This is the start of it

My favourite type of novel is, I suppose, an unsettling one – the sort that when you read it, you can’t, quite, put your finger on what it is that makes you feel so off-kilter. Actually, you don’t really want to analyse what exactly it is that’s messing about with your head, because you’re enjoying it and it would, most likely, be like explaining a good joke. In 2015, my novel, The Black Country, was published by Salt Publishing. When people ask me – and it is usually the very first question I am asked – ‘what kind of novel is it?’ I always hesitate. Then I say something about it being ‘dark’, something about it being a bit ‘psychological’, I tell them it’s set in the Black Country (where I live, in the West Midlands of the UK) and then my voice trails off, or, worse, I start telling them the plot. I’m preparing myself for the exact same question when Salt publish my next novel, to be called Gamble, next year (2018). Maybe if I start thinking about the answer now, I’ll be prepared. As a preview, Gamble is a dark story, and there’s something about it that is works on your psychology, it’s unsettling, and it’s set in the Black Country. In the writing of these two novels, I became aware of the link between the setting (the landscape, the geography of the Black Country) and a certain psychological colour that came out of that, and how it made me operate the characters – the way they moved through and so on – and how I wanted to make readers feel. I was, without realising it, getting a bit psychogeographical.

Which is how I came to be studying for this PhD: Psychogeography and Black Country Literature.

A bit of detail and rationale: Guy Debord, who is given credit for coining the term, stated, psychogeography is, ‘the study of the precise laws and effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the behaviour of individuals.’ Following Coverley’s assertion that ‘The current revival of psychogeography manifest(s) itself as a literary trend with London at its centre...This history of ideas is also a tale of two cities, London and Paris.’ (Coverley, Psychogeography, 2010, p11) the impression is that psychogeography is experiencing a return to the literary tradition. Psychogeography and the study of literary cities has provided the theoretical frame for previous studies (Ross, and Loffler), attempting to define literary psychogeography. Their focus differs, but both have analysed specific works of fiction in relation to the connection between mind and spatial surroundings, and both have concentrated, at least in part, on texts set in London.

Ross, for example, provides a complex, predominantly psychologically-based definition of literary psychogeography which links theory of mind (the ability to imagine ourselves in other people’s places, also known as Qualia) with the ‘fabula’ (or the chronological order of events) into which he calls a ‘psychogeographic bundle’ or ‘packet’, and an accompanying analysis of two well-known texts by best-selling authors, Martin Amis’ London Fields and Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy. Ross’ thesis attempts to legitimise the psychological aspect of both literary psychogeography and the reading process, and the selection of fiction set in ‘big cities’ of London and New York goes some way to corroborate Coverley’s assertion the ‘literary trend’ London (Coverley, p11). By contrast, Loffler attempts to provide a definition of literary psychogeography in the form of a ‘toolkit’, which includes, amongst the criteria, some specifics and some rather unspecifics including: the idea that within the plot of fictions there must be a ‘walking entity’ (Loffler, Walking in the City, Urban Experience and Literary Psychogeograhy in 18th Century London, 2017, p58), ‘The writer or narrator respectively structures reality according to a “wandering viewpoint”, but importantly he or she is not merely a neutral recorder…but a participant whose individual experience shapes the writing in an almost romantic fusion of subjectivity and objectivity.’ (Berensmeyer & Loffler, [forthcoming] in Loffler, p96) and the sense that ‘it can be something of an obstacle race for the reader whose journey through the narrative is anything but smooth and pleasant.’ (Berensmeyer & Loffler, [forthcoming] p120). She quotes Coverley, ‘as the reader is conducted on a journey with the author as a guide.’ (Coverley, p42 cited Loffler, p56).

Loffler analyses several texts set in 18th century London, so the very nature of text choice allows for analysis of ‘crime and poverty, fear of cultural disasters, an exploration of marginal areas, religious forebodings’ (Loffler, p102). Texts range from Ned Ward’s The London Spy and Defoe, Wordsworth and Blake, to the less well-known John Thelwall’s The Peripatetic and Thomas Brown’s Amusements Serious and Comical. So, Loffler’s study is interesting because it applies the relatively modern concept of psychogeography to eighteenth century literature, as well as using a selection of a number of different and less well-known types of texts to effectively create a new genre.

For Loffler, literary psychogeography is ‘topographical references to the real-world city so that the reader can place themselves in the city and within someone else’s experiences in that place…subjectivity happens when personal descriptions enter into it.’ (p97) which is, effectively similar to Ross’ theory of mind connection.

According to Loffler, the success of such subjective versions relies on walkers (both actual and protagonist walkers, that is) to go into an ‘alert reverie’ defined as a ‘double presence that is both in the here and now and the imagination’ (O’Rourke, 2013 p25 in Loffler, p98) which is a state of mind similar to Csinkszentmihalyi’s Flow experience and clearly one which lends itself to the capability to ‘drift’ both physically and psychologically, therefore allowing psychogeographical experiences to take place. Solnit considers ‘this kind of unstructured, associative thinking is the kind most often connected to walking, and it suggests walking as not an analytical, but an improvisational act.’ (Solnit, 2002 [2001]: 21 in Loffler p98). Both Loffler and Ross attempt to show the literary form of psychogeography as a new approach to literary studies in relation to literary representations of urban space.

However, to provide a clear-cut, all-encompassing and comprehensive definition of psychogeography, or literary psychogeography is, by its very nature, extremely difficult. Aiden Byrne said psychogeography is: ‘Reinscribing the unspoken histories and experiences of place into its official discourse, so it’s the bits that don’t get recorded in town planning documents or documentaries. It’s how people have lived in a place, and the emotions and sensory experience of a particular location, the ignored areas.’ (youtube with Dr. Hilary Weeks). Coverley suggests that psychogeography keeps ‘resisting definition through a shifting series of interwoven themes and constantly being reshaped by its practitioners [so that the term] has become so widely appropriated and has been used in support of such a bewildering array of ideas that it has lost much of its original significance.’ (Coverley 2010, p10). In addition, Coverley further suggests that ‘It is around the Sinclair-Ackroyd axis that most London writing, psychogeographic or otherwise, appears to rotate.’ (p26) and that ‘Modern psychogeographers of the London occult, from Peter Ackroyd to Iain Sinclair and Stewart Home, use gothic imagery to symbolise the mystery beneath the apparently banal surfaces of the everyday city.’ (p45)

Despite the ambiguity, psychogeography does appear to have four particular characteristics: urban walking (the so-called ‘derive’ carried out by situationist flaneurs) of a kind designed to cause what Freud might refer to as ‘cognitive dissonance’ (and this relates to his ideas about The Uncanny: an instance where something can be familiar yet foreign at the same time); the spirit of political subversion; the focus on the mysterious and occult and the preoccupation with rediscovering the past as a means of casting light on the present. And it derives from the imminent (physical, psychical and intimate) experience with the urban terrain. The act of unrestricted walking, wandering or strolling around a place (for the Situationists, a city) is vital for psychogeographic practices (what Sinclair refers to as ‘landscape of the id’ in Lights Out for the Territory, 2003, p306).

Although not defined as such, Coverley’s ‘literary psychogeographic’ texts include The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde because it has an ‘extra-literary existence somewhere between reality and fiction…[because of the]…seemingly factual correspondence in the Ripper murders.’ (pp45-6). The implication is that a mix of fact and fiction is a factor in Coverley’s notion of literary psychogeography, and additionally that the text is perceived as active rather than passive, offering some agreement with Reception Theory. Added to this, ‘Defoe inaugurates a tradition of London writing in which the topography of the city is refashioned through the imaginative force of the writer.’ (p16). So, where Ross and Loffler have tended to focus predominantly on a readerly psychogeographic analysis, Coverley is, at least, mentioning the role of the writer.

This combination of writerly as well as readerly psychogeographic roles in fiction is something my thesis will aim to analyse, focusing on Black Country literature. I aim to consider particularly the connection between mind and spatial surroundings in the reading and writing of fiction and to build on the elements of the ‘flow experience’ that exist within the psychogeography of reading, and the creative process of the production, of a complete fiction piece. In so doing I aim to illuminate the possible connections between aspects of Csinkszentmihalyi’s Flow experience, together with Ross’ and Loffler’s literary psychogeographies, and psychogeography in Black Country literature. Importantly, the assertion that literary psychogeography having London or Paris at its centre is a factor that my thesis aims to disrupt by focusing on existing fiction, as well as the creation of a new piece of fiction from and about the Black Country. I aim to attempt to show that there is a ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ ‘psychogeographic flow’ that can effectively escape from the restrictions placed upon psychogeography/literary psychogeography by its association with London-based fiction, and with ‘best-sellers’. Whilst still maintaining a sense of its 1950 Situationist International context, I aim to demonstrate that Black Country fiction (both new and existing) contains literary aspects and elements of history and experience which is ripe for psychogeographical readerly and writerly analysis, at least in part because it is an ‘ignored geographical area’ whose existence as a literary place has tended to be perhaps overlooked or undervalued. The relationship between the landscape and literature of the Black Country and how existing and new fiction set in the region might be influenced by a process of psychogeography (or psychogeographic flow) will be explored. In so doing, I hope to reveal or create a new psychogeographic Black Country genre. The hope is that the possibilities that are opened up will give rise to not only a new creative fiction piece to add to the field, but the potential for a range of future responses.

I aim to do this in three parts:

1: A literature review of existing literary psychogeography research and a psychogeographical analysis of existing Black Country fiction (by Anthony Cartwright, Joel Lane, Francis Brett Young, Charlie Hill and Richard Bruce Clay).

2. The production of a new psychogeographic Black Country fiction.

3. A critical element and commentary of both the process of production and the creative piece.

I keep in mind a paper by Mike Harris: Escaping the Tractor Beam of Literary Theory: Notes towards Appropriate Theories of Creative Writing – and some arguments against the inappropriate ones (2009) in which he asks whether the application of ‘literary theory to a task for which it was not designed (ie: improving creative writing practice) is the best, most efficient way of accomplishing that task?’ (p6). He quotes Camilla Nelson and argues that ‘we need to move towards a “productive, post-critical research vocabulary” which means that instead of “mining the text for meanings” we follow and analyse the experience of the writer writing.’ (Nelson, 2008 in Harris, 2009, p15). Kim Lasky (2013) in Kroll & Harper’s Research Methods in Creative Writing also concedes that there is a difficulty in creative writing research that lies between the creative work itself and the critical element. She suggests the concept of poetics as a way to tackle the critical element of creative writing research, it being ‘the means by which writers formulate and discuss an attitude to their work that recognises influences, the traditions they write within and develop, the literary, social and political context in which they write and the processes of composition and revision they undertake’ (p3). Lasky refers to the way in which there is a ‘kind of disconnection’ (p2) in the way in which the creative and critical become falsely disconnected, and that in the actual production of a creative piece, it has already been (critically) reflected upon (and edited) as part of the creative process. She refers to John Fowles’ ‘Notes on an Unfinished Novel’ (1969) in which his reflection on the writing of The French Lieutenant’s Woman was written concurrently with the novel itself in the form of diary entries. Keeping all this in mind, as part of my critical piece – and this is why I am here in this blog space – I to keep a blog diary written concurrently with the creative piece, so that the psychological (psychogeographical) creative writerly process can be mapped in ‘real time’, taking account of links with ‘Flow’. The rest of the critical piece will be written after the event, which I hope will comment on the interconnected psychogeographic influences on the writing process.

So, today is the first day. I took a walk, with the dog, through Stourbridge High Street, intending to go for a walk by the canal. The dog (Frank) likes a walk next to the canal. He likes the grass, and something about the way the air is down there (and it is, literally, down there) changes him into something more inquisitive, a little wary. It might be the smell of the water. Whatever the reason, he seems to like it. I was aware that we were walking the same route as David and Karl did in Joel Lane’s From Blue to Black, with the River Stour to the left of us and the canal to the right. On the way though, twice, we passed lamp posts with laminated posters telling us of a missing man. Earlier, at the Crystal Leisure Centre gym, there had been the exact same poster taped onto the automatic door there. Matthew Gill. Had I seen him? And then, down on the tow path, someone had stuck another poster, the same poster, onto a metal gate. As it happened, Hurricane Ophelia had been terrorising Ireland, and a snippet of it was blowing across England, making the sun look like a burning cigarette end in the sky, yet a burnishing of brown cloud made things seem pre-apocolyptic, sepia. The poster on the gate flapped, and I’d have had to stop to actually hold it to read it, so I didn’t, but I could see it was Matthew Gill. Usually, I take a longer walk, up to the Wordsley bridge but today, I could see the usual posse of male drinkers just past the elbow of the canal. That’s where they congregate, drinking out of cans, every day. Usually, I walk past and sometimes there are some pleasantries, sometimes not. Today, I don’t know, I just felt like I couldn’t somehow risk walking past them. I’ll have to process exactly why.

Back up through town, I noticed that on one of the posters there on a lamp post had a different picture. I didn’t stop to look properly. It could have been a different picture of Matthew Gill, of course, or it could have been a different person altogether. So, all this put me in mind of a ‘plot’ (see how I use quote marks there? For protection against my lack of planning?) John Fowles in Notes on an Unfinished Novel refers to his ‘mythopoeic “stills”’ (p136) by which he means various images which floated about his head, and ended up as The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Perhaps I have had the same experience today: a series, or a montage of images and experiences including the weather, the town and the feel of it, the water of the canal – its smells etc., the placement of the missing posters, the process of walking, that feeling of (what was it?) Vulnerability? Fear? I don’t know for sure yet that sent me back home. Anyway, this, I feel is where this novel is going to emerge from. This is the start of it.