University of Huddersfield Repository Toth, Hayley G. Making home in the city: a spatial analysis of representations of London in contemporary fiction Original Citation Toth, Hayley G. (2016) Making home in the city: a spatial analysis of representations of London in contemporary fiction. Masters thesis, University of Huddersfield. This version is available at http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/31470/ The University Repository is a digital collection of the research output of the University, available on Open Access. Copyright and Moral Rights for the items on this site are retained by the individual author and/or other copyright owners. 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For more information, including our policy and submission procedure, please contact the Repository Team at: [email protected]. http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/ Making Home in the City: A Spatial Analysis of Representations of London in Contemporary Fiction Hayley Georgia Toth A thesis submitted to the University of Huddersfield in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts by Research in English Literature University of Huddersfield September 2016 Abstract The plethora of novels dedicated to describing London over the centuries is telling of the city’s prolonged perceived importance to authors, their readers and inhabitants alike. Longstanding though the compulsion to imagine London may be, fiction – even fiction written and published in the same moment of history – provides contradictory accounts of the city at best, something which this thesis traces to the very ambiguities and instabilities of London itself. Using a focused spatial framework, this thesis places four stylistically, authorially and thematically diverse contemporary novels that are situated in London and, to an extent, about what it means to live in London, side-by-side with a view to highlighting the multitude of experiences available in the city. Citing the urban space as the site at which the social and the political is constructed, the practice of space is emphasised to be a key trajectory through which identity, agency, and notions of home and belonging are established. With a view to developing Doreen Massey’s (2005) distinction between space and place, coined terms ‘the cartographical’ and ‘the phenomenological’ are applied to analyse the significance and effects of different spatial practices and develop an understanding of London’s contingency. This contingency theorised is further cultivated through an analysis of the city’s palimpsestuousness – that is, how London seems to retain much of its heritage and discursive history (whilst simultaneously modernising, and thus overwriting much of its ancestry) – and an exploration of how each of the four novels interact with the city’s palimpsestuous quality through the employment of intertextuality. Providing insight into both the politics and poetics of London, then, this thesis contributes to the remerging field of spatial scholarship and brings a new and fruitful lens through which to read contemporary works. Keywords London, Spatial Theory, Contemporary Literature, Geography, Cartography 1 CONTENTS ABSTRACT 1 NOTES ON THE TEXTS 3 INTRODUCTION 4 VERNACULARS OF LONDON 8 THEORETICAL IMPETUS 20 THE POLITICS OF LIVING IN THE CITY 23 INTRODUCING CARTOGRAPHICAL AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL SPATIAL DISCOURSES 24 CARTOGRAPHY, LONDON AND CARTOGRAPHIC LONDON 28 READING CARTOGRAPHICALLY 31 A CARTO-PHENOMENOLOGY OF LONDON 44 CONCLUDING THOUGHTS 58 THE POETICS OF THE CITY: LONDON AS A PALIMPSEST 60 HAUNTED HOUSES AND SPOOKED STREETS 62 TEXTUAL GHOSTINGS 67 CONCLUSION 87 REFERENCES 90 APPENDICES 96 FIGURES 99 FIG. 1 99 FIG. 2 100 FIG. 3 100 FIG. 4 101 FIG. 5 101 FIG. 6 102 FIG. 7 102 FIG. 8 103 Word Count: 27,540 2 Notes on the texts Primary Text In-text Author Full Reference citation Saturday (2005) Saturday Ian McEwan McEwan, S. (2005). Saturday. London: Johnathan Cape. Something to Tell Something Hanif Kureishi Kureishi, H. (2008). Something to You (2008) Tell You. London: Faber and Faber. NW (2013) NW Zadie Smith Smith, Z. (2013) [2012]. NW. London: Penguin. A Concise Chinese- Concise Xiaolu Guo Guo, X. (2008) [2007] A Concise English Dictionary Chinese-English Dictionary for for Lovers (2008) Lovers. London: Random House. 3 Introduction [I]f you live in London, it isn’t that you get on with the business of living and the backdrop happens to be this place called London. It is that you are living in London. Living in London is a thing. China Miéville in Schmeink, On the Look-Out for a New Urban Uncanny The general consensus at which authors have arrived, as early as Charles Dickens and Samuel Johnson, and as late as Iain Sinclair, Martin Amis and, of course, China Miéville, is that London brings with it a particular spatial experience – both in name and inhabitation. For all their unanimity, however, these are authors who express the nature of that particularity quite differently, and the experience of the city is thus as complex as it is idiosyncratic. The respective Londons about which they write have come to influence contemporary understandings of the city, and continue to guide how the city’s spaces are lived in and appropriated. Not only is London a city defined by particularities then, but it also represents a nexus between the real and the imaginary. At once, London is both a real, topographical location around which socio-political discourses circle, and a work of fiction, undergoing constant re-writing and compilation. The trance of London and, in particular, the propensity to narrativise its form has been highlighted by a great many over the years, including Ian Jack who writes in his ‘Introduction’ to Granta’s London: The Lives of the City, “People who come to London also bring it with them in their minds. They have a feeling of how the city should be before they meet it” (Jack, 1999, p. 6) Writing just less than ten years later, Gail Cunningham expresses much the same; for her, “London occupies a unique position in England’s – and probably the Anglophone world’s imagination” (Cunningham, 2007, p. xi). Though the compulsion to imagine or narrativise the metropolis is not new (and London has a long discursive history), in contemporary society, the stakes are – arguably – somewhat higher considering the social, cultural and ethnic diversity that has borne out of its new international standing. 4 Narrativisation (not just in terms of the literary but discursivisation in general) can mark an intervention on the plural, the complex and the different, and can be accompanied by the standardisation – and subsequent codification – of laws, rules, identities, and moral and ethical standards. Narrative can also be generous, however; literary narratives have the ability to both present and create different or multiple truths. Indeed, often, literary narratives critique narratability itself which, for urbanity, represents an awareness of the city’s complexity and an unwillingness to tame it. Imagining London in discourse can therefore be deconstructive and offer new ways to make sense (or not make sense) of the city’s contemporary condition. In order to begin a critique of the supposed narratability (read: singularity) of London and highlight the importance of such deconstruction, it is useful, first, to look briefly at the sheer plurality by which the city’s demographic is now, more so than ever, defined. In today’s London, difference is both omnipresent and complex. Quantitatively speaking: over the ten year period following the establishment of the European Union in 1993 (which also saw the inclusion of further member states), Rienzo and Vargas-Silva observe that the number of foreign citizens in the UK doubled to around 7.8 million (Rienzo and Vargas-Silva, 2014, p. 2). In terms of migrant demographic, London outstrips other UK towns and cities by far; the capital accommodates over a third of all migrants entering Britain and has borne witness to the highest rates of migrancy for the past decade. The city now plays host to over three hundred languages, having united people from all seven continents (Kershen, 2015, p. 13, 18). This process of migration and settlement has affected the very fabric of what constitutes the city; London has seen the greatest change to its landscape in terms of food, the Arts, and popular culture whilst, according to Kumar, “large sections of British society remain relatively untouched” (Kumar, 2003, p. 261). Not just affecting London’s culture but the 5 bearers, makers and recipients of that culture, the capital’s consistently high level of net migration (Perfect, 2014, p. 2-3) and its resultant heterogeneity has produced, Kumar goes on, “not simply more variegated but also more provisional, constantly changing, identities” (Kumar, 2003, p. 242). This constant bodily flux can be observed most clearly in the creation of creoles between second and third generation youth migrants (Kershen, 2015, p. 20) and, certainly, migration and ethnic diversity are amongst the most discernible sites of multiplying difference in terms of London. This changing social reality has had a number of different effects; most prominently, it has brought with it both the possibility of renegotiating Britain’s national identity and the fear of losing a national identity, or the notion of Britishness, entirely – with the two implications neatly wrapped up in the term multiculturalism. Indeed, multiculturalism and to what, or whom, it supposedly refers have each been plagued by several high-profile differences of opinion since its citation in Britain (see Modood, 1997; Alibhai-Brown, 2001; Kumar, 2003).