Book Review: Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways, by Phil Smith, Triarchy Press, 2010, ISBN 978-0956263131
Phil Smith’s Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways is extremely hard to categorise. That is one of its strengths. The digressive text could lead us to William S. Burroughs’ cut-up verbal collages; to J. G. Ballard’s depictions of the dystopian edge lands of west London, or to the ‘psychogeographic’ writings of Will Self and Iain Sinclair.
Contained within it is a travelogue. Smith, assuming the identity of ‘crab man’, re-traces the 200-mile journey of a real-life Edwardian oak tree planter, an engineer called Charles Hurst in the east midlands. But this is only one element of an impressive bricolage of philosophy, poetry and manifesto.
For this reader, the book is more reminiscent of the eighteenth-century fiction and journalism of Sterne, Fielding and Defoe than the colder eyes of Self and Sinclair – poetic and unabashed in its ambition, it has a warmth and social inclusiveness that they lack. This is a journey that we want to be on. Its good-natured trickster verbosity echoes the tone of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, published in 1759, arguably the first ‘experimental novel’.
Endlessly digressive, the text, whose endnotes occur playfully at the half-way point, is a multi-layered concoction of prefatory matter, codicils, appendices, an ‘Orrery’ and a concluding ‘panography’. It’s a Russian doll, wherein (F) denotes a footnote, (FF) denotes a footnote to the footnote, (FFF) a footnote to the footnote to the footnote.’ Like a modern-day Sterne, Smith informs us, with a wink, on page 11, ‘I wrote all the documents here. The rest is a literary device. But you are the characters.’
Textual symbols
The book uses textual symbols a framing device – Plaque Tournante, a junction where decisions change everything, Tripods, an opportunity for reverse archaeology, Grid – a place of homogenisation. This indicates its didactic intent. Mythogeography, which provides the book with its armature, can be seen as an evolution from psychogeography. This, in turn, derived from the writings of Lettrist philosopher Guy Debord in the 1950s, and was adopted by the French Situationists in the 1960s.
Debord’s concept of the ‘dérive’ or ‘drifting’, means ‘an unplanned journey through a landscape’. It was the unlikely underpinning of a radical political movement in France, re-interpreted on English university campuses and in art schools, where, one could argue, it became an academic rather than political phenomenon.
Its exponents strongly opposed the codification of landscapes by planners and architects and the consumerist homogeneity layered onto places by the state – as observed by Smith in the ‘plastic horror’ of the visitors’ centre of Sherwood Forest.
He observes, on his journey, an ‘inner city mix of wasteland and workshop, beached-whale ruins and reticent estates, retail units shaped like stunted temples and Hand Car Washes returning high-tech industrial trainees to a labour intensive economic banditry’.
Smith, an associate professor the School of Humanities and Performing Arts at the University of Plymouth, is a prolific author and playwright, associated with the world-renowned TNT Theatre. He was an originator of mythogeography, as part of the site-based arts collective Wrights & Sites.
This unique and rewarding grab bag of a book reclaims the political intent of Debord, adding English humour to French seriousness. It concludes, appositely, with a quotation from the Oasis song Wonderwall: ‘And all the roads we have to walk are winding. And all the lights that lead us there are blinding. There are many things that I would like to say to you. But I don’t know how.’ Exactly.