexuality, escape and adventure. We children of the Blitz are not to be pitied. We are to be envied. We are to [This] may be interpreted as allowing for the evocation of trauma, be congratulated because we survived; so if you must pity someone then individual and collective, as if the trauma of the Thatcher years pity the relations of the dead and the parents of my dead contemporaries, were a secondary moment in which the original effraction, that of my friends; but we were happier than any generation before or since. We wartime trauma, were re-activated, according to the most basic laws of were allowed to play in a wider world. (ML 172, Crostwaite 236) Nachträgligkeit [sic!]. (Ganteau 121) This double vision of the war years has also been observed by Sebastian Groes: Moorcock introduces us to the three main characters talking about the traces “what should also be noted is that the author recuperates these repressed voices the war left in their adult lives, the continuous presence of an inescapable precisely by positing the novelist and his writerly practice as an activity that absence as is manifested in the 14-year-long coma of Mary Gasalee or the presents voice as space” (55). Moorcock’s novel keeps coming back to a very hallucinations of Josef Kiss, who sees “crazed horsemen”, “naked giants”, and specific time and place in the history of London: the Blitz (the bombing raids the “beasts of the apocalypse” (ML 246, Crosthwaite 238). This psychological of September 1940 until May 1941) and the V-1 flying bomb and V-2 rocket Blitz condition modifies the realistic narration and suggests a perception of reality of June 1944 until March 1945. Moorcock tells the story of this historical period that is subjective and inseparably linked to the characters’ trauma: “He from the perspective of the post-war lives of three protagonists. Everything we groaned, less sure of reality than he had ever been, for this air-raid was itself learn about the war is remembered and goes through the very individual and unimaginable” (ML 246).