- 1 The term is understood in Jean Baudrillard’s analysis of the collapse of distinctions between reali (...)
- 2 Inasmuch as they are characterised by a subversion of logic and the exploration of dream-like, unca (...)
- 3 The term is used in the novel and discussed in the first section of this article.
1In Walking to Hollywood (2010), the protagonist (Will Self) crosses diverse physical landscapes, emphasising their transience, from the eroding coastline of Holderness to the expansive cityscape of Los Angeles. The detailed hyperreal1—veering into surreal2—description of the crossing from Flamborough Head to Spurn Head asserts the uniqueness of this walk as one of ‘erasure’3 caused by coastal erosion. The novel explores the protagonist’s internal landscape, his struggles with memory and identity, echoing his physical journey with a psychological one, highlighting the delicate borders between grounded, conscious experience and dream, and between sanity and insanity. The book has been described as a reflection on the complex relationship between selfhood, fiction, and reality, where autofiction helps articulate emotional truths and confront both personal and cultural crises (Davies). In his 2018 talk, ‘Living between Fact and Fiction’, Will Self located his work on a border among literary genres. His oeuvre intertwines satire, criticism, journalism, and literature to reshape perceptions of British society (Matthews 12).
- 4 Psychogeography is the ‘point at which psychology and geography collide, a means of exploring the b (...)
- 5 Self’s ‘A Posthumous Shock’ frames trauma not just as a grand narrative imposed by trauma theorists (...)
- 6 As a matter of fact, it would be hard to defend the idea that Will Self is strictly speaking a ‘geo (...)
- 7 This is a delicate enterprise for a field that is indeed quite suspicious of novels, or that remain (...)
2Self is known for his psychogeographic experimentation (Gonneaud 2018; Mudie); the use of the term geopoetics (as outlined primarily by Kenneth White) to engage with his work may therefore come as a surprise. Indeed, psychogeography and geopoetics share a common fascination with the reciprocal relationship between the physical world and the human imagination, but they approach this subject from slightly different angles and intellectual traditions.4 Psychogeography originated as a more urban-focused concept, analysing the effects of the built environment, infrastructure, and cityscape on the psyche. It also has stronger roots in avant-garde art, literature, and radical politics, while geopoetics aims to be a larger, certainly more academic, interdisciplinary theory-practice. In addition, psychogeography often emphasises the subversive, playful, or critical exploration of environments, while geopoetics is more focused on appreciating and understanding the creative potential of place. In borrowing from geopoetics, the aim is not to contradict psychogeographical readings to Self’s work, but to widen the angle of approach. The core hypothesis here is that the gist of Self’s work is to treat Western Modernity as a core dislocating experience that defines the condition of humankind under Capitalism (Self 2021).5 The title of this paper might therefore appear to be misleading, since the novel cannot be understood as an exemplum of a certain geopoetic methodology6 but it can be read as a novel that could very well be added to the great library of geopoetics.7 The purpose of this paper is to show how Walking to Hollywood is concerned with escaping what Self perceives as the Western cultural impasse to which geopoetics is so attached: ‘We have come to the end of the Highway of the West’, White wrote in 1994 in Le Plateau de l’Albatros. To do this, it will first focus on how Self’s narrative crosses geographical and psychological boundaries to construct a new mental geography. Secondly, it will analyse how satire is used to subvert the ideological boundaries of Modernity to the point of exhaustion. Finally, it will suggest that Self’s ‘intellectual nomadism’ explores new frontiers in order to construct a new topology of being.
3The act of walking, a literal crossing of geographical borders, coupled with the self-conscious narrative aligns with the geopoetic ideal of an engagement with the earth and its diverse expressions. Federico Italiano has argued that geopoetics presents an operative category that allows for a complex understanding and analysis of the territorial, geographical, and geological dimensions within literary texts. It highlights geographical awareness and territorial knowledge emerging from literary works that transcend traditional perceptual and phenomenological boundaries (2008). With this in mind, it is worth considering first how the ‘geo-’ in Self’s novel extends beyond the concept of landscape, then illustrating how borders are understood as living spaces, and finally raising the question of the nature and function of bridges against the backdrop of such a breakdown of borders. The Simmelian understanding of landscape is fundamentally a phenomenological approach involving a subject to object relation (Italiano). Geopoetics extends beyond the concept of landscape (i.e. the aesthetic ordering of nature), not just because it offers more diverse possibilities of interpretation (Italiano), but precisely because geopoetics (as outlined by White) is very suspicious of the pitfalls of Cartesian worldviews.
4In his novel, Self stresses the importance of being able to acquire a mental geography and the capacity to design routes. The following long quote is worth reproducing here, to illustrate Self’s strategy:
I conceived of taking a walk from Flamborough Head . . . to Spurn Head, that peculiar three-mile shingle bracket that hooks round into the wide mouth of the River Humber. It occurred to me that were I to keep for the entire distance within six feet of either cliff edge or shoreline, I would, very likely, have completed a journey it would be impossible for anyone to ever make again. By the time another year had passed the solid ground that had risen up to meet my feet would have disappeared forever. This would be a unique walk of erasure—a forty-mile extended metaphor for my own embattled persona, as its foundations were washed away by what I suspected was early onset Alzheimer’s. Perhaps it was also sympathetic magic: the walk devised as a ritualised erection of groynes, which might impede the longshore drift of my psyche.
To counter this—frankly morbid—self-absorption, I scanned the data on a long-, short- and medium-term cliff erosion rates. I checked out coastal evolution and beach plan shape modelling. I examined the evidence of site inspections, and the various proposals—including the Mappleton coastal defences—that had been advanced against the ceding of solid to liquid. I read the reports of expert witnesses, and looked at the aerial photographs they had posted on the web, marked up so as to make explicit the underlying dynamics.
The names of the towns and villages that had been inundated since the medieval era were legion: Wilsthorpe, Hartburn, Hyde, Withow and Cleton; Hornsea Burton, Hornsea Beck and Southorpe; Great Golden, Golden Parva and Old Aldborough—and so on; like mortality itself, the sea had ground into utter oblivion, these, the habitations of already faceless villeins. Near to Spurn Head itself had stood the substantial town of Ravenser, a sturdy plantation of spires and spars where Henry Bolingbroke landed in 1399, and which, until the rise of Hull, was the principal port of Yorkshire. Since the Roman occupation more than fifty square miles of land had gone from Holderness, and still it disintegrated, clods and stones plash-plopping into the shallow sea. (345)
5The protagonist’s attempts at quantification and analysis of erosion—through the study of coastal evolution and aerial photographs—contrast with the more introspective and symbolic perception of his journey as ‘sympathetic magic’. The narrator’s oscillation between scientific detachment and emotional resonance underscores the porous boundary between rational understanding and personal experience, a recurring theme in Self’s work. The passage also places the journey within an ongoing sequence of historical losses, inventorying flooded towns and summoning figures such as Henry Bolingbroke in the name of linking personal wastage to the longer stretch of human and civilisational flow. The ‘plash-plopping’ of land into the sea animates the falling of the landscape, then turning it into an active companion to the story. Upon examination, it becomes evident that Self’s attempt to design a mental route (‘I conceived of taking a walk’) is swiftly followed by a projection of the narrator’s angst onto the landscape (‘a unique walk of erasure—a forty-mile extended metaphor for my own embattled persona’). The use of self-deprecation ensures a rapid bathetic movement (‘To counter this—frankly morbid—self-absorption’), which is consolidated by a conscious effort to excise human subjectivity and ‘restore’ the environment to its geological and historical factual dimension (‘I checked out’ / ‘I examined the evidence’ / ‘I read the reports’ / ‘The Names’ / ‘1399’ / ‘Since the Roman occupation’); before concluding on a satirical note:
As I undertook these researches the conviction grew in me that far from the erosion of two yards of land every year being a tragedy, it should be regarded as uplifting—for here was a landscape that was more transient than an individual human. The bungalows would be rebuilt inland, the UPVC windows reinstalled, the caravans would head north to Filey—only the earth was drowning. (346)
6The narrator’s ‘uplifting’ realisation—presented as an existential insight—that the landscape is ‘more transient than an individual human’, actually undercuts the tendency to view nature as eternal and reliable. Thus, the narrator diminishes the gravity of both human and environmental fragility, lampooning the philosophical posturing that often accompanies ecological discussions. The irony is compounded by the implication that humans, with all their hubris and destructive tendencies, still manage to outlast some landscapes—making the narrator’s reflection all the more disturbing.
7The border, understood as a living space, is thus endowed with its own ontological significance, as a privileged, dynamic space with an existential and narrative importance. In the following example, for instance, the border/coastline is not only the place where human limitations and absurdity become visible, but also the event of that limitation and absurdity, as well as the space of reflection.
Even at the time—and I cannot have been more than eleven or twelve—I remember thinking that this fellow must have been formidably stupid to have invested in a property on the brink of a sea cliff; for had Barratt not just told the viewers that this was the fastest-eroding coast in Europe? That its biscuity loess was being dunked, then chomped, by the North Sea at the prodigious rate of two whole yards every year, as fast, in geological terms, as a speeding bullet? (342)
8Four temporal layers interlace in the passage: the child-narrator’s perspective, the adult-narrator’s present reflection, the forward-looking temporality implied in the description of the erosion and its consequences, the geological time emphasising temporal disjunction, and the narrative temporality itself, which incorporates temporal layering as an aesthetic device to evoke synchronicity. The various temporalities in the passage interact; it should be noted for instance that the ‘formidable stupid[ity]’ noticeable by the eleven or twelve-year-old narrator is measured against geological time. Similarly, the narrator’s retrospective irony is imbued with an implicit sense of futility against the background of the ongoing and inevitable coastal destruction.
9A significant question the reader faces as Self continues his assault against one of the most emblematic architectural features of the landscape, is the following: what do bridges stand for in the context of borders being renegotiated? Bridges are not only the architecture of social control but also a means of territorial measure and expansion:
By the time I had reached the middle of the bridge, and was standing there listening to the wind shear lament through the cables, and watching the drop yawn below me, I had succumbed to its sublime contours. If the monumental was an architecture of social control, then what could be said of monumental bridges, save that they were very obviously for jumping off—that they in fact ordered you to jump off them? ‘Jump!’ they bellowed, sergeant-majors on the vast parade ground of civilization, and so the Mayans, the Easter Islanders, the Norse Greenlanders, the Romans and now the entire West did their bidding. (70)
10Self experiments here with the idea of the bridge as a multi-layered metaphor for the ambiguities of civilisation: sublime, coercive contours that tightly wrap up the tension between progress and self-destruction, wonder and fear, freedom and domination. This satire of monumental architecture extends to the cultural psyche and ways in which the grandest achievements too often bear within them the seeds of their undoing. Endowing bridges with the paradoxical function of signalling the (dramatic) end of a (civilisational) space/territory, Self invites the reader to consider the eternal rhythms of human history in the tightrope balance between creation and annihilation.
- 8 Rospide’s thesis positions Self’s work as a nuanced critique and extension of postmodernism, blendi (...)
11In addition, as Maylis Rospide has shown, Self’s exploration of urban landscapes as sites of tension between modernist order (urban planning, industrialisation) and postmodern disorder (gentrification, alienation) is central in his fiction, operating as both a critique of modernist rationality and an extension of postmodern dystopian sensibilities. The theme of ‘urban anomie’ emerges, where individuals struggle to find identity and coherence in environments shaped by contradictory forces of modernisation and late capitalism (2010, 508–530).8 This alignment of outer and inner landscapes sets the stage for Self’s satirical critique of Modernity. ‘Maybe civilization was the great catastrophe’, says White reflecting on his work, Incandescent Limbo (2023). Like White, Self thus exposes the existential failures of civilisation by highlighting them in their most iconic forms. This is the heart of Self’s iconoclastic satire.
12Charles A. Knight’s approach will be used as a starting point for our critical overview of Self’s satire:
Satire is thus pre-generic. It is not a genre in itself but an exploiter of other genres. Nor is it quite a mode in the usual sense. In what I call the Quixotic phase, satire is modal, and the identifying genre—the work—is the novel. In contrast, Lucianic or Menippean fiction is satire that takes the form of a novel. As a pre-genre, satire is a mental position that needs to adopt a genre in order to express its ideas as representation. (Knight 4)
13Thriving on its protean nature, satire blends elements of other genres and exhibits traits of both genre and mode. In Self’s narratives, this is particularly evident in his exploration of liminal spaces, where borders become sites of both conflict and transformation. By amplifying the absurdity of rigid constructs, Self’s satire destabilises fixed identities and geographies, aligning with geopoetics’ emphasis on non-binary conceptualisation and redefinition. In her thesis, Rospide stresses that Self’s satire operates on dual fronts, provoking established norms while simultaneously critiquing re-establishing them (17). This is crucial for understanding its role in engaging with and reconfiguring borders—geographical, cultural, and intellectual. Moreover, the thesis highlights that satire’s ambiguity as both disruptive and constructive mirrors the broader critique of modernity, where established frameworks are dismantled to make space for new paradigms.
- 9 Self shares with White the analysis that the precocious base of Western civilisation established un (...)
14Alan Munton connects Self’s work with cultural materialism but suggests that his satire serves as a commentary on the material conditions of modern intellectual life only to a certain extent. He argues that Self’s narrative style should be distinguished from that of his contemporaries, due to the purposefully disruptive nature of his satire. In his view, Self employs satire to critique prevailing ideologies, rooted in his philosophical leanings towards transcendental idealism (2012). Building on Munton’s idea, it is possible to argue that Self’s satire also goes beyond targeting specific ideologies. Indeed, it has a much broader scope: it is concerned with the very foundations of Western Civilisation.9 But how far can satire be seen as a fundamental mode of engaging with the critique of Modernity, and how do these ideological boundaries get crossed geopoetically?
15First, by insisting on the existence of a more palpable reality than the one presented by the world of celebrity culture. Self contrasts the authentic imitation of street performers with the manufactured personas of Hollywood stars. The city’s obsession with image is laid bare as the protagonist reflects on the growing impersonator industry while the ‘real’ stars have become distant caricatures: ‘the only movie stars left in Hollywood were the supermen’s batmen, the jokers’ tin men, the Elvises and the Marilyn Monroes. Still, at least the impersonators had the virtue of honest subterfuge’ (217). Second, Self’s peripatetic meditation continues his psychogeographical critique of neoliberal capitalism’s impact on urban life and explores the emotional and psychological effects of urban environments on characters (Cornier Michael) and on crossing Western ideological borders more broadly. In this context, Hollywood is both a cultural allegory of Modernity and its embodied locus, as it is vividly depicted in the following excerpt:
Beyond the main gates Los Angeles was waiting, her hot legs spread—and I entered them, devoutly. In the Hayden Tract, a phantasmagoria of Sci-Arc buildings with broken bone girders, staircases to nowhere and oriel windows bursting like buboes, I found a café where I could sit outside. (274)
16Hollywood is also Modernity’s temporality, and Self’s novel is an attempt to walk against the current such a temporality imposes:
If I want to discover who—or what—did for film I’ll be better off walking. Walking is so much slower than film—especially contemporary Hollywood movies, with their stuttering film grammar of split-second shots—and it isn’t framed, when you walk you’re floating in a fishbowl view of the world. (124)
- 10 ‘Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; (...)
17But as an heir of Jonathan Swift, Self knows satire is the mirror everyone avoids looking into,10 and he turns this awareness into a privileged locus of narrative ambiguity. Drawing on Baudrillard’s notion of the hyperreal, the novel depicts artificial, oversized simulations that obscure authentic human experience. Sherman Oaks’s monumental sculptures, such as Behemoth—a 128-foot-high humanoid structure—are grotesque self-replications distributed globally, symbolising late capitalism’s fixation on commodified, meaningless icons. These hyperreal constructs critique the sterility and artificiality of modern life, contrasting with Self’s use of surrealism to evoke the absurd and the uncanny. For instance, the narrator vividly imagines Sherman’s sculptures improbably inhabiting the volcanic craters of Easter Island, their surreal presence undermining rational perceptions of space and highlighting the fragility of modernity’s logic. There is no doubt that Sherman’s work offers an opportunity for the satire of conceptual and allegorical art. But Self’s satire is also directed at the main character’s own pathology. Sherman Oaks is given numerous opportunities in the novel to mock his friend’s troubled state and artistic endeavours:
Sherman slid down the baffler of bags until he was sitting. The cyclopean eye of his torch dazzled me, and his voice—nasal, insistent—soared above the jeremiad of the jets. ‘You and your dumb books!’ he prated. ‘Micro-satire, dirty doodlings in the margins of history!’
‘I say, that’s a bit harsh.’
‘Is it? When Gutenberg invented the printing press there were at most a hundred titles produced annually; by 1950 this had swollen to a quarter of a million; now a book is published somewhere in this dumb world every twenty seconds, and you have the nerve—no, the gall, to contribute to this flood of verbiage that is inexorably inundating the land with ill-contrived metaphors!’
‘I—I . . .’ I wanted to rebut him forcefully; instead I only spread my hands and said, ‘I don’t know how to do anything else’. (44; emphasis added)
18Mark Davies draws parallels between The Childermass (1928) by Wyndham Lewis and Walking to Hollywood to show how both engage with the interaction between selfhood and modern technology in their narrative. The comparison with Lewis can be expanded to the authors’ understanding and practice of satire. Lewis opposed the image of the militant satirist adopting a normative position—as his essay Satire and Fiction proves (1976, 42–43)—and developed the idea of a non-moralising satire, whose original impulse is not didactic but primitive (1987). In this sense the satirical attitude should not be considered in its strictly polemical or didactic dimension, but as a dissident one. Self also eschews passing moral judgement and shares with Lewis this theory and practice of satire as metaphysical exploration of irrationality as an innate human characteristic.
- 11 ‘I could no longer cope at all with the infantilizing demanded by intercontinental air travel. It w (...)
19In this context, the landscape, the architecture and the natural environment function as a satirical mirror the main character is forced to look into numerous times during the novel. One such example is when the protagonist first encounters his old friend’s monumental statues—all gigantic (and grotesque) versions of himself. Sherman’s art provides an opportunity for Will to reflect on his own obsession with scale. Similarly, although Will rebels against the infantilisation of modern travel,11 he is also forced to the realisation that his own neurotic obsession with packing only worsens the loss of autonomy in a mechanised world.
- 12 ‘In the course of the Modern Era, Cartesian rationality has corroded, one after the other, all the (...)
20In this respect, the image of the ‘satirist being satirised’ reflects the ambiguity of the satirical project (Elliott 14–15, 97–98). Elliott stressed that the origin of the satirist’s authority stemmed from ancient beliefs that satire had magical powers. Once that was lost, satire acquired a softer, more symbolic social role. Consequently, modern satirists were merely left with the role of social commentators, always running the risk of becoming themselves the object of ridicule. As Self continues to pursue his satirical project to its logical conclusion, the reader is left with no discernible social corrective function in the narrative, resulting in a sense of exhaustion. One might contend, however, that Self’s objective is more focused on the visibility of specific issues than on influencing societal change in a particular direction. In The Art of the Novel, Kundera outlines the idea that there is a uniquely novelistic knowledge: ‘novelists discover “what only the novel can discover”: they demonstrate how, under the conditions of the “terminal paradoxes”, all existential categories suddenly change their meaning’ (2023). Such terminal paradoxes are inherently linked with the experience of Modernity.12 Going back to the image of the bridge mentioned earlier, the terminal paradox that it presents is that this dominance plants the seeds of self-destruction.
21By deconstructing the cultural borders of Modernity, Self also exposes the reader to the question of how the novel as an art form can engage with what it has identified as a world in decline.
- 13 In a piece published in The Guardian in 2014 and titled ‘The novel is dead (this time it’s for real (...)
- 14 Self has been rebuked by his peers and academics alike for professing the death of the novel, yet a (...)
22It is therefore equally important to acknowledge that Self’s perspective is that the novel as an art form is dying,13 and he supports his claim with three arguments. First, technological advance, and in particular, the rise of digital media and the internet which have undermined the focused, immersive reading experience the novel requires, creating a growing cultural ‘active resistance to difficulty’ (2014). Subsequent economic changes, Self argues, have resulted in the collapse of older economic models that allowed novelists to make a living has been accelerated by the transformation of copyright and distribution control brought about by digital media. A further factor is the institutional dimension: creative writing programmes are becoming self-perpetuating rather than fostering viable novelist careers (2014).14
- 15 For a broader discussion on the perceived decline of the British novel and its response to cultural (...)
- 16 In this reading, the narrative invests characters with gaming avatar attributes, offering readers n (...)
23It is not within the scope of this analysis to evaluate the veracity of this claim, although several aspects of this ongoing debate15 are worthy of consideration for the implications they have for Walking to Hollywood. In particular, Davies sees in it an exploration of the novel’s capacity to adapt the changes introduced by the Digital Age, and introduces the notion of avatarisation16 as a narrative technique to support his claim. While this is undoubtedly an interesting perspective, it may also be seen as a rather hopeful reading that overshadows a rather central aspect of the novel, namely its function as Memento Mori. Civilisations are mortal, the reader is often reminded. Similarly, art forms are transient.
24Attention must therefore be drawn to the subtitle: ‘Memories Before the Fall’. The work stubbornly reminds the reader of death throughout. Self’s novel contribution is distilled in the following statement: ‘The world is all used up—only tourists or salesmen set off on journeys; the real explorers strike out for the known’ (304).
25The impending loss of memory and identity on a personal level is echoed with what is perceived as civilisational decay, calling for a new methodology that goes beyond mere self-awareness and cultural critique, and ‘intellectual nomadism’, one of the cornerstones of geopoetics, is one such methodology.
- 17 This phenomenon can be understood in the philosophical and critical tradition that views Western Ci (...)
26Intellectual nomadism in Self’s work represents a crossing of mental and cultural borders, exploring new pathways out of civilisational pathology, which is one of the central concerns of geopoetics: ‘[I]ntellectual nomadism is fundamentally about opening paths out of pathology. What pathology? The pathology of civilisation’ (White 2023, 4). Walking to Hollywood is certainly concerned with this pathology, as is made clear with the coda of the book: ‘The mental pathologies that underlie the three memoirs—obsessive-compulsive disorder for “Very Little”, psychosis for “Walking to Hollywood” and Alzheimer’s for “Spurn Head” are themselves displacements of a single phenomenon’ (432). That single phenomenon is, of course, the ailing civilisation.17 Self contributes to the intellectual nomad’s endeavour by transforming symptoms of mental decompensation into literary tropes recasting ‘pathology’ as social illness, which seems to be based on the idiom: ‘just because you’re paranoid it doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you’. It is quite an ambivalent apophasis. The trope functions by seemingly acknowledging the common dismissal of paranoid feelings, namely, that they are merely irrational and baseless (‘just because you’re paranoid’), then undercuts this dismissal by stating that paranoid beliefs could still be valid, that is to say, that they could be based on reality (‘it doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you’). However, it also highlights the underlying truth in overblown symptoms. As feeble as this may seem, it does give a glimpse of a sense of reclaimed agency, which should not be underestimated.
- 18 Here is an example of how White uses the term: ‘Ça se situe à la fois dans le domaine du savoir, où (...)
- 19 Jean-Michel Ganteau has highlighted Self’s use of the Uncanny as a radical tool for satire in How t (...)
- 20 ‘the term “topology” itself, on which both of us have rung changes, from a cosmological space-time (...)
27The book is therefore also a walk out of madness, by educating the reader to see beyond the individual pathology and discern the part of truth hidden in every symptom. More specifically, Self seems to engage in a methodology which resembles White’s geopoetic ‘deconditioning’18 in order to ‘strike out for the known’ to achieve a clear version of the world.19 His strategy results in an attempt to compose a new literary topology20 of being.
- 21 Further echoes with film references can also be found: ‘Still, as the lugubrious narrator of La Jet (...)
28In creating a new literary topology of being, Self navigates the boundaries between different states of existence, suggesting that borders become manifest only retrospectively, much like knowledge itself, which becomes evident only once it has been crossed.21
Was I in the world any more? Or was the world in me? Just before the Shrine Auditorium I had crossed the fault line where the plate of the old pueblo grinds against that of the new city, and now as I navigated east towards south central I realized I had crossed the border that separates LA from Los Santos. (190–191)
- 22 Justine Gonneaud argues that Self’s work uses notions of scale, proportions, and perceptions, to ch (...)
29It is important to stress that, throughout the novel, the character’s depersonalisation is intimately linked to his dislocation. In this sense, the use of the term ‘topology’ is even more relevant as the novel explores a whole range of aspects of being, including: fundamental types of being; relationships and transitions between different modes of being; levels and gradients of being;22 boundaries, limits and thresholds that define realms of being; continuities, overlaps and connections that unite different aspects of being. Many of the topological dynamics found in the novel are used in the following example:
Out in the wheat field the sound mirror bloomed. Softened by the sea fret it was movingly lovely. The circular depression in its seaward side suggested that somewhere nearby hovered the enormous and comforting breast that had moulded it. I laid my cheek where it once had been and suckled on the sounds: the gull squeak and peewit, the distant groan of heavy machinery, the cries of children, the groans of the dispossessed, and the entreaties of those about to die. (417)
30Ancestors of radars, the sound mirrors—commonly known as ‘listening ears’—planted along the south and northeast coasts of England create a continuum of suffering and noise that capture historical and timeless echoes of loss and suffering. They act as boundary objects that crystallise a liminal space where the protagonist experiences present and past synchronically. They also contribute to the narrator’s experience of the landscape as a soundscape. Firstly, the ‘gull squeak and peewit’ situate the passage within a pastoral and coastal environment, evoking a sense of place and continuity with the natural world. Secondly, the ‘distant groan of heavy machinery’ interrupts this idyllic scene, signalling the encroachment of human industry and its discordant relationship with nature. The ‘cries of children,’ ‘groans of the dispossessed,’ and ‘entreaties of those about to die’ imbue the soundscape with a tragic human universality.
31Walking to Hollywood may therefore be read as a geopoetic satire, where crossing borders—geographical, mental, and narrative—becomes central to its critique of Modernity. For Self, border-crossing is not just a literal journey through disintegrating spaces, but a metaphor for the breakdown of cultural and personal coherence.
To conclude, a few considerations on the following sentence:
And, as I crossed over the goods yards and began to drag up the desolation row of 4th Avenue, the heroic skyline in front trickled down to the homeless man who walked ahead of me, in the gutter, pushing his shopping cart piled high with nothing fit for e-commerce. (82)
32It is remarkable for its combination of numerous tropes, including personification, metaphor, juxtaposition, irony, and successfully merges bathos with iconoclastic satire. If Walking to Hollywood’s objective is to ‘strike out for the known’, Self employs his long-walking methodology to expose the underlying pathology of civilisational structures. Self’s topology of being however continues to explore a fundamental feature of the novel: time-warping, as he suggests in his essay ‘Literary Time’. More specifically, he highlights the finding of a philosopher called J. W. Dunne:
who hypothesised that human consciousness itself had some of the capabilities of the novel; specifically, that within us there’s a sort of narrator-figure, who has access to an atemporal viewpoint—and a sort of ‘express’ timeline, that allows it to move between different pages of the life story. (Self 2022)
33In that sense, Walking to Hollywood strikes out for the known territories of novelistic art, only aims for non-lyrical epiphanies that are very dense in terms of form. The final sentence exemplifies what may be Self’s most significant artistic achievement, his rage against the dying of novelistic light: namely the creation of a remarkable poetic density resulting from a radical apprehension of what he perceives as the ‘Western Fall’. Most intriguingly, he locates the possibility of this poetic density ‘Before the Fall’, where ‘The Fall’ should be understood as a border crossed, leading to the loss of novelistic consciousness and temporality.