3Historical continuity naturally leads to the metaphor of London as palimpsest, best illustrated by the city’s architectural history. Indeed, London’s architecture frequently gives evidence of continuity. About a drawing, by George Scharf, of an oyster shop in Tyler Street, Ackroyd explains that ‘the shop itself has gone but all the buildings on the same site have followed its contours’ (Ackroyd 2000, 659). But, more important here is the fact that new buildings are very often built over old ones: ‘Close by was Bunhill Fields, the final home of William Blake and John Bunyan, and the hall itself was supposed to have been built on the site of a Dissenters’ chapel which had been destroyed during the East riots of 1887’ (Ackroyd 1992, 2). The house Matthew Palmer inherits in The House of Doctor Dee can be compared to a succession of strata, each storey dating from a different period, the lowest level being the oldest one. In English Music, Clement Harcombe explains this principle of architectural stratification to his son: ‘Houses are built on, Timothy. One gives place to another. Foundations laid upon foundations. The end of one is the beginning of another’ (Ackroyd 1992, 92). Houses in general best represent this link between temporal and spatial continuity, as stated in The House of Doctor Dee: ‘“In the sixteenth century, this whole area was covered by a nunnery. [. . .] Your house isn’t marked as a separate dwelling.” “So I’m living in the nuns’ house?”’ (Ackroyd 1993, 16). Through architecture, the palimpsest metaphor highlights the textual identity of London space, a palimpsest being a text erased and written over again and beneath the surface of which the traces of the previous text are still visible.

4The image then which at once comes out is that of London as narrative. The association is particularly obvious in Hawksmoor, a detective story whose main protagonist is the architect Nicholas Dyer, the fictional counterpart of the historical Nicholas Hawksmoor. Constructing the model for his new Spitalfields church, he teaches his assistant the following lesson: ‘Draw the erect elevation of this Structure in face or front, then the same object elevated upon the same draught and centre in all its optical Flexures. This you must distinguish from the Profile, which is signifyed by edging Stroaks and Contours without any of the solid finishing: thus a book begins with a frontispiece, then its Dedication, and then its Preface or Advertisement’ (Ackroyd 1985, 5). Peter Ackroyd seems to conform to the postmodern theory according to which the writing of history is a rhetorical construction: ‘What the postmodern writing of both history and literature has taught us is that both history and fiction are discourses, that both constitute systems of signification by which we make sense of the past’ (Hutcheon 89). This is made clear by the written traces that contribute to establishing London as a site of memory. The discovery of the past is very often associated with traces engraved on London’s material, that is to say, on stone. For example, the symbols written in Matthew’s house, or in Clement Harcombe’s hall: ‘The hall had been constructed in 1892: I knew this because the numbers had been scratched into the brickwork just below the roof’ (Ackroyd 1992, 1); those supposed to make Dyer’s architectural work last forever, or the marks engraved inside the tumulus excavated by Mark Clare. As a consequence, the past is generally linked to the process of reading.

5London then seems to be an appropriate site of memory for Ackroyd to achieve his resurgence of the English cultural heritage. It is an artefact, a textual construction whose uninterrupted continuity may supply Ackroyd’s reconstitution with a unity. Paradoxically however, from this mnemonic and constructed space expected to help the writer organize the vast amount of information he has to deal with, no overall pattern ever takes shape, the construction remaining beyond the control of its architect. As we shall see, the different memories concerning this English heritage accumulate but never get organized. It is as if Ackroyd were destroying his own construction at the same time as he is constructing it.

6Despite this representation of London as rhetorical construction, the reader soon gets lost in the work. This certainly comes from the vast nature of the subject but also mainly from the fact that Ackroyd’s representation of the English cultural heritage is an excessive one. Indeed, the work is built around a plethoric intertextual network, which changes London into an unnaturally gigantic space.

7Ackroyd extensively quotes the voices of the past, either in the biographies or in fictional contexts, for example in fake biographies and autobiographies like Chatterton or The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, or in fictions like Hawksmoor or The Plato Papers, in which historical characters are introduced. The work appears as a tremendous network of quotations and, as these quotations partake of all the genres, their number is inordinately increased. Moreover, the fact that these references cross the frontiers of the genres adds to the already intricate texture of the work whose structure, as a consequence, becomes hazier and hazier. But Ackroyd above all endlessly returns in his fictions and in his biographies (as well as in the other non-fictional books) to the same themes already developed by these characters he quotes. Michel Schneider, in Voleurs de mots describes quotations as palimpsests, as covered bodies: when a writer quotes, his body is in part covered with the name of a stranger (Schneider 278). For Ackroyd, names are more important than words. A name represents an influence, a presence that weighs so much on the work that it irremediably leaves its mark on it. In fact, what Ackroyd really quotes are the themes developed by the writers he is interested in, the places they describe, the style that characterizes them. Ackroyd uses these quotations to reveal a filiation. That’s why the books contain, in several artistic domains, a plethora of names, the names of the representatives of the English cultural heritage. The phenomenon is aggravated in English Music, so much so that in a way the novel resembles a list of names. As a consequence, these successions of well-known characters disorientate the reader, preventing him from getting an exhaustive view of the cultural heritage.

8The same phenomenon can be observed on a topographical level. Because it contains all these names, London becomes out of proportion, monstrous, ‘Straggling and out of all Shape’ (Ackroyd 1985, 48) as Nicholas Dyer says in Hawksmoor. This aesthetics of excess is based on a strictly cumulative technique, reflecting Ackroyd’s tendency for what he calls ‘the intellectual equivalent of bulimia’ (Ackroyd 1976, 7). London is described in Hawksmoor as ‘that great and monstrous Pile of London’ (Ackroyd 1985, 13). All the information gathered by Ackroyd about Englishness is piled up within a defined area, London, out of which almost no character ever travels, or even more restricted places, the East End for example, a house, a theatre or a church. This narrowing of space comes from a desire, fully expressed by the characters, to overcome the vast number of elements they have to face when trying to piece their own history together. The characters find themselves trapped within a vertical representation of space divided into strata, the image of layers recurring almost obsessively, as the palimpsest metaphor already suggested. This gigantic piling-up is illustrated by the number of lists that can be found in the novels and biographies, particularly the innumerable topographical lists (all the more so since a list, according to Marc Chénetier [Chénetier 1994, 107], is traditionally considered as a vertical enumeration): the characters’ journeys throughout London are often described step by step thanks to long and precise lists of street names.

9The words, it seems, are gradually buried by this aesthetics of excess, by this piling-up of the voices quoted by the author. Meaning is masked by the plethoric tradition and the word becomes cryptic. As a consequence the past, which is linked, as we have seen, to the process of reading, can’t be read anymore. In most of the novels, the characters are compulsively attracted by what lies beneath the surface of the town and are therefore lead into a subterranean world which is the realm of death, in other words into the crypt. A crypt is the place where the past lies, that’s why it has to be explored by anyone who searches the past. The excessive accumulation of historical references, the piling-up of quotations gradually digs the ground towards the crypt supposed to contain all the information needed by the author and his characters in order to reconstruct their genealogy (a literary genealogy for Ackroyd).

10Hawksmoor in particular is almost entirely based on the crypt metaphor. The only way for detective Nicholas Hawksmoor to piece the facts together, to reconstruct the past is to acknowledge the part played by Nicholas Dyer’s churches under which the architect used to bury his victims. Dyer’s victims are the sacrificial victims of an occult religion. Consequently, the churches are built in accordance with esoteric rules, as witness the walls in the crypts on which the architect engraved signs supposed to remain indecipherable by the uninitiated (Ackroyd 1985, 24). The crypts then, covered with these obscure signs, are in turn crypted, ciphered. The cryptic space then has changed into a cryptic text. These signs can be considered as what Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok call cryptonyms, that is to say words whose meaning is hidden because they refer to a strange, occult significance (Abraham 115). This notion definitely links the architectural crypt to the encoding process: the hammering produced by the voices of the past had first caused these voices to go down into the crypt and now, their clamour is muffled by the vault’s walls so that it can no longer be heard from the surface. Too much noise changes into silence, the meaning of the word is stifled by this excessive process of repetition. Nicholas Hawksmoor himself experiences this gradual stifling of the word’s significance. As Hawksmoor is about to solve the mystery on which the novel is built, that is to say to discover the link between the murders and Dyer’s churches, the very word which is the key to the mystery is encoded: ‘And he repeated the word—churches, churches, churches, churches, churches—until it meant nothing’ (Ackroyd 1985, 211). The past has to be buried in order to make sense, to create a coherent and manageable construction, a continuity.

11Repetition then, which had first threatened Ackroyd’s construction, will now prove to be the key to any attempt at representing the past. Since the crypt emerges as an indecipherable text for the author in search of the past, the only way of explaining its obsessive presence in the work is to postulate that it has an important part to play from a strictly spatial point of view. A crypt is a small enclosed space and as such produces the image of a fragmented urban space. The work will no longer appear as an all-including unity striving to circumvent the whole tradition by accumulating an excessive amount of information, thus leading to the representation of a chaotic and unmanageable space, but as a space at the same time organized and taking into account its own plethoric nature.

12Ackroyd doesn’t supply any comprehensive view either of London or of the whole cultural heritage the town is supposed to represent. It seems that the author simply piles up all the memories of the town he can get, his own and those of the historical and fictional characters of the work, as well as the traces of the past London itself exhibits on its surface. Ackroyd’s work even seems to come to a halt with this cumulative method. As illustrated by the house in The House of Doctor Dee, the piling-up process digs a hole in the ground. As a consequence, London progressively becomes associated with the image of the hole, the pit, the crypt. Since he is refused deciphering, the reader becomes aware of the presence in the work of a certain number of small enclosed spaces as well as of a general movement of reduction of the vast urban space into smaller spaces (death is omnipresent in the novels and the plots of many of the fictions are built on a certain number of sepultures). These areas, because they are precisely delimited, contrast with the excessive vastness of the city and as such are supposed to be easier to represent. London is first divided into districts then, within these areas into buildings. These places are always described as closed spaces: ‘enclosed’, ‘confined’ or ‘box’ are recurring words. The question of memory in Ackroyd’s work inevitably creates an image of confinement. Memory is always represented as contained, shut up, as in The House of Doctor Dee in which the protagonist, Matthew, tries to piece the story of his life together. The narrative moves from London to the area of Clerkenwell then to Matthew’s house; then to a room upstairs, a chest of drawers, a drawer and lastly a test tube that once contained the key to Matthew’s quest for origins since Matthew is suspected of being a homunculus. The final image then is again that of a character confined deep into other enclosed spaces and thus brought to a standstill, buried in the depths of time.

14It looks then as if Ackroyd had chosen to concentrate arbitrarily on a specific aspect of this tradition. Indeed, the great majority of these areas is situated in the east of London, even most of the time in what is called the East End. Ackroyd shares with Dickens, who is one of the work’s major influences, an interest in East London and in the issues linked to the area, as for instance crime, misery but also the theatrical character of this part of the city and of its inhabitants. London: The Biography, despite its title, deals almost entirely with this part of the town, at least with the themes that are associated with it. However, although Ackroyd seems willing to favour a particular memory, this area soon proves to have been chosen for other reasons than the cultural interest Ackroyd has in it.

15The East End shares many characteristics with London as a whole. First, it can be described as an excessive and stratified area: ‘in “this overwhelming quantity it no longer looks like an excess of human beings, but like a geological formation [. . .] it was piled up from soot and dust”’ (Ackroyd 2000, 681); it is a palimpsest, displaying, even after its postwar reconstruction, traces of its past architecture (Ackroyd 2000, 685); and it also has a sense of diminution, of ‘constriction’ noticeable in the area’s architecture (Ackroyd 2000, 676). In fact, according to Ackroyd, the East End is where the origin of London’s culture may be found, as stated in London: The Biography. As a consequence, the process of fragmentation no longer merely appears as an arbitrary selection. This focusing on a restricted space related to the origins of London’s culture eventually enables Ackroyd to change his fragmented representation of London’s immeasurable vastness into a metonymic one. The fragments no longer remain separated but are associated with each other through this metonymic relationship. The division of London space, as well as the selection following the fragmentation are justified by the fact that the chosen fragments are fragments of origin. Metonymy appears as a mnemonic process. Since it represents the origins of London’s culture, the East End supplies the work with the continuity on which any work on memory depends. Another kind of continuity, of construction has been found, engendered by and freed from the cumulative repetition of the past’s (material and textual) traces. This construction is produced by fragmentation, by a discontinuity it doesn’t try to hide, just as fiction and biography, historical facts and imagination, alternative discourses intertwine in Ackroyd’s work.

16Although, at first sight, Peter Ackroyd seems willing to construct a monolithic and totalizable history of the English tradition, his work reads as an initiatory journey during which the author, suddenly aware of the impossibility of reconstructing the uninterrupted continuity of the English tradition, experiences a symbolic death before setting up a new configuration of London and of the past. This representation of the past is based on relation, rather than on organization, it is dynamic rather than static, and it shows the English cultural heritage as a relative and plural tradition. Therefore, Ackroyd doesn’t offer the representation, an authoritative of the English literary heritage from its origins, but representations of this tradition and of London. Ackroyd’s work then may paradoxically be regarded as the biography of the city because it offers different irreducible representations of London and of its history. It perfectly describes and represents the essence of the city. London is an appropriate site of memory because it enables the author to fit his way of writing the past to the very nature of the tradition represented, but also because it writes its own history at the same time.