Abstract
Sam Selvon’s classic novel of West Indian migration to Britain, The Lonely Londoners (1956), is exemplary in showing how a literary text can reveal the layered or hidden ‘time’ of an urban space. The migrant characters’ very newness in the cityscape and their irregular or anti-social hours of work mean that they experience the city very differently to the majority of the ‘host’ population. This experience of time might be termed ‘migrant time’: not in the sense that it is unique to migrants or that all migrants necessarily experience time in this way, but in so far as Selvon’s novel shows us another temporal dimension to life in the city through the prism of migrancy. As the novel’s title suggests, London is also viewed through the affective lens of the migrants’ feelings of loneliness and alienation in the city and their intense longing for connection, dwelling and ‘at-homeness’, itself a major trope in West Indian literature. With a focus on time, space and place in a relational context, this chapter argues that the novel’s distinctive use of intertextual ‘layering’ and of characteristically West Indian speech acts ‘speak’ a new city into being and make fictional use of ‘space as a dynamic force in the contemporary struggle for meaning, belonging and power’ (Berland, Place. In New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, eds. Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg and Meaghan Morris, 256–257. London and New York: Blackwell Publishing, 2005, 334).
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Notes
- 1.
Thus, for example, Selvon alludes to Dante in Bart’s search for his lost love, ‘Beatrice’ ‘comb[ing] the whole of London, looking in the millions of white faces walking down Oxford Street, peering into buses, taking tube ride on the inner Circle just in the hope that he might see she. For weeks the old Bart hunt, until he became haggard and haunted’ (Selvon, 1985, 66).
- 2.
MacPhee is among a number of critics who read Selvon’s novel as a ‘highly self-reflexive modernist novel’ (2011, 125).
- 3.
Jonathan Raban’s alternative term for this kind of plasticity in the experience of living in urban centres (from his 1974 book Soft City) is the ‘soft city’.
- 4.
Indeed, Clement-Ball suggests that ‘At the height of imperial power…London was the great metropolis, the world’s largest city. “The Heart of the Empire” (as a famous painting named it in 1904), London projected itself to the inhabitants of its pink-stained territories as the centre of the world, the fountainhead of culture, the zero-point of global time and space’ (2006, 4).
- 5.
As the cover illustration picturing Galahad next to the (suitably apt) statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus for the 1985 Longman edition of the novel also underlines.
- 6.
Significantly, in Moses Ascending (1975), his sequel to The Lonely Londoners , Selvon returns to the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus as pivotal to the migrants’ changing sense of belonging in the city. Now having ‘gone up in the world’ as a house owner and writer of independent means, Moses reflects, in characteristically bawdy fashion: ‘I have weathered many a storm in Brit’n, and men will tell you that in my own way I am as much part of the London landscape as little Eros with his bow and arrow in Piccadilly, or one-eyed Nelson with his column in Trafalgar Square, not counting colour’ (1989, 44).
- 7.
These include the foggy opening to Dickens’ Bleak House (1851), Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1901), Ezra Pound’s ‘ In a Station of the Metro’, T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ (1922), Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) and a host of more diffused intertextual echoes in representations of the city such as St Augustine’s ‘Celestial City’ (The City of God), the diseased city of Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) or William Cobbett’s Rural Rides (1830), Dick Whittington’s London, Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ (Milton, 1808), and popular cultural references such as the song ‘Maybe it’s Because I’m a Londoner’ (Hubert Gregg, 1944).
- 8.
Groes goes further in contending that: ‘the metropolis is a place that embodies and literalises process…London is a living metropolis, a healthy city that is laboured on constantly; it is the ultimate city of BECOMING’ (2011, 2).
- 9.
See also McLeod (2004, 8–9).
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Welsh, S.L. (2021). ‘This Is London, This Is Life’: ‘Migrant Time’ in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners. In: Evans, AM., Kramer, K. (eds) Time, the City, and the Literary Imagination . Literary Urban Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55961-8_6
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