American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light by Iain Sinclair

Abstract

the world’s “universal language.” What defines (and sustains) a universal language , Mizumura argues, is its role as the primary purveyor of (global) knowledge, particularly among those for whom it is an external language (one written or read by a speaker of a different language). From this premise grows an impassioned plea to resist—but not overthrow, which may be impossible—the inexorable catholicizing effects of this hegemony. Mizumura’s exegesis on the development of modern Japanese literature in the face of this relentless force would seem to share some theoretical DNA with what Stephen Greenblatt calls “the swerve.” Her construction of literary history is engaging and provocative yet idiosyncratic, and with only minimal academic armature. In a practical sense, all this means is that she has served up an idea worthy of greater explication drawn from her personal experiences as a learner of foreign languages, a scholar of French literature, a novelist, and a citizen focused with almost nationalistic zeal on the need to preserve a culture she loves. In the final analysis, The Fall of Language both lacks the requisite academic rigor and overindulges too frequently in the burdens of privilege to call it an unqualified success. Too often is the reader pulled from the core problematic by extraneous or yet-inchoate arguments that simply beg for refutation; yet the extent to which one can forgive these foibles will determine how readily her arguments find fertile soil in a kindred mind. Whatever failings it may have, Mizumura has crafted a book that stimulates thought, excites passions, and encourages debate. For these alone, it is well worth a read. Erik R. Lofgren Bucknell University Iain Sinclair. American Smoke: Journeys to the End of the Light. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2015. isbn 9780865478275 Iain Sinclair sets out on his quest for the ghosts and spirits of members of the Beat Generation because “I needed a new mythology to shield against the sense of loss and hanging dread inherent in the invasion and dissolution of my familiar London ground.” He ranges across America from ocean to ocean, from Charles Olson to Gary Snyder and down the list of marginal figures who have become “living exhibits,” discovering in the process that poets have been “absorbed by the fetishized objects that surround them.” Those who cannot create “a successful brand” and in effect issue an IPO can only fall back on “erasure, suicide, Mexico.” A collector himself, Sinclair is ambivalent about the turning of creative passion into catalogs and items in air-conditioned vaults or in the “bibliographic landfill” of a fading used bookstore. Those who undertake “the labor of keeping the texts alive” do so, monastically and perhaps heroically, even though “the work loses its potent illusion of edge and discovery” while continuing in “Beckettian absurdity.” By the end of his journeys, Sinclair is told that he “will never understand Americans” and realizes that it is true, and in that recognition realizes, “I was cured of my interests and obsessions. Cured by confrontation.” But the quest is not a failure, for along the way Sinclair makes a number of sharp observations about people, as in calling Gregory Corso “the Joe Pesci of the Beats,” likening him to the character in Casino, the foil to “Ginsberg’s Jewish De Niro, who was trying to do business, keep the Beat empire moving and growing as a great American resource.” Gary Snyder, sustained in his retreat by leaving it to give lectures, emerges as the most solid of the people whom Sinclair encounters , not just surviving but grounded. Sinclair has been known for his interest in psychogeography, and American Smoke exhibits throughout a keen sense of what D. H. Lawrence called “the spirit of place”— most notably, in a few lines, of Seattle’s Pike Place Market, where the details of “Heroic metaphors of success” make even the most jaded stop and look again. The same could be said of Sinclair’s style, which is occasionally as dense and chewy as a pumpernickel bagel, as in, when describing Nevada City, “weekend tourists take brunch in revamped saloons with sepia World Literature in Review 78 WLT NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2015 photographs of the mining days” or...