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The Urban Geographies of Iain Sinclair's London Orbital and Zadie The Report Committee for Nicole Ashley Iverson Certifies that this is the approved version of the following report: Imagining London: The Urban Geographies of Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital and Zadie Smith’s NW APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE: Supervisor: Mia Carter Co-Supervisor: Casey A. Boyle Imagining London: The Urban Geographies of Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital and Zadie Smith’s NW by Nicole Ashley Iverson, B.A. Report Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts The University of Texas at Austin May 2015 Acknowledgements My first thanks go to Alan Jacobs, who introduced me to Iain Sinclair and Zadie Smith during his final year of teaching at Wheaton College. I am also deeply grateful to Casey Boyle, Mia Carter, Kathleen Stewart, and Hannah Wojciehowski for their generous feedback on multiple versions of this project. Thank you to a kind audience member at Rice University’s “Reconceptualizing Narrative” conference who asked a great question about Zadie Smith’s formal choices in NW that challenged me to write more about genre. Finally, thanks to my parents, for their unflagging encouragement, and to Austin, for being a willing and thoughtful reader along the way. iii Abstract Imagining London: The Urban Geographies of Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital and Zadie Smith’s NW Nicole Ashley Iverson, M.A. The University of Texas at Austin, 2015 Supervisors: Mia Carter and Casey Boyle In World City, Doreen Massey traces how two strong narratives about London have dominated political rhetoric about the city since the 1960s, creating a rigid “geographical imagination” that has been perpetuated through the government and business up to the contemporary moment. Two writers very attentive to these questions about how places in London are overwritten with particular narratives—Iain Sinclair and Zadie Smith—draw specific attention to the built environment as a complex and integral part of the problem Massey identifies. Sinclair’s London Orbital: A Walk Around the M25 and Smith’s NW both perform practices of perceiving and engaging space—that could also be called mapping—in ways that foreground how spatial imaginations are at play in everyday life. Through these practices, which have a strong affinity with Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of mapping in One Thousand Plateaus, their works explore how what happens in London confounds the stultified geographical imagination that Massey describes. As a result, their books incite fundamental shifts in narrow conceptions of space through experimenting with form and genre. London Orbital and NW imagine real iv worlds, but rather than taking on realism’s focus on human subjectivity in the form of character, they investigate the architectures of London to describe how a multitude of objects and structures and, of course, people, make and remake the city. Their formal attention to space allows them to imagine a distribution of agency among human actors and the built environment. v Table of Contents IMAGINING LONDON ...............................................................................................1 Economic Practices of Place in Iain Sinclair's London Orbital .............................10 "Architecture as Destiny" in Zadie Smith's NW ....................................................23 Conclusion .............................................................................................................35 References ..............................................................................................................39 vi Imagining London In World City, Doreen Massey traces how two strong competing narratives about London have circulated in political rhetoric about the city, both of which gained momentum in the 1960s and 1970s and have persisted through the contemporary moment. While Massey and the left with which she identifies herself tell a story about Margaret Thatcher’s destruction of the welfare state and the ensuing decline of life in the city, perpetuated by deregulation, development schemes, etc., those on the other end of the political spectrum conceive of London as a “Golden Goose” whose finance and business sectors produce an abundance of wealth that independently sustains not only the rest of London, but the whole country.1 She laments how the “geographical imagination” of both of these narratives has calcified, and how, in their rigidity, they serve only a fraction of the population.2 In its basic sensibility, her complaint is hardly new: for decades, people have spoken from a wide range of contexts against the ways in which a 1 Massey shows how these narratives run through all kinds of political documents. On the left, she focuses on documents issued by the now-defunct Greater London Council, particularly during the periods with a Labour majority. On the right, Massey analyzes numerous speeches and documents by Conservatives in government and, to a lesser degree, business leaders. 2 Massey’s complaint resonates with numerous other writers who identify the ways in which particular places are heavily inscribed with persistent and reductive stories that limit the possibilities attributed to them. Jeff Rice’s Digital Detroit responds to a remarkably similar problem that he encountered when he moved to Detroit: “What meaning Detroit did have, no doubt, was connected to the popular imaginary of ruins and riots, representational imagery I had formed out of newspaper headlines, TV news, jokes, and other references” (9). 1 particular story about something—from such specific topics as Nigerian men3 to others as capacious as “objects”4—has a powerful stultifying effect in its reductiveness and pervasiveness. But the problem persists, and that London particularly remains plagued by these exhausted narratives is evident in the numerous government documents that Massey analyzes in World City.5 Massey’s concept of the “geographical imagination” locates the potential for promoting creativity, for envisioning new futures, and for developing new forms of politics in the cultivation of conceptual models of space that accommodate the city’s dynamism rather than flattening it into singular narrative. In this wider vision, politicians aren’t the only targets of her corrective. In For Space, Massey insists on the need for scholars, too, to foster attention toward the “multiplicity of trajectories” made possible within and by space, trajectories not simply overdetermined by the teleological arc of 3 Novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave a TED talk called “The danger of a single story,” in which she articulates the ways in which she has encountered a combination of ignorance and monolithic stereotypes in response to her work and in life more generally, and tells a story about how a student came up to her after a book talk to say “It was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel.” 4 For example, Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter argues that things generally considered as inert and lifeless matter—things that, in the subject/object binary, are simply acted upon and without agency—have an observable vitality that is obscured by traditional conceptions of matter (vii). 5 The government minister of manufacturing insists, “there can be no question of holding back London and the South East. They must grow in order to tackle poverty in parts of London, as well as in Hastings, the Isle of Wight, Brighton, and Norwich” (World City 102). The Oxford Economic Forecasting for the Corporation of London reports “London is a success story that we believe to be worth further investment” (109). Although she has higher hopes for the progressive community, she remarks on the persistent danger of slipping into a counter narrative that takes a fundamentally similar conception of space as those above, but just takes an opposite stance. 2 progress imposed on places and people by “neoliberal capitalist globalisation” (4), but that “open up the imagination” to greater possibilities (5). This requires the cultivation of geographical imaginations, that, although very active in world (World City 22), do not get the kind of space she thinks they deserve in print, especially from scholars who are generally thought to be opposed to the kinds of hegemonic thought that Massey depicts (For Space 36). Although there are numerous scholars in the social sciences and humanities doing productive work to challenge, stretch, and enrich the geographical imagination (as I am sure Massey would agree), the commonplaces that circulate about London, specifically, persist as an evident problem. Two writers very attentive to these questions about how places in London are overwritten with particular narratives—Iain Sinclair and Zadie Smith—draw specific attention to the built environment as a complex and integral part of the problem. Sinclair’s London Orbital: A Walk Around the M25 and Zadie Smith’s NW both perform practices of perceiving and engaging space—that could also be called mapping—in ways that foreground how spatial imaginations are at play in everyday life. Through these practices, their works explore how what happens in London confounds the stultified geographical imagination that Massey describes and incites fundamental shifts in such limited conceptions of space. Though Sinclair’s and Smith’s books tend to be self-consciously subjective and local, and do not directly address some of Massey’s bigger picture questions, such projects foreground particular
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