A coincidence of disparate incidents

London undone or, seven artists in search of the city

pp. 209-236

in: Julian Wolfreys, Writing London II, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004

Abstract

"London", writes Iain Sinclair, "is begging to be rewritten" (LOT 141). Such rewriting is of course already underway, not only in the texts of Iain Sinclair, in those of Peter Ackroyd, Maureen Duffy, and Elizabeth Bowen, as we have seen in the previous chapters, but also in the work of a number of other artists and writers. Such writers and artists acknowledge the modernity of the city, a modernity as old as London itself; for in their articulation of urban modernity in art they recognize and so respond to "the preservation of all the temporalities of place, the ones that are located in space and in words' (Augé N-P 77). Even as the city is always in the process of recycling and reiterating the traces of its otherwise occluded memories, so too are those who respond to London, a place read by Sinclair not as an identity, but as a "network of coincidences and cyclic collisions' (LOT 141). Allen Fisher's London is, for Sinclair, a "fragmentary, multivoiced schizo — only invaded by a consciousness of "the other"" (LOT 154). As such, Fisher's work produces a topography rather than a representation of the city; it "fosters connections between fields",¹ unfolding "in dynamic thought movements, mutating as they go" (Lorraine "Sch" 276). Such haunting echolalia is also at work for Sinclair in the verse of Richard Makin, whose poetry is composed of "revenant diction geistraum" (LOT 238), so that the writer's response is understood also as a telepathic channelling of the city's traces of alterity.