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Paulo Lorca

Professor Allison Ramay

Culture and Civilization

June 11 2014

A Walk Through Selvon's London: The Individual and Space in Sam Selvon's The Lonely

Londoners through the scope of Psychogeography

The Lonely Londoners is a novel by Sam Selvon, which presents a wide variety of

the migratory experiences of West Indians and their descendents who come to post-war

London in search of new opportunities. It is in this particular city, Selvon's London, that a

diverse cast of characters wander through the complexities of being immigrants. However,

through the scope of Psychogeography, which gather studies of space in relation with the

individual, one can discover that the characters of The Lonely Londoners are constructed in

intimate relation with the fictional space they inhabit, where London, as an specific space

that frame this process, plays a defining role in shaping the different identities of these

characters. While these characters try to map their roads in order to identify themselves as

Londoners, they are immerse in an urban landscape with all its mechanism in motion, from

the social struggles of the city, to the threatening weather conditions that fiercely reject

them.

Psychogeography is a term resilient to definitions. In its most literal sense, as Merlin

Coverley affirms, the concept must be understood "as the point where psychology and

geography intersect" and that its essential characteristics "may be identified in the search

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for new ways of apprehending our urban environment" (13). Another definition comes

from the Situationist Guy Debord, for whom Psychogeography is "the study of the precise

laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether consciously organized

or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals" (5). Thus, following this scopes,

Psychogeography can be comprehended as a perspective, a type of lens through which one

can analyze the relation between the individual psyche and his or her environment, as well

as the consequences of both in their reciprocal formation. However, it remains the question

of how this term can be applicable to literary studies . Among the many fields in which

Psychogeography has been used (Sociology, Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, etc.), it is in

English literature that this concept finds an important component of its history and

tradition. Coverley gives an account of the literary roots of the concept, and remarks that

among many writer who have cared about the 'secret influence' of the city (Charles

Baudelaire or Walter Benjamin, for instance), the British have shown special care for this

practice. He states:

In English writing, or more particularly in London writing, there is a visionary

tradition that is best represented by the motif of the imaginary voyage, a journey

that reworks and re-imagines the layout of the urban labyrinth and which records

observations of the city streets as it passes through them. The earliest examples of

this tradition are, in fact, pioneering psychogeographical surveys of the city.

(Coverley 15)

William Blake, Thomas De Quincey, Daniel Defoe, Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur

Machen are some of the examples of this pioneering current of writers that crystallized the

roots of this concepts in English literary tradition . In consequence, it is not arbitrary that

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this concept could be used as a perspective through which one can read the relations

between the literary urban landscapes and the characters, in a piece of narrative. Since

Psychogeography is not strictly a science, it can perfectly be seen as a poetic scope to

examine the imaginative possibilities that the urban landscape offers in relation with the

individual in literary texts.

Kenneth Ramchand states in his introduction to The Lonely Londoners, that "novels

characteristically distort and re-shape facts in order to express feelings that are part of the

meaning of the facts, feelings that may well be about to lead to a new set of facts" (7).

From this one can extract that the novel, its characters, the space they inhabit, and all the

rest of its elements, are a concatenation of signs referring to a very specific reality. Context

is not less important in the understanding of how the different signs of the narrative

intertwine an relate to one another. That is why the geographical context that the author

chooses in this novel as setting is so important, for the mechanisms of shaping identity at a

character level as well as for a configuration of literary space that frames this mechanism.

The very opening sequence of Sam Selvon's novel The Lonely Londoners embraces

a connection with what is a core element throughout the whole narrative: the city of

London itself.

One grim winter evening, when it had a kind of unrealness bout London,

with a fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights showing in the

blur as if is not London at all but some strange place on another planet,

Moses Aloetta hop on a number 46 bus at the corner of Chepstow Road and

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Westbourne Grove to go to Waterloo to meet a fellar who was coming from

Trinidad on the boat-train. (23)

The description of place in this passage follows a sense of the metropolis as essentially

strange in itself, in other words, a place which adopts alien characteristics from the

perspective of Moises. It also follows, in a certain way, the literary image of London as a

fog-covered city (something present in some of the precursors of psychogeography, such as

De Quincey or Defoe), which presents itself menacing in nature, as it settles as the starting

point from which to plunge into the big problematic of the narrative.

It is not random that the first place of London that is actually introduced in the novel

is the big Waterloo station. As the narrator describes it, the station "is a place of arrival and

departure, is a place where you see people crying goodbye and kissing welcome"(25). The

station is described as place of contrastive experiences, a place of dichotomies. But it is

also a threshold area, a space of transition between worlds, where the West Indies end and

London begins. This is quite important if one considers that the road to configure identity

for the characters of the novel begins here, in a place that has no identity, in a sense that

one understands limits and definition; the essence of Waterloo station is moveable, as well

as the identity of the newcomers. They have no where fixed to go to in London, this is

evidenced by the narrator's remark upon the fact that this is not the first time that Moses

goes to the station to pick up newcomers, and that "all sorts of fellars start coming straight

to his room in the Water when they land up in London from the West Indies"(23-34). In

this way, as a starting point, Waterloo Station is not a frozen picture, but a mirror of the

constant march of arrivals and departures.

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E. V. Walter in his book Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment, explains

that "a place binds people together by the common emotions it elicits. Moreover, (...) [it]

gathers experience and must be understood as one of the unities of experience" (133),

which is to say that places do not conform separate objects from the individual who inhabit

them in terms of experience, but become a unity with them. The experience of the of

geography, of the physical landscape, is also a psychic experience in The Lonely

Londoners. Moses experiences this phenomenon when he arrives to the station:

he had a feeling of home sickness that he never felt in the nine-ten years he in this

country (...) the station is that sort of place where you have a sort of feeling. It was

here that Moses did land when he come to London, and he have no doubt that when

the time come, if it ever come, it would be here he would say goodbye to the big

city. (25-26)

The station is a place of great significance and it is also a place that interacts with Moses. It

leaves him feeling "lonely and miserable"; it makes him think about his home land for the

first time since he arrived; and it makes him hesitate on his decisions.

Another example of the direct argument of the city with characters in the novel, is

Sir Galahad, who has an experience of loneliness similarly influenced by landscape as in

the case of Moses and the station . He stands still when "he make for the tube (...) on

Queensway watching everybody going about their business, and a feeling of loneliness and

fright come on him all of a sudden (41). The character is in one of these threshold areas of

the novel, where they stop to contemplate how the machinery of the city works quite well,

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and relentlessly, without them being part of this movement. He suddenly realizes that "here

he is, in London [where] everybody doing something or going somewhere" (42).

The construction of identity in The Lonely Londoners is not a simple process, in the

way that it does not consist only of one method. It is not only the city that shapes characters

in their way of adaptation to the difficult atmosphere of London; characters among

themselves, in a dialogue through urban symbols, also form a part of the process of shaping

their landmarks and portraits. Lisa M. Kabesh states that The Lonely Londoners is an

"enunciative text; it produces the community it describes in the act of writing, recording

and mapping its voices and movements"(1). It is interesting that the concept she uses to for

describing the processes of construction is mapping. When one thinks of a map, one thinks

of a representation of certain geographical location, which shows its limits, positions and

distributions of all its points. The process of mapping evidently evokes the notion of space,

and following Kabesh's premise of enunciation as the main characteristic of the novel

regarding the construction of its own characters, it is possible to find here another way in

which the character's identities find their form: the enunciation of landscape.

Mapping involves the inherent process of naming the inhabited place, marking its

components, and thus, creating a two folded relationship between the individual and

landscape . A relation of naming and the urban landscape is present throughout the novel.

Characters often name the city at their will, or use the city characteristics even to refer to

other characters. One simple example could be Moses himself, who at his first conversation

with Galahad is called "mister London"(39) by the latter. The association that Sir Galahad

does, which might seem a simple conjecture, gives account of the blurry limits of reciprocal

influence that the city and the characters have on each other. Moses is mister London

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because he is in many ways a veteran of among the immigrants to London. He is the

starting point for many others that are newly arrived to the big city. The London experience

is a cruise for the character, who much rather prefer to have a destination and a crew than

experiencing the voyage alone, "for this city powerfully lonely when you on your

own"(47). Moses is in this sense the London newcomers can relate to, figuratively

speaking, a cardinal point to move with the city-flow, a characteristic that Galahad

recognizes, for when he is calling him mister London, he is asking for some advice from

the experienced Moses. This notion of Moses as the character that mores resembles the city

(because of his knowledge and experience on it) might seem contradictory with the notion

that the character has of London. He confesses to Galahad: "All them places is like nothing

to me now (...) you see them for yourself, and is like nothing" (85). However, although it

may seem that the lack of significance of the places of London is an obstacle for him to be

seen as a cardinal point of the city, it is not. Moses' identity and relation with place is

paradoxical, but his perspective do not damage the perspectives of other characters who see

in him the only way of finding direction in urban chaos.

Another example, that is even more clear is the one of Big City, whose obsession

with the big capitals of the world give him his name. His process of relating with the city is

a process of naming, also related to the process of mapping, because Big City uses his own

transformed terminology to refer to the places of London. Some examples are: Nottingham

Gate instead of Notting Hill; Gloucestershire for Gloucester Road or Kensington Mansion

to name Kensington Palace. His map of the city is his own fiction, or as it is presented to

the reader, "Big City used to have dreams, and he believe those dreams as if they happen

true"(100). He is constantly corrected by Moses (mister London), who at the same time

tries to course the boy, constantly telling him to "make a effort to learn, boy"; however,

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despite Moses' efforts, Big City adjusts to his fantasies. He repeats to himself religiously:

"Big city for me (...) Is New York and London and Paris"(94); "Big city, boy, big city.

Paris, Berlin, Rome, Bargdan, then after the States, San Francis, Chicago, New York" (97).

In this case, the city devours the individual, to the point of amalgamation.

But there is a reverse side to the coin that Big City represents. In the same line of

enunciation, the character of Sir Galahad has his own method to move around London, but

his methodology is quite contrastive in comparison with the one of Big City:

[Galahad] getting on well in the city. He had a way whenever he taking with the

boys, he using the names of the places like they mean big romance, as if to say 'I

was in Oxford Street' have more prestige than if he just say 'I was up the road'(84)

In Saussurean terms, Big City uses the signifier in his own way, notwithstanding the lack of

a conventional agreement to name the city as he likes it, whereas Galahad uses the

conventionally agreed signifiers to name the city. Sir Galahad recognizes the implications

that the correct names of London's topography have, and his process of mapping them as

the entire world does, gives him a sense of importance. Moreover, there is another aspects

that position both characters as contrastive to one another. On the one hand, Big City

unconsciously incorporates the city into his own name and personality in an attempt to

believe his own fantasy. He is swallowed by his beloved City. Sir Galahad on the other

hand, uses the stamp that he recognizes in places in order to detach himself from reality and

feel like a King in London. An example of this is given by the account of one of his dates,

in a place that he identifies as Charing Cross, where he "[does not] matter about the woman

he going to meet, just to say he was going there made him feel big and important"(84).

An element that is present in the character of Galahad ( and other characters of the

novel) and directly concerns the scope of Psychogeography, is walking. Psychogeography,

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since its early roots found in the literature of Thomas De Quincey or the ideas of

Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin about the flâneur, has been interested in the character

figure that walks through the city, and discovers through this activity the underlying

patterns of this space. According to Coverley, the role of the wanderer is the one of the

"detached observer" (20-21) who "becomes intoxicated by [the crowd] movement"(58).

The crowd works as another symbol of the city, it is a different element to the individual

who is a witness of its distinct mobility. In the case of Galahad, who often wanders around

the urban environment, the role of the detached observer is evident:

Many nights he went there [the Piccadilly Tube Station] before he get to know how

to move around the city, and see them fellars and girls waiting, looking at they

wristwatch, watching the people coming up the escalator from the tube (...) All these

people there, standing up waiting for somebody. (84)

He observes how the mass of London moves around, but at the same time, the narrator

remarks the actual observation: they are waiting. There is a sense that mobility is paused, or

at its most rapid, slow motioned. Again there is a functionality to space, since it is a station

the scenery for Galahad's analysis of the crowd. Again the urban landscape works as a

threshold area, a place between two places, where the observer can stand and look, while

he grasps the hidden patterns of his environment.

Howard Stein states that "space is the stage on which dramas of time are

enacted"(103). Some examples of the characteristics of this 'stage' where the character's

dramas are played have already been treated. However, there are some others that are

worthy of mention. London has a crude urban landscape, but it also has crude weather

conditions, and this is not an anecdotic element for characters. At the beginning of the

novel, in Waterloo Station, a reporter comes to interview Tolroy, an immigrant that is with

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his entire family that just arrived, and "maliciously" warns him "I hope you don't find the

weather too cold for you"(32). Here, weather as a part of London has an underlying

connotation, because of the adverb that describes the intention of the reporter. Weather is

another brick in wall that segregates immigrants who come from tropical areas of the

planet. In an optimistic way they arrive "looking about the desolate station as if (..) in an

exhibition hall on a pleasant summer evening"(33); as if weather came with them to

embrace them as they enter to the fog-covered city of London. This naivety is shared by

more than one member of the diasporean group: Tolroy, Galahad, and even the elder Tanty,

who explains "I never thought in my old age I would land up in a country like this, where

you can't see where you going and it so cold you have to light fire to keep warm"(80).

Furthermore, another element that characterizes Selvon's London is the one of

separation or disjunction within the London crowd of habitants. The character Tolroy

observes: " A man could get lost here easy, it have millions of people living here, and your

friend could be living in London for years and you never see him." (72). There is a sense in

this passage that people disappear within the crowd in the city, as if this mass, as a

distinctive feature of London, swallows its own inhabitants. Landscape contributes to this

separation:

It have people living in London who don't know what happening in the room next to

them (...) London is a place like that. It divide up in little worlds, and you stay in the

world you belong to and you don't know anything about what happening in the other

ones except what you read in the papers. (74)

It is evident that the characteristics of space works as defining the social boundaries that

separate London into little ghettos, which are unknown to the rest of the city (further below,

a similar phenomenon occurs regarding the participation of immigrants in economy). The

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relation that people create here with their environment is a negative one, since they ignore

the links between the different locations of the city. If one thinks of Kabashe's conception

of enunciation, the process here is rather the opposite, for nothing is uttered nor

communicated directly, information comes to disjointed places by indirect means, such as

the newspapers. As the narrator remarks "People don't talk about things like that again, they

come to kind of accept that is so the world is (...) it bound to have some who live by the

Grace and others who have plenty"(74); thus stating that this pattern of segregation is

reinforced by people who neglect this situation by taking it for granted, as they mark a

determination regarding the relations that the rest of the inhabitants have with space.

Social limits of characters are also marked by the city landmarks. Such as an

example of this can be found in the area on which Tolroy and his family live, where

"people on that area are call the Working Class"(73). Here the city landscape reflects

entirely the conditions of the characters who belong to this class; "This is the real world,

where men know what it is to hustle a pound to pay the rent (...) Houses around here are old

and grey and weatherbeaten, the walls cracking like the last days of Pompeii"(73). Social

and structural detriment are bound to each other; the sign and the referent are one of these

worlds created by the mechanism of segregation that the city embodies.

The city is not always as benevolent as it is with Moses or Big city, in their own

way respectively . There are other characters on whom the influence of London is

diminishing; there is the case of Captain , who in a sense, represent the confident new

generation after Moses that come to London looking for a reality to correspond with certain

projections, and as a result they find a colossus that limits them: "[Captain's] father send

him to London to study law, but Captain went stupid when he arrive to the big city"(48).

At one point in Cap's story, he is sent to the railway to get a storekeeping work, but the man

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in charge of the place, after looking at him, gives him a job, but not quite the one he is

expecting. When he is back to Moses, he explains him the following: "they want to put you

in the yard to lift heavy iron. They that is all we good for, and this time they keeping all the

soft clerical jobs for them white fellars"(52). Therefore, in this encounter of man and space,

or Captain and the railway, the diminishing experience takes another perspective. The

encounter is presented to the reader as it follow:

The people who living in London don't really know how behind them railway

station does be so desolate and discouraging. It like another world. All Cap seeing is

railway line and big junk of iron all about the yard, and some thick heavy cable

lying around. It look like hell, and Cap back away when he see it."(52)

Again, it is possible to identify the gloomy London atmosphere, but this no longer provokes

nostalgia, now there is a form of terror represented in a vision of a wired and desolate hell.

Landscape diminishes the individual with its overwhelming features. But the experience

also implies a double sided rejection to Captain. Kabasha explains the process undergoing

this passage:

Cap’s experience at the rail yard does more than explicate the racial hierarchy of

labour in postwar London; it further uncouples the symbol of British progress par

excellence—the railway— from its association with freedom and mobility. (...) he

discovers that the rail yard is a physically segregated space—he is taken to “the

back of the station, and behind there real grim” (52). The implication of this

separation is that the colonial system of segregation is in the process of reification at

home, in England, in this period of decolonization. (8)

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it is patent how the characters experiences a racial and an economical kind of segregation;

furthermore, it is interesting that landscape here reflects this process by the exclusion of

Captain from London's appreciable development, by taking him into the backyard,

unknown to the rest of the citizens. Moreover, iron and railways played an important part in

British economy, as Kabesh remarks, they were "constructed as routes of resource

extraction [that] operated as a function of imperial exploitation and appropriation"(8).

Therefore, space here is also symbolic, as it represents the reflection of the old ways

regarding racial segregation at the colonies.

The closing vignette of the book opens with a description of the changing of seasons

in London and a narrative voice that explicitly questions the paradigm beyond the relation

of the individual and the city. It says :

"to say these things, to have lived these things, to have lived in the great city of

London, centre of the world (...) What it is that a city have, that any place in the

world have, that you get so much to like it you wouldn't leave it for anywhere

else? (...) Why it is, that although they grumble about it all the time, curse people,

curse the government (...) why it is, that in the end, everyone cagey about saying

outright that if the chance come they will go back to them green islands in the `

sun?"(137)

In this passage, inner perception of the narrator's perspective as an individual is attached to

space. The apprehension of the urban environment, of the city, is total, because regardless

of the many obstacles and hazards that London represents for the immigrant, the city is at

the same time part of the cultural construction that the individual overcomes. The

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psychogeographical perspective that Howard Stein applies to this kind of processes can

elucidate the problem. Describing metapsychological reflections on migration and culture,

Stein explains that "It is into geographic, hence cultural space that the burden of

generational and intrapsychic space is displaced, projected, and played out"(103). In other

words, the individual projects his psyche onto the environment in the process of

construction of identity. That is why, "any threat of culture loss is experienced as renewed

separation and object loss"(105). Therefore, it is understandable that the character

embraces the city despite its threats, and dismisses as weary any possibility of leaving a

place that conforms part of his cultural construction.

Through the scope of psychogeography and other contemporary theories that gather

studies of space in relation with the individual, one can discover that the characters of The

Lonely Londoners are constructed in intimate relation with the fictional space they inhabit.

This fictional space is a sign-translated reality that refers to a certain time and place, that

are important to consider at the time of interpreting the patterns that form the different

elements and symbolic devices of the novel. Although it is difficult to identify a group

identity in the novel, because of the very set of different migratory experiences , it is

evident that in most of the characters, if not in everyone of them, the immigrant experience

is tightly bound to the experience of the city of London. The consideration of the last

sequence of the novel also evokes the conception of a collective experience that, despite of

particular difficulties, embraces landscape as a fundamental part of their process of

construction of identity.

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Works Cited

Coverley, Merlin. Psychogeography. Wales: Pocket Essentials, 2006. Print

Kabesh, Lisa. "Mapping Freedom, or Its Limits: The Politics of Movement in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners". Postcolonial Text. 6.3 (2011). web. June 11, 2014.

Selvon, Samuel. The Lonely Londoners. New ed. London: Penguin, 2006. Print

Stein, Howard. Developmental Time, Cultural Space: Studies in Psychogeography. United

States: The University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Print

Walter, Eugene. Placeways: A Theory of Human Environment. Chapel Hill: The University

of North Carolina Press, 1988. Print