Form, Place, and Memory Materialist Readings of Iain Sinclair’s London Writing A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities 2012 Duncan Hay School of Arts, Languages and Cultures Table of Contents List of Figures 5 Abstract 6 Declaration 7 Copyright Statement 8 Dedication and Acknowedgements 9 Introduction 10 I 10 II 13 III 25 Part 1: Form 36 Chapter 1: A Communal Poetic 37 Twopoetries 40 ThePoliticsof Difficulty 47 AllegoryandAuthorityinLudHeat 53 ACommunalPoetic 63 Conclusion 75 Chapter 2: Dealers and Detectives 77 Detectivefiction 83 Clues 86 2 Suspects 92 Aura 98 Conclusion 106 Part 2: Place 108 Chapter 3: Downriver’s flâneurs 109 Downriver’sflâneur/s 115 Thenarrator/flâneur 118 Dissolvingplots 124 WhitherDownriver’sflâneuse? 131 Conclusion 137 Chapter 4: Psychogeography in Translation 142 ParisianPsychogeography 146 Drifts 157 LondonPsychogeography 163 Methodologiesandrepresentations 173 Part 3: Memory 180 Chapter 5: Gothic Histories 181 ThePoliticsof theGothic 184 GothicTemporalities 191 HauntedGround 195 HistoryasFate 200 Conclusion 207 Chapter 6: Nostalgia for the Future 211 SuburbiaandAmnesia 214 SuburbanUtopias 221 Actually-existingUtopias 230 3 Conclusion 237 Conclusion: After London 239 Bibliography 247 Word Count: 88,800 4 List of Figures Figure 1: William Blake, ChristianReadinginHisBook, c1824, watercolour. 60 Figure 2: Sinclair outside St. George in the East, from Iain Sinclair, LudHeat. 60 Figure 3: A proliferation of meanings in WhiteChappell,ScarletTracings. 90 Figure 4: ‘A Study in Scarlet’ ‘treated’ in WhiteChappell,ScarletTracings. 90 Figure 5: Le Corbusier, VilleContemporaine, 1922. 151 Figure 6: Constant, GezichtopNewBabylonischesectoren (detail), 1971, watercolour and pencil on photomontage. 151 Figure 7: Constant, Labyrismen (detail), 1968, series of 11 lithos with texts by C. Caspari. 154 Figure 8: Constant,VogelvluchtgroepsectorenI, 1964, ink, pencil, and pen on paper. 154 Figure 9: Guy Debord with Asger Jorn, TheNakedCity:illustrationdel’hypothése desplaquestournantesenpsychogeographique, 1957, screenprint. 161 Figure 10: Ralph Rumney, TheLeaningTowerofVenice (detail), 1957, photographic collage. 161 Figure 11: Brian Catling, BeingaMapofthe8GreatChurches:theLinesofInfluence theInvisibleRodsofForceActiveinThisCity, from Iain Sinclair, LudHeat. 175 Figure 12: Gull’s Vision, from Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, FromHell. 204 Figure 13: An Example of a Myriorama, c1820. 227 Figure 14: Still from Chris Petit, LondonOrbital 227 5 Abstract The body of poetry and prose produced by Iain Sinclair between 1975 and 2002 represents a sustained engagement with the question of the role of art and literature in the representation and comprehension of the city. This thesis reads Sinclair’s work as a political intervention in the relationship between literature, urban space, and history, and takes its theoretical stance from the body of critical approaches to the city first articulated in Walter Benjamin’s ArcadesProject. The thesis proceeds on a broadly temporal and geographical basis from the East End of the author’s 1975 poetic work LudHeat to the suburbs of the capital in 2002’s LondonOrbital, and is split into three sections of two chapters each, entitled ‘Form’, ‘Place’, and ‘Memory’ respectively. This structure periodises the author’s oeuvre, demonstrating the ways in which his work responds to a series of historically specific cultural and political constellations; the titles name the perennial themes and critical concerns of Sinclair’s writing, and allow the investigation of the ways in which these are instantiated and elaborated in his texts. Sinclair’s earliest work builds upon the formal innovations and ambition of modernist poetics. Through an analysis of his first major collection of poetry, LudHeat (1975), and his first novel, WhiteChappell,ScarletTracings (1987), the first part of the thesis— ‘Form’—argues that these texts constitute an interrogation of the institutions of literature in postwar Britain in the wake of what Peter Bürger identifies as the failure of the historic avant-gardes. These opening two chapters contextualise Sinclair’s work so as to reveal its anti-establishment, oppositional character; the second section of the thesis—‘Place’— moves on to examine how these concerns are expressed in relation to urban space. Chapter 3 turns to the figure of the flâneur in his second novel, Downriver(1991), and demonstrates how this work at once radically decentres this subjectivity and is conditioned by his limitations. Downrivermarks a moment of political nihilism in Sinclair’s work, neither able to bring to representation Fredric Jameson’s aesthetic of ‘cognitive mapping’, nor the emancipatory potential of postmodernism. His later ‘psychogeographic’ writing articulates a response to this impasse: chapter 4 demonstrates the ways in which Sinclair’s use of this term at once divests it of the utopian character of its Situationist origins and transforms it into a dissenting, heterogeneous, literary mode. The final two chapters—‘Memory’— investigate the political potentialities of the models of history expressed in Sinclair’s work. Chapter 5 turns to the author’s use of the Gothic in relation to Benjamin’s ‘messianic’ notion of ‘the what has been’, and argues that whilst such strategies can be of great critical potential, they at once risk collusion with that which they attack. Chapter 6 then analyses 2002’s LondonOrbital, and argues that this work’s ironic, tentative nostalgia for both the author’s anti-establishment past and for the utopian character of former socio-political projects represents an attempt to find a way beyond the political malaise that Sinclair’s London corpus identifies. 6 Declaration No portion of the work referred to in this thesis has been submitted in support of an application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning. 7 Copyright Statement i. The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/or schedules to this thesis) owns certain copyright or related rights in it (the “Copyright”) and s/he has given The University of Manchester certain rights to use such as Copyright, including for administrative purposes. ii. Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts and whether in hard or electronic copy, may be made only in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended) and regulations issued under it or, where appropriate, in accordance with licensing agreements which the University has from time to time. This page must form part of any such copies made. iii. The ownership of certain Copyright, patents, designs, trade marks and other intellectual property (the “Intellectual Property”) and any reproductions of copyright works in the thesis, for example graphs and tables (“Reproductions”), which may be described in this thesis, may not be owned by the author and may be owned by third parties. Such Intellectual Property and Reproductions cannot and must not be made available for use without the prior written permission of the owner(s) of the relevant Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions. iv. Further information on the conditions under which disclosure, publication and commercialisation of this thesis, the Copyright and any Intellectual Property and/ or Reproductions described in it may take place is available in the University IP Policy (see http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/DocuInfo.aspx?DocID=487), in any relevant Thesis restriction declarations deposited in the University Library, The University Library’s regulations (see http://www.manchester.ac.uk/library/aboutus/ regulations) and in The University’s policy on Presentation of Theses. 8 Dedication and Acknowedgements For Meg & Frank. I would like firstly to thank my supervisors, Dr. Daniela Caselli and Prof. Bertrand Taithe, for their patience, encouragement, and intellectual rigour over the six years that I have been working to complete this thesis. In addition, Dr. Robert Spencer and Prof. Janet Wolff have both made invaluable contributions to the development of my ideas. I would also like to thank Daniela for securing a grant from Manchester University, which made a huge difference during the final year of the project. The conversations with my fellow PhD students within the department of English and American Studies at Manchester University, my colleagues and friends at Cornerhouse, the Salford Restoration Office, Islington Mill, and Free Word, have been vital. In particular, I would like to thank Andrew Bracey, Gavin Grindon, James Hutchinson, Gary Leddington, David Price, Cherry Tenneson, and Lesley Young for their ideas, advice, and input. I would like to thank also Susie and Chris Hay, Misty Hay, and Tony Hay, for their intellectual and financial help and moral support. Finally, I would like to thank Katherine Woodfine, without whose support and belief this thesis could not have been written. 9 Introduction The truth content of all authentic works of culture indicates utopia, the desired destination, or the distance yet to be travelled.1 Always historicize!2 I At one point in Iain Sinclair’s LondonOrbital (2002), the text makes reference to a Victorian parlour game called the ‘myriorama’. This consists of a pack of cards, each illustrated with scenes of country life, which are designed so that they can be arranged in any order to produce a ‘“perfectly harmonious landscape”’.3 They are described as follows: A landscape of symbols: road, lake