A Vagrant Sensibility

The second chapter, ‘A Vagrant Sensibility: Patrick Keiller’s Robinson Films’, casts new light on Keiller’s later work, partly by considering it in relation to the idea of ‘left-wing melancholy’ and Svetlana Boym’s writing on nostalgia. If, as Raymond Williams wrote, ‘there is usually principle in exile, there is always only relaxation in vagrancy’, then this chapter shows how the vagrant wanderings of ‘Robinson’ through London and England are able to both ‘luxuriate’ and to produce a potent critique of capital, landscape, and culture. Beginning by reading the Robinson of London (1994) as an urbanist swayed not so much by the ebb and flow of the Baudelairean crowd as by the blips and dips of the free-market economy, it then examines the ‘English Journey’ of Robinson in Space before enquiring into Keiller’s own critique in Robinson in Ruins (2010) of Heideggerian dwelling as the process of ‘entering in simple oneness into things’.

Introduction

The introduction commences with a ‘detour’ into the history of landscape art and the picturesque, suggesting ways that this mode pre-empted what may seem like more modern ideas about the interference between perception and representation. This discussion is folded into a brief account of the so-called ‘spatial turn’ and the interventions of theorists including Doreen Massey and Marc Augé, establishing an immediate context for the work of Keiller, Sebald, and Sinclair. Suggesting a twin heritage of the ‘English Journey’ on the one hand and the French Surrealists and Situationists on the other, the introduction then offers the tension between amant and amateur as a way of characterizing the balance of exotic/everyday, plan/coincidence, and high-brow/low-brow in these figures’ work. It considers the role of pedestrianism and melancholia before closing with a discussion of Walter Benjamin and Gustave Doré’s ‘New Zealander’.

Iain Sinclair’s Early Writing

Chapter 5, ‘Iain Sinclair’s Early Writing: The Arcane Scholarship of Place’, begins by exploring the special influence of an eccentric 1914 text by Elizabeth Gordon entitled Prehistoric London: Its Mounds and Circles (1914) on Sinclair’s occult-inflected poetic geographies of London. Examining his creative exchanges with other writers, including Peter Ackroyd and Alan Moore, it explores the coterie atmosphere of Sinclair’s early work before going on to navigate his increasingly venomous and toxic vision of East London and the Thames Estuary in the period spanning 1970 to 1994, adumbrating and critiquing the parallel development of what Patrick Wright has called the ‘acid negativity’ of Sinclair’s prose.

Conclusion

In 1955’s The Making of the English Landscape, W.G. Hoskins more than once echoed Keats’s ‘Grecian Urn’ in his description of ‘the gentle unravished English landscape’ visible from the window where he sat, perhaps consciously also echoing the position of Christopher Hussey when he first noticed Uvedale Price’s writings on his uncle’s bookshelf—the image with which this book began....

An English Pilgrim

If, as Salman Rushdie has written (in an essay on Günter Grass), ‘the migrant is, perhaps, the central or defining figure of the twentieth century’, then Chapter 4, ‘An English Pilgrim:?Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz’, explores how Sebald depicts spaces scored by both his own migration to England and that of the Jewish refugees he encounters there. Placing Sebald’s work into dialogue with itself (polemical texts like On the Natural History of Destruction) and with regional history texts like Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield (1969), this chapter examines how Sebald’s East Anglia becomes an exemplary setting for his saturnine account of the ‘natural history of destruction’ as well as his problematic depiction of ‘heritage’ spaces in The Rings of Saturn (1995). It goes on to show how Austerlitz (2001) frames its depictions of England within a network of other locations including Brussels, Prague, Paris, Marienbad (Czech Republic), and North Wales, cultivating a thickened sense of space and place by way of the profound and moving friendship that it recounts between Sebald’s narrator and the fictional Jacques Austerlitz.

The Camera-I

The opening chapter, ‘The Camera-I: Patrick Keiller’s Early Short Films and Essays’, reconstructs Keiller’s early career and his shift from architecture to film-making, reading the use of ‘subjective camera’ and the creation of ‘subjective townscape’ in his early experimental works as crucial to the developing sensibility of his later docu-narratives. Excavating a history of the ‘London Film-makers’ Co-op’ and examining Keiller’s early essays before looking at the short films Stonebridge Park (1981) and Norwood (1983), it explores the ‘atmosphere of unemployed reverie’ and paranoiac, noir methods that provided a footing for the later Robinson series. At the same time, it offers a view of the exciting world of political agitation and experimental film of 1960s London.

Crosses, Circles, and Madness

Sinclair’s creative misreading of ‘psychogeography’ as ‘psychotic geography’ is central to the sixth chapter, ‘Crosses, Circles, and Madness: Iain Sinclair’s Lights Out for the Territory, London Orbital, and Edge of the Orison’. This chapter centres on the self-conscious neuroticism of Sinclair’s later documentary narratives, showing how the idea of walking is ever more closely associated with madness and psychological instability. Exploring Sinclair’s cultivation of ‘secret’ histories and ‘obscenery’ in Lights Out for the Territory (1997) and London Orbital (2002), its examination of Edge of the Orison (2005) arcs back to John Barrell’s canonical study of landscape art and the poetry of John Clare, suggesting that Sinclair’s agonized attachment to the figure of Clare finds his work ‘haunted’ by nothing so much as itself, returning constantly to the same themes and territories in a perverse parody of the picturesque mode.

W.G. Sebald’s Early Writing

Chapter 3, ‘W.G. Sebald’s Early Writing: “A European at the End of European Civilization”’, begins by reading the long poem After Nature (1988) as one version of what Markus Zisselsberger has called Sebald’s ‘original journey’ from the Allgaü region of southern Germany to Manchester in the 1960s. It discusses and critiques his depiction of the city in that poem as well as ‘Max Ferber’ (the final story of 1996’s The Emigrants) and his early poem ‘Bleston. A Mancunian Cantical’ (1967). Reading these works, and their representation of Manchester, in light of Susan Sontag’s comments on Sebald as ‘a European at the end of European civilization’, the chapter shows how Sebald’s work combines fictional and factual histories to produce a rich texturology of place. At the same time, tracing Sebald’s work with the damaged histories of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, it stages his work in the context of Theodor Adorno’s famous comment on the ‘barbarism’ of writing poetry after Auschwitz.