Beyond the Gaps: Postmodernist Representations of the Metropolis

Abstract

Abstract:This chapter investigates representations of London from the late twentieth century to the other side of the millennial threshold; the complex layers of the urban palimpsest are explored in relation to Peter Ackroyd's Hawhmoor, Martin Amis's London Fields, Emma Tennant's Two Women of London, Alan Moore's graphic novel From Hell Michael Winterbottom's film Wonderland. Despite the nihilistic stance that many texts appear to propose, this analysis demonstrates that traces of redemption are also visible in many of these postmodernist representations of London. The metamorphic city thus becomes paradoxical dimension where metropolitan lives, though apparently entrenched in the claustrophobic space of their urban experience, may give in to the magical openness of chance. Moreover, beyond the spectral gaps, glimpse of the 'real' may appear unexpectedly.Key names concepts: London - city - metropolis - postmodernism - psychogeography.Photographs of disappeared humans, victims of the latest outrage, multiply across plywood fences that protect the latest grand project. Life drains from the image like hope from dying eye. Memory-prints of the lost are arranged, in the hope that such ritual will restore the missing person, the loved one: daughter, brother, husband, father. [...] In our present climate of shoulder-shrugging amnesia, we have memorials to memorials, information posters telling us where the original slab has been stored. Heritage replaces the memories which should be passed on, anecdotally, affectionately, from generation to generation, by word of mouth.(Sinclair, London: City of Disappearances 2006: 2)It's so cool when the heat onAnd when it's cool it's so wickedWe just keep melting into oneJust like the tribes before us did,I love this concrete jungle stillWith all its sirens its speedThe people here united willCreate kind of London breed.(Zephaniah, 'The London Breed' 2001)To any writer the metropolitan space simultaneously gift curse. On one hand, the city is text that can be read, as Dana Arnold reminds us, and open to multiple varied interpretations which can explore the resonance between different discourses relevant to social cultural theory (2000: xix). On the other, resisting monolithic interpretations, the city's multilayered palimpsest an organic entity, but also a labyrinth, as Peter Ackroyd puts it, of stone half of flesh (2001: 2). Disorienting as the city space may be, the maze-like structure of the metropolis conceals, Elizabeth Wilson notes, its paradoxical semantic essence:This recurring image, of the city as maze, as having secret centre, contradicts that other equally common metaphor for the city as labyrinthine centreless. [...] Yet one never retraces the same pathway twice, for the city in constant process of change, thus becomes dreamlike magical, yet also terrifying in the way dream can be. (1992: 3)Incorporating the architectural layers of past present times, the metropolitan space ambivalent in its defiance of linear chronology. Janus-faced, looking simultaneously to the past the future, the city rejects categorical approaches to its topographical syntax: [T]here are only imagined Londons, Pamela Gilbert argues, and the work of understanding them not best served by easy assumptions about fictive versus factual discourse or 'art' versus science, journalism, popular culture, or what have you. (2002: 3) Viewed in terms of its fluctuating boundaries, London reflects Donald's notion of the modern city, devoid of any ontological coherence outside the realm of narrative representation:To put it polemically, there no such thing as city. Rather the city designates the space produced by the interaction of historically geographically specific institutions, social relations of production reproduction, practices of government, forms media of communication, so forth. …