From: James Diedrick
Category: Amis's Contemporaries
Date: 7/29/99
Time: 3:11:48 PM
Remote Name: 147.124.221.202
Your humble site manager again, with the first part of my report on Iain Sinclair, who appeared at—I’m quoting the conference program--
"The Contemporary British Fiction Symposium Sponsored by The London Network for Modern Fiction Studies In conjunction with South Bank University
The British Library Conference Centre 96 Euston Road, NW1 Wednesday, June 2nd 1999, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.
Organizers:
Dr. Philip Tew (University of Westminster) Dr. Richard Lane (South Bank University)
Featuring:
A.L. Kennedy Will Self Iain Sinclair
Professor Simon Crithcley (Essex University) Professor James Diedrick (Albion College, Michigan) Professor Rod Mengham (Jesus College, Cambridge)
The day consists of readings, Q&A sessions, discussions, analysis of the author's works and signings of two new books launched this week: Everything You Need (Jonathan Cape) by A.L. Kennedy, and Rodinsky's Room (Granta) with text by Iain Sinclair and illustrations by Rachel Lichenstein."
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2-3 p.m.-1 p.m.: Iain Sinclair PART I
Iain Sinclair read from several of his books during his appearance--*Downriver,* *Lights Out for the Territory,* *Rodinsky's Room*--but the passages all converged on the same themes--the secret histories of London, the disenfranchised of London, “rivals claims about and for London,” mapping London (“mapping as an attempt to enter a dream and contact others, contact the dead”--Sinclair).
Sinclair expressed his dissatisfaction with traditional genre divisions, and described Downriver as a book that “moves in and out of documentary.” He said that fiction “comes out of a tension between the world/city/room as you know it and as you want it to be.” (*Slow Chocolate Autopsy*: “The boundaries between fictions had been worn away. Narrative integrity was lost”).
For years, Sinclair worked in relative obscurity, and identified with other little-known artists (“If you want to destroy a poet, first publish him”--*Slow Chocolate Autopsy*), but with his increasing appearances in mainstream, high-profile journals (Granta and The London Review of Books, a recent issue of the latter containing his essay on the Millenium Dome [check the web site for an excerpt: http.www.lrb.co.uk/ ]), he may be about to depart this fraternity. In an important sense sense, Sinclair is a militantly provincial writer (far more so than Martin Amis, also closely identified with London): Sinclair's form of cultural archaeology, exclusively devoted to London and its environs, densely topical, will keep many non-U.K. readers at a distance.
By contrast to the high-energy A.L. Kennedy and Will Self, Sinclair seemed almost ascetic, both in appearance and manner. His obsessive mappings of the city and its alternate histories, A-Z guide in hand, sounded in the telling like the loneliest of enterprises--even though he is often accompanied by a photographer (Marc Atkins) or co-author ( Dave McKean in *Slow Chocolate Autopsy,* Rachel Lichenstein in *Rodinsky’s Room*).
Reading Sinclair, I’ve been struck by certain affinities with Amis—some stylistic (high/low diction shifts, love of triplets), some political (leftist sympathies), some allusive (both writers draw from Ballard and Burroughs). On the other hand, reading Sinclair reminds me that no matter how postmodern Amis’s themes may be, he remains a comic NOVELIST, offering many of the satisfactions we receive from Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Evelyn Waugh. Sinclair is much less interested in the project of the traditional novel—characterization, linear plotting, the quotidian social scene. In --*Slow Chocolate Autopsy* he calls his project “urban psychogeography,” but I don’t find much psychology here. I would call him a Foucauldian urban archaeologist, uncovering layers of the city’s forgotten past(s), mapping the city’s networks of power/knowledge.
*Slow Chocolate Autopsy,* for instance:
--The “graphical” chapters by Deave McKean are visually rich, dense, haunting variations on/distilled versions of Sinclair’s prose chapters. Chapter vi, “The Griffin’s Egg,” contains several verbal phrases overlaid on the images, and they offer a summary of the aims and methods of this hybrid book—not to mention much of Sinclair’s work:
WANTED: INTERPRETER UNEDITED CITY LOG THE DETAIL FLESH IS STONE TREAT LONDON LIKE AN AUTOPSY CATALOGUE SURVEILLANCE IS THE ART FORM OF THE MILLENIUM
The main character in *Slow Chocolate Autopsy* (though hardly a character in the conventional sense) is “Norton,” the name taken from *Junkie,* William Burroughs’ *Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict* (written under the pseudonym William Lee). The first page of Lee’s book is placed at the end of *Slow Chocolate Autopsy*: “My first experiences with junk was during the War, about 1944 or 1945. I had made the acquaintance of a man named Norton who was working in a shipyard at the time.” Of Burroughs, Sinclair’s narrator writes “nobody has more relish for the dark, greater access to postmortem revelations.” The Norton of Sinclair/McKean’s book is a denizen of the Thameside, and a connoiseur of danger, decay, paranoia, hallucination. Through Norton, Sinclair explores a London of the disenfranchised, the forgotten, the doomed.
*Slow Chocolate Autopsy* is less a novel than a haunting series of apocalyptic ruminations on London. Sinclair writes here as if he were a coroner, and London an exquisite corpse. Or to shift metaphors, he writes as if at the end of history, an urban mythographer sifting the rubble for ways of making meaning again.
COMING NEXT: Sinclair on Amis in *Lights Out for the Territory*
In the meantime, I'd be interested in hearing from others who've read Sinclair, and thought of connections/disconnections with Amis.