Arguably, what is uncanny in this representation is precisely its understanding, its apperception of a multiplicity of simultaneous times being traced in one location. The subject responds to and relays to the reader in particularly graphic terms, the confluence of different myth systems, different semantic and epistemological networks, and differing historical frames of reference. Noticeably, there is a sense of a phantom-graphic impression, registered through that acknowledgement of the glyph remaining in the mind's eye. Clearly then, the uncanny in this 'taking place' is not simply the condition of the locus, even though the site is a necessary precondition for the urban subject to experience the uncanny. As Anthony Vidler suggests: 'The "uncanny" is not a property of the space itself nor can it be provoked by any particular spatial conformation; it is, in its aesthetic dimension, a representation of a mental state of projection that precisely elides the boundaries of the real and the unreal to provoke a disturbing ambiguity, a slippage between waking and dreaming'.[13] Thus, in the chorographical writing of the city, Sinclair registers graphically the motions of the amaterial trace, and so focuses the reader's attention on that phantom-graphic oscillation, as can be witnessed here, from Radon Daughters: 'Spasms of language, ameliorated by the random collisions of the city'.[14] As with innumerable occasions in Sinclair's prose, there appears here the ghost of self-referentiality, as if he were writing about his own writing, and through that opening for the reader a glimpse of the uncanny urban experience, as it leaves its incision on the self. Slightly displaced, perhaps unhinged, in the shadow of London's many absences, the graphic condition of the text enacts location and event in an uncanny series of sequential and simultaneous displacements and dislocations in lieu of the city, offering the reader of Sinclair so many phatic snapshots, postcards, by the arrival of which the city is announced, however indirectly. The relationship between the elements of a structure translates as those elements transmit.

<17> Thus locus or structure as realised topography and chorography -- the structurality of structure -- has, implicated within the formal presentation that seems merely synchronous, a number of temporalities; having to do on the one hand with the times, if not the untimeliness, of communication and reading -- even when all the signs appear to be there in the same frame, or as the structural elements comprising that frame (for even the most apparently formal element is not only a base or support but also, in principle, an articulation, however silent); and concerning, on the other hand, the traces of the material, of a site or text's historicity. Despite the material and historical dimensions at work here, what returns is immaterial and yet is capable of producing a material effect. The multiple temporalities immanent within any frame or complex of graphic traits facilitate and yet interrupt the subject's consciousness in the event of reception and in response to the event of perception. As Husserl remarks, the now of apprehension, in this case the perception of the city in the graphic texts with which we are concerned, has about it a sense of belatedness. One gathers, in apprehension, what Husserl terms 'earlier now-points of the motion', which are, themselves, apprehensions of, and marked by, still earlier now-points.[15] Only a few signs are gathered, beyond which lies an unmappable topography composed from the ineffable totality of diachronic and synchronic lines of flight in endless intersection.

<18> The megalopolis often emerges in Sinclair's writing as necropolis (as the passage just cited from Lights Out should make apparent). Yet in being a city of the dead, Sinclair's graphic manipulations of time, place and confluence offer London as being uncannily alive, after a fashion. Neither quite living nor dead, the city arrives as so many liminal sites and crossings, animated through intermittent pulsations of so many heterogeneous marks and signals, phantasmic flows that are disembodied, barely present (if at all), either to sight or hearing. Synchrony and anachrony, framing and disjointing as well, all are intimately entwined with one another, as is clear in the various narrative-temporal-historical loops of a novel such as White Chappell, Scarlett Tracings. The sites of any Sinclair novel are connected by the passage of the narrative that reads significance and pattern onto aleatory motion in a redrawing of the map. This is apprehended most immediately in the charting of the pentagram overlaid as the psychic topography punctuated by Nicholas Hawksmoor's churches, the V traced through London in the first essay of Lights Out, or indeed, the orbital line, perhaps reminiscent of the dentated serpent circling the Tradescant tomb, that emerges through its historical and mythical counterpoints as pursued in London Orbital. Sinclair's punctuations sketch invisible relations, and thus open onto other histories, to specific events often irrelevant to that historical event on which the narrative latches initially.

<19> It is as if the energy of the city is so forceful that, in being relentlessly dragged by London's energy fields, the narrator in Sinclair will catch hold of almost anything from the confusion of signals in order to be able to discern in the graphic re-tracing a narrative ground, some figural motif to economize on the abyss. Such instances of the graphic figure in their now-time [Benjamin's jetztzeit] of presentation and staging an instance of chorographical perception, retaining in the conjoined relation of presentation and perception 'the past ... which is to say absence', or what Husserl has termed the retention of now-points [jetztpunkt], as we have already remarked. Neither simply narrative nor image then, the city is marked symbolically, that is to say graphically (to recall the definitions from the OED), and in the apparent synchrony of the frame presentation takes place 'by virtue of this retention [of the invisible shape] constitutive of the act of perception as "a single continuum that is continuously modified".'[16] This continuum, called by Husserl a Heraclitean flux, is what both enables and disables; and it is in the articulation of this impossible simultaneity that the graphic text shows itself as a singularly appropriate medium of response to the uncanny structures of the city's spatial and temporal identities.

IV. Slow Chocolate Autopsy

<20> Dave McKean's images from Slow Chocolate Autopsy map and project such circuits tellingly. In a number of montages that gather together photographs, film-stills, fragments of type, pen and pencil drawings, maps and etchings, McKean projects uncanny chorographical forms that serve to figure London and particular strands from the history of its discomposed identity. In the various acts of yoking together the heterogeneous fragments and traces, McKean illustrates how the work of the graphic artist is to provide the autopsy, to demonstrate how 'history [is] that which has passed away' as Elissa Marder remarks,[17] and which is therefore, only ever available as the projection of assembled graphic elements having to do with place and event. In one such image from Slow Chocolate Autopsy, (SCA, 87) we witness road-signs, surveillance cameras, scraps of text, a Hawksmoor church, a distorted image of an obelisk, the head of a gargoyle a barely discernible, shadowed face superimposed onto an arched window, a cartouche, and projection lines offering some kind of mapping the purposes of which are undecidable. Everything floats, a near simultaneous gathering of graphics irrecuperable into any single form or identity, other than that which might be signalled in the name London.

<21> Each image, each piece of text, performs as a kind of memory-fetish of the city; bearing no connection to any one temporal moment, each trace can be read as serving as 'a kind of memory trace of a mode of inquiry that does not simply obey the dubious temporality'[18] of linear narrative, narrative presentism, or historical 'progress'. McKean's illustrations realize the immanence of Sinclair's prose. They enact the gathering and concatenation of random now-points, where the narratives are only ever immanent or implicit, or they can chart or imply violent events or narratives through inventions of identity and memory that traverse time. The graphic produces, as it performs, snapshots of history, snapshots of sites and locales, topographies and cultural memories, in the single, and therefore uncanny, location of the frame or panel as the instantaneous autopsy of a 'series of relayed looks'.[19] In addition, the graphic makes possible the merest chance that what Françoise Dastur describes as the 'silent event of the encounter'[20] come into ghostly being in the relation between apperception and the multiplicity of the trace. There is thus presented to the gaze -- and in this presentation there is also a demand that one bears witness -- to an iterable relay of passing moments, oscillating between one another as analogous, ghostly figures of each other, and through the passage of time. This is to be witnessed in another illustration from Slow Chocolate Autopsy (60).

<22> The illustration in question, part of the title page to Chapter Two of Slow Chocolate Autopsy, involves a multiple projection: there is a map of London's East End, first published in the 1880s, a film still, and a handmade mark on the image. The chapter itself, "No More Yoga of the Nightclub," offers the reader an imaginative reinvention of the murder of Jack "The Hat" McVitie, in 1967, as witnessed by Sinclair's time-travelling narrator, Norton. A member of the Kray Brothers' gang (who, along with the Richardson family, controlled much of organized crime in London's East End, South London, and Soho during the late 1950s and 1960s), McVitie was killed by Tony and Chris Lambrianou at the order of the Krays, for which murder, along with that of associate George Cornell, they were imprisoned. In Sinclair's version, McVitie is described as 'memorising the geography of an event which had not yet happened' (SCA 66). He has visions of London architecture in the 1990s (68). In this world 'boundaries warped' (75), and 'London settled on its proper axis' (67). Sinclair's narrative relies for its effects on disruptions of temporality and space, on alignments in the force field of the city, and McKean's montage figures such effects analogously, in its combination of film still and map. The still is taken from John Mackenzie's The Long Good Friday (1979), a story of the decline and fall of gangland London. In the image, we see gang boss Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) to the right of the car (a Jaguar, de rigueur in London gang mythology). The scene from which this still comes is shot in London's Dockland. The location on the map included in the illustration is Whitechapel, the district infamous for the Ripper murders as many will know, but also the site of one of Nicholas Hawksmoor's churches, Christ Church, Spitalfields.

<23> McKean's montages figure an impossible simultaneity, the possibilities for the analysis of which are, in principle, endless. The emphasis, as already remarked, is on difference rather than identity; what disturbs in the montage is the reliance on a knowledge of particular East End histories of different orders, so that there is implied an iterable revenance of violent events in close proximity, and with multiple intertextual and discursive resonances. With its immediate citation of film and topography, and from there to other discourses and narratives (myth, architecture, paganism, freemasonry), the image promises an opening from within and yet beyond, as well as in excess of its immediate presentation. And then there is that obviously graphic intrusion, which might be read as either a ladder or a strip of film stills or negative frames. McKean's singular image is fascinating: for, in figuring the different times of one particular location in London, along with events of differing orders and different modes of presentation, it bears in it the burden for bearing witness to history in inventive ways that open rather than foreclose acts of reading, whereby chorography and autopsy are caught up in a potentially infinite relay.

<24> This can be expanded upon in the following manner. While 'every history' is 'incontestably unique, [and] contains structures of its own conditions of possibility', as Reinhart Koselleck comments in The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, the 'finitely delimited spaces' in which historical events take place have the possibility of changing 'with a speed other than that of the events themselves'. Every event is thus marked by a 'temporal multilayeredness'. Such temporal layering and spatial iterability define the ways in which the chorographically inclined graphic text functions. History, Kosselleck avers, 'proves to be the space for possible repeatability; it is never only diachronic, but, depending on how it is temporally perceived and experienced, it is also synchronic'.[21] We might add to this that the effect of possible repeatability is a translation effect, from the materiality of history to the materiality of the letter (or, indeed, any graphic mark), and that history is in principle translated into historiography. The multilayered surface of an illustration such as McKean's-and, indeed, any given passage from Sinclair's writing-renders visible that which is already suggested in the map, the locus, and by the topography and history of the city's sites, laying bare as it were the occluded chorography beneath its more familiar 'dermis'.

<25> The radical, phantom-graphic negotiation of which I am speaking effects a mediumistic communication. The passage as prose or poetic montage, along with the montage image call together in the act of making visible the ineffable forces that inform the city. Uncannily, the refusal of a single time, whereby every moment is opened in the now-time of reading, of looking, of experience, suggests that the reader is drawn into this matrix, even as the subject-position exceeds the frame reciprocally in a moment of disturbing temporal passage. For the reader's gaze assumes the position of the narrating subject's eye, and thus we are simultaneously figured, implicated in the moment of the frame and in our own time of reading; ours is the eye observing a hand both ours and not ours. Furthermore, we are implicated in what Derrida has referred to as le plus-de-vue, 'the (no)-more-sight ... the visionary vision of the seer who sees beyond the visible present, the overseeing, sur-view, or survival of sight'[22] (it is this which is registered in Jack McVitie's visionary apostrophes, and Dave McKean's montages). In this one moment -- a moment that is both more and less than one moment, irreducible to a single instant, a sole now-point -- the past is never quite past, over or done with; in the double moment of autopsy, analysis and/as the act of seeing with one's own eye, the pasts of London overflow the frame, the image, the page, so that we are called to trace the connections and bear witness to only a few of the chorographical resonances. Inscription promises to trace, after the event, the immanent trait, the invisible graphic, a not-yet visible structure that will never be present, as we have said. At the same time a graphic heterogeneity is admitted. It is a heterogeneity, as Derrida explains, 'between the thing drawn [in this case the traces of historical narratives] and the drawing trait [that] remains abyssal .... This heterogeneity of the invisible to the visible can haunt the visible as its very possibility'.[23] And so perception is solicited uncannily, as the force of what can never be witnessed traverses the field of vision in the reception and retention of the graphic in all its multiple motions.

<26> In the images from Slow Chocolate one possible configuration for the otherwise unmappable chrono-topography of a monstrous megalopolis unveils itself. One possible projection of the city as graphic text, as chorography, has the chance of crossing the invisible. Graphic intersections generate the possibility of an image, a phantom site or narrative from within the materiality and history of the city. At stake therefore is the manifestation of the relationship between a certain haunting, uncanny persistence of violence and the idea of the millennial or apocalyptic city, as this can be expressed through the graphic novel. Implicit in this is a two-fold concern: on the one hand, with the ways in which the material environment, the materiality of site and its histories might be understood to determine or to impose itself graphically on writing and image, and, on the other, to explore ways in which writing, in the broad sense of all forms of graphic mark, shapes itself through singular responses so as to attune its representation most faithfully to the call of the city.

V. Phantastry

<27> Something is clearly at work here, having to do with the visionary evocation of what we are tempted to describe as the spirit of London. If Sinclair's texts can be read as manifestations of chorographic discourse, they are also receivable in another manner. For what should by now be clear is that the graphic, as I am defining its operation in Sinclair, operates through serial and iterable processes of visualization, of making visible the invisible, giving momentary material or graphic articulation to the phantasms of the city's histories, myths, to what are perceived as the capital's recurrent psychic forces; or, to articulate this a little differently, the graphic text gives visibility to the invisible traits that write the city in particular ways. In this, every passage figures the work of every other passage, in a graphic iterability of the very condition of the graphic itself: to project momentarily 'an encounter with the dead, with the ghostliness of ancestral voices and intertextual hauntings',[24] and thereby re-mark the trace of endless, illimitable flux.

<28> The graphic inscription of such fluxions we designate, in concluding this essay, phantastry, a term serving to signify the phantasmic performative of phantom-graphic modes of production. This word, phantastry, is now almost wholly forgotten. In being nearly invisible -- though materially there on the page, it nonetheless resists revelation of any certain meaning -- it comes to have its chance in the analysis of the graphic manifestation of what Iain Sinclair has described as the 'sticky webs of memory' that trace the city (DS 102). Taking the image above as our immediate example of phantastry, we comprehend an instance of single, fragile synecdoche, a singular semi-fluid figure serving in this essay as a mediation of the 'conduit for the spirit of place'[25] as that which takes place in the work considered here. Phantastry's simultaneous materiality and hieratic exclusion does double service in fact; for it figures both the graphic text's ability to draw our attention to the self-replicating and dividing limits of iterability and un/readability, and the abyssal, untotalizable text that is London.

<29> Appearing to admit of a relation, obviously, both to fantasy and phantasy, and being, we might say a long-lost relative, phantastry's strangeness materializes, for me at least, that which passes graphically, and thus silently, between phantasy / fantasy; it traces a movement for me between lyrical, possibly non-rational, composition inimical to the drive and tyranny of narrative and psychic projection. The trace of that spectral apparition or phantom that haunts this particular family of words arrives, having to do with what comes to light, and what brings with it illumination. This somewhat dusty term signifies a fantastic display or performance, marked by ostentation or affectation. Proposing, finally, a strong reading of the word, one might understand it as one possible manifestation of what might otherwise be called a trope or a conceit. Moreover, phantastry also refers to a visionary delusion, the projection or phantasm of a fevered or disoriented imagination, perhaps even that particular delusion described by Sinclair as "the madness of seeing London as text. Words. Dates. Addresses. No brick that has not been touched, mentioned in a book" (DS 100).

<30> If there is a madness in seeing London as a text, it is an instability contracted from the city's chorographic identities, which arrive unexpectedly to leave an indelible, graphic trace on the subject. This is traced nowhere more completely, more graphically, than in the following passage from Dining on Stones:

The man whose magnum opus the Mare Street woman was promoting, peddling around town, had cultivated a massive brain tumour, which pressed angrily on his optic nerves. He had X-rays of the intruder -- which he superimposed over a map of medieval London, the walled City. He walked the shape of his pain, his unlanguaged parasite, into the map. His tiny script, pages of it, was hardy to read than my own. But I caught the drift. I didn't want to be suckered into another malign fiction, in which his story became my story, my reading of his cuneiform text. (DS 13)