2In this article, circularity will be envisaged as a modality of circulation, itself featuring a type of transmission. I shall address three Ackroydian novels. The first one is Chatterton (1987). This narrative comprises three distinct strands: the one featuring Charles Wynchwood (a fictional character living in contemporary London), Thomas Chatterton (the famous Romantic poet) and Henry Wallis (the renowned 19th-century painter and creator of Chatterton’s famous portrait). This novel displays the intermingling of several narratives, some more fictional than others. As Thomas Chatterton and Henry Wallis were real persons, Ackroyd intertwines fictional creation and factual elements. The second novel, English Music (1992) relates the story of the Harcombes, especially that of Clement, the father, and Timothy, his son, who live in Edwardian England. It presents sundry protagonists from British novels as Timothy, when he dreams, enters famous British works of fiction as a character in his own right. Another element that echoes the resurfacing of the past is the presence of spirits: both Timothy and Clement boast great visionary powers as they can engage with ghosts. Spectres, which are paramount in the novel, come from the past to appear in the present, but their very existence also brings one back to the past. This oscillation between past and present symbolises circularity and is at the heart of this project. The last novel, The House of Doctor Dee (1993), tells the story of Matthew Palmer, a fictional character in contemporary London and that of John Dee, a famous astrologer from the 16th century. After inheriting from his father, Matthew moves into a house filled with spectres that will enable him to gain access to an old terrifying family memory that he had kept shut down for years. Once again, Ackroyd presents a hybrid narrative conflating fictional creation (through Matthew Palmer) and factual elements (through John Dee’s life). In most of his theoretical writings, he asserts his admiration for English culture. To his mind, one of the goals of contemporary literature should be to give the readers access to old English stories. These stories, he insists, are part of the British tradition and should ensure an inheritance. In ‘London Luminaries and Cockney Visionaries’ (1993), he writes: ‘[y]ou may think I have been talking about the past, but all the time I am talking about the present. I am describing what is all around us still, if we cared to see it’ (Ackroyd 2001, 344). In the three novels under study, as past works are delivered back into the present, circulation prevails which is consonant with Genette’s vision when he explains that transtextuality is ‘this incessant circulation of texts without which literature would not be worth an hour of trouble’ (Ackroyd 2001, 453).

3Through the intermingling of past and present, Ackroyd’s novels convey an all-pervasive sense of haunting. Not only do past texts come back in the present, but past ghosts along with uncanny events disrupt the chronology of the narratives and come back to haunt the characters along with the readers. Haunting through the mode of the romance and the coexistence of past and present will be the first step of this demonstration. Ghosts call for unsettling encounters that trigger the vulnerability of the protagonists. The second step of my demonstration will veer towards this concept of vulnerability, that is by definition ethical. It will be analysed through the lens of traumatic behaviours along with that of alterity (the experience with and of the Other).

Haunting: Romance and Atemporality

4Haunting and the apparition of ghosts embody a singular vision on temporality and more precisely on atemporality. In Spectres of Marx (1994) Derrida describes the encounter with the spectre as a moment that one cannot inscribe in what is usually referred as time:

A spectral moment, [is] a moment that no longer belongs to time, if one understands by this word the linking of modalized presents (past present, actual present: ‘now,’ future present). We are questioning in this instant, we are asking ourselves about this instant that is not docile to time, at least to what we call time. Furtive and untimely, the apparition of the specter does not belong to that time. . . . (Derrida xix)

5Ackroyd often explains that, to his mind, time should not be considered as linear but more as an oscillation between past, present and future that would eventually form a circle. In Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (2002) he indicates: ‘[a]nd so the English imagination takes the form of an endless, enchanted circle, or shining ring, moving backwards as well as forwards’ (570). By referring to time as a circular concept and including ghostly manifestations in most of his writings, Ackroyd reasserts his ideas on temporality in literature and promotes a constant communication between what is past, what is in the present and what will be.

6In The House of Doctor Dee, Matthew Palmer inherits a beautiful house from his estranged father. In this new residence, Matthew comes across ghosts but, most of the time, he cannot entirely fathom whether these spectres or apparitions are real—i.e., external—or productions of his own imagination. This emphasises how the protagonist slowly becomes unstable. Matthew experiences various ghostly manifestations, which leads him to make the following confession: ‘[t]hat was why I had seen ghosts rather than real people. That was why I was haunted by voices from the past and not from my own time’ (Ackroyd 1994, 178). Soon, Matthew starts becoming edgy and he is under the impression that the house is speaking to him. This progressive fall into madness leads him to act like his father.

7This is even more present in chapter five in which haunting takes the form of a re-enactment of past unconscious events; one learns that Matthew’s father used to perform black magic and sexual rituals. Matthew’s relation to sex becomes more and more ambiguous to the point of inviting a prostitute to engage in an extremely violent intercourse. Matthew meets this girl and is sexually aroused by her. They go to the basement and he is filled with weird desire for her because he can feel that his father and Daniel (his father’s lover) might have engaged in sexual activities in there. Matthew confesses: ‘I wanted to hit her across the face, just as my father might have done . . .’ and continues stating: ‘[t]his must have been the corner where Daniel and my father performed their own rituals and, as I grew rougher with Mary, I knew it had been used for the same purpose in much earlier times’ (Ackroyd 1994, 172). The haunting of unconscious memories makes Matthew become (like) his father. Without even being fully aware of it, Matthew exposes himself to his haunted past, leaving room for what might be old, buried memories to come back in the present through the way of a re-enactment of this very same past. The ghosts of his past wounds resurface in the present to invade the character. After this, he decides to dig deeper into his past, trying to find answers in old books and through his mother’s memory. He thereby goes back to the past, even while the latter repeats itself in the present, the two complementary movements producing an impression of temporal circularity: a disruption of the usual linearity of time. This echoes what Ackroyd implies in ‘London Luminaries and Cockney Visionaries’ when he indicates: ‘[w]e must not think of time as some continually flowing stream moving in one direction’ (Ackroyd 2001, 343). The apparition of ghosts, the movement to the past and the re-enactment of past events combine to produce an impression of circularity that the narrative performs on the characters and readers alike. Matthew’s father’s darkest sides are coming back in the present to invade and pervade the main character along with the narrative.

8Interestingly haunting is also experienced by the reader. Indeed, the spectral manifestations plunge the reader in a world where ghosts are all-pervasive emphasising ever more the performativity of haunting. The distortion of temporality through occult phenomena has an impact on characters and readers alike. As Gibson and Wolfreys state in Peter Ackroyd: The Ludic and Labyrinthine Text (2000), this idea is reminiscent of Ackroyd’s way of writing: ‘Ackroyd’s interest is with spiritual or spectral topographies and architectural or architextual forms, reading the possible connections of which acknowledges the haunting trace of otherness and the past within the present identity . . .’ (Gibson and Wolfreys 191). Indeed, the use of past writings in all three novels forces the reader to encounter past words and writers in present days. The constant call to the past is a characteristic that the reader might feel as haunting. It implements a circular movement as the reader even while projecting on the future of the narratives cannot escape the past as it is redundant. The readers do not read Ackroyd’s novels as they would do any other writing: they are forced to go back in time (whether it be the ‘real’ time, cultural and literary history or the diegetic timeline) in an incessant circular process.

9Following this idea, haunting can also convey a sense of circulation. In ‘The Logic of Affect: Romance as Ethics’, Jean-Michel Ganteau analyses several contemporary novels through the lens of the romance. He mentions that these novels could be identified as following the conventions of the romance in different ways: ‘. . . by ceaselessly plunging into the mists of the past, by tapping the powers of such genres or inflections as the Gothic, the uncanny or the sublime, by specialising in the fictional presentation of trauma through hallucinations and ghostly manifestations . . .’ (Ganteau 2001, 79–80). Three main characteristics seem to emerge from this, including a link between haunting and romance. The first one would be the relation between past and present. In A Companion to Romance—From Classical to Contemporary, Corinne Saunders reminds us that: ‘[r]omance . . . is situated in and speaks of timeless moments’ (Saunders 1). Such a theme finds echoes in Ackroyd’s narratives, for instance in Chatterton, which provides the reader with what could be the motto of his production: ‘[t]ime past is time future’ (Ackroyd 1996, 27).

11The last characteristic, the presentation of trauma through ghostly apparitions or hallucinations, also partakes of the uncanny. In Chatterton, Charles becomes so obsessed that eventually, when he looks at the portrait, he sees Chatterton lying on the bed believing the portrait to be alive. He even asks Edward (his son): ‘[h]e’s alive in the picture, isn’t he?’ (Ackroyd 1996, 129). This is another example of the uncanny as Charles’s obsession with Chatterton, which literally haunts him, builds up to the point where he hallucinates. Later on, Charles is in hospital, half dreaming about Chatterton’s papers and the narrator states: ‘and yet it was the last time he would ever see them, the last time, the last time, the last time, the last time’ (169) emphasising once more how haunting is represented even through the repetition of words.

12One last main component of romance writing that Ganteau underlines in his article is that of the quest. As Fiona Robertson states in ‘Romance and the Romantic Novel: Sir Walter Scott’, ‘[t]he journey or quest, usually involving a search for identity, provides the basic structure of all [romance novels] . . .’ (Robertson 296). The entire novel is based on the quest to find answers to both Chatterton’s death and the secrets behind the manuscript and painting. The quest becomes all-absorbing especially for Charles, who even tells his friend Phillip and his son Edward: ‘the quest begins on Saturday’ (Ackroyd 1996, 45). As seen before, the romance expresses a sense of transmission through the use of a secular literary mode, whose origins pre-date the rise of the novel, as it is brought into the present of literary circulation. However, the interweaving of past and present is predominant and so is the quest that is the foundation of all romance narratives. This quest paradoxically calls for circularity as it implies a present choice and desire to go back to the past in order to come back to the present with a solution to the initial trigger of the quest.

13Several critical writings analyse how some of Ackroyd’s novels can be considered as following the conventions of the romance. In ‘Peter Ackroyd’s English Music as Romance of Englishness: A Response to Susan Ang’ it is through English Music that Ganteau addresses this link:

If provisionality is to be found in English Music . . . it applies certainly to the unstable, indefinite movement of romance that explores more than it asserts, and multiplies questions instead of providing answers. This corresponds to the ever-fluctuating vision of an English canon that the narrative does not present as finite, although it gives the reader access to a finite number of parodies and pastiches, in the even-numbered chapters. (Ganteau 2008b, 279)

14What Ganteau seems to be referring to is how English Music, instead of providing a stable chronological and assertive narrative, focuses on infinity and atemporality along with perpetual questionings and explorations. This echoes the last above-mentioned characteristic of romance, i.e. the quest. In English Music, after facing multiple questions that were left unanswered, and being in search of his identity, inheritance and purpose throughout his life, Tim eventually states in the closing line: ‘So you see, as I explained to you before, I no longer need to open the old books. I have heard the music’ (Ackroyd 1992, 400). Through the infinity of English words and stories from the past Tim has managed to find his true self. The questions might not have been fully answered but he has found peace through old books. It is through the words written by others that Tim has come to find the end of his quest.

15In ‘Peter Ackroyd’s English Music as Romance of Englishness: A Response to Susan Ang,’ Ganteau indicates: ‘What I see at work in English Music is an ethics of romance that privileges the open over the closed, the infinite overt the total, the other over the same’ (Ganteau 2008b, 278). Romance writing through its use of the past (or how the past haunts them, how it circulates in the present) calls for the unknown and the Other. Haunting triggers off vulnerability as it exposes the characters along with the reader to a forced openness to the Other, leaving room for potential sufferings. The I and the Other communicate and open themselves to one another in a circular movement while this very exchange leaves room for the circulation of vulnerability. The following paragraphs will be devoted to how Ackroyd’s works constantly call for the vulnerable Other through the ethics of alterity and that of trauma.

Ethics: Ackroyd’s Call for the Vulnerable Other

Reading the very first page of Peter Ackroyd’s 1993 novel, The House of Doctor Dee, for the first time, the experienced and attentive reader is quite probably ready to hazard the guess that it houses a narrative about childhood, secrets and forgetfulness. Once the same reader has read the whole novel, s/he should also be able, upon going back to that same page, to discern the signs there of a romance quest, that gradually reveals the intimate connections between those three themes, but also reveals that the connective node they share is that of trauma. (Winnberg 228)

17I have already presented how Matthew re-enacts his father’s past. By so doing, the protagonist also inherits his father’s traumas which eventually become his own. Right after the episode involving the prostitute, Matthew remembers that his father already talked to him about his sexual magic rituals. He then decides to confront his mother about it, and she reveals that he was adopted by his father for the sole purpose of performing magic and sexual rituals. The reader understands that Matthew’s relations with his father were painful to such an extent that the excruciating violence of past events remains inaccessible to him. The inheritance of the house can be seen as an occasion that reactivates the past wounds in conformity with the Freudian theory of trauma. More specifically, this refers to the belated understanding of events that are so violent that they remain uninscribed and manifest themselves belatedly, as they come back to be repeated in the present. One can find various translations of Nachträglichkeit, a term initially used by Freud, among which ‘afterwardsness,’ or ‘deferred action.’ According to Freud, it indicates how an event can fail to become inscribed in a subject’s psyche because it is too violent and can resurface in later life. Indeed, as early as Project for a Scientific Psychology in 1885, Freud used the term to describe how ‘a memory is repressed which has only become a trauma by deferred action’ (Freud 1966, 356). This means that prior events only become traumas après-coup, in relation to later events calling back for the prior ones. Freud furthered his theory in several writings including his Studies on Hysteria (1895) in which he elaborates on the idea as the effect of a violent event happening in childhood manifesting again when the child reaches sexual maturity. Jacques Lacan went back to the concept after Freud’s death with his work on après-coup, followed by Jean Laplanche who offers a new definition that includes his theory on ‘the enigmatic message’ as well as what he calls the avant-coup. The maternal unconsciousness works as a message that is passed on to the infant creating his or her own unconscious, this message would prefigure potential traumas. In ‘Notes on Afterwardsness’ (1992) Laplanche states:

. . . right at the start, there is something that goes in the direction from the past to the future, and in the direction from the adult to the baby, which I call the implantation of the enigmatic message. This message is then retranslated following a temporal direction which is sometimes progressive and sometimes retrogressive. . . . (Laplanche 222)

18This concept may explain why, without being fully conscious of any prior episode, Matthew becomes violent with the prostitute. Trauma comprises a bitemporality: it enables to go back to the past while allowing this very same past to invade the present. Matthew’s reaction emphasises this movement: ‘I staggered out of the house in search of someone else, some other woman, or girl, to continue the ritual I had begun’ (Ackroyd 1994, 173). This concept represents a cycle, and from this point of view, trauma may be said to be evocative of the figure of circulation. Matthew’s present traumas come from past violent events and bear consequences on the present. Moreover, the non-chronology of the novel produces instability: Ackroyd keeps writing backwards and then forwards creating some sort of circular movements and such instability points at a temporal vulnerability that manifests itself at a technical level too.

19As mentioned in the first part of this article, this instability is also channelled through the all-absorbing presence of ghosts. However, these uncanny others do not only embody a temporal distortion but foreground more ethical topics including that of alterity—they are the architype of what the Other is—, and that of vulnerability—representing something one cannot comprehend as well as being intrinsically linked to death. In The Ethics and Aesthetics of Vulnerability in Contemporary British Fiction, Jean-Michel Ganteau explains how ghosts can embody alterity and vulnerability at the same time:

. . . the spectre, either ghost or phantom, is obviously a way of incarnating and at the same time excarnating absence. . . . It is also a means of ontologising alterity, whether it is situated outside the subject or inside, or outside and inside at the same time, in a fantastic oscillation that makes any certainty waver and contribute to the aesthetics of vulnerability inherent in traumatic realism. (Ganteau 2015, 115)

20Ghosts make vulnerability and alterity visible through their appearance. In English Music as Tim and Clement can see the spirits of dead people and engage in conversations with them, ghosts are recurrent no matter their chronological determination, and Clement states: ‘. . . of course there are other spirits . . . We might even call this the spirit of the past’ (Ackroyd 1992, 338). Tim can sometimes feel so overwhelmed by some spirits that he distances himself from his own body almost as if the whole world around him were put on hold to make room for these specific others. Elsewhere Tim elaborates: ‘I was no longer able to listen to Edward, but instead felt the infliction of other voices and other lives’ (186). Moreover, as already mentioned, Tim enters famous British novels when he sleeps. Through the voice of the Other, words can be reborn. It is through Ackroyd’s writings that the reader can access other works as indicated in English Music: ‘[n]o books are ever old. It is said that the soul of one man can pass into another and so do words, after certain ages, find men and minds like that which first begat them’ (165), a statement evoking how past words circulate.

. . . I didn’t feel what Bloom calls ‘anxiety of influence,’ nothing of that kind at all. I suppose I could describe it as a process of exploration of myself. That when I began writing about other people, I was also writing about myself essentially. . . . (Onega 1996, 212)

22In Ackroyd’s writings, the I and the Other communicate and open themselves to one another emphasising once more a circular conversation while this very relation leaves room for the circulation of affects along with a better understanding of the self. In Embodying the Monster (2002), Margrit Shildrick reveals how vulnerability, the Other and the I are so strongly connected. She indicates:

[t]he call to ethics is not a question of more or less adequate knowledge, but of the encounter with the irreducibly different, in which I also encounter myself. . . . Responsibility lies rather in an openness to the radically, but not absolutely, unknowable other, which understands that neither the one nor the other can exist apart. (Shildrick 131)

23This strong link between self and Other is reminiscent of Ackroyd’s way of writing: the three novels under study all explicitly display this idea as they emphasise processes of co-dependency between two (or more) characters. In the novels, the main characters all coexist with another one from which they are indissociable. In The House of Doctor Dee, Matthew’s narrative is intermingled with that of John Dee who could be considered as a past doppelgänger while his father, because Matthew re-enacts all his rituals, could also be presented as his alter ego. In English Music, Tim’s double is immutably his father, Clement, as Tim indicates: ‘[h]e was one version of what I might become; he was, perhaps, some ghost of the future’ (Ackroyd 1992, 339). As for Chatterton, Charles’s alter ego is the eponymous figure of the novel. Interestingly, this relation of co-dependency is pushed to an extreme in Chatterton as both protagonists eventually die almost simultaneously. In chapter eleven Charles expires after having been transported to the nearby hospital in which he imagines that he is sitting in Chatterton’s room and that a young man is staring peacefully at him. The reader understands that this young man is Chatterton, or at least an image of him created by Charles: ‘in front of [him] stood a young man smiling and pointing to a small book which he was carrying in his right hand. 'Like the painting,' he said and everything moved away’ (Ackroyd 1996, 165). This uncanny apparition of Chatterton foreshadows what is about to happen a few pages later: Chatterton’s own death, almost as if within the narrative one could not exist apart from the other.

24In ‘Peter Ackroyd’s English Music as Romance of Englishness: A Response to Susan Ang’, Jean-Michel Ganteau furthers this idea by showing how this relation between the Other and the I represents Ackroyd’s way of writing and foregrounds ethical questions that include a sense of consideration towards the Other:

[In Ackroyd’s works] Englishness is characterised by a ceaseless move out of the same so as to take the other into consideration. Of course, the idea of mere concern or meeting with the other—the basis of the ethical relation—is somewhat thwarted by the image of assimilation, which implies something that goes beyond the ethical, in that it might be said to appropriate the other and to encapsulate it in some totality, heterogeneous as it may be. (Ganteau 2008b, 280)

25Such a call towards the Other is very much present in the humanities nowadays and it springs from the desire to make the world a better place through the notions of responsibility and consideration. A parallel can be drawn between Ackroyd’s constant desire to put the vulnerable Other at the centre of his work and the ethics of care. Though this would benefit from a more in-depth analysis, I would like to suggest that consideration and responsibility towards the Other in Ackroyd’s works can be considered as characteristics shared with writings that hover around what has been defined as the ethics of care. I do not seek to label Ackroyd as an ethicist of care but rather to put forward an immutable link between his way of writing and the main elements conveying care in literature. The ethics of care could be defined as ‘. . . a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our “world” so that we can live in it as well as possible’ (Tronto 103) as indicated in Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care (1993). The parallel created between Peter Ackroyd and the ethics of care can, at first sight, seem quite odd owing mainly to its feminist origin and Ackroyd’s lack of explicit engagement with feminist issues. However, our goal here is to show how Ackroyd’s narratives can align with some aspects of the notion. The ethics of alterity along with the ethics of vulnerability are notions very much in line with Ackroyd’s writings. Tronto shows that the ethics of care aims at making the world a better place by putting forward consideration towards the (usually vulnerable) Other: “Care appears as the concern of the less powerful and important in society. . . . By calling care a power of the weak, we notice that care givers provide an essential support for life.” (Tronto 122).

26Not only does Ackroyd write solely about the Other but this very Other is always a vulnerable one, as shown in the three novels with which this article is concerned. This embodies how alterity and vulnerability are at the centre of his work. Ackroyd grants his characters agency: to him, vulnerable others are not meant to be invisible, cast aside or secondary in a narrative. As Guillaume Le Blanc explains in L’Invisibilité sociale (2009), this desire to put the vulnerable Other forwards shows a willingness to expose the unfairness of social exclusion:

• 8 ‘Les vies rendues invisibles sont-elles des vies dont l’invisibilité peut être expliquée par le dén (...)

Can the invisibility of lives that were made invisible result from the denial of recognition of which they are the object? The struggle for recognition is accompanied with a desire for visibility which indicates that the invisibility inflicted on these anonymous lives is unjust. (Le Blanc 84; translation mine)⁸

27By giving the Other a central voice as well as making invisible vulnerabilities visible, Ackroyd can be considered as advocating for a more responsible and considerate world in which the vulnerable Other matters.

Conclusion

28Through its different instances, circularity works as a modality of circulation, being itself a type of transmission. In Ackroyd’s writings, not only do past texts come back in the present, but past ghosts along with uncanny events disrupt the chronology of the narratives and come back to haunt the characters along with the readers. The intermingling of past and present shows that Ackroyd’s works convey an inescapable sense of haunting allowing the two to co-exist through the mode of the romance. Ghosts also allow vulnerability to invade the protagonists mostly because the characters all suffered from past events that have left a permanent mark on the present. By giving a voice to these vulnerable subjects, Ackroyd shows us that the Other matters and that it is only through the Other that creation can become possible emphasising how circulation prevails.