Of Maps and Moles: Cultural Negotiations with the London Tube

The world on a train: global narration in Geoff Ryman’s 253

“…Interestingly, in his essay on literary representations of the London Underground, Tobias Döring makes use of images of Nancean inoperativity to evoke 'London's vast immensity' and, more specifically, the tube system that renders this immensity more easily negotiable. What Döring invokes by describing the tubed city as 'a network of relations without a centre, without clear limits' (Döring, 2002, p.55) as well as 'a vast arena for unforeseen, momentary and often singular encounters' (p.57), and the tube itself as 'a site to trade collective fantasies or to respond to the contemporary fragmentation of urban existence' (p.56), is Nancy's promise of inoperative community emerging from the contagion of the mass's entirely quotidian exposure to itself. 'Long seen as the greatest concentration of the urban crowds,' Döring notes, 'underground stations, carriages and passages are consistently described in a rhetoric of physicality, with strangers' bodies regularly touching, rubbing, sweating, pressing, pushing one another as closely as nowhere else' (p.58).…”

“…Emotion spills into song that touches and 'infects' bystanders, demonstrating just how close an anonymous mass of people is at any one moment to stepping into sync and pulling together. Despite the fact that the train is hurtling towards destruction it seems at least initially very appealing to think of 253 as basically 'a novel without a plot' (Döring, 2002, p.58); its mechanisms of cohesion appear far more tentative, random and haphazard than those of a conventional novel. Still, even though Ryman's text is clearly straining towards achieving a more flexible dynamic, it remains confined by traditional emplotment.…”