(Espaço) Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell, Robert Hudson-Land & Identity - Theory, Memory, and Practice-Rodopi (2012)

Land & Identity
Spatial Practices
An Interdisciplinary Series in
Cultural History,
Geography and
Literature 13
General Editors:
Christoph Ehland (Universität Paderborn)
Chris Thurgar-Dawson (Teesside University)
Editorial Board:
Christine Berberich
Catrin Gersdorf
Jan Hewitt
Peter Merriman
Ralph Pordzik
Merle Tönnies
Founding Editors:
Robert Burden
Stephan Kohl
Land & Identity
Theory, Memory, and Practice
Edited by Christine Berberich,

Neil Campbell, and Robert Hudson
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2012

Cover Design: Inge Baeten
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO
9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISSN: 1871-689X
ISBN: 978-90-420-3460-0
E-book ISBN: 978-94-012-0743-0
©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2012
Printed in the Netherlands
The Spatial Practices Series
The series Spatial Practices belongs to the topographical

turn in cultural studies and aims to publish new work in
the study of spaces and places which have been appropri-
ated for cultural meanings: symbolic landscapes and ur-
ban places which have specific cultural meanings that
construct, maintain, and circulate myths of a unified na-
tional or regional culture and their histories, or whose
visible ironies deconstruct those myths. Taking up the
lessons of the new cultural geography, papers are invited
which attempt to build bridges between the disciplines of
cultural history, literary and cultural studies, and geogra-
phy.
Spatial Practices aims to promote a new interdis-
ciplinary kind of cultural history drawing on constructiv-
ist approaches to questions of culture and identity that
insist that cultural “realities” are the effect of discourses,
but also that cultural objects and their histories and geog-
raphies are read as texts, with formal and generic rules,
tropes and topographies.
Robert Burden
Stephan Kohl
Founding Editors
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements 9
Notes on Contributors 11
Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell & Robert Hudson

Introduction:
Framing and Reframing Land and Identity 17
Section A
Land and Identity:
Theories and Philosophies
1 David Crouch
Landscape, Land and Identity:
A Performative Consideration 43
2 Fran Speed
Nature Qua Identity:
Nature, Culture and Relational Integrity 67
3 Donna Landry
The Geopolitical Picturesque 91
Section B
Landscapes of Memory:
Eschatology, Trauma, and Diaspora
4 Kirby Farrell
Eschatological Landscape 117
5 Jenni Adams
Cities Under a Sky of Mud:
Landscapes of Mourning in Holocaust Texts 141
6 Moy McCrory
“This Time and Now”:
Identity and Belonging in the Irish Diaspora:
The Irish in Britain and Second-Generational Silence 165
Section C
Literary Landscapes:
Urbanism, Ecology and the Rural
7 Elsa Cavalié
“And I found myself looking through another window at a
darker landscape inhabited by neither the present nor the
past”: Recovering Identity in A Month in the Country 193
8 Monica Germanà
Beyond the Gaps:
Postmodernist Representations of the Metropolis 213
9 Brian Jarvis
“It is always another world”: Mapping the Global
Imaginary in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition 235
10 Alex Lockwood
The Shore is Not a Beach 259
Christine Berberich & Neil Campbell

Afterword:
Lines of Flight: Unframing Land, Unframing Identity – Two
283
Speculations
Index 305
Acknowledgements
The Editors would first of all like to acknowledge the funding given
by the University of Derby to help with the original symposium. The
University also granted further research funding for work on the
manuscript.
We would particularly like to thank all the contributors to the
‘Land & Identity’ symposium which took place on 16th May 2009.
Our initial Call for Papers was met with worldwide interest and enthu-
siasm, which resulted in a stimulating event. Special thanks go to Dr.
Ruth Larsen for helping with some of the organization, and especially
to the MA students Glen Harbord, Emma Elliott, Jane Flynn, Gwilym
John and Rob Hodkinson for auditing the symposium for us.
The series editors at Rodopi, Prof. Stephan Kohl at the Univer-
sity of Würzburg and Dr. Robert Burden at the University of Teesside,
have dealt swiftly and efficiently with all our queries; Esther Roth at
Rodopi in Amsterdam has been a reliable source of information and
assistance. Elke Demant, Franziska Fröhlich and Kristina Baudemann
are to thank for their speed and diligence in preparing the manuscript
for publication.
The considerable academic interest in matters of land and iden-
tity has given us much food for thought and has spurred us on to plan
another joint venture, a conference on ‘Affective Landscapes’, to be
held at the University of Derby in the early summer 2012.
Christine Berberich would like to thank past and present stu-
dents at the Universities of Derby and Portsmouth for engaging dis-
cussions on matters of personal and national identity.
Neil Campbell would like to extend thanks to his students for
useful discussions of D.J. Waldie’s Holy Land and to Don Waldie
himself for commenting so positively on the work in progress.
Similarly Robert Hudson would like to thank those students
studying his module on European Cultural Identities and Ethnic Mi-
norities for their enthusiastic discussion on some of the issues raised
in this book.
Portsmouth, 2011 C.B.

Derby N.C. & R.H.
Notes on Contributors
Jenni Adams is Lecturer in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century

Literature at the University of Sheffield. Her research addresses the
relationship between ethics and aesthetics in Holocaust literature, with
recent publications including essays on the work of Jonathan Safran
Foer and Markus Zusak in the journals Clio and Children’s Literature
in Education. Her first monograph, Magic Realism in Holocaust
Literature: Troping the Traumatic Real was published by Palgrave
Macmillan in 2011.
Christine Berberich is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the

University of Portsmouth. Her research specialism is Englishness and
the creation of National Identity. She has published book chapters and
journal articles on Englishness as well as the authors W.G. Sebald,
Julian Barnes, James Hawes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Siegfried Sassoon,
Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell. Her book The Image of the Eng-
lish Gentleman in Twentieth Century Literature: Englishness and
Nostalgia was published by Ashgate in 2007. She is co-editor (with
Prof. Arthur Aughey) of These Englands. Contemporary Conversa-
tions on Englishness (forthcoming, Manchester University Press,
2011) and is currently at work on a new monograph dedicated to
identity formation in the contemporary English Home Tour.
Neil Campbell is Professor of American Studies and Research

Manager at the University of Derby, U.K. He has published widely in
American Studies, including the books American Cultural Studies
(with Alasdair Kean), American Youth Cultures (as editor) and (as co-
editor) Issues on Americanisation and Culture. He has published
articles and chapters on John Sayles, Terrence Malick, Robert Frank,
J.B. Jackson and many others. His major research project is an
interdisciplinary trilogy of books on the contemporary American
West. The first two are The Cultures of the American New West
(Edinburgh, 2000) and The Rhizomatic West (Nebraska, 2008) and he
is currently working on the final part, Post-Westerns, on cinematic
representation of the New West.
Elsa Cavalié holds a PhD from Toulouse University, France. Her

work focuses on the study of “Englishness” and the rewriting of
history in contemporary novels revisiting the Edwardian and Georgian
periods. Recent and forthcoming publications include ‘“England [is] a
long way off”: McEwan’s French Counterpoint’ (Etudes Britanniques
Contemporaines [37] 2009); ‘“Unofficial Englishmen”: Representa-
tions of the English gentleman in Julian Barnes’s Arthur and George’,
in F. Reviron (ed.) Englishness (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars
Press, 2009: 352-64); ‘“She would rewrite the past so that the guilty
became the innocent”: Briony’s House of Fiction’ in Ian McEwan: Art
and Politics (in the Age of Terrorism) (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag
Winter, 2010); ‘England still waits: Howards End et l’Angleterre
Enchanté’ in Y. Clavaron (ed.) E.M. Forster et l’étrange étranger (St
Etienne: P.U de St Etienne, 2010).
David Crouch is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Geography at the

University of Derby, UK. His research and writing crosses a number
of fields of cultural geography, connected through an attention to life
and space, and includes landscape, everyday life and its tourism,
community involvement and the work of artists. This work includes
an interest in gentle politics, cultural identity and human expression.
His latest book, Flirting with Space: Journeys and Creativity, is
published by Ashgate, 2011. He is an exhibiting artist. He can be
contacted at: Orchard House, Hagg Lane, Epperstone,
Nottinghamshire, NG14 6AW; email: d.c.crouch@derby.ac.uk;
websites: davidcrouch.co.uk, davidcrouch-art.co.uk
Kirby Farrell is Professor of English at the University of

Massachusetts in Amherst. His books include Post-Traumatic
Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the 90’s, Play Death and
Heroism in Shakespeare, Shakespeare's Creation, Women in the
Renaissance, and other early modern studies, most recently, The
Mysteries of Elizabeth I. He has also published several novels. He is
an editor of English Literary Renaissance and Kritikon Litterarum.
His latest book is Berserk Style in American Culture, due in 2011.
Monica Germanà is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and
Creative Writing at the University of Westminster. Her research
interests include late twentieth-century and contemporary British
literature, with a specific emphasis on the Gothic tradition, contempo-
rary women’s writing and Scottish literature. She is the editor of a
special issue of Gothic Studies on contemporary Scottish gothic and
the author of Scottish Women’s Gothic and Fantastic Writing,
(Edinburgh UP, 2010). She has published articles and chapters on
Emma Tennant, Ali Smith and Alasdair Gray.
Robert Hudson is University Professor in European History and

Cultural Politics at the University of Derby and Director of the
Identity, Conflict and Representation Research Centre. A graduate of
the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of
London, he held a Yugoslav government scholarship as a Post-
Graduate Fellow at the University of Sarajevo. He taught previously at
Exeter College of Art and Design and the University of Rennes II –
Haute Bretagne. He is a faculty member of the European Doctoral
Enhancement Programme (EDEN) in Peace and Conflict Studies, a
thematic network, funded by the European Union. He has re-visited
Yugoslavia and its successor states frequently since 1995, and during
the 1990s participated on six missions with the OSCE (Organisation
for Security and Cooperation in Europe) as an election supervisor. He
co-edited Politics of Identity: Migrants and Minorities in Multi-
cultural States (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2000), Different Approaches to
Peace and Conflict Research (University of Deusto, 2008) and Peace,
Conflict and Identity: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Research
(University of Deusto, 2009). He is currently co-editing After
Yugoslavia: Identities and Politics within the Successor States (to be
published by Palgrave/Macmillan) and is also Editor in Chief of
Response, the University of Derby’s E-journal for research and
scholarship.
Brian Jarvis is Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Film at

Loughborough University. He is the author of Postmodern Cartogra-
phies: The Geographical Imagination in Contemporary American
Culture (London: Pluto, 1998) and Cruel and Unusual: A Cultural
History of Punishment in America (London: Pluto, 2004) as well as a
number of essays on aspects of cultural geography, contemporary US
fiction, film and politics.
Donna Landry is Professor of English Literature at the University of

Kent, Canterbury, and Co-Director of the Centre for Studies in the
Long Eighteenth Century. She has published widely on eighteenth-
century British literature and culture. Her research is very interdisci-
plinary, covering literature, history, ecology and landscape aesthetics.
She is currently involved in the Evliya Çelebi Ride and Way project, a
proposal for a new cultural route in Anatolia. Her most recent book is
Noble Brutes: How Eastern Horses Transformed English Culture
(Johns Hopkins UP, 2008).
Alex Lockwood is Senior Lecturer in Journalism at the University of

Sunderland, specialising in environmental writing. He is a member of
the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment
(ASLE) and the Association for Journalism Education (AJE). His
latest research on the representation of climate change policy in the
UK press appeared in the collection Climate Change and the Media
(Oxford: Peter Lang).
Moy McCrory is a writer born in England of Irish parentage. Her

fiction has let her be claimed critically as an Irish writer. She has three
short-story collections and a novel published, and her fiction has been
widely anthologised, including entries in the influential Field Day
Anthology of Irish Writing, and Irish Writing in the Twentieth Century
(Cork UP). She was one of the featured writers chosen for the national
short story campaign, Endangered Species, in 2004. She has worked
as both a travel writer and an arts reviewer and was a weekly
columnist for the London Times. She has had work commissioned for
theatre and has been broadcast on radio and T.V. She is a
Hawthornden Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the
University of Derby. Themes in her work include the effects of culture
and background on women, women’s history and Irish studies.
Fran Speed is an independent scholar with a PhD in philosophy. She

was formerly a lecturer in Environmental Ethics at Birkbeck College,
London University. The focus of her research in environmental
philosophy resides at the intersection of aesthetics and ethics. Areas of
interest include environmental aesthetics; ethics of the built
environment; aesthetics of nature; aesthetics in everyday life; the
aestheticisation of the everyday and emotion and empathic imagina-
tion. Recent publications include ‘The Sacred Environment: an
investigation of the sacred and its implications for place-making’ in
Menin, Sarah (ed.) Constructing Place: Mind and Matter (London &
New York: Routledge, 2003) and ‘An Ethic of Relations: the aesthetic
imperative in environmental planning and development’ in Ethics and
the Built Environment (forthcoming). Fran is an artist, writer and film-
maker and is currently involved in a book proposal and a screenplay.
Introduction:
Framing and Reframing Land and Identity
Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell & Robert Hudson
What is at issue is the performative nature of differential identities: the

regulation and negotiation of those spaces that are continually, contingently,
‘opening out’, remaking the boundaries, exposing the limits of any claim to a
singular or autonomous sign of difference – be it class, gender or race. Such
assignations of social differences – where difference is neither One nor the
Other but something else besides, in-between – find their agency in a form of
the ‘future’ where the past is not originary, where the present is not simply
transitory. It is, if I may stretch a point, an interstitial future, that emerges in-
between the claims of the past and the needs of the present.
(Bhabha 1994: 219)
For a long time, our understanding of land and identity, expressed as

territoriality, had been located in the nation and the state. This had cer-
tainly been the case in the disciplines of International Relations, Inter-
national Politics, History, and Peace and Conflict Studies. Indeed, a
specific reading of territoriality was to be a dominant theme of inter-
national politics throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries, during which time armed conflict was mainly between nation
states or between states (often empires) and minority peoples strug-
gling for their independence. The objectives of these conflicts were
the acquisition and domination of enemy territory, or the creation of a
national ‘homeland’ through armed conflict, concomitant with the
stimulation of national identity. Alternative interpretations of such is-
sues as territory, home, and identity in their many configurations have
come through the work of Cultural Studies, Spatial Theory and Post-
colonial critique (Krause/Renwick 1996: x). One influence on such
writing has been Henri Lefebvre whose work on the “production of
space” argues: “[I]t is precisely because [Space] has been occupied
and used, and has already been the focus of past processes whose
traces are not always evident on the landscape”, that it might appear
18 Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell & Robert Hudson
“neutral”, and yet “[s]pace is political and ideological. It is a product

literally filled with ideologies” (Soja 1989: 80). Similarly, the above
quote by Bhabha identifies an “‘opening out’, remaking the bounda-
ries, exposing the limits” (1994: 313) as vital in a reconsideration of
normative notions of land and identity, emphasising the contingent
and negotiated status of human relations to space in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries. Thinkers such as Lefebvre and Bhabha have
transformed our sense of spatiality to critique notions of neutrality and
to see it instead as contested terrain, filled with ideological struggles
over political and poetical meaning as well as actual physical territori-
ality.
1. Landscaping
Our sense of place is really part of our cultural systems of meaning.

We usually think about or imagine cultures as “placed” – landscaped,
even if only in the mind. This helps to give shape and to give founda-
tion to our identities. However, the way in which culture, place and
identity are imagined and conceptualized are increasingly untenable in
the light of the historical and contemporary evidence. (Hall 1995:186)
Hall’s statement reminds us of the need to continually re-examine how

relations between land and identity might be re-configured and re-
theorised and shows how real and imagined senses of self and place
are filtered, amongst other forces, through memory, trauma, diaspora,
language, and history. Hall’s essay, first published in 1995, still rings
true today, perhaps with an ever greater resonance, given historical,
political, and cultural changes which have taken place over the inter-
vening years. Whether one thinks of ethnic wars, terrorist attacks,
natural disasters, technological developments, ecological warnings,
economic collapse, or global migration, concepts of land and identity
seem fundamental and significant to the twenty-first century. How we
feel about place; how we define ourselves in relation to landscape; and
how we respond to others’ sense of these complex attachments is cru-
cial, and is at the very heart of this collection of essays.
The word land in the title always suggests the physical and tan-
gible, even though land is always more than this, connecting, as it
does, to emotions, imagination, nationalism and identity. The piece of
land on which we stand is always already bound up with an array of
meanings that take it beyond itself to connect with a host of other dis-
courses around landscape, place, dwelling, as well as region, nation
and territory. Within this book we treat land as a starting point and
springboard for a series of sometimes inter-related, sometimes diffuse
cultural, social and political experiences stemming from its associa-
tions both real and imagined. It is generative – enabling, originating,
producing, or reproducing ideas and theories. The word land is, how-
ever, inevitably, most commonly bound up with landscape, that is,
with what we do with land; how we shape, construct, imagine, trans-
form and destroy it. Cultural geographer, J.B. Jackson, explained it
clearly:
[Landscape] is really no more than a collection, a system of man-made

spaces on the surface of the earth. Whatever its shape or size it is
never simply a natural space, a feature of the natural environment; it is
always artificial, always synthetic, always subject to sudden and un-
predictable change. We create them and need them because every
landscape is the place where we establish our own human organization
of space and time. (Jackson 1984: 156)
Therefore, as Mike Crang suggests, “landscapes are not individual

property; they reflect a society’s – a culture’s – beliefs, practices and
technologies” (1998: 15). Landscape is not one thing, but always mul-
tiple and connected relationally to a host of other cultural and political
concerns. Stephen Daniels once wrote of the duplicity of landscape as
a cultural term, carrying meanings of surface and depth, solid earth
and superficial scenery, natural and cultural, the ontological and the
ideological. To him, this provided a “broadening of the purview of
cultural geography” in which landscape was “reinstated”, “not despite
its difficulty as a comprehensive or reliable concept, but because of it”
(1989: 196-7). Tim Cresswell, following Daniels, explains this further
when he argues that
[p]laces are neither totally material nor completely mental; they are
combinations of the material and the mental and cannot be reduced to
either. […] Places are duplicitous in that they cannot be reduced to the
concrete or the ‘merely ideological’; rather they display an uneasy and
fluid tension between them. (Cresswell 1996: 13)
Many of these debates over terminology and how humankind relates

to concepts such as land, landscape, space and place are fundamental
to this collection. Perhaps Douglas Reichert Powell summarises it well

when he writes that
[p]lace is thus a constantly generative construction in which the physi-

cal place, the practices of its inhabitants, and the intellectual observer
are factors, but three among many factors. The experience of place is
always mediated by preconceived notions, expectations, biases, and
attitudes of the observer, and by these same considerations as they in-
tersect from other sources. (2007: 34)
Thus in considering land always already embroiled with landscape/

place/space we must allow for inclusiveness and contradictions, mak-
ing it both provocative and problematic in the relations it suggests.
Landscape is a term, therefore, to pause over and think about. David
Matless argues for the “relational hybridity of the term” bringing to-
gether, as it does, many apparent tensions, oppositions and combina-
tions, “shuttling between fields of reference”, as he puts it (1998: 12).
Daniels writes that this ‘duplicity’ in landscape, as he terms it, might
be seen as Adorno sees culture generally, as a “dialectical image” –
an ambiguous synthesis whose redemptive and manipulative aspects

cannot finally be disentangled, which can neither be completely rei-
fied as an authentic object in the world nor thoroughly dissolved as an
ideological mirage (Daniels 1989: 206).
Hence, landscape, as many other critics testify (like culture) is a

tricky term and yet this duplicity or variance can be a useful critical
tool allowing for a variety of approaches and arguments to cohere
around the word and its many associations. Landscape is neither fact
nor fiction, “object” or “mirage” (206), in Daniels’ terms, but encom-
passes all these connotations as a complex, real and imagined space of
relations, representations, and sensations. Daniels advocates the explo-
ration and utilization of this duplicity, this ambiguous dialectic, as the
heart of any new cultural geographies.
One might develop this idea through Mikhail Bakhtin and argue
that landscape, in these terms, as Anne Whiston Spirn advocates, is
also inherently dialogical, “shuttling” between material and immate-
rial, perception and presence, human and non-human, as spatial het-
erogeneity, mixing, crossing-over, contradicting; always processive –
and always unfinished:
Landscape is loud with dialogues, with story lines that connect a place
and its dwellers. […] A coherence of human vernacular landscapes
emerges from dialogues between builders and place, fine-tuned over
time. […] The context of life is a woven fabric of dialogues, enduring
and ephemeral. (Whiston Spirn 1998: 17)
In this way, landscape and identity are closely related, since “identities
[just as landscapes] are never completed, never finished […] they are
always as subjectivity itself is, in process […] always in the process of
formation” (Hall 1991: 47). We define ourselves, our countries, our
neighbourhoods in part by reference to landscapes, but in doing so of-
ten reduce the concept of landscape back to a more static, nostalgic,
and fixed sense of ‘belonging’ and rootedness, rather than embracing
a more fluid sense of place as mobile and hybrid, full of potentials for
‘becoming’ that may, in the end, be a more productive sense of land-
scape. Krista Comer comments in a very helpful way about how one
might re-define landscape not as “an empty field of vision (the prem-
ise of perceptual geography) but rather a brimming-full social topog-
raphy that creates and enacts the various cultural assumptions and
power struggles of the age” (1999: 13). In this sense, landscape is the
visible and invisible meeting ground of culture, place and space –
where identities are exchanged, performed and constructed. Too often,
as we have seen, land and identity have been twinned together as iron-
clad testaments to ethnic solidarity and nationalist territorialism with
horrifying consequences. This was notoriously borne out by the Nazis’
primordial and essentialist implementation of Blut und Boden ideol-
ogy and, more recently, by the proliferation of inter-ethnic wars in the
1990s whereby “the use of landscape or poetic spaces and the use of
history or golden ages” (Smith 1991: 78) have served as accelerants of
conflict. This theme will be more fully developed in section three of
this introduction, which will use specific cultural evidence from Croa-
tian and Spanish texts to support this claim, as well as Kirby Farrell’s
chapter on eschatological landscapes later in this volume.
Of course, the idea of landscape has become increasingly util-
ized in a much broader, poetic sense, to signify a whole set of mean-
ings and associations – the landscapes of the mind, the landscape of
fear, the landscape of loneliness. These uses show the need for a wider
definition of the notion of landscape to encompass more than just the
‘land’, the ‘surfaces of the earth’ and even the ‘visible terrain’, a term
more able to suggest the range of contacts, encounters and experiences
one might have with the world, the representations of the world and
the feelings, emotions, sensations, affects bound up with that ‘ex-
change’ or ‘dialogue’. Daniels and Cosgrove suggest this wider defini-
tion, arguing that
[a] landscape is a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing,

structuring or symbolizing surroundings. This is not to say that land-
scapes are immaterial. They have been represented in a variety of ma-
terials and on many surfaces – in paint on canvas, in writing on paper,
in earth, stone, water and vegetation on the ground. (1988: 1; empha-
sis added)
Increasingly, this acceptance of the “immaterial” has extended beyond

the ‘pictorial’ and ‘representational’ view of landscape to also include
other modes of phenomenological experience and ‘bodily practices’
through which we encounter, ‘read’, relate and construct ‘space’.
Catherine Nash argues for “performativity” and “practices” as central
to cultural geography, quoting Nigel Thrift’s “non-representational
theory” which is “concerned with […] the performative ‘presenta-
tions’, ‘showings’ and ‘manifestations’ of everyday life” (Thrift 1996:
126-7) and concerned with the “embodied, relational, expressive and
involved with others and objects in a world continually in process”
(Nash 2000: 655). Chris Philo terms this shift “dematerialized geogra-
phy” in contrast to traditional geographic territory defined as “obvi-
ous, tangible, countable and mappable phenomena present to the
senses (primarily sight)” (Philo 2000: 30). The focus was “human
modifications” and “human productions” on the environment and an
“aversion to the immaterial”, as he puts it. However, Philo argues for
balance between the two positions; “a vision sensitive to the complex
fusings of material and immaterial” (36). Tim Cresswell summarises
these ideas well, linking such ‘practices’ with ideology:
The geographical environment forces people to relate beliefs to ac-

tions. People read places by acting in them. Our actions in place are
evidence of our preferred reading […] so a place comes to have mean-
ing by our actions in it – by “practice” – and through our reactions to
this practice. […] Thus places are active forces in the reproduction of
norms – in the definition of appropriate practice. Place constitutes our
beliefs about what is appropriate as much as it is constituted by them.
(Cresswell 1996: 16)
We, of course, perceive landscape constantly, but as Cresswell re-

minds us, we are constantly ‘in’ places too, so although interpretation
is a key response, it is only part of our relationship. The concept of the
landscape/place as a ‘text’ that we can interpret or ‘read’ has been
much used and provided an important cultural, semiotic approach to
defining and discussing land’s interaction with humanity, however, as
Cresswell again reminds us, “the text is subject to multiple readings
despite the fact that some readings are encouraged more than others”,
with some as “normal, accepted” and others seen as “heretical, ab-
normal readings” (16). We might ultimately think of the landscape as
a complex, multiple field of experience to be read, felt, imagined,
used, known, performed and sensed. Thus, when we think about and
encounter land as space and place, perhaps we should always relate to
it as a complex layering of “texts, experiences, and interpretations of
specific locales that produces, in its ongoing processes, a place”
(Powell 2007: 35). However, these layers are shifting and metamor-
phic rather than fixed because “the layers have been bent, folded, bro-
ken, and melted into each other; they are transformed and transform-
ing” (35).
Increasingly, as we have seen and will discuss more in the Af-
terword, the idea of landscape as text, as representation, became itself
questioned and problematised in favour of what is known as non-
representational theory (see Thrift 2008; Bennett 2010; Crouch in this
volume). As John Wylie explains, this was an attempt to situate “eve-
ryday life, embodied experience, and practice” back on the landscape
agenda and to put life back into approaches which seemed drained of
vitality and energy (Wylie 2007: 163). The relations of power deter-
mined by the “preformed social codes and categories: race, gender,
class and sexuality” had become dominant (163) and non-representa-
tional, or “more-than-representational” (as it has been termed – see
Lorimer 2005) theory looked to reaccentuate the multisensual world
as significant in appreciations of landscape. At the heart of these ideas
is the view that “the world is understood to be continually in the mak-
ing – processual and performative – rather than stabilised or structured
via messages in texts and images” (Wylie 2007: 164). As Lorimer puts
it:
The focus falls on how life takes shape and gains expression in shared
experiences, everyday routines, fleeting encounters, embodied move-
ments, precognitive triggers, practical skills, affective intensities, en-

during urges, unexceptional interactions and sensuous dispositions.
Attention to these kinds of expression, it is contended, offers an es-
cape from the established academic habit of striving to uncover mean-
ings and values that apparently await our discovery, interpretation,
judgement and ultimate representation. (Lorimer 2005: 84)
2. Identity
As Raymond Williams wrote in 1961 culture is “the study of relation-

ships between elements in a whole way of life. The analysis of culture
is the attempt to discover the nature of the organization which is the
complex of these relationships.” (Williams 1965: 63) In the shadow of
Williams’ rethinking of cultural analysis as about “active relations”
within a “lived culture” (62, 66) identity formation has been tied more
closely to what Lorimer calls “how life takes shape” in its various and
multiple encounters with the world. Significantly, Doreen Massey
wrote in 1995, “the notion of place simply as settled, enclosed and in-
ternally coherent” has to be replaced by the idea of it as “a meeting
place, the location of the intersections of particular bundles of activity
spaces, of connections and interrelations, of influences and move-
ments” (Massey/Jess: 58-9). Identity emerges from these layered con-
tacts and relations with place, where it is seen as not static, but rather
constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meet-

ing and weaving together at a particular locus […] articulated mo-
ments in networks of social relations and understandings […] con-
structed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that
moment as the place itself [...]. And this in turn allows a sense of place
which is extroverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with
the wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the
local. (Massey 1994: 155-6)
Rejecting the rootedness of “some long, internalized history” Massey

favours a progressive “extroverted” sense of place with “a global
sense of the local, a global sense of place” (Massey 1994: 156, 155,
158). Indeed, in her later work Massey sounds increasingly Deleuzian,
allowing more for the affective, immanence of landscape in this proc-
ess; stating that space is “the sphere of possibility of the existence of
multiplicity in the sense of contemporaneous plurality […] in which
distinct trajectories coexist […] [in] the sphere […] of coexisting het-
erogeneity” (Massey 2005: 9).
Massey’s rejection of place as “settled, enclosed and internally
coherent”, as a rooted and fixed location through which identity is
formed is important in any reconsideration of notions and concepts of
identity formation. Critics like Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, and James
Clifford have developed these ideas as a way of seeing culture in late
modernity where notions of “roots” or essential identity rooted in
place and commonly shared by all, are less prominent than a more
fluid, hybridised sense of culture and identity born out of exchange,
movement and relationality. Hall’s discussion of “cultural identity”
warns of a too-neat linkage between landscape and the concept of na-
tional identity, whereby an essentialist position looks back to a point
of unity where identity was formed and whole, but which has subse-
quently been altered and corrupted. Instead, Hall favours a view of
identity which acknowledges “critical points of deep and significant
difference” which constitute “what we have become” (1990: 225). In
this, Hall moves closer to a sense of identity emerging through a more
fluid and divergent relationship to place and landscape:
Cultural identity [...] is a matter of “becoming” as well as “being”. It

belongs to the future as much as to the past. [...] Cultural identities
come from somewhere, have histories. But like everything which is
historical, they undergo constant transformation [...] subject to the
“play” of history, culture and power [...]. It is not once-and-for-all. It
is not a fixed origin to which we can make some final and absolute
Return. [...] It has its histories – and histories have their real, material
and symbolic effects. [...] It is always constructed through memory,
fantasy, narrative and myth. (225-6)
Sounding very much like our earlier definitions and problematisations

of land and landscape as “real, material and symbolic”, key to Hall’s
analysis is the notion of how identity is not fixed or rooted, but “con-
structed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth”; a space of
complex interactions rather than “a straight, unbroken line, from some
fixed origin” (226). In the words of Dieckhoff and Gutiérrez “identity
is contextual: it changes with the passage of time” (2001: x). To this
we could add that place and/or landscape are also factors that interact
with one’s sense of identity. Hence, there may be continuity within
concepts of “identity” but also, simultaneously, discontinuity; as other
forces such as migration, imperialism, ethnic dispute, violent interven-
tion, and cultural exchange enter into the equation. These themes will
be taken up further again in section three. In this sense, “difference,
therefore, persists – in and alongside continuity” (Hall 1990: 227).
Within histories there are always points of coherence for all – rela-
tions with the land, for example – but also the significant “play” of
difference (including race, class and gender), as Hall terms it, suggest-
ing instability, movement and “the lack of any final resolution”. Hall
suggestively comments that any attempt to represent these relations
could not rely on a conventional “binary structure” such as “past/
present” or “them/us” because the “boundaries are re-sited” (228). In
so doing, Hall refers to Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance which
deliberately echoes differ and defer in order to indicate that difference
is critical and yet within it is the persistent chain of other meanings
into the future (hence deferred) and back into the past, seen in the
“trace” contained in the word (différance). The outcome is the rejec-
tion of binary fixtures which seek to stabilise meanings, in favour of a
more fluid concept of difference, deferral and incompleteness.
This can be a helpful approach to how we think about land and
identity, since as we have seen too often there is a simple binary asso-
ciation between personal/cultural identity and its rootedness in the his-
torical landscape. As Edward Soja puts it “spatial thinking tended to
be straitjacketed into a tight dualism that limited its critical capacity,
especially in comparison with critical historiography and social the-
ory” (2010: 101). Hall, however, revised notions of cultural identity in
line with shifts in spatial theory to reject concepts of rooted and fixed
essence, defined by rigid binary thinking, favouring instead contested
and dynamic approaches. One key version of such a contested relation
of land and identity is what Hall terms the “diasporic”:
[T]he recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a

conception of “identity” which lives with and through, not despite,
difference; by hybridity. Diaspora identities are those constantly pro-
ducing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and
difference. (Hall 1990: 235)
The sense of identity and land “which lives with and through, not de-
spite, difference”, is a dynamic and mobile approach, attuned to a
sense of culture created by a whole body of ideas, struggles, and rep-
resentations. To revise identity and place as “diasporic” is one way to
challenge identity as essential and absolute and, as a result, “problem-
atizes the cultural and historical mechanics of belonging” by disrupt-

ing the mythic, explanatory “links between place, location and con-
sciousness” (Gilroy 1997: 328). Under such conditions, identity is dy-
namic, contested and productive (just as landscape), “travelling” and
encountering along its complex “routes” of diasporization, with “iden-
tities […] constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew,
through transformation and difference” so “that specific dynamics of
dwelling/travelling be understood comparatively”, questioning culture
as simply “a rooted body that grows, lives, dies, and so on” (Hall
1990: 235; Clifford 1997: 25). The work of postcolonial critics like
Clifford, Hall and Gilroy values and emphasizes “tangled cultural ex-
periences” challenging us to see identity and place as complex dias-
poric contact zones of “intersecting histories – discrepant detours and
returns”, where diaspora
involves dwelling, maintaining communities […] [and] articulates, or

bends together, both roots and routes to construct […] alternate public
spheres, forms of community consciousness and solidarity that main-
tain identifications outside the national time/space in order to live in-
side, with a difference. (Clifford 1997: 2, 30, 251)
Like Gilroy’s analysis of black musical cultures, we would see place

and identity as constituted by “histories of borrowing, displacement,
transformation, and continual reinscription” that “should not be reified
in the primary symbol of the diaspora and then employed as an alter-
native to the recurrent appeal of fixity and rootedness”, but rather be
viewed as a space where identity is “neither as a fixed essence nor as a
vague and utterly contingent construction to be reinvented by the will
and whim of aesthetes, symbolists and language gamers” (Gilroy
1994: 102).
From this critical “third space” Gilroy re-imagines this space
(of the Black Atlantic) as a “non-traditional tradition, an irreducibly
modern, ex-centric, unstable, and asymmetrical cultural ensemble that
cannot be apprehended through the manichean logic of binary cod-
ing”, a tradition redefined as “the living memory of the changing
same”. Through this revision of terms, he stresses that tradition is no
longer about “a lost past” nor a “culture of compensation” that might
retrieve it, but about “circulation and mutation”, a “two-way traffic”
that shifts us from the “chronotope of the road to the chronotope of the
crossroads” to demonstrate the nature of this intercultural process of
exchange (Gilroy 1994: 96, 102, 198, 199). Gilroy’s inventive formu-
lations, traditional senses of land and identity are disrupted and re-
arranged in productive ways that remind us of the endlessly entangled
ways in which identities form in contact with land, as material and
immaterial presence. Another post-colonial critic Edward Said ampli-
fies this new thinking in very clear terms which emphasise the need to
see “the connections between things” rather than to focus on what
separates or isolates them:
Yet just as human beings make their own history, they also make their
own cultures and ethnic identities. No one can deny the persisting con-
tinuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages,
and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and
prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if
that was all human life was about. Survival in fact is about the connec-
tions between things. […] It is more rewarding – and more difficult –
to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others
than only about ‘us’. But this also means not trying to rule others, not
trying to classify them or put them in hierarchies, above all, not con-
stantly reiterating how ‘our’ culture or country is number one (or not
number one, for that matter). For the intellectual there is quite enough
of value to do without that. (Said 1993: 407)
As far back as 1983, Denis Cosgrove wrote (following Raymond Wil-

liams) that landscapes “contain residual and emergent, as well as pre-
sent, cultural meanings” and that any “radical cultural geography”
must “follow Gramsci’s example of struggling to create a new culture
– a culture which will involve the production of new landscapes, and
of new meanings in the landscapes we already inhabit” (9-10). In or-
der for these new meanings to emerge and form, we have to know and
learn from the real and imagined worlds around us, study and engage
with them, interrupt and disrupt them, “refuse the picturesque and the
fragmentary for their own sakes […] in favour of a faulty and disor-
derly architecture”, a “truly improper aesthetics” unhindered by any
single vision but more likely to think multiply and dialogically about
the complex identities we construct in our relations with place and
space. It is perhaps under such conditions that we need to reassess the
meanings of land and identity, taking our lead from the “live culture”
all around us with its continually shifting and contested ground within
a global-local nexus of power, culture and identity (Vidler 1994:107).
3. Conflict
The dominance of the state in political history, politics and the realist
school of International Relations has led to the belief that the cultural
influence on identity formation was not as strong as the political one.
For a long time our understanding of land and identity was posited
upon an understanding of territoriality that underpinned national iden-
tity and the nation state. And this emphasis on territorial nationalism
has often resulted in armed conflict.
For Ernest Gellner nationalism, whether explicitly or implicitly,
referred to a peculiar link between ethnicity and the territorial state,
whereby the nation-state is dominated by one particular ethnic group
to the disadvantage of minorities within that state, thereby sowing the
seeds of discontent for the future (1983). Anthony Smith, a student of
Gellner, affirms that: “At the simplest level [the nation] refers to the
unification of national territory or homeland, if it is divided, and the
gathering together within the homeland of all nations.” (Smith 1991:
75) Behind this statement lies the role of irredentism and the attraction
of matrix states to ethnic minority communities. Irredentism refers to
the sense of a ‘lost’ space or territory that necessitates the gathering
together, annexation or occupation of lands that were considered to
have been lost and needed to be recovered or “redeemed”. Based on
the understanding of territoriality, irredentism would reinforce nation-
alism, and as an ideology, within a European context, irredentism
would become one of the main accelerants of conflict from the early
19th century to the outbreak of the Second World War.
From a European perspective, the theme of territoriality domi-
nated throughout the 19th century and early 20th centuries; witness the
main European struggles for independence and national liberation
based upon territoriality, with major examples being provided by
Greece (1830), Belgium (1831), the Italian and German lands (in 1861
and 1871 respectively), Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia (1878), Norway
(1905), Albania (1913), Finland (1917), Czechoslovakia, Estonia,
Latvia, Lithuania and Yugoslavia (1918), and Ireland (1922).
Academic debate over nationalism and national identity intensi-
fied with the transitions that were taking place in Eastern and Central
Europe in the wake of the collapse of the Iron Curtain and especially
with the inter-ethnic, intra-state wars that broke out in the successor
states to Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union as well as in many other

states, such as Somalia, Rwanda and Sudan, in the early 1990s.
Thomas Hylland Eriksen explores the theme of topicality and
modernity further and suggests that
nationalism offers security and perceived stability at a time when life-

worlds are fragmented and people uprooted. An important aim of na-
tionalist ideology is thus to re-create a sentiment of wholeness and
continuity with the past; to transcend that alienation or rupture be-
tween the individual and society that modernity has brought about.
(Erikson 2002: 104)
Put another way, “[t]he sense of ‘whence we came’ is central to the

definition of ‘who we are’” (Smith, 1991: 22), and within an East
European context, Denisa Kostovicova comments that “[t]erritory has
been a key physical and symbolic resource in post-socialist national
mobilisation as well-defined nations have sought to confirm or create
nation-states and their boundaries” (2004: 1). Nevertheless, “the idea
that nations can be free only if they possess their own sovereign state
is neither necessary nor universal” (Smith 1991: 74) given that a na-
tion’s quest for control over a claimed territory goes beyond spatial
consciousness about its homeland, and it is this identity of nations that
is rooted in a raft of proto-national elements such as ethnic ties, lan-
guage, religion, image, and representation as political, cultural and
symbolic markers and formers of identity. Indeed, it was Amilcar
Cabral who recognised that
[t]he value of culture as an element of resistance to domination lies in

the fact that culture is a vigorous manifestation on the ideological or
idealist plane of the physical and historical reality of the society that is
dominated or to be dominated (1973: 54).
Furthermore, within the realm of cultural politics it is the fine-tuning

of perceived language differences that can play a major role in the de-
liberate process of forging ethnic identity through competing proc-
esses of inclusion and exclusion; based on ‘us’ and ‘them’, the ‘in
group’ and the ‘out group’, or the ‘endogenous’ and ‘exogenous’ cul-
tures that seek salvation by emphasising differences from their rivals.
“Culture”, as Cabral points out, “is an essential element of the
history of a people. Culture is, perhaps, the product of this history just
as the flower is the product of the plant.” (1973: 55) Culture becomes
inherently political in that it can shape and influence attitudes, ideas

and experiences; serve as a key motor of a community’s identity; be
used as an ideological resource by contestants; and serve as a source,
even an accelerant of conflict. In times of tension, Freud’s narcissism
of minor difference becomes paramount, whereby the smallest differ-
ences between cultures and communities can be magnified to acceler-
ate conflict. By contrast, in times of reconciliation, difference can be
minimalised and built upon in the process of post-conflict reconstruc-
tion.
The emotional attachment to land in a nationalist setting was
neatly illustrated in a ‘former’-Yugoslav setting, in a phrase book pro-
duced for tourists in Zagreb in 1972, where the following phrase was
to be found:
Pogledala sam u nebo, pogledala sam u more, pogledala sam u gore,

a zatim sam poljubila sveto tlo gdje sam rodila.
I looked at the heavens, I looked to/at the sea, I looked at the moun-
tains and I kissed the sacred earth where I was born. (Englesfeld 1972:
206)
This phrasebook primarily targeted tourists from the Croatian diaspora

who were revisiting the ‘homeland’ (domovina/stari kraj) of their
forefathers. According to the author’s introduction, the book “con-
sist[s] of situation[s] in which the learner or tourist may well find him-
self” (Englesfeld 1972: 206). But is it normal practice to kiss the earth
whilst on holiday in a foreign country? Do phrasebooks for tourists
normally give voice to idealistically romantic notions of the ‘poetic
purity’ of patria? A raft of similar representations of the homeland lit-
ters the rest of the phrasebook, which would certainly have an appeal
for the diasporic community.
So clearly, there is more to all this than mere territoriality, and it
was Richard Davies who affirmed that nation-state identity may now
be less significant than other identities, particularly ethnic identities,
which “often generate greater loyalty than any national identification
to which an individual should nominally subscribe” (Davies 1996:
79). Since 1989, identities other than those of the territorially based
nation state have come to the fore. It is in these disputes over territory
that cultural identity and cultural politics have dominated.
Since the waning of the Cold War in the late 1980s, and the re-
gime changes in eastern and central Europe that followed against the
background processes of greater European integration and enlarge-
ment, the field of identity politics has changed greatly, from the per-
spectives of History, Politics and International Relations. This was fu-
elled by the inter-ethnic and intra-state conflicts of the first half of the
1990s and enhanced by growing concerns of an ethical foreign policy,
the growing debate over the Responsibility to Protect, and the move
towards intervention in defence of humanitarian rights.
As writers such as Gellner, Smith, Hobsbawm, Anderson and
others have shown, the importance of territoriality alone has declined
in its importance in academic debate. It has long since been recog-
nised that issues such as language or speech community can have a far
greater impact upon identity than state borders and defined national
territories, since a language community, based upon speech varieties,
can often cross inter-state borders and intra-state boundaries alike,
giving greater identity to a wider community.
Certainly, after the break-up of the Soviet Union and Yugosla-
via, after the collapse of the state in Somalia and Liberia, the crisis in
Albania, or even the fragility of Walloon – Flemish relations in Bel-
gium or Quebecois separatism in Canada, alongside notions of failed
states, pariah states, fragile states or even imagined states, it becomes
more difficult to think of states in their hard-shelled post-Westphalian
form. Against this background, our understanding of the processes of
identity formation poses one of the greatest challenges to the interna-
tional order in the first decade of the twenty-first century, especially
given that identity politics, and in particular ethnic conflict have been
central to the events of the post-Cold-War world.
Within nationalist discourses, primarily posited upon symbols,
and particularly the use of language and linguistic difference, Smith
highlights the resort to two main strategies in identity formation based
upon the referents of territory, history and community. Here he makes
reference to “the use of landscape or poetic spaces” and the “use of
history or golden ages” as mentioned above (1991: 78). Within this
context we find that “popular attachments to home and fathers” are
made, with reference to ancestral homelands and the “generations of
one’s forefathers”, and beyond that the idealised image of the family.
In this context, the concept of family should be interpreted as an
“imagined family” rather than the individual’s actual family, which, in

the words of Benedict Anderson denotes: “[M]embers of even the
smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members” (Smith
1991: 6). For Smith, the nation is: “depicted as one great family, the
members as brothers and sisters of the motherland or fatherland,
speaking their mother tongue” (79). This is what Michael Ignatieff re-
ferred to as “blood and belonging” in his book of the same title
(1993). It is this language and symbolism that serves to fuel the ideol-
ogy of nationalism.
Dieckhoff and Guttiérrez have commented that “[t]he invention
of tradition builds on three major innovations designed to influence
the masses by frequent repetition: a standardized school system, pub-
lic ceremonies and mass production of public monuments” (2001: xii).
A good example of the first of these ‘innovations’ is provided by the
following poem, where we see how the notion of patria was presented
in the form of a text book, El Enciclopedia, to elementary school chil-
dren in Franco’s Spain in the 1950s and 1960s. This was a book which
celebrated Spain’s historical golden age from the Reconquista to the
colonisation of the Americas, the Catholic faith, mathematics and the
splendours of the Spanish language.
Homeland
Sweet is the name which quivers and twinkles
the name of the blessed homeland;
it moves the heart, throbs in the idea
and coos with its magic sound.
The homeland is the place where we are born,
the homeland is the corner where we die,
the first prayer that we learn,
the last caress that we receive,
The homeland is a venerable and holy soil
that man always manages to embellish
the maternal language and the first song
the kindly air, the purest light…
The homeland is faith, homeland is heroism,
faith of the martyr, emblem of the soldier,
bond with the future that unites with the past
L. Diaz
(translation by Robert Hudson)
This poem provides an example of that construction of “memory, fan-

tasy, narrative and myth” as well as the “straight, unbroken line, from
some fixed origin” referred to by Stuart Hall above and expressed in
the language of the sacred and the heroic, and offering an unbroken,
eternal vision of the homeland (patria), past, present and future. It is a
baroque eulogy of the homeland, a piece of romantic, lyrical poetry
that embodies the idea of Anderson’s imagined community, built upon
a passion and love for the homeland, and containing many of the ele-
ments that make up the concept of national identity formation (birth-
place, language, sacredness of the soil, music and mythology, linking
the past with the future). It is almost religious in its perception (“the
first prayer”, the holiness of the land, and faith), and reference is made
to the military mythology of the homeland with expressions such as
martyr, heroism and emblem of the soldier.
If, by comparison, we look at the making of English national
identity we see how 19th-century literature actively aided the imple-
mentation of national identity. Krishan Kumar persuasively argues for
the link between the creation of a national canon of literature and the
idea of national belonging:
English culture, at its deepest level, is seen as created by a series of

‘national poets’, dramatists and novelists. Their writing embodies val-
ues, whole ways of life, which express the aspirations of the national
culture at its best and highest. (Kumar 2001: 42)
The mere reading of literature such as this (and we might, here, in-
clude such ‘Greats’ as Austen, Charlotte Brontë or Dickens) would in-
stil in the reader a sense of fellowship and national pride – albeit one
often built on xenophobia and casual anti-Semitism.
Culture shapes and influences attitudes, ideas and experiences
and as such serves as a key motor of a community’s identity. Further-
more, “a community’s culture can not be separated from its economic,
social and political practices” (Ashcroft/Ahluwalia 1999: 89) and one
can not study culture as though it was a discrete entity and divorced
from the social and political context within which culture manifests it-
self and within which it was conceived. Culture can be used as an
ideological resource of identity by contestants, thereby becoming a
source, or even an accelerant of conflict. When cultural identity is thus
politically charged – usually by nationalist, racist or ethnic discourses,
this can result in genocide, as has been the case in places such as
Rwanda, Burundi, and Darfur, as before them in Nazi Germany (see
also Avruch, 2000: 18).
Ultimately, identity is inherently interlinked with culture, and
the impact of cultural identity upon identity politics and conflict needs
to be fully addressed if one is to gain a better understanding of the is-
sues affecting International Relations and the Cultural Politics of our
own time.
4. Using this collection
This collection of essays had its origin in a one-day symposium held

at the University of Derby in May 2009 at which over 100 academics
discussed issues around the stated themes of the event – land and iden-
tity. The aim of the symposium was to investigate the complex issues
surrounding contemporary cultural discourses on land and identity –
their production, construction, and reconstruction across a range of
different texts, materials and even disciplines. The papers offered dis-
ciplinary and trans-disciplinary approaches opening up discussion and
new routes for research in a number of interrelated areas such as
Countryside vs. City, Diaspora, Landscapes of Memory and Trauma,
Migrational Spaces, and Ecology. The essays in this collection repre-
sent a number of innovative contemporary responses to how concepts
of land intersect and dialogue with notions of identity across and be-
tween regions, nations, races, and cultures. Through employing inter-
disciplinary methods and theories drawn from diverse sources, such as
cultural studies, spatial theory, philosophy and literary theory, the es-
says chart varied and complex themes of identity formation in relation
to spatiality. The preceding discussion in this Introduction, provides
some of the context for this symposium, offering studies of how con-
cepts of land and identity operate across a range of diverse cultural
texts. To borrow a metaphor from David Crouch, writing in this vol-
ume, the essays collected here “flirt” with place in an effort to articu-
late its multiplicitous dimensions and to demonstrate how writers, art-
ists and philosophers, in particular, have been drawn to its endless ex-
ploration.
What follows is arranged into four sections. Section A, ‘Land
and Identity: Theories and Philosophies’ presents three theoretical and
philosophical chapters that launch the reader into a series of vital de-
bates around themes and issues picked up elsewhere in specific chap-
ters in different ways. At turns philosophical and textually specific,
these chapters encourage us to think again about concepts and terms
that have for so long been fundamental to the definitions of identity
and landscape. Hence, David Crouch examines the “performative” and
the actions of “spacing” as means to re-think relationships between
identity and land, engaging with theorists such as Deleuze and Guat-
tari whose work encourages us to “move beyond landscape as fixed
text” and to break free from any sense of the “pre-scripted” environ-
ment so as to engage with the bodily “in a flirtatious mode: contin-
gent, sensual, anxious, awkward”, as he puts it. Importantly, and as a
helpful connection to many of the chapters that follow, Crouch re-
minds us that land, like art, is encountered diversely as “flows”:
through the “body, memory, recall, inter-subjectivity, emotion, fear
and anxiety”. Fran Speed exhorts us “to understand nature as a dimen-
sion of our collective identities” rather than separating it off like some
“ecological museum”. Like Crouch, she identifies the importance of
relational interactions as central to where land and identity, or human
and non-human meet, staging a critical moment where the “integrity
of the relationship that their interaction establishes in our perceptual
experience” dissolves traditional distinction between culture and na-
ture. For Speed, conservation, indeed all exchanges between human
and nature, identity and land, are about negotiation not separation, as-
serting that in re-thinking these boundaries we re-think the signifi-
cance and “merit” of relations as the key determinant of our world.
Finally, Donna Landry re-investigates the Picturesque from its eight-
eenth century anchorage in the work of William Gilpin and his fasci-
nation for ruins, in order to reclaim it politically in the writing of Pal-
estinian Raja Shehadeh whose walks in Palestine critique “instrumen-
tal modernity” and Israeli occupation, offering a “perambulative pro-
test against capitalist privatization and maximal extraction from land
and labour alike”. In this she establishes the key thread of textuality in
the collection; of how representation and language function as primary
drivers for our consideration of the human integration and tension
with land.
Having established these threads and theories, the remaining
seven chapters interrogate how land and identity intersect across a
range of interdisciplinary studies, cultural, and textual examples. Sec-
tion B, on ‘Landscapes of Memory’, explores the impact of specific

landscapes and their associated traumas on personal identity formation
even in later generations. Section C, on ‘Literary Landscapes’, offers
compelling case studies of specific literary engagements with the in-
terconnection of land(scape) and identity that stretch from the impact
of the First World War and the tranquil English countryside to con-
temporary ecological debates that are now pursued in the relatively
young discipline of Eco-criticism. The intention of this selection of
material is to form a coherent but diverse body of research which, as a
cohesive whole, will establish new directions for the study of land and
identity, showing how different disciplines and theoretical approaches
can be gathered towards better and more critical analysis of human re-
lations with nature and space. The collection ends not on a conclusion
– the ongoing active debate surrounding all issues of land and identity
seems to forbid such a conclusive tone – but on a forward-looking
‘speculation’. We offer two specific case studies of contemporary lit-
erary and cultural engagement with the interlinking of land(scape) and
identity (formation) with which we want to look ahead to potential fu-
ture developments. The planning and hosting of the 2009 symposium
on ‘Land & Identity’ has convinced us of the considerable contempo-
rary academic interest in the field – on its cultural as well as political
developments – that we feel merits further engagement.
Works Cited
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SECTION A
LAND AND IDENTITY:
THEORIES AND PHILOSOPHIES
Landscape, Land and Identity:
A Performative Consideration*
David Crouch
Abstract: This chapter considers ideas of land and identity processes through an origi-
nal consideration of landscape. Following Taussig’s argument that cultural meaning
and identification are less constituted in institutionalised and ritualised signification
than emergent in the performance of life, attention focuses upon the performative
character of landscape and its relationality with land and identity (1992). For over a
decade landscape has been exemplary of the critical debates between representational
and so-called non-representational theories affecting cultural geographies and related
disciplines. At the same time discussions concerning mobility, in for example the rela-
tive irrelevance of institutional borders and the occurrence of translocal identities con-
test the familiar emphasis upon the habitual and situated character of landscape, iden-
tity and its role in the work of representations. This paper offers a contribution to the
growing awareness of a need to try and engage these debates surrounding landscape
across disciplines. Making land significant in life is considered through landscape in
the notion of spacing. The notion of an everyday, gentle politics is introduced to the
constitution of identities and feelings of land. This approach is pursued particularly in
terms of how we understand artwork and representation, insistently in comparison
with wider kinds of practice. Landscape is considered as the performative expressive-
poetics of spacing in a way that makes possible an always emergent dynamic relation-
ality between representations, practices and identities. Finally, identities and values
concerning land are produced relationally in the energy cracks between performativity
and institutions, as the several investigations upon which this chapter draws testify.
Key names and concepts: Art practice - identity and land - landscape - performativity
- poetics - spacing.
*
Colleagues and audiences in Berkeley, Goteborg, Aarhus, Reykjavik, Karl-
stad, Institute of British Geographers’ conferences helped grow this paper,
plus good argument with Neil Campbell, Martin Gren, Sally Ness, John Newl-
ing and others, and constructive responses from Hayden Lorimer, and Tim
Edensor.
44 David Crouch
1. Introduction
In his marvellous story, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan

Kundera asks what flirtation is.
One might say that it is behaviour leading to another to believe that

sexual intimacy is possible, while preventing that possibility becom-
ing a certainty. In other words, flirting is a promise of sexual inter-
course without a guarantee. (1984: 174)
Such possibility of becoming, the implicit if possibly agonising play-

fulness; the very combination of contingent enjoyment, uncertainty
and hope would seem to thread across living. To fix may be assurance,
certainty or entrapment, closure, or a mix of these.
The more explorative, uncertain, and tentative ways in which
our surroundings become engaged in living suggests a character of
flirting, exemplified in the way one often comes across very familiar
sites seeing new juxtapositions of materials and materialities, as it
were, ‘unawares’. The unexpected opens out; we discover new ways
of feeling, moving and thinking, however modest these may be, unset-
tling familiar and expected cultural resonances and the work of poli-
tics. Encounters like this may happen in increasingly diverse and
complex ways across multiple spaces and in the ways in which we en-
gage them. Even in familiarity and habitual rhythmic engagement, the
meaning, our relationship with things, can change in register; slight
adjustments of feeling over time becoming more significant. Might
these observations suggest a way of rethinking landscape and its con-
stitution? Several recent journal collections offer fresh approaches to
landscape thinking (Wylie 2006, Rose 2006, Lorimer 2006, Matless
2004, Mitchell 2003, Merriman et al. 2008).
With significant exceptions conceptual debate on landscape has
emphasised a relative stability, marked more recently by Ingold’s ar-
ticulation of dwelling, an articulation in which he refers both to habit-
ual practices and their representation in Breugel’s art (2000). Impor-
tant works on the ideology and power of particular landscapes in rep-
resentation emphasise their persistent consumption and longevity
(Cosgrove/Daniels 1988). Whilst the intended political power of the
use of landscape is difficult to contest, the way it works is less clear,
yet no less important (Mitchell 2003).
Landscape, Land and Identity 45
Landscape is a word that has considerable popular purchase.

The ‘stuff’ that is often substituted for what is meant by landscape
tends to be more in terms of countryside, but it can also include
broadly the assemblage of landforms, concrete shapes, fields, gutters,
designed spaces, and serendipitous collections of things. Implicitly in-
cluded are our own bodies that are now enlivened into the landscape.
Cresswell persistently points to a problem with the (merely) common-
sensical character of landscape, yet prefers the even more prevailingly
popular word place as a relevant geographical category, as do Massey
and Tuan (Merriman et al 2008, Massey 2005, Tuan 2001).
In this paper, I pursue these questions and concerns through at-
tention to process rather than category (representation, life, etc), draw-
ing primarily on recent interventions in art theory. Articulating what
landscape ‘is’, rather than how it emerges and happens, feels very in-
complete as Tolia-Kelly acknowledges (2008a, 2008b). If it is that we
live space, not merely in relation to it, there would seem to be more
going on than evocation of cultural resonance. At the core of this feel-
ing of incompleteness is a sense that landscape and space might be
conceptualised relationally.
Recent critical attention to space directs attention to its rela-
tional, dynamic, contingent character. Space emerges from this as per-
sistently ‘in the making’, through a complexity of forces, influences,
practices. Massey’s focus on space (itself) as relational to flows, ener-
gies and things renders space closer to the lived and human. She ar-
ticulates the character of space as relational through the connectedness
and dynamics of things (2005). Significant components of her thesis
are that space is produced of inter-relationships in life, and that there-
fore space is always under construction, in flows of influence, in proc-
ess (2005: 9). Edward Casey has written of more explicit connections
of space to life, seeing them in fact as mutually constitutive (1993).
Growing unease with landscape identified only in rooted cir-
cumstances is well marked in recent conceptualisations of contempo-
rary mobility that tends to emphasise the relatively increasing distur-
bance of the traditional and habitual wrought through increased speed,
temporality, distance and a projected shallowness of encounters in the
light of the consequent fast multi-sited character of living (Han-
nam/Sheller/Urry 2006). However, there are also widespread, every-
day, outwardly mundane, habitual practices of profound significance
46 David Crouch
that are relatively unchanged by such mobility, even though the rela-
tional iterations amongst diverse life modes is little evidenced
(Merriman 2008). How do these adjustments affect how landscape is
felt, or the character of its representations? J.B. Jackson argued the
importance of mobility in understanding landscape, arguing for con-
ceptions of landscape as lived in and also moved in, while Edward
Casey’s recent interrogation of artwork offers insight into the more
performative possibility of art (Jackson 1984, Casey 2005). The pos-
sible similarities rather than distinctions between ‘mobile society’ and
the habitual are given attention in this paper in consideration of how
mobility and its arguably intensely multi-sited temporality may be re-
lated to more habitual practice in the constitution of landscape.
British geography’s recent interest in the French theorists
Deleuze and Guattari has focused upon their notions of territory,
space and spacing. In geographically pertinent terms this space is
highly contingent, emergent in the cracks of everyday life, affected by
a maelstrom of energies well beyond human limits. What interests
them is the potential of space to be constantly open to change and be-
coming, rather than only or mainly as the more settled (Deleuze/
Guattari 2004: 407-411, Doel 1999, Buchannan/Lambert 2005). Inter-
preted in terms of individuals’ participation in space, in making space
through spacing, space and life cohabit in holding on to the familiar
and going further into what is unknown. Adjustments are produced
through which life can be negotiated, always in tension in an unlim-
ited array, or immanence of possibility (Grosz 1999). Moreover, life
does not work to a given script or prefigured world, not even linearly
with our own memory and its spaces (Ingold/Hallam 2007). To a de-
gree, this process happens in an embodied way; it could not do other-
wise, as Deleuze insists upon the possibility of everything being in-
volved in this process, not merely mental reflexivity, and potentially
including memory of other times and spaces engaged relationally.
Spacing happens in highly intense and in less urgent moments. As
Deleuzian geographer, Bonta argues this awkward and pregnant vital-
ity enables us to move beyond landscape as (fixed) text (2005).
Spacing relates to a degree to the earlier place and landscape
work of humanistic geographers who were drawing on the work of
Merleau-Ponty (1962). Spacing goes much further than this work, and
emphasises capacity and energies for change that are abrupt, non-
linear and non-accumulative, and that includes influences that are
other-than-human (Crouch 2003a, Shotter 1993, Harré 1993). In an

autobiographical narrative, British geographer John Wylie wrote of
the more familiar embodied thinking and the more-than-embodied
practice suggested by Deleuze in accounting for landscape in his walk
on the south west coast of Cornwall in England (Wylie 2005). Cru-
cially, he describes a landscape as geopoetics, as though it erupts in a
clash of many impulses in his brief journey, definitely not felt as pre-
scripted.
It is interesting to observe that much of the work on art/
representation in discussions on landscape has concerned the determi-
nistic meanings and significances of landscape in the form of values,
relationships and influences including ideology, significantly exam-
ined in terms of the way place or space is experienced and consumed
(Duncan/Ley 1993, Miller 1998). Humanistic geographies offered an
alternative to the work of representations in the emphasis on landscape
in experience, yet found limits in acknowledging too the work of rep-
resentations, i.e. the broad cultural significances felt to influence ex-
perience (Seamon 1980). It is representation’s capacity to frame and
prefigure the world that is open to use in pursuit of particular ideolo-
gies of power.
David Matless noted that representations are the product of liv-
ing and emerge through practice (Matless 1992). Perhaps paradoxi-
cally the so-called ‘non-representational theory’ that is strongly influ-
enced by Deleuze is not antagonistic to representations, but regards
them as fluid and engaged (Dewsbury et al. 2002). I suggest in this es-
say that understanding the performance of artwork both in the making
and in its mutual articulation in life beyond its making may offer a
means both to deepen an articulation of landscape in relation to life,
and space in relation to living. Rather than attend to the familiar de-
bates concerning institutional power, space and its ideologies of land-
scape, this discussion pursues the potential of diverse constitutions of
identity through the performative emergence of landscape, as repre-
sentational and non-representational relationally. Ideas of land and
feelings of identity through belonging are considered in relation to the
contingent constitution of attitudes, values and meanings that become
affective through practice and subjectivity.
The following sections of this paper consider ways in which the
process of spacing, with its openness to possibility, disruption, com-
48 David Crouch
plexity, vibrancy and liveliness, may inform the making and liveliness
of landscape in new ways. The first section particularly draws upon
recent work by Bolt, an art practitioner and theorist, and philosopher
Edward Casey with particular regard to landscape representations pro-
duced in and as artwork (Bolt 2004, Casey 2005). A second section
considers the dynamic and processual character of representations in
its fluidities and how artwork resonates with and through the character
of vitality in living. Hence the subsequent section considers the vital-
ity of artwork in relation to the character of vitality in other, so-called
mundane practices. Here the character of landscape is considered
across different but arguably relational modes and different registers
of mobility. The paper suggests a way of conceptualising landscape as
active, through notions of creativity and space. Landscape is situated
in the expression and poetics of spacing: apprehended as constituted in
a flirtatious mode: contingent, sensual, anxious, awkward.
2. Reworking representations dynamically
In a recent challenging discussion of artwork, Barbara Bolt examines

the notion of ‘art beyond representation’. She notes that Heidegger
talked of the power to go beyond; that art is more than the intention
(Bolt 2004: 185). She finds in Deleuze a means to address and engage
the character of what she calls “working hot” in the performativity of
art in ways that I will argue informs our grasp of the flows of land-
scape: “In rhyming the rhythms of the landscape and the body, mean-
ing and reality are constituted in performance.” (171-72)
In a fascinating discussion of the “material productivity of the
performative act” Bolt addresses the performed materiality of plastic
arts and thus refutes the distinction with conceptual art as a “Cartesian
leftover”: “[I]n the carnal acts between bodies (human and non-
human)” she argues, “the work of art exceeds its own structures in a
radical performativity” (2004: 190). Non- or post-representational art
may also be working with and through life, confounding categorisa-
tion. Working with Bolt’s ideas, it is possible to couple together and
relate categories: so-called non-representational art is also representa-
tional in its expressivity (Rycroft 2005).
Bolt emphasises the performativity of creative practice. Taking
the idea of performativity in and of artwork further, representations
continue to participate in flows of poetic possibilities in their public

availability. The performative ‘life’ or vitality of the artwork – even
two dimensional work – is performed too by the individual in his and
her encounter with it. Two dimensional pictures may not be experi-
enced only through the gaze, but with diverse dispositions of the body,
memory recall, inter-subjectivity, emotion, fear and anxiety unlike the
formal viewing mistakenly associated with art in the gallery (Jones
1997). In its object-ness the painting continues in flow. Bolt’s thesis
offers a critical intervention in conceptualising the working of land-
scape that moves forward the critical conceptualisation of art as be-
yond representation. Recent contributions on the merging of art and
everyday life further prompt engagement and relationality between
modalities and realms of performativity in terms of landscape (Cant/
Morris 2006).
3. Practices, intensities and becoming:

The performativity of landscapes in the making of representations
The capacity and possibility of ‘working hot’, as Bolt put it, is evident
in the work of Peter Lanyon. In wandering around parts of England
near John Wylie’s walks, the Cornish and International Movement art-
ist Peter Lanyon wanted to express in words as well as paintings and
constructions his affective emersion in what he called environments.
These environments or spaces provoked responses, feelings and ideas
in his process of painting (Crouch/Toogood 1999). His paintings
sought to express movement, and the tensions he felt in wandering,
turning, and so on. As Lanyon walked, he felt surrounded by space,
but also, implicitly, he was feeling varying intensities of different
moments and memories. Varying sensualities merge and flow in his
work, commingle inter-subjectively and with expressive character.
The work involved walking in the areas he sought to paint, and later
gliding (Garlake 1992). In doing his artwork he would walk an area,
return to his studio, paint, return to the area, and so on, reworking his
art (Crouch/Toogood 1999). Painting and making constructions were
mutually enfolded in the way he worked.
Lanyon was performing (with) the materiality of space and his
perpetual creation of metaphor, of which he was intensely aware,
through his consciously and unconsciously embodied performativities
50 David Crouch
in space that flowed across his work in the studio (Crouch/Toogood

1999). His constructions and paintings frequently and significantly
express the materiality of handling and of touch in the performance of
his work. His paintings express a poetics of his ‘working hot’ in his
journeys walking and riding through to the physical emotionality of
painting.
He wrote of feeling an intense awareness of things around him,
but in a way that these things were influencing and having an affect
upon him and his relationship with what he felt surrounded him: of
“flowers moving”, “gates uneasy” with themselves; of one moment
the cliff and sea being on one side at one angle; the next, at the other
(Crouch/Toogood 1999). In dance theory the idea of performativity
has been applied in the way a dancer can feel detached from her or
himself outside their own body and instead feel part of the wider mi-
lieu.
However, Lanyon did not act in an individualist isolation, nor
was he unaware of prevailing politics. His writing and a number of his
artworks testify to his deeply felt if often semi-detached identification
with particular experience of working the land. For him this meant tin
miners and their terrible experiences of mining disasters, shellfish col-
lectors at the beach and agricultural labourers. He attended their ex-
periences with critical empathy and in an agitated rather than senti-
mental way (Lost Mine, oil painting, 1958).
In a recent consideration of artwork, Casey acknowledges the
utility of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of becoming as opening up
possibility, through unbidden or unanticipated happenings that can
prompt landscapes of performance, exemplified in de Kooning and
Diebenkorn as well as land art that he renames “earth art” (2005: 181-
82). He pursues aspects of Deleuze’s thinking with regard to the
openness of becoming through land art or earth art and painting in
ways that echoes recent work on Lanyon: “[…] fosters connections
between fields, the removal of blockages on bodies without organs
[…] to do with performance (not alleged competence)” (Casey 2005:
175).
Lanyon worked bodily in large movements and intimate ones
against the canvas, inscribing, scraping, turning his body in expression
of his ways of moving and of experiencing space just as he likened the
rhythms of painting to those of gardening, but also in an urgency with
the tortured histories and lives in what he painted. Community gar-

dener Carole Youngson describes gardening in the following way:
[W]orking outdoors feels much better for your body somehow […].
more vigorous than day to day housework, much more variety and
stimulus. The air is always different and alerts the skin, unexpected
scents are brought by breezes. Only when on your hands and knees do
you notice insects and other small wonders. My (community garden)
is of central importance in my life. I feel strongly that everyone should
have access to land, to establish a close relationship with the earth
[…] essential as our surroundings become more artificial. (quoted in
Crouch 2010: 9)
As a community gardener, Youngson articulates an emergent feeling

about space that is also a way of making sense of her life: an ethics of
rented land and ecology, a sense of touch and body movement, the af-
fect of nature in loosely articulated fragments. An active feeling of
calm tension between holding onto particular identities, values and
gentle poetics is explored and deepened in fresh ways through what
she does and where she does it. I identify gentle politics in the nego-
tiation of meaning and relationships that can adjust world views. She
makes an ‘art’ of this, relationally patterning the ground and her feel-
ing of it through what she does and how she does it; a situated practice
and performance that builds and reassures and agitates. In Lanyon,
Diebenkorn and de Kooning’s work as well as the ‘land artists’ that
Casey examines and Youngson’s expression of her feeling, there is a
curious combination of intense engagement and the self almost lost in
a wider intensity of events through which landscape is detonated as
examined in the next section.
4. Connections and mobilities
Frequently Lanyon’s lines on the surface of his work are lines of

movement, mobility, not of borders and boundaries but inscribed in
living (Stephens 2000). In this his work resembles the artist Paul
Klee’s ‘taking a line for a walk’, and like Klee these lines were not de-
tached from resonances in living but full of openness and possibility
(Casey 2005, Dewsbury et al. 2002). Lanyon articulated these as they
were emergent in multiple reflections through other streams of influ-
ence:
52 David Crouch
Having experienced this long line say from the armpit down over the
ribcage down to the pelvis, across the long thigh and down to the feet
that line may take me out in the car to the landscape and I might ex-
perience this again but by having drawn this dune I experience it seri-
ously, the sort of experience one would have by some sexual contact
with the female but in this case transformed to an understanding of the
landscape. (Stephens 2000: 64)
Rather than reductively referring to this as the masculinist gaze I take

this to be a caring and slowness; intimacy across body and space
through its performativities (Nash 1996).
Bolt argues that “it is not an easy matter to produce an intense
series (of artwork) that is transformative; to do so is likely, to say the
least, to rely on openness and becoming in performance; indeed much
the same may apply to the practice of everyday life” (2004: 56). Land-
scape in performance can be transformative and reassuring. She ac-
knowledges the propensity of works to transcend the existing, not in
and of itself – the work of art/the act of making – but in combination
often and usually awkwardly, unevenly, and riskily. Lanyon referred
to sites that were very familiar to him suddenly appearing very differ-
ent, as having been “come across unawares” (quoted in Crouch/
Toogood 1999). There is a possibility in artwork of an experience of
tensions between a sense of what is ‘out there’ as materially subjec-
tive, and the intensities of expression it carries and conveys. That vi-
tality is distinct from the mere transference from one kind of material-
ity to another; the work is energetic, it bears energy through its life.
Lanyon’s other contexts included an acute awareness of significant
social histories, such as the dangers of mining work that were fre-
quently adjacent to his walks and that became present in his work. The
moment of intensity may occur as a feeling of “rightness”, as Lanyon
wrote, a “fusion […] clicks within me” (quoted in Crouch 2010: 9).
Such moments were registered in driving and motorcycling and on the
top of a bus as much as they were in walking around even though he
acknowledged that the land(scape) was known as much through his
own two feet as his two eyes.
Fusion may be an awkward, chaotic thing, an awkwardness of
belonging in moments of high-intensity presence that resonates the
way in which sociologist Anne Game conceptualised the dynamic
character of belonging (Game 2001: 227). In her feeling of belonging
and of dwelling, and in her intense experiences of lying, reading and
feeling the sand and sun on Bondi Beach, Anne Game felt unfettered
by the resort’s powerful culturally mediated landscape of muscular
surfers (Game 1991). Her relatively brief moments at the beach were
expressively felt and poetic, inflecting memories of her childhood
across different sites visited and different landscapes made. These ex-
periences were felt so strongly that she re-engaged them in her discus-
sion of heightened intensities and of feeling-as-belonging (Game
2001). Landscapes as the expressive poetics of spacing can be multi-
ply situated, engaging different temporalities in memory and mobile
lives. Such a poetics can become powerful, even if only gently per-
formed as landscape. Lanyon, Game, and Wylie exhibit momentary
intensities in flows of sensuous feeling that, whether familiar or not,
create feelings of momentary belonging. The artist Willem de Koon-
ing expressed this: “There is a time when you just take a walk; and
you just walk in your own landscape.” (de Kooning 1960: 15)
The fleeting view from the car window is now familiarly of-
fered as stereotypical of contemporary mobility, detached from other
kinds of practice in a way that renders visual cues dominant, land-
scape passing by and emerging serially as in a movie. Yet Casey ac-
knowledges a more spontaneous character of dwelling (Casey 1993:
115-16). Mobility is often signified in the multiple sites of practice
and performance; a multi-situatedness that has the potential of multi-
ple dis-locatedness exemplified in being unsettled, ‘out of place’, and
detached from identities (Creswell 1996). Multi-site dwelling and
multiply ‘situated locatedness’ can each have a depth of feeling as
Game and Wylie imply. Travel includes ‘being there’.
Whilst much of Lanyon’s art was done in ‘local country’ he
produced similarly powerful images on brief but deeply felt visits in
Czechoslovakia and western USA (Stephens 2000). Arguably the car,
its motion and technologies, can make possible new and temporary
landscapes (Campbell 2007, 2004). J.B. Jackson argued that a perva-
sive shift was happening. He contrasted “the values we stress [as] sta-
bility and permanence and the putting down of roots and holding on”,
and another strong, very different “tradition of mobility and short-term
occupancy” (quoted in Crouch 2010: 11). He identified these apparent
oppositions – ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ that merge, as James Clifford dem-
onstrates globally (1977). American cultural studies theorist Neil
Campbell argues that Jackson asserts a mobile spacing and landscape
constituted of practices that confront the essentialist tendencies of a
54 David Crouch
rooted sense of place where “land was the object men [sic] could best
use in their search for identity” with an “existential” perspective
“without absolutes, without prototypes, devoted to change and mobil-
ity”, equally pregnant of expression and poetics (Groth/Bressi
1997:152). Jackson subverted and undermined typical representations
of the west as frontier through his different way of conceptualizing
landscape as in process and provided an early intervention as to how
people ‘affect’ landscape in their living.
The Finnish artist Anne Keskitalo traces the echoes between art
and travel in a way that combines and expresses fragments that evoke
the landscapes of W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz (2004). Making an
unfamiliar trip, Norwegian geographer Inger Birkeland narrates an un-
familiar wonder of being that transforms her from feelings of detach-
ment from the familiar and that entwines her in something much more
significant, a remote sense of belonging in a mobile world, being
alone visiting the Arctic Circle at midsummer in Scandinavia:
In the evening I was waiting for the deep red midnight sun. I was
alone but didn’t feel lonely. We were many who shared the act of
waiting for the midnight sun. […] Even if we were strangers to each
other, there was a mutual seeing of the same deep red sun [...] as more
and more visitors arrived at the cliffs, I felt like I was walking in a
multicultural, multicoloured city. […] The words uttered were the un-
complicated, the kind of words that sound trivial outside the space of
there and then. But they were not trivial, rather they represented an-
other way of creating meaning out of the meaningless, Order out of
Chaos, light out of darkness. (Birkeland 1999:19)
Spending time in unfamiliar spaces away from routine offers an ex-

perience of different mobility but involves a space of performance that
can be acutely open and sensitive to the affects outside the self. Yet in
habitual practice like regularly spending time at one familiar site can
offer similar experience. A feeling of being detached yet full of emo-
tion emerges in the example of regular short distance recreational ve-
hicle travelling (caravanning) in England:
[I]t all makes me smile inside. I mean, everyone just comes down to
the ford and just stands there and watches life go by. It’s amazing how
you can have pleasure from something like that. I just sit down and
look and I get so much enjoyment out of sitting and looking and doing
nothing. We wake up in the morning, open the bedroom door and
you’re like breathing air into your living. (quoted in Crouch 2010: 11)
There is a momentary detachment from the self in a wider set of im-

pulses, feeling and relations in reaching for landscape that resembles
Lanyon and the dancer.
Landscape would seem to emerge in the poetics and expressiv-
ity of engaging space in complex, uncertain and widely affected ways.
The art theorist Griselda Pollock refers to paintings of landscape as
the poetics of experience, “a poetic means to imagine our place in the
world” (Pollock 1997: n.p.). The register of landscape in this way
would seem to extend well beyond artwork that provides a mutually
vibrant ‘surface’, or depth, of mutual accessibility. A poetics of space,
in and as landscape, emerges performatively in the making of repre-
sentations and in life more generally. Adapting Deleuze, the world
contains infinite possibilities, making an ‘immanent surface’ of possi-
ble poetics.
Representations are familiarly considered as objects, objects of
their own completeness that have reduced landscape to available con-
templation. Artists are frequently understood as working in a situation
of fixed location, if not in a studio, in the plein air of artists’ colonies
(Lubbren 200). Representations are also momentary expressions of
journeys, similar combinations of influences and affects erupt. Land-
scape emerges in moments of diverse temporality and different inten-
sities. Like many other artworks, Lanyon’s paintings and construc-
tions not only demonstrate journeys through life over time in a more
familiar, linear art-historical way; they also each perform moments of
life possibly folding with others that they express in a fluid manner
(Crouch/Toogood 1999).
Land emerges as an open rather than foreclosed character of
identity and its flows are expressed in practices rather than in fixed in-
stitutional prescription. Movement across borders that may be material
and metaphorical are arguably of increasing significance, though their
history is huge, if bearing distinctive character at each flow of time;
identities increasingly engage individuals irrespective of formalised
borders; the emergence of new kinds of trans-local identification and
dis-identification prompt a more dynamic approach to arguments con-
cerning land, identity and landscape. Whilst individuals denied choice
and freedom in everyday life may severely lack opportunities of per-
formative subjectivity, even there may survive potential and opportu-
nity. Elsewhere the performative character of life, its identities and
56 David Crouch
feelings of land are in ongoing construction. Identities are partly con-

stituted in performance, relationally across sites of living.
5. Dissolving dualities of landscapes in art and life
Everyday life can be related to this model of the poetics of landscape

in spacing. In a narrative of his project Chatham Vines the perform-
ance artist John Newling unravels “The journey of the grapes”:
Intoxication
The material and symbolic journey of the grapes reveals a conceptual
aspect of the project. Organising inside an abandoned church, the
grapes travel through the chemical transformations of the wine mak-
ing process. The grapes are then transformed again, symbolically,
within the service of the Eucharist. More wine will be consumed in a
secular environment. The grapes enter our blood bringing the possibil-
ity of intoxication. (Newling 2006: 63)
The strange, evocative and fleshy process Newling describes involved

hydroponics, an abandoned church, a small team of growers, people
blessing and/or drinking. Vines were grown along the pews. The space
combined the performativity of all of these players and the affect of
the vines growing, in a space once familiar for many of those in-
volved, their multiple and uneven affect emerging and flowing expres-
sively and poetically:
A project that grows literally within this space was to increase the
feeling of abandonment and sharpen the sense of life within the vines.
[…] The prior function of the church was self evident but the possi-
bilities of that function had gone; it was a landscape in transition […]
the vines also […] demanding the responsibility that we all have to-
wards the living. Chatham Vines gave new knowledge through the
simple action that brought context and intention together both physi-
cally and conceptually. (64)
There is a mutual and multiple intimacy and complexity of mobility

and habitual rhythms in this work, events and participation.
The artist Steve Willatts worked in north-west London. In one
intervention he problematised the ordinariness of space with its poten-
tial to be felt otherwise. He worked with several young people who
spent time in a piece of vacant ground, close to their home in poorly
maintained high density flats nearby, but far enough away to give
them a feeling of escape, ownership and belonging. They were asked
to put together objects found in ‘their’ patch of ‘wasteland’ that reso-
nated with their feeling of this place as their place in their lives. Wil-
latts photographed their invited assembled collections of scant, often
recycled material as visual collages in an exercise of interactive repre-
sentation. Their collages adumbrate a series of representations and
performativity in a multiple practical process, engaging and sharing an
ideology of landscape (Willatts 1980).
In another example that commingles the vitality of art and life,
a group of performance artists worked with people who had plots on a
community garden (allotment) in Birmingham UK. The event, ‘Bloom
98’, was developed over a growing season and then staged there on
one day. One thousand participating visitors sought to celebrate two
interlinking ‘landscapes’. One was the growers’ moulding of the culti-
vated areas that expressed their acts of cultivation in material arte-
facts. Their experience of cultivation was also expressed in written
and spoken narratives. This landscape commingled with the other art-
ists’ interpretations of spending time there over several months
(Crouch 2003b: 1953). In one plot, one hundred umbrellas that were
lit from beneath were synchronised with recorded sounds of crackling
roots in the earth. In another, a decorated shed told a story of multi-
ethnicity and green concerns, including different free seeds in packets
designed by the growers from India, Jamaica and Poland.
Both ‘Bloom 98’ and Willatts’ representations have a gentle
politics whose expressive force works through space as landscape.
Two-dimensional art has similar performative power. Bolt’s interven-
tions regarding representations adjust further the ways in which land-
scape is conceptualised. Spacing works in flows that engage and in-
terplay across particular moments or events of varying intensities.
Spacing can productively ‘flatten out’ traditional distinctions of repre-
sentation, ‘artistic’ and other kinds of performativity. Whilst they each
hold relative and relational distinctiveness, together they produce new
landscapes. As Bolt asserts, art may be involved in making representa-
tions but it initiates and provokes rather than constrains, “a performa-
tive not a representational practice” (Bolt 2004: 83). Such a position
adjusts the reading of representations, and of landscape-as-represen-
tation. Moreover the ‘viewing’ of artwork, or participation with it, can
58 David Crouch
bear a similar performativity of encounter, as art historian Nick Jones

narrates in his story of arriving in a gallery (1997).
6. Relating the dynamics of landscape
Across disciplines the familiar argument is of landscape as denoted

powerfully through institutional meanings. Through considering land-
scape beyond familiar limits representations emerge as part of a much
wider relational field in which action and reflection can be grasped in
a broader process of making space in spacing.
Spacing offers a way to rethink how and where landscape re-
lates in life; ideas of land as identity relate to landscape in perform-
ance; connecting feelings of belonging and identity are negotiated.
This more explorative, uncertain and tentative way in which spacing
can occur suggests a character of flirting: opening up, trying out, un-
expected, multiply affected and embodied. Representations can be
fluid and ‘real’ beyond their character as objects. Expressive poetics
can emerge in spacing. Spacing offers a way of thinking through how
space is given meaning and how landscape may relate in this process.
Meanings and relations constituted in performance and inter-
subjectively become mutually enmeshed in institutional closure; kept
open, fluid. These processes contain potentialities for mutual regard
and care; a gentle politics through which life can be lived and mean-
ings flow.
In varying degrees of permanence and emotion and across dif-
ferent situatedness and their mobilities, individuals negotiate life. The
emergent landscape evoked in any one location may bear traces of
other, earlier experiences there and elsewhere, merging the ways in
which landscape happens, relationally. Cultural resonance emerges as
one way in which landscape is informed. Landscape erupts in this
process as an expressive and poetic act of which artwork is unexcep-
tional. Representations are borne of the performativity of living. The
liveliness of performativity is available to individuals who encounter
these representations. Thus in no sense are representations fixed or
closed to change. They are open to further interpretation and feeling.
Representations and their projected cultural significance remain open
too, ‘available’ for further work. The certainty of representations can
be disrupted in this complex/multiple process of spacing: available,
open and flexible, with a permanent possibility of re-inscription and

gentle politics as well as purposive resistance. Landscape is informed
through combinations of different times and life durations and
rhythms, different registers and intensities of experience (Paterson
2001).
Landscape emerges as continual process, emergent in the ex-
pressive and poetic character of spacing: creative, contingent, awk-
ward and not blocked in representations. Landscape may be present or
it may present itself in artwork variously on the ground (for example
in landscape design), on canvas or in any other form. The continual
insistence on the referral back to historical definitions in order to fix
the meanings of landscape can be unhelpful in re-conceptualising
landscape, privileging continuity and fixity (Olwig 2005). Constant re-
ferral back in this way suggests a need to link landscape as contempo-
rarily understood with its antecedent conceptualisation in a linear
fashion. For example, to consider landscape as only prefigured is now
anachronistic. Instead landscape itself is vital.
The humanistic geographies of the nineteen seventies and eight-
ies variously pursued in North America, Scandinavia and north-west
Europe are resonant in this approach, but can become more dynami-
cally engaged in cultural contexts and wider possibilities. An insis-
tence on the only-representational statics of art-as-landscape becomes
instead malleable, fluid, reflexively produced and experienced, not
only as material productions within which were coded particular ide-
ologies. In dwelling there is creativity, the possibility of unsettling
rather than concreted stability. However in a similar way the new,
fleeting and temporary moments of heightened intensity do not re-
place slowness, familiarity of rhythm and continuity, but awkwardly
enfold with them.
This paper has been concerned to open up possible ways in
which landscape can be recognised as dynamic and processual
through a consideration of representations relationally with the charac-
ter of life and its practices, through each of which landscape arguably
happens. These have been related to ways in which landscape can en-
gage multiple interactions and a possible unsettling of cultural reso-
nances through which new ones may emerge.
John Berger narrated his experience of being by a field:
60 David Crouch
It is the question of contingencies overlapping. The events which take

place in this field – two birds chasing one another, a cloud crossing
the sun and changing the colour of the green – acquire a special signi-
fication because they occur during the minute or two which I am
obliged to wait. It is as thought these minutes fill a certain area of time
which exactly fits the spatial area of the field. Time and space conjoin.
[...] The field that you are standing before appears to have the same
proportions as your own life. (Berger 1979:193)
There is a sense here of the relationality of landscape and self, some-

times of more than the self.
Berger found resonances of his own life with the space he came
across unawares, momentarily encountered and felt. Thus, I suggest,
the intensities of landscape, however mundane, soft, or powerful,
borne in and through representations that are imagined, felt, and ob-
served can circulate feelings of belonging but also of detachment. To
‘feel’ landscape in the expressive poetics of spacing is a way to imag-
ine one’s place in the world. The individual can feel so connected with
space that s/he no longer is aware, momentarily, of being (merely)
human; we may become the event, become the landscape. As Bolt
urges “we can set a work of art in motion to take us to a place other
than where we usually are” (2004: 190). Such a ‘motion’ is not line-
arly propelled through art. Berger and Bolt are not in conflict: we set
our lives in moments where we can ‘go’ somewhere else. Landscape
can collide with something else that resonates a sense of our own
lives, and has the power to re-assemble it. Such intensities of signifi-
cance, or merely calm moments of reassurance, happen across the
range of performativities and their circulation in representations.
Landscape resonates a capacity of belonging and disruption.
Whilst ‘place’ may continue in popular exchange, it seems su-
perfluous in the face of spacing. The term place may have significant
fluid connotations, but it is also archetypal in popular tourism litera-
ture: the synagogue or temple to be visited, the vibrant city, ‘fixed’. It
is difficult to relate place to process conceptually. Landscape as signi-
fied through spacing can have a gentle yet cumulative politics, pro-
found in its feeling and ideas, as the community gardener expressed.
Landscape as practice or art practice is forwarded into process, as dy-
namic rather than either ‘outside’ experience or only focused through
the physical character of encounters. In this article I have placed em-
phasis upon efforts to articulate the dynamic and complex character of
landscape in process, working away from the particularly fixed char-

acter familiarly associated with landscape in and as representation. By
so doing, I hope to have rendered landscape’s purported fixed and
steady character as instead shuffling, unstable and lively.
62 David Crouch
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Nature Qua Identity:
Nature, Culture and Relational Integrity
Fran Speed
Abstract: The term nature remains an ambiguous, contentious concept which contin-
ues to prove a stumbling block in environmental theory and practice, for example in
conservation. While various definitions of nature abound, it is most commonly de-
fined as that which is independent of human agency. According to this definition, hu-
man beings and their artefacts are separate from what is considered a wholly inde-
pendent nature. As a result, it has created a prevalent culture/nature dualism that in-
hibits both practical land management and the formulation of a viable environmental
ethic. In seeking to establish a cohesive understanding upon which we can collectively
draw I present an understanding of nature qua identity. The account of nature that I
propose not only resonates with the intuitions from which the expression springs, but
overcomes the nature/culture divide. In the account I present nature is inclusive of
human beings, since it describes a collective dimension of the identity that we hold in
common with all evolved entities. To speak of nature, from this perspective, is not to
speak of some scientific or ontological basis for it but to identify narrative qualities
that characterise and define it. I illustrate how this collective dimension of our iden-
tity, and the affective bond of allegiance that it affords, makes our relationship to the
non-human world significant, such that the scope and integrity of our human interac-
tion with it can be of major concern. In light of this account of nature I argue that to
describe landscape as ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’, is to communicate a relational distinc-
tion; a distinction that bears on the integrity of the relations set up by the interaction
of human and non-human interests. In conclusion, I examine the ramifications of this
account of nature for considering the rationale that drives conservation.
Key names and concepts: Affective bonds of allegiance - conservation - culture -

identity - meaningful relations - narrative qualities - nature - nature/culture dualism -
relational integrity.
1. Introduction
In relatively recent times there has arisen a tangible groundswell of

support for the protection of what we, collectively, value and refer to
as nature. Yet though the values, policies and practices that we adopt
68 Fran Speed
to ensure its protection are, ultimately, determined by how we define

the term it remains the case that we do not hold a cohesive, collec-
tively unified understanding of what we or others mean by it. Indeed,
without a unified notion the formulation of environmental theory and
practice invariably leads to a state of impasse hamstrung, as it is, by
misunderstanding and conflicting interpretations. This is clearly a
worrying situation since, as has been suggested (Evernden 1992), it
would seem unlikely that we can ever hope to ‘save’ nature without
first ascertaining just what it is we are attempting to save. What is
more, without such knowledge, we can assume that the policies and
practices adopted are likely to be inadequate and misdirected.
No matter how agonizing or difficult a task, the challenge to es-
tablish a cohesive understanding on which we can collectively draw
would seem to be a prerequisite, not simply so that we can continue to
use the term in normal discourse but so that we can continue, justifia-
bly, to argue for something that expresses what is commonly felt to be
a source of inimitable meaning and value. It is for the latter of these
reasons that I take up the challenge by proposing what I believe to be
a compelling understanding of nature qua identity. I say compelling,
because while it not only resonates with the intuitions from which the
expression springs, it also convincingly overcomes the problematic
nature/culture dualism that inhibits both practical land management
and the formulation of a viable environmental ethic. In conclusion, I
briefly consider the ramifications of this proposal for the rationale that
drives conservation.
2. What do we mean by nature?
What do we mean by nature? To what does the expression answer in

our understanding and why should this matter? It has been suggested
that like the Rorschach inkblot tests psychologists use to tap into our
psyche, nature presents an open invitation to see what we want, or
need, to see (Dizard 1994). Nature, as Raymond Williams remarks, is
one of the most complex terms in the language (Williams 1980: 68).
Yet, as with many other problematic terms, its complexity is con-
cealed by the ease and regularity with which we put it to use in a wide
variety of contexts. It is at once both very familiar and extremely elu-
sive. While the criteria employed in such distinctions prove difficult to
Nature Qua Identity 69
specify, they are yet neither of a kind with which we can readily dis-
pense or to which a more stringent terminology, as Kate Soper (1995)
argues, can necessarily capture more adequately. Indeed, as Soper
suggests, the ambiguity of the concept represents one of the most sig-
nificant problems facing the establishment of an environmental ethic.
While various definitions of nature abound, it is most com-
monly defined as that which is independent of human agency.1 From
this perspective, nature and culture are viewed, essentially, as distinct
and separate. According to Malcolm Budd (2003), for example, nature
must not be the product of human skills, design or artifice, or even the
work of God. Bill McKibben's radical view that nature is ‘already
dead’ is characteristic of this common definition (McKibben 1990).
Nature, according to McKibben, is constituted in the way that it ex-
isted before human beings intervened in planetary processes. A signif-
icant consequence of conceiving nature in this way has been its impact
on the development of environmental theory and practice. In environ-
mental philosophy, the discipline that examines the ethical relation-
ship between humans and the non-human world a major consequence
has been the dogged pursuit of an objective, ontological, account of
nature which has excluded other approaches, particularly those that
focus on the influence of human experience and subjectivity.2 Indeed
the concept of nature as being independent of human agency has led to
the predominance in environmental ethics of theories that view non-
human entities and processes as being of intrinsic value in themselves,
such that these are viewed as having moral status and hence are enti-
tled to the kind of rights granted to human beings.3 All too frequently,
radical environmentalists and deep ecologists come close to accepting
as a first principle the premise that human presence destroys nature:
citing the popular notion that our environmental problems began with
the invention of agriculture. As William Cronon (1996) stresses, the
farm becomes the first and most important battlefield in the long war
1
See Mill, John Stuart. 1985 [1874]. ‘Three Essays on Religion (1874): Nature’
in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Vol.X, Essays on Ethics, Religion
and Society (ed. John M. Robson) (1833). Toronto: U of Toronto P, London:
Routledge and Paul Kegan, 1985: 373-402.
2
For a comprehensive overview of the various stances involved see Light/Rolston
(2003).
3
For an extreme example of this approach see Stone (1974).
70 Fran Speed
against ‘wild’ nature, and all else follows in its wake. The upshot is
that we are pushed towards privileging some environments at the ex-
pense of others, wilderness being a prime example. In spite of the
worthy intentions of theorists who defend nature in this way, many
others argue that it is just not a viable approach since it renders all
natural entities and processes inviolable. Every non-human entity, on
this view, would be something on which we could not trespass. Such
prohibition of human intervention, of any kind, would make life un-
tenable.
On the other hand, some sociologists for example take the view
that nature is a human idea, a ‘contested’ concept, and assert that there
is no singular nature as such, only ‘natures’ which are historically,
geographically and socially constituted (Mcnaghten/Urry 1998). This
social constructivist position, as it is termed, is heretical to many envi-
ronmentalists since it implies that nature, independent of our means of
articulating it, does not exist except as an idea. Others, for instance
Henry Plotkin (2003), maintain that since human beings are them-
selves an evolved species, then nature includes everything including
all human artefacts and activities. Others, however, continue to view
nature as distinct from what human beings create and do (Katz 1993:
223-24, Lee 1999). Indeed such theorists believe it crucial to maintain
the ontological distinctions between what they view as ‘natural’ and
‘artefactual’, or ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’. While what is deemed natu-
ral has traditionally been viewed as whatever fulfils its telos, that is to
say, the purpose or end for which it exists, there are those resigned to
the view that there can be no right answers to the question of what we
mean when we describe something as ‘natural’.4 A more recent and
promising view is that naturalness is not a descriptive term but is a
spacio-temporal concept determined by origin and history (O’Neill/
Holland/Light 2008).
As the foregoing definitions and views illustrate, the concept in
question is deeply problematic, essentially because while nature is
construed as separate from us it is also seen as something of which we
4
Aristotle’s theory of ‘natural’ law continues to be a significant influence in
contemporary ethical thinking in the way that it holds that something is ‘right’
if it fulfills its ‘true’ purpose in life and ‘wrong’ if it goes against it. An exam-
ple would be the influence of natural law in the debate over the ‘naturalness’
of homosexuality. (Book II.8)
are a part. Since the concept is considered logically inconsistent and

impracticable, it has been suggested that we ought to eschew it alto-
gether (Vogel 2002: 23-39). Although I empathise with these con-
cerns, it is my view that to eschew it entirely because it proves prob-
lematic is insufficient reason, particularly in light of the meaning and
value from which, for a great many people, the expression intuitively
springs. Furthermore, to eschew it on the basis of its impracticality is
to discount the intractable complicity of philosophical positions that
render it so. Nevertheless, the concept does remain a stumbling block,
particularly in the way that it has set up a pervasive nature/culture du-
alism in interdisciplinary theory and environmental management, for
example in conservation.
3. The nature/culture dichotomy
While nature conservation is one of the primary expressions of envi-

ronmental concern, it has long been regarded as an important factor in
planning and a legitimate land use. Even though much else has
changed, as the geographer Bill Adams (1996b) explains, nature con-
servation has remained remarkably unchanged in its fundamental ap-
proach since the 1940s. What has clearly not changed is conserva-
tion’s struggle with the problematic nature/culture dichotomy. Ad-
ams’s own seminal overview of conservation practices illustrates the
prevalence of this dualism. While we value the countryside because,
in contrast to the city, it seems ‘natural’, the distinction, he suggests, is
largely in our minds. What we value about the countryside is the
meanings we attach to it, in art, literature and personal experience.
While conservation has a vital role in holding and sustaining these
meanings, he believes that, to a large extent, nature both physically,
and in the sense that we attach values to natural entities and land-
scapes, is socially constructed. Even so, he nonetheless thinks that al-
though socially constructed there is also something ‘beyond’ that con-
struction. While he accepts that we are part of nature he yet feels that
we need its ‘otherness’. While conservation is about nature it is also,
for Adams, inextricably about culture. There again, on other occasions
he slips back into using the term in an objective way as when he refers
to specific non-human entities and processes. Not surprisingly, per-
haps, Adams also feels that the concept of nature is problematic.
72 Fran Speed
An influential element that drives the motivation for conserva-

tion is the idea of a ‘lost’ nature. Although the notion continues to act
as a powerful stimulus, Adams believes that the idea of a ‘natural’
state of nature or a ‘natural’ countryside is problematic since there is
very little landscape that is untouched by human intervention. The so
called ‘wild’ uplands, the hill pastures, the chalk grasslands and the
ancient woodland in Britain, for example, all bear the mark of human
activity. Since the arboreal practices of pollarding and coppicing, the
hedgerows and dry stone walls characteristic of these landscapes, have
emerged from specific farming and land management practices, these
features are constitutive of what Adams calls a “human-made ecosys-
tem”(Adams 1996a). It is for this reason that landscapes, for Adams,
are cultural and cannot be considered wholly natural.
Given Adams’s view that conservation built around myths of
the natural is not useful, his conclusion that the central task of conser-
vationists must be “the weaving of the natural back into everyday life”
poses something of a contradiction, since for the natural to be ‘woven
back’ assumes that a state of nature actually exists in itself, a notion
which, at other times, he is at pains to reject (Adams 1996a: 273).
While Adams’s proposal for what he refers to as a “creative conserva-
tion” is commendable in the way that it seeks to combat fragmentation
and recognises the need to link conservation with wider economic pat-
terns, the relevance of drawing on his thinking is to illustrate how it
not only swings between different and conflicting understandings of
nature, but how the nature/culture dichotomy continues to prove a sig-
nificant stumbling block. As Adams himself asks, if the countryside is
culturally created, and if what really matters about it is the natural
value that we attach to it, where does that leave nature and nature con-
servation? What exactly is it that conservationists are striving to pro-
tect?
Given the influence of human activity in shaping much of the
upland areas and the cultural features that characterise them, these
landscapes are nevertheless valued as distinctly ‘natural’ or ‘wild’
places by many people such that they are deemed of significant
beauty. Indeed, in conflicts concerning the development and manage-
ment of these areas the destruction of their natural beauty is often
cited as reason for protecting them. Given that these landscapes
clearly are a consequence of farming and land management practices,
it surely follows that such human intervention does not render them
either ‘unnatural’ or ‘unbeautiful’. So what is it, exactly, that consti-

tutes the natural beauty that people seek to protect in these land-
scapes? While to persist in claiming that it is nature clearly makes no
logical sense, what other expression best captures the experience or
communicates what is felt to account for the meaning and value these
landscapes embody and express?
4. Nature qua identity
Although we may agree that the value of a landscape rests in what we

see as its ‘naturalness’ or ‘beauty’, these aesthetic expressions tend to
resist rational justification. There are profound difficulties, which
none of us can evade or ignore, in using conventional forms of lan-
guage in order to express feelings and intuitions that attempt to escape
what David Kidner describes as “the suffocating gravitational pull of
the existing conceptual-commercial system” (Kidner 2001). Kidner
agrees that such forms of expression are not, however, comfortable ar-
ticulating realities that are marginalised or suppressed within our
technological world. It is for this reason that it is not easy to defend
the very concrete reality that expressions such as natural and beautiful
convey, in any other way. Yet to argue for the protection of landscape
in these aesthetic terms is to do so at the risk of appearing a little ab-
surd. Aesthetic reactions, on the whole, tend to be greeted by policy-
makers as emotionally suspect, as the consequence of subjective im-
pulse, as displaying ‘sentimental’ or ‘romantic’ notions and, therefore,
as irrational. I contend however that aesthetic judgments provide a
valuable source of concern in environmental deliberation. The basis
for this claim, as I argue more comprehensively elsewhere (Speed
2009), rests on the view that our aesthetic reactions, amongst other
things, are perceptual responses to the merit of the relations that a
given environment embodies and expresses.
On this view, in describing these landscapes as naturally beauti-
ful, we describe what we perceive as possessing relational integrity.
Natural value, on this account, expresses a relational distinction that
bears on our identity as natural, ‘nature’ beings. The understanding of
nature that I propose, therefore, hinges on the view that nature is not a
human idea but is a descriptive term that describes a foundational di-
mension of our identity. It is not to understand nature as denoting any
74 Fran Speed
objective, ontological basis that human, or non-human entities, may

exhibit. Neither does it refer to the myriad species that inhabit the
earth per se. Rather it is descriptive of narrative qualities that we rec-
ognise as characteristic of evolved entities. The account of nature that
I propose can therefore be likened to the term human. To describe
ourselves as human does not describe the physical or mental attributes
of our species per se, but describes a collective identity that is defined
by characteristic qualities that unite us; qualities that we identify as
being part of what makes us human. Subsequently when, for example,
a person behaves in ways we view as contra to this human identity, we
judge them as acting ‘inhumanly’. What is considered inhuman is
something that society, in general, tends to take seriously even though
what we mean may be contentious and unclear.
By the same token, when we speak of nature we speak of a col-
lective dimension of our identity. Consequently, things that share its
characteristic qualities we tend to describe as being natural. In con-
trast, those things that flout, or lack, these qualities we describe as un-
natural. Such expressions do not describe any physical attributes or
properties of human or non human entities per se, but communicate a
judgment concerning relational integrity. Integrity implies being true
to something in its wholeness, its completeness. For things to express
integrity means that they encompass and express every aspect of the
connections that make them what they are. To describe something as
natural, or unnatural, is to communicate a relational distinction; a dis-
tinction that bears on the integrity of this relationship. What is per-
ceived to have relational integrity can strike us as profoundly mea-
ningful. It is for this reason that we tend, on the whole, to relate to the
non-human world in a positive way as when we describe things or
places as being ‘naturally beautiful’. Considered in this way, the ac-
count of nature, as identity, provides valuable insight for understand-
ing what it is that inspires our love and concern, and is the topic to
which I now turn.
5. Identity
Our sense of self-identity, as some psychologists (Fogel 2001) argue,

is properly understood as constituted by a network of relations. All
psychological experience implies a connection, a relationship whether
with another person, with cultural tools, with language or with the
non-human world. While psychological research shows that the influ-
ence of social relations on our attitudes and behaviour is significant,
the influence of our relations with the natural world is generally less
so. An early exception is Harold Searles (1960) who insightfully ar-
gued that our relationship to the natural world was transcendently im-
portant, and was to be ignored at peril to our psychological well be-
ing.5 What is important, as Searles might agree, consists in the ramifi-
cations of this relationship for the construction of identity and mean-
ing.
As Charles Taylor notes, one can define one’s identity only
against the background of things that matter (1998: 40). To bracket
out history, nature, society: that is, everything but what one finds in
oneself, would be to eliminate all candidates for what matters. To cre-
ate a life is to create it out of the materials that these things have es-
tablished, that they have given us. Identity is thus not an arbitrary
sense of self-authorship, that is to say, some authentic inner essence
independent of the world into which we have grown, but the product
of our relational interaction with it from birth. A basic condition for
making sense of ourselves, as Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre (1985)
agree, is that we grasp our lives in a narrative. What is important is
narrative unity; that is to say, the ability to tell a story of one’s life that
hangs together. While it need not be exactly the same story from week
to week, or year to year, what matters, as Anthony Kwame Appiah
(2005) explains, is how it fits into broader narratives outside our per-
sonal choices or control. While personal and social histories constitute
narratives that are clearly important for making sense of ourselves, we
also see our lives in the context of broader narratives that shape col-
lective identities. These collective dimensions of our identity, as Ap-
piah further explains, are equally important since both personal and
collective frames of identity inform our experience and influence our
judgments in significant ways. While nature as a collective identity is
not one that he acknowledges, his explanation for how identity fits
into the orbit of our broader moral projects is relevant.
While there are many things of value in the world, Appiah sug-
gests that there is no way of ranking these or trading them off against
5
More recent exceptions are Clayton/Opotow (2003).
76 Fran Speed
one another, there is not always, all things considered, a best thing to
do. One thing that identity provides is another source of value, one
that helps us to make our way among given options. Identity structures
how we move through life since it has patterns of relation built into it.
The question who we are has always been linked, he suggests, to the
question of what we are. Who you are is constituted, in part, by what
you care about; to cease to care about those things would be to cease
to be the sort of person you are. Hence some relationships prove sig-
nificant such that they exert affective bonds of allegiance. Nature, as a
collective dimension of our identity, is no exception. As Appiah ex-
plains “[r]elationships that matter provide reasons for partiality, for
unequal treatment. Our identities, our identifications, make some ties
matter to us, and give rise to ethical communities” (Appiah 2005:
237).
Recognition of nature as a collective dimension of our identity
is clearly significant, not only for understanding the value we attribute
to the non-human world, but for understanding the basis for the atti-
tudes we take towards the development and management of the envi-
ronment in general. However before moving to consider the ramifica-
tions of my account of nature for the rationale of conservation, an ex-
amination of how this dimension of our identity emerges in our ex-
perience is useful, not least for distinguishing my account from recent
theories which, while promising, present only a partial explanation.
6. Narrative qualities in the ‘evolutionary story’
As a fundamental dimension of our identities, nature ‘backgrounds’

our experience and influences how we perceive and evaluate many as-
pects of our world. Over time, this dimension of our identity is formed
through the recognition of narrative qualities that we hold in common
with other evolved entities. I want to consider some of these narrative
qualities and illustrate how they shape this collective dimension of our
identity.
During a normal lifetime we can hardly avoid encountering in-
stances of birth and death. In such instances we are made acutely, and
often painfully, aware of the evolutionary narrative that constitutes our
own biological inheritance. Though we may contemplate our own
death with reticence, we recognise at such moments that we are all
moving towards this inevitable stage in our own narrative. Indeed we

recognise from early childhood that whatever is capable of life will
inevitably perish. But it is not the fact of these instances in the evolu-
tionary story that contribute to shaping this collective identity, but the
characteristic qualities that surround and define them. These instances
are not merely registered as data, as facts of life, but are marked by
qualities that are emotionally affirmed as constitutive of who we are.
The cumulative effect is that not only are we made aware of the tran-
sient and mutable nature of our own existence, but of other things
from the smallest insect to the mountains, the seas, the moon, the sun,
and the universe itself. While talk of the ‘birth’ and ‘death’ of stars is
clearly metaphorical, our use of metaphor is to regard them as pos-
sessing qualities which we recognise and with which we identify.
Creation, as well as death, invokes qualities which are no less charac-
teristic: mystery being of particular significance.
The mystery that surrounds existence is foundational to our
self-understanding. Instances of wonder and awe, for example, are
common reactions to the mystery that surrounds each new, unique,
beginning. While the birth of a human infant is frequently greeted as a
small ‘miracle’, our response to the emergence of non-human entities
is often no less so. In such instances we are responding to the ineffable
forces responsible for their emergence. All things that share in the
evolutionary narrative have emerged by means that, strictly speaking,
remain beyond science’s full grasp. Mystery surrounds existence.
David Cooper (2002) goes further in claiming that mystery constitutes
the measure of all things. Given this view mystery is not a narrative
quality that separates us from the non-human world but, like other nar-
rative qualities, is one that unites us in a very real sense. Richard
Norman (2004: 7-27) is an example of those who, in the wake of
scientific advance, argue that nature has lost its mystery. In contrast,
Ronald Hepburn (2001: 145) argues that since our grasp of nature is
selective and partial it leaves out both the vast and the minute that lie
beyond the meager zone of our receptivity. This surely suggests, he
claims, that mystery lies not only beyond our awareness in every di-
rection, but that it constitutes an element upon which the value of life
is contingent. Mystery, from this point of view, constitutes an integral
narrative component, a quality that we recognise as defining the col-
lective identity we refer to as nature. Though not an exhaustive list,
78 Fran Speed
other narrative qualities that we can recognise as integral to this iden-

tity include autonomy, uniqueness, diversity, and spontaneity.
The urgency towards recognising the autonomy of nature is
something that some environmental philosophers, Thomas Heyd
(2005) for example, consider to be of primary importance for estab-
lishing what nature is. But nature’s autonomy, its independence, as the
common definition implies, is not the ‘other-than-human-world’. A
sense of independent authority is not a distinction that separates the
non-human from the human. It is a characteristic that we hold in
common. Indeed while we did not create the non-human world, nei-
ther are we responsible for our own human origins. Similarly unique-
ness and spontaneity are not only qualities that we hold in common
with the non-human world but are qualities that we, subsequently,
admire and value. John Stuart Mill would seem to agree in his revul-
sion towards the thought of “contemplating the world with nothing left
to the spontaneous activity of nature” (Mill 1848: 118). Indeed the
loss or lack of such narrative qualities destroy the fabric of identity
that provides meaning. What is important for what follows is how
these narrative qualities are not only key factors in shaping our sense
of self but also influence how we experience and evaluate environ-
ment in general.
7. Experience and perception in the evaluation of environment
How we experience environment and come to value it is not simply a

consequence of our physical engagement with it but the perceptual in-
volvement of the participant and in particular the capacity of imagina-
tion to extend our understanding in significant ways (Hepburn 1996:
191-204). In focusing on the rich web of interrelations between aes-
thetic experience and wider human concerns, Hepburn argues that our
evaluation of environment requires different approaches that accom-
modate not only their indeterminate and diverse character but also our
multi-sensory experience and varied understanding of them (1984: 9-
35). Indeed a serious appreciation of environment, as Hepburn
stresses, cannot be reduced to an absorbed attention to the surface
qualities of its features alone. Rather it is the centre and occasion of
many possible lines of perceptual reflection that may affect a person’s
life and modify the quality of their experience long after they have
ceased to contemplate it. What we encounter, he argues, is subject to

the whole of experience and not only to what is experienced at the
present moment. When we experience environment in the broader
context of space and time, for example, it may involve the importing
of components quite distinct from anything actually present in the
scene itself. While we might see this component as externally related,
it is better described, he suggests, as internal to the experience since
“it is concerned, perhaps, with the relation between the subject and
object, the relation between appreciator and landscape” (Hepburn
1996: 197, emphasis added).
In the perceptual framework that Hepburn describes we engage
in a form of mental synthesis, a mental appropriation of an environ-
ment’s features, events, processes and patterns such that we come to
relate to, and identify with, aspects of the broader contexts in which
they are experienced. The ability to ‘realise’ in this way, as Hepburn
explains, is contingent on perceptions upon which we dwell and lin-
ger. In so doing we, importantly, allow the forms and processes of
non-human entities ‘free-play’ in modifying our sense of our own be-
ing, such that we become aware of a network of affinities, analogous
forms, spanning the inorganic and organic world.
The human inner life has been nourished by images from the natural
world: its self articulation and development could hardly proceed
without annexing or appropriating forms from the phenomenal world.
They are annexed not in a systematic, calculating, craftsman like fash-
ion, but rather through our being imaginatively seized by them, and
coming to cherish their expressive aptness, and to rely upon them in
our efforts to understand ourselves. (Hepburn 1993: 71, emphasis
added)
This form of self identification, as Hepburn insightfully stresses, is not

to humanise non-human forms, rather “it may be more like a ‘natural-
izing’ of the human observer” (Hepburn 1963: 201). Our motive, as
Hepburn suggests, is in part “the desire for a certain integrity or
‘truth’” (Hepburn 1963: 200).
What the foregoing illustrates is how perceptual reflection and
imagination enable us to reach out to insights and forms of relation
that are omitted in a rational, scientific account of nature. Indeed to
become imaginatively absorbed in natural phenomena can, as Hep-
burn states, bring about a change in one’s total conception of the
80 Fran Speed
world by strengthening or weakening the rightness of certain attitudes,

for instance, an openness to the quality of ‘mystery’. The importance
of experience and perception in environmental evaluation cannot be
underestimated since what is of significance is, not only, how we re-
late to the non-human world but the influence that this exerts upon our
affective relationship with it.
8. The value of nature in the rationale of environmental conservation
While the idea that the source of value we attribute to nature resides in
its origins and history is a promising advance in environmental value
theory, it offers only a partial explanation for why we value nature and
seek to protect it. Indeed those philosophers who advance this view
agree that environments matter to us because they embody broader
narrative contexts in which we make sense of our lives (Holland/
O’Neill 1996). The natural world, just as much as human culture, has
a particular history that is part of our history and part of our context.
While we should take into account what has gone before this does not
mean, they argue, preserving or returning to some ‘ideal’ natural state,
free from human intervention and frozen in time. Rather it means that
we consider environments within a temporal context and consider all
the narratives that this reveals. With this information the aim in land
management and conservation practices, they explain, would be to de-
termine the most appropriate trajectory for the narrative to take. The
aim would not be about preserving the past or protecting pieces of the
countryside in a particular state, but about negotiating the transition
from the past to the future in such a way as “to secure the transfer of
maximum significance” (Holland/Rawles 1993: 14-19). In the case
where there are several narratives, the aim would be to adjudicate be-
tween them while being true to the past. In a more recent account, the
authors stress that the value of the natural world should “be measured,
not in terms of its degree of freedom from human impact, but in terms
of a continuity that is true to the historical processes of natural selec-
tion that it embodies” (O’Neill/ Holland/Light 2008: 162). Indeed they
go so far as to claim that “being natural is, and is only, determined by
origin and by history: it is a spatio-temporal concept and not a descrip-
tive one” (148).
While in principle I am in some general accord with the fore-

going stance, I am not in total agreement since it provides only a par-
tial explanation for why we find nature, and the natural, valuable.
What is omitted is an account of how our capacity for identification
and recognition makes sense of these narratives in ways that provide
meaning. Although origins and history have an essential role it is how
we relate to the narratives they disclose that is key. Without this abil-
ity the affective bond of allegiance that motivates and inspires our
love, regard and concern for the natural and cultural aspects of our
world would fail to emerge.
While the value we attribute to non-human entities is not a con-
sequence of the history or process of their creation alone neither is it a
consequence of any physical attributes or properties that they might
display but a consequence of the way we identify and relate to the
narrative qualities that characterise them. To describe something as
natural does not, as I have argued, imply independence of human ac-
tivity or intervention but expresses a relational distinction that bears
on the integrity of our collective identity as natural beings. It is for this
reason that landscapes that are the result of human activity can be ex-
perienced as naturally beautiful. Gardening and farming practices of-
fer clear examples for illustrating this claim.
9. Human intervention and the natural
The sight of daffodils set out in uniform rows in a forest setting would
likely strike some as unnatural. This, however, would not be a re-
sponse, necessarily, to evidence of human design or intentionality but
to the perception of the daffodils as lacking qualities of ‘wildness’.
The manner in which daffodils propagate themselves in what we call
‘drifts’, random clusters, is characteristic of daffodils in this setting
because they reflect qualities integral to it, that is to say, qualities of a
unique form of self-directed, spontaneous, independence. Nature as a
distinction of an autonomous authority is, you will remember, remi-
niscent of the definition of the natural as that which is ‘independent’
of human agency. Although this is the basis of a common intuition,
independence is not an innate ontological property that can be objecti-
fied but is a perceptual quality of organisation characteristic of all
evolved entities. In the context of the urban park flowers organised in
82 Fran Speed
ways that express a strict formal symmetry are not, in general, per-
ceived as unnatural as much, perhaps, as bordering on the dull or life-
less. Part of the joy and satisfaction that flowers and plants elicit in an
unmanaged setting rests in their unfettered artless exuberance. The
gardening practice of topiary provides another example.
While a tree that has been shaped by a topiarist clearly indicates
human manipulation it is rarely viewed as unnatural. Indeed where
human intervention is not perceived to radically inhibit or threaten the
integrity of the dynamic between human/non-human interests, the
products of such practices can be perceived as both natural and as pos-
sessing great beauty.6 Some topiary however can be perceived to
‘trivialise’ this relationship, for example, when trees are purposely
shaped to resemble representational forms such as top hats or hand-
bags. This perception arises because the topiarist is seen as simply ex-
ploiting the tree as a sculpting material while ignoring the characteris-
tic qualities held in common. In such cases the element of exploitation
will render it distasteful or vulgar, rather than unnatural.7
In the realm of human affairs, exploitation and oppression are
forms of relationship that, generally speaking, are considered intoler-
able forms of behaviour. Yet in our treatment of non-human entities,
domestic animals for example, these forms of relationship are endemic
in an intensive modern farming approach. In judging this approach as
unnatural we are not making a judgment about the farming structures
or methods employed in themselves, but the merit of the human/non-
human relations that these tangible things embody and express. Inten-
sive farming landscapes can strike us as unnatural, or ugly, because
they lack relational integrity. When the narrative qualities that define
our relationship with non-human entities are lacking, or contravened
in this way integrity and meaning can be lost or destroyed.
6
For a fuller argument that discusses ethical and aesthetic questions in relation
to the gardening practice of topiary, see Brady/Brook (2003).
7
Ronald Hepburn offers some interesting ideas on this, pointing to a trivialising
approach as one that “distorts, ignores, suppresses truth about [nature’s] [...]
objects, feels and thinks about them in ways that falsify how nature really is”
(1993: 69). Although his examples are directed at more natural environments
rather than gardens, his ideas can be applied here to address the relationship
between nature and humans in the garden.
In contrast, the timeless appeal of traditional farming settle-

ments and practices, the mediaeval towns, the ‘honeypot’ villages and
beauty spots that have been gradually ‘loved to death’ is not a conse-
quence of some sentimental attachment to what is old and quaint for
its own sake but a response to the perception of an integral relation-
ship between human activities and the land involved.8 Such places ex-
press the tempered, relational constraint characteristic of the vernacu-
lar tradition, a way of life consciously set by the bounds of what was
immediately available in terms of land, materials and energy. This
sense of relational constraint is not something that modern urban set-
tings tend to convey. Indeed, experience of them as ‘ugly’ or ‘soul-
less’, from this perspective, can be understood as a reaction to them as
expressive of an arbitrary, capricious disregard for relationships of all
kinds.
As these examples illustrate, landscapes which are to a great ex-
tent the result of human activity, as in the case of the uplands of Brit-
ain of which Adams speaks (Adams 1996b), can be experienced as
possessing a natural, even wild, beauty. Although the appearance of
these landscapes has, plainly, been shaped by centuries of sheep farm-
ing, its natural beauty springs from an integral relationship with the
land. The drystone walls that enclose these upland areas are emblem-
atic of this approach, and although permanent features they are prone
to collapse and constant back-breaking renewal. It is likely that the
very temporality of such features is what makes them seem alive and
responsive. While some might see this form of enclosure as unneces-
sary and uneconomic, there are others who recognise the integrity that
such practices embody and express.
10. The rationale of conservation – what are we striving to protect?
In light of the foregoing account of nature qua identity, what might we

consider the ramifications of it for the rationale of conservation? What
might we consider drives our desire to protect landscapes of both
natural and cultural merit? One answer posited by Robert Hewison
8
I use the term land here to mean what Aldo Leopold (1989) refers to as the
non-human community of entities and processes that constitute a particular
region.
84 Fran Speed
(1987) is the ‘nostalgic’ impulse. Nostalgia, which is seen to consti-

tute a significant part of the conservation frame of mind, is thought by
Hewison to be a misguided hankering after some ‘golden age’. Never-
theless Hewison, for one, provides some support for my argument.
The demolition of community settlements, he suggests, “deprives
people of tangible manifestations of their identity”. 9 While he criti-
cises the nostalgic longing for landscapes of the past he nevertheless
acknowledges that this impulse may be a means of coping with
change, with loss, and with perceived social threat which in part, he
thinks, is for a “lost sense of authenticity” (29). In the face of apparent
economic and environmental decline the past might seem a better
place but what matters, he says, is not the past but our relationship
with it.
I contend that what we are striving to protect are meaningful re-
lations. The nostalgic impulse is not for landscapes of the past per se
but for some integrity of relationship which they symbolise and which
has been lost in modern life. While this is likely for some loss of so-
cial identity it undoubtedly involves a loss of identity that my account
of nature proposes. While landscapes embody many identities, nature
is foundational such that the social and cultural can not be considered
independently of it. Given this view, my account of nature necessarily
overcomes the culture/nature dualism. The approach to environmental
evaluation that it sets up is no longer about the protection of nature or
culture per se; it is not about privileging the one over the other, but
about the protection of a tenacious, respectful integration of the two.
On this view the rationale of conservation would seem misguided in
its continued practice of preserving ‘bits’ of the environment judged to
be of natural or cultural merit.
When we view nature in terms of identity we focus on the
qualities that define ourselves, as much as the non-human world, such
that, not only can they become the basis for guiding environmental
practices that advocate ‘working with nature’ but the basis for guiding
development in a broader sense. We might, as Adams says, under-
stand enough about the way that natural systems function to make a
good job of undoing the constraints that our industrialism has placed
upon things like rivers, for example; but if we fail to recognise that
9
Hewison cites the views of Tamara Hareven and Randolph Langenbach
(1981: 115).
these constraints are more to do with our lack of identifying, and relat-
ing, to qualities that define ourselves we will indeed, as Adams sug-
gests, merely “stand outside of it like some remote technocratic eco-
logical engineer” (Adams 1996b: 169-70). One can only go so far in
imagining the future of conservation, as Adams notes, without coming
up against the constraint of current patterns of production and con-
sumption. And there lies the rub, for the meaning and value that nature
as identity affords finds little defense in a world increasingly dominat-
ed by political, economic, and technological imperatives. Before I
conclude, however, I want to address a possible criticism.
The account of nature qua identity that I propose might be taken
to imply that the protection of vulnerable species and habitats cease to
be a priority. This is not the case. It is merely to stress, as David
Kidner (2001) argues, that while stopgap measures such as isolating
and preserving parts of our environment in a piecemeal fashion may
be vital first steps, they do not realise the necessary extent of our vi-
sion. Nature, or the ‘natural order’, as he refers to it, “cannot be pro-
tected simply by preserving its component parts as if in an ecological
museum”. Our starting point, as he stresses, “must be a tenaciously
defended relation to this natural order”. Nature is not experienced as
something external to ourselves which we conceptually or geographi-
cally visit from time to time, “but as a felt resonance that is basic to
our identities as human animals” (15).
11. Conclusion
Without a clear understanding of what it is we are aiming to protect,

conservation and environmental development, in general, will con-
tinue to lack a coherent philosophy and remain hampered by the na-
ture/culture dichotomy. Ridding ourselves of this dualistic perversion
is long overdue, but it will not be an easy task as long as we continue
to view nature as something ‘outside’ ourselves, as ‘other’. Nature
viewed as identity convincingly overcomes this dualistic perspective.
What is more, because it resonates with the intuitions from which the
term springs it presents a compelling account. I think it is probably
true to say that when we use the term in everyday discourse we are not
necessarily, or intentionally, defending the many non-human entities
that proliferate upon the planet or the environments that they inhabit.
86 Fran Speed
Rather we are appealing to something greater, to something more uni-

versal in our understanding. When we defend nature we defend quali-
ties that construct this dimension of our collective identity, qualities
that we recognise and to which we relate in a positive way. While the
affective bond of allegiance that this identity elicits is responsible for
the enduring relationship that we hold with the non-human world, it is
perhaps the potential of this relationship for directing our activities in
the realm of human affairs that I hope will inspire further interest and
thought. It might be reasonable to propose that nature, as identity, pre-
sents itself as a political issue, and to consider what claims, if any, we
might justly make in its defence.
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The Geopolitical Picturesque
Donna Landry
Abstract: First theorised by the eighteenth-century English clergyman William Gilpin,

the Picturesque has now attained a global usefulness. Like other Enlightenment lega-
cies, it serves as a mode of post-imperial auto-critique. Gilpin’s Picturesque has re-
emerged in the twenty-first century as the aesthetic of the post-imperial backpacker,
the post-industrial wasteland, the anti-globalisation movement, and the Middle East-
ern War Zone. It is also in a less cool and ironic, less postmodern, form the aesthetic
of official conservation and wilderness-preservation agencies in Britain and the
United States. Cool anguish is its affect. A Picturesque aesthetics is not a politics.
However, from the beginning of the movement a certain radical ambivalence towards
economic and social hierarchy and exclusivity has accompanied the Picturesque. A
sensibility attuned to the Picturesque is likely to be critical of capitalist modernity’s
drive for maximal extraction from land and landscape, from human labour and the
natural world. Together, Picturesque aesthetics and pedestrianism have provided very
different writers and shapers of landscapes with appropriate stances from which to
represent themselves and their natural worlds. For the late eighteenth- and early nine-
teenth-century English writers Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Sophie Dixon, for the
Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh, who is our contemporary, and for the Syrian au-
thorities who administer the Picturesque installation of Quneitra, something we could
call a shared Picturesque aesthetic furnishes a shared vocabulary that turns on a taste
for wildness, ruins, and decay; a suspicion of development and modernity; and a sym-
pathy for the vagrant, the outcast, and the downtrodden.
Key names and concepts: Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Sophie Dixon - Golan Heights -
Israel/Palestine - Quneitra - Raja Shehadeh - decay - literary geopolitics - pedestrian
tourism - Picturesque aesthetics - political economy - ruins.
Has decay ever seemed so gripping, so ravishingly tenacious, so impossibly tender?

(Jay Merrick)
Without the aesthetic legitimacy granted by Picturesque theory, it is

unlikely that pedestrianism – rambling, walking, hiking, trekking –
would ever have become fashionable. Reviewing the work of the pho-
tographer and architect Dan Dubowitz, Jay Merrick gives voice to the
92 Donna Landry
phenomenon I call the resurgence of the Picturesque. Describing the

Victorian Gothic ruins of Ancoats and Manchester’s Gorton Friary in
Dubowitz’s photographs, Merrick appears awash in affect. His rhe-
torical question flirts with the possibility that these representations
might make decay unprecedentedly “gripping”, “ravishingly tena-
cious”, and “impossibly tender” (Merrick 2004: 3). Such an affective
attitude towards ruins implies a specific sort of identity in relation to
land and landscape. Finding decay both ravishing and tender is char-
acteristic of the Picturesque theorist or observer. In capturing the af-
fect produced by these aesthetically sumptuous representations of
post-industrial and post-ecclesiastical ruins, Merrick recreates the
stance and vocabulary of William Gilpin, eighteenth-century theorist
of the Picturesque, who first described Tintern Abbey as “a very in-
chanting piece of ruin”.1
I suggest that Gilpin’s Picturesque has re-emerged in the
twenty-first century as the aesthetic of the post-imperial backpacker,
the post-industrial wasteland, the anti-globalisation movement, and
the Middle Eastern War Zone. It is also in a less cool and ironic, less
postmodern, form the aesthetic of official conservation and wilder-
ness-preservation agencies in Britain and the United States. It finds
Hollywood expression in eco-disaster films too numerous to mention,
and literary form in post-apocalyptic writing such as Cormac
McCarthy’s (2007).2 Between the 1790s and 1820s, Picturesque tour-
ism first came into its own. A Picturesque aesthetics is not a politics.
However, from the beginning of the movement a certain radical am-
bivalence towards economic and social hierarchy and exclusivity has
accompanied it. A sensibility attuned to the Picturesque is likely to be
critical of capitalist modernity’s drive for maximal extraction from
land and landscape, from human labour and the natural world. The
Picturesque and pedestrianism together have provided very different
writers and shapers of landscapes with appropriate stances from which
1
“But if Tintern-abbey be less striking as a distant object, it exhibits, on a
nearer view, (when the whole together cannot be seen, but the eye settles on
some of its nobler parts,) a very inchanting piece of ruin.” (Gilpin 1782: 33)
2
The Picturesque also furnishes the aesthetic for socially alert feature films
such as David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) and Curtis Hanson’s 8 Mile
(2002), and for more radical documentary films such as Stephanie Black’s
Life and Debt (2001), on Jamaica, globalisation, and the International Mone-
tary Fund (IMF).
to represent themselves and their natural worlds. For the late eight-
eenth- and early nineteenth-century English writers Samuel Taylor
Coleridge and Sophie Dixon, for the Palestinian writer Raja Shehadeh,
who is our contemporary, and for the Syrian authorities who adminis-
ter the Picturesque installation of Quneitra, something we could call a
shared Picturesque aesthetic furnishes a shared vocabulary that turns
on a taste for wildness, ruins, and decay; a suspicion of development
and modernity; and a sympathy for the vagrant, the outcast, and the
downtrodden.
1. Political Economy and the Picturesque
Gilpin conjured an emotional atmosphere that would inspire his audi-

ence actively to seek out the experience of Picturesque decay. It was
Gilpin’s work, and the subsequent debates it inspired, that first made
remote or wild landscapes, and resonant ruins within them, worth en-
deavouring to encounter on foot, in a kind of secular, nature-attendant
pilgrimage.3 Gilpin exhorts his audience to Picturesque tourism by
conjuring details of decay ravishingly. Human constructions are
dwarfed, overwhelmed, redecorated, and finally reincorporated into
the green world. Of Tintern Abbey, Gilpin writes:
Nature has now made it her own. Time has worn off all traces of the
rule: it has blunted the sharp edges of the chisel; and broken the regu-
larity of opposing parts. [...] To these are superadded the ornaments of
time. Ivy, in masses uncommonly large, has taken possession of many
3
I focus on Gilpin’s work here, which was aimed at Picturesque tourists, but
the debate about Picturesque aesthetics included a second generation of writ-
ers, the landowners Uvedale Price and Richard Payne Knight. Both wished to
turn their estates into Picturesque prospects, though they differed about par-
ticulars. Their landlords’ Picturesque may be said to be less radically ‘wild’,
less anti-improvement than Gilpin’s, since it is directed towards the working
and management of large estates, but it represents nevertheless a landscape
aesthetics that runs counter to ‘improvement’ as ever-increasing productivity
and maximal extraction from the land. See An Essay on the Picturesque, as
compared with the Sublime And The Beautiful; and, on the Use Of Studying
Pictures, for the purpose of Improving Real Landscape (Price 1794), The
Landscape. A Didactic Poem. In Three Books. Addressed to Uvedale Price,
Esq. (Knight 1794) and An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste
(Knight 1805).
94 Donna Landry
parts of the wall; and gives a happy contrast to the grey-coloured

stone, of which the building is composed. Nor is this undecorated.
Mosses of various hues, with lychens, maiden-hair, penny-leaf, and
other humble plants, over-spread the surface; or hang from every joint,
and crevice. Some of them were in flower, others only in leaf; but, all
together, they give those full-blown tints, which add the richest finish-
ing to a ruin. (Gilpin 1782: 33-34)
Glorious decorativeness rescues decay from merely inducing melan-

choly. There is a fiendish life in these mosses, lichens, ferns and hum-
ble wild flowers. Nature taking back the accomplishments of human
labour is to be celebrated. These plants are no longer weeds to be ex-
pelled from the garden, but rather an ecosystem to be embraced.
However, this ravishment of the spectator by the green world is
accompanied by a certain unease, even a desire to commit violence.
Gilpin records that he wished to take a mallet to the ruins of Tintern
Abbey to improve its outline, but just stopped himself from doing so:
[A] number of gabel-ends hurt the eye with their regularity; and dis-
gust it by the vulgarity of their shape. A mallet judiciously used (but
who durst use it?) might be of service in fracturing some of them; par-
ticularly those of the cross isles, which are not only disagreeable in
themselves, but confound the perspective. (Gilpin 1782: 33)
Alan Liu is right to suggest that Gilpin’s Picturesque aesthetics con-

tains within it a moment of arrested violence (Liu 1989: 63-64). It is
this precise aesthetic assembly – the oblique acknowledgement of vio-
lence and its resonance with historical conflict, marked yet arrested,
combined with an ecological sensibility, a sense of the interconnect-
edness of the whole natural world – that has made the Picturesque
amenable to rediscovery in urban post-industrial and war-devastated
situations.
The Picturesque is both a mode of representation and a style
possessing a certain characteristic content. As a mode of representa-
tion, the later eighteenth-century Picturesque emphasizes roughness,
wildness, and the line, as in drawing, over the sense of embodied mass
given in painting. As a style with characteristic content, Gilpin’s Pic-
turesque features bandits, gypsies, and other walkers on the wild side,
in proximity to wild scenery and ruined habitations. Gilpin declared,
when characterising fit subject matter for Picturesque representation:
“Low arts of husbandry exclude: The spade,/The plough, the patient
angler with his rod,/Be banish’d thence” (Gilpin 1792: 20). Instead,
Picturesque beauty required more leisured, less laborious figures in
the landscape:
[...] far other guests invite,

Wild as those scenes themselves, banditti fierce,
And gipsey-tribes, not merely to adorn,
But to impress that sentiment more strong,
Awak’d already by the savage-scene. (Gilpin 1792: 21)
John Barrell connects these figures, who signify the absence of human
labour, with Gilpin’s desire, as a gentleman amateur (a schoolmaster
and vicar), to distinguish the practice of Picturesque drawing from any
mechanical or manual trade. As an amateur's pastime, the Picturesque
might then appeal to genteelly self-improving audiences sufficiently to
provide both patrons and prospective pupils (Barrell 1992: 96-97).
Kim Ian Michasiw develops Barrell’s argument by finding the
absence of manual labour synonymous with an absence of social or
ethical purpose. Picturesque drawing or writing becomes an end in it-
self. Following Rosalind Krauss, Michasiw describes Gilpin’s enter-
prise as playfully proto-postmodern, its rules deliberately artificial and
arbitrary, emphasising that an actual landscape perceived within the
Picturesque mode is always measured against a pre-existing notion of
the Picturesque and is thus a copy of an ideal original, which is itself a
representation (Michasiw 1992: 96; Krauss 1985: 163-66). What
Michasiw celebrates as subversive of the moral ambitions of Kantian
aesthetics – the Picturesque’s playfulness and emphasis on representa-
tion for its own sake – is given a darker cast by John Barrell and
Stephen Copley.
For Barrell and Copley, this avoidance of seriousness in Gil-
pin’s Picturesque leads to the complete exclusion of the social. Barrell
describes the Picturesque as “a Polaroid lens, which eliminates all sen-
timental and moral reflection” (1992: 104). Gilpin’s Picturesque, ac-
cording to Barrell, “is thus also absolutely hostile to narrative; and
when it depicts figures it attempts to do so in such a way as raises no
question about their thoughts or feelings or their interactions with
other figures” (104). Copley agrees regarding the suppression of nar-
rative, and illustrates it by reading Gilpin’s description of the old
woman who lives within the ruins of Tintern Abbey as a “narrative
96 Donna Landry
suppression of the act of charity”, in which the “imperative of the nar-

rative sequence [...] truncates the potentially sentimental episode” that
had begun to develop; rather than picture giving money to the old
woman in return for her guided tour and story of destitution, Gilpin
hurries on to the next landscape description (Copley 1997: 152).4 For
Copley, there is a conflict within the Picturesque between “sentimen-
tal engagement” and “aesthetic enjoyment”, with Gilpin opting for
“the picturesque attractions of decrepitude” over any picturing of ac-
tive benevolence (153, 144). Picturesque theory, according to Copley,
could be said to aestheticise “the visible signs of economic depriva-
tion” rather than pointing towards its relief (144).
According to this reading of Gilpin, then, in so far as Pictur-
esque aesthetics is a leisured pastime dedicated to enjoyment, the Pic-
turesque can only intermittently or obliquely engage with social com-
mentary, let alone intervention or protest. The Picturesque as a mode
of representation would seem to require the suspension of any evi-
dence of social divisions or the cash economy just as it demands the
exclusion of toiling labourers.
Despite his ostensible rejection of the Picturesque in the Prel-
ude, I read William Wordsworth’s poetic project as Picturesque in
Barrell’s and Copley’s terms, in that Wordsworth appears to share the
hostility to social, economic, and narrative considerations they iden-
tify (Landry 2004: 1-17). ‘The Ruined Cottage’ emblematises the very
aestheticisation of deprivation that Barrell and Copley consider char-
acteristic of the Picturesque. Readers of ‘The Ruined Cottage’ are di-
rectly instructed by that typically Picturesque figure, the Pedlar, that to
read into the picture of ruination an excess of grief is to read “with an
unworthy eye” (l. 511). Even the very weeds and “high spear-grass”
(l. 514) that signify decay have seemed to Armytage the Pedlar also
on occasion to offer “an image of tranquillity,/So calm and still, and
looked so beautiful” (ll. 517-18):
That what we feel of sorrow and despair

From ruin and from change, and all the grief
The passing shews of being leave behind,
4
The incident at Tintern Abbey is to be found in Gilpin’s Observations (1782:
36-37).
Appeared an idle dream that could not live

Where meditation was. I turned away
And walked along my road in happiness. (ll. 520-25)
And so the Pedlar comforts himself and carries on, made happier by
an image. This is the solace he offers to the poem’s narrator and to the
audience as well. To read the rougher text of social upheaval and eco-
nomic exploitation underpinning, ‘The Ruined Cottage’ requires read-
ing against the grain of this pleasure in the picturing of decay. It also
requires resisting Wordsworthian homily, the sense that the poem it-
self supplies both its own sufficient context and its own compensa-
tions as a poetry of feeling, not a poetry of analysis, let alone protest.
Wordsworth’s project from the Lyrical Ballads onwards was
increasingly to create a poetry of emotion in which “the feeling
therein developed gives importance to the action and situation, and not
the action and situation to the feeling” (Wordsworth 2000: 599). Mary
Jacobus rightly congratulates Wordsworth on the success of his po-
ems’ sleight of hand, substituting “the poetry of passion” for “passion
itself”, so that we might respond to the representation of destitute or
displaced cottagers as if they were real people and thus potential ob-
jects of benevolence (1976: 205). And yet, as Nicholas Roe observes,
this very success of Wordsworth’s poetry of feeling marks a move
away from any tradition of poetry as protest, although it derives much
of its original energy from that tradition (1988:140-41).
However, the Picturesque can be read as more ambivalent in at-
titude and more ambiguous in significance with regard to the social
than can be grasped by considering, as Barrell and Copley do, Pictur-
esque ‘pictorialism’ as always already a refusal of the social. The Pic-
turesque as it evolves, and becomes not so much novel as fashionable,
begins to gather around itself a set of characteristic figures that might
be called its semantic content. This particular pictorial repertoire, in its
refusal to portray labour and labourers, could be read as directly coun-
tering the emergent ideology of political economy, with its emphasis
on the need for improved discipline and productivity within the labour
force. Brigands and gypsies, idling ostentatiously, might be said to
cock a snook at Adam Smith (Landry 2008c; Landry 2010). The Pic-
turesque, in its fondness for uncultivated land and the encroachment
of wilderness, could also be read as countering the ideology of so-
called improvement of the land consonant with the Agricultural Revo-
98 Donna Landry
lution. Rather than entirely bracketing off any consideration of eco-

nomic and social conditions, and rather than entirely suppressing any
‘sentimental engagement’ with their often violent effects, the Pictur-
esque might then be understood as implicitly invoking for considera-
tion the effects of intensification of capitalist exploitation of the natu-
ral world.
During what Robert C. Allen calls the “second” or “landlords’”
Agricultural Revolution (1750-1850), intensifying productivity by
means of the last wave of enclosure of common lands, and the en-
grossment of land by the owners of vast estates, led to considerable
upheaval and depopulation in the countryside (Allen 1992: 21). This
second agricultural revolution put into practice the dictates of political
economy by emphasizing efficiency of production and maximal ex-
traction from both land and labourers. By the 1790s, the evocation of
what I have called the Picturesque’s ‘semantic’ content – signs of
economic deprivation, abandoned or ruined habitations, gypsies or
other vagrants – might be understood to register unease at the policies
that had brought about this evidence of decay of traditional agricul-
ture, especially the disappearance of smallholders, cottagers, or ‘peas-
ant’ farmers. Questions might implicitly be raised about the political,
economic, and social causes of this change. The bracketing off of sen-
timental engagement or possible protest might then seem a more frag-
ile affair, with evidence of these political economic forces frequently
threatening to re-emerge in the picture, producing ambivalence and in-
stability within Picturesque art and writing. By the late 1790s, I would
suggest, the Picturesque had become a code with richly ambiguous
possibilities that could be evoked by the briefest of excursions into a
particular kind of pictorial language, as evidenced in the paintings of
George Morland (Landry 2008a, 2008b).
If the English Picturesque in the 1790s might be understood as
producing radical ambivalence, the Picturesque as disseminated
worldwide today is often mobilised on behalf of a ‘late-Enlighten-
ment’ reaction against the capitalisation of agriculture and maximal
extraction from land, labourers, and the natural world often referred to
as “globalisation”. If we look East instead of West, taking the example
of the particular confluence and collision of modernity and tradition to
be found today in Greater Syria and Israel/Palestine, we will find a
comparably subtle critique of, and perhaps a more emphatic resistance
to, imperial domination and belated settler-colonialism inscribed in
the preservation of ruins as commemorative sites and in the practice of

sarha, or going for walks.
2. Coleridge’s Boots
Coleridge’s taste for tramping cannot be disassociated from the Pic-

turesque (Landry 2001: 125-28, 205-29). Claiming solidarity with the
disenfranchised and disaffected, unable to further revolution abroad or
openly at home, Coleridge took to the road, hoping to unlearn Cam-
bridge privilege. He shares a moment with James Plumptre’s satire on
Picturesque tourism and pedestrianism, The Lakers: A Comic Opera in
Three Acts (1798). His advocacy of lowly pedestrian travel, which
would have been criminalised as vagrancy in an earlier historical mo-
ment (MacLean/Landry/Ward 1999: 5-6, 14-15; McRae 1999), was a
blow struck for democracy as well as an attempt to throw off the con-
servative prejudices of his Church-and-King supporting Devonian
family, whose fortress-England was shored up by Adam Smith’s pro-
ductivity quotients.
Landscape produces identity in diverse and even contradictory
ways. The Picturesque guarantees nothing but the possibility of a radi-
cal ambivalence. As Devonians, Coleridge and his near contemporary
Sophie Dixon shared a regional identity. Both appear to have gained a
taste for tramping from the Picturesque. Coleridge’s notebook entry
regarding having a pair of walking boots made, on the one hand, and
Sophie Dixon’s books, on the other, make manifest how similar rela-
tionships to landscape may produce the writing subject, produce iden-
tity, differently.
Coleridge is a prime example of a famous writer whose reputa-
tion comes historically packaged within his own highly self-critical
sense that his actual achievement never matched the promise of his
ambition or his abilities. The handful of famous Coleridge poems –
Jack Stillinger reckons there are only seven “consistently recognized
as major” (Stillinger 1994: 17, 5) – the philosophy and literary criti-
cism of the Biographia Literaria and the Table Talk, the journalism,
letters, and occasional verse, all bespeak a something-more finally un-
expressed. That this story of epic promise unfulfilled is something of a
fiction, partly generated by Coleridge’s own sense of inadequacy and
100 Donna Landry
guilt and invidious comparisons with Wordsworth, does not lessen its
hold on Coleridge’s readership. As Stillinger remarks,
Coleridge’s “ ‘ failure’ is only relative, of course. The volumes of the

Bollingen-Princeton Collected Coleridge are approaching the bulk and
width of the proverbial five-foot shelf. Only a few of the successful
writers in English literature wrote and published more than Coleridge
the failure.” (Stillinger 1994: 17).
That he achieved his effects through obsessive correcting and revision,

not simply through the white heat of inspiration, self-medicated or
otherwise, his perpetual revisions make clear (Stillinger 1994: 104,
109). This self-correcting and self-censoring impulse makes Col-
eridge’s notebooks, in which he could let himself go, pen in hand, less
bound than usual by social anxieties, conventional expectations, and
the demands of genre, an especially rich text. But nothing could be
more slippery, fragmented, or potentially evanescent than these note-
book entries. Their seeming immediacy – or lack of mediation be-
tween writer and text, and then between writing subject and interlop-
ing or eavesdropping audience – is, of course, a textual effect. The
notebooks, more than any other mode of writing, allowed him a free-
dom to imagine possibilities as if they were material facts.
A notoriously fragmentary poem such as ‘Kubla Khan’ and a
notebook entry such as Coleridge wrote about a pair of made-to-
measure walking boots might be said to share a peculiarly fictional yet
in some sense undoubtedly material existence. Both objects exude the
textual effect, the effect of their existence within “the textual condi-
tion”, in Jerome McGann’s phrase (McGann 1991: 3).5 Yet both are
rendered fictively present to audiences as a consequence of Col-
eridge’s reputation, his successful bid for immortality and monumen-
tality, in spite of his concomitant sense of himself as a failure.
5
“Both the practice and the study of human culture comprise a network of
symbolic exchanges. Because human beings are not angels, these exchanges
always involve material negotiations. Even in their most complex and ad-
vanced forms – when the negotiations are carried out as textual events – the
intercourse that is being human is materially executed: as spoken texts or
scripted forms. To participate in these exchanges is to have entered what I
wish to call here ‘the textual condition.’ ” (McGann 1991: 3)
The notebook entry about boots records not only Coleridge’s desire to
have a pair of walking boots made to fit his feet, but also how he
would clean and protect them according to his own special recipe. To
wish for the boots is, it seems, to have them and record looking after
them, labouring on the boots’ behalf.
N. B. Have two Lasts made exactly the shape of my natural foot – the
Boots to have a sole less on the hollow of the foot – Mutton suet 1.
Hog’s Lard 2. Venice Turpentine 1/2 – all mixed & melted – always
put on warm, Shoe or boot being held to the fire, while it is being
rubbed in – The middle sole of the Boot covered with Cobbler’s wax –
or still better, steeped thoroughly in the above Composition/the
Leather of the Boot should be stout Horse leather – if none to be had,
Cow-leather/a piece of oil Silk 6 inches above the Heel, 2 inches wide
with a back strap to the Boots. (1273)
Coleridge’s biographer Richard Holmes has read this entry as describ-

ing boots Coleridge actually obtained on a walking tour of Wales with
Tom Wedgwood in the autumn of 1802. The back strap would aid in
pulling them on, the oil-silk cuff six inches above the ankle would be
elegant and waterproof. Holmes describes Coleridge’s enthusiasm
here as that of the “true fell-addict” (Holmes 1989: 342).
Certainly Coleridge must have worn something on his feet. That
he had boots of a sort we must assume, although exactly which ones
when, and of what sort, history does not relate. The biographical im-
perative is above all to construct a narrative of the subject’s life that
has the look, sound, and feel – to say nothing of taste and smell – of
material reality. In biographical terms, since Coleridge made the entry
recording a plan to have walking boots made, those boots were made.
Holmes even remarks that during a trip to Scotland with William and
Dorothy Wordsworth in August and early September 1803, on which
Coleridge soon parted from his friends and struck out on his own, in
“a pair of light shoes that split when he dried them in front of a cot-
tage fire”, that “(He had evidently forgotten his fell-boots)” (Holmes
1989: 353).
The story of Coleridge’s made-to-measure walking boots is a
good story and may even be true. But the possibility remains that
those boots were never made. The maybe/maybe not status of the
boots as material reality – apart from the notebook entry’s textual ma-
teriality, that is – parallels the maybe/maybe not status of the unwrit-
102 Donna Landry
ten, laudanum-inspired vision of a complete poem of which the exist-

ing ‘Kubla Khan’ is only a fragment. A powerful, magical, perfect
fragment, but a fragment nevertheless. It was crucial for Coleridge and
his contemporaries that it was possible to theorise that the fragment
was a superior aesthetic representation of the status of the work of art
or the act of writing, one that trumped any supposedly finished form
(Dillon 2006). The poem is a fragment that has contributed greatly to
Coleridge’s status as a major English (and Romantic) poet, but that
also draws, as a single text, as a solitary instance of writing, weight
and freight from that very status which it has helped create.
3. Sophie Dixon’s Books
Not so the slim volumes of verse and prose by Sophie Dixon or count-
less other women writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Jerome McGann has written movingly of Anne Batten Cristall’s single
slim volume of verse, of which perhaps only one copy survives, prais-
ing her poetry for its “commitment to (not a mere belief in) expendi-
ture and ecstasy” (McGann 1996: 203). Dixon, like Cristall, and like a
number of other women writers, requires to be read according to a
new aesthetics of the fleeting, the impermanent, the strenuously occa-
sional, the deliberately marginal. These are not the terms in which cul-
tural history has traditionally been written. But they might be the
terms in which a new ‘green’ history, more modest about human am-
bitions and achievements than the old one, more responsive to mate-
rial realities and requirements, including those beyond the human,
might be written.
A resident of Princetown, in the vicinity of Dartmoor Prison,
Dixon published a collection of poems in 1829, identifying herself as
Dartmoor’s truest native poet.6 The very topography of the moor, dark
and rough, and as vast as the ocean, lends the poet a language as en-
during and beyond human control as the geological forces that formed
that topography. A glimpse of glory, as fleeting as the radiance of a
setting sun, is all that can be hoped for. In ‘On Longaford Tor – one of
6
My discussion of Sophie Dixon here repeats material from The Invention of
the Countryside (Landry 2001: 237-43), but the comparison with Coleridge
appears here for the first time.
the hills of Dartmoor’, Dixon represents Dartmoor as a “Desert”, un-

visited by most people, but all the more dear to her for that:
What dreams are ours, thus pondering mid

The Desert all around us spread!
Half seen in light, in shade half hid,
Dusk vales below, rocks overhead;
And where the cataract flashing dread
Boils up in its tremendous glee, –
By the blithe crowd unvisited,
– Yet sought and loved by me. (ll. 25-32)
Dixon has internalized the codes of the Picturesque and the sublime
along with the forms of contemporary verse; she quotes James Beattie
and Lord Byron and echoes Coleridge and Wordsworth. The “cataract
flashing dread” is like nothing so much as Coleridge’s Exmoor-
inspired “deep romantic chasm” complete with insurgent river in ‘Ku-
bla Khan’, combined with his description of the poet who has acquired
the forbidden knowledge necessary to represent such a landscape.
Dixon is more modest than Coleridge in her claims for poetry.
In the desert, she does not long for fame, but only to recompense the
moor for the pleasure it has given her. The apparently unchanging face
of the moor, too rugged and remote ever to become a modern culti-
vated landscape, gives her a sense of a massive permanence beyond
herself, or beyond any human capacity. The moor is a repository of
vast energies and forces as well as a realm of freedom for wandering
humans. Wild nature is now not to be feared so much as its loss in
over-cultivation. What would in earlier times have been a language of
menace has become the language of desire.7 The following lines from
‘On Longaford Tor’ could serve to gloss the appeal of Dartmoor for
many people since Dixon, including many conservationists:
Man may encroach – but never plough

Shall e’er thy craggy summit pass –
His roofs may grow around – but thou
Untouched shalt lift thy mountain-mass;
And when all he hath wrought, must class
With things gone by, – thy rugged brown
And its thin wreath of desert grass,
Remain as they are now. (ll. 81-88)
7
I owe this formulation to Kevin Sharpe, for which, much thanks.
104 Donna Landry
Imagining the new roofs of an increasing population surrounding the

moor, but the high moor itself remaining unchanged, a monument to
geology rather than agriculture, Dixon records a sensation felt by
many people since. The obscurity of Dixon herself, the few copies of
her works that were printed, and the very few now in existence, all
testify to the comparative insignificance of any single human endeav-
our on the scale of geological time.
4. Raja Shehadeh’s Walks
Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks reprises Picturesque theory and

practice. Aestheticising the signs of economic deprivation makes what
might be otherwise unviewable, or unreadable, recreative for both
writer and reader. And yet Shehadeh’s book also insists upon one en-
tailment of the semantic content of the Picturesque – its critique of in-
strumental modernity in the guise of settler-colonialism.8 The book’s
lyrical pleasures simultaneously reveal the undergirding of unappeas-
able hardship and exploitation that marks the conflict within Is-
rael/Palestine. As in ‘The Ruined Cottage’, so also in this book, the
unbearable is rendered bearable, and even pleasurable, by means of a
Picturesque protocol of what can and cannot be seen, felt, appre-
hended, or textualised, at a given moment. In the hills above Ramal-
lah, Shehadeh comes upon a mountain spring:
8
The best recent discussion of settler-colonialism, Israel-Palestine, and the lit-
erary imagination is to be found in Gabriel Piterberg, The Returns of Zionism
(2008: 51-92, 192-243). Piterberg draws upon the work of Patrick Wolfe, es-
pecially ‘Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race’ (2001:
866-905), and Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology:
The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (1999), as well as George
M. Frederickson’s The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slav-
ery, Racism, and Social Inequality (1988: 216-35). Frederickson in turn de-
velops the categories of D.K. Fieldhouse (1966). Hilton Obenzinger cites both
Frederickson and Fieldhouse regarding the “deviant” or “hybrid” quality of
U.S. settler-colonial society – its combination of pure and plantation settle-
ment forms – a deviance or hybridity that would have implications for Zion-
ism and for Israel as a settler-state (1999: xvii; 9-11). See also the indispensa-
ble work of Gershon Shafir, Land, Labour and the Origins of the Israeli-
Palestinian Conflict, 1882-1914 (1989).
I stretched out my hand and let the cold water run over it. There were
plenty of stones and weeds. The spring was in bad need of cleaning –
otherwise the water would be gushing out. I sat nearby smelling the
moist soil and looking at the impressive mossy brown cliff across the
wadi. It was studded with cyclamens that grew out of every nook and
cranny. They always seemed to grow in rocks that shied away from
the midday sun, squeezing themselves between cracks to keep their
bulbs from drying up. And despite their precarious position their deli-
cate flowers grew straight up and were hooked at the top like a shep-
herd’s staff. Their large round variegated leaves, similar to those of
the grapevines but thicker, rounder and with a deeper green, seemed
suspended from nowhere, miraculously hanging on the high steep rock
as though trickling down it. (2007: 8)
The physical apprehensions of the moment – cold water, scent of

damp soil, sight of those hardy, struggling, yet deeply green-leaved
and delicately blooming cyclamens – give way to subtle reflections
about the miracle of those natural forms that survive in spite of ardu-
ous conditions and adversity. The land is now neglected, the spring is
in need of cleaning, yet the cyclamens figure a kind of resiliency that
stands in for the absent Palestinian shepherds who once dwelt in this
landscape. Like Wordsworth, Shehadeh suspends analysis of social
conditions in order to value the aesthetic consolations of the landscape
of decay.
Unlike Wordsworth, however, he never abandons hope of in-
troducing analytical reflection and even political protest into the pro-
gramme of accounts of perpetual sarha, his walks or perambulations
of the bounds of what was once his country. There is an important dif-
ference, then, between the Wordsworthian and the Shehadehian, in
that this suspension of social, economic, and historical narrative is
only intermittent, only momentary. Shehadeh accords the very geol-
ogy of the landscape a history of tension, force, and deformation by
powerful energies reminiscent of Sophie Dixon’s account of Dart-
moor:
There are no mountains anywhere in sight, only hills. […] All you can
see are hills and more hills, like being in a choppy sea with high
waves, the unbroken swells only becoming evident as the land de-
scends westward. This landscape, we are told, was formed by the tre-
mendous pressure exerted by tectonic forces pushing towards the east.
It is as though the land had been scooped in a mighty hand and
scrunched, the pressure eventually resulting in the great fault that cre-
ated Jordan’s rift valley, through which runs the River Jordan. The
106 Donna Landry
land seems never to have relaxed into plains and glens with easy-
flowing rivers but has been constantly twisted and pressured to the
point of cracking. Its surface is not unlike that of a giant walnut. (6)
For Shehadeh, as for John Clare, the contestation of land cannot be

elided for very long:
There was so much upheaval, it was as though the entire earth was be-
ing re-shuffled. Developers were levelling hills, destroying the terrac-
ing and excavating large boulders from the ground for service in re-
taining walls. Israeli settlements no longer consisted of modest en-
claves planted in our midst that could be reversed. Enormous changes
were taking place that it was hard not to see as permanent. It was as
though the tectonic movements that had occurred over thousands of
years were now happening in a matter of months, entirely re-drawing
the map. The Palestine I knew, the land I thought of as mine, was
quickly being transformed before my eyes. (180)
This is a Picturesque aesthetics that resituates itself perpetually in rela-

tion to the ragged edges of pictorial restraint. Shehadeh’s writing
opens itself to what lies within the fissures of the text as well as be-
yond the edges of the text: “the unconscious which is history”, as Pi-
erre Macherey once put it (Macherey 1978: 94).
The landscape works upon Shehadeh not so much in the way it
does upon Wordsworth, equating the monumental reputation of the
poet with the grandeur and permanence of the landscape, but more in
the way it works upon John Clare, or Sophie Dixon – authors without
entitlement, or a sense of a claim upon immortality. Even the less as-
sured, more symbiotically disposed Coleridge has a greater sense of
entitlement when it comes to laying imaginative claim to a specific
topography than do these writers. Shehadeh musters a very Clare-like
exposition of the walk as doing at least two things: the walk is both a
ritual reclamation of common rights to identity with a landscape, and
it is a re-enactment of human liberty shared with other animals, a
sense of fellow-creaturely feeling experienced as freedom: “To go on
a sarha was to roam freely, at will, without restraint. The verb form of
the word means to let the cattle out to pasture early in the morning,
leaving them to wander and graze at liberty.” (Shehadeh 2007: 2)
This combination is what distinguishes one of Clare’s greatest
and most formally innovative poems, ‘The Mores’, from the works of
any of his contemporaries.
Inclosure came and trampled on the grave

Of labours rights and left the poor a slave
[…]
The sheep and cows were free to range as then
Where change might prompt nor felt the bonds of men
Cows went and came with evening morn and night
To the wild pasture as their common right[.] (1984: ll. 19-20, 23-26)
The economic and the aesthetic cannot be separated from one another
here, anymore than the refusal of end-stopped lines can be separated
from a refusal of enclosure, or walls, fences, or other boundaries that
would pen up or hem in the free ranging of livestock and their human
keepers (Goodridge/Thornton 1994). Raja Shehadeh’s evocation of a
vanishing Palestine attempts a similar imaginative re-enactment and
reclamation of what would otherwise not be properly mourned or even
necessarily remembered.
As Shehadeh has recently remarked in a piece in The Guardian,
in which he compares walking holidays in Scotland with his walks in
Palestine, the two landscapes could not appear to be more different,
and yet both places share a history of the uprooting of the inhabitants
and the expropriation of their land. Shehadeh reports getting carried
away thinking about the resemblances between the Highland Clear-
ances and the Nakba of 1948 until he realises how the openness of the
Highlands signifies a very different historical trajectory from Pales-
tine’s fragmentation “by roads and Jewish settlements” (2009: 2):
In the Highlands the loss of that way of life was not replaced by an-
other. The landlords who evicted the farmers did not bring their own
people to replace them. The land returned to what it had been: empty
glens, rivers and lochs offering hikers a superb view of an exquisite
land that seems to be there for their sole enjoyment. (3)
Filled with fury at the history of his people, the continuing conflict
“without a solution in sight”, Shehadeh remarks upon “the baggage”
he must always carry with him, “living under a foreign occupation in a
land that was becoming out of reach to the non-Jewish inhabitants”
(3). The very act of hill climbing in wild places such as Scotland, a
substitute for his own very different hills, is a way of “unburdening
myself of one cause of anger after another” (3). A restoration of the
‘unconscious which is history’ to the ragged text of settler-colonialism
108 Donna Landry
of a once settled, and by no means empty, landscape is his fragile

achievement.
5. Quneitra: Syrian Picturesque
What I will call the Picturesque installation of Quneitra offers no

homiletic compensations, only the Picturesque in its dereliction.
Unlike Wordsworth’s ‘Ruined Cottage’, or Shehadeh’s book, Quneitra
offers aesthetic possibilities that do not necessarily lead to affective
pleasure, but then again they might. Is it possible to walk through the
ruins of Quneitra and feel anything like Jay Merrick’s reaction to An-
coats, that decay might be in itself gripping, ravishingly tenacious,
even impossibly tender?
I have never been to Israel or Palestine, but I have visited
Quneitra twice, in late May of 2003, not long after victory had been
declared in the invasion and occupation of Iraq, and again in April
2007. Seized by the Israeli army in 1967, Quneitra is now a ghost
town under United Nations control on the edge of the demilitarized
zone separating Syria from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Before
leaving, the Israeli army forcibly evacuated the entire population of
37,000, diverted the rivers to flow into the occupied territories, and
destroyed the houses and ancient marketplace of the town, leaving
standing the remains of a Greek church, the minaret of a mosque, and
the shelled walls of the famous Golan hospital, which bears a sign:
‘Destructed by Zionists and changed it to firing target!’ As Gerald
MacLean observes in The Rise of Oriental Travel, “Quneitrah today is
a museum-trip” (MacLean 2004: 107).
Rather than rebuilding, Hafez el Assad’s policy for Quneitra,
which his son Bashar has not yet done anything to reverse, was to pre-
serve the destruction, as if under glass, as a memorial to what was lost.
The effect of this has been to create within the demilitarized no-man’s
land between Syria and Israel, with their different approaches to farm-
ing and husbandry, a wild and ecologically rich zone. MacLean con-
trasts Quneitra as it was in the clergyman William Biddulph’s day, in
the early seventeenth century, with Quneitra today:
On reaching Quneitrah, which he calls ‘Contera’ [Biddulph] found it a

‘pleasant’ place to rest a few days, especially after the ‘tedious travell’
of getting there. He greatly enjoyed walking and ‘beholding greene

pastures and running rivers near unto I’, and wrote of his pleasure
strolling in the cloistered ‘Bazar’ among the people of ‘sundry Na-
tions’ who were happily ‘assembled together from sundry places’.
(2004: 106)
As MacLean concludes wryly,
“[t]here have been a great many changes since Biddulph’s visit. […]
You are accompanied by a police guide who directs you around a de-
serted upland plain strewn with destroyed houses. Everywhere you
look there are collapsed roofs that seem to be slowly growing back
into the land.” (106-107)
If the original Picturesque tourists went by coach or on horseback or

even on foot, today’s go by taxi. Framed by a bright yellow vehicle,
the sadness assumes a nearly jaunty air. In 2003, in the brilliant sun-
shine of a dry late May on the verge of June, yellow dogs slept on yel-
low collapsed verandahs. Brilliant birds flew over the sea of pale
green grass and scrub, dotted with poppies and other bright flowers. A
rich palette suggested nature reclaiming the human for her own, as
Gilpin might have put it. By 2007, at a moment earlier in the year,
well before the summer drought, the experience of an encroaching
green world was even more overwhelming. If the Israeli tanks had
“broken the regularity of opposing parts”, now “[t]o these are super-
added the ornaments of time”. Not ivy, but other green vegetable
forms “in masses uncommonly large”, had “taken possession of many
parts” of the ruins, giving “a happy contrast to the grey-coloured
stone” or concrete of collapsed roofs, while everywhere the fragile
plants of a dry climate, “[s]ome of them [...] in flower, others only in
leaf; but, all together”, were giving “those full-blown tints, which add
the richest finishing to a ruin” (Gilpin 1782: 33-34).
Both visits to the site were shadowed by the Golan Heights,
bristling with communications antennae and artillery installations. Di-
version of the river system by Israel has produced on the slopes of
these hills the intense, nitrogen-blue crops of non-organically farmed
agribusiness, while leaving the no-man’s land of Quneitra un-irrigated
for the first time in centuries. It is common knowledge that “Israel has
the highest per capita consumption of water in the region and uses far
more than it produces” (McGreal 2004: 2), while “Jewish settlers in
the West Bank use 10 times as much water per capita as each Palestin-
110 Donna Landry
ian” (3). According to Chris McGreal writing in The Guardian, agri-

culture consumes “two-thirds of Israel’s water while contributing to
just 2.5% of its gross domestic product”: “Irrigation, compounded by
a growing number of swimming pools, is a leading cause of the gap
between production and consumption” (2). The Little House on the
Prairie frontier-settler mode of kibbutz Zionism of the 1960s has given
way to Little Los Angeles on the Mediterranean. This shift raises the
spectre of unsustainability, rendering the scene rich in associations for
ecologically-minded tourists inclined towards anti-capitalist, anti-
modernist critique.
‘Cool’ anguish might be the only way to describe the mixed ef-
fect, on the Syrian side, of spoliation, and the ironic preservation of
that spoilage, of former cultivation, fertility, and prosperity. The Is-
raeli prospect offers perilously unsustainable modernity with a venge-
ance. This was Picturesque theory set to work, all right. But to what
ends? As Brian Dillon notes with regard to twentieth-century ruins,
“the ruin always totters on the verge of a certain species of kitsch”
(2006). Under these circumstances, aestheticising by museumising the
signs of economic deprivation seems above all to imply a hoped-for
triumph by the deprived in the long term, if not in the short.
6. Geoliterary Politics
Sophie Dixon writes, in knowing inadequacy, in order to fail to repay

her debt to Dartmoor, the ideal walker’s object, the ultimate Other,
whose antiquity and magnitude exceed any fragile human attempts to
capture them. She leaves behind as little trace as does any careful
tracker who hunts and gathers Picturesque views and sublime experi-
ences rather than any other prey. Coleridge’s repeated failure to
achieve the material measure of his capacity – and the inescapably in-
conclusive evidence of moments such as his description of possibly
material, possibly fictional walking boots – instances the other, more
familiar, story. Raja Shehadeh also writes in knowing inadequacy in
order to fail to reclaim or restore the countryside from which genera-
tions of his family have gained their livelihood and identity. In this, he
re-enacts John Clare’s re-enactment of a former liberty, and that
poet’s perambulative protest against capitalist privatisation and maxi-
mal extraction from land and labour alike.
The Picturesque, although we might say that its clearest theori-

sation can be read in the writing of an eighteenth-century English
clergyman, William Gilpin, has now attained a global usefulness. Like
other eighteenth-century legacies, it serves as a mode of post-imperial
auto-critique. Cool anguish is the affect. The stakes are no less than a
geopolitical realignment of East and West, North and South, past and
present. As Iain Sinclair writes, inspired by an English moor scattered
with ancient remains, “the track of the moor is the time switch” (1995:
209). He could equally well be describing Palestine or Syria, espe-
cially when he introduces the notion of spectral riders who prefigure
and continue to shadow today’s walkers: “Myth makes track in the
hoofprints of place” (153).9
9
My current project puts ‘hoofprinting’ into practice as a mode of historical re-
search. Following in the hoofprints of the great Ottoman traveller Evliya
Çelebi (1611-c.1684) promises to reveal hidden traces of rural worlds van-
ished, vanishing, and as yet unknown. See the project website: http://www.
kent.ac.uk/english/evliya/index.html and blog: http://www.hoofprinting.blog
spot.com.
112 Donna Landry
Works Cited
Primary References
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Authors: John Clare. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP: 167-69.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1957. ‘November 1802’ in Kathleen Coburn (ed.) The
Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge Vol. 1: 1794-1804. Text. 3 vols. Lon-
don: Routledge: 1273.
Dixon, Sophie. 1829. Castalian Hours. Poems. London: Longman, Rees, Orme,
Brown, and Green.
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Wales, &c. relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made In the Summer of the
Year 1770. London: Printed for R. Blamire in the Strand.
––. 1792. Three Essays: on Picturesque Beauty; on Picturesque Travel; and on
Sketching Landscape: to which is added a poem, on Landscape Painting.
London: Printed for R. Blamire.
Knight, Richard Payne. 1794. The Landscape. A Didactic Poem. In Three Books. Ad-
dressed to Uvedale Price, Esq. London: Printed by W. Bulmer and Co. and
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––. 1805. An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste. London.
McCarthy, Cormac. 2007. The Road. London: Picador.
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for W. Clarke.
Price, Uvedale. 1794. An Essay on the Picturesque, as compared with the Sublime
And The Beautiful; and, on the Use Of Studying Pictures, for the purpose of
Improving Real Landscape. London: J. Robson.
Shehadeh, Raja. 2007. Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape. London:
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––. 2009. ‘Echoing lands’ in The Guardian, Travel (11 July 2009).
Sinclair, Iain. 1995. Lud Heat and Suicide Bridge. London: Vintage.
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Butler). Ithaca: Cornell UP.
––. 2000 [1984]. ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads, with Pastoral and Other Poems’ in Gill,
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pects for the Nation: Recent Essays in British Landscape, 1750-1880 (Studies
in British Art 4). New Haven, CT and London: Yale UP: 133-55.
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Issue 20 (Winter 2005/06). On line at: http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/
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eenth Century. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
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ton, Hugh, Adam Phillips, and Geoffrey Summerfield (eds) John Clare in
Context. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP: 87-129.
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(1798). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Krauss, Rosalind E. 1985. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist
Myths. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.
Landry, Donna. 2001. The Invention of the Countryside: Hunting, Walking, and Ecol-
ogy in English Literature, 1671-1831. Houndmills, Basingstoke and New
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––. 2004. ‘Ruined Cottages: The Contradictory Legacy of the Picturesque for Eng-
land’s Green and Pleasant Land’ in Gilroy, Amanda (ed.) Green and Pleasant
Land: English Culture and the Romantic Countryside. Leuven: Peeters: 1-17.
––. 2008a. ‘Picturing Benevolence Amidst the Violence of Decay, 1750-1799, or, the
Secret Causes of Romanticism’. Keynote address presented at the South East-
ern American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies Conference: Contexts
and Legacies (Auburn University, Alabama, 14-17 February 2008).
––. 2008b. ‘Picturing Benevolence Against the Commercial Cry, 1750-1798, or, Sarah
Fielding and the Secret Causes of Romanticism’. Keynote address presented
at Writing the Self – Modes of Portrayal in the Cultural Text (University of
Bucharest, 5-7 June 2008).
––. 2008c. ‘Picturing Benevolence: The Picturesque and Radical Charity’ in Writing
the Self: Modes of Self-Portrayal in the Cultural Text, University of Bucharest
Review: A Journal of Literary and Cultural Studies 10(2): 87-96.
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Fielding and the Secret Causes of Romanticism’ in Labbé, Jacqueline (ed.)
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grave Macmillan: 150-71.
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try and the City Revisited, c.1550-1850’ in MacLean, Landry and Ward (eds)
114 Donna Landry
The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture,
1550-1850. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UP: 1-23.
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Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style. Oxford: Clarendon
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The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event. London and New York:
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Historical Review 106(3): 866-905.
SECTION B
LANDSCAPES OF MEMORY:
ESCHATOLOGY, TRAUMA, AND
DIASPORA
Eschatological Landscape
Kirby Farrell
Abstract: We create landscape and landscape creates us. As psychic topography, land-
scape is as insolubly ambivalent as the human imagination. Deeply imbued with
meaning, landscape provides the existential means for understanding and managing
the self and our place in the world. This chapter explores the topographical sense of
self-identity by focusing on Hitler’s relationship with the architectural model of his
birthplace, Linz, as Berlin was steadily being destroyed by the Red Army and his own
death was imminent. This chapter explores how Hitler re-enforced himself through art
and culture and the relationship between art and power with an interesting comparison
between the art mania of the Nazis and that of Revolutionary France, whereby the arts
served the psychological needs of a transitional culture struggling for coherence and
self-esteem.
Key names and concepts: Art and power - conflict - culture - identity - landscape -
psychic topography.
1.
The more symbolically charged a landscape is, the more virtual it is.
Landscapes range from archetypal abstractions such as the Garden of
Eden, the city on a hill, and the Mother- or Fatherland through the al-
legorical formal garden and Barbizon paintings, to the clod of moist
earth between your thumb and forefinger. To some extent all land-
scapes are imaginative constructions that work to put us into the
world. At once they are ‘out there’, in the family or group, and in the
head. On the deepest level they substantiate the ephemeral human self.
In conventional wisdom land is invested with ancestral authority,
foundational and everlasting. People fight to the death over ‘my land’.
Ulysses undergoes a heroic ordeal in order to return to ‘his’ home. For
Jews, Muslims, and Christians, ‘Eretz Israel’ and ‘Jerusalem’ shimmer
with transcendent significance.
118 Kirby Farrell
Geology tells us that everything is in motion and ultimately

evanescent, but our need for a conviction of identity and lasting sig-
nificance defies scientific demystification. In proverbial wisdom we
are lords of all that we survey. Vision frames and names ‘a landscape’.
Imagination possesses it by fencing it in, for example, or containing it
within a gilded picture frame within a museum. In this way landscape
becomes a marker, part of the larger vocabulary that we use to orient
ourselves in reality. To the extent that it is ‘our’ landscape, it functions
as a symbolic extension of the self.
In this sense landscape is a form of psychic topography, and
history is a record of attempts not just to own land, but to identify with
it. Land is ‘ground’ (Grund and Boden), the foundation of life. The
custom of deriving personal names from places reflects, among other
things, an effort to ground the self, just as the migrants’ tacitly preda-
tory vision of a land of milk and honey or Lebensraum would expand
the self and thereby generate more life. The two motives are insepara-
ble: the search for a ground of experience is also a quest for more life.
In looking at landscape we are always investing it, however unwit-
tingly, with our motives and values. This is why it makes sense to re-
gard landscape not simply as an entity, but also as a tool or technique
for managing the self.
For centuries Europeans dreamed of ‘the Indies’ as a realm of
spices and gold. Yet charged with symbolic significance, those pre-
cious resources were a store of vitality to be shared out in trade,
looted, or expropriated. Like the New World, Lebensraum was a
magical landscape, both an actual place and an imaged source of copi-
ous vitality, not unlike the magical pictures of harvest, hunting, and
domestic productivity in the tomb chambers of the pharaohs, or the
spellbinding promise of the Holy Land. As cultural fantasies, such vi-
sions are a means of managing morale: they energize hope and wishes,
and counter anxiety about death and the unknown future. Like the col-
orfully lighted, lavishly ornamented Christmas tree, which in the men-
acing dead of winter recreates indoors a tree laden with marvelous
symbolic fruit, those conjured lands are deeply motivational.
Such landscapes blend together symbolically charged values –
wealth, mastery, reverence, belonging, fountains of youth – and prac-
tical concerns. After William the Conqueror subdued the English, he
commissioned the Domesday Book to assess ‘his’ new domain and
tally up his riches. The project inventoried natural resources such as

arable lands, livestock, and fisheries, but it also identified the inhabi-
tants, enumerating the barons’ under-tenants, for example, in order to
formalize their loyalty to the crown as well as their productive capac-
ity – what the corporate world today would call human resources.
As psychic topography, landscape is as insolubly ambivalent as
the human imagination. Even as they assert mastery over an environ-
ment, an abode and its boundaries also project our unique creaturely
awareness of human vulnerability and death. Walls and fences signify
home, but also embody the fear that ‘mother’ nature and the neigh-
bours can kill us as well as support us. As a technology of nurture,
fences have always sheltered gardens, livestock, and vulnerable chil-
dren, guaranteeing the family’s vitality. But they have also always
functioned as a defence against two- and four-legged predators. The
dark forest and the tangled jungle in the distance become hearts of
darkness. As the Domesday Book was incorporating the vitality of his
new land, securing boundaries and itemizing taxes, William the Con-
queror was simultaneously busy fortifying his position behind new
castle walls. The effort to encourage more life was also a campaign to
master threat.
The medieval city developed the psychic topography of the feu-
dal castle. Its walls marked an impregnable, strictly monitored bound-
ary between executive reason and civilized values on the inside, and a
muscular, illiterate countryside without.1 The central minster and pal-
ace epitomized authority and guaranteed conventional reality. They
defined what is right. Beyond the city walls, at the margin of control,
trade, agriculture, mining, and the hunt harvested energy for life. Fur-
ther out the more exotic and dangerous realms of strangers and ene-
mies shaded over the horizon into the indeterminacy of the sea and
Terra Incognita.
A psychic economy structured the landscape. With its raw ma-
terials and labour the country bestowed riches and obedience on the
city in exchange for transcendent authority for life. The city took in
foodstuffs and precious metals and returned religion, law, literacy, and
other treasures of civilization. In its way the city was an alembic refin-
ing the raw stuff of the mortal world into symbolic immortality. At the
1
This paradigm is developed from Farrell (1989): 91-94.
120 Kirby Farrell
same time the minster and palace took their power to generate life
from the angels and the heavenly father in exchange for their devo-
tion.
A closer look shows the same fantasy structure repeated in ar-
chitecture and art. The minster and palace reproduced the larger con-
figuration of city and wilderness inasmuch as their architecture con-
centrated imagination on the heroic authority inside each edifice.
Made not of wood and thatch but of everlasting stone, their walls en-
closed altar and throne in a shell meant to be as secure as the city
walls. The minster’s stained glass windows reconstituted the external
world in the transcendent images of myth, bodying forth the city’s
ground and eschatological destiny. As in social hierarchy, so in archi-
tecture: restrictive structures were designed to concentrate imagination
on altar and throne. Like city gates, the great doors controlled admis-
sion to sites where earthly and supernatural power met. Spire and tow-
ers dominated the skyline as landmarks visible from afar, but they also
lifted the eye to the heavenly source of their power.
Just as the earthly and divine came together in altar and throne,
so those sites focused the supreme power of the man-god Christ and
his current representatives, lords of the church and the land. Within
the minster funeral effigies immortalized the lords. Great princes
needed the throne and the sanctified tomb not only to project their un-
dying power over death and chaos, but also to counter the inevitable
guilt and conflicts that haunt forceful leaders.
Both the architecture and the topography of the medieval city
attempt to resolve the ambivalence between rulers and subjects by af-
firming hero-worship. After all, the prince holds sway over the land
through benevolence and terror. Minster and palace deliberately in-
timidate as protect the subject. Historically, the city has always shown
a capacity for creativity and violence. The founder of the first city,
says Augustine in The City of God, was Cain, the first killer.
Great cities are founded by those who have murdered their brothers;
aspiration is compensation, shadowed forever by guilt. But, the human
challenge to time and nature that great cities also represent [...] also
nurtures a sense of kinship with the divine. (Paster 1985: 11)2
2
Paster’s opening chapter demonstrates the ancient association of the city with
immortality.
Conceived this way, landscape is shaped by creaturely motives. But to

leave it at that would be to miss the dynamism in our relation to land-
scape. We use landscape to put ourselves into the world. We create
landscape and it creates us.
2.
One way to get at the radical existential character of landscape is to

recall the famous photograph of the doomed Hitler in his bunker gaz-
ing down like a god upon the architectural model of Linz (Spotts
2003). At the heart of the rebuilt city would be his museum of immor-
tal world art as well as a shrine for his parents’ sarcophagus and po-
tentially his own tomb as well. In the ideal city before him landscape
is at once real and imaginary – art. Hitler is contemplating a world that
substantiates his life and consoles for his imminent death.
For Hitler and the Nazi confederates who shared in the mania
for art that Lynn Nicholas has described in The Rape of Europa
(1994), art was one means of recreating a ground of experience. In-
vesting themselves in stolen art treasures, the self-proclaimed Nazi
revolutionaries sought to substantiate their radical ideology and justify
their ruthlessness. Art enabled them to embed or frame themselves in
European history and value systems. At the same time it gave them
objects to desire. Having cut themselves loose from traditional identity
and inhibitions, they were open to boundless dreams and equally
boundless insecurities and inchoate appetites. Art presented particular
trophies to be seized, prized, and vaunted, and Hitler and Goering
were fascinated by art markets and dealers. But they also relished and
sheltered in the halo of cultural authority afforded by the subject mat-
ter of art, whether religious images, a voluptuous feast in a Flemish
still-life, or bucolic vistas. Goering blanketed the walls of his Carin-
hall estate with art, so that a room became a world of stories and val-
ues. Such a room provided visions of riches beyond mere foodstuffs
and raw materials that would replenish the nightmare landscape of Le-
bensraum that the Nazi war machine was blasting to rubble.
To be sure, art mania was by no means unique to the Nazis. A
similar mania surged in the wake of the French Revolution. The Napo-
leonic conquests reached over the horizon to Italy, Egypt, and beyond,
carting off masterpieces that would be monumentalized in the Louvre.
122 Kirby Farrell
The French raided elite institutions and other cultures for treasures to
fill the vacuum left by revolutionary iconoclasm. The attack on the
ancien régime had mutilated and destroyed traditional aesthetic mark-
ers for the values and authority of the nobility and the Church. Riot
and greed stripped Versailles and château, smashed sculpted saints,
and left bare ruined choirs. For the new owners, beaux-arts trophies
represented literal wealth as well as new pleasure and prestige. But in
addition, the arts served the psychological needs of a transitional cul-
ture struggling for coherence and self-esteem. The ambiguity of art
enabled it to sublimate and euphemize traditional verities that the
revolutionaries had violently repudiated. Like the Nazi inner circle,
the revolutionaries could cynically manipulate the meanings of art as
propaganda and yet also be personally susceptible to its naively sub-
limated appeal. Heroic images on canvas or in marble could advertise
the glories of democracy and revolution even as they silently evoked
the saints elsewhere defaced or demolished in religious settings.
For Hitler, art and architecture were a formative obsession.
From his early days in Linz and Vienna he associated them with indi-
vidual and group identity, as measures of self-worth and as means of
reinforcing personal coherence. The idealized Linz displaced the ac-
tual sites of his childhood that retained associations with his own
faulty inheritance – including a mentally disabled cousin he eventually
had euthanized – and his own provincial nonentity. In providing a
ground for his identity the virtual city substantiated him. It replaced
the childhood landscapes he felt compelled to destroy, and fulfilled
the project of self-creation that he had pursued all of his life.
The process of self-creation required the Führer to order the vil-
lages of Döllersheim and Strones turned into an artillery target range
and obliterated, apparently because they were sites associated with his
father’s illegitimate birth and his grandmother’s grave. His political
opponents circulated rumours that his father had been half-Jewish, and
Hitler’s mother Klara was in fact her husband’s niece, so that the cas-
ual acceptance of irregular relationships and births in rural Austria
marked Adolf as an outsider in the respectable German society with
which he identified as an adult. In the peculiar scheme to create an ar-
tillery range, the man was not simply nullifying compromising infor-
mation, he was attacking, making war against, his tainted origins.
Hitler remained sensitive about the authority of origins, as in his

objection to Himmler’s mystical Teutonic archeology:
Why do we call the whole world’s attention to the fact that we have no
past? It isn’t enough that the Romans were erecting great buildings
when our forefathers were still living in mud huts; now Himmler is
starting to dig up these villages of mud huts and enthusing over every
potsherd and stone axe he finds. All we prove by that is that we were
still throwing stone hatchets and crouching around open fires when
Greece and Rome had already reached the highest stage of culture. We
really should do our best to keep quiet about this past. [...] The present
day Romans must be having a laugh at these revelations. (Nicholas
1994: 72)
Linz also condensed an ephemeral childhood into material that could

be endlessly reworked as art. The model in the bunker stands for self-
fashioning and self-improvement. In the wisdom of slang, art enabled
him to ‘make something of himself’. The photograph is poignant in-
sofar as it shows the man desperate to put new life into this topog-
raphical self even as bombs were obliterating the real Berlin overhead
and his own death loomed hours away. He crouches forward gazing
raptly at the model’s improvements in progress: not only his own ar-
chitectural labours but also the buildings meant to house the vast
hoard of art from all over conquered Europe that he has painstakingly
looted, assembled, catalogued, and protected. Into the museum will go
his personal art collection, too. The city and the man are one.
In the late 19th century Europe of his youth, Hitler had reason to
be anxious about origins. Although he dreamed of a career in art and
marvelled at Vienna’s monumental architecture, for much of his time
in the city he was ‘a down-going man’. Rejected as a student by the
Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, struggling to develop his talent, he was
“a young man on the skids, sleeping in cafes, parks, cheap lodging
houses and eventually various shelters for the homeless” (Spotts 2003:
5).3 He was on the edge of social death, and the experience marked
him for life. It reinforced his striving for glorious accomplishment, but
also aroused a sadistic survival rage. “This was the saddest period of
my life”, he commented in Mein Kampf. It was also the moment
when, by his own testimony, it rooted in him a deep cruelty which, as
3
This period is treated in greater detail in Hamann (1999): 152-57. Hamann,
too, reproduces the photograph of the Führer gazing on Linz.
124 Kirby Farrell
he remarked, “kills all pity” and “destroys our feeling for the misery
of those who have remained behind.” (5)
Popular lore routinely dismisses Hitler’s early artistic efforts al-
though it would be more realistic to say, as he himself sometimes ac-
knowledged, that he was at best a minor talent. Still, in his youth he
was serious about art as a career. He imagined himself in retirement
‘working with art’, a phrase that allowed him to be publicly associated
with masterworks while no longer seriously aspiring to paint them. In
2002 a show of his early work at the Williams College Museum4 in-
cluded an attractive watercolour of a mountain chapel, a commission
brokered with a Jewish dealer with whom he was on friendly terms in
Vienna.
For the vulnerable young artist, then, taste operated in a force
field of self-esteem and survival. For the most part Hitler accordingly
preferred artworks that embodied the authority and respectability of
the Habsburg world of his youth. The moral piety of a milkmaid an-
chors in domesticity the abstract grandeur of craggy mountainscapes
and the sentimental religiosity of the sacrificial knight in armour.5 As
he grew older, despite an interest in modern building materials and an
evolving ambivalence about American-style skyscrapers, in architec-
ture he admired – venerated would not be too strong a term – Roman
and Greek models. That said, he viewed the classical world through a
late-19th century lens, splitting off its forbidding austerity from the
romantic qualities that excited him in opera and in the architectural in-
fatuation of the Märchenkönig Ludwig II – Bavarian prototype of the
supreme ruler as architectural visionary.
Emulation of the idealized past put the master builder in an
equivocal role. Even the Führer was generating a radical new world,
he was resurrecting the lost civilizations rediscovered in the Renais-
sance. The extermination of unworthy neighbours and degeneracy in
the present was simultaneously a fantasy of heroic rescue. Having nur-
4
‘Prelude to a Nightmare: Art, Politics, and Hitler’s Early Years in Vienna
1906-1913’ presented by The Williams College Museum of Art (July 13-
October 27, 2002).
5
For an overview of late-‘Victorian’ fantasies about chivalry, see ‘Traumatic
Heroism’ in my Post-Traumatic Culture (1998): 37-53. It is useful to keep in
mind that Hitler grew up in the 19th century – witness his lasting reliance on
Karl May’s fantasies.
tured his youthful ambitions and dreams in museums and opera

houses, Hitler looted art treasures and obliterated the monuments of
inferior cultures during the war not as a marauder but as a connoisseur
and conservator of the Old Masters. He was drawn to cultural forms
that legitimized visions of grandeur and the beyond. In much of his
own architecture, he fixed on the inflated neo-baroque style that Kai-
ser Wilhelm II had fostered, just as he modeled his persona as Führer
in many ways on the imperious Kaiser, an absolute monarch in a
brownshirt.
As a tacitly messianic fantasy of heroic rescue, art functioned
throughout Hitler’s life as a means of undoing menacing realities even
as it had supported his morale in his bitter days in Vienna. Under pres-
sure as the war effort deteriorated, he never relaxed his obsession with
his impossibly grandiose building projects. To cope with stress he
turned to movies and architectural picture books. On the night that
they learned that the Normandy invasion was in motion, Goebbels re-
corded that he and Hitler “looked at the latest newsreels [...] and
talk[ed] a lot about film, opera, and theatre matters” (Spotts 2003: 14).
The newsreels presented a virtual landscape that presumably enabled
the overwhelmed leader to feel he was actively struggling with strate-
gic realities while in fact vicariously removed, sitting with his syco-
phantic sidekick “in front of the fireplace until 2 a.m. sharing memo-
ries” (14).
In an anthropological perspective, as Ellen Dissanayake pro-
poses in Homo Aestheticus (1992), art is a technology to make things
significant. Hitler tried to use art to make spellbinding, irresistible sig-
nificance through which he could control a mass audience. He used it
as he did weapons, to impose his will on the world. His party rituals,
monumental edifices, and museums all dictated significance. In the
process, acting as a medium for an imagined ‘eternal’ meaning, he
tried to keep himself enchanted as well.
The ideal landscapes Hitler projected in his endless drawings
and off-scale urban planning never lost their spellbinding power over
him. Many party functionaries and the masses never fully appreciated
– and sometimes privately objected to – the prodigality of the dream.
For the visionary artist himself the dream landscape was Lebensraum,
a fertile sanctuary, a utopia, a holy land. Yet any such ideal space has
to be tirelessly wished into being over and over again, so it is more
126 Kirby Farrell
accurate to think of it as an action rather than as an object. And since

the ‘eternal’ significance of the space always had a quixotic colora-
tion, the architect and his legions of experts and slave labourers were
always in effect enacting the projects: role-playing and theatricalizing
experience.
There was always something clandestine about these prodigies.
Berlin kept their exorbitant budgets hidden, and fictionalized the time-
tables and productivity of most projects. The process worked to mys-
tify not just Nazi bureaucrats and the gullible masses, but the magician
himself. As a drive toward self-substantiation – or more bluntly, sur-
vival rage – the obfuscation was inescapable and the performer
worked painstakingly at it.
We cannot be sure how fully Hitler grasped this psychological
principle, anymore than we can know how clearly he could see its im-
plications shaping his own personality, even though he could be said
to have thought around the principle continually. His language naively
confuses art objects and imaginative processes, stasis and flux.
Even at the best of times Hitler had been wont to describe the arts as
“a truly stable pole in the flux of all other phenomena”, “an escape
from confusion and distress”, a source of “the eternal, magic strength
[...] to master confusion and restore a new order out of chaos” . (Spotts
2003: 15)
This magisterial abstraction makes a cosmic principle out of Hitler’s

personal incoherence. The unpredictable mood swings and incongrui-
ties in his private life were well known to those around him. Spotts
condenses the observations of many others when he reports that Hit-
ler’s periods of indolence, “trance-like states”, “chaotic work habits
and indecisiveness” were punctuated by long, compulsive monologues
and spells of frenetic activity and startling concentration. His noctur-
nal habits and preference for working in his private rooms fostered a
dreamy, bohemian, Romantic mentality that coexisted with an excep-
tional, even fanatical command of statistics, details, and principles in
particular matters that fascinated him (2003: 91-92).
The problem with enchantment, as with a drug addiction, is the
shock and suffering of withdrawal. It is no easy matter to stay finely
tuned in a state of induced exaltation, and loss of that equilibrium can
make for irritability or rage. If art is felt to be life-giving and mind-
preserving, it stands to reason that any art that challenges the anxious
self will be threatening. Hence Hitler’s fury against ‘bolshevist’ and
decadent art, the work of ‘lunatics or criminals’ and supposedly
lethally toxic. Given his furious inner conflicts and need for mastery,
it is no surprise that he deemed ‘degenerate art’ forms that emphasized
incongruity and foregrounded the constructedness – the epistemologi-
cal dynamism – of artistic imagination. Invariably he prized the ‘real-
ism’ of conventional styles of verisimilitude and scorned impression-
ism, expressionism, cubism, and other ‘distortions’ that challenged the
perceiver’s confidence. At the same time Hitler was drawn to aspects
of modernism that stressed clean, graspable design. In this context his
racial theories about art are altogether consistent, since he feared and
resented unfamiliar people he could not ‘grasp’ in every sense of that
word.
If art is life, then people who resist him in life are as dangerous
as conceptually disorienting, emotionally unsettling art. To put it an-
other way, a particular vision of landscape in life and art implies a par-
ticular culture. In his persecution of art and peoples he designated de-
generate, Hitler openly sought to exterminate cultures that opposed
him. His command that occupied Athens be spared any harm offset
the deliberate smash and grab demolition of Polish arts and culture,
and the eventual drive to annihilate Judaism.
One way of construing the man’s contradictions is to see them
as counterphobic: as strategies for managing a menacing world and
primary death-anxiety.
3.
Es gibt ein Reich, wo alles rein ist;

Es hat auch einen Namen:
Totenreich
There is a land where all is pure;
And it has a name:
Land of the dead.
(Hugo von Hofmannsthal [Spotts] 2003: 120)
Spotts astutely associates Hitler with Shakespeare’s ruler and artist-

magician Prospero. But the analogy goes deeper than that. Prospero is
128 Kirby Farrell
a master of staging illusion in the service – so he tells us – of white

magic. But there is a dark underside to the play. The exiled Duke
holds absolute sway over his isolated, magical island realm. He gains
control over his enemies and others by staging an illusory shipwreck:
a massive death-threat meant to crush resistance to his will. What’s
more, he is preoccupied with his own death, famously renouncing his
magic and contemplating his retirement to “my Milan, where/Every
third thought shall be my grave” (Shakespeare 1974: 1635).
As a tidal current in Hitler’s personality, art could function as a
source of ecstatic absorption. But it was always counterphobic as well.
Examples are legion. Even when Germany was suffering devastating
bombardment and the war effort was perilously starved for resources,
the Führer was adamant about squeezing money out of the budget for
the arts, insisting that the arts were crucial to maintaining public mo-
rale. In 1942 he declared that “[i]f we gradually wind down cultural
activities, the home front will slip into a mood of resignation and after
that into a mood of pessimism” (Spotts 2003: 86).
As noted above, the model landscape in the bunker was an en-
gine of self-creation as well as escapism. Spotts indirectly picks up on
this in describing Hitler’s “childlike absorption” in the model “when
the real world around him was literally collapsing” (2003: 94). In the
chapter title “immortality through Architecture” he recognizes the dic-
tator’s fantasies of transcendence. In the prospective world, after pass-
ing through avenues and rooms of spectacular magnificence, a visitor
to Hitler’s study in the Reich chancellery “would be overwhelmed
with ‘the sense that he is standing before the lord of the world’”
(311).
This is the ancient equation of immortality with glory that is as
old as the pyramids and as toxic as Nero. But there are other ways in
which the model of Linz was functioning as a tool or a vehicle for Hit-
ler to think about his death. Over the years the man had lavished a
good deal of thought on his marmoreal afterlife, as in his rapt response
to Napoleon’s tomb during his short hop to conquered Paris – his first
and only visit. Like cities competing to host the Olympics today, as
many as five cities of the Reich vied for the honour of housing Hit-
ler’s mausoleum one day. Although Speer and the architect Giesler
disagreed about Hitler’s ultimate intentions, his sentimental ‘home’
town Linz, site of his parents’ projected mausoleum, had good reason
to expect to win.
Viewed this way, the ideal city of art is generically a form of
triumphal arch or, more exactly, a mausoleum. It tames terror with the
consoling illusion of posthumous glory. It represents the adoration and
uplifting mourning of the pilgrims that the fallen leader imagined
seeking him out in death. In this respect Hitler’s Linz resurrects the
paradigmatic medieval walled city organized to elevate the palace and
minster and its enshrined heroes. The model serves as a tool to conjure
with. It functions as a stage prop for role-playing at apotheosis. In this
theatrical landscape the entranced Hitler plays all the roles: designer,
critic, inhabitant, awestruck audience, conqueror, giver of life. It could
be argued that the dream of Lebensraum aggressively recapitulated the
post-medieval expansion of European cities beyond their walls, with
mortar and stone sublimated in nation-state ideology and, for the Na-
zis, in a millennialist Reich (Cohn 1970).
The model of Linz itself converts mourning into exalted subli-
mation. At once Hitler is the transcendent witness yet also tacitly en-
tombed like a Charlemagne or a sacrificial Wagnerian Siegfried as an
object of everlasting admiration and sympathetic forgiveness. Though
he consistently favoured grandiose public projects, over time the pres-
sure of death awareness reinforced the theme of mourning, most viv-
idly in his obsession with the lost glories of ancient Greece and Rome.
With Speer he designed edifices to look sublime after they had fallen
to decay – the so-called ruins principle.
In looking ahead to inevitable death, the ruins principle devi-
ously played out Hitler’s pride in his realism. The lifelong fan of Karl
May’s adventure sagas and Wagner’s fabulous twilight of the gods
could insist that he was no dreamer. When Field Marshal Rommel told
him in 1943 that he believed the war could no longer be won, for ex-
ample, Hitler countered that he was not foolish: he understood the
grim strategic reality. By enabling him to think about ultimate fatality,
the (distant) day when Nazi vitality would expire, mourning allowed
Hitler to appear to be bolder and more realistic than those people
hedged about by denial who kept death a taboo. Although he schemed
and bargained with destiny to the last minute, he reassured himself
and others of his unblinking courage.
The fatal paradox in this behaviour is of course that the obses-
130 Kirby Farrell
sive use of vainglorious art to manage death-anxiety may well exacer-

bate it. The more urgent the fantasy of surmounting death, the more
likely that visionary ecstasy will make decline, old age, and death
harder to bear. The self-intoxicating conviction of unlimited freedom
in art and magical thinking makes actual human limits the more op-
pressive. The awareness that no particular future project can finally re-
lieve the core terror of death invites furiously ambivalent responses,
including envy and rage at rivals and the young. Worse, the visionary
drive sooner or later begins to exhaust the available repertory of ulti-
mate projects. How many urban wonders can a successful Führer con-
jure up before urban wonders begin to seem humdrum and arbitrary?
The struggle to finance and maintain them leads to the consolation of
the ruins principle and the Romantic prospect of mourning.
Another face of this paradox is in plain view. The force required
to make art yield a conviction of immortality also acts to inhibit and
destroy creativity. Finally only the Führer’s judgment counted. He de-
creed what was efficacious art – and destroyed the rest. In this respect
he was using up others and his own inner resources the way his bea-
tific Linz would use up slave labourers and exhaust the Reich’s treas-
ury.
Hitler’s aesthetic mourning carried denial to a new meta-level.
He gazed on the model of Linz as a mausoleum charged with the
quasi-sacred vitality of art. That vitality had the power of magical
thinking: the belief in what Freud called the omnipotence of thought,
that by thinking or willing something intensely enough we can influ-
ence physical reality. The magic is evident in the worshipful attitude
toward beauty and perfection encoded in museums and gilt picture
frames, and in the religious and ideological subjects embodied in art.
Magic is massed in the invested money and cultural prestige of art
lovers who form an elite priesthood of experts and collect the concen-
trated authority of all human history in such ‘imperishable’ artifacts as
the Greek discus thrower and the Pantheon. It goes without saying that
these motives are evident in the treasures stored up in the medieval
minster, not only in artful gold and jewels, but also in reliquaries
housing supernaturally invested history.
Hitler’s imaginative landscapes included sublime ruins in the
doomed twilight of the Wagnerian opera house and in the millennial
future, but in the meantime he never stopped bargaining with, and
conjuring, fantastic destiny, scheming to trump fatality. In the final

days of the bunker, with his enemies in the next room, as it were, he
ordered that the art treasures stored in the Obersalzburg salt mines be
protected so that if or when he arranged an alliance with the western
allies against the Communists, he could still deploy his storehouse of
magic art (Nicholas 1994: 317-19).
While art objects are charged with symbolic vitality, the magic
is also at work in the roles that art culture generates. Museums of art
‘treasures’ and memorials for fallen Nazi martyrs tacitly cast the art-
ist-architect in the role of priest. In his ministrations the artist-priest
symbolically turns death into consoling victory. Like Nazi martyrs,
‘Old Masters’ represent a world that is lost. But with magnificent
mourning, the glories of the dead past may live again in the love and
reverence of the faithful. The battlefield littered with horrific corpses
can become a shining monument inspiring the living to new potency.
Hitler’s rapt gaze at his Linz memorial summed up years of im-
plicit role-playing in which he identified both with the revered leader
in an imposing mausoleum like Napoleon’s and also, vicariously, with
the devoted masses of ‘pilgrims’ to the hero’s shrine. Like any artist,
he needed to create not only out of ideal principles, but also in accord
with what an audience can see and needs to see. In theatrical terms he
was at once spectacle and spectator in a kind of psychic splitting that
is routine and even indispensible in art. Paradoxically the split role
holds the potential for imaginative sympathy but also for narcissism or
solipsism. In identifying with an audience, a creator may also vicari-
ously be playing all the parts, tempted to subsume the spectators, or-
chestrating their responses, making them captive puppets in his drama.
Hitler’s secretary Traudl Junge looked back on him ruefully as
an ‘idealist’ and terrifyingly out of touch. The rapture of art makes the
behaviour easier to understand inasmuch as art is an intermediate real-
ity. After all, the artworks, models, and edifices are concrete objects,
and the social relationships generated around art are alive and full of
conviction. The austere leader relished meeting, and gossip about, op-
era singers and movie stars. The maestro was also an impresario of
sorts, and a fan. At the same time art’s content is always virtual: a
nimbus of meanings susceptible to deep creaturely motives and sus-
tained by belief.
132 Kirby Farrell
It makes sense that Hitler would be attracted to ‘stars’ while

making ordinary mortals expendable. His dream cities such as Linz
are practically hostile to the humble human body. As a means to sym-
bolic immortality, these cities venerate the glorious but dead past. His
Linz excludes the happenstance sloppiness of an actual city: habitat
evolved over centuries and a concatenation of lived-in individual
styles. It is a landscape without need for sanitation, nursing homes, or
troubling extermination camps. Its hypothetical inhabitants have no
need for privacy and are assumed to feel awestruck and not crushed by
the gargantuan scale of things around them. The models aspire to
‘pure’ geometry and impose irresistible rules on spaces that are free of
anomaly and circumstantial resistance to imagination or will. Em-
bodying the architect, at whatever remove, the model landscape fore-
stalls oblivion.
The tragic reality is that such glorious cities grow by consuming
life, most shockingly as slave labour and deprivation of the genera-
tions beggared to pay for it. Less obvious, no less important, is the cit-
ies’ demand for military sacrifices to destroy rivals and conquer space.
When the Führer demanded ‘his’ soldiers be willing to die for him, the
idea of sacrifice takes on the coloration of a master-slave relationship.
As in slave economies, military dynamics gave the master multiple
pairs of hands – millions of them – to extend his will and magnify his
vitality. Like art, this system of hero-worship or transference func-
tioned to magnify the creator-master and insulated him against death.
The soldiers who died for him also died instead of him.
This doublethink helps to account for the man’s peculiar mix-
ture of personal kindness and the dissociated rage that Walter Benja-
min saw as self-alienation. In combat soldiers who run amok can be
“beside themselves” with the cold-blooded fury that psychiatrist Jona-
than Shay deems “flaming ice” (Shay 1994: 91).6 As the living land-
scape above the bunker was suffering annihilation and horror, the art-
ist-magician underground was recreating it in the virtual reality of art
and in a visionary future: das Jenseits. In this sense the project was
eschatological, operating in the beyond. This psychic alchemy paral-
lels Hitler’s war aims: a drive not simply to govern and exploit other
6
Traudl Junge, Hitler’s young secretary in the bunker, describes his capacity
for surprising personal kindness in André Heller and Othmar Schmiderer’s
documentary Blind Spot (2001).
lands, but to annihilate inferior, resistant reality in order to replace it

with an idealized realm. The drive into Poland and Russia deliberately
sought to strip the land of its cultural markers so the canvas could be
repainted. The military obliteration of cities and populations cleared
sites for remodelling. In turning neighbours into slave labour and raw
materials, Nazi invasions blindly caricatured the ancient paradigm of
an illiterate countryside to be exploited through civilization. Let the
projected ideal become vivid enough to the civilizers, and it could out-
shine the reality of inflicted suffering and havoc, dissolving the vi-
sionaries’ guilt.
4.
Gazing at the miniature Linz in the clammy, doomed bunker, Hitler

looks and undoubtedly was enchanted – or certainly wished to be en-
chanted – by the age-old consolation of art as immortality. The Nazi
investment in the fantasy is plain to see in Thorak’s and Breker’s co-
lossal statues, which inflate the puny human body to death-defying
proportions. The SS death’s head insignia is a threat display to enforce
dominance over others, but it is also a counterphobic talisman boast-
ing that the SS initiate has mastered death, implicitly by killing others
and potentially, in his willingness to sacrifice his own life. In Otto
Rank’s memorable words, “[t]he death fear of the ego is lessened by
the killing, the sacrifice, of the other; through the death of the other,
one buys oneself free of the penalty of dying, of being killed” (Becker
1973: 108). No wonder, adds Becker that “men are addicted to war”
(108).
Hitler’s death-anxiety came out clearly at the cultural session of
the 1935 party rally.
In a rhetorically violent prologue, he exposed his long pent-up rage at

modern political and cultural life. Boasting that the institutions of the
pre-Nazi era had been ‘crushed’, ‘broken’, ‘beaten and pursued’, ‘an-
nihilated’ and ‘extinguished’, he threatened similar consequences in
the art world. (Spotts 2003: 25)
His invective against the perpetrators of modern art ranged from accu-
sations of imbecility and degenerate insanity to criminal perversion.
The sights and sounds of Modernist culture, he thundered, “were ugly,
134 Kirby Farrell
incoherent, incomprehensible, shocking, depressing, bizarre” (25). He

contrasted such sound and fury with the “eternal principles” of great
art (25).
Like the idea of culture, eternal in this context is a loaded term,
at once a glib rhetorical ornament and a sacramental gesture. The term
directs pumped-up rage toward a vague cosmic authority that tran-
scends the doomed mortal world. In this rhetoric art is religion, and
the Führer-priest is summoning the faithful to a crusade against dia-
bolical forces. In this priestly role, imagination could disavow its own
survival greed. When Nazi armies were first closing in on Moscow
and victory seemed assured, he remarked that wars are quickly forgot-
ten: “One day this will also be forgotten. Our buildings, however, will
stand.” (Spotts 2003: 29) The self-intoxicating concentration on artis-
tic ‘eternity’, that is, both justifies and excuses sadistic rage. Insofar as
it inflames and then tries to stabilize adrenalized exaltation, the behav-
iour is akin to drug addiction as a means of managing morale.
Death-anxiety had post-traumatic urgency for Hitler. His father
beat him as a child, and as a young man with failing ambitions in Vi-
enna he had skirted social death. Rescued by the heroic purpose
drummed up in the First World War, he was wounded and decorated
as a soldier but reacted to the defeat in 1918 with traumatic desolation.
He witnessed the industrialized slaughter at the front, and could never
accept its futility. Instead the remainder of his life was a comprehen-
sive project to magically undo – or to fulfill – the catastrophic impact
of that overwhelming mortality. His aggressive National Socialist
‘revolution’ countered the traumatic after-effects of the war on a na-
tion in which everyone knew someone who had died, and died to no
end.
The historian E.J. Leed recognizes an intimate “interaction be-
tween German cultural categories and German soldiers’ experiences
of the Great War” (Modell/Haggerty 1991: 208). He concludes “that
the effect of combat was a disintegrative personal experience which
rendered the self instinctively meaningless” (208). A “disintegrative
personal experience” is a definition of madness, whether expressed as
catatonic depression or berserk fury. How did such destructiveness
come about?
Going into the war, German culture comprehended battle as a test of

self that could resolve the pressing contradictions of modernity. In-
stead, the harsh reality of battle marginalized its participants, its

trenches ironically objectifying the very labyrinth that the experience
of modernity had come to seem. (208-9)
It makes sense that the war’s survivors feared and censured ‘Degener-
ate’ modern art – Entartete Kunst – that attempted to confront what
Leed calls “disintegrative personal experience”. Postwar artists such
as Otto Dix attempted to ‘capture’ the horror and madness of the war
in art that could be shared and therefore managed, whereas the Nazis
used art in the service of denial. In Hitler’s models the ghastly land-
scape of trenches – “the very labyrinth that the experience of moder-
nity had come to seem” – became purified cityscapes: massively ex-
plicit projections of health and sanity; as rule-bound and hierarchical
as the imperial military.
In this context, Hitler’s great white cities resemble not only
temple complexes but fabulous hospitals. Hitler had been a sickly
child in a family that saw four young siblings die. From early in his
career he somatized his anxieties in worries about his health. He was
phobic about tuberculosis, cancer, and stomach disorders. Toward the
end he developed symptoms of Parkinsonism. As the stress on him in-
tensified during the war, his doctor, Morell, gave him morphine, co-
caine, and amphetamines to regulate his anxiety enough for him to
function, as well as a strychnine-based ‘digestive’ nostrum. By the
time of the photo in the bunker, he was a stricken man. His fixed stare
suggests an effort to hold himself together under the pressure of trau-
matic stress and drug addiction.
As Peter Cohn documented in Architecture of Doom (1989), a
preoccupation with health drove the Nazi programmes of euthanasia
and racial extermination. Propaganda associated the victims with ver-
min and disease, construing the organized murder as a public health
campaign. The same blend of eugenics and hypochondria in turn
played out in Nazi militarism and geopolitical doctrines. From the
start the Nazi party cultivated a paramilitary cast, refighting The First
World War in its paraphernalia and rituals. As the aggressive victories
of the Second World War turned to calamity in the east and firestorms
consumed Cologne, Hamburg, and other great – and real – cities, the
latent death-anxiety among the leadership became epidemic and pal-
pable throughout the country.
136 Kirby Farrell
Once we understand Nazi aggression as survival greed, the pe-

culiar quality of play-acting in their behaviour makes more sense. En-
countering one of Hitler’s brownshirt uniforms from his Munich
apartment in a private collection, I was surprised to see how small the
man was – the impression is of a boy scout uniform – and how camera
angles and self-conscious poses had magnified his stature. But then,
the mass rallies, the bullying gangs, the mania for ritual, bureaucracy,
and social rules: these behaviours all acted out self-expansion. They
staged a melodrama of vitality that promised to postpone death as long
as the play lasts.
The same can be said for Hitler’s architectural cityscapes. As
long as the play of design and construction was in progress, life was
triumphing over death and the architect could trust in a glorious es-
chatological outcome. The belief in the transformative power of art is
a familiar trope, evident in magical pictures and images (and therefore
iconoclasm), including the Pygmalion story. The trope is grounded in
the basic process of acculturation that turns wilderness into a garden
and habitat, and the compulsion to feed and mate into the elective arts
of cuisine and matrimony. Hitler’s preoccupation with barbarism,
primitives, and the developmentally disabled is a logical expression of
fear of the biologically doomed body in which the mind is trapped
with its impossible appetite for life without end. No wonder the body
is the Devil’s grotesque instrument in traditional lore, especially in
witchcraft hysteria, with its emphasis on sterile hags, the shameful
anus, icy copulation, and infant cannibalism.
One way of overmastering the doomed ‘enemy’ body is suicide,
which fantasies of martyrdom and the ruins principle imply. Sacrifice
transmutes the martyr into pure spirit – and a granite monument. Al-
ternatively, rage can be redirected at the bodies of enemies or scape-
goats. Following Leo Alexander, Ernest Becker recognized the impor-
tance of the Nazi “philosophy of blood and soil which contained the
belief that death nourishes life” (103). In effect, this ancient pagan be-
lief converts death-anxiety into “thanatolatry”, a belief in
“ death potlatch” by means of which death is thought to mystically re-

plenish life. It is unmistakable in the Nazi psychology. Goering, for
example, made a statement early in the war that “with every German
airman who is killed by the enemy our Luftwaffe becomes stronger.”
(103)
In the vocabulary of landscape, the Nazi survivors of The First World

War used the “philosophy of blood and soil” to make the slaughter in
the “soil” of the trenches meaningful and even life-giving by convinc-
ing one another that sacrifice and martyrdom could replenish life. The
mud and carnage of the front then became a magical landscape of
“blood and soil” cultivated to increase vitality. Such a fantasy system
turned the depressing futility and guilty savagery of the war into an
elixir of pride and even euphoria.
Hitler’s model cityscapes were a further development of this
fantastic project. They are demonstrations of mind, broad avenues and
inexorable sightlines purged of mortal bodies – in effect, the cities im-
ply or incorporate the absent bodies. This is not simply a fanciful ab-
straction. The relevant logic surfaces in the response of the Reich’s
medical officer Dr. Karl Brandt, who,
when asked about his attitude toward the killing of human beings in
the course of medical experiments, replied, “Do you think that one can
obtain any worthwhile fundamental results without a definite toll of
lives? The same goes for technologic development. You cannot build
a great bridge, a gigantic building – you cannot establish a speed re-
cord without deaths.” (Becker 1985: 103)
By this logic, living beings are building materials and ‘great’ and ‘gi-
gantic’ structures require mass deaths. Lest we underestimate,
Brandt’s sacrificial building materials include not only victims actu-
ally put to death, but the regime’s vast armies of slave labourers, who
were in a condition of “social death” on the job and as often as not
destined for physical death (Patterson 1982). Like the war, then, Hit-
ler’s grandiose cities imply an economy in which homicidal force is
transformed into artistic creativity that buys survival through the har-
vesting – the sacrifice – of other lives. The cityscapes are in effect en-
gines of immortality to be fuelled by fatal manpower. Forcibly ex-
panding into the Lebensraum of neighbouring space, the city ingests
the lives and raw materials it encounters, converting them into the
stuff of its eschatological apotheosis.
In such a belief system the urge to beautify the self and its cul-
ture translates the natural magic of soil into fantasies of transcen-
dence, so that in a perverse way Hitler’s model city is analogous to
Augustine’s city of God. It is superhuman yet ascetic; it sublimates or
purifies tainted bodies in the perfection of monumental righteousness.
138 Kirby Farrell
The viciousness of the fantasy is not only its idolatry but also its devo-
tion to an impossible goal: to free the human creature from the burden
of death, finitude, and guilt. Striving for the impossible, the undying
perfection to which it aspires, it demands endless, increasingly des-
perate force and sacrificial raw materials – Dr. Brandt’s indispensible
victims and slave labour. And in the end, as we keep reminding our-
selves, the dream consumes the dreamer.
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Press.
Cities Under a Sky of Mud:
Landscapes of Mourning in Holocaust Texts
Jenni Adams
Abstract: This chapter examines the relationship between landscape, memory and
mourning in Holocaust literature, with a particular focus on the work of Anne
Michaels. After outlining the spatial disruptions and displacements entailed in both
Holocaust experience itself and the Holocaust memory of later generations, it explores
the degree to which images of landscape offer a meaningful and ethically-sound
means of negotiating these issues.
Key names and concepts: Anne Michaels - Fugitive Pieces - The Winter Vault - ethics
- Holocaust memory - landscape - mourning - postmemory.
We do not descend, but rise from our histories.

If cut open memory would resemble
a cross-section of the earth’s core,
a table of geographical time.
(Michaels, ‘Lake of Two Rivers’ 2000: 9)
Landscape is an often unacknowledged factor in memory: the land-

scapes of past experience both populate memory and are populated by
it. Not only is place often the subject matter of memory, but the proc-
esses of memory and mourning frequently depend upon both the
physical context of the rememberer and the degree to which past ex-
perience may be located in an image of place. As Juhani Pallasmaa
suggests, “[w]e have projected and hidden parts of our lives in lived
landscapes and houses, exactly as the orators placed themes of their
speeches in the context of imagined buildings” (Pallasmaa 2009: 19-
20). But what happens when this relationship between the individual
and the landscape is disrupted by displacement or traumatic loss, and
when the losses themselves take place in a landscape which appears to
retain no trace of these histories?
142 Jenni Adams
This essay aims to address such questions in the specific con-

text of Holocaust memory and postmemory, examining the ways in
which experiences of the Holocaust and its aftermath challenge a
sense of spatial continuity for survivors and their children.1 Focusing
on Anne Michaels’ 1996 novel Fugitive Pieces, I examine the ways in
which images of landscape may be deployed as a means of responding
to these individuals’ dislocated relationships to the places and events
of an unwitnessed familial past, through a compensatory yet ethically
questionable poetics of preservation, recuperation and plenitude. After
tracing the presence of, and resistance to, such uses of landscape im-
agery in works including W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2002), Georges
Perec’s W or the Memory of Childhood (1975) and Anne Michaels’
recent work The Winter Vault (2009), this essay aims to arrive at a nu-
anced and ethically sensitive appraisal of the consolatory and repara-
tive role of landscape in postmemory.
1. Landscape and the Holocaust
The Holocaust is frequently interpreted as an event which stands in

radical disruption of the necessarily close affiliation between memory
and sense of place. As Ulrich Baer notes, “[s]urvivor accounts often
recount the deportation to a non-place and the destruction of the sym-
bolic notion of a ‘place’ that could hold experience together” (2000:
46). This sense of the spatial and experiential dislocation entailed
within concentration camp experience is expressed particularly effec-
tively in the words of Charlotte Delbo, who notes of her fellow de-
portees that “[s]ome of them have travelled in all the countries in the
world, businessmen. They were familiar with all manner of landscape,
but they do not recognize this one” (Delbo 1995: 5). Delbo’s articula-
tion of the alterity of the Holocaust landscape is further echoed in the
following lines from Auschwitz and After, in which the incomprehen-
sion of the Holocaust’s victims is sharply contrasted with what Delbo
perceives as post-Holocaust culture’s assumption of familiarity with
the geography of genocide:
1
As discussed below, postmemory is Marianne Hirsch’s term for the imagina-
tive reconstruction of a traumatic familial past by the children and grandchil-
dren of its survivors.
Landscapes of Mourning 143
From all the countries of Europe

from all the points on the horizon
trains converged
toward the nameless place
loaded with millions of humans
poured out there unknowing of where
[…]
burned
without knowing
where they were.
Today people know
have known for several years
that this dot on the map
is Auschwitz
This much they know
as for the rest
they think they know. (1995: 137-8)
Between the individuals “burned/without knowing/where they were”

and the people who “know […] that this dot on the map/is Auschwitz”
resides an unbridgeable gulf. While those who come after may claim
an illusory spatial ‘knowledge’ of Auschwitz in their capacity to iden-
tify and name the site, to the survivors and victims of this atrocity –
many of whom, as Delbo points out, were killed even before they
learned where they had been taken – the experience radically refuses
assimilation to any existing conception of place. Delbo powerfully
summarizes this abolition of place and place-experience in her de-
scription of Auschwitz and Ravensbrück as “an elsewhere/which is
nowhere” in the fragment “[Whether you return from war or from
elsewhere]” (256).
The radical disruption of space is not only a dimension of con-
centration camp experience, but pervades, in different ways, the con-
tinuum of experiences during the Holocaust, including the experiences
of ghettoization, escape, and hiding. Both escape and hiding form im-
portant aspects of the Holocaust experience of Jakob, the protagonist
of Anne Michael’s Fugitive Pieces (1997 [1996]). Jakob escapes the
murder of his family through repeated acts of confinement, hiding in a
recess as his family are killed, and later burying himself up to the neck
during daylight hours to escape discovery by soldiers. He remarks af-
ter his rescue that “Jews were filling the corners and cracks of Europe
[…]. They buried themselves in strange graves, any space that would
fit their bodies, absorbing more room than was allotted them in the
144 Jenni Adams
world” (Michaels 1997: 45), powerfully situating his own “strange

grave” within a broader context of similar Jewish experiences in war-
time Europe.
2. Landscape and Aftermath
Disruption in the experience of space is hence an integral aspect of

Holocaust experience in a number of different contexts. Most signifi-
cant for the purposes of this chapter, however, is the endurance of
such disruption from the testimonial into the memorial and postmemo-
rial eras, profoundly troubling the project of attempting to ‘locate’
Holocaust memory in space as part of the process of mourning at-
tempted by later generations.
An insight into this process and its difficulties is presented by
Georges Perec’s 1975 work W or the Memory of Childhood, which
traces Perec’s attempts to come to terms with the loss of both of his
parents, but particularly his mother, during the war. Perec comments
of a visit to his father’s grave that:
[There was] something like a secret serenity connected to this rooting

in space, […] to this death which had at last ceased to be abstract […]
as if the discovery of this tiny patch of earth had at last put a boundary
around that death which I had never learnt of, never experienced or
known. (Perec 1996: 38)
Perec’s comments highlight the therapeutic necessity of the relation-

ship between memory and physical place: rendering the death con-
crete through its location in ‘this tiny patch of earth’ enables Perec to
encounter it as tangible, bounded and marked by a continuity which
reinforces the trace of the event in memory. As Jorge Otero-Pailos
states, place possesses a mnemonic value which derives from the fact
of its stability (Otero-Pailos 2009: 253). Although Perec’s father died
as a soldier rather than as a Holocaust victim, this example under-
scores the significance of the physical site to Holocaust memory, if
only by contrast with the unplaceable death of Perec’s mother, a Jew-
ish deportee, of whom no trace can be located and whose disappear-
ance carries no such tangible marker: “We never managed to find any
trace of my mother or of her sister.” (Perec 1996: 40) This contrast be-
tween placeable and unplaceable losses highlights the degree to which
the Holocaust memory of later generations frequently lacks a stable

and specific geography from which acts of mourning might proceed.
In this context, the proliferation of Holocaust memorials in Europe
and the United States illustrates strikingly the need to tie memory to
place in the face of an attempt to destroy not only large numbers of
persecuted individuals but also any trace of how and where this de-
struction took place.
Spatial difficulties in post-Holocaust memory arise not only
from the frequent unplaceability of Holocaust losses, but also from the
sense of disparity between the landscapes of the Holocaust and the
horrific nature of these events. Of a trip to the Palmiry Forest near
Warsaw – the site of mass killings of the Polish intelligentsia between
the years 1939-1943 – during the process of research for the United
States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Edward T. Linenthal reflects, for
example, that:
These beautiful woods, with the sound of the wind rustling through
the trees, made it difficult to visualize the horror that had occurred.
Nature softened the impact of the site, and awareness of the tension
between beautiful site and historical event heightens consciousness of
the precarious nature of the context in which memory works. Not only
had the Nazis murdered people, and attempted to erase the physical
traces of that murder, they chose places that made it difficult to visual-
ize in the mind’s eye what had happened, to feel the horror that was
appropriate to the place. (Linenthal 1995: 156)
Linenthal’s comments illustrate the degree to which, as Anne White-

head elsewhere comments of Simon Schama’s description of the Pol-
ish countryside in Landscape and Memory, the horror of the Holo-
caust is for the most part not signified in the sites at which these
events took place (Whitehead 2004: 49-50; Schama 1995: 26). Docu-
mentary films such as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah underscore this in-
ability of landscape alone to render visible the atrocities which took
place there, as emphasized in the survivor Simon Srebnik’s testimony
on his return to Chelmno: “It’s hard to recognize, but it was here.”
(Lanzmann 1995: 3) This sense of disparity between the experiential
reality of the Holocaust and the signifying capacity of its remains
might be considered particularly disturbing given the attempts of the
Nazis to obliterate the connection between landscape and event in
their efforts to destroy all traces of the genocide at such sites as Treb-
linka.
146 Jenni Adams
Such therapeutic linkings of memory and space as those pre-

sented in the above passage from Perec are thus both particularly nec-
essary and particularly difficult in the context of the Holocaust, an
event which entailed a radical disruption both in the spatial experience
of its victims and in the attempts of later generations to approach and
commemorate these losses. The attempt to re-establish, or ‘re-ground’
the relationship between landscape and memory – enlisting physical
space in the marking of a loss which is resistant to the localisations of
knowledge – will be the focus of the subsequent analysis, which will
examine the unfolding of this process in Anne Michaels’ 1996 novel
Fugitive Pieces. In the pages that follow, I explore the consolatory and
potentially ethically problematic dimensions of memory’s location in
geological terrain in the novel, uncovering the magic realist and other
strategies by which Michaels’ spatial poetics of landscape is able to
resist a fetishistic approach to traumatic history, while at the same
time permitting a necessary link between memory, landscape, and the
Holocaust experience of previous generations to be restored.
3. Fugitive Pieces, Postmemory and Exile
Fugitive Pieces presents itself as the memoir of the displaced Polish-

Jewish poet Jakob Beer, who as a child overhears from a hiding place
the death of his parents and the disappearance of his sister, Bella, at
the hands of Nazi soldiers. Jakob is eventually rescued by the Greek
archaeologist Athos, who removes him to the relative safety first of
Zakynthos, Greece, and later of Toronto. Nevertheless, his life is
shaped by these losses, and by his inability to bear witness to his fam-
ily’s final moments, as he summarizes in the statement that “I did not
witness the most important events of my life” (1997: 17). This failure
of memory places Jakob in what might be understood as a postmemo-
rial relation to his family’s deaths.
Postmemory is Marianne Hirsch’s term for a second generation
individual’s relationship to the traumatic experiences of a parent or
grandparent, and their compulsion to reconstruct these experiences in
memory as a result of what Hirsch terms the “[need] simultaneously to
rebuild and to mourn” (1996: 664). The relationship of postmemory is,
in its focus on a series of events occurring prior to the experience, and
in most cases the existence, of the second generation individual, a
fundamentally belated one, mirroring the status of traumatic experi-

ence itself as that which cannot be fully assimilated as it takes place.2
As a result of this belated character, and of the frequent absence of the
traces by which these histories may be reconstructed – documentary
evidence may be lacking, for example, and survivor relatives may be
reluctant or unable to supply narratives of their past – postmemory
constructions are often supplemented by what Hirsch refers to as
“imaginative investment and creation” (Hirsch 1996: 662).
In Fugitive Pieces, Jakob cannot be categorized straightfor-
wardly as a member of the second generation, in the sense that he has
experienced the events of the Holocaust first-hand, as detailed above
in the discussion of his spatial experience as ‘hidden child’. However,
Jakob might nevertheless also be understood as an agent of postmem-
ory in his attempts to overcome both the physical ‘distance’ from the
event incurred with his removal to Zakynthos, and the temporal belat-
edness which surrounds the experience of the familial trauma: Jakob’s
‘missed experience’ of his parents’ death and his painful lack of
knowledge regarding Bella’s probable demise.3 In this intermediate
position between survivor/witness and descendant of Holocaust vic-
tims, Jakob might be located among what Susan Rubin Suleiman
terms “the 1.5 generation”, comprised, in Suleiman’s words, of “child
survivors of the Holocaust, too young to have had an adult under-
standing of what was happening to them but old enough to have been
there during the Nazi persecution of Jews” (2004: 372). Such survi-
vor-descendants are forced to negotiate not only the traumatic dis-
placements which comprise their own Holocaust experience but also
the spatial and temporal displacements inherent in their postmemorial
relation to familial suffering, as I shall discuss below.4 The member of
the 1.5 generation is thus simultaneously troubled by both Holocaust
experience itself and by their postmemorial relationship to events.
The degree to which this postmemorial relation involves a dis-
ruption at the level of landscape and spatiality is elaborated by Hirsch
2
In Caruth’s definition, for example, trauma is understood as a missed experi-
ence which “is not fully perceived as it occurs” (1996: 18).
3
For a discussion of belatedness in Fugitive Pieces, see Kertzer (2000: 205).
4
Other texts which address the experience of the 1.5 generation include Perec’s
W or The Memory of Childhood (1975), Friedländer’s When Memory Comes
(1979) and Sebald’s Austerlitz (2002).
148 Jenni Adams
in her use of the intensely chronotopic image of exile,5 a concept

which indicates the degree to which temporal belatedness and spatial
displacement unfold concurrently to intensify the sense of disorienta-
tion surrounding the postmemorial subject. As she explains in the fol-
lowing passage:
Holocaust postmemory […] attempts to bridge more than just a tem-

poral divide. The children of exiled survivors, although they have not
themselves lived through the trauma of banishment and the destruc-
tion of home, remain always marginal or exiled, always in the dias-
pora. ‘Home’ is always elsewhere, even for those who return to Vi-
enna, Berlin, Paris, or Cracow, because the cities to which they return
are no longer those in which their parents had lived as Jews before the
genocide, but are instead the cities where the genocide happened and
from which they and their memory have been expelled. (Hirsch 1996:
662)
In Hirsch’s reading, the children of Holocaust survivors are exiled in

both time and space, in a form of displacement that cannot, as a result
of its temporal dimension, be resolved by an ostensibly straightfor-
ward return to the familial place of origin. Nevertheless, Hirsch pre-
sents the possibility of overcoming such displacement in strikingly
spatial terms as a ‘bridging’ of the divide of familial trauma. While
the architectural register of this formulation is emblematic of a wider
tendency in trauma theory to use a concrete vocabulary in the concep-
tualisation of that which resists articulation, it also, I suggest, hints
towards the constructive role of instrumentation at the level of land-
scape, space and their imagination in overcoming the challenges
postmemory presents.
Such a reading of postmemory work as potentially employing
the imaginative reconstruction of space to negotiate the temporal and
spatial disturbances of the postmemorial relationship is implicit in the
following passage from Fugitive Pieces, in which Jakob articulates his
compulsion to reconstruct his unwitnessed familial past:
Night after night, I endlessly follow Bella’s path from the front door
of my parents’ house. In order to give her death a place. This becomes
my task. I collect facts, trying to reconstruct events in minute detail.
5
Chronotope is Bakhtin’s term for “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and
spatial relationships” in literature (Bakhtin 1981: 84).
Because Bella might have died anywhere along that route. In the
street, in the train, in the barracks. (139)
This passage demonstrates both the compulsive nature of Jakob’s

‘task’ and the importance of physical space to this process, with the
act of ‘giving a place to’ Bella’s death symbolizing the possibility of
gaining the concrete knowledge which might enable both mourning
and postmemory to proceed. Yet such concrete knowledge is unavail-
able to Jakob, rendering impossible the therapeutic location of Bella’s
death in a stable and identifiable geography, as the multiplication of
possibilities in this passage underlines. In the failure of this quest for a
specific site of loss, Jakob is forced to employ space, and the image of
space, in more complex ways, illustrating in an unusual way Hirsch’s
suggestion that postmemory deploys the resources of the imagination
(through “imaginative investment and creation”) to compensate for
such absences in knowledge.
4. The Spatial Poetics of Postmemory
One way in which Jakob employs space to negotiate this crisis in

postmemory is in his use of geological data as a substitute for the ab-
sent knowledge the process of mourning pursues. The attraction held
to Jakob by images of geological transition, for example, is illustrated
in the following passage, in which he reflects on the education pro-
vided by Athos during his time in hiding:
During the long months, I listened to Athos recount not only the his-
tory of navigation […] but the history of the earth itself. He heaped
before my imagination the great heaving terra mobilis: “Imagine solid
rock bubbling like stew; a whole mountain bursting into flame or
slowly being eaten by rain, like bites out of an apple…”. (21)
The possibility that such vividly-imagined natural histories function

for Jakob as substitute for a missing postmemorial knowledge is
strongly implied by his acknowledgement that “[e]ven as a child, even
as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were
strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a second history” (20).
The geological nature of this “second history” is significant in its pro-
vision not merely of distraction for the grieving Jakob, but of a substi-
150 Jenni Adams
tute knowledge whose concrete nature provides a consolatory alterna-

tive to the indeterminacy surrounding Bella’s disappearance, a surro-
gate geography for the uncertain landscape of her death. The content
of this concrete knowledge, furthermore, enables a displaced articula-
tion of Jakob’s losses, through the earth’s subjection to catastrophic
processes metaphorically comparable to those he has undergone, as
Dalia Kandiyoti has observed (2004: 322). Such parallels are under-
lined in Jakob’s statement that the geologist and the elegiac poet share
the same task: the exploration of what Jakob terms “buried and aban-
doned places” (49), or the pursuit of the past from a position subse-
quent to its destruction.
Jakob’s use of geological and landscape imagery to implicitly
give voice – in a manner simultaneously more concrete and more
oblique than might otherwise be possible – to his own situation as
both an agent of postmemory and a traumatized refugee is elsewhere
exemplified in the importance he attaches to the properties of natural
materials. One anecdote given particular weight is Athos’s report of a
Greek Jewish stevedore’s remark that “[t]he great mystery of wood is
not that it burns, but that it floats” (28), with the Jewish identity of the
stevedore and the evocation of the Holocaust in the reference to con-
flagration suggesting the image’s function for Jakob as a metaphor of
Jewish resilience and survival. Natural imagery in this sense enables
the shaping and articulation of constructive responses to loss, indicat-
ing its function in permitting both an escape from and an implicit en-
gagement with trauma and postmemory.
A comparison might be made on this point between Jakob and
the eponymous protagonist of another fiction of postmemory, W.G.
Sebald’s Austerlitz (2002). A former Kindertransport child, the adult
Austerlitz employs architectural knowledge as “a substitute or com-
pensatory memory” which simultaneously allows both a protective
“self-censorship” (198) of his psyche and an emergence of the dis-
tressing contents of the past within the less threatening context of ar-
chitectural research. One example of this is Austerlitz’s stated “early
fascination with the idea of a network such as that of the entire rail-
way system”, an “obsession with railway stations” (44-45) which
functions as a displaced articulation both of the protagonist’s re-
pressed experience of childhood evacuation and of the unwitnessed

deportation of his mother.6
In Sebald’s novel, Austerlitz implicitly ‘works through’ his dis-
placement through both an engagement with architecture in general
and a specific fixation upon such sites as Liverpool Street Station in
London, to which he is “irresistibly drawn” and which turns out to
have been the site of his arrival in England (180, 193). Just as Auster-
litz makes use of both specific and non-specific architectural images
in this process of sublimation and evasion, Jakob too employs not only
a knowledge and imagination of macro-geographic processes but also
an attention to specific landscapes as a means of both compensating
for and explicitly engaging with Bella’s unplaceable death. Travelling
through the ravaged landscape of Greece after the end of the war, for
example, Jakob states:
The landscape of the Peloponnesus had been injured and healed so

many times, sorrow darkened the sunlit ground. All sorrow feels an-
cient. Wars, occupations, earthquakes; fire and drought. I stood in the
valleys and imagined the grief of the hills. I felt my own grief ex-
pressed there. It would be almost fifty years and in another country
before I would again experience this intense empathy with a land-
scape. (Michaels 1997: 60)
In this passage, the specific landscape of the Peloponnesus functions

as a means of encounter, with Jakob confronting his own sorrow
through the process of projection.7 The landscape offers a concrete site
in which the emotional excesses of traumatic loss might be accommo-
dated, both as a means of imaginatively engaging with that which, in
its traumatic magnitude, cannot be directly examined or worked
through; and as a means of overcoming the protagonist’s sense of iso-
lation and displacement by positing a personal relationship to post-
Holocaust landscape and place: “I felt my own grief expressed there.”
Jakob’s sense of loss is, similarly, articulated in the Greek landscape
in the villagers’ practice of signposting villages destroyed during the
war (“This was Kandanos”, “This was Skines” [70]), with such signs
6
For a brief discussion of Austerlitz in relation to Fugitive Pieces, see also
Kandiyoti (2004: 309).
7
On this point, see also Kandiyoti (2004: 316-7).
152 Jenni Adams
implicitly enacting Jakob’s own need to render visible that which has
been lost.
This use of one landscape to implicitly articulate one’s own lost
landscapes (in both a literal and a metaphorical sense) recalls the at-
tempts of Marco Polo in Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1997 [1974]) to
invoke his own lost Venice through the invention and narration to the
Khan of the cities encountered on his travels (Calvino 1997: 78). Both
examples underscore the integral role of landscape in the externaliza-
tion of human memory, indicating landscape’s constructive and re-
parative potential in the creative response to exile, displacement and
loss. As Howard states, “imaginative reconfigurations of the natural
world […] may serve as vehicles for the expression of grief, the con-
struction of memory and the writing of historical narratives either sub-
jective or cultural in scope” (2003: 47).
5. The Invisible World
I have thus far examined the way in which images of landscape and
narratives of geological history become a form of substitute memory
for Jakob, providing both an escape from and a sublimation of the task
of postmemory. This attempt to find both comfort and a means of
mourning in images of land is taken further, however, in the sugges-
tion of a form of memory residing in the earth itself. This idea origi-
nates in the novel in Jakob’s fixation on the practice of archaeology as
described to him by Athos. Archaeology presents a chronotope, or im-
age of the relationship between time and space, in which these dimen-
sions are similarly layered: time becomes spatialized in the sense that
digging deeper into the earth allows the partial reconstruction of in-
creasingly distant periods from the present. Such a layering is, indeed,
expressly imagined by Jakob in his statement, of his studies with
Athos, that “I was transfixed by the way time buckled, met itself in
pleats and folds” (Michaels 1997: 30), with the allusion in this image
to the earth’s strata, the buckling and folding of rock seams with the
movement of tectonic plates, presenting the operations of time as
structurally analogous to those of space.
Such spatialization of time is, interestingly, also to be found in
Sebald’s Austerlitz, in which, for example, the protagonist states his
growing feeling that “time [does] not exist at all, only various spaces
interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of stereometry, be-

tween which the living and the dead can move back and forth as they
like” (2002: 261). In both texts, and particularly in the archaeological
model presented by Michaels and Jakob, the notion of spatialized time
introduces the possibility that lost events may be recovered through a
process of spatial excavation, an idea elsewhere exploited metaphori-
cally in the Freudian method for recovering ‘buried’ memories (see
King 2000: 145). The comfort this idea provides for Jakob, and the
degree to which the notion of archaeology is consequently distorted to
this end, may be illustrated by a glance at the following passage:
The Zohar says: “All visible things will be born again invisible.”
The present, like a landscape, is only a small part of a myste-
rious narrative. […]
Athos confirmed that there was an invisible world, just as real
as what’s evident. Full-grown forests still and silent, whole cities, un-
der a sky of mud. The realm of the peat men, preserved as statuary.
The place where all those who have uttered the bony password and en-
tered the earth wait to emerge. (48-9)
The mention of bog people here, both in the historically-located sense

and as an allusion to Jakob’s survival in the bog at Biskupin, under-
lines the very real possibilities for preservation offered by the land-
scape’s geological depth. Nevertheless, Jakob and Athos’s construc-
tion of archaeology manipulates these prospects in a way that is obvi-
ously consolatory, most notably in its suggestion of the totality of that
which is preserved. The images of “whole cities under a sky of mud”
and “full-grown forests” – indeed, of an entire “invisible world” – use
a vocabulary of plenitude to suggest that nothing whatsoever is lost,
that the dead are merely transported, intact, to a world beneath the
ground, where they await the attentions of archaeologists. The quota-
tion from the Zohar, and the absolute terms in which it describes the
invisible rebirth of ‘all things’, likewise suggests totality, whilst also
serving to signify the mystical nature of archaeology in Jakob’s eyes.
Archaeology thus provides Jakob with a fantasy of preservation,
in which time is stratified in geological space and consequently re-
mains available to recovery. This fantasy is represented most potently
in the following, oft-quoted passage, in Jakob’s insistence that:
154 Jenni Adams
It’s no metaphor to feel the influence of the dead in the world, just as
it’s no metaphor to hear the radiocarbon chronometer, the Geiger
counter amplifying the faint breathing of rock, fifty thousand years
old. […] We long for place, but place itself longs. Human memory is
encoded in air currents and river sediment. Eskers of ash wait to be
scooped up, lives reconstituted. (53)
In this passage, geological space becomes fully attributed with human

characteristics, with Jakob’s longing for knowledge inverted into the
desire of this spatialized knowledge for its gathering by human hands.
Such a process of gathering is imagined in Jakob’s assertion that pris-
oners forced to exhume the dead from mass graves were able to take
on the memories of the deceased, as, in Jakob’s words, “the dead en-
tered them through their pores and were carried through their blood-
streams to their brains and hearts. And through their blood into an-
other generation” (52). Memory here becomes fully distinct from hu-
man minds through its projection onto the landscape itself, with the
implication being that Bella’s memory is not lost, regardless of its ab-
sence from human consciousness. Thus while Jacob cannot himself
bear witness to Bella’s death, the possibility remains that these memo-
ries may be recovered, and even transmitted to future generations
“through their blood”.
The notion of an externalized memory located in a specific site
– and hence distinct from the contingencies of human witness and re-
membering – is a prevalent one in Fugitive Pieces’ treatment of the
Holocaust, with Jakob suggesting both geological depth (“In the holy
ground of the mass graves, the earth blistered and spoke” [143]) and
cosmological distance (“If sound waves carry on to infinity, where are
their screams now? I imagine them somewhere in the galaxy” [54]) as
possible landscapes of absent Holocaust memory. The redemptive ca-
pacities of landscape in both a specific and an abstract sense are, in-
terestingly, elsewhere imagined by Jakob to intervene not merely in
the unfolding of memory and postmemory but also at the point of the
unwitnessed genocide itself, as the following passage illustrates:
Geography cut by rail. The black seam of that wailing migration from
life to death, the lines of steel drawn across the ground, penetrating
straight through cities and towns now famous for murder: from Berlin
through Breslau; […] from Vilna through Grodno and àódĨ; from
Athens through Salonika and Zagreb. Though they were taken blind,
though their senses were confused by stench and prayer and screams,
by terror and memories, these passengers found their way home.

Through the rivers, through the air. (51-2)
Landscape is here explicitly opposed to the technological machina-

tions of Nazism, with the railway system by which Jews were de-
ported presented as a form of assault or even rape upon the country-
side of Europe, “cut[ting]” and “penetrating” the terrain. The passen-
gers’ return through death takes place not along these inhospitable
railtracks but “[t]hrough the rivers, through the air”, in a reappropria-
tion8 of pastoral imagery which firmly positions landscape as the
sympathetic medium of the dead. In terms of both the preservation of
memory and the possibility of an afterlife, landscape and its imagina-
tion in Fugitive Pieces thus permit a profoundly comforting response
both to the absence of postmemorial knowledge and to loss of life it-
self.
6. The Ethics of (False?) Consolation
The idea of geological memory is thus a consolatory one, which at-

tempts to reinstate the materials necessary for mourning through its
displacement of time onto geological and archaeological space. This
consolatory dimension has been viewed as problematic by a number
of the novel’s critics. Nicola King, for example, compares Fugitive
Pieces unfavourably with Perec’s W, another text in which memory
and land are deeply intertwined through the alternation of Perec’s
autobiographical fragments with an adventure narrative of a voyage to
the island of W, a fictional place which increasingly resembles the
concentration camps in which Perec’s mother disappeared. In Perec’s
refusal to integrate the narrative of the camps with his personal ac-
count, King reads a recognition of the dimensions of the past unavail-
able to recovery, even as the island of W provides a concrete site for
their imagining (King 2000: 24, 120).
8
As Coffey (2007: 38-44) suggests, the Nazi appropriation of the pastoral in
the ideology of ‘blood and soil’ renders the use of the mode in Holocaust lit-
erature problematic unless these disturbing associations are first acknowl-
edged and undercut, a process Coffey identifies in Fugitive Pieces in such in-
stances as the novel’s engagement with the deception present in the Nazi ap-
propriation of such archaeological sites as Biskupin.
156 Jenni Adams
In contrast, King suggests, Michaels fetishistically recuperates

the unknown, using language to “‘suspend time’ rather than acknowl-
edging the impossibility of fully restoring the past” (King 2000: 148).9
To borrow, and to a certain extent take out of context the typology
proposed by Pierre Nora (1989), the island of W might be viewed as a
lieu de mémoire, a ‘site of memory’, arising in the absence of the mi-
lieu de mémoire, the real environment of memory, and standing as a
symbol of the incompleteness and artificiality of memory in the after-
math of the traumatic break.10 In contrast, Fugitive Pieces may be
viewed as attempting to reinstate the possibility of milieux de mé-
moire, environments of memory, by literalizing this idea so that the
landscape itself remembers, even where human memory is necessarily
fragmented by loss.11 The traumatic basis of the break in memory is
thus obscured by Michaels’ novel, and it is this element of what Eric
Santner would term narrative fetishism – “the construction and de-
ployment of a narrative consciously or unconsciously designed to ex-
punge the traces of the trauma or loss that called that narrative into be-
ing in the first place” (Santner 1992: 144) – that renders the novel
ethically questionable.
I’d like to argue against this judgement of the novel, however,
first by addressing the context and ontological status of these consola-
tory images of landscape, and finally through a discussion of
Michaels’ most recent novel The Winter Vault (2009), another text ex-
tensively preoccupied with memory and landscape and which might,
in many ways, be read as an extended clarification of Michaels’ views
on memory, land and consolation in the face of the criticism met with
by Fugitive Pieces. To begin with Fugitive Pieces itself, any debate
about consolation in the novel must first recognize that the text pre-
9
For discussion of the falsely consolatory nature of Michaels’ novel, see also
Kertzer (2000: 199) and Vice (2000: 9).
10
In Nora’s original formulation, what renders milieux de mémoire no longer
possible – and hence what precipitates our interest in lieux de mémoire – is not
the experience of historical trauma, but is instead the onset of modernity and
postmodernity, and in particular the increasing historical and historiographical
consciousness of the contemporary era, which Nora views as displacing the
cultural traditions and rituals which constituted the living practice of memory.
11
This is a divergent application of Nora’s ideas to the novel to that advanced by
Whitehead (2004: 58), who focuses on the novel’s manifestation of the “will
to remember” identified by Nora with the formation of lieux de mémoire.
sents a first-person narration of a traumatized character; it does not

position itself as a model for how such trauma should be negotiated by
post-Holocaust culture at large. Jakob’s use of landscape in his repara-
tive response to absent familial knowledge might thus be understood
as a personal and therapeutic intervention into the project of post-
memory rather than a statement of objective validity. Indeed, Jakob
himself acknowledges the wistful nature of these imaginings, linking
the experience of mystical belief to desperation in the statement that
“[s]ometimes the body experiences a revelation because it has aban-
doned every other possibility” (53), and explicitly stating his doubts
regarding memory’s preservation in the words “I long for memory to
be spirit, but fear it is only skin” (170).
Furthermore, Jakob’s focus on the intact preservation of past
events in the land strata is countered by an emphasis upon transition,
both in discussions of geological processes (“But at what moment
does wood become stone, peat become coal, limestone become mar-
ble?” [140]) and in the discussion of past events themselves, with Ja-
kob asking, for example, “How many years pass before the difference
between murder and death erodes?” (54). Such utterances as the latter
highlight the degree to which the past’s interpretation depends upon
the present conditions of its reading or remembering, in the process of
Nachträglichkeit identified by Freud (in contrast to the archaeological
model of memory most commonly identifiable with psychoanalysis).12
An extreme example of such ‘afterwardsness’ is, indeed, presented by
the novel’s references to the SS-Ahnenerbe’s falsifications of archae-
ology at the site of Biskupin, in an emphasis upon the operation of
subjective motivation in contemporary reconstructions of the past.13
The relationship between landscape and memory in Fugitive
Pieces is hence qualified by both the subjective nature of Jakob’s nar-
12
For a discussion of these alternative models of memory, see King (2000: 11-
32).
13
Such an emphasis is also present in Michaels’ The Winter Vault, in Lucjan and
Jean’s discussion of the deceptions brought about by the Soviets at the site of
Katyn (2009: 219).
For a more detailed discussion of the significance of Biskupin to the
novel, see Kandiyoti (2004: 310-312), and for a discussion of the work of the
SS-Ahnenerbe, see McCann (1990) in Gathercole and Lowenthal (eds). Gath-
ercole and Lowenthal’s edited volume is one of the historical sources listed by
Michaels in her “Acknowledgements”.
158 Jenni Adams
rative and this narrative’s simultaneous emphasis upon transition, in-

stability, and a lack of neutrality in the retrospective construction of
events. To turn next to the ontological status of Michaels’ images of
memory and landscape, it might also be argued that the magic realist
nature of the novel’s engagement with landscape prevents these im-
ages from functioning fetishistically. Magic realism may be briefly de-
fined as a literary mode in which, as Spindler suggests, “two contrast-
ing views of the world (one ‘rational’ and one ‘magical’) are pre-
sented as if they were not contradictory” (1993: 78). While this blend-
ing of ontological registers is most frequently associated with the
work of such Latin American or postcolonial writers as Gabriel García
Márquez, Salman Rushdie and Ben Okri, magic realist strategies also
form an identifiable tendency in recent representations of the Holo-
caust. Such works as Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated
(2002), Joseph Skibell’s A Blessing on the Moon (1997) and Markus
Zusak’s The Book Thief (2005) use magic realist techniques to negoti-
ate the complex ethical and representational difficulties which sur-
round the representation of the Holocaust, creating fictions which
strive to engage productively with these events while acknowledging
their ethical and experiential distance from the real. Far from present-
ing an inappropriate, kitsch or falsely consolatory vision of Holocaust
history, magic realist Holocaust fictions offer an innovative means of
foregrounding the limits of Holocaust representation, through the use
of supernatural motifs resistant to assimilation into a realist concep-
tion of history.
Viewing Fugitive Pieces as magic realist means appraising it in
precisely this context, paying attention to the ontological differences it
includes and approaching its images of geological memory not as
merely implausible or excessively reassuring images, but as images
which stand in a relationship of radical alterity to the historical realism
of the novel’s plot and setting. From such a perspective, the super-
natural or mystical status of the idea that the memories of the dead
might be preserved in, and transmitted through the earth stands as a
signifier of these events’ irreconcilability with the historical real, a
disavowal that takes place even as this therapeutic fantasy unfolds.
Magic realism thus allows an ontologically and epistemologically di-
vided narrative to emerge that is comparable to the more clearly de-
marcated narrative(s) of Perec. In the case of Fugitive Pieces, this di-
vided narrative is one which simultaneously articulates Jakob’s fanta-
sies of recovery and indicates the presence of that which is not recu-
perable to historical and postmemorial knowledge, defusing the possi-
bility of narrative fetishism by incorporating a recognition of post-
memory’s absences into its otherwise consolatory constructions.
7. Conclusion
I would like to conclude by taking a brief look at the relationship be-

tween landscape, memory and consolation in Michaels’ recent novel
The Winter Vault (2009), which explores the concepts of exile and
loss with a particular focus on the displacement of communities dur-
ing the building of the Aswan High Dam and the St Lawrence Seaway
Project in Ontario. The novel traces the relationship between Jean and
her husband, Avery, an engineer who participates in both the seaway
project and the scheme to transport the Abu Simbel temple to a site
not threatened by the dam. Following the still-birth of Jean and
Avery’s first child during their time in Egypt, Jean returns to Toronto
and begins an affair with Lucjan, an exiled Polish Jew, who relates his
experiences both of the war itself and of the post-war rebuilding of
Warsaw.
In its focus on two acts of resurrection – the piecemeal recon-
struction of the Abu Simbel temple in a different location, and the re-
building of Warsaw’s Old Town exactly as it had been before the
bombing – The Winter Vault continues on a more literal level a dia-
logue opened in Fugitive Pieces as regards the degree to which the
past can and should be made present at the level of landscape.
Michaels’ treatment of the Abu Simbel project addresses the fetishis-
tic possibilities inherent in this insistence on continuity and preserva-
tion, with Avery reflecting, for example, that “[i]f one could be fooled
into believing he stood in the original site, by then subsumed by the
waters of the dam, then everything about the temple would have be-
come a deceit” (Michaels 2009: 4). As the novel progresses, however,
Avery moves towards the realization that the problem with the tem-
ple’s reconstruction lies not in the fetishism of its transplantation but
instead in the human cost of the Aswan Dam itself, as he acknowl-
edges in the statement that “[m]oving the temple was not the lie […],
but moving the river was” (332). Like the St Lawrence Seaway pro-
ject, in which “even the dead were dispossessed, exhumed to church-
160 Jenni Adams
yards north of the river” (44), the dam displaces individuals and com-
munities on a large scale, a fact that goes unacknowledged within the
official discourse of technology and progress which surrounds its con-
struction (35). The resettled Nubians are irretrievably severed from
their past, as the commissioner Hassan Dafalla observes: “It was he
who felt the acute, breath-taking, shock of defeat; and saw that life can
be skinned of meaning, skinned of memory.” (108)
It is by this same yardstick that the rebuilding of Warsaw’s Old
Town is examined by Lucjan, as a process whose ethical status resides
precisely in its complex and ambivalent human impact:
Walking for the first time into the replica of the Old Town, said
Lucjan, the rebuilt market square – it was humiliating. Your delirium
made you ashamed – you knew it was a trick, a brainwashing, and yet
you wanted it so badly. […] It was a brutality, a mockery – at first
completely sickening, as if time could be turned back, as if even the
truth of our misery could be taken away from us. And yet, the more
you walked, the more your feelings changed, the nausea gradually di-
minished and you began to remember more and more. (309)
This passage perfectly glosses the sense of desired falsification sur-

rounding Jakob’s construction of landscape in Fugitive Pieces, with
Lucjan’s comments indicating both the dangerous nature of such con-
solation – the status of the rebuilding as an effacement of loss in pre-
cisely the sense intended by Santner (“It was a brutality, a mockery”)
– and its function in the citizens’ necessary ‘grounding’ in their past:
“the more you walked, the more your feelings changed”. It is perhaps
for this reason that Lucjan notes, after discussing the debate surround-
ing the project, that “even those who disagreed understood the neces-
sity” (228), and for this reason that he rather cryptically remarks that
“any consolation is true” (235).
The Winter Vault might hence be seen as a confrontation and
clarification of the consolatory approach to landscape that proved the
focus of a great part of the critical response to Fugitive Pieces. In this
recent text, Michaels acknowledges such ethical difficulties whilst
also emphasizing the relatively greater importance of both human suf-
fering (for example, the displacement resulting from the destruction of
landscapes in the building of the Aswan Dam) and the potentialities of
healing (as illustrated in the psychological necessity of Warsaw’s re-
building) rather than the rights and wrongs of representation and mis-
representation in a more abstract sense. This human focus is often

used to highlight the necessity of letting go of the past as well as at-
tempting to preserve it, with the titular image of the winter vault – the
place in cold countries where bodies are stored while the earth is still
too frozen to dig their graves – used to indicate the necessity of relin-
quishing one’s hold on the dead. In this image, the idea of geological
depth is employed not to advance the possibility of the past’s preser-
vation, but instead to indicate the necessity of both the living and the
dead moving on, as Jean herself recognizes in her statement of her
own mother’s interment in such a vault that “even a grave can be a
kind of redemption” (243).
Anne Michaels’ fiction thus presents a sustained engagement
with the redemptive and therapeutic possibilities of instrumentation at
the level of landscape, imagination and spatial practice, examining
both the ethical dangers of this consolatory spatial poetics and its
sometimes necessary role in response to the spatially and temporally
exilic relation of postmemory. Incorporating both the metafictional
techniques of magic realism and a self-conscious engagement with the
possibility of narrative fetishism, these practices in themselves stand
as signifiers of the traumatic break represented by the Holocaust in
both personal memory and the collective (post)memory of the family.
Such strategies as the landscape’s supernatural preservation of unwit-
nessed events in Fugitive Pieces function in this sense as eloquent
compensations for the losses entailed in the Holocaust, compensations
that nevertheless make the boundaries of these losses – and the impos-
sibility of their recuperation – painfully visible.
162 Jenni Adams
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Delbo, Charlotte. 1995. Auschwitz and After (tr. Rosette C. Lamont). New Haven and
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Foer, Jonathan Safran. 2002. Everything Is Illuminated. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
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in English Studies in Canada 26(2): 193-217.
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“This Time and Now”:
Identity and Belonging in the Irish Diaspora:
The Irish in Britain and Second-Generational Silence
Moy McCrory
Abstract: The Irish in Britain have only recently been granted ethnic status. This blind
spot which existed towards the Irish community, even as highly visible negative as-
sumptions about the Irish circulated, resulted in a strange invisibility which simulta-
neously derided as it denied Irish identity, and failed to acknowledge the Irish as an
ethnic group. This has effected how the generation born from the 1950’s/60’s migra-
tion into England can both consider and describe their notion of identity. Silence, de-
nial and over identification reveal how the sense of non belonging, or ‘otherness’ is a
common touch stone, and identification as a constant outsider is a prominent note.
Criticisms of national identity levelled against the second generation from within the
community reveal attitudes about ownership of a ‘nationhood’ which is still contested
ground. Identity displayed through those visible traditions which are frequently
stronger in displaced communities can not be taken as the sole markers of national be-
longing as memories, silences and post memories impact on such constantly evolving
groups as are created by emigration. Historic patterns and beliefs which are traceable
through the images, stories and customs which were originally brought over create an
image bank with which the generation born in England might consider and negotiate
its relationship to nation and home. This paper asks whether the models this genera-
tion grew up with, and which have begun the journey from lived experience into lit-
erature and into folklore, can still have a relevant social function when we consider
the idea of identity and belonging?
Key names and concepts: Aidan Arrowsmith - Angela Bourke - Liam Harte - Mary J.
Hickman - Marianne Hirsch - Ernst van Alphen - diaspora - identity - Irish - post
memory - second generation.
Like oil lamps we put them out the back -

of our houses, of our minds. We had lights
better than, newer than and then
a time came, this time and now
we need them…
(Boland 1991: 108)
166 Moy McCrory
1. The Constant Past
The title of this paper “This Time and Now”, comes from a broken
line in Eavan Boland’s poem, ‘The Emigrant Irish’, where the poet
pays homage to the generations of Irish who have taken the emigrant’s
route out of poverty (1991: 108). Such journeys with the metaphors of
leaving the old and dreading the new in equal measure are constant
features in Irish writing, expressing an idea which has become incor-
porated into a sense of identity. It is hard to find a country that equals
Ireland in the desire to both escape and return to it, and for which, un-
til recently, the answer to unemployment has been to look to emigra-
tion.
Boland’s broken line which stresses time, “A time came, this
time”, then counts a beat before the emphasis falls on “now” to drop
away into the quieter “we need them” places the past, slap bang up
against the present, the “this time and now” of lived experience.
There is apparently a state of being which incorporates into its
sense of self not only the behaviours and models of a previous genera-
tion, but its memories. Termed post memory (Hirsch 2008) this per-
sonal sense of history is markedly different to a family’s knowledge of
itself, occasionally rediscovered in the search for ancestry. This term
has grown out of Holocaust Studies where excavation of the past is
further galvanised by the need to capture the testimonies of an ageing,
ever decreasing population of survivors. However the shift in post
memory is that it locates itself in the next generation (the “hinge” gen-
eration, according to Eva Hoffman 2005: 198) with its focus on how
such testimonies are not merely interpreted as is the case with histo-
ries, but are remembered by this follow–up generation. Post memory
is in this instance specific to the children of survivors for whom paren-
tal experience has become part of their identities. According to Hirsch
post memory “describes the relationship of the second generation to
powerful, often traumatic experiences that preceded their births, but
that were transmitted to them so deeply as to seem to constitute
memories in their own right” (103).
Of course this is a dangerous area, a shifting ground where in-
stinct could be seen to sway evidence, where the anecdotal would
supplant the archival. However for the purposes of this paper, post
memory provides a term to identify a sense of otherness that appears
Identity and Belonging in the Irish Diaspora 167
to mark out those whose parental trauma/disruption occurs as part of a

larger group which is socially altered or affected in such a way as to
produce a different sense of identity in those, and successive genera-
tions who have been affected by mass upheaval. Applying the term
post memory to the generation born in England from the 1950’s and
60’s emigration from Ireland (the largest immigrant group since the
famine years of the 1840’s) is not to claim trauma on a grand scale but
merely to establish a method through which an examination of second
generation identity might take place.
This might seem a long way from Hirsch’s work in which the
historical trauma of that overwhelming barbaric past overshadows
everything, but it allows a consideration of how social dislocation is
passed down, in this case to those who grew up to find themselves
rooted elsewhere, existing in a constant state of unbelonging. Post
memory could provide a tool to enable a different way of considering
those features of identity which the generation born in England to
Irish parents have a stake in. Long memories (with all the problems
this implies) seem to be one of them.
1.1 Language and Silence
It has been suggested that the shadow cast by the Famine has pro-
duced similar effects to the way the Holocaust is remembered in that
“the horror of [it] […] is beyond language and expression” (Whelan
2005: 1). Ernst van Alphen asserts that the disruption of language
which occurred during the events of the Holocaust made the events
impossible to figure back into language – that an experience outside of
all normal codes and understanding lacked the terms in which to de-
scribe itself (1997: 41-45). It seems a far stretch to make the connec-
tion between the Famine in Irish history and the Holocaust of lived
memory, but silence as an insistent result of trauma informs what
Hirsch calls “the particular form of belated or inherited memory”
(2008: 107).1
1
Whelan cites Fintan O’Toole who notes that the horror of the Famine could at
least be considered in the light of Holocaust studies as being beyond words in
Ó Ciosáin (‘Was There “Silence” about the Famine?’ [1995]) (Whelan 2005:
1-22).
168 Moy McCrory
That such silence surrounds childbirth, a particular female

trauma, bears out this lack of expression, in this case of the insuffi-
ciency of language to meet an experience. Language rather than suffer
disruption on the massive scale described by van Alphen, is in these
smaller, personal experiences simply not up to the task and the events
are re remembered post the experience in reinvention. “The notion of
experience […] implies a certain distance from the event. Hence the
experience of an event is already a representation: it is not the event
itself.” (van Alphen 1997: 44)
That the famine is regarded with a sense of special ownership of
an inherited wrong which is resistant to interpretation has caused an
image of Irish people as victims to be popularised. This sense of past
oppressions when it allows a people to deem themselves eternally
colonised, long suffering and innocent is never helpful in critically re-
considering long standing beliefs and attitudes, especially when con-
fronted with the changing demographic of Ireland which is seeing
immigrants and asylum seekers in the 21st century, as Ireland becomes
a host nation itself.
In the second generation, famine as motif is more commonly
placed back onto parental experience, considered their shadow, rather
than ours: “Old comrades long dead, All drinking for the famine.”
(McNamara 2008: 11). In her poem ‘English as a Foreign Language’
O’Keeffe uses the image of hunger to make an oblique link with the
nature of language and the difficult properties of words (“Bony lines
lack magic, Starved words crave nutrition” [O’Keeffe 2008: 22])
while similar themes of difficult encounters with a more formal Eng-
lish (the ‘bony’ words) become the site of language and history ex-
perienced as loss.
When a colleague from an Irish family tells me he has a prob-
lem with leaving food on his plate then goes on to outline his general
terror of shortages, it is this ancestry he cites which pulls him to
access the potato famine in a constant lived sense, despite the reality
of supermarkets stocked with ready meals. Anecdotes are rife but
most second generation Irish will still have a parent or an elderly rela-
tive who can become emotional at the sight of potatoes on the dinner
table.2 That such a tropic phrase makes it difficult to write about with
2
Conversations with Simon Heywood musician and traditional storyteller,
across Spring 2010 Semester at University of Derby.
any freshness today sets a challenge: shortages, privation, the images

of Boland’s earlier emigrants still resonate. We know we are fooling
ourselves if we cast ourselves back there however this knowledge that
we have come from privation remains, there is guilt in our perceived
softness, and a stern warning to not get carried away: “They would
have thrived on our necessities./What they survived we could not even
live.” (Boland 1991: 108) The practical nature of the earlier emigrants
is encoded in the practical materials Boland gifts them and their hard-
ships. But she wishes that from this history of struggle and making do
we will emerge stronger by the act of imaginative reclamation.
Terry Eagleton remarks that the realist novel “is the form […]
of settlement and stability” and suggests that this is difficult for the
Irish to reconcile (Eagleton 1995: 147). The inherent lack of owner-
ship (of settlement) within one’s cultural identity which is the experi-
ence of the second generational writer possibly explains why mem-
oirs, testimonies, are the more numerous effects, in an almost anti-
fiction response, while those fictions that result show close reading of
ancient myths and a dependency on orality. When Eagleton points to
the turning away “from realist fiction to the short story” by Irish writ-
ers, it is this spoken, portable commodity, which relies on its extreme
antecedents which are far removed from secular daily routine, and
tend to the “heroic, romantic, fantastic” stories of early legends (147).
As a young writer I understood that there would be no more
weeping over King Edwards as a cultural signifier, instead I found
myself inexplicably writing a short fiction about a woman whose hus-
band turned overnight into a massive potato, with whom she found a
sort of accommodation, or reconciliation. The woman’s low key and
practical acceptance of the surreal, while it might also suggest a
Catholic motif of fatality, allows the possible to elide and overlap with
the subconscious, into a new present state, at odds with the reality ex-
perienced (see McCrory 1989).
This is not to suggest a framework for madness as has been
suggested but to seek ways to manipulate experience which is felt, as
well as lived, and for which realist writing may be inadequate. The
distance between ownership of the history and shame at its conse-
quences has widened to allow famine imagery to be reconsidered, re-
moved from its savage past to where it begins to function as a motif in
170 Moy McCrory
the second generation, in a way that the Holocaust’s use as a motif is

still difficult to reconcile.
1.2 Nationality and Silence
A major factor in second generational silencing has been hostility in-

side the community to those borne on English soil. That hostility to-
wards the Irish became overt during the 70’s and 80’s bombing cam-
paigns, made claiming Irish identity a politically motivated decision
for second generation Irish. Confronted with a sudden, shocking anti-
Irish backlash many new immigrants at the time felt that the second
generation were equally culpable of these attitudes by the rationale
that they had been born in the country which expressed hostility and
were by definition part of the same consciousness.
However the popular assertion that as people who have known
oppression the Irish will understand the needs of others who are op-
pressed has not been borne out, or as Gretchen Fitzgerald wrote in
1992: “Experiencing racism does not prevent one being racist one-
self.” (1661)3 For the Irish in Britain, living and working in racially
mixed environments presented its own challenges, however for their
children who attended integrated city schools, this was their reality. Of
those traditions that can be happily surrendered, an irrational anti-
black racism borne of fear is one of them.
While the fact of whiteness was used against the Irish to defuse
and silence concern over anti-Irish behaviours, the notion of
assimilation was given as another reason for the strange non status of
the Irish and for the unreadable nature of the second generation. The
Commission of Racial Equality’s research project (cited in Hickman/
Walter 1995) found that such assimilation is not as widespread as has
been previously believed and challenges the assumption that the Irish
and the second generation can simply assimilate into a white majority
in Britain. In ‘The Hidden Irish in Multi-Ethnic Britain’, Walter notes
3
For further commentaries about Irish forms of racism see Bourke et al. (2002)
including Fitzgerald’s pamphlet (1992).
how children of Irish parentage are “placed at the intersection of two

nations, neither of which represent the Irish identity as real” (report to
ESRC website).4
Second generation writer John Walsh in The Falling Angels
(2000) writes about his sense of being “sucked into a new Gaelic iden-
tity” even as he claims “I who am not Irish” (30). So he begins the
process of remembering “the years I’ve spent being both English and
Irish, the constant switchback of my relationship with both countries,
the condition of being between the two cultures” (30). Indeed Liam
Harte notes how the falling angels of the title represents this state –
beings who are between Heaven and Earth, in a constant state of fal-
ling, not fully at home in either place (2003). “You don’t have to go to
Hell. But you can’t stay here. You’ll always be falling.” (Walsh 2000:
30)
2. A Plural History
As if to counter the dislocation of unbelonging the expression of self

in the second generation Irish in Britain tends to the plural, not singu-
lar, as if an allegiance is sought in numbers. This links back to how
immigrants first arrived as part of a family, or a group, and if alone
may have been quick to seek out others they knew from back home.
Interviews published in Across The Water Irish Women’s Lives in
Britain (Lennon/McAdam/O’Brien 1988) reinforce this ‘group
headed’ identity.
So, my sister, her boyfriend and me sat by the fire talking one night
and all of a sudden the three of us decided, just like that, to come over
here and see if we could find work. And it was a great big adventure
to come over, but we were actually frightened as well. (37)
4
For further details about the effects of such ‘non assimilation’ see the Mind’s
report, concerning specific problems associated with the Irish community in
Britain and the problem of identification:
“There is a general assumption by many professionals that the white
British middle-class model is appropriate for Irish people. Conversely, there is
little recognition of the diversity of the Irish community, and in particular the
reality that there are black Irish people, Irish people with English accents, and
Irish people of homosexual or bisexual orientation.” (Tilki 2008)
172 Moy McCrory
When the train stopped at Euston, we sat in the train and – this
shows you how green we were – the porter came round and said “Eve-
rybody off ” and we said “Oh we’re going to London.” He said, “You
are in London!” (41)
However those links are tenuous and instead of a group sharing of ex-
perience the plural self can also lean towards a post-modern view
where there can be no single interpretation of experience and where
the resulting multiplicity of realities demands to be read as equally
valid expressions.
However the plural self with its insistence on a place amongst
others reinforces a social structure, or bond and as such owes its ori-
gins to a time before Thatcherism with its lack of faith in society and
quasi religious belief in the individual.
At the risk of sentiment and of placing the author in the text, I
will risk the plural self for a moment to establish the context in which
the second generation experience an essential identity; it is my own
experience in Liverpool as a child which I draw on and which rein-
forces this when I remember how ‘we’ were brought up dreaming of
somewhere else. We grew up dreaming history. It was partial, spoken
and image laden. Our history was in songs, in half remembered pasts
and those images which were shrouded in a receding forgotten lan-
guage. We grew up among strangers and in England, we were the for-
gotten people. We were not immigrants in the proper way, we did not
come up on official forms as a minority group, but in those places we
had settled, we were a problem to be solved. We were not expected to
achieve. We were to be pitied.
Up till the 1980’s in England, to be Irish, or identified as such,
was to be associated with poverty and ignorance (Hickman/Walter
1995).
John O’Donoghue, a London Irish writer claims his parents
were part of the “brawn drain” (2009). This is the prevailing image of
the Irish who arrived into England right up till the 1980’s when this
was radically altered by the newest generation of immigration, but
when Eavan Boland cast her ancestors as mythic heroes facing a sud-
den new world such positive affirmations were scant.
2.1 A Short History of Invisibility
Despite being one of the oldest and largest immigrant groups in Eng-
land, the Irish community has been distinguished by its official invisi-
bility. It has had a buried presence until comparatively recently. The
Commission of Racial Equality published the first major study of Irish
people in Britain in 1997 which marked official recognition of the
Irish as an ethnic group (see Hickman/Walter 1997). However histori-
cally there has been a documented Irish presence from the Anglo
Normans onward and a suitably varied range of negative descriptions.
In the 12th century Giraldus Cambrensis reported back to Henry
II that the Irish were “so barbarous that they cannot be said to have
any culture […] they live like beasts [and] […] have not progressed at
all from […] primitive habits” (1982: 101). He could not account for
the work of Irish scribes which he witnessed; he records “a wonderful
book” and discusses this as “a miracle” (101). That so fine a work (as
later typified in the Book of Kells) could have been created by such a
people caused him to suggest that it was the work of angels – not a
euphemism in the 12th century. The uncouth Irish he encountered were
obviously assisted by divine intervention.
Colonial practices seek justification for expansionist aims and
so must promote the coloniser’s natural superiority. Post English Civil
War anti-Catholicism also found a whipping boy for their national as-
pirations in their regard to Catholic Ireland:
The object was to identify Papism with alien Irish barbarism, French
despotism, and corrupt Roman luxury. The very names ‘Papist’ and
‘Romish’ locate the church as foreign; the universalist assertion im-
plicit in the name ‘Catholic’ is one Protestant writers never allowed to
be legitimate. (Tumbleson, 2008: 13)
This allowed for Protestant fears of “unsuppressed Catholicism”, to

become “a dread that kept penal laws against Catholics in effect for
centuries” (13). That Irishness “signifies a threatening otherness” dur-
ing times of political or social unrest in the past is without question.
Irishness becomes a cipher which is used to both express and contain
“religious and political subversiveness, social barbarity, moral laxity
and a wild sexuality” (Arrowsmith 2006: 163).
174 Moy McCrory
2.2 Scientific Racism
It was the development of anthropological studies in the 19th century

that allowed the famine escapees of the 1840’s to be treated to a new
form of racism which took its guidance not from religion, but from
contemporary science, which like the earlier religious strategy
assumed an authority which was difficult for the uninitiated to
question. Such pseudo scientific racism is well documented in Curtis
(1984). In a 19th century press illustration three images of men’s heads
are drawn, which purport to show the Irish, the African and the Anglo
Saxon. The caption notes the Irish are
[d]escendants of savages of the stone age who in consequence of iso-

lation from the rest of the world have never been out competed in the
healthy struggle of life and thus made way according to the laws of
nature for superior races (Curtis 1984: 55).
Whiteness alone is not enough to denote race (Hickman/Walter 1995).

The Irish were seen as the other in relation to a civilized England
(Arrowsmith 2006). Although by the second half of the twentieth cen-
tury the overt racism of No Irish, Blacks or Dogs allowed had disap-
peared from signs, in the late 20th century there was a marked resur-
gence of anti Irish sentiment in Britain as a response to the Troubles in
Ulster. As a response to the Birmingham bombing the British Gov-
ernment’s introduction of new security laws including the Prevention
of Terrorism Act in 1974 led to a heavy handed policing of the Irish
community: “Irishness became almost synonymous with subversion
and criminality.” (Whelan 2005: 20)
That the Jak Cartoon ‘The Irish’ in the London Evening Stan-
dard (29.09.1982; cited in Curtis 1984: 84) employed racist stereo-
types to promote a view of Irish people as a homogenous race of mas-
culine killers, explodes the definition of racism as a descriptor for atti-
tudes concerned with skin colour. Billed as a movie advert it describes
the Irish as the “Ultimate in Psychopathic Horror”. Ridiculous sub
human figures straight from the 19th century press example, gather in a
graveyard clutching a variety of weaponry to create mayhem and
murder. Such received images now posit a race as mindless thugs.
However this reactive model of anti-Irish expression is only one form
of the previous anti Irish stands taken to illustrate “the continuing
resonance of the Irish as an Other of Britishness” (Hickman/Walter

1995: 10).
2.3 Continued Stereotypes and Buried Identity
During the 60’s and 70’s the anti-Irish joke enjoyed popularity as Irish
people became targets for frustration. As the Irish did not yet consti-
tute an official ethnic group, it was made difficult to counter such
negative images publicly. Andy Medhurst notes how if a sense of na-
tional identity is to be reinforced the proximity of strangers increases
the need to emphasise differences: “British (and especially English)
comedians have been so devoted to the Irish joke, but have no need
for Portuguese jokes.” (Medhurst 2007: 28)
It might seem ludicrous now to put the words ‘stupid’ and
‘Irish’ together, but this was so common a phrase in the 60’s and 70’s
that it became a cliché. While humour has always made mock, its un-
critical absorption allows negative values to gain currency.
If the general attitude of the immigrants in the 50’s and 60’s
was to keep their heads down, and their business to themselves, the
reasons to be fearful of standing out had a long historic precedent. For
my parents’ generation difference was noticeable publicly in speech
when accent immediately marked a family out.
In Over the Water (1987) Maude Casey has the narrator, who is
a second generational girl, say of her mother “I hate it when she
sounds so Irish”: “Mammy knows no one in our road. She is so afraid
of […] her Irish voice that she opens her mouth to no one. She says
that we should do the same. ‘Keep your business to yourself’ she
says.” (2)
This common image of hiding and burying behaviours, of the
life lived indoors and the life lived publicly being two different arenas
are a constant feature in second generation experience. It is hardly any
wonder that people marked out their differences in small, private
ways. Ray French wrote about his father how
[h]e’d come belting into the house, open the bottle of Guinness that
he’d left warming in front of the fire and stir in a couple of teaspoons
of sugar to take the edge off the bitter taste that stout always used to
have outside Ireland (French et al. 2006: 9).
176 Moy McCrory
This caused me to consider and re-remember how my own father

never drank a cup of tea all the time he lived here, swearing that the
English water ruined the taste. Discomfort was internalised, a swal-
lowing and silencing of protest took place both metaphorically and ac-
tually for our parents’ generation.
2.4 Public Identities
The 80’s immigrants – young, educated, middle-class and upwardly

mobile – were strikingly different to the waves who had preceded
them. As the children of the 50’s and 60’s generation reached
adulthood, anger at their parents’ buried pasts and the demonisation of
the Irish generally made claiming Irish identity a political decision.
The rise in immigration in that decade coincided with the worsening
situation in the Republic as backward looking referenda were passed
which seriously impacted on people’s lives. At a conference Deidre
O’Byrne said she had little idea she was part of a movement when she
left Ireland in the 80’s, only that it was a dreadful time for women and
she chose to get out.5 The journalist Nell McCafferty wrote: “The
nineteen eighties will go down in history as a lousy decade for Irish-
women.” (1987: 1)
Unconsciously or not, this new wave of immigration coincided
with the adulthood of the second generation. Kate Foley noted how
this second generation identified with Irish experience: “[I]ncreasingly
it was an experience they wanted to celebrate and not hide.” (2000:
16)
The Irish In Britain Representation Group was set up in 1981.
Its chief aim at the time was to foster a positive Identity for the Irish in
Britain. Two years later the London Irish Women’s Centre was set up
which would look at the needs of Irish women who were largely ex-
cluded from the social circles which already existed for men.
However it must be stated that the 80’s was also a decade of bit-
ter infighting and conflict. The Manchester Irish group acknowledge
that the new immigrants reacted badly to established communities.
5
O’Byrne, D., speaking at The Land and Identity Conference, University of
Derby, May 2009.
The term Plastic Paddy was used to describe those not born in Ireland,
for whom the outing of nationality could be a choice and the IBRG’s
rationale was to claim the “right to be Irish” which does eloquently
express the sense of defence, attack and choice implicit in identity
(IBRG website). The Manchester Irish network reveals how attitudes
impacted onto existing communities, with a destabilizing effect.6
The features that marked out the second generation group were
also at odds with a new Irish middle class. Poverty, lack of opportu-
nity were not shared markers of childhood while hostile encounters
with the host community which were sudden and shocking to new
immigrants, were familiar (but socially uncounted) amongst those
who had grown up in England.
It is tempting to use the same argument in the developing sense
of a new, youthful nation of Ireland, as “one core element in the con-
structing of a nation is the ascertaining and labelling of those who do
not belong” (Medhurst 2007: 28) to look at this difficult period as the
second generation were now by default twice removed from those
ideas of nation and home.
Any second generation person stands accused of having no sin-
gular features, almost as if their past and the post past has never hap-
pened, but they will exist in a vacuum, which might be termed ‘Eng-
lish’ no matter how awkward that descriptor feels, or indeed is given.
As a result many second generation disavow their own experience, as
if the sliding scale of misery is a competition, and they cannot com-
pete with integrity. There is always someone worse than us.
When it became generally easier to claim ‘Irishness’ in England
after the signing of the Peace Agreement in 1998 and the end of hos-
tilities, any emphasis on class-bound relationships was negated and
6
“The late 80s and early 90s saw a sudden but short-lived influx of new emi-
grants from Ireland. This had a negative impact on the development of the set-
tled Irish community in Manchester.
Firstly it destabilised community organisations. The GAA is a good
example. Young Manchester-born players had been nurtured through the
ranks of GAA clubs. The newcomers – with greater exposure to Gaelic foot-
ball in Ireland – had superior skills. They displaced the Manchester – born
who were then lost to Gaelic football. When the new arrivals returned to Ire-
land Gaelic clubs in Manchester were significantly weaker.” (see ‘Manches-
ter’s Irish Story’, website)
178 Moy McCrory
the reality many second generation had experienced was now at odds
with ‘real’ Irish experience, creating a double inauthenticity.
Because an image has been overworked, the resulting cliché is
not made any less true and cannot reduce its relevance in moulding
identity. However post memory allows the sense of ‘otherness’ to be
traced as it maintains itself despite social and class bound categorisa-
tion and begins to offer a way of revealing the second generation and
more importantly retains its significance when the group passes
through such markers of class which they experience fluidly and not
in a static sense.
When the Irish in Britain were recognised officially as an ethnic
group in 1997 and the category ‘Irish’ was finally included in the 2001
census, this ought to have been a ‘homecoming’. Instead it raised
many of the same old questions about the Irish viewed as a race, now
applied to the second generation who came under attack for having
been born in England, and for speaking with different accents to those
of their parents.
3. Rescripting and Remembering
In Letters Home (1999) Fergal Keane wrote: “So much of our Irish
past is snagged with myth and suppressed memory, it is as if the blood
and bitterness made truth too painful to bear.” (92)
Possibly the urge to escape, to live without obligations to one’s
past and to the constant rescripting of the self calls to question the
‘successful gene’ which is sometimes seen as resulting from immi-
grants who are driven to succeed when economic migration is defined
as a ‘choice’. In a report on mental health for the King’s Fund London
Commission, it was found that Irish people in England have the high-
est rate of admission to psychiatric hospitals (Leavey, Gerard et al.
1997). If one’s parents sought a materially better life the details gath-
ered would suggest that the downside is that the dislocation of identity
has produced further problems for the next generation to overcome.
The Israeli journalist Amira Hass, whose parents both survived
the death camps to emigrate from a Europe forever tainted by Nazism,
has spoken about the positions taken by the children of Holocaust sur-
vivors who have little desire to make contributions, with what she
calls “the urge to waste a life”.7 She puts this lack of personal ambi-
tion down to an awareness of the overarching powerlessness that the
previous generation experienced whereby a creeping sense of futility
is reinforced by a past, wherein (to paraphrase Primo Levi 1988) peo-
ple died for nothing. Her family dealt with this by their political en-
gagement: “Today I understand that my parents’ vision of a socialist
utopia helped us all escape the vacuum that was left after Auschwitz.”
(Hass 1999: 8)
The urge to “escape the vacuum” is fundamentally different to
an attempt to find positive meaning in such experience. In this latter
version, all experience can be reworked to a positive end and is best
expressed in a triumphal version of the past. In the Italian Roberto
Benigni’s Holocaust film Life is Beautiful, the surviving mother clasps
her child as the liberators’ tank rolls over the hill and they sob “We’ve
won!” as the game of the camps has ended. Levi’s statement sounds
most loudly in these instances.
There are different ways of negotiating the vacuum of the past.
Hass’s post memory has been the catalyst for her actions. This seminal
image is derived from a memory of her own mother, who survived
Belsen. “Of all […] memories that have become my own” she writes,
“one stood out” (italics added):
On a summer day in 1944 my mother was herded from a cattle car

along with the rest of its human cargo. […] She saw a group of Ger-
man women, some on foot, some on bicycle, slow down as the strange
procession went by and watch with indifferent curiosity on their faces.
(1999: 6)
From her parental memories this image is the one which crystallised
into a symbol of non intervention, and is why at an early age she had
already decided that her place in life was “not with the bystanders”
(Hass 1999: 1-10).
The post memory mind stands aside from its own direct experi-
ence and, like the survivors who felt that the experience of the Holo-
caust never ended, might exist in a different consciousness of the pre-
sent where the past elides and overlaps. (The second volume of Art
Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, which details his father’s liberation
7
Hass – McCrory, private correspondence from the mid 80’s.
180 Moy McCrory
from Auschwitz is subtitled ‘And Here My Troubles Began’ [Spiegel-

man 1991, endpapers].) It would seem that some events in history are
a continuous present.
This is something that the children of emigrants experience, be-
ing brought up in the new world, while the older is evoked in the daily
life of the home, yet such tradition (the old ways) become the sites of
clashes of culture and behaviour with which the generation born of
their parents’ exodus struggle and as such resist total integration either
into the present, or the past, or into the larger community.
The children of Irish immigrants into England had to react to
their parents’ ‘new’ life: this was our regular experience, with all the
associated difficulties, constantly expressed as ‘advantages’. Our poor
housing was expressed as a development stage, even our unemploy-
ment could be regarded as a ‘choice’, if a parent had ‘chosen’ to move
to England where unemployment may have been their lot, instead of
the hoped for regular work.
Discussing John Walsh’s memoir The Falling Angels (2000)
Liam Harte draws attention to the “inordinate power of storytelling
over the second-generation imagination” (Harte 2003: 298). He refers
to Richard White’s study of family storytelling: “I entered into my
mother’s stories so fully that I am not always sure now whether I re-
member my mother’s stories about a place that I had never seen or my
own combinations of the stories.” White suggests that such formative
aspects of second generation identity are “pre-eminently a matter of
narrativity, of stories being told, just as autobiography itself is another
re-scripting of self”. These stories provide ‘a coherence’ that he sus-
pects may be lacking in the ordinary events of everyday (cited in
Harte 2003: 298).
3.1 A Little Divine Intervention
In an introduction to Legends of the Supernatural, in The Field Day

Anthology of Irish Women’s Writing, Angela Bourke notes how the
traditional stories “are valuable repositories of practical information
(even if) their central plot is usually an extraordinary encounter of
some kind” (2002: 1284). Traditionally women were allowed the
greater ownership of such tales where descriptions of “familiar envi-
ronments, life and work” provide contrast to supernatural elements.

This interest in females which many magic tales reveal is, she sug-
gests, a product of a traditionalist patriarchal society which “did not
assign places or roles to women in their own right”. In this way the
fairy-legend area encoded such practical experience as might be diffi-
cult to express directly (1284).
What Liam Harte calls “[t]he complex imbrication of storytel-
ling, myth and memory in the process of second-generation ethnicisa-
tion” (2003: 298) is also part of not merely self mythicisation, but a
use of images and detail which are ‘found’ in that oddly creative and
dreaming space where writing begins. A place which uses as its re-
sources not only lived experience but all the retold stories and en-
coded details of others’ lives.
If, as Arrowsmith writes, the Irish claim a special relationship
with the past, the issues of memory and “the connectedness it seems to
offer” are recurring features in the literature of the Irish diaspora. Yet
this past which he calls a “constant and elusive presence” he warns “is
not always acknowledged as driven by fantasy” (2006: 166).
But fantasy also implies the need to create the self on such
shifting and vague details in a separation from the ‘real’ self to the
products of that imaginative ‘self’ which is the process of fiction. If
the second generation no longer own their subconscious, and image
heavy realisations, if these become areas difficult to walk alongside, is
there a restricted, pure version of reality, or indeed of history, which
can be accessed to replace such ‘dreaming’ pasts?
If a second generation creates false models of nationhood, the
question of how experience constructs such models when time is
backward looking has to be raised. If the present is defined in relation
to a troubled past, as Hirsch suggests, can we initiate the new? Med-
hurst remarks that “nationalists [...] can never risk acknowledging that
any sense of national cultural unity can only ever be fictional”. He
claims this “result[s] in scenarios where belonging is only ever a mat-
ter of looking inward and backward and where extreme ethnic nation-
alism offers ‘a last refuge from social change’ (Cook 1996: 2)” (Med-
hurst 2007: 29).
The economic migrants, such as remembered by Boland, might
present a real danger to how the next generation perceives its present,
whenever a status of victim hood is employed to gain moral ground.
182 Moy McCrory
But a discussion over the reality of a writer’s experience strikes me as

odd, and wrong headed, as following on in the models of immigrant
groups, all second generations have their differing take on the devel-
opment of national identities (Arrowsmith 2000).
Rather than answer claims towards the falsity of second genera-
tion nationality, which is in reality confronting it with what is an out-
dated national model, post memory acknowledges the quality of ex-
perience felt in the second generation Irish which goes beyond a visi-
ble register of culture and custom. The generation borne of their par-
ents’ lives in England might express a sense of non belonging, of non
ownership. Indeed trans-national forms might be the most authentic
expression of self such a generation can express and within their own
lives experience their most authentic belonging in a state of un-
belonging.
The second generation are a demonstration for the idea of na-
tionality as part of continuous social construction, and reveal the post
modernist interpretation of such constructs as being open to multiple
interpretations.
3.2 Irish as she is spoken and written
The definition of nationality through language in Ireland is not popu-

lar as only 3% of the Republic speaks Gaelic as the main language. In-
stead a ‘knowledge of Gaelic’ is counted, with one person in three
claiming this.8
In ‘Mise Eire’ Eavan Boland states how she will not return to
such a definition, as the older language seems to crush the idea of na-
tion. However, Boland acknowledges the battle scars of such a chan-
geover:
A new language
is a kind of scar
and heals after a while
8
See ‘Statement of the Irish Language’, Government of Ireland website (2006)
and Gaeltacht.com for statistics. The Gaeltacht website notes that Gaelic “has
the status of an endangered language in the Republic of Ireland and officially
extinct in Northern Ireland”.
into a passable imitation

of what went before. (1991: 78)
However early Irish literature is accessed, in a sense of ownership, or

development, its readers still find it rich with satire, curses and mock-
ing. Originating from a time when words were all powerful and the
seanchai held the largely illiterate audiences in thrall by their spinning
of tales, words carried great power and to speak badly about an en-
emy, or to take this further and compose, or pay a poet to compose, a
satire against someone was to inflict great suffering on them.
My experience of working at the Irish Women’s Centre in Lon-
don in the late 80’s revealed a strong cultural recognition of this spo-
ken form among the women who attended literature and creative writ-
ing classes there. A particular female expression of evil speaking is
Malacht na Baintri – ‘The Widow’s Curse’ (Witoszek/Sheeran 1991:
16). Even the famous 18th century ‘Lament for Art O’Leary’ by Eib-
hlín Dubh Ní Chonaill also curses those who caused his death
(O’Tuama/Kinsella 1985: 209): “Ruin and bad cess to you, Ugly trai-
tor Morris, Who took the man of my house.” At the Centre when we
explored traditional phrases, many women were uneasy about the
status of historic and family curses and preferred to circulate these in
written form rather than give them voice.
In their article ‘The Tradition of Vernacular Hatred’, Witoszek
and Sheeran question the tradition of “begrudgery” and ask what is it
that sustains this (1991: 11-27): “The English nursery rhyme ‘sticks
and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me’ has
never carried any conviction in Ireland.” (15) They note with surprise
how the Ancient Brehon laws have an entire section given over to
“crimes of the tongue” for slander and speaking ill of someone. In this
the dispossessed, having nothing left but words, might curse freely. Ó
Súilleabháin notes that although meant for fun, malice and insult were
often a feature of this ‘sport’ (1961: 56).
While the taboo about speaking ill of the dead remains as strong
as ever, it would seem there is no such respect for the living. The lyr-
ics to ‘Nell Flaherty’s Drake’ fairly sum up what such curses might
entail, this extract sets them out and they range from the comic to the
serious: “May his pig never grunt, may his cat never hunt,/May a
ghost ever haunt him at dead of the night.” (Welsh 1907: 404) It also
wishes persecution by “every old fairy, from Cork to Dunleary” (404)
184 Moy McCrory
on the unfortunate, but it changes from this ragging tone as it wills

childlessness and general ruin upon the accused, which are far graver
matters. Is this ‘begrudgery’ or the words of a powerless, dispossessed
people seeking the only expression left to themselves (Zipes 2002)?
The strangely workerist acceptance of the miraculous which is
common in tales from the folk tradition points not only to an earlier
unquestioning belief in elements which could not be explained, but as
Bourke has already suggested to a way of encoding behaviours.
Women found a critical voice in the manipulation of such low status
stories as were seen to be in their domain (Bourke 2002: 1284). The
following was recorded in the middle of the last century from Máire ní
Bheirn, an illiterate storyteller born around 1890. This translation
(‘The Woman Dropped From the Air’) of ‘An Bhean a Thuit ón Spéir’
provides a window into the acceptance of the unexplained, and a
common sense desire that everything continues as usual. Even the
magical has its commonplace use:
Long ago there was a man living in the glen whose wife died very
suddenly. On the same day that she was buried, a man in Connact […]
saw a woman in the air coming towards him. […] He took hold of her
and brought her to his house and he kept her there to do the house-
work. (Bourke et al. 2001: 1293)
It’s hard to not hear the echoes of such practical detail when Boland’s
emigrants stand at last in the New World with scant possessions which
include “[a]ll the old songs” (1991: 108).
It is also impossible to hear it and not feel the digging in of so-
cial patterns and the tired but powerful conventions that so many
second generation (and women especially) were reacting to in their
parent’s lives.
4. How Irish Are You?
The tension about identity in the community can provoke scorn for
anyone who appears to ‘want to be Irish’ with its implication of
choice. The nature of assimilation which made the original immigrants
fit in has been laid at the door of the next generation. If Plastic Paddy-
ism is used to quell an unhealthy ‘over identification’ it has also made
it an option for everyone in a consumable ‘identity’. At the London
Irish Women’s Centre today the issues about identity are not fiercely
contested (Foulkes 2010). However in a time of multiculturalism this
raises questions about the role of national identity in Irish returnees. Is
there now a genuine Plastic Paddy consumed by Irish people in Ire-
land? According to Bernadette Whelan many of those comfortable
traditions (dancing and music) are now being put back in place in an
attempt to rescue “some sort of identity from the colonial past our par-
ents were fleeing” – It is no accident that Irish language classes and
step dancing have seen a resurgence of interest in Ireland as an anti-
dote to the Celtic Tiger which made Ireland like everywhere else in
Europe (Whelan 2010).
Arrowsmith celebrates what he calls the inauthenticity in the
writing from the Diaspora, seeing this as a necessity in its evolved
creation. What marks the work genuinely are issues about identity and
unbelonging and its sense of its own difference. It represents the tussle
at the heart of the emerging group to describe themselves and in this is
the shared sense of un-belonging.
The difficulty about claiming ‘Englishness’ is perhaps best
demonstrated by the way most second generation Irish if pushed will
only claim allegiance with the city of their birth, so they become Liv-
erpool-Irish or London-Irish, and at larger group connections such as
the IBRG become part of the Irish in Britain for expediency. “I used to
pity English people who didn’t have this other world” (Whelan 2010)
shows a positive negotiation of a double identity while Carl Tighe, a
second generation Irish writer notes: “When you live at the edge of a
community, alliances and identities are always uncertain. You can feel
the world shifting under you like an irregular sea swell.” (Brady 2004:
80) Born in Birmingham he felt he was perceived as “less [than] the
real thing” and was “not what was required” suggesting that this fun-
damental flaw in existence can never be corrected (80-82).
Wary about claiming one identity over another, a shared sense
of difference from which there is no easy one size fits all identity,
emerges. The second generation might express national identity as a
fluid construct which is responsive to background but which defies
clear definitions. This broken identity or disrupted image allows the
way for different models to emerge (Arrowsmith 2000). Indeed a sub-
version of ‘easy’ national identification is at the heart of the second
186 Moy McCrory
generation who have long existed between two land masses, con-
nected and simultaneously disconnected to both.
If since the eighties Irishness has become more popular and eas-
ier to claim publicly, any trading of descent for gain is rejected out-
right. Ronald Reagan’s attempt to exploit an Irish link – which was so
distant as to be meaningless – prompted this lyric on his visit in 1984.
Hey Ronald Reagan,

I’m Irish I’m pagan,
I’m Black and I’m gay and I’m free.
I’m an environmentalist, non fundamentalist,
Go home and don’t bother me.9
This series of different expressions of self, while they might reflect the
lived experience of the second generation, would be harder to promote
as indicative of background culture. The second generation’s cultural
model while highly adaptive in pragmatic terms has tended to the
more static in described terms. Until comparatively recently the re-
verse might be said of those who remain in Ireland however recent
shifts in populations have seen immigration into Ireland and social
change.
In common the community in Britain shares the disruption and
rediscovery of the language and the power of the word. The Irish own
a crazy jumped up English. It still has not settled down. In Boland’s
phrase the new language which superseded Gaelic is shown as being
worn like a scar which will heal “after a while” (Boland 1991: 78).
Maura Dooley, in her poem ‘Second Generation’ talks about the
same scar but relocates it into the general past as the older culture
rises to the surface, in this case of the skin: “we want to feel this
greenness like a skin,/to scratch it when it itches, watch it heal.”
(2000: 1170) But she concludes, the loss is weighty, the return impos-
sible and the sense of unbelonging is a constant echo, no matter how
we attempt to reclaim the past, it will not reclaim us:
9
Lyrics ascribed to The Jacket Potatoes, an Irish band who played regularly in
The Favourite, Holloway Rd, and North London during the 80’s (BBC radio
programme 2004).
No siege of Ennis in the Irish Club, […]

can net us back across that narrow passage,
nor make this town, a place we can call home. (1170)
But rather than relive scar tissue and go forward into a “passable imi-
tation of what went before”, to use Boland’s poignant phrase, it is the
second generation who cannot simply remain as static passable imita-
tions of the ‘real’ thing whatever ‘real’ might be. If the Famine is the
historic site “where the battle over the meaning of the Irish past is
fought” (Klein 2007: 60) and as such is reinterpreted by each genera-
tion, the Irish future may equally be fought in those communities who
took the traditional route away from Ireland, but who kept and simul-
taneously re-inscribed those versions of home wherever they settled.
Rather than exist in a state of silence and ‘non existence’, second gen-
eration writers have to find a way of absorbing fluid boundaries,
where the past is ever present but its significance may be residual to
the realities of every day experience. However the practical intelli-
gence which is a necessity in immigrant communities allows those
‘outsiders’ to occupy a continuously questioning place where new ex-
pressions of identity and self can be realised, rather than settle for
‘passable imitation(s)’.
188 Moy McCrory
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SECTION C
LITERARY LANDSCAPES:
URBANISM, ECOLOGY AND
THE RURAL
“And I found myself looking through another window
at a darker landscape inhabited by neither the present
nor the past”:
Recovering Identity in A Month in the Country
Elsa Cavalié
Abstract: A Month in the Country (1980) – J.L. Carr’s best known work – retraces the
memories of Tom Birkin, a Great War veteran, as he spends a blissful summer in Ox-
godby, Yorkshire, in order to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the vil-
lage church. The novella then follows Birkin’s artistic progress, his friendship with
fellow veteran Charles Moon, and the bonds he develops with the local community.
Situated somewhere between L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953) and Pat Barker’s
Regeneration Trilogy (1991), A Month in the Country is a curiously hybrid work, still
imbued by nostalgia for the comforts of England’s ‘green and pleasant land’, but also
borrowing the staple elements of postmodernist novels. Through the meticulous res-
toring of the hidden 14th century mural and the frequent walks in the English country-
side, Birkin tries to get in touch with a part of his identity that was buried under the
fields of the Somme. Indeed, the novella emphasizes the fact that the First World War
made the soldiers foreigners in their own country and probes into the ways in which
personal and national identity may be restored, and trauma ‘worked through’.
Key names and concepts: J.L. Carr - Michel Foucault - Dominick LaCapra - the First
World War - heterotopia - landscape - lieux de mémoire - memory - pastoral - trauma.
J.L. Carr’s novel A Month in the Country was published in 1980, three
years before Graham Swift’s Waterland, a novel which also centres on
the exploration of the British countryside and similarly questions the
writing of personal and national history. Like its more famous coun-
terpart, Carr’s novella (it is only 80 pages long in its British edition)
revisits a pastoral topos deeply linked with the concept of Englishness,
that of the ‘perfect summer’ glorifying the English countryside, a
theme which can be traced back to Edward Thomas’s and Siegfried
Sassoon’s poetry (“O thrilling sweet, my joy, when life was free/And
194 Elsa Cavalié
all the paths led on from hawthorn-time/Across the carolling meadows

into June” [Sassoon 1983: 106]) but which has remained very much
alive, from L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between, to Ian McEwan’s Atone-
ment (2001) and Pat Barker’s Regeneration Trilogy. Like Thomas and
Sassoon, but also McEwan, Swift, and Barker, Carr interweaves the
evocation of a pastoral, regenerative countryside with the distress of
shell-shocked veterans, as if the two worlds, in their almost ontologi-
cal opposition (at least in British minds) were two sides of the same
coin.1 As Paul Fussell famously put it in The Great War and Modern
Memory: “Recourse to the pastoral is an English mode of both fully
gauging the calamities of the Great War and imaginatively protecting
oneself against them.” (Fussell 1975: 235)
A Month in the Country is the autobiographical story of Tom
Birkin, a Great War veteran who comes to a remote Yorkshire village
named Oxgodby in order to restore a recently discovered fresco in the
village church. There, Birkin meets Charles Moon – fellow veteran
and archaeologist – who has been hired in order to find the grave of
one Piers Hebron. Birkin becomes friends with the villagers and falls
in love with the vicar’s wife, although his love will eventually remain
unfulfilled, another of the fond memories he will cherish for the rest
of his life. It is in art, not love, that Birkin finds fulfilment: the fresco
he thought to be mediocre is revealed to be a stunning work of art,
even though the restorer remains puzzled by the identity of the falling
man represented in the bottom right hand corner of the fresco, a mys-
tery that brings dynamic suspense to the novel.
In order to depict Birkin’s gradual process of recovery, this
chapter will first analyse the stereotypical depiction of the English
countryside as a comforting haven soothing the broken psyche of the
veterans. Then it will evoke the English landscape as a “shard of the
past” (Nora 1989: 12) or, according to Foucault’s terminology, a hete-
rotopia. The chapter argues that it is only through a heterotopia within
the heterotopia (the fresco inside the church) that apparently incom-
patible spaces open up an access to what J. Hillis-Miller names the
1
In Regeneration Sassoon fictionally opposes the relief provided by the English
countryside when coming back from the Somme front: “He remembered the
silvery sounds of shaken wheat, the shimmer of light on the stalks. He’d given
anything to be out there, away from the stuffiness of the carriage, the itch and
constriction of his uniform.” (Barker 1992: 6)
Recovering Identity in A Month in the Country 195
“atopical” (1995: 52), a place that is everywhere and nowhere, and

that allows Birkin to recompose his identity. Indeed, only through the
uncovering of that ‘other space’, or ‘space other’, will Birkin be able
to revisit the battlefields of France and recover a sense of his own
identity.
In his preface to the novel, Carr explains that he intended to
write A Month to the Country as a homage to Hardy: “[M]y idea was
to write an easy-going story, a rural idyll along the lines of Hardy’s
Under the Greenwood Tree” (2000 [1980]: xxi), thus inscribing it in
the tradition of English pastoral literature. Indeed, the opening of the
novel, where Birkin’s train stops in a quiet village during a peaceful
June afternoon, might remind the reader of Edward Thomas’s ‘Adle-
strop’ where a train stops in a West Country village during the sum-
mer, causing the poet to marvel at the beauty of the landscape: “One
afternoon/Of heat the express-train drew up there/Unwontedly. It was
late June.” (Thomas 2004: 27) However, very much unlike Thomas’s
poem, Birkin’s first vision of Oxgodby is far from idyllic: rain is pour-
ing down, he has no idea where the church is and consequently finds
himself lost in the small village. Furthermore, because of the nor-
therners’ thick accent, Birkin does not understand a word they are say-
ing: “‘Thoo’s ga-ing ti git rare an’ soaaked reet doon ti thi skin,
maister,’ he said and shut the window in my face.” (3) Carr’s attempt
at recreating the local accent, by no means meant in a derogatory
sense as Carr was a proud Yorkshireman himself and believed in the
moral superiority of the North over the South, seems meant to under-
line the fact that Birkin is isolated and alienated from his ‘home coun-
try’ – the South: “If this was a fair sample of northerners, then this
was enemy country.” (3)
The village of Oxgodby itself seems to be in a derelict state that
reflects Birkin’s own mental and emotional strain:
And there was a single building; it turned out to be a dilapidated

farmhouse, its bit of front garden sulking behind a rusting cast-iron
fence. A dog, an Airedale, dragged on its chain, howled half-heartedly
and ran for shelter again. After that, there was a couple of hen-huts
collapsing amongst nettles in the decaying orchard. (5)
The description appears almost exaggerated in its effort to convey a

sense of decay and weariness: rust, the howling dog and the decaying
orchard seem to fit perfectly with what Birkin himself expected to find
196 Elsa Cavalié
in Yorkshire. As in many works of War literature, the landscape ap-

pears to function as a mutable space in which Birkin projects his own
anxiety and trauma, maybe reminding him of the battlefield he has just
left.2
For it is soon obvious that Birkin’s traumatic war-time past is a
burden to him: right from his first morning in Oxgodby, the recurrent
mention of the word field in the description of the landscape hints at
the time Birkin has spent on another ‘field’ – the battlefield. Still,
Birkin’s deep shell-shock appears to wear off when soothed by the
English countryside and the ominous “field” (19) is soon transformed
into a much more welcoming “meadow” (28).3 Moreover, when
Birkin and Moon have become friends, the field even becomes
“Moon’s magic meadow” (28). From grim battlefield to “magic
meadow” the charm surrounding these summer days seems to gradu-
ally endow this remote corner of England with an enchanting, regen-
erative virtue:
Day after day, mist rose from the meadow as the sky lightened and
hedges, barns and woods took shape until, at last, the long curving
back of the hills lifted away from the Plain. It was a sort of stage
magic – “Now you don’t see; indeed there is nothing to see. Now
look!” (61)
Here the English landscape appears to be endowed with magical, oth-

erworldly regenerative virtues. Its apparition every morning is felt as
miracle by Birkin, something supernatural that might be able to coun-
teract the supernaturally horrific experience of the trenches. And, in
retrospect, it seems that the rain that welcomed the weary veteran
must be interpreted as purifying rather than ominous, for the same
2
One can here think of Barker’s trilogy again, and especially of Regeneration,
in which WHR Rivers, witnessing one of his patients, Lieutenant Burns, ex-
perience a regression into trauma, realizes just how the Suffolk coast resem-
bles a battlefield in France: “A resemblance that had merely nagged at him be-
fore returned to his mind with greater force. This waste of mud, these sump
holes reflecting a dim light at the sky, even that tower. It was like France. Like
the battlefields.” (1992: 179)
3
A very British motif that one can find in Sassoon’s and Brooke’s poetry (‘The
Old Vicarage, Granchester’) as well as Larkin’s famous ‘Going, going’: “And
that will be England gone/The shadows, the meadows, the lanes” (Larkin
2003: 133).
landscape he first encountered when arriving from the station is trans-

formed:
And beyond lay the pasture I had crossed on my way from the station
with a bell tent pitched near a stream, then more fields rising towards
a dark rim of hills. And, as it lightened, a vast and magnificent land-
scape unfolded. I turned away; it was immensely satisfying. (19)
Although it may retain a trace of its ‘northerness’ in the “dark rim of

hills” the landscape offers all the conventional attributes of the mythi-
cal English countryside: hills, rolling fields, a stream. One might even
add that although the scene is situated in Yorkshire it belongs to the
‘mythical South Country’ defined by Alun Howkins as an ideological
rather than geographical entity:
[I]t is important to remember […] that the ‘South Country’ rapidly

lost its real existence in the sense that Thomas meant it. What was
substituted were a set of yardsticks of ‘rurality’ by which the observer
judged landscape. Thus Shropshire could be incorporated into the
‘South country’ but Cornwall could not. (Howkins 1986: 63)
Furthermore, one might significantly notice that the final adjective

Birkin uses is “satisfying” – a term not conveying vision but feeling:
nothing in the description attempts at faithfully rendering the visual
details of the landscape and it is precisely that narrative void that
opens up a space of projection for Birkin and the reader. It is this same
visual void which allows one to emotionally invest this indefinite
landscape and project into it what Ford Madox Ford called one’s “own
heart of the Country”: “Each man of us has his own particular heart.”
(2003: 115) This may remind one of Bachelard’s notion of “intimate
immensity” (2004: 193) – a regenerative place where identity may be
rebuilt thanks to the proximity with an ideal landscape.
As Birkin discovers the mythical landscape of timeless En-
glishness, one has the feeling that his summer in the country is a mo-
ment out of the conventional flow of time. For instance, his day off –
spent having a picnic with the villagers in the countryside – poignant-
ly conveys this ambivalent feeling of timelessness and fugacity: “For
me that will always be the summer day of summer days – a cloudless
sky, ditches and roadside deep in grass, poppies, cuckoo pint trees
heavy with leaf, orchards bulging over hedge briars.” (102) One might
incidentally notice the presence of poppies in the description, a dis-
198 Elsa Cavalié
crete but vivid reminder of the battlefield, made emblematic by John

McCrae’s 1918 ‘In Flanders Fields’: “In Flanders fields the poppies
blow/Between the crosses, row on row” (McCrae 2008: 13). Still, the
afternoon might also be considered as what Pierre Nora calls a “shard
of the past” (1989: 17) – expressing the idea that the past is an en-
closed space that cannot be re-created or re-lived through the means of
nostalgic memory.
Yet, the timelessness we evoked seems to be undermined by the
consciousness of death and presents this seemingly perfect summer af-
ternoon as a powerful memento mori:
Then, as the first star rose and swallows turned and twisted above the
bracken, our wagons rumbled down from above the White Horse and
across the Vale towards home: the Sunday School Treat was over.
And when we reached Oxgodby, we heard that Emily Clough
had died this afternoon. (103)
The death of a young girl puts an end to his perfect, idyllic afternoon,
as if only the spectral presence of Death could endow these days with
their unique, magical fleetingness. Similarly at the end of the novel,
the landscape is magnified by the impending coming of autumn: “I
knew now that this landscape was fixed only momentarily. The mar-
vellous weather was nearing its end.” (130) As Paul Fussell notices,
the irruption of death into an Arcadian English landscape is very cha-
racteristic of British Literature: “Skulls juxtaposed with roses could be
conventionally employed as an emblem of the omnipotence of Death,
whose power is not finally to be excluded even from the sequestered,
‘safe’ world of pastoral.” (1975: 246)
Caught between life and death, timelessness and transience, this
suspended moment in time seems to have all the characteristics of
Foucault’s heterochrony – a different time/a time Other – which, ac-
cording to Foucault, is a corollary to the heterotopia:
The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at

a sort of absolute break with their traditional time. This situation
shows us that the cemetery is indeed a highly heterotopic place since,
for the individual, the cemetery begins with this strange heterochrony,
the loss of life, and with this quasi-eternity in which her permanent lot
is dissolution and disappearance. (Foucault 1967)
And it is indeed in a church and a cemetery that Birkin and Moon

work, places that are simultaneously separated from the space of the
living (here, the village and the English countryside) but which are al-
so connected to it, for they belong to what Nora calls lieux de mémoire
(‘sites of memory’, Nora 1989: 7). According to Nora: “[I]n certain
sites […] a sense of historical continuity persists. There are lieux de
mémoire, sites of memory because there are no longer milieux de
mémoire, real environments of memory.” (Nora 1989: 7) The ceme-
tery’s symbolic force is all the greater since War has shattered the tra-
ditional organisation of beliefs and the very existence of God. Birkin’s
sense of being lost in his own country comes from the fact that society
does not provide him with a milieu de mémoire (a “real environment
of memory”): he therefore needs to find a lieu de mémoire favourable
to the reconstruction of his identity. Because England strives to forget
the great massacre of the Somme, Birkin needs a place to mourn and
‘work through’ his trauma.4 As Dominick LaCapra has it: “Mourning
brings the possibility of engaging trauma and achieving a reinvest-
ment, or recathexis of, life which allows one to begin again.” (LaCa-
pra 2001: 66)
Indeed, protected by this ‘other space’ – the heterotopia – the
veterans’ identities can be cured from the sufferings of the trenches
and trauma worked through in order to “begin again” and regenerate
the self. However, Carr is not univocal in his representation of ‘work-
ing through’ trauma, insofar as his novel presents several types of re-
generations. The first of these is achieved through the proximity with
the English landscape, allowing Birkin a symbolical rebirth. His very
first night in Oxgodby is ambiguously presented as a death followed
by a rebirth: “[F]or the first night during many months, I slept like the
dead, and the next morning, awoke very early.” (18) It seems that the
veteran needs to ‘re-live’ or ‘re-enact’ the traumatic events (what La-
4
In Writing History, Writing Trauma, Dominic LaCapra elaborates the concept
of “working through” (as opposed to “acting out”) trauma after Freudian the-
ory: “Working through is an articulatory practice: to the extent one works
through trauma […], one is able to distinguish between past and present and to
recall in memory that something happened to one (or one’s people) back then
while realizing that one is living here and now with opening to the future.”
(2001: 22)
200 Elsa Cavalié
Capra would identify as “acting out”5) in order to work through trau-

ma and be freed from it. The feeling of symbolic rebirth is indeed
reinforced by the strange scene in which, during a hot afternoon, Bir-
kin takes a nap, of all places, on the tomb of one of the villagers fond-
ly referred to as Elijah:
It was here, above Elijah, that normally I sat and ate, looking across to
Moon’s camp, letting summer soak into me – the smell of summer and
summer sounds. Already I felt part of it, not a looker-on like some
casual visitor. […]
So I nudged back my bum and lay flat on the stone table, cov-
ered my eyes with a khaki handkerchief and, doubtlessly groaning
gently, dropped off into a deep sleep. (41)
The ambiguity of Birkin’s ‘resting place’, where he is represented as-

leep, as it were, on top of a dead comrade, offers a strange anamor-
phosis of the horror of the trenches, where that situation was painfully
familiar, an anamorphosis in which one can read another instance of
the process of ‘acting out’ or ‘re-enacting trauma’. As often with
shell-shocked veterans, sleep, meant to soothe and regenerate, is the
privileged site of haunting dreams and nightmares. Although it is the
Great War that sleep is meant to erase, the khaki handkerchief – cov-
ering Birkin’s eyes – points to the difficulty to eliminate it from his
consciousness and to stop seeing things ‘as a soldier’. Despite the
sounds and smells of summer, war still veils his gaze, and sleep is still
described as ‘dropping off’, a verb that could be read as a marker of
the re-enactment of trauma. Birkin’s ‘resting place’ – intermingling
sleep and death – may also remind the reader of Wilfred Owen’s poem
‘A Terre’ evoking the ground of the battlefield as a soft, comfortable
bed: “I shall be better with plants that share/More peaceably the mea-
dow and the shower./Soft rains will touch me” (Owen 1963: 65). De-
spite the positive influence of the English landscape, the battlefield is
still very much present in Birkin’s mind and surroundings. As LaCa-
pra explains it, ‘acting out’ trauma and ‘working through’ it are not
necessarily mutually exclusive processes, and indeed, ‘acting out’ may
be considered as a prerequisite to ‘working though’: “[T]he muting or
mitigation of trauma that is nonetheless recognized and, to some ex-
5
“In acting out, tenses implode, and it is as if one were back there in the past
reliving the traumatic scene.” (LaCapra 2001: 21)
tent, acted out may be a requirement or precondition of working

through problems.” (LaCapra 2001: 71) As the English landscape pro-
vides a first tentative way out of re-enacting trauma, it is the hetero-
topic quality of the place Birkin has chosen that will eventually offer a
basis for ‘working through’ it.
Indeed, the church, the field and the cemetery have another
property belonging to heterotopias: they are “capable of juxtaposing
in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in them-
selves incompatible” (Foucault 1967), for the church might be consi-
dered as an interface between the mythical regenerative English land-
scape and the trenches.
Set a few years after World War I, in 1920 (113), the novel does
not offer any direct images of the battlefield: the Somme, Ypres and
Arras are always represented in absentia, through the silences of Tom
Birkin and the screams of Charles Moon. While it seems that, similar-
ly to the process of talking cure, reconstructing one’s identity and
‘working through’ entail the metaphorical revisiting of the geographi-
cal and metaphorical places of trauma, Carr offers two different pers-
pectives on the psychological aftermath of war and trauma through the
examples of Birkin and Moon. One should however notice that the
two characters are contrasted, not drastically opposed. Although the
reasons for their visits to Oxgodby are similar, their attitudes towards
the war are different: Charles Moon is (officially) searching for the
tomb of one of the influential local heiress’ ancestors (“the grave of
Miss Hebron’s forebear, one Piers Hebron, 1373” [25]), while Tom
Birkin has been hired in order to uncover a medieval Judgement in the
local church. Interestingly enough-h, Moon’s and Birkin’s physical
positions in the church and the yard are related to their respective po-
sitions during the war, which could be considered another form of re-
enactment of the war trauma. From his days in the trenches, Moon has
kept the habit of digging in order to feel safe, just as Birkin does the
opposite and goes to live in the church belfry:
To my astonishment [his tent] was pitched over a pit. “It’s better insu-
lated,” he said. “And besides, it’s like old times: I developed a great
affection for holes. You up your ladder, me down my hole… we’re
survivors.” (28)
202 Elsa Cavalié
Like his way of entering the church and his posture (“[he] stood as
though he’s taken root” [24]), Moon’s relationship to his war memo-
ries is very straightforward insofar as he outright and frankly refuses
to dwell on the trauma. Charles Moon may be considered as a literary
avatar of John Bull: of average height, sturdy, his blue eyes and the
clarity of his voice (22) make him look like a good comrade, a confi-
dante to whom Birkin might start to open up about his war memories.
Still, one may notice “the three holes in his tunic’s shoulders where
his captain’s pips should have been” (24) – discreet war wounds that
underline his being a veteran and emphasize the indelible physical and
emotional scars war inevitably leaves.
Like Moon’s, Birkin’s past as a soldier is revealed in an oblique
way; his too big an overcoat catches the eye while protecting him
from inquisitive looks: “[It was] wonderful material, the real stuff,
thick herring-bone tweed. It reached down to my ankles; its original
owner must have been a well-to-do giant.” (4) Birkin’s overcoat, like
his stammering and his nervous twitches, represent the externalisation
of his experience of war and seem to signal the difficulty in accepting
shell shock which mark him as stuck in the ‘acting out’ phase of trau-
ma. Unlike him, Moon reveals the reasons why he placed his tent on
top of a hole on his very first meeting with Birkin and seems to be
able to verbalize his experience of war: “‘Oh, come on,’ he said. ‘I
don’t need to be told you didn’t catch that twitch on the North-Eastern
Railway, so we may as well start straight away swapping stories about
the same bloody awful place.’” (25) If putting trauma into words is
the first step towards working it out, Moon seems to be more likely
than Birkin to find a new start in Oxgodby.
As the novel unfolds, Moon appears to represent an interme-
diary between the reader and Birkin, who verbalizes what the shell-
shocked veteran cannot bring himself to express. Still, in the same
way Moon the archaeologist refuses to dig in the field he is supposed
to excavate, Moon the veteran has no intention of ‘unearthing’ the re-
mains of his painful war memories. Those should remain buried and
be progressively washed away by time: “I tell myself it will be better
as time passes and it sinks further back.” (97) The ghosts from the past
are to be forgotten: “But I remember them less well now… they’re
dwindling.” (98) The power of shell shock and repression is reflected
in the veterans’ relationship to language, for even Moon cannot direct-
ly name the battlefield: it needs to be referred to through periphrases
(“the same bloody awful place” [25]) – a symbolical distancing from

the reality of war. Indeed, for both veterans striving to emerge from
shell shock, the consciousness of war is frequently encapsulated in pe-
riphrases like “What befell you Over there” (32) or “it came out I’d
been Over There” (88), which underline the ominous capacity of lan-
guage to summon the ghosts of the past.6 Similarly, the aposiopesis in
one of Moon’s comments about Miss Hebron’s brother opens up the
dark vortex of trauma: “Her brother, the Colonel… no, no, Boer War”
(24), as if the Boer War could actually be named, while only uttering
the word ‘Somme’ could render it too close for comfort. Alternately,
one may detect in the same aposiopesis the trace of Birkin’s telling of
the dialogue, hinting at the fact that Moon’s openness in discussing
the war experience was not (yet) shared by his friend.
The unsaid – participating in the First World War’s great mas-
sacre – cannot be written into the text: that liminal place of trauma
brings about what LaCapra describes as “a dissociation of affect and
representation: one disorientingly feels what one cannot represent; one
numbingly represents what one cannot feel” (LaCapra 2001: 42). This
non-place of representation has been defined by J. Hillis-Miller as the
atopical:
[…] a place that is everywhere and nowhere, a place you cannot get to
from here. Sooner or later, in a different way in each case, the effort of
mapping is interrupted by an encounter with the unmappable. The to-
pography and the toponymy in each example, in a different way in
each case, hide an unplaceable place. It was the locus of an event that
never ‘took place’ as a phenomenal happening located in some identi-
fiable spot and therefore open to knowledge. (1995: 7-8)
Confronted with the atopical, Birkin thus refuses to relive the traumat-
ic scenes, as Reverend Keach notices it: “You have come back from a
place where you have seen things beyond belief, things you cannot
talk of yet can’t forget.” (119-20) Therefore, revisiting the space of
trauma needs to be mediated by the contact with another space – the
fresco inside the little church which offers a physical and artistic inter-
6
The names of places and battles themselves might indeed be considered
evocative enough to bring back painful memories from the front. As Sassoon
has it in Barker’s Regeneration: “Language ran out on you, in the end, the
names were left to say it all. Mons, Loos, Ypres, The Somme.” (Barker 1992:
90)
204 Elsa Cavalié
face between past and present. One might consider the fresco a meta-
phor, or mise en abyme, of the recreation of the past in the novel.
Representing history means bringing the picture in the fresco back to
life, an image of the English past which appears simultaneously close
and remote from Birkin (and the reader) as it is impossible for the art-
ist (Birkin the church restorer or Carr the novelist) to know when his
task is finally complete.7 Then, the unmappable limit between past and
present connects time and space for the veteran in order to reunite “af-
fect and representation” (LaCapra 2001: 42).
The church in the middle of the fields indeed functions as a he-
terotopia within the heterotopia and recreates the comforting familiar-
ity of a bygone past. Thus, when Birkin discovers the baluster of the
church, his youth instantly comes back to him:
There, almost scraping my nose, was a baluster. And I began laughing.

Although I’d never seen one before, I recognized it immediately from
good old Bannister-Fletcher, our bible in Miss Witherpen’s English
Architecture class. “Draw a baluster,” she used to chide. “Go on,
never mind fiddling about with fancy Corinthian capitals – draw an
English baluster.” (21)
The baluster seems to represent the epitome of Englishness and to of-

fer a direct access into Birkin’s peaceful pre-war days. According to
Foucault, “[h]eterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and
closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable” (Foucault
1967). In the novel, Birkin’s physical position – isolated on top of the
scaffolding, where no one can join him but where he can be seen and
communicate with people (“So, even if King George came, he’d have
to look down on Mr Moon and up to me. Absolutely no exceptions”
[36]) – very much illustrates that concept. Indeed, while somewhat
‘isolated’ from other human beings, Birkin is still in contact with the
regenerative landscape evoked before: “It was very pleasant sitting on
the boards, leaning against a wall, because through my window I still
could see the hills heaving up like the back of some great sea-creature,
dark woods washing down its sides into the Vale.” (19)
7
An idea that can similarly be found in Julian Barnes’s Talking It Over, where
the heroine also is an art restorer: “It’s an artistic rather than a scientific deci-
sion, when to stop […]. There’s no ‘real’ picture under there waiting to be re-
vealed.” (Barnes 1991: 122)
As he begins to work on the fresco, Birkin finds himself in a

liminal space – a heterotopia poised between the present and the past:
You know how it is when a tricky job is going well because you’re do-
ing things the way they should be done, when you’re working in
rhythm and feel a reassuring confidence that everything’s unravelling
naturally and all will be right in the end. (46)
Both values around which the space is built – the tranquil rhythm of
the craftsman and the satisfaction found in a well-executed job – seem
dated and reassuring and thus point to the heterotopic function of the
space in which Birkin finds himself in. While working on the uncover-
ing of the Judgement, Birkin discovers what Foucault describes as
“another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours
is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled” (Foucault 1967) – that of the
memorial and artistic puzzle of the fresco where the key to his identity
seems to lie: “It would be like a jigsaw – a face, a hand, a shoe, here a
bit and there a bit.” (43) The patient reconstruction of the bodies of the
characters in the painting may be thought of as exorcising the scenes
of horrific dismemberment experienced in France and thus metaphori-
cally bringing together the pieces of his identity in a process of ‘work-
ing through’ trauma.
Still, in the first weeks of work, Birkin appears to be opaque to
himself, unaware of the double meaning of his quest, and it is once
again Moon who notices the proximity between the fresco and the ex-
perience of the trenches:
“Amazing! Do you know, in some ways, it brings back the whole

bloody business in France – particularly the winters? Those red even-
ings when the barrage was starting up and each man wondered if this
was to be the night…” (76)
Yet, it seems that even before Moon verbalizes the ‘uncanny’ feeling
of familiarity, Birkin had had intuitions of the double meaning of his
work, for instance when he described the dammed in the fresco as
“fire fodder” (74) – a phrase that recalls the terrifying feeling of being
nothing but “cannon fodder” evoked in the first words of Wilfred
Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’: “What passing-bells for these
who die as cattle ?/Only the monstrous anger of the guns” (Owen
206 Elsa Cavalié
1963: 44).8 Still, once the parallel between the vision of hell as de-
picted in the fresco and the carnage of the trenches has been estab-
lished, their similarity becomes obvious. Birkin’s patient uncovering
of the fresco reveals “torrents of human flesh” that very clearly point
out the dual symbolic value of the fresco: “So each day, I released a
few more inches of a seething cascade of bones and worm-riddled vi-
tals frothing over the fiery weir.” (74)
Becoming an artist thus allows Birkin to escape his condition as
a victim and, through the fresco, to recreate a scene where he has the
power to preside over the destiny of men who are (literally) in front of
him. To draw a parallel with a more famous war novel – Pat Barker’s
Regeneration – the passivity felt by the men at the front seems to have
been the most painful element: “The war that had promised so much
in the way of ‘manly’ activities had actually delivered ‘feminine’ pas-
sivity, and on a scale that their mothers and sisters had scarcely
known. No wonder they broke down.” (Barker 1991: 107-8) Conse-
quently, ‘doing things’, instead of just being subjected to the implaca-
ble unfolding of events opens the path towards psychological recov-
ery. Trusting his artistic knowledge, Birkin soon guesses that the fres-
co he is uncovering is, in fact, a Last Judgement, and, in order to con-
firm his hunch, decides to start his restoration work with the figure of
Christ – usually situated at the centre of such a fresco. And while he
actually discovers a Christ in majesty, Birkin is, for the first time, sur-
prised by the fresco: he does not find the expected “cinnabar” (33) on
the lips of a Christ proving to be very different from what he foresaw.
The ‘modernity’ of the figure is indeed striking: “This was no cata-
logue Christ, insufferably ethereal. This was a wintry hard-liner. Jus-
tice, yes there would be justice. But not mercy.” (33) The harshness of
Christ’s features, the feeling that mercy has disappeared from the
world, resonate with Birkin’s war experience. Oxgodby’s Christ does
not exude benevolence and compassion, and, because of that, can
somewhat justify the horrors of war: “This was the Oxgodby Christ,
uncompromising… no, more – threatening. ‘This is what you did to
me. And, for this, many shall suffer the torment, for thus it was with
me.’” (33-4) Through the representation of Christ, Birkin finds a rea-
8
Freud defines the Uncanny as “something that was familiar to the Psyche and
was estranged from it only through being repressed” (Freud 2003: xlii), it is
often evoked in the ‘presence’ of ghosts.
son for his own sufferings, an almost divine justification of the in-
comprehensible carnage of the Somme in a world where God seems to
have abandoned men.
The uncanny emotional proximity to the fresco Birkin experi-
ences thus provokes an interest in the Last Judgement that turns into
an obsession (“Bringing back that dead man’s apocalyptic picture into
daylight obsessed me” [47]) for through it, the young man literally
widens his horizons: “It was like a window in a filthy wall which
every day or two, opened a square foot or so wider.” (46) The window
opens up on a wealth of colours – contrasting with the greys and
browns associated with the landscape of the trenches – which soothes
the young man’s tormented soul. The vitality of the reds and blues
breathes life into him, and replace the “cascade of bones and worm-
riddled vitals” with a torrent of colours: “A tremendous waterfall of
colour, the blues of the apex falling then seething into a turbulence of
red; like all truly great works of art, hammering you with its whole be-
fore beguiling you with its parts.” (75) The re-discovery of the beauty
of the world – however close to its horrors – regenerates Birkin’s psy-
che and allows him to stop escaping his memories in order to be fi-
nally able to put the ineffable into words, when questioned by Alice
Keach (the vicar’s wife):
“Do you believe in hell, Mr Birkin?”

Now that was a thought! Hell? Passchendaele had been hell.
Bodies split, heads blown off, grovelling fear, shrieking fear, unspeak-
able fear! The World made mud!
[…] “Then what about hell on earth”, she said.
I told her I’d seen it and lived there and that, mercifully, they
usually left an exit open. (95)
If hell seems to belong to an improbable future for Mrs Keach, it ex-

ists in a very concrete way in Birkin’s past. The triple repetition of the
word ‘fear’ brings the three qualifiers (“grovelling”, “shrieking”, “un-
speakable”) into semantic collision: the fear Birkin felt in the trenches
is defined as simultaneously silent and ineffable (“unspeakable”) but
also painfully loud (“shrieking”). It is therefore both indescribable and
personified – a presence lurking in the shadows of one’s conscience
ready to leap out unexpectedly. In Paschaendale – “the World made
mud” – Birkin’s identity was unbound and he became opaque to him-
208 Elsa Cavalié
self as he experienced the “dissociation of affect and representation”

described by LaCapra. The man, the soldier and the artist could no
longer be one therefore causing a war-induced ‘schizophrenia’. As
Sassoon explains it in Barker’s Regeneration: “‘It was like being
three different people and they all wanted to go different ways.’”
(Barker 1991: 35)
Nevertheless, this split identity entails a closeness with the
painter of the fresco – the mysterious medieval artist whose footsteps
Birkin follows in: “But also about the nameless man who’d stood
where I stood. Not his technical abilities although, quite properly,
these were extremely interesting to me. […] No it was his quirks
which really fascinated me.” (91) Intrigued by the “quirks” of the
painter, Birkin tries to solve the mystery of his own identity and, at the
same time, to understand why one of the characters of the Judgement
is represented with a crescent-shaped scar on his forehead: “And he, I
could have sworn, was a portrait – a crescent shaped scar on his brow
made this almost certain.” (74)
In the last pages of the novel, the mystery of the fresco is
brought full circle by the discovery of the falling man’s identity:
Moon unearths Piers Hebron’s tomb in the churchyard and it is dis-
covered that he, the mysterious character in the fresco and the painter
are, in fact, the same person. Yet, even at that crucial moment, it is
once again Moon who enlightens Birkin:
“But first we’ll climb your ladder and have a look at his face before it
fell off.”
Do you know, until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to me that
this bundle of bones was my falling man. (127)
Piers Hebron’s triple identity – soldier, painter and character in his

own fresco – fascinatingly reflects Birkin’s triple identity – soldier,
artist, and character in his own novel. Having finally ‘brought togeth-
er’ Piers’s three identities endows Birkin with a bittersweet sense of
completion, for the fleeting moment of wholesomeness soon gives
way to the consciousness of an inescapable ending. Yet, as Rosemary
McGerr notices, the recovering one’s identity cannot mean a reverting
to an original, prelapsarian state: “Like their search for the medieval
past, their personal recovery does not completely restore an original
state.” (2005: 358) Just like it is not possible to ‘bring back’ the past
in the fresco, the part of his identity that has been shattered by time
and suffering is now irretrievable: “It simply isn’t possible to return a
five hundred-year old wall painting to its original state. At best, I
aimed at approximation, uniformity, something that looked right.”
(46) To quote Pat Barker, whose Regeneration trilogy hinges on very
similar themes: “Regeneration is very substantial, you get a lot of sen-
sation back, but at the same time, regeneration is never complete.”
(Barker 2001, video Interview)
When uncovering the mystery of Piers Hebron’s identity, Tom
Birkin recovers a sense of his own identity – shattered by the war. In
that process, the English landscape plays a crucial part, for it offers
both a protective space in which to recover from one’s psychological
wounds and an opportunity to safely revisit traumatic events. Still, it is
only through the mediation of the fresco – an interface between two
countries, England and France – and two periods – the past and the
present – that Birkin is able to face the events that haunt him and to
put his trauma into words.
The brevity of Carr’s novella – mirroring the fleetingness of
Birkin’s summer in Oxgodby – makes it a fascinating object, halfway
between nostalgia and postmodernity. Although it rests on familiar
themes, establishing the bygone magic of Englishness, it does surpris-
ingly not advocate an open, regressive nostalgia. As the elderly ver-
sion of Birkin has it at the end of the novel:
We can ask and ask but we can’t have again what once seemed ours
forever – the way things looked, that church alone in the fields, a bed
on a belfry floor, a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved
face. They’ve gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass. (135)
Reminiscent of L.P. Hartley’s famous opening to The Go Between

(“The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there”
[2000: 5]), the ending of Carr’s novel underlines the pain felt when
youth is irretrievably lost and creates a literary heterotopia: a closed
and open space where past territories are both visible and inaccessible.
210 Elsa Cavalié
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Beyond the Gaps:
Postmodernist Representations of the Metropolis
Monica Germanà
Abstract: This chapter investigates representations of London from the late twentieth
century to the other side of the millennial threshold; the complex layers of the urban
palimpsest are explored in relation to Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, Martin Amis’s
London Fields, Emma Tennant’s Two Women of London, Alan Moore’s graphic novel
From Hell and Michael Winterbottom’s film Wonderland. Despite the nihilistic stance
that many texts appear to propose, this analysis demonstrates that traces of redemption
are also visible in many of these postmodernist representations of London. The meta-
morphic city thus becomes a paradoxical dimension where metropolitan lives, though
apparently entrenched in the claustrophobic space of their urban experience, may give
in to the magical openness of chance. Moreover, beyond the spectral gaps, a glimpse
of the ‘real’ may appear unexpectedly.
Key names and concepts: London - city - metropolis - postmodernism - psychogeo-

graphy.
Photographs of disappeared humans, victims of the latest outrage, multiply across

plywood fences that protect the latest grand project. Life drains from the image
like hope from a dying eye. Memory-prints of the lost are arranged, in the hope
that such a ritual will restore the missing person, the loved one: daughter, brother,
husband, father. […] In our present climate of shoulder-shrugging amnesia, we
have memorials to memorials, information posters telling us where the original
slab has been stored. Heritage replaces the memories which should be passed on,
anecdotally, affectionately, from generation to generation, by word of mouth.
(Sinclair, London: City of Disappearances 2006: 2)
It’s so cool when the heat is on

And when it’s cool it’s so wicked
We just keep melting into one
Just like the tribes before us did,
I love this concrete jungle still
With all its sirens and its speed
The people here united will
Create a kind of London breed.
(Zephaniah, ‘The London Breed’ 2001)
214 Monica Germanà
To any writer the metropolitan space is simultaneously a gift and a

curse. On one hand, the city “is a text that can be read”, as Dana Ar-
nold reminds us, “and is open to multiple and varied interpretations
which can explore the resonance between different discourses relevant
to social and cultural theory” (2000: xix). On the other, resisting
monolithic interpretations, the city’s multilayered palimpsest is an or-
ganic entity, but also “a labyrinth”, as Peter Ackroyd puts it, “half of
stone and half of flesh” (2001: 2). Disorienting as the city space may
be, the maze-like structure of the metropolis conceals, Elizabeth Wil-
son notes, its paradoxical semantic essence:
This recurring image, of the city as maze, as having a secret centre,

contradicts that other and equally common metaphor for the city as
labyrinthine and centreless. […] Yet one never retraces the same
pathway twice, for the city is in a constant process of change, and thus
becomes dreamlike and magical, yet also terrifying in the way a dream
can be. (1992: 3)
Incorporating the architectural layers of past and present times, the

metropolitan space is ambivalent in its defiance of linear chronology.
Janus-faced, looking simultaneously to the past and the future, the city
rejects categorical approaches to its topographical syntax: “[T]here are
only imagined Londons”, Pamela Gilbert argues, “and the work of un-
derstanding them is not best served by easy assumptions about fictive
versus factual discourse or ‘art’ versus science, journalism, popular
culture, or what have you.” (2002: 3) Viewed in terms of its fluctuat-
ing boundaries, London reflects Donald’s notion of the modern city,
devoid of any ontological coherence outside the realm of narrative re-
presentation:
To put it polemically, there is no such a thing as a city. Rather the city

designates the space produced by the interaction of historically and
geographically specific institutions, social relations of production and
reproduction, practices of government, forms and media of communi-
cation, and so forth. By calling this diversity ‘the city’, we ascribe to it
a coherence or integrity. The city, then, is above all a representation.
(quoted in Bocock/Thompson 1992: 427)
Resisting the linearity of chronological narrative, London, is, simulta-

neously entrenched in human perceptions of time and space: “The city
is the artificial environment par excellence” Lawrence Phillips rightly
remarks, though “perceptions change while the physical structure that
expresses them remains until reformulated and reconstructed” (2006:

4). Unsurprisingly, the tension produced by the relationship of the me-
tropolis with its complex layered space and historical past, therefore,
becomes the subject matter of a very prolific literary and artistic pro-
duction and a challenging field for the cultural historian and re-
searcher.
This essay looks back to selected late-twentieth-century repre-
sentations of London; the complex layers of the urban and historical
palimpsests will be explored in relation to fiction, with particular em-
phasis on Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (1985) Martin Amis’s London
Fields (1989) and Emma Tennant’s Two Women of London (1989). In
addition to literary fiction, this analysis will also take into considera-
tion other media of representation, including Alan Moore’s graphic
novel From Hell (1989-1999) and Michael Winterbottom’s film Won-
derland (1999). Viewed in postmodernist terms, in these historical and
aesthetic renditions, the metropolis is a space that defies its own
status, a simulacral hyperreal with no real referent. As a hybrid space
caught in a continuous process of self-negotiation, London is the
backdrop for broken identities and dysfunctional relationships. De-
spite such negative premises, this essay will argue that traces of re-
demption and regeneration are also visible in these significant repre-
sentations of postmodern London. The metamorphic city thus be-
comes the paradoxical site where metropolitan identities, though ap-
parently entrenched in the claustrophobic space of their urban lives,
may give in to the magical openness of chance. Moreover, beyond the
spectral gaps of the postmodern city, a glimpse of the ‘real’ may ap-
pear unexpectedly.
In his study on literature and the city, Richard Lehan’s outline
of the major theories on the origin of cities reveals the dual foundation
of the first human settlements: on one hand, certain favourable condi-
tions determined food surplus, in turn allowing for differentiation of
labour, the beginning of trading transactions, and consequently the
abandonment of a nomadic life; on the other, the development of spiri-
tual forms of culture, which focussed on the necessity to worship and
be close to burial sites (1998: 13), generated the need for stationary
modes of living. The early city, therefore, revolves around pre-
capitalist forms of commerce and a notion of belonging distinctly tied
to the worship of the dead. Though cities developed and grew in size
throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, it is in the Enlighten-
216 Monica Germanà
ment that the modern city has its ideological and intellectual roots, as
Lehan proposes: “Medieval-Renaissance London ended at 2:00 A.M.
on Sunday, September 2, 1666.” (26) It is after the Great Fire that
London enters modernity, largely according to the vision of Sir Chris-
topher Wren, whose original plan to shift the centre of the city from
St. Paul’s Cathedral to the Bank of England, though unaccomplished,
is suggestive of a vision that departs from “the old idea of the spiritual
city, founded as a sacred burial place with the sanctuary in the center”
(26). While the modern city retains some of the Enlightenment’s uto-
pian ideals, it also incorporates the seed of capitalist economy and im-
perial hegemony, both determining factors in its development:
The city came into being when a surplus of food allowed a diversity of
tasks. Diversity is a key to urban beginnings and continuities, and di-
versity is also the snake in the urban garden, challenging systems of
order and encouraging disorder and chaos. And as the city reached out
into the hinterland and eventually beyond itself in the name of empire,
more was demanded of the urban center. The industrial city brought
with it urban pollution and slums: smokestacks became a way of life.
The urban crowd, unstable and volatile, made city life increasingly
unpredictable. (8)
The following phase, the postmodern (and postcolonial) metropolis, is

simultaneously an extension and a reaction to the modern city. Centre-
less by definition, the postmodern metropolis is an alienated, dehu-
manising space: “[U]rban activity becomes more abstract and ‘unreal’
as power operates from hidden sources” (287). The metropolis be-
comes, in John Hannigan’s words, a “fantasy city”, distinguished by
the presence of a “theme”, the exploitation of “brand”, 24-7 activity, a
modular approach to its topography and planning, and its fundamen-
tally ‘solipsistic’ approach to human relationships. Quintessentially
postmodern, the “fantasy city” “is construed around technologies of
simulation, virtual reality and the thrill of the spectacle” (Hannigan
1998: 4). Predominantly concerned with the development of the
American metropolis, epitomised by the centreless topography of Los
Angeles, Hannigan’s study nevertheless is relevant to a postmodernist
reading of London, particularly, as seen later, in relation to Amis’s
London Fields, Tennant’s Two Women of London and Winterbottom’s
Wonderland. More than just a backdrop to these narratives, London
offers a powerful metropolitan subtext that subverts its own sense of
origin and authenticity, reflecting its evolution from “the industrial
metropolis of the nineteenth century” into “the consumerist city of the

contemporary moment” (Phillips 2006: 3). The problematic relation-
ship with the past emerges as key preoccupation with the millennial
anxieties surrounding postmodernist representations of the metropolis
in the historiographic metafictions of Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor and
Moore’s From Hell.
In engaging with the most infamous of London’s historical
revenants, From Hell, which takes its title from a letter the alleged
Ripper sent along with half a human kidney to the Chairman of the
Whitechapel Vigilance Committee on 16 October 1888, invests the
Ripper murders with a symbolic resonance that exceeds the historical
boundaries of the actual events. Moore’s version of the story does not
concentrate on the mystery behind the ripper’s identity: the reader
knows from Chapter Four that the murders are the responsibility of Dr
William Gull, Queen Victoria’s physician and a freemason. Asked by
her majesty to ‘silence’ five Whitechapel prostitutes, aware that her
grandson, Prince Albert Victor – also known as ‘Prince Eddie’ – had
had an affair with Annie Cook, a shop girl, Gull interprets the queen’s
words to suit his own ‘mission’: that of restoring masculine/
Apollonian power by exercising control over its dialectic counterpart,
the feminine/Dyonisiac force, by taking the five women’s lives in a
series of highly ritualised murders. The history of the city of London
(and indeed the world), Gull elucidates, is an ongoing dialectic battle
between these two principles. As Moore acknowledges in the 2006
edition of the collected episodes of the serialised graphic novel, the
royal conspiracy plot derives from Stephen Knight’s Jack the Ripper:
The Final Solution (1977) (Moore/Campbell 2006: Appendix, 1), but
the notion of Gull’s engagement with the dark energy of the city
draws significantly from Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat (1975) (Moore/
Campbell 2006: Appendix, 11). The section ‘Nicholas Hawksmoor,
His Churches’ in Sinclair’s narrative poem is central to Moore’s psy-
chogeographical reading of certain focal points or, in Sinclair’s words
“sources of occult power” (1995: 15), including the magical align-
ments of Hawksmoor’s six churches, and particularly Christchurch in
Spitalfields, “magnet to the archetypal murder myth of the late 19th
century” (1995: 22). The church appears sublimely erected in Eddie
Campbell’s drawing towards the end of Chapter Four (Moore/
Campbell 2006: 32), and captioned by Gull’s explanatory commentary
218 Monica Germanà
Here’s Hawksmoor’s most affecting church, his creed of “Terrour and

Magnificence” most forcefully expressed. Its tyranny of line enslaves
the nearby streets, forever in its shade. Its angles trick the eye, seem
from a distance flat then swell upon approach… Its tower about to
topple forwards like some monstrous corpse… Its atmosphere enve-
lopes Spitalfields, casts shadow-pictures on the minds of those whose
lives are spent within its sight. (2006: 32)
In fact, Hawksmoor’s imposing designs, along with other important

topographic references – including the spectral residue of Boudica’s
incendiary wrath in the ancient wall of London (61 AD) and the site of
the Radcliff Murders (1811), the Isle of Dogs – contribute to the no-
tion of London as haunted territory where evil forces transcend time
and are perennially at work. But Gull’s journey through the streets of
London, whose dark, ominous character is rendered in Campbell’s
dark etching-style drawings, reminiscent in style of some of the illus-
trations used in Punch magazine and other publications at the time of
the murders, simultaneously subverts the linearity of a conventional
historical narrative. The specific reference to James Hinton’s notion of
time as fourth dimension – “all times coexist in the stupendous whole
of eternity” (Moore/Campbell 2006: 12), an idea which is also self-
consciously embedded in the visually spatialised narrative of the
graphic novel, exceeds the psychogeographical reading of the city to
embrace a universal interpretation of human history. The notion that
“[t]ime is a human illusion” leads to a definition of history in the
paradoxical terms of a space-less architecture: “There is not space.
There is not time and therefore nothing moves, but only is” (Moore/
Campbell 2006: 12, 14). In broader terms, and in relation to humanist
notions of historical progression, such theory foreshadows a disturb-
ing conclusion, as noted by Alexandra Warwick:
In the context of Jack the Ripper, Brady, Myra Hindley and Peter Sut-
cliffe this comes close to suggesting that the sexual murder of women
and children is somehow a metaphysical inevitability that has hap-
pened and will always happen, refusing any social or cultural account-
ability for such events. (2007: 83)
The sequence of panels depicting the crimes of ‘Monster’ Renwick

Williams (1788), the so-called Halifax Slasher (1938), Ian Brady and
Myra Hindley (1963) underpin a notion of inescapable evil throughout
the history of mankind, a thesis also (tenuously, perhaps) supported by
Moore’s emphasis on the repetitive patterns in the names of those in-

volved: the name Sutcliffe, for instance, belongs to both the first al-
leged victim of the Halifax slasher and, in more recent times, the
Yorkshire ripper Peter Sutcliffe. That the ripper murders ensconce a
trans-chronological significance is made explicit by the link, amongst
the others, established between the chronology of the Whitechapel
murders and the conception of Europe’s most evil offspring, Adolf
Hitler, born on 20 April 1889, just short of eight months after Polly
Nichols’ murder on 31 August 1888. Most significant, however, is the
chronological disruption that in Chapter Ten transports Gull from the
nineteenth-century East End house where he has been mutilating Mary
Kelly’s body to a late twentieth-century office space. Here Gull’s ad-
dress to the workers, who appear to be self-absorbed in the apathetic
world of personal computer technology, appears as a tirade against
modernity and twentieth-century disaffection:
With all your shimmering numbers and your lights, think not to be in-
ured to history. Its black root succours you. It is inside you.
Are you asleep to it, that cannot feel its breath upon your neck,
nor see what soaks its cuffs?
See me! Wake up and look upon me! I am come amongst you.
I am with you always! (2006: 21)
The vision suggests that, while Gull is responsible for Mary Kelly’s
physical demise, he also paradoxically, consigns her to eternity,
through the fame acquired as the last fatal victim of Jack the Ripper.
Simultaneously, the symbolic scattering of the ashes of Kelly’s heart
signals the beginning of modernity: “For better or worse, the twentieth
century. I have delivered it” claims Gull after the ritual (2006: 33). As
the content of the story points to the problematic loss of authenticity in
the age of postmodern simulation, so does the form of From Hell pur-
posely deconstructs the logic foundations of a linear historical narra-
tive, deliberately moving away from the ‘whodunit’ model of many
Ripperologist narratives – a parody of which is presented in Appendix
II, ‘Dance of the gull catchers’ – and eroding the foundations of his-
torical knowledge: “There never was a Jack the Ripper. Mary Kelly
was just an unusually determined suicide. Why don’t we leave it
there?” (2006: Appendix II, 23).
Moore’s choice is subverted by the more conservative approach
to the mystery of Jack the Ripper in the Hughes Brothers’ (2001) film
220 Monica Germanà
adaptation, which, glamorising the sensational appeal of the story,

simplifies the novel’s complex scope, as indicated by Iain Sinclair’s
review: “What Moore proposes and what the film necessarily refutes,
is the belief that the past is unknowable” (Sinclair 2002). Moreover, as
Sinclair does not fail to note in his review, the film seems to buy into
the sensationalist marketing that has made of Jack the Ripper a Lon-
don theme – and perhaps even a brand, to refer to Hannigan’s notion
of “fantasy city” cited earlier – a packaged version of history ready for
the tourist market and general customers: “The Ten Bells pub, where
the movie prostitutes meet and drink, offers ‘Hot Toddies’ and leaflets
for Ripper tours” (Sinclair 2002). Along with their place in crime his-
tory as the archetypal serial killings, the Whitechapel murders become
the epitome of the postmodernist commodification of history and, to
use Fredric Jameson’s phrase, “the cultural logic of late capitalism”
(Jameson 1992). Depicting the legacy of the Whitechapel murders as
the combination of relentless exploitation of female bodies in the Ten
Bells pub turned pole-dancing club and the gentrification of Spital-
fields, the final frames of From Hell confirm a bleak vision of the
metropolitan space.
Similarly drawing from Sinclair’s psychogeographical interpre-
tation of Hawksmoor’s churches, Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, is another
example, prior to Moore’s From Hell, of postmodernist manipulation
of the city’s historical palimpsest. The narrative revolves around a
dual plot, set two hundred and fifty years apart, but sharing the pattern
of some mysterious murders committed in the proximity of the six
churches designed by Hawksmoor following the Parliamentary Act of
1711: St. Alfege’s (Greenwich), St. George’s (Bloomsbury), Christ-
church (Spitalfields), St. George in the East (Wapping), St. Mary
Woolnoth (City) and St. Anne’s (Limehouse). Set in the eighteenth
century is the story of the architect – renamed Nicholas Dyer – and his
attempts to convert the apparently Christian churches into temples de-
voted to the dark forces of Satan: “It is only the Darknesse that can
give trew Forme to our Work and trew Perspective to our Fabrick, for
there is no Light without Darknesse and no Substance without Shad-
dowe.” (1993: 5) The pagan philosophy that underpins Dyer’s theories
about the universe directly influences his architectural designs: the ro-
bust, imposing look of his churches then becomes symbolic of the ob-
scure forces that govern mankind’s history. Shadows are the negative
of light. They are also, of course, reminders of death, and, more dis-
turbingly, of the liminal dimension occupied by the souls of the de-

ceased, trapped between life and death.
The shadows of Dyer’s propitiatory murders are significantly
reflected on the late twentieth-century third-person narrative focalised
through the point of view of a police detective, named after the his-
torical Hawksmoor, and his quest for a solution to the uncanny series
of cryptic murders. Along with the shared location around the six
churches, underlying the twofold narrative is an intricate web of inter-
textual references (nursery rhymes, characters’ names, historical
events) and cross-references that obliterate any clear boundaries be-
tween past and present, the simultaneity of which is reinforced by the
words that at the beginning of each chapter echo the last words of the
previous one; the most self-conscious of these links is found between
the end of chapter 6 “What time is it now?” (1993: 127) and the be-
ginning of chapter 7, which echoes an identical request: “What o’
clock is it, dear Mr Dyer? I have let my Watch run down” (1993: 128).
Drawing attention to the novel’s self-referential interrogation of time,
such questions, simultaneously voiced by Dyer and Hawksmoor, in-
vite a psychogeographical reading of the city, as already seen in rela-
tion to Moore’s From Hell, as a space simultaneously haunted by and
actively involved in its own criminal life, historical and fictional: the
references to the Ratcliff Highway Murders (1811) in Chapter 6, for
instance, are linked to previous instances of mob violence within the
same location. Similarly, patterns of repetition emerge from the names
of the fictional victims and modalities of their deaths in Hawksmoor:
the city becomes more than just a backdrop to these events, as the nar-
ratives seem to suggest that the city’s buildings, streets and indeed
churches are capable of instigating the violent episodes. Viewed in
transhistorical terms, the city space becomes a haunted receptacle of
simultaneous transgressions, as Dyer observes of the site for his
church in Limehouse: “And it is not strange (as some think) how they
will haunt the same Districts and will not leave off their Crimes until
they are apprehended, for these Streets are their Theatre.” (1993: 94)
Like Moore’s novel, then, Hawksmoor projects onto the dis-
rupted historical trajectory of London’s history a postmodernist anxi-
ety about the relationship between the ‘now’ and ‘then’. Time appears
to be equally complex in both the modern and historical narratives of
Ackroyd’s novel: “Truly Time is a vast denful of Horrour”, Dyer
claims, “round about which a Serpent winds and in the winding bites
222 Monica Germanà
itself by the tail” (1993: 62), suggesting a claustrophobic notion of

chronological circularity in relation to the metropolitan space. As
summarised by Lawrence Phillips: “London is overburdened by its
past” (2006: 150). Concerned with time at various levels of his inves-
tigation, detective Hawksmoor interrogates the coherence of linear
time:
He was not sure if all the movements and changes in the world were
part of some coherent development, like the weaving of a quilt which
remains one fabric despite its variegated pattern. Or was it a more
delicate operation than this – like the enlarging surface of a balloon in
the sense that, although each part increased at the same rate of growth
as every other part, the entire object grew more fragile as it expanded?
(1993: 126)
Ackroyd’s complex novel self-consciously sets out to present a ver-

sion of the history of London as linear and logic – epitomised by de-
tective Hawksmoor’s attempt to solve the mystery – and simultane-
ously, the notion of the city as transhistorical palimpsest: much like
Gull’s London in Moore’s graphic novel, the architecture of the city is
transformed into a living entity, one which does not simply witnesses
historical events, but takes active part in their development; moreover,
as seen with From Hell, Hawksmoor “sets recurrence against irre-
versibility”, Steven Connor argues, “proposing against a developmen-
tal view of history a spatialised view which sees history as occurring
all at once” (1996: 144). In doing so, Ackroyd’s novel – and the vision
of London it proposes – points to, as Linda Hutcheon puts it, “the im-
possibility of final meaning” (1988: 15), deliberately mutilating –
much like a metaphorical ripper – its own text to establish a playful
relationship with the reader, who is drawn into the historiographic dis-
course the narrative initiates. The reader’s collusion in the historical
manipulation is prompted by deliberate errors and red herrings
(Dyer’s year of birth is moved from 1661 to 1654; the historical
Hawksmoor did not build the fictional church of Little St Hugh’s) and
literal gaps in the text, such as the missing letters from the old sign of
the “M(U)SE(U)M”, which, Hutcheon would argue, represents a di-
rect invitation to the reading ‘you’ to partake the textual manipulation
(1988: 156).
In proposing to rewrite Stevenson’s famous doppelgänger,
Emma Tennant’s Two Women of London similarly engages with the
city’s historical and literary past, whilst articulating a critique of gen-

der politics in the late twentieth-century metropolis. In doing so,
Tennant also establishes a manifest link with the misogynist discourse
underpinning the ripper murders, by setting the beginning of her story
in 1988, exactly one hundred years after the Whitechapel murders. Set
in the fashionable neighbourhood of Notting Hill, the all-female narra-
tive focuses on a community of women shaken by a series of attacks
attributed to “the local Ripper” (2000: 187), whilst simultaneously
subverting the historical gender/power distribution: the novel opens
with the corpse of Jeremy Toller, the victim of Mrs Hyde’s murder.
Far from a straightforward parody of gender reversal, the novel
proposes to investigate the problematic interaction between the city
and the female body, interrogating the notion of female empowerment
and postfeminist ideology. The central re-positioning of the female
body in the city is explored through the mysterious character of Mrs
Hyde, whose grotesque physicality incarnates the notion of the mon-
strous female other. The text articulates the problematic question of
the female body with reference to the wider discourse on the com-
modification of female attractiveness and youthfulness in a capital-
ist/consumerist society endorsed by Tory politics and Thatcher’s re-
turn to Victorian values in the 1980s: “We are surrounded daily by
evidence of violence, poverty and misery in this city”, the anonymous
Editor comments at the beginning, “[t]he media leave us in no doubt
that rapaciousness and a ‘loadsomoney’ [sic] economy have come to
represent the highest value in the land” (2000: 177). While, as Marga-
ret Elphinstone has suggested, “like Stevenson, she [Tennant] uses a
London background that suggests Edinburgh” (1992: 51), it is also
true that Tennant’s transposition of Stevenson’s Jekyll engages with
specific metropolitan concerns in relation to female emancipation. As
Elizabeth Wilson argues, the twentieth-century metropolis is an am-
bivalent space, in which feminine subjectivity can simultaneously
consume and be consumed:
The city offers untrammelled sexual experience; in the city the forbid-
den – what is most feared and desired – becomes possible. Woman is
present in cities as temptress, as whore, as fallen woman, as lesbian,
but also as virtuous womanhood in danger, a heroic womanhood who
triumphs over temptation and tribulation. (1992: 5-6)
224 Monica Germanà
Such tension is explored to its full potential by Tennant’s novel, which

proposes an important shift from Stevenson’s original text. While
Hyde is the drug-induced alter ego whose body Jekyll’s self inhabits
to transgress the rigid boundaries of his codified Victorian self, the os-
tracised Mrs Hyde is the ordinary – if precociously aged – woman
who relies on drugs to re-acquire lost beauty and youth and become
the charming Eliza Jekyll. Whereas Eliza represents beauty, success,
perfection and inclusion, Mrs Hyde embodies decay, failure, corrup-
tion and rejection. As in Wilson’s observation, to Eliza Jekyll/Mrs
Hyde, and all the other women in the story, London is both the site of
temptation and fall, a tension well captured in Jean Hastie’s musing
that “the streets, where orange shop windows beckoned with displays
more extravagant and sumptuous than those to be found north of the
border, seemed to lie like arms a-glitter with bangles and rings” (208);
but behind the gilded façade of easily achieved (and consumed)
wealth, the ‘other’ side of London surfaces as “a mean wind wafted
nothing more satisfying that paper bags and Smartie cartons to the
sleeping homeless by the entrance to the Tube” (209). Much like
Jekyll/Hyde, London is an ambivalent space, whose borders and ori-
gins are incessantly being pushed further and deeper. As Eliza’s suc-
cessful performance in the world of (simulated) images in which she
operates conceals the simulacral vacuum of her solitary existence, so
is the city incessantly subject to a process of change that, prompted by
its capitalist drive, ultimately reveals a loss of authenticity:
Lamp-posts, facsimiles of the Victorian originals and insisted on by

rich residents of the borough as replacements for the fluorescence of
past decades, stood marooned on their islands of concrete as the road-
widening exercise took place. (214)
Captured in the subversive manipulation of its own past, Tennant’s

London, therefore, appears to epitomise the late twentieth-century’s
anxiety about the loss of the ‘real’: “Although postmodern in its use of
tradition”, Carol Anderson notes, “Two Women is both implicitly
critical of the late twentieth century’s often casual and exploitative use
of history and imagery, and self-aware about its own strategies”
(2000: 121). Much like Jekyll/Hyde’s fractured subjectivity and split
identity, the metropolis is no longer the place where, as seen in From
Hell and Hawksmoor, layers of history and multiple meanings can be
attached to every street, lamp-post or brick wall. Quite the opposite,
Tennant’s London is reduced to the realm of simulacral topography,

which, in Jean Baudrillard’s theorisation of postmodernity, remains
self-referential. Whilst echoing the earlier furore incited by the Ripper
murders in 1888, Mrs Hyde’s murder captures Tennant’s double-take
on the vain consumerism and materialism of 1980s London.
Published the same year as Two Women of London, Amis’s
London Fields (2003 [1989]) is set in 1999, projecting its narrative
scope onto the capital’s dystopian future. Amis’s London – much like
J. G Ballard’s anonymous city in Crash (1973) – epitomises the post-
modern character of the metropolis. To start with, the story does not
revolve around the geographical area of Hackney referred to in the ti-
tle. Set mostly around Ladbroke Grove, London Fields embodies in-
stead a sense of pervasive, if ambivalent, nostalgia, epitomised by the
narrator’s unfulfilled fantasy – “I must go to London Fields, before
it’s too late” (2003: 323). In a playful way, the place-name represents
the ghost of nature, that which is juxtaposed to the built-in, man-made
space of the city: “[B]ut this is London; and there are no fields. Only
fields of operation and observation, only fields of electromagnetic at-
traction and repulsion, only fields of hatred and coercion.” (134). Pre-
viously used to store radioactive matter by his father as part of ‘High
Explosive Research’ (HER), London Fields is in fact a toxic place, re-
sponsible, as Samson Young, the author/narrator reveals to his charac-
ter/murderee, Nicola Six, for his terminal illness (161). The fact that
London Fields is also the place where Samson wishes to be buried
(120) reinforces the place’s connections with death. Set within the
context of a dystopian, apocalyptic London on the verge of collapse,
many references point in fact to the millennial anxiety about a world
meeting its end:
Imagine the planet as a human face – a man’s face, because men did
it. Can you see him through the smoke and heat-wobble? His scalp
churns with boils and baldspots and surgeon’s scars. What hair is left
is worried white. (369)
“Necropolitan Nicola” (467) lives on a dead-end street; the signifi-

cantly named Golgotha and Black Cross pubs indicate the lifeless
quality of entertainment within the self-conscious death discourse of
the postmodern metropolis.
226 Monica Germanà
An elusively spectral space, the city resists any kind of closed

and straightforward reading:
There was a time when I thought I could read the streets of London. I
thought I could peer into the ramps and passages, into the smoky dis-
positions, and make some sense of things. But now I don’t think I can.
Either I’m losing it or the streets are getting harder to read. (367)
Though seen as text, as in From Hell and Hawksmoor, to Samson

Young, who returns to the city from America, London is, as in
Tennant’s novel, an unreadable, obscure system of signs. His first im-
pression of the city, viewed from the vantage point of the aircraft,
foreshadows the inherent loss of signification:
Then the city itself, London, as taut and meticulous as cobweb. I had
the airplane myself because nobody in their right mind wants to come
to Europe, not just now, not for the time being; everybody wants to go
the other way, as Heathrow confirmed.
It reeked of sleep. Somnopolis. (2)
The metropolis is fundamentally a deadly, claustrophobic space, a Ne-

cropolis, feeding off murder, abuse, corruption and greed. Amis sus-
tains this notion of an impending apocalypse through the close asso-
ciation of Nicola Six with Enola Gay and Little Boy, the names, as
everyone knows, of the aircraft Paul Tibbet flew and the nuclear bomb
he dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945. As in From Hell, an un-
conventional reading of history links London’s corrupt core to the
most sublimely iconic manifestation of human destruction of the 20th
century.
Centreless and captured in the slow process of decay, in Amis’s
dystopian representation, London’s simulacral dimension is that of a
quintessentially postmodern ‘Non-Place’, as theorised by Marc Augé:
The non-places are the real measure of our time; one that could be
quantified […] by totalling all the air, rail and motorway routes, the
mobile cabins called ‘means of transport’ (aircraft, trains and road ve-
hicles), the airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks,
large retail outlets, and finally the complex skein of cable and wireless
networks that mobilize extraterrestrial space for the purposes of a
communication so peculiar that it often puts the individual in contact
only with another image of himself. (1995: 79)
Augé’s theorisation of non-places, used by Jean Baudrillard for his

reading of the un-real city in Ballard’s Crash, reflects on the non-
specificity of post-industrial cities, global in their uniformity and lack
of authenticity. In polar opposition to the notion of ‘place’ as that
which “is never completely erased”, the non-place is “never totally
completed” (Augé 1995: 79). Resisting form, the streets of London,
just like its people, are “strictly non-symmetrical, exactly lopsided –
far from many things, and far from art” (Amis 2003: 463). As text,
therefore, the postmodern city resists the notion of closure, prompting
Amis’s self-conscious analogy with Samson Young’s stalled writing
process: “The truth is I am stalled. You wouldn’t call it writer’s block.
You might call it snooper’s block. Tower block” (2003: 99). The city,
to use another metaphor produced by Augé’s reading of non-places, is
a palimpsest “on which the scrambled game of identity and relations is
ceaselessly rewritten” (Augé 1995: 79).
Much like the fluctuating metropolis, the metamorphic mur-
deree, though destined to die from the beginning, is also able to resist
the single reductive roles produced by the principal representatives of
the male gaze in the novel to embrace them all, as she cleverly re-
fashions herself to assume different identities: to Samson Young, Ni-
cola Six is the ‘murderee’; to Guy Flinch, she is the demure virgin; to
Keith Talent she is the fetishised body of simulated sexuality (pornog-
raphy): “I am a male fantasy figure”, she claims when Samson Young
struggles with an accurate description of her character. But to Samson,
Nicola’s essence, like London, is impossible to contain in a single
definition: “You are hard to categorize, even in the male fantasy area.
Maybe you’re a mixture of genres. A mutant” (Amis 2003: 260). In
spite of the notion that ‘character is destiny’, Nicola’s subjectivity ar-
guably performs a subversion of authorial control, embodying instead
the fluctuating body of a non-entity, a camouflaging, formless vac-
uum. The ability to change underpins her power to transgress any role,
escape her prescribed ending and even manipulate the past. Travelling
around the city, for instance, Nicola’s anatomy is able to rescue what
was once lost:
Sitting in the car on the Friday afternoon, after the heavy lunch, as
they dragged through Swiss Cottage to the motorway, or through the
curling systems of Clapham and Brixton and beyond (where London
seems unwilling ever to relinquish the land, wants to squat on those
fields right up to the rocks and the cliffs and the water), Nicola would
228 Monica Germanà
feel a pressure in those best panties of hers, as it were the opposite of

sex, like the stirring of a new hymen being pinkly formed. (20)
Although Nicola is, in more than one respect, London’s ‘black hole’ –
“Nothing can escape me” (67) – the apparent misogynist approach to
her violated body, may also be read, as the passage above suggests,
against the grain, to reveal a subversion of the Ripper’s mutilations.
Rather than signifying her demise, Nicola’s fallenness is a much more
complex trope blending the corruption of her imminent death with the
potential for subversive regeneration that she embodies.
Released on the millennial cusp, Michael Winterbottom’s Won-
derland (1999) reflects many of the qualities discussed so far in rela-
tion to the postmodern metropolis. In many respects, London is an ar-
tificial ‘fantasy’ city, revolving around the pursuit of temporary pleas-
ure, to assuage the deficiency of ‘real’ emotions. Set around the paral-
lel stories of three sisters (Molly, Nadia and Debbie), besides a quick
glimpse of St. Paul’s Cathedral, the film “is not some touristic confec-
tion, nor an unremitting hell hole”, reviewer Stuart Jeffrey suggests,
“it’s a London that you may actually recognise in all its splendid
grubbiness and tatty grandiosity” (Jeffries 2000). The charm of Win-
terbottom’s production, though emotionally charged by Michael Ny-
man’s music score, is not romanticised, as the director confirms:
“London is a restless place and people have to struggle to keep their
heads above water” (qtd. in Jeffries). That the city is more than just a
backdrop to the characters’ crises becomes manifest, for example,
when Molly’s partner, Eddie (John Simm), addresses the river from
Southwark Bridge, revealing his commitment anxieties. Only the city,
the film seems to suggest, can listen to and (perhaps) empathise with
the anxieties of a father to be.
Wonderland encapsulates the alienating pace and intrinsic haz-
ards associated with the postmodern metropolis. When, at the begin-
ning of the film, Nadia (Geena McKee) walks the busy Soho streets
after an unsuccessful blind date, her journey-home, shot with surreal
acceleration, becomes a melancholic commentary on the solipsistic
existence of the metropolitan self lost within the hyperreal city, as
noted in Jeffries’ review of the film:
[T]he colours blur and McKee is transported through the streets as

though she’s got a jet pack in her duffel bag. Winterbottom says that
he was influenced in these scenes by Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Ex-
press, and here he has created a visual parallel to Kar-Wai’s seedily

beautiful neon-and-noodles Hong Kong. Yet at the same time he
shows what London looks like to his characters: a rush of poignant
colours and noise, a floating world that signifies all too much. (Jeffries
2000)
In a sense little separates London from other embodiments of the

postmodern fantasy city, be it Los Angeles, Hong Kong or Tokyo.
Yet, at the same time, Winterbottom’s urban space conveys a very dis-
tinctive, familiar collage of London fragments: the claustrophobic yel-
low greyness of its brickwork is as recognisable as the steamed-up
windowpanes of the night-buses on a Saturday night. More than any-
thing, perhaps, it is the difficult negotiation of the crowds of strangers,
and the paradoxical sense of loneliness that emerges from Nadia’s in-
ability to share the temporary ecstasy of the city’s weekly bacchanalia.
Nadia’s Saturday-night flânerie is suggestive of an aimless tra-
jectory through the busy streets of the inscrutable city. The film thus
exposes the dehumanising truth about the metropolis, an immensely
dynamic space that nevertheless undermines the foundations of any
kind of human relationship, being that of a neighbourhood or family
unit: Debbie has a difficult relationship with Daniel’s father; Nadia re-
lies on personal adverts to find a partner; Eddie deserts Molly before
the birth of their daughter. Such dysfunctional relationships suggest
the impossibility of authentic emotional bonds in the city, underpinned
by the film’s use of space: contrasting with the chaotic world of the
public spaces in London, are the cramped domestic spaces, the enclo-
sures of lonely, alienated people: in their small terraced house, Bill
and Eileen’s strained marriage is haunted by a nostalgic memory of
happier times and the absence of their estranged son; Nadia shares a
meaningless sexual experience in her date’s cluttered flat; the walls of
Franklyn’s bedroom convey a sense of hopeless claustrophobia.
While the constrained indoor spaces are suggestive of the crip-
pling effect the metropolis may have on human relationships, the
city’s open spaces conceal other kinds of threats. The ambivalent ap-
peal of the metropolis is captured in the wanderings of Daniel, Deb-
bie’s son, who, deserted by his father, walks to a fun fair, alone, on
Guy Fawkes’ night. Like other powerful moments in the film – includ-
ing the scene at the football match – London emerges from the syn-
ergy of the community of strangers, captured in the simultaneous en-
joyment of the fireworks display. Juxtaposed to the collective eupho-
230 Monica Germanà
ria and the city’s eternal potential to entertain is the festering menace
of its underworld, as the park’s shady darkness conceals the ‘other’
side of the city. The aggression, made all the more threatening by its
contest within the collective enjoyment of the fireworks display juxta-
posed with the faceless anonymity of the attackers, signals Daniel’s
loss of innocence, in what could be described as the London adoles-
cent’s rite of passage. The city is no paradise.
Yet one could argue that the film also offers an alternative read-
ing of the city, as its title suggests, as a place that never ceases to
amaze. The birth of Molly’s daughter, Alice – named after Carroll’s
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) – though born at the end of
a hellish week-end “into a city that seems anything but a wonderland”
(Jeffries 2000), nevertheless represents the possible answer to the
characters’ quest for authentic bonds that the film interrogates
throughout. The night-time shot of London as Darren travels back
North seems to point to the strange beauty of chance encounters that
can happen in the metropolis: the smallness of individual flats is
viewed in contrast with the limitless space that the city incorporates,
hinting to the possibility that the closeness of strangers may occasion-
ally lead to deeper bonds, as suggested by the ending, which sees
Nadia and Franklyn walking to work together.
Looking back to the texts examined in this essay, one realises
that even within the darker visions of the city presented so far, the re-
generative principle of the metropolis emerges in contrast to its inher-
ent death drive. In Moore’s From Hell, the possibility that Mary
Kelly’s life may have been spared is represented in the last vision Wil-
liam Gull has of the woman surrounded by four children, named
Anne, Polly, Kate and Lizzie after the other victims of Jack the Rip-
per. The last scene in the Hughes Brothers’ production takes this no-
tion further, engendering a more overt critique of the city in relation to
its rural counterpart: surrounded by the crisp greenness of the Irish
countryside, Mary Kelly survives with the little girl born out the secret
relationship of Prince Eddie and Annie Cook, also named Alice.
Even in the novel haunted by the sacrificial murders of children,
Hawksmoor, the ending suggests a duplicitous reading of the city.
Though the city’s “past is a source of alienating disturbance” (Phillips
2006: 148), the novel’s final sentence – “And then in my dream I
looked down at myself and saw in what rags I stood; and I am a child
again, begging on the threshold of eternity” (Ackroyd 1993: 217) –

also suggests a redemptive reading. The story ends in the fictionalised
space of Little St. Hugh’s, a church that symbolises, through the refer-
ence to the patron saint of children, the regenerative power of the met-
ropolitan space, and the place where Dyer’s and Hawkmoor’s selves
appear to be mystically reconciled.
Juxtaposed to the conclusive resolution of the original story, a
sense of imminent return pervades also the ending of Tennant’s re-
writing of Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. With Mrs Hyde still
alive – though temporarily out of sight – and her children removed to
be fostered by Jean Hastie in Scotland, the ambiguous ending of Two
Women of London does not preclude the possibility of renewal and re-
turn to a revenant-haunted metropolis: the word “KILL” threateningly
placed at the very end of the text self-consciously draws attention to
Mrs Hyde’s unsolved business in the city, while the presence of her
children undoubtedly suggests the concrete, if ambivalent, prospect of
her dark legacy.
The emphatic promise of childhood pervades more positively
Amis’s bleak vision of a millennial London on the verge of collapse:
What impresses and stays with me is the power of the baby’s face –
the power. It is knit tight, like a tautly prominent navel, chockfull of
possibilities, tumescent with potentiae, as if the million things that
could happen to her, the essences of the million Kims there might be
one day be out there, are concentrated in this powerful face [.] (2003:
138)
Juxtaposed to Nicola’s deathly poise, the tabula rasa of Kim’s face

contains the multiple regenerative power-lines that may insure the fu-
ture of the city. The problematic ending of Amis’s London Fields is
simultaneously marked by death (Nicola Six; Samson Young) and the
faint, though tangible, assertiveness of life: while “the sun will start to
climb a little higher in the sky” (470), baby Kim Talent is removed
from her abusive (working-class) parents to be probably brought up by
the dysfunctional (upper-class) Guy and Hope: in spite of its dubious
class politics, the ending suggests that Kim, though bruised, will heal
in due course.
Haunted by its own history and, simultaneously, the impossibil-
ity to attach any kind of stable meaning to its own past, at the end of
the twentieth century the postmodern city rests on simulacral gaps: the
232 Monica Germanà
distant memories of mutilated bodies are hailed as tourist traps of the

fantasy city; authentic kinship is absent, while anonymous crowds
regularly gather to perform the utopian dream of the hip metropolis;
the postmodern city is a vacant illusion. As such, however, what keeps
the city alive is exactly the potential for re-fashioning and constant re-
generation: like the mythical phoenix, a version of London rises again
in the aftermath of the incendiary destruction of its previous self. Hav-
ing feigned its own multiple deaths, its bricks cemented by the con-
gealed blood of its sacrificial victims, at the edge of the twentieth cen-
tury the metropolis survives, corrupt as ever, ready to embrace its
twenty-first-century reincarnations.
Works Cited
Primary References
Ackroyd, Peter. 1993 [1985]. Hawksmoor. London: Penguin.

Amis, Martin. 2003 [1989]. London Fields. London: Vintage.
Ballard, James G. 1973. Crash. London: Cape.
Hughes, Albert and Allan Hughes (dirs). 2001. From Hell. 20th Century Fox.
Moore, Alan and Eddie Campbell. 2006 [1989-1999]. From Hell. London: Knock-
about.
Tennant, Emma. 2000 [1989]. Two Women of London: The Strange Case of Ms Jekyll
and Mrs Hyde in Tennant, E. The Bad Sister: An Emma Tennant Omnibus.
Edinburgh: Canongate: 169-268.
Winterbottom, Michael (dir.). 1999. Wonderland. London: Universal Pictures.
Zephaniah, Benjamin. 2001. Too Black, Too Strong. Tarset: Bloodaxe.
Research Literature
Ackroyd, Peter. 2001. London: The Biography. London: Vintage.

Anderson, Carol. 2000. ‘Emma Tennant, Elspeth Barker, Alice Thompson: Gothic
Revisited’ in Christianson, A. and A. Lumsden (eds) Contemporary Scottish
Women Writers. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP: 117-30.
Arnold, Dana. 2000. Representing the Metropolis: Architecture, Urban Experience
and Social Life in London 1800-1840. Aldershot, Ashgate.
Augé, Marc. 1995. Non-Places: Introduction To An Anthropology of Supermodernity.
London: Verso.
Ball, John Clement. 2004. Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transna-
tional Metropolis. Toronto: U of Toronto P.
Baudrillard, Jean. 1994 [1981]. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P.
Bocock, Robert and Kenneth Thompson (eds). 1992. Social and Cultural Forms of
Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Connor, Steven. 1996. The English Novel in History 1950-1995. London: Routledge.
Donald, James. 1992. ‘Metropolis: The City as Text’ in Bocock/Thompson (eds):
417-61.
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Tradition’ in Gonda, C. (ed.) Tea and Leg-Irons: New Feminist Readings
From Scotland. London: Open Letters: 45-59.
Gilbert, Pamela K. (ed.). 2002. Imagined Londons. Albany: State U of New York P.
Hannigan, John. 1998. Fantasy City: Pleasure and Profit in the Postmodern Metropo-
lis. London: Routledge.
Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory Fiction. Lon-
don: Routledge.
Jameson, Fredric. 1992 [1991]. Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capital-
ism. Durham, NC: Duke UP.
234 Monica Germanà
Jeffries, Stuart. 2000. ‘The Walking Wounded of Wonderland ’ in The Guardian (18
January 2000). On line at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2000/jan/18/
artsfeatures (consulted 06.07.2009).
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Collins.
Lehan, Richard. 1998. The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History.
Berkeley: U of California P.
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2009).
–– (ed.). 2006. London: City of Disappearances. London, Penguin.
Warwick, Alexandra. 2007. ‘Blood and Ink: Narrating the Whitechapel Murders’ in
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Disorder, and Women. London: Virago.
“It is always another world”:
Mapping the Global Imaginary in William Gibson’s
Pattern Recognition
Brian Jarvis
Abstract: No account of the contemporary relationship between landscape and identity
can afford to ignore the impact of globalization. Understanding the intricate imbrica-
tions of space and subjectivity increasingly requires a global perspective. This essay
examines tensions in the global imaginary as they are articulated in William Gibson’s
novel, Pattern Recognition (2003). The framework for this reading is taken from Ar-
jun Appadurai’s essay, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’
(1990), in which he divides the ‘imagined worlds’ of globalization into five overlap-
ing categories: ethnoscapes, financescapes, technoscapes, mediascapes and ideo-
scapes. The heroine of Gibson’s novel, Cayce Pollard, moves across and into each of
these -scapes and finds herself positioned precariously in a complex economy of
global flows: a node in the network of people and power, finance and commodities,
art and machines, images and information.
Key names and concepts: Arjun Appadurai - Manuel Castells - William Gibson -
brandscapes - consumer capitalism - global city - global imaginary - globalization -
transnational - virtual landscape.
No account of the contemporary relationship between landscape and

identity can afford to ignore the impact of globalization. Understand-
ing the intricate imbrications of space and subjectivity increasingly
requires a global perspective. A wide variety of connections have, of
course, always existed between groups in far-flung places, but the
contemporary era has witnessed a spectacular intensification of global
socio-spatial interdependence. The movement of people, capital, com-
modities, information and images between regions, countries and con-
tinents is now taking place in magnitudes and at velocities which are
entirely unprecedented. The Westphalian nation state is far from obso-
lete, but its once sovereign borders are now continuously crossed by
transnational flows. As the identity of any landscape is progressively
determined by its relationship with other places, axiomatic geographi-
236 Brian Jarvis
cal markers such as ‘here’ and ‘there’ become permeable and even
problematic.
The burgeoning critical literature on globalization is vast and
variegated but, at the risk of caricature, we might say that it tends to
point in one of two directions. On the one hand, many studies in this
field have signposted the destructive consequences of globalization.
According to this perspective, globalization involves the displacement
of a vibrant regional particularity by the bland, the placeless and the
homogenized. Traditional links between local geography and distinc-
tive cultural identity are eroded by transnational capital and consumer-
ism, tourism and telecommunications. Some of the most strident cri-
tiques of globalization equate this term with U.S economic and cul-
tural imperialism: “coca-colonialism” or “McDonaldization” steam-
rollers diverse and indigenous locales to pave the way for standardized
shopping malls selling standardized commodities to standardized con-
sumers living in standardized suburbs. Alongside the discourse of
anti-globalization (of which the preceding is of course only a crude
sketch), there is a second and more sanguine critical perspective. A
number of studies in the field have focused on the enabling conse-
quences of globalization. Whilst not altogether denying the powerful
shaping influence of global corporate empires and multinational me-
dia, this school of thought insists that homogenization is counterbal-
anced by “heterogenization”. Developments in transport and commu-
nications technology have dramatically increased mobility and inter-
action between distant and different cultures. This has resulted in the
evolution of unique and hybridized cultural identities, the expansion
of social relationships beyond regional and national boundaries and a
concomitant rise in global consciousness.
Despite their differences, these two perspectives on globaliza-
tion often share a critical idiom: both agree that relatively fixed and
linear structures have been superseded by “flows” and “flexibility”,
“nomadism”, “networks” and “deterritorialization”. These terms and
an acknowledgement of their indebtedness to Deleuze feature promi-
nently in the work of leading globalization theorist, Arjun Appadurai.
In one of his early essays, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global
Cultural Economy’ (1990) (which subsequently appeared in revised
form in Modernity at Large [1996]), Appadurai introduced a service-
able framework with which to approach the subject of landscape and
identity in the contemporary era. This model divided global cultural
Mapping the Global Imaginary 237
flows into five overlapping categories: “ethnoscapes”, “technoscapes”,

“financescapes”, “mediascapes” and “ideoscapes”. The ethnoscape
signifies “the landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world
in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, exiles, guest-workers,
and other moving groups and persons” (Appadurai 1990: 297). In con-
junction with the acceleration of geographical mobility and cultural
exchange on the ethnoscape, Appadurai draws attention to the rapid
movement of technology across borders which previously appeared
impervious. The technoscape refers to the global configuration of all
forms of industrial machinery and postindustrial gadgetry owned by
individuals, corporations and government agencies. Financescape is
Appadurai’s term for the indefatigable flows of capital across the
globe. With the advent of digital currency, financialisation and neolib-
eral deregulation, this global economic landscape has become ever
more mercurial and inscrutable. Whilst the financescape is largely
hidden, the mediascape is spectacularly visible. The global and in-
creasingly integrated infrastructure of media and communications
technologies facilitates the ceaseless flow of images in newspapers
and magazines, on television and cinema screens, mobile phones and
the internet. Appadurai’s final category, the ideoscape, is closely re-
lated to the mediascape as a “landscape of images” (299), but one
which is more “directly political [...] the ideologies of states and the
counter-ideologies of movements” (300). Together, these five land-
scapes form the building blocks of what Appadurai refers to as “imag-
ined worlds” (296). This term extends Benedict Anderson’s concept of
“imagined communities” to a global scale and is founded on the in-
creasing social significance of the imagination:
The world we live in today is characterized by a new role for the

imagination in social life. To grasp this new role, we need to bring to-
gether: the old idea of images, especially mechanically produced im-
ages (in the Frankfurt School sense); the idea of the imagined com-
munity (in Anderson’s sense); and the French idea of the imaginary
(imaginaire) as a constructed landscape of collective aspirations...
now mediated through the complex prism of modern media. The im-
age, the imagined, the imaginary – these are all terms which direct us
to something critical and new in global cultural processes: the imagi-
nation as a social practice. (Appadurai 1996: 31)
The global imaginary – a consciousness of inhabiting a dynamic and

interconnected world – is a key component in globalization itself. And
238 Brian Jarvis
Appadurai contends that the “imagined worlds” in which people live

can be a source of political hope as they “are able to contest and some-
times even subvert the imagined worlds of the official mind and of the
entrepreneurial mentality that surrounds them” (Appadurai 1990:
300).
It might be tempting to establish a straightforward opposition
between the pivotal role played by print media (newspapers, novels,
poetry) in the construction of the ‘imagined communities’ of national-
ism and the visual media which are at the heart of the transnational
imaginary. This tidy binary, however, would repress both the histori-
cal and contemporary significance of fiction in the formation of
‘imagined worlds’. As Thomas Peyser illustrates in Utopia and Cos-
mopolis (1998), a nascent brand of the global imaginary flowered in
American fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Peyser’s study focuses on realist writing by Henry James and William
Dean Howells, but begins with Edward Bellamy’s science fiction
novel, Looking Backward (1888) in which the protagonist Julian West
falls asleep in 1887 and wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a uto-
pian and globalized new world with the U.S at its centre. In Equality
(1897), the sequel to Looking Backward:
Bellamy foresaw a world linked by video telecommunication, a world

in which the global and the local could as nearly as possible occupy
the same space... Julian West, seated at the controls of the “electro-
scope”, “had but to name a great city or famous locality in any country
to be at once present there so far as sight and hearing were concerned.
I looked down on modern New York, then upon Chicago, upon San
Francisco, and upon New Orleans [...] I visited London. I heard the
Parisians talk French and the Berlinese talk German, and from St. Pe-
tersburg went to Cairo by way of Delhi.” (Peyser 1998: 37)
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, science fiction has
continued to play its part in the fashioning of a global imaginary. Cy-
berpunk has been especially prominent in this regard. Fredric Jameson
has proposed that this sub-genre offers not only an “archaeology of
the future” but perhaps the “supreme literary expression if not of
postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself” (Jameson 1992: 419).
For the past thirty years, William Gibson has been at the forefront of
cyberpunk fiction as both archaeologist and architect of the future.
Gibson is credited with coining key words such as ‘cyberspace’, the
‘Net’ and ‘the Matrix’ as well as prophesising the advent of ‘reality
TV’. Gibson’s cyberpunk mise-en-scène crosses over with visual cul-

ture (science fiction films, anime and graphic novels) and its global
imaginary involves crossings on a deterritorialized terrain: the disjunc-
tive flows of people and technology, capital and commodities, infor-
mation and power across international boundaries and polarized
zones. One side of Gibson’s cyberpunk cartography is dominated by a
grungy global cityscape: rustbelt, rundown and retrofitted with rain
falling on permanently nocturnal crime-ridden streets that are overrun
with crooked cops and jaded private investigators, rival gangs and
sleazy nightlife. This low-tech, noir city is then jarringly juxtaposed
with a high-tech digital spatiality: cyberspaces and virtual realities
governed by shadowy global corporations and crime cartels. Identity
in this bi-polar landscape is profoundly unstable, fractured and multi-
ple: the body is grafted onto technology and consciousness fused with
computers. The cyberpunk self is a matter of software and hardware,
clones and avatars: memory is downloaded, implanted and erased. The
crossing of boundaries between and within spaces and subjectivities
has to be triangulated with a third traversal since cyberpunk also cuts
across historical boundaries. Although it is set in the future, the genre
offers a cartooned cartography of the contemporary: a comic book de-
lineation of the contours of late capitalist uneven development and
postfordist subjectivity.
In Pattern Recognition (2003), his first novel of the twenty-first
century, Gibson appeared to turn his back to the future. Pattern Rec-
ognition was published in February 2003 and set in August-September
2002 which, for a cyberpunk author, is practically the distant past.
However, this milieu needs to viewed in the context of Gibson’s
proposition that “the future is already here; it’s just not evenly distrib-
uted” (Gibson 1999). This aphorism reminds us that the future in sci-
ence fiction is always a projected vision of current conditions. In Pat-
tern Recognition, Gibson offers a vision of the future of landscape and
identity which is in fact now but as yet unevenly distributed. The pro-
tagonist at the centre of Gibson’s decentred postmodern travel narra-
tive is Cayce (pronounced ‘Case’) Pollard. “Google Cayce and you
will find ‘coolhunter’ and if you look closely you may see it suggested
that she is a ‘sensitive’ of some kind, a dowser in the world of global
marketing.” (Gibson 2003: 2) In Pattern Recognition identity proto-
cols are wedded to information technology: internet search engines, e-
mail and text messaging, social networking and chat forums. Cayce is
240 Brian Jarvis
a freelance consultant on fashion and image who surfs the web for
new trends but also does field work. On the streets of the global city
she surveys the semiotics of subcultural style. Her CV boasts that
Cayce spotted “the very Mexican who first wore his baseball cap
backwards” (32). This somatic sensitivity to street fashion is speedily
appropriated by transnational capital.
“What I do is pattern recognition. I try to recognize a pattern before

anyone else does.”
“And then?”
“I point a commodifier at it.”
“And?”
“It gets productized. Turned into units. Marketed.” (86)
This work is not without its risks since Cayce is an advertising con-
sultant afflicted by an allergy to advertising. Her “sensitivity” esca-
lates into a violent reaction when she is exposed to certain successful
brands and logos such as Disney, Tommy Hilfiger and Bibendum (the
‘tire man’ corporate symbol for the Michelin Company). This hyper-
sensitivity makes Cayce an invaluable marketing tool and she is re-
cruited by various corporations to test the potency of new brands and
trademarks. At the start of the novel Cayce has just arrived in London
to work for Blue Ant, a “lethally pomo ad agency”, who are designing
a new logo for a multinational sports shoe company (277). Blue Ant
themselves are so expansive and diffuse that Cayce sees them as
“more post-geographic than multinational” (6). At the briefing session
she meets the company’s similarly “post-geographic” founder and
marketing guru: Hubertus Bigend is a “nominal Belgian” in a cowboy
hat who “looks like Tom Cruise on a diet of virgins’ blood and truf-
fled chocolates” (6). Bigend proceeds to offer Cayce an additional and
unexpected contract: to hunt down the maker of a series of mysterious
film clips, known as “the footage”, which appear at random on the
internet and have generated a global cult following. Bigend sees the
footage as “‘the most brilliant marketing ploy of this very young cen-
tury […] attention focused daily on a product that may not even ex-
ist’” (65). Cayce initially has reservations about accepting the contract
in part because she is a self-confessed “footagehead”. As part of the
global fan base she is addicted to watching the 135 film clips over and
over and she belongs to an online discussion forum (F.F.F) which end-
lessly debates their meaning and origin.
Somewhat reluctantly then, Cayce accepts the assignment and
her first lead is offered by a friend on the discussion forum. “Parka-
boy”, an online nom de plume, e-mails Cayce with the revelation that
an encrypted watermark appears to have been discovered on a seg-
ment of the footage. As Cayce pursues this lead she becomes entan-
gled in international plots and conspiracies. She globetrots between
transnational urban landscapes (New York, London, Tokyo, Moscow
and Paris) and navigates the informational city (the digital labyrinth of
the internet). Both her geographical and virtual movements are mir-
rored by noir crossings and double crossings involving corporations,
the Russian mafia and the post-cold war intelligence community.
Cayce’s quest to find the origins of the footage also gets snared in an
oedipal dragnet. The search for the film’s “maker” is spliced with the
mystery surrounding Win Pollard, Cayce’s father and a cold war secu-
rity consultant, who vanished in New York on September 11th 2001.
(Pattern Recognition was the first major novel to incorporate refer-
ences to 9/11). Cayce finally tracks down the makers of the footage in
Russia: twin sisters: Stella and Nora Volkova, the nieces of a “Russian
zillionaire” and organised crime boss, Andrei Volkov. Stella is re-
sponsible for distributing the short films which are made by her sister.
Nora, the film-maker, has been severely traumatised following an as-
sassination attempt on her uncle which resulted in a T-shaped frag-
ment from a “U.S Army M18A1 Claymore mine” being lodged in her
brain (274). Although Nora cannot speak and her movements are se-
verely restricted, she manages to create the footage on a computer by
gently manoeuvring a mouse. The raw materials that Nora works on
are fragments of “found video” from surveillance and security cam-
eras (305). The enigmatic short films she crafts are then rendered in a
labour-intensive process at the “Dream Academy”: an isolated privat-
ized prison owned by her uncle. Cayce’s discovery of the Volkova
twins leads to an encounter and then apparent merger between Andrei
Volkov – the Russian mafia boss – and Hubertus Bigend. The two are
last seen on CNN standing ominously alongside a senior US politi-
cian. Cayce realises that she has been complicit, “[t]hough in what,
exactly, is harder to say” (194). At the end she turns her back on the
cabals of global politics and capitalism and retreats to a flat in Paris
with her friend, now lover, Peter ‘Parkaboy’ Gilbert.
242 Brian Jarvis
As this précis indicates, Gibson’s narrative rendition of contem-

porary space and subjectivity is painted with a broad brush. At the
same time, the novel features some intricate and suggestive patterning.
My aim, in the reading that follows, is to use Appadurai’s critical
framework of “ethnoscapes”, “financescapes”, “technoscapes”, “me-
diascapes” and “ideoscapes” as a stencil through which to trace the
global imaginary in Pattern Recognition.
***
Appadurai suggests that whilst “stable communities and networks”

continue to exist in the global cultural economy, “the warp of these
stabilities is everywhere shot through with the woof of human motion,
as more persons and groups deal with the realities of having to move
or the fantasies of wanting to move” (Appadurai 1990: 297). The con-
temporary ethnoscape is characterised by a rapid acceleration of geo-
graphical mobility and cross-cultural exchange: “the landscape of per-
sons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, im-
migrants, refugees, exiles, guest-workers, and other moving groups
and persons” (297). The ethnoscape is a key part of Gibson’s global
imaginary. Pattern Recognition begins with Cayce waking up in
Camden Town to “[f]ive hours New York jet lag” (Gibson 2003: 1).
In the short (six pages) opening chapter there are references to no
fewer than five cities (Cannes, Chernobyl, Chicago, London and New
York), two US states (California and New England) and nine nations
(Afghanistan, America, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea
and Russia). In the subsequent chapters Cayce travels between global
cities: London (chapters 1-12 and 20-32), Tokyo (14-20), New York
(in memories and dreams in chapters 15, 21 and 27), Moscow (33-42)
and Paris (43). Several sections of the novel are devoted to airports
and flights between them. When she is not travelling between cities,
Cayce is traversing the urban landscape by limo and scooter, tube train
and taxi, or on foot. On her one excursion outside the city – escaping
from the Dream Academy to a desertscape north of Moscow – she is
rescued by helicopter.
Cayce is not alone in her restless globe-trotting: Blue Ant’s
other employees are similarly transient. When Cayce asks her Japa-
nese-American co-worker where he is based, Boone Chu points to his
“child-sized antique suitcase” and says: “‘I’m based in this.’” (104)

The “realities of having to move” are tied to the exigencies of work.
Although relatively small in terms of permanent staff, Hubertus
Bigend’s agency is “globally distributed, more post-geographic than
multinational [...] a high-speed, low-drag life-form in an advertising
ecology of lumbering herbivores” (6). Unlike the “older, more linear
sort of agency” (9), Blue Ant specializes in the spatial rhizomatics of
the network and thus typifies organisational structure in a global in-
formation economy. In The Informational City, Manuel Castells ex-
plains that whilst organizations are still located at specific sites (Blue
Ant has offices in London, New York and Tokyo), “the organizational
logic is placeless, being fundamentally dependent on the space of
flows that characterizes information networks” (Castells 1989: 169).
Castells’ description of the paradigmatic worker within the informa-
tional city could serve as a job specification for Cayce Pollard:
[E]mployees, consultants, and other businesses – are brought together

to work on a particular project, then dispersed and reallocated when
the task is complete. This new environment requires skilled flexible
workers: the organization man gives way to the flexible woman (12).
With her daily Pilates exercise regime, Cayce displays all of the at-
tributes of the flexible woman required to gather and process informa-
tion in the network of global style and fashion: “[H]yper-specialized, a
freelancer, someone contracted to do a very specific job. She seldom
has a salary [...] adamantly short-term.” (Gibson 2003: 61)
Geographical mobility also characterizes other areas of the la-
bour market. On her travels, Cayce encounters migrant workers: Pol-
ish and African and Russian antiques dealers in London; an Israeli
street vendor selling Chinese sunglasses in Tokyo; cabbies and limo
drivers from Cambodia and the Caribbean. At a “faux-French café” in
Camden town, Cayce finds “real French waiting the tables. Chunnel
kids, guest workers” (79). The hordes of American and Japanese tour-
ists on the Portobello Road remind us that transnational mobility is as
integral to leisure as labour. In each location she passes through,
Cayce experiences a prodigious ethnographic diversity. The every-
dayness of cultural heterogeneity is particularly noticeable in relation
to food. Before she travels East, Cayce samples numerous westernized
versions of Asian cuisine at restaurants in London: the dishes at
“Charlie Don’t Surf” are “California-inflected Vietnamese fusion
244 Brian Jarvis
with more than the usual leavening of colonial Frenchness” (14); she
enjoys a Tandoori takeaway and also sushi at “a pan-Asian place”,
which is served in “sanded wood and raku bowls” (107). Conversely,
when she arrives in Tokyo, Cayce is intrigued by the way “Japanese
hotels interpret Western breakfasts” (138). Cumulatively, the effect
produced by Cayce’s constant travel, the melting-pot of international
food cultures and other instances of cultural diversity, is both stimulat-
ing and somewhat disorienting. Gibson develops the motif of jet-lag
as “soul delay” to underline his heroine’s essential homelessness.
“What is that”, Cayce ponders, “to be over thirty and not know where
you’ll be in a month or two?” (88) Dis-location encompasses not only
the future but the present: as well as not knowing where she will be,
Cayce often does not know exactly where she is. Sites of consumption
trigger an unheimlich queasiness. At a Greek restaurant in London, the
“utterly characteristic Greek tourist tat [...] somehow reminds Cayce
of the experience of being in a Chinese restaurant in Roanoke, Vir-
ginia.” (214) The Starbucks in London and Tokyo have “exactly the
same faux-Murano pendulum lamps they have in the branch nearest
her apartment in New York” (207). Cayce experiences global cities as
uncanny “mirror worlds” in which she struggles to find her bearings.
The movement of people and cultural commodities across a
shifting ethnoscape is closely mirrored by the global flows of capital
on the financescape. According to Appadurai,
the disposition of global capital is now a more mysterious, rapid and

difficult landscape to follow than ever before as currency markets, na-
tional stock exchanges, and commodity speculations move mega-
monies through national turnstiles at blinding speed (Appadurai 1990:
299).
Pattern Recognition offers glimpses of a “mysterious, rapid and diffi-

cult” financescape. Boone Chu traces an e-mail address linked with
the footage to a domain based in Nazran:
Capital of the Republic of Ingushetia. It’s an ofshornaya zona [...]. An

offshore tax haven. For Russia [...] the outfit our boy is with has links
to some of the players who’re looking into Russian oil [...] Saudi oil
has not been looking so good to the really big guys, globally, since
nine-eleven. They’re tired of worrying about the region. They want a
stable source. Russian Federation’s got it. Means huge changes in the
flow of global capital. (Gibson 2003: 280-1)
Although Gibson offers occasional allusions to heavy industry and

manufacturing (of athletic shoes), the financescape in Pattern Recog-
nition is primarily associated with postindustrial phantasmagoria:
computers and cell phones, television and film, fashion and advertis-
ing. In this regard, Pattern Recognition confirms Castells’ thesis, in
The Rise of the Network Society, that machinery associated with en-
ergy and materials is increasingly matched in importance by informa-
tion technology (Castells 2009). Bigend is desperate for information
about the footage because it represents the century’s “most brilliant
marketing ploy” (65). The footage itself has been secretly encrypted
with a watermark that can be used to track its distribution on the inter-
net: “Steganography is all about concealing information by spreading
it throughout other information.” (76) Parkaboy suggests to Cayce that
“the highest level of play [...] is always and purely about the informa-
tion itself” (169) and this resonates with Bigend’s claim that his work
is purely concerned with “transferring information” (63). One of Blue
Ant’s sub-units, “Trans”, is experimenting with a new form of niche
marketing that involves paying people to namedrop in clubs, restau-
rants and bars: to “mention a client’s product [...] [a] great new
streetwear label, or this brilliant little film” (84). The point of this
strategy is not (at least initially) to get consumers to “buy jeans [...]
see movie” so much as to “recycle the information. They use it to try
to impress the next person they meet.” (85)
When Cayce hears that this “[w]ord of mouth meme thing” is
being used to promote the footage, she feels as though something is
“infecting everything. Hubertus. Trans...” (88, 95). Cayce’s authority
as a critic of “infection” is, however, compromised by her role as a vi-
ral agent in the fashion industry and consequent involvement with “the
money people” (2). The main ‘money people’ in Pattern Recognition,
Bigend and Volkov, offer two distinct faces to transnational capital.
Bigend’s father was an “industrialist [from] Brussels” (65), but the
son heads into a postindustrial and transnational future that includes
summer in Cannes, a British boarding school followed by Harvard,
independent film production in Hollywood, a hiatus in Brazil and then
the “emergence of Blue Ant, first in Europe, then in UK and New
York” (65). Cayce notes that Bigend has “less accent of any kind than
she can recall having heard before in any speaker of English [...] it
makes him sound directionless, like a loudspeaker in a departure
lounge” (56). The repeated emphasis on Bigend’s teeth and a desire
246 Brian Jarvis
which is “constant and ever-shifting” (61) underscore his status as the

personification of a vampiric capitalism. Whilst Bigend is highly con-
spicuous, Volkov is the “invisible oligarch. The ghost. Very possibly
the richest of them all. He rode out the Bankers’ War in ninety-three,
untouched, then emerged to take even more” (313). Volkov’s roots are
in oil and organised crime, but he has diversified and was “particularly
farseeing, in his recognition of the importance of computing” (337).
When Volkov meets with Bigend, Parkaboy senses “[a] lot of infor-
mation being exchanged” (330). Volkov and Bigend are last seen to-
gether on television alongside the U.S Secretary of the Interior and it
is clear that their partnership represents a menacing consolidation on
the financescape.
When Volkov hosts a dinner, Cayce is surprised that it “isn’t a
Russian meal”:
Perhaps it’s a meal in that country without borders that Bigend strives
to hail from, a meal in a world where there are no mirrors to find
yourself on the other side of, all experience having been reduced, by
the spectral hand of marketing, to price-point variations on the same
thing. (341)
Having earlier denied her involvement in this process, Cayce progres-

sively comes to experience a sense of guilty complicity
in whatever it is that gradually makes London and New York feel

more like each other, that dissolves the membranes between mirror
worlds. She knows too much about the processes responsible for the
way product is positioned, in the world, and sometimes she finds her-
self doubting that there is much else going on. (194)
Although she sees England as America’s “mirror-world”, Cayce sus-

pects that “it’s not going to be that way much longer. Not if the
world’s Bigends keep at it: no borders, pretty soon there’s no mirror to
be on the other side of” (106). In Gibson’s global imaginary, the fi-
nancescape seeks to colonise all space and subjectivity. Although we
cannot see the global flows of capital itself, we can see the signs. The
urban landscape in Pattern Recognition is a “logo-maze” (18). The
signifiers of transnational capital are so pervasive that landscape
elides with brandscape. Cayce has a “compulsive memory for brand-
names” (27) and compiles an exhaustive inventory on her travels that
includes: clothing, shoes and accessories (501’s, Agnes B Homme,
Armani, Barbour, Benetton, Ben Sherman, Buzz Rickson, Converse,

DKNY, Dr Martens, Duffer of St. George, Fogal, Fruit Of the Loom,
Gucci, Laura Ashley, Louis Vuitton, Mont Blanc, Paul Smith, Prada,
Rolex, Tommy Hilfiger, Tony Lama and Versace); gadgets, software
and websites (Casio, Cube, eBay, Google, Hitachi, Hotmail, iBook,
Mac, Nintendo, Palm, Sanyo and the Sinclair ZX81/Timex 1000); food
and drink (Bisto, Bikkle, Coca-Cola, Fanta, Holsten Pils, Medaglia
d’Oro, Pepsi, Perrier, Tuborg and Weetabix); cigarettes (Gitane,
Marlboro, Mild Seven and Silk Cut); cars and tires (Hummer, Jetta,
Mercedes, Michelin, Vauxhall and Volvo); assorted others (Aeroflot,
Ashai, British Airways, FedEx, Fimo, IKEA, Hello Kitty, Kohler,
Kleenex, Kogepan, Lego, Parco, Tiger Balm and Visa); as well as the
franchised shops in which these brands are sold (Dean & Deluca,
Fred Segal, The Gap, Harvey Nichols, McDonalds, Selfridges, Star-
bucks and Virgin). It is worth itemising the brandscape in this way
since ubiquity is the key to its practical invisibility. These names are
so much a part of everyday life that Cayce almost always uses the
brand name without bothering with an accompanying definition of the
product.
The global city in Pattern Recognition is swamped by cloned
stores, branded objects and homogenised fashions. In the empty mir-
ror of the brandscape, one name stands out as the pinnacle:
This stuff is simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. Tommy Hilfiger is a

diluted tincture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory
days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product
of Jermyn Street and Savile Row, flavouring their ready-to-wear with
liberal lashings of polo knit and regimental stripes. But Tommy surely
is the null point, the black hole. There must be some Tommy Hilfiger
event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative,
more removed from the source, more devoid of soul. (17–18)
Cayce’s critique here offers a seriocomic counterpart to Naomi

Klein’s No Logo (2000) which, like Pattern Recognition, specifically
targets Tommy Hilfiger, The Gap, Starbucks and Nike (who are never
mentioned by name but are alluded to as the anonymous athletic foot-
wear corporation who consult Blue Ant about a new logo). According
to Klein, the new corporations aim less at the production of things
than “‘images’ of their brands. Their real work lay not in manufactur-
ing but in marketing.” (Klein 2000: 4) Gibson might almost be ven-
248 Brian Jarvis
triloquising Klein when Bigend explains to Cayce that “[f]ar more

creativity, today, goes into the marketing of products than into the
products themselves, athletic shoes or feature films” (Gibson 2003:
67). Instead of creativity, however, the hyper-sensitive Cayce sees
only sterile and standardized urban landscapes. In Clerkenwell, for
example, there is ‘nothing much to distinguish any very individual
“hoodness [...] Street level is routine London retail and services” (59).
Distinctive geographical markers are recycled as touristscape: “A red
double-decker grinds past, registering less as mirror-world than as
some Disney prop for Londonland.” (52) When she leaves London for
Tokyo she is greeted by “a remarkably virtual-looking skyline, a float-
ing jumble of electronic Lego” (127) which includes “the Coca-Cola
logo pulsing on a huge screen, high up on a building” (125) and a
“Gap sign” (132). Subsequently, the Aeroflot flight to Moscow begins
with Cayce noting that “Russia serves Pepsi” (266) before she is bom-
barded by logos at Sheremetevo-2: “there seems to be advertising on
virtually every surface [...] the density of commercial language here,
in this airport at least, rivals Tokyo” (268). Driving from airport to ho-
tel her cab passes “[b]illboards for computers, luxury goods, and elec-
tronics [...] increasing in number and variety as they approach the
city”, a McDonalds the size of a train station and a “huge Prada logo”
(271). When Cayce finally makes it into the inner sanctum of the
maker, her first impressions are not of artistic sanctuary but rather the
bric-a-brac of globalization: IKEA desks, Macintosh computers, a
“plastic Garfield” and a Coca-Cola place mat commemorating 9/11
(302-3). Even hundreds of miles north of Moscow, at the isolated
prison where the footage is rendered, the inmates look “as though they
all shop at The Gap and nowhere else” (344).
Pattern Recognition insists that whilst this global ‘malling’ is
rampant it is still far from being complete. The identity of the cos-
mopolis may be under siege by the signifiers of transnational capital,
but it has not entirely succumbed to placelessness. Gibson’s global
imaginary recognises both the drive towards homogenization and the
persistence of place in residual and resistant pockets of diversity and
hybridization. The “[g]enius loci” (257) (to borrow a phrase from
Parkaboy) endures. Along with her hyper-sensitivity to logos, Cayce
is also attuned to the distinct spirit of place and instinctively registers
those local differences from which the everyday urban landscape is
composed. When Boone Chu suggests that London is only a pale copy
of an American city – “[t]his is just more of our stuff” – Cayce cor-

rects him: “‘No [...] different stuff.’” (105) Walking the streets she is
confronted viscerally by the “age of the city, the depth of its history,
the stubborn vastness of it” (118). London stretches back “long before
the Roman city. [Primrose] Hill a place of worship, of sacrifice, of
executions. [...] That Druid thing.” (69) Cayce recognizes, this is not
simply “a place that consisted of buildings, side by side, as she
thought of cities in America, but a literal and continuous maze, a sin-
gle living creature (because it still grew) of brick and stone” (195-6).
Inside this urban ecology, Cayce repeatedly notes subtle but signifi-
cant distinctions: The “mirror-world” has its own cars, license plates
and traffic, plugs and electricity, street lamps and telephone handsets,
sash bolts on windows and pop stars on TV, the water and milk tastes
different, lager cans come in unexpected sizes and there is a unique
ensemble of morning snacks available on British Rail trains. Camden
Town may have Starbucks and McDonalds, faux-French cafés and
touristy Greek restaurants, but one can also find the odd “sandwich
shop, small and preglobalized” (195). Cayce is overwhelmed by the
“logo-maze” of Harvey Nichols, but later explores antique dealers and
grubby backstreet markets “away from the sun” (83) selling un-
branded historical curios.
Whilst London has history, Cayce has “almost never seen any-
thing genuinely old in Tokyo” (161). In contrast to London’s earthi-
ness, Tokyo appears purely simulacral and Cayce speculates that there
might be “nothing beneath the pavement but a clean, uniformly dense
substrate of pipes and wiring” (130). However, Boone Chu later takes
her beyond the parts of the city which were rebuilt after U.S firebomb-
ing in the second world war to a “prewar apartment building” (161).
Cayce first notes “[c]ooking smells she can’t identify” – something off
the olfactory map of international cuisine – and then
looks out at gently sloping rooftops that seem, impossibly, to be par-

tially covered in knee-deep moss, but then she sees that this is some-
thing like the kudzu on Win’s farm in Tennessee. No, she corrects
herself, it probably is kudzu, kudzu where it comes from. Kudzu at
home [...] A large tan insect strobes through the communal patch of
light, vanishes. “This is an amazing place”, she says.
“There aren’t many left.” (161-2)
250 Brian Jarvis
Although the “neon carnival excess” in the rest of the city does not
compare to the singularity of this scene, Cayce can still detect traces
of cultural difference and hybridity on the brandscape (131). Along-
side the “logos of corporations she doesn’t even recognize”, more fa-
miliar labels lose their power to unsettle her as they are “mysteriously
recontextualized” by the Tokyo cityscape (127).
Cayce goes on to make similar discoveries in Russia. Beyond
the generic brandscape, Moscow is idiosyncratic in ways that both ex-
cite and unsettle her. To begin with, everything is “far larger than it
could possibly have any need to be” (269). Cayce resorts unsuccess-
fully to a tourist reflex:
staring at the streetscape of this old residential neighbourhood, [she] is

acutely aware of her mind doing the but-really-it’s-like thing it does
when presented with serious cultural novelty; but really it’s like Vi-
enna, except it isn’t, and really it’s like Stockholm, but it’s not,
really... (276)
Faced by the grandeur of the Moscow Metro she tries to map it onto
Oxford Street tube in London, but “the match-up module fails” (310).
Whilst her first taste of Russia was the Pepsi served on the plane,
Cayce later looks out of a hotel window past a glass cooler stocked
with “much Pepsi” at a skyline of “ancient-looking apartment build-
ings, white spires, and one amazing crenellated orange-and-turquoise
bell tower. In the deeper distance, golden onion domes” (275).
From an early age, Cayce is shown to be susceptible to what
lies beneath the glossy surfaces of the brandscape. On a trip to Dis-
neyland as a child, she recalls how
Pirates of the Caribbean had broken down and they’d been rescued by
staff wearing hip-waders over their pirate costumes, to be led through
a doorway into a worn, concrete-walled, oil-stained subterranean
realm of machinery and cables, inhabited by glum mechanics remind-
ing Cayce of the Morlocks in The Time Machine. (110)
As an adult, Cayce retains this concern for concealed infrastructure.

Whilst consulting on the aesthetics of a new logo, she does not lose
sight of that other key symbol, the dollar sign and “all those billions in
athletic-shoe sales” (83). And briefly she also
imagines the countless Asian workers who might, should she say yes,
spend years of their lives applying versions of this symbol to an end-
less and unyielding flood of footwear. What would it mean to them..?
Would it work its way into their dreams, eventually? Would their chil-
dren chalk it in doorways before they knew its meaning as a trade-
mark? (12)
Cayce’s speculations here on a brand of subliminal indigenization

should be connected to her subsequent discovery, at a private prison
factory called the “Dream Academy”, of sixty inmates tirelessly ren-
dering each frame of the footage on a post-industrial assembly line.
The root cause of Cayce’s logophobia is never explained, but it seems
to be linked to an affinity for the secret history of exploitation and vio-
lence encrypted in signs and objects. At the themed restaurant, “Char-
lie Don’t Surf”, she is less interested in her Californian cabernet than
the prints on the walls of
close-up black-and-white photographs of “Nam-era Zippo lighters,

engraved with crudely drawn military symbols, still cruder sexual mo-
tifs, and stencilled slogans. These reminded Cayce of photographs of
tombstones in Confederate graveyards, except for the graphic content”
(14).
As well as haunting restaurants, the ghosts of war manifest in fashion

and technology. Damien wears a “flecktarn” camouflage jacket (188)
and Boone Chu has a “M-1951 U.S. Army fishtail parka, an embroi-
dered red-white-and-blue RAF roundel on its back, like a target”
(142). The most prized possession in Cayce’s wardrobe is a Buzz
Rickson “museum-grade replica of a U.S. MA-1 flying jacket [...] cre-
ated by Japanese obsessives” (10-11). When this jacket is damaged
she orders a new one in the same city, Tokyo, which was destroyed by
the U.S Air Force in World War II. The jacket is paid for by Bigend,
who drives a Hummer (originally a military vehicle) and who also
foots the bill for Cayce’s flights on planes that, in her dreams, will al-
ways be associated with the 9/11 attacks. Wearing her Buzz Rickson
on the Portobello Road, Cayce approaches three men gathered around
the trunk of a car and thinks she glimpses “[g]renades. Black, com-
pact, cylindrical. Six of them, laid out on an old grey sweater.” (28) In
fact, these are antique dealers with a collection of Curtas:
Calculators [...]. It is a precision instrument [...] performing calcula-

tions mechanically, employing neither electricity nor electronic com-
252 Brian Jarvis
ponents [...]. It is the smallest mechanical calculating machine ever

constructed [...]. It is the invention of Curt Herzstark, an Austrian,
who developed it while a prisoner in Buchenwald. (28-9)
Whilst Curta was designing his calculator, the U.S military was devel-
oping ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), the
world’s first electronic digital computer. Subsequent increases in the
numbers of computers led to the concept of a network. ARPANET,
the forerunner of the internet, was funded by the U.S Department of
Defense in the 1960s and according to cyber-lore was designed as a
communications system that could function in the wake of nuclear
war.
Communications devices, computers and the net are of course
key features on contemporary techno- and mediascapes and each of
these is prominent throughout Pattern Recognition. Around half of
Cayce’s communication in the novel is mediated by technology: prac-
tically every chapter includes several phone calls, e-mails and visits to
online chatrooms. Paul Virilio, amongst others, has offered a strident
critique of the displacement of face-to-face communication by “simu-
lators of proximity” (Virilio 2002a: 41). According to Virilio’s cri-
tique, the proliferation of screen interfaces not only produces alien-
ation, but also threatens to dematerialize the city: “the architectonic
element begins to drift and float in an electronic ether” (Virilio 2002b:
442). In each city she travels through, Cayce is permanently framed
by a variety of screens which cumulatively contribute to the hegem-
ony of the hyperreal. Landscape, people and events are filtered
through the lens of media culture: Tokyo is “Bladerunnered” (Gibson
2002: 146); Bigend looks like Tom Cruise; Cayce acts as though she
is in a James Bond film and when she is rescued by Parkaboy it be-
comes a scene from a cowboy movie. Most disturbingly, Cayce’s ex-
perience of 9/11 is reshaped by CNN:
[T]hough she will know she must have seen people jumping, falling,
there will be no memory of it. It will be like watching one of her own
dreams on television. Some vast and deeply personal insult to any or-
dinary notion of interiority. (137)
The destabilization of identity on and by the mediascape is evident in

other areas as well. The virtual city is populated by impersonators.
Parkaboy and his friend Darryl create a fake identity online as “gender
bait” for a Japanese games designer who has information about the
watermark. Using a combination of online chat, text messaging,
“Anime Magic” and “Photoshop”, they successfully generate a Japa-
nese schoolgirl persona called “Keiko” (129). Cayce’s nemesis, Doro-
tea Benedetti, similarly infiltrates and spies on F:F:F under the guise
of “Mama Anarchia”. The virtual landscape is under constant surveil-
lance by various parties: “American intelligence have a system [Eche-
lon] that allows for the scanning of all Net traffic” (244), Bigend’s and
Volkov’s people monitor the web and Cayce’s e-mails, online chat,
keystrokes and cell phone conversations are all recorded.
Panopticism is also routine outside the virtual city: Cayce spies
surveillance cameras at airports, in hotels and on the city streets. Gib-
son recognises this as one of many dangers on the techno- and media-
scape, but the global imaginary in Pattern Recognition resists the
temptation of a causally dystopian response. Nora works with “[m]ere
scraps of found video” from surveillance cameras so the footage leads
both into but also back out of the carceral city (305). Bricolage can
make art even from the disciplinary infrastructure of the surveillance
state. A similar aesthetic is practised by others in Pattern Recognition:
Damien leaves behind the glitzy world of music videos and commer-
cials to make a documentary about a world war two plane he finds
buried in the “unfrozen swamps past Stalingrad” (72); and Voytek
creates an installation by recycling retro computers (Sinclair ZX-81s
and Timex 1000s). For Gibson, then, technology and aesthetics can
converge on what Appadurai terms the “artscape” (Appadurai 1996:
33). Cayce’s attraction to artscape of the footage is fuelled by its
promise of an escape from the brandscape: “Worlds. Places to retreat
to.” (Gibson 2003: 94) Nora’s independent film-making spreads
virally across the globe without the “infection” of marketing. In this
regard, the footage represents the mirror image of the branded “black
hole” of Tommy Hilfiger. The aura of the anti-commodity attracts a
global subculture of followers: the “footageheads” flock to the forums
which Cayce sees as a “way of being at home [...]. The forum has be-
come one of the most consistent places in her life, like a familiar café
that exists somehow outside of geography and beyond time zones.”
(4-5) Although the threat of surveillance and faked identity cannot be
ignored, neither, Gibson suggests, can the possibilities for new forms
of sociability and even intimacy. The footageheads do not inhabit a
purely virtual community: “[T]he universe of F:F:F is everting. Mani-
254 Brian Jarvis
festing physically in the world.” (198) There are stills from Nora’s
work posted all over the city and Cayce randomly encounters and en-
gages in conversation with other followers: a waiter in a café and a
woman on the New York subway. Cayce’s romance with Parkaboy
begins online and even the “gender bait” ruse eventually results in a
genuine transnational courtship between Taki and Judie (who had un-
wittingly posed for the doctored photograph of ‘Keiko’). Returning
briefly to his cyberpunk roots, Gibson intimates that the virtual land-
scape might offer opportunities for adventure.
Hack into the system. Merge with it, deep enough that it, not you, be-
gins to talk to us [...] it’s like Coleridge, and De Quincey [...] it’s sha-
manic [...] we may all seem to just be sitting there, staring at the
screen, but really, some of us anyway, we’re adventurers. We’re out
there, seeking, taking risks. In hope [...] of bringing back wonders.
(255)
This is Parkaboy’s philosophy, one which complements his self-image

as a digital Huck Finn who can “li[gh]t out for the territories” (74).
However, whilst Parkaboy dreams of pioneering in cyberspace, Cayce
is anxious about becoming a cyborg. In Damien’s apartment she re-
peatedly stares at a group of lifeless “robot girls”, left over from a mu-
sic video, who seem perhaps to mirror her own “lack of autonomy”
(171). She refers ironically to her outfits as “CPUs”, or “Cayce Pol-
lard Units” (8), performs her robotic Pilates regime and often finds
herself on auto-pilot: “content [...] to go along for the ride” (25), to
“go with the flow” (37). Her grimace is “mechanical [...] [h]er legs
feel wooden” (98), she sees a “disjointed puppet” (3) in the mirror and
worries that she may be Hubertus’s “puppenkopf” (309). Employed by
the Blue Agent agency, Cayce’s paranoid suspicion is that she has lit-
tle agency of her own. Is she anything more than a relay in the trans-
national networks of capital and consumerism, image and informa-
tion? For Appadurai, agency panic takes place when the subject sees
past the surface of the ideoscape:
[T]he consumer has been transformed, through commodity flows (and

the mediascapes, especially of advertising, that accompany them), into
a sign [...] in Baudrillard’s sense of a simulacrum which only asymp-
totically approaches the form of a real social agent [...]. Global adver-
tising is the key technology for the worldwide dissemination of a
plethora of creative and culturally well-chosen ideas of consumer
agency. These images of agency are increasingly distortions of a

world of merchandising so subtle that the consumer is consistently
helped to believe that he or she is an actor, where in fact he or she is at
best a chooser. (Appadurai 1990: 307)
This emphasis on systems of global control challenges the contours of

the contemporary ideoscape with its insistence on “freedom” and
“democracy”. Post-9/11, these terms dominated an ideoscape whose
centrepoint was Ground Zero. Aside from an oblique reference to oil
in the middle east, Gibson largely sidesteps global geopolitics in the
early twenty-first century. In place of Islam and the War on Terror,
Pattern Recognition offers a more intimate response to 9/11 – a psy-
chogeographical mapping of the topography of trauma.
The cryptic watermark encrypted in the footage is first thought
to be the map of an unknown city before it is revealed to be the con-
tours of the T-shaped fragment of shrapnel embedded in Nora’s brain.
Although Gibson foregrounds the visuality of traumatic experience
(the footage is a silent film and Cayce’s memories of 9/11 merge with
CNN coverage), echoes can still be heard in the language of Pattern
Recognition. In their gothic revision of classical psychoanalysis,
Abraham and Torok proposed the investigative method of “crypton-
omy” for understanding trauma. Cryptonomy is a mode of textual ex-
cavation that seeks not “a metonymy of things but a metonymy of
words” and we might add of numbers and letters (Abraham & Torok
1986: 19). Cayce imagines that she, like the footage, is watermarked:
“Eyes closed, she finds herself imagining a symbol, something wa-
termarking the lower right-hand corner of her existence” (Gibson
2003: 78). This symbol is two numbers – 9/11 – which we arrive at by
following an odd sequence from the final piece of the footage, no.
#135 (1-3-5-7-9-11). Letters are encrypted here as well. The first ini-
tial of each twin sisters’ forename is ghosted by the image of the Twin
Towers (Nora/North Tower and Stella/South Tower). The World
Trade Centre, headquarters of global finance, was destroyed by twin
(t-shaped) planes with the first explosion and fall uncannily mirroring
the second. This event is embedded in the collective psyche of Ameri-
cans and in Pattern Recognition is doubly lodged as a traumatic frag-
ment in Cayce’s memory as the day she lost her father. Like the foot-
age, 9/11 is replayed as fragmented images in the bereaved daughter’s
memory. The landscape of trauma is incorporated within the self.
Ground Zero is literally inside Cayce: “images called up by Damien’s
256 Brian Jarvis
e-mail. Heaps of bone. That initial seventeen stories of twisted, im-

pacted girder. Funeral ash. That taste in the back of the throat.” (79)
Cayce’s compulsive repetitions - the exercise regime, the chanting of
a peculiar mantra (“a duck in the face”) and the repeat viewings of the
footage – are typical manifestations of PTSD. In the closing para-
graphs of the novel, Cayce (presumably wearing her customary black
CPU) completes the symptomatology by engaging in a symbolic ritual
of mourning. Before leaving Russia she visits the site of Damien’s war
documentary outside Stalingrad:
She found herself, out of some need she hadn’t understood, down in
one of the trenches, furiously shovelling grey muck and bones, her
face streaked with tears. Neither Peter nor Damien had asked her why,
but she thinks now that if they had she would have told them she was
weeping for her century, though whether the one past or the one pre-
sent she doesn’t know. (355-6)
Although she testifies that her mourning is generic, this act seems
compensatory for a specific subject: the fact that she was unable to re-
cover her father’s body from the ruins at ground zero.
***
The global imaginary of Pattern Recognition offers an energetic

dramatisation of tensions on and between ethnoscapes, financescapes,
technoscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes. Gibson eschews the easy
rhetoric of cyber-utopianism and anti-globalization in favour of a deft
tracing of patterns. Cayce Pollard is positioned precariously in a com-
plex economy of global flows: a node in the network of people and
power, finance and commodities, art and machines, images and infor-
mation. Although she is unable to map the totality of this network,
Cayce exhibits a fierce sensitivity to its contours and configurations.
In the aftermath of 9/11 and at the dawn of a new century, it is not
clear to her how these patterns will develop but Cayce, like Stella
Volkova, senses that it will not be “our parents’ story. Not their world.
It is another world. It is always another world.” (308)
Works Cited
Primary References
Gibson, William. 2003. Pattern Recognition. London: Penguin.
Research Literature
Abraham, N. and M. Torok. 1986. The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Econ-
omy’ in Theory, Culture & Society 7: 295-310.
––. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Castells, Manuel.1989. The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic
Restructuring, and the Urban Regional Process. Oxford: Blackwell.
––. 2000. ‘Materials for an exploratory theory of the network society’ in British Jour-
nal of Sociology 51(1): 5-24.
––. 2009. The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Gibson, William. 1999. ‘The Science in Science Fiction’ roundtable discussion on
‘Talk of the Nation’, 30.11.99. On line at: http://www.npr.org/templates/
story/story.php?storyId=1067220 (consulted 23.04.10)
Jameson, Fredric. 1990. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Durham: Duke UP.
Klein, Naomi. 2000. No Logo: no space, no choice, no jobs: taking aim at the brand
bullies. London: Flamingo.
Peyser, Thomas. 1998. Utopia & Cosmopolis: Globalization in the Era of American
Literary Realism. Durham: Duke UP.
Virilio, Paul. 2002a. Ground Zero. London: Verso.
––. 2002b. ‘The Overexposed City’ in Bridge, Gary and Sophie Watson (eds). The
Blackwell City Reader. Oxford: Blackwell.
The Shore is Not a Beach
Alex Lockwood
Abstract: While environmental psychology has in general focused on constructs such

as ‘place attachment’ to explore the formation of environmental identification, other
disciplines have sought out modes of understanding that introduce ‘space’ as a means
to highlight possibilities for pro-environmental identification that move away from
self-concepts engendered through fixed named and specified places. In the era of
global ecological crises, the play of difference between place and space can be exam-
ined in works that respond to the tropes of sea-level rise and the disappearing coast-
line. Through Rachel Carson’s sea writing, J.G. Ballard’s terminal beaches, the liter-
ary environmental journalism of Mark Lynas, and Cormac McCarthy’s post-human
borderlands, this chapter explores writing that shifts the terrain of meaning between
two articulations of landscape: the shore and beach. In the context of the contempo-
rary experience of our relationship with survival, such a shift might operate as a ‘lit-
erature of recruitment’ for pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours, offering a last
defence in shoring up the walls of human identity with nature at the point of ecologi-
cal collapse.
Key names and concepts: J.G. Ballard - Rachel Carson - Mark Lynas - Cormac
McCarthy - affective landscapes - climate change - crisis - cultural geography - ecol-
ogy - emotion - environmental identification - landscape - place - space.
1. Introduction
Much environmental psychology has focused on a physical connection

to place, or ‘place attachment’ (Kelly & Hosking 2008: 578) as the
subject for studying practices that facilitate pro-environmental atti-
tudes and behaviours. For example, in their study of 281 respondents
in Germany, Kals, Schumacher and Montada found the most powerful
predictors for developing an affinity with nature were “the present
frequency of time spent in nature [and] by past frequency of time
spent in nature” (191) and that these, in turn, were the strongest pre-
dictors for individual pro-environmental behaviours.
260 Alex Lockwood
Yet a considerable body of work suggests that our ability to

spend time in ‘natural places’ has been eroded (e.g. Jacques 2008;
Kovel 2008; Wilding 2008) by the structures of a “deep anthropocen-
trism” that, finding their articulation in the structures of capitalist
ways of living, have led to “the domination of the non-human world
[by] the Western industrial network of knowledge and power”
(Jacques 2008: 10). Or as Bill McKibben puts it: “Wilderness – in its
truest sense, of places totally separated from human influence – is ex-
tinguished.” (McKibben 1995: 5)
Perhaps as a result of the threats that are perceived to accom-
pany ever-louder suggestions of global ecological degradation brought
on by this ‘Western industrial network’, of which climate change is
perhaps only the most visible warning (Wilson 2003), this process of
self-conceptualisation, or identity formation, has been an urgent area
for exploration by environmental psychologists who wish to under-
stand the many different ways in which ‘place attachment’ may set in-
dividuals along a path on which they might (or might not) develop
pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours. In their study of univer-
sity students, environmental psychologists Hinds and Sparks found
that engendering empathy towards nature tends to increase the level of
connectedness people feel towards it, which in turn encourages pro-
environmental behaviours (Hinds and Sparks 2008). Their study
builds on work by Clayton and Opotow, who concluded that “an iden-
tification with, or sense of connection to, the environment [broadens]
the mainstream concept of identity formation to include [...] how peo-
ple see themselves in relation to the natural world” (Clayton & Opo-
tow 2003, cited in Hinds and Sparks 2008: 110). This empirical evi-
dence pointing toward an attachment to place or places, whether rural
or urban, wild or sanitized, is, according to Lynne Manzo (2003: 54)
“critical in demonstrating that people are active shapers of their envi-
ronments, and their interaction with the world around them is part of a
conscious process”. In her review of the literature of the emotional re-
lationships toward place, Manzo states that:
People choose environments that are congruent with their self-

concept, modifying settings to better represent themselves, or moving
to find places which are more congruent with their sense of self […]. I
call this a ‘conscious discontinuity’, where new environments are cho-
sen to mark a new stage in life. Conversely, people also remain in
places because they provide a sense of continuity. Here, people make
conscious choices of where to live based on their needs and their self-
concept. (Manzo 2003: 54)
Manzo (and others) are clear that many critical questions remain, in-
cluding the need for a “better understanding of the places which con-
tribute to a person’s self-concept, as well as the feelings and experi-
ences that get incorporated into one’s sense of self, and the processes
by which they get internalised” (Manzo 2003: 57), and which explore
not just the individual’s attachment to place, but also the individual’s
relationship to the politics of place.
A re-folding of these questions has come recently from cultural
geography and the work of, among others, David Crouch and John
Wylie. For Crouch, ‘place’ “may have significant fluid connotations,
but it is also archetypal in popular tourism literature: the synagogue or
temple to be visited, the vibrant city, ‘fixed’” (Crouch 2010: 14).
Rather, Crouch relates identity as a “possibility of becoming” with a
dynamic relationality found and expressed through space, in particular
landscape, where landscape “is situated in the expression and poetics
of spacing: apprehended as constituted in a flirtatious mode: contin-
gent, sensual, anxious, awkward” (Crouch 2010: 7). From a phenome-
nological position, Crouch renegotiates the role individuals can play
as “active shapers of their environments” (Manzo 2003: 54) from
within a poetics – a making – of space that is not fixed to one or even
many ‘places’. For Crouch space is not a place but a process that “can
become powerful, even if only gently performed as landscape. [Per-
formances that] exhibit intensities in flows of sensuous feeling that,
whether familiar or not, create feelings of momentary belonging”
(Crouch 2010: 10).
One such performance can be found in Wylie’s study of percept
and affect during a walk along the South West Coast Path in North
Devon. Wylie begins by locating the ‘feelings and experiences’ that
Manzo discusses through “an involved walking affect, a particular
density of materialities and movements, precipitates a certain sense of
self” (Wylie 2005: 240). But Wylie’s idea of self-concept, or identity,
implicates, as noted by Crouch, a change in register towards the land:
here the coastal path is “neither something seen, nor a way of seeing,
but rather the materialities and sensibilities with which we see” (Wylie
2005: 243, original emphasis). Landscape is processed, not inhabited.
262 Alex Lockwood
In Crouch’s terms, landscape “erupts in this process as an expressive

and poetic act” (Crouch 2010: 13).
The rejection of ‘place’ takes a twist in Wylie here and else-
where (see Wylie 2009). The practitioner’s self-doubt regarding how
“a perspective of overly-reflexive and intellectual concerns are im-
puted into quotidian places” (Wylie 2005: 244) inflects his conclu-
sions. He has carried with him (in his rucksack) the books and “eyes
of Deleuze, Lingis, Bachelard [...] itself a particular complex from
which distinctive senses of self and spatiality [are] distilled” (245).
That is, for Wylie, the literature of the self plays a role in the seeing of
the place; and “the coast walk as described comes to transcend the
point of view of its narrator” (Ibid: 245). Wylie concludes that his ar-
ticle is his own assembling but that its writing “might be termed a
post-phenomenological understanding of the formation and undoing
of self and landscape in practice” (245). It is this provocative implica-
tion of reading/writing in the “formation and undoing of self and land-
scape in practice” that can be usefully thought in addressing the ques-
tion: can pro-environmental writing or literature, rather than immer-
sion ‘in’ nature, engender an empathy with nature? And if pro-
environmental identification, attitudes and behaviours can be strength-
ened when salient pro-environmental norms are present (e.g. Kals,
Schumacher and Montada: 1999) is it enough that these ‘norms’ are
simply ‘present’ through an individual’s engagement with such pro-
environmental writing and literature?
The impact of the environmental imagination formed through
writing has a long and theorized history dating back at least to Rous-
seau, Wordsworth and Thoreau (Buell 1995). Here, however, I wish to
address contemporary writers who address human agency in the proc-
esses of global ecological breakdown, particularly climate change; as
such, I turn towards those who have, since the marine biologist Rachel
Carson wrote Silent Spring, “broke[n] the hold of the old contempla-
tive nature essay as the primary medium for reflections about human-
ity’s relationship with the natural world, using instead [...] a literature
of science-based activism” (Killingsworth and Palmer 2000: 187). To
emphasize the break, critics Killingsworth and Palmer employ the
term a ‘literature of recruitment’ to describe a “writing that fires the
imagination and inspires interest in scientific topics” (175) beyond
mere reflection.
A ‘literature of recruitment’ is a useful concept for exploring

the means by which writing may engender a pro-environmental re-
sponse to ecological crisis. Killingsworth and Palmer, as have many
others, emphasize the literariness of “most of the important nonfic-
tional writing about the environment that has appeared since [Rachel
Carson’s] time” (177) as essential to their power to ‘fire the imagina-
tion’ (and, I will argue below, not just the imagination, but also identi-
fication). Much of their work on Carson is interwoven with their cri-
tique of science fiction (Killingsworth and Palmer 2000: 203) and
boundaries between journalism and literature, science writing and sci-
ence fiction are put aside. Their approach, which I employ here, is that
by pursuing a literature of recruitment and studying
narratives of all kinds across the lines imposed by specialisation and

genre, we enrich our understanding of narrative possibilities and in the
best case create new options for thought and action (Killingsworth and
Palmer 2000: 177).
For what thought, action? As McKibben argues, what is required is to

“let the rest of creation begin, however tentatively, to flourish once
more” (McKibben 1995: 15). This is ‘recruitment’ in its broadest
form. Etymologically, to recruit is to re-grow; not only to gather peo-
ple to a cause, but for that cause to allow its subject to “flourish once
more”. What I am interested in here is a concept of a ‘literature of re-
cruitment’ that can stimulate pro-environmental attitudes and behav-
iours, and encourage a natural re-growth in response to our environ-
mental crises; what Crouch may summarize as the ways in which in-
dividuals and communities, “[i]n varying degrees of permanence and
emotion and across different situatedness and their mobilities […] ne-
gotiate life” (Crouch 2010: 13).
What I explore below is this question: In what ways has pro-
environmental literature engaged individuals in a process of identifica-
tion with land and place as a means of coming to terms with global
ecological crises? I believe Wylie has already put a finger (or foot) on
a starting point: the challenge to domination over nature elucidated by
narratives explored at/by the coast, particularly coastal sensitivities to
climate change. The majority of Americans associate climate change
with sea level rise (Bell 1994). In their study of the impact of personal
vulnerability on responses to climate change, Samuel Brody et al.
found that:
264 Alex Lockwood
Respondents appear to register climate change risk when the threat or

sense of vulnerability is most overt. For example, living adjacent to
the coastline and/or in areas of low elevation prevents an obvious
threat from sea level rise. Thus physical position and proximity char-
acteristics lend themselves to increased public perceptions of the po-
tential negative impacts of climate change. (Brody et al. 2007: 89)
I argue that these images of sea level rise and coastal vulnerability
have played a critical role in the science-based activist writing of
campaigning environmental journalists, as well as in a recruitment to
an identification with nature in contemporary literature that engages
with environmental themes; and that the poetics of the space between
articulations of the coastal zone, namely, representations of ‘wild’
shore and ‘tamed’ beach, are instrumental in mobilizing the pro- (or
preventing the anti-) environmental behaviours they distil. What I
hope to do is track some of these relations as they appear in fictional
and nonfictional responses to ecological breakdown: to approach the
metaphors that speak to Wylie’s formulation of “the materialities and
sensibilities with which we see”. After providing a sketch of my un-
derstanding of identification in relation to a ‘literature of recruitment’,
I look at these images in the nonfiction of Rachel Carson alongside the
early works of J.G. Ballard. From there I trace the concepts through
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, alongside the environmental journal-
ism of Mark Lynas. A configuration of the shore as a ‘wilder’ space in
relation to a cultivated appropriation of the coast as beach provides
productive grounds for addressing our identification as being(s) re-
sponsible for destructive changes wrought on our climate. The play
here is a poetics of spacing that operates between the fixed (or placed)
constructions of shore and beach that decentres what Joel Kovel terms
the “technocracy and economism” of capitalist domination over nature
(Kovel 2008: 8). The play between literature and nonfiction further al-
lows the causes of ecological breakdown to be exposed, and with them
the values shoring up identities formed within the “Western industrial
network of knowledge and power” (Jacques 2008: 10). From there I
offer discussion on where we need to go next in exploring an identifi-
cation with which we can see an environment subject to catastrophic
change.
2. Identification: frontier-effects
For Stuart Hall, identification is “a process of articulation, a suturing,

an over-determination, not a subsumption. Like all signifying prac-
tices, it is subject to the ‘play’ of difference.” (Hall 1996: 3) Dif-
férance is Jacques Derrida’s term for the ways in which the referent is
supplemented by its others (e.g. capital, technology, writing) to de-
termine what it signifies within cultures (Abbinett 2003: 64). Wylie’s
Coast Path is a useful example of this. His formation of self and land-
scape in practice is always relational to the “tones, topographies, theo-
retical discourses” (Wylie 2005: 245) with which he sees (and writes)
his passage along the path. In another coastal walk, quoting Derrida,
Wylie advances that “analysis of self, body, landscape” proceeds from
“‘the constitution of the body [...] [as] a passage outside and through
the other’” (Wylie 2009: 282). Much post-structural thought is di-
rected towards this play. The unsettling of established concepts that it
unleashes does not mean a denial of their referential status (Williams
1965). But as the cultural critic John Storey, commenting on Wil-
liams, adds: “What is also absolutely the case is that the material (or
the natural) world exists for us – and only ever exists for us – layered
and articulated in signification.” (Storey forthcoming: 2)
Resonant to a ‘literature of recruitment’ is the sense of identifi-
cation constructed by “frontier-effects” (Hall 1996: 3), where identifi-
cation is “formed and transformed continuously in relation to the ways
we are represented or addressed in the cultural systems which sur-
round us [as] historically, not biologically, defined” (Hall 1992: 277).
It is not, I think, simply fortuitous that the representations of land,
landscape and space suggested above and below are structured simi-
larly to this frontier process of identification. The structuring of identi-
fication with the environment is not a new concept. But it is the
broadening of the concept of identification with the environment, pos-
ited by Hinds and Sparks, that I draw on here, coupled with the post-
phenomenology of Crouch and Wylie: that such an identification is
constructed in relation to the other but with a constant antagonism that
is always self-doubting, that makes clear that “no complete coinci-
dence of self and other or self and world is possible” (Wylie 2009:
285). What stands in the way, as Adrian Wilding argues, is a certain
antagonism “within society that mediates our relation with nature”
(Wilding 2008: 55); an antagonism in our social relations that plays it-
266 Alex Lockwood
self out in our environmental relations as the domination of nature. In

particular, it is important to mark out the forces at work within a ‘lit-
erature of recruitment’ that can stimulate a renewed relationship with
the environment in an age of climate change: to build momentum
around the metaphors and narratives of ecological activism in the way
that images of a ‘hole’ activated responses to the atmospheric crisis in
the ozone layer, to counter the results of this antagonism. The meta-
phors of the coast are a useful departure point from which to mark a
first footprint in the sand.
3. Flood Tides, Drowned Worlds
How is a beach different from a shore? They are not a binary

(shore/beach), but a movement along an axis, where the beach is a
commodity, to be possessed, something to note on the hotel brochure,
for the resort: Crouch’s ‘fixed’ places. The shore is a more ambivalent
representation, one that hints towards what has been extinguished,
what Wylie sees tourists on the Coast Path “[apprehend] as a ‘wild’
antithesis and antidote to urban life” (Wylie 2005: 236). The shore is
not pure wilderness: both meanings are constructed by culture through
its discourse, and the shore is as much a cultural articulation as the
beach. But there are different overdeterminations at work. How it is
represented differently? Through its use value – are we going to the
beach today? Or by its otherness – the shore is difficult to access, no
beach huts when we see a shoreline. Beach houses, yes, but shore
houses, no, because the shoring up of houses is for those in a state of
dilapidation, overcome by natural elements, damp, subsidence, shift-
ing encroachments unfriendly to the concept of capital and property.
On the shore a natural seepage reclaims something of the land from
the social. Saturation is less visible in the manicured beach: the domi-
nation of the non-human world is total when invisible. The shore al-
lows for, if not what McKibben calls “wilderness – in its truest sense,
of places totally separated from human influence” (McKibben 1995:
15) then at least more of the subaltern. Whether we choose a shore or
a beach with which to see the landscape is indicative of the antago-
nism at work in our social relations that Wilding urges us to recognise.
One of the first writers to comprehend this antagonism, and to
make the choice of what words to use with which to see the landscape,
was Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring. Written in 1962, the book
is seen as the founding text of modern environmentalism as it ques-
tioned the social relations that were leading to ecological breakdown.
It is nonfiction but studied for its use of literary strategies to address
this antagonism. Drawing on Keatsian imagery, its opening vignette
‘A Fable for Tomorrow’ describes a community unknowingly in con-
flict with itself as it deadens its pastoral American life through the use
of pesticides in mass agricultural practices. Killingsworth and Palmer
suggest that “it is a culture-bearing book, gathering the threads of my-
thology that precede it, reweaving them, and casting into the future a
narrative fabric that will become the fascination of a new generation
of writers (Killingsworth and Palmer 2000: 190-191). Yet Carson’s
narrative fabric began on the weft 21 years earlier, in 1941, with Un-
der the Sea Wind. This was the first of three books that took as their
narrative perspective the point where lands meets sea to explore hu-
manity’s relations with the world. Carson stated that:
I have tried to say [in all my books] that the life of the planet is inter-
related, that each species has its own ties to others, and that all are re-
lated to the earth. This is the theme of The Sea Around Us and the
other sea books, and it is also the message of Silent Spring. (quoted in
Gartner 2000: 120)
The later book is often regarded separately to these earlier works.

Carol Gartner argues
what makes Silent Spring different is that the philosophy has become
the overt message, that Carson’s goal has become not education alone,
as in the other books, but education in the service of persuasion: mak-
ing the case for change (Gartner 2000: 109).
That is, it had become explicitly a literature of recruitment. However,

this limits the agency of the reader in mobilizing the earlier texts to
produce an identification with the pro-environmental norms structured
in Carson’s ‘sea books’. It also constrains Carson’s own motivations
to undo the anthropocentric turn: She told her editor that in writing
Under the Sea Wind she was attempting to avoid the “human bias in
(marine) geography” (Montefiore 2001: 51). Carson’s work instigates
a narrative of movement towards the relationships between humans
and world, prioritising the poetics of space operating at the shore/
nature process, rather than the beach/human fixture; a narrative of
268 Alex Lockwood
movement which extends throughout her ‘sea writing’ towards and in-
forming Silent Spring. Indeed, her oeuvre takes its first step on the
shore, in the first chapter of Under the Sea Wind, ‘Flood Tide’:
The island lay in shadows only a little deeper than those that were
swiftly stealing across the sound from the east. On its western shore
the wet sand of the narrow beach caught the same reflection of palely
gleaming sky that laid a bright path across the water from beach to ho-
rizon. Both water and sand were the colour of steel overlaid with the
sheen of silver, so that it was hard to say where water ended and land
began. (Carson 1991 [1941]: 1)
At the origin of a critique of the anthropogenic age of warming1 is a

first example of this movement between two representations of the
coast. There is a continuum between land and sea (“hard to say where
water ended and land began”) but also a discernible differentiation be-
tween shore and beach (“on its western shore the wet sand of the nar-
row beach”) – the shore and beach are supplemental to each other, in
the deconstructive sense; both a part and apart from the other.
Through the play of supplementarity, Carson begins, tentatively, to
unsettle the culturally imposed meanings for both. That her writing
begins with a process – a movement from the beach to the shore – and
remains loyal to that process, suggests that Carson’s attempt to avoid
the human bias in science writing was also an attempt to engage with
the poetics and materialities of a literature of recruitment as re-growth,
to expose the fixity of signification in the practices of human domina-
tion over nature.
This signification is further questioned in the work of Carson’s
contemporary, J.G. Ballard, whose early writing revolves around
questions of human agency played out through his characters’ identi-
fications with their environment, notably the beach and shoreline. In
his 1962 novel The Drowned World – published the same year as Si-
lent Spring – Ballard also plays with the processes that are exposed in
the discursive spaces between ‘shore’ and ‘beach’. A small cast of
characters inhabit the drowned cities of the past. Kerans, the protago-
nist, is
1
I am looking at key texts and media across a period that begins in 1938, when
G.S. Callender presented the first scientific findings that anthropogenic green-
house gas emissions were warming the climate, and lasts up to the present
day.
busy himself with the job of mapping the shifting keys and harbours
and evacuating the last inhabitants [some of whom were] unable to
separate their own identities from the cities where they had spent their
lives (Ballard 1999 [1962]: 12).
Kerans’s own identity is also problematized by his relation to the land,

specifically, the beach. The mercenary Strangman taunts Kerans as a
subject no longer able to rationalise his own decisions or self-
identification via this identification:
“Your motives seem so complex, Doctor,” he remarked to Kerans.

“But perhaps you’ve given up hope of understanding them yourself.
We shall label them the total beach syndrome and leave it at that.”
(Ballard 1999 [1962]: 90)
This total beach syndrome finds other articulations: “Staring out at the
immense loneliness of this dead terminal beach, he soon fell into an
exhausted sleep.” (Ballard 1999 [1962]: 168) This terminal beach is
the title of Ballard’s famous short story, at first glance an apocalyptic
re-reading of Hiroshima that establishes a fixed identity attached to
the commodified representation of the beach. In ‘The Terminal Beach’
a dead Japanese tourist speaks to the protagonist Traven:
The beach is a dangerous zone. Avoid it. Have a proper humility, pur-
sue a philosophy of acceptance. (Ballard 1964: 156)
In these texts the ‘total’ or ‘terminal’ beach represents a human iden-

tity fixed in its social relations to others, the stasis of ‘a dangerous
zone’ unwilling to recognise social antagonisms, playing itself out in a
domination over nature. The beach exposes these social relations – be-
tween Kerans and Traven and those with whom they are in conflict –
even as it fixes their identities in a possessive individualism, and at the
same time erasing the land with which the identification is made. For
Peter Jacques it is “an erasure of meaning and ethical obligation to
anything outside the possessive individual” (Jacques 2008: 28). This
use of the beach exposes the relations that support the prevailing
structures of power: the quest for a fixed identity in relation to the
other through which one is passing, leading to domination of that
other.
However, this is set against those moments where Ballard in-
troduces the shore: as a less fixed space, identified as a process, a
270 Alex Lockwood
‘zone of transit’ where individual identity is (still) open to change. In

The Drowned World, the professor Bodkin says to Kerans:
The very junction where we stand now on the shores of this lagoon
[is] the great zone of transit... recollecting in our unconscious minds
the landscapes of each epoch. (Ballard [1999], 1962: 44)
This zone of transit is the location through which Kerans and others
break out of the normative social relations of the dying culture. It is on
the shore, not the beach, where the ‘Terminal Beach’ closes with a
similar movement: “[...] as the waves broke on the distant shore” (Bal-
lard 1964: 157).
Gregory Stephenson argues that “the narrative of The Drowned
World is shaped and enriched by patterns of imagery and allusion; in-
deed, ultimately the novel is to be understood more through its im-
agery than through its action” (Stephenson 1991: 64). The choice of
the alternative patterning here and in the shorter pieces is, therefore,
not simply by chance. As Patrick McCarthy identifies, Ballard uses
the term ‘shore’ for its play of signification: as physical coastline, but
also a shoring up. In The Drowned World, Ballard has borrowed a
passage from “Death by Water”, part four of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste-
land and given it to the mercenary Strangman, the novel’s anti-hero.
McCarthy argues:
Strangman’s appropriation of a few lines from Eliot’s poem, torn from

their context, is related to his larger project: the theft of paintings and
other cultural artefacts from the cities he temporarily reclaims from
the sea. This project in turn parodies Eliot’s own appropriation of
fragments of culture as a bulwark against the ruins of twentieth cen-
tury European civilisation: ‘These fragments I have shored against my
ruins.’ (line 430) (McCarthy 1997: 304-5)
Ballard appropriates this image, and in doing so exposes the beach for
offering no fault line in the construction of dominant cultural relations
between the characters and their environment. It is only through intro-
ducing a movement in imagery from beach to shore that the fragmen-
tation of meaning and its ‘shoring up’ through language can begin to
expose the impact of social relations on environmental identification.
When the texts suggest an identification of self with the shore and its
spaces of play, it reclaims from the fixed totality of the beach and its
possessive individual human identification a multiplicity of conditions
for human existence: what Doreen Massey calls “the gift of space.
Space is the sphere of the possibility of the existence of plurality, the
co-existence of difference” (Massey 2003). This shift in imagery lets
emerge what is, again drawing on Massey, a representation of land as
a reminder “of this place’s place within the wider scheme of things”
(Massey 2003).
4. A world burning on the shore of an unknowable void
This reminder is picked up in the contemporary work of Mark Lynas,

journalist and author of nonfiction books on climate change. During a
conversation at his home in Oxford, Lynas showed me his column in
the Guardian that same day, 12 June 2008. Its headline: “Climate
chaos is inevitable. We can only avert oblivion.” I wanted to know
why, then, had he written the book at all? “The journalist’s job is just
to tell a story,” he explained.
You’re getting onto dangerous terrain if you are setting out to advo-
cate a response. But if you’re talking about campaigning journalists,
then of course that’s different. As a campaigning journalist I seek to
raise awareness. (quoted in Lockwood 2008)
Lynas’s garden backs onto a tributary of the river Thames. It is the

flooding of this canal with which Mark opens his book, Six Degrees.
He prefaces the flood, a warning of the present effects of climate
change, with a quote from the first level of the Inferno in Dante’s Di-
vine Comedy (as Patrick McCarthy points out, this is also the place
Kerans finds himself in at the end of The Drowned World, lost in a
forest, as if there is an indirect awareness that passes from Dante to
Ballard to Lynas). Many writers since Carson have set out to advocate
a response that allows the individual space in which to identify with
their environment. As Carol Gartner puts it plainly: “[Carson’s] goal
was to initiate change.” (Gartner 2000: 103) For Jen Birks, campaign-
ing journalism is a well-resourced category of writing with
272 Alex Lockwood
a coherent and consistent notion of objectivity and truth, an under-

standing of ‘publics’ as politically active, a commitment to discussing
what should be done (not just finding fault) and to empowering pub-
lics (not speaking for them) (Birks 2010: 221).
Similarly to Carson, Lynas uses literary tropes and structure to shape

his books, High Tide and Six Degrees. Both Lynas’ books begin with
the visual and emotive effects of climate change in isolated inland
flooding (in Oxford) and sea level rise in the Pacific islands. In Six
Degrees he writes:
The end for atoll countries will not be rapid [at least not in human
terms] or cathartically dramatic. Instead it will be death by a thousand
cuts, an incremental diminishment of each nation’s ability to support
itself, as young people lose confidence in the future and old people
sink back into comforting dreams of the past. Each bit of beach lost
[...]. Decades before the last bit of coral disappears under the sea,
community services will decline, children will emigrate, schools will
close, and the fabric of a nation will begin to unravel. (Lynas 2008:
47)
Interesting here is that ‘each bit of beach’ is not listed in ecological

but human terms: community services, schools, and national identi-
ties. The coral remains even after ‘the beach’ is lost. The beach offers
little space for the recognition or participation of nature. Drawing on
Schlosberg’s conception of environmental justice, “if you are not rec-
ognised, you do not participate” (Schlosberg 2004: 520). Nature is
barely participating in its own demise, subsumed under human asso-
ciations. This is not a criticism of Lynas, but an example of how the
beach, further back from the shore, has come to represent a particu-
larly fixed meaning, a possessive appropriation of landscape. As Ste-
ven Lukes puts it, this is “recognitional domination” – where the
dominant group in control of the means of interpretation and commu-
nication project their own experience as the norm, rendering invisible
the perspective of those they dominate (Lukes 2005: 120). Lynas’s use
of the beach activates a response that can and should recruit us to the
knowledge that this appropriation of land under erasure requires an al-
ternative set of pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours to avert
further not just catastrophe, but oblivion.
We can follow that trace across borders into the fiction of Cor-
mac McCarthy. According to James Lilley,
McCarthy’s vision of the natural world [...] challenges and questions

the symbolic boundaries and apparent borders between word and
flesh, subject and society [...] and illuminates instead a fluid connec-
tivity between these ostensible binarisms (Lilley 2002: 163).
To go further, Lilley proposes that the question at the heart of all

McCarthy’s fiction is: “What is the nature of the body’s interaction
with the environment?” (149)
Much of McCarthy’s questioning is done through his charac-
ter’s relation with borders and crossings. To engage with this con-
struction, and with an echo of both Hall’s ‘frontier effects’ and Bal-
lard’s ‘zone of transit’, McCarthy represents the border as what José
David Saldivar calls a ‘transfrontera contact zone’ (cited in Eaton
2003: 174), which Mary Pratt defines as a place “where disparate cul-
tures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asym-
metrical relations of domination and subordination” (Pratt 1992: 4;
cited in Eaton 2003: 174). If this holds for McCarthy’s border fiction,
then it ascends to its apotheosis in his 2006 novel The Road, where the
disparate cultures are those of humanity and nature, where the asym-
metrical relations have reached their extremity in the death of both at
the hands of the one.
The Road is the story of a father and son in a world that has lost
civilisation, a world overheated and covered in ash. It is the story of
their passage along the road to the sea, pushing a trolley full of what-
ever food and goods they scavenge: another Danteesque road trip into
the Inferno, influences of which have been noted across McCarthy’s
fiction (e.g. Eaton 2003). The journey in The Road is a visceral en-
counter with the environment. The road and the coast are set perpen-
dicular to each other, a physical impasse met at the shoreline, and an
end to the movement of narrative. But it is also worth noting that, as
Doreen Massey suggests, “an encounter is always with something ‘on
the move’. The voyager is not the only active one. Origin and destina-
tion have lives of their own.” (Massey 2003) For Manzo, “[j]ourney-
ing suggests a dynamic interplay between people and their physical
surroundings, and conveys a sense of personal development and
change over time” (Manzo 2003: 52), a trajectory cutting across a
multitude of stories. So, when the boy and man first encounter another
human being, it is on the road, but a road itself where the macadam is
melting onto their shoes, a trajectory that moves with them. It is at this
274 Alex Lockwood
point that the text couples together the road with the exposure of the
process by which the road-as-narrative shores up the identities of
those who travel along it:
Someone had come out of the woods in the night and continued down
the melted roadway.
Who is it? said the boy.
I don’t know. Who is anybody? (McCarthy 2006: 50)
The road itself is the last reminder of the organising principle at the
centre of modern society. As Dianne C. Luce writes of the web of
meaning created by the road as it appears in McCarthy’s fiction “the
matrix of meaning achieved in human connectiveness itself appears
constrained by the linearity of the road” (Luce 1999: 205). In
McCarthy’s The Crossing, a gypsy tells the protagonist Billy that
“‘[t]he shape of the road is the road. There is not some other road that
wears that shape but only the one’” (McCarthy 1995: 230). In The
Road what was once a mechanism of translation and transportation is
now a principle of disorganisation. But they stick to it, literally, to
reach their destination. And it is here where the play between the two
representations of beach and shore reach their forceful apogee.
Then they came upon it from a turn in the road and they stopped and
stood with the salt wind blowing in their hair where they’d lowered
the hoods of their coats to listen. Out there was the gray beach with
the slow combers rolling dull and leaden and the distant sound of it.
Like the desolation of some alien sea breaking on the shores of a
world unheard of. (McCarthy 2006: 230)
This is strikingly similar to a description of the borderlands in The

Crossing, “a world burning on the shore of an unknowable void”
(McCarthy 1995: 73-74), and emphasizes McCarthy’s commitment to
the imagery. However, here on page 230 of The Road, we also first ar-
rive at the first instance in the text of the ‘beach’. Up to this point, the
edge of this landed space has only ever been represented as the shore.
The Road begins on a shore:
In the dream from which he’d wakened he had wandered into a cave
where the child led him by the hand [...] until they stood in a great
stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a
creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and
stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of
spiders. (McCarthy 2006: 1-2)
And this shore reappears throughout the novel in the man’s dreams.
But on reaching the sea, their destination and origin, the text oscillates
between the two representations, and it is within this space that identi-
fication with the human domination of nature is most keenly trauma-
tized. And, I would argue, this representational shift is central to this
traumatisation in the text, and is in itself a tragic event that captures
the sensation posited by Lynne Manzo that: “[E]motional bonds with
places can form or change through experiences of tragedy and loss
[…]. In some cases, places that formerly had no meaning become
meaningful through tragic events.” (Manzo 2003: 51) In McCarthy, it
is always a question of meaning. The boy and man set about scaveng-
ing for food and goods for survival; in doing so, the man tells the boy
they are “beachcombers” but the boy has no referent against which
this word makes sense. Echoing Lynas’s use of the term, the man has
to explain that beachcombers are “people who walk along the beach
looking for things of value that might have washed up” (McCarthy
2006: 235). The boy asks: “What kind of things?” He has no under-
standing of the meaning of ‘things’ or the ‘value’ they have, either for
use or exchange.
Here the beach is the site of the detritus of a capitalist system
washed up. While the beach is tied to human domination, however,
the shore is terrifying in its animality and ambivalence to life. So,
while they beachcomb what they find is life erased by ecological
breakdown. The play between these signifiers exposes the lack of rec-
ognition of the ecological world’s identity, subsumed by the readiness
and accessibility of a beached humanity, cleaved of life. Lilley argues
that “McCarthy has always been a writer of the border between the
human and the natural world” (Lilley 2002: 153). But what is at stake
here is not the meaning of the border but the borders of meaning.
Nothing makes sense in this world rendered unliveable, written at the
location of the signification – the shoreline: “At the tide line a woven
mat of weeds and the ribs of fishes in their millions stretching along
the shore as far as the eye could see like an isocline of death. One vast
salt sepulchre. Senseless. Senseless.” (McCarthy 2006: 237) What is
taking place, as the sea-levels rise, is the exposure of the saturation of
signification and its unravelling, or Wylie’s “formation and undoing
276 Alex Lockwood
of self and landscape in practice”. Earlier in the novel, the text de-
scribes exactly this process:
He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The
cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak
and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered
and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Un-
supported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief.
If only my heart were stone. (McCarthy 2006: 10)
As in Ballard’s work, it is this second sense – the exposure of the

processes of language that can no longer shore up meaning in an in-
creasingly senseless world moving rapidly along a road to cultural and
ecological breakdown – that underpins the first sense, undermines all
fixed meanings. ‘Things’ themselves, found by beachcombing, fail to
signify, making impossible any identities constructed through our re-
lation to things, each other, or the world. As Crouch says, the land-
scape “erupts” in its possibilities (Crouch 2010: 13).
If this is so, in what way can McCarthy’s work be placed along-
side that of Rachel Carson, J.G. Ballard and Mark Lynas as a literature
of recruitment? What are its material sensibilities with which we can
see how to “let the rest of creation begin, however tentatively, to
flourish once more”? Steven Frye argues that McCarthy’s border fic-
tion “portrays a world invested with a meaning experienced existen-
tially in the movement of narrative, one that tracks in the direction of
an end grounded, however tentatively, in purpose and value, as well as
in the reality of a distinctly human world” (Frye 2007: 62). Yet in The
Road the end for culture’s narrative has arrived: the ability to name
things, to create meaning, is disappearing: “The frailty of everything
revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness
and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it.”
(McCarthy 2006: 28) The oscillation represents, at the end of the road,
to use Joel Kovel’s term, “the cold and dark dead end signified by a
dying capitalism” (Kovel 2008: 14).
Yet, I would argue, The Road operates more powerfully as a
tool for recruitment and re-growth exactly because it reveals without
flinching the processes of cultural signification and the outcome of
maintaining an ignorance of capitalist social relations that play out as
the domination over nature. The Road offers its own theories of the
self in the seeing of the place. It is a literature where “collecting im-
ages and stories – building a fund of diverse rhetorical elements and

thereby enriching the environmental imagination – becomes an activ-
ist practice” (Killingsworth and Palmer 2000:196). Through doing so,
The Road, perhaps more than the other texts, allows for identification
with land/landscape; an identification so connected with space that
neither boy nor man can avoid the sense that their identities are shored
up by meanings that cannot, ever, be fixed. As Crouch says:
[T]he intensities of landscape, however mundane, soft, or powerful,

borne in and through representations that are imagined, felt, and ob-
served can circulate feelings of belonging but also of detachment. To
‘feel’ landscape in the expressive poetics of spacing is a way to imag-
ine one’s place in the world. The individual can feel so connected with
space that s/he no longer is aware, momentarily, of being (merely)
human; we may become the event, become the landscape. (Crouch
2010: 14)
5. Conclusion
These initial thoughts trace a genealogy of imagery through work of

this period and across fictional and nonfictional boundaries. It pro-
vides us with the beginnings of a critical opening for just one set of
metaphors, to build momentum for what the geographer Mike Hulme
calls, perhaps wryly, a “novel motor for cultural change” (Hulme
2007: 5) to mobilise resistance to the erasure of our shores. The works
of Carson and Ballard can be read as a literature of recruitment to con-
temporary issues of ecological breakdown in the way they approach
the antagonisms in our social relations that find manifestation in our
domination of the natural world. Whether Ballard saw his work as a
‘literature of recruitment’ in the same way that Carson (probably) did
is impossible to establish. However, his careful crafting of the sensi-
bility of the environment/identification matrix is central to his work.
As Umberto Rossi suggests of imagery in The Drowned World, “the
waters and this exotic fauna represent the gradual but inescapable sur-
render of the city to the wilderness, to an un-human or pre-human
state” (Rossi 1994: 156). The drowning of the world works at the
edges of self, allowing for the re-growth of nature (‘wilderness’), al-
though never quite escaping from culture. But escape is not the objec-
tive. In his study of Ballard’s fiction, David Pringle quotes Ballard
278 Alex Lockwood
drawing on Joseph Conrad, and provides some insight to explore fur-

ther these concerns: “‘Conrad once said that it’s necessary to immerse
yourself in the most destructive elements of the times and then attempt
to swim [...]. Through my books, what I’m seeking to discover is
whether a new sensibility exists on the far shore.’” (Pringle 1979: 52)
Lynas rejects the idea that his journalism is an attempt to advo-
cate a response to ecological breakdown – but that does not mean his
literariness cannot be classified as a recruitment tool, one that engen-
ders empathy for the environment world: awareness-raising as politi-
cal activity. And McCarthy’s work has so far resisted most labels crit-
ics have attempted to employ. This is, however, only the beginning of
a trace, brief and rudimentary, of an argument for the shore that is not
a beach in these four writers. Both representations, beach and shore,
are structured within language, and so both are forms of meaning-
making that privilege human agency; but, in these texts, and I would
argue, more widely, thinking about the spaces between these two rep-
resentations is a less worse way of mobilising understanding of a posi-
tive environmental identification, one that is less about nature existing
‘for us’ and more about nature able to gain a foothold outside of our
attempts to dominate it: for the ‘wild’ to re-grow.
Further research is required, particularly into the relevance of a
literature of recruitment to the study of environmental psychology and
reader research. This can help us evaluate claims made for the neces-
sity of a set of metaphors and narratives to help us to ‘work wisely’
and establish the grounds for a renewal of social relations and envi-
ronmental identification.
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Afterword:
Lines of Flight:
Unframing Land, Unframing Identity –
Two Speculations
Christine Berberich & Neil Campbell
This section we hope will serve at least two purposes, to conclude our
collection and deliberately and provocatively project ideas drawn from
these original and important chapters forward to speculate on future
thinking and directions for land and identity research. In particular, it
will examine how, in different ways, these chapters allow us to think
critically about the nature of the local and the global, about the rela-
tions of text and place, regionalism and nationalism, psyche and place,
and the need for ongoing and sustained inter-disciplinary and trans-
disciplinary work around these areas. What follows is speculative and
rhizomatic, presenting lines of flight towards possible agendas for fu-
ture research and perhaps, to bring us back to where it all began, even
suggesting gentle coordinates for a future conference.
What we would like to do in the remaining section of this col-
lection is to present two speculations on land and identity as a ‘layer-
ing’ of approaches, tracing shifts and connections across different
texts and continents. The intention is, as we have said, to provoke
thought and new research to fill in the gaps, to disagree, or to follow
the lines of flight wherever they might lead.
Human life is consequently and consequentially spatial,

temporal, and social, simultaneously and interactively real and imagined.
(Soja 2010: 18)
284 Christine Berberich & Neil Campbell
***
American anthropologist Kathleen Stewart describes her practice as

“cultural poesis”, a phrase that may have some use as a preface to
what follows in this afterword. She defines it as
an experiment that writes from the intensities in things. It asks what

potential modes of knowing, relating or attending to things are already
being lived in ordinary rhythms, labors, and the sensory materiality of
forms, of attunement to worlds. (Stewart 2009)
We need to notice, feel, acknowledge, and value all that is around us

and that we already experience but often forget or disregard or dimin-
ish. The grand sweep of landscape from which myths of nation, region
and self have so often been formed do not tell the whole story or even
a fraction of it. It is through the “intensities in things” close at hand
that we might become more “attuned” to the world all around us, con-
necting the local to the global not through abstraction and distance,
but rather through inter-relation and specificity. For Stewart this ne-
cessitates an attention to the ordinary: “things that are necessarily
shifting, opportunistic, polymorphous, indiscriminate, aggressive,
dreamy, unsteady, practical, unfinished, and radically particular”
(Stewart 2005: 1028). In order to record such flighty, generative things
she recommends new forms of writing, “as if the writing were itself a
form of life” – responsive, affective, mobile and poetic:
It follows leads, sidesteps, and delays, and it piles things up, creating
layers on layers, in an effort to drag things into view, to follow trajec-
tories in motion, and to scope out the shape and shadows and traces of
assemblages that solidify and grow entrenched, perhaps doing real
damage or holding real hope, and then dissipate, morph, rot, or give
way to something new. (1028)
As we will develop below, perhaps this attention to what Stewart calls

“Ordinary Affects”, is emerging across different fields of land and
identity studies, ranging from new travel literatures, ficto-criticism,
new ethnography, radical cultural geographies, and psychogeography.1
1
It is dangerous to suggest a list, but certainly we might include Edward Platt’s
Leadville (2001), Robert Sullivan’s The Meadowlands: Wilderness Adven-
tures on the edge of New York City (1998), David Searcy’s Ordinary Horror
(2001), Iain Sinclair’s Lights Out for the Territory (1997), Will Self’s Psy-
Lines of Flight 285
These human interactions with land might be re-thought and re-felt as

a “patterning of desire and routine”, as “orchestrations and intensities
[…] as much characterised by confusion as clarity” since, as High-
more argues, “the ordinary con-fuses thought and feeling as ideas and
sensation, remembrances and hope, and myriad somatic perceptions”
(Highmore 2011: 2). As we have seen throughout this collection, these
are the very spaces that writing occupies, traverses, and folds.
D.J. Waldie is a writer Stewart admires and refers to directly as
“surreally realist” in his approach to the suburban landscapes of
Lakewood, California (Stewart 2007: 7). It is with his work that this
section begins.
Speculation 1:
D.J. Waldie’s Affective Suburban Landscape
The city and my body supplement and define each other.

I dwell in the city and the city dwells in me.
(Pallasmaa 2007: 40)
Laura U. Marks writes disparagingly in The Skin of the Film (2000) of

“the sensuous nonplace of a North American suburb” dominated by
the “commodification and genericization of sense experience” where
the world has become increasingly optical and symbolic, dominated
by the “abstraction and symbolization of all sense modalities” (Marks
2000: 244). Such generic bland landscapes, she claims, can only be
countered by “pools of local sensuous experience” created by the peo-
ple who actually live there, achieved through “practices like cooking,
music, and religious ritual”, around which are “created new, small
sensuous geographies whose monuments are grocery stores, places of
worship, coffee and tea shops, and kitchens” as well as through “their
very bodies, in the organization of their sensoria” (245). Suddenly,
Marks’ judgmental and generalist attack on suburbia is modified by a
different perspective, at once more complex and multiple than the ini-
tial one; a haptic and affective landscape of the everyday explored and
chogeography (2007), and Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost

(2006).
enhanced by the likes of D.J. Waldie for whom suburbia is his flawed
home, yet always a rich and varied space of becoming.
Waldie challenges representations of suburbia as a type of re-
gion unworthy of serious, close attention, proving that regionalist
study can be critical too, interrogating the local and proximate pre-
cisely in order to demonstrate its universality, its connectedness and
its differences with the wider world. As Lucy Lippard puts it, “[g]ood
regional art has both roots and reach” (Lippard 1997: 37). In this
sense, and following from Stewart’s ideas, Waldie’s Holy Land is both
rooted in a deep, intense “ordinariness” of Lakewood whilst never los-
ing sight of the relatedness of suburbia to the ‘reach’ of national and
global forces (Stewart 2007: 7).
Waldie, who, until 2010, worked as a public official for the
Lakewood authority, claims suburbia is a “landscape people rarely no-
tice” and his writing presents a mosaic of episodes made up of me-
moirs, gathered stories, observations and other fragments that demon-
strate precisely why it is worth noticing and how its multiple narra-
tives, when looked at from the ground up, enmesh us into not just lo-
cal, but national and international histories (Waldie 1996: 154). To
this end, I would argue, Waldie stands at the forefront of an expanded
or reframed critical regionalism that builds upon a definition provided
by Douglas Reichert Powell who sees it as a “strategy for cultural cri-
tique” that links
individual moments of cultural struggle to larger patterns of history,

politics, and culture, by understanding how they are linked not only in
time and in the nebulous networks of discourse, but also in space,
through relationships of power that can be material and cultural (Pow-
ell 2007: 20-21).
Critical Regionalism originates in architectural theory to describe the

relationship between the universal and the local in architectural styles.
It asserts the need to be critical of the local and regional to avoid a
tendency toward naïve inwardness and nostalgia, whilst at the same
time, being critical of an overly prescriptive “universalism” that
sweeps away the significant contributions of the local and the regional
in favour of standardization. It emerged in 1980 with an unpublished
piece by University of Texas architecture scholar Anthony Alofsin,
‘Constructive Regionalism’, in which he identifies an understanding
of regionalism through the work of Lewis Mumford in his admiration
Lines of Flight 287
for architect H.H. Richardson and later the San Francisco Bay Region
School. Key to Alofsin’s article is his idea that out of Mumford’s con-
cern for balance and reconciliation between the local and universal
styles might emerge “both criteria for criticism as well as a direction
for the production of architecture, in essence a constructive regional-
ism” (Alofsin 2007: 372): “It would embrace traditions and transform
tradition; it would be wed to its setting […] it would foster craft and
push the limits of technology; it would speak to the individual search
for the universal.” (372) Wrestling with its paradoxes, Alofsin saw
“human use”, “local life”, and the “bonding of people” as intrinsic to
this constructive, critical regionalism, whilst refuting “imposition of
style or visual hegemony” and “cultural hedonism” (373, 372).
This idea, like the term Critical Regionalism itself, is borrowed
from Lefaivre and Tzonis who coined it in 1981 and traced it first in
the works of Lewis Mumford and John Brinckerhoff Jackson
(Lefaivre/Tzonis 1981). It was, however, Kenneth Frampton’s influen-
tial essay ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism’ (1983) that gave a wider
audience to these debates, noting the fundamental, and often produc-
tive, tension between “universalization” (closely allied to what we
might now term globalization) and the “local/regional” (often viewed
as limited, inward, provincial). As noted above, since regionalism is
often seen as naïve localism as opposed to a more fluid and postmod-
ern cosmopolitanism, Critical Regionalism attempts a negotiation be-
tween these two poles to avoid the excesses or limitations of each.
Lefaivre and Tzonis write of the need for critical self-consciousness to
avoid reviving any form of nostalgic vernacular with its echoes of
compensatory idealism, and instead echo Frampton’s call for a “dou-
ble mediation” – “to ‘deconstruct’ the overall spectrum of world cul-
ture which it inevitably inherits” and “to achieve through synthetic
contradiction, a manifest critique of universal civilization” (Lefaivre/
Tzonis 2003; Frampton 1990: 20, 21, 22, 23, 25).
Frampton desires “the dialectical interplay between [universal]
civilization and [local] culture” and asserts that this might happen
through “double mediation” and “interaction” whereby modern uni-
versalization is constantly interrupted and unsettled by what he use-
fully terms “a revealed conjunction between” (17, 21, 22; emphasis
added). The “conjunctural” denies the assertion of hierarchical order,
of the dominant, universal form over the regional, and instead finds
effective ways to “mediate” between and across forms. This conjunc-
tural process Frampton calls “in-laying” or “layering” whereby the

site “has many levels of significance […] the prehistory of the place,
its archaeological past and its subsequent cultivation and transforma-
tion across time”, displaying all the “idiosyncrasies of place […]
without falling into sentimentality” (21, 26). In these points, Frampton
presents a radical vision of “critical regional” space as complex, lay-
ered, and multiple, a palimpsest comprising past, present and future
that opposes any effort to reduce or limit its capacity through narrow
definition or “rootedness”.2 As I will suggest briefly here, D.J.
Waldie’s approach to the suburban landscape of Lakewood, California
has just such a layered, “conjunctural” emphasis, interested in the past
and the community dreams of post-war culture, without becoming
nostalgic or reductive in his attitude to its continuation and evolution
as urban space.3 As Waldie constructs this critical region on the page
nothing simply snaps into place “to support a well-known picture of
the world” (Stewart 2005: 1027), for he tests us, surprises us, shifts his
tone and style as if to imitate the variant, mutable world he describes.
It is never a represented world, but an emergent, immanent, and poetic
one – characterised by what Stewart calls the “jump or surge of affect”
seeing the “affective as a state of potential, intensity, and vitality”
(1027-28).4
Indeed, as the opening of Waldie’s Holy Land suggests, his in-
tention was to present a more human, affective relationship to the
soulless appearance and reputation of the grid: “That evening he
thought he was becoming his habits, or – even more – he thought he
was becoming the grid he knew.” (Waldie 1996: 1) The author, here
referred to as “he”, absorbs the grid into himself, just as the book itself
metaphorically embodies the shape of the grid with its 316 sections
(some long, some short, some poetic, some mundane) intersecting and
2
The influence of these ideas can be seen in the collaboration between Jacques
Derrida and Bernard Tschumi, see N. Campbell, The Rhizomatic West (2008)
for more on these links.
3
Waldie commented in a personal email to Neil Campbell that “I found this
judgement entirely refreshing and novel. I had never thought of Holy Land or
my other work as regional (perhaps because a southern Californian assumes
certain privileges for his place). But your analysis here feels right.”
4
Stewart’s form of ethnographic writing is linked with Benjamin, Foucault,
Taussig, Bakhtin, Barthes, Deleuze, Raymond Williams, Haraway, Sedgwick
and others.
Lines of Flight 289
juxtaposing across its pages; fragments and layers that together, like
the lives within the gridded streets he investigates, create a story to
challenge the normative mythology with its “necessary illusion [of]
predictability” (2). As he writes, “[t]he grid limited our choices, ex-
actly as urban planners said it would. But the limits weren’t paralyz-
ing” (116). One might learn to live within such apparent restrictions,
structure a whole life within and through such maligned patterns.
Echoing the new forms of writing Stewart wrote of earlier,
Waldie’s suburban palimpsest demands a different type of text; pho-
tographic, prosaic, and poetic, its many layers of form and content
present, investigate and circulate around the structures of deep feeling,
“active relations”, and histories that delineate his Lakewood (Williams
2001: 62, 64). To capture these patterns Holy Land shifts self-
reflexively from third to first person, interweaving historical and af-
fective elements across the landscape Waldie knows so well. “What
more can you expect of me than the stories I am now telling?” he
writes, and it is through these stories that he unravels a critical region-
alist methodology (Waldie 1996: 13); an approach that echoes that of
Michel Foucault’s notion of genealogy: “the union of erudite knowl-
edge and local memories” (Foucault 1980: 3). Waldie has lived in
Lakewood all his life, occupying the same house his parents bought in
the 1940s and, with failing eyesight due to glaucoma and keratoconus,
he walks its streets like a flâneur noting its details and quirks, its lines
of demarcation and celebration, hearing the voices of the dead and the
living echoing through what Foucault terms its “insurrection of
knowledges” (84). Holy Land juxtaposes psychogeographic tales of
land and identity, cross-cutting, like the suburban grid it examines, be-
tween historical figures and Waldie’s neighbours, childhood memories
and religious rituals, his real father, the city Fathers, and the Holy Fa-
ther. Thus Waldie moves seamlessly between stories of Mr H and the
fallout shelter built under his garage or Mrs R’s dead baby baptized by
Waldie’s mother in the street, to the implications of geological shifts
and water politics in LA, to the racial restrictions on home ownership
in the post-war USA.
To some extent Waldie’s approach mixes Will Self’s descrip-
tion of the ideal psychogeographer, as a “local historian with an atti-
tude problem” (Self 2007: 12) with Michel De Certeau’s sense of his-
torians as “prowlers”.5 For he works the suburban “zones of silence”

(De Certeau 1988b: 79), constructing a version of place akin to De
Certeau’s – “composed by a series of displacements and effects
among the fragmented strata that form it and that it plays on these
moving layers”; a space of memories, “haunted by many different
spirits hidden there in silence […] [since] [h]aunted places are the
only ones people can live in” (De Certeau 1988a: 108). Lakewood’s
voices, its personal and public ghosts, echo across Waldie’s frag-
ments: his dead parents summoned up through the stories he recalls of
their lives and his living with them; his neighbours across the years
from the primarily white demographic of the post-war years to its in-
creasingly multicultural make-up in the twenty-first century; the
founding boosters, and further back, the Spanish gentry who founded
Los Angeles; and even the dead soldiers memorialized on the plaque
Waldie replaces in Lakewood. These voices pattern the book, like “the
ghosts of repetition that haunt […] with ever greater frequency”, as
Sebald puts it in The Rings of Saturn (1998: 187), all filtered through
Waldie’s “Catholic imagination”. His poetic technique layers the
fragments and traces before the reader, providing “a meditation on the
fate of ordinary things – the things we touch and the lingering effects
of their touch on us” (Waldie 2007: 61).
Waldie contrasts this “touch” of suburban life, of really work-
ing close to the ground, with the stereotypical judgements of suburbia
derived from aerial photography presenting the hideous sameness and
grid-like rigidity of this distanced view. As Waldie writes, “you can’t
see the intersection of character and place from an altitude of five
hundred feet, and Garnett [the photographer] never came back to ex-
perience everyday life on the ground” (Waldie 2009: 3). Architectural
theorist Juhani Pallasmaa also claims the city has been overburdened
by the visual, created by “rapid motorised movement”, and “through
the overall aerial grasp from an airplane”. For him, as for Waldie, this
enforces “the idealising and disembodied Cartesian eye of control and
detachment […] le regard surplombant (the look from above)”
(Pallasmaa 2007: 29). Just like contemporary British psychogeogra-
5
There is a brief discussion between Waldie and Self on the internet KCRW
‘Which Way LA’ around the latter’s walk from LAX airport to the Watts
Towers. See http://www.kcrw.com/news/programs/ww/ww071101the_writers_
contract .
Lines of Flight 291
phers such as Will Self and Iain Sinclair, what matters more is prox-
imity and a felt connection to the overlooked landscapes of the every-
day through which one might counter what J.G. Ballard famously
called the “death of affect” (Ballard 1984: 96).
For Waldie, it is this proximate spatiality that concerns him,
seeing beyond the aerial view and its gridded imagery that literally
and metaphorically “looks down” on suburbia, to a view made up of
the human and the material landscape and their “joining of interests”
(Waldie 1996: 6). For only then will you experience its vital details:
“house frames precise as cells in a hive and stucco walls fragile as an
unearthed bone” (5). Through these organic, breathing images of cells,
hives, and bones Waldie creates his phenomenological, affective land-
scape vision “like the illustration of a fold of skin in a high school bi-
ology book” (125), never static or dead but always already engaged in
the multiple processes of embodied living in the world. As he has
written elsewhere, “[i]t’s only the skin I won’t slough off, the story I
want to hear told, my carnal house and the body into which I welcome
myself” (Waldie 2004b: 108).
If the gridded space of the suburbs has become its defining im-
age, Waldie’s writing gets inside the grid seeing complex lives and af-
fects implicated within it and “which it cannot contain, which spills
out from it, linking it to the outside” (Rajchman 1998: 20). “The crit-
ics of suburbs say that you and I live narrow lives”, writes Waldie, “I
agree. My life is narrow. From one perspective or another, all our
lives are narrow. Only when lives are placed side by side do they seem
larger.” (1996: 94) As we read Holy Land from section to section,
across time and perspective, this is the experience gained; of lives and
stories juxtaposed, side by side within the grid, building layer upon
layer within the intersecting streets of a community constantly evolv-
ing and yet, in some important ways, remaining constant and eternal.
At one point he uses the word “interleaving” to express this (1996: 3),
as if to deliberately invoke once again both the organic process of
overlapping growth and the bookish metaphor that reminds us of how
these suburban streets, for all their apparent ordinariness, are like the
text itself with each section a new “leaf” combining with others new
and old forming a complex, spectral document.
Through this interleaving process, Holy Land reaches beyond
localism showing instead these deep histories of the grid as regional
yet always simultaneously connected to national, and international

histories: the consequences of wars (both the Second World War and
Vietnam), the Atomic Age, the processes of migrational, racial, and
demographic shifts into and out of the American West; the develop-
ment of a military-industrial complex as the life-blood of the Sun Belt
economies (Lakewood is an aerospace suburb in part built to service
the workers at South Bay and Long Beach); and the dramatic ecologi-
cal changes written on the very landscape of suburbia. Through these
examples, Waldie locates Lakewood within a matrix of environmental
and political change like the work of Mike Davis, a writer he admires,
and yet whose work is apocalyptic in portraying LA’s decline, whe-
reas Waldie prefers his “skeptical optimism” born of a mixture of civ-
ics and Catholicism (2004b: 27). “My ‘sense of place’ is based”, he
writes, “on the belief that each of us has an imaginative, inner land-
scape compounded of memory and longing that seeks to be connected
to an outer landscape of people, circumstances, and things” (2007:
62). Thus self for Waldie is spatial, social and spiritual, all channeled
through sense which “enmeshes the ghostly and the definite”, as he
puts it, drawing in from his experience of the suburbs, “like the Word
being made flesh”, all its material and immaterial elements and sto-
ries, until what emerges is, as he writes, a “dialog, a continuous narra-
tive within and without, that I understand to be prayer. Because my
imagination inclines to being analogical, habitual, communitarian, and
commonplace, I assume that’s Catholic.” (2007: 63) In a correspond-
ing and beautiful moment in Holy Land, he writes, “When I walk to
work, thinking of these stories, they seem insignificant. At Mass on
Sunday, I remember them as prayers.” (1996: 111)
Waldie’s identity as social, spatial, and spiritual emerges
through his relationship to place, just as place forms from its dialogi-
cal relations with people. To reflect and interrogate this, he creates a
unique form of critical regionalist text involving a hybridization of
materiality and sensibility, yet one always already entwined with spiri-
tuality, since, as he writes, “[t]he everyday isn’t perfect. It confines
some and leads some astray into contempt or nostalgia, but it saves
others. I live where I live in California because the weight of my eve-
ryday life here is a burden I want to carry.” (2009) Through recognis-
ing and recording this “burden”, like the image of crucifixion that haunts
Holy Land from beginning to end, he constructs an expanded critical
regionalism in the spirit of Frampton’s mediated “conjuncturalism”;
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appreciating the local in the context of the wider world, the inner with
the outer, the material with the immaterial, the “Christic” with the civ-
ic; seeing how even in the most disregarded and ordinary landscapes
love, care, and redemption might still be possible both individually
and collectively. In the words of Kathleen Stewart, “[p]otentiality is a
thing immanent to fragments of sensory experience and dreams of
presence. A layer, or layering to the ordinary, it engenders attach-
ments or systems of investment in the unfolding of things.” (2007: 21)
How appropriate it is then, that Holy Land concludes at Easter, juxta-
posing religious rituals of sacrifice and atonement with the civic and
community care that Waldie espouses, clearly linking the obligations
and responsibilities of faith with his view of properly sustained subur-
ban duties. “There was”, he writes, “no distinction about who could
participate in the veneration of the cross”, and in his memory the Eas-
ter Mass merges with the secular gathering of suburbia until the words
of the hymn Pange Lingua take on another meaning as relevant to the
struggles and trials of suburban family life in Lakewood as to the
death and resurrection of Christ: “Sweet the wood/Sweet the nails/
Sweet the weight you bear.” (Waldie 1996: 178-79)
Curiously, Waldie claimed in 1999, when answering an LA
Times round-robin on the question “L.A. Lit (Does it Exist?)”, that
“[t]he literature to come isn’t here yet” (2004: 123). However, he is
too modest, for his own writings, scattered across books, articles, in-
terviews and blogs suggest that his affective memoirs of person and
place with their passionate breadth and emotive depth point towards
new and exciting forms of expanded critical regionalism resonant with
a complex and mysterious “compass of possibilities” (Waldie 1996: 4)
derived from an intense relationship to the everyday and an “invest-
ment in the unfolding of things”. In the words used by Kathleen Ste-
wart to define her own book Ordinary Affects, Waldie creates a new
form of writing “about how moving forces are immanent in scenes,
subjects, and encounters, or in blocked opportunities or the banality of
built environments” (2007: 128). Holy Land works rhizomatically
outward from the everyday and the disregarded – the “landscape
people rarely notice” (Waldie 1996: 154) – to build a complex, ambi-
guous, and always moving (in every sense of the word) vision of sub-
urbia, rather like the process defined by Stewart, as a
sense of force and texture and the sure knowledge that every scene I
can spy has tendrils stretching into things I can barely, or not quite,
imagine. But I already knew that. The world is still tentative, charged,
overwhelming, and alive. This is not a good thing or a bad thing. It is
not my view that things are going well but that they are going. (Ste-
wart 2007: 128)
As Waldie has written elsewhere, in similar terms, of his relationship

to place, “[t]o be a citizen of Los Angeles means, in this hour, not to
dream but to pick up the burden and gift of bearing witness to this
place” (Waldie 2009: 6). Through such powerfully affected and affec-
tive terms, Waldie expresses something of the poetic purpose and po-
litical drive defined by the great French chronicler of everyday life,
Michel de Certeau, who lived out his own life in California, and who
wrote that:
One must awaken the stories that sleep in the streets and that some-
times lie within a simple name, folded up inside this thimble like the
silk dress of a fairy. (De Certeau/Girard/Mayol 1998: 142)
Speculation 2:
“On this spot nothing happened”: Locating Affective Landscapes
Psychogeography is now a term widely used and applied. It can be

seen as a “literary movement” and a “political strategy”, a “series of
new age ideas or a set of avant-garde practices” (Coverley 2008: 9-
10). Originally meant as “an attempt to transform urban life […] for
aesthetic purposes”, psychogeography has since been applied more
widely, making full usage of Guy Debord’s attempt at definition: “The
study of the specific effects of the geographical environment, con-
sciously organised or not, on the emotions and behaviours of indi-
viduals.” (Debord 1981: 5) Explicitly, in Debord’s vision of the “soci-
ety of the spectacle” where things were becoming ever more bland,
simulated, and “screened” psychogeographic drifting (or dérive) of-
fered a means to reacquaint oneself with the types of disregarded
spaces Waldie is interested in. In Will Self’s words, by “walking you
can decouple yourself from the human geography that so defines con-
temporary urbanity” (in Bures 2007). Waldie’s Holy Land is a perfect
example of a work of psychogeography: in the manner of the flâneur
he discovers a small and familiar territory and makes it entirely his
Lines of Flight 295
own. In fact, at a talk Waldie gave in Los Angeles, provocatively enti-

tled ‘Walking in LA’, he urged people:
to wander in the city and wander in your neighborhood. I would

urge you to become an expert flâneur. I would urge you to acquire
not only pedestrianism as a vice but flânerie as a vice as well –
the ability to walk into your community and expect something to
occur to you as you found your way to some undiscovered part of
your neighborhood. (Waldie 2009)
From the relatively restrictive and limited space of Waldie’s Lake-

wood it seems a big jump to discuss the exploration of an entire coun-
try, especially as that also seems to divorce psychogeography from its
predominantly urban and small-scale context. Nevertheless, one could
argue that a contemporary ‘home tour’, the exploration and discovery
of one’s home country, is simply an extension of the smaller radius of
the traditional psycho-geographic exploration, such as, for example,
Iain Sinclair’s perambulations around London’s orbital motorway
M25. In a Home Tour, the ‘geographical environment’, i.e. the coun-
try circumnavigated (Raban 1987), cycled through (Vernon 1985) or
walked around (Goggarty 2007) or across (Crane 2008) certainly af-
fects the “emotions and behaviours of individuals” as it, more often
than not, is not undertaken to actually discover the land, but rather to
find the self, a self that often believes itself to be rooted to or influ-
enced by a specific location. This can be seen as an extension of
Waldie’s encouragement to find one’s way to an undiscovered part of
one’s neighbourhood.
However, the question that needs to be asked is just how the be-
haviour of individuals is affected. More often than not, the individual
traveller finds it difficult to liberate him- or herself from preconceived
notions, ideas or prejudices surrounding the land that is being trav-
elled. Waldie’s example has already demonstrated how the neighbour-
hood flâneur has to divorce himself from the expected, the familiar, in
order to look beneath or beyond. In a similar vein, accounts by travel-
lers have, over the years, contributed to creating inhibiting stereotypes
and expectations. This seems to be particularly problematic in the case
of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century English home tour. In 1983,
the American travel writer Paul Theroux remarked that “[t]here were
no blank spaces on the map of Great Britain, the best-known, most
fastidiously mapped and most widely trampled piece of geography on
earth” (Theroux 1984 [1983]: 15). In 2006, the writer Joe Bennett en-
countered a similar problem when asked by a publisher to produce a
book-length travelogue about England:
I bought a road map of England and spread it out to plan a route. But
there was too much England. Every inch of the map was dotted with
place names I knew and should visit. It was impossible to be compre-
hensive. Any route I took would miss infinitely more than it hit. What
I needed was a frame for the journey, a skeleton to which I would add
the flesh. (Bennett 2007 [2006]: 1)
Bennett’s “frame” and “skeleton” are the equivalent of Robert

MacFarlane’s ‘beginner’s guide’ to psychogeography:
Unfold a street map of London, place a glass, rim down, anywhere on

the map, and draw round its edge. Pick up the map, go out into the
city, and walk the circle, keeping as close as you can to the curve. Re-
cord the experience as you go. (MacFarlane 2005)
Bennett found his “frame” in the form and shape of one of the most
famous – dare one say mythologized – travelogues of the twentieth
century: H.V. Morton’s In Search of England, a work first conceived
and published in 1927 to help its writer and, presumably, his reader-
ship, over the turmoil and trauma of the First World War. In Search of
England is a work replete with images of a rural, pre-lapsarian Eng-
land that has since been absorbed into the mythology of the country it-
self: to see the real England, to realise what it means to be English,
Morton’s work has, for decades, been a formative influence. Published
virtually 80 years after its predecessor, Bennett’s quaintly named
Mustn’t Grumble: In Search of England and the English takes Mor-
ton’s work to task, criticizing its quest-motif from the outset: “His
purpose, openly expressed, was to find the real England, the core of
Englishness. He duly found it. It was an England of rural stolidity,
drenched in the past.” (2007: 2) Bennett shows himself critical of
Morton’s opus from the outset – so as readers we expect a deconstruc-
tion of the Mortonian myth of rural England. What we get, however,
is not quite so clear-cut. Throughout his book, Bennett makes a num-
ber of scathing remarks relating to the image of England that Morton
has created and that “has proved remarkably durable. It remains in the
collective mind, and is reproduced on a million calendars a year, and
in countless brochures and magazines” (2007: 11) – but he still finds
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himself, very much against his better judgement, not only enthralled
by what little he finds of the actual countryside but also, incongru-
ously, repeating countryside depictions à la Morton. What clearly dis-
tinguishes Bennett from Morton, though, is his awareness of the inter-
connection between painstakingly preserving an image of rural Eng-
land not in keeping with modern times on the one hand, and the tour-
ism/heritage industry and, effectively, political spin and power on the
other. His book is full of critical remarks such as:
It’s the tourist mantra around the world but especially in England. Old
is good and modern is bad. Today is an unenchanting mess. Yesterday
was a mess too, once, with its poverty, suffering and violence, but
time has composted it into sweet-smelling stories. (Bennett 2007: 31)
This points at the subjectivity and, potentially, unreliability of histori-

cal presentation that even goes so far as to ‘replace’ authentic artefacts
to make them more aesthetically pleasing for the viewing – and, cru-
cially, paying! – tourist public. When visiting Winchester, the first
English capital, Bennett notices that a gravestone, dedicated to the
“Memory of Thomas Thatcher a Grenadier in the North Regt. of Hants
who died of a violent fever contracted by drinking Small Beer when
hot the 12th of May 1764. Aged 26 years” has “been replaced three
times, most recently in 1968” and concludes that “[t]he reason this
stone has been replaced is that time has transmuted this young man’s
death into something delicious” (Bennett 2007: 55). For Bennett, this
questions the authenticity of all and sundry he sees around him. Simi-
larly, in Winchester he gazes, “as Morton gazed, on the Arthurian
Round Table that isn’t Arthurian. It’s an impressive thing weighing
over a ton, but it’s a Tudor fake. Myth-making to impress visitors is
nothing new.” (2007: 55)
This critical tone continues throughout the book, and particu-
larly so when Bennett surveys the merchandise specially produced to
entice tourists. Of the ‘Lilliput Lane’ ceramics depicting thatched cot-
tages and idyllic countryside settings he says that “they are deemed
collectibles but are more honestly religious icons. They represent an
ideal”; of the National Trust that it
sells a distinctively English fantasy […] a nicely-nicely, middle-class

Englishness, born of the same impulse, the same ideal, as the Lilliput
Lane ceramics and the tended prettiness of [villages such as] Fac-
combe. The natural world it celebrates is a domesticated, governed

one, fragrant and threatless. (Bennett 2007: 55, 112)
Bennett is deeply concerned that what he encounters is no longer the

‘real’ England, whatever that may actually be, but a sanitized, family-
friendly and highly consumer-orientated hyperreality where even
“[c]athedrals strive so hard to deny that they’ve become theme parks”
(2007: 77). This different attitude becomes particularly apparent in
places that both Morton and Bennett describe in some detail, Tintagel,
for example, or, even more so, Land’s End. What for Morton was still
“fairyland” (1960: 84), Bennett views with a considerable portion of
irony: “down there to the west where the daffs come early and the
smugglers roam” (2007: 100). Land’s End, in Bennett’s eyes, has been
transmuted into a theme park aimed, predominantly, at keeping tour-
ists entertained and spending money: “[I]t’s a form of parodic culture-
packaging and is mostly gruesome” (117). Instead of climbing the ac-
tual rocks that tumble into the sea, or going for a walk along the shore,
looking out to sea, the paying customer also known as ‘the tourist’ is
invited to explore “over 20,000 square feet of Undercover Attractions”
that include hands-on exhibitions dedicated to “The Relentless Sea”
and a “Return to the Last Labyrinth” (118-19). An appalled Bennett
concludes that
[i]t’s a distillation of pap, a Disneyland of verbal dishonesty. ‘Hero-

ism, skulduggery and adventure’ mean sanitized glorifications of
fighting and illegality. ‘Monsters’ is a bald lie. ‘Pirates’ were thieves.
‘Smugglers’ were tax-dodgers. ‘Wreckers’ were vultures. ‘Arthur and
the Age of Knights’ were more or less mythical. (119)
With his outspoken criticism, Bennett virtually stabs at the very heart
of English identity and reveals that much of what has been celebrated
and revered over the ages is just fabricated and invented and, like
Land’s End itself, only given the “significance we’ve chosen to invest
in it” (118).
Bennett concludes that many of the points and icons tradition-
ally used to instil a sense of national belonging and identity are conse-
quently based on “faux glamour, […] dishonest guidebooks, [and] the
gross and culpable commercial delusion that is the travel business”
(100). At the end of In Search of England, H.V. Morton, in a para-
graph literally overloaded with symbolism, picks up a handful of soil
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in an overly romanticised village with a “churchyard where the green

stones nodded together”, declaring to the vicar “‘You have England’”
(1960: 277). Bennett picks up on these concluding words and – in a
very tongue-in-cheek manner – surmises that the village at the end of
Morton’s journey might not actually have existed: “Morton’s arche-
typal sleepy English village comes with no name. I suspect that he
embellished it beyond recognition, or else that he simply made it up.”
(2007: 277) The conclusion, therefore, must be that, potentially, de-
pictions of rural England have their foundation more in dream or
myth, rather than a reality in keeping with the times. A mythical land-
scape that, as the contemporary novelist Kazuo Ishiguro once re-
marked in an interview, is “harmless nostalgia for a time that didn’t
exist. The other side of this, however, is that it is used as a political
tool.” (Vorda 1993: 5)
The main problem that Bennett experiences on his tour is that
he can’t quite free himself from Morton’s work. Wherever he goes,
Morton has been before, and has influenced his own thinking and feel-
ing. Instead of finding the ‘real’ England, Bennett finds an England
that has been written about, described, summarised or compartmental-
ised by somebody else before. Instead of an affective landscape that,
potentially, helps him find out more about himself, he finds effective
tourist sites, hyperrealities that no longer have bearings to reality.
They are as distanced and remote as the stereotyped suburbs D.J.
Waldie counters in Holy Land. However, Bennett has a moment of
epiphany. While touring Dartmoor, he spots a plaque on a Princetown
public house: “‘In 1832’, it says, ‘on this spot nothing happened’”
(Bennett 2007: 141). For Bennett, this sign is a refreshing departure
from all the strenuous efforts at selling off history and national iden-
tity in the many tourist spots he has visited before where he felt stifled
and restrained by institutionalized attempts to stop him from ‘seeing’
and ‘thinking’ for himself. Kathleen Stewart writes about ‘The Per-
fectly Ordinary Life’ and summarises it as
A taste for the miniature, a passion for secrets,

a place where desires float free.
Life seized in the sidelong glance.
And in that glance, the glimpse of something brooding,
inexplicable, beautiful.
The hunch that everything might become clear if we just keep
Watching for the faces in the trees. (Stewart 2003)
Stewart’s affective landscapes are rooted in the small-scale, in the in-

timate rather than in the grander picture. And this is the realization
that Bennett arrives at, too. He concludes that
I have a lovely evening. I learn a few things about Dartmoor but more
about the people who tell me about Dartmoor. I drink quite a lot of
good beer. I eat a plate of roast meat and vegetables that is quite
rightly inexpensive. I laugh a lot, I exchange a lot of words that nei-
ther I nor anyone else will ever remember […] and I galumph happily
back along the main street at closing time without noticing whether
it’s raining or not. In short, on 24 April 2005 on this spot nothing hap-
pened. (2007: 142)
After travelling the length and breadth of the country, Bennett has
found one place that has affected him to not feel disengaged or alien-
ated, but to belong.
***
Although our attention has been primarily on the ways land and iden-
tity have been presented through literature, it is important to recognise
the cultural political dimensions of such textualities. As Ben High-
more reminds us, creative texts are “the communal circulation of af-
fects and passions” (Highmore 2011: xi-xii) and so form a vital part of
what Edward Soja terms “a critical spatial perspective” built on the
recognition that all space is real and imagined simultaneously (Soja
2010: 3). This brings back Benedict Anderson’s theory of nations as
“imagined communities” built on communal acceptance of precondi-
tioned visions, ideas and conceptions, be they the notion of the na-
tion’s physical borders or the far more abstract idea of the deep com-
radeship among citizens of the same nation (1991: 6-7). Thus in exam-
ining texts we reveal how identities emerge socially and spatially, how
just and unjust geographies are formed and challenged, and how acts
of writing, in a number of forms, might contribute towards what Soja
terms “spatial justice” (2010). For, as he puts it, “justice and injustice
are infused into the multiscalar geographies in which we live, from the
intimacies of the household to the uneven development of the global
economy” and it is in negotiating these spaces that we “create our bi-
ographies and geo-histories” (2010: 20, 18). Whether through Waldie’s
suburban LA memoirs or Bennett’s shadowing of Morton’s journeys
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around Britain, they demonstrate the power of texts to open up appar-

ently closed or defined spaces to new scrutiny and for more nuanced,
layered, and often ambiguous consideration. Crucially, they open up a
debate – and one that needs further attention in the future. The interac-
tion between land(scape) and identity is, initially, and as our case
studies of Waldie and Bennett have shown, a personal and introspec-
tive one but, ultimately, one that affects the historical, social and cul-
tural sphere, and that turns it, effectively, and to link it back to the
words of Kazuo Ishiguro, into a political tool. The continued and im-
portant work of analysing the relations of land and identity in all its
variant forms is political, as it always has been, and it is our conten-
tion that in widening and deepening these studies through new and
challenging approaches such work can contribute to a critical spatial
consciousness and dialogue aimed at understanding and improving
how we live in the world.
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Online 2(1): n.p.
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Theroux, Paul. 1984. Kingdom by the Sea. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Vernon, Tom. 1985. Fat Man on a Roman Road. London: Fontana.
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Index
Keywords
aesthetic 73, 78, 82, 91-92, 94, 96, beauty 72-73, 82-83, 95, 130, 195,
102, 105, 107-108, 122, 130, 207, 224, 230
215, 253, 294, 297 natural beauty 72-73, 83
aesthetic mourning 130 becoming 21, 25, 44, 49-50, 52, 261,
aestheticisation 96 286
aesthetics 28, 93, 102, 250, 253 begrudgery 183-184
Kantian aesthetics 95 belonging 21, 27, 47
Picturesque aesthetics 92-94, blood and belonging 33
96, 106 feeling-as-belonging 53
afterwardsness (Nachträglichkeit) 157 national belonging 34
agriculture 69, 98, 104, 110, 119 ‘Bloom 98’ 57
agricultural Revolution 97-98 Blut und Boden 21
allegiance, affective bonds of 67, 76, Boden 21, 118
81, 86 Book of Kells 173
anamorphosis 200 brandscape 235, 246-247, 250, 253
ancien regime 122 brawndrain 172
anti-semitism 34 Britishness 175
apotheosis 129, 153, 157-158
archaeology 152-153, 157-158 capitalism 220, 238, 241, 246, 276
architecture 28, 120, 122-125, 151, consumer capitalism 235
204, 218, 222, 286-287 Cartesian leftover 48
architecture of Doom 135 chaos 54, 120, 126, 216, 271
art 36, 44-60, 71, 98, 102, 117, 120- chronotope 27, 148, 152
136, 194, 204, 207, 214, 227, city 35, 54, 60, 71, 119-123, 129, 132,
235, 253, 256, 286 137, 170, 185, 213-218, 220-
art and life 56-57 226, 238-239, 241-243, 248-
art and power 117 249, 251-255, 261, 277, 285,
art-as-landscape 59 289-290, 295-296
art beyond representation 48 city of God 137
art practice 43, 60 city on a hill 117
artwork 43, 46-50, 52, 55, 57- cityscape 135-137, 239, 250
59 fantasy city 220
degenerate art 127 global city 235, 240, 247
“earth art” 50 virtual city 252-253
Auschwitz 142-143, 179-180 class 17, 23, 26, 177-178, 183, 231,
authenticity 84, 178, 216, 219, 224, 276
227, 297 middle-class 171, 176-177,
autonomy 78, 254 297
306 Land & Identity
upper-class 231 darkness 54, 119, 220, 230

working-class 231 Dartmoor Prison 120
Cold War 32, 241 death 76-77, 83, 117-123, 128-133,
community 27, 31-32, 34, 51, 57, 60, 136-138, 144, 146-150, 154-
83-84, 165, 170, 177, 180, 155, 157, 183, 198-200, 220-
184-186, 193, 223, 229, 241, 221, 225, 228, 230-232, 270,
253, 267, 272, 288, 291, 293, 272-273, 275, 291, 293, 297
295 birth and death 76-77
imagined community 34, 237 consciousness of death (see
Irish community 165, 171, 173- memento mori) 198
174, 177 death anxiety 127, 130, 134-
conservation 36, 67-68, 71-72, 76, 80, 136
83-85, 91-92, 103 death camp 178
continuity 25-26, 30, 59, 80, 142, death drive 230
144, 159, 199, 260 mass death 137
Cornish and International Movement social death 134
49 unplaceable death 144, 151
cosmopolis 238, 248 decay 91-94, 96-98, 108, 129, 195,
countryside 35, 37, 45, 71-72, 80, 98, 224, 226
102, 110, 145, 155, 194, 197, landscape of decay 105
297 Picturesque decay 93
British countryside 193
English countryside 193-194, democracy 99, 122, 255
196-197, 199 desertscape 242
illiterate countryside 119, 133 deterritorialization 236
Irish countryside 230 Devonian 99
creativity 48, 59, 120, 130, 137, 248 diaspora 18, 26-27, 31, 35, 148, 165
cryptonomy 255 diasporic 26-27, 31
cultural poesis 284 diasporization 27
cultural studies 17, 35, 53 dichotomy
culture 18-21, 24-28, 30-31, 34-36, nature/culture dichotomy 71-
67, 69, 71, 80, 84, 100, 117, 72, 85 (see dualism)
122-125, 127, 131, 134, 137, différance 26, 265
171, 173, 180, 182, 186, 214- discontinuity 25, 260
215, 236, 244, 265-267, 270, dis-locatedness 53
273, 276-277, 286-288, 298 dis-location 142, 167, 171, 178, 244
endogenous culture 30 dispute 31
exogenous culture 30 ethnic dispute 25
culture of compensation 27 distance 45, 54, 119, 147, 154, 158,
English culture 34 168, 169, 218, 250, 284
media culture 252 diversity 26, 78, 171, 214, 216, 243-
modernist culture 133 244, 248
post-Holocaust culture 142, doppelgänger 222
157 drifts 81
visual culture 239 dualism 26, 71
cyberpunk 238-239, 254 nature/culture (culture/nature)
cyberspace 238-239, 254 dualism 67-68, 71, 84 (see
dichotomy)
Index 307
dwelling 19, 27, 44, 52-53, 59 aesthetic experience 78

dystopia cultural experience 27
dystopian 225-226, 253 experience of place 20
Holocaust experience 141, 143,
eco-criticism 37 146-147
ecology 35, 51, 243, 249, 259 poetics of experience 55
economy 96, 119, 137, 216, 223, 235, sexual experience 223, 229
243, 256, 300 urban experience 213
cultural economy 235-236,
242 fantasy 25, 34, 120, 124-125, 130,
political economy 91, 93, 97- 133, 137-138, 153, 158, 181,
98 225, 227, 297
Eight Mile 92 fantasy city 216, 220, 228-
electroscope 238 229, 232
England 47, 49, 54, 99, 151, 165, 167, fatherland 33, 117
172-174, 177-178, 180, 182, feminism
193, 196, 199, 209, 216, 242, postfeminist 223
246, 296-299 Fight Club 92
rural England 296-297, 299 financescape 235, 237, 242, 244-246,
Englishness 185, 193, 197, 204, 209, 256
296-297 flânerie 229, 295
enlightenment 91, 98, 216 flâneur 289, 294-295
Entartete Kunst 135 frontier 54, 110, 265
environment 22, 36, 49, 56, 67, 70, frontier effect 265, 273
73, 76, 78-80, 84-85, 119, Führer/Fuehrer 122-125, 128, 130,
170, 214, 243, 260-261, 263, 132, 134
265, 268, 270-271, 273, 277-
278, 293 gardening 50-51, 81-82
environment of memory 156, The Guardian 107, 110, 271
199 gender 17, 23, 26, 223, 252, 254, 262
natural environment 19, 82 geography 21, 46, 142, 145, 149-150,
geographical Environment 22, 154, 236, 253, 267, 294
294-295 cultural geography 19, 22, 28,
natural environment 19, 82 259, 261
environmental 69, 71, 73, 78, 80, 84- dematerialized geography 22
85, 259-260, 262-264, 266- geology 104-105, 118
267, 271-272, 277-278, 292 geopoetics 47
environmental ethic 67-69 geopolitics
environmental theory 67-69 global geopolitics 255
pro-environmental 259-260, literary geopolitics 91
262-263, 267, 272 generation 32, 37, 110, 132, 141, 144-
environmentalism 267 146, 154, 165-167, 172, 175-
environmentalist 69-70, 186 176, 178-182, 184, 187, 213,
escapism 128 267
ethics 15, 51, 69, 141 1.5 generation 147
ethics of consolation 155 second generation 93, 146-
ethnoscape 235, 237, 242, 244, 256 147, 165-166, 168, 170-172,
experience 176-178, 180-182, 184-187
308 Land & Identity
second-generational 165, 169- national identity 17, 25, 29,

170 34, 165, 175, 185, 193, 299
genius loci 248 nature qua identity 67-68, 73,
globalisation/globalization 91-92, 98, 83, 85
235-237, 248, 256, 287 translocal identity 43
Golan Heights 91, 108-109 identification
Gorton Friary 92 environmental identification
graphic novel 179, 213, 215, 217-218, 259, 262, 271, 278
222, 239 ideology 21-22, 29-30, 33, 44, 47, 57,
Ground Zero 255-256 97, 121, 129, 155, 223
Grund 118 ideoscape 235, 237, 242, 254-256
imaginaire 237
heroism 33-34, 124, 298 imaginary 121, 237-238
heterochrony 198 global imaginary 235, 237-
heterogeneity 20, 25-26, 243 239, 242, 246, 248, 253, 256
heterotopia 193-194, 198-199, 201, imperialism 25, 236
204-205, 209 inauthenticity 178, 185
hidden child 147 industrialism 84
historiography 26 in group 30
Holocaust 141-148, 150-151, 154-155, inter-subjectivity 36, 49
157-158, 161, 166-167, 170, intertextuality
178-179 intertextual 221
Holocaust memory 141-142, Irish 165-187, 230
144-145, 154 Irish diaspora 165, 167, 169,
homeland 17, 29-34 181
homosexuality 70 Irish identity 165, 171, 176
‘hoofprinting’ 111 Irish in Britain 165, 170, 176,
hyperreality 298-299 178, 185
hyperreal 215, 228, 252 second generation Irish 168,
170-171, 182, 185
Iiconoclasm 122, 136 Irishness 173-174, 177
identity 17-18, 24-32, 34-37, 43, 47,
54-55, 58, 67, 73-78, 81, 84- Iron Curtain 29
86, 92, 99, 106, 110, 117-118, irredentism 29
121-122, 150, 165-167, 170- Israel, Israeli 36, 91, 98, 104, 106,
172, 175-178, 180, 184-185, 108-110, 117, 178, 243
187, 193-195, 197, 199, 201, Eretz Israel 117
205, 207-209, 217-224, 235,
239, 248, 252-253, 259-261, kibbutz Zionism 110
269-270, 275, 283, 292, 298 Kindertransport 150
identity and land/land and kitsch 110, 158
identity 17-18, 21, 26, 28-29,
35-37, 43, 176, 283-284, 289, land 17-21, 23, 25-26, 28-29, 31, 34-
300-301 37, 43, 47, 50-52, 54-56, 58,
cultural identity 25-26, 31, 34- 67, 68, 71-72, 80, 83, 91-93,
35, 169, 236 97-98, 104-110, 117-120,
landscape and identity 21, 235- 125, 127, 133, 152, 155-157,
236, 239 176, 186, 193, 223, 227, 261,
Index 309
263, 265-266, 268-269, 271- 194, 198-199, 229, 239, 246,

272, 277, 283-286, 288-289, 252, 255, 292-293, 297
291-295, 299-301, 303-304 landscape of memory 37
land and identity (see identity) Holocaust memory 141-142,
land artist 51 144-145, 148, 154
land management 67-68, 72, metaphor 35, 49, 77, 150, 154, 166,
80 204, 214, 264, 266, 277, 278,
landscape 291
affective landscape 259, 285, metonymy 255
291, 294, 299-300 metropolis 213-217, 223-232
landscape as representation 57 migration 18, 25, 35, 154, 165-167,
landscape as text 23 172, 176, 178, 186, 292
landscape of fear 21 milieu de mémoire 156, 199
landscape of loneliness 21 mise en abyme 204
landscape of trauma 255 mobility 43, 45-46, 48, 51, 53-54, 56,
Lebensraum 118, 121, 125, 129, 137 236-237, 242-243
lieu de mémoire 156, 193, 199 modernity 25, 30, 36, 91-93, 104,
Life and Debt 92 110, 134-135, 156, 206, 216,
literariness 263, 278 219, 236
literature 34, 60, 71, 148, 165, 181, Morlock 250
183, 215, 236, 260-262, 264, motherland 33
276, 293, 300 mourning 129-131, 141, 144-145, 149,
19th century literature 34 152, 155, 199, 256
British literature 198 landscape of mourning 141
English literature 100, 195 movement 24-26, 49-51, 55, 91-92,
Holocaust literature 141, 155 106, 152, 176, 222, 235, 237,
Irish literature 183 241, 244, 261, 266-268, 270,
travel literature 284 273, 276, 290, 294
war literature 196 anti-globalisation movement
local, the 24, 284, 286-287, 293 91-92
the global and the local/the mystery 77, 80, 150, 194, 208-209,
local and the global 24, 238, 217, 219, 222, 241
283 myth 25, 34, 72, 111, 120, 169, 178,
logos 240, 248, 250 181, 217, 284, 296-297, 299
London 56, 151, 172, 174, 176, 178, mythicisation 181
183-186, 213-218, 220-232, mythology 34, 267, 289, 296
238, 240-244, 246, 248-250,
295-296 Nakba 107
Nachträglichkeit (afterwardsness) 157
martyr 33-34, 131, 136 narcissism 31, 131
martyrdom 136 narrative 47, 56-57, 75-77, 80-81, 95-
matrix 29, 238, 274, 277, 292 96, 101, 147, 152-153, 155,
mediascape 235, 237, 242, 252-254, 158, 197, 214, 216-217, 220-
256 223, 239, 242, 263, 266-268,
memento mori 198 270, 273-274, 276, 278, 286,
memory 18, 25, 27, 34-36, 46, 49, 53, 292
141, 144-148, 150, 152, 154- fantasy, narrative and myth 25,
160, 167, 178-179, 188, 193- 34
310 Land & Identity
historical narrative 105, 152, pedestrianism 91-92, 99, 295

218-219, 221 Pedlar, the 96-97, 112
narrative fetishism 156, 159, perfect summer 193, 198
161 performative act 48
narrative qualities 67, 74, 76- performativity 22, 43, 48-50, 56-58
78, 81-82 phrasebook 31
narrative unity 75 Picturesque 28, 36, 91-99, 103-104,
nationalism 18, 29-30, 33, 181, 238, 106, 108-111
283 geopolitical Picturesque 91
territorial nationalism 29 Picturesque aesthetics 91-93,
nature 36-37, 51, 67-86, 93-94, 103, 96
109, 119-120, 145, 225, 259- Picturesque pictorialism 97
260, 262, 264-265, 268, 272- Picturesque tourism 92-93, 99
273, 277-278 place
domination of/over nature non-place 142, 203, 226-227
263-264, 266, 268-269, 275- Plastic Paddy 177, 185
276 Plastic Paddyism 184
lost nature 72 plein air 55
natural 18, 67, 70-72, 74, 79- plurality 24, 271
85, 101, 105, 119, 137, 149- poetics 43, 50-51, 54-56, 104, 142, 261,
150, 173, 260, 263, 265-266 264, 268
unnatural 67, 70, 73-74, 81-82 expressive poetics 43, 53, 58,
naturalness 70, 73 60, 277
nature qua identity 67-68, 73, geopoetics 47
83, 85 poetics of spacing 43, 48, 53,
Nazi 21, 117, 121-122, 126, 129, 131, 60, 261, 264, 277
133-137, 145-147, 155 spatial poetics 146, 149, 161
Nazi Germany 35 poetry 97, 102-103, 193, 196, 238
Nazism 155, 178 lyrical poetry 34
necropolis 226 politics 29, 32, 44, 50, 60, 91-92, 104,
nine-eleven (9/11) 226, 241, 244, 248, 124, 223, 231, 261, 286, 289
251-252, 255-256 cultural politics 30-31, 35
nostalgia 84, 193, 209, 225, 286, 292, gentle politics 43, 51, 57-59
299 geoliterary politics 110
notebook global geopolitics 255
Notebook entry 100-101 global politics 241
Coleridge’s notebooks 99-100 identity politics 32, 35
international politics 17
object-ness 49 literary geopolitics 91
Other, the 17, 133, 174, 265 postmemory 141-142, 146-150, 152,
otherness 71, 165-166, 173, 178, 266 154, 157, 159, 161, 165-167,
out group 30 178-179, 182
postmodernism 213, 238
palimpsest 213-215, 220, 222, 227, psychology 136
288-289 environmental psychology
Panopticism 253 259, 278
pastoral 155, 193-195, 198, 267 psychogeography 213, 284-285, 294-
patria 31, 33-34 296
Index 311
psychogeographical 217-218, emblem of the soldier 33-34

220-221, 255 somnopolis 226
space 17-25, 27-28, 35, 37, 44-52, 54-
Quneitra 91, 93, 108-109 58, 60, 79, 125-126, 132, 137,
143-144, 146, 148-149, 152-
race 17, 23, 26, 104, 174, 178 155, 181, 194-199, 201, 203-
racism 104, 170, 174 205, 209, 213-216, 218-226,
Ratcliff Highway murders 221 229-231, 235, 239, 242-243,
realism 127, 129, 158 246, 259, 261, 264-265, 268,
magic realism 158, 161 270-272, 274-275, 277-278,
reality 30, 48, 73, 101, 118-119, 129- 285-286, 288, 290-291, 294-
134, 168-171, 178, 181-182, 295, 300-301
203, 276, 299 aerospace 292
Reconquista 33 cyberspace 238-239, 254
Red Army 117 lost space 29
region19, 35, 83, 109, 235, 244, 284, natural space 19
286-287 poetic space 21, 32
regional 236, 286-289, 291 third space 27
regional identity 99 time and space 60, 148, 152,
regionalism 283, 286-287, 292-293 204, 214
regionalist 286, 292 spacing 36, 43, 46-48, 53, 56-60, 261,
regionalism 283, 286-287 264, 277
critical regionalism 286-287, spatial consciousness 30, 301
292-293 spatiality 18, 35, 147, 239, 262, 291
Reich 127-130, 137 SS 133
relation SS Ahnenerbe 157
meaningful relations 67, 84 stereometry 153
relational integrity 67, 73-74, subjectivity 21, 47, 55, 69, 223-224,
82 227, 235, 239, 242, 246, 297
relationality 25, 43, 49, 60, 261 inter-subjectivity 36, 49
river Jordan 105 symbolism 33, 298
rootedness 21, 24, 26-27, 288
Rorschach inkblot test 68 technoscape 235, 237, 242, 256
ruins 36, 91-95, 99, 108-110, 130, 256, temporality 45-46, 55, 83
270 terra inkognita 119
ruins principle 129-130, 136 territorialism 21
territoriality 17-18, 29, 31-32
sarha 99, 105-106 territory 17, 19, 22, 29-32, 46, 218,
seanchai 183 284, 294
sexuality 23, 173, 227 textuality 36
homosexuality 70 thanatolatry 136
simulacrum, simulacra 247, 254 theory 23, 45, 50, 70-71, 80, 218, 300
simulacral 215, 224-226, 231, architectural theory 286
249 cultural theory 214
shore 259, 264, 266, 268, 270-272, environmental theory 67-69
274-276, 278, 298 Freudian theory 199
soldier 132, 134, 143-144, 146, 200, literary theory 35
202, 208, 290
312 Land & Identity
non-representational theory post-traumatic 124, 134

22-23, 47 trauma theory 148
picturesque theory 91, 96, 104, traumatic heroism 124
110 Treblinka 145
social theory 26
spatial theory 17, 26, 35 unbelonging 167, 171, 182, 185-186
trauma theory 148 uncanny, the 205-207, 221, 244
Tintern Abbey 92-96 uniqueness 78
topiarist 82 unnatural 67, 70, 73-74, 81-82
topiary 82 utopia, utopian 125, 179, 216, 232, 238
topicality 30 utopianism
topography 102, 106, 120, 203, 216, cyber-utopianism 256
225, 255
psychic topography 117-119 war literature 196
social topography 21 Whitechapel murders 219-220, 223
toponymy 203 wilderness 70, 97, 120, 136, 260, 266,
topos 277, 284
pastoral topos 193 wilderness preservation 91-92
tourism 60, 91, 236, 261, 297 world
tradition 27-28, 33, 53, 97-98, 165, natural world 75, 79-80, 91-92,
170, 180, 183-185, 195, 224, 94, 98, 152, 260, 262, 265,
287 273, 277, 298
cultural tradition 156 World Trade Center 255
non-traditional tradition 27 World War I 37, 134-135, 137, 193,
vernacular tradition 83 201, 203, 296
transfrontera 273 World War II 29, 135, 249, 251, 253,
transhistorical 221-222 292
transnational 235-236, 238, 240-241,
243, 245-246, 248, 254 xenophobia 34
trauma 18, 35, 37, 147-148, 150, 156-
157, 167-168, 193, 196, 199- Zionism 104
203, 205, 209, 255, 296 kibbutz Zionism 110
historical trauma 156-157
parental trauma 167
Index 313
Names
Abraham, N. 255 Bhabha, Homi 17-18

Ackroyd, Peter 213-215, 217, 220-222, Biddulph, William 108-109
231 Birkeland, Inger 54
Adams, Bill 71-72, 83-85 Birks, Jen 271-272
Ahluwalia, Pal 34 Black, Stephanie 92
El Assad Bashar 108 Bocock, Robert 214
El Assad Hafez 108 Bonta, Mark 46
Alexander, Leo 136 Boland, Eavan 165-166, 169, 172, 181-
Allen, Robert C. 98 182, 184, 186-187
Alofsin, A. 286-287 Bolt, Barbara 48-49, 52, 57, 60
Amis, Martin 213, 215-216, 225-227, Bonaparte, Napoleon 121, 128, 131
231 Bourke, Angela 165, 170, 180, 184
Anderson, Benedict 32-33 Brady, Emily 82
Anderson, Carol 224 Brady, Eoin 185
Appadurai, Arjun 235-238, 242, 244, Brady, Ian 218
253-255 Brandt, Karl 137-138
Appiah, Anthony Kwame 75-76 Breker, Arno 133
Aristotle 70 Bressi, Todd W. 54
Arnold, Dana 214 Breugel, Pieter 44
Arrowsmith, Aidan 165, 173-174, Brody, Samuel 263-264
181-182, 185 Brontë, Charlotte 34
Ashcroft, Bill 34 Brook, Isis 82
Augé, Marc 226-227 Brooke, Rupert 196
Augustine 120, 137 Buchannan, Ian 46
Austen, Jane 34 Budd, Malcolm 69
Avruch, Kevin 35 Buell, Lawrence 262
Bures, Frank 294
Bachelard, Gaston 197, 262 Byron, George Gordon 103
Baer, Ulrich 142
Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhaӿlovich 20, Cabral, Amilcar 30
148, 288 Callender, G.S. 268
Ballard, James Graham 225, 227, 259, Calvino, Italo 152
264, 268-271, 273, 276-277, Cambrensis, Giraldus 173
291 Campbell, Eddie 217-218
Barker, Pat 193-194, 196, 203, 206, Campbell, Neil 43, 53, 288
208-209 Cant, Sarah 49
Barnes, Julian 204 Carr, J.L. 193-195, 199, 201, 204, 209
Barrell, John 95-97 Carroll, Lewis 230
Baudrillard, Jean 225, 254 Carson, Rachel 250, 262-264, 267-268,
Beattie, James 103 271-272, 276-277
Becker, Ernest 133, 136-137 Caruth, Cathy 147
Bell, Alan 263 Casey, Edward 45-46, 48, 50-51, 53
Benigni, Roberto 179 Casey, Maude 175
Benjamin, Walter 132, 288 Castells, Manuel 235, 243-245
Bennett, Joe 23, 296-301 Çelebi, Evliya 14, 111
Berger, John 59-60 Charlemagne 129
314 Land & Identity
Clare, John 106, 110 Dixon, Sophie 91, 93, 99, 102-106,
Clayton, Susan 75, 260 110, 112
Clifford, James 25, 27, 53 Dizard, Jan E. 68, 87
Coffey, Donna 155 Doel, Marcus 46, 63
Cohn, Norman 129, 135 Donald, James 214, 233
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 91, 93, 99- Dooley, Maura 186, 188
103, 106, 110, 254 Dubowitz, Dan 91-92
Comer, Krista 21 Duncan, James 47, 63
Connor, Steven 222
Cook, Pam 181 Eagleton, Terry 169, 189
Cooper, David 77 Eaton, Mark 273, 279
Cook, Annie 217, 230 Elphinstone, Margaret 223, 233
Copley, Stephen 95-97, 112 Eliot, Thomas Sterns 270
Cosgrove, Denis E. 22, 28, 38, 44, 62 Englesfeld, Mladen 31, 38
Coverley, Merlin 294, 302 Erikson, Thomas Hylland 30, 38
Crane, Nicholas 295, 302 Evernden, Neil 68, 87, 89
Crang, M. 19, 38
Cresswell, Tim 19, 22-23, 38, 45, 62, Farrell, Kirby 21, 119, 139
64 Fawkes, Guy 229
Cristal, Ann Batten 102, 114 Ferguson, Kennan 89
Cronon, William 69, 87 Fieldhouse, D.K. 104, 113
Crouch, David 22-23, 35-36, 47, 49, Fincher, David 92
50-55, 57, 62, 261-263, 265- Fitzgerald, Gretchen 170, 189
266, 276-277, 279 Foer, Jonathan Safran 11, 158, 162
Cruise, Tom 240, 252 Fogel, Alan 74, 87
Cubit, Geoffrey 189 Foley, K. 176, 189
Curtis, Liz 92, 174, 189 Ford, Ford Maddox 197, 210
Foster, John 89, 302
Daniels, Stephen 19-20, 22, 38, 44, 62 Foucault, Michel 64, 193-194, 198,
Dante Alighieri 271, 273 201, 204-205, 210, 288-289,
Davis, Mike 292, 302-303 302
Davies, Richard 31, 38 Foulkes, Caroline 185, 189
Davidson, Joyce 89 Frampton, Kenneth 287-288, 292, 302
Debord, Guy 294, 302 France, R. 89
De Certeau, Michel 289-290, 294, 302 Franco, Francisco 33
De Kooning, Willem 50-51, 53, 62 Frederickson, George M. 104, 113
Delbo, Charlotte 142-143, 162 French, Ray 175, 189
Deleuze, Gilles 36, 46-48, 50, 55, 62, Freud, Sigmund 31, 130, 153, 157, 199,
64, 236, 262, 288 206, 210
Dewsbury, Jon-David 47, 51, 62 Friedländer, Saul 147, 162-163
Diaz, L. 33 Frye, Stephen 276
Dickens, Charles 34 Fussell, Paul 194, 198, 210
Diebenkorn, Richard Clifford 50-51
Dieckhoff, Alain 25, 33, 38-39 Gade, Rune 63
Dillon, Brian 102, 110, 113 Gallagher, S.F. 189
Dissanayake, Ellen 125, 139 Game, Anne 52-53, 63
Dix, Otto 135 García Márquez, Gabriel 158
Garlake, Margaret 49, 63
Index 315
Gartner, Carol 267, 271, 279 Hindley, Myra 218

Gathercole, Peter 157, 162-163 Hinds, Joe 260, 265, 280
Gellner, Ernest 29, 32, 38 Hirsch, Marianne 142, 146-149, 162-
Gibson, William 8, 235, 238-239, 242- 163, 165-167, 181, 189
248, 252-257 Hitler, Adolf 117, 121-137, 139, 219
Gilbert, Pamela K. 214 Hobsbawm, Eric 32
Gilpin, William 36, 91 Hoffman, E. 166, 189
Gilroy, Paul 25, 27-28, 38 Holland, Allan 70, 80, 87-88
Girard, Luce 294, 302 Holmes, Richard 101, 113
Goebbels, Jopseph 125 Holt, Jim 280
Goering, Hermann 121, 136 Hosking, Karin 259, 280
Goggarty, Paul 295, 302 Howard, W. Scott 152, 162
Goodridge, John 107, 113 Howkins, Alun 197, 210
Gramsci, Antonio 28 Hughes, Albert 219, 230, 233
Gray, Breda 189 Hughes, Allan 219, 230, 233
Grosz, Elisabeth 46, 63 Hulme, Mike 277, 280
Groth, Paul 38, 54, 63 Hutcheon, Linda 222, 234
Guattari, Félix 36, 46, 50, 62 Hyde, Douglas 188
Gutiérrez, Natividad 25, 38, 39
Ignatieff, Michael 33, 39
Haggerty, Timothy 134, 139 Ingold, Tim 44, 46, 63, 89
Halifax Slasher, the 218-219
Hall, Stuart 18, 21, 25-27, 34, 38, 265, Jackson, John Brinkerhoff 19, 39, 46,
273, 279 53-54, 62-63, 287, 302
Hallam, Elisabeth 46, 63 Jackson, Peter 39
Hamann, Brigitte 123, 139 Jack the Ripper 218-220, 230, 233-
Hannam, Kevin 45, 63 234
Hannigan, John 216, 220, 234 Jacobus, Mary 97
Hanson, Curtis 92 Jacques, Peter 260, 264, 269, 280
Haraway, Donna 288 Jameson, Frederic 220, 234, 238, 257
Hareven, Tamara 84, 87 Jeffries, Stuart 228-230, 234
Harg, Ian L. 89 Jerslev, Anne 63
Harré, Ron 47, 63 Jones, Nick 49, 58, 63
Harte, Liam 165, 171, 180-181, 189 Junge, Traudl 131-132
Hartley, L.P. 193-194, 209-210
Hass, Amira 178-179, 189 Kacandes, Irene 162-163
Heidegger, Martin 48 Kals, Elisabeth 259, 262, 280
Heller, André 132, 139 Kandiyoti, Dalia 150-151, 157, 163
Heller, Chaia 89 Kaprow, Allan 63
Hepburn, Ronald 77-79, 82, 87, 89 Kar-Wai, Wong 228-229
Hewison, Robert 83-64, 87 Katz, Eric 70, 88
Heyd, Thomas 78, 87 Keane, Fergal 178, 188
Heywood, Simon 168 Kee, Robert 189
Hickman, Mary J. 165, 170, 172-175, Kelly, Gail 259, 280
189 Kelly, Mary 219, 230
Highmore, Ben 38, 285, 300, 302 Kertzer, Adrienne 147, 156, 163
Hillis-Miller, J. 194, 203, 210 Keskitalo, Anne 54, 63
Himmler, Heinrich 123 Kidner, David W. 73, 85, 88
316 Land & Identity
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie 262-263, Lukes, Steven 272

267 Lynas, Mark 259, 264, 271-272, 275-
King, Nicola 153, 155-157, 163 276, 278
Kinsella, Thomas 183, 188 Lynn, Nicholas 121
Klee, Paul 51
Klein, Bernhard 187, 189 MacFarlane, Robert 296
Klein, Naomi 247-248, 257 MacIntyre, Alasdair 75
Knight, Richard Payne 93, 112 Macherey, Pierre 106
Knight, Stephen 217, 234 MacLean, Gerald M. 99, 108-109
Kostovicova, Denisa 30, 39 Manzo, Lynne 260-261, 273, 275
Kovel, Joel 260, 264, 276, 280 Märchenkönig (Ludwig II) 124
Krause, Jill 17, 38-39 Marks, Laura 285
Krauss, Rosalind E. 95, 113 Massey, Doreen 24-25, 45, 271, 273
Kumar, Krishan 34, 39 Matless, David 20, 44, 47
Kundera, Milan 44, 63 May, Karl 124, 129
Mayol, Pierre 294
LaCapra, Dominick 193, 199-201, McAdam, Marie 171
203-204, 208, 211 McCafferty, Nell 176
Lambert, Greg 46, 62 McCann, W.J. 157
Landry, Donna 36, 96-99, 102, 113- McCarthy, Cormac 92, 259, 264, 272-
114 276, 278
Langenbach, Randolph 84, 87 McCarthy, Patrick 270-271
Lanzmann, Claude 145, 162 McCrory, Moy 169, 179
Larkin, Philip 196, 210 McGann, Jerome J. 100, 102
Lease, Gary 89 McGerr, Rosemary 208
Leavey, Gerard 178-179 McGreal, Chris 109-110
Lee, Keekok 70, 88 McEwan, Ian 194
Leed, E.J. 134-135, 139 McKibben, Bill 69, 260, 263, 266
Lefaivre, Liane 287, 302 Mcnagthen, Phil 70
Lehan, Richard 215-216 McNamara, J. 168
Lennon, Mary 171, 189 McRae, Adnrew 99
Leopold, Aldo 83, 88 Medhurst, Andy 175, 177, 181
Lernout, Geert 189-190 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 46
Levi, Primo 179, 188 Merrick, Jay 91-92, 108
Ley, David 47, 63 Merriman, Peter 44-46
Light, Andrew 69-70, 80 Michaels, Anne 141-142, 144, 146,
Lilley, James 272-273, 275 151-153, 156-161
Linenthal, Edward T. 145 Michasiw, Kim Ian 95
Lingis, Alphonso 262 Mill, John Stuart 69, 78
Lippard, Lucy 286 Miller, D. 47
Liu, Alan 94 Mitchell, David 44
Lockwood, Alex 271 Modell, John 134
Lorimer, Hayden 23-24, 43-44 Montefiore, Janet 267
Lowenthal, David 157 Moore, Alan 213, 215, 217-222, 230
Lubbren, Nina 55 Morland, George 98
Luce, Dianne 274 Morton, H.V. 296-300
Ludwig II von Bayern (Märchenkönig)
124 Nash, Catherine 22, 52
Index 317
Newling, J. 43, 56 Richardson, H.H. 287

Ní Bheirn, Máire 184 Roe, Nicholas 97
Ní Chonaill, Eibhlín Dubh 183 Rolston III, Holmes 69
Nicholas, Lynn H. 121-123, 131 Rommel, Erwin 129
Nero 128 Rose, M. 44
Nora, Pierre 156, 194, 198-199 Rossi, Umberto 277
Norman, Richard 77 Rousseau, Jean-Jaques 262
Rushdie, Salman 158
Obenzinger, Hilton 104 Rycroft, S. 48
O’Brien, Joanne 171
O’Byrne, Deidre 176 Said, Edward 28
Ó Ciosáin, N. 167 Santner, Eric L. 156, 160
O’Donoghue, John 172 Sassoon, Siegfried 193-194, 196, 203,
Okri, Ben 158 208
Olwig, K. 59 Schama, Simon 145
O’Keeffe, E. 168 Schlosberg, David 272
O’Neill, John 70, 80 Schmiderer, Othmar 132
Opotow, Susan 75, 260 Searcy, David 284
Ó Súilleabháin, Seán 183 Seamon, David 47
Otero-Pailos, Jorge 144 Searles, Harold 75
O’Tuama, Seán 183 Sebald, W.G. 54, 142, 147, 150-152,
Owen, Wilfred 200, 205 290
Self, Will 284, 289-291, 294
Pallasmaa, Juhani 141, 285, 290 Shafir, Gershon 104
Palmer, Jacqueline 262-263, 267, 277 Shakespeare, William 127-128
Paster, Gail Kern 120 Sharpe, Kevin 103
Paterson, Mark 59 Shay, Jonathan 132
Patterson, Orlando 137 Sheeran, Patrick 183
Perec, Georges 142, 144, 146-147, 155, Shehadeh, Raja 91, 93, 104-108, 110
158 Sheller, Mimmie 45
Peyser, Thomas 238 Shotter, J. 47
Phillips, Lawrence 214, 217, 222, 230 Sinclair, Ian 111, 213, 217, 220, 284,
Piterberg, Gabriel 104 291, 295
Platt, Edward 284 Skibell, Joseph 158
Plotkin, Henry 70 Smith, Adam 97, 99
Plumptre, James 99 Smith, Anthony 21, 29-30, 32-33
Pollock, Griselda 55 Soja, Edward 18, 26, 283, 300
Powell, Douglas Reichert 20, 23, 286 Solnit, Rebecca 285
Price, Uvedale 93 Soper, Kate 69
Pringle, David 277-278 Sparks, Paul 260, 265
Prospero 127 Speed, Fran 36, 73
Pygmalion 136 Spiegelman, Art 179-180
Spindler, William 158
Raban, Jonathan 295 Spirn, Anne Whiston 20-21
Rajchman, John 291 Spotts, Frederic 121, 123, 125-128,
Rawles, Kate 80 133-134, 136
Reagan, Ronald 186 Srebnik, Simon 145
Renwick, Neil 17 Stephens, Chris 51-53
318 Land & Identity
Stephenson, Gregory 270 Virilio, Paul 252

Stewart, Kathleen 284-286, 288-289, Vogel, Steve 71
293-294, 299-300 Vorda, A. 299
Stillinger, Jack 99-100
Stone, Christopher 69 Wagner, Richard 129-130
Storey, John 265 Waldie, Donald J. 285-286, 288-295,
Suleiman, Susan Rubin 147 299-301
Sullivan, Robert 284 Walsh, John 171, 180
Sutcliffe, Peter (The Yorkshire Ripper) Walter, Brownen 170, 172-175
218-219 Ward, Patrick J. 99
Swift, Graham 193-194 Warwick, Alexandra 218
Wedgwood, Tom 101
Taussig, M. 43, 288 Welsh, Charles 183
Taylor, Charles 75 Whelan, Bernadette 167, 174, 185
Tennant, Emma 213, 215-216, 222- White, Richard 180
226, 231 Whitehead, Anne 145, 156
Thatcher, Margaret 172, 223 Wilding, Adrian 260, 265-266
Thatcher, Thomas 297 Wilhelm II 125
Theroux, Paul 295-296 William the Conqueror 118-119
Thomas, Edward 193-195, 197 Williams, Raymond 24, 28, 68, 265,
Thompson, Kenneth 214 288-289
Thorak, Josef 133 Williams, Renwick (Halifax Slasher)
Thoreau, Henry David 262 218
Thornton, Kelsey 107 Williats, Steve 56-57
Thrift, Nigel 22-23 Wilson, Elizabeth 214, 223-224
Tighe, Carl 185 Wilson, O. Edward 260
Tilki, Mary 171 Winterbottom, Michael 213, 215-216,
Tolia-Kelly, Dyvia 45 228-229
Toogood, Mark 49-50, 52, 55 Witoszek, Nina 183
Torok, M. 255 Wylie, John 23, 44, 47, 49, 53, 261-
Tschumi, Bernard 288 266, 275
Tuan, Yi-Fu 45 Wolfe, Patrick 104
Tumbleson, Raymond D. 173 Wordsworth, William 96-97, 100-101,
Tzonis, Alexander 287 103, 105-106, 108, 162
Ulysses 117 Yorkshire Ripper, the (Peter Sutcliffe)

Urry, John 45, 70 218-219
Van Alphen, Ernst 165, 167-168 Zephaniah, Benjamin 213

Vernon, Tom 295 Zipes, Jack 184
Vidler, Anthony 28 Zusak, Markus 158
Vice, Sue 156

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Land & Identity

Edited by Christine Berberich,

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2012

The series Spatial Practices belongs to the topographical

Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell & Robert Hudson

Christine Berberich & Neil Campbell

Portsmouth, 2011 C.B.

Jenni Adams is Lecturer in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century

Christine Berberich is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the

Neil Campbell is Professor of American Studies and Research

Elsa Cavalié holds a PhD from Toulouse University, France. Her

David Crouch is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Geography at the

Kirby Farrell is Professor of English at the University of

Robert Hudson is University Professor in European History and

Brian Jarvis is Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Film at

Donna Landry is Professor of English Literature at the University of

Alex Lockwood is Senior Lecturer in Journalism at the University of

Moy McCrory is a writer born in England of Irish parentage. Her

Fran Speed is an independent scholar with a PhD in philosophy. She

Christine Berberich, Neil Campbell & Robert Hudson

What is at issue is the performative nature of differential identities: the

For a long time, our understanding of land and identity, expressed as

“neutral”, and yet “[s]pace is political and ideological. It is a product

Our sense of place is really part of our cultural systems of meaning.

Hall’s statement reminds us of the need to continually re-examine how

[Landscape] is really no more than a collection, a system of man-made

Therefore, as Mike Crang suggests, “landscapes are not individual

Many of these debates over terminology and how humankind relates

to this collection. Perhaps Douglas Reichert Powell summarises it well

[p]lace is thus a constantly generative construction in which the physi-

Thus in considering land always already embroiled with landscape/

an ambiguous synthesis whose redemptive and manipulative aspects

Hence, landscape, as many other critics testify (like culture) is a

[a] landscape is a cultural image, a pictorial way of representing,

Increasingly, this acceptance of the “immaterial” has extended beyond

The geographical environment forces people to relate beliefs to ac-

We, of course, perceive landscape constantly, but as Cresswell re-

ments, precognitive triggers, practical skills, affective intensities, en-

As Raymond Williams wrote in 1961 culture is “the study of relation-

constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meet-

Rejecting the rootedness of “some long, internalized history” Massey

Cultural identity [...] is a matter of “becoming” as well as “being”. It

Sounding very much like our earlier definitions and problematisations

[T]he recognition of a necessary heterogeneity and diversity; by a

atizes the cultural and historical mechanics of belonging” by disrupt-

involves dwelling, maintaining communities […] [and] articulates, or

Like Gilroy’s analysis of black musical cultures, we would see place

As far back as 1983, Denis Cosgrove wrote (following Raymond Wil-

states to Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union as well as in many other

nationalism offers security and perceived stability at a time when life-

Put another way, “[t]he sense of ‘whence we came’ is central to the

[t]he value of culture as an element of resistance to domination lies in

Furthermore, within the realm of cultural politics it is the fine-tuning

inherently political in that it can shape and influence attitudes, ideas

Pogledala sam u nebo, pogledala sam u more, pogledala sam u gore,

This phrasebook primarily targeted tourists from the Croatian diaspora

“imagined family” rather than the individual’s actual family, which, in

This poem provides an example of that construction of “memory, fan-

English culture, at its deepest level, is seen as created by a series of

4. Using this collection

This collection of essays had its origin in a one-day symposium held

tion B, on ‘Landscapes of Memory’, explores the impact of specific

Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and