1Every time Peter Ackroyd writes a new book, the reader cannot but feel that he or she is reading about the same things over and over again. Ackroyd’s work is obsessed, haunted by what may appear as a kind of nostalgia for a glorious past, especially concerning the English literary canon. Whatever the genre of the new book, whatever the period or periods it is situated in, it endlessly investigates the same English tradition, the whole work nevertheless covering a period of more than 2,000 years. As a consequence, one soon gets lost among all these fragments of Englishness piling up, intersecting or intertwining. Before long the reader, urged by the author’s obsession to try and piece this history together, becomes more concerned with it than with the literary work in itself and loses Ackroyd among the ghosts of England’s cultural heritage.

2What is at stake here is the way in which language in Ackroyd’s work addresses the question of postmodern impersonality. This question is first raised by Ackroyd’s excessive representation of London, a representation based on a gigantic intertextual and quotational network leading to the crushing of the author’s personality. The supernumerary word endlessly piles up, burying the author’s personality under a surfeit of emotion, of sublime terror. However, I would suggest, this last excess—an emotional excess—appears as the only condition for the author’s personality, though deeply buried, to be born again through the impersonation of emotion.

1 Ackroyd’s London: A Monstrous Body

3What strikes first is the monumental size, the bulk of Ackroyd’s production. Moreover, it is a polymorphous work, partaking of many literary genres: fiction, including novels and short-stories, biographies, poetry and non-fiction (essays, or works such as Albion). Ackroyd seems to be willing to deal with his favourite subject in as many ways as possible, each book thus reminding the reader of how difficult it is to contain such an extensive subject within textual limits. Ackroyd intends to account for the English cultural heritage, going back to its origins, as Albion’s subtitle, ‘The Origins of the English Imagination,’ indicates. This tradition soon appears to be a teeming, overpopulated one, the more so since Ackroyd places this quest for origins within the frontiers of London’s space, a delimited area (however extensible it may appear to be). The books are overloaded with the names of those whom Ackroyd regards as representative of the English tradition (Blake, Wilde, Dickens, Eliot, Hawksmoor and so on). A plethora of references strives to circumvent England’s cultural heritage, mostly textual but also at times musical, theatrical and pictorial.

4Ackroyd extensively quotes the voices of the past, either by reproducing in the biographies what these historical characters actually said, or are supposed to have said, or by inserting them in a fictional context, thus no longer laying claim to authenticity. But Ackroyd above all endlessly returns in his fictions and in his biographies (as well as in the other non-fictional books) to the same themes already developed by these authors. This network of quotations appears as a gigantic one and, as these quotations partake of many genres, their number is inordinately increased. As a consequence, this hyperbolic work, this vast amount of information soon becomes a maze, first because of its vastly intertextual pattern as well as the countless topographical indications accompanying this network since, according to Ackroyd, London is where the English tradition lives, but above all because of these references’ ability to cross generic boundaries, thus adding to the already intricate texture of the work whose structure, as a consequence, becomes hazier and hazier.

5Moreover, as is often the case in contemporary literature, Ackroyd plays with literary conventions—not in a conventional way though, but immoderately. His fictional production can be defined as what Linda Hutcheon, in A Poetics of Postmodernism, calls historiographic metafiction: ‘those well-known and popular novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages’1 and which can be characterised by their ‘theoretical selfawareness of history and fiction as human constructs.’ (Hutcheon 5) Historical facts and characters are the subjects of most of the fictions, a transgression most of the time foretold by the titles: for instance Hawksmoor, The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde or Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem. At the same time, biographies are not free from fictionality, like Dickens in which seven independent sections, provided with their own number system, are added to some of the chapters. These sections either re-create Dickens’s fictional work, or present characters belonging to the universe of Ackroyd’s production, and they all deal with the metafictional issue of biography writing, as in the fake (or maybe real) interview of Ackroyd in the last section but one. All this creates a vast and disordered, cross-referential network through which information keeps circulating in every direction. Movement indeed is very important in Ackroyd’s work. It is most of the time chaotic, disorganized and as such prevents the establishment of any fixed pattern, both of London’s geography and of the work. This infinite movement seems to place the work beyond subjectivity since it cannot be apprehended and thus escapes the author’s control. Transiense and mobility are defined as London’s vital energy, an impersonal energy created by London’s ‘historical imperative,’2 an ineluctable movement: ‘the streets of the city are always being torn up, or demolished, or rebuilt, in a cycle of perpetual change and renewal. London is never still’ Ackroyd writes in London: The Biography about one of George Scharf’s London pictures. It is an energy that the city is subjected to, witness the use of the passive.

6London, the place chosen by Ackroyd to harbour the English tradition swells out of proportion into something unnatural, monstrous, ‘Straggling and out of all Shape’3 as Nicholas Dyer says in Hawksmoor. This poetics of excess, based on a strictly accumulative technique, gives birth to a voracious work reflecting Ackroyd’s tendency for what he calls ‘the intellectual equivalent of bulimia.’4 ‘I’m eating the past,’5 a character says in Chatterton. The author’s voice is gradually muffled by the voices of the past, swallowed by this work changed into a monstrous body, a gigantic and starving beast, thus falling into impersonal silence. The author sacrifices himself to this enormous task, to the mnemonic monster, an idea expressed by T. S. Eliot in his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent,’ the work Ackroyd most intensely converses with. In this essay Eliot claims that any work of memory is an impersonal work, that is to say a work which implies a sacrifice of personality:

What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past.... What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.6

7The author’s personality has been sacrificed to the gigantic work that he has started and such representation of London’s spatial impersonality leads one to wonder how postmodern writing is to deal with the ‘extinction of personality.’

2 From the Burial of Personality to Sublime Emotion

8In Hawksmoor London is described as a great and monstrous pile. All the information gathered by Ackroyd about Englishness is piled up in London—out of which no character ever travels —, or even in more restricted areas—the East End for example, a house, a theatre or a church. This narrowing of space comes from a desire, fully expressed by the characters, to overcome the excess of information they have to face when trying to cope with the riddle of their identity. The characters find themselves trapped within a vertical representation of space divided into strata, the image of layers recurring almost obsessively. This is most especially the case in Hawksmoor in which architecture and archaeology are prevailing themes. Such a motionless, vertical pattern is, according to Ackroyd in his biography of London, one of the consequences of the city’s perpetual movement:

Throughout [the early middle ages] there was a continual process of building and rebuilding.... When these layers of the city were excavated there lay revealed foundations of chalk and ragstone, chalk cesspits, arches of Reigate stone, building rubble, beechwood piles, oak timbers and threshold beams as well as the various impressions of walls, drains, floors, vaults, wells, rubbish-pits and stake holes. They were evidence of protracted and productive activity. (Ackroyd 2000, 53-4)

9London’s history can thus be read in its impersonal energy become still.

10Such gigantic piling-up is best illustrated by the number of lists, such as the one just quoted, that can be found in the novels and biographies, particularly the innumerable topographical lists. Here again circulation is essential since most of the characters’ (either fictional or historical) itineraries are precisely described. This is the case in The House of Doctor Dee, for example, whose first two pages are devoted to the description of the protagonist’s journey towards his new house in Clerkenwell. These lists in a way mimic the digging of London’s ground. The author’s voice, first muffled and swallowed, is gradually buried, negated into death. Indeed, as Marc Chénetier explains in his article ‘Kyrielle et liaison: propos profanes sur la liste en littérature,’ the list is at first sight a sign of impersonality erasing the enonciator’s voice and presence. The list appears as a ‘perfectly objective place.’7

11Impersonal writing of this kind, linked to the images of sacrifice and burial, gives birth to a very strong emotion. The verticality of the piling-up process described above is, according to Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry, exactly what is needed to create a sublime effect.8 The image of excess and the question of limits, both essential to Ackroyd’s representation of London are at the heart of the notion of the sublime. Now, the sublime can only be produced by greatness, be it great height, great depth or great width, by what cannot be ‘conceived in its entirety,’ (Ackroyd 2000, 2) what is beyond all understanding. The image of burial previously mentioned leads one to suppose that depth is more often represented than height and that, while the limits of London’s surface are clearly drawn (even if regularly modified), this depth is limitless. The tremendous, unnatural dimension of the town, added to the digging process produced by the paradoxical concentration of a vast amount of information within restricted areas, as well as to the image of limitless depth and to the prospect of death gives birth to a feeling of sublime terror. In his biography of London Ackroyd quotes Julian Wolfreys’s book Writing London about ‘the sinister, the threatening, monstrous inhumanity of the limitless city.’ (Ackroyd 2000, 449) The burial of personality turns out to be a source of strong emotion, of sublime emotion.

12Consequently, the sublime fear of death, linked to the poetics of excess, is often illustrated by quantification. This can be best exemplified by what Ackroyd writes about the Great Plague epidemics when he describes one of the numerous pits dug in London’s ground: ‘about forty feet in length, sixteen feet broad and twenty feet deep, containing more than a thousand corpses.’ (Ackroyd 2000, 204) Death for Ackroyd is closely linked to a process of quantification, where measurement is used mostly to draw attention to what cannot be measured. Quantification highlights excess. London seems to illustrate the fact that the weight of memory always exceeds what language may be able to assume. As an objective process, quantification turns sublime terror into an impersonal emotion.

13If emotion remains impersonal here, this going down into the grave, into the crypt will prove necessary for the work to start a new movement, a manageable and repetitive movement that will allow the author not only to pass on but to personify emotion.

3 The Personification of Emotion

14The word then, buried, shut into the crypt, becomes cryptic. First, the hammering produced by the accumulation of the voices that Ackroyd’s quotations allow to be heard causes these voices to sink into the ground; moreover, their clamour is deadened by the grave’s walls and as a consequence can no longer be heard, or at least grasped, from the surface. Consequently, the crypt as a specific underground architectural structure is not what Ackroyd is interested in. The important thing is the buried meaning contained in the grave. The recurring image of London as an underground city primarily aims at giving access to the idea of an architectural crypt, an idea which then leads to that of a verbal crypt built, dug by the textual references to the past, an ‘intertextual crypt’ to quote Catherine Lanone’s article about Chatterton.9 The crypt defines itself as buried meaning. The equivalent to such a crypt in Chatterton is, according to Catherine Lanone, the library, where the excessively intricate intertextual network may be decoded (Lanone 24). Other cryptic sites may be represented by the places which the characters systematically go back to. They are places where the characters’ past is hidden, a past which is as mysterious as the characters’ instinctive attachment to these buildings. For example, in The House of Doctor Dee, Matthew, at first reluctant, finally moves into the Clerkenwell house inherited from his father; as for Timothy in English Music, he compulsively returns to Hackney Square and to the Chemical Theatre where he used to live and work with his father when he was a child.

15The characters are prompted by their expectations to come back over and over again to the same encoded inscriptions and to try and decipher them. This recurrent movement provides the work with a repetitive pattern. Repetition introduces a structure, organizes London space, a space that had so far remained overloaded and unmanageable. The intricate and infinite intratextual and intertextual network of Ackroyd’s work becomes a repetitive system. Repetition initiates a new movement, thus allowing the work to escape the stillness forced by the crypt. This repetition is illustrated in different ways. The first and most obvious one is duplication, as embodied by the double structure of some fictions. For in fact, Hawksmoor, The House of Doctor Dee and English Music are divided into two narratives: the odd-numbered chapters are situated in the present and the other ones in the twentieth century, each series presenting the reader with different characters. However, most of them are dual characters: Nicholas Hawksmoor and Nicholas Dyer are doubles, Doppel-gängers and, in all these novels, the past highlights the present while the meaning of the narrative situated in the past can only be grasped in relation to the discoveries made by the twentieth-century narrator. What this system tends to highlight (and this is equally true of the novels composed of more than two narratives) is that the stories, the characters and the town can only become whole through this process of duplication. In order to exist, they need to repeat themselves. In other words, the work is based on self-quotation.

16The work now no longer focusses on the vast intertextual network that partook of the process of ‘depersonalization’ of the work, to take up Eliot’s phrase (Eliot 17), but on the smaller—even if still intricate—intratextual network. These self-quotations however are all slightly different, they are in fact near repetitions and as such may rather be considered as echoes. London turns into an ‘echoic city’ (Ackroyd 2000, 452), ‘an echo-chamber’ (Ackroyd 2000, 73) as stated in London: The Biography. All these near repetitions are characterized by the fact that the text is changed when echoing against a surface, be it one of the city’s surfaces or a metaphorical one. Either a self-quotation crosses the ontological frontier between the real world of the character and his imaginary universe, as in English Music, or between one narrative and the other in the double-structured novels. In this case, stone is recurrently used as the medium through which the transformation takes place, as shown by the crystal stone in The House of Doctor Dee or the cobblestone for example in Hawksmoor. It is as if the process of transmutation, so often represented in the work through the theme of alchemy and occult sciences, materialized, became tangible. The stone is the work’s symbol, a work whose texture one seems to cross physically while following the text’s transformation through the stone. Thus when, at the end of Hawksmoor, the author is supposed to join his characters, he no longer feels as if he were voraciously swallowed but assimilated. In other words, transmutation may bring personality back into the work.

17The prevailing organic metaphor, with which London: The Biography opens, the metaphor of London as body, first as monstrous and then as deathlike body, means that transmutation is in fact a transmutation of the body, and this ties in with the theme of cross-dressing, a theme associated both to that of alchemy and to the role of drama in the English tradition. The body becomes the place of transmutation. Cross-dressing is the subject of an early essay written by Ackroyd in 1979 entitled Dressing Up. Transvestism and Drag: The History of an Obsession and pervades Ackroyd’s fictional work. Pat, the sports teacher in Chatterton, Daniel Moore and Matthew’s father in The House of Doctor Dee or Elizabeth Cree in Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem are all transvestites. Susana Onega in Metafiction and Myth in the Novels of Peter Ackroyd reminds us of the importance of popular drama in Ackroyd’s work:

all of Ackroyd’s fiction may be said to reflect with greater or lesser intensity an interest in transvestism and drag as well as such popular art forms as vaudeville and pantomime, evinced, for example, in the construction of grotesque and ludicrous gay or lesbian secondary characters or of heterosexual characters related to the world of music hall.10

18For T. S. Eliot, the poet was a catalyst, also allowing a transmutation, the ‘transmutation of emotion’ (Eliot 19) into a new kind of emotion. This was supposed to be a very impersonal process, a fusion which represented ‘an escape from emotion... from personality.’ (Eliot 21) Ackroyd too may appear as a catalyst because the transmutation process happens through him, through his work, but it also happens with him. Ackroyd in fact is both creator and creature, this is what cross-dressing allows him to do. First, he is depersonalized and then his personality is revealed thanks to a process of impersonation. Ackroyd does not really represent the English tradition, he rehearses it. Susana Onega explains: ‘he tries to recreate the voices and styles of all the English writers in his own version of the English canon, joining them in a joyous unison he calls English music, capable of expressing the essence of the “true” Cockney visionary sensibility.’ (Onega 99) This allows him to create emotion like Eliot, new emotion from old ones, but also to embody all these emotions, to personify them, to experience the emotion of being created endlessly, the emotion of creation. For Ackroyd, an excavation of personality takes place with each new voice, personality is the experience of embodiment, an impersonation.

19As a conclusion I would like to quote Ackroyd on the difficulty he encountered when he wrote Eliot’s biography due to the fact that he had been forbidden to quote much from Eliot’s published production and anything at all from his unpublished one:

So how was I going to evoke the texture of the man, and of his age? The best way of doing this was in fact by attempting to reproduce the cadences and movements of his prose within my own narrative—to introduce Eliot within the texture of the book. I hoped that this would have a subliminal effect upon readers so that they might say, ‘I am here. Yes. I am seeing this.’ (Ackroyd 2002, 365-6)

20According to Ackroyd, the emotion of art, unlike Eliot’s statement, is not impersonal. It is the ability to join, to combine a reflexive movement with an outward one. By recreating Eliot’s voice, Ackroyd has created his own as well and both together are this living body: English tradition.