A distinctive strand of English indolence precedes 60s rock in Victorian fiction

Evidence

Entropy is everywhere in the work of Position Normal, an act whom Simon Reynolds once called ‘the godfathers of hauntology’, but it is a very English kind of entropy. In Position Normal’s music, it is like London has finally succumbed to the entropy that always threatens to engulf the city in Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius mythos. Except there’s something attractive about the deep daydreamy lassitude that reigns here: entropy isn’t a threat so much as a lysergic promise, a chance to uncoil, unwind, unspool. Gradually, you are made to forget all of your urgencies as your brain is lulled and lured into the sunny Sunday afternoon when all Position Normal tunes seem to take place. The allure of this indolent London was touched upon by a certain trajectory in 60s’ rock: the sunny daze of The Kinks’ ‘Sunny Afternoon’, The Small Faces ‘Lazy Sunday Afternoon’, The Beatles’ ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and ‘I’m Only Sleeping’. Yet this particular strand of Anglo-languor didn’t originate here, in the acid and weed reveries of rockers in repose. You can look even further back for antecedents, to moments in Great Expectations – the airless, inertial stasis of Satis House – or to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (especially well captured in the hookah-hazes and fugues of Jonathan Miller’s 1968 BBC television version). — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 340

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the hauntology/English-languor theme threaded through the book; also the ADDENDUM ‘grafting’ essay’s palimpsest-city imagery in para 341.
• SEED: Angle: tracing a national ‘lazy afternoon’ aesthetic through Victorian fiction to 60s psychedelia and hauntological electronica as a genealogy of a mood.