In addition to the point made above, significant here is both the acknowledgement of the unusual cohesion of objects in Rodinsky's room despite the passage of time, as well as the acknowledgement of the deep-seated human need to believe that we somehow outlive the death of the body. The draw of Rodinsky's room is therefore largely more to do with its status as a privileged zone in which the dispersive and decaying properties of time have been temporarily suspended than with anything strikingly unique about Rodinsky's actual life. This life becomes interesting precisely because of its autobiogeographical transmutation into a room and a collection of objects that hold themselves aloof from the forces of oblivion that relentlessly sweep through the streets of the city, gradually erasing the individual traces on its surface. Rodinsky was the chosen mastodon appointed to stumble into the proverbial tar pit, fated to leave behind a skeleton that survives long after his contemporaries' remains have turned to dust. What moves and motivates -- for good or for ill -- all those who take an interest in the room is the fact that its contents (and the life they indirectly evoke) have remained so long beyond the realm of human witness. Captivating to these individuals is not just the question of what can be known about Rodinsky's life, but rather the fact that this life was for such a long period of time unknown, and would have remained so had it not been for the accidental discovery of the room.

<12> Following the discovery of the room, Sinclair and Lichtenstein gradually rouse the objects in the room from their long slumber, selectively reintroducing certain items back into the orbiting mass of rubbish and relics that stream through the concrete arteries and veins of the city. As mentioned previously, there is almost an erotic element to this movement of Rodinsky's effects back and forth between their formerly 'frozen' status in the room and their subsequent re-absorption into the flow of the street. Great pleasure is taken by Sinclair and Lichtenstein in asserting their temporary ownership of the items -- Lichtenstein states in so many words that she has been appointed by God to preside over Rodinsky's premises and former possessions. In an art exhibition held in the cavernous interior of a former slaughterhouse, Lichtenstein displays carefully selected artefacts from Rodinsky's room, while Sinclair adds to the atmosphere by reciting his poetic speculations into a microphone. After the exhibition, the items are returned to the 'magic circle' of Lichtenstein's 'ownership', the 'thrill of acquisition' passing over them (Benjamin, Illuminations 62).

<13> This eroticised fort-da exercise in which objects occupy a kind of liminal zone between the glass case of Benjamin's collector and the self-propelled circulation of commodities in the city recalls again the adventures of Katchor's Julius Knipl. In 'The Lay-Away Planner,' Knipl accompanies his friend, Morris Borzhak, on his daily journey to assess his 'empire' of 'six hundred pieces of merchandise' that he has placed on lay-away in various establishments across New York City (27).[9] Borzhak enthusiastically explains to Knipl that the beauty of the lay-away plan is that 'when you buy something outright, it disappears into your closet or becomes ruined through wear. Here, they keep it for you in perfect condition with your name on it ... for a fraction of the price!' (27). The appeal of lay-away, then, is that it preserves items from the effects of time while simultaneously keeping them just on the cusp of the endless flow of goods that course through the city. This same impulse is apparent in Rodinsky's Room when Lichtenstein exhibits some remnants from her late grandfather's clock repair shop (again, the reference to time is significant) in the window of one of the last remaining Jewish establishments on Princelet Street. Sealed in resin while simultaneously occupying the quintessential position of the commodity (i.e. the window display), otherwise mundane objects assume the status of holy relics, suggestive of the passage of time while simultaneously positioned somehow just beyond the processes of decay, dilapidation, and disintegration.

<14> This transformation of an object from throw-away commodity to relic occurs when, in Graeme Gilloch's paraphrasing of Benjamin, 'the context in which it originally existed has disappeared, when the surfaces of the object have crumbled away and it lingers precariously on the brink of extinction' (14). Participating in this phenomenon, the commodities sealed for so many years in Rodinsky's room appreciate in value and suggestibility, gradually shifting from their former infinitely-reproducible quality to their current rarity. Bus tickets, shopping receipts, and chocolate wrappers become portals to another dimension, mundanities now supercharged with a palpable air of mystery. In the limited editions of Sinclair's work, Dark Lanthorns, he includes a facsimile of the Cadbury's wrapper found in Rodinsky's room, its underside covered with a hand-drawn map of the city as well as some kind of indecipherable language or code. We are meant to view this precious artefact as a kind of splinter of the holy cross, a small piece of a reality that remains forever lost to us but also somehow omnipresent, still haunting the streets of the East End. These objects' power derives not so much from the fact that their original context has disappeared, as Benjamin suggests, but rather from the fact that they provocatively juxtapose implications of their original context with the much-altered context of the present. So, for example, the bus tickets indicate itineraries that while divergent from the routes travelled by today's buses, still tantalising overlap at various points, suggesting that there is an ongoing dialogic relationship between past and present, even if this relationship is increasingly difficult to trace or to discern. The chocolate wrapper and pack of cigarettes indicate, perhaps, now-disused factories or distribution centres where they were produced and processed. Many of the items found thus encourage memory journeys to seek out their increasingly obscure origins, to determine if these now unanchored objects can be linked to some material referent in the city's contemporary topography.

<15> Through imaginative speculation and committed research, it is also possible to reconstruct some of Rodinsky's spatial practices and to resurrect some of the rituals performed by his now absent body. Encoded within the inanimate, material objects he left behind are clues to the animate, amaterial actions performed by his body. The boots, imprinted pillow, stiffened pyjamas, fossilized blankets, and 'chunky tweed jackets, so hairy that they appeared to be still growing' outline Rodinsky's vanished body, while also providing prompts for imagining the rituals of sleeping and dressing that he would have daily performed. Similarly, the bowl of porridge, empty beer bottles, tea cup, battery-powered razor, newspapers, spectacle case, cigarette packs, bubblegum cards, gramophone records, and religious items are associated with the bodily and spatial acts of eating, drinking, grooming, reading, smoking, collecting, listening / dancing / relaxing, and praying. Particularly striking is the way in which some of the objects -- the personal items in clear view, the open newspaper, the half-drunken cup of tea, the half-eaten bowl of porridge -- suggest the suddenness, indeed the abruptness, with which their owner departed, his rituals forever frozen at a point of incompletion that only his physical return could remedy. These objects are the known variables in a complex equation that allow us at least to approach a better understanding of the one unknown (Rodinsky), even if their infinite suggestibility resists any definitive solution. Ultimately, though, the draw of Rodinsky's objects is not due to the small amount of information they provide us concerning his habits, rituals, and predilections, but rather in their powerful testimony to the irrecoverability of time, of their whispered refrain that something once was that shall never be again. It is this quality that provokes the strong emotional response of the room's visitors - their almost irrational obsession with the desiccated tea leaves, the faintly visible script on the piano keys, the imprint in the pillow, the charcoal halo just above the gas lamp. One thinks here of Breton's description of the inexplicable effect on him of the sky-blue glove in Nadja and his 'sudden fear' when its owner began to comply with his request to take it off (56). 'I don't know what there can have been, at that moment, so terribly, so marvellously decisive for me in the thought of that glove leaving that hand forever' (56). Here, and in Rodinsky's Room, certain objects become screens onto which we project some of our most deep-seated desires, fears, and hopes.

From Objects to Spatial Practices: Rodinsky's London A-Z

<16> One of the achievements of Rodinsky's Room is to connect the at first sequestered and unanchored objects of the room to its former occupant's spatial practices in the larger city. In a confirmation of its Surrealist pedigree, Rodinsky's Room frequently seeks to animate the material vestiges of the past by mapping them onto the city, an act that recalls Breton's telling juxtaposition of his discussion of the inanimate sky-blue glove with the mysterious cylindrical device that textually transcribes aspects of Paris' topography (52). This use of the textual as a link between the inanimateness of objects and the more intangible practice of mapping the city can be usefully applied to Rodinsky's Room. Both Lichtenstein and Sinclair tend to gravitate towards linguistic metaphors as a way of linking Rodinsky's possessions with his paths through the city streets. At one point, Lichtenstein refers to Rodinsky's items as 'consonants of a forgotten language, bare bones of meaning,' while Sinclair, with reference to his novel, Radon Daughters, extends this metaphor to the act of perambulation, musing that 'the physical movements of the characters across their territory might spell out the letters of a secret alphabet' (96; Lights Out 1). This quote recalls the peripatetic retracings in Paul Auster's City of Glass (the first instalment in The New York Trilogy), in which the narrator gradually begins to equate the traversal of the city's surface with the graphic act of textual inscription. Here we enter the terrain of Michel de Certeau's spaces of enunciation and Bailly's 'grammaire générative des jambes' "generative grammar of the legs", two theorists whose works suggest a mutually-constitutive relationship between walking and writing, wandering and remembering. Applying this paradigm to Rodinsky's Room, we might view Rodinsky's objects as nouns, and his spatial practices in the city as verbs, a reading that resonates with de Certeau's assertion that, 'the art of "turning" phrases finds an equivalent in an art of composing a path (tourner un parcours)' (100). Ultimately, both Rodinsky's objects ('nouns') and the peripatetic retracing of his pathways through London ('verbs') are required to compose a legible memorial narrative. These two components of autobiogeography (the material and the amaterial) overlap in the form of Rodinsky's London A-Z, which functions both as inanimate object and as guide for the perambulatory retracing of his spatial practices.

<17> The London A-Z and the reconstructive journeys it enables constitute Rodinsky's mental map of the city, a guide to generating an informed speculation regarding some of the ways in which Rodinsky perceived and experienced the city. In the introduction to Dark Lanthorns: David Rodinsky as Psychogeographer, Sinclair decides that 'the only way to make sense of Rodinsky's doctored map was to walk his red lines' (14); elsewhere, describing the public appeal of the London A-Z, Sinclair gives voice to some of the questions pondered by those who learn of its existence: 'Perhaps these charts would show the peregrinations of an invisible man? If his walks could be repeated, might he be brought back to life?' (Rodinsky's Room 185) The conceit is that the physical retracing of Rodinsky's routes through the city might trigger his memories (Pinder 11). Sinclair's and Lichtenstein's following of Rodinsky's footsteps recalls him to us by giving us 'readings' of London that he, in effect, 'authored,' since he chose the routes, stops, and points of emphasis. In an actualisation of Benjamin's flirtation with the notion of 'setting out the sphere of life -- bios -- graphically on a map,' Sinclair's peripatetic retracings shape London into an oblique biographical portrait of one of its latter-day inhabitants (Berlin Chronicle 259). Sinclair's journeys through London emphasise the way in which identity is not contained within the confines of the body, but rather bleeds out into the surrounding urban environment. The question of 'Who am I?' that Breton famously poses in the opening sentence of Nadja must be answered not simply with reference to 'whom I "haunt,"' but also to where I haunt (11). This geographization of identity is one of the defining attributes and preoccupations of Rodinsky's Room as well as of many of the other works that constitute the emergent genre of London Gothic.

<18> Sinclair's retracing of Rodinsky's footsteps eventually reveals certain tentative links between his at first seemingly disconnected and random journeys. Sinclair notices that 'certain categories of location receive particular attention' on these traced routes, 'institutions such as prisons, asylums, burial grounds and hospitals being especially privileged,' while the main avenues of tourism are avoided (Pinder 13).[10] Increasingly apparent is a demonstrable preoccupation with institutions of power and control, particularly L. C. C. Claybury Mental Hospital, whose tower Sinclair discovers to be the 'fixed compass-point from which Rodinsky drew his circuits of London. All his maps were based on that sightline' (Dark Lanthorns 32). As a result of Lichtenstein's research, we learn that this is the hospital where Rodinsky's sister, Bessie, was sectioned, a fate that would befall Rodinsky himself when the authorities forced him out of his home on Princelet Street, setting in motion a series of events that led to his eventual entry into a mental institution in Surrey (Longrove), where he later died of heart failure. A narrative of dispossession also underlies Rodinsky's perambulatory excursions through Dagenham, which we learn was the area where he was placed in a foster family for several years following the death of his mother. Aspects of Rodinsky's identity thus emerge not simply from Sinclair's and Lichtenstein's meditations upon his former possessions, but also from their attentive following of his physical journeys through London, which, together, constitute a posthumous autobiogeographical portrait.

<19> As more details of Rodinsky's life are learned, Sinclair is keen to maintain the ultimate elusiveness of his identity and to guard it against those who would appropriate it for their own ends. Property developers, enthusiastic about the popular appeal of Rodinsky's story, are especial targets for Sinclair's scorn: 'Composed. Contrived. Authenticated. Grant us a ghost in the attic, a broken weaver's loom, and we will do you a dozen kosher Georgian units, at 200k a throw, for the Far Eastern catalogue' (64). Such parodic gestures -- never very far from the truth -- demonstrate how Rodinsky's life is all too easily banalized into a colourful story by property speculators and those who seek to impose a kind of Disneyfication on the East End. As a consequence of such efforts, Rodinsky's genuine otherness is domesticated, made safe, appropriated as bourgeois adornment, as 'character.'

Rodinsky as Golem

<20> Sinclair's concern to maintain the otherness of the Rodinsky story - as well his commitment to the autobiogeographical interweaving of person and person, past and present, animate and inanimate - find their most metaphorically-rich expression in Sinclair's chapter, '"Mobile Invisibility": Golems, Dybbuks and Unanchored Presences.' Here, Sinclair draws a sustained comparison between Rodinsky and the mythical Golem, a figure of Jewish folklore referenced at various points in Hebrew scripture. A popular medieval variant of this myth (which in turn inspired numerous variants) centres around Rabbi Löw of sixteenth-century Prague.[11] Concerned with the growing anti-Semitism of the period, Rabbi Löw decided to use his powers to create a servant that would help the Jews by, among other things, dispelling common rumours of the time, the most grievous of which were allegations that Jews were responsible for the death of Christian children. Rabbi Löw used mud from Prague's Moldavka River to fashion a crude facsimile of the human form. After performing a ritual, the Golem comes to life and proceeds to carry out the tasks and missions that Rabbi Löw proscribes. Irrespective of the many variants of this myth, the Golem's power is seen as intrinsically linked to his undefined quality, his inherent unplaceability.

<21> Sinclair and Lichtenstein (the latter to a lesser extent) repeatedly compare Rodinsky to a modern-day Golem, an apt association that brings into sharp relief many of the key components that comprise the autobiographical act of memorialisation. The Golem is literally an animated place, an amalgam of mud, tree limbs, and rags that is imbued with mobility, the power to haunt. Just as in the case of the Golem, it is impossible to separate person from place in the autobiogeographical memorialisation of Rodinsky's life and its material vestiges. The appeal of Rodinsky's room is precisely its status as a personified place, as an uncanny transmutation of flesh and bone into geography. And yet, the static tranquillity of the room only achieves genuine memorial power when the Golem within is released and allowed to wander the streets, an act performed by Sinclair's peripatetic retracing of Rodinsky's itineraries through the city. Objects and architectural spaces remain mute and dormant until activated by human motion, a truth echoed by the fact that the Golem (whose name derives from the Hebrew word gelem, meaning 'raw material') only comes to life after Rabbi Löw walks around him seven times. It is this peripatetic component that elevates my reading of autobiogeography beyond a facile equation of person with place. Despite its provocative pairing of these two entities, both maintain their essential otherness.

<22> As discussed previously, a tension mounts over the course of Rodinsky's Room as Sinclair's attempts to maintain the otherness of Rodinsky's story begins to contrast with Lichtenstein's ongoing demystification of Rodinsky's life. Sinclair relishes opportunities to occult the unexplained aspects of Rodinsky's biography, the mysterious patterns formed by his wanderings, the indications of his knowledge of cabbalism, the electric quality of the air in his room. This approach jars with Lichtenstein's assertion that there is 'nothing romantic about the room,' and her expressed belief that Rodinsky's life 'was grim and lonely' (300, 301). As the book progresses, one increasingly has the sense that Sinclair's recounting of Gustav Meyrink's description of the fate of the Golem (contained in his work, Der Golem) functions as a potential critique (even if unconscious) of Lichtenstein's increasing insistence on disclosing the specifics of Rodinsky's story.[12] In Meyrink's book, a mob assembles to discover definitively whether the Golem exists, ransacking the synagogue where it is purported to dwell. After each room is searched, a sheet is hung from the window. When they finish, they realise that one room has not been searched -- a hidden room without any entries or exits. Sinclair reads this as a cautionary tale, a warning: 'In obscurity the golem is immortal. He defines the singularity of place. ... When the golem's hiding place is uncovered, and his myths are made public, then the ghetto loses its integrity' (181). While this critique is aimed at the media, property developers, and tourist industry, it is difficult not to perceive its at least partial applicability to Lichtenstein's memorial approach. Her efforts at explanation gradually erode the indeterminacy that allows Rodinsky's spectre to haunt the city, to roam freely down its alleys and back ways. Her factual discoveries about Rodinsky's life might be compared to Meyrink's description of the mob's hanging of sheets out of each window of the Altneu Synagogue in Prague, gradually exposing the Golem's hiding place to the public gaze. Continuing with this reading, Lichtenstein's careful and well-meaning attempts to catalogue and archive the items in the room might be seen further to defuse the energies that make possible Rodinsky's autobiogeographical afterlife.

<23> Despite the textual evidence that solicits this accusation, Rodinsky's Room disallows this kind of one-sided reading. After all, the Golem is indisputably seen as a dispeller of false rumours, a service that Lichtenstein might be said to provide as a result of her committed efforts to reveal the human being behind the many myths. Or, to take a different tack, the Golem is represented as a creature whose mysterious powers must be tempered if they are not to assume a sinister quality and/or exert a deleterious effect on the people whom it is meant to serve. Many variants of the myth indicate that Rabbi Löw is forced to remove the shem from the Golem's mouth just before the Sabbath in order to check his growing power and to prevent Jews from worshipping him as an idol.[13] Lichtenstein's research-based approach holds in check the many proliferating rumours about Rodinsky that threaten to sensationalise, invent, and eventually eclipse the actual facts and experiences of his life. In further support of Lichtenstein's approach is Roger Luckhurst's critique of what he sees as a zeal for hypermystification, occultation, and the ahistorical in Sinclair's works, as well as in those by authors writing in a similar vein:

Unable to discriminate between instances and largely uninterested in historicity (beyond its ghostly disruption), the discourse of spectralized modernity risks investing in the compulsive repetitions of melancholic entrapment. In this mode, to suggest an inevitably historicized mourning-work that might actually seek to lay a ghost to rest would be the height of bad manners. (535)