culture essay.docx
TRANSCRIPT
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Paulo Lorca
Professor Allison Ramay
Culture and Civilization
June 11 2014
A Walk Through Selvon's London: The Individual and Space in Sam Selvon's The Lonely
Londoners through the scope of Psychogeography
The Lonely Londoners is a novel by Sam Selvon, which presents a wide variety of
the migratory experiences of West Indians and their descendents who come to post-war
London in search of new opportunities. It is in this particular city, Selvon's London, that a
diverse cast of characters wander through the complexities of being immigrants. However,
through the scope of Psychogeography, which gather studies of space in relation with the
individual, one can discover that the characters of The Lonely Londoners are constructed in
intimate relation with the fictional space they inhabit, where London, as an specific space
that frame this process, plays a defining role in shaping the different identities of these
characters. While these characters try to map their roads in order to identify themselves as
Londoners, they are immerse in an urban landscape with all its mechanism in motion, from
the social struggles of the city, to the threatening weather conditions that fiercely reject
them.
Psychogeography is a term resilient to definitions. In its most literal sense, as Merlin
Coverley affirms, the concept must be understood "as the point where psychology and
geography intersect" and that its essential characteristics "may be identified in the search
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for new ways of apprehending our urban environment" (13). Another definition comes
from the Situationist Guy Debord, for whom Psychogeography is "the study of the precise
laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organized
or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals" (5). Thus, following this scopes,
Psychogeography can be comprehended as a perspective, a type of lens through which one
can analyze the relation between the individual psyche and his or her environment, as well
as the consequences of both in their reciprocal formation. However, it remains the question
of how this term can be applicable to literary studies . Among the many fields in which
Psychogeography has been used (Sociology, Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, etc.), it is in
English literature that this concept finds an important component of its history and
tradition. Coverley gives an account of the literary roots of the concept, and remarks that
among many writer who have cared about the 'secret influence' of the city (Charles
Baudelaire or Walter Benjamin, for instance), the British have shown special care for this
practice. He states:
In English writing, or more particularly in London writing, there is a visionary
tradition that is best represented by the motif of the imaginary voyage, a journey
that reworks and re-imagines the layout of the urban labyrinth and which records
observations of the city streets as it passes through them. The earliest examples of
this tradition are, in fact, pioneering psychogeographical surveys of the city.
(Coverley 15)
William Blake, Thomas De Quincey, Daniel Defoe, Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur
Machen are some of the examples of this pioneering current of writers that crystallized the
roots of this concepts in English literary tradition . In consequence, it is not arbitrary that
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this concept could be used as a perspective through which one can read the relations
between the literary urban landscapes and the characters, in a piece of narrative. Since
Psychogeography is not strictly a science, it can perfectly be seen as a poetic scope to
examine the imaginative possibilities that the urban landscape offers in relation with the
individual in literary texts.
Kenneth Ramchand states in his introduction to The Lonely Londoners, that "novels
characteristically distort and re-shape facts in order to express feelings that are part of the
meaning of the facts, feelings that may well be about to lead to a new set of facts" (7).
From this one can extract that the novel, its characters, the space they inhabit, and all the
rest of its elements, are a concatenation of signs referring to a very specific reality. Context
is not less important in the understanding of how the different signs of the narrative
intertwine an relate to one another. That is why the geographical context that the author
chooses in this novel as setting is so important, for the mechanisms of shaping identity at a
character level as well as for a configuration of literary space that frames this mechanism.
The very opening sequence of Sam Selvon's novel The Lonely Londoners embraces
a connection with what is a core element throughout the whole narrative: the city of
London itself.
One grim winter evening, when it had a kind of unrealness bout London,
with a fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights showing in the
blur as if is not London at all but some strange place on another planet,
Moses Aloetta hop on a number 46 bus at the corner of Chepstow Road and
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Westbourne Grove to go to Waterloo to meet a fellar who was coming from
Trinidad on the boat-train. (23)
The description of place in this passage follows a sense of the metropolis as essentially
strange in itself, in other words, a place which adopts alien characteristics from the
perspective of Moises. It also follows, in a certain way, the literary image of London as a
fog-covered city (something present in some of the precursors of psychogeography, such as
De Quincey or Defoe), which presents itself menacing in nature, as it settles as the starting
point from which to plunge into the big problematic of the narrative.
It is not random that the first place of London that is actually introduced in the novel
is the big Waterloo station. As the narrator describes it, the station "is a place of arrival and
departure, is a place where you see people crying goodbye and kissing welcome"(25). The
station is described as place of contrastive experiences, a place of dichotomies. But it is
also a threshold area, a space of transition between worlds, where the West Indies end and
London begins. This is quite important if one considers that the road to configure identity
for the characters of the novel begins here, in a place that has no identity, in a sense that
one understands limits and definition; the essence of Waterloo station is moveable, as well
as the identity of the newcomers. They have no where fixed to go to in London, this is
evidenced by the narrator's remark upon the fact that this is not the first time that Moses
goes to the station to pick up newcomers, and that "all sorts of fellars start coming straight
to his room in the Water when they land up in London from the West Indies"(23-34). In
this way, as a starting point, Waterloo Station is not a frozen picture, but a mirror of the
constant march of arrivals and departures.
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E. V. Walter in his book Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment, explains
that "a place binds people together by the common emotions it elicits. Moreover, (...) [it]
gathers experience and must be understood as one of the unities of experience" (133),
which is to say that places do not conform separate objects from the individual who inhabit
them in terms of experience, but become a unity with them. The experience of the of
geography, of the physical landscape, is also a psychic experience in The Lonely
Londoners. Moses experiences this phenomenon when he arrives to the station:
he had a feeling of home sickness that he never felt in the nine-ten years he in this
country (...) the station is that sort of place where you have a sort of feeling. It was
here that Moses did land when he come to London, and he have no doubt that when
the time come, if it ever come, it would be here he would say goodbye to the big
city. (25-26)
The station is a place of great significance and it is also a place that interacts with Moses. It
leaves him feeling "lonely and miserable"; it makes him think about his home land for the
first time since he arrived; and it makes him hesitate on his decisions.
Another example of the direct argument of the city with characters in the novel, is
Sir Galahad, who has an experience of loneliness similarly influenced by landscape as in
the case of Moses and the station . He stands still when "he make for the tube (...) on
Queensway watching everybody going about their business, and a feeling of loneliness and
fright come on him all of a sudden (41). The character is in one of these threshold areas of
the novel, where they stop to contemplate how the machinery of the city works quite well,
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and relentlessly, without them being part of this movement. He suddenly realizes that "here
he is, in London [where] everybody doing something or going somewhere" (42).
The construction of identity in The Lonely Londoners is not a simple process, in the
way that it does not consist only of one method. It is not only the city that shapes characters
in their way of adaptation to the difficult atmosphere of London; characters among
themselves, in a dialogue through urban symbols, also form a part of the process of shaping
their landmarks and portraits. Lisa M. Kabesh states that The Lonely Londoners is an
"enunciative text; it produces the community it describes in the act of writing, recording
and mapping its voices and movements"(1). It is interesting that the concept she uses to for
describing the processes of construction is mapping. When one thinks of a map, one thinks
of a representation of certain geographical location, which shows its limits, positions and
distributions of all its points. The process of mapping evidently evokes the notion of space,
and following Kabesh's premise of enunciation as the main characteristic of the novel
regarding the construction of its own characters, it is possible to find here another way in
which the character's identities find their form: the enunciation of landscape.
Mapping involves the inherent process of naming the inhabited place, marking its
components, and thus, creating a two folded relationship between the individual and
landscape . A relation of naming and the urban landscape is present throughout the novel.
Characters often name the city at their will, or use the city characteristics even to refer to
other characters. One simple example could be Moses himself, who at his first conversation
with Galahad is called "mister London"(39) by the latter. The association that Sir Galahad
does, which might seem a simple conjecture, gives account of the blurry limits of reciprocal
influence that the city and the characters have on each other. Moses is mister London
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because he is in many ways a veteran of among the immigrants to London. He is the
starting point for many others that are newly arrived to the big city. The London experience
is a cruise for the character, who much rather prefer to have a destination and a crew than
experiencing the voyage alone, "for this city powerfully lonely when you on your
own"(47). Moses is in this sense the London newcomers can relate to, figuratively
speaking, a cardinal point to move with the city-flow, a characteristic that Galahad
recognizes, for when he is calling him mister London, he is asking for some advice from
the experienced Moses. This notion of Moses as the character that mores resembles the city
(because of his knowledge and experience on it) might seem contradictory with the notion
that the character has of London. He confesses to Galahad: "All them places is like nothing
to me now (...) you see them for yourself, and is like nothing" (85). However, although it
may seem that the lack of significance of the places of London is an obstacle for him to be
seen as a cardinal point of the city, it is not. Moses' identity and relation with place is
paradoxical, but his perspective do not damage the perspectives of other characters who see
in him the only way of finding direction in urban chaos.
Another example, that is even more clear is the one of Big City, whose obsession
with the big capitals of the world give him his name. His process of relating with the city is
a process of naming, also related to the process of mapping, because Big City uses his own
transformed terminology to refer to the places of London. Some examples are: Nottingham
Gate instead of Notting Hill; Gloucestershire for Gloucester Road or Kensington Mansion
to name Kensington Palace. His map of the city is his own fiction, or as it is presented to
the reader, "Big City used to have dreams, and he believe those dreams as if they happen
true"(100). He is constantly corrected by Moses (mister London), who at the same time
tries to course the boy, constantly telling him to "make a effort to learn, boy"; however,
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despite Moses' efforts, Big City adjusts to his fantasies. He repeats to himself religiously:
"Big city for me (...) Is New York and London and Paris"(94); "Big city, boy, big city.
Paris, Berlin, Rome, Bargdan, then after the States, San Francis, Chicago, New York" (97).
In this case, the city devours the individual, to the point of amalgamation.
But there is a reverse side to the coin that Big City represents. In the same line of
enunciation, the character of Sir Galahad has his own method to move around London, but
his methodology is quite contrastive in comparison with the one of Big City:
[Galahad] getting on well in the city. He had a way whenever he taking with the
boys, he using the names of the places like they mean big romance, as if to say 'I
was in Oxford Street' have more prestige than if he just say 'I was up the road'(84)
In Saussurean terms, Big City uses the signifier in his own way, notwithstanding the lack of
a conventional agreement to name the city as he likes it, whereas Galahad uses the
conventionally agreed signifiers to name the city. Sir Galahad recognizes the implications
that the correct names of London's topography have, and his process of mapping them as
the entire world does, gives him a sense of importance. Moreover, there is another aspects
that position both characters as contrastive to one another. On the one hand, Big City
unconsciously incorporates the city into his own name and personality in an attempt to
believe his own fantasy. He is swallowed by his beloved City. Sir Galahad on the other
hand, uses the stamp that he recognizes in places in order to detach himself from reality and
feel like a King in London. An example of this is given by the account of one of his dates,
in a place that he identifies as Charing Cross, where he "[does not] matter about the woman
he going to meet, just to say he was going there made him feel big and important"(84).
An element that is present in the character of Galahad ( and other characters of the
novel) and directly concerns the scope of Psychogeography, is walking. Psychogeography,
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since its early roots found in the literature of Thomas De Quincey or the ideas of
Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin about the flâneur, has been interested in the character
figure that walks through the city, and discovers through this activity the underlying
patterns of this space. According to Coverley, the role of the wanderer is the one of the
"detached observer" (20-21) who "becomes intoxicated by [the crowd] movement"(58).
The crowd works as another symbol of the city, it is a different element to the individual
who is a witness of its distinct mobility. In the case of Galahad, who often wanders around
the urban environment, the role of the detached observer is evident:
Many nights he went there [the Piccadilly Tube Station] before he get to know how
to move around the city, and see them fellars and girls waiting, looking at they
wristwatch, watching the people coming up the escalator from the tube (...) All these
people there, standing up waiting for somebody. (84)
He observes how the mass of London moves around, but at the same time, the narrator
remarks the actual observation: they are waiting. There is a sense that mobility is paused, or
at its most rapid, slow motioned. Again there is a functionality to space, since it is a station
the scenery for Galahad's analysis of the crowd. Again the urban landscape works as a
threshold area, a place between two places, where the observer can stand and look, while
he grasps the hidden patterns of his environment.
Howard Stein states that "space is the stage on which dramas of time are
enacted"(103). Some examples of the characteristics of this 'stage' where the character's
dramas are played have already been treated. However, there are some others that are
worthy of mention. London has a crude urban landscape, but it also has crude weather
conditions, and this is not an anecdotic element for characters. At the beginning of the
novel, in Waterloo Station, a reporter comes to interview Tolroy, an immigrant that is with
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his entire family that just arrived, and "maliciously" warns him "I hope you don't find the
weather too cold for you"(32). Here, weather as a part of London has an underlying
connotation, because of the adverb that describes the intention of the reporter. Weather is
another brick in wall that segregates immigrants who come from tropical areas of the
planet. In an optimistic way they arrive "looking about the desolate station as if (..) in an
exhibition hall on a pleasant summer evening"(33); as if weather came with them to
embrace them as they enter to the fog-covered city of London. This naivety is shared by
more than one member of the diasporean group: Tolroy, Galahad, and even the elder Tanty,
who explains "I never thought in my old age I would land up in a country like this, where
you can't see where you going and it so cold you have to light fire to keep warm"(80).
Furthermore, another element that characterizes Selvon's London is the one of
separation or disjunction within the London crowd of habitants. The character Tolroy
observes: " A man could get lost here easy, it have millions of people living here, and your
friend could be living in London for years and you never see him." (72). There is a sense in
this passage that people disappear within the crowd in the city, as if this mass, as a
distinctive feature of London, swallows its own inhabitants. Landscape contributes to this
separation:
It have people living in London who don't know what happening in the room next to
them (...) London is a place like that. It divide up in little worlds, and you stay in the
world you belong to and you don't know anything about what happening in the other
ones except what you read in the papers. (74)
It is evident that the characteristics of space works as defining the social boundaries that
separate London into little ghettos, which are unknown to the rest of the city (further below,
a similar phenomenon occurs regarding the participation of immigrants in economy). The
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relation that people create here with their environment is a negative one, since they ignore
the links between the different locations of the city. If one thinks of Kabashe's conception
of enunciation, the process here is rather the opposite, for nothing is uttered nor
communicated directly, information comes to disjointed places by indirect means, such as
the newspapers. As the narrator remarks "People don't talk about things like that again, they
come to kind of accept that is so the world is (...) it bound to have some who live by the
Grace and others who have plenty"(74); thus stating that this pattern of segregation is
reinforced by people who neglect this situation by taking it for granted, as they mark a
determination regarding the relations that the rest of the inhabitants have with space.
Social limits of characters are also marked by the city landmarks. Such as an
example of this can be found in the area on which Tolroy and his family live, where
"people on that area are call the Working Class"(73). Here the city landscape reflects
entirely the conditions of the characters who belong to this class; "This is the real world,
where men know what it is to hustle a pound to pay the rent (...) Houses around here are old
and grey and weatherbeaten, the walls cracking like the last days of Pompeii"(73). Social
and structural detriment are bound to each other; the sign and the referent are one of these
worlds created by the mechanism of segregation that the city embodies.
The city is not always as benevolent as it is with Moses or Big city, in their own
way respectively . There are other characters on whom the influence of London is
diminishing; there is the case of Captain , who in a sense, represent the confident new
generation after Moses that come to London looking for a reality to correspond with certain
projections, and as a result they find a colossus that limits them: "[Captain's] father send
him to London to study law, but Captain went stupid when he arrive to the big city"(48).
At one point in Cap's story, he is sent to the railway to get a storekeeping work, but the man
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in charge of the place, after looking at him, gives him a job, but not quite the one he is
expecting. When he is back to Moses, he explains him the following: "they want to put you
in the yard to lift heavy iron. They that is all we good for, and this time they keeping all the
soft clerical jobs for them white fellars"(52). Therefore, in this encounter of man and space,
or Captain and the railway, the diminishing experience takes another perspective. The
encounter is presented to the reader as it follow:
The people who living in London don't really know how behind them railway
station does be so desolate and discouraging. It like another world. All Cap seeing is
railway line and big junk of iron all about the yard, and some thick heavy cable
lying around. It look like hell, and Cap back away when he see it."(52)
Again, it is possible to identify the gloomy London atmosphere, but this no longer provokes
nostalgia, now there is a form of terror represented in a vision of a wired and desolate hell.
Landscape diminishes the individual with its overwhelming features. But the experience
also implies a double sided rejection to Captain. Kabasha explains the process undergoing
this passage:
Cap’s experience at the rail yard does more than explicate the racial hierarchy of
labour in postwar London; it further uncouples the symbol of British progress par
excellence—the railway— from its association with freedom and mobility. (...) he
discovers that the rail yard is a physically segregated space—he is taken to “the
back of the station, and behind there real grim” (52). The implication of this
separation is that the colonial system of segregation is in the process of reification at
home, in England, in this period of decolonization. (8)
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it is patent how the characters experiences a racial and an economical kind of segregation;
furthermore, it is interesting that landscape here reflects this process by the exclusion of
Captain from London's appreciable development, by taking him into the backyard,
unknown to the rest of the citizens. Moreover, iron and railways played an important part in
British economy, as Kabesh remarks, they were "constructed as routes of resource
extraction [that] operated as a function of imperial exploitation and appropriation"(8).
Therefore, space here is also symbolic, as it represents the reflection of the old ways
regarding racial segregation at the colonies.
The closing vignette of the book opens with a description of the changing of seasons
in London and a narrative voice that explicitly questions the paradigm beyond the relation
of the individual and the city. It says :
"to say these things, to have lived these things, to have lived in the great city of
London, centre of the world (...) What it is that a city have, that any place in the
world have, that you get so much to like it you wouldn't leave it for anywhere
else? (...) Why it is, that although they grumble about it all the time, curse people,
curse the government (...) why it is, that in the end, everyone cagey about saying
outright that if the chance come they will go back to them green islands in the `
sun?"(137)
In this passage, inner perception of the narrator's perspective as an individual is attached to
space. The apprehension of the urban environment, of the city, is total, because regardless
of the many obstacles and hazards that London represents for the immigrant, the city is at
the same time part of the cultural construction that the individual overcomes. The
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psychogeographical perspective that Howard Stein applies to this kind of processes can
elucidate the problem. Describing metapsychological reflections on migration and culture,
Stein explains that "It is into geographic, hence cultural space that the burden of
generational and intrapsychic space is displaced, projected, and played out"(103). In other
words, the individual projects his psyche onto the environment in the process of
construction of identity. That is why, "any threat of culture loss is experienced as renewed
separation and object loss"(105). Therefore, it is understandable that the character
embraces the city despite its threats, and dismisses as weary any possibility of leaving a
place that conforms part of his cultural construction.
Through the scope of psychogeography and other contemporary theories that gather
studies of space in relation with the individual, one can discover that the characters of The
Lonely Londoners are constructed in intimate relation with the fictional space they inhabit.
This fictional space is a sign-translated reality that refers to a certain time and place, that
are important to consider at the time of interpreting the patterns that form the different
elements and symbolic devices of the novel. Although it is difficult to identify a group
identity in the novel, because of the very set of different migratory experiences , it is
evident that in most of the characters, if not in everyone of them, the immigrant experience
is tightly bound to the experience of the city of London. The consideration of the last
sequence of the novel also evokes the conception of a collective experience that, despite of
particular difficulties, embraces landscape as a fundamental part of their process of
construction of identity.
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Works Cited
Coverley, Merlin. Psychogeography. Wales: Pocket Essentials, 2006. Print
Kabesh, Lisa. "Mapping Freedom, or Its Limits: The Politics of Movement in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners". Postcolonial Text. 6.3 (2011). web. June 11, 2014.
Selvon, Samuel. The Lonely Londoners. New ed. London: Penguin, 2006. Print
Stein, Howard. Developmental Time, Cultural Space: Studies in Psychogeography. United
States: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Print
Walter, Eugene. Placeways: A Theory of Human Environment. Chapel Hill: The University
of North Carolina Press, 1988. Print