Stalking the East End: Iain Sinclair's White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings and Lights Out for the Territory

英國九十年代的世紀末，文壇出現一批對倫敦新市景極度敏感、以倫敦的空間及文本綿密性為題材的當代倫敦文學，其中以辛克萊最受注目。辛克萊筆下的倫敦，過去和現在並存，文類跨界，真實和虛擬共舞，他以「心理地理」（psycho-geography）方法，挖掘倫敦被遺忘與被擦拭的空間邊緣意象，以行走倫敦街道為一再出現的主題和比喻，建構一個抗拒柴契爾主流空間論述的反對空間。本文探討其最為著名的兩部作品，一九八七年的成名小說White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings和一九九七年的Lights Out for the Territory。首先探索作為辛克萊倫敦「心理地理」首要場域的倫敦東區空間意象；其次討論他空間調查的行走模式－潛伏盯梢；最後指出這種行走觀察模式的內在限制，它以建構抗拒空間意象為號召，但本身就自居於某種優越知識和窺視能力的位置，這種對過去被抹滅記憶的全然投入及全然肯定，和對當今所有既存現實的全然否定和漠視，與建構某種另類的真理無異，無法挑戰二元架構。

關鍵字

伊安辛克萊；當代倫敦文學；倫敦東區；白教堂；紅血跡；騰出疆域

並列摘要

A new school of London literature has emerged in the 1990s as a response to the neo-modernist regeneration of London's East End in the 1980s by the Thatcherite Conservative government. Using the spatial and literary density of London as their subject, these new urban writings juxtapose the present with the past, presenting a cityscape of heavy fragmentation, elusiveness as well as dynamics. Of these, Iain Sinclair's work stands out as ”our greatest guide to London,” and ”the most distinctive voice among an array of lyricists-cum-satirists of fin-de-siècle British life.” Sinclair has made a vocation of excavating the hidden, the lost or erased spatial configurations of London's cultural marginalia, in order to construct an oppositional space on the material and everyday level against the official historical and spatial discourse of Thatcherite corporatism. Sinclair practices a method of psychogeography, where the city and subject collapse into one, and the city becomes a psychological entity and a shifting character. Walking the streets of London has in particular become a recurring theme and metaphor. This paper examines two of his most famous works, his breakthrough novel White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987) and Lights Out for the Territory (1997), a non-fictional prose work on London. It focuses first on the spatiality of London's East End, which is the primary territory of Sinclair's psychogeography, and then on his mode of spatial investigation, that of the walker/stalker. The paper then seeks to point out the limitations inherent in such a mode, its assumption of privileged knowledge and voyeuristic power, and its inevitable selectivity due to an exclusive interest only in the erased past and a denial of any redemptive quality in the present. The dark energies thus unearthed, despite their resistance to the dominant spatial discourse, are no less a form of canonization, albeit an alternative one.