I think Alan Moore is one of the great English language writers. The famous anarchist occult magician from Northampton, England, Moore is best known for his graphic novels. From Hell, Watchmen, V for Vendetta, and Swamp Thing are among the most important works in the entire medium, a medium he helped redefine through his creative anti-hierarchical propensities and intelligent formalism (the latter a perceived rarity in mainstream comics). His voice is singular:
The child had woken before she could ask whether this meant that pigeons were all human ghosts, forms that dead people had gone into and become, or whether they somehow existed simultaneously in Heaven, where dead people go, and up amongst the rafters of the derelict barn in the neighbour’s yard at the same time.
Who else can write like this? No one.
In 2016, Moore published Jerusalem, a difficult novel composed of three books that took a decade to write. His magnum opus is a massive, occasionally terrifying, modernist-mythological epic. Think of The Lord of the Rings if it were written somehow more ambitious and written by our greatest pagan anarchist prose stylist—and, of course, a slap more irreverent. Jerusalem is so intriguing precisely because it’s a novel only Alan Moore could conceive of.
But it’s difficult. I consider myself a well-read person and I love reading difficult novels (I finished Thomas Pynchon’s V. and wasn’t completely lost!), but I’ve rarely been troubled to finish (and understand) a book to the same extent that I have been with Jerusalem. I’ve tried on three, maybe four, occasions and have never finished the first book. If I could pinpoint its difficulty, I think it’s the novel’s experimental and stylistic dependence on psychogeography.
Psychogeography developed out of post-war French Marxist and anarchist theorists and artists interested in more helpful critiques of consumerism informed by surrealism and other mid-century Leftist-adjacent art theories and academic movements. According to Guy Debord, the patriarch of psychogeography, it is “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”
Intentionally ambiguous and relatively unplanned exploration of urban areas through “aimless strolls,” dérive (French for “drift”) is the most widely known practice inspired by psychogeography. The point, as far as I can tell, is to intentionally disconnect from the monotony of capitalist modes of production and the predictability of consumerist cultures. From what I can gather—and please, do not judge me here—the point seems to be that capitalist modes of production have so taken over our societies that “ordinary life,” with its patterns of leisure, spaces for exploration and the imagination, and even mindlessness has been lost. Somehow exploring cities without a plan can help fix this?
I failed (and still fail) at seeing the materialist critique that supposedly ungirds dérive. The “Dérive app,” whose motto reads “We help get you lost,” gives quite trifling commands like “Take a left and document something out of the ordinary” or perhaps “walk backward and do something silly.” What this might have to do with the material conditions of the poor feels a bit distant, even if there is solid a theoretical connection (and I’m not sure there is!). It almost feels incompatibly bourgeois.
Nothing special ever happened on my walks. I never encountered any time-traveling ghosts like in Moore’s novel, nor did I see anything of interest in and of itself. I didn’t meet any new people, nor did I have a political awakening of any sort. I just went on a handful of walks that made me look stupid to those around me. The featured image on this post is a random photo I took today when I redownloaded the app and it told me to take a picture of something different or something along those lines. I thought the grass looked different…
Look: I’m probably giving a crude and simple definition of a complex theory. In fact, I’m positive that’s what I’m doing. I’m also positive that I don’t fully understand it, and that’s okay. But maybe I felt the point even if I don’t fully understand it: I feel free from work commitments, free from the 9–5 cycle, free from my own thoughts in my experimentation on the Dérive app.
Did I meander enough in this essay?
Joshua Polanski (’20) is a freelance film and culture writer who writes regularly for the Boston Hassle and has contributed to the Bay Area Reporter, In Review Online, and Off Screen amongst other places. His interests include the technical elements of filmmaking and exhibition, slow and digital cinemas, cinematic sexuality, as well as Eastern and Northern European, East Asian, and Middle Eastern film.
