Robert Bond

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Biographical note:  Robert Bond was born in London in 1972. He has taught at Cambridge, South Bank and Westminster universities. He is co-editor (with Jenny Bavidge) of City Visions: The Work of Iain Sinclair, and is now working towards a comparative study of Iain Sinclair and Wyndham Lewis. This book is the first full-length study of Iain Sinclair’s writing to be published, and is Robert Bond’s first book.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781876857813
ISBN-10:  1876857811
ISBN-13:  9781876857813
Author:  Robert Bond
Title:  Iain Sinclair
Series:  Salt Studies in Contemporary Literature and Culture
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CSBH
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Sep-05
Extent:  240pp
Height:  228 mm
Width:  152 mm
Thickness:  14 mm
Weight:  360 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 16.99
Price:  USD 26.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  This study represents the first comprehensive study of Iain Sinclair’s writing, covering his key texts from the early 1970s to the present. It features individual chapters analyzing Lud Heat, White Chappell: Scarlet Tracings, Downriver and London Orbital. In exploring Sinclair’s unique vision of London, this study aims to define his writing as the culmination of a trajectory of London writing that stretches from Blake and Dickens, up to more contemporary writers such as Alexander Baron and Peter Ackroyd. The book suggests that the writing of the city is preoccupied by the relation between capitalism and religion, and hence by the question of domination. It emphasizes the mythic quality of contemporary urban life. The book therefore aims to extend the critique of urban experience formulated in the work of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer.

The book’s cultural Marxist perspective is supplemented by a sociology of culture derived from the work of Pierre Bourdieu. The author aims to explain why Iain Sinclair has become the sole serious contemporary poet to have broken from the avant garde into a popular, more commercial status. What can we learn from a writer who is at once a rare neo-modernist and the focus of a metropolitan literary cult? Why are other major poets still unrecognized outside academia? This study explores Iain Sinclair’s relation to the ‘Cambridge school’ of neo-modernist poetry, and reconstructs the twentieth century poetic genealogies upon which Sinclair's writing has drawn.

Table of contents:
Acknowledgements
Chapter One
Introduction
Chapter Two
Lud Heat
Chapter Three
White Chappell: Scarlet Tracings
Chapter Four
Downriver
Chapter Five
‘London Orbital’ and Beyond
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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This study focusses on Sinclair’s prose. Prose works such as the essays in Lud Heat (1975) and Suicide Bridge (1979), or the novels White Chappell: Scarlet Tracings (1987) and Downriver (1991), represent Sinclair’s fullest accounts of urban experience. Sinclair, however, is distinctive among contemporary novelists in that he is also a poet and film-maker. Questioned on his ‘fragmented career’ in a 1997 interview for The Edge, he stressed the interdependence of his various artistic activities:

I did a lot of small underground documentary films — about eight years of 8 mm films. But all these seemingly fragmented activities fed back into each other. There were always elements in my prose writing that would suggest something visual, or dreamlike, that was beyond the text. So I’d do a film version of something that was written, and doing the film would inspire me to be able to write about that scene in a later piece. So the whole thing, as far as I’m concerned, is part of one structure of energy.

Here the phrase ‘one structure of energy’ refers to Sinclair’s artistic activity, though an earlier description of Brian Catling’s sculptural work had pointed to an alternative conception of a structure, or ‘field’ of energy as a process or force of individuation drawing on a diverse array of singular interests and activities, some artistic and some nonartistic: ‘The objects that emerged were only a single element in a field of energy that included writing, film-making, weapon fetishism, herpetology, conversation, food, friendship and practical magic.’ Sinclair’s equation of his own purely artistic activity with a unified ‘structure of energy’, draws our attention to the need to consider how his prose-writing was influenced by his involvement with other artistic activities. His prose was influenced by his involvement with the work of other film-makers; in the next chapter I refer to his early interest in Stan Brakhage. Sinclair’s prose was also influenced by his own film-making, as we have just seen. In conversation with Ian Hunt, Catling — who was taught film by Sinclair at Walthamstow — noted a specific quality of Sinclair’s early film-making that reappears in his prose: ‘Sinclair would use hand-held, dashing around grabbing images in a kaleidoscopic attack. And of course it’s exactly the same in his writing.’ He retained this immersive technique in later film-making. We can think of the sequence of images in The Cardinal and the Corpse (1992) wherein panoramic shots of the riverscape taken from a car crossing Waterloo Bridge, are alternated with glimpses of the St Luke’s (Old Street) obelisk and a residential street: from the comfort of the editing suite Sinclair mounts a kaleidoscopic attack on the entire city.

Yet it was Sinclair’s involvement with one particular current of contemporary poetry which had the most significant effect on his prose. His writing emerged from what Hunt has called the ‘small press, self-authorising sector’ of contemporary British writing, and the publication of his work in journals such as Grosseteste Review and (more recently) Angel Exhaust and Parataxis, as well as in the poetry anthology A Various Art (1987), associated his writing with the neo-modernist production of the ‘Cambridge school’ of poetry in particular. Sinclair’s very conception of his artistic activity as a unified ‘structure of energy’, which entails a questioning of the division of artistic labour, is consonant with the neo-modernist conception of poetry as, in Clive Bush’s words, ‘one intellectual activity among and related to other activities’, which entails a similar questioning of any division of the poet’s intellectual labour between, say, ‘poetry’ and ‘research’. Of course Sinclair is himself a researcher-poet; in the course of my account of his relation to neo-modernist poetry in the first part of this introductory chapter, I show that he displays a typically neo-modernist impulse to draw on a range of specialist knowledges.

Two likely reasons for the failure of critical surveys of contemporary writing to so much as recognize the existence of Sinclair’s output can be suggested: the fact that his work has not been confined to literary production, and its inaccessibility. Yet it is precisely the inaccessibility of research-based neo-modernist writing such as Sinclair’s which draws our attention to the inadequacy of the notion of linguistic accessibility, and the mystificatory falsity of the concept of a common readership, in a society in which linguistic competence is unequally acquired on the basis of personal wealth. Simon Jarvis noted that ‘calls for all writing to be accessible to all competent readers given a modicum of effort have as their corollary a double exclusion’: of ‘thought and reference which does not fall within the terrain of such average competence’, and of ‘the incompetent reader, apparently self-disqualified before writing judged accessible by appeal to a consensual notion of competence’. He commented that reading J. H. Prynne’s poems is not ‘only a question of reading them off against a competence which has been accumulated in advance’, because Prynne’s ‘readers are asked to become researchers, to take purchase on the whole body of the language and the history and polity sedimented within it, rather than acquiescing in their dispossession in the name of the figment of a common readership’.

Unpublished endorsement :  Bond’s take on Sinclair is relentless and completely engrossing. It has intellectual drive, theoretical acuity and immersive vigilance. This is precisely the kind of politically adroit reading that Sinclair's writing is intended to produce.

Rod Mengham