(Faber & Faber, £12.99)
London: City of Disappearances ed Iain Sinclair
(Hamish Hamilton, £22.50)
Psychogeography by Merlin Coverley
(Pocket Essentials, £9.99)
Here's a mystery for aspiring literary detectives. Case one, Paul Auster: popular New York crime writer with experimental pretensions. The "bard of Brooklyn." Born in the 1940s. Years on the breadline, translating French poetry. First work, New York Trilogy, published in 1987. Since then, highly productive, ten books since 2000 alone: fiction, non-fiction, poetry, film scripts. Has collaborated with the conceptual artist Sophie Calle on Double Game (2001). New book, the novel Travels in the Scriptorium, published in October: an uncanny tale of an old man who awakes to realise that all his memories have vanished.
Case two, Iain Sinclair: popular London-based experimental writer with a penchant for metropolitan crooks and lowlifes. The "psychogeographer of Spitalfields." Born in the 1940s. Years on the breadline, writing poetry. First novel, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, published in 1987. Since then, highly productive, six works since 2000 alone: fiction, non-fiction, documentaries. Has collaborated with the conceptual artist Rachel Lichtenstein on Rodinsky's Room (1999). New book, the anthology London: City of Disappearances, published in October: uncanny tales of things that have vanished from London.
Paul Auster and Iain Sinclair are not, as one might suspect, one and the same person. And yet the parallels between them are revealing. Over the last two decades, both have brandished a very similar kind of literature: stories in which lonely male protagonists roam the labyrinthine streets of the metropolis. Their protagonists are not, as Baudelaire had it in the 1850s, flâneurs—they don't breeze through the city but walk with a sense of purpose, tracing the steps of other urban wanderers. In Lights Out for the Territory (1997), Sinclair likens himself to a stalker.
For Sinclair and Auster the metropolis is a place where social paths interweave, historical narratives overlap, coincidences bring people together. But the urban jungle is also a place of mystery, where people vanish in the crowds.
When associated with Sinclair, this literature has a name, a brand even: "psychogeography." It's a term that is rarely used in relation to Auster, but then what does it actually mean? In his recent book Psychogeography, Merlin Coverley points out the curious nature of the genre: everyone wants to be part of it, but hardly ever for the same reasons. For those who first coined the term—the Parisian Lettrist group of the 1950s, spearheaded by the situationist Guy Debord—it was a political artform. For the proto-psychogeographer Baudelaire, it was a purely aesthetic experience. For William Blake, the urban stroll was a visionary pilgrimage. These days, novelist Will Self has a column called "PsychoGeography" in the Independent, in which he tells amusing anecdotes about south London.
Psychogeography now seems to mean little more than writing consciously about the city. Or does it? There is still, as Coverley implies, a crucial difference in the way psychogeographers can operate. The French Lettrists tried to document the behavioural and emotional impact of the modern city—while in the English tradition of Thomas De Quincey, Blake and Arthur Machen, psychogeography is more concerned with espying the eternal among the commonplace.
The popular psychogeography of today, as practised by Sinclair and Auster, is closer to the latter. For a movement which lives off its experimental reputation, it is curiously old-fashioned. Sinclair's narrators, for one, rarely stray beyond the east end, where London is still at its most sprawling. He scouts for tradition among the debris of modern living: in the prose poem Lud Heat (1975) Sinclair scans London maps for marks left by the baroque architect Nicholas Hawksmoor. In Rodinsky's Room it is the mystical Jewish scholar David Rodinsky; in Edge of the Orison (2005) the poet John Clare and his "Journey out of Essex"; and in Lights Out for the Territory it is a gaggle of writers: Defoe, Shelley, Poe, Rimbaud and Machen. When he comes across markers of modernity, he mythologises them: graffiti artists are "like monks labouring on a Book of Hours," a sprayer's tag is "an announcement of nothingness, abdication, the swift erasure of the envelope of identity."
Auster too is a conservative when it comes to writing about the city. In City of Glass, writer-turned-detective Daniel Quinn follows Stillman Sr's seemingly directionless meanderings through Manhattan and transcribes the old man's movements on to a map. The words that emerge from his obsessive sketches are "Tower of Babel": an archetype of the city.
A conservative impulse in literature is not a bad thing as such. Some of the most radical innovators in art and literature have been arch-conservatives, and one of the most riveting poems about London ever written, The Waste Land, pairs classicism with modernist disjunction. But a literature that professes to be dealing with the specifics of space should be expected to react when the specifics of that space change. And city life in London and New York has changed since Auster and Sinclair wrote their first novels. Both cities have been the targets of terrorist attacks, and both cities have had to face increasing political pressure from within their own national borders: the 2004 American presidential elections highlighted a conflict between rural and urban interests much in the same way the rise of the Countryside Alliance has done in Britain. Plenty of things for psychogeographers to chew on.
Read between the lines: Sinclair's and Auster's recent works do indeed reflect a certain discomfort with their working formulas. Usually focused on the historical grounds of mythical "old London," in 2002 Iain Sinclair suddenly turned his attention to suburbia and the M25 ring road in London Orbital; this is Ballard territory, and the very opposite of Sinclair's usual hunting grounds. Auster's Brooklyn Follies (2005) was conventional in setting (New York, with short road trips to Brattleboro and Winston-Salem), but put a satirical spin on his usual hallmarks. The New York of Brooklyn Follies is a much less mythical place than that of City of Glass: there is literary chatter (in bookshops, in cafés and diners) and there is the real thing, a city bracing itself for the 2000 presidential elections, unaware of the hole that is about to be burned into its centre. The novel finishes on 11th September 2001.
The promise of these works was that they seemed to reach out to the real world in search of new challenges. The more disappointing, then, to realise that in Travels in the Scriptorium and London: City of Disappearances, Auster and Sinclair return to their old routines. Travels in the Scriptorium has echoes of Paul Auster at his most immature, or perhaps Samuel Beckett at his most decrepit. Each morning the old man, "Mr Blank," awakes in a bare room with no memory. There are photographs of people by his desk, but he cannot remember their names nor their relation to him. Eventually, a lawyer enters the room. The people in the photographs, he says, are called John Trause, Sophie Fanshawe, Daniel Quinn, Marco Fogg and Benjamin Sachs: these are all characters from previous Auster novels, returning to haunt their creator. Had Travels in the Scriptorium been a debut, it would have been daring and exciting. Now its self-enclosed self-referentiality feels like a tired old joke.
London: City of Disappearances is an anthology of articles, short stories and gazette-like entries. By its very nature it is a more polyphonic affair and there are some great pieces by Patrick Keiller, JG Ballard, Bill Drummond, Nicholas Royle and Marina Warner, which try to cast light on London's relationship with history and modernity. Even Sinclair, in "Fallujah London," tries to rise to the challenge of recent events: the "disappearance" theme seen through the prism of the 7/7 attacks. Yet the red thread in this book is the psychogeographical formula of old: instead of creating new stories for the forlorn concrete spaces that need them, Sinclair harks on about the mythical, "metatemporal" London. Instead of engaging with the people that actually populate the city, he talks to ghosts. "That triangulation, Blake-Defoe-Bunyan, covers it. Everything in old London, in England, moves out from here."
In On Late Style: Music and Literature against the Grain, Edward Said picked up the German philosopher Theodor Adorno's argument: authors and musicians in their late period often display a taste for irreconcilabilities and dissonances, a desire to rebel against the coherence of their previous works. Psychogeography is an idea which is slowly edging past its sell-by date—now would be the time for its representatives to start writing against the grain and reinvent it from within. Instead, Auster and Sinclair's latest works are, once again, uncannily similar: they are rewrites, not revolts.
