Writing London, Volume 3: Inventions of the Other City

Writing London Volume 3 Inventions of the City

Julian Wolfreys

Writing London Volume 3

Also by Julian Wolfreys Als ob ich tot wäre, with Jacques Derrida and Ruth Robbins (Turia + Kant) Being English: Narratives, Idioms, and Performances of National Identity from Coleridge to Trollope (State University of New York Press) Critical Keywords in Literary and Cultural Theory (Palgrave) Deconstruction · Derrida (Macmillan) Key Concepts in Literary Theory, 2nd rev. and expanded ed. with Ruth Robbins and Kenneth Womack (Edinburgh University Press) Occasional Deconstructions (State University of New York Press) Peter Ackroyd: The Ludic and Labyrinthine Text, with Jeremy Gibson (Macmillan) Readings: Acts of Close Reading in Literary Theory (Edinburgh University Press) The Old Story, with a Difference: Pickwick’s Vision (Ohio State University Press) The Rhetoric of Affirmative Resistance: Dissonant Identities from Carroll to Derrida (Macmillan) Thinking Difference: Critics in Conversation (Fordham University Press) Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature (Palgrave) Writing London Volume II: Materiality, Memory, Spectrality (Palgrave) Writing London: The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens (Macmillan) Edited and Co-edited Collections: Ann Radcliffe, The Castles of Athlin and Dunblayne (Stroud: Alan Sutton) Applying: To Derrida, with John Brannigan and Ruth Robbins (Macmillan) Charles Kingsley, Yeast (Alan Sutton) Edward Bulwer Lytton, The Coming Race (Alan Sutton) Glossalalia (Routledge) Introducing Criticism at the 21st Century (Edinburgh University Press) Introducing Literary Theories: A Guide and Glossary (Edinburgh University Press) Literary Theories: A Case Study in Critical Performance, with William Baker (Macmillan) Literary Theories: A Reader and Guide (Edinburgh University Press) Modern British and Irish Criticism and Theory (Edinburgh University Press) Modern European Criticism and Theory (Edinburgh University Press) Modern North American Criticism and Theory (Edinburgh University Press) Re: Joyce: Text, Culture, Politics, with John Brannigan and Geoff Ward (Macmillan) Richard Marsh, The Beetle (Broadview Press) The Continuum Encyclopedia of Modern Criticism and Theory (Continuum) The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances (Edinburgh University Press/Nebraska University Press) The Edinburgh Encyclopaedia of Modern Criticism and Theory (Edinburgh University Press) The French Connections of Jacques Derrida, with John Brannigan and Ruth Robbins (State University of New York Press) The J. Hillis Miller Reader (Edinburgh University Press/Stanford University Press) The Mayor of Casterbridge: Contemporary Critical Essays (Macmillan) Victorian Gothic: Literary and Cultural Manifestations in the Nineteenth Century, with Ruth Robbins (Palgrave) Victorian Identities: Social and Cultural Formations in Nineteenth-Century Literature, with Ruth Robbins (Macmillan)

Writing London Volume 3 Inventions of the City Julian Wolfreys

© Julian Wolfreys 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his/her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–00895–3 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–00895–X hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 16 15

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For Caroline and David Blomfield

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Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Abbreviations

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

ix

Introduction: Of Invention and the Singularities of the City of London

1

The Hieroglyphic Other: The Beetle, London and the Anxieties of Late Imperial England

8

The ‘tortuous geography of the night world’: ‘Productive disorder’ and the Noctuary Text

37

Brief moments in time I

63

Between Seeing and Knowing: Amy Levy, Arnold Bennett and Urban Counter-romance

81

Brief moments in time II

135

‘All the living and the dead’: Urban Anamnesis in John Berger and Iain Sinclair

159

‘Concatenated words from which the sense seemed gone’: The Waste Land

191

Notes

247

Works Cited

252

Index

260

vii

Acknowledgements A third volume of Writing London was neither envisioned nor intended. Like London itself, it seemed simply to have happened, and then kept happening. However, despite that chance and the insistence of the city, a number of people have made suggestions, responded to drafts or conference papers in various guises, and so have crept into the book. Without any explanation therefore, I would like to thank Jenny Bavidge, Brycchan Carey, Pamela Gilbert, Jane Goldman, Anne Humpherys, John Leavey, J. Hillis Miller, Lawrence Phillips, Al Shoaf, Phil Tew, Greg Ulmer and Keith Wilson. Thanks are also due to Paula Kennedy at Palgrave Macmillan for commissioning the volume, and her subsequent enthusiasm over the project and particular, sudden changes in direction at the last minute. Also at Palgrave, I would like to thank Christabel Scaife for her diligence, organization and thoroughness. And, of course, Xu, Franz, and Gina . . . The author and publisher would like to thank the estate of T. S. Eliot and Faber and Faber Ltd for permission to reprint material from The Waste Land. Julian Wolfreys

viii

Abbreviations B CP

HWM SCA RS RoS RSt

WL: FT

Richard Marsh, The Beetle. Ed. Julian Wolfreys. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems 1909–1962. London: Faber and Faber, 1974. All references to The Waste Land are taken from this edition, and cited by line. Any other poem to which I refer is given as CP. John Berger, Here is Where We Meet. London: Bloomsbury, 2005. Iain Sinclair and Dave McKean, Slow Chocolate Autopsy. London: Phoenix House, 1997. Amy Levy, Reuben Sachs. Ed. Susan David Bernstein. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2006. Amy Levy, The Romance of a Shop. Ed. Susan David Bernstein. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2006. Arnold Bennett, Riceyman Steps and Elsie and the Child. Ed. and introd. Edward Mendelson and Robert Squillace. London: 1991. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound. Ed. and introd. Valerie Eliot. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1971.

ix

Really, there is but one way for the stranger to see London in such a way as to know it. That is, by not looking at it. If you go about with carefully studious eyes and a programme of sights to be visited . . . you will learn a good deal . . . but you will never catch the heart-beat of London . . . You catch it by fits and starts in a hundred-and-one unexpected and unconsidered spots; by moving about London . . . let it enter your skin in its own haphazard ways. Thomas Burke, London in My Time

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Introduction: Of Invention and the Singularities of the City of London

It is not that I have no more to say of London, that I break off here; but that I have no room to say it . . . Daniel Defoe I have often amused myself with thinking how different a place London is to different people. James Boswell . . . we have had no time to Londonize ourselves . . . Frances Burney

Inventing In what way does writing and representing London invent the city, it may be asked? What do writing and representation have to do with invention? In addressing invention, I have particular meanings for the word in mind as these have been drawn to critical attention initially by Jacques Derrida (1989: 25–66), and subsequently in the work of other critics. There are a number of semantic resonances in this familiar term, not all of which spring to mind as readily as others. On the one hand, invention speaks of a creative process, of producing something new, original, bringing into the world ab ovo, as it were, that which has never been seen or imagined before. Invention is thus closely tied to the idea of innovation or discovery. It implies a work of fabrication, of the imagination, a fabulation, fantasy or, possibly, a narrative phantasm. There is thus the more pejorative sense of fabrication, devising something false. At the same time though, there is also the more acceptable mode of fabrication associated with invention, which involves the composition of a work of art, most commonly literature but also, at least in Bach’s case, music. On the other hand, there is a more technical sense to invention. It bespeaks design, a contraption or device; something comes (venire) into 1

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Writing London

(in-) being. Invention therefore finds, as if for the first time, but it ‘unveils what was already found there, or produces what . . . is only put together, starting with a stock of existing and available elements’ (Derrida 1989: 43). Invention itself is not creative then. It produces nothing as such, out of nothing. Instead, invention is a response, a reaction or finding out of that which was already there, a discovery that is a dis-covering. However, from out of such configuration by which invention takes place comes the possibility that it ‘gives rise to an event, tells a fictional story and produces a machine by introducing a disparity or gap into the customary use of discourse’. It does so moreover by ‘upsetting to some extent the mind-set of expectation and reception that it nevertheless needs’ (Derrida 1989: 43). Such disruption or eruption thus marks invention with the possibility of a surprise or novelty of an event, a ‘coming about of the new . . . due to an operation of the human subject’ (Derrida 1989: 43). In this therefore is the registration of the sense of that which arrives or is immanent, however unpredictable, that which is oncoming, about to happen, shortly to take place, or come about – at least as its possibility. Invention is marked by that which comes from the future, becoming visible, and so is given form but which, implicitly, is already there, in however invisible or inchoate a manner. To such a ‘coming on’ or ‘oncoming’ instance, such invenience (to coin a word),1 an uncovering and bringing to light which is touched by the possibility of the novelty of an event provides the act of writing the city with what Derrida calls the ‘singular invention of a performative’ (1989: 59) that bends the rules (as he continues) ‘in order to allow the other to come or to announce its coming in the opening of a dehiscence’ (1989: 59–60). In considering the act of writing the city as so many inventions, I have had, necessarily, to reflect upon the extent to which invention responds to singularity. It has to be stressed therefore – and as has just been indicated – that ‘invention is always the invention of the other. And the other does not exist as an entity, but is lived through as an event’ (Attridge 2004: 43). If it takes place at all, invention does so in response to the experience of the singular. To break this down somewhat schematically as a series of sequential and dependent hypotheses: First, if invention is in any fashion inscribed in the acts of writing or reading; and (2) if readings are engendered in the experience of the city and what takes place between site and subject as event; and furthermore (3) if what is occasioned is a writing that not only doubles the reading but also attempts to double both the experience and the site; then it follows that (4) that which is singular and by which reading and writing are called into being is both the singularity of the experience or event, and (5) also, in a different manner, the singularity of place, of particular locus distinguished from the more abstract or general notion of London as a whole. For the singular to be perceived as such inevitably entails

Introduction 3

a concomitant recognition, which is itself doubtless double: on the one hand, every perception will differ from every other and so proscribe the notion of an authoritative, commanding perspective; on the other hand, that which is experienced as singular is necessarily other – other than every other singularity, and other than the idea of any general concept. Part of the invention therefore is grounded through historical situatedness (Attridge 2004: 45): the historicity encrypted in place and the historical situatedness of my response, by which it is understood that ‘inventiveness is always inventiveness for the reader’ (Attridge 2004: 45), but that the experience of that inventiveness is ‘an encounter with alterity’ (Attridge 2004: 46). In small measure, what I am proposing here is crystallized in the second of my epigraphs from Boswell’s London Journal. Defoe’s ‘limit’, the breakdown of writing in the face of the immensity of the city, also expresses such a recognition of the endlessly invenient condition of the city. It admits in its defeat to every moment that takes place between city and subject, to which the subject must, in each singular case, respond with invention, with fabulation in the face of the immanent apparition or phantasm and so give form, where there was none visible, or as such, but which was there nonetheless. Invention thus causes to bring about that which is always already oncoming, giving form or vision to, and beginning as Gilles Deleuze has it, ‘the actualization of the singularities’ (1990: 109). In this manner, in those innumerable inventions of the city, of each and every other city, other than the abstract idea of ‘London’ and other than each and every other invention of the city, ‘a world therefore is constituted on the condition that series converge’ thereby enveloping ‘an infinite system of singularities selected [invented] through [the response to invenient] convergence’ (Deleuze 1990: 109). Writing the city stages and gives form to a topology that is also a topography, a surface of lines and intersections that imagine the city, producing one from a potentially endless series of Londons, each the crystallization or actualization of the city’s countless singularities, its countless moments of takingplace, of becoming. But in finding what was already there it recalls, it brings back what is forgotten, overlooked, occluded, obscured, taken for granted, or ignored. Writing is therefore invention in that technical sense of devising a form, a structure for memory. It taps time if you will, entering into the temporal core of place, of what has taken place in place and which imprints itself indelibly as the signature of place, awaiting invention by the subject who responds to the resonance of that location, who provides the inventive and corresponding locution to the location, in which give and take the singular locus of the city is neither simply in the subject or the particular place, but is instead discernible as the invenient becoming taking place, once more, between subject and site. Singularities are therefore actualized ‘both in a world and in the individuals which are parts of the world’ (Deleuze 1990: 110). It is this commensurate, shared actualization that Defoe does not

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Writing London

apprehend, and so is defeated, but which Boswell perceives as the possibility of inventions of the city. ‘To be actualized is to be expressed’, writes Deleuze (1990: 110). But as no one person, no writer is ever capable of expressing every possible actualization, no single writing, no one composition can invent that which the city appears to make possible – endless invention, endless singularities. Literature though at least implies the possibility of impossibility, to which Boswell gives the beginnings of expression. Yet, such recognition is clearly not available to everyone, and this is why, perhaps, the city is perceived by so many writers across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as monstrous, as a monster, a formless form constantly reforming and deforming itself, as I have suggested in the previous volumes of Writing London. As Roy Porter remarks of Georgian art and thought, ‘London became a lead character in its own right . . . an addictive imaginary space, London was endlessly praised or pilloried by essayists like Addison, Steele and Defoe, by Pope, Swift, Gay, Fielding and other poets and novelists, and by artists like Hogarth: Londoners evidently could not get enough’ (1994: 35). What is true of the Georgian era is as true of London writing in both the nineteenth and twentieth, and it would begin to appear, the twenty-first centuries (though of course it is always too early to tell). What is interesting however in Porter’s description, despite its historical specificity, is that in the syntax and rhythms of his prose in what he calls, apropos the cultural life of London in the eighteenth century, ‘the ceaseless throb of activity . . . to be found from Cheapside to Chelsea’ (1994: 35), there is a performative dimension that invents the ceaseless throb which in turn expresses the addictive condition of the imaginary space. Porter’s prose does not merely take up the pulse it finds in its motions but enacts it, and so expresses the addiction of the city. This brings me back to my title, to a certain grammatical, genitive invenience in the syntax of the subtitle in particular, inventions of the city. A double genitive is at work here. It takes place within the structure of the phrase. It speaks to the ‘becoming’ or actualization between subject and place, individual and world addressed above by Gilles Deleuze. In the phrase it is implied that the writer of London ‘invents’ the city, its locations, its memories and histories, its experiences and events. He or she finds them, uncovers their traces and duplicates, reiterates them in the imaginative invention of the particular singularity to which a given narrative attests. This is writing the city as invention. But in that sense of discovery, of finding what is already there, rather than creating from nothing, the other semantic horizon of the phrase makes itself known. In this reading, inventions of the city names, and especially in its plural, the experiences and events that have become, which come to pass, and which are oncoming, awaiting becoming in the encounter between the future subject in his or her interaction with locality.

Introduction 5

About this book I do not intend here to précis what the following chapters address. What is coming, what is invenient, will come as and when it does, in each example and on each occasion. The arrival or reception cannot be programmed. In speaking of so many singular inventions of the city, one should resist or avoid the programme as far as this is possible. After all that has been said in this introduction about singularity, to attempt to summarize or ‘economize’ would be disingenuous to say the least. It would assume that my subject could be defined finally, that one could speak of London, or writing concerned with London, through particular customary, generalized statements. It would be to invent an introduction as a fabrication of a presumed or imagined totality to which language is somehow adequate or equal. Moreover, any effort to make systematic or schematic ignores the extent to which London is and has always been a place without design, an excess within itself and an ‘uneven patchwork . . . evolving in immediate response to the changing practical needs of the people’ (Hudson 2002: 583). As a metropolis it has always been ‘defined’ (if that can be the right word) by its ‘largely undirected and eclectic growth’ (Hudson 2002: 583). Invention thus takes place everywhere then, at every historical moment, in every cultural and social situation as the response to event and experience, for which no retrospective language aiming at authority or governing control is adequate. There is, from the earliest writings concerning London onward, a sense of the prodigality of the city. That perception is found, whether one considers John Stow’s Survey from the 1590s, Peter Ackroyd’s ‘Biography’ at the end of the twentieth century, or Samuel Johnson’s sense of ‘distress and alienation of a small town teacher in the face of the bewildering modernism of an expanding metropolis’, which is given poetic expression in his London of 1738 (Hudson 2002: 584). This is my introduction then, if there has to be one: there can be no introduction or foreword as such, nothing arriving before what takes place between the individual encounters on every occasion and those aspects of the city in all its fragmentary identities and expressions, articulations or inscriptions. The assumption governing my own resistance to organization in response to the modernity of the city, a modernity extending back at least to the sixteenth century, is that what we call London is a ‘natural’, in Shakespeare’s sense of that word, a monstrous form. As such – and I cite Nicholas Hudson once more – ‘attempts to reduce life or cities to rational design depart from the asymmetrical and heterogeneous realities of human life’ (2002: 588). What I will say is that the present volume of Writing London spends much more time, for the most part, in a much more circumscribed historical period than either of the previous volumes. With a few exceptions – Chapter 4, for example, or certain illustrations and passages given in Chapter 2 – I range

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Writing London

across a small number of texts from the 1880s to the 1930s. This, it appears in retrospect, has been dictated by the city itself on a number of occasions and through different occasional experiences, to which the photographs in the present volume give oblique testimony. At the same time, there is to be discerned from chapter to chapter, and in the chapters themselves, a somewhat restless movement, a little aleatory in its direction of composition and invention, to and fro, between the customarily perceived centres of the city to the suburbs and back again. The very idea of a suburb is of course not fixed; what is urban in one generation becomes suburban in another; what is the country during one decade becomes gathered into the suburban or urban in another. It is very much the case though that this book interests itself in the writing of district, as each and every district is an other London. Each is an other in two ways at least. On the one hand, it is a singular other distinct from every other district; it is singular and other also for each of its subjects, and for its writers. On the other hand, every district is understood as an other in yet another doubling fashion. It is, first and obviously, other to both the political and economic, judicial, cultural or legislative centres of London (and therefore The City or Westminster, it goes without saying). It is also implicitly an other, a singular and actualized convergence (to recall Deleuze’s term), to the more abstract or conceptual, and therefore empty, notion of London conceived as an otherwise inexpressible totality. Each London invented articulates or expresses a specificity and a difference to any centre, to the very idea or possibility of a ‘centre’ or some other seemingly transcendental conceptualization. In giving place to location, writing the city makes possible that site’s taking place. Far from identifying unequivocally location, name admits the fragmentation of topography and, as such, the delineation of topological space as the inscription of a counter-signature in the name of London, as the only possibility by which London can be known. Such instances of alterity and singularity may not be either greatly distinct or autonomous, absolutely. ‘Charter’d’ boundaries according to the mapping of wards, boroughs and districts aside, who can say where Putney ends and Sheen begins, for example, or for that matter what distinguishes Kew from Richmond, Chelsea from Kensington or Knightsbridge? In all such nominal distinctions, the invisible traces of the past, of cultural memory and history are articulated. The names themselves stand as singular expressions, the beginnings of inventive articulations. Writing London therefore sets out – although I still remain uncertain as to where I have got in London, with London, if anywhere – to consider through my various chapters certain doubtful grounds, to recall a phrase of Dickens’. I seek to explore those inventions of the city, and the ways in which they find and uncover within such places as I consider the imaginary, occasionally visionary dimensions of topological space as, themselves, so many intersecting, interanimating surfaces. Facilitating somewhat this consideration, each chapter relies on certain keywords,

Introduction 7

though not in any strictly systematic manner. Motifs such as hieroglyph, noctuary, counter-romance, ekistics, anamnesis and crisis inform and provide if not keywords then at least the grounds (as in ground bass, surface or subjectile, the basis or, let us say epistemic trope) from which to cover the ground of each London, by the implicit articulation of which structure may erected provisionally, built and then unbuilt. Each is a dubious co-ordinate in an ever-changing cartographic conceit. The motifs do not dictate the readings; they merely give them the illusory comfort of a knowable reference on a virtual series of maps, in each of which the lines are constantly in flux, undergoing endless realignments. After all, it may be said not without justification, this just is London. It is in the end what the name comes down to, the place at which it arrives, a place which is no place and yet every place, every occasion that takes place between subject and locus. The city is mediated only through the kaleidoscopic refractions of its parts and fragments; it is only apprehended, if at all, ‘through the prism of difference rather than uniformity’ (Hudson 2002: 591). Or, as James Boswell tells us Samuel Johnson insisted, Sir, if you wish to have a just notion of the magnitude of this city, you must not be satisfied with seeing its great streets and squares, but must survey the innumerable little lanes and courts. It is not in the showy evolutions of buildings, but in the multiplicity of human habitations which are crowded together, that the wonderful immensity of London exists. (Boswell 1: 421–2) Magnitude: innumerable: evolutions: multiplicity: immensity: Johnson touches on the pulse of the city, and in so doing, invents a play to which we would do well to attend. For between the discourses of growth and transformation on the one hand and that discourse indirectly signalled of a sublimity resistant to and in excess of all calculability on the other, there is demand that readers and writers of the city respond to its singularities. Such singularities are not merely the differences between works. They announce themselves as those phenomena or events which arrest one’s attention through exceeding certain conventions or forms, and so bring about a discontinuity irreducible to habit, organization or representation (Clark 2005: 3). They are the metamorphic and performative differences by which one comes to know London, every other London. In this, London becomes unmade and rebuilt, its elements rearranged and translated, as it transmutes one. Without the chance of this experience it is impossible to conceive the other that comes to be glimpsed through the urban fretwork of what I believe to be the ‘singularities of the city of London’ (Stow 1598: 485). In this glimpse, the brief glimmer, the inventions of the city emerge through the ‘traces [converging] in a dense palimpsest’ (Attridge 2004: 139), to which writing responds.

1 The Hieroglyphic Other: The Beetle, London and the Anxieties of Late Imperial England

. . . what a monster must London be, extending (to take it in a line) from the farther end of Chelsea, west, to Deptford-Bridge east, which I venture to say, is at least eleven miles. Daniel Defoe A modern suburb is a place which is neither one thing nor the other. Anon., 1876

I In this, the first chapter of Writing London: Inventions of the City, I wish to propose what might appear at first an untenable hypothesis. From that, and concomitantly projected, I intend to describe and so situate an equally improbable, not to say foolhardy, analogy. Put as directly as possible, it is this: in both the formal composition of Richard Marsh’s most successful novel The Beetle, and in the creation of the creature ‘born of neither god nor man’ for whom this fin de siècle Gothic narrative of the consequences and crisis of empire is named, there are to be discerned peculiar and singular structures and cultural interactions. The encounter with such assumed formal relationships foreground and illuminate that which is occluded or obtusely present in particular urban identities. In their singularity, such forms stage pastiches of specific cultural ontologies analogous with the perception of London at the end of the nineteenth century. Such encrypted forms present the reader with an inscription of historical, cultural and ideological anxiety as a dissonant constitutional component at the empire’s heart, its capital, as well as in those who represent its typical upper- and middle-class types. The complex or pattern of implied normative social relations is opened at a moment of crisis in order to unveil to the reader that which is projected as necessarily grotesque and other within the 8

The Beetle, London and Late Imperial England

9

intercommunications and privileged discourses of the subjects who inform and maintain an otherwise hegemonic grid on which the social order is maintained. This perceived, necessary monstrosity and the accompanying radical undecidability that, in turn, underlies the provisional determination of London as monstrous at the fin de siècle finds its most exemplary and yet troubling figure, as I wish to argue, in Richard Marsh’s ‘liminal man-womangoddess-beetle-Thing’ (Luckhurst 2000: 160). More than merely a figure, the Beetle in its protean transformability that worries at the very definitions of gender and sexuality is, and must be read as, effectively, a trope that resists mastery or control. Moving through the city and a few of its inhabitants’ lives and imaginations, it inscribes a counter-signature to London, thereby intimating those uncontrollable forces that are the city’s own. The Beetle does not merely rewrite the city. Neither does he/she/it simply make urban space complicit in the staging of transgressive acts. In Marsh’s imaginatively constructed night world, London is locus and agent, as well as provisional identity for monstrous otherness. In that Marsh chooses recognizable fictional types drawn from popular literary genres, he produces and writes the city’s late nineteenth-century culture through a few paradigmatic stereotypes, which are, themselves, phatic snapshots of that culture. Into this cultural demi-monde, comes this other hieroglyphic ‘text’, the Beetle. Far from being just some identifiable ‘Oriental other’ however, the Beetle implicates itself into a network of discourses in fiction and culture. In this, it provides the opportunity for Marsh to construct a number of interwoven pastiche narratives of gender, class, institutional and oppositional politics, science, technology, and the economic and ideological bases on which the city thrives. To stress this point again from the outset, such a discursive matrix has less to do with the foreign as such than with the limits of any ontological and ideological programme of definition aimed at self-fashioning. In its radically abyssal and archaic heterogeneity therefore, and through its motions and interactions with the fictional and cultural ‘types’, whose very narratives are themselves stereotypical vignettes, the Beetle serves to focus once more the fears expressed in much fin de siècle literature, whilst also revealing that within the narratives and discourses which is other to them. At the same time, Marsh’s bizarre and fantastic, powerful being also draws attention to particular currents in the popular culture and psyche of late Victorian London, by which the imperial city comes to be aligned with the moral corruption, decay and degeneracy of its fictionalized ‘underworld’. While the creature we call the Beetle has within the novel a signifying materiality intimating radical alterity and ontological instability, it is only the most extreme manifestation of the novel’s destabilizing forces therefore. As I have already proposed, there are those aspects of Marsh’s novel in its formal condition, its contours and trajectories that attain to and signal a fluctuating otherness. In this, the novel itself is excessive beyond hybridity

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or polyvocal play. It presents through its narrative how that series of pastiche first-person tales have neither ground nor centre. Presented sequentially, the narratives’ competing claims deny the possibility of a consensual centre given material manifestation as the city as the heart of empire. This dismantling of the assumption of a ‘heart’ or ‘core’ undoes any privileged meaning for London, thereby demonstrating its own monstrous and mutable state. In this, London is therefore akin to the Beetle in its resistance to a final ontologization. Being haunted by numerous traces of successive states of abjection and otherness from within itself, and moving its narrative along through the frequent display of supplementary statements that offer a critique, directly or otherwise, of the very premises of any stable meaning or identity, both The Beetle and the Beetle, place alterity, abjection and a vertiginous abyss as the axial khoric focal point of all determination. Through this strategy, London is only available therefore as an everchangeable site of fluctuating and variable forms, each of which find or invent the city they require in order to sustain particular boundaries of selfhood. The novel, the creature, the city: a triad then, each trope the duplication and other of every other, and yet singularly other to its others, because of its alterity. We are dealing here with the triplication of a Borromean knot, so lacking in a centre and so intent on erasing the very possibility of a fixed core that the mirroring functions as an ‘apparatus of disclosure’ (Armand 2006: 51). This apparatus, describing and functioning through constantly shifting internal differences, ‘screens, mediates, translates, interprets and metaphorises’ (Armand 2006: 51) in order to unveil a ‘deformation irreducible to any form’, as Derrida puts it in Dissemination (1981: 314). And this, with London as the mise-en-scène for such activity, underwrites its own ghastly spectralization. Marsh’s tripartite apparatus – a catachresis machine perhaps – ‘describes a structural matrix, a mechanism or programme in which the ghost writing of the signifier [but which one, precisely?] in the illusion of a signified marks a schematics’ (Armand 2006: 51) of ‘a lost memory of what is no longer here’ (Derrida 1992b: 31.3). The Beetle’s revenant eruption is just the appalling ‘memory’ of the impossibility of origin, or the recollection, apropos of London, that this too has been one of the dark places of the earth. Cultural consciousness in the narrative is so caught up in the illusion of itself under threat, a threat to self which it misreads as a threat to the illusion of centre and origin, that it cannot read. It fails or avoids reading either its own ‘confusion of arche and mimesis’ (Armand 2006: 52); or it fails to read the Beetle and the otherness of the city as ‘ghosts in the machine’. The spectral excess thus presents urban identity as always other to itself. This is the very meaning, we might say, of a being-there which just is being-in-London, all the elements, signifiers and traits of which are part of what Hélène Cixous calls a ‘metonymic chain where the other place always has its other place’ (1984: 23). Marsh realizes, more than any

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of his contemporaries perhaps, that London ‘gives’ itself as the name of a being of which there is no being, as the name for that which is beyond being or presence. In order to pursue such monstrous analogy, one in which relation fragments rather than making connection, I shall turn first to Marsh’s novel and his creature as the provisional embodiment of those late imperial phobias I have sketched, before offering an analysis of mapping and representation of London in The Beetle. I do so in order to pursue, and so outline, the multiple overdeterminations of the text, addressing in this manner the particular cultural discourses of The Beetle as these together offer a sense of productive disorder that confounds ontology and foregrounds otherness. The Beetle arrives therefore, as if it were some ‘illegal’ immigrant, its ‘illicitness’ (proposed by others) the very device that exposes the competing striations and their points of stress and fracture within the illusion of a ‘present’ identity produced only by the contesting claims of its inhabitants’ desires.

II Published in September 1897 just two months after Dracula, The Beetle is a novel in which the various facets of late Victorian modernity, science, parliamentary democracy, imperial identity, and, most generally expressed, the nineteenth-century investment in the attainability and efficacy of knowledge as a form of power and control are confronted by the non-rational, the inexplicable, the archaic, the other. Taking place in fin de siècle London, and almost entirely at night, it brings together the dominant fears and anxieties of the age, as it confronts through its narrative various dissolutions of personal and cultural identity. It thus exemplifies ‘the post-Darwinian imperial age that is the late nineteenth century’, as Daniel Bivona has it, in which ‘ “knowledge” of the alien Other is being produced on a large scale, and occasioning a crisis in the way England looks at itself’ (1990: 75). As Bivona implies and as is now largely accepted, this alterity is never in any simple fashion external to Englishness. It erupts in numerous places from within that national identity. Moreover, it is arguable that such potentially ruinous fragmentation of identity comes to haunt the very form of the novel itself. The extent to which such a haunting takes place for the reader at the fin de siècle is all the more pronounced when something such as the Beetle, which is so undeniably archaic and capable of shape-shifting, is able to move with apparent ease, not only throughout the streets of London, but to enter its houses and homes. But to pause for a moment: beyond the obvious internal narrative logic that accepts supernaturalism as its necessary premise, what are the conditions by which Marsh’s creature is able to produce such disruption? We might begin by locating such disturbances in the novel’s use of mesmerism, the practice of which was widespread throughout the nineteenth

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century. If we recall briefly many fin de siècle London-texts, such as Dorian Gray, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, any of the Sherlock Holmes tales, or even later texts such as The Secret Agent or The Lodger, the ‘city of dreadful night’ as it was widely understood undoubtedly provides an exemplary site for the hallucinatory and phantasmagoric. One might even venture to suggest that the night world of London offers for the writer endless possibilities for what I wish to define provisionally as the ‘mesmeric’ text. As Alison Winter puts it, ‘Mesmerism was not only ubiquitous but a challenge and threat within Victorian intellectual culture, as experiments became catalysts for competing assertions about the nature and seat of intellectual authority’ (1998: 5). While in Jekyll and Hyde, chemistry provides the narrative ‘trick’ for dividing identity, in The Beetle it is mesmerism. As Robert Holt reflects in his narrative, under the Beetle’s hypnotic power, ‘ “My condition was one of dual personality’ ” (B 69). While being put to legitimate medical uses from the late eighteenth century, mesmerism quickly acquired the patina of a sideshow entertainment, or otherwise suggested non-rational, non-European mysticism. Winter rightly remarks of mesmerism that, from the 1870s onwards, it ‘became the occasion for selfconscious reflections about the basis of race inequalities and the natural laws that helped one people to bend another to its will’ (1998: 7). What is truly unsettling, I would suggest, for the Victorian reader of The Beetle, is that a ‘science’, already suspect, is appropriated by a non-European monstrous other. The Beetle calls into question ‘legitimate’ or more benevolent applications of mesmerism, familiar in the period, for clearly criminal and sexual purposes. Yet it should be noted in passing, this ‘aberration’ concerning the ‘proper’ uses of science implicitly anticipates another element in the narrative, one which is closer to home, practised in someone’s home to be precise. For by its deployment of mesmerism as part of its apparatus of disclosure, The Beetle demands we reflect on the uses of science in the name of the country, through the production of what are now called weapons of mass destruction, which is touched on in the work of the amateur, gentleman scientist of the novel, Sydney Atherton. Atherton invents and constructs deadly weapons for the government to be used overseas in a laboratory in his upper-class home. Here we have a powerful blind-spot within the narrative in which the reader is invited to consider at least what goes on in the homes of the ruling classes. Indeed, Atherton’s ‘improper’ use of his house, his secret practice and understanding of the hieratic discourse of science, particularly its ‘darker’ uses, serves economically to highlight how none of the houses in the novel are homely, all are transgressed in some manner, and not just by the Beetle. Paul Lessingham’s house is the structural site for the return of the repressed in the form of his own alleged foreign transgressions and the minor ‘breakdown’ he suffers as a result of its being brought to light. Marjorie repeatedly disobeys the Law of the Father in the Father’s house, and Holt breaks into

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an unoccupied home. The only ‘house’ put to its ‘proper’ use, conventionally understood, is the House of Commons. Or, looking at this from another perspective, the one already introduced, Marsh takes his readers into the homes of the upper classes, in order to show how there is no propriety as such, no stability. The houses only exist in being transgressed, in having the limits of their boundaries exposed not by something foreign but instead by the other-within, by instances of difference without which the home cannot be defined in its propriety, and yet which it relies on for its definition, for its reflexive grounding and supposed safety and authority. Given that Atherton, Marjorie Linden and Lessingham belong to the upper classes, their homes should in principle figure by synecdoche that which is safe, reassuring and familiar. They are the domestic and private loci of hegemonic power and the ideological values of the status quo – or at least ideological consensus. However, the ruling classes of The Beetle do not behave in their London homes as a middle-class readership might expect of its leaders, of those who are looked to, to set the tone for home life in the capital. Coming back though to the matter of the ‘improper’ use of mesmerism, we should note before going further that ‘impropriety’ is always already inscribed as other in the very concept of propriety. The displacement of this, the occlusion of the necessity of structural difference, is displaced conveniently on to the ‘illegal-foreign’. In being foregrounded in this illicit manner, such uses aim at undermining any self-reflective certainties about the stability of identity, whether one is speaking of class-position, masculinity, femininity, national identity, and indeed a secure belief in one’s own position as a subject of empire. In the hands of the ‘degenerate’ and ‘Gothic’ foreigner, capable of moving about the city ‘ “[u]nseen, in the darkness and the night” ’ (B 65), mesmerism is not merely a narrative device; it is also an effective tool for rewriting ideological assumptions and unquestioned cultural values, whilst ‘translating’ the streets of London into unpredictable locations for its inhabitants’ potential abjection. As a means to unsettle identities and relations in the empire’s capital, it proves efficacious as a narrative device in unleashing irrational and unconscious fears in London. Specifically, Marsh achieves this by providing the Beetle with a counternarrative, and one, which, if taken seriously, may prove to have an undue influence on the susceptible reader. Marsh’s aim then is to undermine conventional justifications of imperial or colonial activity through displaying transgressive, hitherto hidden practices on the part of an Englishman who is also a representative of political power. Specifically, the Beetle strikes at parliamentary power through the pursuit of the Liberal politician Paul Lessingham on the grounds of supposedly justifiable vengeance, by revealing activities on the part of Lessingham, not dissimilar from, and therefore analogous with, those of the Beetle in London. Mesmerism figures as a form of defilement, but of the psyche and not the external, material aspects of a culture.

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From this, mesmerism is clearly readable as an act analogous with sexual penetration, an analogy borne out in both Dracula and The Beetle. There is also a threat through the ‘interpersonal intimacy’ of mesmerism to conventional cultural and psychic constructions of gender – men are described in novels such as Marsh’s as being ‘unmanned’, while women are psychically, if not physically, violated. The Beetle’s mesmeric force is also a colonizing one in effect, a furtive process, pursued under cover of night that ‘conquers’ the citizens of the capital. Furthermore, the specifically sexual threat of this foreign other taps into what Elaine Showalter has described as the fin de siècle’s ‘syphilophobia’ (1985: 88), the anxiety and fear of widespread transmission of sexually transmitted disease. One example of such pathological cultural anxiety can be read in the long-fostered myth that British soldiers would bring sexual diseases with them returning from foreign campaigns, such as those in Egypt and the Sudan throughout the 1880s. It is not too much of a stretch perhaps to read the pervasive, insistent and often seemingly invisible movements of the Beetle throughout the night streets of London as the allegorical or symbolic inscription of the potentially unstoppable threat of a disease within the very heart of empire. Kelly Hurley places this assertion on firmer, more material ground: ‘a paranoiac text like The Beetle serves to reflect and feed into British suspicion of and contempt for Egyptians during a period of heightened British military activity in Egypt’. Additionally for Hurley, ‘it is precisely [the setting of London] which masks the British imperialist project informing and underlying the text’ (1996: 127). The greatest ostensible threat of the foreign other’s application of mesmerism is then to any sense of national, cultural and personal self, of which the sexual and gendered aspects of identity were but the most vulnerable facets. There is though, we should remind ourselves, that other veiled reading, having to do with English domestic improprieties on the part of the upper classes, for which Marsh’s story, and the Beetle, act as apparatuses of discovery. Between the analogies of sexual and psychic penetration and contamination, the constitution of Englishness is under attack, as are the grounds of its authority on the domestic front. Alison Winter remarks that there were ‘two very strong reasons why mesmerism should have made Europeans uneasy: one was the problem of association between the races; the other was the more profound question of what coming under someone’s influence meant in this context’ (1998: 198–9). Allowing the foreign other control over the Englishman or woman, as takes place in Marsh’s novel, produces that imaginative reversal of colonial relations between master and servant, even as within the narrative Marsh produces the association of the ‘vulnerability of the mesmeric subject with colonial subservience’, as we have already implied (Winter 1998: 199). To extend this a little further, the fear of the foreign other’s presence in England in general and in the capital in particular manifests the externalized articulation of the fear of proximity,

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intimacy, contamination and penetration that mesmeric invasion of the subject’s psyche may be read as figuring. In addition, the threat of potential or imminent dangerous and intimate proximity can never be underestimated of course, when the other pursues its schemes at night. The Egyptian Beetle is only ever encountered secreted away, largely unobserved, in an unassuming ‘villa’ in a West London suburb, its own cultural marginality doubled strangely by the middle-class topographic margin of the villa. From here, it unnervingly intrudes or dispatches its agents to penetrate into the private houses of the English ruling classes. In a parallel structure it is found also working its hypnotic way into the minds of the English, in a series of what Roger Luckhurst calls trance-gothic encounters. One particularly disorientating aspect of Marsh’s penetration of the city and its ruling classes arrives via the textual mapping of London, through the mesmerized agency of Holt, and subsequently through his narrative. While Holt offers little description of the streets, he does plot his route through districts and streets to the home of the politician Paul Lessingham: The greater part of the route along which I was driven – I know no juster word – was one with which I had some sort of acquaintance. It led, at first, through what, I take it, was some part of Walham Green; then along the Lillie Road, through Brompton, across the Fulham Road, through the network of streets leading to Sloane Street, across Sloane Street into Lowndes Square. (B 70) Despite the absence of recognizable landmarks or any detail concerning location, the street names provide the reader with very precise, mappable locations. What takes place in this process – and it is a process that is repeated throughout the novel – is that perception and mimetic representation (and with that specific identity) are occluded, as the city becomes reduced to topographical coordinates and denomination. Moreover, the telegraphy of the proper name may be said to heighten the phantasmic state for Holt, if not for the reader. There is though to the list a sense at least of the disorientating rapidity experienced by Holt in his movement across London. Let me take what might appear something of a digression at this moment concerning the suburban erasure of any of the characteristics that make the city districts distinctive from one another. Arguably, it is not only the velocity at which Holt is propelled, through the agency of the Beetle’s supernatural powers, which forestalls any detailed representation of the London streets, their architecture or appearance. It is also, albeit implicitly, the endless – and to some, ineluctable – serial reiteration of rapid terraced expansion of domestic dwellings. This had begun, and had started its creep westward during the 1850s; it was, by the time of Marsh’s novel, ‘radically, even aggressively suburban’ (Porter 1994: 307), as is noted early on in the text. Roy Porter provides exhaustive detail on the suburban transformation of

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London in his comprehensive social history of the city, much of which of course takes place in conjunction with the spread of mass public transport and electricity. Arnold Bennett gives his readers an indication of just how enervating for some the London suburbs can be, when he writes in Riceyman Steps (published the year after The Waste Land) of Mrs Arb, that she ‘abandoned . . . Fulham, where she had been dessicating for two years, and flew to Clerkenwell in an eager mood of adventure’ (RSt 30).1 So lacking in interest are the suburbs that almost anywhere is an improvement. Anonymity, placidity, ennui as the constituent elements of suburban London identity arise through repetition. So does another condition for the subject however, in his or her encounter with the unidentifiable identicality: a kind of quasimesmeric disorientation brought about by incessant recurrence of architectural form. These are the streets of the capital’s suburbs to be found in the novels of H. G. Wells, W. Somerset Maugham, Arthur Machen, Amy Levy and many others. Consider this passage, from Levy’s 1889 novel, Reuben Sachs, which text will be discussed at greater length in Chapter 3: The Walterton Road is a dreary thoroughfare, which, in respect of unloveliness, if not of length, leaves Harley Street, condemned of the poet, [Tennyson, of Wimpole Street, in In Memoriam 7.2] far behind. It is lined on either side with little sordid gray houses, characterized by tall flights of steps and bow-windows, these latter having for frequent adornment cards proclaiming the practice of various humble occupations, from the letting of lodgings to the tuning of pianos. (RS 82–3) Though a different district and rendered in more detail, Levy’s London suburb is essentially the same as those described fleetingly by Robert Holt. The quiet oppressiveness of the fin de siècle suburb is expressed as repeatedly in literature as it was to be found in the last two decades in the capital. Such numbing repetition may well account, I would contend in passing, for the relative lack of detailed description of London street scenes in many later novels of the nineteenth century staged in London, and not a few of the first decades of the twentieth. As the city is remapped, so the novel in the last years of the century redefines its focus away from the City, as if to provide a mediation of its own readers’ identities, and to make the adventures of London relevant to a suburban middle class, whose world was becoming more parochial and circumscribed, in no small part from the sense, however fallacious, that the traditional centres of London and the City were too dangerous, too filled with adventure. Between the tedium of Levy and the abjection of Marsh, there is also the literature of smug self-interest (or at least, a parody of just such a condition). It is just the sense of self-interested insularity and complacency that George and Weedon Grossmith parody through the caricatured figure of Pooter, a city clerk, in the sharply satirical The Diary of a

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Nobody, which first appeared in Punch in 1888, and in volume form in 1892, just five years before Marsh’s novel. I do not intend to spend too much time on this hilarious comedy, so necessary in its time to puncture the pretensions of the petty-bourgeoisie. We can learn an almost inordinate amount though from a few details. Pooter lives on ‘Brickfield Terrace’ (11). The very name of the street is blatantly suggestive of the unending sameness, especially in that oxymoron of a brick field. The house is given a name, ‘The Laurels’, presumably this being the only way to distinguish one’s house from all the others in the street. (Arguably, house numbers would only enforce iterable similarity.) Aspects of the rented house are small and pleasant, unthreatening. There is a ‘little front garden’, a ‘little side entrance’, and a ‘nice little back garden’ (11). Mr Pooter goes to the expense of 5d for a ‘capital little book’ on gardening (22). ‘Enlarged and tinted photographs’ on the walls look very nice’, especially when Mrs Pooter, Carrie as her husband’s diminutive reminds us, adds silk bows to the corners of the frames (92). Pooter’s mode of reference is very telling, for, apropos of nothing, (‘By-the-by’) he draws attention to the photographs for the sake of displaying the Pooter aesthetic sensibility. The Pooters have just one servant, except when they hold their first party seven months after moving in, when their son puts them to the – to Pooter Sr. – unnecessary expense of hiring a waiter for the ‘half-dozen of champagne’ (91); and there is, as in this comment, a constant concern with value for money (the garden backing on to the railway tracks brings about a reduction of the rent by £2; 11). Though the couple suffer ‘no inconvenience’ over a crack in the garden wall, yet inside the house ‘there is always something to be done’ (11). The reader is then afforded a catalogue of domestic adventures: ‘a tin-tack here, a Venetian blind to put straight, a fan to nail up, or part of a carpet to nail down’. Chintz covers are ordered to be made, ‘for our drawing-room chairs and sofa to prevent the sun fading the green rep of the furniture’ (21). The woman ‘called in’ to make the covers is recognized by Mr Pooter, proving reassuringly ‘how small the world is’ (21). The most distressing event in Mr Pooter’s life is the unavailability of good sausages, accompanied by anxiety over a small investment (137). Faced with this, one wonders whether it might not be better to be abducted, if not by a supernatural creature then by aliens; and this in turn leads one to speculate on the reasons why H. G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds. However, to return to The Beetle and the more sensationalist horrors of the suburban location: Before his encounter with the creature, Holt is used initially in the novel to observe the rapid development of suburban housing in West London. Holt is of course Pooter’s other, an unthinkable manifestation of the petty-bourgeois clerk, an abject anticipation of Forster’s Leonard Bast. The point to be made is that alterity is produced by the city, by the mechanisms of a monstrous London far more terrifying to make its own workers invisible to their peers, than any merely imagined foreign creature. The

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novel’s opening is one of the most truly startling scenes in urban literature, with its implicit ideological critique, and with the verbal and physical denial of shelter for someone who is both an inhabitant and product of the city. London is a grotesque nightmarish automaton, producing as its abject waste those whose energies it has employed, and which, in turn, it has rendered as surplus product. Thus Holt’s appearance, homeless amongst the fast developing suburbs with their newly constructed or unfinished ‘homes’ for those not unlike Holt, is an uncomfortable image, to say the least. Of the house in which Holt takes refuge in the first chapter, he remarks: ‘It was one of those so-called villas which are springing up in multitudes all round London, and which are let at rentals of from twenty-five to forty pounds a year’ (B 46). Such fleeting impression of suburban areas such as Hammersmith and West Kensington in the midst of rapid transformation is later supported by remarks of Marjorie Lindon (B 217) and those of Miss Louisa Coleman, who compares the new erections of ‘high-class mansions’ with those already in existence in ‘Grosvenor Square – no shops or public houses, and none of your shanties’ (B 271). Architectural reiteration, planned similarity and, with that, anonymity or at least the erasure of district-specific identity, is implied in the historical vision of suburban development encapsulated in Miss Coleman’s remark. The singularity of identity dissolves – and this is what takes place in Holt’s rapid transport across West London, cited above – even as London spreads like a mutating coral reef (to borrow a favoured metaphor for urban sprawl in the 1890s). Monstrous, hallucinatory, disorientating – phantasmagorical London: the same everywhere and everywhere the same; which paradoxically, in dismantling identities, provides a focus for anxiety and fear through mechanisms of displacement and condensation, as if the city were some huge Freudian psyche, or alien replicating force. Thus, we come to see how, whether externally or internally, the borders of any identity or location are always permeable and always available for haunting in the uncanniest of ways imaginable. Moreover, this permeability is even more pronounced when perceived through the labyrinthine irrationality of London’s topography and street organizations. Like a rhizomic body, the city is open to attack, infection, penetration and infiltration from any direction at any time, but all the more so at night time, when most of The Beetle takes place.

III Typical of many late nineteenth-century novels and short stories, The Beetle explores what Kate Flint has described as ‘the uncertain boundaries between fiction of the supernatural and that which dramatizes the workings of the inner mind’ (2000: 252). In the case of Marsh’s novel, the ‘inner mind’ is the national psyche of fin de siècle imperial Britain. Equally, this psychic space is rendered and projected for both its characters and its readers through

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the perception of a monstrous London, filled with night-time threats – London-phobia in the fin de siècle is the cultural equivalent of US cold war paranoia as encrypted in movies such as Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. Belonging to what Nicholas Daly calls the ‘romance revival’ of the fin de siècle (1999: 4–29), The Beetle exemplifies a form of popular narrative which seeks to accommodate the anxieties of late imperial English national identity, as already remarked. It does so by testing the virility of that identity through the arrival of some threat. Its being set in the Megalopolis of London only serves to exploit and intensify, as well as accommodate, such irrational fears, the difference being that it manifests the threats – for there are more than one – as being of the city, produced by it and belonging to it. It is clear that Marsh’s beetle-human hybrid provides a powerfully exemplary grotesque embodiment of late Victorian anxieties in many ways. Not the least part of this ‘incorporation’ is its encrypted, and therefore at least partially repressed, ‘memory’ – of colonial history in the nineteenth century generally and, in particular, the decade or so prior to the publication of The Beetle. The body is grotesque because it is unstable, excessive, ambiguously traced by so many fragments of identity. It bears ‘the marks of the construction of femininity, “race” and sexuality’ (Halberstam 1995: 252). However, the beetle-creature is readable as a disruptive figure in other ways also. The Beetle gives face to everything that is unstable in late imperial culture. Other characters’ reactions during and after their encounters with the creature serve to produce the novel – and therefore London – as a site onto which is mapped the cultural concerns of the period. Why though, it might be asked, does Marsh choose to make his creature Egyptian? What is there to be read in the relation between Englishness and Egyptian identity? While Dracula’s popularity has been a constant throughout the twentieth century for the obvious reason that the vampire remains to this day a potent, mystified symbol of our fear of the other, Marsh’s exploration of cultural anxiety concerning the occult archaic culture of Egypt may, today, be less immediately apparent. From one perspective, the post-Darwinian pseudo-theories of Havelock Ellis offer a substantial reason. Ellis claims that the ‘true degenerative abnormalities . . . in the lowest human races’ are found most often ‘in Africa . . . among the indigenous fellaheen, Berbers, and negroes of the Soudan’ (1973: 70–1). Socially and historically, there are other equally clear interests at stake. As is well known, English and European, specifically French, interest in Egypt as other has a long history (since the Crusades at least). Such interest manifested itself through colonial, cultural and commercial activities. In 1798, Napoleon invaded Egypt in order to destroy British trade in the Middle East and Britain’s established trade routes through the area. As Edward Said avers, Napoleonic exploits in the Middle East accorded a privileged status to Egyptology (1985: 263) because Ancient Egypt offered, in its model of a dynastic civilization, a legitimation for Napoleon’s own dynastic ambitions.

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In 1799, French soldiers discovered what has since become known as the Rosetta Stone (named after the village in which it was found), the deciphering of which eventually gave access to the decryption of the hieroglyphs found in temples, tombs and pyramids. In 1802, the Rosetta Stone was removed to the British Museum in London, where Jean François Champollion eventually decoded its combination of hieroglyphs, demotic script and Greek in 1822. In 1801, the Ottomans, in alliance with the British, forced the withdrawal of Napoleon’s troops, the British being able to reestablish commercial and colonial interest in Egypt and surrounding regions. While British cultural interest in Egypt and all aspects of Egyptology developed throughout the century, the British strengthened their position in Egypt throughout the Victorian period. With a century of close commercial, political and cultural involvement and investment must come sustained, if misread, perceptions of the foreign other. The Beetle channels and exploits a number of fears, anxieties and obsessions concerning different manifestations of the other in a narrative typical of much fiction of the time, one that mediated cultural anxiety. What gives all the more force to the irrational threat of the Beetle is that its foreign, non-European alterity is so intimately enfolded with its ancient and irrational nature, whereby Marsh mines what Robert Mighall describes as ‘the major organizing figure of the Gothic’, which is its ‘imputation of anachronism as a source of disorder’ (1999: 249). Extremity of cultural age, with its hint of the ‘unnatural’ prolongation of life, ‘disorders’ notions of life itself, especially when the sources of this ‘life’ are religious practices so at odds with the transcendent beliefs of late Victorian Christianity. Beyond its strategic topographical and practical economic value, if Egypt’s exotic cultural appeal throughout the nineteenth century for the English lay in the remnants of its pre-Christian antiquity, then that very same archaic identity is also the source of its perceived threat. That antiquity, suggestive of an empire and civilization as well as a culture analogous with modern imperial and colonial identity, is disruptive and disturbing because, while being similar in some regards, that resemblance nonetheless operates only through the disjunctive reminders of its also being other. For the archaism of Egyptian civilization is not simply figured as the survival of a single predatory and vengeful figure. This hybrid creature, symbol in Marsh’s grotesque and phantasmal narrative of an entire culture, serves as an uncanny reminder that empires, religions and dynasties do not last forever, but leave only the material reminders of their own mortality, haunting us because we see in them our own corporeal, cultural and historical finitude. Thus, the figure of the Beetle operates as a singular and disquieting example of the Freudian uncanny, in a number of ways. As is known, the uncanny is defined as that which causes feelings of horror and dread in the most familiar places, the places where one should feel the safest. In The Beetle, this is simultaneously London, the centre and capital of empire, and

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the houses of the ruling classes in that city. Also, the figure of the Beetle produces ontological and gender uncertainty; it doubles, divides and exchanges a series of selves, while its returns and appearances may be read as ‘the constant recurrence of the same thing’ (Freud 210). In its doubleness and as representative of a long-vanished culture the Beetle’s uncanny resonance is most discomforting. The creature is suggestive of both an ‘assurance of immortality’ and ‘the uncanny harbinger of death’ (Freud 210).2 More than this, the Beetle is available for a reading of it as trope for that which is neither dead nor alive, but which returns and hovers between either condition. In this, it has the potential for ‘awakening uncanny feelings . . . created when there is intellectual uncertainty whether an object is alive or not’ (Freud 208). Furthermore, Freud argues, ‘many people experience the feeling in the highest degree in relation . . . to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts’ (218). From this, Freud finds it hardly surprising that in modern cities spiritualist shows and related phantasmagorical entertainments abound, promising to bring back the dead, and this is advertised in Marsh’s text through the recourse to mesmerism. In our fascination with processes such as telepathy, mesmerism and spiritualism, Freud sees in modern urban humanity the vestiges of a collective ‘primitive’ fear (219). In doing so, he acknowledges that which is other and repressed within us, something archaic and intrinsic to identity rather than being externally other. This is of course an important aspect of The Beetle and is unfolded through the Beetle’s synecdochic function of standing in for the archaism of Egypt, which, I would contend, offers to impose upon the English of the novel generally and through the ‘contamination’ of London specifically an unpleasant recognition concerning the colonial and imperial mission. To read The Beetle against the grain of its fin de siècle fear of the other, where barbarism is located in Egypt and civilization in London, it has to be argued that the human-scarab hybrid pursues the politician Paul Lessingham, less from some irrational and barbaric Oriental blood-lust than out of a sense of injustice for the ‘barbaric’ English defilement of ancient Egypt’s sacred locations, where tomb and temple have become defaced as a result of colonial and imperial intrusion, and by colonialism’s by-product, tourism. Thus, from such a counter-reading, it can be said that the other, the not-self that returns, arrives not from another location, but from within one’s own identity, as a necessary yet repressed mirror of the self that is so much the concern of late imperial English literature.

IV From all that has been said so far, it is clear that The Beetle is a novel materially engaged in an imaginative encryption of historical, cultural and political fears emanating from and mediating particular aspects of the English psyche

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at the end of the nineteenth century. The Beetle is, moreover, exemplary of a world without a stable centre. This is a world where identity is never identical with itself, where all that can be said, of the Beetle for example, that it/he/she is ‘the same, yet not the same’, as Robert Holt has it (B 60). In this it certainly offers one analogical model for perceiving not only London, but, admittedly much more indirectly, the perception of London at the fin de siècle, in a world in which the figure of Babylon was so overused as denomination tending towards representation as to have any significance erased from it. Additionally, The Beetle – and the Beetle – figure as sites for the focus of anxiety in an almost perpetually night-time London, capital of nation and empire, in which the very possibility of agency, whether individually or collectively on the part of the English, is called into question. The London the reader encounters in Marsh’s novel abounds with elements recognizable from many other fin de siècle mysteries. It is an inhospitable, largely nocturnal city, where darkness and adverse weather conditions make possible, while simultaneously hiding, criminal and transgressive behaviour. However, Marsh’s London is not purely this. For the novel begins with representations of the city that, while partaking of tropes recognizably similar to those that construct the images of the city in the works of authors such as Conan Doyle, R. L. Stevenson, Bram Stoker and Oscar Wilde, belong also to more realist and naturalist fictions, such as those, for example, of Walter Besant, George Gissing or George Moore, or Arthur Morrison. In presenting the narration of the tramp Robert Holt, homeless and wandering the streets of West London in search of a night’s accommodation in the Casual Ward, Marsh offers the reader a glimpse, however fleetingly, into the wretched existence of the capital’s poorest inhabitants, the conditions of whom are a by-product of the city. What is all the more startling about the particular image of Holt is that he is not from the working classes but had been a clerk until his dismissal. Furthermore, Marsh stages the initial scene not in the East End of London, as is commonly the stereotypical setting for late Victorian Gothic, but in the upper and, as we have remarked, largely middle-class districts of West London, from Kensington to Fulham. In small, subtle ways therefore, The Beetle is available as staging an alternative, possibly estranging vision of the city for its readers that is unveiled from the contest between the tropes of fin de siècle sensation and those of the text of social realism, while displacing narrative events belonging to both genres from their already clichéd site in the 1880s and 1890s, East London. Admittedly, Marsh’s acts of what may be described as cultural and literary revision are not sustained in any significant way. However, what is effected in this manner is a disruption in both the literary codes of urban representation and the narratives that are informed by such codes. The city’s identity is made to tremble, as are its ontologies and epistemologies of representation. Not only this, but also it is not impossible that, in such gestures, The Beetle invites one to reflect on the identity of literary models beyond their

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diegetic codes or mimetic commonplaces. Events occur in places that they should not, borderlines are crossed both in the imagined topography of the city and in the modalities of genre. London in this particular guise is therefore the ‘same, yet not the same’, to borrow Holt’s words once more. Identities are mixed and thus confounded. What, it might be asked, makes this possible in the first place? Arguably, London itself, already perceived by countless cultural commentators and novelists as monstrous, labyrinthine, a ‘Babylon’ indefinable and irreducible to a single identity, excessive beyond hybridity, amorphous, and endlessly heterogeneous, heteromorphous and heterographic. Apprehending such conditions as being of the very ‘nature’ of the city, we might come to understand how the Beetle is, after a fashion, the most typical London inhabitant; its is the most appropriate identity within a city which, like itself, cannot be fixed as a single identity. To risk hyperbole, it may be averred that, not falling under any single category of identity or identification, not only is the Beetle more a ‘Londoner’ than any of the other characters, it is the only Londoner. Unable to belong or to remain as itself, within itself, and therefore always subject to (of) translation, it is in a strange way homeless, and therefore uncanny. And it is just this condition of beinghomeless, being-uncanny, that marks the Beetle, even as it marks the text that bears its name, as the counter-signature to London, that other denomination for which there is no referent, no thing without difference. The city thus dictates the writing of the Beetle, even as that creature returns to the city the archaic traces and traits of excessive, abyssal and improper identification that analogously re-mark London. In this abyssal relation without relation that I am mapping here, at once hetero-topic and hetero-tropic, a certain textual drift is readable as underway from the very beginning of the novel. Such textual drift ‘contaminates’ the very writing of The Beetle itself. For the novel is without proper form. Not formless, but improperly formed, deformed and disfigured within and across itself, The Beetle has no single identity, no single narrative presentation. From its inauguration with its mixing of genres; through its multiple narrative relays between narrators and within narrators; from parody of ‘New Woman’ fiction to pastiche of detective genre, the excess beyond identity and the simultaneous resistance to any simple or single identity of The Beetle announces its own ‘impure’ affiliations, its relation without relation, both to the creature to which the title refers and to the city that makes possible and authors all such narratives. To return to London and its representation: in making Holt homeless, in expelling him from any ‘home’, whether by home one refers to a dwelling or an identity, the city authorizes the narrative that figures the city. Thus, the experience of the city returns to the reader as one of estranging abjection and unhomeliness. Nothing is familiar in the ephemeral images of the city’s material conditions, either in those images of architecture or topography, afforded the reader in Holt’s narrative. Take Holt’s following commentary:

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The rain was like a mist, and was not only drenching me to the skin, but it was rendering it difficult to see more than a little distance in any direction. The neighbourhood was badly lighted. It was one in which I was a stranger, I had come to Hammersmith as a last resource. (B 45) First speed and now the atmospheric limitation as well as the lack of illumination imposed on sight estrange the subject from any possible familiarity with place. Homeless and a stranger, Holt’s experience of the location re-enforces a sense that any object by which the self can find its orientation or grounding is spectacularly absent. Such effect – or perhaps we should say such affect – is all the more pronounced by the physical limits on vision, on which Holt remarks slightly further in the same passage: Retreating from the inhospitable portal of the casual ward, I had taken the first turning to the left, – and, at the moment, had been glad to take it. In the darkness and the rain, the locality which I was entering appeared unfinished. I seemed to be leaving civilisation behind me. The path was unpaved; the road rough and uneven, as if it had never been properly made. Houses were few and far between. Those which I did encounter, seemed, in the imperfect light, amid the general desolation, to be cottages which were crumbling to decay. Exactly where I was I could not tell. I had a faint notion that, if I only kept on long enough, I should strike some part of Walham Green. How long I should have to keep on I could only guess. Not a creature seemed to be about of whom I could make inquiries. It was as if I was in a land of desolation. (B 45) What is to be observed especially in both passages is the sense of defamiliarization of the self in relation to location. In the second of the two passages, Holt begins by acknowledging specific directions. His memory offers particular bearings. Yet immediately, as soon as a direction is chosen, sight has imposed on it limitation and restriction due to the darkness and rain, and Robert Holt observes immediately the incomplete condition of the location in which he finds himself. If we accept Heidegger’s suggestion that dwelling is the condition brought about by the relation between being and space, and, from there to the relation between space and the desired grounding that location affords (1971: 155), then clearly for Holt his sense of being is violated – by the limits of orientation, the limit of vision, the incomplete structural condition of location, and the apparent sense of no longer being, as he puts it, in ‘civilisation’. That this is not merely Holt’s experience alone is undeniable. Rather it is a shared phenomenal encounter, wherein there is apprehended the condition of the uncanniness of being, and of the articulation of a kind of Dasein in the city. This may be acknowledged through comparision with the

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experience of another character, Marjorie Lindon. Although there is not the space to go into the comparison in any detail, the following passage will allow the reader to consider what is shared between the two characters. Marjorie’s description of the experience of place refers to the same location as that in which Holt had found himself. Despite Marjorie’s encounter occurring in the daytime, her experience is not at all dissimilar. Here is the account in her own words, taken from her narrative: The road he had chosen seemed to lead to nothing and nowhere. We had not gone many yards from the workhouse gates before we were confronted by something like chaos. In front and on either side of us were large spaces of waste land. At some more or less remote period attempts appeared to have been made at brick-making, – there were untidy stacks of bilious-looking bricks in evidence. Here and there enormous weather-stained boards announced that ‘This Desirable Land was to be Let for Building Purposes.’ The road itself was unfinished. There was no pavement, and we had the bare uneven ground for sidewalk. It seemed, so far as I could judge, to lose itself in space, and to be swallowed up by the wilderness of ‘Desirable Land’ which lay beyond. In the near distance there were houses enough, and to spare – of a kind. But they were in other roads. In the one in which we actually were, on the right, at the end, there was a row of unfurnished carcases, but only two buildings which were in anything like a fit state for occupation. One stood on either side, not facing each other, – there was a distance between them of perhaps fifty yards. The sight of them had a more exciting effect on Mr Holt than it had on me. (B 217) Marjorie’s is a representation that emphasizes yet again incompletion, an absence of any proper identity and, with that, an accompanying indeterminacy; chaos and disorder, decay before completion – these are all to be read. The tropes of urban representation are mobile and imprint themselves on the language of the city’s different subjects. What Marjorie’s observations do seem to support therefore is that, while Holt’s mental condition is not completely stable, how he sees the city is not peculiar to him. It is, instead, the very condition of certain aspects of London, which aspects produce particular effects in the rhetoric of urban representation at the fin de siècle. London alienates and makes abject, doing so through the inscription of its spectral imprimatur. That language attests to the otherness of the city is fully in evidence here. What is seen and responded to quickly reaches exhaustion in verbal representation. This is neither chaos nor the absence of chaos, only ‘something like’ that state, a liminal approximation, the condition being unapproachable except by vague simile. The road goes nowhere, and leads to nothing, Marjorie’s second provisional definition, following chaos, of a ‘waste land’, inadvertently anticipating T. S. Eliot’s title in the separation of

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the two terms. That which can be expressed comes about in what might be readable as a pastiche of archaeological or ethnographic discourse, with its references to anonymous activity at ‘more or less remote periods’. So unavailable is any appropriate language indeed that Marjorie perhaps registers her own disconcerting unease in her quasi-anthropomorphic representation of bricks as ‘bilious-looking’. This strange animal apprehension is further taken up in the image of buildings as carcasses. Everywhere in the passage, Marjorie admits to her own perplexity. While the site, and, to risk the pun, the sight of the site, has a ‘more exciting effect’ on Holt than on Marjorie, the signs are there inescapably that Marjorie is also affected in her disorientation, and hence in her reading of the location. This abject reflection on being is further disoriented by the doubly anachronistic experience of location. For, on the one hand the area appears as if it stood outside civilization, and thus had returned as some atavistic hallucination, while, on the other hand, the site is suggestive of some postapocalyptic moment. Desolation and decay – watchwords for the fin de siècle – signify this alternative temporal moment. Thus, we read the city through Holt as the experience of past and future, but not as some present. We would also do well to recall at this juncture that Holt’s experience is a result of the encounter with the city, and therefore his perception, however disorientated, estranging and hallucinatory, is not the result of the Beetle’s mesmeric powers. For the tramp’s mise-en-scène threatens to collapse into a state of mise-en-abyme. It is of course the effect, at least in part, both of atmospheric conditions and the entry into an area the building of which is not yet finished; furthermore though, these are undeniably the effects of homelessness, exhaustion, and lack of nutrition. All of these are caused by the city, not by some monstrous or alien other. Unless one is forced to admit that monstrous alien other just is London. In Holt’s narrative we read what Julia Kristeva has called, apropos of Céline, ‘a narrative of suffering and horror’ (1982: 140),3 which in Holt’s case is produced by London. If the subject has no proper place, no appropriate location in which to ground himself, then ‘suffering’ is articulated ‘as the place of the subject. Where it emerges, where it is differentiated from chaos’, in this case the chaos that is the city-in-ruins, not as a result of decay but because London is undergoing the experience of rapid, protean and excessive transformation. And the result is that through his perceptions, his bearing witness to such violent upheaval, Holt the Londoner affirms through observation of unbearable incompletion that sense of ‘Being’ that Kristeva describes as ‘ill-being’. The sickness of Being imposed by London (and which, perhaps, may be ascribed as one factor in any provisional identity for the city also) comes to a pitch when Holt says ‘I looked about me, in a kind of frenzy’ (B 46). There can be no doubt that it is as a result of urban social forces that have produced this psychic disorder in Holt, and it is only the sudden consciousness of a

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house – of a supposedly familiar, and therefore safe location – that saves this abject figure, later described by Sydney Atherton as a ‘City quilldriver out of a shop’ (B 255). Atherton’s casual phrase offers a passing but nonetheless telling reminder of the direct link between the City and Holt’s state of being. This being the case, arguably the Beetle’s mesmeric power only serves to reveal the full extent of Holt’s condition. Indeed, while mesmerism may account for much, in a later statement concerning his trance-induced propulsion through London, Robert Holt observes the following: All the way I never met a soul. I have since wondered whether in that respect my experience was not a normal one; whether it might not have happened to any. If so, there are streets in London, long lines of streets, which, at a certain period of the night, in a certain sort of weather – probably the weather had something to do with it – are clean deserted; in which there is neither foot-passenger nor vehicle, – not even a policeman. [. . .] Who goes that way goes some distance, and goes through some important thoroughfares; yet not a creature did I see, nor, I imagine, was there a creature who saw me. As I crossed Sloane Street, I fancied that I heard the distant rumbling of a vehicle along the Knightsbridge Road, but that was the only sound I heard. (B 70) That Holt’s testimony to desertion raises the spectre of the undecidable simply by its being articulated presents the reader with the impression that London, at a certain period, in a certain sort of weather, may have, in fact, the ‘power’ to produce uncanny effects. Look at the language Holt employs: he speaks of wondering retrospectively, attesting to the way in which his experience remains to haunt his mind. He acknowledges the abnormality of the events. His speculation that the experience might have occurred for others speaks to that sense that the effect is produced by London. The first and second passages are structured around undecidable reflections and negations, as well as corollary images of absence. And Holt speaks of imagining and fancying. What is most uncanny about London in this representation is not the absence of life, but that of sound. Is it in fact the city then causing this condition and the registration of effects on Holt? How can we know? How do we tell? The answers to these questions are, inevitably enough, that we cannot. However, in this aporetic moment, what we might glimpse is precisely the possibility that to apprehend the city at all is to recognize and so bear witness to that uncanny encounter as the unpredictable event which London makes possible. Its secret is there, but encrypted in its very being such hieroglyphic inscription remains untranslatable. To put this somewhat

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differently: for the perceiving subject to experience the city in such extreme moments is to encounter, and subsequently recognize, ‘the existence of an Other . . . analogous to the I which is the subject of perception’ (Augé 1999: 96). The mirror phase is reversed as Marc Augé, just cited, goes on to suggest; one apprehends that the ‘Other is an I’ (1999: 96). In the example offered by Richard Marsh, this apprehension is truly terrifying inasmuch as what the other4 makes known is that there is no stable ground to being, to identity, or therefore to any narrative by which one claims to orient oneself. Beyond any immediate social or economic abjection (even though these are admittedly not insignificant), London, a figure without proper figure for absolute alterity, gives one to know the groundlessness of one’s own being. If there is no sustained representation of London in The Beetle except for the dim, amorphous, uncanny perception of a ‘there’ that is never totalizable as a ‘there’, this is perhaps because The Beetle is readable as an endless reminder that alterity is unrepresentable as such, that it has no finite form. This is so whether one focuses on the momentary passing references to the city as a topographical surface reduced to a few district and street names, or whether one considers the structure of the novel or the ‘liminal man-woman-goddess-beetle-Thing’ to which the title signals, and yet which has no identity properly speaking. In this light, the extremity of Holt’s condition is available to us because he appears to apprehend fully the encounter with the other before he ever encounters the Beetle. The Beetle merely serves as some provisionally determinable threat against which the English can gather, and offer themselves, the illusion that identity can be stabilized once the other is destroyed. The irony of course is that in the aftermath of the train wreck at Luton, no signs can be found that the Beetle is destroyed. It has disappeared; it is as if it were merely a phantasm, the sign of some cultural psychosis, a displaced metaphor for all that London exacts as capital city and ‘centre’, so-called, of empire. Whatever assurance of identity there may be found is only temporary in The Beetle and always ambiguous at best. We may notice this when Augustus Champnell observes of St Pancras station that, though it is in darkness and deserted (the absence of life here seems to point to a condition of the uncanny city once again, rather than being locatable as a symptom of Holt’s), ‘[a]n occasional light seemed to make the darkness still more visible’ (B 311). London, it may be argued, is the manifestation of ‘darkness visible’.

V The purpose of any detective is to answer questions, to provide solution and resolution, to enact discovery and, where necessary, recovery. The hired sleuth is therefore the very agent of urban romance. The late Victorian or Edwardian confidential agent is also meant to serve in literature as prosopopoeic manifestation of a force, the principal purpose of which is to

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assuage the anxieties and fears of the culture at large: ‘Detective literature deals with disturbance and destabilization as much as crime per se . . . Detective literature . . . confronted Edwardian issues such as gender redefinition, capitalism, cosmopolitanism, social class, international diplomacy, race deterioration and imperial policy’ (Kestner 2000: 7). A number of these issues are already at stake in The Beetle and it is Augustus Champnell, the detective whose narrative concludes The Beetle, who might present the promise of bringing matters to a conclusion. Yet, this is doubtful. For Champnell’s final remarks admit to the undecidability that is announced everywhere in the disturbing signs that serve in the presentation of late Victorian London. Through Champnell, it is revealed that the tramp Holt’s narrative, presented first in the novel, is found to be a composite, not his own first-person report but rather compiled instead ‘from the statements which Holt made to Atherton, and to Miss Lindon’. The detective thus presents the reader with the hitherto hidden textual basis on which the narration of events comes to be constructed. Several writings generate further acts of writing, enmeshing one in a textual web. Furthermore, while Champnell begins Book IV with an assertive statement of fact – ‘On the afternoon of Friday, June 2, 18—’ (B 235) – the purpose of which is to suggest precision, attention to detail and reassuring certainty, he concludes what he calls ‘the Mystery of the Beetle’ with the assertion: ‘I do not propose to pronounce a confident opinion. Atherton and I have talked it over many and many a time, and at the end we have got no “forrader”.’ So far as I am personally concerned, experience has taught me that there are indeed more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy, and I am quite prepared to believe that the so-called Beetle, which others saw, but I never, was – or is, for it cannot be certainly shown that the Thing is not still existing – a creature born neither of God nor man. (B 322) These remarkable statements, which are also the final words of Marsh’s novel, oscillate wildly. They shuttle between recourse to fragile faith and subjective experience; they veer between the suspensive modality of belief – what if? asks Champnell – and the absence of empirical data. No amount of discussion can resolve these issues. The confidential agent and the scientist, representatives of the ruling class, are forced to confront, thereby experiencing the aporia with which each man is confronted, that philosophical impossibility or undecidability leading in this narrative not to closure but to an abyssal impasse. London leaves one without passage, and from that only the confession of doubt. Such confrontation and experience is unsettling, causing the late-imperial English mind to reflect on the absolute limit of its inquiry and the impossibility of reaching a solution. The other renders

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the English helpless, impotent. Invoking Hamlet’s attestation of the limits of the imaginative faculty, the detective admits to the boundaries not only of the knowable but also of what language may express or serve to represent. This is hardly reassuring coming from a representative of the modern science of forensics, whose primary purpose is to interpret the evidence in the name of the Law. It is to be noticed also that the creature is only provisionally named, while, chillingly, there is the implication that it can always return again, and again. In addition, there is that final comment, which registers a radical undecidability concerning the creature, and with that, the failures of analysis, whether grounded in empiricism, forensics or ontology. All the more disturbing for the reader perhaps is the fact that the failure of detection and determination on which the Englishman relies – on which, I would argue, national identity is initially and ultimately reliant – is not peculiar either to Champnell’s or to Atherton’s own abilities or lack thereof. We may begin to read this, I believe, as a more general condition of the English experience of the foreign other. This is interpretable in the fragmentary and reiterated use of negation throughout the final chapter. Years, we are told, have passed, or else Champnell ‘should not have felt justified’ in recounting the mystery of the Beetle (B 319). The detective ‘declines’ to specify the number of years (B 319). Marjorie Lindon’s recovery was ‘not merely an affair of weeks or months’ (B 319). Paul Lessingham is not Paul Lessingham; or rather, this is the fictional name given to protect the real public figure behind it (B 319). Nothing has ever been said, Champnell assures us, to Marjorie about the catastrophic events she underwent at the hands – or should that be pincers? – of the Beetle, while ‘she herself has never alluded to it’ (B 319). Curiously, Champnell is insistent on Marjorie’s ‘mute’, traumatized condition with regard to the experience. He says twice more that she cannot speak of it (B 321, 322), though he does insist on her strange iterable compulsion to tell in writing – ‘she told, and re-told, and re-told again’ (B 322) – of her love and ordeal. Champnell also points out that Marjorie may have no memory of what happened and so, ‘what actually transpired will never, in all human probability, be certainly known’ (B 320). Neither will the fate of the Beetle ever be found out: ‘to this hour these things are puzzles’ (B 320). Paul Lessingham, the reader is informed, cannot bring himself to speak of beetles. Finally, beyond the immediate details of this narrative, Champnell is compelled to narrate a tale concerning the destruction of a remote location, ‘some curious subterranean building . . . the den of demons described by Paul Lessingham’, in the Egyptian desert (B 320–1). Following an explosion, witnesses discover the remains of bodies, which, while neither men nor women, appear, it is alleged – though without ‘scientific examination’ (and thereby open to disbelief and speculation) – to be ‘of creatures of some monstrous growth’ (B 320). Champnell’s final narrative is in ruins itself, in a writerly performative replication of the ‘den of demons’. The detective’s

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account is nothing more than so many negative fragments, the negating force of which is cumulative in its effect on the reader as narrative description slides irreversibly into a performative speech act, so that the absence of knowledge spreads like a virus everywhere throughout the narrative, becoming an inextricable part of it. Even the cause of the death of Robert Holt could ‘never certainly [be] shown’ (B 321). The reader is left, at the conclusion of The Beetle, confronted by the signs of undecidability everywhere. Unlike Stoker’s Dracula, Marsh’s avenging creature leaves no signs that it has been conclusively, finally destroyed. Not all the forces of modernity, deployed in concerted fashion, can rid the empire of this ‘creature born neither of God nor man’, to call up the most haunting line of the text, its very last, in which negation opens, once more, onto an abyssal undecidability, all ontology rejected in the face of this radical other. Champnell’s final words expose the futility of asking the instituting ontological question, ‘what is . . . ?’ so that we are forced to admit that the book does not so much conclude as it confronts us with just this uncanny encounter with, and (appropriately for our understanding of the city) experience of, the aporetic. The text confronts us with irresolvable contradictions. Nothing can be said for sure, except that one can only admit the impossibility of saying anything other than to bear witness to an undecidable narrative event, which nevertheless calls for some response. In this, Richard Marsh’s novel is ultimately, like the Beetle, monstrous, a figure of catachresis, having no proper identity as such, being resistant to any single determination. Recognizing this, and given also the multiple ways in which the Beetle (and The Beetle) are readable as being signed and counter-signed by many of the dominant anxieties of late Victorian culture, it might be necessary to understand the Beetle in a manner that departs from a literal apprehension of the creature’s existence within the logic of the narrative. We should not read this figure as a supernatural creature, or indeed any form of being that we are expected to accept as more or less real. Instead, it is more productive, if more difficult, to approach it as an effect of some hieroglyphic writing; to see it as a trace irreducible to any particular meaning, and yet one which causes a proliferation of interpretation. In order to accept this, one would have to recognize that it is important that one suspends one’s conventional reading habit – ‘the naïve opening that once linked the text to its thing, referent or reality’ (Derrida 1981: 43) – of perceiving an implied empirical object or metaphysical concept beyond the words on the page. Another way to put this is to propose the following: that we resist treating the Beetle as a character, in any conventional sense or habit of reading. We should not give in to the temptation of perceiving this figure as an anthropomorphized embodiment of attitudes, rhetorical figures and descriptive language, beliefs and other systems of thought, gathered together and animated by the work of the proper name. Rather, we might attempt to decipher it in that other sense of character. We might wish to read it as a mark,

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inscription or engraving, a graphic symbol if you will, a form or system of writing; or a cipher the purpose of which is to encrypt and therefore make secret communication not about some other culture but about the other of our own cultures and identities. It is impossible, of course, to abandon altogether the phantasmic ‘reality’ that we, as readers, conjure whenever we read. It is though nonetheless necessary, I would contend, that we attempt to put the breaks on this process as far as possible with regard to the example of the Beetle. I argue this only because there is such an hysterical rush in the novel, in which the unwary reader can be swept away, in support of the cultural and ideological condemnation of the other given monstrous form. I am not suggesting that we humanize the Beetle – the novel already engages in just enough anthropomorphization in order to make the creature appear even more monstrous – in some simplistic dialectical opposition to the hegemonic colonial discourse already exposed. Rather, we should assume a reading habit at once cautious and suspicious of anything that would impose itself on us as logical, inevitable, or – scariest of all – common sense. Treating the Beetle as if it were only a ‘real’ monster would be to succumb to such common sense. If therefore we cannot help reading the Beetle as an organism, it has to be comprehended as an organism that, as I have already argued, resolutely resists any final commentary aimed at a firm identification. In coming to terms with this paradox, while holding out the possibility that one can do justice to the Egyptian other in its own terms, it might be necessary, in conclusion, ‘to consider that organism as a hieroglyphic text’ (Derrida 1986: xxviii). In this, it has to be said that far from being some merely externalized and abject other the Beetle is, if not the figure par excellence, then at the very least what I have called a counter-signature for London itself. The very writing of this hetero-graph charges us to turn our gaze back on the monstrous city at the close of the nineteenth century. It demands that we turn our attention to that for which we have no adequate language, though it remains nevertheless our invention. As counter-signature, it bespeaks a city, in the face of breakdown, the desire for annihilation, amnesia and epistemological crisis, ‘resistant to the cognitive regimen of history’ (Luckhurst 2002: 530), or indeed any other mode of determinable perception or ordering. As counter-signature to the city, the Beetle is both ‘gothic fragment’ and ghostly revenant. It serves in presenting the city through the limits of its inhabitants to read it, and the breakdown of both their readings and themselves to varying degrees. The inhabitants of London we encounter are unable to elaborate the contexts for that specific topography of ‘this London Gothic’ and ‘this modern-Gothic London’. The Beetle – and The Beetle – thus punctuate and so contribute to London’s aesthetic of resistance, as Roger Luckhurst has it of the purpose of finding, reading and inventing the gothic fragment (Luckhurst 2002: 533). The ‘violence of reading the ghost’ (Luckhurst 2002: 542) in this manner therefore speaks to

The Beetle, London and Late Imperial England

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that which Paul Lessingham, Marjorie Lindon, Sidney Atherton, Robert Holt and Augustus Champnell are unable to articulate: the politics of a London at the end of the nineteenth century and the ‘demand of its specific symptomatology and its specific locale[s]’ (Luckhurst 2002: 542). In this, the haunting force of the Beetle is not as some archaic ‘find’, the result of a colonial-archaeological ‘adventure’ concerned with the ‘origins of civilizations and knowledge’. It is rather a violent phantom inscription attesting to repressed, traumatic memories of the City’s identity, awaiting recovery from within the city itself.

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2 The ‘tortuous geography of the night world’: ‘Productive disorder’ and the Noctuary Text

One can only believe entirely, perhaps, in what one cannot see. Virginia Woolf, Orlando I have got a Parcel of Visions and other Miscellanies in my Noctuary. Spectator, 1714 The suburban evening was grey and yellow on Sunday; the gardens of the small houses to left and right were rank with ivy and tall grass and lilac bushes; the tropical South London verdure was dusty above and mouldy below; the tepid air swarmed with flies. Eeldrop, at the window, welcomed the smoky smell of lilac, the gramophones, the choir of the Baptist chapel, and the sight of three small girls playing cards on the steps of the police station. T. S. Eliot, ‘Eeldrop and Appleplex’

I What might that phrase, ‘the tortuous geography of the night world’, taken from Gerald Kersh’s novel Night and the City (2001: 33), give us to comprehend about the possibilities of writing London, however indirectly? What might be read as arriving, or what might reading invent beyond the obvious or more literal connotations of images and representations of London at night? Why attempt a recuperation of the phrase, with all due attention to the suggestiveness of a tortuous geography for a reading of the formal aspects of urban writing, beyond those immediate connotations? And finally, what is to be read in the idea and discourses of a ‘night world’ unmoored and set adrift from the overburdened association with representations of an amoral underworld, when considering how one writes London, and how London dictates that we write it? The questions just articulated will be addressed through a consideration of passages that share a focus on transition and the 37

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liminal, on motions, fluctuations, occasionally atmospheric conditions, and also the perception of urban and suburban representation that is transient, sometimes fragile, and ephemeral. Twilight, evening, night; crepuscular and nocturnal times – these involve shifts that are not only matters of temporal motion and changes to visibility; they are also associated in western culture with a movement away from rational thought, organized observation and coherent perception, to sensation, sensual and phenomenal apprehension, from knowing to feeling in fact, if I may put it so baldly. As was observed in the previous chapter, Richard Marsh’s The Beetle stages most of its action at night time. The night, much more than a setting, becomes, if not a character, then a constituent element in the modes of discourse and aspects of subjective interpretation and memory. The night promises to loosen the hold on the world, to open to the city wanderer or observer a sensate rather than a strictly knowable world, a world of impressions and signs not yet resolved into a coherent semantic or epistemological whole. Understood from another perspective, twilight and night, put to work particularly from the mid-to-late nineteenth century onward by writers of London, make possible just such a loosening. Through this, as we shall have occasion to consider, writing the city does not shift in its representations simply from the logical to the sensate. It is not a matter of a simple binary opposition, the polar concepts and ontologies of which remain in place, the boundaries immovable or inflexible. Instead, in responding to the conditions and atmospherics of dusk and evening, along with a nascent, impressionist acuity about that which we now call light pollution, writers address and work with the permeable, the porous, the almost diaphanous, in order to hint suggestively at an other poetics and an other logic for the ‘night world’ of London. What we will come to terms with, effectively, is a poetics of multiplicity, a logic, as Gilles Deleuze has it, of sense. As Deleuze argues, and as we shall see illustrated across the texts of several writers, largely from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (though with some important references from texts outside these parameters), a logic of sense and event rather than one of predication and truth dictates the acts of writing London (Deleuze 1990: 111). This in turn opens to our view the city not as a problem for representation, not as an identity to be comprehended, the very struggle for which on each occasion results in the frustration of limit and the breakdown of the project. What is revealed instead is that one writes the city as being composed of multiplicities, of countless elements, micro-articulations, and streams of mobile signals. In order to address these signals without arresting their motions, the writer frequently sketches with a celerity that goes beyond – or never solidifies into – imitation. A brief example from 1923 should suffice for now: ‘A tramcar thundered up King’s Cross Road, throwing sparks from its heels and generally glowing with electricity. It was crammed and jammed with humanity – exhausted pleasure seekers returning home northwards from theatre, music-hall, cinema and restaurant’ (RSt 160).

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The reader is witness to nothing of the street named. There is no architecture, no developed representation of the scene as a scene. What one sees is movement and flow; parallel flows in fact, that of the tram and that of electricity. By force of these, indistinct ‘humanity’ is propelled. Bennett relies for his jazz-futurist effects on a few brief gestures involving fluctuation, flight, direction, pulsation, transport, and variation in an instant of rhetorical gesticulation. There is the strange partial anthropomorphization that curiously resists human identification in the suggestion – vision is too totalizing a word – of a tramcar with ‘heels’, which kick up sparks. The sparks in their seemingly impulsive, perfunctory and occasional refulgence are perhaps readable themselves as the analogical traces of humanity ‘crammed and jammed’, meaningless collective life brightening only in momentary pleasure before being carried away out of sight, and before disappearing from existence forever, also. Even the modes of entertainment are multiple, without privilege or hierarchy – just random examples, fluctuating signals on the surface of the passage, and passing across the narratorial space. Here, a cryptogram of the city at night presents itself, the key to the deciphering of which is to be found just in what the passage is and does, how and the ways in which it comes to pass, and how it enacts itself, while reminding one of a distance from the city, of which it is the expression: writing is a gesture of London. When tracing the night event, writing balances the outlines of form, the pulses of light with absence and invisibility, distributing the singularities of the experience with flourishes of ‘what effectively occurs’, thereby giving ‘to the truth of the event the only chance of not being confused with [that] inevitable actualization’ (Deleuze 1990: 161) that is the literary passage halted on the page as expression rather than representation. There is thus installed an unbridgeable distance between two materialities, that of the event and that of writing, even as, paradoxically, the performative produces that poetics and logic of sense – for in the reader arises the phantom effect of feeling as if one were the witness. If adumbrating the passage of twilight on the other hand, writing performs the crepuscular rhythms to which it is responding and in which it seeks to immerse itself, in recognition of the precipitate inexorability with which day turns into night, and so resists the pull towards the ideality of a fully mimetic representation. What both the expressions, of dusk and the nocturnal, share in their literary manifestations is their resistance to depth, or, as Deleuze argues in The Logic of Sense, the affirmation of experience as surface, where ‘place only takes place’ (137) and across which the pulses race as part of an evanescent, sensuous continuum.

II In a comment that resonates with the voices of innumerable observers of London, from Donald Lupton and John Stow, from Swift and Defoe, to Peter

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Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair, Victor Burgin has remarked that we can never know what we name, with too much facility, a ‘city’ in its entirety. The desire to know the city drives writers with different interests across the centuries; and yet, those who are most sensitive, attentive to the nuances and pulses of place, are forced back on the conclusion that a total knowledge and, with that, a full representation, is all but impossible. In an article first published in 1888 to which I shall return, Henry James says much the same thing as Victor Burgin. ‘One has not the alternative of speaking of London as a whole’, observes James, ‘for the simple reason that there is no such thing as the whole of it. It is immeasurable’ (1989: 258). Is the relationship between representation, language and the unspeakable a ‘simple’ matter, thinkable in terms of scale? Apparently not; neither is it a question of naming, of attention given to detail rather than some presumed totality. The city is not an other in any simple sense, to be reduced and therefore apprehended analogically – as a body for example, even though, around the attempted representation of London, corporeal and organic metaphors have proliferated at different times, often themselves seemingly organically. Not without irony but addressing London’s ineffability on a much more modest scale, Dyson, one of the protagonists of Arthur Machen’s The Three Impostors, utters an adjunct statement to those already cited: ‘ “it needs much philosophy to extract the wonderful and the beautiful from the Cromwell Road” ’ (1995: 98). In Howards End, E. M. Forster echoes the problem, if indeed it is one and not simply that in the very idea of London, which illuminates a particular crisis in representation (which, conversely is not a crisis for Arnold Bennett as we shall see in the next chapter). ‘Certainly’, asserts Forster, ‘London fascinates’: One visualises it as a tract of glistening grey, intelligent without purpose and excitable without love; as a spirit that has altered before it can be chronicled . . . it lies beyond everything . . . who can explain Westminster Bridge Road or Liverpool Street . . . in the evening? We reach in desperation beyond the fog, beyond the very stars, the voids of the universe are ransacked to justify the monster . . . The Londoner seldom understands his city until it sweeps him . . . away from his moorings. (2000: 92) The language of ‘fascination’ and ‘visualisation’ employed by Forster – and this is a language to be found as well throughout Henry James’ article on London – is important. With its encoded appeal to enchantment and psychic phantasy, its possible nod in the direction of Wordsworth a century earlier,1 Forster’s apostrophe speaks of that which otherwise cannot be addressed; so it opens, if not to the eye then certainly the ear, a kind of apophatic or quasi-apophatic discourse for speaking without speaking of the city, and also speaking while saying that one cannot assert anything. The city’s complex otherness whispers from within the vectors of the inarticulable.

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But in the end as Forster admits this is all a matter of comprehension as après-coup, with a temporal belatedness that may come, if at all, only in the wake of one’s encounter. One figure to be noted here, and one to which I shall return in my conclusion, and the discussion of Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel, is that of spirit. A nebulous motif at best, comprehensible neither with the attentive definition implied by ‘term’ nor with that sense of abstract comprehensiveness signalled in concept, whatever spirit may be it is certainly not present. Having no presence, its very own condition spirits the idea away from itself, from an ‘itself’. Flight has always already taken place here, transformed, translated ‘before it can be chronicled’, narrated or determined. This most ephemeral and evanescent of – how shall we speak of an ‘it’ which is not one? – echoic oscillations, has, Forster lets us know, ‘altered’. All the reader of the city can do is to perceive or believe, imagine that one can observe its afterglow, visualizing that in the mind’s eye. There is no justification, no logic or ground on which to build the representation, there is only a partly inchoate, partly legible poetics of the sensible, irreducible, if properly apprehended, to rational or reasonable representation. If one can address London at all and so figure its difference, then the registers, perhaps even that which gives the tone to utterance, must appeal to the irrational, the hieratic, the secret, and quite possibly the sublime. This last term, I hasten to add, should not be thought of as an alternative and self-sufficient conceptual keyword. It serves instead as only a provisional nomination. In The Three Impostors Dyson offers one perception of the crisis, which having the appearance of an answer, nevertheless confides in the fact that a ‘truth’ is unavailable: ‘ “There lies the strangeness of it all. Those who know the secret cannot tell it if they would; it is positively as ineffable as the central doctrine of Freemasonry” ’ (1995: 49). Ineffability, enchantment and belatedness: London may well be a language, as David Mitchell asserts in his first novel, Ghostwritten (1999: 269), but the keys to its translation are by no means to be gained easily. When translation takes place, if it occurs, whereby the sense is apprehended as already circulating as part of the ‘continual flux’ of the city (Forster 2000: 92) in its whispers and echoes; then there is a translation of sorts effected pre-phenomenally. So, as with the example from Forster, the expression of the city remains as a belated gesture to be spoken or written only after, in response to, the event, as the sketch of the very surface memory recalls as having perceived. Perhaps – for nothing could be less assured. What takes place between the self and the city in the encounters to which I have referred, and in others to which I shall turn, is a negotiation across borders. Specifically, I have in mind the borders of the self, as the subject becoming conscious of what Ford Madox Ford describes as the ‘modern spirit’ of the city ‘loses him [or her] self in this swelling consciousness’, to quote Henry James once more (1989: 246). The illusion of discrete being and its autonomy is overcome. In confronting a greater, radically different

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and impersonal consciousness, perceived in part as such and yet as being strangely different, the self gives way in an acquiescent passivity. It is this transference or passage in the city coming as a result of one’s psychic, phenomenological encounter with London that causes Virginia Woolf to ask in her essay ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’ ‘. . . is the true self neither this nor that, neither here nor there . . .?’ (1993: 76) In this question, we might recognize the tremor of ‘analogical apperception’ (Husserl 1995: 108– 11) – the nature of the city’s radical alterity announces itself indirectly. We apprehend from Woolf’s unanswered interrogation a rhetoric of passage, a poetics of the urban event. In perceiving this motion there must be acknowledged that which comes to pass (to use, once more, a seemingly anachronistic phrase that gestures towards that Deleuzian logic of sense) in both its temporal and spatial implications as these, in turn, offer an inflection of what has already taken place in Woolf’s response to the erasure that occurs between subject and city. What comes to pass in her registration of the limits of ontology, being, and any supposed groundedness of being is fluidity of transport and the transgression of borders. The limits become marked paradoxically in their being expunged, as the full comprehension of being-inthe-city comes to recognize a dissolution of the self’s limits, however briefly. It is also that ‘loss’ admitted by Henry James earlier. At the very least on such occasions, consciousness is caused to tremble, perhaps to lose the illusion of its distinctness. If there is a coming to consciousness, a process of formation involving temporal passage, there is also a dissolution of that consciousness or, at the very least, an inaugural anticipation of the dissolution to come, registered in the almost imperceptible vibrations of which I am speaking. That which traverses the boundaries of subjectivity, coming to find its host in our consciousness even as our consciousness gives way before it, is a certain oscillation-effect therefore. Not restricted to the singularity of the event and one’s experience, such fluctuation can return in the echo chamber of anamnesis. This is perceived by Ford Madox Ford when he reports on the passage of day into night: as ‘. . . outlines grew tremulous, [London] vanished with a touch of . . . pathos . . . it was impressive enough – the modern spirit expressing itself in terms not of men but of forces’ (1995: 29). Outline and touch, this is the language of surface geometries. Observe also in this the return of that motif, spirit. Perception is traversed by certain instances of ‘aleatory and singular points . . . series and displacement’ (Deleuze 1990: 120) that is the generative locus of crepuscular transition. In turn, the logic and structure of such perception finds its own echo in Henry James, again. Writing in a section from ‘London’ of a liminal and twilight transience, even the identity of which is undecidable – it ‘may or may not be . . . sunset’ (1989: 247) – James discerns particular ‘emanations and blurs’ of a ‘radiance’ that ‘hang together’ to ‘form the undertone of the deep, perpetual voice of the place’ (247). Here in this response to the transmission of that secret language of London and its

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utterance, James, Ford, Woolf and others maintain the relay of the city’s expressions – by which I refer to both its articulation and appearance or manifestation; the authors of whom I speak come to ‘see’ pre-phenomenally, and so to write of London in the wake of that event. In this, they reveal, perhaps inadvertently through the temporal disorder necessary to such articulation that the event, in Deleuzian terms, ‘is not what occurs . . . it is rather inside [and therefore other than] what occurs’. This Deleuze describes as the ‘purely expressed’ that ‘signals and awaits us’ (1990: 149). In this, now and then with the intermittence of what I am tempted to describe as the city’s phantom pulse code modulations, we catch the merest sighting of London in the multiple singularities of expression.

III This strange phenomenon, or, more accurately, these constellations of unusual phenomena that arise from within the sites and congeries of the city, and whatever conjures the idea of a city, may be said therefore to be perpetually imminent in all their singularities, and yet still scarcely perceptible in the denomination London. Even as we grasp in our apprehension the becoming-tremulous, as it were, it ‘eludes us’ as Victor Burgin puts it. The very idea and the ‘thing’ so named is such, Burgin continues, that ‘we become uncertain whether we are looking for a city, or for a person’ (1996: 7). Burgin’s assessment acknowledges processes of slippage between the ontic and the ontological. The passage of which I spoke in the encounter between subject and site announces not only the indelible marking of memory but also, in the ‘translation’ between being and place, the taking place of a process between the materiality of location and the immateriality of the perceiving mind. This is a process akin to an inscription of the city on its subject, as should be clear. There is also in Burgin’s commentary an acknowledgement of that undecidability, bordering on the uncanny for some, in which the very perception of and response to what appears to be the prosopopoeic (which nonetheless withdraws as soon as it is glimpsed), unsettles all certain reference. More than this uneasy and unstable relationship between the empirical and the phenomenological to which Burgin attests, there are also the temporal and ‘occasional’ dimensions to be taken into account. There is an irreplaceable specificity to our encounters, the singularities of which will not admit of a totality to be invoked in the name of the city. What we recall of cities, what returns to us, we remember only in relation to ‘certain times spent in certain places’ as Burgin phrases it. The city does not, nor can it ever, exist as a totality available to any work or project of anamnesis. Its revenance in our memories is unexpected, coming to pass in traces, intermittent surges and ruins only, and always, once again, indelibly and inescapably linked with, marked by, the immaterial or amaterial materiality of

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a phantastic temporal recurrence. Ford Madox Ford observes the moving work of writing that the haunting force of London can enact upon the subject’s recollection: ‘Certain corners of streets, certain angles of buildings, the spray of dishevelled plane-trees, certain cloud-forms, gusts of white smoke, odours, familiar sounds – these in their remembrance will wring [the Londonlover’s] heart’ (1995: 22). Note in this particular reflection how architectural detail and geometry are combined with brief impressions and expressions, even as the taxonomy of London-detail, having no governing organization except what the eye happens to gather into its gaze is not developed into full representation. The very brevity and rhythm of description is telegraphic, coded and pulsating. More than this, there is a gradual, irreversible motion in the opening series of clauses from the material to the immaterial, from corner through cloud and smoke, to odours and sounds. Such passage also re-marks that transference, that translation between site and subject, from place to place, across the boundaries between the two. Apprehended in a rapid seriality of semaphore inscriptions, there is that motion between city and self, between the external materiality of the world, to the sense perception of the subject. In being rewritten, Ford’s act of writing the city also, simultaneously, writes the subject as a being written by London. Such a writing of the self announces both the singular encounter and the iterable recurrence, the very course of which is given performative echo in the writing of the line just cited. Where aspects and memories of the city reveal themselves then, this takes place as mnemotechnic event, the projection of a network of signs open to an inventive reinscription. Thus in Victor Burgin’s suggestions, as in the apprehension of Ford Madox Ford, there is to be read the recognition of a materialist historiography that offers the potential for writing the city in excess of any merely materially accurate representation. We observe in that translation of the thing called city what Jacques Derrida calls the ‘ “performative” of writing’ announced by Heidegger as Aufriß or incision, where what is named or represented by writing makes its mark as the wound of writing itself in the place of what is ‘in a certain way still unnamed or unknown’ (1998b: 125). The cut incises the surface of the city, but that immeasurable, ineffable whole closes up around the gesture, outside of all representation or totalizing expression. Or, articulating this differently, the cut is that expression that is also an impression, only the trace of which remains to be reiterated as the text. The question of the relation between the materiality of the city and the amateriality of representation, image and memory is not insignificant therefore, even though it appears to remain as an unanswerable horizon. As Tom Cohen has it, apropos of materiality, ‘[o]ne is always . . . after “materiality” – that is, not only in pursuit of a promised ground or ontology that is also worldly, associable with reference and the “thing” . . . but temporally after . . . as though the term were bound . . . to something anterior to figurative systems’ (2002: 279). This problem of misperception and the often

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obsessive desire to maintain the pursuit after the ever fleeing subject is all the more acute when one seeks to address the city and its myriad modes of literary and aesthetic figuration and representation – as is evinced so repeatedly in the work of Iain Sinclair for example. Burgin appears to acknowledge this, albeit indirectly. He takes the phenomenological register further, offering another, markedly temporal dimension to which we are subject, and which is beyond our control. In considering the subject’s city-memories, he proposes suggestively that ‘places we almost never think of when we are awake may repeatedly return in our dreams’ (1996: 7). Here revenance, temporal echo and iterability are marked by a pronounced narrative or poetic turn, that allusion to dream, hinting at a mode of apprehension quite other than that assumed by the mastery of any mimetic or onto-logic. Never realizable as a whole, the city, when apprehended at all, is glimpsed in Burgin’s terms a ‘night world’ in all its ‘tortuous geography’, to recall Gerald Kersh’s phrase that I have plundered as my title. In my effort to recuperate of the ‘night world’ of London, I am seeking here to open and so sketch a poetics of the nocturnal that provides indirect access to the secret city, to the city’s secrets, and the secret language of this alternative and phantasmic London, which remains within and yet other than any apparently straightforward account of the materiality of the city or what such an account might offer. In the phantasm, ‘a variable combination of singular points’ (Deleuze 1990: 215) expresses indirectly the problem of speaking the city. In this apophatic event, an alterity, which is also an infinitive to which we append the name London, is ‘determined in the phantasm’ (Deleuze 1990: 215). And such determination is most readily sensed for the writers with whom I am concerned as a ‘surface phenomenon’ (Deleuze 1990: 216) at the transition between day and night or otherwise at night; which process of transition, or which disappearance of daylight and the concomitant transformation of vision, serves to foreground surface. Thus far, I appear hardly to have touched on the nocturnal or crepuscular scene, even though this is the silent context of certain passages cited so far. It would appear though that in the idea of the nocturnal city-image, in any faithful inscription of that idea, there is the acceptance of the ‘sleep of reason’ already implicated in Deleuze’s notions of a logic of sense. What is asleep therefore is a multiplicity of logics: of rationality, reason, coherence, connectivity, and mimetic fidelity also. In this perceptual slumber, there comes about the power to produce monsters, to recall E. M. Forster’s word. Virginia Woolf recognizes this in a number of places, not least in Orlando, when she writes of the impossibility of approaching the city’s representation, or indeed any aspect of it, directly: ‘To give a truthful account of London society at . . . any time, is beyond the powers of the biographer or the historian . . . Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma – a mirage . . . [London society’s] intoxication, this seductiveness, entirely evade our analysis . . . Such monsters the poets and novelists alone can deal

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with . . .’ (1992a: 184–5). As with Forster, for Woolf London produces monsters or else is understood as monstrous, though not necessarily threatening. Monstrosity in such examples simply leaves its performative mark, being perhaps a metaphor for all that evades metaphor and therefore ontological determination. While obviously Woolf is satirizing the social behaviour of the upper classes, revealing in the process the material effects of so immaterial a ‘thing’ as ‘society’ on Orlando, on her being, her perceptions and her memory, the passage does nevertheless offer insight into particular aspects of the nocturnal city. The monstrous and miasmic evade direct confrontation, even as glimpses of their ability to engender desire are admitted. To inaugurate a formalization of the nocturnal is then in part to pursue the signs of this other writing. It is to affirm a certain visionary experience, as Woolf shows here, or to accept, with James, ‘the inspiration there may be in the sense of far frontiers’ (1989: 246). It is also to acknowledge in particular acts of writing London the city’s mystery, strangeness and, occasionally, sublimity, recovering these from associations all too often made with an underworld or misperceived ‘subculture’. If the nocturnal city offers the writer metonymic possibilities, it has also been subject to reductive, moralistic reinscriptions. Night, fog, shadows and adverse atmospheric conditions may provide allegorical or symbolic potential for some writers to speak of corruption, or otherwise express a phobic reaction against London. This is well known. In Les Mystères de Paris and ‘The Man in the Crowd’ respectively, Eugène Sue and Edgar Allen Poe are amongst the first to capitalize on this possibility in their representations of Paris. The detective and sensation fictions of the fin de siècle, from Stevenson and Conan Doyle, to Bram Stoker and Richard Marsh – all draw on such forms of representation in their London narratives. As Joachim Schlör has it, ‘[t]he reduction of the nocturnal city to its unusual, mysterious and dangerous sides’; the metaphoric coupling of the concept of night with words like danger, fear, horror and threat; the furnishing of the city night with the appropriate personnel, with their own language and their own – peculiar – behaviour; the decoration of the ‘milieu’ with corresponding visual features: streets slippery with rain, flickering lights, dark corners; these are the preconditions and structural elements of a thorough and comprehensive creation of the underworld in the city. (1998: 120) Every reader of fin de siècle London narratives will recognize the truth of this statement and the almost formulaic subscription to such gestures that abound and recur in a number of novelists in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. However, for other writers, both of that period and from other moments, such chance circumstances open writing to the somewhat apophatic account to which I have already referred. Henry James understands such possibility in the following confession of avoidance: ‘I . . . have

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never said a word about . . . the queer corners, the dark secrets, the rich survivals and mementoes of the City’ (1989: 267). While direct representation founders, the initial impulse being to say that one cannot see, or else to say that one cannot say what one sees, other figural modalities arise, drawing attention to themselves, to the act of writing as both the mapping or tracing of either ‘tortuous geography’ or else the fleeting experience of the miasmic and monstrous. In James, everything that cannot be said is articulated in the hieratic and performative incisions of queer corners, dark secrets, rich survivals and mementoes. In denying direct representation of London, writing takes the chance, as I have argued elsewhere, of a performative staging of the very shapes and sites of the city, sites which are simultaneously material locations and serve also as lieux de mémoire, sites or places of memory distinguished in the taking-place-of-place. Certain aspects of such a staging have already been indicated; turning now to representations of the ‘night world’, we will find how, through the oscillation and relay of unstable traces, writing the city as night world offers to the reader a phenomenal medium for experiencing the city in its performative and tortuous geography.

IV Let us turn to a striking example: the opening chapters of Gerald Kersh’s Night and the City (2001) present the reader with a transient urban moment, as London passes from day to night on an April evening. The first passage comes from Chapter One: Ping! Went the clock, on the first stroke of eight. Up and down the street shops began to close. West Central started to flare and squirm in a blazing veinwork of neon tubes. Bursting like inexhaustible fireworks, the million coloured bulbs of the electric signs blazed in perpetual recurrence over the face of the West End. Underground trains from the suburbs squirting out of their tunnels like red toothpaste out of tubes disgorged theatre crowds. Loaded buses rumbled toward the dog tracks. Cinema vestibules became black with people. Vaudeville theatres, like gigantic vacuum cleaners, suddenly sucked in waiting queues. Behind upper windows, lights clicked on and blinds snapped down. Gas, wire, wax, oil – everything burned that would give out a light. The darkness of the April night got thicker. It seeped down between the street lamps, poured into basements, and lay deep and stagnant under the porches and the arches of the back streets. The last of the shop doors slammed. The places where one could eat, drink, and amuse oneself alone remained open, and burned with a lurid and smoky brightness. Night closed down upon the city. (6) Amongst so many details to be observed, we can comment on at least two, Kersh’s use of neologism (veinwork) and sentence fragment. Here is the flight

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across the surface as the performative inscription and expression of that surface play. Also, here is that necessary celerity of response to the velocities of the city. A strange, perhaps paradoxical and certainly double desire is at work in this, the first of Kersh’s expressions of his night world. On the one hand, there is the desire to stage London, and in that staging to frame and fix its representation conclusively. Hence, the onomatopoeic precision of the clock’s sound with which the passage opens, announcing the imminent arrival of night. Despite this ostensibly prosaic acknowledgement of temporal passage however, perhaps emerging out of this demarcated instant, the figural rendering of clock time conjures the impression of London’s night world. Nevertheless, that pursuit of fixable referents is undeniably there. Then there is what may be read as that quasi-prosopopoeic arrival in the final sentence of Night itself; with it is the apparent arrival of closure, descent, and an apprehension that this particular site is being cordoned off. On the other hand, there appears a desire to write in response to ceaseless movement and transformation, and thus to invent a writing of the city that is itself overflowing, excessive. Everything is in motion, including of course the clock itself, and with that temporal progression. Movement is not opposed to the static, but emerges from it. Irreducible to a single figure, the London night is perceived in its ineluctable becoming. Kersh’s image renews itself, supplementing its own traces with others, in what might almost be read as a response to performative improvisation. Soho is seen initially coming to life, and becoming visible in the process, as a network of artificial, specifically neon, light. Written in 1938 though possibly taking place slightly earlier in the decade, Night and the City acknowledges this still relatively new technology in all its brilliance, neon tubes having first been used commercially in 1923, in Los Angeles.2 Kersh attests to the novelty and the violent force of phenomenological registration through the rapidity of successive verbs and their figural instability: flare, squirm, blaze, burst. Equally unstable are the metaphors for this process of illumination; a veinwork becomes fireworks, as the tubes become augmented, supplemented, by countless bulbs, all of which are figurally reiterated in the trope of perpetual recurrence. Such recurrence marks the language of the passage as well as serving the representation in the mobile tropology – a tropology which serves also as a tropography of the city, as the translation takes place between the constative and the performative, and from any fixable image to ineluctable overflow. Moreover, estrangement within representation occurs as one animated and animating technology supplements another. As fireworks displace veinwork, so any merely organic corporeality gives way to the simulacra of life remarked in the motion of and between lighting, tube trains (this tube displacing and doubling that of the neon tube), buses, and the image of theatres as vacuum cleaners. The night seeps while locations burn repeatedly,

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Kersh’s image of the city staging its contest between successive apprehensions of fluidity and recurrent gestures desirous of marking limit and closure. It may well be that as a result of such a contest of desires that Kersh resorts to speaking of London as ‘this dreary and interminable city’ (31). Yet reflecting on the passage above one has to acknowledge that while indeed London produces images intimating interminability, the dreariness has more to do with the subject’s enervation, with a failure to maintain the act of representation according, once again, to any logic or orderable aesthetic. Thus, of his protagonist, Kersh observes: ‘Fabian . . . had become suddenly aware of the frightful complexity of the City. He had followed a possibility to its logical conclusion, and found nothing at the end of it’ (39). It is precisely the effects of London as night world that exposes the failure, the limit, while London itself withdraws, its secret affirmed in that phrase frightful complexity and simultaneously hidden, the city hiding itself within itself, within the violence of its multiple amaterial traces. While for most of Night and the City London is only ever implied, and the arrival of night opens onto, making visible, an underworld of the kind identified by Schlör, in the opening chapter a brief moment of transition is also one of narrative suspension. The instant gives no hint of what is to come. Instead, writing bears witness to, and so transmits, the visionary experience of London in all its modernity. Kersh maps the city’s traces in its crepuscular and nocturnal translations as a response to what takes place in the city on the one hand, and as a gesture, on the other, of constructing an incomplete frame in the process of disrupting its own borders; or let us say, mise-en-scène is witnessed giving way to mise-en-abyme. Through and as a result of this partial, dissolving structure there come to be projected the intertwining lives of Soho’s inhabitants as, in their movements, they trace the disordered and disorientating topography of the city. As the example makes clear, it is the generation of structure, itself not merely structure but also the performative phenomenon of the ruination of structure in medias res, which is of interest. It is performative because, as we see, while we read here an apparently conventional gesture of scene setting the following must also be noted. If we take the various motions, the processes of becoming, fully into account, then that ‘tortuous geography of the night world’ has to be acknowledged as having a kind of being, albeit one that is distinctly strange, ephemeral, impressionistic, and protean. So, we read a double and therefore divided identity and location. We read of an identity disrupted from within itself, which, in being described, exceeds description in and through its own becoming – and we would argue its becoming other. Location/identity: these are already perceived, when they are perceived always becoming other than they appear, knowable solely in transformation. Moreover, the artificial illumination of the city serves through the act of writing, albeit indirectly, to illuminate the city for the

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reader. This single passage serves as exemplary illustration of my concerns with how one writes a particular London, how one responds to and so affirms its multiple and heterogeneous identities, its processes of projection and its play on the provisional staging of ontologies that the city ultimately rejects through its performative excess. To reiterate, any ontology of the city is, can be, only partial, temporary. Any such representational or constative gesture is always simultaneously necessary and lacking. The very arrival of night exposes the contingent evanescence that representation can obscure.

V Writing the city as ‘night world’ may involve the assumption of the role of Walter Benjamin’s allegorist, who though having ‘given up the attempt to elucidate things through research into their properties and relations’ nonetheless ‘can never have enough of things’ (1999: 211). One seeks to gather the signs with a degree of impressionistic speed in response to the equally rapid transformation before one’s eyes and in one’s memory. The very idea of night is inextricably entwined in the writing of London with a certain registration of and response to the modernity expressed in the many and heteronymous and unstable shapes of the city. The idea of a ‘night world’ might therefore be understood as announcing, however tentatively, the idea of other Londons perceived and figured as a result not only of the loss of light but also of atmospheric conditions whereby the reason and logic of ontologically and mimetically grounded narrative representation comes to be suspended, displaced or disordered. Of London winters in the 1880s, Henry James has observed that ‘between November and March . . . [t]he weather makes a kind of sedentary midnight . . . It is bad for the eyesight, but excellent for the image’ (1989: 261). This is what Benjamin would doubtless describe as ‘productive disorder’ (1999: 211), for there is to be seen in the gathering of disparate remnants the productive disorder of the mémoire involontaire, by which the city has the chance to leave its impression. Night does not simply transform, as I have implied, it translates. Here is Virginia Woolf in Orlando on that very effect: ‘it was a fine night early in April . . . Everything appeared in its tenderest form, yet, just as it seemed on the point of dissolution, some drop of silver sharpened it to animation . . . The buildings had an airy yet formal symmetry not theirs by day’ (1992a: 206). This particular articulation of one section of the city takes on a strange kind of life of its own in its very ephemerality, becoming other from within its daytime identity. Translation renders visible that which resonates within form, and which is the necessary non-identity to that identity. Such strange ‘life’ is expressed in several of the excerpts I have considered, and which I will continue to consider for the rest of this chapter. Its oddity is allied to the equally perplexing notion of ‘spirit’.

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Of course, stepping back from our principal historical focus, as much as a century before Woolf or Kersh, Charles Dickens understood that seeing and writing the city most clearly could take place in conditions of occlusion or darkness. London was perhaps most generative as a constellation of innumerable lieux de mémoire for Dickens in its guise of noctuary text, whether the night was literal or that kind of nocturnal simulacrum produced by atmospheric conditions. Though I have already discussed the following remark from Sketches by Boz (1995: 165–6), this provocative statement first published in January 1836, in which Dickens is given to a kind of negative or apophatic hyperbole, is one that bears repeating: ‘But the streets of London, to be beheld in the very height of their glory, should be seen on a dark, dull, murky winter’s night, when there is just enough damp gently stealing down to make the pavement greasy, without cleansing it of any of its impurities; and’, Dickens continues, When the heavy lazy mist, which hangs over every object, makes the gas-lamps look brighter, and the brilliantly-lighted shops more splendid, from the contrast they present to the darkness around. (1995: 74) Let us note in passing a number of effects contributing to the poetics of noctuary and night world, immersing one in the illusory experience of the event. Dickens inscribes an initial loping sonority in syllabic, stressed, and aural consonance of ‘heavy lazy’, the effect of which is arguably emphasized through the absence of a comma between the first and second adjective. The motion here is heavy and lazy; it has none of the impenetrability of fog, but submerges one in a sensation of being surrounded. This is continued, as if there were serial reduplications and displacements, through Dickens’ use of inter- and intra-clausal alliterations (over/object; gas-lamps; brighter/ brilliantly [lighted]; shops/splendid; contrast/darkness). Sound is sense here; it mediates between the external world and the conscious perception, which is barely perception inasmuch as Dickens does not locate in this sentence at least a subject for whom the perception indicates experience of the event. Lastly, there is that qualified, double-jointed compound word, ‘brilliantlylighted’, which catches in it the joint-work in ‘gas-lamps’. The chain-link stitch of the hyphen strains towards a single term, the two words separately being inadequate. We witness Dickens striving to suggest that the quality of the light is just that it is brilliant, and that the shops are defined by their vivid radiance, as if there were a strange kind of life in this mist-wrapped refulgence. And of course, there is that sensate, sonorous resonance between the i of ‘brighter’ and that of ‘lighted’. Sound and sensation simply unfold, refold, and enfold within and across clauses, throughout the sentence structure as so many filaments. More importantly, though, for the larger discussion underway here, in the particular sketch by Boz to which I refer, there

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is no presence of a criminal world; the concept of night in a poetics of urban representation has not yet been fully co-opted in the service of narratives of criminality. Though miserable, and though indelibly marked by the presence of poverty, there is no obvious underworld here, unless that is the world of the homeless, or the most abject of the working classes. Yet, in counterpoint to the actuality of urban existence, Dickens’ writing enacts the illusory, shimmering brevity explored above. What Dickens’ writing admits here, but also in novels such as Bleak House, Little Dorrit or Our Mutual Friend, is that the text of the ‘night world’ arrives whether the night is literal or figural, merely a matter of temporal inevitability or atmospheric conditions. There is then in the very idea of a night world the possibility for modes of often analogical apperception and subsequent response that may render a just or poetic ‘truth’, a poetics of the sensate world, concerning the city beyond any faithful/false dichotomy or merely mimetic representation. The night world of the city as mnemotechnic device thus generates narratives, or noctuaries demanding that we bear witness. This is illustrated nowhere more clearly perhaps than in the inaugural moment of Marlow’s narration in Heart of Darkness, a text which, it might be observed in passing, offers a counter-signature to the exuberance of a text such as Ford Madox Ford’s The Soul of London. But to the well-known passage to which I just alluded: The sun set; the dusk fell on the stream, and lights began to appear along the shore . . . Lights of ships moved in the fairway – a great stir of lights going up and going down. And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars. ‘And this also,’ said Marlow suddenly, ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth.’ (Conrad 1995: 48) Though his ‘first’ statement, this is, in fact a response, and, with that, an act that initiates a concomitant narrative gesture of bearing witness. It is a response, the opening of a relay of narratives produced by the ‘great spirit of the past upon the lower reaches of the Thames’ (1995: 47), generated by the memory and site of London, the latest return of night time, and with that, of course, the night world. Something returns with the revenance of the night world of London, even though what that is may be unreadable, strictly speaking. Yet in its very unreadability, London bears in it the event of language, the possibility of narrative as testimony and witness, and so survival; this is its gift (Düttmann 2000: 74); in this promise, the appearance of the city bears memory, and so ‘it invites us to cross a limit by appearing’ (Düttmann 2000: 74), however indirectly as the extract from Heart of Darkness announces. London thus arrives, it may be proposed, in the manifestation of the night world, if it arrives at all – and as a name;3 London names, but ‘it names more

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than it names’ (Düttmann 2000: 108). As on other occasions, Ford Madox Ford captures this incisive – and decisive – arrival: ‘From the dark, further side of the Surrey hills at night . . . one may see on the sky a brooding and sinister glow. That is London – manifesting itself on the clouds’ (1995: 23). The night admits of the phantasmagorical effect, and also the sense of perception through indirection, as the phrase manifesting itself on the clouds affirms. There is no city here as such, no direct representation, yet manifestation takes place as the trace appearing, a projection that leaves an ephemeral mark by which one senses the city. Yet, because London is only ever imminent in the apprehension, there remains in this event the sense of unreadability and undecidability. As Henry James remarks of particular atmospheric conditions associated with early evening in London’s winters: ‘as you never can see any source of radiance you can’t in the least tell’ (1989: 247). This should not be any cause for trepidation or alarm, however; far from it in fact, as Virginia Woolf knows. Indicating the appropriate time for walking in the city and receiving its gifts she states ‘[t]he hour should be the evening and the season winter . . .’ (1993: 70) ‘How beautiful a street is in winter!’ she continues. ‘It is at once revealed and obscured’ (1993: 71; emphases added). Again, Woolf apostrophizes the London-subject’s experience in a reflection on how one sees, and what is given to one to observe: ‘How vaguely one can trace symmetrical straight avenues of doors and windows . . . lamps are floating islands of pale light . . . men and women . . . wear a certain look of unreality . . . How beautiful a London street is then, with its islands of light, and its long groves of darkness’ (1993: 71). Even as the language of the city invites response, these are not merely empirical observations for Woolf, if indeed they can even be described as such with any accuracy. For, in her adumbrated remarks that register the signs of the city in this way, and which, for us, recall the earlier geometric sketch of Ford Madox Ford’s, Woolf illustrates how, in the night world of London, ‘the brain sleeps perhaps as it looks’ (1993: 71). Once again, the emphasis is on the geometry one can trace, albeit vaguely, those lines which are other than the solid daytime city, but which come to mind, so that street lighting appears to float, islands interrupting and pulsating in the night. Clearly, for Woolf, the night world is productive in its vague traces, and in the ability of the subject to reiterate those traces in the act of witnessing. Though ostensibly speaking in a different context of an eighteenth-century London rather than of her contemporary scene, the passage just quoted finds itself reiterated with phenomenological and therefore anachronistic torque in Orlando: Now the streets that lie between Mayfair and Blackfriars were at that time very imperfectly lit . . . Lamp-posts lit with oil-lamps occurred every two hundred yards or so, but between lay a considerable stretch of pitchdarkness . . . A very strange state of mind was thus bred in Orlando. (1992a: 195–6)

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As before, in another moment of urban becoming that rushes forward, we witness the interplay, the intimate interanimation, between psyche and place, as the occasion of the city translates the subject subtly. The mind is penetrated, impregnated even, and becomes generative as a result. We encounter in such passages that apprehension of fascination as the force of London that articulates the surfaces of location, spoken of earlier by E. M. Forster. It is in the very possibility of the suspension of rational perception, and the privilege in this afforded to sensory reception that the night presents. As a result of the night the city’s forms, its topography, architecture and geography are able to engender in the imagination such instances of conjuration, beguilement and seduction. To return to Henry James, it is to an evening in London that he turns his memory: ‘There is a certain evening that I count virtually a first impression’, he recalls (1989: 241; emphasis added). The idea of the virtual impression, that phantasmic inscription on the subject that haunts his memory, is telling. There is to be read here a play between the material and immaterial, a mnemotechnic instance all the more remarkable for its signalling of the city’s ghost-writing powers. Should this seem too fanciful, we might observe how James continues the recollection: ‘There had been an earlier vision, but it had turned to grey, like faded ink’ (1989: 247). Indelibly the writing remains in the phantasy of urban memory, recollected only in its retreat, the temporal erasure of its mark, which is sensed rather than perceived directly as a still earlier incision in the self, and therefore unreadable. Here, in this admission of a more haunting figure standing behind the one assumed to be virtually the first, and thus itself, a phantasm of origin, is to be read the indirect, irregular, ‘tortuous’ insinuation of the city’s myriad inscriptions. Effectively, James invents the city’s power in this gesture; he summons another writing, producing what Derrida calls the ‘prior-to-the-first time of pre-originary language’ (1998a: 64), as an act of testimony in the face of the city’s legacy. In this one moment, from which James attempts to get the writing of London underway, is the shadowy figure of otherwise unreadable manifestation of city. All one can do in the face of such a recognition therefore is to retrace such traces, in the hope that an invention might take place. Writing the city should occur in such a manner that the ‘tortuous geography of the night world’ is maintained and allowed to remain, and so to remain as the promise of its always imminent arrivals, of all that remains to come. Such traces allow for the revelation of ‘momentary and half revealed details’, as Ford puts it with a simultaneity of contrast and apparent paradox that echoes Woolf’s above, which traces ‘have about them . . . something “characteristic” and foreign’ (1995: 30; emphasis added). That impossible recognition, of the characteristic and foreign simultaneously and intimately unveiled by the headlights of trams, captures in Ford’s acts of writing the city the sensory impression of the night world, its unreal impression, however fleetingly. Of

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course, ‘[o]ne doesn’t test these truths everyday’, as James puts it; ‘they form part of the air one breathes’ (1989: 241); they inform, again in James’ words, ‘the strangely undefined hour of the day and season of the year’, whether that season be Woolf’s winter night or Arthur Machen’s summer evening, a brief, hovering epoch of uncanny placidity before Machen’s narrative descends into its grotesqueries: The flushing twilight of a summer evening vied with the gas-lamps in the square, had fashioned a chiaroscuro that had in it something unearthly; and the children, racing to and fro upon the pavement . . . rather flickered and hovered in the play of lights than stood out substantial things. (1995: 9) Machen’s registration of the night world performs its suspensive fascination between absolutely definable states or conditions. Between motion and stillness, between the real and the unreal, between the quotidian and the ‘unearthly’; between the material and the immaterial – in this ‘productive disorder’ there is an act of writing the city generated from event and occasion, which implies a knowledge unavailable to finite representation or totalizing gesture. Effectively it is ‘written within languages’ (Derrida 1998a: 64), in and between the tracery of discourses and modalities that inform without dominating this example. Translation of the otherwise unreadable name London takes place here ‘[b]y playing and taking pleasure’ (Derrida 1998a: 64). It delivers no here, no content. Problematizing any straightforward assumptions or distinctions between materiality and immateriality, and the ‘different ways that bodies [such as that of the city or those of its inhabitants] are marked and materialized as “identities” ’ (Cohen 2002: 283), the singularities and events of London arrive and return repeatedly. And this is staged as the very events in language that the name London names, though without naming as such.

VI Naming takes place, but not as the seal set on the closure of definition, or the figural keystone in the architectonics of an ontology of place. The city, immeasurable and ungatherable except as the name, persists in its sites and surfaces of fluctuation and evanescence. In response to this recognition of the essentially fluid condition of the localized noctuary, I will not pretend to gather up the final section of this chapter in the pretence of a summary or conclusion. If twilight and night contribute to the force of ‘productive disorder’, to order our perceptions would be to deny or downplay what is other than rationality, what appeals in its conjuration of the city’s locations through its poetics of sense. The proper name of the city plays on this poetics, toying with a surface determination that defers the

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final identity appearing only as illusion in the urban and suburban phantasmagoria. So no finality, no conclusion; this is the conclusion one reaches, and which is impressed on one in reading the various night worlds of London between the end of one century and the beginning of another. That this is the conclusion – that there can be no conclusion if one is being faithful to the singular events of the city’s nocturnal and twilight scenes – this is, on the one hand, because in freeing up the senses from the assumed necessity for a logic or economics of connection, or connectivity, the sites of the city produce that perception of their being, composed of multiple and heterogeneous traits, marks, signs, lines, fluctuations and pulses. On the other hand, the impossibility of conclusion arises because one is forced to concede, as Peter Ackroyd remarks, ‘the consciousness of the Londoner is composed of a thousand fragments’ (2000: 404). In the light of these impressions, let us turn back to London in its singular manifestations, to two particular night scenes. The first is from the period on which I have concentrated mostly in this chapter; the second from a novel of the twenty-first century, in order to show how the taking place of place is maintained, and how the logic of sense persists in the expression of the night worlds of the city, even though the signals and traces may have been translated, or have arrived – ghosted as they are by those earlier scenes – from another language. The first scene comes from Arnold Bennett, from Riceyman Steps; the second, evincing a distinctively different mood in its crepuscular drift, is from Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black (2005). Bennett’s scene offers a more leisurely, considered pause, in which to reflect on the city district at night than that previous hectic passage addressed in the introduction of this chapter. In a novel in which the majority of extracts describing or expressing Clerkenwell are to be found in the first of its five volumes, the excerpt under consideration is notable for being one of the rare extended images of the district in volume five, over which the narrative idles: A lengthy perspective of the brick-yards of the houses in King’s Cross Road stretched out before her [Elsie]; a pattern of dark walls – wall, yard, wall, yard – and the joint masonries of every pair of dwellings jutting out at regular intervals in back-rooms additional to the oblongs of the houses. The sky was clear, a full moon had dimmed the stars; and fine weather, which would have been a boon to the day, was being wasted on the unconscious night. The moonlight glinted here and there on window-glass. Every upper window marked a bedroom. And in every bedroom were souls awake or asleep. Not a window lit, except one at the end of the vista. (RSt 254; emphases added) There is clearly nothing tortuous here; but the geography of the night world is clearly readable as a geometry, as the majority of terms I have emphasized

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accentuate. Bennett’s language draws attention to the construction underlying and motivating the ostensibly realist Clerkenwell scene, thereby graphically and mutely mediating against a mimetic wholeness. To ‘see’ this though within and as other to the representation one has to be, if not as ‘unconscious’ as the night, then immersed in that nocturnal, passive state that serves to minimize more energetic intervention or readerly activity; hence the example of Elsie in the image. An understated multiplicity of spatial divisions underscores the organization of a perspectival system. What Deleuze describes as the singularityevent is captured here through the relative arrangement and alignment of the traces interrupting the illusion of unimpeded vision and representation. Through this surface interaction that is as temporal as it is spatial (regular intervals, here and there) Bennett organizes this poetics of surface ‘into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather “metastable,” endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences . . . are distributed’ (Deleuze 1990: 103). The reader – and Elsie – are afforded this singular, fortuitous glimpse by the chance felicity of atmospheric conditions, and the virtual absence of active human existence. Even Elsie, we can infer, gazes passively; for it is the brickyards, in iterable and serial configuration intimating the geometry of infinity, which are active, inasmuch as they are said to ‘stretch out’. In conjunction with the nocturnal unconscious, such motion as is implied animates the lines being traced, reduplicated and made visible in this scene. They vibrate microtonally, if you will, thereby making strange, making other or revealing the other with which one comes face to face in the stillness of this night-time experience. Between writing and atmosphere, the sensory apprehension is given in the taking place of place; everything else remains as the illusion of the actual. Travelling almost a century, we come to Hilary Mantel, and the opening pages of Beyond Black. Mantel’s mordantly humorous, macabre tale of a professional spirit medium, Alison Hart, plays on the literal and psychic night worlds of London. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the night world has been significantly transformed. Though not elegiac in any traditional sense, it is nonetheless a lament for the dead; it has about it moreover a febrile urgency suffered passively by the urban subject. Mantel’s night world is altered from those threatening, discomforting places of late Victorian and Edwardian cultures of perception, and thereby is marked in its historicity and material differences, as these inform the translation of expression. This might seem so obvious as to be unworthy of remark. The point is though that it is precisely in the atomistic peculiarity of detail that is otherwise overlooked that the singularity of the night-world event makes itself felt in the manner that it does. Specificity of trait engenders sensual apprehension. The places of the city in which the novel takes place for the most part are the districts touching on the periphery of the city, as defined by the M25,

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the circular motorway and the North Circular road that circumscribe London. Alison ‘kept out of [central] London when she could’ writes Mantel. ‘She would fight her way in as far as Hammersmith, or work the further reaches of the North Circular’ (2005: 10). Here is a tortuous, uncanny and disquieting world comprised of a series of liminal borderlands that are simultaneously spatial and temporal and therefore all the more haunted for that. The buildings in which Alison conducts her act are ‘crumbling civic buildings . . . their exoskeletons in constant need of patching’. Tiles ‘rain’ from the roofs, murals ‘unglue’, carpets ‘felt tacky and the walls exhaled an acrid vapour. Thirty years of freeze-dried damp had crystallized in the concrete’ (10). Though not the extract with which I wish to bring this chapter to a close, it has to be said that there is much to relish about such details – and indeed the novel in its entirety. Unfortunately, there is not the space to offer a more extended reading, but we should at least acknowledge the ‘something more’ than merely a description of the decay of the architectural fabric, inside and out. Mantel’s text exudes an animate but inhuman discomfort. There is what might be termed a predicate-visceral counter-signature to the logic of rational representation, a phantasmic sensual alterity projected from within and transforming the language of the excerpt from constative to performative. Mantel’s night world gives place to the apprehension that ‘there are some spirits . . . who are so tenacious of existence that they are willing to assume any form, however debased, ridiculous and filthy. That was why Al[ison] . . . made sure to keep a clean house’ (270). As that last sentence confirms, the noctuary text concerns spirit of place. However, ‘spirit’ is a name for event, for occurrence, fluctuation and motion. It is not a matter of ontology or being but names a revenance, a conjuration if you will that, in its awakening, stirs echoes and with that a force of law to which it binds one as witness (con-jurare), demanding that one finds, invents the appropriate response. This is what we are made aware of in Mantel’s short, restless opening chapter, as we are introduced to a night world ‘teaming with anonymous and nomad, impersonal and pre-individual singularities’ (Deleuze 1990: 103). The chapter, and therefore the novel, opens, with the word ‘travelling’, to which is appended a colon, from which issues not only the rest of the sentence but also, arguably the rest of the text, as an unstaunchable flow. That first word: is it functioning as a verbal noun, participial adjective, or both? If a verbal noun, where, or who, is the subject? The remainder of the sentence reads ‘the dank oily days after Christmas’ (Mantel 2005: 1). In this, it becomes the days themselves that travel; they are just that endless, ineluctable seepage, which we will later apprehend as the exhalation of walls or the tenaciousness of the phantom past. If travelling is a participial adjective, the flow again qualifies and defines the days. The days are travelling, this is an expression of their quasi-being, while simultaneously travelling is what the days do, what they cannot help but do: so time is broken down into a series of different temporal moments,

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subdivision, decomposition and sequence serving to dismantle meaning and identity from within the very predicative determination. Moreover, with another resonance to be heard in travelling, its dim, archaic ghostly other, travail, haunting it from the past, Mantel’s novel begins with the sign of the endless work and suffering of the city’s currents and surges as they traverse and transform the surface topographies and geometries of London. This is only to introduce, inaugurate what takes place as the initial staging of the city in its heterogeneous series of singularity-events. The first chapter of Beyond Black, and the extracts with which I am concerned, take up most of that chapter. In order to begin to grasp the full effect of this passage from twilight to evening, it must be cited in extenso: The motorway, its wastes looping London: the margin’s scrub grass flaring orange in the lights, and the leaves of the poisoned shrubs stripped yellow green like a cantaloupe melon. Four o’clock: light sinking over the orbital road. Teatime in Enfield, night falling on Potters Bar. [. . .] A sea-green sky: lamps blossoming white. This is marginal land: fields of strung wire, of treadless tyres in ditches, fridges dead on their backs, and starving ponies cropping the mud. It is a landscape running with outcasts and escapees, with Afghans, Turks and Kurds: with scapegoats, scarred with bottle and burn marks, limping from the cities with broken ribs. The life forms here are rejects, or anomalies: the cats tipped from speeding cars, and the Heathrow sheep, their fleece clotted with the stench of aviation fuel. . . . The car flees across junctions, and the space the road encloses is the space inside her [Alison Hart]: the arena of combat, the wasteland the place of civil strife behind her ribs . . . Dim lights shine from tower blocks, from passing helicopters, from fixed stars. Night closes in on the perjured ministers and burnt-out paedophiles, on the unloved viaducts and graffitied bridges, on ditches beneath mouldering hedgerows and railings never warmed by human touch. [. . .] A static cloud bank, like an ink smudge. Darkening air. [. . .] And darker still. Colour has run out from the land. Only form is left: the clumped treetops like a dragon’s back. The sky deepens to midnight blue. The orange of the street lights is blotted to a fondant cerise; in pastureland, the pylons lift their skirts in a ferrous gavotte. (1–2) Through this opening chapter, with night fall the reader is caught up in disjointed, flashing impressions as Alison Hart’s car moves through successive disparate cityscapes and, also, the motions of the writing of the city, as so many rapidly observed sites coming in and out of focus. With its sentence

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fragments and the irregular, impulsive, shuddering propulsion in that frequency of colons, the extract both suspends and drives its somewhat violent gesticulations and transit. This concert of velocities is further kept up by the generative action of the present tense – a present that is without stable presence, and which is read constantly coming to pass, arriving from a future moment and slipping away into the past. Unstoppable and yet seemingly going nowhere, remaining in some kind of hallucinatory suspension, the pace and pulse insist through the frequency of gerunds: looping, flaring, sinking, falling, blossoming, starving, running, limping. The majority of these figures, concentrated for the most part in the first two paragraphs above, name a form of movement even as their grammatical form performs such ceaseless activity. The reader, like the motorist, is immersed in the travelling prose, passive and subjected to the bombardment of what takes place. The locations adjacent to the road are signalled through conflations of the organic and built environments. The ‘confusion’ of discourses pertaining to these different orders of landscape is produced through the interchange in figural language, as metaphor, it might be argued, declines or, perhaps, splits open into catachresis. Lamps ‘blossom’, refrigerators have died. No site retains its proper identity, everything within view can be – and frequently is – substituted for some other object. Wasteland and pastureland are interchangeable, without any sense of impropriety; there is simply a futile, because inevitable, sense of irresistible translation as the condition of place. More than this, however, there is a general linguistic and semantic dehiscence that sets up a curious, sympathetic vibration between language and reality, producing a tenor of unreality as a result. The insistence of movement lends to description a brutality of expression. Remaining immeasurably distant from what they describe through their tropic strangeness and force, images such as the polluted Heathrow sheep, unloved viaducts, and dancing pylons startle because they strike the reader with a perception of known proximity and immediacy. Through that space generated in this ‘bursting open’ of the figural, the languages of encroaching dusk and incipient night invent from within the perception of the real a series of singularities that maintain their sensate otherness, inimical to any domestication or familiarization. Arguably, they resonate with a sense of familiarity just because they are so nightmarishly incongruous. The inanimate appears to come alive, the living is marked with brutalization and contamination. In this, and in other phantasmagoric details, the landscapes have a haunting and fierce, cruel exoticism, about which there is nothing that is comfortable or romantically ‘other’. Even intersections on the roads are threatening, causing cars to ‘flee’, such is the perceived materialization of threat and fear. The fractured places of London’s periphery erupt intermittently, through strikingly alien figures but without a governing taxonomy, unless it is, itself, the estrangement belonging to the

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apprehension of the world as the endless taking place of intersecting planes, surfaces, vectors and momentarily crystallized structures. Leaves assume the colouration of cantaloupes; as the sky shifts tonally from sea-green to midnight blue, the street lamps, having blossomed, become ‘blotted’ to an intensified cerise having the appearance of a smooth edible paste. All life forms, human or animal, are abject, already marginalized, abused; if human, they have fled but remain strangers; they are homeless, albeit not in a literal sense. In this poetics of the contemporary, marginal urban night world, every location, figure, inhabitant, form or feature serves as a souvenir or medium bringing to consciousness the remembrance of something beneath the brutal fragmentary materiality of the present. What is called to mind is sensed rather than comprehensively articulated, and is brought about hovering at the peripheries of nightmare reverie as a result of the conjuring effects occasioned by the fall of night. One cannot remember what one has never known of course, but this in part is intrinsic to the initially dim apperception of being haunted by these surface fragments that Mantel assembles, even as their liminal, nomadic threat arrives and disappears through the transport of the passage and the motion of the car. The ‘menace’ is both spectral and material, phenomenological and political; for what imperils perception is that whatever is apprehended, as abandoned, forgotten, ignored in having been ravaged, not only lives on and at topographical, ideological and cultural margins, it also constitutes those very same boundaries, so many frontiers, edges, and limits that, pushed to the edge of London, nevertheless circumscribe and so threaten to construct its meaning. The threatening, moreover, which appears as night arrives as if it were some return of the repressed, does so in a double manner. For this souvenir of the other,4 is readable both as so many singularities, as singular others, and as a collective, a constellated alterity without shared character other than that abject otherness. Both narrative content and form are vehicles, it may be averred, preserving through their velocity the proximate, intimate timbre of event at the borders that the material details mark. That which lies beneath the surface drifts at the boundary of consciousness as certainly as the topographical locations of the narrative ebb and flow in the movement along the spatial and temporal peripheries of London. In each example, ‘in each case’, as John Rajchman asserts of Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Proust and the work of images in cinema, ‘signs and images belong to a logic of “sense and event” rather than of truth and proposition’ (2000: 118). While ‘for Deleuze art may be said to “make sense” before it acquires significations, references, or “intentions” ’ (Rajchman 2000: 119), and so stays on the semiotic rather than semantic side of the border, Mantel’s night world is discomfiting phenomenologically in the ways it exposes the porousness of the liminal. Significations are presaged, references appear to tease with their very possibility. But then,

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nightfall is seen to produce just such possibilities, in its bringing together contingent lines of flight and borderlines. It causes, or at least invites the London writer to explore, the appreciable pulse of urban modernity an ‘aesthetics of affirmative play’ (Rajchman 2000: 119), or productive disorder, liberated from the rational judgement demanded in the full light of day. This is why I have spoken earlier of the city’s ability to conjure in its presentation of repeatedly fragmentary surfaces, structures and locations. This, let us remind ourselves of Victor Burgin and Henry James, is the only way we might receive or know, however imprecisely, London. London at dusk or in more distinctly caliginous conditions conjures then – it produces illusions, it calls up phantasms, it summons and invokes visions of the other, and always as an insistent, iterable and irreducible series of singular events and experiences. Artificial light sources do nothing to alleviate or abate the felt unreality. In this manner, the taking place of place, to use a possibly already much overworked phrase, produces the writing of the city – or, as Deleuze argues, ‘event make[s] language possible’ (1990: 182). The night world effects this conjuring transference, from perceived, incorporeal surface effects of the event to the surface effects of the written expression. Whether ominously or deliriously, luxuriously or disorientatingly, London calls, and so possesses, those witnesses receptive to what Arnold Bennett has called in his first novel, A Man from the North, its ‘magic utterances’ (1994: 111).

Brief moments in time I

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3 Between Seeing and Knowing: Amy Levy, Arnold Bennett and Urban Counter-romance

There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They did not exist until art invented them. Now it must be admitted, fogs are carried to excess. They have become the mere mannerisms of a clique . . . Oscar Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying’ . . . the tube always filled him with wonder and romance, and always threw him up out of the earth . . . with such a strange exhilaration of soul. Arnold Bennett, Buried Alive [M]erely by its existence around you, [London] quickens the brain, fosters thought that in the country would never come . . . Anon., The Spectator (1889)

I As the precise setting of Arnold Bennett’s Riceyman Steps, Clerkenwell, should make attentive readers of London concede, the particularity of site is not only inextricably connected to modern character, but resists generalizations about London. That specificity appears to be announced with the play between precision and imprecision in the act of dating from the inaugural sentence: ‘On an autumn afternoon of 1919 a hatless man with a slight limp might have been observed ascending the gentle, broad acclivity of Riceyman Steps, which led from King’s Cross Road up to Riceyman Square, in the great metropolitan industrial district of Clerkenwell’ (RSt 7). The reader enters the square, as he or she enters the novel, ascending the stairs. With this double action, reduplicating the motion of that hatless, limping figure, Bennett initiates a series of dualisms and contrasts that determine the sentence as a whole. While the date is as precise as the general appearance and gait of 81

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Henry Earlforward, the specific afternoon is as vague as the chance observation. Bennett’s London, the singularity of site, comes into focus through such ludic fluctuation, the wavering of which counterpoints the general movement from the road to the steps, into the square that is named in relation and distinction to the district. It is, we are therefore given to understand, not just Clerkenwell that is drawn in distinction to London as a whole, but the specific square (and from that a particular bookshop) that provides the title of the novel, and which Bennett distinguishes acutely to King’s Cross Road (on several occasions). In his late, prize-winning novel then, Bennett highlights and specifies the importance of the singularity or peculiarity, the idiom if you will, of a borough, ward or district. He makes one aware how crucial such specificity is in any act of inventing the city. In the case of Riceyman Steps, the author does so through what might be called a symptomatic and syntactical divertissement, a sequence of troping gestures turning in different ways, so that tropic scheme enacts the writing of topographic aura. What the oscillation between differing perspectives of, on the one hand the King’s Cross Road with its suggestion of all London in its immensity and, on the other, the ever smaller and more confined spaces signified by the title of Riceyman Steps, produces is a modern, if not modernist ‘recognition that no one angle of observation has precedence over others’ (Squillace 1997: 152). The play between vagueness and precision echoes this assertion, and so introduces a disturbance in the field of the reader’s vision that implies a necessary subversion of ‘Edwardian conventions from within’ (Squillace 1997: 152) specifically, regarding our particular interests, the questions of realism and urban representation. Writing in its materiality is thus informed by the modernity of the city, by the question of shaping the representation and inscription of the city according to materiality and multiform conditions of London. Bennett’s opening sentence admits not only of different perspectives but also that the city is both a material construct and yet informed by something other than its mere material or physical presence. Within this, he also perceives that specific loci, such as Riceyman Square, the steps, and Henry Earlforward’s bookshop are informed by details of composition and arrangement that demand a writing of district, street, location, which does not seek to extract from that general statements or observations about the condition of London as a whole. Attending as faithfully as possible to both the materiality and the otherness of site in relation to a more generalized conception of the city, displacing the nebulous orientation of ‘space’ in favour of specificity of place and what takes place therein, the writing of particular location simultaneously grounds narrative and gives to that narrative a structure of identity that is implicitly ‘idiocultural’.1 It may be thought that a novel such as Riceyman Steps ‘might constitute an education in such distinctions’ (Squillace 1997: 155). However, on closer observation it serves to remind ‘one of the inde-

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terminacy [if not the undecidability] of reading’; and, furthermore, that if reading depends ‘on the angle of [an object such as the city’s] relationship to the interpreter’ (Squillace 1997: 155), one must always be thrown back on the necessity of the endless work of reading such singularity. Every region or district is, effectively, an other London, however banal, obvious or unremarkable such an assertion must ostensibly appear. Each locus or place offers a heterogeneous identity or counter-signature to the idea of the city as totality, which is within but never fully assimilable with a broader sense of London. At the same time, though, each location, whether of the centre or more unequivocally suburban, serves in the constantly shifting determination of London. Many writers of the city recognize this, and the concomitant resistance to homogenization that the act of writing district and local place entails; the shape their fictions take, the languages and histories that determine their shaping, develop accordingly. Many areas of London now regarded as components in the loose agglomeration that is referred to as a ‘centre’ were however once suburbs, and perceived as such. Whether implicitly or explicitly, negatively or positively, the suburban district, as an historically determined identity peripheral to the capital, provides a series of momentary focal points in the first two chapters of Writing London. Stopping to consider Fulham and its function in Marsh’s The Beetle, I commented, somewhat acidly it has to be confessed, on the comic monstrosity of the suburb as illustrated through The Diary of a Nobody. In contrast to that, the sometimes elegiac or lyrical auratic experience of the suburbs was reflected on in the chapter concerned with London’s night worlds. The suburb’s persistently ambivalent fascination for writers, ambivalent because there is always the perception of something lurking, something other within the safe sameness (reflect, if you will, on Nigel Williams’ The Wimbledon Poisoner, in which comic misadventure a solicitor attempts to poison his wife), will be considered again in my final chapter on The Waste Land. For now though, the present chapter will consider not the suburban as such, but the ways in which district, neighbourhood, location are all bound up with any narrative we wish to tell concerning the historicity, perception and memory of specific London communities, within and yet irreducible to any general definition of London. In Chapter 4, the significance of an other Islington, distinct as a district adjacent to the centrality and assumed power of the City, is considered in a reading of a short memoir by John Berger. Not simply a question of marginality topographically, the suburban functions to define pockets of existence anomalous, anachronistic and culturally different, the otherness of which the writer must invent, beyond the usual commonplaces of centre/margin. Arnold Bennett captures the significance of the suburb in his first novel, A Man from the North (1898), certain extracts of which I have had occasion to consider in passing in the previous chapter. Not a novel to draw on the conventional tedium/horror dichotomy usual in much writing about the

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suburbs, A Man from the North offers this other perspective on the matter. In a conversation with the novel’s eponymous Northerner, Richard Larch, the writer Richard Aked proposes a volume on the ‘psychology of the suburbs’ defining their importance to the idea of London thus: ‘Speaking roughly, each of the great suburban divisions, has, for me at any rate, its own characteristics, its peculiar moral physiognomy . . . Take me blindfold to any street in London, and I’ll discover instantly, from a thousand hints, where I am. Well, each of these divisions must be described in turn, not topographically of course, but the inner spirit, the soul of it. See? People have got into a way of sneering at the suburbs. Why, the suburbs are London! It is alone the – the concussion of meeting suburbs exert a subtle influence on the great central spots. Take Fulham; no one thinks anything of Fulham, but suppose it were swept off the face of the earth the effect would be to alter, for the seeing eye, the character of Piccadilly and the Strand and Cheapside. The play of one suburb on another and on the central haunts is as regular, as orderly, as calculable, as the law of gravity itself.’ (1994: 46) It may be that Aked is Bennett’s composite fictional portrait of any number of late Victorian or Edwardian chroniclers of the minutiae of London life, such as Thomas Burke for example. Be that as it may, this particular extract offers an important understanding of the form and identity of London at the end of the nineteenth century. Aked’s approach to characteristics, to ‘moral physiognomy’, to spirit and psychology, highlights the idiocultural specificity of site. In a comprehensive though brief critique that accounts for the dominant perspectives of the period, Aked is employed by Bennett to defamiliarize the misperception that one can either read or impose a general ontology on the city. This is adumbrated in such a manner that an other London, the other of the undifferentiated meaning or identity is invented through a recognition of the invisible resonances of each location. Additionally, there is that attentiveness to the concert of suburban sites in the composition of the shifting, determinant play of a supposedly ‘central’ identity, without which the centre will not hold. It is found emerging out of the conventions of representation and their reliance on a stable and static centre/margin opposition. At the same time, what is arguably the most fascinating aspect of Aked’s aperçu on the significance of the suburbs is their consequence for apprehending the city as only a shifting and unstable ontology, haunted and informed by a series of singularities or idiocultures, to employ the term again. As Aked’s commentary makes undeniably clear, each must be read – and read, it has to be emphasized not empirically but with the mind’s eye, for what remains hidden, invisible within the ostensible dull, repetitive illusion of homogeneity – for its peculiarities, its own distinct alterity from each and every other district.

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To re-emphasize the point, Aked’s suburban hypothesis accounts for the fact that, while remaining as so many singular, heteronymous others, the suburbs touch upon one another as a constellation in the maintenance of the meaning of ‘London’. In this therefore, what is named London is only ever the product, performance and projection of the play of difference, a play moreover always already at work within each specific suburban locality. More than merely generating London, the suburbs have an importance that goes beyond an architectonic, subservient function. They define and determine the city; the suburbs are the city in the constancy of their physics, as Aked proposes. And the determining force of the suburbs is in their remaining unread, in the fact that they are invisible, unremarkable, and therefore unremarked. Such occlusion belies the detail and difference, the traits of suburban otherness that silently inform, and contribute to the tone of the city, while effecting unseen the inversion of the centre/margin binary opposition. Aked effectively transforms the very meaning of the term ‘suburban’ therefore. Or, let us say that he draws attention to that other semantic echo within sub-. For, while we assume by habit the suburban as that which is geographically on the margins of the urban, as the determinate figure assigned to those spatial outskirts of a centre, Aked’s reading brings back into play that which is the less immediately visible oscillation in the sub- of suburban: that which lies beneath or below the urban, that which supports its being privileged as the principal focus. Thus, it is that locations such as Putney in Bennett’s Buried Alive occasion visions to the mind’s eye of artist Priam Farll. In the very details of Putney, with its fish-shop, ornamental rowing boats, picturesque barges, music hall, there is to be discerned, for Farll at least, a middle-class utopianism. The location on the banks of the Thames ‘seemed to breathe of romance – the romance of common sense and kindliness and simplicity’ (1991: 60). Should this seem somewhat commonplace, the deeper one goes into the suburbs of London in Bennett the odder the experience. The simplicity of suburban romance just announced finds itself amended in somewhat surreal fashion in Bennett’s attentive satire on the commercial and middle-class existence. A Putney morning (the title of chapter VI) reveals to Priam Farll a brave new Edwardian world on his exploration of the neighbourhood, particularly along the Upper Richmond Road. As an artist and cosmopolitan traveller, this other London is a surprise, to say the least, and transforms his perception of the world, as it arrives out of its quotidian invisibility. Churches are not simply churches, but described as ‘vast red things with gigantic bells’ (1991: 70). To these are contrasted blouses in shop windows, cigar-stores, and disproportionate posters for ‘York hams eight feet high’ or with images of ‘shaggy and ferocious oxen peeping out of monstrous teacups in their anxiety to be consumed’ (1991: 70). This last poster, presumably an advertisement for Bovril or an equivalent beef tea, is only one of several comic

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visionary displays of commercial gigantism belonging to the ‘phantasmagoria of Upper Richmond Road’ (1991: 70). As Bennett intensifies the startling vision, so details for Farll become noticed with increasing density and rapidity, which hints at the sublime within the mundane. It is, if not exactly mathematical, then at least an exponential sublimity of signals and impossible visual demands, leading to a sense, a ‘rare vision’, of the ‘interminable, intermittent vision of food dead and alive, and of performers performing the same performance from everlasting to everlasting, and of millions and millions of cigarettes ascending from the mouths of handsome young men in incense to heaven’ (1991: 71). Having walked from Putney to Barnes Station, Farll concedes that the vision stretches ‘on and on’ (1991: 71). The ineluctable modality of the visible (as Joyce would say) produces a singular soporific, if not narcotic effect on Priam Farll. At last, his reverie ends with the visionary realization that, although he ‘had seen the world . . . he had never seen a city so incredibly strange, so packed with curious and rare psychological interest as London’ (1991: 71). Such interest must come, the attentive reader will admit, from the idiocultural specificities of place, and from the play between the single perspective of realism and the subversive emergence and overflow of visionary disorientation from within any realist mode of production.

II Though the suburbs are not the principal locus of concentration in this chapter, Bennett’s powerful critique in A Man from the North and the visionary satire of Buried Alive with its ironic play on popular romance identifies a disturbance from within, and at the illusory heart of urban identity. In doing so, it also allows us a glimpse of what remains to be read in our attentiveness to location and what might be read as the incunabula of modernism just as the condition of modernity, and registered via the modes of critique, satire and, ultimately the undecidability of the ironic. It also helps to explain or, at least, introduce the turn from Richard Marsh in the first chapter, with its more obviously fin de siècle concerns, to Amy Levy and Arnold Bennett in this. When Levy speaks of the ‘pulses of the great city’ that ‘beat and throbbed’ felt by one of her characters, Gertrude, in The Romance of a Shop (RoS 80), or when in the opening chapter of The Sinews of War Bennett (with his occasional co-author Eden Phillpotts) describes the strange nocturnal, mechanical life of ‘that monster, London’ (1975: 1), they are recording and responding to an inhuman, indifferent ‘life’ or form of being perceived, and yet not apprehended as fearful by its subjects. The other cities invented by Levy and Bennett depart then, in their nuanced understandings of the subterranean flows of metropolitan culture and its determinations of modern identity, from many of their contemporaries from the 1880s to the 1930s. They not only depart, they have no point of

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convergence, and so, perhaps, their memory and reception have suffered accordingly, regardless of any futile aesthetic debate about being in the first or second ‘rank’ of novelists of London in the fin de siècle or the decades that are now, and for some time have been, defined as modernist, in distinction from the ‘merely’ late Victorian or Edwardian. Yet Levy and Bennett escape or avoid not only the ‘mere mannerisms of a clique’ (Wilde 1975: 925), but also the kitchen sink miseries and Schopenhaurian ego of George Gissing. Both writers exemplify how the modern urban writer highlights in distinctive manner those other Londons, than either the fin de siècle cities of ‘dreadful night’ on the one hand, or those more ethereal, disembodied urban spaces of modernist consciousness on the other hand, both of which have come to dominate critical analysis, and which imaginary spaces are invented in the decades previously signalled. In part, what I am calling in my title the urban counter-romance of London resides in finding the forgotten or overlooked, in creating from the city’s specific locations a translated bildungsroman for modern urban perception. In the classic bildungsroman, space and place are stages for action, locations for scene setting, subordinate to and not determinants of experience, except in the broadest sense. If there is such a thing as a London bildungsroman, this, it can be argued, is to be found in Henry James’ The Princess Casamassima (1987), first published in 1886, and therefore contemporary with Amy Levy’s novels. In James’ ‘political’ novel the city conforms to the conventions of subordinate role, London remaining detached, essentially the same for its subject at the end of the narrative trajectory and urban adventure as it is at the outset. In The Princess Casamassima therefore romance remains uncontested. Hyacinth Robinson, the protagonist of James’ novel, may undergo the conventional ‘education’ of the traditional bildungsroman in his encounters with terrorists, but that other bildung, the space of the city, remains the same detached romantic space. The city is kept apart from experience, the novel’s urban politics those of the anthropologist or social commentator. It concedes, as David McMurrey has argued (1980), to the romantic sociology of ‘the people’ in its description of the working-class woman, Millicent Henning. . . . but there was something about her indescribably fresh, successful and satisfying. She was, to her blunt, expanded finger-tips, a daughter of London, of the crowded Streets and hustling traffic of the great city; she had drawn her health and strength from its dingy courts and foggy thoroughfares, and peopled its parks and squares and crescents with her ambitions; it had entered into her blood and her bone, the sound of her voice and the carriage of her head; she understood it by instinct and loved it with passion; she represented its immense vulgarities and curiosities, its brutality and its knowingness, its good-nature and its impudence, and might have figured, in an allegorical procession, as a kind of glorified

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townswoman, a nymph of the wilderness of Middlesex, a flower of the accumulated parishes, the genius of urban civilisation, the muse of cockneyism. (James 1987: 92–3) From that grudging ‘but’ that implies admiration despite distaste, James’ representation enfolds the individual within the mannerisms of late nineteenth-century urban registration and representation. It closes off access to apprehension of the city as much as it shuts out Millicent from any singular understanding. She is, and remains, a type for James, unknowable and merely an agglomeration of urban tics, the embodied locus of the undifferentiated city itself. Distinct from the ‘closed-system’ of James’ novel, counter-romance reconstructs the traditional figure of the bildungsroman, the bourgeois (usually male) subject, through a journey around various topographies of London, and the coming to consciousness or vision that such travel and response to place brings about. In the movement through urban and suburban location, and in the concomitant revelation to the subject of that which constitutes geographical singularity, the counterromance translates the subject and offers to unfold the quotidian as one aspect of that which is overlooked in more vibrant, sensational narratives or tales that depart from the equilibrium of the everyday. It also figures a narrative penetration and exploration of the location that is unknown, overlooked, and so, more or less invisible. My use of romance is double. On the one hand, it plays on the idea of a romance language, although admittedly this is to play fast and loose with that meaning, and to risk a strong reading of the term. The language of the ordinary and recurrent, otherwise unremarkable experience is a ‘vernacular’ of place. It bears in it the signs of the idioculture as the traces that inform custom, habit, the ideological normative: hence urban romance – a language that not only comments on but also performs, as it translates those material and experiential conditions of the taking place of place. On the other hand, romance names the fictional narrative of remarkable events and adventures that draw attention to themselves as remarkable for being remote from the quotidian, typically having to do with chivalric quests and endeavours. The romance, conventionally understood, takes one to another place, a world distinct from our own, with an emphasis on location that is foreign, exotic and unfamiliar. Obviously there is nothing remotely heroic, out of the ordinary, or foreign in the narratives of London that are presented by Levy or Bennett. Yet, I would argue, not only do the novels with which we are interested in the present chapter turn to the vernacular in a number of ways, they also invoke in their small adventures that sense of fateful inevitability that Northrop Frye identifies as a hallmark of the romance. Moreover, unlike the more obviously fantastic qualities of much fin de siècle sensation fiction, such as The Beetle, or a novel such as James’ popular romance of anarchists in the capital to which we have briefly alluded, Levy and Bennett’s detailed,

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vividly impressionistic accounts of locality, atmosphere and experience introduce the reader to that which, in literature at least, is unfamiliar or strange in other novels of the city, precisely because it touches on whatever is habitually passed over in its familiarity. Levy and Bennett make the familiar unfamiliar in their detailed observation and construction. More than this, in distinction to other London novelists they admit that ‘[a]esthetic experience and practical reason do not inhabit the same world’. Instead, they ‘engage in a perceptual activity [from within the conventions of realism and allied commonplaces of genre] radically different from that of a spectator [or novelist] who has no interest in the object other than to, say, paint it’ (Danius 2002: 110). To put this somewhat baldly, Levy and Bennett recognize the difference between knowing and seeing. At the beginning of The Romance of a Shop we find ‘the interior of the great glass structure [a conservatory, which] would have presented a surprise to the stranger expectant of palms and orchids. It was fitted up as a photographer’s studio’ (RoS 52). London houses in the same novel are rendered unhomely, places from which the women of Levy’s novels must cast themselves out. Indeed, The Romance of a Shop begins with the sale of the home. Such houses, the common middle-class homes of districts such as Campden Hill and St John’s Wood in Levy’s writing, are ‘nondescript’, they belong ‘to no particular order of architecture’ (RoS 51). They take on a quasi-anthropomorphic condition, being of a ‘dejected and dismantled appearance’, communicating an ‘air of desolation’, or else have a ‘melancholy appearance’, with particular parts being disproportionate to the whole (RoS, 51, 106). Even weather in Levy’s London is not conducive to comfort or domestic familiarity. In late summer, the city stands in suspended animation, its general prospect giving to the time of year a sense of desolation (RoS 160). In winter, the snow whirls so rapidly on the streets of St John’s Wood, visibility is reduced to impressionistic ‘blotches’ of colour, while an anonymous subject, having such vision imposed on her, finds her sensibilities disorientated, making ‘one giddy’ in the contemplation of the scene (RoS 169). There is a certain doubleness, a destabilization in that third person singular. Its anonymity and its implication of hypothetical shared experience implicate the reader into memory of such experience, as there is a movement between character, narrator and reader. A short story of Levy’s, ‘Eldorado in Islington’ (RoS 227–30), also utilizes such representational techniques of quiet estrangement from, within, the familiar. Our experience of the city is disturbed from the very beginning, with that seemingly ironic title, in which imaginary location is suggested as hidden within the topography of a North London suburb. In this story, flights of steps and bow windows are ‘out of all proportion to their size’ (RoS 227). The Islington street is sordid, its foliage dusty and sickly. In North London the ‘spirit’ of summer is brooding, ‘weary and dispirited’, while the air is ‘hot, gusty, grit-laden . . .’ and querulous (RoS 227, 228). In a short

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story of less than three pages, the narrative concerns itself intimately with this counter-romantic defamiliarization of the familiar world. In both the short story and the novel, the writing exceeds representation of London; it is the city. It insists on detail, and therefore effect on the reader, which does not so much figure the city as, simultaneously, it causes the city to take place. Levy’s is a language ‘whose significance’ emerges ‘not simply or exclusively by referring to a location that is external to it’ (as, arguably one could demonstrate to be the case in James’ The Princess Casamassima were there space) . . . ‘but rather insofar as its own occurrence would be its very (taking) place’ (Anidjar 2002: 87). In Levy’s descriptions of atmosphere and site, the subject gives way to the reader, in direct presentation of atmosphere, architecture, the intimation of spirit of place and the perception of the effects on the psyche of such conditions. Levy’s use of transitive verbs to describe the spirit of place, along with her deployment of adjectives grammatically indicative of mood or phenomenal condition, enact experience through syntactical ennui, so as to release sense-experience from the mere suggestion that is mimetic representation. Similar subdued estrangements, the taking-place of place and affect of location, as the displacement of representation maintained in its separation from that which is represented, is brought about in a different manner on a number of occasions by Arnold Bennett. In Teresa of Watling Street, described by the author in the subtitle as ‘a fantasia on modern times’, Richard Redgrave, the protagonist of the novel, has rooms overlooking the Thames. From this otherwise unremarkable vantage point, Bennett makes the perspective unfamiliar initially through a comparison with the more obviously ‘romantic’ (the word is Bennett’s) Danube and ‘Buda-Pesth’. Then comes a description of the view of ‘Waterloo Bridge and of Somerset House [which] seemed like gigantic and strange temples uncannily suspended over the surface of the glooming water’. The sky, we read, ‘was like Joseph’s coat’ over ‘Westminster Bridge and the Houses of Parliament’, though in the east ‘it was like a maiden’s scarf’ (106). The passage moves from disorientation of habitual perception through the foregrounding of a momentary glimpse of sublimity within the massive materiality of the scene, before drifting away, and upwards in contemplation of the sky, in what is arguably reliant more on painterly impressions than any direct representation. The implied contrast of colour, of relative diaphany and lack of transparency offers a subtle displacement of any remaining mimetic qualities, as Bennett aestheticizes reality, in an implied weaving of impression between the fine and the applied arts. The textual effects of both Levy and Bennett in particular passages lie in their arrangement of detail, rather than solely in what they depict. In this, theirs might be compared with the painterly effects of James McNeill Whistler. Knowing rather than just showing the city involves a response to colour and form, and not simply to what is there, as Whistler proposed in a lecture

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given at London, Cambridge and Oxford in 1885, ‘Ten O’Clock’. In that lecture – appositely enough for our present concerns, and also with an eye to the previous chapter on London as night world – Whistler asserts that while the tourist or working man see the city in broad daylight, the artist knows it when atmospheric conditions hinder or, better, augment, vision: ‘when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky . . . and the whole city hangs in the heavens . . . secrets are unfolded’ (507). Whether it is Levy’s snowstorm or Bennett’s textile twilight, such ‘secrets’ unveil themselves through the surface arrangement of the text. Arrangement foregrounds therefore the aesthetic and also the structural; it attends to the material play of detail on and as the surface of the real, as in fact the real itself. There is in the composition of Bennett and Levy the recognition and incorporation of a variation of that aesthetics of rejection belonging to and imposed by the other Londons, which have been given consideration already. Where such an aesthetics in The Beetle was part and parcel of a politics of singularity, in differing ways, Levy and Bennett’s aesthetic arrangements arrive as a poetics of the singular. Arguably, such a poetics attests to a condition of modernity calling for what Timothy Clark describes, apropos of Blanchot, as ‘the lightness of reading’ in which ‘[t]here is to be no positing of . . . some surface text on one side against some underlying “meaning” on the other’ (2005, 107). Levy demands such lightness of reading in response to arrangement for the artistic London interiors of The Romance of a Shop. For example, of the house on Campden Hill, already mentioned, the following details are presented: Several cameras, each of a different size, stood about the room. In one corner was a great screen of white-painted canvas; there were blinds to the roof adapted for admitting or excluding the light; and paste-pots, bottles, printing-frames, photographs in various stages of finish – a nondescript heap of professional litter – were scattered about the place from end to end. Standing among these properties was a young girl . . . (RoS 52) The reader’s eye is engaged seemingly endlessly in an artful disorder enacted through the motions of the syntax. Pattern disorganizes perspective, it prohibits meaningful co-ordination. Nevertheless, there is to the representation of the studio a harmonization of elements for their own sake, into the midst of which is casually revealed a sudden human focal point. It is as if the passage is focusing, constructing a photograph from its play of elements, which become anchored and justified in the revelation of the ‘young girl’. The passage thus gives itself over to the work of framing, but to a framing that is as much interested in the constitution of the frame and how to frame

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as it is concerned with what the frame holds. It is a representation concerned with how one represents. As an aesthetic gesture then staged at the beginning of the novel it serves a quietly didactic purpose, instructing the good reader in the art of knowing rather than seeing through reading, and so how to read the experience of the city that the novel offers. Two other passages in the novel return to such effects of arrangement. Of a photographic studio in Baker Street we read: [an] ambitious style of decoration was attempted in the studio. The objectionable Virginia cork and coloured glass of the little passage were disguised by various aesthetic devices; lanterns swung from the roof, and a framed photograph or two from Dürer and Botticelli, Watts and Burne-Jones, was mingled artfully with the specimens of their own work which adorned it as a matter of course. A little cheap Japanese china, and a few red-legged tables and chairs converted the waiting room, as Phyllis said, into a perfect bower of art and culture; . . . Fred contributed . . . many rustic windows, stiles and canvas backgrounds to the studio . . . (RoS 78) The detail of the studio is the studio, as Levy suppresses her subject in favour of a harmony of composition. As Levy’s figure has it, representation of the room is ‘disguised by various aesthetic devices’. The same is also true of the next passage: The apartment in which Gertrude found herself . . . Was fitted up with all the chaotic splendour which distinguishes the studio of the modern fashionable artist; the spoils of many climes, fruits of many wanderings, being heaped, with more regard to picturesqueness than fitness, in every available nook . . . . . . as she afterwards confessed, she only carried away a prevailing impression of tiger-skins and Venetian lanterns. The fire-light played about her slim figure and about the faded richness of a big screen of old Spanish leather, which fenced in the little bit of territory in the immediate neighbourhood of the fire-place; a spot in which had been gathered the most luxurious lounges and the choicest ornaments of the whole collection; and where, at the present moment, the air was heavy with the scent of tuberose, several sprays of which stood on a small table in a costly jar of Venetian glass. (RoS 106) In each example, the detail and its arrangement are both effect and surface. Each element or feature is a mark in a larger pattern. In the very last, Gertrude Lorimer, both subject and object of the scene, can only recall a prevailing impression, and so it is left to the narrative to bear the burden of the visible. So busy is the room that elements appear to merge into other

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aspects of the scene, even as they give the impression of overflowing their own limits. The gaze is held in the absence of any ‘mobilization of perspective’ in this ‘simple organization of space, a simple choreographing of the visible’, as Jean-Luc Marion puts it of the religious icon (2004: 20). I cite this because, in these particular scenes, Levy’s epistemological propaedeutic reveals the iconic within the everyday, within the living or working spaces. Through this, there might be read a silent critique – or, at least, updating of George Eliot’s initial aestheticization of Dorothea Brooke, in the opening chapter of Middlemarch. The reiterated gesture of iconic representation takes the modern woman from work of art (recall the initial representation of the ‘young girl’) to being the producer of the work of art. It places the woman behind the lens instead of in front of the canvas. In doing so, it replaces the illusions of the pastoral or natural with the material clutter of the studio and the streets of the modern metropolis, in which the woman moves rather than remaining in place to be observed. In Levy’s writing then, Dorothea Brooke steps down from the frame, but with a purpose. In Levy’s retelling, Dorothea – icon, we might suggest, of realism – is refigured and reduplicated through the Lorimer sisters. Gertrude Lorimer had initially been compared with artistic representations, with da Vinci women to be precise (RoS 51). But with the death of her father, she and her three sisters open their photographic studios. In doing so they step out of the frame and the permanent past of art, to gain entrance into the modernity of mechanical manipulation and reproduction of the image, and so the modern world of London. Such are some of the ways in which Levy and Bennett invent the city and London’s locations for their readers, counter to any ostensibly realist paradigm within which they are working. Arrangement of detail and translation of medium implies control and organization of identity rather than that subject being resigned to the role of passive spectator. In effect, this is what the city enables, thereby opening the possibility of the counter-romance of modernity in London. Another recurrent aspect of the small adventure of urban counter-romance is the use of overlooked or hidden location, that which is off the beaten, and more familiar, urban path, which has been addressed in the first volume of Writing London, albeit in passing in my introduction to that book. Amy Levy and Arnold Bennett offer the opportunity to expand that consideration and to extend in the process the historicization of the modes by which writing London takes place. Bennett and Levy are of course not the only writers to exploit such ignored or neglected locales. Nor, perhaps, is it reasonable to suggest that such places are truly neglected, except as they happen to be passed over in particularly persistent and dominant fictions of London, as we have suggested. Such narratives require that we ‘see’ that fog to which Oscar Wilde refers in my first paragraph, in all its mannerism, as constituent element in, for example, narratives of sensation, the fin de siècle’s revivified Gothic, or the more conventionally perceived ‘romances’ of the capital of writers such as Arthur

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Machen, Arthur Conan Doyle or Robert Louis Stevenson, who provide extravagant, exotic or exciting adventures, the spirit of the otherwise inexplicable and its concomitant potential for heroic achievement. Other narratives and genres, such as those of Gissing (to whom we have already alluded), George Moore and Arthur Morrison, or Walter Besant for that matter, demand urgently – and correctly enough – that we see the squalor of the absolutely abject, the extremities of poverty, and the criminal ‘underworld’. Then there are those fictions that present the reader with the overlighted gaiety and excesses, and occasionally decadence of upper-middle- and upper-class social events. None of these genres or modes of presentation are necessarily exclusive. Often in the period of which I am writing, they come to inform and interanimate one another. However, while poverty, unemployment, crime, disease and depredation as well as excess were undoubtedly common at the end of the nineteenth century as conditions of the capital, there was nonetheless another world in London, one which requires a certain critical acknowledgement if it is not to be overshadowed (as it has become already to some extent), by the critical attention given to the polar extremes and symptomatic exoticism that are the keynotes of historicized fin de siècle analysis. And it has to be said, there is also another city that is not that of modernist fragmentation or the representation of sporadic interiorized fluctuations of the urban subject’s consciousness. The everyday condition of the city for many of its working- or middle-class inhabitants is not of such extremes; nor is it suited to the modes of representation or stylistic gesture that mark the more visible fictions in the decades of which we speak. We risk the loss of certain histories or memories of place and, with that, sites of memory if we avoid reading, if we neglect or fail to read such places, their narrated events, and their singular auratic resonance. In such a restitution we accord the other Londons a reading of difference and a different reading. A somewhat lengthy passage, but nonetheless significant to the particular chapter from Hesba Stretton’s Alone in London (1869)2 will help to situate the apparent inconspicuousness of the quotidian. It had been a close and sultry day – one of the hottest of the dogdays . . . All day long the sun had shone down steadily upon the streets of London . . . In the parks, and in every open space, especially about the cool splash of the fountains at Charing Cross, the people, who had escaped from the crowded and unventilated back streets, basked in the sunshine, or sought every corner where a shadow could be found. But in the alleys and slums the air was heavy with heat and dust, and thick vapours floated up and down, charged with sickening smells from the refuse of fish and vegetables decaying in the gutters. Overhead the small, straight strip of sky was almost white, and the light, as it fell, seemed to quiver with the burden of its own burning heat.

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Out of one of the smaller thoroughfares lying between Holborn and the Strand, there opens a narrow alley, not more than six or seven feet across, with high buildings on each side. In the most part the ground floors consist of small shops; for the alley is not a blind one, but leads from the thoroughfare to another street, and forms, indeed, a short cut to it, pretty often used. These shops are not of any size or importance – a greengrocer’s, with a somewhat scanty choice of vegetables and fruit, a broker’s, displaying queer odds and ends of household goods, two or three others, and at the end farthest from the chief thoroughfare, but nearest to the quiet and respectable street beyond, a very modest-looking little shop-window, containing a few newspapers, some rather yellow packets of stationery, and two or three books of ballads. Above the door was painted, in very small, dingy letters, the words, ‘James Oliver, News Agent.’ The shop was even smaller, in proportion, than its window. After two customers had entered – if such an event could ever come to pass – it would have been almost impossible to find room for a third . . . The room beyond was dark, very dark indeed, for the time of day; for, though the evening was coming on, and the sun was hastening to go down at last, it had not yet ceased to shine brilliantly upon the great city. But inside James Oliver’s house the gas was already lighted in a little steady flame, which never flickered in the still, hot air, though both door and window were wide open. For there was a window, though it was easy to overlook it, opening into a passage four feet wide, which led darkly up into a still closer and hotter court, lying in the very core of the maze of streets. (1869: 2–3) What is distinctive in Stretton’s mode of presentation is that it is so unremarkable. The adventure, if there is one, is in finding what has always been there in, or adjacent to, what are, seemingly, the most familiar locations. To highlight unremarkability is not to make an aesthetic judgement on the prose. It is to acknowledge that even the representation is so ordinary, like the location it comes to describe, that one could be forgiven in not pausing over the situation and experience of the unfamiliar within the familiar, an unfamiliarity that leads not to strangeness, but instead to that which is in fact all too drearily homely. This is indicated from the very opening of the passage. The universal oppressiveness of the heat belongs to the perception of the mundane and the implied sense of physical languor and emotional, not to say spiritual ennui or malaise that informs the opening of Stretton’s novel. The heat of the day touches everyone in London, as is suggested in Stretton’s first paragraph, a panoramic view encompassing the city in its entirety. It also signifies both a uniformity and universal mood as modality of perception. From this, we are taken to a specific location, between Holborn and the Strand, before being escorted down an otherwise ignored alley, and from

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there into James Oliver’s shop. Once inside, the reader is then drawn into the perpetual twilight world, not of London’s criminals or opium dens, but the average, and again, unremarkable, tenement dwelling, which serves also as a small but respectable business. There is no hint of Dickensian phantasmagoria surrounding the description of gas lighting and its effects, no exotic exaggeration in the small details of this dispassionate scrutiny. What there is though is the revelation of worlds within a world, of bypassed locations adjacent to the busiest thoroughfares, and of neglected topographies of existence. While all other motion is in abatement throughout London, a solitary tracking shot leads us to a place at which we had not looked and from which will come the rest of Stretton’s novel. In this particular example, place is identified as an otherwise overlooked warren of buildings, and, more specifically, the newsvendor’s shop. The narration of specific location within and as other to location, and its cultural significance to the production of counter-romances of the city is what is significant. For it is the very ordinariness that draws attention to itself, thus inviting us to consider its difference from the more nebulous, if not actually incomprehensible idea of London in toto. Alone in London therefore acknowledges the need for the critic or reader of literary topographies to focus on local place. One must respond to a demand issued from the streets of the city themselves, that one attend and respond to the emplacement of place, the taking place of place, rather than generalized space. Making visible what remains unseen within the singularity of place is the necessary function or duty of the counter-romance, if specific identities and memories of place are not to be erased or forgotten.

III A question is unfolding here, revealing itself slowly. It is an interrogation that is multi-faceted in its structure. It involves a concern with the relation between the idea of urban counter-romance and that of modernity, through the implicit assertion that identity is always identity-in-ruins. As Bennett’s embankment or Levy’s interiors show, locations in the city are harmonious organizations of heterogeneous elements. Every organization is itself an element within, yet finally unassimilable to a larger identity. The modernity of the provisional city-fragment resistant to any gathering arises from its otherwise unremarkable specificity, defiant in the face of any extrapolation tending towards generalization. In Levy and Bennett’s novels, specificity and materiality of place, and the cultural conditions of existence alongside the displacement of the real and the foregrounding of pattern and design are inseparable from consciousness on the part of the narrator regarding how place determines and limits the subject. With Levy, the singularity of site separate from the more diffuse notion of a greater London is bound up with the cultural and material conditions of being Jewish in Reuben Sachs, or being a middle-class working woman in The Romance of a Shop. In Bennett, place is marked by the history of constant

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remaking, of becoming and unbecoming, building and rebuilding. Mr Riceyman, the owner of the bookshop Earlforward inherits, tells Henry of the coming of the Underground line to Clerkenwell that makes just this point, and should be cited in some detail: Riceyman began to talk about his well-loved Clerkenwell, and especially about what was for him the marvellous outstanding event in the Clerkenwell history – namely, the construction of the Underground Railway from Clerkenwell to Euston Square. Henry had never forgotten the old man’s almost melodramatic recital, so full of astonishing and quaint incidents. The old man swore that exactly one thousand lawyers had signed a petition in favour of the line, and exactly one thousand butchers had signed another similar petition. All Clerkenwell was mad for the line. But when the construction began all Clerkenwell trembled. The earth opened in the most unexpected and undesirable places . . . Hundreds of houses had to be propped, and along the line of the tunnel itself scores of houses were suddenly vacated lest they should bury their occupants. The sacred workhouse came near to dissolution, and was only saved by inconceivable timberings. The still more sacred Cobham’s Head public-house was first shaken and torn with cracks and then inundated by the bursting of the New River main, and the landlady died of shock . . . There was a vast excavation at the mouth of the tunnel near Clerkenwell Green. It was supported by enormous brick piers and by scaffoldings erected upon the most prodigious beams that the wood trade could produce. One night – a spring Sunday in 1862, the year of the Second Great Exhibition – the adjacent earth was observed to be gently sinking, and then some cellars filled with foul water . . . On the Wednesday the pavements sank definitely. The earth quaked. The entire populace fled to survey the scene of horror from safety. The terrific scaffolding and beams were flung like firewood into the air and fell with awful crashes. The populace screamed at the thought of workmen entombed and massacred. A silence! Then the great brick piers, fifty feet in height, moved bodily. The whole bottom of the excavation moved in one mass. A dark and fetid liquid appeared, oozing, rolling, surging, smashing everything in its resistless track, and rushed into the mouth of the new tunnel . . . Men wept at the enormity and completeness of the disaster . . . Old fat Riceyman told his tale with such force and fire that he had a stroke. In foolishly trying to lift the man Henry had slipped and hurt his knee. The next morning Riceyman was dead. Henry inherited. A strange episode, but not stranger than thousands of episodes in the lives of plain people. (RSt 17–18; emphases added) There are two narratives at least here, that of the construction of the Underground and that of Earlforward’s inheritance. The text becomes in the

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unfolding of its relay a virtual palimpsest of traces and layers, much as the geography and history of Clerkenwell itself, only to be narrated and remembered in a serial relay of narrative and historical fragments. Urban counterromance, the accumulation of astonishing and quaint incidents is not distinct from the historical or material, but interwoven into those conditions of the city, as so many pulses of historicity’s alterity. And as Bennett’s concluding sentence admits – and whether he is speaking of Riceyman’s tale or Earlforward’s is, arguably, unclear – in every district, every street, there are thousands of such episodes. The counter-romance of the real is not an intrinsic or essential aspect of Earlforward’s personality. It belongs to the memory, the representation, and thus the invention of every other London. The ‘fragmentation’ and ‘ruin’ of the ontology of London into its distinct areas, and from that the city’s rendering into further elements thrown up in the excavation of structure underpinning representation, belong, then, to that modern urban consciousness of London’s multiple materialities as well as its historicity. ‘Territories, buildings, and objects present their own particular visibilities’, writes Bernard Cache (1995: 56). These in turn produce inflections of narrative in Levy and Bennett that admit of a consciousness engaged in constructing the frame that presents the historical and material reality. The novelists’ ‘frames’ are however provisional and mobile, they are the frames on the canvases of which is projected a consciousness of the city, involved in its configurations, and responding to those geographies of lines that pass through objects, to paraphrase Cache (1995: 70). They gesture towards not only what it means to be ‘conscious of one’s modernity’ (Squillace 1997: 17) but also, through urban location and the rhetoric of representation in relation to modern (as opposed to modernist) consciousness, the ‘stubborn, irrational system’ (Squillace 1997: 17) of custom and culture embodied in the city district, by which characters are shaped and circumscribed. The figurality of the urban fragment and the ruin of ontology as the expression of urban modernity are both signs of that modernity and the poetics of the counter-romance. As such, they demand to be read for themselves and not as though they can be placed back within a greater ontology or structure. Before any modernism in which the fragment is perceived as a mediated image or externalized figure for a self-reflexive consciousness, that section of the city that undergoes fragmentation in the attention to its specificity marks the propensity in particular writers of the city to index the city as an ever-shifting and kaleidoscopic constellation of such isolated relics. It may seem to be something of a misappropriation of the term ‘fragment’ to talk of the writer’s attentiveness to particular urban or suburban sites, especially as that motif is intrinsic to modernism ‘fundamentally constituted as a discourse of discontinuity’ (Squillace 1997: 17). But that discontinuity, that mode of fragmentation by which modernism signals its aesthetic has less to do with the perception, representation or invention of the city, than it has to do with the agendas of being. In the desire to situate what Fredric

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Jameson calls the ‘aesthetic epistemology of the shock’ in modernism’s ‘irrepressible search for the break’ (2002: 144, 145), there is tendency to utilize external sites as mediations or projections of the fragmentation and ruin of the self, of consciousness, and the temporal nature of being, or the modernist subject’s perception of the temporal, as is well known and generally acknowledged. If such a break as the hallmark of modernism is, as Jameson argues, ‘merely a narrative effect’ (2002: 145; but surely it is so much more as well), then there is in this a retreat from materiality and historicity on the part of the high modernist text. Or, to place the argument a little differently, if the urban modernity of Levy and Bennett remains in its attention to the detail of the city as a city of ruinous sites disabling ontology a little too engaged in its materialist historicity, modernism is, by and large, if not too little engaged then certainly caught in, and recuperated by, an aestheticization of the historical, the ideological, and the material. Modernism – with the exception of Eliot in The Waste Land, as I shall argue in my final chapter – has to reject tout court the modernity of the city writer qua modernity and not simply an extension of a realist paradigm, in order to affirm that which precisely the city in all its fragmented, surging materiality will not allow for: ‘the autonomy of the aesthetic’ (Jameson 2002: 197). I want to continue this small intervention in the distinction and debate concerning modernity and modernism, with reference to a specific London text, that of Virginia Woolf, who tends to prove the truth of Frank Kermode’s assertion that the modernist ‘is often in practice also the patrician’ (1983: 16). I will do so through what will seem to some a somewhat tendentious series of assertions, involving a sketched reading of Woolf’s poetics of the city as these are implicitly ranged, by Woolf herself, in her critique of Arnold Bennett, ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ (1991: 69–87),3 but which are also developed in essays such as ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’ and Woolf’s second novel, Night and Day. If Woolf, as Gloria Fromm asserts, was ‘incapable of attending seriously – consciously – that is to Arnold Bennett’ (1982: 19), this was perhaps in part due to a personal lack of interest in exploring how one might ‘fit’ the ‘subject to the social’, to borrow from Jason Jones, with that relentless attention to ‘material conditions’ by which Bennett – and Levy – explore the aporia between their characters’ ‘material and psychic registers’ (2003: 29). Such a claim may well make it seem that Woolf is closer to Bennett, if not Levy, than she herself was willing to admit, that she was ‘unconscious’ of a kinship; and indeed, that the lack of ‘consciousness’ was necessary for Woolf as representative of the younger generation of writers to escape the anxiety of influence. Indeed, Wyndham Lewis appeared to intuit as much when he wrote of the two: ‘[t]he preoccupations of Mrs. Dalloway are after all not so far removed from the interests of Mr. Bennett’s characters. One is somewhat nearer to “the Palace,” the other to the “Pub.” But does not that even suggest a subtle kinship, rather than an irreconcilable foreignness?’ (1987: 133) Lewis’ topographically determined

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relationship says much of the respective writers’ attention to the city, but, as Pound gives us to perceive, they were moving in the same urban space, perhaps even crossing one another’s paths. In their introduction to Riceyman Steps, Edward Mendelson and Robert Squillace cite Margaret Drabble who makes a comment similar to Lewis’, Bennett’s editors not unjustifiably remarking of ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’: ‘as a polemic, Woolf’s lecture is magnificent. As an account of another novelist, it is perhaps the one occasion in her career as a critic when she gets everything wrong’, through the ‘thoroughness of [her] misreading’ (RSt xxv). Although by now it is undoubtedly a rhetorical flourish too far to declare that Woolf effectively ruined single-handedly the future reception of Arnold Bennett academically, leaving him to those readers more interested in the sociology of literature rather than its aesthetics, it is nevertheless the case that, along with Joyce and other modernists, Woolf effected an almost irreversible transformation of how one sees the city. However, Joyce and Woolf’s attention to the fluctuations of reflexive urban consciousness and the motion of time, whether in Ulysses’ Dublin or Mrs Dalloway’s London, have less to do with the particularity of the city as such, than they do with the nature of modernist, as opposed to modern, consciousness as I have already argued, above. Beginning with the text of Virginia Woolf as a place from which to depart specifically in relation to London, the following can therefore be opened for consideration. Woolf’s aesthetic challenge to the assumptions and rules of representation are given voice through her Bloomsbury polemic in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, in which Bennett becomes the image of the anachronistic novelist of character and dogged realism against which to rail. Through her critique of Edwardian as distinguished from Georgian fiction in her now famous essay, Woolf marks the break with a London tale, in which the character of Mrs Brown forces itself on her (1991: 71, 74). The shift from modernity to modernism is readable in the seemingly innocuous exemplary narrative of Mrs Brown that is embedded within the essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’. That narrative is both formed and informed by trajectory and topography, across and of London. In this subordinate contextual mapping, its avoidance of detail and the brevity of the narrative doubled and mirrored in the invisible celerity of the train’s motion, Woolf enforces and performs that tectonic and irreversible transformation from modernity to modernism in her writing of the city, by which the technics and the reception of modernist urban poetics and their relation to subjective consciousness are themselves mappable. Despite her tacit disavowal and attempted displacement of the significance of the train journey from Richmond to Waterloo, the co-ordinates of which appear twice so as to frame the recollection, London is resolutely there. Yet, Woolf seeks to distance herself from the significance of place even as she places it before our very eyes, rather like Poe’s purloined letter. There is seemingly little to

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be read in the passing detail that ‘Mr Smith’, so-called, alights somewhat precipitately at Clapham Junction (1991: 74). Woolf’s speculation that perhaps Mrs Brown ‘was going to London to sign some document to make over some property’ (1991: 73) has nothing about it other than a reflective hypothesis indicating the curiosity of the eavesdropper. Despite Woolf’s disingenuous disclaimer – ‘I have not told you this anecdote to illustrate either my own ingenuity or the pleasure of travelling from Richmond to Waterloo’ (1991: 74) – everything recorded as taking place comes down from the beginning and in the end to both the ingenuity of the author and the chance that the city affords. It is a question of what passes between the two, as one traverses the other, while the other inflects the perception, giving the idiom of experience as expression to the one. Through this chance narrative ensconced within the critique of Edwardian literary anachronism, Woolf stages nothing less than the cultural and historical contest for the significance of site as the ground of hegemonic decline and ascension. Undercutting chance and randomness that is the very condition of the city’s modernity in its forced, unexpected encounters, Woolf seeks to emphasize what she calls shortly afterward, ‘the soul alone’, if not, as she puts it, ‘wandering out into the Waterloo Road’ (1991: 75),4 then in the carriage of the train. The train as capsule, encapsulating and providing a mechanistic, impersonal modernist form for the subject’s observing consciousness notes the topographical locations and co-ordinates in an otherwise disembodied passage across the city (the spectral voyeur/voyager; the passenger as passante who reads the city en passant). In this, the city is kept for the moment at a remove, through the telegraphic signalling of the proper names of its stations, outside the transport of train and narrative. Yet London will not be so easily kept at bay – for it exceeds the narrative example of Mr Smith and Mrs Brown, to return as the site for Woolf’s modernist consciousness. Woolf herself comes back in displaced revenant form, as does the city in yet another specific co-ordinate. Woolf displaces her person and personality with a sly, lyric persona: that disembodied anonymous, third-person ‘soul’ who, leaving Waterloo Station, drifts, the ghostly flâneuse on the Waterloo Road. And of course, this figure is appropriate to Woolf’s modernist conception of London; for it offers a solitary and hidden anonymity within the city, in which the modernist subject sees itself as other, impersonal and ethereal as the city allows. Woolf’s dematerialization is not, I think, quite the act of making oneself vulnerable in the streets of London that Deborah Parsons reads it as being, in her comments on Woolf’s essay, ‘Street Haunting: a London Adventure’ (2000: 170).5 Parsons assumes that Woolf’s ‘experience of dispersion’ and ‘dispersion of self’ (2000: 170) that comes about through walking the streets is a precarious and negative occurrence. As the example of the peripatetic soul from ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ illustrates, decorporealization is intrinsic to Woolf’s urban poetics, at least for the purposes of her occasional

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pieces such as the Bennett critique and ‘Street Haunting’. The fading from view of a more substantial self allows one to become the camera eye, the surveillance and recording technology of motion, memory and reinscription, and so, concomitantly, opens consciousness to a greater freedom of reflection and interpretation. No longer circumscribed by the city as such and yet moved by it, one drifts. The city-subject is no longer obliged to observe and record the often overwhelming, not to say oppressive – for some – surfeit of detail (for which Woolf of course criticizes Edwardian writers in general, and Bennett in particular). Indeed, Parsons recognizes this dimension of becoming-apparitional, in that ‘the consequent effect of selfdispersal . . . results in a psychic oneness. It is a spiritual state achieved through connection with the real city’ (2000: 170). This last comment is directed to a reading of Anaïs Nin, as the positive aspect of that dispersal Parsons reads as precarious and potentially destructive in Woolf. Yet, it is something that Woolf observes albeit indirectly as a necessity of freedom in the city for the female subject, a freedom that puts her not in touch with other women in the city, psychically speaking, but instead with London itself. The process of what one might call imaginative auto-spectralization is given sympathetic resonance in certain of Woolf’s characters from her novels, or at least a recognition of, on the one hand, the need to lose oneself in the city, while, on the other, the conditions, whether atmospheric, temporal or imaginative, that make one’s erasure possible. At the same time, such possibilities are tied to a sense that it is impossible to figure London as it ‘truly’ is if one seeks to define or sketch too precisely through the recording of detail rather than risking the adumbration of the city’s evanescent being. Detail is, if not anathema then, at the least prohibitive to consciousness, proscriptive to the freedom of modernist invention, for it involves one – at least as far as Woolf is concerned – in seeking to grasp that which can only be apprehended once one has let go, or has determined the conditions for such a release. One can only capture the eidetic apparition that is the city for modernist consciousness, if one ‘grasps’ so to speak that one has to relinquish one’s grip on the minutiae of form in order to ‘get the picture’ as it were, and so transform oneself into something of an eidolon oneself. Woolf captures this in a passing comment from The Years, in a passage that was cut from the novel concerning Eleanor. Eleanor, Woolf writes, ‘liked walking in London, at night especially, when the outlines of buildings showed; the detail that distracted one by day was lost’ (1992b: 423; emphasis added). Elsewhere, in Night and Day for example, Ralph’s experience of consciousness and the city is transformed through knowledge. Having strode ‘with extreme swiftness along the embankment’, Ralph slows and then moves languidly by the river, his own motions mirroring those of the river with which his path is in parallel. Woolf loosens both Ralph’s grip on the world, even as she lets go of representation in a passage, which though

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not exactly informed by the principle of pathetic fallacy, nonetheless has its effect through causing the dissolution of boundaries between world and subject, and between the subject’s consciousness and the eidetic consciousness of the city. Coming to a self-awareness, Ralph ‘feels’ himself, ‘as he had often fancied other people, adrift on a stream’. Concomitantly, he loses observation of the external urban world in this dawning, reflexive reverie, unable to make ‘patterns out of the sights he saw’ (2000: 160).6 Having the knowledge of Katherine’s engagement, ‘the substantial world, with its prospect of avenues leading on and on to the invisible distance, had slipped from him . . .’ (2000: 161). As Ralph loses focus, and turns inward in moments of retrospective, belated insight, so too does the city become less visible and solid. As I have commented before, the interest here is less in the city than it is in the self. The dispersion of Ralph’s self is occasioned through a coming to psychic realization, and though not the subject, the city and its representation are intimately entangled in the process. Thus, in that paradigmatic and epistemological change from the detailed perceptions of modernity to the more ephemeral assertion of modernist manifestation, Woolf imposes upon consciousness that translation of representational and perceptual modalities, which has much exercised critical interest subsequently. The irresolvable interrogation is as endless as the city itself. It is most directly articulated in recent critical interventions by T. J. Clark, who has asked whether modernism has ‘anything to offer but the spectacle of decomposition?’ (1993: 244) – a question that echoes with Woolf’s own assertion at the end of ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ that in 1924 ‘we must reconcile our selves to a season of failures and fragments’ in the name of truth, if not beauty (86). The response that there is an alternative is, I would aver, to be read in those other Londons sketched in the now seemingly anachronistic urban modernity of Bennett and Levy. Both authors offer examples of metropolitan discourse from the 1880s to the 1920s, which examples are resistant to modernist perplexity or negativity. At the very least (and this is not as inconsiderable as it might at first appear), for every Bloomsbury and Richmond, Levy and Bennett’s texts affirm that there is an Islington, a Clerkenwell, a Maida Vale, a Westbourne Grove, and a Bayswater. For every room of one’s own, there is a parlour, living room, or other domestic space behind a shop that must be shared. Modernism may well address a spectacle of decomposition in the face of a crisis at having no private space except that anonymity assured by the streets and open spaces. Indeed, decomposition may be, for the modernist sensibility, the only private and privative alternative to the ‘crowded dance of modern life’. The urban text of modernity on the other hand, sees accommodations, the possibility for compromise in the community of others, whereby the specificity of place offers a singularity of identity where being finds none for itself, distinct from the shared emplacement in the city. The metropolitan sensibilities of Levy and

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Bennett admit of the city as a series of contiguous yet heterogeneous sites, each of which has a narrative of its peculiar being to offer. Such a narrative as the ‘becoming-of-place’ acknowledges event and experience peculiar to its own topographic idiom; it is, therefore, at least in principle, a ‘positive site for the “other” and the exile’, as Deborah Parsons expresses it. She continues, ‘the city should be regarded . . . as an open space “in which people come alive, where they expose, acknowledge, and address the discordant parts of themselves and one another” ’ (2000: 226). In light of the, doubtless, overly hasty critique just positioned, it must be reflected that arguably, amongst the principal high modernists or Georgians as Woolf was pleased to distinguish them, it is only Eliot who reads London as a ‘positive’ site for the other and the exile. The City is positive for Eliot because it generates the other not as the spectacle of decomposition but as a series of exilic subjectivities, as a multiplicity of others, whose lives are enacted in the contest of consciousness between those discordant parts, parts that are themselves the traces of London’s irreducible historical and material flows. Only Eliot, amongst the high modernists, arguably writes the city, rather than writing of the city as a secondary or constituent element subserviently productive of a subjectivity and narrative embedded in the urban. In this Eliot’s Georgianism may come to seem more like a more old fashioned, if not anachronistic expression of Edwardian or fin de siècle modernity. (If this is in fact so will remain to be seen in the final chapter of the present volume.) Whether this is the case, Eliot, like Bennett and Levy, does not simply appropriate and then disavow the specificity of the urban in gestures conceivable, in the words of Alan Sinfield apropos of Tennyson’s own appropriations, as so many manifestations of an ‘imperialism of the imagination’ (1986: 53). While the Londons of Mr Bennett and Ms Levy share qualities and modes of modern urban representation with other writers of their respective periods, they surprise in small ways; much as particular hidden regions of London can still surprise today, as these appear in the midst of well-known areas to the London flâneur or flâneuse. Perhaps, it can be argued in passing here that it is precisely because, like Eliot’s anonymous narrators of the city in The Waste Land, the characters of Bennett and Levy have, for the most part, no leisure time to walk the city; the demands made on them by the city are such that there is rarely, if ever, the occasion for flânerie. They cannot loiter, as can the inhabitants of Bloomsbury or the heirs of City directors. Though nothing more than a momentary hypothesis, this signals the possibility that the other Londons of Levy and Bennett do not conform neatly to mass critical perceptions of the literature of either the last decades of the nineteenth century or those at the beginning of the twentieth. On the one hand, there is none of the well-known fog, and certainly none of the terrors by day or night of the great grey Babylon, the murky modern metropolis, or the city of dreadful night. On the other hand, there is little

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if anything to suggest a haunted necropolis, or vortex of stimulating or confounding sensation in which the modern subject loses itself, with which it blends and merges, giving itself over to, thereby becoming part of that greater urban consciousness expressed in terms of impressionistic register or quasi-sublimity. Hence, it is to Levy and Bennett that I turn here as, if not forgotten, then certainly, neglected inventors of other Londons. Not being entirely out of favour exactly, but belonging instead to a canonical minority, Bennett and Levy have been overlooked in their small experiments within, rather than with, form, narrative voice, and mode of representation. They experiment particularly with what is conventionally described as narrative voice in minor but significant ways, as critics have had occasion to observe with regard to both.7 In doing this, they challenge and disrupt the limitations of realism from within the very boundaries of that mode. They do so, moreover, for the purposes of staging if not disjunctions, then certain asymmetries between subject and city as the expressions of their respective, differing awareness of modernity as a condition of historicist and material location. Bennett achieves this economically through the registered consciousness of the historicity of location as the invisible within the visible in Riceyman Steps. In Bennett’s Riceyman Steps, the consciousness for Henry Earlforward, Bennett’s principal protagonist, of Clerkenwell’s material history as a condition of its modernity is never far from the surface of narrative or urban representation. Earlforward’s interpretation of the material reality of presentday Clerkenwell and Riceyman Square is transformed by his knowledge of the past: While gazing full at the spectacle of King’s Cross Road . . . He dreamed . . . his own vision of this wonderful Clerkenwell . . . a murmuring green land of medicinal springs, wells, streams with mills on their banks, nunneries, aristocrats, and holy clerks who presented mysteryplays . . . the brown backs of the houses which fronted on King’s Cross Road resembled the buttressed walls of a mighty fortress . . . the grim, ochreish, unwindowed backs of the houses of Riceyman Square (behind him) looked just like lofty, medieval keeps. (RSt 8–9) Earlforward’s vision is, in effect, a translation, a ghostly romance of history resonating within, while other than, the empirical observation of this London district. In part therefore, experimentation within realism can be read once again as being suggested by the city itself. Though in very different fashion, Levy and Bennett rework our understanding of how one represents London. Both novelists invent other Londons serving a double purpose therefore. For, as the Londons of the two writers (who otherwise have little in common) militate against classic realist modes and naturalist forms of narrative, so also do those writers evade the dominant urban discourses of their times: of

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miasma, misery and mystery, or the vertiginous consciousness of being. In so doing Bennett and Levy are available to us in providing the reader with key moments in the tracing of an alternative trajectory, the very arc of which allows us brief images of a London in passing, from, we are tempted to say, the death of Dickens to the outbreak of the Second World War.

IV If we are going to situate Levy and Bennett further against dominant interests and modernist misperceptions, certain formal aspects of their writing need to be considered, two in particular: on the one hand, the disturbance to the idea of a stable or authoritative narrative voice; on the other hand, the function of place in the narrative desire to refocus narrative concerns, thereby bringing to the reader’s attention particulars of London’s cultural topography at a given location. My foremost concern lying with the reading of distinct and singular sites, distinguished from London in general as I have already made explicit, I will turn initially in this section to the disruptions and destabilizations of narrative voice in Levy principally, but also with reference to Arnold Bennett, before addressing the second concern about place, what takes place, and the placing of place by the two authors. The double question focused through discussion of the reception of Levy and then with attention to her texts in this section of the chapter will then return with the emphasis being shifted to Bennett in the next section of the chapter. In large part, the discussions of Levy and those that follow concerning Bennett, are not interested solely in producing readings of the novels in question. I also intend to sketch a recapitulation of those interrogations of technique that complicate the idea of either novelist as ‘merely’ working in classic realist mode, as this has been identified already by other critics. I do so in order to situate and establish my argument for a return to reading these authors, and to taking seriously their acts of writing London, which acts mark them off from their contemporaries, as I have already claimed. In an article discussing the ‘forms of cancellation’ in which Amy Levy’s poetry engages, Karen Weisman comments on Levy’s subversion of generic boundary and expectation. In ‘complicating her works’ generic affiliations’, writes Weisman, Levy ‘plays against a set of formalist and generic norms’ (2001: 59). Such an aesthetic dynamic, far from being one instance of mere fin de siècle playfulness and the assertion of an ‘art-for-art’s sake’ retreat from the real, informs Levy’s poetry, Weisman assures us, as the examination of ‘the relationship between subjectivity and the very ground in which it is instantiated’ (59). That ground, I would contend, is not simply epistemological, ontological or conceptual. Nor is it just the private exploration of the ‘crushing limits’ of Levy’s ‘expressive resources’ (59) belonging to an existential quest divorced from material conditions, as the language of play

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might be misread by some to suggest. Inasmuch as Levy makes plain her constant struggle and engagement with ‘what it means for culture and subjects to be located’ (Blair 2004: 813) throughout her writing, the stakes of expression and the play with generic limits are inextricably linked to the modern city. London is inscribed everywhere in Levy’s writing, even as its specific topographies and locations generate the shapes those texts assume, at least in part. It is there implicitly in her published critical pieces, particularly in an article on James Thomson (a literary interest Levy shares, by chance, with T. S. Eliot). It is announced in her final collection of poetry, titled A London Plane Tree, and other Verse (after correcting the proofs of which she committed suicide in 1889). And it is explored in fascinatingly complex ways in her two novels, Reuben Sachs (1889) already acknowledged, and The Romance of a Shop (1888), both of which are centred on the lives, experiences and expectations of Jewish and Gentile women in London of the 1880s. As should be strikingly obvious it is also radically material in relation to the modernity of the urban subject, as the experience of the city intersects, equally obviously, with questions of the institutional demands and inscriptions of faith, gender and class. Thus, Levy’s poetry and prose engages not ‘merely in a geographical or material landscape, but in a site of social activity that produces itself and its defining relations through local, personal, and public exchanges’ (Blair 2004: 813). It does so in a sustained period of experimentation with narrative strategies from 1880 to 1888, as Linda Hunt Beckman contends (1999: 195). The overt generic play in the poetry is not necessarily as visible in the novels; the constraints of narrative are different, the scope for experiment also different accordingly. And so one faces ‘difficulties of reading cultural embeddedness’ (Blair 2004: 815) in the novels (and as we shall see in the chapter addressing John Berger), in that the dominant narrative modes of Levy’s fiction are those of realism. However, what one misses in Levy – and in different ways in Bennett – is that techniques of urban representation and subjectivity are ‘vulnerable to misinterpretation by the reader’, as Beckman has it of Levy (1999: 195). Misinterpretation proceeds from an inability to perceive or not take seriously the ways in which a novelist such as Bennett or Levy will work dissonantly within the conventional so as to articulate the singularity of the outsider inhabiting the normative. Bennett and Levy work towards such an effect through putting ‘the very ideas and assertions that make up the dominant culture’s distorted image of the marginalised group into the remarks [or narrative mode, such as detail driven, documentary or sociological realism] made by [and generated from the mimicry of] the mainstream voice’ (Beckman 1999: 195). While Levy’s play with the dominant voice or cultural discourse is more overtly, more markedly ideological than Bennett’s, the latter author’s play and resistance is, perhaps, more fundamental in formal terms, inasmuch as he may be read as challenging the dominance not of a mainstream voice, so much as a

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mainstream narrative form, comprised of many voices, all of which are gathered as ‘realism’ for the maintenance of middle-class, Anglo-Saxon autorepresentation. There are thus to be read in the counter-romances of Levy and Bennett local acts of affirmative resistance, which correlate with the specificity of location as an affirmation and resistance to a dominant or mainstream assumption of an undifferentiated ‘London’ as the stage on which the acts of the novelist’s characters are set. This aside momentarily, what can be said with some certainty is that Levy’s novels, and, in different ways, certain of Bennett’s London writings, embody ‘certain key contradictions of class, mobility, transnationalism, and cultural emplacement’ out of which arises with topographic specificity the ‘buzzing, blooming, heterogeneity of modern alterity [that] is absent from Woolf’s work’ (Blair 2004: 827).8 In particular, the concern in Levy’s poetry, particularly Xantippe, with its questioning of the ‘self’s absorption within communal norms’ (Weisman 2001: 63), is also the thematic and structural interest of the novels. In situating this historical and cultural problematic, while Levy does not yet present ‘the modernist rejection of consolation outright’, yet she stages through her London narratives a ‘distrust [for] the possibilities of a recuperative closure’ (Weisman 2001: 66). As we will have cause to observe, here in such distrust is the conceptual articulation of the structure that underlies the powerfully disruptive conclusion to Reuben Sachs. In a gesture that brings together the death of the subject with the modern rush of the city’s public, indifferent life, Levy’s novel militates against either consolation on the one hand or closure and recuperation on the other. It is then in such structural ambivalence that the formal play with generic expectation and the affirmative resistance to the demands of realism are to be registered. For, if as Levy writes in one of her essays that the image of Wandering Jew is specifically a metropolitan other, the double and haunting figure of alterity of the implicitly gentile flâneur, then in this recognition the admission must be that the late Victorian Jew ‘is particularly suited, at least, to Victorian life . . . with its increasing valorisation of the city and its effects’, as Weisman contends (2001: 69). In their focus on London life and female experience in the city, Levy’s novels disturb the form and content of the novel, whether in its realist or sensational guises, through the motions of women through the city, such motions being both a mapping of the everyday activities of the subject within, and pushing against, ‘communal norms’, and also an understated formal attempt to solicit the limits of novelistic representation. Both Reuben Sachs and The Romance of a Shop pursue what Cynthia Scheinberg summarizes as a ‘complex critique of a certain historical [and material] moment and class, in general’ (1996: 173). As a reading across the two novels shows, the position of the English Jew in late nineteenth-century culture is one aspect informing Levy’s critique but not the only one, given that Romance concerns itself with the modernity of the Gentile female urban subject.

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What Scheinberg refers to as the ‘Jewish content’ of Reuben Sachs ‘may have led critics to ignore other’ more formal issues (1996: 181). What is significant nevertheless, Scheinberg continues, is that Levy ‘experimented [with] narrational voice and identity. In general, it is almost impossible to determine whether the narrator is Jewish or not.’ Therefore, while the narrator is ‘clearly very knowledgeable about the Jewish community’ (1996: 181), the evident disdain for aspects of that community displayed through the narratorial voice offers us alternative perspectives and readings, the implicit paradoxes and cultural aporia of which are not easily resolved. To step back from the particular question of perspective on the Jewish community, in this control of narrative voice and its opening of different perspectives, Levy anticipates the formal play with perspective and the reader’s responsibility in the absence of any absolute narrative omniscience in some of the texts of Arnold Bennett. Coming back to Levy, not only may such a voice be read as the effort to construct ‘a “neutral” narrator, one who is neither fully allied with the Jewish characters nor fully outside their world’ (Scheinberg 1996: 181), it is also possible that the voice belongs, if not to a flâneur or flâneuse (who may or may not be Jewish or Gentile, who may or may not be male or female), but to some persona belonging to the city itself. This is the ‘voice’ that observes of the ‘bright’, yet ‘delicate brilliance’ of Kensington Gardens, of an evening at the height of the ‘London season’, that its evanescence is all the more transient in London than anywhere else in the world (RS 151). The spirit of the city is captured here in its fleeting passage; it is, furthermore, a spirit intimately entwined in perceptions of the particularity of minutiae in the social and cultural micro-cultures that indicate London for some, though not for everyone. Such provisional registration of the city is caught elsewhere through this understated mode of articulation, as ephemeral as the aura of the city it intimates: ‘The November air was damp, warm, and filled full of a yellow haze which any but a Londoner would have called a fog’ (RS 121). Levy’s experiment in voice produces an undecidable, unknowable identity, a dimly perceived persona who knows and feels London in her anonymity in a manner that is inaccessible to all but the fewest of Levy’s characters. The experiment with the anonymity and evanescence of urban articulation produces an all-knowing, all-seeing wanderer capable of moving between the Jewish and Gentile neighbourhoods of London, to observe their differences and their similarities. And this ‘wanderer’ – mythopoetic Jewish double of the Gentile flâneur, other and yet within, each identity touching upon and transgressing the boundaries of the other – may just figure the manifestation of an urban sensibility or vitality to which Reuben feels called, by which he is compelled, as the beginning and the end of Reuben Sachs informs us. Clearly, Levy’s text slips away from any easy determination (if not ultimately every attempt to fix it in place). To cite Linda Hunt Beckman once more, ‘there is no objective point of view in Levy’s Jewish novel; its narrative

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voice functions inconsistently, sometimes calling attention to its omniscience and elsewhere undercutting its own authority’ (Beckman 1999: 196). To a great extent, such textual escape is doubtless an effect, in the case of Reuben Sachs at least, of it being part of what Meri-Jane Rochelson, after Bryan Cheyette, calls a literature of revolt (1996: 312). It may also have to do with that which London makes possible, as amorphous, protean and mutable constellation of sites determined, if at all, only through a recognition of the heterogeneity of its local alterities. More than this, London as the site of the loosening of identities, languages, ontologies and gendered boundaries, constitutes the possibility for the urban subject of revolt from within the subject’s own locations – of, once again, material place, community, identity, and of course, the language and idioms in and by which one comes otherwise to be circumscribed. Meri-Jane Rochelson, for example, notes the documentary or sociological brevity of style, the telegraphic manner in which Levy constructs narrative, character and community as a resistance to realist convention, whilst concluding that in recognizing the constant play of identities, the ‘interpenetration’ of gender and Jewishness, one perceives how ‘Amy Levy’s experience as an unmarried, middle-class Jewish woman writer in London shaped all her writing, regardless of form’ (Rochelson 1996: 325). That emphasis on material place as significant determinant in the production of the literary text should not be overlooked. I would argue, additionally, that it is through such grounding that the specific urban element offers during the 1880s, and which allows for the possibility of the chameleon condition of Levy’s writing in strange conjunction with that fleeting, almost imperceptible narrative persona that arrives to speak of the resonance of London’s spirit. Extending these considerations, we find ourselves once again being asked to consider that the ‘relationship between narrator and narrative [is] so shifting – the reliability of the narrative voice so questionable’ that the good reader ‘is not at all sure where Levy stands’ (Hunt 1998). It is this radical undecidability that assaults, presumably, the aesthetic and cultural sensibilities of one of Levy’s editors, Melvyn New. Situating a critique of Levy through her apparent lack of Jewish spiritualism, he asserts the stereotypical and distorted nature of her Jewish characters, privileging at the same time Eastern European Jewry in its spirituality over the ‘perversities of assimilated Jews’ (New 1993: 29). The issue of his failure to read Levy’s experiment aside, or indeed the fact that New seems blithely unaware that anything other than ‘corrupted realism’, as it were, might be the mode here (strange attitudes indeed for an author’s editor), there is an odd, nervous, ironic seeming anti-Semitism in New’s ‘perverse’ misreading in its anxious efforts to control Levy’s narrative experimentation and modal undecidability. I describe New’s misreading as ‘perverse’, for it falls, in the virulence of its key terms, into what is discernibly interpretable as, itself, that anti-Semitic gesture to which I have already alluded. It does so in a double fashion: in its desire to place

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alongside its attempted mastery and containment of Levy there is also what might be considered by some a pusillanimous attack on the negative effects of mainstream imperial English and cosmopolitan London culture on its Jewish communities. Of course, my reading of New may be too strong an interpretation, my perception of a certain linguistic ‘twitchiness’ overdone. Yet, as the example of Levy’s editor illustrates, it is doubtless that something haunts certain readers of Levy in their reaction, both to a literature of revolt, and to a literature that refuses to be assigned, or remain subservient to, an identity. Certainly, while we cannot with any justification describe either The Romance of a Shop or Reuben Sachs as modernist in any recognized, conventional sense of that word, if Levy’s work is marked by an otherwise slippery sense of modernity in the late 1880s that trait is most noticeable in her departure, as we have had occasion to consider repeatedly, ‘from what is now often called “classic realism” ’ (Hunt 1998). Meri-Jane Rochelson also alludes to the revolt against novelistic and narrative normalcy, when she remarks of Reuben Sachs’ ‘unconventional form’ and its ‘long-lasting consequences’ for its reception (1996: 325). On occasions through its form, Reuben Sachs gives the reader access to Reuben’s ‘inner life (by means of free indirect style)’ (Hunt). In this, as in other ways it is, Hunt tells us, ‘epistemologically experimental’ (Hunt); lacking – or abandoning – classic realism’s ‘ “controlling ‘truth voice’ ” ’ (Boumelha cit. Hunt), it adopts a ‘Bakhtinian’ polyphonic quality by ‘experimenting with narrative technique’, within which technics, ‘narrative voice functions inconsistently, sometimes calling attention to its omniscience and at other times undercutting its own authority’ (Hunt). Levy stages this graphically and insistently in Reuben Sachs’ epilogue (RS 151–7), which offers the reader a series of fragmented, discontinuous narratives, separated according to the character and his or her responses to particular events. Through this device, Levy enacts a vertiginous resistance to resolution or closure, concluding in an initially interrogative and subsequently apostrophic present tense. Levy inaugurates, then, a number of ‘epistemological innovations’ in Reuben Sachs, the meaning of which is unstable but suggestive of ‘multiple possibilities’ over what Linda Hunt describes as ‘hotly contested ideological terrain’ (Hunt). There can be no doubt that this ‘terrain’ is in some measure, after some complex, possibly indecipherable fashion, London itself, as the polyphony, play, and transformations of the city’s alterities imprint themselves on Levy’s inventions of the late Victorian urban subject. With this in mind, we should turn therefore to Reuben Sachs and The Romance of a Shop in more detail.

V Both The Romance of a Shop and Reuben Sachs are unequivocally novels of London, as Levy editor Susan David Bernstein illustrates comprehensively

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through her introductions and critical appendices to both. The point is supported further by Deborah Epstein Nord in her discussion of Levy’s first novel: ‘The Romance of a Shop succeeds at conveying how difficult and yet how exhilarating it was to be a woman alone in London in the 1880s’ (1995: 201). Levy’s first novel, writes Nord, ‘shares the urban sensibility of her “London Plane Tree” poems but combines it with a self-consciously female urbanism’ (201). Such self-conscious urbanism is also treated of in Reuben Sachs, though with regard to the borders of the Anglo-Jewish and Gentile social worlds, rather than with work. The difficulty referred to by Nord, with regard to The Romance of a Shop, is chiefly that of economic risk, of entering the workforce, even if that entry is romanticized through the practice of photography rather than in some other more mechanical clerical work. But this is perhaps the point: photography works against mere realism in the narrative logic. Its function addresses the transformation from object to subject, from being framed to having control of how one sees and therefore arrives at consciousness and knowledge – both of others and of oneself. It also provides another means within the narrative for ‘showing’ and ‘knowing’ London to the middle-class woman reader (however idealized such a representation of the working woman this might be, once again). Clearly, there is more about the ‘art’ and ‘work’ of photography that troubles certain definitions and aesthetic, as well as historical boundaries. Photography in The Romance of a Shop highlights technological modernity as an aesthetic medium that calls into question creativity and reproduction as Bernstein reminds us (RoS 11–41; 32), whilst also reminding us uncannily how we ‘are like and yet strangely unlike ourselves’, as Levy herself expressed it, using the metaphor of photography in an essay on American fiction of the 1880s (Levy cit. Bernstein; RoS 33). As I have already suggested such technology is inseparable from the idea of the city in Levy’s novel. It is insistently both device and trope for foregrounding questions of realism and representation. As such, it has all the more urgency in its presence in a novel that posits the role of women in the urban working world (however romanticized) as a result of expulsion from the home consequent on the death of the father. That very death, suggestively symbolic of a break with the past and the advent of a gendered urban modernity, also initiates the making of the map of London in The Romance of the Shop with a female ‘journey’. Death, in this instance, is productive. It generates both dislocation, displacement from the home, and relocation, from the comparative residential ‘safety’ or what Gertrude thinks of as the ‘comparative tameness’ of Campden Hill, to Baker Street, where she feels distinctly the ‘pulses of the great city . . . as they beat and throbbed’ (RoS 80). As the symbolic work of the death of the father acknowledges in its emphasis on generational shift, expulsion from the home, and relocation as the sign of entry into gendered modernity, there is much more going on within the realist paradigm within which Levy is

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working. There is undeniably a form of play in Levy’s writing, as the very title, The Romance of a Shop, hints, in its seemingly oxymoronic juxtaposition that announces the modern urban counter-romance. Susan David Bernstein offers a commentary on just such play in the broader context of the novel as a whole, arguing that the novel ‘explores romance and realism as mutually constitutive forms of representation’ (Bernstein RoS 35). The ideal or symbolic world is not a retreat from the real; it is instead a forceful disturbance from within the real, suggestive of other possibilities that the city affords women in particular circumstances in the 1880s. Doubtless, the perception of this internal violence was what troubled some reviewers of the novel on its publication, who, as Bernstein acknowledges, ‘objected to this wedding of the visionary with the ordinary’ (RoS 35). Yet, it is just such a ‘wedding’ – or perhaps a welding – that announces the modernity of Levy’s London writing, and which is witnessed in Arnold Bennett’s city texts, as we have had occasion to discuss and will continue to explore, below. What then The Romance of a Shop offers, and what it shares with Reuben Sachs, is that alternative gendered model of the revised bildungsroman, from within which a modern female urban consciousness is charted in concert with the journey of that consciousness across the invention of this other London of the modern middle-class woman. What both novels share, as their female characters traverse and chart the city, is a negotiation of London topography as the means of coming to consciousness. This is most immediately ‘mapped’, albeit implicitly, in The Romance of the Shop through the literal journey Gertrude Lorimer takes from her Baker Street photographic studio to the reading room of the British Museum, in order that she can pursue ‘a course of photographic reading’ (RoS 79). Leaving her sister Phyllis at Baker Street Underground Station, Gertrude mounts ‘boldly to the top of an Atlas Omnibus’ (Ros 80; interestingly, in terms of the novel’s theme of visuality, Phyllis, who takes the Tube, is short-sighted, while Gertrude is not). While Levy does not go into any detail in representing the city’s architecture, her acknowledgement of the factual route of Gertrude’s journey, implies the map and so invites or teaches the reader how to plot a course and so orient herself. It might be said that the mapping of the city presented in The Romance of a Shop is itself a modern modality; it is telegraphic, it relies on the attenuated semaphore of the location names for departure and destination rather than fully figured representations, and so partakes of the snapshot rather than a more fully realized image. Beyond the immediate scene and context of Gertrude’s journey, and its hints at route, map and timetable as the signals of modern life, the novel indicates the city not through extended and reflective description, typical of the leisured flâneur, but via place name. Departing from Campden Hill, the Romance touches on Lancaster Gate, near to Paddington and Bayswater, and Queen’s Gate, on the south side of Hyde Park (adjacent to the home of Judith Quixano at the end of Reuben Sachs), where the sisters stay with the

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Devonshires following the sale of their father’s house. The vastness of London for the imagination is revealed in Constance Lorimer’s remark to Gertrude, when she complains that Baker Street is ‘ “such miles away from South Kensington” ’ (RoS 74). The distance, it has to be stressed, is less topographical than it is cultural, a mode of mapping that is crucial in understanding the distinctions between the Jewish and Gentile London districts of Reuben Sachs. The cultural space in The Romance of a Shop is that between a London of leisure and one of work, in which work is an intrinsic element of urban existence. The city’s locations signify such distinct forms of identity and being through the names Baker Street and South Kensington. Place name therefore marks not only the map, but charts also differing cultural and psychic singularities pertaining to the real. Other locations given are Regent’s Park, Sussex Place, York Place, St John’s Wood, Paternoster Row, New Bond Street, the Royal Academy in Piccadilly, South Kensington, Notting Hill, Praed Street, Charing Cross Station, the Café Royal and the Gaiety Theatre in the Strand. Although these are only visited in passing as it were, the naming of site reveals as it charts, drawing in the process the contiguity of central London locations accessible to the middleclass female reader. At the same time though, Levy repeatedly employs place name as the sign of specific ‘ways of being’. While this is true of course of any name in its resonance or significance, in The Romance of a Shop, Levy’s act of mapping offers the co-ordinates for identity, whereby being, personal ontology, is formed as the sum and experience of the modern city, and consciousness is therefore charted in its own distinct, and singular, modernity. More than this, the name without representation puts in place the site for the imagination to explore and inhabit, so many contemporaneous ‘worlds’ belonging to the same constellation. The dispersed index or legend of site names thus constitutes a symbolic social reality. The empirical terrain is also the symbolic place of the cartographic counter-romance, where the contest for identity and experience as one’s own is staged. Such extended glimpses of the streets as the reader is afforded in The Romance of a Shop come irregularly, and are fleeting moments of reverie, as when Gertrude leans ‘in dreamy idleness from the window, looking out into the street, where the afternoon was deepening apace into evening. A duncoloured haze, thin and transparent, hung in the air, softening the long perspective of the street . . . From the corner of the street floated up the cries of the newspaper boys, mingling with the clatter of omnibus wheels’ (RoS 161). One of the very few directly given ‘images’ of London in the novel, its diminishing visibility and drift of competing sounds, records a way of knowing the city inaccessible to simple representation, one that is dependent on a commingling of other senses than the visual with felt apperception. When something does catch Gertrude’s eye, it is the colour of the cab lights, their being noticeable for being violet rather than the customary red (RoS 161). In modern London though, reflection is a luxury, a brief romanticizing

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respite from the difficult, yet exhilarating experience of the city as symbolic system in Levy’s writing. Importantly, Levy’s engagement with the city, and her act of writing the city, require the restriction of mimesis and representation in favour of symbolic stenography, not least for the reasons already indicated. Perceiving London, whether primarily through Gertude’s movements or as the more general ‘system’ of the novel itself as this is figured through the narrative of the Lorimer sisters, Levy’s largely nominal system expresses ‘certain aspects of reality, [and] uphold[s] various relations . . . [that] nonetheless remain incommensurable, at once because each system has its own rhythm of evolution and its specific vulnerability when coming into contact with other cultures’, as Marc Augé expresses the idea of symbolic systems (2002: 58). All of this hints at the ‘impossible totality’ that just is London in all its modernity; and it is primarily through Levy’s reference to stations and locations as points of departure and arrival or destination that London comes to be known, in fragments, through its signal pulses, if at all. It is as if Levy cites the map in lieu of representation, knowing that modernity proscribes anything other than the city-in-ruins, a city of lines and traces, signatures and signs. Thus it is that the Lorimers’ London is a city of travel and travail, of multiple trajectories and journeys, of work and knowledge, and of romance and reality, through the experience of which one arrives at the knowledge that ‘it is impossible to understand, imagine or fully represent the sum of subjectivities . . . [or] to conceive simultaneously the diversity of the moments and spaces’ (Augé 2002: 59). London is invented therefore as a potentially endless series of what Augé calls, with reference to the metro, transfer points. The logic of transfer points within the symbolic social reality of Reuben Sachs is dictated in part by the fraught navigations and negotiations in the late Victorian marriage market. It is made all the more complicated through the interactions of Gentile and Jewish communities in London, even though, we are told that the Sachs family, ‘[b]orn and bred in the very heart of nineteenth-century London, belong[ed] to an age and a city which has seen the throwing down of so many barriers, the levelling of so many distinctions of class, of caste, of race, of opinion’ (RS 94). If London life is difficult in Reuben Sachs then, that difficulty is of a different order therefore than that expressed in The Romance of a Shop. For Reuben himself though, exhilaration is there also, at least initially. A product of London, specifically ‘one of the great London day-schools’ (RS 55), Reuben returns to the city after an absence occasioned by a nervous collapse. Reuben Sachs stepped into the twilit street with a distinct sense of exhilaration. He was back again; back . . . to the din and rush and struggle of the London which he loved with a passion that had something of poetry in it.

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With the eager curiousity . . . which underlay his rather impassive bearing, it was impossible that foreign travel should be without charm for him; but he returned with unmixed delight to his own haunts; to the work and the play; the market-place, and the greetings in the marketplace; to the innumerable pleasantnesses of an existence which owed something of its piquancy to the fact that it was led partly in the democratic atmosphere of modern London, partly in the conservative precincts of the Jewish community. (RS 58–9) Levy’s prose performs the energy and struggle, mixing, with ‘unmixed delight’, its various distinctions and oppositions, as these express through their implicit struggle the agonistic force that defines Sachs. Interestingly, London defined specifically as modern in contradistinction to the ‘Jewish community’, marks the text as having a doubled and divided topography, alternative sites on the same ground. Specifically the Jewish community is identified through the implied geopolitical boundary of the ‘precinct’. In this gesture, Levy conflates place with the realpolitik of identity, while the rest of London is observed to be democratic. The undertow of such conflict returns to the surface of the novel repeatedly, as in the passage quoted above concerning the Sachs family. For though it is London in the nineteenth century that witnesses and stages the removal of various cultural and social barriers, the Sachs, we are told ‘had managed to retain the tribal characteristics, [and] to live within the tribal pale to an extent which spoke worlds for the national conservatism’ (RS 94). Susan David Bernstein illustrates how Reuben Sachs does ‘provide a . . . detailed account of London Jewish geography, with the West End punctuated by a variety of synagogues that offer a key to the social sub-divisions of London Anglo-Jewry in Levy’s day’ (Bernstein RS 11–43; 23). Levy charts the particular distinctions midway through the novel, in recording the ‘Day of Atonement’ (RS 88). Solomon Sachs, ‘his daughter Rebecca, and the Montague Cohens worshipped in the Bayswater synagogue’ in Harrow Road, while ‘the rest of the family had seats in the Reformed synagogue in Upper Berkeley Street’ (RS 88). While the Quixano family ‘attended the synagogue of the Spanish and Portugeuse Jews in Bryanston Street’, Judith attends the synagogue in Upper Berkeley Street (RS 88–9). As there had been the symbolic social reality of London sketched in the narrative of The Romance of a Shop and signified through place name and location, so Levy offers a similar mode of mapping in Reuben Sachs, albeit for very different reasons. Place on this occasion indicates both the locations of worship, and the specific neighbourhoods in which are the homes of particular characters, their families, and by extension particular Jewish communities, and so their economic and class status. Through the reference to the sites of the various synagogues in relation to respective Jewish communities of London the reader is offered a complex understanding of this other London. Bernstein illustrates this,

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pointing to the fact that the synagogue ‘in St. John’s Wood, near Maida Vale’, is a section ‘of North London associated with lower middle-class Jews like the Samuel Sachses and the Quixano family, in contrast to the Leunigers, who live in South Kensington’ (Bernstein RS 23), one of the districts associated with the Lorimers in The Romance of a Shop. The synagogue in Bryanston Street, at which Judith’s family attend, is, Bernstein informs us, ‘a branch of Bevis Marks, the oldest synagogue in London, established in 1701’ (Bernstein RS 23). Thus there is a cultural distinction to do with practice and tradition to be read here. There is though a further complication of the Anglo-Jewish map of London. Levy’s acknowledgement that ‘Reuben, Judith, the Leunigers, and Bertie Lee-Harrison’ attend the West London Synagogue ‘marks them as modern reform . . . in contrast to the more traditionally observant members of their community’ (Bernstein RS 23). As had been staged through the sites of The Romance of a Shop, so in Reuben Sachs an encrypted map of an other London is traced, or, acknowledged indirectly at the very least. In the passage of references en passant, Levy’s narrator reveals that there is a poetics of the city’s locations in which making is always in excess of structure. Levy’s London sites therefore become traced from the ‘forces which hold its own elements together, and from the dynamic coherence of the larger living system which includes it as a . . . part’ (Alexander 1965: 58–9; emphasis added). Living system here names that narratorial play of ‘voice’ and persona, between the material and the ephemeral, between the location of ground and the apprehension of spirit, which is simultaneously Levy’s forte, and that which constitutes the affirmative resistances of her text. Levy’s other city is thus implied a virtual and mobile map the very purpose of which is to make complicated, and possibly even disrupt, any notion or ontology, in the example of Reuben Sachs, of a single, alternative ‘Jewish’ community, and, indeed, the very idea of ‘community’ itself. ‘Community’, marked in the initial reading by Jewish identity, is produced from within as fraught – by distinctions in practice, tradition, and the cultural micro-management of socio-economic positioning. This process of ruining identity or ontology on Levy’s part complicates any simple binary or dialectical separation of Jewish and Gentile London in a fairly obvious manner; for it bespeaks the questions of class, and, by extension, the function of culturally determined gender roles shared by both Jewish and non-Jewish Londoners alike. Levy’s language of modernity and feudal tribalism, democracy and conservatism unequivocally demarcates the different and other Londons within London, to which the novel draws its readers’ attention, in the very same gestures that propose the boundaries as being neither impermeable nor rigid. Yet, while Levy lifts the veil on such distinctions even as she structures what Deborah Epstein Nord (amongst others) perceives, correctly, as a ‘scathing . . . indictment of upper-bourgeois [Jewish] life’ (1995: 203), and the ways in which ‘the making of acquaintance outside the tribal barrier [was] sternly discouraged by the authorities’ (RS 95), this is not the

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sole interest of Reuben Sachs. The further complication – and it is ultimately this complication that troubles any simple or full idea of ‘community’, of a unity speaking as one without either dissent or internal disorder, or for that matter dehiscence – leads finally back in the last pages of the novel to the spirit of London we have just seen addressed in Reuben’s response. In that the novel is not entirely concerned with its eponymous protagonist, the sense of a consistent and unified identity is troubled at various levels by Reuben Sachs. ‘Something interesting happens’, as Nord expresses it, ‘about two thirds of the way through the novel: it ceases to be written from the perspective of Reuben Sachs and shifts its focus onto Judith Quixano, the woman Reuben loves but rejects’ (1995: 203). This may be part of Levy’s experimentalism, but other matters are of interest in this. For, as Levy acknowledges and as Judith’s surname announces, she is a SephardicJewish female. Again as her name might be read as registering, Judith is also, perhaps, a Quixote of sorts9 albeit an ironic one, whose ‘true’ identity remains encrypted. By the secret of the proper name, Judith remains circumscribed within the novel for the most part, a spiritual other within what Levy portrays as a largely materialistic and patriarchal Ashkenazi world. Such circumscription, and the impossibility of marrying Reuben, leads Judith to marry Bertie Lee-Harrison, a Christian Englishman who converts to Judaism, but remains an outsider, an other to the Jewish community. It is in Judith Quixano’s identity, as Sephardic rather than Ashkenazi and described as coming from ‘a family of Portugeuse merchants, the vieille noblesse of the Jewish community’ (RS 67), that Levy can be read as situating the critique, if not the deconstruction, of the very idea of community; and she does so, moreover and ultimately, in the co-ordination between faith and gender with regard to the ground of the city itself as this returns at the end of the novel. I should back up here a little of course, having just made certain claims, and address the subject of the proper name as encryption and hieratic, secret inscription. I would contend that Judith’s name functions as a gesture on Levy’s part, perhaps of a certain symbolic ‘circumcision’ if you will, cutting off and sealing the ‘secret’ of Judith Quixano. Susan David Bernstein discusses in passing Judith’s ‘Sephardic mystique’ in her introduction to the novel (RS 37; see, in the novel, 113–14). It is implied also that she is understood not to belong fully to the community of the Leunigers, in the reference to her as a ‘pseudo-cousin’ (RS 114). However, what I take to be crucial to the reading of Judith and London in the novel, and which allows her to perceive Reuben after death in a manner inaccessible during her life, is both Judith’s Sephardic difference within the Jewish communities of London and, to insist on this issue, that which is written in her name: that which her name signs, and that which it bears within it. As Bernstein notes ‘the Sephardim . . . were viewed as more scholarly and genuinely devout in contrast to prejudice against the Ashkenazim’ (RS 67 n.2). Judith’s name bears

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silent witness to this distinction. ‘Judith’ is a double name already, as will be apparent to some. It names of course a book of Old Testament Apocrypha. As a book, it is a historical romance written for didactic purposes; although this is not the place to go into such a discussion, Reuben Sachs may be said to follow just such a pattern. Additionally, the name ‘Judith’, as will already be known by many, is Hebrew for Jewess. With reference to Quixano, and to Judith’s ‘Quixotic’ condition, as readers of Cervantes will know the ‘real’ name of Don Quixote, revealed on the knight’s deathbed, is Alonso Quixano. Whether or not Quixote is a converted Jew as Dominique Aubier has argued (and the argument is a compelling one), Quixano, possibly Moorish in origin, is an anagram according to Aubier of the Hebrew first-person pronoun Anokhi. Following Aubier’s reading of the encryptions of Cervantes’ protagonist name, it is perhaps worth mentioning that queshot is the Aramaic word for ‘truth’ or ‘certainty’ (a term that appears frequently in the thirteenth-century Castillian mystic text Sefer ha Zohar, as Aubier informs us). As speculative as such an invention of reading must remain, what I would like to suggest, pace Melvyn New’s all too certain and general assertions concerning Levy’s allegedly debased materialistic presentation of the AngloJewish community, is that the good reader is given to read an other complex knot of traces within the text, wherein gender and spiritualism are bound together, eventually finding revelation in the spirit of the city. To extend this hypothetical reading, ‘Judith Quixano’ may be read as inscribing another truth, or certainty, of hidden, invisible spiritualism pertaining to the Sephardic mystical tradition, in which Judith’s last name articulates the ‘I’ that is the hieratic and encrypted truth borne by the Jewish female as outcast, by the end of the novel, to her own ‘communities’. Belonging neither wholly to any of the Anglo-Jewish communities, nor to their Anglican counterpart in London, in part because married to an Englishman converted to Judaism (a figure of inverted converso, following Sephardic history in Spain), Judith is made figurally marrano/a (that which is already implied by her Sephardic surname). In this exilic condition and in bearing in her name the encrypted history of exile and marginalization, Judith countersigns the city, she comes at the end of the novel to offer a signature of otherness and difference for that which the city receives, and to which it is open. Judith thus touches on the spirit of London in an instance and experience of a vision of a new ‘Jerusalem’, distinct from the departure for Palestine, of which Levy was critical in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, and about which Leo and Esther make satirical remarks in Reuben Sachs (RS 100). In the moment of revelation given to her as she looks across Hyde Park, she comes to realize also the apophatic affirmation of the spirit of the dead Reuben Sachs. The passage to which I have been referring begins, and continues through the novel’s epilogue. It thus may be said to be both of the novel, and yet

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also, only improperly so. It stands in pseudo- or quasi-relation to Reuben Sachs, a supplement to the text, the final chapter of which ends – conventionally enough for a realist novel – with the wedding of Judith Quixano and Bertie Lee-Harrison. At that wedding, Reuben stands to one side, ‘a little in the background’ (RS 150). The epilogue picks up the narrative four months after the January wedding, when ‘the London season was in full swing’ (RS 151). There is that momentary description, already acknowledged, of the transient ‘brilliance’ of a London spring, which measures ‘the glory of an hour’ in the life of the city. Levy’s narrative of this perception of modern London is augmented through a series of successive, equally ephemeral yet, by implication, iterable occurrences, suggestive of the variform existence and experience of the city: ‘Under the trees children were playing and calling; out beyond in the road a ceaseless stream of cabs, carriages, carts, and omnibuses rolled by’ (RS 151). To this paragraph of play and mechanical transport that juxtaposes worlds of adulthood and childhood, as well as those of the park and the city outside Kensington Gardens, Levy provides an impression in the subsequent paragraph of the Albert Memorial, represented as if the statue were the Prince Consort himself: ‘The broad back of the Prince Consort, gold beneath his golden canopy, shone forth with unusual splendour; the marble groups beneath stood out clearly against the soft background of pale blue sky’ (RS 151). Levy’s highly focused contrast between an almost dazzling gold thrown into relief by the weak colour of the sky foregrounds composition and order as it draws the eye to the arrangement, the form of representation as much as what is represented. Arguably, in that composition of blue and gold, Levy illuminates for the reader an element within a larger compositional arrangement reminiscent of the paintings, once more, of James McNeill Whistler. As discussed above in a different context, what we come to read here, through the realist structure is the act of architectonic making by which Levy shows this aspect of London, thereby giving the reader to know one dimension of the city. From this organization of colour, illumination and contrast, the narrative turns to another kind of auratic experience: ‘And in the air – the London air – lingered something of the freshness of evening and of spring, mixed though it was with the odour of dinners in preparation, and with that of the bad tobacco which rose every now and then from the tops of the crowded road-cars rolling by’ (RS 151–2). As yet, we assume this representation to be that produced through the realist illusion of the narratorial voice. Its attention to the blending and blurring of aromas, natural, domestic and public insists on the specific identity of odour and atmosphere, as belonging to the city. Levy thus adds to the representation that which mere arrangement of pictorial elements or colours cannot bring. And from this, the singularity of smell is re-enforced, as the ‘characteristic London odour’ is remarked once more (RS 152), and, additionally, there is ‘the sound of the children’s voices, the rolling and turning of the wheels, and the shuffle and tramp of footsteps

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on the pavement below’ (RS 152). In the process that we read, that making in excess of structure taking place here indicates that aesthetic arrangement is not all. It is not to be thought that Levy is retreating into the dead end of formalist aesthetics; her ties to the real are too strong for that. Instead, what we might read in that act of arrangement as a making is a construction ‘in which life engages with things’ (De Solà-Morales 1997: 47), and the world accordingly is re-entered differently through vision. Dwelling upon detail opens one to dwelling within the world. Thus, we are taken to that which had inaugurated the London scene, its sounds, though with the difference that, in this reiteration, there is a specific subject to whom the sounds, aromas and colours are present: Judith LeeHarrison. Levy has placed the subject in the city, also locating her as a subject of the city a figure in the arrangment. Judith is a sign belonging to a different order, singular and irreducible to each and every other sign, and yet one more sign of the London spring evening, as much as its air, its sounds, its play of light, and its aromas. More than this, she is the city’s cryptic signature, an ‘inscription’ that does not signify the city directly, but instead, in its being encrypted announces a truth accessible only to fleeting apprehension. Her presence grounds the evanescent and ephemeral, the visible, the invisible, the audible, and the various sensate elements that write the city. At the same time, as with her name, there is signed an existence beyond the ‘inauthenticity or even imposture’ (Todorov 2001: 75) of the idea of undifferentiated and homogeneous ‘community’. Levy aligns Judith’s perspective and perception with that of the narrator’s, even as the narrator remains outside of this subject position, as its ghostly double, a displaced figure who both experiences the city as Judith experiences it, and who offers the reader a disjointed perception of the organization of perception and perspective. Judith is situated as subject and object; she is located within the scene, belonging to it as well as observing and reflecting it. To make the point once more then, Judith has become intrinsically of London, one trace or figure amongst others, but also much more. She is not quite unequivocally gathered into the city though. Judith is presented from that narratorial perspective as inhabiting a clearly symbolic liminal position signified through two particular details. In having our attention refocused on Judith, we see both the external view and the interior of the Albert Hall Mansions flat in which Judith lives. On the one hand there is the ‘glistening gilt cross surmounting the Albert Memorial’. On the other hand, there are the ‘antique silver Hanucah lamp and a spice box’, which adorn the drawing room as Levy puts it, ‘such as the Jews make use of in certain religious services, of the same metal’ (RS 152). Positioned between two worlds, as it were, belonging in part to both and yet to neither properly, Judith is brought the news of Reuben’s death by her husband Bertie, as if to punctuate Judith’s sensibility of the ‘inrushing sense of exile’ (RS 154). In the revelation of Sachs’ death, ‘ “infinite aeons” ’, as Levy has it, citing with a singularly

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modern urban sensibility James Thomson’s City of Dreadful Night, are acknowledged (RS 155). This perception of absolute, irrevocable temporal division, ‘which seemed to divide the present moment from that other moment, half an hour ago’ when Judith still thought she would see Reuben that evening (RS 155) provides a temporal correlate to the structural and cultural division of the world between the cross and the Hanukkah, between the gold of the one and the silver of the other. Judith’s suffering is brought home to her in that experience of insuperable temporalities and worlds, when she reflects that ‘all the sorrow of her life, all the suffering she had undergone would be wiped out, would be as nothing, if only she could indeed meet Reuben’ (RS 156). All of this appears irredeemably bleak. Yet London returns in the face of, perhaps despite, Judith’s anguish: ‘The children’s voices were silent; the iron gates were shut’, we read, as Levy develops clause on clause to mark the city with an absence of life in a rhetorical gesture analogous with the death of Reuben (RS 156). This too though is momentary; for then are noticed – again by both the narrator and Judith – the ‘ceaseless stream of carriages . . . the people gathered, thicker and thicker . . . lovers mov[ing] along slowly beneath the shadow of the trees’ and the ‘pulses of the great city [that] beat and throbbed; the great tide roared and flowed ever onwards’ (RS 156). Clearly, it is in this revenance that there returns a perception of life, and spirit, and with that Reuben, as Levy makes clear: ‘London, his London, was full of life and sound, a living, solid reality; not – oh wonder! – a dream city that melted and faded in the sunset’ (RS 156). Judith’s consciousness of the city is thus revealed in the transformation of its comprehension, and she is offered in her vision and apprehension a sense of joining in that which had not been accessible before, when understood merely through the external symbols of faith. Of course, my reading of Judith’s relation to London is entirely hypothetical, as I have said, but the seduction of such a reading remains a powerful force. In this encrypted counter-signature and in its secret touching communication with a spiritual resonance, unspoken to any other at the close of Reuben Sachs, Judith Quixano marks the body of Reuben Sachs with the counter-signature of Al-Andalus and crypto-Judaism. Judith’s secret, spiritual Judaism is in her name; it is her name. Further, given that the novel seems as much Judith’s as it is Reuben’s, it may be contended that the corpus of the one serves as the blind or screen for the other. The ghost of the one inhabits and exceeds the materiality of the other. Mourning Reuben, Judith mourns mysticism and messianism also, even as her name marks on the text an uncloseable wound. There is therefore to be read a force of rupture of opening or wounding at the close of Reuben Sachs that is marked by Judith’s spiritual communion with London, and which the city makes possible, in its counter-romance of the other, the outsider, the outsider-within. And, as Judith Quixano’s final vision suggests, she is ‘quixotic’, if by that we can

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suggest at the heart of her passive suffering and recognition of Reuben’s London and the spirit of that place, there is a visionary and messianic perception, which elevates the quixotic beyond the merely idealistic or impracticable negative connotations of the name. London, then. An other London, secreted within the gross materialism of its purely external conditions and relations. London is thus realized. It becomes unveiled to subjective apprehension, or unveils itself as the other for this passing perception on Judith’s part. Neither simply passive nor active, the staging of revelation takes place as the event between what is seen and what comes to be known. With its scents, sights, motions and colours, all of which arrive before the subject, constituting that subject, the city is made the ‘locus . . . that governs whatever may be made present of the subject’, as Jacques Lacan has it. It is, as he continues in his discourse on the relation between the subject and the Other, ‘the field of that living being in which the subject has to appear . . . on the side of this living being, called to subjectivity . . . the drive is essentially manifested’ (1994: 203). What Lacan calls drive, I am risking as the reading of London’s alterity, manifested as Judith is ‘called to subjectivity’ by her apprehension of Reuben’s spiritual vision of the city. In this, her secret remains untouched, as she transcends through suffering identification of any merely dialectical identity. London, it must be said, is the Other – and thus the meaning – for Judith’s being, a being that in suffering and having been alienated from within so-called communal identity, comes to transcend that identity, and so receive the knowledge and vision of the city. The making, the construction in the last pages therefore admits Judith into the perception of what Reuben describes as everything that remains beyond knowledge, ‘ “those unspeakable mysteries, affinity and – love” ’ (RS 102).

VI Mystery, affinity and love are frequently at whatever heart we might believe to beat within Arnold Bennett’s visions of the city, in those moments of reverie and revelation where the pull of London shifts narrative focus or awareness. Bennett’s text is not as obviously fraught or contested as Amy Levy’s in its reception, even if it is arguably akin to Levy’s in its being the product of a ‘realism’ the dominant technique of which was, as Wyndham Lewis had it, ‘put into the service of the “disembodied” ’ (Lewis 1987: 132). The most cursory comparison between Levy’s handling of the revelation of London to Judith Quixano at the end of Reuben Sachs with the impressions of London on the protagonist of Bennett’s 1918 novel, The Roll Call, offer enough evidence in passing to support Lewis’ provocative, seemingly paradoxical assertion. However, at the risk of stating the obvious, there are not at work the questions of belief or gender, even if there is one of genre, in the Edwardian novelist that there are in Levy’s text. Yet like Levy, Bennett

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has until recently been quite overlooked by criticism. Where and when Bennett is remembered at all, it is as the provincial writer, in both senses: as the man from the North, and as the writer of that North, specifically the Five Towns. Certainly, it is not as a writer solicited by T. S. Eliot for a contribution on novel writing for the Criterion, which Eliot was editing at the time. Nor is it as someone whom Eliot asked for advice on ‘writing a drama . . . in a rhythmic prose’ (1971: 482). Yet his first novel, A Man from the North, is not only set in London, it is a romance of the city and the experience of London for Richard Larch, the titular protagonist of the novel. A good number of Bennett’s other novels also address London. Additionally, his journals are filled with insightful observations of the minutiae of the city, its rhythms, inflections, idioms and material specificities as those affect its subjects. Although the journals are not our only subject, they do offer a number of interesting snapshots of London in the early years of the twentieth century. We read how the novelist interprets specific views or points in a sequence of events as part of a continuing process. More than this, particular entries in the journals teach one how to read Bennett’s modern realism and realist modernity, in its attenuation of the material by the disembodied. Bennett’s interest in technique in novel writing expressed in his journals is thus informative here. In particular, his view of character construction, that very point on which Woolf takes him to task, suggests his perception of the inextricability of character from location; additionally, it also hints at how the city might be written. In 1924, reflecting on a visit from, and discussion with, T. S. Eliot (just mentioned), Bennett offers the following observations about which he and the poet were in agreement: a character, writes Bennett, ‘has to be conventionalized. It must somehow from [sic] part of a pattern, or lay the design of the book . . . You can’t put the whole of a character into a book . . . You must select traits. You must take many traits for granted . . . The thing is to produce an impression on the reader’ (1971: 483). When one examines Bennett’s ‘method’ in its representation of character in relation to the specificities of site, it is possible to see how the technique carries across from person to place; or, to articulate this differently, that locality or scene are local characters of the more abstract identity, London. (I bracket the word ‘method’, by the way, because in its implicit attentiveness to the singularity of that being whose traits dictate translation, only the most perfunctory vestiges of generalizable method can be said to be at work.) Consider the following examples of London scenes from the Journals. On visiting the workhouse in the Fulham Road (Monday, 15 June, July 1896), Bennett notes aspects of the inmates, such as their ‘brown coats and corduroy trousers’. In his reflections, however, the author pauses to consider that the ‘clean, soft pinkness of their gnarled work-worn hands seems curiously inapposite’ (1971: 19). In attending to detail, specific to place, there emerges in what appears mere record a specificity of resonance that goes beyond the act

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of representation in its mimetic registration of incongruity. An obvious analogy between person and place is drawn, the two together in their concatenation of proper name, site as context, and close observation producing a specific effect, which arguably is nowhere in the passage, but which is intended to haunt the reader. A kind of counter-cultural construction makes itself known from within the pragmatic constraints of realism. It argues for or at least highlights the need to read within the modern impersonality of urban extremity, after ‘an affirmation of universal exceptionalism and singularity’, in which identities, of both person and place, are always already found to be ‘constitutively non-identical’ (Clark 2005: 21) within the greater ipseity of London, or the ontology of urbanization or modernity. This is not the only small estranging device employed by Bennett, one that loosens the very structure it delineates and serves to construct. In the same year as the previous journal entry, 1896, Bennett records a very different ‘world’ within London from the Fulham workhouse – the ‘Piccadilly pavements’. These are ‘loosely thronged with women in light summer attire’; the women are ‘energetic, inquisitive’, their eyes ‘restless’ and ‘on everything at once’. The house fronts, being decorated by workmen for a royal wedding offer contrasting façades of curved designs in gold and red, while ‘stands and gaspipes’ offer structural counterpoint to the ‘railings of Green Park’. Unlike those inhabitants of the Fulham Workhouse, here faces are ‘infantile’, ‘unmarked by thought’ or ‘care’. Everything is automatic, a series of colours, lines and motions; the police dismount from their horses like ‘automata’, while the cabs and buses echo the shapes of the festoons, in the suggestion of sinuous movement towards ‘the city’. As if this were not enough, Bennett steps back from his observations, considering that, seen in this light, the Piccadilly scene, mistaken for the everyday life of London, would create the impression of ‘a city solely made up of the acute, the knowing, the worldly, the blasé’. In contrast to this, however, Bennett considers what cannot be seen, an invisible population of others, ‘an army of Ignorantly Innocent’ for whom ‘a bus-ride is an event’ (1971: 20). What the scenes of Fulham Workhouse and Piccadilly Pavements give us to apprehend is the extent to which Bennett’s writing of detail is not quite the mechanical, prosaic, lifeless record and the erasing of character, which Virginia Woolf would have had her readers – and so many in the subsequent generations of academics – believe. Not only is Bennett’s writing attendant on, alive to, the modernity and specificity of place, the constitutive nonidentity within identity; it also takes up that impressionistic modernity within its own translation of the materiality of scene and event. Bennett knows the necessity in this mode of apprehension and response. In 1897, one of his earliest journal entries (Monday, 11 January) begins as follows: ‘[t]he novelist of contemporary manners needs to be saturated with a sense of the picturesque in modern things’. Having situated the contemporaneity of the writer in relation to the modernity of the world he invents, he continues:

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Walking down Edith Grove this afternoon, I observed the vague, mysterious beauty of the vista of houses and bare trees melting imperceptibly into a distance of grey fog. And then, in King’s Road, the figures of tradesmen in shopdoors . . . of men and women each totally different from every other . . . these seemed curiously strange and novel and wonderful. Every scene, even the commonest is wonderful, if one can detach oneself, casting off all memory of use and custom, and behold it (as it were) for the first time . . . The novelist should cherish and burnish this faculty of seeing crudely . . . of seeing like a baby or a lunatic, who lives each moment by itself . . . (1971: 28; emphases added) This fascinating declaration draws the reader’s attention specifically because it is generated as a reaction to the encounter with, and experience of the city and its inhabitants in all their singularity. Not only does it recognize how each and every other is wholly and completely other, Bennett’s manifesto of modern urban poetics articulates the necessary sense of tracing in the materiality of fiction the already forceful immediacy of a particular kind of seeing. The fiction of invention is caught in that brief parenthesis by which Bennett reminds himself that there is no unmediated vision, as the strangeness of singular alterities on the King’s Road demands a phenomenal strategy of representation as experience. If there is a principle at work in the poetics of urban modernity to be read in Bennett’s reading that escapes the limits of classic realism it is one of anti-recuperation. Wonder, strangeness and the event, the moment itself, in every moment require that difference and singularity be gathered into the mechanical, implicit self-sameness of a generalized identity going by the name of ‘Mrs Brown’. Passages such as these from the journals share in their representation of specific locations in London a telegraphic abbreviation of detail and adumbration amounting to an impressionistic fragmentation. Despite, or because of, the plethora of hurried detail the scene is both ultra-real and disembodied simultaneously, as Bennett touches on the inner life of urban identity, an inner life not hidden but everywhere, on and as its surface. There is, it might be said, an emptying, a kenosis of the image, in which the specificity of locus gives up the ghost of itself. As Bennett suggests of the cumulative effect in another passage from the journals to do with the London scene, ‘[e]verything, taken separately, ugly and crude . . . in combination, by sheer immensity and bold crudity, certain in the end to produce a great spectacular effect’ (1971: 31). That spectacular effect translated into the materiality of inscription touches on the otherwise invisible within the visible. The effect is performative therefore; for it is not only in the detail in combination, but also in the writing of detail in such frenetic, abbreviated and fragmented constellations, wherein sensation emerges and overflows mere mimetic representation. It is for such reasons that ‘at times, and in some fortunate aspects, London will look as quaint, picturesque, and medieval, as any old world continental

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city’. In such moments, the city is ‘caught’, as Bennett describes it, in ‘such an aspect’. That momentary capture, that fleeting apprehension is all-important to Bennett in seeing what has become obscured by familiarity. While one ‘must’ see the city with an ‘eye unprejudiced by custom and associations’ (1971: 35),10 it is nonetheless the city that reveals itself. Bennett’s sense of the unpredictability of such moments is located more precisely through reference to place and time shortly after these assertions. The place is Green Park, the time of day morning. The park is submerged in an October mist. The conjunction of grazing sheep and soldiers ‘practising flag-signals’ gives Bennett pause, as, in an instant of displacement from habit and consequent self-consciousness of the experience, he is caused to reflect on the quaint oddity of the image. From this, Bennett describes what in any other city would be picturesque, the subject of photographs, and therefore captured, made into urban cliché. In London, however, this occasional exoticism and its revelation conventionally remain unremarked. Thus it is that the other city, the other of and within the city, is glimpsed as if by chance, and the consideration that presents itself through comparison with the foreign; and it is this, in turn, that makes the invisible reveal itself, in that the city admits to its own foreignness. As the contrasts between Fulham, Piccadilly, Chelsea and Green Park make us aware, Bennett is keenly receptive to the nuances and idioms of various London locations. It is just such openness and attentiveness that informs the author’s novels. Bennett’s observation is unforced, casual even. But his deftness of touch in response to the manner in which districts touch him, bringing him to consciousness of the city’s modern conditions, is what makes it possible for Bennett’s writing to produce its effects beyond any straightforward mimetic verisimilitude. As we have seen then on acquaintance with particular passages from the Journals, Bennett’s modal adumbration – modal in the sense that the ‘logic’ of representation is expressed through the relation between the traits of construction, and also in the musical sense of the relation between notes productive of a pattern – is as expressive as it is impressionistic. Detail is merely the collective of ‘conventionalized elements’ within a greater form, for the production of particular effects, and wherein the parts may be said to be greater than the whole. All-but-forgotten novels such as Hugo (1906), Buried Alive (1908), Teresa of Watling Street (1904), The Roll-Call (1917), The Sinews of War: a Romance of London and the Sea (1906; co-authored with Eden Phillpotts) offer significant examples of such construction of London’s particular locations. The Grand Babylon Hotel, published in 1902 (the same year as Anna of the Five Towns), is the first of Bennett’s ‘fantasias’ on modern life and urban modernity. The hotel of the novel’s title is situated in London, ‘on the Embankment’ (1976: 16), and although there is little sustained consideration of the city, yet the title of the novel and the hotel’s name hints at a city of multiple identities, voices and languages. Given the popular use of ‘Babylon’ as alternative name

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for London, from Dickens to James at least, we might even go so far as to suggest that for Bennett the hotel figures a fantastic synecdoche for London, as well as being an architectural structure in which the hierarchical distinctions, locations and interactions of the city’s inhabitants are remapped. Remapping, with its refamiliarization and defamiliarization of London scenes, is given prominence elsewhere, beyond the novel. Bennett wrote the occasional play, such as London Life (1924, with Edward Knoblock), and, more importantly, the story for the film Piccadilly, an expressionist movie of London’s night world, directed by E. A. Dupont and produced at Elstree Studios in 1929. Piccadilly was notable in its time for exploring sexual and ethnic politics in London’s demi-monde. Dupont’s film, made during the year of transition from silent to sound film at Elstree, provides a visual counterpoint to Bennett’s writing, and is worth pausing over momentarily. Dupont was a German director and contemporary of Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang and others who worked in the Berlin UFA studios. Bennett’s story of upperclass decadence and East End squalor provides ideal material for expressionist cinematic techniques, while the film itself gives visual specificity to Bennett’s perceptive exploration of differing locations and their cultural registers in the late 1920s. Particularly fascinating is the interplay of London’s Caucasian world and the film’s presentation of the city’s Chinatown, at the heart of central London. German cinematographer Werner Brandes creates a forcefully unreal yet vivid world of the city, which in his filmic techniques, particularly in its use of long shots, speedy and disorienting pans for the London exteriors, offers the viewer an interesting cinematic comparison with similar narrative scenes not only from Bennett’s journals and novels, but also from other novels such as Gerald Kersh’s Night and the City. Internal shots utilize 360° pans with blurred montages of faces and high-key chiaroscuro effects to disturb realist expectations, whilst being suggestive of the disjuncture materially and psychically of the modern urban subject explored by Bennett in certain of his novels. With its narrative and cinematic exploration of desire, murder, class and ethnicity at the centre of the capital, the film has variously been described as a visual expression of the Jazz Age and film noir avant la lettre. Though not intending to spend any more time on either Piccadilly, or the fantasias such as The Grand Babylon Hotel or Hugo, I have nonetheless highlighted these in considering Bennett’s more overtly experimental forays. As with the journals, such works by Bennett foreground that which is most missed in his more apparently conventional realist fictions. If in no small measure Amy Levy troubles modern or, at least, recent scholarship through her formal narrative techniques that refuse a stable position, which scholarship can only see her writing as so many manifestations of ‘what is usually called Jewish self-hatred’, without understanding that this is, as Linda Hunt Beckman reminds us, only ‘one of [her] themes’ (1999: 186), then in very distinct ways, Bennett has also been consigned to a limited, reductive and

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therefore distorted critical reception – a reception which is haunted by an avoidance of reading. Bennett’s fantasias, but also his explicitly materialist, if not realist works, speak of the ‘absurd element in history’, to appropriate a phrase of Emmanuel Levinas’ (1997: 96). That absurd element is also present within the real, and realism is only that form of presentation unequal to the task of figuring the absurd as a material, yet inexplicable element, while at the same time leaving the absurd as it is and not seeking to reconcile that or rationalizing it within some larger representational or mimetic schema. As with Amy Levy’s ‘impressionistic fragments’ (Bernstein int. 41), Bennett’s modal disruptions of realism situate the ab-surd – literally that which is intensely inaudible to the ear and, by extension, that which can neither be read, spoken or seen – within the realist as the sign of that which remains unspeakable and unheard. Levy and Bennett’s fragments of the modern are ‘absurd’ inasmuch as they remain inharmonious or incongruous within the economy or logic, and the propriety also, of realism. Recalling the ‘gap’ in Bennett’s writing read by Jason Jones (and acknowledged before), we therefore see how Bennett’s counter-romances may be read as opening the realist moment from within itself repeatedly. They produce a wound in the realist narrative world and surface, which opens to disturb the calm surface of rational or logical orders of narrative, as well as the formal devices that produce such orders. Thus it is, as Neil Cartlidge observes, ‘[t]he opening lines of Arnold Bennett’s 1923 novel Riceyman Steps seem to herald an aesthetically and stylistically retarded exercise in late nineteenth-century realism – a self-consciously detached, rationalistic, and materialistic study of a selected set of purportedly ordinary human experiences’ framed by ‘local and temporal co-ordinates . . . established with a demonstrative exactitude’ (2002: 115; emphases added). When orientated by co-ordinates of the local and temporal in a disposition towards the urban other, the ‘absurd’ element is that which, irretrievable for any generalization, does not permit any comfortable mastery of the other scene in an act of erasing specificity in the name of a universal identification. Bennett manages from within the ‘principles and methods of “classic realism” ’ the revelation of wounds, ‘possible fissures in the narrative – quietly understated aporias on the part of the narrator that suggest irony or evasion rather than confidence or certainty in the details of the narration’ (Cartlidge 2002: 117). Narrative order thus conforms to its other, confirming its alterity, whilst undermining ‘the authority of the narrative voice’ (Cartlidge 2002: 117), a result not dissimilar to Levy’s own narrative experiments. Bennett’s writing shapes itself to event and placement, while striving to replace, to supplement, the event’s singularity, so that replacement involves a ‘taking place in the very replacement, which, receiving the place, gives place . . . and opening, lets the place open itself; it lets/makes the open place come about through the replaceability of the irreplaceable itself’ (Derrida 2006: 74). In this, through attention to the details of local specificity and material place,

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Bennett’s ‘alleged materialism . . . foregrounds the self-estrangement of his characters’ as it simultaneously points up ‘the structural “open secret” at the heart of [modern urban] subjectivity’ (Jones 2003: 30). As a result, and again as with Levy’s writing, ‘critical responsibility’ is shifted ‘onto the reader’ (Cartlidge 2002: 118) as the reader is estranged from comfortable identification or comprehension in ways that would deny specificity, singularity or otherness. As we have seen with the oddities of the Upper Richmond Road and Priam Farll, or in Riceyman Steps ‘individuals construct their identities . . . by seeking implicitly to contest the shape of the reality in which their experiences are grounded’ (Cartlidge 2002: 134). Contest is not quite the right word for Farll’s experience, and nor is it for Judith Quixano’s. Yet, there is that slippage from within reality, and therefore from within the realist mode also identified by Neil Cartlidge. There is in the vision of the city, whether that belongs to a particular character or to the disembodied ‘narrator’, a fluidity of always provisional self-determination shaped and channelled by the encounter with London that overflows the conventions of realist representation. As Cartlidge avers, Bennett had a ‘clear sense of the possibility and desirability of accommodating modernist themes and concerns with at least some of the aims and techniques of the realist tradition’ (Cartlidge 2002: 135). Such a ‘modernism’ or quasi-modernism is captured in that notion of sense, of the writer’s ability to convey the sensible from within the intelligible, without wholly sacrificing or abandoning the latter. Bennett’s writing often produces its effects in entering into the modernity of specific urban resonances and flows, in attuning its own rhythms to the fluid motions and material punctuations of the city’s pulses. This effect is caught in a passage near the opening of Riceyman Steps, as Henry Earlforward moves between King’s Cross Road and Riceyman Square: Below him and straight in front he saw a cobbled section of the King’s Cross Road – a hell of noise and dust and dirt, with the County of London tramcars, and motor lorries and heavy horse-drawn vans sweeping north and south in a vast clangour of iron thudding and grating on iron and granite . . . Nearer to the man who could look two ways lay the tiny open space (not open to vehicular traffic) which was officially included in the title ‘Riceyman Steps’ . . . two business ‘yards’ full of lorries, goods, gear, and the hum of hidden machinery. And the earth itself faintly throbbed; for, to the vibrations of traffic and manufacture, the Underground Railway, running beneath Riceyman Steps, added the muffled uproar of its subterranean electric trains. (RSt 7–8) Earlfoward’s ‘arrested’ motion offers a forceful juxtaposition with the constant flow of traffic and the persistence of sound, both above and below ground, which frame this extract. The juxtaposition of the gaze’s directions

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is doubled in that play between visible motion and invisible sonority. Additionally, the ‘traffic’ of cadence and pulse is caught in the motion of trams, lorries and vans, and signalled to the eye through the seemingly endless, unpunctuated description of the movement. As the overwhelming flow of traffic in the street arrests Earlforward, causing him to contemplate the vision of ‘hell’, so the reader’s eye is also arrested. There is to be observed in Bennett’s writing the conceit or illusion therefore of the accidental alignment in the narrative reflection on how one sees and comes to know London. Take the following two passages from Buried Alive as further example. In the first chapter, Bennett writes, ‘[t]he peculiar angle of the earth’s axis to the plan of the ecliptic – that angle which is chiefly responsible for our geography and therefore our history – had caused the phenomenon known in London as summer’ (1). This, the first sentence of the novel, engages in an act of producing the singularity of a modern London sensation related to season from the alignments within a structure or arrangement of geometric lines. As readers, we are invited to follow in this inauguration from abstraction to the sensate, and from the chance cosmic associations to the specificities of place. Following this the opening paragraph of the novel focuses on a particular property in a street in South Kensington, with its ‘grimy stucco front, its cellar kitchen, its hundred stairs and steps, its perfect inconvenience . . . sublimely ignoring the axial and orbital velocities of the earth and even the reckless flight of the whole solar system through space’ (1). So, Bennett engages in a materialization, and a making visible, making concrete of place, as the reader is taken from cosmos to city, to street, to dwelling. At the same time, however, the tawdry details of the house are satirically counterpoised to the impersonal forces of the planet and the universe. Bennett achieves in this contrast between bathos and the sublime. From such comic, not to say absurd overstatement, Bennett descends to the personal impression that ‘[y]ou felt that No. 91 was unhappy’ (1). House and reader are the two co-ordinates here, the latter being always a moving point in relation to the fixed locus of No. 91, while once more geometry and sensory awareness mark the image with an estranging collocation. In defamiliarizing relations, Bennett moves between differing vectors of representation that juxtapose a multiplicity of values without collapsing or subsuming one ‘identity’ in another. The counter-romance of architectural commonplaceness is articulated because the swift descent from the heavens to the street enacts a parallel movement from the sublime to the bathetic, in which the asymmetry serves to show the street and the house from within its very drabness. If one can argue for the modernity of such a passage, for the quasi-modernism of affect within, and in distinction to, realist modes of representation, then it can be read to take place in the singular configuration to which Bennett draws our attention. Later in the novel, as Farll walks aimlessly, he finds himself on the Embankment at dusk, a favoured London location and time of day in

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Bennett’s counter-romance. Geometry is of a more fluid kind in this passage. The curve of the Thames, we read, and the ‘mighty panorama stretched before him in a manner mysteriously impressive, which has made poets of less poetic men’. Bennett continues: [g]rand hotels, offices of millionaires and of governments, grand hotels, swards and mullioned windows of the law, grand hotels, the terrific arches of termini, cathedral domes, houses of parliament, and grand hotels, rose darkly around him on the arc of the river, against the dark violent murk of the sky. Huge trams swam past him like glass houses, and hansoms shot past the trams and the automobiles past the hansoms; and phantom barges swirled down the full ebb, threading holes in bridges as cotton threads a needle. It was London, and the roar of London, majestic, imperial, super-Roman. And lo! earlier than the earliest municipal light, an unseen hand, the hand of destiny, printed a writing on the wall of vague gloom that was beginning to hide the opposite bank. And the writing said that Shipton’s tea was the best. And the hand wiped largely out that message and wrote in another spot that Macdonnell’s whiskey was the best; and so these two doctrines, in their intermittent pyrotechnics, continued to give the lie to each other under the deepening night. Quite five minutes passed before Priam perceived . . . the high scaffold-clad summit of a building . . . It looked serenely and immaterially beautiful in the evening twilight . . . (1) This polyrhythmic passage interrupts one, causing Farll to disappear, his material vision opening onto a more visionary perception of the city, as that very same vision becomes the reader’s own. Beginning with intermittent reiterations, in counterpoint to the observation of particular types of building, writing traces the panorama, eye and pen moving seemingly together. The buildings that read initially as so many individual staccato punctuations, join in a concerted upward vertical motion to describe a trajectory along that of the riverine horizontal. Employing what might best be described as a muted or restricted palette through which to convey course and curve, Bennett imposes a dark middle ground of architectural forms against the less substantial, yet more powerfully felt, because ‘violent’ dimness of the sky. Against and across this solidity of line are the flowing movements of visionary trams and phantom barges. The more fluid motions are themselves offset by the more violent propulsion of hansoms and automobiles, as the scene dissolves into differing, competing rhythms and velocity of line. From the tracing of such dynamic flux and locomotion, the strangeness of the image is given in the simile of barges and bridges being akin to needle and thread; at the same time, the swirl and ebb of river and traffic offers a contrapuntal punctuation to the ‘violent murk of the sky’. There is yet further motile, intermittent activity, as the scene becomes one of an obviously

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luminous night-writing, an erasure, and subsequent rewriting, in successive clauses seemingly drawing their tone, to risk the reading, from theological edict (which appears anticipated by that apostrophic ‘lo!’). This part of London assumes both an auratic quality of unreality and immateriality. Importantly though, it is a quality of experience, a quality of perception for someone. This is as clearly defined in my final examples. The perception and force of romantic translation is presented in Henry Earlforward’s visions of that medieval Clerkenwell hovering in the material lines of the grim, squalid tenements. ‘Riceyman Steps’, Bennett writes, ‘had a picturesque air, with all its outworn shabbiness, grime and decay. The steps leading up to Riceyman Square, the glimpse of the Square at the top, with its church bearing a massive cross on the west front, the curious perpendicular effects of the tall, blind, ochreish houses – all these touched the imagination of every man who had in his composition any unusually strong admixture of the universal human passion – love of the past’ (RSt 10–11). As Bennett remarks elsewhere in the novel, in what appears initially as a contradiction but which on closer inspection is readable as the affirmation of disordering anachronism within representation, ‘squalor and foulness’ are at once – at least to a particular observing eye – both ‘picturesque and . . . sunk in antiquity’ (RSt 61). We have one of the text’s ‘strange contrasts’ (RSt 61) that London imposes. Once more, we read in the charting of territory, a territory comprised of various planes and vectors, which direct the movement from the eye to the imagination, from realism to a visionary other city arriving as cultural memory of the past. Bennett moves the eye from detail to detail of the architecture, in an arrangement that has no accumulative culmination, but instead brings about an instant of reflective consciousness. In that moment of breaking off and breaking away from the potential endlessness of representation, Bennett registers the invention of this aspect of London which remains beyond vision. Implicit seriality is initiated here that is potentially without conclusion. Resistant to all conclusion or closure, it affirms the countless locations, the innumerable other cities suggestive of equally innumerable perspectives, and so an ineffable sublimity. Thus it is that the reading of strange contrast in Bennett’s work produces a sense for us how, ‘with all its solidity’, aspects of Clerkenwell have the ‘unreal quality of a vision, a creation of some djinn, formed in an instant and destined as quickly to dissolve’ (RSt 60).

VII To conclude, without the pretence of reaching an end to this analysis other than a breaking-off: clearly, in any discourse of urban modernity representation is not to be disposed of entirely. Indeed, it cannot be, in a retreat from modernity into the inner reflections of a modernist consciousness alienated and alienating itself from the material, the historical, or the real. The subject

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must engage with, and seek to apprehend the modernity of the urban world, even as he or she transforms the vision. In this comes the apprehension of the subject’s consciousness as the correlative locus for the lines that pass through and intersect as the co-ordinates of place that come to have specific meaning, or which mark experience as singular. In conclusion, it is therefore vital to observe something which Woolf and others miss about Bennett. For Bennett, the modern, modernity, modernism – none are – and here I am paraphrasing Peter Bürger on the subjects of montage and allegory – new categories ‘meant to replace’ realism (Bürger 1984: 73), in some formalist historical succession. As we see in Bennett’s various visions of the city, and in various particulars of Amy Levy’s text, transformation or translation are given us to read in the experience or encounter with specific place, with the contours of its identity. Centred on a consciousness of the counter-romance of the real and the singular condition, the texts of Bennett and Levy in response to London aim ‘at a more precise definition of a particular aspect’ (Bürger 1984: 73) in the first decades of the twentieth century, doing so through the graphic ‘fragmentation of reality’ (Bürger 1984: 73). In such singularity of urban vision the reader is invited in turn to shift his or her perspective, from merely seeing to knowing London, not as a whole but, successively and serially, in impulses and surges; across the surfaces of its architectures, its topographies, its lines of flight, its shifting articulations, and in its intersections of flux. Structure and arrangement not immediately discernible come to light. The modernity of counter-romance is to be found in the implicit challenge to representation of the city and, with that the limits of realism, by which Levy and Bennett’s texts claim our attention. For these acts of writing London take account of the human work of making, and thereby stake a claim for the urban subject’s coming historically to consciousness – to a consciousness, on the one hand, of the city in which it dwells, and to a consciousness, on the other, of itself as formed by the city in which it situates itself.

Brief moments in time II

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4 ‘All the living and the dead’: Urban Anamnesis in John Berger and Iain Sinclair

I In this chapter, I look at the role of memory in two distinctly different approaches to writing London. On the one hand, I consider the way in which, in a short memoir, John Berger unfolds personal and cultural alternative histories of Islington. The memoir, contrasting initially distanced observation of the present with personal knowledge and memory of the past, moves between the personal and the historical, recovering cultural memories of location as these are occasioned and evoked through the experience of a single location, the home of a friend. Thus, the memoir moves from the specific to the more general, in its articulation of a hidden, other London. On the other hand, I look at Slow Chocolate Autopsy, a collaboration between Iain Sinclair and Dave McKean, taking the text by Sinclair as exemplary of his own singular approach to the material and psychic inscription of the city’s other memories. As my title hints, I read, at least implicitly, a difference between Berger and Sinclair’s reflections on the nature of the encoding of the city’s memories, and their respective uses of those traces. While Berger’s focus begins with and returns, repeatedly to the vital force of a living memory, and the survival of memory in however spectralized a form, Sinclair approaches the traits and marks of encrypted memory in a broader, more comprehensive fashion. Berger works in minute detail, to unravel the threads of experience and memory in all their singularity, as they are informed and touched by the threads of reminiscence and personal chronicle with which they come into intimate contact, by the occasion of place and all the flows and forces that intersect across time in that particular site. Sinclair, on the other hand, is not concerned with his own personal relation to the vibrations by which he is motivated, unless that relation be in its mediumistic or shamanistic role as some kind of tele-spectral receiver, the purpose of which is to record and decipher, and so generate counter-narratives of the city, from within the various sites of London that are his frequent haunts, and by which he 159

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is himself haunted. The difference I perceive therefore to be at work in the authors’ respective modalities has to do with a distinction between ‘the living and the dead’, to borrow James Joyce’s well-worn phrase, as that distinction informs the approach to the memories of the city. In the example of Berger, what I read is his sense of what ‘lives on’, as it were, beyond mere existence, and which must, therefore, be accommodated in the personalized form and responsibility of the memoir. In Sinclair’s approach to memory, the question becomes one of speaking for, to, and in the voices of the dead of a city he regards as a vast necropolis. Through this difference both writers produce anamnesiac texts that may be understood as manifestations of chorographical or ekistic discourse, the principal features of which I will discuss briefly, in order to highlight their significance to what is taken to be inventive and also responsible to the necessary recognition of the poetics of singularity, as this serves in the writing of place and event. Chorography first: Though given relatively recent scholarly attention in the work of Gregory Ulmer, chorography1 is an Early Modern discourse giving to the spatial aspect of cartography a temporal dimension that reads the invisible within the visible, the past within the present, as contributing to the ever-changing identity of place. While the term chorography has been superseded by the terms geography and topography, the use of the word is suggestive for the reading of particular London texts that speak to the question of cultural and historical memory. One of the most famous extant examples of chorography is Michael Drayton’s self-styled ‘topo-chrono-graphical’ poem, Poly-Olbion, printed in 1613.2 Drayton’s terminology draws to our attention the importance of understanding the relation between spatial and temporal features informing any structure, place or identity. The purpose of chorography for Elizabethan intellectuals was to map the various historical, folkloric and cultural resonances which could be unearthed in one location, specifically at the county level, as a means of producing an invented identity that acknowledged the singularity of place while showing analogically the resonance, both temporally and spatially, between local and national identity. Chorography was also, often, an act of writing aiming to generate complex and unanticipated relations in the reading of place, thereby performing vertiginous dislocations from within undifferentiated ideologies in the service of cultural mythologization and mystification. Furthermore, Early Modern chorography offered a symbolic alternative to the construction of a monolithic identity, thereby countering chronicle histories, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s, which asserted the hegemonic imperatives of family and dynasty related in a linear, progressive narrative at the expense of place and the cultural memory of location. In effect, chorography served to open identity to its others, to those elements and traces that informed but had been forgotten or erased, thereby

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giving voice to ‘all the living and the dead’ as my title has it. The chorographical or ekistic narrative recalls and risks an articulated translation of the otherwise mute and silent traces of particular places in the city, the events that have shaped it, and, therefore certain of its forgotten inhabitants. Anamnesiac ‘afterimages’ of site and event are in this manner generated, as so many expressions of ‘collective historical memory, haunting images . . . that ha[ve] the capacity for a . . . reawakening’ (Crary 2002: 460). Thus, the chorographical articulation of particular texts having the potential to call up or call us to forgotten memories. Additionally, location does not merely call up memory. It can be figured as a materialized and encoded medium of anamnesis through which writing re-marks and supplements what is already there. As Iain Sinclair has it in London Orbital, ring roads are ‘pastoral memory rind[s] at the edge of things’ (2002a: 71). Here as the figure of the ring road duplicates in prose the graphic demarcation of the building of such a road, edge operates in at least two ways. On the one hand, it names boundary, liminal interstice. The city becomes ‘zoned’ by the material presence. On the other hand, the association of the road with the conceit of memory’s rind intimates another liminal locus – that between what is forgotten and what is recalled. On the edge of memory and the city, the mark left by the road mediates, as mnemic trope, between observation and the recollection or recovery of the historical determination of distinctions between the urban and the suburban. Ekistics, on the other hand, is by comparison with chorography a relatively recently developed discourse, formalized initially by Constantinos Apostolou Doxiadis, first in lectures in the 1940s, and subsequently in his Between Dystopia and Utopia (1966). A neologism derived from Greek, the sources of the term name settlement and house (oikos, as in economy). The purpose of ekistics for Doxiadis is to provide a systematic mode of analysis of human settlements in their entirety that is exhaustively multidisciplinary in its interests and eschews the limitations of approaches governed by any one mode or discipline, or a small consonant group of interlinked disciplinary concerns. As Doxiadis argues throughout Between Dystopia and Utopia, ekistics should account for planning, mapping, economics, geography, sociology, and cultural manifestations of community existence. It should be, in his words, the ‘most inter-disciplinary approach’ (1968: 75). While Doxiadis’ work does not address literature other than as one mode of production amongst many within civilizations, and does not read literary works as intrinsically ekistic, in its multi-disciplinary focus it can be read suggestively as implying that the very notion of a narrative ekistics is comparable to chorography. As a term for the provisional identification of narrative form, and indicative of a comprehensive, rigorous reading, the idea of ekistics is useful for attending to the innumerable, heterogeneous traces and marks of the city that structure and move across the surface of the literary, as that phenomenon is irreducible to any one determination or

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stabilizing identification. The literary text is produced, as will be admitted, as a mesh from a possibly infinite number of traces gathered together in a singular form or event. When those traces, fragments and signals are gathered from another equally untotalizable source, such as a city, only a reading that begins to give attention to what takes place in a given site, to what takes place as place can hope to perceive the condition by which the city is written and how that writing comes to be mediated in the city text, in the writing of London. This is made all the more complex when one appreciates that singularity with which one seeks to come to terms, though constructed as a surface of countless intersections, fluctuations, and lines of flight, is made further complex by the overflow of different times, differing temporalities, histories, and velocities of arrival and return, in order to enact the heteronymous city text. And this is what is apprehended by John Berger and Iain Sinclair, in their different responses to the hidden memories of London, in their narratives that invite their readers to bear witness to ‘all the living and the dead’.

II Much of the Writing London project over its three volumes has concerned itself with the city’s exteriors, its streets, the way its exterior spaces and locations are mapped, represented or translated in acts of narrative. Less attention has been given to interiors, with the obvious exceptions of Charles Dickens, in volume one, and Elizabeth Bowen, in the second volume. In this, the final part of the present chapter, I want to turn, once more, to the London interior. However, while in those previous chapters I had sought to present and analyse the structural and formal repetitions by which the authors in question had shaped, and so determined their ‘poetics of the interior’, across a number of texts, my purpose here is somewhat different. In the present section of this chapter therefore, I propose to turn to a single chapter in John Berger’s memoir Here is Where We Meet, the chapter concerning Islington. In doing so, I will be considering the poetics of a single house, as this house and Berger’s representation of it may be read for what it can tell us about reading the city in general, and how a reading of a single dwelling can situate crucial questions concerning memory and forgetting, as well as personal as opposed to public histories. Cities in general, and districts within cities in particular, are composed as precarious sites of memory for John Berger. The city is the place where the self encounters constantly the flows of the past. Through this flux, there arrive endless encounters with others, which, in their coming and going, tattoo the spectral palimpsest of the city onto memory, as its web and also its own, highly singular cartography. If, as the jacket ‘blurb’ of Berger’s This is Where We Meet, suggests, ‘sensual memories from the past penetrate the present like salt’, then the self is nothing other than a porous membrane

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and medium through which the solution flows. This is given especial focus through domestic interior spaces. Rooms in Berger’s narrative act as cabinets of curiosities, aides-mémoires. The exchange between past and present resolves itself as historical, and implicitly political (or at least politicized) recollection enfolded into and then spun out from the personal. At the beginning of the fifth ‘memoir’ of Here is Where We Meet John Berger comments on the transformed identity, status and perception of Islington, the North London district. In just a quarter century, it has ‘become fashionable’ (HWM 109). It is no longer – obviously – the Islington of the 1950s or 1960s, understood as topographically proximate to the City but culturally and economically Siberian by contrast with the location of money and power. As Berger remarks, districts such as Islington have their identities determined for them not by geography or spatial relation to what is perceived as significant, but through the work of ‘the imagination of those who are prospering’ (HWM 109). Once those who prosper can rethink, and repopulate, a district in their own image, location becomes gathered up, made familiar. No longer in the cultural hinterlands of London, ‘for Londoners today Islington is far closer than it used to be; it is no longer “remote” ’ (HWM 109). In Berger’s representation then, proximity is a matter of the imagination, location a place that can be reinscribed at any time, so as to reflect ideology, taste, desire and wealth. Forty years prior to the encounter with Islington in this particular memoir from Here is Where We Meet buying property in the neighbourhood was, if not unimaginable, not part of the London imagination, then tinged at the least with a certain death-like economic inevitability, having, as it did, ‘something of a foreclosure about it’ (HWM 109). So, Islington’s is an identity that is translated by some alchemical urban process, understandable only through the interaction of time and money. We might say indeed, that money’s meaning changes according to location in the city. Whereas it had signified foreclosure, in the present in which Berger writes, it now symbolizes what is held to be fashionable and desirable. What becomes mapped in Berger’s meditation is that the transformation of urban meaning takes place as a result of active intervention. This seems unarguably obvious enough. Imagined remoteness or ideological marginality and geographical proximity are always enfolded in an uneasy negotiation with the politics of urban ontology. One of the most direct, not to say forceful ways in which the dialectic comes to be transcended is to enforce a makeover of location, in order that it comes to seem nearer to what is deemed from elsewhere ‘central’ in the projection of urban identity. Location is re-envisioned. It is made to aspire to, thereby becoming, a satellite and constituent part of that centrality. Investment and price hiking are of course powerful tools for erasing any hint of the ‘suburb’ from a borough or district on the periphery of any assumed and therefore ‘fictional’ centre (the centre is always a fiction that hides its fictionality inasmuch as it

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presents itself as totality and truth). There is therefore acknowledged in Berger’s opening memory the implicit assumption of a sense of assimilation at work, serving to mark the distance and proximity, between the meeting of the now and then, gathered in that ‘here’ of present experience and recalled past. What this admits to is that the map cannot be moved around as if it were a jigsaw comprised of interlocking parts; instead, the effort becomes one of re-reading the map, imposing new meanings onto topographical permanence in a series of changeable semiotic and relational interactions. How does one belong to place, despite the change? How does one claim the city for one’s own, thereby acknowledging one’s belonging despite irrevocable historical and cultural transformation? How can the ghost of the city remain and return despite the developers’ rites of exorcism? Against the perception of what happens to a place such as Islington and the commitment to remembering that which the economic-phantasmic drive to centralization occludes, Berger situates the memory of a friend. A precarious gesture of spectral empathy is put in place as the possibility of presenting a counter-narrative of the urban subject, and with that, a counter-signature to the present of Islington as the mark of Islington’s erased alterity. Berger’s fellow art-student Hubert belongs not only to Berger’s urban memory, but also to Islington’s past, having ‘forty years ago . . . bought a small terraced house there, with a narrow back garden that sloped down to the canal’ (HWM 109). Hubert does not remain in the past, however. Memory is not enough; it is too precarious an act of alternative mapping. Berger therefore does not rely simply on the conjuring act of recollection; instead, he brings the reader to Hubert’s front door. How this comes about, and what takes place subsequently, informs a personal act of writing the city that, though singular in its nature, nonetheless offers a telling mode of urban inscription that displaces the impersonality of fashionable transformations through the precarious condition of the encounter with, or experience of, the other – the face to face – in which present moment, the past survives. From forty years ago, Berger brings us to just ‘three days ago’ (HWM 111). In this temporal trajectory, the author draws out the thread that he is simultaneously tracing. As if gathered by a running stitch within a larger fabric, the past and present become woven together. This ravelling up of time is significant. While in the initial conversation with Hubert, Berger feels the need to mark the forty years formally, announcing with all the awkward convention of cliché, that ‘it’s been a long time, I said’ (HWM 111), Hubert’s first reported words acknowledge no such passage of years, the separation of friends, or the weakening of friendship, during that time. Indeed, as Berger composes the scene, Hubert admits of no time having passed, his first words, appositely and ironically enough being: ‘Perfect timing . . . the water has just boiled . . . What kind of tea would you prefer?’ (HWM 111). As he is sketched by Berger, Hubert exists still in that Islington of the past.

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Acknowledging no change or temporal passage, Hubert is, in this opening gambit at least, both the same and not the same Hubert. Aged, he nonetheless remains as if haunted for Berger by his younger self. Hubert’s words, his location, and the untimeliness of his house purchase: all seem in Berger’s narrative to mark the North Londoner as a true London figure and not the fashionable economic interloper of more recent years. In this, Hubert is anachronistic; at the same time, his ‘return’ in the present moment of the narrative is anachronic, an eruption that interrupts and yet simultaneously signals the continuity between then and now. It is precisely because Hubert is not of the times, not on time as it were, that his sense of timing is seemingly apropos; in this, it may be argued, he is a synecdochic figure for an authentic London. So untimely is Hubert that he is not merely the figure of a contre-temps to modern Islington but is also, for Berger, situated perpetually, anachronically, against the times in which he is to be found. Berger’s first comments concerning Hubert’s appearance during the years that they attended art college attest to this, as the author recalls how Hubert had the look of a ‘nineteenth-century bookbinder . . . in a state of sad shock provoked by recurring modern stupidities’ (HWM 110). Berger’s observation or, more accurately, recollection, is interesting on a number of counts. Not only is the image with which the reader is presented of the ghost of Hubert’s younger self already haunted by an older, Victorian ghost; through its reference to a ‘profession’ it hints at countless other Londoners of the nineteenth century who had lived in those ‘small terraced house[s]’ backing onto the canal in Islington. He therefore embodies cultural memory in this portrait, albeit unconsciously. And there is nothing conscious about his untimeliness, his being outside the flow of time; this is what marks the image and narrative as a powerful act of urban inscription, made resonant by the singularity of friendship. The author-artist draws the portrait and structures the narrative around personal memory and relationship in order to intimate beyond the immediacy of this personal face-to-face a broader resonance concerning location. Through Hubert Berger locates what is significant about location, that very significance being wholly private and yet, nevertheless, resonant and relevant for its ability to weave together the threads of time, relationship and site. Hubert’s ‘state of sad shock’ is also fascinating and relevant here. His response need never date; it remains pertinent to the conditions of urban transformation that Berger has commented upon, regardless of whether or not this is Hubert’s own personal perception of the changes to which Islington has succumbed. Berger draws a portrait through which the memory of the psychological state of another serves to bear witness in a displacement of the artist’s own registration of social and cultural alteration. Hubert’s response cannot in effect be dated; for there will always be ‘modern stupidities’, to which one responds with shock, sadness, or a combination of the two. This is already implicit in Berger’s opening gambit, in his observation

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of the making-fashionable of Islington. Thus, the memory of Hubert’s condition informs not only Berger’s memory of his friend but also how one perceives the city’s mutations, and therefore the texture of writing about London itself. In this then, recollection of Hubert and that discovery of lost time may be read as that by which Hubert’s memory haunts Berger’s narrative sketch and, as I have averred, his perception of the city across the forty years in question. Yet it is a matter of more than personal recollection, and more than forty years; for that figure of the Victorian book-binder admits to a certain inevitability of urban transmutation with an impersonality that attests, perhaps ironically, from the craftsman to the art student, and beyond to the present inhabitants of Islington, against which nostalgia is powerless. Berger, it might be said, is possessed by Hubert, written by the trace of his friend’s revenant persistence, at least with regard to the apprehension of London. As already suggested, Hubert is one figure for London. There is an interchangeability between the two, between the memory of the one and the spirit of the other, as both are out of time. Alterity, personal and impersonal, militates against Islington’s fashionable present (implicitly associated for some readers with Tony Blair’s residence there, as well as with the ideological contexts of Blairism, for which, it might be said, Islington stands as a privileged pronoun). Hubert’s ‘state of sad shock’ is readable as a thread woven into the passage of urban time and that moment ‘three days ago’ when Berger and Hubert met for the first time, again. Berger’s title – Here is Where We Meet – admits as much. The first word of the title is always perfect in its timing, and yet, at the same time, always out of time, having no time as such in its naming of non-specific location. Here names location that is irreducible to any co-ordinate or fixed topographical reference. When self and other come face-to-face, when there is an encounter, it is always here, whether materially or in memory. There is an intersubjectivity inscribed in a place that is utopian in its revenance, whereby anachronism arises – and arrives through its ghostly order or disorder – through incarnation, whether that be in the perception of the body materially or psychically. Indeed, to use Levinas’ formula for this experience, ‘anachronism consisting precisely in incarnation . . . Consciousness turns out to have already called upon what it is only just supposed to be constituting’ (1993: 97). The ‘sensible content’ manifested through the sketch of Hubert’s state of mind recollected through Berger’s narrative turns out to be ‘inseparable from that [present] incarnation [gathered in the word here], of which it [the narrative sketch] is the “reflection” or “counterpart” ’ (Levinas 1993: 97). It is precisely this that we are given to understand through the encounter with the two Huberts, the one of the encounter three days previously, and the other from forty years ago. At the risk of repeating myself, apprehending this gives one insight into the timeless perception and reception of an authentic Londoner, and so an authentic London, in the face of the material specificities of temporally marked

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London. Through the doubling that takes place in the play between memory and experience and which announces the singularity of the encounter despite its duplication, the very idea of impossible location signified in here attests to a ‘relationship with what always slips away’ (Levinas 1987: 86). The re-encounter with Hubert thus stands in for that which cannot otherwise be expressed – the temporal and material experience of a London no longer available except through its spectral manifestations. Direct representation of the city’s authenticity is proscribed therefore, remaining incommensurable with any mode except that which has the chance to operate through the indirection of the most haunting analogy. Representation is perceived indirectly in this encounter between the three figures of the narrator, Hubert, and the other, younger, recalled Hubert as inadequate to the spirit of London. Whatever is here is never here as such; it only comes to be conjured in the face-to-face with the other. Entwined with, overwritten by memory, location is dislocated from within itself and from itself. Its time is out of joint. Returning thus to the force of anachrony, Hubert’s anachronistic status as Londoner extends beyond himself. Anachronism is not an essential quality of Hubert’s being. It also marks the domestic space. Of Hubert’s living room, Berger writes: ‘the drawing room was full of rugs, cushions, objects, footrests, porcelain, dried flowers, collections, engravings, crystal decanters, pictures. It was hard to imagine anything new . . . finding a home there’ (HWM 112). The crowdedness, with its neutral observation unable or unequal to the task of organizing the objects through the acts of perception or narrative, is redolent of descriptions of the furnishings of Victorian living rooms. Berger fills the reader’s imagination as much as he describes the fullness of the room. His use of the word ‘new’ is telling, for it bespeaks both the recently purchased and the modern. Furthermore, there is a stasis to the room, which effectively removes it from the flow of time, thereby marking it both anachronistically and as being an anachronistic interior location out of step with the passage of time beyond its walls. If there is no space for the new, neither is it imaginable, to Berger at least, how anything could be removed to ‘make more space’ (HWM 112). Everything is in concert with everything else, and together the objects inform one another with a peculiarly harmonious meaning that defines the room. As the author is pleased to observe, ‘[t]here was not a sea shell, a candlestick, a clock, a stool that stood out or appeared awkward’ (HWM 112). This North London domestic interior does not acknowledge, nor will it admit of, modernism’s open planning or white walls. From the porcelain and the crystal to the candlestick and the clock, the reader has no sense of anything that would not necessarily have been in its ‘proper place’, as it were, in the nineteenth century. And, as if to confirm this impression, the paragraph concludes with the author being ushered into a ‘Regency chair by the fireplace’ (HWM 112).

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Everything that gathers around Hubert, and which he has gathered to him, is somewhat spectral, at least in Berger’s narrative and recollection. Hubert’s wife, who died ‘twelve years ago’ (HWM 112), ‘wore brogue shoes’, and is only to be imagined or recalled by Berger as a phantasm of herself ‘on a wartime London bus’ (HWM 112). Tea is served from ‘a silver teapot into a Derbyshire cup’ (HWM 112), while Hubert’s recollections of the rules for tea come from his aunt, and involve the conventions of ‘cucumber sandwiches . . . sponge cake’, and the insistence that guests leave ‘before six o’clock’ (HWM 113). Curiously, perhaps uncannily even, Hubert’s memories of late Victorian or Edwardian bourgeois etiquette cause the narrator to notice the ‘ticking of a pendulum clock’ (HWM 113). From this, he observes, without any apparent motive or purpose – and with not a little strange imprecision – that ‘[t]here were at least four clocks in the room’ (HWM 113; emphasis added). No hint is given as to whether the clocks all work, or if they are all set precisely the same; but observation of their presence is readable as an uneasy response to Hubert’s memories of the past, as social nicety is curiously at odds with the timelessness of the room. The precision of tea’s timing and its conclusion as social ritual stand out against the vague perception of the various timepieces, even as that precision stands out anachronistically in its own ghostly remembrance of a different age that belongs neither to Berger nor Hubert, but a previous generation persisting only in memory. As with the drawing room, so too with the other rooms throughout the house. All are singular spaces, none having anything in common with one another except perhaps their shared eccentricity and anachrony. Each is pointedly other, and remains so. This is captured when Berger pauses to wonder ‘whether for [Hubert] each room in the house had a navigation chart, like seas do’ (HWM 112). Disorientating in their identities, movement from one to another only disorientates the stranger in the house further. Again, the reader is offered a counterpoint between the precision suggested in the idea of a map and the potential fathomlessness of the sea. The house is uncanny because of its being unfathomable and yet homely. The catachrestic effect of disfiguration within representation works so well here because nothing could be less like the ocean than a domestic interior in North London. The force of the juxtaposition works because, despite description, mapping, accuracy in observation and representation of detail, Hubert’s home retains for itself an alterity that remains outside recuperation, definition, and, strangely enough, a generalized economy of domestication (and thus comprehensibility). Like the sea, the rooms remain just other enough, in order to remind the reader that however much Islington may be purchased, gathered up economically in order to be made over as being close to the City and Central London, there will always remain that which cannot be recuperated. Conversation between the two men continues, comprising of memories of ‘art-school days’ (HWM 113). Specifically, Berger wants to ask Hubert if

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he remembers a ‘girl’ who was a friend of a mutual friend, Colette (HWM 113). The past is recovered piecemeal; the name, however, stays beyond reach. As a silence develops in the conversation, Berger is caused to think first of Hubert’s wife, Gwen, and then to reflect once again on the room. Life for Hubert, Berger comments, has not changed since the loss of his wife (HWM 115). A commonplace observation on mourning, the comment is not odd in itself. There is though the following aperçu on the narrator’s part: ‘what this room liked was still the same’ (HWM 115). The domestic space as the site of memory dictates the resistance to either change or the movement of time. Anachronism and stasis are aesthetic, phenomenal, determinations made to seem uncanny by the perception that the room is the source of memory. It locates the past in being the location in which the material remnants of the past congregate and constitute the persistence of memory. In this, the material objects are merely the fetishes for all that haunts the here, traversing the frontiers of any supposedly discrete or simply apprehended now. In Hubert’s Islington interior there is no here and now that is not insistently, reiterably, and in revenant manner, then and then and then. Of course, it may be argued – and not without justification – that any room may be discussed in such terms to a greater or lesser degree. Certainly. That the room is adjudged singular comes down in the end to a life that is neither yours nor mine, nor John Berger’s for that matter. However, it has to be remembered that what is remembered, what is recovered arrives only through Berger’s narrative agency. That the narrative is as much to do with the singularity of Islington and its recent history as the singularity of either Hubert or Hubert’s house – or for that matter John Berger’s memories – is crystallized in a passage following almost immediately on the assertion concerning the room’s tastes. Leaving the drawing room, Hubert, who has promised Berger ‘a splendid view of St Paul’s from the balcony of my bedroom’ (HWM 115), begins abruptly, and in an apparent non sequitur, to talk about the history of the house: This terrace was built in the 1840s and the houses were destined for clerks who worked in the City. Poor man’s Georgian, as you can see. And it didn’t work out. Within a generation they had all been turned into lodging houses, with one or a couple of tenants living on each floor. And so it remained for a hundred years. (HWM 115) In Hubert’s account, the terraced houses remain unmodernized, at least up to the time when he and Gwen bought theirs. There were many, in Hubert’s words, without electricity, ‘[o]nly gas and paraffin lamps’ (HWM 115). As throughout the ‘Islington’ narrative, here Hubert’s voice presents itself directly on the page, as if in first-person narration without the mediation

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of inverted commas and the semblance of reported speech. Hubert as other appears to step forward in this way in order to testify to the experience that is traced in his memory. Concomitantly, Berger gives way, vanishing before the voice and memory of the other in this gesture. Thus it is that the subject gives place to the narrative of place, displacing his own witness (which remains there silently and invisibly nonetheless). Hubert’s cultural history of the street makes no absolute distinction between objective and subjective, between the empirical and the personal. The narrative moves from a broader historical perspective, in which the transformation and identity of Islington is drafted, to the singular, before intimating the general. In this gesture, there is articulated the inextricable link between specific locale and London at large, in much the same way as Hubert and Gwen’s domestic history and cultural identity figures synecdochally for the history of a neighbourhood. A cyclical mutation is therefore elaborated, which, in itself, parallels contrapuntally Berger’s own inaugural historical-social narrative gambit. Yet, Berger’s commentary arrives from some place outside change. Its political force is in its impersonality. Hubert’s narrative offers a counter-signature of the personal and singular to that, as the other attests to personal memory and material experience. As Berger’s narrative begins with general observations on London in order to initiate the focus on a specific memory that serves as a dialectic gesture against the generalized history, so Hubert’s recollections reiterate a similar structure but with a difference. Admitting to the intention of Berger’s way of working, Hubert’s account nevertheless extends itself beyond Berger’s purpose. This occurs because Hubert’s tale belongs to Islington; it is part of the fabric of cultural identity rather than being merely an exterior observation. As Hubert’s memory and knowledge of history clarifies, the history of place, whether district or house, is inseparable from the more personal history of the subject who transforms that location as he or she becomes part of it. Conversely, in writing himself into the identity of place, Hubert both produces and becomes a singular extension of the site, the urban subject being one more site of memory, of a different order than location but having a relationship to place in what is to be perceived as the shared production of meaning and ontology. Hubert continues to tell his interlocutor that the house had been a brothel when he and Gwen bought it, ‘serving the lorry drivers who delivered goods to London from the North’ (HWM 116). The supplementary detail serves in making more specific the general history of house and street. The house’s ‘memory’ is thrown into sharp relief, distinguished from other houses in the terrace. This effect is then reduplicated, heightened when Hubert points out a mirror in the bathroom, originally property of the brothel but kept at Gwen’s insistence. In Hubert’s memory, Gwen imagined she could sometimes see one of the prostitutes reflected in the mirror: ‘Sometimes I see Beatrice in it, Gwen would say laughing’ (HWM 116). In

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this remembrance, Berger presents the reader with an apt image for memory and its significance in this narrative. It encapsulates the dictum, found elsewhere in Here is Where We Meet, that ‘the number of lives that enter our own is incalculable’ (HWM 161). Additionally, it also approximates analogically Berger’s own story-telling technique. As voice is embedded within and yet flows out of voice, as frame presents and yet opens to an image that in turn becomes the framing device for another image, so the mirror and memory are figures of reciprocal interpellation. As Gwen’s voice comes to speak directly, or at least appears to do so, so the mirror acts as a memory-screen, giving access if not in reality then at least psychically to images of the past – which of course is what memory effects already. Memory and mirror ‘mirror’ the work of one another here, in gestures that, in serving to frame initially, open those frames onto a potentially endless perspectival echoing, as every subject sees not themselves but another, whose revenance in turn admits of a discontinuous intimacy of ghostly touch and apprehension. The trace of memory is extended further within the domestic space, the history of the house coming closer. Hubert remarks that Beatrice’s name is ‘scratched on one of the window panes in the drawing room’ (HWM 116). So, the North London house gradually reveals further material reminders from within its living spaces of its others, in an uncanny though not disturbing manner, as the levels of memory, recollection, narrative, history and imagination interlace themselves, as part of a constellation that defines the interior and to which the voices of Berger and Hubert are added. Hubert’s narratives of the unhomely home acknowledge their own fleeting spectral inflections. There is not only the scratched name, but also Gwen’s laughter, and Beatrice’s wave. The scratched signature is itself a potent figure for all that haunts perception as what is written on the house and which appears at a margin and, it is to be inferred, representation. Why? To push this reading of the signature a little further, its location serves as a reminder of that which was both other to the domestic purpose of the house and to any make-over of the house itself or, more generally the district; its liminal position acts as an intimation of histories and memories that are neither strictly ‘inside’ nor ‘outside’, neither ‘proper’ nor ‘improper’ as such, and yet which serve to overdetermine meaning beyond any reinvention. Gwen’s remembered laughter, her vision of Beatrice, Beatrice’s wave and graffito – all speak to a gendered ‘impropriety’ that ‘possesses’ the domestic space and which no possession of the property can efface. Lines are crossed, boundaries erased. And that the bathroom mirror causes such border crossings to occur, that it has some uncanny power to evoke the other and its temporal remainders, is caught in Berger’s apprehension occasioned when seeing Hubert reflected in that mirror. Momentarily, it seems as if Hubert is reflected as his younger self, ‘perhaps’ (HWM 116). The conditional speculation beginning an explanation of the effect does nothing to stay the oddity of perceived

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effect that Berger tries half-heartedly (perhaps) to explain away, through a more distanced observation on the tarnished condition of the mirror’s glass (HWM 116). It still remains that another Hubert returns, in the wake of the other ghosts of the house. From the bathroom the men move to the bedroom balcony, where Hubert offers both a view of St Paul’s and the official history of its construction, which ‘we had been obliged to learn by heart in the History of Architecture class’ (HWM 117). A telling contrast to the impromptu immediacy of the house’s ‘memoir’ is provided in Hubert’s ability to recite the lesson ‘almost word for word’ after more than forty years (HWM 117). Berger’s narrative juxtaposes official and unsanctioned histories of the city, the dialectic played off against, whilst partaking in the tropic recirculation of topographical periphery and centre, forgotten and authorized, external and interior, himself and Hubert, present and past. We should note in passing that in doing so, narration brings to bear various artistic effects in what might be described as a quasi-ekphrastic manner whereby Berger translates between the visual and the written, and in so doing moving between the visible and invisible. Not succumbing to straightforward mimetic realism, the narrative nonetheless relies on particular ‘visual’ devices of contrast, light and shade, and, along with these, the uses of foreground, middle-ground and background in particular metaphorical ways. Returning to the scene on the balcony, recollection of the class leads to other memories for Berger. First, the reader is offered that brief sketch in Hubert’s words of the building of St Paul’s, behind which is shadowed London’s history from the Great Fire of 1666 to the Blitz (HWM 117). From history to representation, Berger recalls having to ‘draw the cathedral’ during the war years. The memory of the cathedral, Churchill being filmed ‘speaking in front of it’, and Berger’s imaginative addition to the drawing of the architecture of Spitfires in the surrounding sky (HWM 117) intimate the collusion between history and memory, experience and imagination. What is more immediately powerful for Berger than the view of St Paul’s, however, is the smell of geraniums, which Hubert keeps in pots. In a Proustian moment, Berger has brought to mind by the smell of a geranium leaf the scent of his lover’s hair ‘newly washed’ (HWM 117). From the play of the various memories, he is then brought to the still more intimate memory of wartime sex with the still unnamed friend of Colette’s, who, as yet, has only been identified through the mutual friend and through the proper names of London locations, Coram’s Fields and Guildford Place (HWM 113).3 Though anonymous, the lover’s identity is produced in relation to location in the city. Identity is thus at once simultaneously announced, while yet remaining secret, unavailable except as – and through – this private association. In attempting to articulate the memory of the intimate experience, the author is forced to confess that language is unequal to the tasks of descrip-

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tion or representation. The closest to definition at which he can arrive is in the conjuring potential of imagination, as this is encapsulated provisionally and uncertainly, once again, in that word, perhaps: ‘perhaps it could only have happened in London during the spring of 1943. We found in each other’s arms a way of leaving together, a transport elsewhere’ (HWM 118; emphasis added). The precarious singularity of experience is the result of location, event and time, even as their concatenation structures that singular instant that offers ‘transport’ and translation. In this, the moment though absolutely other to every other event in the narrative shares, nevertheless, this power to transport. It is this transmutation which can effect the rupture of ‘externalized’ or objective historical narrative in its framing and representational abilities, and which bespeaks the counter-force of domestic memory. In this is hinted, as in all the moments at which we have paused in Berger’s ‘Islington’, what Timothy Clark calls ‘a meditation on the irreducible singularity of each human life, so that, contrary to deterministic models of culture, the possibility of the completely new is always at work’ (2005: 31). Against that historical determinism of gentrification and becoming fashionable by which Islington is perceived as being beset in the opening paragraphs, the possibility of the completely new as, paradoxically, the imprimatur of singular experience and memory of domestic and private London is attested to repeatedly in this small memoir. This question of singularity is both touched upon and touching, in its precarious remembrance. As we are given to witness and so comprehend in the quotation above, the fragility of the remembrance of intimacy remains without direct or adequate representation, but is at least invoked, and therefore borne witness to in its fleeting alterity through the conjectural (perhaps) conjunction of place-name, season and year. Dating is not a representation as such; neither are location nor time of the year. And yet, together they touch upon, without revealing, that which remains hidden from representation. Forms of punctuation, their elliptical precision gives location to what is remembered, in which act of memory, the phantasmic occurrence takes place. In their recollection, ‘London’, ‘spring’, ‘1943’ serve memory in much the same fashion as the objects in the drawing room, the mirror in the bathroom, or the signature on the window. In touching on the moment it is the very fragility of reference that is itself touching, intimate, having a brevity that equals the exactitude of the punctuation, and which is, again paradoxically, excessive in its personal resonance. In this is attestation of the possibly singular encounter – its very precariousness resides in the possibility that it was not singular, that it could, in having happened as it happened, in fact have happened in countless other ways, at other times, in other locations, and not have remained in the memory as the possibility of this impossibly singular event and memory. Date, place, season: all serve in gathering around the empty space of memory as its psycho-topographical co-ordinates to touch on the otherwise ungraspable other, the otherwise

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ineffable totality – for which London becomes one name – as so many partially dissolved particles of salt in the solution of anamnesis (recalling the ‘blurb’s’ metaphor). And the impossibility of representation becomes all the more poignant, when Berger strives to find a language in which to represent the intimate encounter, only to recognize, in reflecting on his choice of words, an anachronistic disruption. Describing the way their bodies fit together, ‘as if we were making . . . a skateboard’, he is forced to concede, ‘skateboards didn’t exist’ (HWM 118). From the memory, the narrator steps back into the present, and ‘into Hubert’s bedroom’ (HWM 118). What he then notices is that this room is ‘provisional’, unlike any of the others in the house. He continues, ‘it looked like a student’s room’ (HWM 119). In a house, the very homeliness of which is an effect of anachrony and the uncanny oscillations of memory and the invisible from within the field of vision, Hubert’s bedroom defines its difference from the other spaces. While everywhere else in the house is determined by multiple strands of the past, the bedroom defines itself according to a past not belonging to the house itself, but as a space other than the house, outside that architectural shell giving structural definition to the ontology of ‘Gwen and Hubert’. It is as if the idea of the bedroom as that which was shared is too painfully intimate as both space and memory for Hubert, and therefore must be redefined through a provisionality that remains outside the shared history of domestic space, announcing to those who enter it another history, an other past. That other past or, more accurately, several other pasts become imagined in what appears to be something like an act of sympathetic communion between the two men. From Berger’s observation of the room, the narrative turns to another imagined historical narrative of Hubert’s that may be read as being engendered by the provisionality of alternative histories. Hubert confesses to Berger that ‘[t]he other night I thought of the clerks who lived here when the house was new. Compared to us they had very little space in their lives. Cramped offices, cramped horse-buses, cramped streets, cramped rooms’ (HWM 119–20). Despite the historical distinction Hubert wishes to stress, we know from the narrator’s description that the rooms have very little space in them. Such space, or lack thereof, is different culturally and historically from that Victorian lack of space, to which Hubert seeks to give shape. This moment of reflection on the difference of space is, arguably, a potent discourse and trope for the cultural memory of London; it gives the city shape and identity distinct from official historical records, public events or official narratives. It bespeaks the city in terms of the historicity of its domestic spaces, its interiors, and its private scenes. Hubert’s narrative imaginatively, provisionally – perhaps – invents the city in terms of its domestic and interior spatial relations, even as in its very articulation the idea of space is recalled as haunted and crammed by countless others: other memories, countless traces, innumerable intimate and private frag-

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ments and ruins of the other, into which one comes into contact endlessly, carelessly, perhaps unthinkingly but always on a provisional basis. Being taken outside the house into the garden, itself another cramped space – ‘the density of the foliage . . . like the density of a closed book, which has to be read page by page’ (HWM 120) – Berger remembers another occasion in ‘Colette’s flat in Guildford Place’ (HWM 121). Movement through the spaces in the present therefore causes a return to the past, and to that other location overlooking Coram’s Fields. The garden in the present, however, is represented as an unmappable space: ‘it was impossible for a stranger to imagine finding a way’ between the plants (HWM 120). Though outside the house, the garden is, essentially, a private and domestic space therefore, homely because its ‘meaning’ or identity remains a secret to those who do not belong to the house. As with the drawing room and, implicitly, everywhere else in the house, the map cannot be imagined unless one already knows the topography, and is familiar with its coded idiosyncrasies. Something significant for the reading of the city is implied here. Berger offers the reader a tentative counterpoint to his initially external view of Islington, which admits of ways the otherness of the city opens itself. Whether garden, drawing room, bedroom, bathroom or, by extension, house, terrace, district – and to extend this further, London itself – space is approachable and knowable only through an intimate and personal involvement. Memory offers one model of such involvement, and, like a hidden doorway in a secret garden, makes possible an opening onto the otherwise private, encrypted, and secret or invisible resonances of place. This model of perception is carried over by Berger to his recollections of wartime lovemaking: parts of the body are given place-names: ‘Tibia and Timbuktu, Labia and Lapland . . . The names of the parts became pet names, the names of the places, passwords’ (HWM 121). Berger is insistent that the acts of definition are modes of mapping and thus orientation, in a language redolent of an earlier Londoner’s poetics of intimacy, John Donne: ‘we travelled from bone to bone, from continent to continent’ (HWM 121). The code is stripped down, sentences are not employed. Here Berger seems to approach the semaphore pulse of Iain Sinclair’s often febrile adumbrations of the city. That the words are passwords and pet words admits to the privacy of the language, its interiorized semantic-topographical force. But while John Donne had been content to suggest colonial relations of conquest and subjugation (‘she is all states, all princes I’), Berger’s remembered conceit draws on more specific, analogous correlations, his lover suggesting of his erections that ‘we’ll call them London’ (HWM 123). In this, close familiarity and humour acknowledge secrecy, while excluding outsiders. Naming, rather than any more developed code or act of representation, serves in the private determination of meaning, apprehension, and the identity of place (after all, ‘London’ means nothing without particular forms

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of contextual knowledge; as with the garden, a stranger will not know their way around). At the same time, the subject – the city – is not delimited in such an act of naming; its ontology remains unfixed. The process of naming and mapping is one that is endlessly open, in principal at least, whether one considers the orientation of body parts and locations, the naming of places on a map, the cataloguing of seeds and plants (HWM 122–3) for distribution amongst ‘people in need’ (HWM 123); or the cataloguing of Gwen’s drawings. Hubert is at a loss as to what he should do with the watercolours and drawings. Berger insists that they must be sorted, but with the openended prescription – a proviso that announces the ethics of openness to the other by which the story of an Islington house comes to be written – that Hubert should just ‘invent any system you like’ (HWM 125). Moreover, it is remarked towards the conclusion of the Islington chapter that one cannot predict what will take place, if anything, as a result of imposing order (HWM 125). Uncannily, at the moment the paradoxically open-taxonomical imperative is suggested, ‘the clocks in the drawing room upstairs were chiming’ (HWM 125). Time returns to this anachronistic location and the anachrony of memory in which it is complicit. Marked time intrudes, imposing punctuation and reminders of the present onto those spaces where potentially endless narratives and histories had promised to flow in and out of one another, touching on each other, opening themselves to yet more strands of personal and cultural memory. It is as if a spell is broken; with that, it becomes time for Berger to leave. And in this moment, Hubert gives a name to Berger’s hitherto anonymous wartime lover – Audrey (HWM 126).

III Although Slow Chocolate Autopsy has none of the elegiac drift of John Berger’s Islington reverie, it is nevertheless a work of witness to, and memory of, the memory-threads of London. If Berger’s narrative encapsulates the singular and personal, opening out from this to address the traces which are everywhere in the city and which await rereading, then Iain Sinclair’s narrative, in its mix of fiction, time travel and historical event, proposes a different mode of attestation addressing another, more troubled side of the city’s memory. Both writers invent other Londons, but the difference between the two is incommensurable, and in this difference, speaks to the endless work that bearing witness to other Londons involves. Yet like John Berger, Iain Sinclair understands the act of writing the city as a response to, and invention of, the memory that becomes inscribed in a place through the events that transform that location; ‘something . . . happens in a place [that] permanently affects that place’, he suggests, continuing, ‘there are these acoustic chambers in the city, voices and echoes’ (Sinclair 2003: 76). The significance of inventing the memory is acknowledged again, made more explicit, in Dining on Stones when Sinclair observes that ‘all composition is memory’,

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London’s past is woven as so many ‘sticky webs of memory’ that trace the city, while observing also that the city is informed by ‘visible echoes’ of the city’s past and its others (2004: 417, 102, 417; emphasis added). Slow Chocolate Autopsy is an uneasy, edgy and excessive hybrid. It yokes together stark events of urban violence from different historical moments, incorporating the traces of the city’s alternative pasts through invented projections of Christopher Marlowe’s death and the murder of Jack ‘the Hat’ McVitie at the instigation of the Kray Brothers in the 1960s. Such a text, it may be argued, engages in a performative violence. To whatever extent that may be true, Slow Chocolate Autopsy is clearly readable as a series of responses to the recurrent patterns of violent power that write London, and which become in Sinclair’s writing a graphic reiteration of the patterns of power that take place historically across London’s topography. In his desire to resist acceptable appropriations of London by heritage-culture narratives, Sinclair therefore invents narratives of abject existences, without either romanticizing or glorifying their subjects, as being amongst the fundamental memory traces of London’s alternative and dissonant identities. The discontinuous narrative of Slow Chocolate Autopsy – it is comprised of what its subtitle calls ‘incidents’ – presents therefore a series of encounters with particular aspects of the city’s darker or, at least occluded histories. In this manner Sinclair weaves into the narrative the act of giving voice to, thereby bringing to sight, chance relations and encounters as images of the city. As the expression of an overexposed snapshot, attestation to cultural memory thus makes explicit the interrelation of the spatial and temporal, of topography and time. In doing so, every act, every intervention in the city, restructures it through the inventive logic of a brutal editorial process. Opening a wound in the present to the violent traces of the past, Sinclair’s text engages in concise, almost epigrammatic instances of surveillance and autopsy (two of Sinclair’s favoured, recurrent metaphors). Autopsy, as we know, is that process of examining the dead. It also means, as Sinclair reminds us, the act of seeing with one’s eyes (the title of a film by Stan Brakhage and referred to on more than one occasion by Sinclair (2004: 347; 1989: 53, 82)). The injunction, to ‘treat London like an autopsy catalogue’ (SCA 90), admits to the importance of seeing with one’s eyes into the membrane of urban memories, and translating the materiality of vision into that of the letter. At the same time, there is always implicit in Sinclair’s writing the insistence that whatever memory comes to the surface and is recorded in the name of London will never amount to anything except editorial, forensic events. Moreover, editing the body so as to produce the autopsy catalogue is, for Sinclair, the only appropriate intervention, given his recent assertion that ‘life doesn’t work in the city’ (2004: 58). Doubtless, from particular perspectives the three motifs or metaphors brought into alignment with Sinclair’s textual configurations of the city can be taken as understood in their operation. Sinclair’s repeated use of autopsy

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and his equally insistent announcement of the word’s meaning leaves the reader little doubt as to the fact that the materiality of the text is intimately enfolded with the materiality of vision (as I have just indicated), as both conjoin to receive and record a third and fourth materiality, those of the city’s sites and those of its histories, or its events. In this connection between sight and writing as the conjunction necessary to the work of attestation, the process of surveillance is also announced, and what comes to be produced thereafter is not so much creative as it is editorial. Invention takes place, but it is the invention of nothing new. It is instead the act – and art – of invention as finding what is already traced and yet forgotten. This is a passive surveillance moreover, one engaged in following the unfolding of a virtual time, virtual because, in travelling across time, it traces a virtual image that it is impossible to experience as such. Of our three figures, surveillance is the most problematic due to its connotations of matters concerning policing and forms of power. The passivity just mentioned gives to Sinclair’s narrator in Slow Chocolate Autopsy qualities of suffering and endurance in his role of witness. In this particular sense of surveillance then, there is for Norton an inevitability that mitigates somewhat the negative nuances implicated in the problematic concept. Certain of those darker undertones remain, however. Given that, it is important that we consider what is at work in this ambiguous term and what therefore lies at the heart of Sinclair’s employment of it. Surveillance, in its conventionally understood sense, and specifically with regard to the use of cctv cameras in and around corporate buildings and public spaces, is a subject that Sinclair addresses in a number of places, not least throughout Lights Out for the Territory, in which he connects corporate and multinational interests with the political agendas of Thatcherism in its various manifestations.4 However, as that text attempts to recuperate the idea of stalking from its overdetermined relationship with sexual predation,5 so, I would like to argue, the idea of surveillance is also forced into double service in Sinclair’s text. For, against the critique of anonymous electronic surveillance associated immediately via the synecdoche of ‘forests of surveillance cameras’ (Sinclair 1997: 105) with a globalized political-economic machinery (2004: 99), and, haunting that, the older notion of surveillance, of keeping watch over prisoners or suspects through the act of spying, there is the act of lone counter-surveillance, of watching – and recording – the Watchers (1997: 106). In King William Street, for example – that location made famous by T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land – near the Bank of England Sinclair and Marc Atkins photograph ‘a major complex of camera poles’, whose ‘interference’, ‘alien consciousness’ and ‘unceasing attention’ disrupt the ‘time-stream’ (1997: 106). Such disruption anticipates the virtual existence of Norton in Slow Chocolate Autopsy. In effect he becomes a recording surveillance device for capturing without control those violent eruptions in the membrane of urban memory. In Lights Out for the Territory ‘legal’ or ‘official’ surveillance is read

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by Sinclair as ‘erasing truth’, it ‘abuses the past while fragmenting the present’ (1997: 106). As we can see, surveillance has a deleterious effect on time and history. One possible counter to this therefore is presented in writing as time-travel. While Sinclair and Atkins record the recording devices, and thus offer themselves as the ‘subversive psyche’ (1997: 106) of countersurveillance and its memory-work at one given time, temporal passage is effected through spectral observations of other times, conjured as the force of counter-surveillance. This process is embodied, let us remind ourselves, given face in Slow Chocolate Autopsy by the temporally unfixed ‘quasi-being’ of Norton, a virtual figure for virtual images captured from the memory of the city. As the medium of counter-surveillance, each encounter with the city is filtered through his spectral presence. Although Norton can never leave the city, he observes or is involved in a number of events, from the murder of Christopher Marlowe, ‘poet and espion’ (SCA 11), to occurrences in the 1990s. Through the specific encounters comes the articulation of the responsibility of the writer that is marked everywhere throughout Sinclair’s publications, and through which engagement the city comes to have the chance of revenant, virtual visualization and spectral anamnesis. Norton figures a split between the real and the virtual. In this he gives expression to the constant unreflective doubling that every being experiences as the condition of existence, that division between perception on the one hand and memory on the other. His counter-surveillance and passive suffering is an endless looped confession, the perfect trope for the city’s recording of its memories. For Norton, each ‘moment of life is split up as and when it is posited’ (Bergson 2002: 147), as it is for us all. His narration ‘consists in this very splitting’ (Bergson 2002: 147), as Henri Bergson puts it in explaining the doubling and division of perception and memory; ‘for the present moment, always going forward’, Norton thus names that ‘fleeting limit between the immediate past which is now no more and the immediate future which is not yet’ (Bergson 2002: 147). He thus enacts the function of the counter-surveillance camera, or the ‘moving mirror which continually reflects perception as a memory’ (Bergson 2002: 147). Norton is his own reflection and in this reflection on reflection disrupts the time-stream, both his own and that of London. But orientating ourselves more precisely to the notion and possibility of Norton’s counter-surveillance, we would do well to look more closely at the word itself. The etymology of surveillance is in some senses obvious: sur, over, above; veiller, to keep watch over, but also with the sense of being vigilant and to look after, to spy on but also to care for someone or something.6 So, given the meaning of veillance it might be asked what the prefix brings or adds to the act of watching over and looking after. Through this addition, there is the intimation of an excess beyond the act of vigilance, as well, perhaps, a kind of ghostly hovering. In this, Norton, as surveillant, is also an example of the survenant (sur + venir), to bring back a disused English

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word – that is, one who comes to or upon a place or location, as the OED informs us. That upon captures nicely, I feel, the sense of random and uncanny encounter which aleatory movement through the city makes possible. Norton happens by chance upon events, violent occurrences, moments in the city’s alternative histories. As the phantom witness of what takes place in the city Norton, it may be imagined, is both revenant and survenant. In coming back repeatedly, he arrives, and presides over, thereby maintaining the memory of location and event as the ghostly spectator of or bystander to an iterable series of occurrences. Thus, if surveillance is indeed the art form of the millennium as Sinclair has it (SCA 91), in the pulsing iterations of revenance and survenance, of the one implied in and as the oscillation of the other, then the millennial is affirmed in every moment of counter-surveillance. Norton’s acts of spying are both open to, and open onto the abyssal in the name of the city, and thus echo with the millennial and the millennial-to-come (to bring back the understanding of the millennial articulated above). Like Eliot’s Tiresias, Norton foresuffers all (WL l. 243); like Conrad’s Kurtz, he lives his life again in every moment, in every ‘detail of desire, temptation, and surrender’ (1995: 139), witnessing through the endless replay of his existence in the city the horror, the horror. Recalling the etymology of surveillance once more, there is also the sense that Norton’s acts of surveillance are themselves double. For he both watches over the scenes of London at various historical junctures, and in remembering the city, testifying as to its darker, more obscure moments, he looks after these, in memory and in narration, as both of these are forms of record or testimony. There is therefore a movement from empirical event, to phenomenological perception, to anamnesiac inscription: from history, to the gaze, to writing. And with this motion, in this flow, there is announced another double-gesture: a gesture of poiesis and of tekhne; a process of making as a making-visible, giving momentary form to that which otherwise remains unedited and unscripted once we have acknowledged that all the times of London are always already immanent, and that all things happen simultaneously but never more than once as such. Thus, while remaining other to the city’s serial alterity, Norton assumes, albeit unwillingly, that responsibility identified by Emmanuel Levinas (and of which I shall have more to say in the conclusion to this chapter) to the city-as-other, to its histories of violence and to the violence of the city’s historicity. It is this role to which he is elected, and in which reluctant function he bears witness to traces of London’s pasts, to ‘London as a millennial landscape’ (Sinclair 1989: 7), and to the persistence of the capital’s ‘millennial fear, the flood at the end of time’ (1997: 98). One might perhaps suggest (though, admittedly, this is nothing more than conjecture) that Slow Chocolate Autopsy begins with Norton’s presence at the murder of the Elizabethan Marlowe – described by Sinclair as ‘a future

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dick’, referring both to a private eye, the hired surveillance operative and Dick Powell, who plays Raymond Chandler’s ‘dick’, Marlow (SCA 9–10) – precisely because this instance of violence is reputedly closely involved with Elizabeth I’s spy service. This narrative event records and remembers an early modern instance in the history of surveillance as but one articulation of power politics staged in London, wherein those figures, images, tropes or motifs – the artist or poet, violence and criminality, state politics, authority and transgression – that comprise in Sinclair’s vision the constellated signature of the city find themselves forcefully expressed. Further, however fanciful this might seem one might also point to a certain temporal-topographical gesture of tracing the city in the connection being made between one Marlowe and another, or, at the least, between two London authors. Marlowe and Chandler, though three hundred years apart offer a pair of those random psychogeographical co-ordinates as one manifestation of London, of which Sinclair is fond. Follow any clew, pull on any thread, and everything promises to unravel; the clew of urban anamnesis, once tugged, can lead one everywhere, even perhaps to another Marlow, on board the Nellie, whose remark about the dark places of the earth might be an apt epigraph for Norton’s experiences. But of course, despite the fact that Norton is in on the murder of Christopher Marlowe, one always has to remember Iain Sinclair’s declaration that ‘there is no Norton’ (SCA 10). One particularly violent occasion in the narrative illustrates the strange half-life of the protagonist. A sharpened stick being held by Norton (recalling the protagonist of the movie Peeping Tom), into which Marlowe runs, and which pierces his eye and brain, is, it turns out, just another surveillance camera: ‘Marlowe, unexpectedly, rushing straight at the camera’ (SCA 10). Sinclair’s signature gerund plays out the moment in ever-present tense, as an always-recurring loop without present or presence. Marlowe keeps coming, head-on, eye to impersonal, technological eye. Here again is Bergson’s split between perception and memory being played out. This is a ‘passive eye’,7 the gaze of which is arguably, momentarily, without a subject, and which, in the instant of this death sentence, this punctuating punctum, can never be switched off. Norton, it appears, names the technology of surveillance and the murderous voyeuristic intent behind every impulse to know the past. This name, we are told, is ‘an invented name to rechristen a dead man’ (SCA 10); in the light of which salutary remark, it seems that we are obliged to consider Norton’s purpose. One must ask why the persistence of this figure, throughout the time of the city as the bearer of its darker memories in Slow Chocolate Autopsy, and beyond this particular text as a recurrent revenant in Sinclair’s writing, most recently in Dining on Stones. At the same time one must avoid attributing to ‘him’ any being, giving ‘him’ a life he never possesses, seeing him mistakenly as a more or less ‘real’, albeit fictive character who is paradoxically only ‘alive in crude print’ (SCA 10).

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The clues for how we do this are already there, in all that has been said thus far, and in Sinclair’s writing of course. A transhistorical phantom, one more pulse, if not the prosopopoeic figure of memory in the city’s synapses, Norton effectively keeps watch through time, in acts that are, in essence, so many acts of autopsy, of seeing the dead with one’s own (dead) eyes. Crossing time, while remaining within the precincts of London, Norton’s function is to maintain what I have called counter-surveillance. This is his curse, the inescapable responsibility dictating that, in being present at a death, that of the playwright and spy, he ‘has lost his chance to escape’ London. As Sinclair remarks, ‘the witness pays the reckoning’ (SCA 11).8 The inescapable truth, however, is that the debt can never be paid in full. It is thus a function of Norton’s ghostly existence to abide (although he finds his condition unabidable) and thus, at the end of the millennium, to register the millennial in every event – to act as a medium, a conduit, or relay, or what Sinclair might call a psychic satellite dish for the reception and transmission of merely a few of the city’s signals. He may have ‘the entire city on file’ (SCA 85), but that entirety will never come to light even though Norton is compelled to watch, to remember, to narrate. In this fashion Norton, much less than human, has no existence for himself. As Sinclair informs us, he is merely ‘a paragraph in a pulp novel’ (SCA 10).9 Norton is double; he is a ‘spook’ (SCA 9), both ghost and spy, a ‘time surfer’ (SCA 9). In this role, he is translated into an editing-machine receiving ‘surveillance acoustics’ (SCA 9), as well as being a tele-technological device for transmitting the city’s signals in some semi-coherent, yet still fragmented manner. In effect, through his shadowy acts of witness at particular sites, and subsequently through his memory-work, Norton edits. Acts of autopsy, of seeing with one’s own eyes, thus become transformed into narrative ruins, from which it still remains impossible to assemble the city, however resonant a glimpse we may be afforded. Norton interprets; Norton translates; ‘Norton’ names a junction box, a neural nexus. ‘Breaking time into a stutter of single frames’ (SCA 11), Norton, a ‘seismographer of the unseen’ (to appropriate Jean-Luc Marion’s definition of a painter; 2004: 37), names if you will a programme that, if you click its icon, appears to promise, in the words of Jacques Derrida to ‘economize on the abyss’ that is London’s memory traces (Derrida 1987: 37). Clicking on the icon, starting up the Norton programme, offers momentary configurations and articulations for the ‘otherwise undocumented past’ (SCA 25) of the ‘unedited city’ (SCA 8). And, of course, like Marsh’s Beetle, ‘Norton’ is hieroglyphic signature, encrypted siglum for urban alterity. However, things are not quite so simple. As Norton is forced to concede early on, the images of the city ‘set up their own force field’ (SCA 6); there seems ‘no way of accessing the data’ (SCA 8). A tension is discernible, then, between the traces of the city, perceived in their inaccessibility as hieratic traces, and the desire or obsession to narrate and thereby create the illusion

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of mastery over London. The problem is that, initially at least, Norton appears to believe mistakenly that responsibility to the city involves a cognitive gathering of the traces of the other into an ontology (such a process is given the lie in the discontinuous, incidental and occasional orientation of Slow Chocolate Autopsy), and, from there, into representation. To borrow once more from Levinas in his discussion of the relationship between the passive self and the other, Norton’s error, his misperception, is in the belief that, in seeking a ‘relationship that might be meaningful’ (Levinas 2000: 187) between his being and the alterity of the city, there has to be a transformation ‘into knowledge’ in more or less stable forms of interpretation. Yet, as Norton will realize, what comes to be disclosed in the random encounters with the city’s traces is not the truth, the permanence, of the city’s identity (there is no such thing, as we have argued). Disclosure takes place for Norton, but it is a disclosure through the encounter with the various times and events of the city of a ‘trauma at the heart of my-self’, the ‘exposure of the “me” [moi] to another, prior to any decision’ (Levinas 2000: 187). The city, defined provisionally by Sinclair elsewhere as ‘an absence, a tremble visited on the neurotically sensitive’ (2002b: 18), thus discloses Norton to himself, to his condition of being written by, as he gathers up memories of the city. Here is the millennial revenance, filtered through all the ‘arcane pulp images of terror, and my own crippling sense of psychogeography’ (SCA 41), until Norton pauses to ask: ‘was he proposing a journey already made? Or casting a future excursion?’ (SCA 102). His task is, of course, ‘to balance the millennial elements, narcissism and melancholy’ (SCA 148). But understanding how this takes place is not easily grasped by Norton, as the temporal dislocation between the questions makes us aware, although he is caught in the time-loop from the very first pages: ‘Movement re-experienced at rest, travelling shots summarising projected walks. Dark doorways through which Norton glimpses . . . past fancies, a speculative future’ (SCA 2). The first sentence lacking a subject says it all, and all in too eager a manner, anticipating as it does the simpler counterpoint of past and future in the second sentence. Other times than the present are seen fleetingly, framed momentarily. Memory recalls past activity as if it were taking place, while the absent subject is inferred only via the surveillance technology, which is itself implied by the mention of those travelling shots that anticipate future motion. That we read of Norton ‘glimpsing’ in the second sentence may be taken as an act of naming the camera alluded to in the previous sentence, of assigning function to the subject. In these lines there is no there there. There is neither place nor present (nor, indeed, presence) that is not phantasmic, displaced from within. Motion belongs to memory and expectation, to a passing instance in the past, and the ghost of the future also. Moreover, motion, pulse, oscillation, that millennial tremble that the subject experiences – none of these come solely from within the self. If they are the signs of a recording device, or perhaps of the otherwise invisible cameraman,

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they are also the traces of the city, the marks of which are ‘visited’ on one. Or, as Sinclair puts it in White Chappell Scarlet Tracings in a ghostwritten letter dated 1875, ‘it is the invisible that moves us’ (174). Norton’s travelling shots are all replays, edits, of the city’s spatial and temporal flux, its innumerable streams. Thus one senses passively ‘the sudden appearance of a visible’ (Marion 2004: 37) emerging from within, and as the condition of that invisible solicitation. It is all a question of unexpected convergent flows. Sudden appearances mark and transform, even as the city is itself changed in the process of being witnessed in ‘its own constant transformation, its becoming different images and different minds’ (Arsic 2003: 9). Traces appear unexpectedly from within the visible and the material. In the event, the gaze does not choose what it witnesses. It is passive, and suffers accordingly: ‘Norton becomes what he sees . . . The ex-writer is a particle swallowed in the vortex. London dissolves, future past & present time gratefully revoked’ (SCA 168). Identities merge and, in the process, pass into one another, boundaries partially erased in an interchange that is as temporal as it is spatial. As the ghostly trace of T. S. Eliot announces, redemption is replaced with revocation. Norton and London inform one another; he is seen ‘adrift in a city that altered as his understanding of it altered. That grew, developed, branched out in fractal abundance’ (SCA 109). The subjectless second sentence appears to grow out of, graft itself onto that first that of the previous sentence, so that we are meant to understand that it is the city which grows, branches out in fractal abundance. However, by a forceful reading, applying just a little torque, we might take the sentence to refer to Norton’s understanding of the city, which sentence then becomes one more version of London. Whichever way we do take this. However, the image of fractal abundance catches significantly that which cannot otherwise be captured, either about the city or in any representation of London. Such depiction involves Norton in what Sinclair refers to as ‘archaeological retrievals, memory games’ (SCA 104), in which London is revealed indirectly at the same time as it withdraws in its unorderable totality, even in the process of mapping ‘this liquid provisional book’ (SCA 102), as Sinclair calls the city. That the city offers such superabundance in a series of potentially infinite rearrangements is apprehended when it is realized that all at once the streets are ‘unknown, over-familiar. They took too much on themselves, replete with bad script, excessive narrative’ (SCA 135). And so London escapes, ‘an infinite image composed of innumerable images’ (Arsic 2003: 4) in a fiction where the millennial might best be conceived as belonging to a ‘logic of infinite [and therefore abyssal] mirroring’ (Arsic 2003: 4). Such a logic gives us to know that in the revelation of truth concerning the city is the disappearance or withdrawal of the city’s ineffable totality. Faced with this, when Norton comments ‘Better to leave it well alone . . . Quit while we’re ahead’ (SCA 181) we might be tempted to agree.

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However, it is important to realize of this logic of infinite mirroring that it also unveils the structure of the millennial in both Norton’s perceptions and Iain Sinclair’s fictions of London. Such logic announces, in the words of Branka Arsic, that ‘the mirror reflection, like every reflection, resembles what it mirrors’. (We may choose to remember in passing that the mirror is that figure for Bergson that reflects the virtual back to the real, even as memory is the reflection of perception.) However, Arsic continues, reflection takes place in such a way that ‘the resemblance does not refer to sameness but to difference. Every mirror image says that it is irreducibly different from what it resembles’ (2003: 4). This is readable in Slow Chocolate Autopsy, appropriately enough for London not in the static metaphor of the mirror, but in Sinclair/Norton’s consideration of the relation between the river and language. As ‘a Dr Fu Manchu figure’ remarks in Chapter Nine, ‘all clues lead to the river’ (SCA 169). Invited to an artist’s studio, Norton finds a river made of words. ‘Each section’ of the river is ‘a repetition, a variation on the last. Any few yards of river, if framed in a glass box, would look the same. But the same words, broken sentences, when they are repeated, are not the same. The displacement alters . . . this liquid, provisional book’ (SCA 101–2; emphasis in original). If there is a sense that Sinclair’s writing about London engages in, and emerges out of, the pulse of revenant, anamnesiac troping, of so many apparent repetitions; and if that sense is foregrounded furthermore in the figure and recurrence of Norton, this is hardly accidental, as the figure and motion of the river makes clear. Like the ebb and flow of the millennial, the river reiterates its images, its figures, even as it moves on, becoming other than it is, and millennial fiction and its protagonists can only respond in like kind if they are to be faithful to the city. In the particular image just cited from Slow Chocolate Autopsy the river is materially translated into text, the very significance of which is its articulation of difference as that which makes meaning possible through temporal and spatial motions, translations, and iterations. As Sinclair has it in Dining on Stones, the river is the ‘medium of memory’ (2004: 117). As all that flow through and define the city, London’s rivers ‘affected all surface life . . . they were our unconscious. Somewhere in that drifting unfocused world the link was to be found’ (1994: 139). That link is perhaps offered to our sight through the troubled drift of the Norton-camera, who, flowing through the city, is both ‘grey-blue, dead water. He’s river’ (SCA 181), and also the passive gaze, through which surge in turn the millennial fictions, the memories, and traces of the city.

IV While ‘every history’ is ‘incontestably unique, [and] contains structures of its own conditions of possibility’, as Reinhart Koselleck comments in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, the ‘finitely

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delimited spaces’ in which historical events take place have the possibility of changing ‘with a speed other than that of the events themselves’. Every event is thus marked by a ‘temporal multilayeredness’. Such temporal layering and spatial iterability define the ways in which the chorographic or ekistic text functions. History, Koselleck avers, ‘proves to be the space for possible repeatability; it is never only diachronic, but, depending on how it is temporally perceived and experienced, it is also synchronic’ (2002: 75). We might replace history in Koselleck’s formula with the literary in general, and specifically for our consideration the act of writing London. And we might add to this that the effect of possible repeatability is a translation effect. Inscription and recognition of the ‘temporal multilayeredness’ promises to trace, after the event, the immanent trait, the invisible graphic, a not-yet visible structure. At the same time however, a graphic heterogeneity is admitted. It is a heterogeneity, as Jacques Derrida explains, ‘between the thing drawn [in this case the traces of urban memories] and the drawing trait [that] remains abyssal . . . This heterogeneity of the invisible to the visible can haunt the visible as its very possibility’ (Derrida 1993: 45). Perception is solicited uncannily therefore, as the force of what can never be witnessed traverses the field of vision in the reception and retention of the anamnesiac trace in all its multiple motions. Admitting that the heterogeneity, the gap, the very difference cannot be closed and is, indeed, that by which the articulation of the other’s singularity might come to be heard, perceived, felt, in the counternarratives and inventions of other Londons such as those offered by Berger or Sinclair is to acknowledge the incontestable urgency that is communicated in the desire to receive the urban memory. In conceding the exorbitant impropriety of London’s inexhaustible anamnesis, Berger and Sinclair attest to the possibility of the other’s taking place once more – and so give place to all the living and the dead. In this, in their shared though idiosyncratically, idioculturally different projects of urban anamnesis, each writer ‘sees’ London’s spaces as locations not just of those who once lived in London and who, traditionally, were those who were never seen or never had a voice in the more conventional histories of the city, except as objects of survey, statistic, anthropological or ethnographic enquiry. They also, I would contend in conclusion, imagine and so invent other spaces, other Londons for all the living whose marginal and mute situations are haunted by the ghostly silences of all the dead. The memoir, the chorographic or ekistic text: all have in their apprehension of the other just this weak hope: the opening of the time of the city itself to the recognition that such time refers always to what Levinas has called ‘this situation of the faceto-face with the Other’ (1987: 79). Such a situation, such an encounter or relationship is, argues Levinas, ‘asymmetrical, without noematic correlation of any thematizable presence’ (1987: 108). In remaining inimical to being thematized, formalized, every narrative of the city’s spaces must insist on

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the singularity of an encounter, and on the recalcitrance of any singularity or event to generalizations or abstractions. We have already seen this expressed in the previous chapter on London’s night worlds. In Berger’s relation to Hubert, and through Hubert to Hubert’s others and Berger’s own phantoms, and also in Sinclair’s encounters with various singularity-events through the figure of temporal travel/travail as given face in Norton, there is the narrative expression of that asymmetry, expressive of ‘an awakening to the other person . . . irreducible to knowledge’ (Levinas 1987: 108). In different ways, in differing modalities and rhythms, pulses, or sequences, this is the work of twilight, the crepuscular, and the motions of the night world. It is also, and again, differently, the function of the Beetle. What is at stake in effect in the work of both Berger and Sinclair, but also in all our texts, is an ethics of urban anamnesis. If there is a limit from this Levinasian perspective in the examples of ‘Islington’ and Slow Chocolate Autopsy, then it has to be admitted that in their attempts to represent the dead as living Berger and Sinclair run the risk of a reduction: ‘of the face of the other to a representation, to the objectivity of the visible’ (Levinas 1987: 111). But then this is an unavoidable risk, one demanded by the city. For, in these representations, what slips away remains London ‘itself’; there is no ‘itself’ to be apprehended – and so, perhaps, it comes to be that the ‘immemorial past’ of London comes to be signified, ‘without ever having been present’ (Levinas 1987: 113). It remains as the shadowy alterity behind a succession of singular urban memories, with all ‘the heteronomy of an irrecusable authority’ (Levinas 1987: 113) affirming magisterially its resistance to any paltry act of representation that would contain the city – hence singularity and sharing in the narrative chorographies of Berger and Sinclair. Despite the difference that informs their narrative ekistics the work of memory, as that which guides the shaping of a response to London in its fragmented, uncontrollable surges and fluctuations, both artist and essayist express that infinite responsibility. Berger and Sinclair write of London, and in so doing speak and express the necessity of such an impossible demand, which, as Levinas has it marks a non-indifference for me in my relation to the other, in which I am never done . . . In this . . . is the ‘mise en scène’ of the infinite, an inexhaustible, concrete responsibility . . . A responsibility never discharged, and always once again future. (1999: 105)

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5 ‘Concatenated words from which the sense seemed gone’: The Waste Land

And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened: and another book was opened, which is the book of life: and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in the books, according to their works. And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man according to their works. Revelations, 20: 13–14 He builded it, in rage & in fury. It is the Spiritual Fourfold London: continually building & continually decaying desolate! William Blake, Jerusalem It is perhaps in the music hall, and sometimes in the cinema, that we have an opportunity for partial realization . . . the English comedian supplies in part, and unconsciously . . . fragments of a possible English myth . . . T. S. Eliot, The Romantic Englishman

I If, as Colleen Lamos avers, the ‘surplus of significance produced by the citations [that pepper The Waste Land] generates an economy of excess, virtually an unreserved expenditure of semantic capital . . . rendering the poem a Venice of textual prodigality’ (1998: 111), what might be done to accommodate that surplus, and that expenditure? In what ways might one think that excess, without resorting to the conventional, not to say by now somewhat hackneyed arguments concerning the poem’s fragmentation, its disunity, and its profligacy? Would it not, for example, be an act of critical perversion to argue for adding yet more text to the poem, for putting back at least some of that which Ezra Pound had the poetic sense to remove? And 191

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to ask, for me, the most urgent question: what is the relation between citation, city, the velocity of transmission, and the apprehension of crisis as representation? As long ago as 1924, I. A. Richards presented the case for the surplus of significance and citation in locating meaning and unity not in T. S. Eliot’s paradigmatic modernist text, but in the reader. To be precise, in an assertion that seems to anticipate the good reader desired by J. Hillis Miller on a number of occasions, Richards contends that the value of The Waste Land resides ‘in the unified response which this interaction [between reader and the numerous citations and allusions] creates in the right reader’ (2001: 231). If the reader can produce a vision of unity for him- or herself, he or she receives that which the text transmits, and so becomes part of the relaycircuitry by which London maintains itself. Aspiring to be one of those ‘right’ or ‘good’ readers, I want to argue therefore that The Waste Land must be read as a singular London text, if not the urban text par excellence of literary modernism. To understand the extent to which City and citation interact, one needs to recover, albeit strategically, various allusions, passages, and entire stanzas in fact, from the various draft manuscripts. Doubtless I am, if not alone, then one of a heterodox few, who would argue that in taking away from the drafts to the extent he does, Pound does a certain small but nonetheless important disservice to the historical and material specificity of The Waste Land. While contributing in no small part to making the poem the canonical high water mark it has become, it cannot be denied that he negates it somewhat as a singular text of London. To be sure, the City remains to exert a powerful influence on Eliot’s poem in its published form, as critics such as Robert A. Day, Hugh Kenner, Eleanor Cook and Michael Levenson have attested. However, in returning to the manuscript drafts, one is impressed with the extent to which Eliot’s poem is written, in effect, by London, for which location he acts as spirit guide, medium and telecommunication device. It is almost as if Eliot becomes a machine or engine for the transmission of London’s voices, whether those voices are generated from human or non-human sources and locations. Yet Pound’s edit misleads us. Specifically, it leads to misperceptions on the parts of critics such as those I have named, and whose readings are otherwise both cogent and elegantly perceptive, of the role and significance of the City and London in general in Eliot’s poem. Moreover, it diminishes Eliot’s selfconscious attempt to place himself within the English literary tradition, however satirically or problematically, through bearing witness to particular voices of that tradition. Regardless of what one thinks though of Pound’s contribution in shaping The Waste Land, it has to be said that he undeniably produces a text informed by an adumbrated and telegraphic sensibility, rather than one in which pastiche, mimicry or imitation are perceptibly dominant modes of perception and production. In so doing, Pound brings out a sense of urgency, of phenomenal rapidity in reaction to the perception

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of becoming disconnected, and of Being’s being haunted by discontinuity as a fundamental constituent of Being’s modernity. Nevertheless, while it might seem a little eccentric to claim the necessity of returning to the drafts of the poem so as to read it differently, if not giving us ‘less’ exactly by adding more, will not ‘more’ somehow allow for an orientation towards disorientation, and with that a means of mapping the particular topography of The Waste Land? Or, to ask the same questions more economically (albeit elliptically), can we not make a case for Eliot’s ‘Venice of textual prodigality’ being, in fact and instead, London? While Lamos’ curiously insensitive urban metaphor seems only partly apropos in its identification of flow and surplus production for determining how the poem works, I have no wish to argue that understanding Eliot’s poem as having as one of its key sources the City in which he worked and, beyond that, the impression of London on the poet generally, in any manner provides a unifying key for the text. It is not the case that London solves all the difficulties, if any of them. Instead, as I hope to show through the following chapter, London as site is, itself, marked by discontinuity, ambiguity, paradox and undecidability; and that it is these very qualities that give to The Waste Land its radical force and form; and which, moreover, can still surprise us as readers in its demands that we come face to face with its often vertiginous alterity – or say, instead, alterities. For, if we perceive nothing else about London, it has to be admitted that its others are irreducible, historically, culturally, ideologically, phantasmically, to a single Other, even though that name – London – gives name to an otherwise impossible ontology, as I have argued in the previous two volumes of writing London. The issue of returning to the drafts, and of recuperating however provisionally particular passages from those in conjunction with the ‘finished’ text, is one of acknowledging, in relation to a reading of the text as a ruinous, disorientating city-poem, the work and heterogeneity of Eliot’s many citations, his textual allusions, borrowings, imitations and pastiches. Thus, to repeat myself, this problematic of citations already announced at the start of this chapter is also, perhaps primarily, a matter of cities also, or at least this one city in particular, London. It concerns the encounter with and experience of that city, and the act of trying to write it, and so doing the police in different voices, as Dickens’ happy phrase, which was to be the original title of ‘The Burial of the Dead’ and ‘A Game of Chess’, has it. Hugh Kenner is correct in noting the novelty of The Waste Land in Eliot’s oeuvre, with its focus on the specific ‘environment, the City of London’ (1973: 27). What might also be remarked is that Eliot’s poem is the first, at least since Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, to offer the reader such a specific narrative and topography of the contemporary urban scene in which the city is named. But as is obvious, Eliot adds to that contemporaneity with its cultural commentary a visionary quality, an apocalyptic sensibility that apprehends

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London as other. In this, his text appears touched by other poetic sensibilities. Chiefly, I am thinking here of William Blake and James Thomson.1 Less obvious perhaps than those overt sources cited by Eliot, placing the City at the heart of one’s reading allows those counter-texts of apocalyptic London to come into focus. Peter Ackroyd comments on the influence of Thomson on Eliot in his biography of the poet. While at Harvard Eliot found nothing of interest in American poetry of his generation, but read instead, ‘Davidson, Dowson and Symons – and . . . the slightly earlier City of Dreadful Night by James Thomson’, amongst others. As Ackroyd remarks, ‘here he found what might be called the poetry of urban romance’ (1984: 33). Thus, the American banker situates himself with this act of writing the city, itself a marked departure from his earlier verse, within a tradition and counter-tradition of urban poetry and poetics, the echoes and rhythms of which are less straightforwardly European and unequivocally modernist than either Pound or subsequent commentators on The Waste Land would perceive. To put this differently, there is something uncannily pre- or ‘early modern’ about the poem, most strikingly noticeable in its affiliation to the past through its many citations of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century (London) sources and texts. In those passages focused most on the representation of the city and the phenomenological experience of the subject’s encounter with London, signals hurtle and shuttle at varying speeds, back and forth, within the space of a couple of miles between the time of Elizabeth and Leicester, Donne and Webster, and that of Eliot and Pound, from ‘time to time’ (l. 196) as the poem has it, or otherwise, to paraphrase Tiresias, palpitating between two lives (l. 218). Of course this is not to deny any or, indeed, all of the many subtle and wholly convincing readings of The Waste Land that address the lines in terms of its modernism, its articulation of existential crisis, or its reception as a remarkable cri de coeur bespeaking a crisis of faith (and many of which implicitly rely on, or otherwise call to mind the overworked line ‘ “I can connect nothing with nothing” ’).2 All such readings are more than valid; they are right. As I. A. Richards put it in 1925, and in a manner that set the agenda, if not the tone for much criticism of The Waste Land, ‘He seems to me by this poem, to have performed two considerable services for this generation’. The first of those two services was to have ‘given a perfect emotive description of a state of mind which is probably inevitable for a while to all those who most matter’ (emphasis added). That for a while is most apposite. For it suggests both the contemporaneity of reception, and the phenomenological registration of the event, between subject and city. Secondly, argued Richards, Eliot effected ‘a complete severance between his poetry and all beliefs, and this without the weakening of the poetry’ (Richards 1925: 520). Still, as James Longenbach has suggested of Richards’ reading, for the latter ‘the title The Waste Land is not mere metaphor . . . but mimetic truth’ (1989:

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845). Longenbach recognizes therefore the extent to which, however correct or persuasive Richards is, he nevertheless wrong-foots our readings. Not that he is the only one. As Jane Goldman has summarized the situation so persuasively, ‘there are certain foundational readings . . . that emphasise nihilism, degeneration, and despair, and through which all other modernist texts are read, and which encourage an understanding of art as an autonomous haven far from the awful praxis of life’ (2004: 62). Awful or not, The Waste Land is very much a poem of praxis, the praxis of perception and decryption, their limits, failures, and all that comes into play as other than, and in excess of, the praxis of reading and interpretation in the material experience of the city as the topographical locus of so many overheard, indirectly perceived whispers and citational ghosts. Eliot appears to admit to the perception of uncanny sounds on a number of occasions. While the opening stanzas concerning the hyacinth girl and Madame Sosostris are marked primarily with suggestions of sight, vision, blindness and ‘broken images’ (l. 22), once the ‘Unreal City’ appears, there is fog, and sound is introduced. There is ‘dead sound’ (l. 68); a voice asks ‘ “What is that noise?” ’ (l. 117), a ragtime tune is implied, a barmaid’s voice intrudes, the Thames must flow until the song is ended; at the narrator’s back he hears ‘the rattle of the bones, and chuckle’ (ll. 185–6), or else the sound of the traffic’s horns and engines (l. 197); there is the accented voice of Mr Eugenides (l. 212), the sound of the gramophone (l. 256); furthermore, ‘ “music crept by me upon the waters” ’ (l. 257), and London is apostrophized in response to its occasional sounds, whether of a mandolin or the less specific noises from a public house, described as clatter and chatter (ll. 259–62). Although there is little in the last section of the poem, ‘What the Thunder Said’, that acknowledges the City or London directly, yet from its title on, aural rather than visual signals dominate. Sound is a mode of citation that is both ephemeral and spectral, as temporary as it is temporal. Coming back to Longenbach’s critique of Richards, however, perceiving the title as mimetic truth is only one acutely focused misreading, which fails to realize fully what takes place in the text as a result of the place that gives the text its resonances. What it highlights is the way in which readings of the poem have removed the poem from histories and the culture that it mediates, for and from which it produces a constellated imaginary topography. Ignoring or not noticing the work of sound in the text is but one way in which the mimetic reading limits itself, whilst also taking the text out of the complex constellation of its disordered historicity. Despite the claims to read the poem as a reaction to the First World War or the rapid technologization of mass culture, such analyses only work if they maintain an immanent coherence behind the assertion of the text’s fragmentary articulations, and by limiting the temporal place of production to one historical moment. Such coherence employs only a circumscribed historicization, or otherwise aestheticizes the historical experience. There is to be read a more radical

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historicity of the subject’s experience of the city, in such a way so as to perceive how radically Eliot conceives the ideological and cultural shift with regard to ‘conceptualizing identity not as a beginning or foundation [or central perspectival locus] but as a product or construction . . . at the moment of its emergence . . . subjectivity degree zero’. In Eliot’s poem, the subject, shot through by the traces of London and the City ‘is thus suspended between the mobility where everything is possible, and the point where it is connected to systems of signification that are always ideologically invested’ (Jonsson 2000: 167). Coming to terms with the radicality of such identityconstruction will involve one in apprehending the extent to which Eliot’s play on literary historiography in The Waste Land (a historiography the poem ultimately refuses) is but one means by which the text opens itself to the voices of the City across a number of epochs, and from a number of different, heterogeneous discursive levels. Hence – I can connect nothing with nothing. Although I shall have more to say about this statement and its complex articulation of estranged subjectivity apropos the city, for now it suffices to say that the words are so familiar they hardly require stitching back into the fabric of the text with quotation marks. Unlike its contemporaries, Ulysses (with Dublin) and Mrs Dalloway, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land realizes its city, London, only in the confession that it fails to realize it, despite the various references to, and significations of that city. The city signals an otherness for Eliot in very particular ways. However, the city is not simply other. To be more precise (and to recall my earlier remarks concerning alterity) it is not an other, an object available to perception. More radically, it ‘is’ nothing as such, but names otherness, alterity. This, again to insist on this point, is what comes to be apprehended. Hence, ‘autrui is not a subject or an object but a principle of the spatial dispositions of our being together, which can itself become undone, exposing a potential for “other geometries” ’ (Rajchman 1998: 94). Other velocities as well – and, it has to be remarked, the innumerable velocities and geometries of the wholly and absolutely other, each and every other that Derrida calls tout autre. Such velocities and geometries are brought into play by that nothing that is literature, in its fleeting revenances as citations, which serve to remind one of the temporal within the spatial. The geometries and velocities of temporal flow are what unground, undo any principle of stable ‘spatial dispositions’ as meaningful relations. ‘I’ can connect nothing with nothing therefore; ‘I’ connects nothing, it has no force, no mastery. A stable subject position does not have this power, this possibility, after the encounter with the modern megalopolis. Nor does the city generate or inscribe a stable subject position. Rather, the city undoes the subject; not as a whole encountered as the experience of a sublime or terrifying totality, but piecemeal. For example, it is Richmond and Kew that ‘undo’ the subject: ‘Richmond and Kew undid me’ (ll. 293–4). The very

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strangeness of the line ascribing such force to leafy suburbs can only be attested to by those with first-hand experience of their safety, their benignity as south-western districts of London. The conscious echo of Dante’s Purgatorio only further enforces that topographical-nominal catachresis, by which ‘me’ is undone. At the same time, however, it is possible to read that I can connect nothing with nothing. This is an affirmation, a performative excess arising from out the negative. It says, in effect, I have the ability to put together two negatives, two absences and produce something in connecting the two nothings. Furthermore, as phantom trope, I is that which serves as the simulacral subject on the page, in the mind’s eye, to connect one nothing with another nothing, and all the while playing on that phantom nothing which is ‘itself’, the spectre of the itself. The trope, topos and locus of lyric subjectivity proclaims an auto-deconstructive ‘truth’, in which, as the sign of its own modernity, that subjectivity and that truth are enacted in their historicity as the ghostly articulation of an equally ghostly shuttle that weaves together ‘epistemology and rhetoric in general’ as Paul de Man puts it (1984: 239), but specifically, the place-in-deconstruction of the urban self. And what comes to unravel identity paradoxically in the gesture of connecting ‘nothing’ with ‘nothing’ from within the attestation of the impossibility of making connection is the materiality of ‘historical modes of language power’, to cite de Man once more (1984: 262). If X marks the spot in some visionary topography, then it also places the map under erasure, opening up representation and co-ordination through the admission of the multiple traces of alterity’s historicities. Concomitantly, in assaulting the very idea of mimetic anthropomorphism the City makes one ask: ‘what is a person?’ (Johnson 2001: 206). ‘Hyperbolic and elliptical’ (to borrow Barbara Johnson’s phrase (206)), The Waste Land reinscribes the haunted place-in-deconstruction that is the subject, if not in its own impossible ‘image’, then at the very least on its own terms. In doing so, what is given us to read via the ‘textual prodigality’ of citations occasioned by the encounter with the City is the following, startling, even scandalous apophatic – and, for me, apodeictic – confession on Eliot’s part: despite, or perhaps because, of the multiple historicities, the materialities of literary language embedded in the imaginary and visionary strata that is London, ‘the edifice of literary history [cannot] be built upon it’ (Johnson 2001: 210). I can connect nothing with nothing. I can connect nothing with nothing. I can connect nothing with nothing. To cite and alter somewhat Barbara Johnson’s compelling reading of Paul de Man’s essay ‘Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric’, ‘if the burden of the analogies [and other figures pertaining to London and the City in The Waste Land] is to convince us that the metaphorical similarities [they are similar in that they all come from a very small area of the City] point to [the possibility of] a higher spiritual unity, then sheer enumeration would disrupt that claim’ (2001: 211).

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II Another reading having to do precisely with the city, and the City with which Eliot comes face to face, remains to be found though, and so invented, if the claims I am making regarding identity’s undoing can be substantiated. Invention here, as elsewhere in this volume of Writing London, has to do with what is found or rediscovered, rather than what is created anew. As Alexander Pope has it in An Essay on Criticism, invention concerns the proper recovery of the rules of Nature: ‘Those Rules of old discover’d, not devis’d/Are Nature still, but Nature Methodiz’d’ (1980: 143–68; ll. 88–9; emphasis in original). Pope’s Augustan paradigm is key to comprehending how Eliot shapes his materials according to the ‘nature’ of London. Hugh Kenner contests that Eliot shaped the image of London in ‘The Fire Sermon’ in the earlier drafts according to Augustan modes of representation, ‘guided’, as he argues, ‘by the norms and decorums of an Augustan view of History’ (1973: 35). This can only be perceived adequately by taking into account the drafts as well as the finished text, as can the larger claims regarding The Waste Land as London-text. While I have been arguing for a reading that returns London to our analysis of the poem, this is not in itself novel. It is signalled though so relatively infrequently in Eliot criticism that one might be forgiven for believing either that one has discovered in Eliot’s London an undiscovered country, or else that one is wide of the mark. However, in 1965, Robert A. Day published in PMLA a wholly convincing analysis of the relationship between what he called ‘the “City Man” ’ and ‘the geography of reminiscence’ apropos London (1965: 285–91). Another, more recent reading must be also acknowledged in its contribution to our understanding of Eliot’s urban poetics. The relative infrequency with which London is considered in Eliot criticism adds a sense of urgency to the project of the invention of reading, to paraphrase Michael Levenson. ‘The Waste Land’ he insists, and quite correctly in my view, ‘needs to be located within the immediate surround of the postwar city, the city cursed not by military violence, but by hectic peace’ (1999: 3; emphasis added). Levenson’s argument can be further supported if we turn to consider comments on the transformation of the city’s identity in the first two decades of the twentieth century from a contemporary of Eliot’s, Thomas Burke.3 Burke’s London in My Time places strong emphasis on the change in London during the period of which Levenson speaks. However, unlike Levenson, while Burke admits that the war is an important factor in the transformation of the city, for the latter it is far less significant than what he takes to be the belated arrival of the twentieth century in London. For Burke, London, during the war years ‘was an anomalous creature going through paroxysms of its own in its approach to the new century’, which upheavals ‘were not immediately perceptible to common observation’. Despite going about its business, London’s identity was resistant to definition,

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disrupted from within and yet not approachable through any gesture of reading or determination. As Burke puts it, stressing the undecidability of the city, ‘it was not itself and it was not definitely anything else’. During the years 1914–19, Burke argues, London was not ‘bright. It was being bright . . . the effect was as strained as when a once-brilliant actor is being brilliant’. There is in Burke’s perceptively acute metaphor that sense of highly strung, grotesque hyperbole and pastiche, verging on faintly camp hysteria that Eliot captures in some passages (ll. 111–13), not least those excised by Pound. However, despite this understanding of performance, Burke does insist that air raids ‘only slightly disturbed the surface of London’s routine’. ‘Entertainers’, he notes, ‘more than anybody, served to nourish the cheerful spirit of the town. The spirit was there to begin with, of course, but they gave it tone’. Throughout Burke’s chapter on the war, the acting, the theatrical, and other metaphors of performance persist. At the same time, he is keen to remind his readers that this is a quality of London itself. What the war produced was one last intensification, a heightening of the ‘carnival blaze’ that was already there as the predominant motif of all aspects of older London cultural life, in all its social and class-orientated registers. Therefore, while ‘oddly enough, those years showed little change in the Londoner’s outlook and temper’, transformation defined the first twenty years of the twentiethcentury city ‘and the period was a spasm of labour between the old and the new’. ‘Not until the twenties’, writes Burke, ‘did we see the full effect of the times in new attitudes, new demands, new forms of entertainment, new modes of speech, new crime, and a new and more violent loosening, especially among the young, of all old restraints.’ And all of these facets of the new are what come to be registered in the hectic life of The Waste Land. As Burke concludes his chapter on the Great War and the city, ‘the real significance of that saturnalia of the twenties is that it was our welcome to the new century’. Again, this is emphasized in another chapter, ‘Spirit of Change’, in which, in the years up to the war, the perception of London was still that of ‘Dickens’s London’. Not until 1920 ‘did London enter upon its new era of structural and spiritual change’. Burke’s pairing of materiality and immateriality is noteworthy. For it couples the visible and invisible, the historical and metaphysical in a manner that echoes everywhere in Eliot’s text as it negotiates between the City’s topography and its spectral resonances. At this, we should pause to reflect on the influence on Eliot of popular culture in London during the years of Eliot’s residence up to the composition and publication of The Waste Land. Marked as London was by the signs and indications of a wild, almost desperate energy, Eliot witnessed some of its older manifestations during the war years. Thus it is that Eliot’s writing has about it on occasion echoes of Edwardian music hall and burlesque, of what were, already by the 1920s, anachronistic modes of being and

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representation, and which were to become supplanted by different, but equally energetic expressions of cultural life, such as those signalled by Burke. The appeal of the music hall was strong for Eliot. Its performers and largely working-class audiences represented a strange, coarse, but appealing, albeit ambivalent carnivalesque life, a savage vibrancy about which he wrote, as well as drawing on such energy for the composition of The Waste Land. Upon her death for example, Eliot eulogized music hall star Marie Lloyd in what Lawrence Rainey describes as one of ‘his finest essays’ (2005b: 62). What appealed to Eliot was what he described as the ‘ “ferocity” ’, the ‘ “mordant, ferocious” ’ humour (Eliot cit. Rainey 2005b: 62). At the same time, Eliot admired the powerful crudity or what he called, with a nod to its historicity, ‘ “the old English ferocity” ’ of H. M. Bateman’s caricatures (Eliot cit. Rainey 2005b: 62). Lawrence Rainey summarizes this for us eloquently and economically: ‘Ferocity, intensity, violence . . . the strange, the surprising, the fantastic, something very near to parody: here is the core of Eliot’s aesthetics while he was writing The Waste Land . . . [Eliot was] responsive to caricature and music hall, modes of cultural production which thrive on wild exaggeration, hyperbolic repetitions, which pivot on the play of likeness and illusion, a grotesque machinery of extremism’ (2005b: 62). As we have seen, Burke also understood such energy and its significance in the expression of London, in London’s enunciations of its monstrous self. He knew, too, exactly what was at stake in the historical and cultural traces that inform the act of writing the city. As a Londoner, he articulates in a systematic manner what Eliot perceives and translates into citations, fragments, and abrupt, shocking shifts of focus, perspective and tone. Which, to encapsulate the point, is that irreversible epochal and epistemological transformation never can be aligned neatly with calendar-history. Vestigial memories return as disorientating ruins of a past that refuses to disappear. As Burke remarks in ‘Spirit of Change’, in a lengthy comment that is worth quoting in full: Thus, in writing of London before the war one has a feeling of writing of the London of last century. And really one is. In talking to young people about London and London life before the war, and the things we did in that London, I find that they cannot regard them as part of twentieth-century life. They are twentieth century, and the London they know is the only twentieth-century London. We middle-aged folk, who started our boyhood ramblings about the London of 1904–5, they regard as stragglers from the Victorian age; which we are. Still, we had the privilege of witnessing the changeover, and it is something to have seen. As I began looking at London in 1897, and, save for holidays, have been constantly in attendance upon it, I have had London under observation through nearly four decades. Those years have been years of such radical and violent change in London life and the ways of the Londoner that no

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similar span of its long life can have known such a transformation. The differences between the London of the year of Diamond Jubilee and the London of 1934 are, I think, even more marked than the differences between the London of James II and the London of the Regency. Certainly they are of wider variety and scope than the memory of any Victorian centenarian could embrace. The processes by which these differences have arrived have been so stealthy and so minute that to the constant Londoner, like myself, who has lived through them, they are often untraceable. Burke’s reflexive discourse is fascinating in its self-acknowledged belated apprehension of the otherwise imperceptible and inarticulable. Eliot gathers up just those inchoate and immanent, revenant reverberations. He traces with an urgency akin to the effects of Pound’s editorial intensifications both that undergoing translation and also those vestiges of modes of existence and apprehension that have become either occluded or encrypted, if not invisible to many. It must be commented here that Eliot perceives a greater historical sweep than Burke. The tracing of such encryptions are not restricted to the cultural signs of the first two decades of the twentieth century in the poem. As is fairly apparent from even the most cursory reading, Eliot records the forceful energies of the Early Modern period also. Citing Dr Johnson on the metaphysical poets the year before The Waste Land was published, Eliot admires the poets of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century because ‘in their works “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together” ’ (Rainey 2005b: 62). In Eliot’s understanding, the history of identity is a brutal act of inscription through a contest of writing irreducible to any reading. Putting this a little differently, the city is an insatiable, gargantuan writerly text, the materiality of which demands it be suffered on its own terms, and that any response must acknowledge its energies, its fluxes and its eruptions. The Waste Land is therefore a performative discourse, attesting to the anachronic singularity of London’s haunted modernity. For the City in particular and London in general is inscribed, or, as Burke has it, ‘marked’ by its differences, by the difference that enacts, making possible in the first place, its vertiginous quasi-identity; and so too is The Waste Land. In this, Eliot plays on the possibilities of composition that the City gives, a gift without recompense. In so doing, he may be read in the act of articulating the irremediable separation of the lyric I (of which more, further on) from itself through returning to poetic vision the ‘poetic tekhne [that is] its foundation’, and which offers an ‘absolute way of seeing’ irreducible to any ‘one single metaphysics’ of presence, identity, or representation, and in which ‘absolute means released, set free . . . From forms of presentation of phenomena and from the connections between phenomena that define the world of representation’, in the words of Jacques Rancière. Eliot thus realizes

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through the composition of The Waste Land that for ‘literature to assert its own power, it is not enough for it to abandon the norms and hierarchies of mimesis’. Rancière continues, ‘it [literature] must abandon the metaphysics of representation and the “nature” [and architectonics] on which it is founded: its modes of presentation of individuals and the connections between individuals; its modes of causality and inference; in short its entire system of signification’ (2004: 148). But then, on the evidence of literary ruins embodied in, and disordering, The Waste Land, the realization is always already in place. It is important in the act of re-reading then that the city not be overdetermined by any single mode of historically orientated reading, whether the question becomes one of imposing a metaphysics of alienation or considering from an historical vantage point the idea or influence of the postwar, with the emphasis on –war being over-stressed as an epoch of determination. In treading the thorny path (which may just turn out to be a minefield) through such pitfalls, Day and Levenson’s articles are instructive, and we will consider them further in this section of the chapter. I have already insisted that one has to acknowledge the extent to which Eliot is registering translation and difference as that which makes London’s identity, and by which such ontology is undone from within itself by its own phantasmic hauntological condition. I would aver this not least because Day’s assertion that the ‘London references [though] not merely incidental, nor accidental’, tend to be overlooked or at least be ‘not so readily apparent when . . . seen from other angles’ (1965: 291). What Day defines as the ‘not so readily apparent’ Burke identifies as the ‘untraceable’. Between the two writers there is this acknowledgement of the motion between the invisible, vision and writing, and also between what is occluded, and what comes to be legible. As Day has occasion to comment in concluding his essay, the signs of the City of London inform the structure of The Waste Land in relation to the poem as memory-work. However, while Day’s essay grounds itself in autobiographical memory, specifically Eliot’s remembrance of his days as a City clerk, I wish to pursue a somewhat different path through the text. It is just the encounter with the City’s disturbing, uncanny modernity as something wholly unprecedented, and so difficult to grasp in terms of conventional representation that determines Eliot’s response and the writing of London in The Waste Land. More than this, Eliot’s reaction in the form of his text acknowledges that the City is one manifest, material expression of modernity, but that modernity is irreducible to a historical moment or any merely contemporary scene. In this, Eliot’s understanding of the City is anachronic as I have said, and thus destabilizing in the extreme. Part of this response is doubtless the historical contingency of the event, as Levenson draws out in his reading. That contingency remains partial though; it is not everything. Let us consider certain remarks of Eliot’s made nearly a decade before The Waste Land was published. These are reported by Frank Kermode in his

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introduction to The Waste Land and Other Poems. Having settled in England in 1914 to study at Oxford, Eliot found the university town somewhat unremarkable and preferred the capital. Although initially Eliot had disliked London (Ackroyd 1984: 55), his letters from the time enthusiastically announce his passion for London: ‘I like London better than before’ becomes ‘I like London very well’, this in turn being transformed into the expression of the desire ‘I want to live in London’, and from this to the affirmation, ‘I love to be in London’ (1988: 55, 57, 107, 122). In these temporal accretions and recirculations there is to be observed what we might call the ‘mixing’ of ‘Memory and desire’ (ll. 2–3). However, Eliot’s response was not unequivocal. Indeed, before writing the poem Eliot recognized that the City and London dictate one’s writing and its reception: ‘London imposes her acceptance of a man’s work on all the English speaking world and . . . accepts no other standard than her own’ (1988: 107, 122). Eliot’s fascination was also tempered simultaneously by the poet’s sense of being an outsider in the city. As Michael Levenson has remarked, ‘within the chanting, crooning enthusiasm, he remained acutely conscious of the strains on a foreigner’ (1999: 2). Such was his perception of alienation that he spoke of it not in English but in Greek, referring to himself, as Kermode tells us, as metoikos, ‘Greek for an alien resident in a foreign city’ (1998: vii) but also, to risk the translation, someone beyond, outside, not belonging to the ‘house’, the place or location (metoikos as unheimlich, perhaps). Perhaps what Eliot perceived, whether fully or not, is that to be a Londoner, to know oneself in this guise, is always to be foreign, estranged from familiarity and homeliness; in short to become an other. Being or becoming too familiar, one stops reading, and the signs of ineluctable flux become untraceable (to recall Thomas Burke’s definition). None of these observations concerning Eliot is meant to return a reading of London in The Waste Land in any simple fashion to psychobiographical contextualization. I merely wish to situate strategically in my reading a certain disjointing doubleness in Eliot’s perceptions. I certainly have no wish to fall back into the reductivism of which Day warned Eliot’s readers forty years ago. ‘It is not my intention’, Day observes, ‘to argue that The Waste Land is a direct transcription of Eliot’s experiences as a young poet who was also an employee of Lloyd’s Bank.’ Such an argument is as ‘myopic’, in Day’s word, as ‘the thinking of those who [discover] that a fictional character is based on a real person’. Though certainly not myopic or ‘naïve’ (another of Day’s terms), Levenson’s historicizing reading, as sophisticated as it is in its construction of economic and cultural contexts – or, as he calls them in a strange grammatical mutation, the immediate ‘surround[s]’ – does have that element of aligning the fictional and real, the literary and, if not the biographical then the historical at least. If not guided by a metaphysics as such, Levenson’s reading of a ‘robustly modernized urban culture’ (1999: 2) does pursue, in Rancière’s terms, ‘the norms and hierarchies of mimesis’. In part,

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therefore, there is discernible in this a relapse into the perception of the analogous or tropic as the mimetic. Having read the economic contexts of the poem, and having argued convincingly for a drift from the representation of ‘labouring crowds’ (Levenson 1999: 9) to the figure of individual initially signified by Stetson and subsequent other figures, Levenson shifts ground. Connecting his reading from the crowd to the individual, Levenson turns to the possible influence on Eliot of John Maynard Keynes (after the work of Eleanor Cook4), before concluding his essay with a somewhat metaphysical sublation, arguing that the numerous citations from the canon are, effectively, ‘citizens in an ideal community’. They create ‘a universe of discourse . . . as wide as the universe of finance . . . The weak currency of postwar modernity’, Levenson argues, is ‘challenged by the gold standard of poetic tradition – in place of banknotes, footnotes’ (1999: 11). I cannot help but feel that in Levenson’s reading a spectre is haunting Eliot. But it is not the spectre of London. Rather it is a strangely Hegelian version of bourgeois liberalism, wherein London is merely the occasion, the excuse for staging the reaction to modernity. The narrative trajectory of The Waste Land is thus established in the form of the dialectic: the literate individual confronts the crowd, and resorts to canonical utopianism in an instant of phantastic aufhebung. Levenson’s reading seeks in its last paragraph to stay politicized readings, whether of the right or left, by presenting us with a scenario in which the ghastly, ghostly masses of modernity send one scurrying back for the safety of the library. In this, Levenson appears to be asserting a view of Eliot as snob, the value of The Waste Land being, as Lyndsey Stonebridge summarizes the point, in its ‘intellectual allusions’ (1998: 24). Given the affirmations of working-class culture’s vitality in the allusions to music hall and popular entertainment, nothing seems less likely. It is enough for Levenson to argue that the City’s locations and the naming of suburbs gives the poem a ‘determinate geography’, and he supports this with references beyond the finished poem to the drafts (1999: 9). But the only ‘city’ Levenson registers is the economic, financial world, London in these terms being ‘the resistless magnet’ (9). He is silent on all other aspects of the City, those churches for example in the purlieus – or shadow – of the Bank of England, or the sounds of music and conversation issuing from a public house. Such a delimiting interpretation calls a violent halt to all those traces of London that militate exactly against such a coercive economics of analysis. And it does so in order to get on with the business at hand. Despite this, there is much that remains to be addressed. For example, what Eliot’s ambivalence about the city appears to register is a sense that the city as multifariously other is the slippery source of paradoxical response that in part writes the urban subject who, as a result, comes to reflect that he has no discrete substance as we have already discussed. That ‘subject’, developed out of Eliot’s own experiences and his historical location,

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his presence in a postwar city as a foreigner to that city,5 is a tropic figure which writes the city as much as ‘it’ is written by it. If ‘he’ do the police in different voices, ‘he’, in being a performer, is as much a fiction as the voices ‘he’ produces. In this manner, the subject may become a ‘hollow man’, ‘pattern . . . dissolv[ing] into something that [on occasions] resembles patter’ (Rainey 2005b: 58). But the patter is also that of the music hall singer or comedian, with which Eliot was familiar, and which he enjoyed. (Of which, more below, when we come to passages from the manuscript drafts.) In this figure of the poet as actor or entertainer, we recall those playful metaphors of public pleasure by which Thomas Burke (in what today reads as an anticipation of Peter Ackroyd) defined the spirit of London. There is also to be read that doubling to which I have already alluded. To put it somewhat differently, the canon meets the music hall, Webster or Shakespeare meet Dan Leno or Marie Lloyd – except, of course, and at the risk of oversimplifying, it takes a few hundred years for the popular entertainment of Early Modern London to become the canonical property of a middle-class Edwardian readership. Thus the poem does appear to offer fleeting instances of construction, to which one might attempt to cling in however futile a manner. In doing so, however, it never allows the reader to forget that these appear only to disappear; each and every one may be just one more simulacrum. Resemblances may be created but they belong nonetheless to ‘evanescent zones of coherence’ (Rainey 2005b: 59) that operate, according to Lawrence Rainey, at formal syntactical levels of the poem. Such connectedness as there is, Rainey argues, ‘isn’t really vivid; it remains inert and extraneous, like so much scaffolding erected around a building that remains obstinately and mysteriously invisible’. He continues, as ‘zones of coherence loom into sight and recede [like so many of those literary citations, which the reader may or may not recognize momentarily], like ghosts who beckon us down darkened paths that repeatedly issue in dead ends . . .’ (2005b: 60). Interestingly, Rainey’s language has recourse to an urban poetics. While relation is described through zones, the structures of connectivity are addressed initially through the metaphor of invisible architecture and the exoskeletal frame that encases it; from this perception there is that shift to the momentary spectral appearances and subsequent disappearances that tempt one along nocturnal side streets which prove to be blind alleys, cul de sacs. As such shifting figures make us aware, if ‘The Waste Land repeatedly engages in a histrionics of non-relationship which effectively undermines . . . modes of connectedness (repetition, narrative)’ (2005b: 62), then these are not, pace Rainey, just the structural, formal elements of the text having to do with the stories Eliot chooses to embed within, and so compose his text. They arrive as so many lures, blinds and traps of the City itself; its structures, its topographies, its labyrinthine layers dictate how one may write – even if only to write oneself

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into a corner. The various traces, signatures and sounds of the city’s difference, its signals arriving from differing, heterogeneous historical instances and material modes (the materiality of both event and letter), gather, only to intensify themselves in their dissonant concert. Stressing the point once more, they produce an oscillation, a sympathetic vibration, within the ‘human engine’, thereby disrupting, through specific historical and cultural frequencies, subjectivity’s sense of permanence and presence through the revelation of material and spectral flux that always already exists prior to any delimiting power of ratiocination, determination and mimetic representation. If ‘I can connect nothing with nothing’ figures a negativity or nihilism therefore, it figures it ‘as the indissoluble relation between an “ineffable” mobility and its “particular determination” ’ (Kristeva 1984: 111).

III The Waste Land, Eleanor Cook asserts, ‘requires three maps for its placenames’ (1979: 341). These are, in turn, ‘a map of Greater London and the lower Thames’, a ‘second map for those place names that are not from the London area’, and the third, ‘Dante’s map of the inhabited world’, the centre of which is ‘Jerusalem’ (341). Now Cook argues that while The Waste Land is not only a London poem, it does retain ‘its geographical unity, [though] the unity becomes far more complex’ (354). This complexity involves the reader in a perception of topographical shifting ‘as we muse on the poem’ ‘and London becomes a center of empire, another Rome’. What London does not become for Cook is Jerusalem, at least not in The Waste Land and not, for Eliot, until ‘Little Gidding in a mystical sense, and by this time the center may be anywhere, “England and nowhere. Never and always” ’. Never and always is right. But pace Cook’s otherwise wholly convincing analysis, it is my contention that there no unity in the poem, except of most limited strategic and contingent kinds, even though for the right reader, the good reader there may appear a unity of sorts. Although the maps may well shift (and, it has to be asked, what kind of unity is there in topographical slippage?), Jerusalem could well be immanent, at the very least, in Eliot’s uncanny City topography. At the risk of appearing to desire a ‘particular determination’ in moving a little too schematically, let us recall how Eliot composes London, specifically the City, but also other aspects of the capital including its suburbs, before analysing those instances in a more sustained fashion. For the moment, in this section of the chapter I shall address only references from the edited and published text of The Waste Land. Glaringly obvious are those general references, adapted and translated (in more than one sense) from Baudelaire, to the ‘Unreal City’ of ‘The Burial of the Dead’ (l. 60) and ‘The Fire Sermon’ (l. 207). To address first the figure of the City as it initially appears in ‘The Burial of the Dead’: Other locatable co-ordinates are provided

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in the final Stanza of this part of the poem, three pronominal indicators following almost immediately on from the introduction of the unreal City: London Bridge (l. 62); King William Street (l. 66); Saint Mary Woolnoth (l. 67). When the ‘Unreal City’ makes its reappearance in ‘The Fire Sermon’, it is given only one determinable coordinate, the Cannon Street Hotel. Following Tiresias’ narrative of the small house agent’s clerk (l. 232) and the typist, London locations return: the Strand, Queen Victoria Street (l. 258), Lower Thames Street, with its public bar (l. 260), and the church of St Magnus Martyr (l. 264). What, if anything do street and place names tell us? To pose a deliberately naïve question, do they offer a constellation, the organization of which produces meaning? Without wishing to sound as if the spirit of Iain Sinclair had suddenly taken possession of me, beyond the fact that the references are all in the City, there appears to be no discernible pattern, mundane, hieratic, or arcane. Cannon Street is the location of the London Stone. But what of that? Knowing that, should one assume a relationship between Mr Eugenides’ invitation to dine and the folklore of London’s origins? More trivially still, does the barmaid from ‘A Game of Chess’ work in the public house on Lower Thames Street? It is impossible to tell. The co-ordinates give us little or nothing. Nothing connects. With nothing. To ask another possibly irrelevant, certainly undecidable, question: is ‘rat’s alley’ a reference to a street that no longer existed by Eliot’s time, and yet over the ground and route of which he walked almost daily when working in the City: Rat Alley in Great Eastcheap? Though this seems a marginal query at best, yet a strong reading may be proposed, requiring a brief, hypothetical detour away from The Waste Land and into London – and London’s past. Neither Rat Alley nor Great Eastcheap (which had been in Candlewick Ward [which still exists], in the City) exists today. Rat Alley appears in maps from 1677 and 1799. In the earlier of the two maps, the street extends north to St Clement’s Church, one of the churches that appears in the London children’s rhyme ‘Oranges and Lemons’. Rat Alley was demolished sometime early in the nineteenth century, as far as it is possible to ascertain. Replacing it was King William Street, which does appear in Eliot’s poem, and which was part of the reconstruction in that part of the City that also included the building of then newest London Bridge. This might lead us to consider another nursery rhyme, ‘London Bridge is falling down’; without, of course, giving us to understand anything of significance, except the fact that traces of the City’s pasts resonate almost imperceptibly from within the phantom-topography of Eliot’s square mile. This topography is undone in the very act of being mapped by an equally phantasmic technology of transmission and communication, however fragmentary, within, despite, what one is tempted to describe, apropos its economic flows, as the closed system of the City. For Eliot, the past gathered as that surfeit of heterogeneous citations and allusions disrupts all economy,

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it reveals itself from within the boundaries of the closed system, out of which it overspills. If the City is comprehended as, amongst other things, the material organization and manifestation of a communication system routed in economic praxis, and running according to a well-ordered and regulated economics, then the intrusion of that which has no utilitarian function – literature, sex – will not only threaten to disrupt the system and the modes of communication by which it maintains itself, they will also cause interference in the very reception and communication of signals intended to connect. What this means, as Bernhard Siegert argues in his semiotic analysis of the postal system, is that, if ‘signals transmitted by the communications system at a given time’ such as the time of the present or that of business, then interference interrupting the signals belonging to those systems, render those signals ‘viewed as the function of a data source or receiver . . . instead as a function of factors in the system of communication itself’ (1999: 99). Put less abstractly, the City is not simply the material embodiment of an economic system. It is also made up of other material forms representing other discourses and praxes, pleasure and religion for example. However, if the City is understood in terms of its topography and its economic praxis exclusively, all other signals are extraneous, in excess of the system, whether transmitted from the present or the past. As so many unassimilable reminders of the way in which identity is shot through with the signs of its alterity, that past is always at Eliot’s back from time to time (l. 196). This phrase, similar to the comment that the subject only sometimes hears (l. 259) is powerfully suggestive of irregular, unpredictable, and therefore uncontrollable transmission given to random broadcasts. Its motions felt, its sounds heard, its texts returning to be cited, albeit incompletely and with incomprehension, the City’s force is thus maintained, the nominal indicators of topography so many hieratic clues in the archive that is London. The traces of literary language and other cultural discourses intrude as a general economy of the City’s identities and histories, making audible the noise of codes, as so many remainders irreducible to, and marking the rupture of, the economic(s of the) subject. Up to the encounter between the typist and the young man carbuncular, Eliot has kept his specific references within the boundaries of the City, sounds overheard and locations such as churches or street names observed presumably by a peripatetic wanderer, or, perhaps and as is equally likely, more than one. After all, repetition of perception does not necessarily signify the utterance being generated from the same subject or the same perspective; it merely plays on the expectation of the conceit it ultimately refuses to assign. From this relatively circumscribed location, we are taken to Greenwich reach and the Isle of Dogs (ll. 275–6) beyond the City boundary on the Thames, and retreating from the present moment of the ‘Unreal City’ passages to the London (at least implicitly) of Elizabeth and Leicester. This both is and is not Spenser’s ‘Sweet Thames’ (ll. 183–4), of course. It might be

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suggested that in the temporal shift, the modern couple of typist and young man carbuncular are reiterated in, and translated by, their Early Modern counterparts. As the river journey moves toward Richmond and Kew (l. 293), the north London district of Highbury is mentioned, and we are returned to the City, with the subsequent reference to Moorgate (l. 296). The movement along the river from Greenwich to Richmond and Kew, from east to west, and from past to present perhaps, implies a history of the river as simultaneously a history of sexual activity. If this is not Spenser’s ‘Sweet Thames’, in all reality then what Eliot’s historical telescoping infers is that it never has been, the myth being solely the earlier poet’s. In drawing our attention to raised knees and supine figures, Eliot echoes in part another satire on Spenser, Pope’s, in his poem in imitation of the Elizabethan poet, ‘Spenser: the Alley’ (12).6 The parallel between the Augustan and the modernist text of the Thames is relatively minor, but instructive nonetheless. In Pope’s poem, one travels in the same direction along the river as one does in Eliot’s, touching on almost the same locations, in Pope’s case Deptford rather than Greenwich to Richmond, and finally beyond to Windsor. It may thus be read as one of those Augustan influences on Eliot’s early plans for composition, to which Hugh Kenner has directed readers of The Waste Land; and from this, one can discern in The Waste Land those ‘satiric parallels between modern London and Augustan London’ (Cook 1979: 342). Or, if not parallels, then certainly the time of the city as being revenant, cyclical, doubling, displacing and haunting itself in its disruption, once more, of any stable identity or meaning. Following this there are just two other direct references to London, in ‘What the Thunder Said’. The first is simply to London, not the City specifically, nor any of its streets or buildings. London is merely the last in a list of cities, following which comes the word ‘unreal’ (l. 376). Here is that term once more, with which the reader found himself on London Bridge, and this time appended to the ‘series of five great cities’ as Cook comments (1979: 341): Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna and London (ll. 375–6). Readings of the City in Eliot’s poem, such as Michael Levenson’s and Eleanor Cook’s, tend to overlook the matter of unreality, the insistent, reiterated emphasis on that seemingly self-evident quality by which Eliot inaugurates and qualifies his representation of London. At the close of the poem though, neither do we read more, nor are we given any larger sense of immediate reference than the city name, the bare topographical sign. ‘London’ resounds nonetheless with all that is implied historically, culturally and imaginatively in such a name, especially when that name arrives as the apparent conclusion to a list of other cities. Of the list of cities, Eleanor Cook draws our attention to the historical progression that gives order to the series: ‘Eliot preserves the chronological order of the flourishing of each empire. He lists three ancient empires in one line, two modern ones in the following line’ (1979: 324–43). Eleanor Cook is only partly correct when she reads the series of cities as merely the markers of a linear temporal progression. What she overlooks is

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the immanence of a recurring circularity that ‘undoes’ the linear, in this case from within that apparently straightforward progression itself. To emphasize repetition and so recirculation further, it is important to note how, just before that series of imperial cities comes the line, ‘Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air’ (l. 373). Here, Eliot hints at least at cycles of recurrence; that which cracks, reforms, and presumably not a single time only. Such tropic, repeated reappearances are to be found littered throughout the poem, attesting to differing modes, levels and manifestations of cyclic-temporal rhythms. They are stated already in a number of places throughout, and perhaps nowhere with greater, more strident emphasis than in the barmaid’s emphatic reminders of closing time, a comic eschatology, the gallows humour of which leaves us in no doubt that death will ‘undo’ us, will ‘undo’ so many as Eliot puts it of the crowds on the Bridge. A final time arrives, again and again, to erase the self. This is what is shared, this is realization, itself written as potentially endless termination, of more than one end but never more than the one ending for the subject, and which was caught epistemologically and formally for Eliot in his original epigraph, that performative utterance Conrad’s Kurtz, ‘the horror, the horror’. Cyclical time is cyclical then precisely because it shares the otherwise unshareable experience, the relation without relation or connection of the apocalypse of coming death and becoming-no-more. What Eliot maps for us is that bleak aperçu of what I call ‘my’ death, the ultimate gift of the other with which Eliot’s narrators come face to face, repeatedly. For when ‘I’ die, it is not simply the end of what I believe to be my world; it is the end of the world. Every recurrence, every reiteration in the poem bears witness to that, while also bearing witness, through the history of London especially, that the fragment remains. The remains remain, remaining to be read however partially, their hieratic resonance coming from their ruinous and undone condition of spectral survival. And the apprehension is everywhere in the City, before the recognition of which ‘I had not thought death had undone so many’ (l. 63). That word, ‘undone’, gives the reader the clue, as does ‘unreal’. For though ‘undone’ is repeated, its reiteration is only partial; it returns as ‘undid’ (ll. 293–4). The self is always becoming undone, this is the very condition, the possibility if you will, of subjectivity, whether the ruination of the self is by Eros or Thanatos. Eliot’s is a poem of many little deaths, of programmatic sex and of corpses and burials; it plays on the potential for undoing, unbuilding, by which every word or phrase can come back but never as itself, and that its signification is already in deconstruction within itself (so that, in effect, there is no ‘in itself’). This is also sketched even in what are apparently the most trivial instances of reiteration. It is there to be witnessed in the formal reiteration of words such as ‘unreal’ or the references to London Bridge. Even the ‘violet air’ is a partial reiteration, with its recollection of the already twice-mentioned ‘violet hour’ (ll. 215, 220). Thus signs return, but only as fragments or echoes of themselves. The City and Greater

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London deliver this knowledge, in every location, in every alley or street. It is in this apprehension that the City is glimpsed as unreal, for everywhere one walks, there are the ghosts of London’s pasts. (It is illuminating to consider and constrast Eliot’s unreal city of the dead emerging from out of the fog, with the instance, observed by Arnold Bennett in his journals that the fog produces images of ‘ “the gigantic ghosts of omnibuses” ’ (1971: 233).) Finally though, after having recalled to memory the phantastic nature of the city (which in all truth has never left us), Eliot brings the reader back to the specific location in the City from which the strange journey in London and the City began: London Bridge (l. 426). This time, however, the reference does not echo with the ghost of Wordsworth but the children’s rhyme: London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down. Canonical literature has been replaced by folkloric, anonymous doggerel in this conflation of material location and oral tradition. It would be erroneous to read in the shift from Wordsworth to children’s rhyme degradation or temporal declension, for the nursery rhyme is in truth much older than the canonical verse. Structurally, Eliot has inverted, then disordered temporal ‘progression’ introducing spiralling revenance. Eliot’s omission of punctuation suggests once more the endless temporality of the end, an ongoing cyclical iterability by which London Bridge this time is defined; its identity, time and time again, is that it just is falling down. Meaning is in its undoing – and yet in the potential for its reformation. In this recirculation we hear, if not Wordsworth, perhaps the spectre of another William, Blake. With this there arrives the image of building, destruction, and making over again that is captured in one of my epigraphs: ‘It is the Spiritual Fourfold London: continually building & continually decaying desolate!’ (53.18–19) The lines, from Blake’s Jerusalem, echo a similar image of the city across time in Milton, where Blake envisions ‘The spiritual four-fold London eternal/In immense labours & sorrows, ever building, ever falling’ (6.2). Elsewhere in Jerusalem, Blake names his own four-fold configuration of cities: ‘Verulam [the Latin for St Albans], London, York, Edinburgh’ (41.24). The fifth, and absent, city is, of course, Jerusalem. Absent and yet everywhere for Blake, realized in its immanence. If it is not too fanciful, one may risk seeing a correspondence, if not a connection of sorts, between Blake’s series and that of Eliot’s. If ‘Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future/And time future contained in time past’ (CP 189) as the older Eliot of The Four Quartets comes to realize, then what begins with Jerusalem perhaps ends there also, but with a difference once again. The series of cities, with their falling towers, belong to the cycle of immanence and manifestation, building and unbuilding, in the hope of the realization of the New Jerusalem. This brings us back to where we began this section of the chapter, and Eleanor Cook’s commentary on the complex unity of the map. ‘Unity’ cannot be the correct word, quite. The concept of unity relies on the implied

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or stated condition of ‘being one’, something whole or complete, in which a fixed identity, self-identical, is produced from the combination of separate, hitherto different entities, concepts, conceits or things. Harmony, homogeneity, singleness and constancy are signified. Certainly, Eliot combines numerous quotations, multiple literary references and allusions. More broadly, he adds to these ruins of culture fragments of other cultural discourses and phenomena. They do not, however, serve in the construction of either a unity or community, unless that be one of death and phantasmic afterlife, in which survival even the identity or unity of death is undone, the spectral being that which is neither there nor not there, neither dead nor alive as such, but a liminal ‘taking place’, between otherwise stable determinations. ‘London’ as name gives the illusion of a unity, but the coordinates on the map do not produce anything other than a perceived constellation of co-ordinates serving to identify, whilst remaining disparate within, heterogeneous to the phantom or quasi-unity of an entity or place named London. And at the risk of stating the obvious, London both is and is not Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna. One can only make a comparison through the tropic play of analogy. Each name attests to its own singularity. The ‘urban apocalypse’ that is London (to borrow Hugh Kenner’s phrase) does not ultimately reveal the suppression of difference and the elevation of the singular to a unity. It only serves to demonstrate, and to perform the difference by which London is apprehended in all its times, as the same and yet not the same. If the maps shift as Eleanor Cook suggests therefore, and if this is ultimately indicated in the play of city names across lines and across history, all of which displace one another sequentially and in a supplementary fashion in ‘What the Thunder Said’, then not only can there be no unity and no permanence as such, the question has to be raised: is there a map at all? The map, its very idea, relies on the reliability of its co-ordinates, its nominal markers crystallizing as loci in a flux. At the same time, however, if every name is singular, but is, in that relation of non-relation with every other singular name (of cities), then the text substitutes its names to signify that difference is at the heart of identity, and that therefore identity can only ever be apprehended indirectly – apocalyptically. For we should not forget that apocalypse names revelation, the tekhne of aletheia, which in its machinery of unveiling reveals the unmaking of identity as the necessity that allows for analogical apperception or, as Eliot has it in ‘Ash Wednesday’, ‘The unread vision in the higher dream’. It is not simply that Jerusalem has not yet arrived, as Cook would have it. For, if time future and time past are in time present, and no time is actual except the one time (never and always, always already), then Jerusalem is always other, and yet has always already arrived; the very possibility of Jerusalem, the New Jerusalem, is in its ineluctable immanence. Out of the eschatological bleakness of The Waste Land, the messianic hope issues not as that which will one day arrive but as that which haunts every turn. The city of God is a city of the imagination, but is

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unavailable except through an apophatic, revelatory negative theology that bears witness to the doubling confession: I can connect nothing with nothing. The true, encrypted confession resides in that affirmation that resists being heard, and yet is there in this apparently nihilistic assertion, emerging in excess of it, and despite it. This is what the Thunder said; it is what is written into every citation, every Dantean allusion; and it is what every reference writes otherwise. Because all time is present and therefore undoes the unity of the purely present through anachrony, whatever is past may no longer have a reality, a gross materiality as such, but has been translated via the materiality of the letter, to resonate through the translation of different voices. The horror (the horror), is not only or merely the realization of nothingness or death, but the sublime and terrible apprehension of the unveiling of God’s face in the vision of the New Jerusalem that is in London: a human awful wonder of God. Eleanor Cook implicitly admits to the possibility of Jerusalem being much nearer than she seems to suggest in her shift from the map of London, to a map of the Mediterranean, and from there to a wholly imaginary map, that of Dante’s at the heart of which is Jerusalem, as she points out. What Cook does not follow through on is that Dante’s map is imaginary, visionary, and thus distinct from, of a different order to, those other maps she describes. The third map figures a city of the imagination, of the mind. It is the third term in the transcendence of a dialectic. How does this allow for reading Eliot’s London differently? In the imagination, London’s alterity is figured indirectly and yet everywhere through the impossible history implied by excessive citation, and ranged in this manner as an impossible cartography or city of the imagination, a disorientating double and other of itself. The map of this visionary London is never stable; quotations are rewritten, becoming pastiches and palimpsests of themselves, while phrases and terms are reiterated, thereby transforming their meaning. Such potentially endless realignments, famously imagined as the fragments shored against the ruins of the self (l. 430) stand against what Blake calls in Book of Urizen, ‘formless, unmeasurable death’ (E74), even as the poet hides himself in Dante’s ‘refining fire’ (l. 427; ‘Poi s’acose nel foco che gli affina’). We see that, despite himself, Eliot perceives how, to borrow from Saree Makdisi’s trenchant analysis of Blakean historicity, ‘it is precisely in accepting that what can be perceived defines what is possible, and that what is possible defines what can be perceived, that the fall [in Eliot’s case, the apperception of eschatological iterability] takes place, every day [though] . . . The fall . . . does not constitute a reality’ (2003: 261). Instead, as Makdisi argues, ‘it constitutes a certain highly circumscribed ontology of perception and of being’. ‘Limitless potential’ (Makdisi 2003: 261) is realized in limited forms, such as Proper Names, fragments of literary works, different voices, and so on. Jerusalem, though not realized materially, is nonetheless there, although never there as such of course. (Never and always.) The Waste Land is Jerusalem’s blueprint and building site, not its realized construction.

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In this, and in the nothingness ‘I’ connects while not connecting and without connecting, is an apophatic visionary arrival: of a Jerusalem of negative theology for Eliot – and again despite himself, despite the crisis that the encounter with the modern city engenders. Eliot’s crisis – a crisis of identity – is presented through the composition of The Waste Land. It is readable as the singular conjunction of multiple, heterogeneous signs belonging to different discourses, different cultures, different identities, and different historical instances. The fragments and ruins gathered together by the poet are analogous to the traces, events and locations, names, voices and other sounds encountered, witnessed and experienced in the movement through London. This motion is also one through time; it is part of an apparently diachronic flow. In responding to the signs, one is caused, one cannot escape the responsibility of, making a judgement or decision in the absence of any discernible unity. In turn it leads one to the apophasis that ‘I can connect nothing with nothing’ and from within that determination to apocalypse, revelation. And its name is London, in all its fearful dissymmetry, as the city of apocalyptic imagination performed in the conjunction of dislocation within location, disorientation with recurrence. As a result of the revelation of the doubleness of the earthly city, in its fragmented representation of the civitas terrena as civitas diaboli and vice versa, representation is broken open, translated from within its already duplicated self. Such breaking open affords one knowledge of ‘the interplay between singularity and repetition’ as Reinhart Koselleck proposes (2002: 136). This is already illustrated historically in the series of imperial cities, on which we have commented. As that series demonstrates, ‘history does not just run in a unique diachronic succession but always already contains repetitions – metaphorically speaking, revolutions – in which unique changes and the recurrence of the same or similar (or at least comparable) phenomena occur together’ (Koselleck 2002: 136) – hence the frequency in all senses of death and its cognates throughout The Waste Land. There are approximately twenty references in the poem to death, the dead, corpses, dying, skeletal remains, and burials. Death is the ultimate and principal sign of the complex realization of Being and its historicity, its materiality and, finally, its modernity on Eliot’s part. For him, this implies in turn both ‘diachronic course constraints, which analogously repeat themselves, and acts by definite agents that can occur side by side’ (Koselleck 2002: 136). For Eliot, the witnessing of the signs of every death belongs to that interplay between singularity and repetition, on which every reflexive consideration is grounded, but which apprehension serves in taking the ground from underneath one. London is realized for Eliot therefore in the poet’s apprehension that displacement, disjointing, rupturing are all reminders of the uncanny estrangement of the self from within itself, and that this ‘is a function intrinsic to all acts of representation’ (Goldsmith 1993: 224).

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Indeed, it is just what takes place repeatedly in The Waste Land through both the crisis of representation and the representation of crisis. We thus witness through the performative crisis of the text the presentation of intertextual references, literary and cultural allusions, place names, voices, and human encounters as Eliot’s judgement, his decisive and defiant act in the face of the undecidable. Citation’s excess in The Waste Land attests to the crisis, but not in any straightforward sense of that word. As Reinhart Koselleck reminds us, one of the fundamental concepts of the Greek language, crisis, ‘derived from krino, [means] to cut, to select, to judge’. Moreover, the concept of crisis ‘always posited a temporal dimension, which, parsed in modern terms, actually employed a theory of time’ (2002: 237). Coming face to face with crisis, one hears, perhaps at one’s back, the words, hurry up please, it’s time. As is implied also in the concept of crisis – and the narratives and images of Eliot’s text bear this out – ‘strict decisions’ to do with ‘life or death . . . salvation or damnation’ must be made. Eliot faces just this crisis by cutting, thereby deciding on, the textual fragments that he leaves adrift from their sources. In this reiterated gesture that is at the heart of the poem’s construction he aims at a ‘definitive, irrevocable decision’. Inasmuch as the decision is irrevocable, then there can be no possibility for connection. I can connect nothing with nothing. Nothing can be connected because the subject knows nothing (l. 40); and cause of that absence of knowledge comes to be projected because the subject is neither living nor dead: ‘I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing’ (ll. 39–40). Acknowledging that one can connect nothing with nothing, however, is consciousness and knowledge, where before it had not existed, placing one in the liminal suspension of being neither living nor dead. The experience of London may be catastrophic but from that experience emerges knowledge, even if it is only the belated temporal understanding that while, before, I knew nothing (note the past tense in the line), now in the present – I can – I know that I do not know and know now also that I did not know in the past. Before London arrives in the poem, in ‘The Burial of the Dead’ we read amongst other things of the sun-scorched landscape of a waste land (ll. 19–30). After leaving London, leaving, substituting, Moorgate for Margate, leaving the City for the Sea, the waste land will return, but with a difference once more. For despite the bleak wretchedness of ‘What the Thunder Said’, there is also the cleansing fire and the promise of an eternity of the iterable ‘Shantih Shantih Shantih’, equivalent, according to Eliot, to ‘the peace which passeth understanding’. So, in the absence of knowledge, everything must be wagered on a judgement. I must decide; and it is the City that recalls me to decision because of the pressure of time. Seeing nothing, connecting nothing – these are merely the gestures, not of doubt or despair, but indicative of the affirmative, felt apprehension of what Levinas calls the ‘absurd element in history’ (1997: 96; that ‘Shakespeherian rag’ highlights this idea nicely), out of which invention and intervention take place on Eliot’s part. Invention and

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intervention in the face of the undecidable are necessary, ethically urgent and inescapable. And if the ethical dimension implied in historical crisis is not clear, the Eliot of ‘Ash Wednesday’ makes it so, sensing that the purpose of crisis lies in: . . . restoring With a new verse the ancient rhyme. Redeem The time. Redeem The unread vision in the higher dream (CP 100) This ‘unread vision’ is also ‘the unspoken word, the Word unheard/The Word without a word, the word within/The World and for the World’ (‘Ash Wednesday’, CP 102). Here given visible form is the apprehension that underwrites The Waste Land: religion may well be an illusion, and faith also; but in another sense they also hold an element of truth, for they manifest both the ‘fantastic realization of the human being’ and so are professions of, and protests against wretchedness, as Marx has argued (1970: 131). If The Waste Land were nothing else, it is certainly just such a protest and profession. Particularly this is to be read in those passages that are touched by pastiche and parody in the manuscript drafts, but also in those aspects of the final, published text that ‘brings together [from the period of the poem’s composition] the electronic media, language automatism, psychotherapy and the discourse of the unconscious, and the idiom of popular culture’ (Suárez 2001: 748). In addition, there are all those traces of the past. But what brings them together for Eliot is undoubtedly London, to the materiality of which he then responds with the materiality of the letter.

IV As my conclusion to the previous section infers, locations, place names and buildings are not the only signs of London in the poem. Events, encounters and experiences – all function in the production of the city and its pile of fragmented and ruined images (l. 22). Several of the text’s characters are identifiable as Londoners, not least the typist and young man, already mentioned. There are also those anonymous ‘loitering heirs of City directors’ (l. 180). Eliot’s familiarity with Heart of Darkness may be glimpsed in these shadowy figures, the captain and host of the Nellie being a ‘Director of Companies’ (Conrad 1995: 47). Eliot also imitates London dialect in the barmaid’s speech, to which we have already referred in passing, and which concludes the second section of The Waste Land, ‘A Game of Chess’ (ll. 139–71). As the office workers are interpellated by Elizabeth and Essex, so the barmaid is transmuted into Ophelia. Everything repeats, everything doubles, but never as itself. It should be restated then that an anachronic mode of historicity intrudes so as to discomfort the subject whose knowledge

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and perception of the world hitherto has been grounded in the assumed presence of the present in some full, discrete form. Now, as with so many aspects of the poem, I am merely reiterating what is already clearly known. The point to be made here though is that, as with the two apathetic, mechanical lovers, so in the scene in the bar, the barmaid’s voice shifts to an Elizabethan counterpart. Or rather say, there is to be read another effect of temporal oscillation, and with that the arrival of specific London identities, shuttling between the 1920s and the 1590s. Such resonance takes place, again through that citation of Spenser of course. Every voice, every being, has its counterpoint, its counter-signature. London’s inhabitants live out their lives in an iterable fashion, surviving as the spectres of London through their iterations, even though there is nothing, other than utterance or action, to connect one to another. Other significations having relevance to discussion of the presentation of London in the poem have already been alluded to, and we should remind ourselves of them. As several critics have observed, the technology of the poem belongs to and serves to define the modern urban environment (Danius 2002).7 There is the gramophone (l. 256), the taxi (l. 217), the sound of car engines and their horns (l. 197), the suggestion of typewriters, and trams (l. 292). While technology is not particular to London of course, it has its place in the text for a number of different reasons, not least in that it informed Eliot’s working environment in the City. The novelty, not to say the strangeness of the working environment should not be overlooked. As Lawrence Rainey has given us cause to consider, ‘Eliot . . . worked in a new office culture, which had only recently taken form,’ . . . an interlocking grid of new communications and storage-and-retrieval technologies – typewriters, Dictaphones, adding machines, duplicators, loose-leaf ledgers, card indexes, and vertical filing systems. The typist was the epitome of that grid – capital conjured into flesh, flesh turned into a nexus of formal communication flows under the impress of systematic management. (2005a: 65; emphasis added) I highlight the image of the interlocking grid because Eliot’s experience of the office conforms to a different, yet related formation, that of the ‘discourse network’ as proposed by Friedrich Kittler (1999), which is itself implied in the office culture of Eliot’s banking world, the technologies employed therein, and their power to produce what Eliot calls the ‘human engine’ (l. 216). The presence of the technological is such that it causes Hugh Kenner to suggest that ‘The Waste Land is, so to speak, a telephone poem, its multiple voices referable to a massive short-circuit at the central exchange’ (1987: 36). Is there a ‘short-circuit’ though? Certainly it might appear manic in the frenzy of electrical activity and the complexity of its machinic connections.

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But does Kenner’s assessment not make a value judgement that is, itself, written back into a perception of technology in the 1920s as producing crisis? Would it not be a more neutral recognition to understand the poem analogically through modes of information dissemination, in all of which there are failures of communication as the inherent problematic of any transmission of signification? Eliot merely taps into the network. The human subject witnesses only partially the workings of the network, the totality and rhizomic complexity of which is beyond comprehension. Signals ‘appear repeatedly’, as do the various intertextual allusions and citations, implying by their frequency, varied duration, changes in direction, and randomness, nothing less than the ‘entire archive of Western culture’ (Derrida 1992a: 275). They gather momentarily, ‘form patterns’, but ‘no identifiable statements, much less a fixed “meaning” ’, comes into view (Emig 1995: 76). To recast this in terms of the text as modernist discourse network: if the subject is transformed in the City into a human engine, then ‘mechanized communication does not respect the organic boundaries of grammar and sense’ (Suárez 2001: 757). Between experience and textuality: modes of storage suggestively produce a mode of transmission in the modern poem, in order that the city can be figured in a manner that is appropriate to, analogous with, its own modes of recording and archiving. Kittler describes this as a mesh of ‘technologies and institutions that allow a given culture to select, store and produce relevant data’ (1999: 369). The problem though is a matter of whether data stored in The Waste Land is relevant, and, if so, to what exactly? And if something communicates, does it communicate in the manner intended, once placed in a tele-technological relay beyond the control of the individual sending the signal? Relevance would imply connectivity, and therefore the stabilizing of information, of signs and texts, as somehow meaningful when gathered together. For this there must be someone, at least in principle guiding generation, controlling storage, and prepared for arrival and reception. So, to insist on this point: although London determines the shape of the poem as well as its voices, this is not to say that London offers a determinate or coherent meaning for the reading of the text. What can be said is that The Waste Land is readable as a discourse network the very process of which is to render data when linked ambiguous, indeterminate or undecidable. Thus, while the office world is a starting point, it is not primarily or solely the world that Eliot has in mind. That is the city, the network of which is of a wholly different order. In this network, the signs of literature or culture, and the signs of modern business practices are not situated in opposition to one another; both are analogous to each other under the conditions of urban modernity. This is a city ‘governed and created by interpretation rather than firm transcendental bases’ (Emig 1995: 79). What the citations and allusions, the various historical references and pastiched styles hint at in this is how the city has always been generated and regenerated. In response to this all one can do is give oneself to ‘The awful daring of a moment’s surrender’ (l. 403).

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Lastly, in signalling those images and signs in the text that signify London and the City, we should note elements of the landscape and its atmospherics that Eliot incorporates. The river, the ‘Sweet Thames’, is observed, initially divested of detritus, though the memory traces return. They remain as testament to unspecified summer evenings in the forms of bottles, handkerchiefs, cigarette butts, boxes and sandwich wrappers (ll. 177–9). In these lines, the river becomes an archive, albeit an empty one. In this function it is analogous with early gramophones and other devices such as magnetic wire for storing voices of the past, the earliest use of which ‘was to preserve traces of the absent’ (Suárez 2001: 752). Memory is here to store that which is no longer there in the water, although those absences linger, figured in the reminiscence of past events as absent testimony. That the river operates as an archive hints at the extent to which London is itself an even greater storage facility of the same kind. The very names of its streets also enact the recording function as well as being structural elements in the larger archive, and even though those names no longer operate with the semantic vitality which they might once have had. Then of course there is sound. Not only are there the voices of Londoners – the barmaid, the typist, and others – there are also non-human sounds, such as church bells (l. 68), or the unheard music of ragtime. The title of the song, ‘That Shakespeherian Rag’ (l. 128) signals another moment in the text that traces a thread, albeit a broken one, between the 1920s and the sixteenth century. There is the music of the gramophone (l. 256), while the sound of Marvell’s ‘Time’s wingèd chariot’ (1985: 50–1; l. 22) is updated, translated in yet another of those temporal juxtapositions, this time between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, in the sound of ‘horns and motors’ (l. 197). Eliot’s translation from Marvell is instructive. Marvell’s poem continues with the couplet: ‘And yonder all before us lie/Deserts of vast eternity’ (ll. 23–4). Marvell’s desert and Eliot’s waste land may be easily imagined as two images of the same mortality, as both men mark their texts as works belonging to historically different cultures of death. Given the undeniable eschatological emphasis throughout Eliot’s poem, the horns and motors clearly substitute as the mechanized, modernized image of impending death, for which the chariot had stood. This alone is telling; for it mediates against readings that insist on Eliot’s perceptions of modernity as a falling off from a golden age. Sex and death are simply recorded differently between the centuries, memory and desire adapting their tropes to the discourse network in which they function. While the ‘human engine’ is reminiscent of a taxi ‘throbbing’, there is also the ‘pleasant whining’ of a ‘mandoline’, accompanied by ‘a clatter and a chatter’ from the public bar in Lower Thames Street (ll. 260–2). At this particular juncture in ‘The Fire Sermon’ it is important to observe that the parallel construction that contrasts the ‘fishmen’ and the walls of St Magnus Martyr (‘Where . . . where’, l. 263) only re-enforces discontinuity, the inability to make connection – except of course through the inevitable

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chance proximity that is offered by London. Observations and phenomena are brought into conjunction, as a result of being in the City, and for no other reason from which significance or ontology could be constituted. Ineluctable randomness and unpredictability are the ‘orders’ of the day (occasionally, they are ‘last orders’ also, as Eliot’s barmaid reminds us). What is seen has no relationship other than in being witnessed in spatial and temporal proximity. And what is seen is limited therefore, except by that analogical relation-without-relation afforded in and by the phenomenon of the metropolis. Very little is seen, in fact. When perceived, or perhaps more accurately imagined, at all, the City is witnessed initially wrapped in a brown fog at daybreak (l. 61) and, later, in the same crepuscular condition at midday (l. 208). The temporal order is merely that of the day, thus hinting at the arbitrary order and motion of time on any given day, to which the ‘I’ can only bear passive witness. Wordsworth on Westminster Bridge is still controlling, or still believes he controls that to which he is witness. Clock time in The Waste Land allows no such luxury, whether it is a matter of St Mary Woolnoth striking the ‘dead hour’ of nine (dead because muffled in the fog) to indicate the final call to work, or the London barmaid reminding everyone repeatedly to ‘HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME’ (ll. 141, 153, 165, 168–9). What one is given to see is dictated therefore from outside oneself. The insistence that time is imposed from outside the self, that it marks thresholds and limits rather than passages of movement (even though it is moving), calls a halt to narration, at least implicitly. If the constant consciousness of time for the subject, and to which one is made subject, is a condition of modernity; then modernity itself is ‘inimical’ not only to narration as Stefan Jonsson argues, but also (to follow his assertions further) to the narrative paradigms by which subjectivity stabilizes itself: ‘the links between life’s events are severed, as are the ones between the agent and the agent’s acts, and this incongruity precludes the establishment of a stable identity’ (2000: 137). Time conspires with place to destabilize the self, and in this the other times of the city flood back in; no longer stable, the selfin-modernity is opened to the reception of the City’s citations, its streams of data, and all those other traces of the other that informs London and the City as sites of memory. But to turn back to the fog: if the end of narrative destabilizes self, the limitations imposed on vision are equally disruptive. In The Waste Land the empirical world of the City founders, allowing entrance – revenance – to its visionary counter-signatures. As much as one might wish to elevate the significance of the phrase ‘Unreal City’ or to give it greater profundity in relation to existential crisis, it has to be said, without wishing to sound disingenuous, that the City appears simply unreal in fog. Given the original Dickensian title of ‘The Burial of the Dead’ section of The Waste Land, we should not forget the historical specificity of fog and the properties

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peculiar to its appearance in London, as is made abundantly clear in Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend. While fog is not an uncommon phenomenon, Dickens makes the reader all too aware that the fog in London is unlike fog elsewhere. Bleak House opens late in November; at this time of year the ‘dense fog is densest’ (1996: 14) in the City, specifically around Temple Bar, which marks the westward limit of the City. In Our Mutual Friend, the fog renders London ‘a sooty spectre’. Within ‘the boundary line’ that separates the City from London, the fog turns from yellow to brown, becoming darker the closer one gets to the heart of ‘the City – which call Saint Mary Axe’ (1991: 421), or the centre of the financial district adjacent, now, to the Lloyd’s Building and the location of 30 St Mary Axe, on the site of which is the building known today popularly as ‘the Gherkin’. The fog is, for Eliot – as it is for Dickens – a powerful rhetorical figure, which spectral manifestation tropes the City, thereby causing writing to counter with an estranged and estranging perception of London as the only fitting response to the becoming-unreal that the atmosphere generates. The crowds who flow over London Bridge cannot help but appear to the mind’s eye as if they were dead, so many revenant traces of the sooty spectre, and so suggestive of countless others crossing the river in previous generations and centuries. Regarding further the ‘Unreal City’ stanza of ‘The Burial of the Dead’, let us consider the relational mapping projected from the concatenation of locations and place names. While Eliot’s inaugural description borrows, it also represents. This is no longer Baudelaire’s, or, indeed, Benjamin’s Paris. Eliot’s London is not that other city of dreams, a spectre appearing in broad daylight. The bridge also recalls another literary antecedent, Wordsworth’s ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’, equally as well known as Eliot’s French source. The motion between distinct poetic sensibilities produces a wholly different visionary moment however. In doing so it dismantles itself in the act of envisioning, through that momentary violent yoking of radically different lyric sensibilities, cities, and historical moments in the cultural history of urban perception. There is thus at work in both references an effect of doubling, if not haunting, which, in their being conjoined, further disjoints them from their sources to project, and so invent, a city singularly other in its revelation. Wordsworth and Baudelaire’s urban visions transmute one another. It is therefore impossible to connect them as they are. Connecting the two fails. I can connect nothing with nothing. And yet, in the yoking of the two, a third is produced, the Unreal City of The Waste Land. So – I can connect nothing with nothing. Added to this particular representation, a representation that appears in the act of undoing itself, are the street and church, in the latter of which the bells mark time, as already remarked. Eliot brings spatial and temporal moments together, even as the proper names indicate not only different historical moments, but also different orders of historical discourse, political

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and ecclesiastical respectively. And of course, immanently resonant beneath the surface of the text there are the different times of construction, of street, bridge and church. Eliot strives to produce a mode of utterance that, from the outset, is concerned with both the poetics and politics of representation, and with intervening in their norms and habits also. For what we read to be at stake is a concern with how one produces utterance from the act of imitation, thereby risking the invention of the difference of the City in a way ‘that is or is not suitable to what must be the tone of the city’ (Rancière 2004: 11). The City gives the tone, but there is no one tone; there is no tone any more appropriate than any other, while there is always more than one tone. Involved in this project is a certain relationship and an encounter; between, on the one hand, ‘a way of speaking – a way of posing or eliding the “I” of the poet – and a way of representing, or not representing’, in Eliot’s case not merely ‘people “as they should be” ’ (2004: 11), as Jacques Rancière continues, but instead, the City ‘as it should be’. Of course in this project, people ‘as they should be’ come to inform the problem of writing the city for Eliot, which perhaps suggests the reason to acknowledge that ‘he do the police in different voices’. This ‘he’ is in one hypothetical reading London. But the voices of the city are produced and generative, even as they arise from its locations, from its streets, hotels, churches, music halls and public houses. Without wishing to enter into a debate about The Waste Land as modernist lyric poetry (which in one sense I have already done, above), or anti-lyric, it has to be said that as a gathering of pseudo-personal perceptions, Eliot’s poem does take on the semblance of a bricolage of transitory lyrical utterances, even as it disrupts from the very beginning the location of a single, stable or pure lyric ‘I’. The illusion that the lyric voice has, the illusion it transmits to its readers, is that its vision and testamentary powers are adequate to the world it seeks to represent and to convey; or, in a negative and sublime mode, to say that it cannot say. The dignity or propriety of this ‘I’ is always undermined in The Waste Land. The polyvocal articulation of London as subject-without-unity serves to make the ‘I’ improper, unstable, undecidable even. The poem, refusing to maintain the discrete separation of genres, emancipates the lyric ‘I’ from its being bound by the laws of particular authorities and canons, even as it plunders them endlessly (in a kind of poetic insider trading on Eliot’s part). This is apparent. But it is the experience of London, the encounter with the City and other parts of the capital, that inform the shaping of the poem. Understanding perhaps that ‘the emancipation of lyricism cannot consist simply of shaking off the dust of obsolete rules and the pomp of conventional expressions’ (Agamben 1993: 67), Eliot must make poetic representation solicit itself from within, with reference to that which refuses all classicism and ontological determination. In this process, encounters and events received as such undermine not only narrative coherence; they also disturb the assurance of identity.

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Eliot’s work therefore opposes to the notion of identity, with its assumptions of ontological stability and temporal permanence, the presentation of an ipseity in a series of successive phantasmagoric vignettes (Agamben 1993: 67).8 The encounter with an inchoate apprehension of the ipseity that is named London, time and again, makes such articulation possible. Indeed, it cannot be otherwise, given that every experience of the city leads one to reformulate one’s response according to the singularity of the event, a singularity that is therefore projected onto, and finding its other presentation in, the self. Hence it is that nothing can be connected with nothing, for the very reason that the singularity of ‘identity’, so-called, reduced in the text either to an ‘I’ constantly shifting or to an anonymous figure or named location ‘is not determinate with respect to a concept’, such as the idea of the City. Every name, place, experience, even the Ionian white and gold of St Magnus Martyr partakes in this revelation, ‘not from its participation in a determinate concept or some actual property . . . but only by means of this bordering. It belongs to a whole, but without this belonging’s being able to be represented . . . Belonging, being-such, is here only the relation to an empty and indeterminate totality’ (Agamben 1993: 67). London names this ‘empty and indeterminate totality’, but each city scene remains a ruin, a broken image heaped on other such visions. Impossible to connect to others, it functions only as a border or threshold at the limit of representation. The city also operates for Eliot in revealing the historically grounded experience of subjectivity’s nothingness, its own ‘being’ being inseparable from the urban surrounding in which it finds itself and so gives utterance to that orientation. For, ‘despite the discontinuities’ as Stefan Jonsson describes the relation between the multiple subject-voices that compose The Waste Land, there is nevertheless ‘a constancy that can ascribed to a subject in process of transforming’, for which location or temporary identity (the typist, the clerk, a sailor) ‘merely serves as a temporary dwelling or incarnation’ of some dimension of London. In this, each of Eliot’s different voices, ‘motored by negativity’, may be read, albeit indirectly, as attesting to their respective singularities in ‘oscillating between indeterminacy (“Who am I?”) and signification (“I am”)’ (Jonsson 2000: 166). It is this understanding of singularity to which Eliot gives voice in ‘Ash Wednesday’, when he remarks ‘And what is actual is actual only for one time/And only for one place’ (CP 95). In these lines, what is ‘actual’ is defined according to the interweaving of space and time, which, as a phenomenon, can never be repeated. The poetic or lyric ‘I’ are expressions of singularity to which the city gives shape. And they are singularities rather than beings, properly speaking, precisely because, in being merely the articulations of that which intersects in space and time within London, and which returns iterably at another moment, in another guise, they have neither existence nor essence as such. That so many voices arrive from other literary works admits to this insubstantiality, this absence of being. I connects nothing with nothing. Iterability, let us remind

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ourselves, only highlights acutely the very break up of the continuity and stability that repetition is intended to signify. Lawrence Rainey poses this assertion as a question, with which to oppose counterintuitively the notion that repetition works to produce a sense of connection: ‘For isn’t it the case’, he asks, ‘that the factitious use of repetition to intimate connectedness . . . works to disable, to annihilate, the claims to logical and spatio-temporal connectedness, which are elsewhere being asserted . . . ?’ (2005a: 57). To substantiate this challenging interrogation of causal common sense, Rainey has recourse to the ‘cityscape’ of London, specifically in the line that traces the route along the Strand, before turning up Queen Victoria Street (l. 258). The intention of the line is, as Rainey argues, ‘to transport us from the flat of the typist to the locale of the City’ and so to offer connection. However, he concludes, ‘[s]uch attention to the demands of the cityscape, and to an implied logic of spatio-temporal connection is rendered otiose by the competing claims of a wholly different kind of order that is organized around the use of repetition and pattern . . . the incremental moments of coherence which The Waste Land fashions are . . . only local, contingent, and retrospective in nature’ (Rainey 2005a: 57). Far from providing a knowable, mappable territory providing the groundwork and ground plan onto which connection and sustained subjectivity can be charted, London operates so as to dismantle, to decentre and therefore demystify, the illusion of subjective permanence and the perceptions of the world the lyric I seeks to record and play back. In fact, insistent white noise stutter of the London-machine hints that the lyric I may well be just one more ‘human engine’, an organic-technological hybrid, and one which, ironically when faced with the City and London, breaks down repeatedly. It is not that the technology of urban modernity and the work place alienates. If it does, its effect is not restricted to one of alienation and trauma for the individual. Inasmuch as it estranges, it also acts as a technology of revelation, making appear to the subject its power to inscribe and reiterate beyond any individual mortality. The City and London swarm with such iterable recordings; effectively, they are composed by them even as such technical-archival traces serve to compose The Waste Land, through their decomposition of presence and unity and, with that, the reminder through endless recycling of so many disordered, disjointing memento mori that the City is unreal because it is, in being a site of memory, the site of the dead also.

V ‘Each of us’, writes John Rajchman, ‘has geometries, composed of lines of different kinds, coming to us in various ways, which make up the arrangements or dispositions of space – the “assemblages” – in which we move and relate to one another’ (1998: 92). The Waste Land, I would argue, is one such ‘assemblage’ made all the more complex through being composed of

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multiple geometries having to do with both space, place and time. To make this more complicated still, Eliot dismantles the privilege of the lyric I. Simultaneously, he plunders and parodies both that ‘I’ and the cultural, ideological and historical contexts on which it relied, and from which it was projected, producing the illusion of such a voice in order to make authoritative statements, mystified by the aesthetic apparatus of sensuous, personal apprehension. In disassembling such authority, Eliot gives his text over to different voices, as we know. But he produces not simply several voices. Rather, he generates and reiterates a range of articulations and inscriptions, all of which register, and are indelibly imprinted by, the fluxes of class, gender, sexuality, and once again history, culture and ideology, yet this time with a dissidence that disturbs authority, centre, presence and identity. These in turn are not static reference points but, once more, assemblages with their own geometries. Eliot’s poem constructs a modernist Babel. What then, of the material from the various drafts of The Waste Land? What may we recover from those so as to understand more fully Eliot’s ambivalent relationship with London? One thing that is abundantly clear, even before we turn to the drafts (but to which sense they only add and intensify), is that he felt something of an outsider, as we have already stated. This is not exceptional though. Having the consciousness of one’s own alterity revealed as being irreducible to any polar or binary, static opposite by the city’s ever shifting, ineffable ipseity is, in no small measure, a part of belonging to the city. Being at home, we would add, with being-homeless, one’s own identity unravels through the perception of the uncanny dimension of a selfhood always in process. That Eliot ends the poem with a repetitive chant in a foreign language drawn from a faith other than Christianity, and which in principle at least has no ending; and, additionally, that he seems to conclude without concluding in a rush of languages in fact, including nursery rhymes, nineteenth-century French, sixteenth-century English, an anonymous poem impossible to date more precisely than as having been written some time between the second and fifth centuries c.e., and, of course, Dante’s thirteenth-century Italian – this all goes towards a perception, already put forward, that one is never at home, one is always foreign, outcast, other. ‘ “I have only one language” ’, Eliot might be imagined as saying, but with the caveat that ‘“it is not mine” ’. One is haunted even as one haunts the city. Never and always. This is the condition, the unbearable and uncanny homelessness of being. It is a condition given us to understand through that which is projected onto the subject as a result of the various geometries of the City and London. Reflecting on the ‘geometries of living’ along these lines, we therefore ‘encounter’, as Rajchman opines, the perennial ‘problem of the other, of autrui’ (1998: 93). Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze apropos the question of geometries that involve us in a relationship with the assemblages we call cities, Rajchman maintains that ‘the other is the “expression of a possible world” that doesn’t exist outside the expression’ (1998: 93); or, to expand

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and so clarify, outside the voice, text, name, location, sound, or other trace. This leads one inevitably to reflect on a perception of oneself as an other, an other who embodies briefly the contingent articulation of a possible world. The Waste Land takes the measure of the phenomenon that is London, finding that it contains multitudes; and so, therefore, does the poem in its response. Eliot compiles trope upon trope, text on text, place on place in such a manner that one is forced to accept that each broken image, each fragment, is autrui. Neither a subject nor an object, ‘autrui . . . [names] a principle of the spatial dispositions of our being together, which can [and in The Waste Land does] itself come undone, exposing a potential for “other geometries” ’ (Rajchman 1998: 94); which, as a consequence, causes to arise ‘the new problem of spaces of possible “encounter” not rooted in the futilities of the search for recognition, but concerned instead with the play of other possible worlds’ (Rajchman 1998: 94–5). Such play renders the stability of possible worlds impossible. It is this play that Eliot realizes throughout the manuscripts, and which, I would insist, Pound seeks to still, to downplay, or to banish. Yet something of that play still remains, as we have seen. For this reason at least, through a kind of via negativa that functions by ‘unbuilding’ images and modes of representation, the play of possible worlds arises out of crisis and judgement. To do justice to the city – this is Eliot’s goal. Too many critics have rushed to judgement of their own in seeing the poem only as the articulation of despair, ‘an account of a collapsing society, [or] an allegory of the grail and spiritual rebirth’ (Ackroyd 1984: 120). The desire for an exclusive reading calls a halt to the endless reading in which The Waste Land seeks to involve us. Despite this, however, though not available directly in word or representation, a Liebnizian ‘best world’ hovers virtually, invisibly through the geometric lines of Eliot’s neo-baroque modernity in which the self inhabits the intervals and interstices, awaiting yet another encounter with an other (and an other, and . . .). For such reasons also, The Waste Land has been adopted, as Michael Long argued two decades ago, ‘as English Modernism’s definitive report on the city’ (Long 1985: 148).9 If other less visible or canonical texts have in the last twenty years begun to usurp The Waste Land’s primacy, doubtless this has taken place as a result of the poem’s power to exhaust criticism, to force it in its ennui to turn to cliché and commonplace. In being confronted with what Kenner rightly calls a ‘form with no form, a genre with no name’ (1973: 47), criticism can have a tendency towards instrumentalism, defined by Derek Attridge as the judgement of a ‘literary work according to a pre-existing scheme of values, on a utilitarian model that reflects a primary interest somewhere other than in literature’ (2004: 13). Curiously, the partial abandonment of the rules that dictate form and genre by Eliot (and Pound) has produced an ironic effect of a critical desire to instrumentalize the text. The critical instrumentalization of the text was inevitable, given the edit. Pound can be credited with translating the poem

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out of its material culture and medium, to produce what has become a key text of high modernism. In this, he – and Eliot along with him – created ‘the perfected poetic apparatus of high modernism’, which, to borrow from Fredric Jameson, ‘represses History’. Jameson continues (in a remark that echoes with Lukacs’ critique of modernism), ‘the political, no longer visible in the high modernist texts . . . has at last become a genuine Unconscious’ (1981: 280). Turning to the excised, rejected passages of the earlier versions can only help to refocus our reading, bringing us back, if not to that which has been repressed, then certainly to a reflection on the nature of repression. Reconsideration of the occluded material should also reorientate our attention to the text as such, and force us to attend once again to the literary with sufficient scrupulousness, as Attridge argues. In no way does it imply a retreat from historicity or the political; indeed, it opens up these questions to a more nuanced and varied reading dictated from the place of the text itself. For when Kenner speaks of a form with no form, a genre with no genre, he might easily be speaking of the condition of London itself. The city presents a problem for classical ontology because it avoids, defeats, or otherwise exposes instrumentalist-analytical constraints. Turning back to those rejected fragments will also take our comprehension of the text’s singular and paradigmatic status as London-text further. More than this, the passages from the original drafts compel us to face the ruins of civilizations not as they are in themselves, but as ruins of ruins. The historical importance in this is the poet’s willingness to allow his text to remain a ‘ruin’, as John Bowen so persuasively reflects, ‘and not seek to become a monument’ (1994: 47). Resisting every effort to rebuild the City as locus of civilization, and thereby present the illusion of it whole, Eliot situates himself in the most dissonant and dissident manner imaginable as an ‘agent of the secret discontent of his own class’ (Bowen 1994: 47). As I have already had occasion to observe, Hugh Kenner has drawn our attention to the extent to which Eliot’s earlier versions of The Waste Land define it as, principally, a London poem, and a poem specifically about London rather than merely the urban in general. It is a poem of place not space. As such it writes itself into singular histories and genealogies that cannot be accommodated by the more abstract notion of space. At the same time, it places Eliot within a specific literary network and geometry, within which the various flows communicate uniquely with one another. As Kenner argues, the intention for the poem ‘was to be an urban poem, a London poem; and it was to be a poem of firm statements and strong lines, traceable to the decorums of urban satire’ (1973: 27; emphasis added). Immediately afterwards, Kenner points out that this is not such a radical gesture, given that Eliot was always an urban poet. What changes though with the composition of The Waste Land is that Eliot gives his poem just this geographical and cartographic specificity. He goes on to assert that in taking out many of the London passages, ‘the center from which . . . details radiate had been

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removed from the poem. What survived was a form with no form, and a genre with no name’ (Kenner 1973: 47). Centre. Radiate. Strong lines. Kenner’s language is informed by structurally inflected observations that give us an appreciation of Eliot’s spatial architectonics. Such an absence of identity for The Waste Land is absolutely appropriate to many of the major thematic concerns of the poem as we have received and understand it today. It makes it clear moreover the extent to which I am batting not only on a sticky wicket, if you will, but also one surrounded by potholes. However, aesthetic arguments aside, what the changes and revisions also effect is the erasure of Eliot from a tradition of urban satire in poetry and prose that includes three of Eliot’s influences, John Dryden, Charles Dickens and of course Alexander Pope. As was asserted at the beginning of the chapter, the effect is to dehistoricize the poem somewhat, to unearth it, to a degree, from the material culture out of which it developed. Pound clearly understood the extent to which Eliot was working in the tradition, when, as Richard Ellmann tells us, and as we can see in the facsimile of the draft manuscripts, he ‘objected specifically to the lines’ in which St Mary Woolnoth marks the time with a dead sound on the last knell of nine (WL: FT 9). Pound’s criticism was that ‘the references to London might sound like Blake’ (64–5). Fortunately, as Ellmann says, Eliot overruled his friend, changing just the last word of the first line, from ‘time’ to ‘hours’. Peter Brooker also comments on the poem as urban text, drawing on particular draft passages. While he reworks some of the well-known and wellworn themes of Waste Land criticism concerning despair and alienation, his contextualization and sketched reading of the poem are amongst the few that place the inauguration of Eliot’s transformation from ‘poet-clerk’ to ‘poet-cleric’ (Brooker 2002: 54) in the context, and as a result, of the bank clerk’s experience of the City. In this assessment he is surely right to locate the early signs of Eliot’s own ‘unbuilding’ and ‘rebuilding’ of the self, as he is when he comments on the vituperative scorn that Eliot displays towards the young man carbuncular in one of the cut passages. Critical dyspepsia for the petty-bourgeoisie who reside in the suburbs is no bad thing necessarily. (From some perspectives it may conceivably be valorized over the sometimes twee celebrations of the suburban banal in poetry such as John Betjeman’s for example.) The barmaid’s Cockney directness and bonhomie displays no such contempt or negative judgement (and neither do those passages from the drafts that utilize working-class London idiom). Unlike the young man carbuncular, this working-class figure is given a voice of her own. Tonality, voice and ideology are closely connected. By contrast, although the typist and her lover are portrayed as two sexual automata reminiscent of Duchamp’s ‘The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)’, the performative neutrality of this particular scene engages in a telling, condemnatory critique arguably absent from the scene and voice of the barmaid.

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The manifestation of such animosity is, Brooker argues, a sign of Eliot distancing himself from his own, more mundane, workaday self. As Brooker acknowledges, not only are various passages structured on doubles, such as ‘the real with the spectral, the mundane with the macabre’, but the finished poem as a whole ‘enacts’ the double life (2002: 52, 53). However, is it merely Eliot distancing himself, the insecurity and fears of the foreigner masquerading behind the more negative, less rationalized excesses of patrician hauteur? Or is the question one of tone and style, an aspect of the work belonging to those Augustan modes to which Kenner has drawn our attention? One can hear the ghost of Alexander Pope in the description of the house agent’s clerk who, having left the typist’s flat, ‘. . . at the corner where the stable is, /Delays only to urinate, and spit’ (WL: FT 47). The caesura in the second line is quite judiciously placed, to my mind at least. It enacts the clerk’s delay, and causes the line to pause, in order to effect an even greater disdain for the subject, which in that hesitation is really quite witty. Whether this image is too ‘near the mark’, as Pound scribbled in the margin, to remove a couplet with such satirical venom renders the clerk less the focus of opprobrium. But a dramatic, not to say performative dimension goes also, the words extending the mechanical carelessness of habitual contempt and disregard as we have already implied, which one reads elsewhere in the clerk. The severe regularity of neo-classical versification, performative in another way in that its metronomic regularity enacts the mechanical aspect of the clerk’s personality at the formal level, also disappears. I do not intend to argue for putting back every excised line or passage. The lines just discussed merely illustrate certain shifts that take place. Again, it has to be stressed that I am not interested in the relative aesthetic merits of what makes the ‘better’ poem. I am, however, interested in seeking to unfold how The Waste Land works as a London text; to do so requires that the local and idiomatic, the specific detail and precise phrasing which mediate cultural idiolect be given space and consideration. Through its many voices and the sensuous apprehension of polyphony, fragmentation and excess that causes the subject to become disorientated, displaced from within, and placed in deconstruction, The Waste Land enacts the gathering of such mediations, producing what Derek Attridge names ‘idiocultures’. (See the chapter on Levy and Bennett.) Individuals are the singular embodiments of idiocultures for Attridge. Here, as earlier, I wish to adapt the idea of the idioculture to address the numerous voices, sites and textual scraps. Let us remind ourselves of what constitutes the idiocultural, already discussed in Chapter 3. Defined as the ‘embodiment . . . of widespread cultural norms and modes of behaviour’, which complex or matrix in the reading of the text is shown to be ‘as a whole . . . necessarily unstable and subject to constant change’ (Attridge 2004: 21), the idioculture of the city is already multiple, and irreducible to the city’s name. Attridge highlights his neologism with the example of the idiocultural dialectic between Stephen Dedalus

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and Leopold Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses, defining it as ‘this highly detailed accumulation of memories, habits, associations, inclinations, fears, doubts, hopes and desires as they manifest themselves’ (2004: 22). Although not consigned to individuals, the idiocultural is nothing less than that which takes place in Eliot’s poem. Without specific persona or voice, it is written radically into every ruin and trace. Peter Ackroyd comprehends this when, in the Eliot biography, he enumerates a few of the idiocultural sites and discourses of The Waste Land: The original poem . . . was one in which Eliot freely developed his gift for dramatic impersonation and stylistic allusiveness . . . music hall monologue . . . Elizabethan narrative . . . misogynistic satire in the manner of Pope . . . the seaman’s yarn . . . [These] are not simply ‘imitations’ but rather the creative borrowing of another style and syntax which releases a plethora of ‘voices’ and perceptions. (1984: 117) The singular idioculture of event as matrix encounters others. Each transforms the other, and so unfolds from within, producing other articulations, other writings. Yet, to cite Ackroyd once more, ‘when Ezra Pound began working on [The Waste Land], he removed most of the elements of stylistic reproduction . . . and curbed the tendency of the poem towards dramatic and fictional exposition’ (1984: 119). Ackroyd concludes this critique with what will, for some doubtless, seem a scandalous, and certainly a heterodox assertion. Pound, he judges, ‘quite misunderstood the essential nature of Eliot’s genius’ (1984: 119). If Pound misunderstood – and I believe he did – it is not a matter of genius so much as missing or misreading the signs of Eliot’s own transplanted idiocultural expression. Though he felt himself a foreigner, on the evidence of The Waste Land, Eliot was much more ‘at home’ with his otherness in London (though not necessarily the economic world of the City by which he was constrained), than his American friend. It is a sign of the extent to which Eliot is immersed in, and produced as a singular example of London idioculture, that the poem produced aesthetic revulsion in John Crowe Ransom, who in 1923 bemoaned Eliot’s poetic slumming: ‘Eliot inserts beautiful quotations into ugly contexts . . . [producing] a considerable affront against aesthetic sensibilities’ (1997: 178). Of course Ransom is not to be blamed for not recognizing that he is made to feel an outsider, the poem clearly producing in him the sensation of a quite violent abjection. But the aesthetic reasoning does illuminate the cultural and historical particularities of the text, those echoes, resonances and oscillations to which Ransom was not attuned, and which to him sounded like so much white noise. Considering the original drafts, there can be no doubt that they show that The Waste Land is more clearly a London text, generated by the city and offering a reading of that city. The first glaringly obvious, though indirect allusion to London is the line from Our Mutual Friend, which Eliot wished to use and so designate ‘The Burial of the Dead’ and ‘A Game of Chess’ as

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‘He do the Police in Different Voices’, parts I and II. (The titles subsequently used were to be subtitles.) Through this line, the reader has her attention directed to a third person who, having no perceptible single voice of his own, instead speaks solely in numerous voices. If this anonymous thirdperson male figure is the narrator, then ‘he’ is a Londoner, a mimic, a shadow figure, the very identity of whom is unfathomable. The most one can say of Eliot’s chosen title and the character it employs and implies is that it offers a prosopopoeic glimpse of London in ghostly guise. It is as if this other, never to be confronted directly, is perceived always just ahead of the reader, just as that third witnessed by the narrator in ‘What the Thunder Said’ (ll. 360–3). If – and it is a large, quite insupportable if – the third as the shadowy figure of Eliot’s original title for the first two sections is readable as that third in this passage, a tenuous, fraying thread may be drawn between the perception of London’s spirit and to pneuma te¯s ale¯theias, the revelation or unveiling of the truth of spirit announced in the Gospels and elsewhere in the New Testament (John 14:17; Luke 24:49; Acts 1:8; Acts 2:4).10 Luke relates the anticipated messianic coming specifically to the city of Jerusalem, where one must remain until the revelation. This spirit, given form elsewhere by Luke as Jesus (Luke 24:13–16), is encountered on the road to Emmaus by the disciples, though not recognized as such and therefore remaining ‘the third’, ‘he’, the other. In the passage above, Eliot structures this appearance both spatially and temporally, leaving the figure anonymous. The third is only to be witnessed ahead of one, he is not recognizable in the present; his presence is deferred, it disorders the present. In being apprehended this other is followed in the hope of revelation. The gap cannot be closed, however; identity cannot yet be revealed. In this sense, one is always after the spirit or Eliot’s hooded anonymous figure, the very appearance of which is never constant, but which flickers in and out of visibility. After here signifies both belatedness and pursuit: partial understanding glimpsed through the coming to consciousness of one’s incomprehension in the face of the other causes one to follow, all the while asking the unanswerable question of identity. This partial, disjointed revelation maintains the messianic promise; as it is reported in John: ‘the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you’ (14:17). ‘He’ remains other, a figure and voice, ‘a stranger in Jerusalem’ as Luke puts it (24:18). But what is anticipated in the coming and unveiling of the spirit, as part of it the messianic promise? The last of the New Testament citations above from Acts makes this plain. On the day of Pentecost the Spirit enters the apostles in Jerusalem, as a result of which, ‘they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance’. To hypothesize further, the strong reading may be risked that, until ‘he do the police in different voices’, and is perceived as giving the gift of excessive speech in ‘other tongues’, there can be no New Jerusalem.11 Yet

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imperatively, it is a question of recognizing that the different voices are always already in play as part of the city, as that which simply is and has been the London of Eliot’s poem. The coming of the New Jerusalem is therefore not some event to be awaited but is always already immanent within the fallen city of barmaids, typists, current merchants, sailors and house clerks. It is not a matter for Eliot of resolving the polyphony into an authoritative logocentric discourse. Instead, the concern is with an understanding that po´liV, the polis, the very identity of the city or state, is always already polyglossic and heteroglossic, inimical to the authority of an ontology, hegemonic discourse, or master voice because always in process, as The Waste Land is at pains to enact. The poem is a performative text in that the voices being ‘done’ make that which is unrepresentable as a finished product (such as a voice, a statement, the city or a ‘finished’ poem which has entered into, been subsumed within, the ‘Tradition’, the ‘Canon’) available through apophatic surges. Making, process, becoming are everything in Eliot’s weak messianic performative. (A brief pause, detour, and interjection, for which I hope readers will forgive me. It is perhaps important to note in passing, apropos the language of Dickens’ quotation and its significance to Eliot’s processes with regard to the other of the city that we do not forget, in some languages at least if not now commonly in English, that the verb to do means also to make, depending on its context. To give an example, the French verb faire operates in this way. The OED gives as its tenth definition of the verb ‘to do’, to produce, make, bring into existence by one’s action. In this sense, what Eliot does, in his unconnected combination of literary citations and the ‘real’ experiences of the city, is to bring the other city into existence without representing it. If the literary is definable at all, and I hesitate to suggest this in anything other than the most provisional manner, it is in this: to bring into existence that which is otherwise unavailable to representation or experience as such. The very possibility, however slight, of the analogical apperception of the City of God, the New Jerusalem, is in this doing of voices, in what the voices make (‘What the Thunder Said’?). It is a doing as a making, which entails also an unmaking, as I have already argued. For, in order to apprehend something truly Eliot may be read as enacting through The Waste Land is the notion that one cannot merely consider the idea of the other city, and the alterity of the city ‘in its constructed or achieved state . . . you also have to represent the phases through which thought had to pass constructing it’ (Agamben 2005: 65). In representing the phases, otherness in general is transmuted into a serial alterity, each trope of the other incommensurate with every other. In the case of Eliot’s text, the ‘constructed or achieved state’ does not exist directly; it is there only in the possibility that the right reader, the good reader may perceive it. If, as Eleanor Cook argues, Eliot’s London is a vision of the modern city as Rome (1979: 341–55, passim), The Waste Land is also Eliot’s quasi-Pauline discourse on Modern London. It is

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a strange discourse, however, if one chooses to read it as this. Such a reading would produce an Eliot appearing to approximate a partial impersonation of Nietzsche’s image of Paul, a Paul who negates God. This is not meant to propose, as Nietzsche did, in a perverse though fascinating, provocative misreading, that Eliot, like Paul, is the Anti-Christ.12 Rather it is that Eliot’s Pauline approximation arrives as a Paul of negative theology (as if Eliot were the third, between Nietzsche and Paul). Pauline elements readable in The Waste Land are to be traced in its soteriological and eschatological motifs, as well as in its belief that the inhabitants of the modern city are sinful and ‘dead’, at least spiritually. For Eliot, as for Paul (stated explicitly in his ‘Epistle to the Romans’) all humanity is fallen, undone, although, and despite the lapsarian condition, there is spirit. ‘Doing the polis in different voices’, the poem not only attests to the spirit of London – and in Paul, Spirit has equality with God – its bearing witness to this spirit is, effectively, an act of faith. In this gesture, Eliot sides with the Pauline belief, expressed again in the Epistle to the Romans, that salvation is to be had from faith, not works. This is, however, merely a passing hypothesis, for which there is not the time or space to substantiate here.) Coming back to where we were, the very idea of the single, commanding voice is what is being mocked in Dickens’ line, with the political authority of the monumental, unwavering sovereign self dismantled from within itself through acts of mimicry and ventriloquism, and through the gesture of those acts being generated by a reader of the press. Communicated and disseminated through the media translation of logocentric utterance, an internal dehiscence is signalled. Satire, burlesque and carnival are the order of the day. To gain entrance to the polis, to become a citizen of this modern, haunted site, is to give oneself over to its voices, as Eliot does in the final stanzas of the poem, already discussed. If this reading has any merit then, it is in its having traced not a connection but a structural trajectory from the beginning to the end of the poem in its various forms and drafts. An admittedly meagre filament threads its way through the babble, carrying in its phantom oscillations the burden of Eliot’s urban vision, and in that the city’s cryptographic alethiology. In the first extended draft passage in which I am interested, one encounters Eliot ‘doing’ a different voice. It is that of Alexander Pope, in Eliot’s narrative of Fresca, a satire on desultory society manners. A woman who reads Richardson and dips into either Gibbon or The Daily Mirror, depending on Eliot’s revisions, Fresca is also arguably a product of London’s fin de siècle aesthetic culture, being either ‘baptised in’ or ‘born upon a soapy sea/Of Symonds–Walter Pater–Vernon Lee’ (WL: FT, 27). Although there are no direct references to London in the 72 lines that were to be cut (WL: FT, 23, 27), that Eliot was writing of London is indicated in Pound’s marginalia. At the phrase ‘cautious critics’, Pound urges, ‘surely as you are writing of London this adj. is tauto.’ (WL: FT, 27) Clearly, not only do the drafts

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provide more material on London, thereby showing the extent to which London was the focus for Eliot’s work at this time. As Pound’s critique, with its ear for tonal nuance as a dimension of the indirect portrayal of place shows, Eliot’s plan to centre the text on the city was discussed between the poets. There are other brief passages, lines, or references in the drafts that concretize the poem’s setting, whilst simultaneously demonstrating Eliot’s intimate knowledge of the capital’s cultural, social and class-based distinctions. One passage consisting of three and a half cancelled lines from a draft of ‘The Fire Sermon’ remains to be considered, before coming to three longer passages. The lines in question were to have come between ‘Queen Victoria Street’ and ‘O City city’ (ll. 258, 259). The excised lines give in detail a pursuit across the map of the City, from the Strand, through Cannon Street, described as ‘ghastly’ and past the imposing tower of ‘Michael Paternoster Royal, red and white’, as the spectral revenance of the music on the waters fades (WL: FT, 35). Little need be said of these lines, beyond the fact that they clearly show Eliot’s detailed knowledge of the labyrinth of streets and locations in the City, around the Bank and St Paul’s Cathedral. Replacing Cannon Street with Queen Victoria Street, Eliot also substitutes one Christopher Wren church for another, St Magnus the Martyr for St Michael Paternoster, replacing also the red and white for the gold and white of the Ionian columns. Other phrases or lines offer greater scope for our consideration here. In one draft extract the young man carbuncular is typified as ‘One of those simple loiterers, whom we say/We may have seen in any public place’ (WL: FT, 33). Someone without purpose, direction, or meaning, and so anonymous that he can stand in, in the poet’s perception of the general urban life, for almost anyone encountered by chance in London. Synecdoche operates here as the trope of endless seriality, iterability and supplementarity. In this early version though, the young man carbuncular is not yet the house agent’s clerk. They are two examples of the same type. The clerk is depicted as a flâneur, idling in what he pretentiously and self-advertisingly calls ‘ “London’s one cafe” ’ (WL: FT, 33), the Café Royal, favoured at the time by artists, writers and members of London’s Bohemian demi-monde. The typist in early drafts is also displayed as having cultural affectations afforded by the inexpensive material opportunities in the metropolis. She wears a ‘bright kimono’, and to her room she gives ‘A touch of art . . . by the false/Japanese print, purchased in Oxford Street’ (WL: FT, 45). Calling the print false, rather than a ‘reproduction’, intensifies the sense of the typist’s délassé status, whilst also proffering a comment on mass culture. Eliot makes a nice distinction here in giving the location of the purchase: for the typist cannot afford to purchase something a little more refined, perceived as having a little more ‘taste’, either at Heal’s store in Bloomsbury, or Liberty’s on Regent Street.

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There are three extended passages to be considered from the drafts, the first two of which were to have been included in ‘The Fire Sermon’. The third is from what Valerie Eliot describes in her note on ‘The Waste Land’ as a ‘miscellaneous’ poem, titled ‘The Death of The Duchess’, which Eliot had considered at some point ‘for it’ (WL: FT, 130), as in insertion into The Waste Land. (Just six lines survive in the published poem.) The first in order is from early versions of ‘The Fire Sermon’, originally intended to have followed on from the second ‘Unreal City’ stanza and the encounter with Mr Eugenides. A ‘ruined’ sonnet of sorts – its fourteen lines are separated at lines four and five – the passage presents what reads initially as Eliot’s most sustained, apostrophic indictment of the negative aspects of the City (WL: FT, 31). In this extract, the City’s creatures are inhuman. They move like pavement toys, mechanical devices which, in their motion, also record and so perform, reduplicate in hideous mechanistic pastiche the clockwork movements of the City workers. What they trace, however, is barely readable, leaving in its wake a ‘cryptogram’, the patterns of which, the visible lines and contrapuntal passages ‘curled’ and reiterated in only the faintest ‘perceptions of the noise’ and the multitude of lights that punctuate the urban scene. The life-forms swarm, they breed (a word within which echoes the image of The Waste Land’s opening line), they react unthinkingly. Life is a single entity, a hive-like collective made up of burrowing multitudes, which lives its existence out in unconscious circular patterns. Not only is this collective organism unthinking, it does not know how to feel. As a result, London’s drones are apostrophized in the declamatory ‘London, your people is bound upon the wheel’, a line that returns in a circular manner, the second time as an image which interrupts parenthetically the poet’s changed perspective. How to read this line? ‘bound upon the wheel’ issues from several sources, literary, historical, cultural and theological.13 One is the medieval instrument of torture, also known as the Catherine Wheel. A second source for the image of being bound on the wheel is Shakespeare’s King Lear, in which Lear remarks, ‘but I am bound/Upon a wheel of fire’ (IV. vi.39–40). With the reference to tears like scalding lead that comes in the next line, Shakespeare’s imagery acknowledges torture practices of the medieval and Early Modern periods. Yet other possible sources include the myth of Ixion and the image of the Buddhist wheel of existence, both of which are suggestive for our understanding of Eliot’s obsessions with human sin and suffering in The Waste Land. Ixion, whose narrative is tied closely to the discourse of host and guest in Greek mythology, is named by Aeschylus as the first human to kill a relative, his prospective father-in-law, Deioneus, in order to avoid providing bridal gifts. As a result of this act and its novelty, it was impossible for Ixion to be purified. He was therefore cast out, made into an exile, a stranger in effect to home, until Zeus purified him, inviting Ixion to be a guest in Olympus. Ixion betrayed the hospitality of Zeus, and Olympus in general, by planning

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to seduce Hera. Zeus set a trap for Ixion by disguising a cloud in the form of Hera, substituting the cloud for his wife/sister in Ixion’s arms. As a result, the cloud-woman, Nephele, gave birth to Centaurus. For this transgression of Ixion’s, as punishment for his desire, Zeus bound him to an eternally revolving, burning wheel. The relation between this myth and Eliot’s ‘wheel’, with its own analogous connections to the slavery and transgressions of modern temporal (in both senses) life, are too palpably apparent to require much, if any, further elucidation. Less immediately related though suggestive in its own way, however, is the fortuitous correlation between the motifs of guest, exile, and being without a home. Ixion’s exile in the first instance prohibits him from receiving the hospitality due to the foreigner or stranger in ancient Greek culture. It means that he is – in an obscure Greek word – xenitis, a stranger everywhere, a foreigner, no longer Greek according to the Law. He can never again enter a house. Ixion’s abjection is therefore an abjection of being in relation to the home, and to the home specifically by which the self defines itself and by which it is defined. Ixion no longer has recourse to the fiction of the guest, whereby though a stranger he can be received into another Greek’s home as if he were at home. While Eliot likes London intensely, as he writes in his letters, there is of course that sense expressed in Greek of his being the stranger, the foreigner that we have already mentioned. As Jacques Derrida has shown (2000), the question of the foreigner is, after a fashion, a question of non-being, of being unable to connect (anything with anything). Then again, there is also repeatedly in The Waste Land the perception and presentation of one’s being neither at home, nor in the home. In the opening lines, Marie is expelled from her childhood, as memory revives the dead past through mourning the loss of the self. In this displaced identity, an identity in mourning because it is an identity only in displacement, there arrives the act of unconcealing, though kept hidden paradoxically in its revelation through the admission in German that, ‘Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch’ (l. 12; I am not Russian at all, but come from Lithuania, pure/typical/genuine/real German). As Eliot unveiled his own foreignness through the encryption of the foreign tongue, as if to admit to an irrevocable loss, so too does the narrator of the opening of ‘The Burial of the Dead’, as if to set or give the tone. The fragment concerning true and false selfhood comes in a foreign tongue as if to signal being’s unhomeliness within itself. In a language that plays between three identities, the loss of self and its impossible, though desired origin is signalled powerfully in the resonance of echt, for which I have provided several possible translations. This mourning for home is here expressed as a writing, a broken image in another tongue, in the tongue of the other, so that being is unveiled as exilic, as constituted by discontinuity, writing, fragmentation, iterability, ‘trait, orginary repetition, différance’ (Armand 2006: 65).14 This theme of the estrangement of self and the call of the lost homeland is then taken up in

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the Wagnerian15 refrain from Tristan und Isolde, in which there is that most resonant of German words, Heimat. Hardly anyone in the poem is at home. Crowds move through open spaces, across bridges, or walk around ‘in a ring’ (l. 56), as if they were bound upon a wheel. Voices emerge from alleys and streets. Anonymous congregations are reminded that it is time to leave the public bar. Albert has come back home, the barmaid tells us, but the home is threatened with the hint that he will be given a ‘good time’, apparently by the barmaid herself if sexual relations between Albert and Lil are not resumed (ll. 148–50; as though sex were analogous with homeliness). Someone, unidentified, imagines rushing out to walk the street (l. 132). There are the loitering heirs, who, having ‘Departed, have left no addresses’ (ll. 180–1). Another figure fishes on the canal, or is behind the gashouse, mourning the death of the Father (ll. 190–2). Tiresias alone speaks of the home, specifically of the evening drift, on which the typist, juxtaposed with the returning sailor, returns home ‘at teatime’ (ll. 220–2) The typist’s home seems only the most desultory, tawdry and temporary of unhomely places. It is a location in which underwear left to dry on the window is, in principle displayed unthinkingly to the outside world. Privacy is thus violated. Things are piled anyhow, personal effects reduced to a catalogue of domestic items and undergarments, while a divan doubles as a bed (ll. 224–7). Of course, a divan is also a type of bed as well as being a form of sofa. Identity and propriety in a domestic context are troubled once again, albelt slightly. Even the identity of furniture is makeshift then. As with Albert and Lil’s ‘home’, the typist’s domestic interior is associated with sex. It is almost as if the home exists for copulation, that is its law. Other narrators hear sounds on the streets, of motor horns or music. And while there is the city and the chapel in ‘What the Thunder Said’, there are no more homes, no longer any intimation of being at home. Certainly, one is never at home in a city where there is always something at one’s back, where streets are ‘ghastly’, and something calls to one, reminding one of mortality, or some ghostly manifestation of another time. If there is no doppelganger in London for Eliot or any of his characters, then the city is all the more estranging and strange; for that uncanniness which we find in the encounter with our double or other relies for its disquieting force in the recognition of the self outside the self. The Waste Land never offers this strange discomfiting comfort. It is a poem of brief encounters, fleeting recollections, and liaisons that are either opportunistic or mechanical. London thus presents Eliot with the Law of the Foreign State, against which there is no appeal. This Law dispossesses one of any connection, of home, and of self-identification in even its most uncanny recognitions. All the inhabitants of the city can do is turn in circles, repeat their actions, even as their activities are dictated through their being bound to the wheel of work and the automated process that is economics. Regarding the dharmic symbol of being on the wheel of existence, it is obviously appropriate to

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Eliot’s various sacred references, not least those to be found in ‘What the Thunder Said’. It also touches on Eliot’s later allusion to Buddha’s Fire Sermon, ‘Burning burning burning burning’ (l. 308), another of those potentially iterable lines, which constitute a simultaneously closed and open circular and recycling structure. The phrase ‘Wheel of Existence’ is of course a translation. Others used in various texts, depending on context, are ‘wheel of becoming’, ‘wheel of suffering’, ‘wheel of transformation’, and ‘wheel of rebirth’. Such translations all highlight an apparent double bind or paradox. The Buddhist image conveys the idea that humans are trapped in their physical existences, and that transcendence remains impossible. Hence the dreary, unending, and apparently inescapable material condition of being in all that one sees, if the swarming life of the city is all that one sees. Certainly, this supports ostensible images of City-life and spiritual death that pervade the City sections of the poem. However, one key to this is the distinction between mere seeing and visionary projection, that kind of visionary state that does not rely on empirical sight, and the phenomenological power of what Eliot above calls the aberrant mind, which I shall go on to discuss. Eliot does not restrict the life of the poem or the discourses on which he draws to the inescapable dharmic figure. Also, one has to recall that the phrase is translatable as proffering the possibility that transcendent states of being can emerge from within lower states, and are not located outside or statically opposed to the conditions of sin and fallenness in which Eliot portrays London’s population. Once more, the reader has impressed upon him or her the time of consciousness and perception, those other temporalities separate from work time and the necessary temporality involved in apprehending or perceiving a state or condition. To extend this comprehension, and to compare also the figure of the wheel by analogy with the cyclical modes used by Eliot, implicated in all of which are the issues of iterability and revenance: in repeating the cycle, the human has the chance in returning to the same location, with the potential for perceiving differently. The trace, the phantasmic citation that is memory, offers not only difference and therefore the opening of a gap between the earlier event or experience and the later ‘aberration’ that escapes equipoise. Memory also ‘shows itself as a propaedeutic and anticipation of salvation’ (Agamben 2005: 77). Not necessarily salvation as such, but the messianic possibility in the breach effected in and through memory. This is perhaps especially the case with the iterability of citation as the sign of the survival of cultural memory. What comes back does so as a ‘vertiginous abbreviation’ (Agamben 2005: 77). It manifests itself as a short-circuited memory if you will, in a recapitulation of citations and allusions maintaining that manic telephonic exchange that is the text. Responsibility for envisioning or realizing encrypted messianic hope resides in the reader, in hearing the stuttering, failed communication within the noise of the discourse network. Turning back now to the passage cited above: the collective life of the City is composed of ‘phantasmal gnomes’ (given in one version as ‘spectral

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goblins’ [WL: FT, 37]), small burrowing creatures who penetrate the very fabric of London, and who are also ghostly. Quite possibly, given the change in focus the verse takes in five of the last six lines above, such perceptions are not grounded in reality but unreal visions of the mind. Given that in folklore gnomes are commonly held to guard the earth’s treasures in secret, usually underground locations, Eliot’s vision of the workers in the financial district is both comically grotesque and apposite, especially in its focus on automated repetitiveness. The image would not be out of place as a dissolving series of montage shots from German expressionist film. It displays a distaste for the economic world, which, in being envisioned in mythopoeic fashion, places the image simultaneously within the real and the unreal, the material and the visionary, thereby once again affirming the doubling and dislocation that is to be found throughout much of the poem within any given, seemingly single image or identity. At the same time, another doubling effect is at work, also found throughout The Waste Land: the play between the organic and machinic, the human and inhuman. For, if the bank workers are gnomes, they are also pavement toys, those clockwork devices sold by itinerant street vendors, perhaps seen by Eliot as he passed up King William Street to work. That the unthinking hordes are gnomes and toys, flesh and mechanical, makes these strange semi-automata all the more phantasmal, more exaggeratedly uncanny. There is in this vision a sense at one and the same time of faint hysteria and yet distance. With that second sense, there is to be read an odd superiority, a strange elevation above the norm. The allusion to certain ‘aberrant’ minds hints at this. Intellectual deviance is preferred to balance, to the circulating, self-maintaining restricted economy of the City. Here is the swerve, the refocusing away from the perception of the daemonic condition of the City, to a reflection on perception as interpretation and decoding, of which I spoke just now. The lines turn away from the vision of the City in order to address how there is to be decrypted that which, invisible to the unthinking, may be there, hidden and inaccessible to sight though not to deviant insight. Eliot thus indicates that there may be a reading of London that belongs to a different order; he does not succumb, either here or elsewhere in the poem for that matter, to offering that reading or any representation of the other directly. Instead, we are informed straightforwardly that the alterity of the city is within and yet occluded by, the cryptogram of automated motion. It may come to light, though of this there is neither guarantee nor certainty. All that can be said is that aberrant minds do record and decipher. So inaccessible is the vision of London’s otherness that, at best, one can only attest to the fact that the others who record ‘trace’ the hypothetical cryptogram, the buried writing that is the City’s counter-signature. In this perception, Eliot keeps up a kind of distance even from those ‘aberrant minds’, as if he were not willing or able to identify himself with them; as if he were recording or perceiving what takes place from some other undisclosed location, perhaps.

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The second passage in which I am interested amounts to eleven lines, from which are filleted just four, ll. 292–5, which mention London suburbs, specifically Highbury, Richmond and Kew (WL: FT, 51). If one wonders occasionally why Eliot chooses the surburban London locations beyond the City that he does, it is impossible to know with any certainty. One is thrown back on the dubious resources of hypothesis. Doubtless, the passage above offers the possibility for displaying what F. L. Lucas, in reviewing the poem for the New Statesman, describes as ‘more suburban sordidness’ (1997: 197), as does the tryst between the typist and her young man at which Lucas recoils. The map remains frustratingly resistant to interpretation, the vagueness of place in inverse proportion to the specificity of name. Highbury is one such site. What we can read from this, with its small, pathetic pride expressed in the affirmation of one’s ‘people’ as ‘humble and conservative’, is the voice of the petty-bourgeois once more. This is not the heir of a Company Director, merely the daughter of a small business owner, whose life is consumed by the business, as that in turn is anthropomorphized in the excised lines, being ‘small’ and ‘anxious’ (presumably like its proprietor). The anonymous voice takes pride in belonging to a community of suburban conformity and humility. The very lines enact the unadventurous sentiment of the collective psyche for which this voice speaks. Here in deceptively mild expression is Eliot’s cynical dyspepsia manifested to the middle classes once more. The intensity of Eliot’s animosity is sounded out in the apparent reasonableness of utterance, which still manages to imply complaint in its repetition of ‘business’, and the fact of its limitations as indicated through the location of the family home, the destination for the annual holiday, and the remembrance of a day’s excursion to the somewhat wealthier, and certainly genteel suburbs of south-west London. Evidently, once more Eliot was keen to get the tone of this vicious caricture just right, in changing the Highbury residents’ holiday location in the excised passage from Shanklin, on the Isle of Wight, to Bognor on the Sussex coast. What is edited from the passage is the extent of the critique, its narrative clarity, its small affirmation of family and community, of settledness. Perhaps the lines are removed because, it might be argued, they could explain or excuse the sexual rebellion on the river. One cannot tell. What I would propose conversely is that the suburban context of the draft sustains Eliot’s critique of paltry middle-class resentments and discontents that are there to be traced in the cryptogram of the passage, and that, in this light, the sexual surrender is made all the more dismal. From the marginalia we see that Pound was in two minds, instructing Eliot to ‘type out this anyhow’, while Eliot was dissatisfied already, having struck through the lines quoted and already at work on the rewrite. (Pound did find the moment of sex in a canoe ‘echt’, though; it rang for him as true or real.) My last extract from the drafts comes from a separate poem, ‘The Death of the Duchess’, intended for insertion into The Waste Land, as Valerie Eliot

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comments. It portrays the inhabitants of Hampstead, a wealthy North London suburb (WL: FT, 105). Little is struck through, changed, or removed (WL: FT, 105). The denizens of the North London suburb are remarked with a numbing conformity of habit. Wearing silk hats, going to tea on Sunday afternoons, playing tennis on Saturdays, their habits of thought are precisely that: habits, without any dissent or pause for reflection. They take the temperature of their opinions from ‘the morning printer’s ink’, and the moribund acceptance and rote condition of their existence is marked and remarked in Eliot’s triple reiteration of the phrase ‘they know’. The regularity and repetition enact lifeless, mechanical orthodoxy. Those who live in Hampstead are identified in the fact that they do the same things at the same times. They do the same week after week, as the cycle of Sundays in the passage announces. And they each do the same as every one of their neighbours. This is, we see, the domestic life of those who, in the City, are ‘bound forever on the wheel’ as the passage has it. The cycle repeats itself from the place of work to the home and community life, thereby indicating a balance, a uniformity and absolute resemblance that erases all distinction between work and home, public and private, whilst doubling and reiterating the pattern and image. Anonymity and stultifying similitude are intensified through the revelation that knowledge is presented through an external medium, the daily newspaper, as already remarked. This is a purgatorial suburban world in which no one thinks for themselves, nor demonstrates any sign that they know how to do so. As the poem continues, ‘In Hampstead there is nothing new’ (WL: FT, 105). As with the Highbury section, this depiction of domestic life is hardly enviable. Its very regularity suggests a mordant drabness, another expression of spiritual death. The only perception of the appalling condition of this life comes from the report of a houseplant, a potted aspidistra, which ‘grieves’ through the lace curtains of an evening (WL: FT, 105). Only plant life despairs in this portrayal of culturally moronic suburban ordeal, in which there is no escape from the wheel of existence. Here at least, and of course in and throughout the London suburbs of early twentieth-century London – the ends of so many spokes of a radial map, the hub of which is the City – Eliot maps what he both reads and experiences as (to borrow a comment of Fredric Jameson, possibly against his intention) ‘a conservative containment strategy without content’, and also a rejection of any ‘intellectual . . . threat of progressive . . . positions’ (2002: 164).

VI Each of the London ‘types’ imagined by Eliot – Fresca, the young man carbuncular and the house agent’s clerk in the drafts, the typist, the young woman from Highbury, and the anonymous suburbanites in Hampstead – all are caricatures. Eliot mimics them all. He does the middle classes, making

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them appear as they are, in their different voices, voices which share in their difference indifference, the lifeless anonymity and mechanical repetition of the modern bourgeois urban and, more significantly, suburban subject. This is Eliot’s nightmare music hall, his parody of monotony and regulation, Mrs Equitone as Mr and Mrs Normal Equipoise, and their children too, the little Equipoise juniors. The middle classes are typified for Eliot by the more conventional Georgian writers in their repeated manifestation of ‘the extreme lack of culture’ (Eliot 2005: 138). Implicitly linked to this critic’s perception in his ‘London Letter, March 1921’ is that ‘[b]oth middle class and lower class are finding safety in Regular Hours, Regular Wages, Regular Pensions, and Regular Ideas. In other words, there will soon be only one class, and the second Flood is here’ (Eliot 2005: 138). Not so much a moronic inferno, more a banal, clockwork and orthodox apocalypse, then, at least as far as Eliot can see, and an apocalypse that unveils ‘a literature without any critical sense’ (Eliot 2005: 138). For Eliot the critic, Georgian writing and culture is inventive only of dullness, its dullness paradoxically ‘original, unique’ (138). Edith Sitwell is singled out particularly for Eliot’s opprobrium in a language appropriate to the critique of the middle-class Londoner with pretensions, of whom we read in The Waste Land. She is ‘tediously given to repeating herself’ (139). Here, artistic creation is reduced to technical invention, one more part constructed from already existing constituent elements in an ordered, cultural totality (Derrida 1989: 43) without the signs for Eliot of throwing a spanner in the works. What the middle-class Englishman and woman lack, Eliot argues in ‘The Romantic Englishman, the Comic Spirit, and the Function of Criticism’, is the ability to see themselves; they have no consciousness, no selfconsciousness. Such consciousness of identity is given only in comedy, in the music hall performances of ‘Little Tich, [George] Robey, Nellie Wallace, Marie Lloyd’ and others (Eliot 2005: 142). Comedy has for Eliot the power of revelation, perhaps despite itself. In its unconscious ability to strip the ideology of national identity down to the Hogarthian or Cruickshank-like bones of satirical caricature, it makes possible the ideological critique that decentres and destabilizes the essentialist and universalizing assumptions of identity as true, eternal, given and unchanging. This comedic force is precarious, however. Were the comedian ‘aware that his fun was more than fun he might be unable to perform it’ (Eliot 2005: 142). Equally, the audience, Eliot argues, ‘do not realize that the performance of Little Tich [and the others Eliot names] is a compliment, and a criticism, of themselves’ (142). Unconsciousness is key here, and Eliot draws our attention to such lack of self-awareness made the driving fuel of the engine of capitalism, business, the very economics of self-regulation in the Georgian City. This fuel is also a virus though – for it contaminates cultural and social being, bringing about cultural and historical amnesia in the very place where the signs of cultural alterity and vitality are to be read, if only they can be

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deciphered. More than this, the flow between the suburbs and the centre of the City is a two-way flow. It is not simply the case that the City is the evil, the heart of darkness for Eliot. The suburbs are already filled, and continue to renew themselves with ‘the petrified product which the public school pours into our illimitable suburbs’ (Eliot 2005: 143). Eliot offers few characters in The Waste Land in opposition to the middle classes of London and the suburbs. There are of course the fishmen, as there are the players of mandolins, and, we must not forget, the barmaid. Though she is comical, as much a product of music hall realization as reality and perhaps somewhat vulgar in her directness, she is not ridiculed, she is not the subject of a blistering attack by Eliot. Instead, there is in her vulgarity or, as Eliot has it ‘[w]hat is sometimes called “vulgarity” . . . [the] one thing that has not been vulgarised’ in English culture of the early twentieth century: a vitality, and a different voice within and yet other to the City’s conformity, habits and conventions. She is thus a figure formed by Eliot’s understanding of the moral purpose of Volpone, criticizing ‘humanity by intensifying’, if not wickedness as in Jonson’s play, then ideologically, culturally and historically grounded ‘humanity’ in an actualization of the singular co-ordinates, the ideoculture of the working-class ‘Londoner’. The barmaid is a ‘fragment’ if you will. Like the literary allusions, the historical references, and the gestures of mapping districts, streets and aspects of the city in all its singularities, she provides what Eliot calls one fragment ‘of a possible English myth’ (Eliot 2005: 142). The unexpected upsurge of the fragment from within the machinery of both the everyday and literary convention risks invention. It invents the myth through initiating the disruption, the disorder, the upset in the system (Derrida 1989: 43). What, in conclusion does such disruption have to say, what might be read concerning the inventions of the city, and the experience of the city’s singularities, with regard to such fragmentary surges on which the poet seizes? London makes possible for Eliot the recognition that, if one ‘remains always a foreigner’ (Eliot 1988: 310), as a result of the city, London at least is always and everywhere ‘foreign, but hospitable, or rather tolerant, and perhaps does not . . . demand to be understood’ (1988: 55); and so one gets ‘used to being a foreigner everywhere’ (1988: 431). If everywhere is foreign, and one is everywhere a foreigner, London offers the possibility endlesslessly of the eruption of the fragment, the ruin, and the revelation of the singular experience of difference, despite the enforced regulation desired by the middle classes. The city is composed and discomposed not by fragments to be assembled, to be connected to one another, but as so many events, sites, locations, voices, caricatures, ruins and inventions of the other. The poem, The Waste Land, is structured like the city, from out of which it unearths its pastiches and palimpsests, suggesting forcefully that this is all there is. There is no centre, no governing order or truth to London and to the identities informing and deforming it. In its predicative assemblage then, The Waste

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Land seems initially to assert the emptiness of particular culturally determined examples of selfhood. This takes place in a modern world where all that can be grounded occurs apparently only in endless repetitions of the selfsame, through an economy of containment and the concomitant evacuation of intellectual energies. Yet despite this, the poem’s bleak hope lies simultaneously within that very same world, in the emergence, as Derrida has it, of invention, of disjointing, disruptive and haunting fluxes, all of which may tend towards and so seize the merest glimmers of invention. Inventing an apparently machinic poetry, making of poetics a tekhne, Eliot kills off verse to bring back to poetry the vision of poets, a vision that is both a poesis and a mnemotechnic of the city. This is what is recognized by Hugh Kenner in describing The Waste Land as being a form without a form, a genre that is no genre. Without disagreeing with Kenner in the least, I would like to supplement his assessment, that the no-form, the no-genre that is The Waste Land is also radically inventive. It invents a performative discourse on the city, each and every other city bound upon the wheel as it were of The City. A weak messianic hope therefore remains, not a representation of the New Jerusalem or the City of God, but nevertheless emerging from within the notion of a waste land. There are to be read the traces of a cryptogram, as Eliot has it and as we have argued, of other Londons, the others of London, the others within London, others’ Londons, and London’s others. Herein lies the poem’s ‘ideological potency’, to borrow Terry Eagleton’s phrase in his assessment of Eliot’s classicism. The inventive power of Eliot’s text – and equally the inventive power of the London he comes to apprehend – is ‘in its refusal of static, rationalist forms’ (Eagleton 1978: 147). Eliot’s writing responds to the invention the city inaugurates repeatedly from within the habitual, which is a ‘labile, self-transformative organism extended in space and time, constantly reorganised by the [idioculture of the] present’, clutching and penetrating ‘the turbulent, fragmentary character of contemporary experience’ (Eagleton 1978: 147). In this invention of the city, The Waste Land dreams a poetry equal to the experience of every other London in all the city’s experiences of the singular, which is to say a writing ‘without the horizon of reappropriation, programmation, institutional legitimation’ and allowing ‘the adventure or the event of an entirely other to come’ (Derrida 1989: 61).

This great work is infinitely difficult in its particulars, though not in itself; not that the city is so difficult to be described, but to do it in the narrow compass of a letter, which we see so fully takes up two large volumes in folio . . . Daniel Defoe

Notes

Introduction 1. While invenience is a neologism, I am inventing it from an already existent if somewhat obscure adjective, invenient.

1 The Hieroglyphic Other 1. Although, in distinction to this, see Bennett’s hallucinatory representations of the Upper Richmond Road in Buried Alive, discussed in the second part of writing London. 2. Interestingly, Freud develops the notion of doubling in relation to death around the example of ‘the Ancient Egyptians’. 3. All further quotations in this paragraph are taken from the same passage unless otherwise indicated. 4. While with his use of ‘big O’ otherness and the reference to the mirror stage, Augé is drawing on a Lacanian paradigm, which in this instance I obviously support, I have kept the lower case for my own spelling of other so as to indicate a sense of alterity more generally epistemological than specifically psychoanalytic.

2

The ‘tortuous geography of the night world’

1. Wordsworth’s ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’ can be read, arguably, as finding its antithetical counter-signature in Forster’s novel, first published in 1910. Had Wordsworth walked a few yards from the bridge, his vision of the city opening itself might have led not to the fields, which Forster ‘reaches’ beyond, but to the monstrous abyss within which representation founders. 2. Neon gas had been discovered by William Ramsey and M. W. Travers in 1898 in London. Georges Claude patented the neon tube in 1915, his earliest experiments with this form of lighting dating back to 1902. In 1923 Claude’s company, Claude Neon, sold two signs to a Packard dealership in Los Angeles. 3. I am consciously imitating in part the opening sentence of Jacques Derrida’s essay ‘Khora’ (1998b: 231–63). I play on Derrida’s phrasing not simply for the sake of play, if in fact at all, but rather as I have been – and remain – indebted elsewhere in my publications on the literary representation of London, particularly the essay ‘London-khoragraphic’, fi rst published in ImageTexT 1:2 (2004; www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext), which addresses the relationship between reading the impossible structure of the city and the notion of khora as it problematizes the arguments of Plato’s Timaeus. 4. I am employing souvenir here in one of its less common senses, as the ‘slight trace of something’, to cite the OED.

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Notes

Between Seeing and Knowing

1. The term ‘idioculture’ is coined, and its meaning defi ned, by Derek Attridge (2004: 21–2, 82–3). Attridge employs the neologism in a constellation of related figures, to do with questions of singularity and invention apropos of literature and, more specifically, the literary. I address those other issues explicitly in my introduction. ‘Idioculture’ is used, Attridge explains, to ‘refer to this embodiment in a single individual of widespread cultural norms and modes of behaviour’ (21). From this defi nition, it can clearly be seen that I am departing from Attridge’s reading of the human as the nexus of cultural encoding, ascribing the idea of idiocultural singularity to the specificity of place, and what takes place habitually in a given place, so as to serve in the definition of that location or site. More than this, however, I perceive also that which is idiocultural about a place, such as Riceyman Steps in Clerkenwell, as being a matter of accretion and sedimentation of cultural traces over time, in particular ways and conjunctions distinct from, other than, other areas in the city. While it can be argued that areas and districts share common patterns of ‘cultural norms and modes of behaviour’, it is my contention that the London writer alive to the idiocultural dimension of place makes it difficult, if not impossible to ignore the singularity of place, as writing invents or, let us say, finds, that which writes location in the precise manner that it does. 2. Page references are taken from the Guttenberg Project e-text PDF download. 3. See Squillace’s defence of Bennett and his own critique of Woolf (1997: 16–25). 4. Once London gets into Woolf’s essay, it is hard to keep it out. The ‘mothers of the Mile End Road’ are invoked, while Richmond turns up once more (1991: 78). 5. See my previous discussion of Woolf’s ‘Street Haunting’ in writing London: the Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens (1998: 199–200). 6. All quotations immediately before this citation are from the same page. 7. See, for example, Neil Cartlidge (2002: 115–36) and Linda Hunt (1998: 235–44). 8. I am borrowing, rather cheekily it has to be confessed, Blair’s approximation of Friedman’s contentions because I disagree in no small measure with Blair’s assertion that the heterogeneity of alterity is to be found in Woolf. This is not to say that such a reading of Bloomsbury is not possible; instead, it is not possible, convincingly, apropos the works of Virginia Woolf. Blair develops her argument through a reading of Bloomsbury as non-lieu, or non-place, drawn from the anthropological discourse of Marc Augé (1995). My own hypothesis is that a non-place, a u-topos, must accede to that imperialism of the imagination of which Tennyson stands accused by Alan Sinfield if it is to be successfully realized at all, and that the act of imagining Bloomsbury, while sharing in its project particular similarities to the locations identified by Augé, such as hypermarkets or airports, is, fi nally, impossible to think on such terms. Inasmuch as it must succumb to the wresting of an imagined from a real world, the non-place must simultaneously partake of both the material and immaterial, or have about it that illusion of immateriality that allows one to erase the heterogeneity of alterity, in favour of the perception of local differences, all of which in turn are consonant and harmonious with one another, and so inform a seamless or relatively seamless structure or architectonics within the greater eidetic simulacrum

Notes 249 of place. Blair’s subtle, rigorous argument throughout the article on place is powerful, convincing, and, for the most part, I am in complete agreement with the ways in which she reads the singularity of Bloomsbury in this admirable essay. It is only over the reading of Bloomsbury as non-lieu in relation to Woolf’s presentation (or not) of its alterity or, to be more specific, the heterogeneity of modern alterity that I disagree. As Blair acknowledges, Woolf writes ‘little about the texture of Bloomsbury . . . spaces, institutions, and local histories’ (2004: 827). In that Woolf’s Bloomsbury is relatively untextured then, and that, equally, it is, similar to the various non-places of Augé’s compelling analysis, defined through the taking place of ‘transition, anticipation, and fluid movement’ (2004: 827), then it aspires to the condition of the non-lieu. But this is hardly to inscribe Bloomsbury as ‘marginal space or a site of uneven alterities’, as Blair argues (2004: 827). It is not that Bloomsbury is not and has not been this. Rather, it is that Woolf remains uninterested in (or unable to) present this. 9. See Aubier (1966: 99–102). 10. All further references to this journal entry are taken from this page.

4

‘All the living and the dead’

1. For a brief, informative discussion of the significance and practice of chorography in Early Modern England, see McLeod (1999: 95–9). 2. William Camden, Britain (1610). For a reading of chorographical texts and their ideological function, see Helgerson (1995: 107–47). 3. Coram’s Fields, a children’s park in Guildford Street, London WC1, is named after Thomas Coram (1668–1751), who is best remembered for the founding of a Foundling Hospital in 1739. While its history is not immediately relevant to Berger’s narrative, the name of the park is significant in the ‘Islington’ chapter of Here is Where We Meet, in that it signifies an alternative historical London narrative in a manner akin to other narrative signs from the chapter. 4. On surveillance and the city, see particularly the third essay, ‘Bulls & Bears & Mithraic Misalignments: Weather in the City’ (89–132). 5. I explore the struggle over the meaning of stalking in Deconstruction • Derrida (1998: 138–58). 6. In French, un veilleur is a lookout. 7. I have taken this phrase from the title of a book by Branka Arsic (2003). 8. In Sinclair’s use of the word ‘reckoning’ there is the smallest intertextual ghost, given that the word is used by Charles Nicholl for his ‘history’ of the events surrounding the murder of Christopher Marlowe (Nicholl 1992). Nicholl’s book also offers a comprehensive study of Elizabeth I’s spy network. 9. The novel to which Sinclair refers is William Burroughs’ Junkie. The first page, the cover from a paperback edition and a photograph of William Burroughs, over which the first page is superimposed, are reproduced at the end of Slow Chocolate Autopsy. Another Norton also appears in a line attributed by Sinclair to Weldon Kees, and is on the title page of ‘The Griffin’s Egg’ chapter of Slow Chocolate Autopsy. In the teasing and vertiginous interests of abyssal intertextual resonance, it should be noted that Weldon Kees alludes to Elizabethans and T. S. Eliot in ‘The Speakers’ (1975: 6), and to Christopher Marlowe in ‘Travels in North America’ (117). What are we to make of all this? Perhaps nothing – or everything. It remains undecidable. But, in a way this is precisely what is at stake in those chance collisions of memory’s flows, on which Sinclair insists.

250

Notes

5 The Waste Land 1. Eliot mentions Blake only once in his letters up to the publication of The Waste Land. In a letter to Mary Hutchinson, in 1919, Eliot remarks of the poetry of T. E. Hulme that ‘I can’t think of anything as good as two of his poems since Blake’ (1988: 311). 2. Given the number of contemporary reviewers of The Waste Land who could see nothing of merit in it, and freely admitted that they did not understand the poem (as a typical instance of the negativity and incomprehension, see, for example, Humbert Wolfe 1997: 200–3); given also Eliot’s fondness for pastiche and mimicry, it is tempting, to say the least, to read this much exercised phrase not as the expression of disillusion or despair, but of someone who, as a reviewer and critic himself, anticipates, and so puts the words ‘I can connect nothing with nothing’ into the mouths of one – if not several – of his future reviewers. 3. Burke, born in 1886 (d. 1945), the year before Eliot, was the author of short stories of the uncanny and grotesque, but also chronicled, in what is arguably a somewhat conservative, not to say sentimental fashion the everyday – and night – life of London in a number of books, including Nights in Town: a London Autobiography (1915), Limehouse Nights (1916), City of Encounters: a London Divertissement (1932) and London in My Time (1934). I cite an e-text of this last book. 4. Cook has argued for the influence of Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of the Peace, especially in its spectral representations of a nightmarish Paris, on Eliot’s own visions of the workers and the banking world of the City (1979: 341–55). Cook also provides the reader with a number of significant literary contexts out of which Eliot produced his vision of London as the new Rome, chief amongst these being The Education of Henry Adams, with its Augustinian influences, Conrad of course, Kipling, and Henry James of The Golden Bowl. 5. We can perhaps read this experience in Eliot’s comedy of American provincial gaucherie in being confronted with London, in the figures of Klipstein and Krumpacker from the unfi nished poem, Sweeney Agonistes: Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama (CP 123–9). Agreeing with Klipstein, Krumpacker remarks, with an air of knowingness, ‘Yes, London’s a little too gay for us/Don’t think I mean anything coarse –/But I’m afraid we couldn’t stand the place’; to which Klipstein responds, ‘London’s a slick place, London’s a swell place,/London’s a fine place to come on a visit –’. There is an air of music hall farcicality about this, a degree also of camp histrionics. 6. Pope’s London is one of ‘foul-mouth’d Scolds’ (l. 17), a Porter with a ‘Hand obscene’ (l. 44); it is a place of stench, curses, and ‘cack’ (l. 8). 7. See also Rainey and Suárez. 8. In distinguishing between identity and ipseity, I am drawing on the work of Paul Ricoeur (1990). 9. I gratefully acknowledge Bryony Randall’s essay, ‘John Gould Fletcher’s City Aesthetic: London Excursion’, for drawing my attention to Long’s essay. Randall offers a cogent reassessment of modernist urban texts that have been unduly neglected. 10. All biblical references below are taken from the King James Version (1998). 11. The transference I am tracing from the excised title to the passage and its implications and contexts from ‘What the Thunder Said’ fi nds its structural parallel

Notes 251

12.

13. 14.

15.

elsewhere in the drafts of the poem. Recalling that Eliot had intended to use the quotation from Heart of Darkness that ends with Kurtz’s repetition-withoutclosure of ‘the horror, the horror’ as The Waste Land’s epigraph, one may (legitimately or otherwise) trace a line from that structurally open iterability to the equally open utterance with which Eliot ends (without ending) the poem: ‘Shantih shantih shantih’. Reading the reiterations from one end of the text to the other, after the discussion above on the relational non-relation between Dickens’ line and the citations from the Bible, it can be argued that the principles of doubleness and dehiscence reveal Eliot’s own understanding that perceiving and confronting the horror (in the poem’s case, that of the modern urban condition) can open one to the apophatic affirmation of that which is otherwise unavailable, the ‘peace which passeth understanding’. For Eliot, the very possibility of the City of God is not a dialectical other situated against and beyond the Babel, the Babylon, and Mammon, the Sodom and Gomorrah that is London – see here how identities proliferate excessively, out of control – but is, invisibly, the other within. Nietzsche asserts the following: Deus, qualem Paulus creavit, dei negatio (‘God, as Paul created him, is a negation of God’; 1987: 163). Eliot is all the more Nietzschean for the contempt he manifests in the poem and in its drafts, particularly towards the middle classes, those ‘bound upon the wheel’ as he puts it in one of the drafts, which hints that he believes in the ‘loftiness of the soul’ (Nietzsche 1987: 114) that expresses superiority over mankind. I would like to thank Pamela Gilbert, Jim Paxson, Raul Sanchez and Al Shoaf who offered several fruitful suggestions and references for sources of the line. By the strangest, most uncanny coincidence, this book arrived in the mail the very day I was working on the passage on the foreigner, the stranger, the other, to which this note is appended. My heartfelt thanks therefore to Louis Armand. As Kermode reminds us, by chance ‘Wagner stayed at the Cannon Street Hotel while in London with the libretto of Parsifal’ (Kermode 1998: 102–3 n. 15).

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Index

Ackroyd, Peter, 5, 40, 56, 194, 205, 230 Arsic, Branka, 187 Atkins, Marc, 180–1 Attridge, Derek, 228, 229, 231 Aubier, Dominique, 119 Augé, Marc, 28, 115 Baudelaire, Charles, 221 Beckman, Linda Hunt, 107, 109, 128 Benjamin, Walter, 50, 223 Bennett, Arnold, 81–134, 209, 229 A Man from the North, 62, 83–5, 86, 124 Buried Alive, 85–6, 127, 131 Journals, 124–7 London Life (with Edward Knoblock), 128 Piccadilly (dir. E. A. Dupont), 128 Riceyman Steps, 16, 56–7, 81–3, 97– 100, 105–6, 129–33 The Roll Call, 124, 127 The Sinews of War (with Eden Philpotts), 86 Teresa of Watling Street, 90, 127 Berger, John, 161–92 Here is Where We Meet, 162–76 Bernstein, Susan David, 111, 112, 113, 116, 117, 118 Besant, Walter, 22, 94 Bivona, Daniel, 11 Blake, William, 194, 211, 212 Jerusalem, 211 Milton, 211 Boswell, James, 3 London Journal, 3, 7 Bowen, Elizabeth, 162 Brooker, Peter, 228, 229 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 193 Aurora Leigh, 193 Bürger, Peter, 134 Burgin, Victor, 40, 43, 44, 45, 62 Burke, Thomas, 84, 200–5, 207 London in My Time, 198–201

Cache, Bernard, 98 Cartlidge, Neil, 129, 130 Champollion, Jean François, 20 Cheyette, Brian, 110 Cixous, Hélène, 10 Clark, Timothy, 91, 175 Clark, T. J., 103 Cohen, Tom, 44 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 22, 46, 94 Cook, Eleanor, 194, 206, 209, 211, 213, 232 Criterion, 124 Daly, Nicholas, 19 Day, Robert A., 194, 204–5 Defoe, Daniel, 39, 245 Deleuze, Gilles, 3, 4, 38, 39, 43, 57, 61, 225 The Logic of Sense, 39 De Man, Paul, 199 Derrida, Jacques, 1–2, 10, 44, 54, 55, 182, 186, 196, 198, 236, 244 Dissemination, 10 Dickens, Charles, 6, 51–2, 96, 128, 162, 193, 221, 228, 232, 233 Bleak House, 52, 221 Little Dorrit, 52 Our Mutual Friend, 52, 221, 230 Sketches by Boz, 51 Doxiadis, Constantinos Apostolou, 163 Between Dystopia and Utopia, 161 Drayton, Michael, 162 Poly-Olbion, 160 Dryden, John, 228 Duchamp, Marcel, 228 ‘The Bridge Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)’, 228 Eagleton, Terry, 244 Eliot, George, 93 Daniel Deronda, 119 Middlemarch, 93

260

Index 261 Eliot, Valerie, 240–1 Eliot, T. S., 25, 180, 191–246 The Waste Land, 16, 83, 99, 104, 191–246 Ellis, Havelock, 19 Ellmann, Richard, 228 Flint, Kate, 18 Ford, Ford Madox, 41–4, 52–4 The Soul of London, 52–3 Forster, E. M., 17, 40, 41, 45, 46, 54 Howards End, 40 Freud, Sigmund, 18, 20, 21 Fromm, Gloria, 99 Frye, Northrop, 88 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 160 Gissing, George, 22, 94 Goldman, Jane, 195 Grossmith, George and Weedon, 16–17 The Diary of a Nobody, 16–17, 83 Heart of Darkness, 52, 216 Hurley, Kelly, 14 Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, 19 James, Henry, 40–3, 46, 50, 53, 54, 63, 87–8 The Princess Casamassima, 87, 90 Jameson, Fredric, 99, 227, 241 Johnson, Barbara, 199 Johnson, Samuel, 5, 7, 203 Jones, Jason, 99, 129–30 Jonson, Ben, 243 Volpone, 243 Jonsson, Stefan, 196, 220, 223 Joyce, James, 86, 100, 162, 230 Ulysses, 100, 196, 230 Kenner, Hugh, 192, 193, 198, 209, 212, 217, 226, 227, 228, 230, 244 Kermode, Frank, 99, 203, 251 Kersh, Gerald, 37, 45, 47–9, 51, 128 Night and the City, 37, 47–50, 128 Kittler, Friedrich, 217, 218 Koselleck, Reinhart, 187, 214, 215, 221 The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, 185–6 Kristeva, Julia, 26

Lacan, Jacques, 123 Lamos, Colleen, 193, 195 Levenson, Michael, 192, 198, 202, 203, 207, 209 Levinas, Emmanuel, 129, 168, 182, 186, 187, 215 Levy, Amy, 81–134, 229 A London Plane Tree and other Verse, 107 ‘Eldorado in Islington’, 89–90 Reuben Sachs, 16, 96, 107, 108–11, 112, 113, 115–23 The Romance of a Shop, 89, 91–4, 96, 107, 108, 111–15, 116, 117 Xantippe, 108 Lewis, Wyndham, 99–100, 123 Lloyd, Marie, 200, 205, 242 Lodger, The, 12 Long, Michael, 226 Longenbach, James, 194–5 Lucas, F. L., 240 Luckhurst, Roger, 15, 32 Lupton, Donald, 39 Machen, Arthur, 16, 40, 55, 94 The Three Impostors, 40, 41 Mantel, Hilary, 41, 56, 57–9, 61 Beyond Black, 41, 56, 57–61 Marion, Jean-Luc, 93, 182, 184 Marlowe, Christopher, 177, 179, 180, 181 Marsh, Richard, 8–33, 38, 46, 83, 86, 182 The Beetle, 8–33, 38, 88, 91 Marvell, Andrew, 219 Marx, Karl, 216 McKean, Dave, 159 McMurrey, David, 87 Mighall, Robert, 20 Miller, J. Hillis, 192 Mitchell, David, 41 Ghostwritten, 41 Moore, George, 22, 94 Morrison, Arthur, 22, 94 New, Melvyn, 110–11, 119 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 233 Nord, Susan Epstein, 112, 117, 118 Peeping Tom, 181 Poe, Edgar Allen, 46 ‘The Man in the Crowd’, 46

262

Index

Porter, Roy, 15 Pope, Alexander, 198, 209, 228, 229, 230, 233 An Essay on Criticism, 198 Pound, Ezra, 100, 191, 192, 194, 226, 228, 229, 230, 233, 240 Punch, 17 Rainey, Lawrence, 198, 199, 203, 215, 224 Rajchman, John, 61, 62, 194, 224, 225 Rancière, Jacques, 201, 202, 203, 222 Ransom, John Crowe, 230 Richards, I. A., 190, 192, 193, 231 Rochelson, Meri-Jane, 110, 111 Said, Edward, 19 Scheinberg, Cynthia, 109 Schlör, Joachim, 46, 49 Secret Agent, The, 12 Shakespeare, William, 205, 235 Siegert, Bernhard, 208 Sinclair, Iain, 40, 45, 161–92, 207 Dining on Stones, 176, 181, 185 Lights Out for the Territory, 178–9 London Orbital, 161 Slow Chocolate Autopsy, 159–87 White Chappell Scarlet Tracings, 184 Somerset Maugham, W., 16 Spenser, Edmund, 208–9, 217 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 22, 46, 94 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 12 Stoker, Bram, 21, 32, 46 Dracula, 11, 14, 19, 31 Stonebridge, Lyndsey, 204

Stow, John, 39 Stretton, Hesba, 94–6 Alone in London, 94–6 Sue, Eugène, 46 Les Mystères de Paris, 46 Swift, Jonathan, 39 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 16 In Memoriam A.H.H., 16 Thomson, James, 107, 122, 194 City of Dreadful Night, 194 Ulmer, Gregory, 160 Weisman, Karen, 106, 108 Wells, H. G., 16, 17 The War of the Worlds, 17 Whistler, James McNeill, 90, 91, 120 Wilde, Oscar, 22, 93 Dorian Gray, 12 Williams, Nigel, 83 The Wimbledon Poisoner, 83 Winter, Alison, 12, 14 Woolf, Virginia, 37, 42, 43, 45, 46, 50, 51, 53, 54, 55, 99–104, 108, 125, 134 ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, 100–2, 103 Mrs Dalloway, 100, 196 Night and Day, 99, 102 Orlando, 45, 50, 53–4 ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’, 42, 101–2 The Years, 102 Wordsworth, William, 221 ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802’, 221