Rethinking Urban Space in Contemporary British Writing
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Birmingham Research Archive, E-theses Repository RETHINKING URBAN SPACE IN CONTEMPORARY BRITISH WRITING By HOLLY PRESCOTT A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English College of Arts and Law The University of Birmingham September 2011 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Abstract Rethinking Urban Space in Contemporary British Writing argues that the prose literature of its featured authors offers a unique forum through which to perceive and account for the multifarious agency of urban space. Chapter one examines the limitations of using the Marxist spatial theory of Henri Lefebvre, widely adopted by literary scholars, to account for the widespread appearance of abandoned, subterranean and transient spaces in contemporary British writing. The thesis then develops new ways of reading which, unlike Lefebvrean theory, allow such spaces to emerge as affective and narrative agents, shaping narrative form and action. Chapter two focuses upon reading abandoned spaces in the work of Iain Sinclair and Cheshire-born author Nicholas Royle; chapter three examines the agency of the subterranean city-space in narratives by Neil Gaiman, Tobias Hill and Conrad Williams; and chapter four interrogates the agency exerted by the hotel space in contemporary hotel novels by Ali Smith and Monica Ali. Throughout, the materialism of Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer is combined with affect theory to stress the narrative and affective agencies achieved by such urban spaces, precisely due to their transcendence of the networks of production and exchange which dominate the capitalist-driven cities of their fictional worlds. Acknowledgements Firstly, I wish to thank my supervisors Deborah Longworth and Jan Campbell for their vital encouragement and expert guidance throughout this project. I am very grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for providing me with the essential support of a full Doctoral Award, and the University of Birmingham Graduate School for their financial and administrative support. I would also like to thank the staff and fellow postgraduates of the English Department for making the Department such a supportive one in which to pursue this research project, for giving me the opportunity to present my work at research seminars, and to gain essential training and teaching experience. I would also like to thank Dr Brycchan Carey (Kingston University), Dr Lawrence Phillips (University of Northampton), Dr Kirsten Seale (RMIT Melbourne) and everyone else involved in the annual Literary London Conference for allowing me to try out new ideas and gain feedback which has greatly influenced this work. Thanks also go to the staff of Lancaster University‟s English and Cultural Studies departments, for encouraging me to take up doctoral research. A big thank you to my family and many friends for lightening the mood and helping me to keep a healthy perspective whilst buried brow-high in books. I am also grateful to Liam Bell and Gavin Goodwin (University of Surrey) and Ulrich Kinzel (Kiel University) for having faith enough to publish material which appears in this thesis. Last but by no means least, I would like to thank Nick Royle (Manchester Metropolitan University) for his support throughout this project, and for taking such a positive attitude to having his work analysed in such detail. This thesis uses the Birmingham version of the Harvard System of Referencing, and English spelling. Parts of chapter two are set to feature in a forthcoming book chapter „“That time at St. George‟s”: Abandonment, Affect and Spatial Agency in two novels by Nicholas Royle,‟ in Writing Urban Space, Goodwin, Gavin and Bell, Liam Murray (eds.) Winchester: Zero Books. Parts of the textual analysis of London Revenant and Neverwhere in chapter four are set to be published in the forthcoming article „“Rid Yourself of this Surface Mentality”: Re- thinking Urban Space in the Contemporary London Descent Narrative‟ (2011), to be published in the journal Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht. Table of Contents Introduction: Introducing Space as a Narrative Agent ………………………………………..1 A Question of Agency: Neil Gaiman‟s „Tale of Two Cities‟……………………….1 „The Space Itself‟: Spatial agency in the cultural history of agoraphobia …………10 Spatial Agency and the Environmental Unconscious ……..………………………15 Bruno Latour and Agency: Rethinking the „Social‟………………….…………….19 A Note on Space and Place ………………………………………..………………22 Chapter Summaries ………………………………………………………………..23 Chapter One: Spatial Readings of Literature and the Problem of Theory………………….. 31 Space, Spatial Theory and Narrative Form …………….………………………….31 Lefebvre‟s The Production of Space ………………………………………………36 Applying Lefebvre to Literary Studies …………………………………………….40 Problems with Lefebvrean Theory: i) Spaces Outside the Modes of Production …………………………………......45 An alternative to Lefebvre: Walter Benjamin ……………………………………...49 ii) Space with Agency …………………………………….……………………..55 iii) Space and Actualisation ………………………………….…………………..64 Non-Representational Theory ……………………………………………………....71 Chapter Two: Abandoned Spaces and Affect in the Prose of Nicholas Royle and Iain Sinclair ……………………………………………………………………………………………......77 Why Abandoned Spaces? ……………………………..……………………………77 Abandoned Spaces and „Ruins Discourse‟…………..……………………………..82 Abandoned Spaces, the Transhuman and Affect: The Fiction of Nicholas Royle ...90 Production, Exchange and Abandoned Spaces …………………………………..100 Ideas of the Transhuman in the Work of Iain Sinclair …………………………...103 Abandoned Spaces, Pathology and Approaching the „Other‟…………………….111 Re-thinking Mental Aberration and Otherness in Abandoned Space …………....114 Approaching the Other in Abandoned Space: Sinclair‟s Collaborative Work …...124 Chapter Three: The Agency of the Subterranean City-Space in Contemporary London Descent Narratives ……….………………………………………………………...………132 Introducing Subterranean Spaces …………...……………………………………132 Representations of Subterranean Spaces over Time ……………………………...136 Towards a Context for the Urban „Secondary World‟ Underground: i) „Wilderness‟ Descent Narratives: Remoteness and Removal …..………….141 ii) „Urban‟ Descent Narratives: The Dialectic of Above and Below……...…..145 The „Self-Defining‟ Descent Narrative …………………………………………..150 The Relationship between Selfhood and Spatiality ……………………………....156 „Hybrid‟ Underground London and Spatial Agency ……………………………..162 The Descent Narrative as the Underground‟s „Lesson‟…………………………..164 Back to Benjamin: Accounting for Contemporary Descent Narratives …………180 Chapter Four: The Contemporary Hotel Novel and the Agency of the Hotel Space……….187 Why Hotel Spaces? ………………………………………………………...…….187 The Hotel Space and Conflicts with Lefebvrean Theory ………………………..191 An Alternative Look at the Hotel: Siegfried Kracauer ………………………….194 Kracauer, Hotels and Spatial Agency …………………………………………...196 „Purpose‟ and Agency in the Hotel Space ……………………………………….198 Contextualising the Contemporary: The Hotel in Modernism ………………….201 Hotels and Narrative: The Hotel and the Detective Novel………………………204 The British Detective Novel …………………………………………………….206 Ali Smith‟s Hotel World: The Hotel Space, Selfhood and Pathology ………….210 The Hotel Refuses to Forget …………………………………………………….215 „Repeated Return‟: The Hotel as a Site of Access and Blockage ……………….217 Monica Ali‟s In The Kitchen: A Crisis of Selfhood, Identity and Spatiality……221 „Repeated Return‟ and the Hotel Narrative in Monica Ali‟s In The Kitchen ……225 The Hotel‟s Ambivalent Relationship to the Capitalist City ……………………231 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………….241 Urban Space and Narrative Form ……………………………………………….241 Modernity, Postmodernity and the Materiality of Urban Space ………………..245 The Issue of „Liminality‟ ……………………………………………………….251 The Problem with Liminality …………………………………………………...256 Opening up Literary Urban Spaces to Analysis beyond „Liminality‟…………...261 Bibliography...........................................................................................................................264 1 INTRODUCTION: INTRODUCING SPACE AS A NARRATIVE AGENT A Question of Agency: Neil Gaiman’s ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ In Worlds’ End (1994), the eighth volume of his Sandman comic series, Neil Gaiman presents ‗A Tale of Two Cities‘: a story related to the tale‘s narrator by its protagonist, Robert. During his evenings and lunch breaks—liminal, ‗in-between‘ times when he can escape his interpellation into the capitalist-driven city and shed his identity as an anonymous desk worker—Robert explores the hidden corners of his home city, only to find himself one day inside what he believes to be the dream-world of the city itself. Here, Robert converses with another marooned city-dweller, who suggests that ‗if a city has a personality, maybe it also has a soul. Maybe it dreams. That is where I believe