Department of English and American Studies English

Masaryk University Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies English Language and Literature Anna Štangelová Depiction of London in Contemporary British Novel: Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Penelope Lively’s City of the Mind Bachelor’s Diploma Thesis Supervisor: prof. Mgr., Milada Franková, CSc., M.A. 2017 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography. …………………………………………….. Author’s signature Acknowledgment I would like to thank my supervisor, prof. Mgr., Milada Franková, CSc., M.A. for her guidance, professional advice and kind encouragement. I would also like to thank my partner and my family who supported me during the writing of this thesis. Table of Contents Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 1 1. Depiction of London in Literature .............................................................................. 3 2. Ian Mc Ewan and Penelope Lively – Brief Introduction ............................................ 6 2.1. Saturday and City of the Mind – Introduction ..................................................... 6 3. Upper-Middle-Class Fitzrovia in Ian McEwan’s Saturday ........................................ 7 3.1. Under the Tower: History and Characteristics of Fitzrovia ................................ 7 3.2. Henry Perowne’s London .................................................................................... 9 4. The Docklands: The New Face of London in Penelope Lively’s City of the Mind .. 18 4.1. Industrial Architecture: Metamorphosis in Construction .................................. 18 4.2. Matthew and his Philosophical View of the City and Time .............................. 20 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 30 Appendix ......................................................................................................................... 32 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 33 English Resume .............................................................................................................. 35 Czech Resume ................................................................................................................. 35 Introduction The thesis aims to compare two different approaches of depicting a city in a contemporary British novel. The novels compared are Ian McEwan’s Saturday and Penelope Lively’s City of the Mind. In both novels, London is viewed by the protagonists as an inseparable part of their lives and is extensively described by them. The city itself is, in both novels, a key element and – to a certain level – a separate character. It determines the lives of the protagonists and shapes their minds as well. In Saturday, the main character Henry Perowne experiences one day in his not very extraordinary life. Perowne concentrates his activities in one particular quarter in the centre of the city, Fitzrovia. Inhabited mostly by the upper-middle class, it is a calm, pleasant place to live, and it bears a certain stillness in its mood. Perowne loves the city and realizes how extensively the city itself shapes his own life. He constantly observes the city and describes the space with profound admiration. On the contrary, Matthew Halland, the main protagonist of City of the Mind, perceives London in the run of time. He, being an architect, inevitably notices the latest changes that the city undergoes literally in every minute. It is in a constant state of flux and Halland contributes to this dynamism by working on a building in Docklands, the area in South London that went through major development during the 90ʼs with the project “London Docklands Development Corporation”. The core of the thesis is, therefore, a comparative analysis of the two separate entities as depicted in both novels. The frame of the compared is not particularly defined, as both Perowne and Halland live in and concentrate on different quarters of London. The key element of the comparison is the difference of the literary depiction of those quarters, as well as the impact of the city on the life of an individual. 1 The necessity of processing this topic lies, on the one hand, in the tradition of capturing the spatiality in literature, on the other hand in the particular aims of the two novelists. They both depict London very intensely, but in their own distinct voices. The literary depiction, or even materialization, of particular places in literature has been around ever since. One of the key questions of the thesis is how the two novelists approach the topic and in what ways their attitude towards the topic differ. The thesis starts with a brief introduction to the authorsʼ literary output. Both Lively and McEwan have great achievement in the field of literature and an overview of their previous works is necessary to understand the two compared novels. McEwan is certainly considering the topic of spatiality more often than Lively: as Petr Chalupský in his book The Postmodern City of Dreadful Night states, “McEwan is not an exclusively urban writer yet the urban environment frequently occurs in his works” (80). Nevertheless, Lively’s approach to this topic is unique in putting into consideration not only the place, but mixing it with the notion of time. The thesis also gives a brief overview of how the urban landscape is depicted in literature. Based on the works of Petr Chalupský and Richard Lehan, the first section of the thesis offers an insight to the problem of urban landscapes in literature. To help the reader locate the points of interest analysed in the thesis I also include an Appendix with two maps of London where the locations of Fitzrovia and the Docklands are marked. 2 1. Depiction of London in Literature When it comes to the depiction of a city in literature, this topic has been around ever since. Setting a fictional story to a place that exists in reality is a popular and often- used scheme; however, the level of accuracy of the depiction of the places in literary works range from almost realistic to completely fictional. In Saturday as well as in City of the Mind the reader is acquainted with a very truthful depiction of London. To support some of the ideas presented in the core of the thesis it is necessary to bring up some theoretical works of scholars who, in their works, deal with the topic of urbanism in literature. Thus, this part of the thesis is focused on the theory of urbanism in literature and is largely based on the works of Richard Lehan and Petr Chalupský. London, being a metropolis of great significance for the Western world, is undoubtedly a very popular object of depiction and was displayed in numerous pieces of art. As Petr Chalupský claims in his study of Peter Ackroyd’s London Novels, “the metropolis has been one of the most common and popular objects of imaginative representation, celebratory as well as condemnatory, literature being no exception” (12). The origin of this approach is, according to Richard Lehan, in the time of the Enlightenment. In his book The City in Literature he says that urbanism is a product of the Enlightenment. In the book he explores “the ways the city has been conceptualized from its origin to the present time” (3). Lehan examines urbanism in literature from a very wide point of view and concentrates mostly on the Enlightenment and Modernism, but he offers an interesting point of view on the city as a state of mind, a concept that is used in Lively’s City of the Mind. Lehan thinks that the postindustrial city, which he connects with postmodernism, is largely affected by the movement of international capital and by establishing 3 multinational corporations. According to him, “urban activity becomes more abstract and ‘unreal’ as power operates from hidden sources. Such a city is at once a psychical reality and a state of mind: to read the city is to read an urbanized self, to know the city from within” (287). It follows that the character of the story identifies with the object, in this case the city that surrounds him, and that inevitably influences his self-perception. Chalupský presents another interesting and relevant point when he says that the vastness of the urban structure causes an insecurity in the inhabitants, because it is impossible to fully understand the complexity of the city. He describes London as too big for an individual to grasp it fully. “Any city as big and diverse as London is too vast, chaotic, volatile and incoherent for its inhabitants to ever understand and know it in its totality” (12). This leads us to the fact that there is a wide range of possibilities of how to capture the specific genius loci of the city, in this case London. Chalupský adds that “London’s heterogeneity is inevitably reflected in the diversity of literary devices – genres, styles and modes of expression – inspired or instigated by the city, which attempt to capture as many of its aspects and metamorphoses as possible” (13), suggesting the possibilities an author has when he decides to implement the city in his writing. In his other book, The Postmodern City of Dreadful Night, Chalupský touches upon the connection between the urbanism in literature and the two movements that largely defined the literature of the present days: modernism and postmodernism. The aim of the

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