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

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.

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

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).

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.

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 spaces and focus in scenes, re-imagining what happens in the city by observing what is happening in singular moments. These enact the kind of

“performance” that Deleuze and Guattari associate with “mapping.” Though this is well-

covered territory, these concepts are worth revisiting because they resonate strongly with

Sinclair’s and Smith’s understandings of both their work and the structures of urban space:

The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable,

reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted

to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. It

can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political

action or as a meditation. (12)

Here, mapping is a process of perpetual revision, rather than a production of a finished and self-contained text. Sinclair and Smith demonstrate how urban spaces, even those that seem the most exhausted, can be mapped in this dynamic way, and allow the rhythms of the city itself to shape the imaginations that emerge in their texts. Their projects practice mapping as composition-in-process, in which connections and spatial relations accumulate and shift in conjunction with what they register about the spaces at hand, so the map also perpetually changes as their narratives progress through a series of tenuous positings, adjustments, and disorientations.

Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, which they intimately connect with that of the map, further frames the attention these writers give to the connections and encounters made in the city. A rhizome is, literally, a perpetually expanding plant system that grows horizontally and proliferates offshoots and roots, and Deleuze and Guattari mobilize this image to conceive of a continually connectable system or assemblage. This model for thinking about how a world emerges as something recognizable is evident in

Sinclair and Smith’s work. Sinclair strings together local narratives, photographic images, and descriptions of motorway landscapes in London Orbital. Smith’s NW narrates the stories of multiple people’s lives around a particular place through demonstrating the multitude of minute relationships that comprise a neighborhood.

Sinclair and Smith both connect quotidian objects and moments to more or less recognizable geographical locations in London—the M25, Maida Vale, the Millennium

Dome, Suicide Bridge, etc.—to make maps that are recognizable as maps, but which allow for connections between places, objects, and subjects to proliferate. These two projects use the loose principles of mapping proposed by Deleuze and Guattari to generate rhizomatic performances of space.

However, these are not pure maps, in that “mapping” as characterized above would not impose any preconceived structure on the spaces that it describes. Deleuze and

Guattari oppose mapping to tracing: while mapping begins in the middle of things, following the bodies and movements that generate space, tracing creates a “reproduction” of an already-known “de facto state” (12). Whatever the “tracing” may follow—one could imagine a number of ideologies alongside Massey’s “neoliberal capitalist globalisation”—it forms a singular line of possible action. Deleuze and Guattari call this kind of formation a tree. The tree “plots a point, fixes an order,” while the rhizome is comprised of shifting and contingent relationships among things (7). Since Sinclair (as

London Orbital’s narrator) and several of Smith’s characters are all invested in ideas about political structures and how they work, their pieces employ some varieties of arborescent logic. And both of the authors themselves hold convictions that resonate in

their works. Some political ideas, including critiques of the particular brand of capitalism inaugurated by Margaret Thatcher, serve as recognizable commonplaces in both books.

As Deleuze and Guattari take care to emphasize, however, rhizomes and trees never exist in a pure form but are always enfolded into each other, and Sinclair’s and

Smith’s texts demonstrate how these two kinds of logics converge in the process of mapping space. In each of the sections that follow, I investigate how London Orbital and

NW map rhizomes and trees. Through narrating scenes in ways that attend to the convoluted structures and connections comprising ordinary life, each bears witness to how the ordinary might unfold in unpredictable directions. The distinctions and differences that punctuate even the most routine scenes of daily life become evident.

These mappings foster geographical imaginations attentive to moments of potential in ordinary life, moments that defy rigidly structured interpretation, although some structures certainly persist and change in complex conjunction with the everyday.

There is a multitude of mapping projects that start in the ordinary middle-of- things that would certainly be productive to investigate within this framework.6 I chose these two writers because they both develop concepts that parallel Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomes and trees in specifically spatial terms: Sinclair’s London Orbital proposes two ways of mapping, and thus differently inhabiting, a landscape, and Smith’s “Two Paths for the Novel” argues that most novels being written in the contemporary moment are marked by one of these two ways of engaging space. I will say more about these concepts

6Perhaps the most famous would be Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. Rebecca Solnit’s atlases and the Hypercities project by Todd Presner, David Shepard, and Yoh Kawano are a couple of other excellent contemporary mapping projects.

in the following sections. I focus on London Orbital and NW because even though they map some of the same quotidian objects and spaces, albeit a decade apart, they are profoundly different in the ways in which they draw attention to the potentials of the city.

They develop distinct forms and genres as they experiment with mapping. Both present their imaginations of the city through narrative components; in the broadest sense, each depicts a journey, or rather multiple journeys, within and around London. But they also attend to the built environment, and its technologies, systems, and surfaces integrally shape the forms of their works. These infrastructures have their own mass and generate their own intensities that resonate with the human figures in these texts. Their rhizomes include surveillance cameras, hand-drawn maps, photographs, and local cultural histories.

The discrete affective structures, to use Lauren Berlant’s term, that Sinclair and Smith consider, require them to develop forms and genres that fit the ordinary that each encounters (2).7 These mappings do not aim to be comprehensive, but take a few quotidian spaces of the city as their subjects to better press into exercising the geographical imagination.

Because political concepts and structures are deeply important to their books, one additional framework can help give a language to how the political fits into these non- programmatic mapping projects. Nigel Thrift draws on Deleuzian conceptualizations of affect to imagine politics that operate on no grand scale, but instead appear in the everyday spaces that “must be thought of…as a means of thinking and as thought in

7 Berlant describes such structures as “a suffusion of practices throughout this social” (101), and thus quite like Raymond Williams’ structures of feeling (7).

action,” even as those who create those spaces experience “affect…as a form of thinking”

(“Intensities” 60, emphasis in original).8 This affective thought is not necessarily conscious, but “mainly figures in perceptual registers like proprioception” (Theory 172) and “refers to complex, self-referential states of being” that involve both the “social” and the “biological” (221). More complicated than emotions, affect involves “flows of imitation/suggestion” through social spaces, and Thrift insists that these flows are increasingly manipulated by various institutions and influence human behavior in the contemporary experience of late capitalism (236). He suggests, then, that the closing off of the geographical imagination also occurs not just in rhetoric, but also on this level of the affective. Both Sinclair and Smith draw attention to the ways in which the built environment profoundly impacts the affective experience of urban space in London. Yet urban experience is still not circumscribed or determined in any absolute sense. Deleuze and Guattari’s theorization of lines of flight is key to remembering the unpredictable potentialities at play in even the most rigidly planned and policed places. The concept of affective engineering offers a language for addressing the micro-politics of space while

8 Thrift takes his understanding of affect from Brian Massumi, whose work is deeply informed by Deleuze. In Parables for the Virtual, Brian Massumi presses beyond theories of intersectionality that work to complicate how we define subjects. The characters and places in London Orbital and NW do at points fit in and between different racial, gendered, sexual, ethnic, and, later, economic strata, but Massumi’s work demonstrates that, although these differences certainly compel our attention, they are not static. Affect allows us to consider the shifts among these categories through looking at how they are dynamically formed and re-formed. These readings of affect may be described as containing either possibility or potential. “Possibility,” Massumi writes, “is back-formed from potential’s unfolding,” being fed back into the system and creating “a region of nominally defining—that is, normative—variation” (9). On the other hand, “potential is unprescripted” and “only feeds forward, unfolding toward the registering of an event” (Massumi 9).

remaining attentive to both the repeated patterns of affective flows and the lines of flight that emerge from them. By inhabiting the ordinary, which certainly involves significant questions of power, these books follow both the refrains and the lines of flight that comprise the experience of living in London.

Taken alongside these concepts culled from affect theory, Massey’s “geographical imagination” expands, taking a key element of human subjectivity—the imagination— into the realm of the ordinary, where even houses and roads can compel the people who encounter them. What follows considers the geographical imagination as it surfaces before the fully formed political thought or individual identity. In Rajchman’s brief commentary on Deleuze, he suggests that in artworks created since the modernist period, there is an evident “problem of ‘making a multiplicity’—the attempt to create uncentered spaces prior to personalized identities and identification” (97). This is precisely the sort of problem Sinclair and Smith work through in these texts. Deleuze’s concept of multiplicity, which describes “what is ‘complicated,’ or folded many times over and in many ways such that there is no completely unfolded state, but only further bifurcations,” is another important starting point for this reading (60). London is indeed a complicated network of objects and ideas, and Sinclair’s and Smith’s works both engage this work of unfolding the everyday life of the city, to investigate what it might generate.

ECONOMIC PRACTICES OF PLACE IN IAIN SINCLAIR’S LONDON ORBITAL

Iain Sinclair’s millennial book, London Orbital: A Walk around the M-25, draws on a large archive of cultural narratives, drawings, photographs taken by friends, and personal experiences to perform a narrative map of his counter-clockwise walk around the M-25, an 117-mile motorway that encircles London. Sinclair embarks on this project

“to exorcise the unthinking malignancy of the [Millennium] Dome,” a massive urban development project that he perceives as draining life out of the city, and simultaneously

“to celebrate the sprawl of London” (Sinclair 342). As the book progresses, this “sprawl” accumulates layers of time and space as it folds in narratives and images that complicate what this motorway does and means. On one level, Sinclair militantly seeks to reverse the erasure of stories and events that has been affected by development projects like the M-

25, and thus to restore these narratives’ vital connections to their physical landscapes.

This involves, at times, Sinclair constructing some tree-like structures when he encounters instantiations of capitalism that he particularly loathes. On another, the capacious “sprawl” of his performative mapping practice exceeds his project. His experiments with mapping generate values and draw attention to objects and narratives that do not easily fit into a system of exchange or singular political ideology, like a rhizome.

Although I will argue that Sinclair’s work should not be read as only adhering to a rigid political system, he importantly frames his project in political terms. In London

Orbital’s introductory section, he insists that his work “spurn[s]” the insidious logic of

“Best Value” that is increasingly visible in the built environment of the city (Sinclair 38).

Although “Best Value” as a policy was first introduced in the British government in 1997 as a part of the Labour Party’s election campaign (Eterno and Silverman 87), Sinclair traces its legacy back to the economic policies implemented by Margaret Thatcher, which led to deregulation and to the privatization of many industries in the UK.9 Indeed,

Massey very similarly articulates how any momentary hopefulness accompanying the rise of New Labour quickly gave way to despair as their policies continued to keep social democratic values out of government (World City 77). Sinclair associates the proponents of “Best Value” with “the planners (the strategists, the salaried soothsayers)” (33),

“compulsory leisure,” and “eco-bondage,” (37), stressing the ways in which capitalist- driven developments in the city set increased controls over the behavior of urban residents and on the possibilities offered by the built environment of the city. On the other hand, Sinclair and his friends, several of whom appear as fellow-walkers throughout the book, adhere to an oppositional economy of Worst Value: “We refused cashback. We solicited bad deals, ripoffs, tat. If you explained something to us, we wouldn’t touch it. We knew what Best Value meant: soap bubbles, scented bullshit” (38).

Worst Value is not limited to a fiscal dimension, though. Its logic informs all of London

Orbital and aims to generate connections among sites at the edges of London, the forgotten objects and stories that reside there, and the walkers themselves. This

9 The association of Thatcher with Best Value was potently articulated upon her death in 2013, in a petition that “Margaret Thatcher’s state funeral should be funded and managed by the private sector to offer the best value and choice for end users and other stakeholders” (Scott Morgan, cited by Abby Ohlheiser). The petition was signed by over 33,000 people.

accumulation is antithetical to Best Value’s ideas of efficiency or productivity, but is, rather, foundational to his book’s form as a mapping project via Deleuze and Guattari.

In a short passage about one of the early walks, Sinclair talks about two Greek concepts of space—topos and chora—that provide a point of connection between the economic logics of Best and Worst Value and the language of mapping. Reflecting on their journey, Sinclair cites a definition of chora, from a book that his fellow-walker

Renchi lent him called Re-Visioning the Earth, by Paul Devereux: “place as expressively potent, place as experience, place as a trigger to memory, imagination, and mythic presence” (Sinclair 100). Devereux heightens this sense that place is produced through practice by his injunction, picked up in London Orbital to do “chorography, not topography” (100).10 Though these are fairly literal concepts of marking physical space, they reflect Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between mapping and tracing. While topography treats space as fixed, dead, and controllable, chorography is dynamic and open, building a rhizome of connection. Chorography also resonates with Sinclair and his friends’ ethos of Worst Value, as their mappings seek to generate connections among

10 Many scholars have written about these concepts as discursive practices. Thomas Rickert explains how the topoi are “discursive place[s]” located in “an external symbolic resource” (251, emphasis in original) while the chora describes any place that “falls outside of discourse” (252). Some of this he draws from Julia Kristeva, who theorizes the chora through a psychoanalytic framework. Kristeva uses some important topoi, including “the subject,” “meaning,” “narrative,” “metalanguage,” and “theory,” to describe how a textual practice of the chora “adopts [such terms] but then pushes them aside as the mere scaffolds of the process, exposing their productive eruption within the heterogenous field of social practice" (101). For Sinclair, the idea of highly systematized and structured political and cultural hegemony functions like discourse.

stories and places that have fallen out of interest or circulation in the tightly utilitarian system of Best Value.

In this scheme, topoi and chora are not ontological properties of specific places, but qualities of place that are produced by the ways in which people engage them.

Because places are produced as they are practiced, places frequently written off as banal like the M25 can be mapped as a places of potential. Sinclair’s geographical imagination produces a few key methods of spatial practice connected to these concepts of chorography and topography. One of the first impulses of Sinclair’s choric practice is accumulation. Sinclair’s narratives flow from buildings or objects they pass by to local histories to passages from novels brought to mind by a place. This method of accumulating connections simultaneously makes a place strange and invests it with new significance, generating new affective resonances through spatial practice. Another method of writing chorography is disorientation. Sinclair both describes moments of his own suspension in the sense of the landscape being unknown and difficult to navigate, and also writes in a way that leaves his experiences opaque for his readers—especially for those not intimately familiar with London. This chorographic practice revels in the inefficiencies of being lost in one sense or another and welcomes the potential of chance encounters and new perspective that disorientation opens up.11 On the other hand,

11 Through practice these methods of walking and mapping, Sinclair clearly situates himself in the tradition of the flâneur. Walter Benjamin describes this tradition in the Arcades Project, when he outlines the process of how the “anamnestic intoxication in which the flâneur goes about the city not only feeds on the sensory data taking shape before his eyes but often possesses itself of abstract knowledge--indeed, of dead facts--as something experienced and lived through” (417). Even the “abstract knowledge”

London Orbital is also clearly marked by some topographic tendencies, particularly when

Sinclair encounters some manifestation of excessive consumerism and when he slips into a nostalgic register. In these passages, Sinclair can mount direct critiques of the forces he perceives as changing the landscape. These moments of resistance parallel the counter- narrative that Massey observes opposes that of the Golden Goose, which is still somewhat invested in the spatial logics of neoliberalism, particularly because of its resistive stance. These movements between openness and closure in Sinclair’s narrative are pivotal to understanding the ethical stakes of his project and the potential he sees in

London.

In the London imagined in London Orbital, an excess of things comprises each space that Sinclair traverses; all objects encountered and all stories heard and told come together to produce a perpetually changing and dynamic place. As Sinclair walks and writes—sometimes its difficult to distinguish between the two actions—certain images and thoughts emerge from the place at hand and stick to his story, some only for a line or two, and others for pages. One section that exemplifies this begins with Sinclair’s observation that “a red circle has been painted on the smooth grey bark of a beech tree”

(312). This is immediately followed by an extended quotation from Conan Doyle’s story

“The Copper Beeches,” in which Holmes remarks to Watson how their perspectives differ, thus affecting what they observe and feel. Then Sinclair says that his fellow- walker and friend Renchi, “placing his hand within the red circle, calls up an Ulster loyalist symbol” (312). “Next comes a tin kettle, hung by a red rope, from a low branch. instantiated in the built environment of the city becomes something that the flâneur can sense.

The kettle has been dented and punctured with bullet holes” (313). There follows

“tumbledown bungalows, guarded by dogs”; “a tea stall sign” (313); being stopped by police after crossing over the M25 on foot; and a recipe for cooking pheasant killed by cars on the motorway (314). This persistent accumulation of sights, sounds, tastes, snippets from the news, cultural history, and traditionally literary texts continues at this pace for the entirety of London Orbital. As Sinclair walks, connections emerge out of the constellation: the beeches along their walk and the beeches in the Sherlock Holmes story, the risk for bodies that get too close to the motorway. These connections do not crystalize into a tight structure, but continue to shift and to accumulate more connections as Sinclair and his friends circumnavigate the city. This technique resists an easily defined narrative of progress or decline. Every interpretation of what London is, or how it should be, must be continually suspended or adjusted with the next encounter. The geographical imagination practiced in this way envisions all spaces as connected and dynamic, and even the shot-out tea kettle is important in this constellation of things, out of which emerges London.

Sinclair narrates this celebration of the ungainly city with a tone of mystery and disorientation that furthers his chorographic ethos. This, in part, allows him to avoid the kinds of ontological certainties and determinations he associates with Best Value, and also establishes him as an authority on London through developing his own intimate experiences of being lost. As seen above, London Orbital is full of sentence fragments, names, and stories or bits of stories often so personal, local, or impressionistic as to force very slow and careful reading. Sinclair makes it difficult if not impossible for the

reader—especially one not intimately familiar with London, its popular culture, and its history—to clearly locate herself in the places Sinclair describes. The first paragraph of the book offers a great example of this:

It started with the Dome, the Millennium Dome. An urge to walk away

from the Teflon meteorite on Bugsby’s Marshes. A white thing had been

dropped in the mud of the Greenwich peninsula. The ripples had to stop

somewhere. The city turned inside-out. Rubbish blown against the

perimeter fence. A journey, a provocation. An escape. Keep moving, I told

myself, until you hit tarmac, the outer circle. The point where London

loses it, gives up its ghosts. (3)

The geographical specificities named in this paragraph are both locatable—“the

Millennium Dome,” “Bugsby’s Marshes,” “the Greenwich peninsula”—and obscure—

“the Teflon meteorite,” “the city turned inside-out,” “the outer circle”—and yet both types may contribute to the reader’s disorientation. Someone quite familiar with London could probably navigate this passage without much of a problem, but for someone who is not, the completely uncontextualized reference to the “Millennium Dome” and the abstractions that follow could be almost impenetrable. In other passages throughout the book, Sinclair’s writing can be even more opaque. Part of the geographical imagination exercised here involves the abdication of control: the reader is plopped down somewhere in London and simply has to follow whatever lines and connections she can hold on to along the way. This disorientation of the reader further establishes how, in Sinclair’s

geographical imagination, London’s spaces cannot be neatly categorized and controlled, but sprawl in ways that neither the reader nor the writer can comprehend or contain.

Sinclair’s use of mysterious and even mystical language signifies a line of flight out of the typical patterns of behavior in the kinds of engineered urban spaces that Thrift descries. In some passages, this spiritual register emphasizes how choric mapping requires an abdication of control, especially in regard to what the mapping will generate in the end. This openness to the landscape has particularly potent effects in relation to the

M25. While Sinclair wants to resist the control of the planners by walking around it, if his own mapping only tries to deliver a controlled critique of the motorway, this chorography would slip into a practice of topography that would collude with the economic logic of

Best Value. To resist the topographic impulse, he must allow the motorway to manifest its own strange affects, which generates important lines of flight:

These are sacred places, where the road meets the river….Here is the

cathedral of the motorway, an open-sided temple of transformation. Perch

on one of the broad ribs, tight under the road, and watch curved concrete

sail on green water like a crescent moon….You could treat these spaces

beneath the motorway as cubicles of incubation; cold bunks in which to

dream of fantastic journeys. (209)

On one hand, this mystical language demonstrates the grandeur of the this urban landscape, which could be implicating the “Best Value” planners who designed this part of the M25 in the kinds of control associated with religious authority. On the other hand,

Sinclair must concede, despite his somewhat overwrought and undoubtedly partly

satirical description of the scene, that even this place can inspire bizarre dreams.12 While an encounter with place-as-topoi is predictable, an encounter with choric space opens even the most banal structures to new potentialities.

Although this deeply mythic engagement with space allows Sinclair to re- invigorate places otherwise written off as dead or static, he also uses this strong rhetoric in direct critiques, shifting from chorography to topography. It is worth looking at his chapter on Bluewater at some length, because here the ethical dynamics of his project become particularly evident. Sinclair calls Bluewater a “Retail paradise” (387) of

“escalators, lifts, cinemas, indoor jungles, pools, boating lakes, climbing walls, and even, yes, cycle hire and a ‘discovery trail’” (388). There are 13,000 parking spaces (387).

Here, he says, the “excess of consumer opportunity…will bring you to your knees” (387).

He directs his hatred of the consumerism manifested in Bluewater not so much to the people who shop there as much as in the mall’s buildings and the affective structures they produce. This development produces a kind of sickness: people get the “yuppie flu”

(387). They are enervated (387), have no “stamina” (389), “arrive exhausted” because of the maze of road systems and car parks they must navigate to get there, and “depart half- dead” (388). Sinclair suggests that Bluewater’s “ribbed domes and curved windows” got

12 In the twentieth century, Guy Debord and his organization—the Situationist International—developed a specifically Marxist practice of flânerie called psychogeography. Heavily influenced by the surrealists, this group produced plans (maps, in French) of Paris based on walks, or derives, through the city. These did not aspire to realism in their representations of physical space, attempting instead to depict the psychical experience of the urban environment and to contest alienating patterns of consumption in the city (Marcus 5). By recording changes in their cities, these individuals and groups (and many others) have produced an important body of texts for tracing the progress of capitalism in the metropolis.

their inspiration from the “huge tents that once sheltered London’s smallpox cases on

Temple Hill” (388). The shopping resort is near Count Dracula’s estate in Purfleet, and it has taken on his vampiric work. “Ordinary, unsuspecting citizens” become “the Retail

Undead. De-blooded victims of the Purfleet kiss….Suspended between life and death.”

Bluewater’s “planners and promoters” inherited their project from H. G. Well’s Martians;

‘they have learnt their lesson: they don’t move out from the crater to threaten London, they let London invade them” (386).

The Bluewater chapter is deeply important because holds one of the clearest descriptions of the type of “malignancy” that Sinclair hopes to exorcise from the

Millennium Dome in the course of this project. One the one hand, his mapping generates new affective resonances in a space typically perceived as banal. Through connecting

Bluewater to some of London’s famous myths and historical tragedies—Dracula, The

War of the Worlds, the small pox epidemic—the narrative heightens its flatness and deadness to a level of strange malignant energy. Sinclair earnestly feels his experience at

Bluewater as a loss of London’s vitality. While Sinclair’s intense condemnation closes off the geographical imagination to a range of experiences and registers, the “tree” planted here limits such an imagination in ways that are deeply important to the mapper.

Every mapping project faces the problem of selecting what points—or in this case, narratives—go into its project, and, of course, the position of the mapper profoundly shapes this selection process. Although elsewhere Sinclair adopts a rhizomatic model, his convictions result in some firmer structures that enable him to establish the project’s ethical stakes.

Some deeply nostalgic passages further mark Sinclair’s position and set the limits of his map, especially when he narrates preparations for a walk from his neighborhood of

Hackney through the nearby Lea Valley. Here, Sinclair both introduces his M25 project and gives an account of the changes he and his wife have observed in his neighborhood over “more than thirty years” (8). Sinclair shows both their restlessness in response to the gentrification of their neighborhood—“We had been talking too loudly about leaving

Hackney”—and their determined rootedness—leaving Hackney was “a fantasy, obviously”—to emphasize their commitment to place (8). He even wryly mocks the wave of people who left Hackney when it became an attractive site for gentrifiers and “started going to the dogs” (17). In articulating the changes Hackney and the Lea Valley have undergone during the three decades he has lived there, he persistently inverts commonplace narratives of progress: “More and more of Hackney is being improved: that is, less and less of Hackney is available to pedestrians” (28); “The [Lea Valley] Park planners wanted to transform areas of neglect and desolation, the very qualities I was intent on searching out and exploiting” (34). On one hand, Sinclair productively uses the appeal of nostalgia to demonstrate how an appreciation of “Worst Value” has been lost.13 And as Bonnett has cogently argued, Sinclair’s “radical nostalgia” confronts

13 Some of the debates about nostalgia’s positive or negative potentials are relevant to Sinclair’s application of it. In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams famously shows how “a well-known habit of using the past, the ‘good old days’, as a stick to beat the present,” particularly in English literature, is often a retrograde movement, and “the successive Old Englands to which we are confidently referred but which then start to move and recede, . . . in fact, mean different things at different times, and quite different values are being brought to question” (12). More recently, Massey responded to Wendy Wheeler’s argument that “Nostalgia isn’t Nasty” by suggesting “in sympathy with

modernity in a process of strange catharsis that proves effective for him and his friends.

However, his romanticization of “neglect and desolation” cuts off any possibility of positive change associated with London’s development (34). By focusing on his experience of living in Hackney in the 70s and 80s, Sinclair tends not to map out possible futures for these places that could go beyond an unattainable past.14

The mapping of the city in London Orbital exercises geographical imaginations of

London both topographical and chorographical. Through an economically inflected mapping practice that intentionally rejects logics of utilitarianism, efficiency, or profit, and that contrarily embraces detritus and takes the long route, London Orbital performs a rhizomatic mapping of the city. Simultaneously, Sinclair derides how “Best Value” is built into the urban landscape, tracing affective structures that close down potentials, and generates a new way of seeing London’s development in relation to its mythic and literary past. The trees that get incorporated into this rhizome strategically delimit the ethical stakes of the project, leveling a pointed critique at a certain type of excessive

[Wendy] Wheeler's thesis at its broadest level,… when nostalgia articulates space and time in such a way that it robs others of their histories (their stories), then indeed we need to rework nostalgia. Maybe in those cases it is indeed 'nasty'” (World City 124). On the other hand, Alastair Bonnett argues that the nostalgic moments in London Orbital, marked by a “profound sense of loss,” supply Sinclair with the energy to attempt this project as a cathartic exercise (55). Sinclair’s work utilizes nostalgia to counter capitalism and exhibits the tunnel vision that Massey and Williams critique. 14 Sinclair certainly seems aware of his tendency toward nostalgia and its possible pitfalls: “Part of our task in this circumnavigation is to become our fathers, our grandfathers; to learn respect for obscured and obliterated lines of biography” (316); “They live with us, these phantoms. … We repeat patterns that we can barely discern. We make old mistakes in new ways” (318). Yet Sinclair’s narrative does not fully explore how his family’s work for the British Empire might be reflected in his own project at any depth, even though he references his great-grandfather’s chapbook on being a Planter and Visiting Agent in Ceylon.

consumerism manifested in new developments. Sinclair’s book performs these firm and recognizable convictions alongside a narrative openness that allows for the production of new relationships among London’s buildings, infrastructures, myths, and quotidian realities—including the M25—recasting the city as being full of mystical potentials.

“ARCHITECTURE AS DESTINY” IN ZADIE SMITH’S NW

Since Zadie Smith’s most recent novel, NW, was released in 2012, reviewers and critics have been puzzling over what, exactly, this novel aims to be, especially in relation to Smith’s essay “Two Paths for the Novel.”15 Smith's essay reviews two novels from the mid-2000s that she describes as exemplifying these two paths: those who take the dominant path affirm "the transcendent importance of form, the incantatory power of language to reveal truth, the essential fullness and continuity of the self" (74), while those that travel the narrower, more experimental path embrace a “constructive deconstruction”

(94) that "forces us to recognize space as a non neutral thing—unlike realism, which often ignores the specificities of space" (96). The realist tradition, Smith suggests, has repeated the same formal qualities and modes of narration over from Balzac and Flaubert to Jonathan Franzen (74). Although the critiques of realism are common currency in scholarship on the novel, Smith insists that realism’s persisting dominance requires serious attention. Smith reads Remainder by Tom McCarthy as a novel that does something different; she celebrates how it looks at a Brixton street “as a series of physical events rather than emotional symbols” (96). This attention to the material allows

McCarthy to end his novel with a “comic declension” that raises questions that are all the more productive for Remainder’s insistent departure from realism and its attachment to transcendence.

15 This was the essay’s first title. It’s published as “Two Directions of the Novel” in Changing My Mind, which I cite from here.

These two paths for the novel resonate in evident ways with Deleuze and

Guattari’s distinction between tracing and mapping, but even though Smith is addressing her distinctions in spatial terms, this mapping differs from the more literal map that

Sinclair’s work performs. The patterns or refrains that have developed throughout the history of the novel have, Smith’s piece suggests, calcified into tree-like structures for most writers. There is, indeed, a kind of affective engineering at work in the realist novel itself: recognizable symbols and tropes, an investment in a particular kind of verisimilitude, epiphanies, and glimpses of the transcendent comprise a very familiar literary structure. Although its practitioners would probably resist the comparison, like genre fiction, literary fiction’s predictability gives its readers something familiar and comfortable (93). Although NW certainly uses some of the conventions of realism, and although Smith herself emphasizes that a complete break from the literary tradition is, of course, impossible, Smith’s novel performs its own version of this experiment. Smith foregrounds space in an unusual way, offsetting the typical emphasis on character by organizing her novel around a council estate—Caldwell—in the London neighborhood marked by the postal code NW. This focus on place and resistance to realism’s comfortable formal patterns might help to explain why NW’s four central characters, two men and two women of approximately the same age who grew up together on a London council estate named Caldwell, have proven disappointing for a number of readers.16

16 A sampling of the critical responses: “For a novel that aspires to take its characters' own forays with authenticity so seriously, the self-conscious artifice of NW is a major roadblock” (Banks); “There is…something uncomfortable about the novel's end, when Smith seems somehow to run out of steam, and both Leah and Natalie retreat shufflingly

These four—named Leah, Felix, Keisha/Natalie, and Nathan—have little in common beyond their place of origin, and the narrative shifts among their perspectives to keep the focus, in one way or another, on their neighborhood. The textual layout of the novel— with changes in font size, in spacing, and in how chapters are varying utilized in each section—also disrupts the unity of the book’s visual surface and calls further attention to the structures of quotidian life. Caldwell is one of the few permanent fixtures in the architecture of NW (both the novel and the neighborhood as the novel describes it), and the life depicted within and around it reflects the subtle rhythms and patterns that circulate through characters and the places important to them. Her mapping is thus, like

Sinclair’s, deeply attentive to the built environment and to the way that affects are engineered in a particular moment of late capitalism, but the writing of the novel itself also maps new forms and attempts the experimental path that Smith marks out in her essay.

As with Sinclair, I will begin with an eye toward the politics of the ordinary in

Smith’s book, but although NW is brimming with moments where affect is engineered or manipulated for the purposes of capitalist exploitation as Thrift describes (“Intensities”

67), Smith’s work considers this much more subtly than Sinclair does in London Orbital.

In Non-Representational Theory, Thrift describes many ways in which affect has grown increasingly important for corporations as they “have…been able to generate new to a position previously held up by the novel for our disapproval” (Cooke); “Here [in this novel], her pimps and junkies populate the streets like stock characters from "The Wire," and the story seems to be more about being set in the "hood" - as the two letter "NW" title boldly proclaims - than about being a real story at all” (D’Souza). For a more positive (or at least mixed) spin, see David James’ “Wounded Realism” and Vanessa Guignery’s “Zadie Smith’s NW: The Novel at an Anxiety Crossroads?”

performative knowledges which depend upon the staging of affect, most of which revolve around generating engagement through the manipulation of mood.” Marketers thus strategize to “induce [the consumer’s] emotional identification with the commodity”

(245). Even though consumers often see through these attempts to manipulate them, they remain effective, operating on a sub-conscious level (246). The corporate engineering of affect interestingly makes an explicit appearance in NW, when a minor character named

Tom Mercer tries to sell a rusted out Mercedes to Felix Cooper. While they make awkward small talk, Tom says that he works for a firm that does “cutting-edge brand manipulation” (Smith 139), which Felix translates as “advertising” (140). How Tom perceives his job becomes clear when Felix offers him advice about his girlfriend problems: “you just got to be the best that you can be. The rest will follow naturally” and

“the personal is eternal” (151). Tom then thinks to himself, “How close to superfluous his job was these days! The slogans came pre-embedded, in people’s souls.” He identifies

Felix’s speech as a product of corporate marketing strategies, even though the object of their conversation is not a commodity. It is not the economic exchange of money for the car, but relationships that end up being the object of the feelings that Tom attributes to affective engineering. In Smith’s novel, the spaces of London are intimately relational, and it is these messy relationships between family members, friends, their residences, and urban infrastructures (internet, roadways, etc.) that take on corporately designed patterns of affective engineering, often in unpredictable ways. Although the machinations of affective engineering often serve to flatten out characters’ geographical imaginations of

their neighborhood, Smith presents how such imaginations are produced not nearly as straightforwardly as Tom Mercer might think.

Smith’s novel draws attention to corporate affective manipulation most persistently in the way that each of the four former Caldwell residents relates to their housing, both past and present. For Leah, who grew up on the council estate and Michel, her husband, the concept of social mobility and the desire to move into a better neighborhood are connected to growing feelings of anxiety and threat. Though Leah has been “as faithful in her allegiance to this two-mile square of the city as other people are to their family, or their countries” since she grew up on the nearby Caldwell estate, an emotional and compassionate exchange with a woman who then conned her out of twenty pounds has inspired her husband’s “new wariness” (102). Though she somewhat critically judges her husband’s “dream[s] of a windfall that will transport them to another urban suburb more to his taste,” she acknowledges “they have gone up one rung, at least in the quality and elaboration of their fear.” She begins to imitate him, mirroring his affective posture of discontentedness though she consciously aims to resist his desires.

She begins to physically engage with a place she has always been comfortable with timidly, so that the idea of “moving out” becomes a fixture of their relationship and conversations despite her former dedication. Out of NW’s five sections, Leah’s contains the most irregular elements, with frequent changes in line spacing, line breaks in the middle of thoughts, what look to be directions from Google Maps, a concrete poem, and

4 chapter 37s. Leah’s conflicted attachments to her husband, to Caldwell, and her work manifest in the gymnastics of the words on the page. Though Smith does not identify

Leah’s fear about living in her neighborhood as coming from anywhere more specific than this isolated event, the purchase of a stronger lock and the insinuation that a move would entail social mobility through achieving greater distance from “certain elements” they hope to “avoid” suggest the circulation of corporately engineered affects at work in

Leah’s growing conviction that an ostensibly more expensive house, further away from

Caldwell, would be better. Yet the formal disjunctiveness and attention to both familiar and unfamiliar aspects of NW’s landscape suggests that Leah’s geographical imagination only partially conforms to a pattern of upward mobility associated with the housing market.

Contrarily, Natalie Blake, Leah’s best friend since childhood, seems to have thoroughly bought into a narrative of capitalist advancement (akin to the neoliberal

“Golden Goose” narrative that Massey decries in World City) since she was young, and the section of the novel written from her perspective involves several explicit considerations of how these values are produced in relation to various dwellings.

Natalie’s section contains 185 short chapters, and although some of these are not traditional prose,17 these are generally very contained, in conjunction with Natalie’s strong desire to contain the different aspects of her life in discrete spaces. After having graduated from law school and married, Natalie buys her own flat, moving farther

Northwest and closer to Caldwell. She invites Leah to see her place the day she moves in,

17 These moments include: a conversation, presumably on instant message that has different line spacing than the rest; a chapter title with the URL of a Google search; dialogue without tags; and some chapters that are a single quotation from a philosopher, or an aphorism.

and she recognizes that her friend is impressed with a space “twice the size of a Caldwell double” (293). Leah’s point of reference is still the estate where they grew up, even though her family moved out into a “maisonette” “practically in Maida Vale” in the year or two before she left for university (232); Natalie, on the other hand, has long since raised her standards, inspired, in a way, by the Hanwell’s moving out of the estate when she and Leah were teenagers. For her, Caldwell does not inspire fear as much as it does disgust and distaste for the poverty it symbolizes. When she protests that her family still lives in this place and forcefully offers to help them get out, she can hardly comprehend that “no one here is looking for [her] help” (311). That anyone would voluntarily live in

Caldwell is unfathomable to her after she has immersed herself in the rhythms of finer middle class life, and yet an attitude of relative superiority is evident in her mother, too.

In watching a “reality show” about an estate “fractionally worse than the council estate in which she sat,” Natalie is struck by how her mom perceives her “meticulous” care of her own flat relative to the “filthy” ones of the people on the show, for whom “poverty was understood as a personality trait” (317). The show elicits disgust for a particular way of life that Natalie identifies her family with, and yet her family can distance themselves from it. This constant and compulsive sizing up of the relative position of other people’s lifestyles is deeply attached to patterns of housing consumption that circulate through media, forming a particular kind of geographical imagination that fosters patterns of social comparison, even if it does not precipitate a felt need to move somewhere “better.”

Even while private housing promises Natalie that she can manipulate her social position and comfort through dwelling in bigger and better properties, her house

sometimes troubles this feeling of control. In the following extended quotation from

Natalie’s section “163. Architecture as destiny,” this is particularly evident:

To Leah it was sitting room, to Natalie living room, to Maricia, lounge. The light

was always lovely. And she still liked to stand in the bay and admire her view of

park. Looking around at the things she and Frank had bought and placed in this

house, Natalie liked to think they told a story about their lives, in which the reality

of the house itself was incidental, but it was also of course quite possible that it

was the house that was the unimpeachable reality and Natalie, Frank and their

daughter just a lot of human shadow-play on the wall. Shadows had been passing

over the walls of this house since 1888 sitting, living, lounging. On a good day

Natalie prided herself on small differences, between past residents, present

neighbors and herself. Look at these African masks. Abstract of a Kingston

alleyway. Minimalist table with four throne-like chairs. At other times—

especially when the nanny was out with Naomi and she was alone in the living

room feeding the baby—she had the defeating sense that her own shadow was

identical to all the rest, and to the house next door, and the house next door to

that. (325-6)

In the drive to compare with mother and friend, neighbors and past residents, Natalie calls to mind “the things she and Frank had bought and placed in this house” to bolster their sense of distinction. These vital marks of differentiation do not simply feed a petty desire for superiority, but stand against Natalie’s fear of oblivion, of dissipating into nothing but so much “shadow-play on the wall.” Natalie asks the same question that

Smith does through the very form of her novel: what happens to the subject when inhabitants do not control the physical places that ostensibly belong to them? The house holds affective power in its life beyond Natalie’s residence there. Rather than being a simple instrument that her family can employ to develop a social position that feeds into certain positive affective structures, the house also overwhelms Natalie. The positive feeling generated when she “stands in the bay and admires her view of park,” exhibiting her self-satisfied ownership of the place, is falsified in some way by the house itself, which gives Natalie a “defeating sense” of her failure to exert ultimate control over the space itself. She is limited to possibilities reified within a paradigm of consumption that seem to depend on an unattainable desire for complete control over her affective state.

“Architecture as destiny” marks ways in which place gets folded in to structures of status and upward mobility for Natalie’s family and illuminates how Natalie’s encounter with her house generates the potential for new kinds of relationships and imaginations of how space works.

Though most of these examples show the ways in which affective structures connected to capitalist marketing – particularly of private spaces – simultaneously work to generate positive affects toward upward mobility and negative affects toward maintaining the status quo of one’s housing situation, NW’s action climaxes in a line of flight that emerges for Natalie. After her husband discovers her habit of arranging sexual encounters with people around northwest London and furiously begins to question her,

Natalie walks (without wallet, phone, or coat) out of their house where her mother, sister, nieces, nephews, son, and daughter are getting ready for the annual carnival. As her

husband yells after her to ask where she is going, she replies, “Nowhere” (355). Walking through her new and her old neighborhoods – for “walking was what she did now, walking was what she was” – NW becomes both a postal code and a “nowhere” (360).

This space becomes indeterminate and map-able in a new way, not because the landscape itself in unfamiliar or foreign, but because Natalie feels that all of her previous markers of identity have “fled into paradox” (360). She walks through Caldwell, then north to

Hampstead Heath, until she reaches Hornsey Bridge, infamous for the many suicides attempted there. As she makes this journey, she feels consciously reduced to “certain physical memories” (360) that lead her to a vision of “suburban shame, choking everything” with “no exit” (364). These affects are intensified and redirected by the complex combination of things that are thrown together in this moment: her encounter with Nathan Bogle, NW’s fourth central character turned pimp and drug dealer since school; the effects of smoking with him; the physical architecture of the council estate’s five towers, visible from the bridge; and the adolescent memory of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, when her mother told her that “our people hardly ever do that” – and she looked it up and found that “statistically speaking,” this was true (235). Natalie’s breakdown has led to a distinctly new set of affective influences, which open up another line of flight..

While on the bridge, Natalie is aware that she is breaking out of the patterns of affective possibilities circumscribed by the “Daughter drag,” “Sister drag,” “Mother drag,” “Wife drag,” “Court drag,” “Rich drag,” “Poor drag,” “British drag,” and

“Jamaican drag” she identifies herself as wearing and constantly switching between

(333). When Natalie mounts the ledge and faces a “six-foot barrier…topped by spikes”

(384), Smith has already established the bridge at Hornsey Lane as a deadly place (169).

This pattern is also inscribed in the architecture of the bridge itself, which was fitted with higher railings and spikes in 2005, when local residents and councilmembers initiated the first of a handful of movements to work toward preventing the numerous suicide attempts at Hornsey Lane and Archway (Manning). The aesthetics of the bridge since these modifications look deadly, marking “both the possibility and the act itself, as they had been doing with grim regularity ever since the bridge was built” (Smith 385).18 Yet having arrived at “Suicide Bridge,” as local residents colloquially call it, with no pride or drag left to wear, “right at this moment, there was no one left to jump” (385). Natalie steps down and “shakes with laughter,” “[t]he act [having] remained just that: an act, a prospect, always possible.” The affect of this scene is mysterious and elusive, involving

Natalie’s conscious perceptions of her own body and some identifiable patterns of possibility, yet ending with a sense that she “had been saved,” though from what and by whom she is not sure (385). Natalie returns to her family after this event; her first thought after realizing she was not going to jump off of the bridge was that she wished she had money to take the bus home. Yet the convergence of infrastructures, feelings, and memories opened up a line of flight out of the affective pattern of “suburban shame” that led her toward “Suicide Bridge.”

In this modest way, NW maps the everyday, showing the ways in which feeling is manipulated through patterns of consumption, particularly in relation to housing, but also

18 These also recall Septimus Smith’s suicide in Mrs. Dalloway; he is impaled on “rusty spikes” having jumped from the upper story of a house (Woolf 184).

opening up to everyday scenes and objects that produce their own networks and patterns that incorporate engineered structures and exceed them. Those who would write off

Smith’s novel because its characters are not easy to sympathize with risk missing her characters’ radical openness to the things around them, and the perpetual, subtle changeableness resulting from ever-shifting affects that move through them. Elizabeth

Grosz, writing about the future of urban environments, affirms that cities’

“transformation is in resonance with the transformations of the body” (52). If both the spaces of London and the bodies of Smith’s characters change in a profoundly connected manner, NW shows a neighborhood and its inhabitants co-making one another. They are often complicit – though generally not consciously – in repeating refrains designed to market products or lifestyles, but amidst the multiplicities and intensities of daily life, alternative potentials for the city also emerge.

CONCLUSION

This paper has focused on the geographical imagination because it uniquely allows for the acknowledgement of the city’s futurity and becoming, as Elizabeth Grosz’s work demonstrates. Starting with some of Henri Bergson’s idea that “space is not a ground on which real motion is posited; rather it is real motion that deposits space beneath itself,” Grosz builds upon this idea that the movement of things—people, houses, animals, roads, trees, sidewalks, strollers, tea kettles—in relation to each other dynamically produces space (115). This theorization of space as dynamic importantly

“requires not only a time before time but also a time after time,” an incorporation of the past and the future that releases “the stranglehold that the present and its correlatives, identity and intention, maintain on space and matter” (111). London Orbital and NW, although in very different ways, both delve into the dynamism of the spatial, considering moments in which the identity and intention of their central human subjects are suspended and opened up to new potentials. In her introduction to Cruel Optimism,

Lauren Berlant also articulates this idea, but in the framework of larger social systems; rather than analyzing “the vision of the everyday organized by capitalism that we find in

Lefebvre and de Certeau, among others,” she turns her focus toward “the overwhelming ordinary that is disorganized by it, and by many other forces besides” (8). Although, as both Smith and Sinclair would attest, systems like capitalism have an enormous impact on the built environment and on the people that live in London, this impact is not universal or systematizable in the way that the “Golden Goose” narrative, for instance, hopes it is. The geographical imaginations driving both Smith and Sinclair’s books

confound simple narratives of either progress or decay because of their dynamic engagements with space. Space, as Grosz reminds us, it not a “medium” or a “container” in which the dramas of modernity are played out, but, rather, “a moment of becoming, of opening up and proliferation, a passage from one space to another, a space of change, which changes with time” (119). The imagined Londons we see in London Orbital and

NW are not closed systems in which certain economic and political forces have determined how people will live and how the city will develop, but involve highly complicated and continually shifting networks of connections.

In these two books, geographical imaginations result in formal and generic innovation. Both Sinclair’s London Orbital and Smith’s NW are highly formalist, and as different as these two works are, it is the urban environment itself—affective and infrastructural—that informs their formal choices. This attentiveness to space echoes the formal experimentations of the modernist novels that Susan D. Spencer investigates in

Space, Time, and Structure in the Modern Novel. She calls those books, that were deeply informed by relativity theory and its new conception of space “as relative to a moving point of reference,” architectonic novels (xviii). The writers she considers diverge from the norms of realism, which Spencer defines as “characters rendered according to the principles of external and psychological verisimilitude; dialogue that approximate actual speech; plots, actions, and themes that reproduce the sociological and psychological pre- occupations of the majority of normal, middle class men; and a story, or sequence of events, that moves forward from point to point from a definite beginning toward a definite conclusion” (xv). Rather, they embrace a more experimental form that

foregrounds time, space, and the structure of imagined realities made possible by advancements in science.19 The displacement of character and emphasis on form that

Spencer observes in the novels that she studies resonates resoundingly with Smith’s characterization of the experimental novel in her essay.20 Despite the fact that both

London Orbital and NW utilize conventions of verisimilitude that Spencer identifies with realism, this concept of the architectonic describes both of these very different projects.

Although one of these books is clearly billed as a novel and the other might be considered a sort of travelogue or “ramble book,”21 both Sinclair and Smith write in a register that might be called architectonic realism, a genre somewhere between the “realism” of which Smith is markedly suspicious and the highly experimental attentiveness to structures found in the novels Spencer considers. London Orbital and NW imagine real 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

19 Some of the authors she considers: Djuna Barnes, Hermann Broch, Michel Butor, Julio Cortázar, Robert Desnos, Alfred Döblin, John Dos Passos, Maurice Fourré, Carlos Fuentes, André Gide, John Hawkes, Michel Leiris, Robert Musil, Vladimir Nabokov, Anaïs Nin, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Raymond Roussel, Edoardo Sanguineti, Marc Saporta, Nathalie Sarraute, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf (xiii). 20 Spencer’s unflattering suggestion that “the unprepared reader” will experience “insecurity and anxiety and, eventually anger” upon encountering one of these books is provocative in relation to some of the negative reviews that NW received (xvi). See n. 14 on page 20 for examples. 21 Sinclair’s London Orbital and several of his other books are interestingly similar to this genre books that became popular in the 1930s and 40s, in response to the expansion of suburbs in England (Bluemel 97).

attention to space allows them to imagine a distribution of agency among human actors and the built environment.

Sinclair and Smith’s attention to what happens amidst the space, time, and structures of London also opens up a new kind of politics, like that Massey so urgently attempts to trace out in World City. In For Space, Massey insists that "conceptualising space as open, multiple and relational, unfinished and always becoming, is a prerequisite for history to be open and thus a prerequisite, too, for the possibility of politics” (59). The geographical imaginations of these two books allows for politics to expand in a very ordinary dimension, on a plane where programs and structures established at a governmental or corporate level sometimes have very strange and unpredictable effects.

In these quotidian Londons, any number of affectively engineered structures (the retail resort, for Sinclair, and the feelings about housing, for Smith), and of lines of flight that emerge from the refrains of the ordinary, operate simultaneously, in open and dynamic spaces. As Massey observes, “places, rather than being locations of coherence, become the foci of the meeting and the non meeting of the previously unrelated and thus integral to the generation of novelty” (71). The new connections generated in the space of London allow for ordinary innovations, and for a literature that bears witness to the city’s potential futures.

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