So what is the exact nature of this larger magical force which is the object of Sinclair’s obsessive, compulsive urban excavation? What, eventually, is he all the while lambasting the official discourse for ignoring and suppressing, while engaging all his works to write about, over and over again? The answer is not easy, for like the prize text sought after in White Chappell, the buried truth Sinclair seeks about London is elusive, and often just leads on to more clues. But a grouping of the clues that he seeks, the dark secrets, criminal edges and bloody stains whose scent his walkers are always after and whose greater truth than mainstream reality is constantly avowed, seems to suggest a preoccupation with what can only be vaguely described as dark evil. This would be a preoccupation that is more sinister and darker than De Quincey’s, and points specifically to evil of a primordial,
“preconscious” kind. The Ripper murder is an act of evil, but it is predestined to be committed, and is just a recent example in a long stretch of repeated patterns of evil including the earlier Ratcliffe Highway serial murders and the more recent Kray Brothers mafia crimes, because the place they all took place in, London’s East End, itself emanates sinister evil that needs repeated blood sacrifices.
The cityscape of East London, built on lands that used to be pagan sacrificial mounds where “the hell shrieks at night,” the baying of sacrificial animals, “helpless, pointless, already dead” are always heard (White Chappell 113), is teeming with dark energies that successive human attempts at subordination and rationalization will prove futile. Neither the Hawksmoor churches built there in the 18th century, which forms a sort of a code or metaphor to impose religious order on the turbulent site,9 nor the latest Thatcherite redevelopment of glass and steel “sepulcher towers” (Lights Out for the Territory 41) that
points out that this stance is different from the typical middle-class social investigator or reform-minded novelist who also deal with the poor, for the opium-eater, born and bred of middle-class origin, is able to mingle unrecognized with the poor, cloaked in the incognito of the classless stroller, and identifies with their problems whilst free from the constraints of bourgeois life (43). Whilst there are similarities between De Quincey’s vision and that of Sinclair, an interesting difference is that De Quincey’s opium allows greater familiarity with and insight into the ordinary life of working-class people, but Sinclair’s obsession with the past actually comes with a somewhat negligence of the ordinary experience of the present-day, working-class Bengali inhabitants of London’s East End. See later for more.
9 Sinclair’s prose poem on Hawksmoor in Lud Heat later inspired Hawksmoor, a best-selling novel by the fellow London writer Peter Ackroyd. These two have helped to solidify the churches’ image, with its limestone steeples and huge interiors inspiring feelings of weight and gloom, as related to the malevolent energies of the place that have yet to be laid to rest. See Bond 43-8.
tries to tame and bury the place’s dark ghosts can wipe out this sinister energy.
The Hawksmoor churches, built from 1712 to 1731 by Christopher Wren’s student Nicholas Hawksmoor, which often invoke feelings of gloom, weight, and mystery, have been a favorite subject for Sinclair ever since his early days in the opening prose-poem “Nicholas Hawksmoor, His Churches” in his poetry collection Lud Heat. Sinclair’s ideas about the malevolent energies of a place are connected to his occultist belief about primordial, archetypal fears and yearnings that link up places like old London to Egypt or Aztec America. Both the Hawksmoor churches as well the extinguished St. Mary Matfellon Church in White Chappell, which gave the alias name White Chapel to this East End district, are religious attempts to impose order in an unruly and evil place, but the White Chapel was burned down, and the Hawksmoor churches become an “urban apocalypse,” where the river rises to “sweep away all the potentialities of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s baroque overview,” and the grass covers over the “pretensions of stone,” reducing the churches to “an Aztec desolation” and destroying Hawksmoor’s “ordered mapping…before it could be articulated” (Lights Out for the Territory 187). The latest Thatcherite planning which has made a new religion out of capitalism, whose glass and steel towers make “an astonishingly obvious solicitation of the pyramid, a corrupt thirst for eternity” (41), will prove just as futile, for the primordial evil and unruly darkness is the only truth of the place, and the only truth that lasts.
By this stage, questions about Sinclair’s approach to this dark evil are inevitably raised. If this dark evil is “older and wilder” (126) and if ordering, mapping and control are the wrong way, what is the right way? An unconscious surrender to, awed worship of, involuntary identification with, or even complicity with the dark forces? On this question, Sinclair’s response again proves ambivalent. On the one hand, the narrator anticipates and partially admits to such charges in White Chappell – there is “a sort of sucking in towards evil in the text” (149), “something inherently seedy and salacious in continually picking the scabs of these crimes, peering at mutilated bodies, listing the undergarments, trekking over the tainted ground in quest of some long-delayed occult frisson” (57). Yet on the other hand, the author also vigorously offers a rebuttal by including in the novel, rather bizarrely and self-consciously, a letter addressed to Sinclair himself by a real-life artist friend Doug defending Sinclair’s perceived predilection for evil. Calling any charge that sees Sinclair’s work as a “dabbling with demons” a relegation of the “poetic process to a nothing,” the letter sees Sinclair’s work as essentially poetic, which has sublimated evil into a higher state (145-49). The purpose of the letter seems dual. On the one hand Sinclair achieves more persuasive objectivity by using the defense of a third party; on the other, the letter, penned not by the author himself but by a real-life critic, more eloquently sets forth Sinclair’s own “Blakeian sense” (148) of good and evil as utterly interdependent dynamically and not arbitrarily contrary, and his belief in the need to know the phantasmic forms and ghosts of the self in order to recognize the true self, the need to explore the cosmology on its dark side to make our vision unflinching and accurate.
Here the influence of Blake’s idea of good and evil is worth exploring. Blake gives good and evil a meaning which is not just opposite to their usual moral connotations—i.e., opposition or energy is seen by him as good, passivity as evil－, but more importantly, he denies completely the conventional use of such dualism. Therefore the upsurge of desire in the body whose energetic appearance frightens the self into the conviction that it must stem from an external hell, appears evil or dark only because it will seem so to followers of the Christian tradition of moral dualism, which sets the body’s energy as evil against the soul’s reason as good (Bloom 4). “Dark” energy, a term favorite to Sinclair, thus envelops us all and produces eternal creative conflicts. If Sinclair’s obsession with dark energy is to be
seen in this light, then he should indeed be exempt from the charges of “dabbling with demons” and
“obsession with evil.” Critics like Ken Worpole, who reprimands Sinclair for failing to be
“humanistic,” and views his preoccupation with dark energy as “suspect” and “distasteful,” “the literary equivalent of collecting Third Reich militaria or shrunken heads” (188), may be misreading Sinclair through the lens of conventional moral dualism, for Sinclair is certainly refuting such categories of good and evil altogether. Yet a contradiction with Sinclair is that, if the Blakeian Devil is energy, and creative, dynamic opposition and conflict, Sinclair’s own vision of the dark energy betrays a somewhat reductive single-mindedness that falls short of the always dynamic, always flowing, changing and interdependent nature of such “devilish” energy. To criticize Sinclair for being
“devilish” would be missing the point, but to claim that he is perhaps too selective and fixed, that he narrows the scope of the Blakeian concept, is more accurate. His work, for instance, seems to be only interested in what conventional moralism would define as the marginal and the criminal, a place where conflict and opposition certainly abounds but not exclusively so. This would seem to suggest that Sinclair himself, however much he refutes the constraints of fixed moral categories, is still very much bound by them, since he only goes for the reverse of the conventionally good.
This advocacy of only the marginal, the sinister and the unofficial seems to affect other dimensions of Sinclair’s urban vision, particularly where his attitude toward the cultural and social mainstream is concerned. Sinclair seems to view the mainstream as a seamless block of ideological manipulation. Anything that is tainted by official endorsement or belongs to mainstream culture has to be rejected. Official memorials “are a way of forgetting” (Lights Out for the Territory 9), public sculptures like Henry Moore’s bronzes “do not so much affect memory as displace it” (265), and the sooner these symbols of collective amnesia are “disposed of,” the better (239). Such a more or less sweeping denunciation of the commodity culture and whatever is present and mainstream, and a refusal to see therein any positive residue other than a saturation of the official spatial discourse, would seem to fall short of a more dialectical vision of the dynamically changing urban spatiality. In such exclusive vouchsafing of the greater truth of the hidden and the dark and nothing else, Sinclair would actually risk imposing a rather fixed interpretation on the spaces of the city, a canonization of the uncanonical and the sinister, that threatens to be no less arbitrary and selective than the Thatcherite official space mapping. Julian Wolfreys claims that the essence of Sinclair’s work lies in a deconstructionist act of writing under erasure which reflects the ineffability of the contemporary city (2: 144, 147, 148). Yet Sinclair is obviously not just interested in recording the ephemeral, the fleeing and the dynamic, but exclusively in the sinister part of that urban ephemerality and energy; in thus doing, he really risks building an alternative domination, an alternative paradigm.10
This risk of complicity because of a lack of a more dialectical vision can also be seen in another example. Sinclair’s walking, for instance, is championed by him for its material, physical and emotive nature and its meticulous recording of every detail in order to counteract the erasing and abstracting
10 Wolfreys has written several important pieces on Sinclair and has even singled out Sinclair in his 1998 work on Derrida, as a literary exemplification of the deconstructionist approach. However, while Wolfreys seeks to point out the basic ineffability of London’s urban space, that its illusive and ghostly traces always defy any attempt at fixed or ultimate representation, it must be pointed that Sinclair’s writings actually betray a departure from that approach. In tirelessly seeking to unearth what seems to him to be the forgotten, erased part of London’s space and in vouchsafing for that part’s greater truth, Sinclair seems to believe in a certain version of the ultimate truth (albeit an alternative one), quite different from the deconstructionist denial of any such certainty.
nature of official mapping. But materiality itself, as Alex Murray points out, can also be exploited by the establishment to convey a conservative ideology (2:1). Thatcherite National Heritage industry and conservationism, for instance, also promote detail-packed Heritage walks along designated streets as the most physically and emotionally immersive means for tourists to evoke and remember the local past and instill a nationalist sense of pride. Walking with your own legs, as opposed to traditional tourist means of commuting in the car or on the bus or underground, is here promoted as offering more empathy with the magic of the place, a turn of phrase that Sinclair himself might find alarmingly familiar. To drive the irony deeper home, Sinclair’s own East End walks, recorded with often mind-blowing detail and covering only the forgotten and the repressed, have themselves become, after the books’ success, popular tourist pilgrimages marketed by entrepreneurs to the occult-minded, the mystery seekers, and the ever expanding public bored with the usual routes. Formerly anonymous chapels now flaunt plaques on doorsteps with quotations from Sinclair’s works, obviously banking on his celebrity to attract more tourists and increase revenue. The commodification of this Other London and of Sinclair’s own vision11 is not unaware by Sinclair himself. In Lights Out for the Territory, the narrator laments the “imposition of camera crews and the vulgarly curious, guided by onto [the]
territory by best-selling gothic fictions.” Even the homeless vagrants got “weary of media exploitation,” moving elsewhere to avoid being woken by “lunatics” and “psychogeographic journalists taking their own editorials too literally” (243). This certainly shows that a position of complete uncompromising opposition is itself problematic and subject to appropriation, in the same way that what is reifying and commodified may not be totally without a potential of being otherwise appropriated as well.
A second significant limitation in Sinclair’s urban vision is the problematic nature of the stalker’s spectatorial position. Sinclair’s walker/stalker is also the writer, recording and remembering the buried dark energy. This linking of walking and writing and spatial rhetorics echoes the arguments of recent urban theories, but it is important to point out that this walking is not just the everyday mundane walking of De Certeau’s citydweller,12 but is highly symbolic and more enlightened. Despite the constant admission of involuntary compulsion by a larger, magical force, Sinclair’s work portrays his walker as the one with a deeper inkling of such compulsion. Though not the modernist walker with a superior knowledge of the city and the crowd, Sinclair’s stalker possesses knowledge that pertains not to the exact nature of this larger urban force, which constantly defies understanding, but rather to the awareness of the unwieldly nature of such dark energies and of the limitations on any human agency
11 Apart from making a point of praising his friends’ work in his own work and reviews, many of Sinclair’s later works (Mark Atkins provided the illustrations in Lights Out, again in Liquid City, and Rachel Lichtenstein co-wrote Rodinsky’s Room with Sinclair) are collaborations with little-known artist friends, which also boosted the latter’s status. Other instances of mutual inspiration and mutual promotion can be seen in Peter Ackroyd, another erstwhile underground writer, who acknowledges the inspiration of Sinclair’s early poetry Lud Heat on his own bestseller Hawksmoor, and has later generously reviewed the works of other occultist London writers.
12 De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life sets out an influential theory for everyday tactics by ordinary urban dweller to sidestep or appropriate, often below the table, dominant spatial discourses, and weave their own meanings and resistance on an everyday, material level into their lived urban space. The importance set on walking, the perception of walking as writing and as spatial inscription, and the emphasis on resistive use of the material and the everyday against official mapping are common links between De Certeau and Sinclair, but Sinclair’s urban vision seems more sinister and more elitist.
which seeks to control and shed light but is, actually, being controlled. A line in White Chappell states,
“Do we slowly begin to understand only because we are about to become performers in the same blind ritual?” (58) The stalker has this knowledge, while still being involuntarily compelled by this larger, manipulative force. But it is this knowledge, however limited and impotent, that elevates Sinclair’s stalker one step above the mundane crowd walking the streets in amnesia and unconscious slumber.
As such, Sinclair’s stalker is a member of the more initiated few, over and above the mundane urban crowd.
In that small community of the initiated, Sinclair places earlier writers like De Quincey and Blake, whose writings on London he constantly invokes and remembers to form the palimpsestic nature of his own London cityscape. Echoing these other texts, Sinclair’s work seems to establish a sense of a small community across time whose contributions and insights certainly transcend the short-sightedness or amnesia of the present society. Also looming large is his immediate circle of artist friends, the underground poets and artists with whom he has been closely associated since his earlier days. The Ripper-investigating narrator in White Chappell is accompanied in this pilgrimage by the character Joblard, who is modeled on Sinclair’s sculptor friend B. Catling.13 Sinclair’s friend Doug writes that important letter of support that establishes Sinclair as the misunderstood poet that really sees deeper and higher. The narrator in Lights Out for the Territory makes a symbolically charged journey to Richard Makin’s art installation, and other artist friends like Aidan Dun and Gavin Jones make favorable appearances both in the text and in the photo pages, their artistic eccentricity and shamanship – “Shamanism of Intent” being the caption to Jones’s photo14 － shown to best advantage. Shaman is indeed a word Sinclair often uses to describe this small community of the initiated, pioneering artists who refuse contamination by the mainstream and is the medium into truth and knowledge for contemporary society. “The health of the city and the culture depends upon the flights of redemption of these disinherited shamans” (Lights Out for the Territory 131).
Yet such a posture, though uncompromisingly oppositional, does open itself to the charge of self-involved elitism. The psychogeographer may be physically one of the mundane crowd walking the back streets of London, but mentally, it is still a position of elevation and privilege. However limited that elevation may be, the stalker’s voice is still raised above the urban din, above the dialogic, buried voices and traces that Sinclair always claims to uncover in order to counteract the monologic imprinting of official discourse. An example of such dialogic yet buried voices, for instance, would be the urban graffiti that Sinclair claims to be always looking out for in his walks. But graffiti, as public, activist and anonymous art, transgresses many key socio-spatial divisions, particularly the idea that art is the product of individual geniuses and is appreciated by well-educated people in rarefied or private spaces. Graffiti’s trait as rebellious art that cannot be bought may bear affinities with Sinclair and his underground artist friends, but graffiti as public and anonymous art, there for all to see in the open spaces of the everyday and with the author always already absent and erased, is obviously not in the
13 For that connection, see Bond 298, footnote 19. Joblard and his real-life counterpart Catling both become
13 For that connection, see Bond 298, footnote 19. Joblard and his real-life counterpart Catling both become