Apologies for the rough text--this was only available through interlibrary loan.
Literature Interpretation Theory, 20:45–64, 2009 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1043-6928 print=1545-5866 online
DOI: 10.1080/10436920802690430
Victoria-Arcana and the Misogynistic Poetics of Resistance in Iain Sinclair’s White Chappell Scarlet Tracings and Alan Moore’s From Hell
CHRISTINE FERGUSON
Like the graphic novel on which it is based, the 2002 DVD release of the Hughes Brothers’ Jack the Ripper film From Hell comes with its own set of explanatory paratexts.1 In the ‘‘Tour of the Murder Sites’’ feature, the brothers guide us through the ersatz Whitechapel set they were compelled to con- struct in Prague due to the prohibitive costs of filming in the real London. Here, as they proudly describe the accuracy of the reconstructed locations (‘‘This outhouse back here looked pretty much exactly the same way!’’), they produce a moment far more horrifying than any they were ever able to evoke in their otherwise disappointing and kitschy adaptation. The brothers stand over an eerie model of alleged Ripper victim Martha Tabram, snickering like schoolboys over the lifelike precision and technological sophistication of their expensive new toy. The temptation to play becomes too great to resist. Allen leans down, grabs the dummy’s face by the nose, and begins banging its head against the ground while mimicking the sounds of a dying woman’s screams. The brothers dissolve into giggles; it is funny stuff this, ventriloquizing the suffering of a victim of brutal sexual homicide. What is it that makes this moment not only possible but also includible within the extras section of the DVD edition? Why does this piece of playacting whose obvious bad taste would render it taboo, in mainstream cinema at least, were its basis the subject of other historical atrocities—the Holocaust, for example, or the Killing Fields—become both permissible and apparently hilarious when its referent is a homeless sex trade worker killed at the end of the nineteenth century? Comfortably, if inexplicably, divorced from its original, the Ripper victim simulacram presented here acts as empty vessel to be manipulated and articulated by artists drawn to the case’s sensational appeal.
One might dismiss this scene through recourse to a reactionary elitism, casting it as an example of the sophomoric sexism one might expect from purveyors of low-brow Hollywood sensationalism whose political sensibilities are as blunted as their aesthetic capabilities. But to readers of the self-consciously experimental and esoterically avant-garde form of neo-Victorian fiction, which I will refer to as Victoria-arcana, such a dismissal must increasingly seem hollow. Victoria-arcana represents one of the most stylistically inventive, overtly political, and critically lauded version of neo- Victorian writing to emerge in the last two decades; it is also, as this article will argue, the site of some of the most prurient and misogynistic depictions of the Whitechapel murder victims ever to appear in the history of Ripper representation, a tendency neglected in the genre’s criticism out of deference to, among other things, its counter-cultural capital, deflective irony, and self- professed politics of opposition. My goal here is two-fold: first, to demon- strate and meditate upon the representational violence of two successful and critically lauded Victoria-arcanic texts, Iain Sinclair’s White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987) and Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell (1999); and second, to trace their misogyny (whether intentional or not) to what might seem like an unlikely source—not to their political or cultural support of violent patriarchy, but rather to their exaggerated and undercriti- cal investment in the same hermeneutics of suspicion and spectralization of power that animates the alternative historiography of New Historicism. In the course of performing a feminist critique of Moore and Sinclair’s esoteric and experimental accounts of the Whitechapel murders, this article will draw attention to the pervasive aesthetic and ideological continuities between popular, academic, experimental reconstructions of the Victorian period, ones with important and, indeed, troubling implications for the way we
Literature Interpretation Theory, 20:45–64, 2009 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1043-6928 print=1545-5866 online
DOI: 10.1080/10436920802690430
Victoria-Arcana and the Misogynistic Poetics of Resistance in Iain Sinclair’s White Chappell Scarlet Tracings and Alan Moore’s From Hell
CHRISTINE FERGUSON
Like the graphic novel on which it is based, the 2002 DVD release of the Hughes Brothers’ Jack the Ripper film From Hell comes with its own set of explanatory paratexts.1 In the ‘‘Tour of the Murder Sites’’ feature, the brothers guide us through the ersatz Whitechapel set they were compelled to con- struct in Prague due to the prohibitive costs of filming in the real London. Here, as they proudly describe the accuracy of the reconstructed locations (‘‘This outhouse back here looked pretty much exactly the same way!’’), they produce a moment far more horrifying than any they were ever able to evoke in their otherwise disappointing and kitschy adaptation. The brothers stand over an eerie model of alleged Ripper victim Martha Tabram, snickering like schoolboys over the lifelike precision and technological sophistication of their expensive new toy. The temptation to play becomes too great to resist. Allen leans down, grabs the dummy’s face by the nose, and begins banging its head against the ground while mimicking the sounds of a dying woman’s screams. The brothers dissolve into giggles; it is funny stuff this, ventriloquizing the suffering of a victim of brutal sexual homicide. What is it that makes this moment not only possible but also includible within the extras section of the DVD edition? Why does this piece of playacting whose obvious bad taste would render it taboo, in mainstream cinema at least, were its basis the subject of other historical atrocities—the Holocaust, for example, or the Killing Fields—become both permissible and apparently hilarious when its referent is a homeless sex trade worker killed at the end of the nineteenth century? Comfortably, if inexplicably, divorced from its original, the Ripper victim simulacram presented here acts as empty vessel to be manipulated and articulated by artists drawn to the case’s sensational appeal.
One might dismiss this scene through recourse to a reactionary elitism, casting it as an example of the sophomoric sexism one might expect from purveyors of low-brow Hollywood sensationalism whose political sensibilities are as blunted as their aesthetic capabilities. But to readers of the self-consciously experimental and esoterically avant-garde form of neo-Victorian fiction, which I will refer to as Victoria-arcana, such a dismissal must increasingly seem hollow. Victoria-arcana represents one of the most stylistically inventive, overtly political, and critically lauded version of neo- Victorian writing to emerge in the last two decades; it is also, as this article will argue, the site of some of the most prurient and misogynistic depictions of the Whitechapel murder victims ever to appear in the history of Ripper representation, a tendency neglected in the genre’s criticism out of deference to, among other things, its counter-cultural capital, deflective irony, and self- professed politics of opposition. My goal here is two-fold: first, to demon- strate and meditate upon the representational violence of two successful and critically lauded Victoria-arcanic texts, Iain Sinclair’s White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987) and Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell (1999); and second, to trace their misogyny (whether intentional or not) to what might seem like an unlikely source—not to their political or cultural support of violent patriarchy, but rather to their exaggerated and undercriti- cal investment in the same hermeneutics of suspicion and spectralization of power that animates the alternative historiography of New Historicism. In the course of performing a feminist critique of Moore and Sinclair’s esoteric and experimental accounts of the Whitechapel murders, this article will draw attention to the pervasive aesthetic and ideological continuities between popular, academic, experimental reconstructions of the Victorian period, ones with important and, indeed, troubling implications for the way we
imagine the poetics and politics of dissent in contemporary Britain.
VICTORIA-ARCANA AND THE NEW HISTORICISM
White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings and From Hell belong to an esoteric and self-consciously referential sub-genre of neo-Victorian fiction that I term ‘‘Victoria-arcana,’’ one whose increasing popularity over the last two decades seems intriguingly at odds with its experimental style and putative opposi- tional politics.2 Victoria-arcanic works of fiction both take the occult as sub- ject matter and incorporate its rituals into their narrative strategies, working not to re-present a pre-existent and ontologically accessible nineteenth cen- tury in a linear or ‘‘authentic’’ fashion but rather to incant it into being from a series of chaotically assembled textual fragments, loosely defined cultural ‘‘energies,’’ and historical detritus. As such, Victoria-arcanic texts often bear
White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings and From Hell belong to an esoteric and self-consciously referential sub-genre of neo-Victorian fiction that I term ‘‘Victoria-arcana,’’ one whose increasing popularity over the last two decades seems intriguingly at odds with its experimental style and putative opposi- tional politics.2 Victoria-arcanic works of fiction both take the occult as sub- ject matter and incorporate its rituals into their narrative strategies, working not to re-present a pre-existent and ontologically accessible nineteenth cen- tury in a linear or ‘‘authentic’’ fashion but rather to incant it into being from a series of chaotically assembled textual fragments, loosely defined cultural ‘‘energies,’’ and historical detritus. As such, Victoria-arcanic texts often bear
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Victoria-Arcana and the Misogynistic Poetics of Resistance 47
a strikingly suggestive formal and thematic resemblance to works of New
Historicist literary criticism. Among the preoccupations of New Historicism
which White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings and From Hell share are a commit-
ment to the recovery and creative juxtaposition of lost textual artifacts, a
conviction that literature produces (in a very literal way) history rather than
simply reflects it, a fascination with the dynamics of power, and, perhaps
most strikingly, a fondness for occult metaphors of social production and
hermeneutics—although in Sinclair’s case, occult contact becomes far more
than simply a metaphor for historical hermeneutics.
New Historicism’s occult rhetoric is most familiar to us through Stephen Greenblatt’s famous opening pronouncement in Shakespearean Negotiations (1988) that he ‘‘began with the desire to speak with the dead’’ (1). Green- blatt’s predilection for representing New Historicism as a metaphoric form of necromancy remains in vogue with its leading practitioners; in 2000, for example, Catherine Gallagher memorably described New Historicism’s anec- dotalist technique as an attempt ‘‘to revivify, to bring something back to life that had been buried deep in oblivion’’ (71). This goal also animates Sinclair’s and Moore’s fictional exhumations of the Ripper case. It is through this common mandate, one that extends beyond a mutual interest in historical revivification to include a fascination with the occultation of social power and human agency, that Victoria-arcanic writing becomes susceptible to the same types of critiques leveled against New Historicism over the last three decades. I will argue that the deeply troubling and ethically dubious representation of the Ripper murders that emerges in these two Victoria- arcanic texts derives, not from their willful celebration of sex murder, but rather from their cartoonish exaggeration of political and aesthetic tenden- cies hitherto over-exclusively associated with New Historicist criticism.
Before proceeding, I must make two crucial stipulations. First, in allying the goals and methods of New Historicism with those of Victoria-arcanic fiction, I am not suggesting that one genre has catalyzed the other in any crudely deterministic way. If the two resemble each other, it is because both take their cue from the same contemporary debates about the difficulty of constructing, and political dangers of enforcing, a singular, authoritative, and ‘‘authentic’’ account of a past that we can only ever access through repre- sentation, not because the academy dictates the content of modern fiction or vice versa. While several critics have noted the similarity between Sinclair’s poetics and those of New Historicism,3 none has used this suggestive corre- spondence to consider how the political critiques of the New Historicism might illuminate the ethical and political liabilities of Victoria-arcana’s subversive chic. Second, I must explain that my goal here is not to perform a tacit critique of New Historicism by presenting Victoria-arcanic fiction as a straw man version of it. New Historicism has been exhaustively (and exhaust- ingly) critiqued elsewhere for a number of putative sins, such as for being anti- or overly aesthetic in its willingness to treat all objects as texts, politically
New Historicism’s occult rhetoric is most familiar to us through Stephen Greenblatt’s famous opening pronouncement in Shakespearean Negotiations (1988) that he ‘‘began with the desire to speak with the dead’’ (1). Green- blatt’s predilection for representing New Historicism as a metaphoric form of necromancy remains in vogue with its leading practitioners; in 2000, for example, Catherine Gallagher memorably described New Historicism’s anec- dotalist technique as an attempt ‘‘to revivify, to bring something back to life that had been buried deep in oblivion’’ (71). This goal also animates Sinclair’s and Moore’s fictional exhumations of the Ripper case. It is through this common mandate, one that extends beyond a mutual interest in historical revivification to include a fascination with the occultation of social power and human agency, that Victoria-arcanic writing becomes susceptible to the same types of critiques leveled against New Historicism over the last three decades. I will argue that the deeply troubling and ethically dubious representation of the Ripper murders that emerges in these two Victoria- arcanic texts derives, not from their willful celebration of sex murder, but rather from their cartoonish exaggeration of political and aesthetic tenden- cies hitherto over-exclusively associated with New Historicist criticism.
Before proceeding, I must make two crucial stipulations. First, in allying the goals and methods of New Historicism with those of Victoria-arcanic fiction, I am not suggesting that one genre has catalyzed the other in any crudely deterministic way. If the two resemble each other, it is because both take their cue from the same contemporary debates about the difficulty of constructing, and political dangers of enforcing, a singular, authoritative, and ‘‘authentic’’ account of a past that we can only ever access through repre- sentation, not because the academy dictates the content of modern fiction or vice versa. While several critics have noted the similarity between Sinclair’s poetics and those of New Historicism,3 none has used this suggestive corre- spondence to consider how the political critiques of the New Historicism might illuminate the ethical and political liabilities of Victoria-arcana’s subversive chic. Second, I must explain that my goal here is not to perform a tacit critique of New Historicism by presenting Victoria-arcanic fiction as a straw man version of it. New Historicism has been exhaustively (and exhaust- ingly) critiqued elsewhere for a number of putative sins, such as for being anti- or overly aesthetic in its willingness to treat all objects as texts, politically
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48 C. Ferguson
quietistic, insufficiently radical, formulaic or, paradoxically, arbitrary in its
anecdote-driven readings of the past.4 The very frequency with which its
academic practitioners have had to respond to such allegations has strength-
ened their work, ensuring a constant alertness and sensitivity to the complex
ethical ramifications that proceed from the foundational New Historicist
precept that ‘‘no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to
unchanging truths nor expresses inalterable human nature’’ (Veeser xi). Thus
far, Victoria-arcanic writers such as Sinclair and Moore remain far behind
their New Historicist counterparts in their willingness to address and engage
with the potential political shortfalls of alternative historiography; indeed, the
brief and arguably perfunctory moments of self-reflexivity that do appear in
White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings and From Hell come disturbingly close to
licensing the same historical entrapment and misogynist celebration of gyno-
cide that the texts seem otherwise geared to resist. It is Victoria-arcana’s
occultation of the Ripper murders and not New Historicism per se that forms
my critical quarry here.
KILLING BY THE BOOK: TEXTUAL DETERMINISM AND OCCULT AGENCY IN WHITE CHAPPELL, SCARLETT TRACINGS
In their introduction to Practicing New Historicism (2000), New Historicism’s founding critics Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt define the purpose of their eponymous practice in terms that could easily serve as the rallying cry for Sinclair’s Ripperological ‘‘anti-narrative’’ (Murray, ‘‘Jack the Ripper’’ 52) in White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings: ‘‘We are intensely interested in tracking the social energies that circulate very broadly through a culture, flowing back and forth between margins and centre, passing from zones designated as high art to zones apparently indifferent or hostile to art, pressing up from below to transform exalted spheres and down from on high to colonize the low’’ (Gallagher 13). An aficionado of pulp fiction whose prose bears the influences of highbrow and hack writing alike, Sinclair shares New Historicism’s fascination with the marginal and fondness for depicting the social field as an arena of circulating, multidirectional, and disembodied forces, ones which the modern subject seems less to explicate than to dowse. Sinclair’s spectralized poetics of power has, however, generated a remark- ably different critical response than New Historicism’s. While some Marxist and feminist thinkers have castigated New Historicism for locating power in free-floating ‘‘energies’’ rather than in specific institutions and thus render- ing its operations esoteric, Sinclair’s critics often laud his alternative occult historiography for resisting the oppressive totalization they equate with Thatcherism and capitalism alike. Robert Bond, for example, argues that White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings’s rejection of historical synchrony represents the novel’s most ‘‘direct opposition to a contemporary vision that . . . would
KILLING BY THE BOOK: TEXTUAL DETERMINISM AND OCCULT AGENCY IN WHITE CHAPPELL, SCARLETT TRACINGS
In their introduction to Practicing New Historicism (2000), New Historicism’s founding critics Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt define the purpose of their eponymous practice in terms that could easily serve as the rallying cry for Sinclair’s Ripperological ‘‘anti-narrative’’ (Murray, ‘‘Jack the Ripper’’ 52) in White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings: ‘‘We are intensely interested in tracking the social energies that circulate very broadly through a culture, flowing back and forth between margins and centre, passing from zones designated as high art to zones apparently indifferent or hostile to art, pressing up from below to transform exalted spheres and down from on high to colonize the low’’ (Gallagher 13). An aficionado of pulp fiction whose prose bears the influences of highbrow and hack writing alike, Sinclair shares New Historicism’s fascination with the marginal and fondness for depicting the social field as an arena of circulating, multidirectional, and disembodied forces, ones which the modern subject seems less to explicate than to dowse. Sinclair’s spectralized poetics of power has, however, generated a remark- ably different critical response than New Historicism’s. While some Marxist and feminist thinkers have castigated New Historicism for locating power in free-floating ‘‘energies’’ rather than in specific institutions and thus render- ing its operations esoteric, Sinclair’s critics often laud his alternative occult historiography for resisting the oppressive totalization they equate with Thatcherism and capitalism alike. Robert Bond, for example, argues that White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings’s rejection of historical synchrony represents the novel’s most ‘‘direct opposition to a contemporary vision that . . . would
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Victoria-Arcana and the Misogynistic Poetics of Resistance 49
bury, close off, secrete away and render secret the past’’ (93), a curious state-
ment that pits Sinclair’s arcanic techniques against those of the state. Bond is
surely right to note the reliance of Thatcherist ideology on a nostalgic and
falsely unified vision of the Victorian past, one which presented individuals
as wholly free social agents whose success or failure in life rested on their
own efforts alone, but his slippery treatment of the arcane—is it a tool of
governmental oppression or aesthetic resistance?—well illustrates the pitfalls
and liabilities of Sinclair’s occult historiography.
Described by Alex Murray as a ‘‘spiritual se ́ance into the Ripper murders’’ (‘‘Jack the Ripper’’ 59), White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, like Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations, poses as a form of artistic communion with the dead. Like any good se ́ance communication, its formal structures and linguis- tic registers are decidedly nonstandard. Sinclair’s characters, in whose number he inserts himself as the sometime narrator ‘‘Sinclair,’’ seek the solution to the Ripper case, not simply by reviewing the details of the case, but also by becoming textual Rippers themselves: mutilating, cutting up and re-arranging fictional and historical texts Dada-style to see if a solution might emerge from the remnants. The novel’s tripartite structure replicates the form of its charac- ters’ palimpsestic detection methods. It is composed of three juxtaposed narrative fragments: the first a heady account of the dealings of a manic and drug-addled group of contemporary London book dealers, the second a description of Sinclair and his friend Joblard’s5 attempt to identify the Ripper through cryptographical readings of books and city architecture, and the third a psychobiography of Royal Physician Sir William Gull, the novel’s (following Stephen Knight) suspect of choice in the case. These three sections are themselves composites, riven through with quotations from other texts such as personal letters and popular novels that have been pasted collage-like alongside Sinclair’s prose.
Sinclair’s textual bricolage and thematic occultism are prerequisites of his stated political mandate; indeed, for him the realms of politics and the occult are inextricably linked, both sites of a power that the writer must work to harness or resist. Consider Sinclair’s comments about the role of the London artist under Thatcherism in a 2003 interview with Kevin Jackson:
London writers or visionaries of whatever stripe have to counter the main political culture.... Thatcher introduced occultism into British political life.... She wanted to physically remake, she wanted to destroy the power of London, the mob, all of those things, which finally through the Poll Tax riots brought her down. I can’t look at in any other way but as actual demonic possession. She opened herself up to the darkest demons of world politics, and therefore writers were obliged to counter this by equally extraordinary projects. (qtd. in Murray, ‘‘Exorcising’’ 66)
This statement is astonishing for a number of reasons, not least of which for its stunning (and indeed, unintentionally hilarious) personification of the
Described by Alex Murray as a ‘‘spiritual se ́ance into the Ripper murders’’ (‘‘Jack the Ripper’’ 59), White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, like Greenblatt’s Shakespearean Negotiations, poses as a form of artistic communion with the dead. Like any good se ́ance communication, its formal structures and linguis- tic registers are decidedly nonstandard. Sinclair’s characters, in whose number he inserts himself as the sometime narrator ‘‘Sinclair,’’ seek the solution to the Ripper case, not simply by reviewing the details of the case, but also by becoming textual Rippers themselves: mutilating, cutting up and re-arranging fictional and historical texts Dada-style to see if a solution might emerge from the remnants. The novel’s tripartite structure replicates the form of its charac- ters’ palimpsestic detection methods. It is composed of three juxtaposed narrative fragments: the first a heady account of the dealings of a manic and drug-addled group of contemporary London book dealers, the second a description of Sinclair and his friend Joblard’s5 attempt to identify the Ripper through cryptographical readings of books and city architecture, and the third a psychobiography of Royal Physician Sir William Gull, the novel’s (following Stephen Knight) suspect of choice in the case. These three sections are themselves composites, riven through with quotations from other texts such as personal letters and popular novels that have been pasted collage-like alongside Sinclair’s prose.
Sinclair’s textual bricolage and thematic occultism are prerequisites of his stated political mandate; indeed, for him the realms of politics and the occult are inextricably linked, both sites of a power that the writer must work to harness or resist. Consider Sinclair’s comments about the role of the London artist under Thatcherism in a 2003 interview with Kevin Jackson:
London writers or visionaries of whatever stripe have to counter the main political culture.... Thatcher introduced occultism into British political life.... She wanted to physically remake, she wanted to destroy the power of London, the mob, all of those things, which finally through the Poll Tax riots brought her down. I can’t look at in any other way but as actual demonic possession. She opened herself up to the darkest demons of world politics, and therefore writers were obliged to counter this by equally extraordinary projects. (qtd. in Murray, ‘‘Exorcising’’ 66)
This statement is astonishing for a number of reasons, not least of which for its stunning (and indeed, unintentionally hilarious) personification of the
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50 C. Ferguson
aesthetic as some kind of super-heroic anti-Thatcherist exorcist. Even if
intended to be tongue in cheek, Sinclair’s words would strain the patience
of even the most Quixotic of writer-activists: Thatcher, or rather a demon
temporarily possessing her, brought down by a coterie of London avant
garde poets and psychogeographical situationists? Really? How, one won-
ders, did this actually work? And why didn’t it prove equally effective
against New Labour? Should said group of London artists be dispatched to
Washington or Riyadh? What we see here is an absurd exaggeration of the
hermetic depersonalization of power often attributed to, but never in my
experience so blatantly demonstrated in, New Historicist criticism. Sinclair
suggests that even if power appears to reside in a centralized political figure,
its real source is actually far more esoteric and indeed demonic; as such, it
can only be resisted by an equally esoteric set of writing practices whose
potency can be asserted without needing to be proven. In Sinclair’s schema,
the possessed politician and writer alike act as vehicles for an energy that
works through, rather than originates in, their bodies.
Sinclair’s depiction of humans as vessels for, and victims of, free-floating metaphysical, political, and historical energies manifests both in the content and formal arrangement of White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. Acrostical rather than chronological in structure, the novel is divided into three books that take their names from a unique arrangement of the initials of the five ‘‘cano- nical’’ Ripper victims—Mary Ann Nicholas, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly.6 Thus book one is titled MANAC; book two, MANAC ES CEM; book three, JK. This structuring device mimics the surrealist detection techniques of characters Sinclair and Joblard as they pursue the Gull hypothesis in a smoky Brick Lane boozer. Playing with a ser- ies of victim name cards, Sinclair comes up with the sentence ‘‘MANAC ES CEM JK’’—a phrase phonetically similar to ‘‘Maniac is Come Jack.’’ Simulta- neously, Joblard plays the same game with the initials of Moors Murder victims John Kilbride, Lesley Ann Downey, and Edward Evans to ‘‘arriv[e] at the dreadful statement: JK LADEE’’ (Sinclair 51). Sinclair and Joblard react with terror to these seeming acrostic prophecies, (mis)recognizing them as the catalyzing triggers of two of Britain’s most notorious serial murder cases. In the nightmarishly hypertextual world of White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, words don’t simply describe; they instigate. Joblard and Sinclair thus effort- lessly diagnose serial murder as the product, not of the psychological deviance of its perpetrator=s, the failure of social and community health services, the inefficiency of Victorian slum policing, or the depressing ease with which society’s most vulnerable members might become prey to its most vicious, but rather of the unfortunate invocative power of the victims’ sequenced names: MANAC ES CEM JK, JK LADEE. Like runes, the letters augur acts that victims and predators alike are equally powerless to prevent.
This preternatural criminology is somewhat undermined by the fact that Joblard has to leave out of two Moors’s victims’ names (Pauline Reade and
Sinclair’s depiction of humans as vessels for, and victims of, free-floating metaphysical, political, and historical energies manifests both in the content and formal arrangement of White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. Acrostical rather than chronological in structure, the novel is divided into three books that take their names from a unique arrangement of the initials of the five ‘‘cano- nical’’ Ripper victims—Mary Ann Nicholas, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly.6 Thus book one is titled MANAC; book two, MANAC ES CEM; book three, JK. This structuring device mimics the surrealist detection techniques of characters Sinclair and Joblard as they pursue the Gull hypothesis in a smoky Brick Lane boozer. Playing with a ser- ies of victim name cards, Sinclair comes up with the sentence ‘‘MANAC ES CEM JK’’—a phrase phonetically similar to ‘‘Maniac is Come Jack.’’ Simulta- neously, Joblard plays the same game with the initials of Moors Murder victims John Kilbride, Lesley Ann Downey, and Edward Evans to ‘‘arriv[e] at the dreadful statement: JK LADEE’’ (Sinclair 51). Sinclair and Joblard react with terror to these seeming acrostic prophecies, (mis)recognizing them as the catalyzing triggers of two of Britain’s most notorious serial murder cases. In the nightmarishly hypertextual world of White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, words don’t simply describe; they instigate. Joblard and Sinclair thus effort- lessly diagnose serial murder as the product, not of the psychological deviance of its perpetrator=s, the failure of social and community health services, the inefficiency of Victorian slum policing, or the depressing ease with which society’s most vulnerable members might become prey to its most vicious, but rather of the unfortunate invocative power of the victims’ sequenced names: MANAC ES CEM JK, JK LADEE. Like runes, the letters augur acts that victims and predators alike are equally powerless to prevent.
This preternatural criminology is somewhat undermined by the fact that Joblard has to leave out of two Moors’s victims’ names (Pauline Reade and
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Victoria-Arcana and the Misogynistic Poetics of Resistance 51
John Kilbride) in order to make his formulation work, but such omissions are
permissible in order to produce an elegant historical solution. As Sinclair says
of their experiment in metaphysical detection, ‘‘In our deranged state there is
no interest in following detail or making logical connections; we know it
all. . . . If the equation is neatly made, then it is true’’ (Sinclair 55). Sinclair’s
anarchic detection not only permits but absolutely necessitates the omission
and suppression of victims’ names and consequent identities; Whitechapel’s
women are flattened out into a series of initials for use in an occult parlor
game. For Robert Bond, this technique is evidence of Sinclair’s difference
from prurient and obsessive Ripperologists, such as the character Eves
who appears briefly in White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings:
As detectives, Joblard and ‘Sinclair’ resist the type of positivistic analysis that would dissect evidence simply in order to divide it up into classifica- tory categories. Joblard states his abhorrence for ‘these hacks with their carrier bags of old cuttings’, suggesting that the dissection of evidence performed by Ripper journalism bears a similarity to the original dissec- tion of the victims. . . . This is how Joblard and ‘Sinclair’; distance them- selves from standard obsessives like Eves.... Whilst in fact obscuring the identity of the victims, whose names are rendered quite literally occult or hidden, his strategy attests to the impulse of his method of detection towards a synthesis rather than classificatory analysis of evidence. (107)
But what, one wonders, is the real difference of this so-called synthetic mode of detection from the more familiar and obviously exploitive forms of Ripper investigation if it achieves the same erasure of victim name and history, if it similarly reduces impoverished prostitutes to play things in an eccentric and pseudo-political game for drug-addled male artists? The fact that Bond is able to ignore the troubling implications of this moment indicates just how unwill- ing some of Sinclair’s critics have been to take on the novel’s troubling gen- der politics.
In White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, the paranoid critical charges against New Historicist hermeneutics are hideously reified as texts become conspira- tors and, disembodied social ‘‘energies’’ are stripped of their metaphoric status and turned into ferocious psychotic forces. Thus, Sinclair reads late Victorian novels not as a context for the Whitechapel murders but rather as viable suspects in them. He proposes to Joblard:
Accepting the notion of ‘presence’—I mean that certain fictions, chiefly Conan Doyle, Stevenson, but many others also, laid out a template that was more powerful than any local documentary account—the presences that they created, or ‘figures’ if you prefer it . . . became too much and too fast to be contained within the conventional limits of fiction. . . . The wri- ters were mediums; they articulated, they gave a shape to some pattern of energy that was already present. They got in on the curve of time, so that
As detectives, Joblard and ‘Sinclair’ resist the type of positivistic analysis that would dissect evidence simply in order to divide it up into classifica- tory categories. Joblard states his abhorrence for ‘these hacks with their carrier bags of old cuttings’, suggesting that the dissection of evidence performed by Ripper journalism bears a similarity to the original dissec- tion of the victims. . . . This is how Joblard and ‘Sinclair’; distance them- selves from standard obsessives like Eves.... Whilst in fact obscuring the identity of the victims, whose names are rendered quite literally occult or hidden, his strategy attests to the impulse of his method of detection towards a synthesis rather than classificatory analysis of evidence. (107)
But what, one wonders, is the real difference of this so-called synthetic mode of detection from the more familiar and obviously exploitive forms of Ripper investigation if it achieves the same erasure of victim name and history, if it similarly reduces impoverished prostitutes to play things in an eccentric and pseudo-political game for drug-addled male artists? The fact that Bond is able to ignore the troubling implications of this moment indicates just how unwill- ing some of Sinclair’s critics have been to take on the novel’s troubling gen- der politics.
In White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, the paranoid critical charges against New Historicist hermeneutics are hideously reified as texts become conspira- tors and, disembodied social ‘‘energies’’ are stripped of their metaphoric status and turned into ferocious psychotic forces. Thus, Sinclair reads late Victorian novels not as a context for the Whitechapel murders but rather as viable suspects in them. He proposes to Joblard:
Accepting the notion of ‘presence’—I mean that certain fictions, chiefly Conan Doyle, Stevenson, but many others also, laid out a template that was more powerful than any local documentary account—the presences that they created, or ‘figures’ if you prefer it . . . became too much and too fast to be contained within the conventional limits of fiction. . . . The wri- ters were mediums; they articulated, they gave a shape to some pattern of energy that was already present. They got in on the curve of time, so that
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52
C. Ferguson
by writing, by holding off the inhibiting reflex of the rational mind, they
were able to propose a text that was prophetic. Doyle encodes the
coming sacrifices, Stevenson’s Jekyll & Hyde . . . describes what is almost
at hand—the escape of the other, the necessary annihilation of self. The
Whitechapel Golem, unsouled. There were so many figures, conjured
essences, loose among the traps—unfocused, undirected. I don’t know
whether they reported them or created them. (128–29)
Amidst this familiar riff on writing as mediumship, we encounter the chicken- and-egg paradox that lies at the very heart of New Historicist ontology: is the cultural text best understood as a secondary interpretation of the real, or rather as a primary agent of it? As the novel progresses, Sinclair clearly leans towards the latter option, stating of Arthur Rimbaud that ‘‘he described more fiercely than any other man, then or now, the elements of the Whitechapel millennial sacrifice. And by describing them, caused them. They were said. They had to be’’ (Sinclair 131). Without Rimbaud, then, no slaughter; White- chapel’s prostitutes would have had to contend only with the less sensational but equally fatal depredations of malnutrition, addiction, disease, violence, and systematic sexual abuse that make up the impoverished sex trade work- er’s daily life. Such mundane suffering fails to warrant an occult explanation or much attention in the Victoria-arcana of White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings.
This indifference towards the quotidian sufferings of the Ripper victims morphs periodically into an overt and incredibly callous misogyny, one that seems less the product of deliberate maliciousness than of the supernatural model of textual agency the novel adopts. Consider the following assessment of putative Ripper Sir William Gull’s responsibility for his crimes. Urged on by the aetheric energies unleashed in Rimbaud’s and Doyle’s work (which he may or may not have read) and by his friend James Hinton’s views on pros- titution, Gull becomes a passionless conduit for actions he is helpless to con- trol: ‘‘What Hinton said, Gull did . . . He was a victim. He could not escape the acts he had to perform. The will of the victims was as great as his own: rush- ing together into annihilation, each serving the other’’ (113). Far from resist- ing, then, the women apparently collaborated. I am not the first critic to be appalled by the misogyny implicit in mythic constructions of the Ripper crimes, ones in which, as Jane Caputi writes, ‘‘sex crime is lifted out of the historical tradition of gynocide and represented as some mysterious force of nature, the expression of deeply repressed ‘human’ urges, a fact of life, a supernatural evil, a monstrous aberration—anything but the logical and eminently functional product of the system of male domination’’ (Caputi 28).7 What separates Sinclair’s novel from the majority of works Caputi surveys in her 1986 monograph The Age of Sex Crime, however, is that its misogyny is produced in a very different way—not through recourse to theories of the Ripper’s romanticized individualism and immortality, but rather from a particularly nihilistic theory of historical determinism. There are, after all,
Amidst this familiar riff on writing as mediumship, we encounter the chicken- and-egg paradox that lies at the very heart of New Historicist ontology: is the cultural text best understood as a secondary interpretation of the real, or rather as a primary agent of it? As the novel progresses, Sinclair clearly leans towards the latter option, stating of Arthur Rimbaud that ‘‘he described more fiercely than any other man, then or now, the elements of the Whitechapel millennial sacrifice. And by describing them, caused them. They were said. They had to be’’ (Sinclair 131). Without Rimbaud, then, no slaughter; White- chapel’s prostitutes would have had to contend only with the less sensational but equally fatal depredations of malnutrition, addiction, disease, violence, and systematic sexual abuse that make up the impoverished sex trade work- er’s daily life. Such mundane suffering fails to warrant an occult explanation or much attention in the Victoria-arcana of White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings.
This indifference towards the quotidian sufferings of the Ripper victims morphs periodically into an overt and incredibly callous misogyny, one that seems less the product of deliberate maliciousness than of the supernatural model of textual agency the novel adopts. Consider the following assessment of putative Ripper Sir William Gull’s responsibility for his crimes. Urged on by the aetheric energies unleashed in Rimbaud’s and Doyle’s work (which he may or may not have read) and by his friend James Hinton’s views on pros- titution, Gull becomes a passionless conduit for actions he is helpless to con- trol: ‘‘What Hinton said, Gull did . . . He was a victim. He could not escape the acts he had to perform. The will of the victims was as great as his own: rush- ing together into annihilation, each serving the other’’ (113). Far from resist- ing, then, the women apparently collaborated. I am not the first critic to be appalled by the misogyny implicit in mythic constructions of the Ripper crimes, ones in which, as Jane Caputi writes, ‘‘sex crime is lifted out of the historical tradition of gynocide and represented as some mysterious force of nature, the expression of deeply repressed ‘human’ urges, a fact of life, a supernatural evil, a monstrous aberration—anything but the logical and eminently functional product of the system of male domination’’ (Caputi 28).7 What separates Sinclair’s novel from the majority of works Caputi surveys in her 1986 monograph The Age of Sex Crime, however, is that its misogyny is produced in a very different way—not through recourse to theories of the Ripper’s romanticized individualism and immortality, but rather from a particularly nihilistic theory of historical determinism. There are, after all,
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Victoria-Arcana and the Misogynistic Poetics of Resistance 53
no individuals in White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings; we are all, no less than the
Ripper, slaves to a monstrous set of determining texts which are written
through but never by us. ‘‘Until we can remake the past, go into it, change
what is now, cut out those cancers,’’ ‘‘Sinclair’’ notes, ‘‘we are helpless. We
are prisoners, giving birth to old faults, carrying our naked grandfathers in
our arms’’ (113). Little wonder that his preferred model for authorship is
mediumship; if we cannot escape the past, then we are bound to channel
it, twitching and stuttering as its alien contours force their way through our
throats and limbs.
No less remarkable than the intensity of the misogynistic memorializa- tion in White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings—the serial murderer as partner of willing victims, women turned into hierophantic symbols of the new millen- nial slaughter—is the almost complete critical silence with which it has been received.8 Those writers who have registered the dubious aspects of the novel’s gender politics tend to adopt one of two equally unsatisfying positions. The first is to suggest that the Ripper is target rather than productive source of the novel’s political and aesthetic critique. For such critics, the Ripper represents the true face of a destructive Victorianism venerated by and productive of Thatcherism, one that Sinclair’s experimental anti-narrative strategies aim to counter and transcend. Thus, Alex Murray argues that the novel presents ‘‘sexual depravity, irrational fundamentalism, and inhumane spectacles [as the] obscene underside to late Victorian culture. . . . By exposing the salacious and repressive underbelly of Victorian culture, Sinclair is able to shatter the mythology of Victorian values that had been built up by Thatcher in the 1980s, undermining an ideology that attempted to generalize and homogenize the past’’ (‘‘Recalling London’’ 69– 70). This strikes me as a strangely positivistic claim to make about a novel one has previously described as ‘‘ruptur[ing] historical authority, failing to declare the accuracy of its own contents’’ (‘‘Recalling London’’ 57)—how do you ‘‘expose’’ the hidden underside of history if you don’t believe historical accuracy or authority are possible?—and it becomes even more problematic later when Murray adroitly shifts the political currency of Sinclair’s Ripper. Now the Ripper ceases to be a symbol of Thatcherite oppression but rather an analogue of the subversive narrative violence that avant garde writers must pit against Thatcherism. He writes, ‘‘The violent acts of Jack the Ripper haunt the pages of the novel, yet simultaneously the violence of linear historical nar- rative will be attacked by Sinclair’s prose style which . . . chops narrative logic at unexpected points, leaving it in a state of violent disorientation’’ (‘‘Recalling London’’ 54). The loaded diction here—the prose ‘‘chops’’ and ‘‘violent[ly] disorientates’’—suggests that the real alliance here is between the Ripper and Sinclair rather than the Ripper and Thatcher. Robert Bond makes a similar point when he writes that White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings’s title ‘‘not only refers to the surgical violence of the Ripper, but also intimates the way in which Sinclair’s novel performs a dissection of the historical traces of that violence, as
No less remarkable than the intensity of the misogynistic memorializa- tion in White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings—the serial murderer as partner of willing victims, women turned into hierophantic symbols of the new millen- nial slaughter—is the almost complete critical silence with which it has been received.8 Those writers who have registered the dubious aspects of the novel’s gender politics tend to adopt one of two equally unsatisfying positions. The first is to suggest that the Ripper is target rather than productive source of the novel’s political and aesthetic critique. For such critics, the Ripper represents the true face of a destructive Victorianism venerated by and productive of Thatcherism, one that Sinclair’s experimental anti-narrative strategies aim to counter and transcend. Thus, Alex Murray argues that the novel presents ‘‘sexual depravity, irrational fundamentalism, and inhumane spectacles [as the] obscene underside to late Victorian culture. . . . By exposing the salacious and repressive underbelly of Victorian culture, Sinclair is able to shatter the mythology of Victorian values that had been built up by Thatcher in the 1980s, undermining an ideology that attempted to generalize and homogenize the past’’ (‘‘Recalling London’’ 69– 70). This strikes me as a strangely positivistic claim to make about a novel one has previously described as ‘‘ruptur[ing] historical authority, failing to declare the accuracy of its own contents’’ (‘‘Recalling London’’ 57)—how do you ‘‘expose’’ the hidden underside of history if you don’t believe historical accuracy or authority are possible?—and it becomes even more problematic later when Murray adroitly shifts the political currency of Sinclair’s Ripper. Now the Ripper ceases to be a symbol of Thatcherite oppression but rather an analogue of the subversive narrative violence that avant garde writers must pit against Thatcherism. He writes, ‘‘The violent acts of Jack the Ripper haunt the pages of the novel, yet simultaneously the violence of linear historical nar- rative will be attacked by Sinclair’s prose style which . . . chops narrative logic at unexpected points, leaving it in a state of violent disorientation’’ (‘‘Recalling London’’ 54). The loaded diction here—the prose ‘‘chops’’ and ‘‘violent[ly] disorientates’’—suggests that the real alliance here is between the Ripper and Sinclair rather than the Ripper and Thatcher. Robert Bond makes a similar point when he writes that White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings’s title ‘‘not only refers to the surgical violence of the Ripper, but also intimates the way in which Sinclair’s novel performs a dissection of the historical traces of that violence, as
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54 C. Ferguson
part of its broader forensic examination of the period’’ (100). Again, Sinclair’s
prose style is positively likened to the surgical violence of the Ripper.
If, as these critics imply, Sinclair attempts to do in prose what the Ripper did on the flesh, how then can this style possibly be rendered as progressive, resistant, or, even more unconvincingly, anti-hegemonic? After all, what could be more depressingly mainstream, more tediously familiar, than the image of the Ripper as daring countercultural antihero, a mythical super- human figure depicted as a cunning genius in a popular imagination which inexplicably clings to the belief that getting away with the murder of impo- verished sex trade workers in poorly policed urban slums somehow requires great intelligence and deft. The Ripper simply cannot stand as the contested target of Sinclair’s politics while functioning as the subversive analogue to his poetics; these two extremes simply cancel each other out to produce a gaping ethical and political vacancy in the text.
A second, and no less problematic, critical reaction to White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings’s occultation of the Ripper crimes is to exculpate it on the basis of the text’s self-reflexivity. Thus, Robert Sheppard writes that ‘‘Sinclair . . . criticizes Ripperologists as ‘those who keep pain alive by describ- ing its parameters’...the advantage ‘Sinclair’ has over Stephen Knight and other nostalgists of evil is that he knows this’’ (53–54).9 A chief example of this apparently redemptive knowingness is Sinclair’s decision to include a response to the White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings manuscript written by his friend and fellow poet Doug Oliver that warns him about the subject’s potential to evoke prurience and, worse, bad art. Oliver writes:
Here, there’s a crucial difference between bad poets and good. Any fool can know about these things by reading about them; any fool can construct surrealistic or fantastic visions and, having worked them out, can even see them. But good poet, working in such fields of knowing, doesn’t necessarily ‘want’ to see what he sees; he just sees it, impelled necessarily upon him by circumstance and mood and by his trust in those, his willingness to speak whether gripped by horrors or by beatitudes or by some kind of shining commonsense. (Sinclair 160)
Although clearly discomfited by the darker and latently exploitive aspects of the manuscript, Oliver here defines and defends good art through the very cri- teria that makes these troubling moments possible: that is, through an assertion of individual helplessness in the face of a pseudo-supernatural aesthetic that mercilessly imposes its visions on the reluctant, Cassandra-like artist. Given the compatibility of Oliver’s view of aesthetic determinism with Sinclair’s own rendering of power, it is hardly surprising that the author would choose to incorporate it into the manuscript. Although offered as an example of oppo- sition, Oliver’s letter reproduces rather than challenges the novel’s conviction that texts, history, and, indeed, sexual violence are the fatalistic products of a disembodied force that spectators might describe but not resist. Such critical
If, as these critics imply, Sinclair attempts to do in prose what the Ripper did on the flesh, how then can this style possibly be rendered as progressive, resistant, or, even more unconvincingly, anti-hegemonic? After all, what could be more depressingly mainstream, more tediously familiar, than the image of the Ripper as daring countercultural antihero, a mythical super- human figure depicted as a cunning genius in a popular imagination which inexplicably clings to the belief that getting away with the murder of impo- verished sex trade workers in poorly policed urban slums somehow requires great intelligence and deft. The Ripper simply cannot stand as the contested target of Sinclair’s politics while functioning as the subversive analogue to his poetics; these two extremes simply cancel each other out to produce a gaping ethical and political vacancy in the text.
A second, and no less problematic, critical reaction to White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings’s occultation of the Ripper crimes is to exculpate it on the basis of the text’s self-reflexivity. Thus, Robert Sheppard writes that ‘‘Sinclair . . . criticizes Ripperologists as ‘those who keep pain alive by describ- ing its parameters’...the advantage ‘Sinclair’ has over Stephen Knight and other nostalgists of evil is that he knows this’’ (53–54).9 A chief example of this apparently redemptive knowingness is Sinclair’s decision to include a response to the White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings manuscript written by his friend and fellow poet Doug Oliver that warns him about the subject’s potential to evoke prurience and, worse, bad art. Oliver writes:
Here, there’s a crucial difference between bad poets and good. Any fool can know about these things by reading about them; any fool can construct surrealistic or fantastic visions and, having worked them out, can even see them. But good poet, working in such fields of knowing, doesn’t necessarily ‘want’ to see what he sees; he just sees it, impelled necessarily upon him by circumstance and mood and by his trust in those, his willingness to speak whether gripped by horrors or by beatitudes or by some kind of shining commonsense. (Sinclair 160)
Although clearly discomfited by the darker and latently exploitive aspects of the manuscript, Oliver here defines and defends good art through the very cri- teria that makes these troubling moments possible: that is, through an assertion of individual helplessness in the face of a pseudo-supernatural aesthetic that mercilessly imposes its visions on the reluctant, Cassandra-like artist. Given the compatibility of Oliver’s view of aesthetic determinism with Sinclair’s own rendering of power, it is hardly surprising that the author would choose to incorporate it into the manuscript. Although offered as an example of oppo- sition, Oliver’s letter reproduces rather than challenges the novel’s conviction that texts, history, and, indeed, sexual violence are the fatalistic products of a disembodied force that spectators might describe but not resist. Such critical
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Victoria-Arcana and the Misogynistic Poetics of Resistance 55
‘‘self-reflexivity’’ hardly seems risky. Indeed, even were Oliver’s putative
critique less in line with White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings’s aesthetic and histor-
ical ethos, it seems unlikely that ‘‘Sinclair’’ would engage with it in any substan-
tial way. As proof of this reticence, we need only consider the following
example of the narrator’s extinguishing attitude towards criticism, written in
response to the Oliver letter: ‘‘I absolutely would not ‘defend’ any position
he found that I had occupied’’ (Sinclair 165). The inclusion of criticism with
which one has no intention of engaging serves as an empty gesture.
Nonetheless, despite such evasions, contradictions, and obliquities, Sinclair’s Victoria-arcanic novel continues to enjoy the reputation of a politi- cally redemptive work that produces a deliverance from the representational violence of mainstream Ripperology and Thatcherite neo-Victorian nostalgia alike. Alex Murray sees this deliverance in the novel’s final moments when ‘‘Sinclair’’ discovers the blackened shell of an old barge in a field near William Gull’s childhood home in Thorpe-le-Soken. Murray contends that the boat ‘‘symbolizes the ark that [Sinclair] suggests is symbolic of Gull’s conviction that he was appointed by god to save the human race by murdering the five prostitutes in an ancient Masonic ritual. This understanding is not authoritative and final, but its function is to perform an act of understanding, and thus to deliver’’ (‘‘Jack the Ripper’’ 64). ‘‘Sinclair’’ imagines returning to the spot with his family so that his children may play on the barge ruins ‘‘and the connection will be made, the circuit completed’’ (Sinclair 210). But if this act represents a form of deliverance, it seems an extremely pallid and misplaced one. Who, after all, is being delivered from what in this moment? In this Victoria-arcanic take on one of Britain’s most famous, and—the word is apt if dismaying— popular episodes of violence against women, is Sinclair the psychogeographi- cal writer really the one most in need of deliverance? These questions would not be so urgent if Sinclair did not insist, throughout his novel and in his inter- views, on attaching a real if hermetic social efficacy to his experimental aesthetics; he lures his readers with a promise of subversion whose fulfillment is asserted the more fervently the less it is evidenced. Sinclair’s children play on a barge perhaps once connected to the Gull family, and, magically, transcendence is achieved. Perhaps the deliverance is supposed to be inher- ent in the finished text itself; now complete, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings may unleash ‘‘energies’’ and resonances to counter those mysteriously discharged by Rimbaudian poetry and Thatcherist social policy alike.
‘‘AN UNUSUALLY DETERMINED SUICIDE’’: THE SERIAL HOMICIDE VICTIM AS SELF-MURDERER IN ALAN MOORE AND EDDIE CAMPBELL’S FROM HELL
Although clearly inspired by the Sinclair novel from which it takes its choice of suspect, plot, and esoteric metatextualism (Baker 60), Alan Moore and
Nonetheless, despite such evasions, contradictions, and obliquities, Sinclair’s Victoria-arcanic novel continues to enjoy the reputation of a politi- cally redemptive work that produces a deliverance from the representational violence of mainstream Ripperology and Thatcherite neo-Victorian nostalgia alike. Alex Murray sees this deliverance in the novel’s final moments when ‘‘Sinclair’’ discovers the blackened shell of an old barge in a field near William Gull’s childhood home in Thorpe-le-Soken. Murray contends that the boat ‘‘symbolizes the ark that [Sinclair] suggests is symbolic of Gull’s conviction that he was appointed by god to save the human race by murdering the five prostitutes in an ancient Masonic ritual. This understanding is not authoritative and final, but its function is to perform an act of understanding, and thus to deliver’’ (‘‘Jack the Ripper’’ 64). ‘‘Sinclair’’ imagines returning to the spot with his family so that his children may play on the barge ruins ‘‘and the connection will be made, the circuit completed’’ (Sinclair 210). But if this act represents a form of deliverance, it seems an extremely pallid and misplaced one. Who, after all, is being delivered from what in this moment? In this Victoria-arcanic take on one of Britain’s most famous, and—the word is apt if dismaying— popular episodes of violence against women, is Sinclair the psychogeographi- cal writer really the one most in need of deliverance? These questions would not be so urgent if Sinclair did not insist, throughout his novel and in his inter- views, on attaching a real if hermetic social efficacy to his experimental aesthetics; he lures his readers with a promise of subversion whose fulfillment is asserted the more fervently the less it is evidenced. Sinclair’s children play on a barge perhaps once connected to the Gull family, and, magically, transcendence is achieved. Perhaps the deliverance is supposed to be inher- ent in the finished text itself; now complete, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings may unleash ‘‘energies’’ and resonances to counter those mysteriously discharged by Rimbaudian poetry and Thatcherist social policy alike.
‘‘AN UNUSUALLY DETERMINED SUICIDE’’: THE SERIAL HOMICIDE VICTIM AS SELF-MURDERER IN ALAN MOORE AND EDDIE CAMPBELL’S FROM HELL
Although clearly inspired by the Sinclair novel from which it takes its choice of suspect, plot, and esoteric metatextualism (Baker 60), Alan Moore and
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56 C. Ferguson
Eddie Campbell’s graphic novel From Hell seems, at least at first, to be as
much a political corrective as a tribute to White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings.
Moore and Campbell’s occulted historical pastiche resounds with the ethical
gestures and concerns that seem dismayingly absent from Sinclair’s novel.
The book opens with a dedication to the six established Whitechapel victims;
its appendix lauds the successful feminist protests against the vulgar attempts
to rename ‘‘The Ten Bells’’ pub ‘‘The Jack the Ripper’’ and calls for a more
realist, sympathetic, and responsible representation of the victims than
has hitherto been available in the popular imagination (Moore, From Hell
Appendix I, 7). ‘‘These women were neither the sultry, wanton beauties that
they are depicted as being in the more exploitational Ripper movies,’’ writes
Moore, ‘‘nor the disfigured and toothless hags that some writers have
described them as. They were ordinary women, who, despite their deprived
and unhealthy situation, were trying to look attractive for the only job that
society had seen fit to offer them’’ (Moore, From Hell Appendix I 8). Finally,
and perhaps most compellingly in light of our focus on the ethics of Victoria-
arcana’s style, Moore apologizes for ‘‘wrapping up miserable little killings in
supernatural twaddle’’ (Moore, From Hell Appendix I 30). Although From
Hell’s self-reflexivity is more refreshingly direct than the similar metacritical
moments in White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, it is not, however, substantially
more convincing. Certainly, the painstaking giallo-esque depictions of the
final victim’s evisceration in Chapter Ten, ‘‘The Best of All Tailors,’’ somewhat
undermine the sincerity of Moore’s appended reflections. In this chapter, as
in others throughout the novel, words and images seem somewhat at odds,
with the text offering caveats, provisos, and explanatory afterthoughts that
struggle to contain the excess of the illustrations.
The most significant impediment, however, to Moore and Campbell’s attempts to distance themselves from the (b)latent misogyny of Ripper nos- talgia lies less in their prurient visual reproductions of the crimes than in their commitment to the same metaphysics of textual determinism that drive Sin- clair’s Victoria-arcana. We see this investment nowhere more clearly than in their speculative etiology of William Gull’s homicidal madness. Like so many contemporary screen serial killers—witness John Doe in David Fincher’s Se7en (1995) or Richard Thompson in Phillip Noyce’s The Bone Collector (2000)—Gull is a bibliomaniac, one who has turned the entire city of London into a text whose stone ciphers and brick syntax only he can read. As he tells his cab driver John Netley when they drive through London, ‘‘The greater part of London’s story is not writ in words. It is instead a literature of stone, of place names, and association’’ (4, 9). Needless to say, Gull’s London- as-text remains unreconstructed by the modern hermeneutics of reader- response theory: authorial intention provides the sole legitimate context through which the city might be read, and its author is god himself, whether imagined as Jesus, Dionysius, Yahweh, Baal, or the Masonic deity Jahbulon. In this supernaturalization of Gull’s motives, From Hell playfully perpetuates
The most significant impediment, however, to Moore and Campbell’s attempts to distance themselves from the (b)latent misogyny of Ripper nos- talgia lies less in their prurient visual reproductions of the crimes than in their commitment to the same metaphysics of textual determinism that drive Sin- clair’s Victoria-arcana. We see this investment nowhere more clearly than in their speculative etiology of William Gull’s homicidal madness. Like so many contemporary screen serial killers—witness John Doe in David Fincher’s Se7en (1995) or Richard Thompson in Phillip Noyce’s The Bone Collector (2000)—Gull is a bibliomaniac, one who has turned the entire city of London into a text whose stone ciphers and brick syntax only he can read. As he tells his cab driver John Netley when they drive through London, ‘‘The greater part of London’s story is not writ in words. It is instead a literature of stone, of place names, and association’’ (4, 9). Needless to say, Gull’s London- as-text remains unreconstructed by the modern hermeneutics of reader- response theory: authorial intention provides the sole legitimate context through which the city might be read, and its author is god himself, whether imagined as Jesus, Dionysius, Yahweh, Baal, or the Masonic deity Jahbulon. In this supernaturalization of Gull’s motives, From Hell playfully perpetuates
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Victoria-Arcana and the Misogynistic Poetics of Resistance 57
the same act of mystical displacement that David Cunningham recognizes in
the promotional literature of the Ripper tour industry: ‘‘misogyny can never
be enough to ‘explain’ the murders; they must be a Masonic ritual, superna-
tural event, design’’ (Cunningham 167). Gull is identified as both the city’s
reader and its own textual product, a vehicle for an occult force that writes
him into being. Readers of Peter Ackroyd, or indeed, Thomas Carlyle,10 will
no doubt recognize this now somewhat hoary psychogeographical trope of
the East End as psychic lodestone, one whose popularity amongst pseudo-
mystical writers seems in no likelihood of abating despite its increasingly
hackneyed iteration. From Hell’s own rampant intertextuality provides a fit-
ting stylistic counterpart to, and arguably aesthetic endorsement of, the mur-
derous bibliomania that drives its antagonist.
Moore and Campbell introduce the textualist origins of William Gull’s psychopathology in the opening sequence of the book’s second chapter, ‘‘A State of Darkness.’’ The reader encounters a series of pure black panels punctuated by snippets of dialogue; as a small space of light begins to open up in the following frames, we realize we have occupied the point of view of the young William Gull as he travels through a river tunnel on his father’s barge. The ‘‘State of Darkness’’ described in the opening title is thus literal, but only partly so; we have also occupied the murky moral and spiritual darkness that will incite the older Gull’s acts. The segments of dialogue we encounter here will surface again in the latter sections of the book, occurring in future conversations that the young Gull cannot possibly have anticipated in his youth. Thus, the question ‘‘What is the Fourth Dimension?,’’ the title of an 1884 book penned by the son of Gull’s friend James Hinton, appears juxtaposed with Gull’s future explanations to his medical students of the neurological basis of cretinism (Moore 2: 1). Always already written, the future loops endlessly through the past in a series of text fragments that stand as pretext and product of impending events. Less sex than text murderer, Gull the monster is incanted into being by words that have been scripted elsewhere, that write on him just as he attempts to inscribe the symbols of male domination on his victims’ bodies.
Gull’s psychogeographical theory of urban determinism, in which the city-as-text prescribes rather than describes our actions and emotions, has the potential to fuel a really interesting model of resistance politics. Consider Gull’s theory of sexual domination through urban planning: ‘‘Symbols have POWER, Netley . . . Power enough . . . to deliver half this planet’s population into slavery!’’ (Moore 4: 23) If, as Gull suggests, architecture rather than biological hard-wiring, capitalism, or misogynistic monotheism is the source of men’s quest to subjugate women, then what better way to strike out at the patriarchy than to blow up a (preferably phallic-shaped) building? Such an act would cease to be symbolic and become purely pragmatic; aspiring
Moore and Campbell introduce the textualist origins of William Gull’s psychopathology in the opening sequence of the book’s second chapter, ‘‘A State of Darkness.’’ The reader encounters a series of pure black panels punctuated by snippets of dialogue; as a small space of light begins to open up in the following frames, we realize we have occupied the point of view of the young William Gull as he travels through a river tunnel on his father’s barge. The ‘‘State of Darkness’’ described in the opening title is thus literal, but only partly so; we have also occupied the murky moral and spiritual darkness that will incite the older Gull’s acts. The segments of dialogue we encounter here will surface again in the latter sections of the book, occurring in future conversations that the young Gull cannot possibly have anticipated in his youth. Thus, the question ‘‘What is the Fourth Dimension?,’’ the title of an 1884 book penned by the son of Gull’s friend James Hinton, appears juxtaposed with Gull’s future explanations to his medical students of the neurological basis of cretinism (Moore 2: 1). Always already written, the future loops endlessly through the past in a series of text fragments that stand as pretext and product of impending events. Less sex than text murderer, Gull the monster is incanted into being by words that have been scripted elsewhere, that write on him just as he attempts to inscribe the symbols of male domination on his victims’ bodies.
Gull’s psychogeographical theory of urban determinism, in which the city-as-text prescribes rather than describes our actions and emotions, has the potential to fuel a really interesting model of resistance politics. Consider Gull’s theory of sexual domination through urban planning: ‘‘Symbols have POWER, Netley . . . Power enough . . . to deliver half this planet’s population into slavery!’’ (Moore 4: 23) If, as Gull suggests, architecture rather than biological hard-wiring, capitalism, or misogynistic monotheism is the source of men’s quest to subjugate women, then what better way to strike out at the patriarchy than to blow up a (preferably phallic-shaped) building? Such an act would cease to be symbolic and become purely pragmatic; aspiring
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58 C. Ferguson
feminists would major in demolition explosion rather than, say, women’s
studies. My tongue-in-cheek suggestion here is intended to expose the
absurdity of From Hell’s argument for aesthetic determinism, one that
becomes most unsettling when espoused, not by Gull himself (after all,
he’s a fictional character), but by Moore in his explanatory notes. Mad as Gull
seems intended to be, his views of historical formation are granted meta-
textual authority through their assertion in the first appendix. Here Moore
writes, ‘‘The suggestion that the 1880s embody the essence of the twentieth
century, along with the attendant notion that the Whitechapel murders
embody the essence of the 1880 s is central to From Hell’’ (Moore 1: 14).
Later, Moore meditates on the bizarre 1930s Halifax Slasher case in which
a localized outbreak of mass hysteria caused several West Yorkshire residents
to deliberately cut themselves and then claim that a shadowy, unknown
assailant had attacked them. He muses, ‘‘In my more fanciful and speculative
moments, it seems almost as though whatever dark chthonic energies led to
the crimes of Whitechapel and elsewhere was unable to find a suitable
receptacle in Halifax, leaving a vortex of panic and mutilation with an almost
mystic absence at the centre’’ (Moore 1: 41). What both sentiments share is
the conviction that the Whitechapel murders were not an influence on
twentieth-century consciousness, but rather the influence; that the entire
twentieth century and all episodes of violence attendant therein may best
be read through the narrow (not to mention extremely Anglocentric) lens
of a small if brutal number of 1888 serial murders, crimes which are
themselves only literalized versions of textual injunctions which come from
everywhere and nowhere.
It is in its culminating conflation of act with text, of historical incident with discursive interpolation, that From Hell’s ostensible ethical difference from White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings collapses most completely. The novel closes with an illustrated appendix that satirizes contemporary Ripperologists even as it includes Moore and Campbell in their numbers; what separates From Hell’s creators from the surrounding hordes of obses- sive Jack or ‘‘Gull’’ catchers, the images suggest, is that they have the good sense to be ironical about their pursuit (Figure 1). Thus, Moore and Campbell stand apart from the crowd of feckless seekers, the former adopting an Elmer Fudd stutter to counsel his co-creator, ‘‘Be vewy, vewy quiet. We’re hunting wippers.’’ A caption overhead declares the Rippero- logical pursuit to be ‘‘dodgy pseudo-history’’ (Moore, From Hell Appendix II, 16).
But what alternatives to dodgy pseudohistory have Moore and Campbell provided us with at this point in the novel? Only a few pages later they present their own satirical solution to the Whitechapel murders, one surely no less excessive than those of the Ripperologists they mock or shocking than Sinclair’s vision of eager whores waiting to impale themselves willingly on the Ripper’s knife. In the wake of Ripperology’s endless parade of
It is in its culminating conflation of act with text, of historical incident with discursive interpolation, that From Hell’s ostensible ethical difference from White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings collapses most completely. The novel closes with an illustrated appendix that satirizes contemporary Ripperologists even as it includes Moore and Campbell in their numbers; what separates From Hell’s creators from the surrounding hordes of obses- sive Jack or ‘‘Gull’’ catchers, the images suggest, is that they have the good sense to be ironical about their pursuit (Figure 1). Thus, Moore and Campbell stand apart from the crowd of feckless seekers, the former adopting an Elmer Fudd stutter to counsel his co-creator, ‘‘Be vewy, vewy quiet. We’re hunting wippers.’’ A caption overhead declares the Rippero- logical pursuit to be ‘‘dodgy pseudo-history’’ (Moore, From Hell Appendix II, 16).
But what alternatives to dodgy pseudohistory have Moore and Campbell provided us with at this point in the novel? Only a few pages later they present their own satirical solution to the Whitechapel murders, one surely no less excessive than those of the Ripperologists they mock or shocking than Sinclair’s vision of eager whores waiting to impale themselves willingly on the Ripper’s knife. In the wake of Ripperology’s endless parade of
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Victoria-Arcana and the Misogynistic Poetics of Resistance 59
FIGURE 1 Moore and Campbell stand apart from the Ripperologists in Alan Moore and Eddie
Campbell From Hell (1989).
self-cannibalizing solutions, writes Moore, truth has become not only clouded but obsolete: ‘‘The actual killer’s gone, unglimpsed. Might as well not have been there at all. There never was a Jack the Ripper. Mary Kelly was just an unusually determined suicide. Why don’t we leave it there?’’(- Moore, From Hell Appendix II 23) (Figure 2). Faced with a seemingly unsol- vable textual aporia, From Hell’s solution is to blame the victim for her own evisceration.
There are, however, plenty of good reasons not to simply ‘‘leave it there’’ with the conclusion that the Whitechapel crimes, because ultimately unsolvable, must be read as acts of self-annihilation. Indeed, Moore and Campbell’s solution rests on a pernicious false dilemma that all too com- monly characterizes postmodern takes on the Ripper case: either we must absolutely and definitively identify the culprit (the Patricia Cornwall route) or, failing that, subsume the murders within a circuit of amorphous textuality which denies their human consequences and material existence. Because the only access we’ll ever have to the Ripper is through text, such logic holds, then the Ripper might as well be no more than text; if we cannot discover who killed Whitechapel’s women in the autumn of 1888, then we must conclude that no one did and indict instead a series of books. Such an
self-cannibalizing solutions, writes Moore, truth has become not only clouded but obsolete: ‘‘The actual killer’s gone, unglimpsed. Might as well not have been there at all. There never was a Jack the Ripper. Mary Kelly was just an unusually determined suicide. Why don’t we leave it there?’’(- Moore, From Hell Appendix II 23) (Figure 2). Faced with a seemingly unsol- vable textual aporia, From Hell’s solution is to blame the victim for her own evisceration.
There are, however, plenty of good reasons not to simply ‘‘leave it there’’ with the conclusion that the Whitechapel crimes, because ultimately unsolvable, must be read as acts of self-annihilation. Indeed, Moore and Campbell’s solution rests on a pernicious false dilemma that all too com- monly characterizes postmodern takes on the Ripper case: either we must absolutely and definitively identify the culprit (the Patricia Cornwall route) or, failing that, subsume the murders within a circuit of amorphous textuality which denies their human consequences and material existence. Because the only access we’ll ever have to the Ripper is through text, such logic holds, then the Ripper might as well be no more than text; if we cannot discover who killed Whitechapel’s women in the autumn of 1888, then we must conclude that no one did and indict instead a series of books. Such an
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60 C. Ferguson
FIGURE 2 ‘‘Mary Kelly as Suicide’’ in Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell From Hell (1989).
interpretation leaves us with nothing except perhaps a particularly compel- ling argument in favor of literary censorship; after all, if texts and not humans cause serial murder, we would do far better to police library holdings than criminal records.
Rather than conceding to From Hell’s Victoria-arcanic disavowal of human agency in the Whitechapel murders, we need to ask a crucial ques- tion: For whom was there never a Jack the Ripper? Maybe not for Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, but the figure (or figures) was certainly real enough for Mary Ann Nicholls and Annie Chapman. My question here is analogous to the one I raised in response to White Chappell, Scarlet Tra- cings’s conclusion: who is most in need of ‘‘deliverance’’ from the Ripper’s legacy of violence and historical repetition, contemporary sex trade work- ers or psychogeographical writers? To what omissions and silences does Victoria-arcana’s game of esoteric textualism lead? What are the potential ethical consequences of imagining history as one gigantic, seething textual conglomerate in which books, unanchored from their authors, incite acts that humans are powerless to either resist or own? The two responses offered in White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings and From Hell seem distinctly repellent: sexual homicide victims become either masochistic co-participants or ingenious suicides.
interpretation leaves us with nothing except perhaps a particularly compel- ling argument in favor of literary censorship; after all, if texts and not humans cause serial murder, we would do far better to police library holdings than criminal records.
Rather than conceding to From Hell’s Victoria-arcanic disavowal of human agency in the Whitechapel murders, we need to ask a crucial ques- tion: For whom was there never a Jack the Ripper? Maybe not for Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, but the figure (or figures) was certainly real enough for Mary Ann Nicholls and Annie Chapman. My question here is analogous to the one I raised in response to White Chappell, Scarlet Tra- cings’s conclusion: who is most in need of ‘‘deliverance’’ from the Ripper’s legacy of violence and historical repetition, contemporary sex trade work- ers or psychogeographical writers? To what omissions and silences does Victoria-arcana’s game of esoteric textualism lead? What are the potential ethical consequences of imagining history as one gigantic, seething textual conglomerate in which books, unanchored from their authors, incite acts that humans are powerless to either resist or own? The two responses offered in White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings and From Hell seem distinctly repellent: sexual homicide victims become either masochistic co-participants or ingenious suicides.
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Victoria-Arcana and the Misogynistic Poetics of Resistance 61
It would be easy yet myopic to dismiss these Victoria-arcanic texts as the
products of unreconstructed patriarchy, a reaction compromised by Moore
and Campbell’s frequently stated, and I suggest earnest, commitment to
the recovery of the victims’ dignity. A more convincing source of the novels’
misogyny lies in their gleeful exaggeration of two ontological assumptions
that H. Aram Veeser has identified as foundational to New Historicist scholar-
ship: one, ‘‘that literary and non-literary ‘texts’ circulate inseparably,’’ and
two, ‘‘that no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives access to unchanging
truths or expresses unalterable human nature’’ (Vesser 2). If there is no
unchanging truth, then it surely doesn’t matter whether someone or no
one killed the Ripper victims; if literary and nonliterary texts (a term which
seems to assimilate every possible type of expression or performance) are
not substantially different in terms of impact and function, then novels as
well as people might be indicted for producing the ‘‘dark chthonic energies’’
that (apparently) fuel gynocide. The texts embrace a fantasy of total historical
organicism remarkably similar to New Historicism’s position that, in Veeser’s
words, ‘‘everything is logically connected to everything else . . . Each unique
detail, episode, or essay comes to represent, duplicate, stand in for much
more than its insignificant self’’ (4). Thus William Gull-as-Ripper is alter-
nately imagined not just as lone madman but also as the spiritual descen-
dent of figures as diverse as Dionysius and Nicholas Hawksmoor, as
anachronistic subject of William Blake’s ‘‘The Ghost of a Flea’’ (1819–1820)
and instigator of Peter Sutcliffe’s late nineteen-seventies homicidal attacks
on Yorkshire prostitutes. In Sinclair’s and Moore’s paranoid fictional his-
tories, every conspiracy theory is true; the Ripper crimes stretch out beyond
their 1888 confines to merge with and catalyze an infinite number of events,
individuals, and texts. For those who know how to read correctly, all of his-
tory can be seen as originating and culminating in this single series of acts.
The atrocity exemplified in White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings and From Hell is not that of Jack the Ripper but of a world so programmed by texts and multi-directional pseudo-occult verbal energies that humans have neither will, responsibility or even reality; dissent is utterly futile. Thus, the Victoria-arcana’s attempt to forge a politics of resistance through a ravenous hypertextualism fails for the same reasons as do, according to David Cunningham, Iain Sinclair’s efforts to reclaim the East End from the heritage industry by focusing on its submerged and deviant past. Commenting on Sinclair’s East End oeuvre, Cunningham writes,
The problem here for a would-be ‘aesthetic of resistance,’ is that it is hard not suspect that the ideological function of much ‘preoccupation’ with the ‘traces and residues’ of a gothicized ‘past’ is . . . to elide and compen- sate for their effective replacement. Far from resisting the imperatives of contemporary capitalist development, this can, at another level, very often amount to a (more or less unknowing) complicity with them. (169)
The atrocity exemplified in White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings and From Hell is not that of Jack the Ripper but of a world so programmed by texts and multi-directional pseudo-occult verbal energies that humans have neither will, responsibility or even reality; dissent is utterly futile. Thus, the Victoria-arcana’s attempt to forge a politics of resistance through a ravenous hypertextualism fails for the same reasons as do, according to David Cunningham, Iain Sinclair’s efforts to reclaim the East End from the heritage industry by focusing on its submerged and deviant past. Commenting on Sinclair’s East End oeuvre, Cunningham writes,
The problem here for a would-be ‘aesthetic of resistance,’ is that it is hard not suspect that the ideological function of much ‘preoccupation’ with the ‘traces and residues’ of a gothicized ‘past’ is . . . to elide and compen- sate for their effective replacement. Far from resisting the imperatives of contemporary capitalist development, this can, at another level, very often amount to a (more or less unknowing) complicity with them. (169)
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62 C. Ferguson
In place then of the opposition so loudly proclaimed in Victoria-arcanic
rhetoric, we find instead a complicity and co-option that is facilitated rather
than offset by perfunctory moments of self-reflexive irony. At this point in
British literary history, the countercultural value and allegedly subversive sta-
tus of narrative fragmentation, pseudoautomatic forms of inscription, occult
rhetoric, and obligatory irony have never seemed more obsolete. Without
minimizing or wishing away the very real ontological concerns to which
Moore’s and Sinclair’s occult alternative historiography responds, we must
question how liberating the new paradigm of circulating energies, anthropo-
morphosized power, and autonomous textual agency might be if its end pro-
duct is a grubbily sensational vision of sexual homicide victims eviscerating
themselves or jumping on knives, impaling themselves on the destiny already
inscribed for them in their era’s literary texts. Surely the new amplification of
textuality, the interest in the buried, the fragmented, and the esoteric is just as
capable of producing a dehumanizing version of the past than the older
models of historical inscription they (apparently) replace. In the neo-
Victorian literary quest to recuperate, ‘‘the fingerprints of the accidental, sup-
pressed, defeated, uncanny, abjected or exotic’’ (Gallagher 52), we must be
wary of vaunting a form of ‘‘radical’’ historiographical imagination that
ultimately regenerates the myths of patriarchal power that it claims to oppose.
NOTES
1. Thanks to Top Shelf Productions for permission to reproduce the images from From Hell.
2. Indeed, at the time of its 1987 publication, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings became the most commercially successful of all of Sinclair’s works, allowing him the entrance to mainstream publication venues that had hitherto evaded him.
3. See, for example, Alex Murray’s Recalling London: Literature and History in the Work of Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair (2007). Here Murray notes, ‘‘Sinclair’s practice of literary history is similar in both politics and method to that of Foucault, attempting to undermine the discursive structures of power by uncovering those moments that have been obliterated from the record of literary history’’ (80).
4. For examples of these various critiques of New Historicism, see J. Hillis Miller’s ‘‘Presidential Address, 1986: The Triumph of Theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of a Material Base’’ and essays by Marcus, Newton, Graff, Fox-Genovese, and Pecora in H. Aram Veeser’s The New Historicism Reader (1994).
5. Pseudonym for Sinclair’s real-life friend, the performance artist Brian Catling.
6. As Paul Begg, Martin Fido, and Keith Skinner point out in their introduction to The Jack the Ripper A-Z (1991), the actual number of Ripper victims remains in much dispute. This confusion is a result of the depressing regularity of violent attacks on Whitechapel’s women, some of which approximated the brutal- ity of the Ripper murders without ever being directly linked to the case. While some ‘‘Ripperologists’’ speculate that the Ripper may have attacked as many as thirteen women, all of the case’s commentators agree that the following five were verifiable Ripper victims: Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly (Begg et al. 2).
7. See also Judith Walkowitz’s City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late- Victorian London (1992) for a further feminist critique of the Ripper myth.
8. David Cunningham’s and Alexandra Warwick’s excellent contributions to Jack the Ripper: Media, Culture, History (2007) form notable exceptions here; being largely centered on the respective issues of the East End heritage industry and narratology, these essays are only able to briefly touch on White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings’s implicit misogyny before moving on to tackle their main critical concerns.
NOTES
1. Thanks to Top Shelf Productions for permission to reproduce the images from From Hell.
2. Indeed, at the time of its 1987 publication, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings became the most commercially successful of all of Sinclair’s works, allowing him the entrance to mainstream publication venues that had hitherto evaded him.
3. See, for example, Alex Murray’s Recalling London: Literature and History in the Work of Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair (2007). Here Murray notes, ‘‘Sinclair’s practice of literary history is similar in both politics and method to that of Foucault, attempting to undermine the discursive structures of power by uncovering those moments that have been obliterated from the record of literary history’’ (80).
4. For examples of these various critiques of New Historicism, see J. Hillis Miller’s ‘‘Presidential Address, 1986: The Triumph of Theory, the Resistance to Reading, and the Question of a Material Base’’ and essays by Marcus, Newton, Graff, Fox-Genovese, and Pecora in H. Aram Veeser’s The New Historicism Reader (1994).
5. Pseudonym for Sinclair’s real-life friend, the performance artist Brian Catling.
6. As Paul Begg, Martin Fido, and Keith Skinner point out in their introduction to The Jack the Ripper A-Z (1991), the actual number of Ripper victims remains in much dispute. This confusion is a result of the depressing regularity of violent attacks on Whitechapel’s women, some of which approximated the brutal- ity of the Ripper murders without ever being directly linked to the case. While some ‘‘Ripperologists’’ speculate that the Ripper may have attacked as many as thirteen women, all of the case’s commentators agree that the following five were verifiable Ripper victims: Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly (Begg et al. 2).
7. See also Judith Walkowitz’s City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late- Victorian London (1992) for a further feminist critique of the Ripper myth.
8. David Cunningham’s and Alexandra Warwick’s excellent contributions to Jack the Ripper: Media, Culture, History (2007) form notable exceptions here; being largely centered on the respective issues of the East End heritage industry and narratology, these essays are only able to briefly touch on White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings’s implicit misogyny before moving on to tackle their main critical concerns.
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Victoria-Arcana and the Misogynistic Poetics of Resistance 63
9. Another version of this (partial) defense of White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings’s compromised
politics comes in David Cunningham’s ‘‘Living in the Slashing Grounds’’: ‘‘[A] politicized poetics of place
may find itself in a double bind—compelled to resist this progressive ‘sitelessness’ by insisting on the
‘active’ historicity that it effaces, yet by doing so, risking simply feeding its concomitant aestheticization
of the ‘historical’ itself . . . Sinclair is almost unique in incorporating an ironic recognition of such a dou-
ble-bind into his expanding oeuvre.’’ (169) The insight of Cunningham’s analysis is slightly compromised
by its incompleteness; what, one would like to know, is the political relevance or function of Sinclair’s
ironic recognition? At a time when the necessarily subversive and anti-hegemonic function of irony has
become the object of a necessary and long overdue critical suspicion, it is difficult to know what to do
with textual irony rather than to simply mark its presence.
10. Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841) provides a compel- ling and unexpected pre-text for Peter Ackroyd’s post-modern exegesis of London’s architecture. In ‘‘The Hero as a Man of Letters,’’ he writes, ‘‘It is the Thought of man; the true thaumaturgic virtue; by which man words all things whatsoever. All that he does and brings to pass, is the vesture of a Thought. This London city, with all its houses, palaces, steam-engines, cathedrals, and huge immeasurable traffic and tumult, what it is but a Thought, but millions of Thoughts made into One—a huge immeasurable Spirit of a Thought, embodied in brick, in iron, smoke, dust, and rest of it! Not a brick that was made but some man had to think of the making of that brick’’ (154).
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Baker, Brian. Iain Sinclair. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2007.
Begg, Paul, Martin Fido and Keith Skinner. The Jack the Ripper A-Z. London:
Headline, 1991.
Bond, Robert. Iain Sinclair. Cambridge: Salt, 2005.
Carlyle, Thomas. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. 1841.
Toronto: Cassell, 1908.
Caputi, Jane. The Age of Sex Crime. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State UP, 1986. Cunningham, David. ‘‘Living in the Slashing Grounds: Jack the Ripper, Monopoly
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Begg, Paul, Martin Fido and Keith Skinner. The Jack the Ripper A-Z. London:
Headline, 1991.
Bond, Robert. Iain Sinclair. Cambridge: Salt, 2005.
Carlyle, Thomas. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. 1841.
Toronto: Cassell, 1908.
Caputi, Jane. The Age of Sex Crime. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State UP, 1986. Cunningham, David. ‘‘Living in the Slashing Grounds: Jack the Ripper, Monopoly
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Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. ‘‘Literary Criticism and the Politics of the New Histori- cism.’’ The New Historicism Reader. Ed. H. Aram Vesser. New York: Routledge, 1989. 213–24.
From Hell. Dir. Albert Huges and Allen Hughes. Perf. Johnny Depp, and Heather Graham. Twentieth Century Fox, 2001.
Gallagher, Catherine and Stephen Greenblatt. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.
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Reading, and the Question of a Material Base.’’ PMLA 102.3 (1987): 281–91. Marcus, Jane. ‘‘The Asylums of Antaeus: Women, War, and Madness: Is There a Fem- inist Fetishism?’’ The New Historicism Reader. Ed. H. Aram Vesser. New York:
Routledge, 1989. 132–51.
Moore, Alan. From Hell: A Melodrama in Sixteen Parts. Art by Eddie Campbell.
Marietta, GA: Top Shelf Productions, 2004.
Murray, Alex. ‘‘Exorcising the Demons of Thatcherism: Iain Sinclair and the Critical
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———. Recalling London: Literature and History in the Work of Peter Ackroyd and
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