Subject: Re: Quest
Date: Mon, 7 May 2001 12:01:44 +0100


Much more common than literalism or hyperliteralism in philosophical and
theoretical thought is something like the opposite. I read some time ago of
Whitehead's phrase "misplaced concretism". I haven't been able to find the
source of this (and would be grateful if someone could point me in the right
direction) but I take Whitehead to be talking about the practice of treating
abstractions (in some cases, figurative, non-literal abstractions) for concrete
things; that is, to take a contentious, tendentious, stratospherically rarified
theoretical term, which may draw what meaning it has only within a system of
theoretical concepts, for a solid untendentious thing -- which can then be used
to beat dissenters over the head.

This practice is extremely prevalent in many areas of contemporary thought --
often among people who seem to have no developed capacity for abstraction. The
greater confusion is not of the figurative with the literal, but the opposite.

 Below I have pasted a review I did for the TLS a few years ago of a bad novel
which (the novel, that is) perfectly illustrates the silliness and absurdity of
this way of thinking:

 Regards
 Simon



The streets of the metropolis
Simon Beesley
20/06/1997
BLEEDING LONDON. By Geoff Nicholson. 348pp. Gollancz. Paperback, Pounds 9.99. -
0 575 06351 3.


After eight novels which have attracted terms like "zany", "inventive" and
"postmodern", Bleeding London seems to be Geoff Nicholson's bid to be taken
seriously, either as seriously playful or playfully serious. Responsible for the
play of ideas, here, are Judy Tanaka, an upper-class girl from Streatham, whose
ambition is to sleep with someone in every London postal district, and Stuart
London, who is attempting to walk every street in the A-Z. Stuart delivers
himself of a series of observations on the city in his diary. His apercus tend
to be dated, when not plain silly or second-hand: "The city, it seems to me,
must always be a palimpsest, a series of erasures, of new beginnings,
obliterations, of temporary preservations and misguided reconstructions. Much of
it is guesswork. There is no authorized text."
        Any character in search of a postmodern sensibility will be in need of a
metaphor, or may indeed even be a metaphor. But the characters in this novel
treat the airiest abstractions as concrete. Judy asks: "Is the body like a city
or is the city like a body? Which is the metaphor? Which is the subject?" And,
however you like your metaphor cooked, Stuart makes heavy weather of the
business of making sense of London.
        The most central character is Mick, a hard man from Sheffield, come to
avenge the gang rape of his girlfriend. He has no metaphorical leanings, except
in so far as he is rather pointedly shown to have difficulty finding his way
about. Here, as everywhere, the connections are ponderously signposted. In fact,
Nicholson seems to be making the same confusion between the figurative and the
literal as his characters do. There are heavy nods in the direction of other
fictional Londons, particularly Martin Amis's and Iain Sinclair's. Since getting
from A to B is problematic for Mick, he enlists Judy's help in tracing the
rapists - familiar metropolitan types: a food critic, an actor, a property
developer, etc. Over six chapters, Mick humiliates each in turn before giving
them a good kicking. The violence is inexplicable and unnecessary; on meeting
his first native Londoner, a taxi-driver, he beats the man up for refusing to
drive him from Park Lane to Hackney.
           Taken on its own terms, Bleeding London is hackneyed through and
through, but Nicholson is too English and too cosy a writer to be considered
seriously phoney. The book is instead a bizarre and unconvincing mish-mash. And
most bizarre is that it invites the kind of "reading" the reader would scoff at
if it came from Stuart London's diary. The author is a native of Sheffield, now
living in New York after a sojourn in London. Perhaps the goal he is actually
pursuing, all unknowingly, is one which many another hard-working middlebrow
author has sought - contemporary London as the maker and breaker of literary
reputation.






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