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Urban Space and Representation:
Bowlby / Brooker Discussion

Teresa Ford - University of Nottingham
Matthew Gandy - University College, London
Matilda Rosa - University of Nimegan, Netherlands

Teresa Ford - University of Nottingham
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To what extent is there some sort of crisis of masculinity which you seem to allude to through your recollection of the work and maybe has that got something to do with what’s excluded as well as included? I think that that’s something that seems to be underlying particularly in the way in which you talk about the relationship between the novelist and this represetation of women as some kind of salvation, or whatever they may be. The tradition from the 60s of this gradual crisis of masculinity and what can come in its place - is that a sort of pscho-geographical sight as much as what the East End is being used as do you think?

Peter Brooker:

Clearly I am suggesting something like a crisis in masculinity and I’m trying to situate it in terms of particular cultural historical formation and the 60s are important there. But I wouldn’t like to say that that’s the only way out of the 1960s, there’s a lot of detail to the way that Sinclair reassembles, remythologises the 1960s and he is doing that in a kind of conscious opposition to his sense of what is actually represented in the city. But I think the crisis kind of comes through in the lack of representation, the lack of a space or speaking voice to women, and in this particular episode which is an exceptional one given his claims that women are included too, plenty of them, and they’re simply not there. That’s one of the astonishing things that I find about his work - it is highly dense, I think most readers will find that, on any given page, but the absences are glaring and what I’m trying to add to the crisis in masculinity, if you wish to call it that, is also the more blatent invisibility of Bangladeshes in his accounts of his walks through the East End. I hope that’s one of the things that the film shows, you just can’t carry a camera about on any given day, of course you’re going to see that kind of changing culture and the peoples of Brick Lane where so much of this is actually centred. So I want to kind of add a crisis of white male masculinity

Matthew Gandy - University College, London:
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I found the presentation really fascinating about Sinclair and I wondered whether in a way if he’s grappling with the chameleon-like nature of capitalist urbanism - you’ve got these different layers but they’re all basically capitalist and it reminded me a bit of the recent cutlural history of 1960s music like Revolution in the head and the way that the 1960s cultural changes were part of a more long-term drift towards self-actualisation and cultural vibrancy in the city, and there were a series of tensions that Sinclair simply cannot resolve adequately and maybe fundamentally he’s a kind of late 20th Century romantic or something like that. I find it difficult to place really who he is.

Peter Brooker:

Late 20th Century Romantic would make sense given some of the key precedents, William Blake for one. There’re often these kind of echoes of Blakes’s London. Sinclair’s response to the Millenium Dome was a long review of this - very considered until he explodes at the end, this kind of anarchistic gesture wiping it away - clear the spot, take it back to the kind of empty pastures, the hedge priests, the wandering visionaries. And that’s how he closes his account of what might happen on the Millenium Dome site. There are clearly echoes of Blake there, and there are else where and one of his quarrels with Peter Ackroyd (an Ackroyd/Blake book) is that Ackroyd did not walk the streets of London the way that Blake did and Sinclair does, so there’s mirroring of that earlier position and it’s radicalism, if you will, but by way of Ginsberg, a very important influence for Sinclair - rooting that through an American literary heritage and figures ………? as well. But vortex was the term that I chose and that’s not entirely by accident as a way of describing all stuff that was heaped into this bubbling cauldron. Vortex is a term that Sinclair uses directly of Brian Catlin’s work, he was a counter-example in much of this - his work is not anywhere nearly so closely referenced to East End sights, but for Sinclair he’s an East End poet representing that kind of tone and sensibility of the East End.

The essay on Catlin is called "A New Vortex - A Shamenism Of Intent" and there are a number of citations through Ezra Pound and others which make sense of, in terms of his present aesthetic, of a re-reading and a re-citing of that alternative of modernist tendency which was opposed, I think there are tensions within htat modernist formation - on one side there was a reference back to Egyptian and Sumerian forms which Sinclair picks up on and employs in his reading of Hawksmore. So a lot of strands reworking there to produce this composite, this assemblage, aesthetic and social and cultural which he does pit against, quite consciously, against his understanding of that moment of Thatcherist post-modernism, particularly in the East End. But I don’t believe that he controls or resolves those tensions - the interesting thing that I couldn’t talk about, maybe the video in its own way comments upon, is the later movement in his writing, an attempt to leave London, to exit from all of that, as if on a kind of leash, but he’s pulled back because that is the materials of his writing. But "Down River" and the latest graphic novel type work "Slow Chocolate Autopsy" are examples of that kind of impulse - to go "down river" and the sites he then finds are on the edge of the city, Shearness, the Isle of Shepy, which are swamp land, and I find that highly indicative atht he can’t find a place ot anchor, there’s no firm ground.

Matilda Rosa - University of Nimegan, Netherlands:
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I have a comment for Peter Brooker- I don’t know Sinclair’s work unfortunately but your phrase "Archival probings", I’m listening ot your presentation and watching it, I was very strongly reminded of French Realists, Andre Britons ……and L…….. they also portray these incredibly detailed wanderings of the city, stories of statues and streets and signs, random occurences. I was wondering if there is any connection you know of?

Peter Brooker

….spiritism is one of the strands that Sinclair uses to reconstuct his late-modern, post-modern aesthetic and relation to the kind of material life of the city. And there is very close, con-physical contact clearly in the walker, he chooses that mode but is mythologising the whole time. The important Surrealist for Sinclair is David Gascoigne, a lone English Surrealist, in a kind of a re-reading of the English tradition as it were. What Sinclair is seeking, the thing that interests me, is really that it’s not aimless, it’s purposeful, it is a kind or quest and it’s not for odd titbits, it’s materials of a secret London, the energies of that London which once assembled would oppose, kind of dominate, contemporary 1980s London being made over by Thatcherism. There were paradoxes in that because its value was often, that its secret, once discovered, if it is discovered, cannot be made public and retain that value any longer. But quite often too, in a self-parody, and maybe that’s not the only early example the valued artifact is not discovered - he goes in a kind of quest which loses its way. So I’m not sure if his tracking was a seeking a secret underground map is quite the same relation to the city as those earlier French examples.

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