MASARYK UNIVERSITY Historicity in Peter Ackroyd´S Novels Diploma

Home , Great Fire of London, Marshalsea Road, Peter Ackroyd

MASARYK UNIVERSITY FACULTY OF EDUCATION DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

Historicity in Peter Ackroyd´s Novels Diploma Thesis

Brno 2018

Thesis Supervisor: Author Mgr. Lucie PODROUŽKOVÁ, Ph.D. Mgr. Veronika NEDVĚDOVÁ

Declaration

I hereby declare I have worked on this diploma thesis entirely on my own, using only the sources listed in the “Works Cited” section. I agree with storing this thesis in the library of the Faculty of Education at Masaryk University and making it available for study and research purposes both in electronic and print form.

March 29, 2018 Mgr. Veronika Nedvědová

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my admiration and gratitude to my supervisor, Mgr. Lucie Podroužková, Ph.D., for her guidance, kind support, invaluable advice as well as her almost superhuman patience which she provided me with during my work on this thesis. Many thanks also go to my friend, my family, colleagues as well as my students for their support.

Contents Contents ...... 4

1. Introduction ...... 7

2. Chapter 2 – Theoretical Background ...... 10

2.1. Postmodern Theory ...... 10

2.2. A Chronicler ...... 18

2.3. Image of the City ...... 22

3. Chapter 2 – Rewriting the City in Ackroyd´s Novels ...... 27

3.1. The Great Fire of London ...... 27

3.2. Hawksmoor ...... 44

4. Conclusion ...... 58

5. Works Cited ...... 61

Abstract This Master thesis examines the application and effectiveness of the postmodern genre of historiographic metafiction in writing of the British author Peter Ackroyd and it focuses on the spacialtempotal area of London in his two early novels. This work provides an overview of the notion of London as an intertextualised city building on the postmodern theory. The assertion is that even though Peter Ackroyd rejects postmodern features in his fiction and he emphasises the inherited traditional English approach, his novels demonstrate and Ackroyd´s work is a typical example of the deconstructed image of history which is redesigned as a living material into a new shape. London especially creates the concept of both original and distinct fictional world. The argument this work makes is that the parallel between Ackroyd´s historical writing and the real history provides insight into the historicity of London. The theoretical part discusses the theory of postmodernism and the concept of historiographic metafiction based on the studies of Linda Hutcheon. It also contains a short biography of the author focused on his interest in London. The practical part explores the ways establishing the essential idiosyncratic features such as a sense of place, a representation of the city as a reflection of its inhabitants´ minds, the concept of time challenging the traditional notion of temporal linearity, and the themes of crime and mystery. It examines these characteristics in two novels by Peter Ackroyd, The Great Fire of London and Hawksmoor, and it attempts to confirm their position within the overall system of historiographic metafiction.

Anotace

Tato diplomová práce se zabývá aplikací postmoderního žánru historiografické metafikce ve dvou raných dílech britského spisovatele Petera Ackroyda a zaměřuje se na oblast Londýna z hlediska času a prostoru. Tato práce vychází z teorie postmodernismu a

věnuje se konceptu Londýna, jehož pojetí vychází z techniky zpracování pojmu města založené na interpretaci textu. Tvrzení je opřeno o předpoklad, že ačkoli Peter Ackroyd ve svém díle odmítá používání postmoderních prvků a zdůrazňuje tradiční přístup v anglické literatuře, jeho romány ukazují a jsou typickým příkladem dekonstrukce představy Londýna, který autor přetváří jako živý materiál a dává městu nový tvar. Londýn vytváří dvě představy o fikčním světě: jedná se o původní a osobitý koncept. Argument, na kterém je tato práce založena, je, že paralela mezi Ackroydovým pojetím historie a skutečnou historií poskytuje vhled do historičnosti Londýna. Teoretická část se zabývá teorií postmodernismu a konceptem historiografické metafikce vycházející z prací Lindy Hutcheon. Dále obsahuje krátkou biografii Petra Ackroyda, zaměřenou na jeho zájem o Londýn. Praktická část se zabývá způsoby, které představují charakteristické jevy Ackroydových prací jako je smysl pro místo, reprezentace města jako odrazu mysli obyvatel, koncepce času, která odmítá tradiční pojetí časové linearity, téma zločinu a záhady. Tyto prvky zkoumá ve dvou románech, Velký požár Londýna a Hawksmoor, a potvrzuje jejich postavení v celkovém systému historiografické metafikce.

Key Words

Peter Ackroyd, London, British literature, historicity, postmodernism, history, historiographic metafiction, The Great Fire of London, Hawksmoor, rewriting the city, intertextuality, sense of place, notion of time

Klíčová slova

Peter Ackroyd, britská literatura, Londýn, historicita, historie, postmodernismus, historiografická metafikce, Velký požár Londýna, Hawksmoor, přetváření města, interpretace textu, smysl pro místo, pojetí času

1. Introduction

The first thing which made me interested in the novels of Peter Ackroyd was my previous studies of History and English language and literature. I realised that these two subjects are very close and this gave me the idea to carry out a research into the topic of historicity and novel. My presupposition is that the area of literature and history is rather underestimated. To narrow the wide topic of historicity in literature I have chosen one target which is historiographic metafiction. For this purpose, I chose a contemporary British author

Peter Ackroyd since he uses the works of earlier novelists as material for his own works which revolve around themes concerning the city of London. Peter Ackroyd started his writing career in early eighties and London became the unifying element of his novels and biographies. The word "London" requires cautious approach which springs from Ackroyd´s unique and distinctive retrospective vision and the knowledge of unknown (Sinclair, "The

Necromancer´s A to Z"). In his works Peter Ackroyd often covers a wide range of individuals whose behaviour, thoughts, or appearance reflect the actual city; London, The Biography becoming the masterpiece in his conceptualization of the city. He is claimed to be a postmodern writer, but the concept of postmodernism and postmodern writing is a rather broad topic and therefore I decided to concentrate only on some elements of Ackroyd´s works dealing with history and rewriting the city of London.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore how Peter Ackroyd deals with the place of

London in the context of historicity in his historiographic metafiction. The expected outcome is to prove that he destroys literary myths of historical truth and reinvents history to make it different. He intentionally takes and deconstructs the image of history as a living material which can be moulded and so he reveals us the world we live in.

More specifically, the core of this thesis is based on a detailed analysis of Ackroyd's novels, namely The Great Fire of London and Hawksmoor, within English historiographic

metafiction that brings into focus the importance of history and its literary interpretation. The overall aim is to understand how literature deals with history of London in postmodern context.

In the course of time I intended to discuss primary and secondary sources concerning the theory of postmodernism, historiography, historiographic metafiction, urbanism, and representations of London in literature. I went through electronic sources (JSTOR, EBSCO) and I supposed that various sources bring various opinions on my topic. The core of the thesis is to analyse two Ackroyd's novels which are mentioned above. Most of his novels move in the English literary history of postmodernism. The Great Fire of London rewrites Little

Dorrit, a classic novel by Charles Dickens, and Hawksmoor is projected into the era of

Christopher Wren when London was rebuilt after the Great Fire.

Peter Ackroyd´s novels are not widely known in the Czech Republic. Only a few of his novels have been translated into the Czech language so far and there has been little research into his works. Therefore, my aim is to address the gap in the existing empirical research on historicity and historiographic metafiction. The reason behind choosing these two novels is that both of them were written in 1980s and they belong to the earlier works of the writer, and the fact that both of them cover the topic of London´s burning in 1666.

The analysis of Ackroyd's novels is the main target. Besides I searched and critically analysed the secondary sources. As for critical method, I intended to rely on several postmodern theorists, mainly Nick Bentley and his Contemporary British Fiction, Linda

Hutcheon and her book A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction and her article

"Historiographic Metafiction." Other sources are the works of Susan Onega, Peter Chalupský and Berkem G. Saglam. I also referred to Ackroyd´s own writings. The variety of articles published by The Guardian provided me with the information about Ackroyd´s life and reviews of his works. Beside these most valuable material, I also worked with other sources

listed in the section "Works Cited" in the last part of the thesis. This research methodology wass to sort literature in order to identify the essential attribute of materials. Finally their synthesis provides valuable insight into Ackroyd´s fiction and thinking.

The diploma thesis is divided into two parts: a theoretical and a practical one. The theoretical part deals with chapters focused on the theoretical background introducing the author and describing the theory of historiographic metafiction. The practical part is formed by the detailed analyses of Ackroyd´s novels The Great Fire of London and Hawksmoor.

Finally, the conclusion summarises the whole research and it proves the presupposition of this thesis.

Here might be found the 'heart of London beating warm'." London: The Biography

very rapidly announces itself as Peter Ackroyd: The Autobiography. The celebrated author

transforms himself, with a showman's pass, into a city of memory. Proceeding by a series of

recognitions, he dowses for the qualities that have defined and sustained a career of heroic

endeavour. He has set himself to know everything that is to be known about an unknowable

mass: a history that is used up, a Falstaffian past that overwhelms an anorexic present.

(Iain Sinclair, "The Necromancer´s A to Z")

2. Chapter 2 – Theoretical Background

This chapter is to introduce the vast concept of postmodern theory and literature since

Peter Ackroyd is a representative of British postmodern novelists who are term postmodernist.

First, an introduction into the postmodern British literature is made and its significant features are highlighted. Next, on overview of historiographic metafiction is provided and it features relevant to Ackroyd´s works are mentioned. Finally, Ackroyd´s short biography and his vision of London is described since it is discussed throughout this thesis.

2.1. Postmodern Theory

Postmodernism is a varied movement which has developed in the late 20th century through the branches of literature, philosophy, art, and criticism among others. The term is very complex. It is characterised by "broad scepticism, subjectivism, or relativism

("Postmodernism"). To define it properly, the modernism needs to be taken into account. This literary style describes the aesthetic and cultural practices spanning from 1890s to 1930s.

However, the historical etymology relates this term to the period from 1450s in Britain and it associates the high point of it with the Enlightenment concept in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it establishes "modernity in a range of social, political and philosophical contexts" (Bentley 32). An important philosopher and theorist Jean-François

Lyotard suggested and apt definition of postmodernism when he claimed:

that modernity relates to "any science that legitimates itself with reference to a

metadiscourse [that makes] an explicit appeal to some grand narrative, such as the

dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or

working subject, or the creation of wealth." (qtd. in Bentley 32)

He also provided an explanation of postmodernism which according to him:

represents an ̔incredulity towards metanarratives’ of this kind, which is often understood

to mean a scepticism towards the grand narratives of rationalism, science, the Cartesian

self, and the prevailing economic theories in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth

centuries, including most controversially, Marxism. This scepticism towards grand

narratives has provided a fruitful area for novelists who are keen to explore the nature of

fictional narratives generally. (qtd. in Bentley 32)

As a result postmodernism dismisses the notion of grand metanarratives which

"explain many aspects of the natural or social world within a given domain of knowledge […] since they impose conformity on other perspectives or discourses" ("Postmodernism"). The postmodern indicates a mode of writing that departs from the modernist literature of the early twentieth century and at the same time it involves a philosophical perspective that is critical of the enlightenment thinking of modernity. What differentiates postmodernism from modernism is that postmodernism abounds in different approaches, practitioners and techniques. It is a term which periodizes literary history, it includes ideas of experimentation, scepticism and irony, and rejection of grand narratives and universalism. Marxist literary theorist Frederic

Jameson argued that postmodernism as a phase in cultural history was associated with "the cultural logic of late capitalism." (Bentley 33)

Bentley further claims that the term postmodernism does not relate to a fixed set of characteristics or criteria, but is a rather fluid term that takes on different aspects when used by different critics and different social commentators. (33) The development of postmodern technique in fiction has been influenced by an area of critical thought of poststructuralism.

This term defines an intellectual concept from 1950s which rejects structuralism and its description of the world as an accurate way by means of structures. The function of language in poststructuralism was to challenge the assumption of the record of realistic experience and the authors were to attempt to construct the aspects of world anew and create it in a textual

way (Bentley 33). Postmodern theorists argue that language is not "a mirror of nature" (qtd. in

"Postmoderninsm") but they based their claims on the linguistic theory of Ferdinand de

Saussure which maintains that "language is semantically self-contained, or self-referential: the meaning of a word is not a static thing in the world or even an idea in the mind but rather a range of contrasts and differences with the meaning of other words." (Postmodernism")

In addition, postmodernism disapproves of literary realism which is based on the assumption that the aspects of the world are to be represented truthfully. A literary critic Ian

Watt focused on the individual experience which characterises the novel. He gives examples of "the use of identifiable locations and periods of history, characters that are representative of people you might meet in real life, a plot structure based on cause and effect, and an assumption that language is referential and denotational." (Bentley 34) As a result of the intricate development, postmodernism can be describe as an opposite of modernism and realism, and associate of poststructuralism. Postmodernism has been developed into one of the most influential and controversial styles across a broad range of disciplines. David

Lehman defines it as an ironic attitude which is represented by the artistic techniques of fragmentation, experimentation, contradiction, and stylistic imitation (5).

Recent interest in the British literature over the last forty years is reflected by the space which has been devoted to the research and studies on contemporary literature. Nick

Bentley in his work Contemporary British Fiction (2008) refers the term "contemporary" to the period between 1975 and 2005, the first date marking the election of Margaret Thatcher as the leader of the Conservative Party and the key moment for political, social, economic and cultural changes in Great Britain (2). The latter is related to the year in which the latest references to fiction appear (1). The post-war British literature reacted to pre-war modernism and it tried to retrieve "an English realist tradition that had been diverted by modernist experimentation" (Bentley 30). The British novelists were placed into a problematical

situation in terms of approach to a form: realistic, modernist and experimental, and postmodernist.

Postmodernism is an eclectic concept loving paradoxes and being a paradox itself

(Bentley 31). Although the term refers to the present, the prefix "post" carries the meaning of the future. Postmodernism is perceived as an opposition to the sense of the traditional and ordinary, and so relating to the modern. The experimental writing of 1970s and 1980s was considered to be new and modern, but the term of "modernism" in literature was defined earlier in the twentieth century and could not be used to denote this mode of writing. As a result the prefix "post" was applied to "establish a link with this experimental attitude towards writing, whilst at the same time signalling that the experiment itself had shifted due to the changed historical situation in which writers of the late twentieth century found themselves"

(Bentley 32).

One of the trends in the contemporary British fiction is inspired by the historical novel and rewriting narratives of the past which rises from the postmodern condition of suspicion towards grand narratives. History is considered to be "a single monolithic account of the past"

(Bentley 128). In conformity with postmodern ideas, the concept of history has been pluralised "to accommodate the sense in which accounts of past events are different according to the position from where they are viewed, especially in terms of the ideological agendas that may lie behind the presentation of what appears to be an impartial view of historic events."

(Bentley 129) A typical example is given by Salman Rushdie who provided a striking image of historical narratives as "a set of competing stories, the most powerful of which survive at the expense of the less powerful, remarking that 'History loves only those who dominate her'."

(qtd. in Bentley 129)

Bentley mentions another literary critic and theorist, Linda Hutcheon, who identifies a number of postmodern novels and who is interested in recounting narratives that engage with

the past. (130) Hutcheon identifies a new mode in contemporary fiction that she calls

"historiographic metafiction" which "actively promotes a sense of historicity, and of thinking through our relationship with the past. This kind of writing is historiographic in that it self- consciously interrogates the way in which history is recorded." (Bentley 130) According to

Linda Hutcheon, postmodern theory challenges the separation of literature and history which happened in the nineteenth century. She claims that postmodern writing is based on the permeability of these branches of learning. (Poetics 105) The relationship of historiography and art dates back to Aristotle. At that time, history was connected with the revelation of the truth of what had happened in the past while on the other hand art spoke of what might have happened. Since then, history writing have used the techniques of fictional representation to create imaginative versions of the real worlds. As a result of this development, history and fiction became two genres and the relation between them was determined by the concept of the truth in narrative. (Hutcheon, Poetics 106)

However, Hutcheon deals with the process of both writing history and historical narratives. She argues that "The interaction of the historiographic and the metafictional foregrounds the rejection of the claims of both 'authentic' representation and 'inauthentic' copy alike. [In her opinion] the very meaning of artistic originality is as forcefully challenged as is the transparency of historical referentiality" (Poetics 110). The postmodern concept of the multiplicity which arose from the link of the fictitious to mendacious resulted in the fact that historiographic metafiction is based on the double awareness of fictive and factual. Moreover, it establishes the frames of truths and then crosses them, challenging the artistic originality and historical referentiality. As a result, the truth and falsity are not the right terms to be applied. (Hutcheon, Poetics 108) Besides the binary opposition between fiction and history, the protagonists of historiographic metafiction are the ex-centric, marginalized, and peripheral figures of fictional history. (Hutcheon, Poetics 114) Historical personages of William

Shakespeare are given the secondary role. They are deployed not to validate the narrative but to question its authenticity. Historiographic metafiction does not recognize either type or cultural universality. It undermines the traditional role of history in the way that it conditioned its identification with a postmodern ideology of plurality and the notion of difference.

(Hutcheon, Poetics 114)

Bentley suggests that Hutcheon adopts a different attitude from Fredric Jameson who is worried about "weakening of historicity" (Bentley 140). Jameson accuses postmodernism of using techniques that lower the status of history making it nothing but texts. Hutcheon opposes this point of view when she defends historiographic metafiction as a new trend

"which actively promotes a sense of historicity, and of thinking through our relationship with the past." (Bentley 140) She claims that it questions and critically evaluates history while problematizing the concept of the truth. She understands postmodern fiction as strengthening of historicity since it embodies "an endless desire and imperative to look again at the past, reviewing and reassessing received histories, but without the striving for closure as represented by a grand narrative of history." (Bentley 151) This concept of rewriting history undermines the nature of historical knowledge and it confuses the notion of fact and fiction.

Although both narrative forms mediate meaning, historiographic metafiction reveals a constructed, imposed meaning. (Hutcheon, Poetics 112)

Historiographic metafiction is based on the postmodern concept which confronts the paradoxes of fictive / historical representation, the particular / the general, and the present / the past. The confrontation of these sides of dichotomy is contradictory and willing to be exploited. (Hutcheon, Poetics 106). There are various tools applied to achieve this aim. One of them is the use of parody in postmodern writing. Hutcheon defines it as a perfect postmodern form since it reveals discontinuity at the heart of continuity and difference at the heart of similarity. (Poetics 11) Postmodern parody restores history and memory. It signals a

self-reflexive discourse which incorporates the past into its structure. It becomes a mode of the ex-centric characters who are marginalized by the dominant ideology. (Hutcheon, Poetics

35) It is a strategy which combats the hegemony of the modernism and realism. In this sense it puts into question the authority of any act of writing by means of locating the discourses of both history and fiction within an ever-expanding intertextual network that mocks any notion of either single origin or simple causality. (Hutcheon, Poetics 129)

Postmodern fiction is opened to history. Historiographic metafiction situates itself within historical discourse and at the same time it refuses to surrender its autonomy as fiction.

It is a mode of parody that enables the contradictory doubleness of the intertexts of history and fiction. They take on a parallel status in the parodic reworking of the textual past of both the history and literature. The textual incorporation of these intertextual pasts as a constitutive structural element of postmodernist fiction functions as a formal marking of historicity – both literary and historical. (Hutcheon, Poetics 124) The intertextual parody offers a sense of the presence of the past, but this past can be known only from its texts, its traces – be they literary or historical. Hutcheon says that postmodernism tries to retain the notion of the work of art, bit it returns the text to the historical discourse. (Poetics 125) Michel Foucault described aptly this self-conscious postmodern art as "art within the archive," which is both historical and literary. (qtd. in Hutcheon, Poetics 92)

Hutcheon asserts that the parody is not to destroy the past. Its purpose is to point out to the postmodern paradox and both to enshrine it and to question it. Julia Kristeva supported this paradox by her theory of the "irreducible plurality of texts within and behind any given text." (Hutcheon, Poetics 126) The concept of intertextuality challenged the relationship between the author and the text, and replaced it with the one between the reader and text. The literary work is not considerate to be original, but the text derives its meaning and significance form the prior discourses. The intertextuality puts the centre of textual meaning

into the history of discourse itself. (Hutcheon, Poetics 126) Hutcheon accentuates the definition of postmodernism in which:

the notion of parody as opening the text up, rather than closing it down, is important

one: among the many things that postmodern intertextuality challenges are both closure

and single, centralized meaning. Its willed and wilful provisionality rests largely upon

its acceptance of the inevitable textual infiltration of prior discursive practices. The

typically contradictory textuality provides and undermines context. (Poetics 127)

Another characteristic of historiographic metafiction is related to the deliberate falsification of used details and historical data, which are incorporated. It plays upon the truth and lies of the historical record. It incorporates the historical facts into the narrative, but it does not assimilate them. As a result historiographic metafiction "acknowledges the paradox of the reality of the past but its textualized accessibility to us today." (Hutcheon, Poetics 114)

Reader´s knowledge is derived from the knowledge of the past which is mediated by textual version. Ackroyd´s Dickens is and is not the historical Charles Dickens. The reader only knows the British writer by the way of texts which Ackroyd collected to create his biographies and novels. As a result historiographic metafiction of writing history is an act of fiction which is characterised by the doubleness of inscribing of both historical and literary intertexts. We know that the past existed, but we know it today only through its texts, and so it is connected to the literature. Although the historiographic metafiction is historical, history is not truth. The past arrives in the form of texts and textualized remainders. (Hutcheon, Poetics

128-129).

Historiographic metafiction confronts the literature with history employing the mode of themes and forms. For example, Ackroyd´s three-volume biography about Charles Dickens contains the fictionalized meeting of the author and the great writer. (Ackroyd, "Cockney

Visionaries) To rewrite the past means to open it up to the present. Such is the teaching of

Ackroyd´s novel Hawksmoor. Other historiographic metafiction points to other implications of the rewriting of history. Ackroyd´s The Great Fire of London is an apt example. Hutcheon contrasts historiographic metafiction with historical novel. She states that historiographic metafiction is self-conscious in the manipulation of history and it deliberately falsifies historical details "in order to foreground the possible mnemonic failures of recorded history and the constant potential for both deliberate and inadvertent error (Hutcheon, "Pastime" 62-

63). Ackroyd emphasises this strategy in his fiction "particularly when it comes to biographical facts and even the most important detail is sometimes distorted" (Saglam 8).

The novels of Peter Ackroyd, one of the most acclaimed writers of British fiction and non-fiction today, are identified as postmodern texts, and most of his critics, including Susana

Onega, have aligned his novels with historiographic metafiction and typical postmodernist features. However, Ackroyd himself rejects this description and he stresses the innate traditional English approach (Onega, "Interview" 217) and the influence of poetry which

"didn´t disappear [and] just went into the fiction" (Onega, "Interview" 212). The aim of this thesis is to prove that even though the author refuses the categorization of his works into the system of postmodern literature, his novels demonstrate the typical features of historiographic metafiction.

2.2. A Chronicler

The Guardian describes Peter Ackroyd to be a prolific writer (Hattenstone, "Tales of the City"). Having started his career as a poet and literary editor for The Spectator magazine, he has acquired reputation as a novelist, biographer and historian. For his books, both fictional and nonfictional, he has looted the treasure chest of the British history, culture and literature.

He is noted for the volume of works based on the careful and extensive research; deriving his main inspiration from the capital city of the United Kingdom. He has borrowed as many

characters as he was able to move them in time and plant them into London. Ackroyd has created the chronicle of the city starting it in 1399 with The Clerkenwell Tales and ending it in the 3700s with The Plato Papers. In this time span, he observes the relationship between

London´s past and present. He claims that William Blake made the biggest impact on his work as he was a powerful, significant thinker and philosopher. Ackroyd´s works are as a chapter in an unfinished work which will be ended by the author´s death. He produced the biographies of Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Charles Dickens, William Blake, Thomas More,

Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, Charlie Chaplin, and a mammoth book on London. The list of novels includes The Great Fire of London, Hawksmoor,

Chatterton, The Lambs of London, and Three Brothers.

Peter Ackroyd was born on 5 October 1949 in East Acton, London. He never knew his father. He was brought up only by his mother who was a devoted Catholic in a council house and "the city became the landscape of his imagination." (O´Mahony, "London Calling") This fact influenced Ackroyd in his mysticism. The sad and unhappy characters in his novels spring in Ackroyd´s nature of being melancholic and likely to be hurt. His Cambridge tutor

Richard Gooder recalls that "He never made a point at anybody's expense. If someone made one at his, he was wounded and didn't retaliate. He was not exactly self-effacing but certainly not aggressive." (qtd. in O´Mahony, "London Calling") The sense of the past, his identification with the character, and the belief that there are certain people "to whom or through whom the territory – the place, the past – speaks" (O´Mahony, "London Calling") make his writing brilliant and unputdownable.

In Ackroyd´s young world everything happened naturally. He loved books, read newspaper at five and wrote a play about Guy Fawkes at nine. He attended St Benedict´s, an independent Roman Catholic day school situated in Ealing. Ackroyd was first interested in poetry. At Clare College, in Cambridge, he was active in poetry circles and he graduated with

double first in English literature. He published his first book of poems called Ouch! in 1971 followed by another one called Lonodn Lickpenny two years later. He wrote his first book of prose at Yale. It was a polemic called Notes for a New Culture where he presented his opinion on the decline of British literature. Later he explained that he "was perplexed and dismayed by the lack of courage in English poetry." (Onega and Ackroyd, 210)

After return to London, Ackroyd became the youngest literary editor of the Spectator.

He is said to have been refreshingly straightforward. He wrote what he really thought, e.g. he dismissed Auden´s poetry as "dreadful stuff," or he accused Nabokov of the literary equivalent of "playing with himself" (O´Mahony, "London Calling"). According to his agent

Giles Gordon Ackroyd showed interest in paradox, word and language, and he was a great debater.

Since 1980s he has been a full-time writer who is able to publish one book a year. He lives in his flat in central London working on three books at the same time. In 1999 he suffered from a heart attack, spending one week in comma which is an interesting episode in his life since it happened a day after he submitted the manuscript of his work London: The biography. Ackroyd believes that he was confronted with one of the oldest truth about the city when he claims that "London can kill" ("BBC" 00:01:36). This turned out to be true.

His novels are based on the biographies and "the biographer´s concerns with the patterns of history and careful evocations of character and period." (O´Mahony, "London

Calling") Peter Ackroyd regards many attributes of the historiographic metafiction to be a part of English tradition. He claims that "the history of English literature can profitably be seen as a history of thefts and plagiarisms, of formal borrowings and melodic echoes." (The

Collection 207) He follows that "the essential constituents [of postmodernism] (theatricality and an awareness of the relativity of style) have always been an essential component of

English taste. […] Postmodernism is simply a belated academic recognition of what is a very

old tradition." (The Collection 259) Ackroyd´s own techniques of writing – rewriting, intertextuality, and parody – emphasises this old national tradition.

Almost all Ackroyd´s novels and biographies up to 2008, except for The Last

Testament of Oscar Wild, The Light, and Milton in America, are situated in London. It seems that this city became a unifying element of is works and research. Not only does London create the frame of his fictional narratives, it is also taken as the main subject of his nonfictional studies London: The Biography, London Under, and Queer City. It is the infinity which lies the ancient and modern city beside each other. The "relics of the past now exist as part of the present. It is in the nature of the city to encompass everything." (London: The

Biography 760)

Ackroyd´s writing style is elaborated and experimental. History, time and place are crucial elements which Ackroyd uses to structure his fiction. In the interview with Jeremy

Gibson, Ackroyd said that "[writing the novel was] an attempt to infuse the past and the present and suggest that the past can only really exist in the present, and the present in the past" (Gibson and Wolfreys 223). Although he talked about The Last Testament of Oscar

Wild, he sticks to this principle in all his novels. As in Hawksmoor, different time periods fold into one another across centuries either structurally or thematically. He produces the concrete historical moments, roots them in London, and "refracts the social and political realities of the present through the prism of the past" (Lewis 10 – 11).

Ackroyd is very artful and imaginative when he creates the reality of his novels. He uses history to justify the existence of the book. His fiction depends on the textual sources as history itself is grasped through existing texts. He considers the historical facts to be rather neutral and so he places them into interpretative framework to breathe new life into them. He also invents the language for the past to evoke the emotional atmosphere (Gibson and

Wolfreys 224). The interpretative quality of history is also emphasised by Linda Hutcheon as an essential element of the historiographic metafiction.

2.3. Image of the City

The history of the city cannot be reduced to small pieces, representing London in the

19th century and then jumping into the 1980s. It is a complex structure reflecting annular circles of history, representation, and literary and urban movements (Lehan 4). The study of culture provided several urban visions, among them the city as a place of commerce, industry, hospitality, community, individuality, symbolism, mysticism, conspiracy and others. (Lehan

4-6) Lehan claims that there are forces beneath the surface of modern city which are as old as our origins. These are disruptive forces, natural disasters and what-the-city-cast-off forces (6).

The city has been influencing the human fate for over three hundred years. Richard

Lehan defines urbanism as "the very heart of Western culture" (3) and the modern city as "an

Enlightenment construct and the literary and cultural response to that idea – the dissenting paradigm – from the eighteenth to the present." (3) He understands the city as an evolving construct influencing and influenced by literary styles of comic realism, romantic realism, naturalism, modernism, and postmodernism (with its subgenres like a detective story). (3) As the time passed, the city was moulded by various tools, e.g. after 1666 it was the plans and portraits drawn up by Christopher Wren and in the nineteenth century Charles Dickens reflected the change in urban life in his novels. Each new literary technique transformed the older views of the city. (Lehan 4-5)

Ackroyd follows the line of urban identity that reveals our secrets and cultural values.

He combines historical and literary approaches to conceptualize the new city. As a historian he emphasises the origins of the city, physical laws and effects of the city on its inhabitants and as a writer of literature he relies on imaginative systems. (Lehan 6-7)

Lehan claims that "the city and its literature share textuality – that the way reading literary texts are analogous to the ways urban historians read the city. (8) Since the city is a complex and difficult structure, diversity becomes a key to to its beginnings and continuities.

It also challenges disorder and chaos. (Lehan 8)

Peter Ackroyd describes London as "a vast, complex and confusing city which has existed now for 2,000 years." ("The Best Books") He claims that the city was built upon the imperatives of money and power. Its growth has taken a thousand of different forms. ("The

Best Books")

Peter Ackroyd imagines London as "a human body [which] is striking and singular"

(London: The Biography 1). He uses the metaphor of "a living, breathing being which is capable of vengeance and violence." ("BBC" 00:01:11) He thoroughly searched chronicles and historical documents which revealed the records that London has burnt many times.

Ackroyd observed that the city acted as an invitation for fire and destruction. However, it grew stronger and mightier after each conflagration. Ackroyd claims that London was forged in fire which is one of the principal forces in its history. ("BBC" 00:02:40) He also asserts that

London is a murderer who changes silently and invisibly like an indestructible living being.

("BBC" 00:05:59)

Historical and literary London is arguably the most ambitious project of Peter

Ackroyd. London appears in all his non-fiction and fiction works. He reconstructs the city in his seminal work London: The Biography. In this giant project, which took twenty years to accomplish, Ackroyd returned to the material that inspired him in his fiction writing. Sinclair writes that "All the contrary currents of London life are on display, the grand spectacles and sacrifices" and that "Ackroyd had maintained a gold-top literary profile by ventriloquizing the dead – Blake, Wilde, Dickens, Thomas More." ("The Necromancer´s")

Ackroyd envisions London as a place where the "past is a form of occluded memory, in which the presence of earlier generations is felt rather than seen. It is an echoic city, filled with shadows." (London 448) The writer invented a kind of religious sense when describing

London which he considers to be a pagan place. He believes that the place can "affect the character and behaviour of the people" (Ackroyd, "Cockney Visionaries") who live in it.

Ackroyd suggests that past and present are in locked in mysterious embrace everywhere. It represents millions of human lives which have come and gone. The city is a

"part of a large process, pattern which arises up through centuries" ("BBC" 00:44:13).

Ackroyd likes old maps. When looking into them, he can see how quickly London spread and grew. ("BBC" 00:06:08) London is a city of ancient origin. As such it went through the changing human history while accommodating itself to the changing conditions. It mirrored and recorded the prosperity, hardship and secrets of human world.

Ackroyd´s novels draw attention to the streets of London. The oldest recorded street called the Ironmonger Lane is from the twelfth century and it bears the signs of the destruction caused by fire. This combustion dates back as early as the fourth century. Other development also shows a great number of cases when the fire happened. Ackroyd perused the records and he noticed that the alignment reveals the continuity. The underground layers show the fire devastation ("BBC" 00:10:38). As a result Ackroyd came up with the whole theory of redness. He dressed London into the red colour. This is confirmed by the fact that the officials also have worn red uniforms. Generally, red is a colour of blood which is connected to violence and that is why London has fierce and deadly spirit inherited from the

Celts. Ackroyd goes even further in his assertion when he points to Roman ruins of an amphitheatre which London hides under the concrete layer of the modern age. In this mighty construction, the bloody sports and games took place. Consequently, London is built on this secret bloody arena and red is a typical sign of the city.

According to some ancient writers, the history of London is connected to the ancient

Troy, to the city destroyed in flames. Troy functions as an image of mythical combustion.

Brutus compares London to New Troy. For this reason, London Stone was brought from the

Old Troy to protect the city and a proverb started to be hold: "if the stone is safe the city will flourish". ("BBC" 00:24:55) Moreover, the London mythology is ruled by death and bad signs. There are superstitions, e.g. when the howling of dogs at night, comets and eclipses.

The London houses refuse to be numbered by the thirteen.

Ackroyd sees the city as a place of ancient spirit which has survived until the present days. The character of London had been established in the earliest years ("BBC" 00:15:33). It was a site abounding with merchants, workers, traders and immigrants. These people are here still today. Neither did the fires of the 19th century devastate its mystery and attractiveness.

The fire is a phenomenon which is usually considered to be a theatrical performance drawing the attention of London inhabitants, e.g. the event of The Great Fire was recreated into a fireworks performance in the 19th century. ("BBC" 00:31:20)

However, the defining moment is the 1666 fire. After this event Christopher Wren draw and built his masterpiece which withstood the bombing of the Second World War. This hell threw London back in time. The Blitz uncovered the ruins of ancient times. London uncovers its history after each burning and bombing. It is an evidence of continuity and a sense of ancient. Each inferno represents a new hope, spirit of survival and reconstruction.

After the Blitz, London was rebuilt again, but in stones and glass. ("BBC" 00:40:00)

In the BBC documentary Ackroyd emphasises that every journey throughout its streets becomes a journey into the past which starts in Roman times. The atmosphere of London attracts and it stimulates artists and writers such as Virginia Woolf ("BBC" 00:16:01) who was forced to leave it after her doctors had discovered that "the excitement of the city provoked her mental turmoil and her attempt at suicide" ("BBC" 00:16:51). Ackroyd himself

suffered a heart attack after he had finished his masterpiece and he even refuses to leave the city. He hates the countryside. (Chalupský, Horror and Beauty 11)

Ackroyd hates talking about his work. He claims that he "can't even remember the names of the characters." (O´Mahony, "London Calling") However, in a lecture entitled

"London Luminaries and Cockney Visionaries" he allowed himself a short autobiography and he also gave the most coherent outline of his London vision and the characters he has chosen to write about. His intention was to define the continual process of London existence, its development and violence. Ackroyd says that London luminaries and Cockney visionaries express the true nature and spirit of London which has gone unrecognised and unacknowledged. (342) This ignorance of the past is present, it is around us. According to

Ackroyd London´s sensibility derives its energy from variety, spectacle and display. This sensibility is a combination of pathos, comedy, tragedy and farce. ("London Luminaries") The inheritance of Cockney visionaries is this:

they were preoccupied with light and darkness, in a city that is built in the shadows of money and power; all of them were entranced by the scenic and the spectacular, in a city that is continually filled with the energetic display of people and institutions. They understood the energy of London, they understood its variety and they also understood its darkness. But they are visionaries because they represented the symbolic dimensions of existence in what Blake called "Infinite London" – in this vast concourse of people they understood the pity and mystery of existence just as surely as they understood its noise and its bustle. (Ackroyd,

"London Luminaries" 346-347)

Ackroyd´s conception of London is created by a number of idiosyncratic features.

Such characteristics include intertextuality, criminality, occultism, mysticism, theatricality, irrationality, genus loci, and a concept of time. Some of these notions are discussed in the next chapter.

3. Chapter 2 – Rewriting the City in Ackroyd´s Novels

This chapter is grounded on the examination of individual novels and it provides the analysis of how Ackroyd deals with the historicity and historiographic metafiction in his novels. The aim is to determine the choices and techniques employed by the author and to identify common features which will provide the material for the conclusion.

3.1. The Great Fire of London

The Great Fire of London is the first Ackroyd´s novel published in 1982. The author employed for the first time the technique of overlapping history in different parts of London which later became a synonymous style with him. He portrays the city of the twentieth century as he based the narrative on the Dickens´s novel of Little Dorrit. He establishes the dialogue between the contemporary and historical, or 1980s and Victorian London. Lewis claims that "Ackroyd´s novel follows closely Dickens´s template particularly with regard to the depiction of London as a kind of a wasteland." (18) He continuous that London is bleak when he says that: "It is a city of wailing fire-engine sirens and buzzing flies, of sleazy bars where men in leather look for one-night stands, and of tramps loitering around tube stations.

All the characters are looking for ways to escape their sterile lives. The novel is full of images of prison and confining relationships." (18) This is underlined by Ackroyd´s depiction of the city as a dark, decaying place in all cases in the book. Ackroyd tries to represent Victorian

London and the authority of a prison as a decaying and repressive institution (Ackroyd, Great

Fire of London 120)1 achieves this purpose perfectly.

Besides Ackroyd´s darkness which casts the shadow on the whole London society, the city is depicted as a component of everyday reality. When Little Arthur looks for his window, he can see "a familiar scene: the backs of other houses, other windows with their curtains

1 abbreviated as GFOL 27

down, the small gardens with their stunted shrubs and bushes." (Ackroyd, Great Fire of

London 5) The streets which appears in the novel such as the Borough High Street really exists. In addition, Ackroyd´s sense of London underlines the narrative in the way that the scenic view of the city arises from the scraps of the story and it "casts significant light on the condition of contemporary man." (Onega 20) The novel is based on the sense of belonging to a particular area which "[affects] the mood and behaviour of individual, both consciously and unconsciously." (Lewis 128)

Ackroyd beliefs that if we want to examine the distinctive conditions of contemporary life, we must turn to the city (qtd. in Chalupský, Horror and Beauty 165). Arthur Feather lives in the Fun City which enables him to cope with his mental disease. London is hostile city for

Audray "and so into the dark street they went, walking across shadows, scuttling against the wind which tried to push them back" (Ackroyd, GFOL 9) There are more instances in the novel when the city is unfriendly towards the characters. The underside of the city is represented by the tramps who helps Audrey to set fire in the London film sets. The city becomes embodiment of Audrey and tramps. It is embodiment of neglecting and paranoia.

Audrey believes that she does London a favour (GFOL 162), she destroys the bad city and makes it a better place for living.

The novel´s structure consists of four narratives and according to Susan Onega it resembles a typical Victorian multiple plot novel (27-28). The story revolves around four central characters, namely Spencer Spender, Rowan Phillips, Little Arthur and Audrey

Skelton who are gradually introduced in the first four chapters. The following chapters are developed into the elaborated network of relationships that tie together the lives of all characters in the narrative "whose paths meet either because they are 'intellectually' interested in Dickens, like Spenser and Phillips, or because they live in the area where the plot of Little

Dorrit was set, like Little Arthur and Audrey Skelton." (Onega 20) The chapters are juxtaposed as the novel progresses, however, they alternate in changing the characters.

The story is introduced into the 19th century when an agent Pancks discovers that the

Dorrits inherited a great fortune (Ackroyd, GFOL 3). From the very beginning of the book, the narrative is tinged with the apocalypse and mysterious reincarnation. This is emphasised at the end of the first two chapters which are concluded by ominous sentences saying: "He hardly knows what he is saying." (Ackroyd, GFOL 7) and "She had to find him before something terrible happened." (Ackroyd, GFOL 10) The effect is to alienate the reader with the disastrous consequences the living in the city brings.

The first chapter is opened with the character of Little Arthur, the incarnated character of Little Feather and a proprietor of Fun City. This amusement arcade is visited by a young couple Audrey Skelton and Tim Coleman who know Arthur as a smiling and quiet man.

However, this time he gets furious and expels them from the arcade. The complexity of his story is accomplished when he is accused of a murder of a young girl and placed into the same prison where the film of Little Dorrit is being filmed.

Chapter three starts the key narrative of the book. Spenser Spender, a film maker, finds inspiration for his next venture when he tries to remember which book the sentence "I never should have touched you, but I thought you were a child." (Ackroyd, GFOL 11) come from and which persistently haunts him. When he discovers that he has a great theme of Little

Dorrit which is described as "London itself" (Ackroyd, GFOL 12), he realises that he can use a real prison as his model, create pictures and images, and probe mystery (Ackroyd, GFOL

12). One of the key aspects of Ackroyd´s writing is using a postmodern technique of intertextuality. Ackroyd intentionally imposes one text upon another which creates specialtemporal disruptions. (Komsta 168) He uses the classic novel of Charles Dickens as an intertextual invader, giving each of the characters a different perspective on this novelist.

Komsta argues that "Ackroyd´s novel is constructed upon conflicting attempts at defining whose version of Little Dorrit is the real one." Seen from this perspective, Ackroyd imprisoned Dickens´s novel within a postmodern novel. (168)

The whole conception of rewriting and reinventing London through the text is underlined in The Great Fire of London by the fact that Ackroyd used Dickens´s novel "as a means of recovering London´s history" (Onega 27). However, Spender realizes that there are a lot of interpretations of the original text and he does not "want to be further confused: each time a new interpretation of Little Dorrit [is] sprung upon him" (Ackroyd, GFOL 85). There are found three interpretations of Dickens´s Little Dorrit in the novel. The first one is provided by Sir Frederick who wants to abandon the idea of working on the film in the prison.

This fact is strictly refused by Spenser Spender who objects that "this would mean altering the entire structure and idea of the film." (Ackroyd, GFOL 151) Another meaning of the book is given by Job Penstone, a professor of Victorian social history whom Spenser meets in a restaurant. It is provided in the dialogue with his students when they complain about

Dickens´s anti-feminist attitude since there are "no real women, that is, just male stereotypes."

(Ackroyd, GFOL 83) Spenser admits that this idea is constructive and he likes the idea of

"giving the film more of a documentary look." (Ackroyd, GFOL 84) But he dismisses it when he imagines the scene where London is presented as a dark fearful city whose noise and spectacle reduces the human figures (Ackroyd, GFOL 84). The last interpretation and the one accepted by Spenser is put by Rowan Phillips who sees Little Dorrit "in terms of its symbolic structure and the ambiguity of its images." (Ackroyd, GFOL 90)

Ackroyd chose the prominent Victorian novelist Charles Dickens, "whom he considers one of the most outstanding London writers." (Chalupský, "Like a Furnace" 12) His conception of Dickens and Dickensian London is explained in the words of Spenser "Dickens understood London. He was a great man. He knew what it was about. He knew that in a city

people behave in different ways like they were obsessed. He was here when it all started. He knew what was going to happen." (Ackroyd, GFOL 16)

Another character important in the interpretation of London, Rowen Phillips, appears in the fourth chapter. He is a tutor in English literature at Cambridge University "involved in a critical study of Charles Dickens" (Ackroyd, GFOL 19). Even though he is of a Canadian origin,

Ackroyd used this character to enter the story himself. When the author claims that Rowen writes "books in the same way that other people doodle – compulsively, with little affection, defending himself against criticism by ignoring each work as soon as it was finished," he provides an apt characterization of Ackroyd´s own writing. Moreover, Rowen is a homosexual which corresponds with the sexual preference of the author. Rowen arrives in London to find out where Marshalsea prison was located. During his quest he meets the tramps who inhabit the area of the former penal institution and Tim who becomes his secret lover.

The strong sense of place is a feature of historiographic metafiction which connects

Ackroyd, Dickens and other character. Ackroyd enters the novel as the character of Rowan to be able to interpret Little Dorrit. He also "reincarnated" Dickens into the novel as the character of Spenser Spender. His marriage which splits up reminds of marital problems Dickens had when he began to write this novel. In this sense, Ackroyd creates a framework for his imaginative interpretation of London.

Spenser´s life is connected with a prison since he grew up beside it. He considered this brick building to be a real image of human who holds a mystery, fate and death around them.

(Ackroyd, GFOL 11) When Spenser realised that he was going to make a film of Little Dorrit, he likened his main theme of London to the prison. Ackroyd elaborates this metaphor further in the novel. The capital is represented as a cage. When Rowan is strolling through the

London night he senses it as being "like a cloth placed over the cage of a bird."(Ackroyd,

GFOL 71) Ackroyd used the term of cage as a synonym for prison.

The first part of the novel is textually locked in the Marshalsea Prison. The characters of the narrative are eager to find its location. Ackroyd shows a genuine sense of metaphor when he allows Rowan to describe the place as "A small open space, […] it was surrounded by large tower-blocks, so that it resembled a small wound which had never healed" (24).

Marshalsea is used as a metaphor for London and literary representation of the city. The novel can be read as a text which explores the theme of London based on the portrayal of the city as a prison.

The author opens his novel with the preface entitled "the story so far" (Ackroyd,

GFOL 3) where he summarizes the story of Little Dorrit. Even though it evokes the association between Ackroyd´s novel and Dickens´s classic, the last sentence of the chapter claiming "Although it could not be described as a true story, certain events have certain consequences ... ." (Ackroyd, GFOL 3) breaks the continuity between these two works. Onega suggests that "the words can be interpreted simply as a warning that Dickens´s writing of

Little Dorrit was not a self-contained act, that, once created, the novel will condition the work of successive generations of writers." (Ackroyd, GFOL 19) This idea promotes the main plot of the narrative which unfolds from the intention of Spenser Spender to transform Dicken´s classic into a film version. Onega follows that "the 'consequences' of unearthing and appropriating Little Dorrit in order to recreate it go beyond the technical bounds of intertextual indebtedness and affect the lives of the people involved in the project in very awkward ways." (20)

According to Komsta Ackroyd´s vision of London reflects the city as "detached from its cultural heritage and subsequently degenerated into a textual reprise' of Dickensian city."

(169) However, it is not the copy, but a prisoner and a prison. (Komsta 170). The fact that most of the meetings and activities happen around and in Marshalsea Prison (Spenser´s film is made there, Rowan meets Tim outside it, Audrey´s séance draws her attention to it), the area

functions as a "powerful special area" and a "microcosmic manifestation" of a wider London

(Chalupský, Horror and Beauty 151). Komsta claims that the prison influences the

"spatiotemporal mechanisms governing the presented narrative´s world, transforming the city into a prisonscape." (175)

Another key aspect of Ackroyd´s writing is placing textual traps into his novels. One of the typical examples is using a misnomer. The textual aspect of the city is represented by the title of the novel. The event of the Great Fire of London is not mentioned in the novel at all. Using the 1666 conflagration, Ackroyd places a textual trap for readers who learn that the title is intentionally misleading and that Ackroyd´s novel has nothing to do with this historical event. The central plot of the novel revolves around the film adaptation of Little Dorrit which is destroyed by its own protagonists and culminates in a fire which destroys the film sets and the surrounding parts of London. The term Great Fire of London is an eponym for an event which happened three hundred years later.

The narrative is constructed on Dickens´s text. Even though the introductory chapter titled "the story so far,"(Ackroyd, GFOL 3) provides a plot summary of the first part of Little

Dorrit, the text is flawed by an error. Ackroyd implies that Arthur Clennam discovers the details about the fortune that the Dorrits can claim and that his agent, Pancks, assisted him.

Lewis points to chapter 35 of Dickens´s novel where "Pancks astonishes Clennam with this discovery. It is one made entirely on his own initiative and at his own expense." (18) Another mistake occurs when Rowan Phillips and Tim Coleman are walking down Marshalsea Road after visiting the site where a prison once stood. The Cambridge academic tells Tim of a scene from the Dickens novel when Little Dorrit and Little Mother spent all night walking up and down Borough High Street. Crossing London Bridge, the two women meet a crazed woman who thinks that Amy is a child. The Person referred to here as "Little Mother" is the simpleton Maggy. But in the Dickens novel it is actually Maggy who uses that name to refer

to Little Dorrit herself. Rowan, then is confused in retelling his anecdote. In these two examples Dickens´s text is corrupted. Using the tool of the falsification either of the title or of some parts of the text, Ackroyd underlines the credibility of the novel and he enhances the story. He also empathises the role of the novel as a mode of presentation of historical events which are not limited but open to fictionalization. In this sense the purpose of the narrative is to open insight into the past.

Although the novel takes place in contemporary London, its plot is determined by a different historical period so the author uses London´s past "as a trope for the repressed underbelly of modern life and identity" (qtd. in Chalupský, "Like a Furnace" 11) Ackroyd adopted "historical setting and characters in order to address a wide range of present-day concerns" and invited "a felt sense of connections with people, places, and events of the past"

(qtd. in Chalupský, "Like a Furnace" 11). To achieve this past feeling he used the concept of reincarnation. As the story develops, Audrey Skelton, a bored girl dissatisfied in her job, attends a séance held in the house of Miss Norman. She loses consciousness and her body is visited by the ghost of Amy Dorrit, who introduces herself as "the child of Marshalsea" (40).

Onega suggests that "in the world of The Great Fire of London, the boundaries between fiction and reality are one non-existent, that the difference between fictional characters and real people; between real and fictional Great Fires, and between real and fictional worlds simply does not hold." (31) The explanation lies in the moment when the spirit of Little Dorrit enters the body of Audrey Skelton. The reader expects the difference between the fictional and real worlds. However, the reincarnation of Little Dorrit into Audrey presuppose "either the fictionality of the visionary telephone operator, or the reality of the

Dickensian character." (Onega 30)

The novel revolves around the real and fictional worlds. As is revealed at the end of the novel, the latter one is dominated by two sets – a prison and a spectacle. (Komsta 169)

The first eighteen chapters are locked in the text of Dickens´s narrative in the context of

Marshalsea Prison. The rest of the chapters is based on the spectacle when a prison house is transformed into a film setting and finally a fire scene. (Komsta 169) As far as the time notion is concerned, Komsta suggests that the present is:

understood here as the repetitive present of the performance, [it] denotes the status of

Ackroyd´s text as a revision of the chronotope established in Dickens´s Little Dorrit.

Time is essentially stripped off its past and future, enclosed as a result within the frame

of the all-encompassing now. The implied repetitiveness of the novel´s temporality will

be validated in the observation of the characters, who are forced to remain within their

roles, deprived subsequently of any development and thus – inherently static. (Komsta

169)

Ackroyd possesses a strong sense of place. Chapulský points to Mangham´s practice called "archeology of the imagination which explores "the historical layering of experience that has accumulated in a particular place." (qtd. in "Like a Furnace" 19) Spencer is aware of this feature when he explains Laetitia why London should play a special role in his film saying:

There´s something strange about London […] That´s why the Romans built their ruins

here and everything. I´m sure here´s something to it, some kind of magic or something.

Did you know if you drew a line between all of Hawksmoor´s churches, they would

form a pentangle? Isn´t that weird? (Ackroyd, GFOL 16)

Ackroyd demonstrates that the ruins are the evidence of the city´s historical and mystical heritage (Komsta 177), and its past. The element of location in his novel is fundamental for understanding of human history. Unlike Spenser, other characters are insensible of the city.

They consider it static, buried in present, rejecting everything past and future. For them, the

capital is imprisoned in temporariness. (Komsta 177) As Spenser and Laetitia go out to eat they:

walked out into the King´s Road, the old woman passed them at the corner, pushing one

pram ahead and dragging one pram behind her. She came this way often, aiming with

single-minded determination for a row wooden benches by the Royal Hospital. Her

prams were filled with scraps of old clothes and newspapers, empty tins of Horlicks and

old bottles stuffed with rags. She simply added material to the piles; the stuff at the

bottom of the prams could not have been seen, or touched, for many year. It represented

the remnants of the Chelsea street, perhaps the only history they had. (Ackroyd, GFOL

14)

Here the character of the old homeless woman symbolizes the narrative´s separation from the past. She signifies the discarded history of the area, piled in her pram. The newspaper represents the past rejected by all characters. (Komsta 177) This is emphasised several pages later when Rowan is trying to find Marshalsea Prison he gets lost in the labyrinth of streets which are full of "cigarette packets and old newspapers discarded in the already crowded gutters; scraps of old front pages, like fragments of conversation, had been blown together.

CHINA ATOM SCARE, AMERICA ACCUSES, SOVIET THREAT." (Ackroyd, GFOL 22)

By means of using a paraphrase, Ackroyd placed history into a gutter. (Komsta 177)

The impression of historicity and the sense of entrapped past are intensified in the moment when Spenser and Laetitia are eating out. The old Edwardian restaurant with "Old

English agricultural implements" and "a large blown-up photograph of "Derby Day 1911"

(Ackroyd, GFOL 15) becomes an emblem of historicity. Komsta suggests that "The fake past of the diner is an indication of its intense presentness in which the moment of now is connected with the past only through the act of imitation and repetition, aimed at producing a

'rising tide of false nostalgia' within the patrons of the place." (177) This affinity between present and past provides the novel with dynamism and originality.

In the final chapters, the development of all characters approaches to the forthcoming disaster; Audrey loses her Job, Timothy is confused about his sexual life, and Laetitia abandons her husband. Spender meets first Job Penstone and then Rowen Phillips, and they discuss the adaptation of Dickens´s novel into a film. After six weeks of shooting, an incident causes a strike of the film crew. Spenser and Rowen meets in the set which was created by the river and they discuss the problem with union demands when suddenly Audrey appears and ignites the place. At the end of the novel, Spenser dies in the flames and Little Arthur manages to set free himself and other prisoners.

The Great Fire which breaks up at the end of the novel is as apocalyptic as the fire in

1666 and it reveals the connection between the present and the past since an inscription on the wall of Marchalsea Prison says that it was destroyed "on December 14, 1885" (Ackroyd,

GFOL 25) There is a mythical cycle linking the three periods which re-enacts "the same apocalyptic fire, signalling the transition from one historical cycle to the next, each closing a darker and darker phase of decline" (Onega 26).

At the start of the novel, Timothy Coleman is watching television where "there was some sort of drama concerning fireman" (Ackroyd, GFOL 9). This scene depicts London as a red place full of sirens and suspense. However, Timothy is interrupted by Audrey who asks him about the location of an old prison. This section indicates author´s intention to connect the 1666 fire with the modern fire on television. And at the same time it joins Audrey´s intention to find out the location of the prison which was destroyed in the fire. Onega argues that the area of London has been inhabited by:

an unbroken chain of successive generations of men and women whose traces are

still recognisable on the faces of the people as well as in the alleys, the squares,

and the buildings […] they are somehow connected to the past of the city and a

better understanding of the history of London would help them come to terms

with themselves. (27)

Audrey perceives this fact when she claims that "History is interesting when you live in the area, isn´t it?" (Ackroyd, GFOL 9) Ackroyd reduplicates London´s events in a cyclical pattern. These echoic occurrences are controlled by the sense of place, but they are chaotic.

This randomness is caused by the human factor. People are driven by space and time in their actions. (Chalupský, "Like a Furnace" 18) The example of this is Audrey who feels the presence of history in the area around the Marshalsea prison and who sets the film set in fire.

Not only the title of the novel plays an important role in Ackroyd´s universe, but also the naming of characters contributes to Ackroyd´s self-conscious use of nomenclature. Onega suggests that the author applies Dickensian mechanisms when naming his character. (20) The way the characters interact creates the impression that they are echoes of the original text.

Onega points to the fact that the names of the secondary characters are conditioned by their type: the innocent working-class youth Timothy Coleman, the left-wing teacher of Victorian social history, Job Penstone, the flamboyant Sir Frederick Lustlambert, director of the Film

Finance Board. (20) Spenser Spender is a visionary film director who conceives the idea of adapting the first part of Little Dorrit. His name functions as an onomastic palimpsest of accumulated echoes. His name evokes Edmund Spenser, Herbert Spenser, Stanley Spencer, and Stephen Spender. (Onega 21). Audrey Skelton recalls John Skelton and Sir Frederick is a nonchalant financier with a hooked nose like Dickens´s Punch. The whole character-Dickens relationship is completed by Rowen Phillip, a scholar-turned-scriptwriter who he is writing a book on Dickens. However, the most Dickensian figure is Little Arthur who ends up in the prison.

Onega claims that when the shooting of the film starts three characters who are the reincarnation of the Victorian protagonist (Little Arthur, Pally, Audrey) "become more suspicious and reckless." She equalizes them with the suspicion and recklessness of the outcast crowd which fills the prison and the street of London (27). After her fight with

Spenser, Laetitia strolls through London streets which forms a setting for her aimlessness and unhappiness. The people she sees seem to be "creatures from some dream of the past"

(Ackroyd, GFOL 134). Onega quotes Ackroyd when she explains that Laetitia "watches them pass by and reflects on how they have lost all traces of individuality in order to become just types, definable through their relationship to London: 'they represented this city, they existed in no other place. The strength and the darkness of London had compressed itself into these tiny, wandering forms.'" (27)

Ackroyd´s and Onega´s conception of circularity and timelessness expressed through the repetition of key words is demonstrated by the tramps. The old woman with the prams first appears in the narrative when Laetitia wanders the city. She belongs to the group of tramps who survives in the streets of London and inhabit the area by the Thames where the exterior shots of the film are made. These beggars gather around near the Marshalsea Prison and they "are often associated with, like the sirens of the fire brigades, an ominous warning of the chaotic phase the city is undergoing." (Onega 28) However, it is Audrey who realizes this association and who relates the presence of beggars to the recurrence of suffering in specific areas of London: "There has been so much suffering and distress around here […] It can´t really be all that different now from what it was then, can it? All those young boys begging down by the station – wasn´t that a Victorian thing, too all that? Begging and all?" (qtd. in

Onega 28) Audrey suggests that tramps are ubiquitous features in the history of the city. They

"represent the final stage of degradation and self-alienation toward which Laetitia and the other Londoners inexorably move" (Onega 28). Ackroyd situates the tramps in the middle of

the final disaster and he takes the liberty to envision them as the ones who are convinced and believe that "the film is hopelessly misreading the real spirit of London." (Onega 28) When

Audrey decides to set the film exteriors to fire, she realizes that "their plight seemed very similar to her own." (Ackroyd, GFOL 161) Audrey asks one of them to help her to burn down

"an old dump up the road" and they agree. The young man she tries to persuade to become her accomplice has red hair. (Ackroyd, GFOL 161) It is the colour Ackroyd uses to describe

London. According to the author "the flames burnt for a day and a night. It seemed to Tim that they might burn for ever, taking the whole of London with them." (165) The event which is described by Ackroyd as the Great Fire:

inflicted disaster and destruction upon the city, razing offices and homes, blasting the

lives of those who worked and lived in them. It destroyed much that was false and ugly,

and much that was splendid or beautiful. Some longed for it to burn everything, but for

others a new and disquieting sense of impermanence entered their lives. Eventually,

legends were to grow around it. It was popularly believed to have been a visitation, a

prophecy of yet more terrible things to come. (165)

As the readers contemplates the effect of the Great Fire, they are reminded of a double-pattern that is given due consideration in the novel. This is that the beginning of life tend to be repeated in a form of regeneration for the outcasts and working-class visionary Londoners. On the other hand, Onega claims that the conflagration signifies a new and disquieting sense of temporariness for socially integrated and rationally educated middle-class people. (29-30)

Ackroyd starts and finishes the novel with the statements that it is a made up story:

"Although this could not be described as a true story, certain events have certain consequences" (Ackroyd, GFOL 3) and "This is not a true story, but certain things follow from other things" (Ackroyd, GFOL 168). He intentionally projects the 1666 and 1885 fires into the Great Fire and demonstrates the circularity of time.

In The Great Fire of London, Ackroyd builds his own version of contemporary

London based on the accumulation of fragments of the styles, voices, and echoes of his strong predecessor, Dickens and Eliot. (Chalupský, Horror and Beauty 74). He suggests an overall unifying metaphor of a transcendental or mythical vision of the millenarian city. He presents

London as the cultural palimpsest gathering together the wisdom of the English race at large and suggests that the recovery of this lost wisdom is the necessary prerequisite for a true understanding of the plight of contemporary man.(Chalupský, Horror and Beauty 74)

Ackroyd´s conception of mythical time is based on circular or spiral recurrence and a labyrinthine intersecting of different time levels and it is essential for his understanding of the process of London’s historical development (Chalupský, Horror and Beauty 74). His perspective is best understood in his London: The Biography where he claims that London history is not "a seamless, sequential account" but a "search of those heights and depths of urban experience that know no history and are rarely susceptible to rational analysis” (qtd. in

Chalupský, Horror and Beauty 74). Chalupský suggests that Ackroyd does not reject the traditional linear understanding of time, but he is "ultimately incapable of capturing the complexity of the city´s past. (74) This conception of time made London a distinct city with familiar patterns of urban existence identifiable underneath the surface. These structures has not changed for ages and they were employed by Ackroyd in his genuine sense of place.

(Chalupský, Horror and Beauty 74) Ackroyd´s time line is not ordered year by year since he collects urban experience and imposes it on a Londoner. Chalupský quotes David Charnick who claims that "Ackroyd portrays London as an eternal city, one beyond the confines of time, which maintains itself by interaction with its population and exists as an inspiration for those receptive to its mythic qualities." (74) and he points to some of Ackroyd´s works when he discusses the impermanence:

for instance, that of a lava flow moving in many streams of varied velocity and in

different directions, which suggests that not all occurrences in time are predestined to be

reduplicated or perpetuated (Ackroyd, Collection 343). Another is that of "a house with

many rooms" in some of which the past is introduced to the present, while in others the

present is introduced to the past, only for both to eventually be introduced to the future.

(74)

Ackroyd claims that all his works aim to use a metaphor and capture "that spectral and labyrinthine world where the past and the present cannot necessarily be distinguished"

(Collection 368). Chalupský explains that "as the present and the past imbue each other and human experience layers and accumulates, 'every period has a different sense of time '"

(Horror and Beauty 85), depending not only on the memory and weight of the previous happenings, but also on the current modes of evoking time and approaches to its measuring.

Therefore, the patterns of mythical time resulting in what may be termed "perpetual time" stem from the invariability of the very essence of the human condition, and so it is legitimate to use the past to illuminate the present just as the present can help to get hold of the past, as neither can be understood without the other." (75)

In The Great Fire of London this complex model is only suggested and rather fragmentarily outlined, yet both the defining aspects of Ackroyd’s time, the circular/spiral and the labyrinthine, are presented in the novel. (Chalupský, Horror and Beauty 87) When

Spenser is contemplating the sinister atmosphere of the old prison, he comes to the conclusion that the very existence of sites of confinement is a product of the city´s temporal cyclicality:

"Such places will always exist – once the Marshalsea, now here. Only a small time – an historical moment – separated the two; and they represented the same appalling waste of human life. Nothing had really changed in society which had such places as its monuments"

(GFOL 57). The two physically and temporarily different places are therefore connected

through their metaphysical affinity, as they are merely two recurrent materialisations of the same mental conception, and as such they are not separated by any substantial historical time distance. However, Spenser also feels himself part of a much less graspable pattern of the city, one defined by its human dimension. (Chalupský, Horror and Beauty 90) When walking around the crowded streets, he has the sensation that other people "also, became part of him – as though he contained them all within himself at the same time as they directed him forward.

The pattern was one, within and without" (GFOL 37). This dimension makes the time structure of the city even more amorphous and directionless, rooted not only in its territorial properties, but also in its inhabitants´ imaginations and creativity, which are presented as the only means through which human beings can possibly make their imprint on the larger space- time framework of their existence. (Chalupský, Horror and Beauty 87)

The most obvious characteristic of Ackroyd´s novel The Great Fire of London is the

Dickensian London, as all its main characters get involved in the film adaptation of Charles

Dickens´s story of Little Dorrit. It is set against the backdrop of an apocalyptic conflagration.

London is depicted as a living human being. The city is personified in the character of

Spenser Spender, a film director who resolved to adapt Little Dorrit for the screen. However, his endeavour is thwarted by cumbersome bureaucracy, difficulties on the film set and his personal problems (Letitia and Andrew) and finally his death in the fire.

Ackroyd deliberately focuses reader´s attention on London. The distinctive features of the city are isolation, loneliness, obsession, mystery and darkness. Rowan Phillips considers it a place of sexual freedom and satisfaction of his erotic fantasies. (Ackroyd, GFOL 19) He gets involved into a relationship with Timothy, who does not return his feelings in the manner

Rowen would like him to do. It promotes a certain way of behaviour. Disappointed by Tim´s refusal, Rowen turns to his work on Dickens, which serves as a disguise for his presence in

London, and he finally realises that he is lonely in the big city and longs for someone who would love him.

This construction of London evokes an individual identity to the city. London is perceived as a chaotic and complicated system understood as a place and time, present and past, and reality and fiction. It is a dark mechanism based on heterogeneous, but logical forces.

3.2. Hawksmoor

Hawksmoor is the third Ackroyd´s novel published in 1985 inspired by a poem of Iain

Sinclair called Lud Heat which opened Ackroyd´s eyes to the vision of London (Ackroyd,

"Immagining" 99). The author invented a new version of historical novel when he employed a postmodern technique and portrayed the city throughout the ages as he based the narrative on the relationship between the present and the past. Chalupský claims that the similar technique is used in other Ackroyd´s novels of The House of Doctor Dee and Chatterton. (Horror and

Beauty 45) This time the writer concentrates the narrative around two central characters,

Nicolas Dyer and Nicola Hawksmoor, and around two time periods which are given equal length. The chapters are juxtaposed as the novel progresses, however, they alternate in changing the centuries. To intensify the difference between two time spheres, Ackroyd uses the different writing style – the prose of the eighteenth century and contemporary one; and different narrative types – first and third person narratives. The main characters are doubled.

They become virtual mirror images and they seem to merge in identity in the end of the narrative.

The story is introduced into the year of 1711 when a London architect Nicholas Dyer was commissioned to build seven churches in the City of London and Westminster. Unlike other architects, he worked only with his assistant Walter Pyne. The reincarnated version of

this character is introduced later in the novel when Hawksmoor´s assistant Walter Pyne enters the narrative. From the very beginning of the book, Dyer´s narrative is tinged with the mystery and mysticism. Dyer´s artistic style is connected to the belief that the Darkness rules the world and life saying that it "can give the trew Forme to our Work and trew Perspective to our Fabrick, for there is no light without Darknesse and no Substance without Shaddowe."

(Ackroyd, Hawksmoor 5) He claims that his churches are built on the imposition of coles because they "feed the Fires of the City." (Ackroyd, Hawksmoor 7)

In the very first chapter, Ackroyd also introduces the notion of the dark city born in the cole whose sole cannot be burnt in the fire. (Hawksmoor 9) He mixes the philosophy of the Bible, science and mysticism to refuse the traditional writing about city as a clear, God city.

Onega describes Ackroyd as a master of the technique of mixing genres. This time it is a detective story and autobiographical journal which are used as a tool to break the conventional rules to underline the metafictional effect of Hawksmoor. The first chapter is written in the style of Dyer´s personal confession revealing the growing up in London and the death of his parents in the plague. Throughout his journal, the reader learns about two disastrous events which affected London and changed its architectural and mental picture: the great plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of 1666. Nicolas Dyer was born in 1654 in "Black-

Eagle-Street in the Parish of Stepney, close Monmouth Street and adjoining Brick Lane"

(Ackoryd, Hawksmoor 11). Not only here, but also in other parts of the novel, Ackroyd emphasises the importance of the place. His childhood is connected to the places where he is going to build his Church in Spittle Fields and is influenced by the belief that Devil exists which is accentuated by the fact that his first read book became Doctor Faustus (Ackroyd,

Hawksmoor 12). After the death of his parents, he lost everything, his home having been pulled down. In all the events that happened to small Nicolas, Ackroyd uses the names of

London streets to stress the location. Later on, Dyer is introduced to his satanic beliefs and his motives for the murders when he meets a magus Mirabilis who predicted the Great Fire, and becomes the member of his secret company seated in Black Step Lane (Ackroyd, Hawksmoor

19). In this place of the book, London is depicted as the city of many religious beliefs, Dyer refuses all of them and chose to confess the Creed of Mirabilis. This belief refuses the thoughts coming from the Bible and it justifies the existence of the Evil. Dyer builds his churches so that they will become eternal architecture of ancient teachings. He sets the beginnings of London into the times of the Druids whose mysteries were passed on to the

Christians. Dyer emphasises that the two most important churches in London, St. Paul´s and

Westminster, were built on the places where the ancient temples had stood. His churches are intended to join these places of worship, each of them having a labyrinth and built on a sacrifice. As Dyer reveals his private thoughts and faith, it becomes clear that he has satanic plans concerning the churches he is building. He intends to build vaults, labyrinths and crypts beneath each of them and to sacrifice a victim there. Each time it should be a virgin boy, since this is what the Druids who worshipped Baal Seman sacrificed (Ackroyd, Hawksmoor 21).

Consequently, the first chapter is ended by the death of a mason´s boy who falls down the tower.

In the second chapter, which is juxtaposed after the first one, the author changes the time period and he sets the narration into the present. He also switches into the third person narrator. He depicts London as a hustling and bustling city. The guide who shows the tourists round uses the quotes of famous poets who said that London "defies imagination and breaks the hearts […] it contains something grand and everlasting" (Ackroyd, Hawksmoor 26). She shows the tourist round the Spitalfields and the area where the great plague had started, and she describes it as the place where the death arose. (Ackroyd, Hawksmoor 27) In this chapter the author introduces the character of a young boy, Thomas Hill, who is the modern version

of young Nicolas. He wanders in the same city areas, learns similar rhymes and reads similar books. His mother does not like the places where he idles as "the church represented all that was dark and immutably dirty" (Ackroyd, Hawksmoor 34).

The third chapter moves back into the Dyer´s time. Nicolas describes how he started to work with Christopher Wren and how he became the renowned architect. He says that London was "the Nest of Death and Contagion" (Ackroyd, Hawksmoor 47). He says that although the fire changed the used building material (stone began to be used instead of wood), the city remained the "Capitol of Darkness" which is composed of the tangle of the streets, houses and chaos. (Ackroyd, Hawksmoor 47) The biggest innovation came with plants and workmen whose growth made London a monster of ignorance. Here the second sacrifice of his churches appears. It is a beggar.

Chapter four again moves in time into the twentieth century and it depicts the story of a homeless Ned, a former printer in Bristol. Ned describes his life which diverted its way after one party where he got drunk and revealed that he stole money from the company he worked for. He gets mad, leaves everything for London where he lives in the streets. At the end of the chapter, Ned dies and this event moves the reader back in centuries to chapter five. The story slowly develops. Detective Chief Superintendent Nicolas Hawksmoor enters the narrative in the sixth chapter in the second part of the novel. By the time he is introduced, he starts to investigate the murder of the third body who has been found at Wapping. Dyer continues with the scarifying, now having help of Joseph. Simultanously, Hawksmoor is worried because he cannot find out the time of murders which he considers to be the key to the successful investigation. The next victim is a young boy called Matthew Hayes. This murder bears a parallel with the strangling of Yorick Hayes in the seventeenth century whose skeleton is discovered in an excavation site next to the church of St Mary of Woolnoth. Hawksmoor´s attention is drawn by a tramp calling himself "the architect" who sends him a letter with the

indices which can prove that he is the murderer. Meanwhile in the seventeenth century Dyer discusses with John Vanbrugghe the form of the building methods. Ackroyd employed the structure of drama into this conversation and he also used it in the next chapter when

Hawksmoor interrogates a tramp. After Dyer completes his churches he reveals not only the shape of his murderous intention but also his whole mystic view:

And thus will I complete the Figure: Spittle-Fields, Wapping and Limehouse have made

the Triangle; Bloomsbury and St Mary Woolnoth have next created the major Pentacle-

starre; and, with Greenwich, all these will form the Sextuple abode of Baal-Berith or the

Lord of the Covenant. Then, with the church of Little St Hugh, the septilateral Figure

will rise about Black Step Lane and, in this Pattern, every Straight line is enrich´d with a

point at Infinity and every Plane with a line at Infinity. Let him that has Understanding

count the Number: the seven Churches are built in conjunction with the Seven Planets in

the lower orbs of Heaven, the seven Circles of the Heavens, the seven Starres in Ursa

Minor and the seven Starres in the Pleiades. Little St Hugh was flung in the Pitte with

the seven Marks upon his Hands, Feet, Sides and Breast which thus exhibit the seven

Demons – Beydelus, Metucgayn, Adulec, Demeymes, Gadix, Uquizuz and Sol. I have

built an everlasting Order, which I may run through laughing: no one can catch me now.

(186)

Since Hawksmoor cannot see into the past and unlike the reader, he is not informed about Dyer´s actions, he gets exhausted psychologically and he is discharged from his investigation. Dyer also shows the signs of tiredness and weakness. They both got the the church of St Little Hugh in Black Step Lane where the two characters merges. Dyer feels that he "ran to the end of his time and he was at peace." (Ackroyd, Hawksmoor 209) On the other hand, Hawksmoor sees his own image which was "a child again, begging on the threshold of eternity." (Ackroyd, Hawksmoor 217)

Ackroyd involves historical characters events as a tool to invent his own version of history. He used the parody of detective fiction and biography as a tool of investigation. First, he intentionally disrupts the linear narrative and he chronologically metamorphoses London.

Second, he underlines the doubling of his characters of Hawksmoor and Dyer. And finally, he employs the technique of falsifying the facts and establishes the credibility of the narrative.

(Hutcheon, "Pastime" 62-63)

Saglam quotes Perez Zorgin who claims that the history is different mode from literature since it "does not contain an invented or imaginary world. It presents itself as consisting, to a great degree, of facts and true or probable statements about the past" (qtd. in

Saglam 9). Zorgin refuses the aesthetic view of history since it leads to its trivialisation. The aestheticiesed history fails to "acknowledge features that both define history as a form of thought and give it its significance" (qtd. in Saglam 9). In Hawksmoor, Ackroyd employed the techniques of historiographic metafiction to emphasise that there is a relationship between history and fiction, which is not futile. Nicolas Dyer´s fictional life is based on factual evidence, with additional interpretation of his thoughts and life philosophy. In this way, the author aims at Hutcheon´s theory that suggests the rethinking of history as a human construct.

She states that the past is accessible to us through texts and thus it "is entirely conditioned by textuality." (Hutcheon, Beginning 256) Ackroyd does not deny or ignore history, his work gives prominence to a questioning. In Hawksmoor, the reader is made to ask, what if some of the "accounts" were falsified. (Hutcheon, Politics 88)

As I claimed above, Ackroyd identifies his writing about history as being a part of authentic British tradition. He suggests that British writers have mixed historical styles to comprehend the past. (Ackroyd, Collection 2) However, his historiographic metafiction differs in the way of the self-conscious manipulation of history and in the use of historical data which are deliberately forged (Hutcheon, "Pastime" 63). Ackroyd deliberately falsifies

the biographical information of Nicolas Dyer in Hawksmoor and he questions the reliability of

Dyer´s autobiographical journal and confessional narrative. Saglam argues that the aim of

Ackroyd´s novel is to underline this unreliability and "the reader´s choice for gaining insight into Dyer´s character is to believe his own version of life. That this version might not be fully reliable is obvious from what we learn about Dyer´s character" (Saglam 131).

Detective Hawksmoor reads in the encyclopaedia entry that Nicolas Dyer was born in

1654 and he died in 1715 (Ackroyd, Hawksmoor 12). An English architectural historian Kerry

Downes sets the probable date of Dyer´s birth into the year of 1661 and his death into the year of 1736 (Hawksmoor 12). Another significant deviation from the fact is that Ackroyd´s architect was born in London, even though the real character on which Ackroyd based his

Dyer was not a Londoner, but he was born in Nottinghamshire (Saglam 131). Ackroyd dismisses the idea of acknowledging this fact and he transports the main character from the original birthplace into London. He intends the reader to see him as a Londoner and so he rebuilds London and introduces it as the birthplace of the famous architect. This is underlined when Dyer states that he knows "these Streets as well as a strowling Beggar: [he] was born in this Nest of Death and Contagion" (qtd. in Saglam 132).

In addition, Ackroyd rewrote artists and their texts as productions of London (Saglam

3). The city is known through the textual form. The text is "highly subjective and open to interpretation for the protagonists" (Saglam 1). The past which is in Acroyd´s works known from the text, is not reliable and it is present in the present (Saglam 1). In Hawksmoor,

Ackroyd takes two time frames under investigation. There are two different periods – one historical and one contemporary which form two separate but linear narratives in order to be merged with each other at the end. (Saglam 1). The time shifts are tied to each other by two tools – the technique of the detective plot and the technique of parodied biography. Detective

Hawksmoor, who is set into the contemporary time frame, struggles to determine what has

happened in the past and what is happening at the time. Saglam maintains that "it is evident from the very beginning that in spite of his appearance as a classical detective much in the manner of Sherlock Holmes, he is a parody." (137) The reader knows more than the detective as they have the chance to follow the historical narrative which shows that what the detective finds out is not true. (Saglam 2) Ackroyd introduces a new version of detectives termed by

Mervile and Sweeney "metaphysical detectives" (Saglam 2). They are a form of parody of the traditional detectives created by e.g. Poe. By means of employing the technique of corruption of the linearity of narrative, Hawksmoor gets lost in the narrative and subsequently he is inefficient in his investigation.

Ackroyd´s Hawksmoor questions the informative function of history and historiography thematically and structurally. Hutcheon claims that "through the several different accounts of Nicolas Dyer´s life that are presented in different chapters, Ackroyd emphasizes the interpretative quality of history." (Politics 46) Ackroyd´s novel underlines the theory of Hutcheon´s historiographic metafiction and answers the question of "how we can come to know the past today" (Hutcheon, Politics 47). The past existed and the texts provide us with the material to know it. The historian F. R. Ankersmit asserts that the postmodernism accepts scientific historiography, but it "does not point towards the past but to other interpretations of the past" (142). Dyer´s journal is not the representation of facts but interpretation of texts. It is a complex of intertextual cross-references that operate within a context (Hutcheon, Politics 87). This problematization of texts is dealt in Hawksmoor when the character of Nicolas Dyer narrates his life story which illuminates "facts" about his life and historical events. He is a historical narrator of the story and his narrative is bound to the contemporary characters of the novel. Saglam quotes Rana Tekcan who claims that a biography is a reflection of historical facts which bind it to history (2). However, his journal is distorted. The seeming authenticity of this biographical journal assumes that it is real.

Ackroyd employed one of the techniques of historiographic metafiction and he evoked the impression that the past can be known through texts that are interpretations of reality (Saglam

2).

As far as the concept of reality is concerned, Ackroyd mingles fictional and factual and London becomes a fact and fiction at once. The historiographic metafiction is understood on multiple levels and parallel centuries (Saglam 100). This analogy is foregrounded by the connection between Dyer and the characters in the twentieth century. The second chapter describes the story of the first victim in the twentieth century, which is a ten-year old boy

Thomas. This account reveals similarity to the previous chapter in which the first victim of

Dyer´s plan falls down the church tower. Moreover, both Dyer and Tomas are linked with the literary character of Doctor Faustus who becomes their preferred reading item and when Dyer narrates that:

it was known to us Boys that we might call the Devil if we said the Lord´s Prayer

backwards; but I never did it myself then. There were many other unaccountable

Notions among us: that a Kiss stole a minute of our lives, and that we must spit upon a

dead Creature and sing Go you back from whence you cam / And do not choose to ask

my name. (Ackroyd, Hawksmoor 12)

This shows resemblance to the third person narrator in the next chapter which says:

so it was [Thomas who] learned that, if you say the Lord´s Prayer backwards, you can

raise the Devil; he learned, also, that if you see a dead animal you must spit on it and

repeat, "Fever, fever, stay away, don´t come inside my bed today." He heard that a kiss

takes a minute off your life. (Ackroyd, Hawksmoor 29)

Saglam argues that the change of words pronounced upon the carcass is thought-provoking and she suggests that the addition of the sentence driving the fever out signifies "the occurrence of the plagues that devastated the city, underlining the role that the city plays in

the reincarnation that Dyer goes through, and show that unlike ordinary murderer pursued by a detective, Dyer is at once murderer, victim, and investigator." (Saglam 137)

Hawksmoor is a novel which mixes a lot of genres. It is difficult to specify it. There are a historical novel, detective story, signs of horror, a palimpsest, and it is set both in the past and present. It is a very unconventional novel about the evil. Edward J. Aehran describes the novel as "rooted in visionary tradition" (453) and with "a dense network of references to occult and apocalyptic traditions," (453) which refutes "the stabilities of world and person, time and space, consciousness and sexual identity, and with them religious and ideological certainties concerning society and history." (Ahearn 453) Ackroyd sees London as a place of darkness and mystery. To achieve this vision of London, he loaded the character of an architect with occultism and placed him into this city. He also invents his life story as a man since there is little information unveiled about his character or personality. As Downes argues there is a significant amount of Hawksmoor´s works hidden in museums and libraries, but these drawings and letters "throw much light on his ideas and methods of working, and – less explicitly – on his personality" (9). Based on the existence of plans of churches and churches themselves, Ackroyd envisions Hawksmoor as one of the mysteries of the city. When he disguised the real architect Hawksmoor as "Dyer" who is one of the secrets of the city, he continued with his concern to "depict a dark, mysterious London in which there is a considerable amount of interest in the occult and the supernatural" (Saglam 132). Ackroyd´s imaginative work corresponds with a kind of chaos and unpredictability which underlines his effort to display the story of the city as a piece of art sticking together by diversity which can never be fully put together.

The central point of the narrative is formed and developed around the churches. There are seven churches mentioned in the text, six of them are real (Spitalefields, Limehouse,

Wapping, St Mary Woolnoth, Bloomsbury, Greenwich), but the last one is fictional (Little St

Hugh in Black Step Lane). The churches represent the axis of the narrative and they are "the most significant deviation from the factual records of Hawksmoor's life" (Saglam 133). At the very beginning of the novel, Ackroyd informs the reader of the intention to build these buildings:

Thus in 1711, the ninth year of the reign of Queen Anne, an Act of Parliament was

passed to erect seven new Paris churches in the Cities of London and Westminster,

which commission was delivered to Her Majesty´s Office of Works in Scotland Yard.

And the time came when Nicholas dyer, architect, began to construct a mode of the first

church. (Hawksmoor 1)

All the mysterious killings are set in their surroundings. Dyer´s conception of architecture is infused with a combination of different religions and thoughts, evil Biblical belief that "it was Cain who built the first City" (Hawksmoor 9) and mysticism. Dyer builds his churches with devilish intentions when he declares that if the Devil were dead, he would live the wrong life (Ackroyd, Hawksmoor 9).

Ackroyd´s Dyer dies in 1715 which suggests that the architect built all seven churches within the period of four years. Saglam quotes Downes who claims that 1711 Act of

Parliament intended to build fifty new churches and Hawksmoor was not commissioned to erect the churches by himself:

Hawksmoor and William Dickinson were to find and survey sites, treat for their

purchase, obtain artificers, make estimates, record the progress of work both for

payment and for the information of the commissioners, and to see in general that

designs were carried out correctly and soundly. As administrative architects they were

not required to design the churches, although they were in a favourable position when

the Commission came to consider designs (133).

This case is another distortion of fact in Ackroyd novel. Dyer is the only person responsible for the design and construction of the churches and by 1715 he constructed seven churches while Hawksmoor is alleged to have constructed only six (Saglam 134). Ackroyd adds one more church to emphasise the mysterious past of London. He was inspired by the name of Little Saint Hugh, a boy who was murdered by the members of the local community in 1255. His story and consequences of his death are aligned to Dyer´s narrative, "making his name an apt allusive choice for an imaginary church to be built by Dyer. Both stories involve a ritual sacrifice – it is blood split in his churches (preferably the blood of little boys)."

(Saglam 134) In the concept of churches, Ackroyd balances between two of his techniques, namely the sense of London as a dark city and falsification of facts, to present the complementariness of the use of these ways.

As I suggested above, Ackroyd´s distinctive feature is London. This theme is examined through a fascination for human beings inhabiting this large and threatening city. It is his matchless sense of place which evokes a mysterious, sinister city. The characteristics of

London in the novel, its streets and architecture "underline Ackroyd´s argument of an eternal city (Saglam 146). The architecture is the binding factor of the city and the characters. At the very beginning of the novel, Dyer teaches Walter:

1) That it was Cain who built the first City, 2) That there is a true Science in the World

called Scientia Umbrarum which, as to the publick teaching of it, has been suppressed

but which the proper Artificer must comprehend, 3) That Architecture aims at Eternity

and must contain the Eternal Powers: not only our Altars and Sacrifices, but the Forms

of out Temples, must be mystical, 4) That the miseries of the present Life, and the

Barbarities of Mankind, the fatall disadvantages we are all under and the Hazard we run

of being eternally Undone, lead the True Architect not to Harmony or to Rationall

Beauty but to quite another Game […] I build my Churches firmly on this Dunghill

Earth and with a full Conception of Degenerated Nature. (Hawskmoor 9)

Saglam suggests that "Dyer regards his occupation as possessing the ability to create eternity and therefore visualises himself as some sort of god, building everlasting structures."

(146) His churches represent strength and force of the city, which Ackroyd describes as mystical and eternal (Hawksmoor 9). In chapter four, Dyer explains that:

[this]Capital City of the World of Affliction is still the Capitol of Darkness, or the

Dungeon of Man´s Desires: still in the Centre are no proper Streets not Houses but a

Wilderness of dirty rotten Sheds, always tumbling or taking Fire, with winding crooked

passages, lakes of Mire and rills of stinking Mud, as befits the smokey grove of Moloch

[…] Thus London grows more Monstrous, Straggling and out of all Shape; in this Hive

of Noise and Ignorance, Nat we are tyed to the World as to a sensible Carcasse and as

we cross the stinking Body we call out What News? or What´s a clock?. And thus do I

pass my Days a stranger to mankind. I´ll not be a Stander-by, but you will not see me

pass among them in the World. (Hawksmoor 47-48)

Following the second chapter the narrative becomes visibly ambiguous. Ackroyd subverted the convention of historical fiction when he used the unconventional time structure.

(Hutcheon, Poetics 98) There are connections between the chapters divided by the time changes. Ackroyd employs repetition of images, rhymes, locations and street sounds in both time frames and he "emphasise the circularity of life in London" and the timelessness of the city. (Saglam 141)

Susan Onega claims that:

circularity is expressed through the repetition of key words, such as "pattern,"

"shadow," "time," "child," "tramp," and "dust," which recurrently point to the most

complex layers of meaning underlying the surface message of the novel. Moreover, the

crisscrossing of references does not move, as one might expect, in a single direction

from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, but rather works forward and backward at

the same time, disrupting traditional notions of chronological linearity in favour of a

circular, or mythical conception of time. (Metafiction 47)

Ackroyd´s key word that represent the connection between the present and the past is that of "dust." Dust represent Ackroyd´s concept of timelessness of London and circularity of life in this city (Saglam 142). Saglam claims that "Dyer understands the infinity and circularity of the city, and works to develop it according to the same pattern." (147) The history of London unveils a great number of disasters. Two titular spirits of London, fire and plague, destroyed parts of the city; the oldest fire dating back into the Palaeolithic period

(Ackroyd, London 283). Dyer met and survived both of them and his intention to become an architect who is able to rebuild the ruined city is an evidence that he is aware of the relationship between London and eternality. Detective Hawksmoor shows different perception of London. His character refuses to understand the circularity and eternity of the city.

Using the character of Dyer, his reincarnation through the history and the mirror image of the murders which are connected to a certain place (churches), Ackroyd emphasises his sense of place which this time enables the repetition and circularity of time. London is depicted as a mysterious city whose eternity is locked in the architecture. Its past contributes the reader to understand the present.

4. Conclusion

After the deep examination of the selected novels it can be observed that Ackroyd always uses London as the unifying element in his representation of the contemporary British fiction. London is the main protagonist of the past functions in the present city. However, this character is not just the typical black and white depiction of a busy cosmopolitan city and its history cannot be considered chronological in a sense of linearity and time. Instead of these,

Peter Ackroyd applies the postmodern technique of historiographic metafiction and he creates the literary city which is based on a great number of texts which inspired the author to use them in his attempt to rewrite the previously established ones. His London creates a labyrinth of space, time, and crowds. The fact that the author employs the use of a misnomer in the narrative and he falsifies historical facts contributes to the novels’ credibility. It seems that in each of the novels, Ackroyd approaches the image of London from a different point of view and he puts the emphasis on different issues related to historicity. The strong sense of the place of the author can be traced helping to tie the plot, characters and the city of London. By dealing the main protagonists in pair he demonstrates how complicated the historical and contemporary maze of London is.

In The Great Fire of London one of the main characters decides to make a film based on the classic novel Little Dorrit written by Charles Dickens. The London´s literariness is examined through the personality of Charles Dickens and the Victorian city. Dickens is considered to be the person who understood London and his writing becomes an object of both academic and screenplay research. The structure of the novel and the development of the characters is based on Little Dorrit, which is regarded as an interpretative layer of the novel.

Since the very beginning of the narrative, Ackroyd proves to be termed postmodernist as he employed various techniques of historiographic metafiction. First, he used the technique of distortion of historical facts when he falsified the data in the summery of Little Dorrit, or

when he used a misnomer if the title of the novel. His strong sense of place is proved in the identification of London streets and places such as Marshalsea prison. Next, the characters and plot are a channel through which the reader sees the city. They determine the shape and image of London. This time it is the vision of a dark and apocalyptic city.

In Hawksmoor one of the main characters decides to follow the ancient religion and he buries under each of his built churches a sacrifice. The London´s literariness is explored through the protagonist Nicholas Dyer and his journal. Dyer is considered to be an occultist architect who builds his churches to conceal a dark secret which will be uncovered in the twentieth century by a detective Nicholas Hawksmoor. The structure of the novel and the development of the characters follow the pattern of juxtaposed narratives of the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. The technique of historiographic metafiction is employed in the use of parody as a basic layer for other postmodern features. Ackroyd based his novel on the falsification of historical facts when he invented the date and place of Dyer´s birth. Next, he used Dyer´s journal as a textual pattern for the literary interpretation of Dyer´s life which is full of occultism and mysticism. As the reader sees London through the characters, he envisions it as a dark, eternal and labyrinthine city with a secret buried under its surface.

Concerning the date of issue, The Great Fire of London is Ackroyd´s first novel and it establishes the essential and traceable features of author´s fictional writing. First of all, both novels devote attention to a great number of diverse characters. Each of the protagonist is personally responsible to the city so there are different interpretation of London. Many of these protagonists are eccentric, marginalised and peripheral figures who question history and whose fates are brought together through the central motif. Each novel is broken into several plotlines, The Great Fire of London conceives separate, but related narratives in which the characters meet each other. It demonstrates the multiplot narrative strategy of Victorian novel which implies a labyrinth of complicated relationships of characters. On the other hand, in

Hawksmoor the author visualizes the parallel narrative strategy which mixes fictional and real characters. Both novels have unhappy endings, the main protagonists becoming victims of the concept of the city. Ackroyd does not envisions the city as a whole, but he needs to have a definite place such as a prison or church (Marshalsea, or Spitalfields) to reinvent.

Finally, the aim of this thesis was to prove that Peter Ackroyd belongs to the group a postmodern authors and that his works evidence the features of historiographic metafiction.

The author of this thesis came to the conclusion that there are significant features of postmodern techniques in two Ackroyd´s novels which demonstrate that he belongs to the category of postmodern writers.

To conclude, historicity in Peter Ackroyd´s novels is approached by means of the use of historiographic metafiction, the technique which describes the connection between literature and history in contemporary literature. All features mentioned in the theoretical part of this work have been used in both Ackroyd novel.

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