Scholarly record

INFINITE LONDON: THE REAL AND IMAGINARY CITY IN PETER ACKROYDВ’S HAWKSMOOR AND LONDON: THE BIOGRAPHY

A. Cojocaru

Abstract

London is an ambivalent space, a site of renewal and tradition, dissonance and harmony, fragmentation and unity, destruction and rebirth. This paper aims to investigate the mapping of London as a city prone to regeneration, constructed as a sum of factual and fictitious experiences and perceptions of the urban milieu in a transcendent spatial continuum. In this respect, geocriticism will be used as a theoretical point of departure in order to investigate London as a real and imaginary city, whereas psychogeography will be employed to trace the correlations between the physical and the cognitive maps. The cyclical design of both London: The Biography and the novel Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd will be explored in relation to the less addressed issues of spatiality and memory. Specifically, London: The Biography will be examined inasmuch as it documents the historical series of destructions and transformations undergone by the metropolis, delineating the urban milieu in its complexity and diversity. Conversely, the relationship between the cityscape and the psychological manifestations derived from the urban experience will be addressed in the novel Hawksmoor, where the eighteenth-century mystical ritualistic deaths performed by the architect Nicholas Dyer are mirrored two centuries later under the investigations of the detective Nicholas Hawksmoor. Hence, the overlap of past and present, death and rebirth, self and other, in the experienced landscape of memory.

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