The Visor Effect in Literary Geography: Reformation London in Zadie Smith and John Stow

Abstract

This paper asks what conversation might be taking place between two seemingly very different texts, John Stow’s Survey of London (geographical, early modern) and Zadie Smith’s NW (a novel, early twenty first century). The starting point is that NW, like Stow’s Survey, is chorographical, organized by its characters’ passage through and across London; but the conversation between the two texts becomes more striking through their hallucinatory, spectral relationships to time. Both texts conjure images of London in which the present becomes thin, permeable by other periods. By combining the literary geographical term “interspatiality” (Hones 2022) with Derrida’s concept of the visor effect, we can begin to see the ways in which Stow is behind Smith’s text, troubling and interrogating the “timelessness” that NW creates. In this way, we can begin a second conversation between concepts: using this conversation between Smith and Stow to exemplify the way the visor effect can be combined with interspatiality, and, therefore, with other concepts from literary geography.