Abstract
This article examines the peculiar spatio-temporal ambivalence of Hanif Kureishi’s 2008 novel, Something to Tell You. Building on Doreen Massey’s (2005) understanding of space and place, I put forth a new framework of spatial production and experience, comprising the cartographical and the phenomenological. Through these terms, I argue that we can engage with both the particularity and the plurality of the novel’s representation of London. Geographic Information System (GIS) software is employed both to make explicit the novel’s relationship to cartography, and to cartographic London, but, equally, to conceptualise Something to Tell You’s reconstellation of the city. By way of conclusion, I suggest that Something to Tell You bears a political and poetic ambivalence that is symptomatic of a wider hesitancy toward representing the capital (as representation relates to stultification). And whilst this unsettledness and non-surety as to the ‘where’ and the ‘when’ of London experience is, for protagonist, Jamal, a cause of great anxiety, is it nonetheless true to the ‘reality’, in Wolfreys’ (1999) sense of the term, of living, of doing, and of being in London.
Highlights
In 2014, author China Miéville said in conversation with Lars Schmeink, [I]f you live in London it isn t that you get on with the business of living and the backdrop happens to be this place called London
As Julian Wolfreys persuasively argues in the first book of his multivolume work, Writing London: The Trace of the Urban Text from Blake to Dickens (1999), London novels tell us that the city is diverse, rich and strange, estranging and alien; real and yet hyperreal, babbling and yet ineffable, apocalyptic and yet banal, quotidian and exotic at one and the same time (Wolfreys, 1999: 12)
In light of the hugely successful publication of Kureishi s first novel The Buddha of Suburbia (2000 [1990]), this hesitancy toward capturing a full picture of the capital has continued to be critically understood as a strategic, postcolonial move and one which is geared toward bringing attention to the politics of migrancy
Summary
In 2014, author China Miéville said in conversation with Lars Schmeink, [I]f you live in London it isn t that you get on with the business of living and the backdrop happens to be this place called London. Because whilst Jamal takes time to differentiate between the time-frames and their corresponding spaces, and the GIS map created mirrors this distinction with its colour-coding, Londons of past and present continually intertwine over the course of the narrative threatening the narrator s situatedness and drawing attention to the city s peculiar temporal ambivalence.
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