The Flavour of the Street: The Factory Series by Derek Raymond

Abstract

The five novels included in the Factory series by the British writer Derek Raymond (He Died with His Eyes Open, 1984; The Devil’s Home on Leave, 1985; How the Dead Live, 1986; I Was Dora Suarez, 1988 and Dead Man Upright, 1993) encompass the core issues in Raymond’s literary and political project: a representation of the margins of society and of its evils aimed at uncovering and overthrowing the power relations embedded beneath its apparently plain surface. One shared element that allows the five novels to be recognizable as part of a composite project is the interaction between the characters and the urban landscape; both bodies and the city are represented and can be analysed in spatial terms, as ‘cartographies of meanings and identity’ (Pile 1996, 178), surfaces of signification where geographies of power are inscribed in a way that is productive and constraining at the same time: ‘The individual is to be mapped by the spatial specificity of their subject position, […] but […] space is not an innocent backdrop to position, it is itself filled with politics and ideology’ (Keith and Pile 1993, 4). Moreover, in the spaces in Raymond’s novels, bodies and subjectivities are caught in a relationship of identification: ‘The body […] is not distinct from the city for they are mutually defining’ (Grosz 1995, 108). Both the bodies of the protagonists and the city of London are very specifically located, their interactions covering a fairly well-defined time span — the 1980s, during Thatcher’s mandates.