The Cityscape of Memory and Transition in Peter Ackroyd’s London Novels
摘要
In his London novels, Peter Ackroyd has created a complex transhistorical meta-chronotope of the capital. Principal to the spatial properties of the city is his concept of perpetual time, which stems from the cyclic and spiral understanding of temporality, and his belief in the power of the genius loci whereby some places in the city emanate potent energies that magnetise certain kinds of people to occupy them and cause certain kinds of actions to recur in them. In combination, they produce a cityscape that finds itself in a spatial–temporal continuum in which certain events, phenomena and tendencies, in varying forms and metamorphoses, tend to occur recurrently in certain areas and within diverse historical contexts. These vibrant places/spaces are always in motion, in transit, due to the ongoing and inherent processes of juxtaposition, layering, superimposition and transgression that shape their character and, in consequence, their production of meanings. As a result, they are endowed with both individual and collective memories, which have been generated along with the accumulated human experience they have absorbed over centuries. Referring to Ackroyd’s London: The Biography and selected London novels, and using the concepts of palimpsestic and multidirectional memory, this chapter attempts to show how the author renders such “heterotopic,” “third-spatial” and entre-deux places/spaces of memory as defining and constitutive elements of the cityscape’s transitivity. Its focus is placed both on how Ackroyd’s novels treat the memories of these places/spaces, that is, how they have been reflected by their occupants over different time periods, and their memory, that is, how their occupants’ experiences and acts have imprinted in their spiritual and spatial properties.