‘That particular psychic London’: the uncanny example of Elizabeth Bowen

Abstract

Elizabeth Bowen is a writer responsive to what she has called in The Heat of the Day a ‘particular psychic London’ (HD 92). While this novel addresses the condition of the city and life in London during wartime, the psychic and phantasmagoric aspects of the city are Bowen’s constant concerns, even as the spectral nature of urban materiality in its relation to the uncanny and anamnesis come to inform her act of writing the city text. Although Bowen ostensibly writes of a recognizably ‘real’ and apparently somewhat representable world, the force of the city is perceived through fragmentary details, ruins, and remainders belonging to what might best be described as the ‘schemata of dream-work’, to use a phrase of Walter Benjamin’s (AP 212). Or as Maud Ellmann has it, ‘the furniture of realism is shattered by the violence of Bowen’s style’.¹ This shattering effect is irreversible. Once having taken place, and having imposed its violence on the reader, the ruination of representation cannot be reconfigured. The city, its buildings, its people, its domestic interiors and external public spaces: all undergo a critical transformation that admits of a multiplicity of haunting traces on and as the urban scene.

And yet, what do I see from the window if not hats and coats that could conceal spectres or automatons?

René Descartes

Writing is eventful; one might say it is in itself eventfulness.

Elizabeth Bowen

[T]he image has to be present and past, still present and already past, at one and the same time. If it was not already past at the same time as present, the present would never pass on. The past does not follow the present that it is no longer, it coexists with the present it was. The present is the actual image, and its contemporaneous past is the virtual image, the image in a mirror.

Gilles Deleuze