will self how the dead live

8/12/2019 will self how the dead live

1/30

M G D L E N M C Z Y N S KThis Monstrous City: Urban Visionary Satirein the Fiction of Martin Amis W il l SelfChina Mivil le and Maggie Gee

rom modernist inquiry into the metropolitan mind topostmodernist interest in the sociocultural constructionof urban space, creative theory and practice of the lastcentury have been committed to investigating the urbancondition. The novel, whose generic history is bound up withthe developm ent of the mod ern m etropolis, has played a centralrole in illuminating and shaping this investigation. Novelisticdiscourse produced throughout European modernity reflects thecity s heterogeneous, palim psestic character; late twentieth -century fiction foregrounds these aspects of the fictional form inorder to investigate the relationship b etween langua ge and placeand to reimagine the textual representation of urban environ-m ents. In Lon don, the last two de cades of the twen tieth centurywitnessed the emergence of a new type of fiction that draws onthe interconnected traditions of realist, satirical, and fantasticwriting to produce a generic hybrid: urban visionary satire.W hile rejecting the m ethod s of classical realist repre senta tion infavor of imaginative, fantastic departures, visionary-satiricalnovels retain the desire to portray the personal and collectiveexperience of their subjects, with the goal of offering an icono-clastic, satirical critique of the contemporary metropolis.

The twinned imp ulse tow ard satire and fantastic vision is dis-


2/30

M A C Z Y N S K A 9

Sartre , and The T ibetan Book of theDead Self s Great pes (1997)and China Miville s King Rat (1998) follow the metamorphictradition of Apuleius and Ovid to portray Londoners altered byviolent transformation in a city inhabited by talking apes androden ts; M artin A mis inLondon ields (1989) and Maggie Gee inThe Burning Book (1983) offer visionary apocalyptic narrativesthat imagine an end-of-the-millennium London shadowed bynuclear threat. All six narratives construct the British capital asa historically specific locus but also, in varying degrees , an objectof dark satire and a site of fantastic transform ations.

In visionary satirical fiction, ontology is tampered with; theofficial facade of the city is stripped away; new layers of urbanspace and meaning are exposedor creatively imposedas thecity undergoes its metamorphoses. This effect is achieved in anumber of ways: through introducing characters whose con-sciousness has been radically altered, resulting in parallel alter-ations of the cities they inhab it (M iville s hum an-tu rne d- rat.Self s hum an-turned-ap e, Am is s and Self s dead wom en);throug h focusing on marginal or subterranean urba n spaces (thesewers and tube tunnels in Amis and Miville, the dismal sub-urbs inSelf the back alleys and underground topographies inall four authors); through the intrusion of irrational forces intothe orde r of the metropo lis (disembodied voices in Gee, mythicalcreatures in Miville); through uncanny readjustments of per-spective or propo rtion (Self s dim inished simian city, Am is s andGee s abn orm al urban microclimates. Self s and Am is s oneiricnecropolises). What connects these various strategies is the dualpurpose they serve within their textual economies, combiningsuperrealist explorations of imaginary cityscapes with a satiricalcritique of Lo ndon s m aterial, cultural, and social conditions atthe end of the second millennium.

The innovative energy of late-twentieth-century London fic-tion reflects the turbulent changes undergone by the British cap-ital during its transition toward a decentralized, postcolonial


3/30

6 C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E

mighty metropolis was left in need of redefinition. By the 1980sand 1990s, the shock of global transform ations had tak en its tollon the rapidly changing city: the Thatcherite years were m arkedby severe crises in a number of areas, including housing, laborconditions, schooling, health care, transportation, and race rela-tions. Roy Porter's 1995 social history of London portrays theeighties as a time of deteriorating infrastructure and skyrocket-ing unem ploy m ent figures, paired with the grow th of an increas-ingly alienated and deprived urban underclass. These changeswere accompanied by rising crime rates and massive socialunrest. Repeated incidents of council housing w ars an d citywiderioting (Brixton and Southall in 1981, Brixton and Tottenham in1 9 8 5 the poll tax riots in the early 1990s) constituted, in thew ord s of Jerry W hite, the most serious civil distu rbances any-where on the British m ainlan d in this cen tury (76).

Against the ba ckd rop of escalating urb an crisis, the City, w ithits stock exchange open to overseas members in 1986, continuedto flourish. The success of the City established the British capitalas one of the w orld 's leading economic centers, creating an insu -lar culture of consum erism and affluence. T he spectacular rise ofLondon's new financial class provoked comparisons with thestruggles of the capital's underprivileged. Pointing to thedecade's dramatic rise in homelessness (from 16,579 householdsin 1980 to 37,740 household s and 65,000 single hom eless in 1990),Porter offers a vivid picture of London's economic disparities: Hom elessness eradicated by the m id tw entieth centurybecame endemic again during the Thatcher years. Swarms ofdossers and vagrants reappeared, cardboard cities sprouting inthe luxu riance of yu pp ie affluence (372). The social ineq ualitiesof the period lend an ironic dimension to the Thatcherite nos-talgia for Victorian valu es, sugg esting a series of da rk paral-lelsthe growing culture of discipline and policing, thereemergence of sweatshops in the wake of relaxed labor laws,and the dramatic growth of the city's displaced populations


4/30

M A C Z Y N S K A 6

fears provoked by growing environmental damage and nuclearproliferation. London writers of the 1980s and 1990s respondedto the unrest of the century's final decades with narratives thatbreak down textual boundaries, defy generic conventions, andtransform fictional ontologiesas if only such outrageousreimagining of urban narrative and urban space could conveythe force of the city's millennial crisis.A troubled metropolis bree ds satirical discourse. It's ha rde r

tto be writing / satires; for who could end ure this m onstrou scity, however / callous at heart, and swallow his wrath?inquired Juvenal at the onset of the first millennium (4), articu-lating for future centuries the critical relationship between thesatirist and the urbanit. The London satirical tradition, with lit-erary chroniclers from William L angland to Will Self den ounc ingthe city's corruption and excesses from positions of moral out-rage, journalistic scrupulousness, or morbid fascination, reachesback to the fourteenth century. Its canon includes the narrativepoe try of Lang land and Chaucer, the ano nym ous fifteenth-century poem s London Lickpenny and Winner and Waster,classical satires of the Tudor era (Thomas Lodge, John Donne,Edw ard Gu ilpin, Joseph H all, John Marston), print-based urba nprose pamphlets of the same period (Lodge, Robert Greene,Thomas Nashe, Thomas Dekker), eighteenth-century formalverse satires (Alexander Pope , Sam uelJohnson),prose narrativesthat established the novel as the dominant form of modern satir-ical writing (Daniel Defoe, Henry F ielding, Tobias Sm ollett, Fran-ces Burney), and their Victorian successors, most imp ortan tly thesocially engaged fiction of Charles Dickens. The rich, grotesquestorytelling of Dickens is a particularly important influence, asit pushes the form of the realistic novel toward fantastic defor-mation, effecting a blending of realism, fantasy, and satire thatanticipates the deve lopm ent of postrealist urb an n arrative at theend of the twentieth century.

What distinguishes contemporary visionary satirical novels


5/30


urba n visionary fantasy developed and refined in the nineteenth-century British metropolis. The modern London v isionary im ag-ination, first fully articulated in the work of William Blake,provides a counterpoint to urban realism by exploring the irra-tional forces and subconscious tensions at work in the industri-alized city. Follow ing the consolidation of classical realism as thedom inant novelistic form in the mid -nin eteen th century, Lond onwitnessed a flourishing of fantastic urba n w riting: Oscar W ilde sThePicture of orian Gray(1880), Robert Louis Stevenson s TheStrange Case of D r Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Bram Sto ke r s Dracula (1897), an d A rthu r M ach en s The Great God Pan (1894), TheHill of reams(1907), The Secret Glory(1922), an d TheGreenRound(1933). Theoreticians of the fantastic emphasize its subversivecharacter and its opposition to the rational materialism under-pinning classical realist representation.^ Visionary satirical nov-els of the 1980s and 1990s combine this nonrepresentationalstance of fantasy w ith the desire to expose and explore the crisisof the contemporary capital: fantasy gives the satirist the powerof defamiliarization as well as epistemological and ontologicalelasticity. The satirical and the fantastic modes share an oppo-sitional and deeply ambiguous stance toward dominant culturaldiscourses. The result of their coupling is a hybridized form ofurb an writing tha t offers a felicitous su rplu s of textual economy:while it incorporates multiple modalities, visionary satirical fic-tion finally transcends the individual goals of the satirical andthe fantastic to produce a new, multimodal and multidimen-sional experience of the fictional me tropo lis.

The contemporary emergence of London visionary satires isattributable in part to the influence of international postmodern-ist aesthetics, even if none of the authors examined here applythat much-contested label to their own writing. Postmodernistexperimentation forwards the antirepresentational agenda offantasy, extending its foundational paradigm of epistemologicalhesitation between the rational and the irrational (Todorov) onto


6/30

M A C Z Y N S K A 6

other aspects of the narrative construct: ontology, characteriza-tion, spatiotemporal structure, genre, et cetera (Brooke-Rose,Hoffman, McHale). The novel, as pointed ou t by Mikhail Bakhtinand m any after him , is a mongrel thing to begin with; postm od-ernist fiction takes this quality to its extreme th rough a conscious,playful erasure of narrative conventions and generic divisions.Underlying these developments in fictional form is the philo-sophical shift away from positivist constructions of the realtoward more malleable and contingent ontological modelsatransition illustrated in Richard L ehan 's med itation on the semi-otic instability of postindustrial urban writing:

Urban activity becomes more abstract and unrea l as pow er operatesfrom hidden sources. . . . Once we lose a transcendental signifier, thetotalizing process is called into question and the city tur ns in to a place ofmystery: chance and the unexpected dominate, a romantic sense of theuncanny becomes exaggerated, and the city takes on the meaning of puretext, to be created by each individual and then read.

(287)The postmodern sense that, to use Christine Brooke-Rose's for-mulation, the real has become un real (8) can be negotiated onlythrough a destabilized novelistic discourse, whose mimeticambitions address a far more mediated, language-based idea of reality tha n that found in classical realist fiction.^ Nevertheless,unlike the critical terms applied to late twentieth-century exper-imental narratives in Am erica (Robert Scholes's fabulation,Raym ond Federm an 's surfiction, W. R. Irw in's postrealisticfiction, Gerhard Hoffman's New Fiction ), terms deno ting par-allel developments in British writing (Marguerite Alexander's flights from realism , Richard Todd's realism of excess,Elias's postm odern realism ) invariably contain the supe rsededrealist modality, underscoring British fiction's complex, oftenparadoxical relationship with the mimetic imperative. Late-twentieth-century visionary satire is one example of this com-


7/30


iconoclastic deformations w ith a continuing com m itment to rep-resenting the end-of-millennium city.An analysis of visionary satirical fiction's relationsh ip w ith tra-ditional realist conventions should begin with a list of classicalrealism's defining features: (1) its use of objective and empiricalepistemological m ethods; (2) its choice of low subject m atter;(3) its seamless relationship with surrounding nonfictional dis-courses; (4) its unobtru sive m odes of narration and plot construc-tion; (5) its focus on the external and internal complexity ofcharacters; and (6) the realist ontology of its fictional worlds. Inthe fiction of Amis,Self Miville, and Gee, the discontents oftwentieth-century London are portrayed with great topographi-cal and sociological accuracy. Characters are placed w ithin a pre-cisely defined social environment (the suburban middle classes,wo rking-class sq uatter s, Junglists), in accordance w ith G eorge J.Becker's observation that the ultim ate subject of a realistic w orkis a milieu (64). M ost protagon ists are ordinary L ondo ners,often inhab iting the city's cultural, econom ic, and social m argin s.Visionary-satirical fiction also preserves a discursive continuityw ith contem porary nonfictional m ode s of textual representation,largely avoiding the violation of syntactic, stylistic, and topo-graph ical rules and s triving to record curren t mo des of colloquialspeech in the characters' dialogue. Finally, it incorporates jour-nalistic headlines, television news reports, commercial flyers,and new spap er clippings, w ith the goal of enhancing its mimetictexture.

If Am is, Gee, Miville, and Self follow realist princ iples in theirepistemology, themes, and discursive patterns, they radicallydepart from classical convention in the areas of fictional ontol-ogy, narration, and characterization. On the level of plot con-struction, visionary-satirical fiction exhibits elaborate patterns,nonlinear and fragmented structures, overt intertextuality, andextensive use of prerealist narrative models (allegory, romance,the picaresque). Its interest lies in violently spectacular events


8/30

M A C Z Y N S K A 6

ested in such metafictional devices as authorial narrators andauthor characters, especially favored by Martin Amis, or themore subtle self-referential commentary found in Maggie Gee.On the level of characterization, visionary-satirical novels featureprotagonists who are round, nuanced, and socially grounded,but also hybrid (Miville's Saul), internally divided (Amis'sMary/Amy, Self's Simon), dead (Amis's Mary, Self's Lily, Gee'sfloating voices of Hiroshima victims), or outright fantastic(Miville's King Rat, Anansi, and Loplop; Self's simian London-ers). This playful cross-fertilization of realism and fantasy pro-duc es a satirical discourse that is both fully novelistic (unlike thenar rative satires of a Jona than Swift) and fantasized, inHoffman's postmodern sense of the term (unlike the fictional satiresof an Evelyn Waugh).

The imprint of postrealist, postmodernist poetics and thesocial crisis of the British capital provide twin, complementaryexplanations for the develop m ent of visionary satirical fiction inthe 1980s and 1990s. Contemporary London satire's subversive,irreverent character suggests one other important influence: thecountercultural tradition of twentieth-century m etropolitan icon-oclasm. Amis, Gee, Miville, and Self's literary antics foUow^eight decades of iconoclastic urban movements: since 1916,Dadaists, Letterists, Situationists, psychogeographers, and theirdisciples have been calling for the abolishment of traditionalurban structures and a creative reconfiguration of the imaginaryand physical metropolis. The Letterist International and Situa-tionist International critique of commodity culture in the 1950sand 1960s gave a special place to questions of the city: the rev-olution called for in LI/SI writings was first and foremost anurban revolution; the yearned-for transformation of everydaylife was primarily the transformation of urban space and urbanconsciousness. Following the leads of Greil Marcus and SadiePlant, who drew the subterranean genealogy from Dadaism,through the SI to punk, I propose that the visionary satires of


9/30

C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E

the exhaustion of ideological paradig m s, or the mom entou s sym -bolism of the calendar. All these factors converged in the Britishcapital at the end of the second millennium.In a recent Albert Hall conversation with Will Self and KevinJackson, Iain Sinclair commented on the appeal of Situationistthought in Thatcherite London: [E]verything wa s being wipe dout, old values, so it became necessary to provoke the humanimagination. There were ways of resurrecting tools of resistanceand one of them , certainly, was the notion of psych ogeo graphy(qtd. in Barfield). Will Self confirms the im portance of Sl-inspiredresistance in articu lating his ow n artistic project: But Ithink thatif there is a quest I'm looking for, it is how can we ap proach thecity, and particularly the power of walking and its destructiveability to destroy the way we are meant to live in cities and theway we're meant to perceive them and the way they're meantto be for us (qtd. in Barfield). Visionary satire offers preciselysuch a subversive reimagining of urban space and perception,by dismantling the familiar metropolis and imposing upon itpalimpsestic, alternative urban structures. This creative resis-tance is actualized in texts that push past the bound aries of real-ist representation to defamiliarize, deform, and transform themodern city, as well as enact the construction (and deconstruc-tion) of the contemporary urban subject.

The following sections exam ine six recent fictions that em bodythe theoretical developments outlined above; the section head-ings ( Necropolis, M etamorphosis, Apocalypse ) point tothe narratives' gro und ing in ancient my thical and literary topoi,now in fruitful dialogue with the (post)modern novelistic form.Although grouped under the common label of visionary satire,the novels employ d iverge nt narra tive strategies and offer dif-fering combinations of satirical purpose, visionary fantasy, andmimetic verisim ilitude. The category of visionary-satirical fictioni s thus, not meant to constitute a genre or subgenre in the rig-orous sense de n ed by Tzvetan Todorov in his discussion of le


10/30

M A C Z Y N S K A 7Liveand Martin Amis'sOtherPeople offers a n ana lysis of vision-ary satire's textual strategies, including its uses of defamiliari-zation, dream logic, and the uncanny, culminating in aninvestigation of Self's and Amis's revisionary engagement withthe urban ethosolnerie.Briefer reading s of the four rem ainingnovels (Self's Great Apes Miville's King Rat Amis'sLondonFields and Gee'sBurningBook complement this discussion, pro-viding additional examples of visionary satirical themes andmethods.

NecropolisLewis M umford, in his seminal studyTheC ity inHistory exam-ines the connection between the origins of the city and the ear-liest permanent burial sites developed by nomadic peoples.Mumford's striking suggestion is that the first human citiesm ight have been modeled on such sites; hence [T]he city of thedead antedates the city of the living. In one sense, indeed, thecity of the dead is the forerunner, almost the core, of every livingcity (7).This proximity with the dead has hau nted urba n culturethrou ghout its historical developm ent, from Egyptian catacombsto contemporary horrorm ovies.M odern Europ ean w riting offersa rich geogra phy of ghostly cities: E. T. A. Hoffmann 's Berlin,Fyodor Dostoyevsky's St. Petersburg, Mikhail Bulgakov's Mos-cow, the London of Charles Williams. The contemporary satiresof Will Self and Martin Amis inscribe themselves within this lit-erary tradition, adopting the point of view of the dead to defam-iliarize the city of the living.

How theDead LiveandOther Peopleare based on a dua l ontol-ogy: the Londons they construct are both historically specificphysical loci and projections of the protagonists' minds. Self'sguiding intertext isThe Tibetan BookoftheDead which providesthe structural concept of a spectral metropolis generated by thenarrator Lily Bloom's disintegrating consciousness. Amis's tex-


11/30


emphasis on the consciousness of deceased female charactersdefamiliarizes the city on tw o levels: because Lily and M ary aredead , and because they are wom en. This distancing u se of pointof view (and, in the case ofSelf narrative voice) produces anuncanny urban topography, in which familiar London elementsappear uncomfortably enhanced, altered, or deformed but stillretain many of their recognizable qualities. Such reconfigura-tions of urban landscape destabilize the reader's perception ofthe contemporary metropolis, both strengthening the novels'satirical impact and enabling an exploration of psychologicaland philosophical anxieties that falls beyond the scope of tradi-tional social satire.Mary Lamb's mind at the beginning of ther eople is a per-fectly blank slate, the source of her p urity as well as of her height-ened perceptive p ow ers. As a result, she is unn aturally attentiveto the experience of London space:

She can do some things that you can't do. Glance sideways down anunknown street and what do you s e e an aggrega te of shap es, figures an dlight, and the presence or absence of movement? Mary sees a windowand a face behind it, the grid of the paving stones and the rake of thedrainpip es, the way the distribution of the shadow s answ ers the skyscapeabove.

(55-56)A time-honored satirical device, Mary's naive point of viewallows a fresh insight into the city's familiar infrastructure. Inher eyes, the U nd erg rou nd acquires a chthonic fearfulness: peo -ple winched up and lowered down into the earth in steel cagesand speed-fed through the tunnels, with doors cracking shuteverywhere, and arctic winds mingling with dusty gasps of firefrom the plane t's core (67). London pub s are stripped of theirconven tional conviviality: The pu b was a pub lic house , one ofthose rare places where you could go without being asked.Appropriate care had therefore been taken to make things ashard on the senses as possibleor else everybody would come


12/30

M A C Z Y N S K A 9

joints, corrup t police stations, hom eless shelters, and dea den ingsuburbs. As the reader accompanies M ary /A m y on her journeyfrom innocence to experience, the city is gradually reconstruc tedas a site of horro rs, ad din g u p to a fully articulated con tem poraryinferno.

The afterlife universe of Will Self's ow the ead Livefocuseson the physical and ideological landscape of London suburbia,observed thro ug h the lens of Tibetan Buddhist eschatology. Aftersuccu m bing to breast cancer, Lily Bloom is escorted by a dea thgu ide to the district of Dulston, where she is to reside in theforty-nine-day period separating her death and reincarnation.The neighbo rhood, with its labyrinthine architecture and flexibletime-space continu um , mimics the logic of bad d ream s: Du lstonis one of those districts you're always finding yourself lost in,rather than arriving at. It 's the place you wind up in when youovershoot yo ur destination or take the wron g turn . It 's the 'bu rbas displacem ent activity (175). The district's othe rw orldly m or-phology is emphasized by the name given to Dulston by Lily'sguid e: [I]t swells up , then it leaks, then it swells u p again. It'sa cystrict (174). Lily is quick to grasp the implications of thismon iker: Dulston m ust be as big or small as its beho lders. It 'sa hidd en pleat in the city's roUed-up sleeve (175). This elusivespace is shared by the dead and the living; the latter perceive itas merely a drive-by span of inattention , a glimpse of their ownspeeding car wa rped in a showroom window, una w are of theneighborhood's ghastly ontology. A similar mingling of livingand dead Lo ndo ners takes place in the offices of the dea th-ocracy, wh ich Lily is obligated to visit w hen apply ing for anallowance or for reincarnation. Deathocracy centers, with theirobscure locations sprinkled throughout Greater London, rein-scribe Franz Kafka's urban nightmares in a contemporary Britishcontext.

Lily Bloom's journeys through the barren landscape of Duls-ton debun k the m odern m yth of a wholesome and verdant sub-


13/30


plays w ith the nov el's central conceit of life-in-death to blu r theboundary between the protagonist 's pre- and posthumous sub-urba n existence: If you d lived in Hendon in the sixties you'dknow w hat living death was like (185), Lily pronou nces,emph asizing the awful sym m etry between H end on 's livingde ath and the death ly life of Du lston (280). This equivalen ceis pa rt of the na rrativ e's satire on w ha t Robert Fishm an calls thecollective creation of the Anglo-Am erican m idd leclass:the bou r-geois Utopia (x). Th roughout How the ead Live, Self developsa sustained critique of the spatial and ideological structures oftwentieth-century suburban life, denouncing its failed commu-nality, class isolationism, oppressive patriarchal regime, andinfantilizing consumerism through a playful exploration of fan-tasized London topographies.

The failure of the m od ern am bition to re-create a new con-sciousness of something that had been lost in the rapid growthof the city the sense of the neig hborhoo d (Mumford,Culture499) is epitomized in the bleak appearance of Dulston's com-m unity center, a dead modern ist building flat roofed, grey-concreted, blank-windowedwhich was neither central norcom m unal, situated between a piece of wa ste grou nd . . .where hulks of adventure-playground equipment were boundin vetch and nettle s and a derelict w are ho use (191). Far fromdeveloping a new model of social cohesion. Self's suburb ismarked by a deadening combination of uniformity and socio-economic alienation. The m onoton y of Dulsto n's infrastructure,with its repetitive clum ps of houses, flats, commercial prem ises,w arehouses, used-ca r lots and light-ind ustrial uni ts (175), isechoed throughout the slightly posher district of Dulburb: every mile or so the houses pared away from a brief stretch ofdual carriageway and you found the same mouldering paradeof identical shopsthe butcher, the baker, the greengrocer, theironmonger as you 'd encountered a mile back (278), culmi-nating in the upscale neighborhood of Ennuyeuseville (whose


14/30

M A C Z Y N S K A 7

Self's denunciation of the suburban dream culminates in therejection of its core prin cip les, the prim acy of the family anddom estic life (Fishman 3) and the pursuit of consum erist plea-sures,jointly critiqued by Lewis M umford: This was not merelya child-centered env ironm ent: it was based on a childish view ofthe world, in which reality was sacrificed to the pleasure prin-ciple Culture494).The dom estic ideal is deb unk ed throug h thedescription of Lily's hom e at Argos Road27,its dank , musty,and m ould ering interior complete w ith the trappin gs of abygon e era, includ ing 1960s w allpape r covered with bilious loz-enges and a fucking meatsafe (177)bad flashbacks to theprotag onist's Valium-laced days as a hom emak er. Co m po un din gLily's disgust at the banality of the middle-class lifestyle, the cityteems with infantile appetites: It wa s sum m er in Lon don, anintensely sticky summer, when the childish gods the citizenryworshipped seemed to have drenched the very fabric of the cityin Coca-Cola, dripped it with melting ice lollies, gummed it upw ith old W rigley's (344-45). The evocation of familiar (Am eri-can) corporate br an ds reinforces Self's und erly ing critique of latecapitalist culture and its insidious impact on the contemporaryurban environment. The novel's central synecdoche for capitalistconsumerism is the paper-goods emporium owned by Lily'sdaughter Charlotte, with outlets strewn across the sprawlingsub urba n landscap e, in between Woo lworth's and M&S, or inbetween McDonald's and Barclays, or in between the NCP andthe w ar mem orial (262), and a bran d nam e ( Waste of Paper )unintentionally suggestive of tedium, futility, and excess.

Much of the novel's anticonsumerist satire depends on theeffect of the uncanny, offering both the dread of the unknown(living dead Londoners, nightmarish neighborhoods) and themimetic pleasures of recognition. The boundaries between thefantastic a nd the realist are tenuo us , w ith dea thocracy offices andPersonally Dead support-group meeting rooms fitting comfort-ably into the recognizable urban infrastructure of shopping fran-chises and corporate marketing headquarters. Although set


15/30


Amis's OtherPeople, whose fantastic premise shapes the protag-onist's defamiliarizing point of view but does not radically alterthe cityscape she inhabits. Th roug hou t the narrative, the fantasyis largely nonintrusive, and the mimetic illusion is more likelyto be broken by the authorial narrator's metafictional commen-tary than by open ly oth erw orldly interventions. Rather, the effectof Amis's novel is achieved through an accretion of subtle exag-gerations, building toward a vision of phantasmagoric bleak-ness. The disquieting impact of Amis's and Self's narrativestrategies is further enhanced by the black humor of their nar-rators, whose mixture of unflinching observation and darklaughter underscores the satiric fervor of their implied authors.The irreverently comic tone ofOther Peopleand How the DeadLiveis part of the novels' program m atic iconoclasm, draw ing onthe postmodern tradition of playful seriousness to enact a cri-tique of the millennial city. A centra l aspec t of this critique is thedebunking of urban flnerie, whose contemporary breakdownillustrates both the particular crisis of the late capitalist metrop-olis and , more broadly, its problematic m od ern ideological foun-dations. Amis's Mary and Self's Lily negotiate urban spacethrough the act of solitary walking. Like the Situationists, how-ever. Amis and Self deflate the flaneur sromanticized image byexposing its exclusionary underpinnings. The two dead womentraversing contem porary Londo n are parodie variations on Wal-ter Benjamin's alienated m an , w ho stan ds at the m argin , ofthe great city as of the bourgeois class, to experience the famil-iar city as fan tasm ago ria (Benjamin 1 7 0 . Theln urs an aesth-e t e , an urban detective, a delighted stroller and w ind ow shop per;Mary Lamb and Lily Bloom are tired, shabby females to whomthe city refuses to yield its deligh ts. The maze of urb an signs th atafforded such pleasure to the explorer of Parisian arcades is inac-cessible to A m is's protagon ist: The streets were full of display,of symbols whose m ean ing was coolly den ied to her (16).Mary's walks through South London reveal a devastated city-scape, a grid of ramshack le streets, eviscerated bu ilding-s ites,


16/30

M A C Z Y N S K A 7

rou nd in the city's fuming entrails. She rode the Circle Line until,on this new scale of time and distance, the Circle m ad e her headreel. An d it never got her anyw here (169). M ary's journeysthroug h the urban labyrinth afford her no pleasure. On the con-trary, she is always un de r threat of becom ing the object of some-one else's enjoyment: as a young woman alone in the streets,Mary is manipulated, abused, and repeatedly taken for a pros-titute, confirming the impossibility of female flneriepostulatedby contemporary feminist criticism.^

Unlike the unencum beredmale lneur whose identity is pred-icated on the suppression of his own place in the city's socioeco-nomic matrix, Mary is a participant in, rather than a consumerof, the London she traverses. Her living arrangem ents include asquat and the Church-Army Hostel for Young Women, popu-lated by sex workers, add icts, and victims of domestic violenceall of whom have taken smashes recently and are thus, in amorbid echo of Victorian rhetoric, fallen women (70). She expe-riences firsthand the mechanisms of police control and socialspacing that Zygmunt Bauman identifies as the enabling condi-tions of the flaneur s aesthetic play* Far from exercising agency,aesthetic or otherw ise, Mary is one of the city's strangers , subjectto institutional regulation: She rode in a van to a place whereyou had to empty your pockets and your bag and submit to thefar-flung presence. They shut her for a nigh t with a girl w ho kep tweeping and getting up to pee drillingly into the pot beneathher bu nk (169). M ary 's London is a risk-area of clinks andclinics and soup-queues, of hostels and borstals [reformatories]and hom es full of mad wo m en (106), and sheherself althoughset apa rt by her o therworldly status, is also always on the inside,never insulated from the city's horrible dan gers. Even when hermanipulative benefactor Prince whisks her away from the streetsand into the shelter of subu rbia, M ary experiences this remote


17/30


arcadia, a pleasa nt, fallen wo rld (207) as an oppres sive prison ,which ultimately becomes the site of her violent death.Will Self's M r s . Bloom, a self-described fat, old, bou rgeo is baglady, weighted down by a Barnes & Noble book bag full of sec-ond -hand c ulture (162) provid es another variation on the themeof theanti-flneuse. She sees herself as one among many elderlywo m en walking the streets of Lond on, the pavem ent-strollers,the window-shoppers, the bored, bunion-hobbled boulevardi-res, some of whom have already given up the world of theliving: You look at the cityscape and see us tottering abou t inour insupportable hosiery. Look again and realize that whilemany of us are clinging on to the ledge of life, many more havelet go already (2). Self's acerbic desc riptions of Lon do n's zom -bie grannies are a far cry from the heartbreaking charm of the pe tites vieilles (little old ladies) celebrated by thepoet flaneurCharles Baudelaire in his Tableaux Parisiennes selection ofurban poems add ed to the 1 8 6 1 edition of L e sfleurs du m a l WhileBaudelaire's elderly Parisians may carry un petit sac bro d defleurs ou des rbus (264) (a small pu rse emb roidered w ith flow-ers or rebuses). Self's aging London ers are tweed -wea rers, thebearers of the capacious gu sset and the porters of the nylon ba g

3 ) . Lily's charmless city is m ad e u p of terrace up on terrace ofknock-kneed, terminally warped Victorian townhouses, withshitty council blocks sticking them a pa rt (166), lined up alongstreets blobbed w ith dog shit; spattered with chew ed-u p gum ;cluttered u p with cars (58) and pun ctuate d by sho ppin gparad es that are parodies of comm erce, every third win do wboarded up and plastered with flyposters for pop and politics(166)a distorted echo of Benjamin's delightful arcades. Herhalf-hearted peram bulations lead thro ug h a Dickensian city ofsnaking alleys and sun less courtyards , w here the corroded bricksoozed pigeon droppings, and indecorous ledges were blanketedby sootfalls, w ith the occasional wedg es of m odernity, ham -mered into the creaking joints of the city, like plastic hips intoarthritic old wom en (315). The deflating hum or of Lily Bloom's


18/30

M C Z Y N S K bIn How the Dead Live a n d Other People Will Self and MartinAmis manipulate the image of late-twentieth-century London

through the use of fantastic ontology, defamiliarizing point ofview, and comic debunking. Projected onto the structures of theliving city, their necropolises are slightly altered versions of thefamiliar polis; the source of the novels' satirical power lies pre-cisely within the space opened by that alteration. The figure oftheflneuse manqueeprovides the perfect vehicle for the critiqueof the contemporary capital, exposing the ideological limitationsof bourgeois urban myths and mapping urban space from alter-native, playfully subversive positions. The final effect is anuncanny, misaligned metropolis, macabre but darkly comical,drawn with a satirical humor laced with existential dread.

MetamorphosisThe m etropolis is a richly m etam orphic locus: its structures arein constant flux; its self-image is subject to ongoing renewal; itscitizens are granted endless opportunities for acquiring, shed-ding, and shifting identities. In his classic defense of urban cul-ture,Jonathan Raban contrasts urban plasticity with the stabilityof rural and small-town life, emphasizing the city's proteancapacities: The city, our great m od ern form, is soft, am enab le toa dazzling and libidinous variety of lives, dreams, interpreta-tions (15). Self's and Miville's Londons are exactly such softcities, charged with powerful transformative potential, theirfluid n ature signaled in the w atery im agery of the novels' open-ing scenes: Simon Dykes looking at the Thames as he contem-plates his theory of perspectiveless vision in Great Apes; th erodent king wading through the city's underground rivers in ingRat The promise of these aqueo us beginn ings is carried o utthrougho ut both narratives, as the protagonists' metam orphosesfrom human to animal makes accessible to them a new, nonan-thropocentric vision of the metropolis.Once Miville's Saul finds out abou t his half-rodent na ture , he


19/30


and secret passages that expands his limited human view of thecity. He escapes the symbolic power of Westminster Palace andCity skyscrapers to inhabit an underground metropolis thatdefeats the conspiracy of architecture, the tyran ny by which thebuildings that men and women had built had taken control overthem, circumscribed their relations, confined their movements(288). M iville's nov el loosens the dead en ing gra sp of familiarityby redra w ing the m ap of London to include alternative passage-ways ( I can squeeze between buildings through spaces youcan 't even see [3]); alternative dim ens ions ( I climb above thestreets. All the dimensions of the city are open to me [3]); anddirections ( up's no longer out of bounds, and down's nothingto fear [62]).This restru cturin g op ens new possibilities for imag-ining urban geography, freeing Saul from the rigid, hierarchicalorder of the hum an m etropolis that King Rat dismisses as a merefacade: All the main streets, the front room s and th e rest of it,that's just filler, that's justchaff tha t ain't the real city. You get toth tby theb ckdoor (45^6 ) .

The novel's privileging of the back-door perspec tive is appar-ent in its attention to Lo ndo n's periph eries an d liminal zones, tothe exclusion of the capital's historical monuments, touristattractions, and centers of political and financial power, heedingHe nri Lefebvre's w arnin g that any space . . . organized arou ndthe m onu m ent is colonized and opp ressed , because greatm onu m ents hav e been raised to glorify co nquerors and the pow -erful (21). The nov el's focus on margina l landscapes is alreadyapparent in the opening of the first chapter, as the train bearingSaul toward his life-altering metamorphosis moves from thenor th toward King's Cross: In the depth s below are lines ofsmall shops and obscure franchises, cafs with peeling paint andbusinesses tucked into the arches over which the trains pass. Thecolours and curves of graffiti m ark every w all. . . . The rhy thm sof London are played out here, in the sprawling flat zonebetween suburbs an d centre 7 ) . Once the protagonist aband ons


20/30

M C Z Y N S K

fantasy of a centerless city serves as a counterbalance to thepower structures embodied in the architecture and topographyof the anthropocentric metropolis. Miville's plot unfolds in thecity's shady parking lots, warehouses, train tracks, and backalleys,rather than in the pa rks, circles, and landm arks that con-stitute the official image of the British capital.

The novel's most important alternative locus is the urbansewer system, which forms London's literal as well as meta-phorical underground. The sewers, running parallel to over-grou nd passagew ays and crossroads, are the city's mirror imageand dark alter ego. Peter Stallybrass and AUon White's analysisof sewer imagery in the writings of Victorian reformers positsthe emergence of an urban geograph y of the bourgeo is Imagi-na ry (126), in wh ich the sewer rat becom es a figure of simul-taneous repulsion and fascination: [T]he rat, then , furtivelyemerged from the city's underground conscience as the demon-ized Other. But as it transgressed the boundaries that separatedthe city from the sewer, above from below, it was a source offascination as well as ho rro r (143). M iville's half-rat, halfhuman protagonist likewise negotiates between the upper andlower realms of London's imaginary structure. Like the reader,he is both revolted and attracted by the urb an subterranea n land-scape, with its secret channels an d cargo of hum an refuse. As helearns to master his disgust and navigate the labyrinth of thesewers, Saul ultimately reconciles the binary structures of thesymbolic city by accep ting the am biguities of his hyb rid citizen-ship.

The alternative London uncovered in the course of Saul's jour-ney not only transcends the limitationsepistemological andtopographicalof the city he had known as a man but alsobecomes a site of urban reenchantment. Energized by his meta-morphosis, the rat-man experiences a series of unlikely spiritualepiphan ies: This was urban vood oo , fuelled by the sacrifices ofroad death s, of cats and people dy ing on the tarmac, an I Chingof spilled and stolen groceries, a Cabbala of road signs. Saul


21/30


alternative occult metropolis, charged with forces accessiblethroug h the act of radical imaginative transformation. An aw are-ness of these forces alters the consciousness of the metropolitansubject, allowing him to discover a vibrantly mutable Londonbeneath the regime of stale familiarity: They wove in and ou tof Central London, climbing, creeping, moving behind housesand betw een them , over offices and un de r the streets. Magic hadentered Saul's life (120). Miville's exp loration of the city'ssubterranean energies pairs the subversive, transformativeimpulse of Situationist play with the tradition of metam orphosis,drawn from myth and literary fantasy, to open new ways ofexperiencing, reading, and interpreting urban space.

Will Self's reatApes like Miville'sKing Rat projects an ani-mal city onto the familiar contours of the human metropolis.Self's p rotagonist, Simon Dykes, wakes u p in an alternative uni-verse where chimpanzees are the civilization-making species,while the few remaining groups of Homosapiens roam in thewilderness. The ape city into w^hich Simon is thrust resemblesthe one he had left behind in almost every respect, with theexception of its dim inished scale: This spatial incon gruityinfected everything around, buildings, other vehicles, the roaditselfall were small. And roving over this two-thirds set wereits dwarfish in ha bitan ts (223). The uncann y effect of this scalingdown is amplified by the protagonist's intimate recognition ofLondon 's topograph ical and semiotic structures: Everyw hereSimon directed his gaze he saw^ something familiar, a shop sign,a petrol station decal, a peg-board m enu in a caf window . o beconfronted with such a mundane, familiar scene only served toenhance the distortions wh ich had been w rou gh t up on it (223).The new city is both familiar and foreigna strategy that allowsSelf to explore the paradoxes of his protagonist's perception aswell as the satirical potential of the simian metropolis.

The centerpiece of the novel's social satire is the panoramiccanvas of Primrose Hill park, a public space that brings together


22/30

M A C Z Y N S K A 9

erect fur poking up from the necks of their Fred Perry sportsshirts, and sub-adults grouped around a large ghettoblaster (83-84). The force of Self's satirical vignette s is aug-mented by the juxtaposition of humanlike clothing, indicatingthe ape s' socioeconomic status, and anim al naked ness: Simonw as struck anew by the absu rd sight of furry little legs and flesh-less arses poking out from the hems of pin-stripe jackets, denimjackets, flowery blouses, and T-shirts blazoned with slogans(224). The effect of this juxtaposition is an obscene defamiliar-ization that foregrounds both the absurdities of social norm s an dthe raw forces at work beneath the facade of urban civilization.At their most extrem e, these forces m anifest them selves in scenesof group copulation taking place openly in the city's publicspaces. A m iddle-aged femalea bank worker judgin g by herplain grey jacket and p lainer white blo use (289) takes on aque ue of males in the Lond on un de rgro un d; ma ting chimps form conga-lines of bu gg ery (290) in Oxford C ircus: Self's simianLondon ab ou nd s in similar scenes of Rabelaisian excess, offeringan outrageous alternative to the human urban landscape thatSimon Dykes has left beh ind in the course of his transform ation.A related interplay of familiar topography and exaggeratedphysicality is found in the protagonist's artwork, which fore-shadows and mirrors his metamorphosis. Simon's paintingsexplore the violent disintegration of metropolitan bodies, depict-ing the safest and mo st urbanely dull of m od ern environ m ents,but subject to an horrific destructive force which shook, stirred,and ultimately shredded their hum an cargo (25).The g rotesqueviolence of Dykes's canvasesa fireball at King's Cross, a tidalwave drowning the Stock Fxchange, an instant Fbola attack atIKFA that leaves the processing hordes of you ng n ew lyw edspurchasing flat-pack furniture liquefying, still hand-in-hand(25)parallels the uncanny grotesqueness of the ape city.Inspired by the apocalyptic paintings of John Martin and thecinematic imagination of Fritz Lang, Simon's oeuvre expresseshis obsession with the body, hu m an or simian, constrained,


23/30


Miville's Saul, Simon Dykes's London can be understoo d onlyas an embodied experience, a site where the body and its envi-ronment enter into destructive and productive entanglements.The libidinal ape city reinscribes Simon's apocalyptic anxieties,replacing images of disintegration with images of physicalexcess.

pocalypseThe modern European apocalyptic imagination, while rooted inbiblical visions of the final events, has become increasingly sec-ularized, reconceptualizing the end of the world as part ofhuman, rather than divine, history.^ This secularization of theapocalypse is apparent in the literature of the last two centuries:the prophetic writings of William Blake posit an imm ane nt rathe rthan imminent concept of apocalyptic ending; Mary Shelley's astManrejects the trium phalist idea of the Millennium; the sci-ence fiction of H G. Wells shifts the threa t of apoca lyptic destruc-tion from divine to technological agents. Late-twentieth-centuryfiction supplements these developments with the vision of am an-mad e Arm agedd on m ade possible by the developm ent andproliferation of nuclear weapons.

Jacques De rrida's 1984 essay No Apocalypse, Not N ow callsfor the recognition of nuclear arm s' historical singularity: thecritical zeal that leads us to recognize precedents, continuitiesand repetitions at every tu rn can m ake us look like suicidal sleep-walkers, blind and deafalongside the unheard-of (21). The samesense of urgency is found in the writing of Martin Amis and hispeers: in contrast to the postwar generation of British authors,their successorsmost notably Amis junior, Maggie Gee, IanMcEwan, and Julian Barnesshow a deep preoccupation withthe problem of the atomic race. In the introduction to his 1987collection Einstein s Monsters,Amis reflects on the specter ofnuclear threat present throughout his childhood years, examin-


24/30

M A C Z Y N S K A 8

with Jonathan Schell, whose 1982 classicThe Fateo the arthhadshaped his thinking on the subject, that the fear and anxietyengendered by the prospect of global annihilation are alreadymanifestations of atomic warfare's destructive pow er: W hatw e are experienc ing, in as m uch as it can be experienced, is theexperience of nuclear war. Because the anticipation ... the anxi-ety, the suspense, is the only experience of nuclear war thatanyone is going to get (22). An exam ination of the ways inwhich cold w ar anxieties corrupt the urban environm ent, physi-cal as well as psychological, is Amis's most interesting contri-bution to twentieth-century literary engagements with nuclearproliferation.

London Fields is a novel abo ut a city in crisis. The escalation ofstreet violence, desiccation of urban nature, and abnormalweather and human behavior patterns are all indirect conse-quences of living in a nuclear world. This is an insidious apoc-alypse, a slow but inevitable corruption of an environmentwh ose na tural clock has been replaced by the atomic cou ntdown.The nove l's self-destructive heroine Nicola Six rem em bers grow-ing up in the sha dow of the bomb: On television at the age offour she saw the warnings, and the circles of concentric devas-tation, with London like a bull's-eye in the centre of the board.She knew that would happen, too. It was just a matter of time(16). This scene, reminiscent of Amis's own childhood recollec-tions, establishes the novel's ominous sense of timing. Nicola'simaginary London like her self-destructive life narrative, isalways already m arked by the knowledge of impend ing destruc-tion, making apocalyptic teleology the governing s tructu ral logicof Amis's narrative.

The nuclear city ofLondon Fieldsis riddled with intimations ofviolence, from m ysterious jet planes disturbing L ond oners' quo -tidian activities to a series of catastrophic rum ors reminiscent ofthe Book of Revelation: an Apollo object, rippe d loose from theasteroid belt is head ing tow ard us at ten miles per second


25/30


omnipresent sense of threat poisons the minds of the city'sinhabitants. The sensitive dreamer Guy Clinch finds himselfread ing an editorial on The Effects of Therm onuclear D etona-tions and visualizing the stages of the catastrophe in the com-fort of his opulen thome: So the first event w ou ld be light-speed .A wo rld become like a pale sun. . .. T he next event wou ld comerather faster than the speed of sound, faster than the noise, thestriden t thu nder, the h eavensplitting vociferation of fission. . . .Everything that faced the window would turn to fire: thechecked curtains, this new spa per (276). The novel's antago nistKeith Talent concretizes the diffuse anxieties of the end-timesthrough repeated acts of domestic aggression. Most spectacu-larly, the novel's femm e f t leNicola actively seeks her ow ndestruction by singling out and seducing m en with the potentialto become her m urderers.

The city as a whole shares in the malaise of its individualprotagonists. The capital's physical structure bears marks ofongoing abuse: its streets are filthy, its pubs defaced, its parksbrutalized and filled w ith dog shit. Iconic London p ho ne booth s,redu ced to glass ruins , serve as urinals, as shelters from therain, and as job-center clearing-houses for freelance prostitutesand their clients (94). M ore frighteningly, urb an violencereduces its human victims to the status of inanimate objects: [VJandalism had moved on to the human form. People nowtreatedthemselves like telephone boxes, ripping out the innardsand throw ing them aw ay, and plaster ing their surfaces w ith sex-signs and graffiti (94). These acts of desecration a re pres ide dover by an ailing, ove rheated natu re: the sky tinged pink likesom ething bad , som ething high (391), the clouds behav ing sostrange ly (95), the sun shining like a nuclear deto natio n (365).Amis's London is sick with an anxiety that gradually contami-nates the city, precipitating its undoing long before the awaitedact of final destruction.

While Amis stops short of imagining the nuclear event itself


26/30

M A C Z Y N S K A 8

olis is affected by the impending catastrophe in ways that par-allel Amis's London Fields, with both Lon don's naturalenvironment and its inhabitants crushed under the weight ofmillennial dread. The crisis manifests itself in the form of anunbea rable summ er heat wa ve: The city was boiling hot, andno air came in from outside. Every factory in London was burn-ing its engines, running on throbbing heat. There wasn't anyoxygen any more; they were brea thing fumes of poiso n (224).Positioned between the unforgivable destruction of Hiroshimaand Nagasaki and its own apocalyptic ending. Gee's end ofmillennium London is a haunted metropolis. The municipalbuses and trains are filled w ith dark rum ors and voices, snippe tsof anxious conversations that disclose nothing but the fear thatdrives them. More radically, the streets are invaded by the face-less ghosts of nuclear victims, whose unspeakable suffering vio-lates the decorum of the city:

The screams seem unwritable, hkewise, and they demand to come in. Itis hardly the thing , I think, to be heard in a family play. But thousa nds ofvoices are crying. They scratch the pane like birds.

Like pigeons in a lost grey square. The buildings they cling to are life-less. The bright tours of summer are gone. They scratch at a pane withno faces. But the truth is, yes, we are here.

(20)The truth of nuclear violence will not be denied. The brokenpeople of Hiroshima and Nagasaki appeal to the people ofLondon: Hibakusha,queuing and pleading for jobs and moneyand help. Even w orse, they beg us to see them. They can't imag-ine our terror (21). The ha un ting presence of the ibakusha( explosion-affected peop le, a Japanese term for the victims ofatomic attacks) is an embodiment of both historical guilt andanxiety about the future. Gee forces her readers to confront theconcrete, physical reality of nuclear threat by inscribing the Brit-ish capital into the mod ern narrative of urban destruction.


27/30


in a sweat every morning, too early, brain buzzing with worry(225). Angela's bodily response goes back to her first schoolgirlencounter with the nuclear history of the twentieth century,when, upon learning about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she felt a vagu e du ll ache that settled over her life like a hea dac he,never to leave again (232).The Burning ook focuses on historyas experienced in the human body: the pain of Hiroshima vic-tims, the deformities of the survivors, the elusive guilt and fearexperienced by the novel's late-twentieth-century London sub-jects, the brutality of the terminal event toward which the nar-rative, like Amis's London Fields is inexorably oriented. Themoment of Angela's death explodes the limits of her physicalself together with the limits of language, emphasizing the pow-erlessness of cu ltural discourses in face of total annihilation: H e rhair was a burning bush but her body crackled like pork. Theyw ou ld find tha t all hair bu rned , and th at m etap ho r is a lie (39).The city, an icon of hu m an culture, is also consum ed in the finalconflagration. Gee's narrative offers the most radical version ofvisionary urban satire, not only probing and bending linguisticand ontological structures, but also daring to imagine the oblit-eration of the fictional metropolis.

Apocalypse, metamorphosis, city of the deadLondon narra-tives of the late twentieth century combine traditional literarytopoi with contemporary historical anxieties, forcing old mate-rial into unexpected configurations. The form of the novel itselfbecomes transformed, as the realist formula expands to accom-m od ate elem ents of fantastic vision and satirical subv ersion. Th isfreedom to create new structures is a time-honored privilege ofnovelistic discourse; urban fiction of the 1980s and 1990s is par-ticularly well-positioned to participate in this heterogeneousheritage. The philosophical and artistic developments of post-modernity have shaken old generic certainties, opening narra-


28/30

M A C Z Y N S K A 8

and conceptual iconoclasm. Shaped by those various but con-vergent forces, the fictions of Martin Amis, Maggie Gee, ChinaMiville, and Will Self offer visionary, darkly satirical represen-tations of the British capital torn by millennial crisis.

M arymount M anhattan ollegeW O R K S C I T E D

Abrams , M. H . Natural Supernatura lism. Tradition and Revolution in Rom anticLiterature. New York: Norton, 1973.

Ahea rn , Edw ard J.Visionary Fictions. Apoc alyptic Writing from laketotheModernAge. N ew H av en , CT: Yale UP, 1996.

Alexander , Marguer i te F .Flights from Realism: Themes and Strategies in P ostmod-ern British and American Fiction.Lon don: Edw ard A rnold , 1990.

Amis , Mar t in . Einstein's Monsters. 1987. New York: Vintage, 1990.. Lotidon Fields.N e w York: Vin tage, 1989.. OtherPeople.1981. N e w York: Vintage , 1994.

Barfield, Steven, ed. Psy cho geo grap hy: Will Self an d Iain Sinclair in Con ver-sa t ion with Kevin Jackson. Literary London6.1 (Mar. 2008).

Baudela i re , Char les . Les fleurs du mal. 1861. Paris : Anc ienn e M aison , 1890.B a u m a n , Z y g m u n t . Postmodern Ethics. 1993. C am bri dg e, M A: Blackwell , 1994.Becker, George J. Realism in Modem Literature. New York: Ungar, 1980.Benjamin, Walter. CharlesBaudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism.

Trans . Harry Zohn. London: New Lef t , 1973.Brooke-Rose, Ch r is t ine . A Rhetoric of the U nreal: Studies in Narrative a rid Struc-

ture, E specially of the Fantastic. Ne w York: Ca m brid ge UP, 1981.Bull , Malcolm, ed. Apocalypse Theory and the Ends of theWorld Oxford: Black-

well, 1995.Der r ida , J acques . No Apoca lypse , No t Now . Diacritics: A Review of Contem-

porary Criticism 14.2 (1984): 20-31.Elias, Amy. Meta-mimesis? The Problem of Br i t i sh Pos tmodern Real ism. Brit-

ish Postmodern F iction.Ed. Theo D 'h aen and H ans B er tens. At lanta : Rod opi ,1993.9 - 3 1 .

Enzensberger , H an s M agn us . Two No tes on the End of the W orld . New LeftReview 110 (1978): 74-80.

F e d e r m a n , R a y m o n d . Su rflction: Fiction Now and Tomorroiu. Chicago: Swal low,1975.

Fishman, Rober t . Bourgeois Utopias. The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. New York:Basic, 1987.


29/30


Humphries , S teve, and John Taylor . The Making of Modern London 1945-1985.Lon don: S idgw ick, 1986.

Irwin, W. R. The Game of the Impossible: A Rhetoric of Fantasy. Chicago: U ofIllinois P, 1976.Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. New York : Methuen ,

1 9 8 1Juvenal . The Sixteen Satires.Trans. Peter Green. Lon don : Peng uin , 1998.L e e Alison.Realism andPower Postmodern British Fiction.N ew York: Ro ut ledg e,

1 9 9 0Lefebvre, Henri .The Urban Revolution. Trans . Rober t Bobonno. Minneapol is : U

of Minnesota P,2003.Lehan , Richard Daniel .The City in Literature:An Intellectual and Cultural History.Be rkeley : U of Californ ia P, 1998.Marcus , Grei l . Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Cen tury. C a m -

br idge , MA : Harv ard UP, 1989.Mc Hale , Br ian. Postmodernist Fiction. 1987. N ew York: Ro utle dg e, 1999.Mivi l le , China. King Rat. 1998. London: Pan, 1999.Mumford , Lewis . The City in History. New York: Harcour t , 1961.

. The Culture of Cities.1938. W es tpor t , CT: Gre enw ood , 1981.No rd , Deborah Eps te in . Walking the Victorian Streets: Women Representation n d

the City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1995.Plant, Sadie. The Mo st R adical Gesture: The Situationist International and After.New York: Routledge, 1992.

Porter, Roy.L ondon: A SocialHistory. 1995. Ca m bridg e, MA : Ha rva rd UP, 1998.Raban, Jonathan. Soft City. London: Hamil ton , 1974.Scholes , Robert E. TheFabulators.1967. N e w York: Ox ford UP, 1976. elf Will. Great Apes. New York: Grove, 1997.

. How the Dead Live. New York: Grove, 2000.Siebers, Tobin.The Romantic Fantastic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1984.Stallybrass , Peter , and Allon White.The Politics and Poetics ofTransgression.Ith-aca, NY: Corn ell UP, 1986.Todd, Richard . Consuming Fictions: The ooker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today.

London: Bloomsbury, 1996.Todorov, Tzve tan . The Fantastic. A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre.Trans .

Richard H ow ard . Cleveland , OH : Case Western Reserve UP, 1973 .W alkowitz , Judi th R.City of Dread ful Delights: Narratives of Sexual D anger in Late-

Victorian London.Chicag o: U of Chic ago P, 1992.White, Jerry. London in the Twentieth Century: A City and Its People. N ew York:

Viking, 2001.W ilson, Elizabeth. The Invis ible Elaneur. Postmodern Cities and Spaces. E d.


30/30

Copyright of Contemporary Literature is the property of University of Wisconsin Press and its content may not

be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written

permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

will self how the dead live

Documents

Transcript of will self how the dead live