THE CRISIS OF VALUE AND THE PLAY WITH LANGUAGE AND TIME IN THE NOVELS OF PETER ACKROYD
THE CRISIS OF VALUE AND THE PLAY WITH LANGUAGE AND TIME IN THE NOVELS OF PETER ACKROYD

Summary/Abstract: Starting from Peter Ackroyd’s critique (in “Notes for a New Culture”) of what he considers to be an enduring subjective humanism in English Modernism, a culture of literary stagnation in contrast with a more radical continental Modernism, I am going to focus on the way the crisis of value is represented at the level of language, of form and myth in two of his novels: Hawksmoor and Chatterton. Issues like: the advent of fully-fledged time, the retrieval of the past, the ludic temporal play, the intertextual game and the anxiety of influence will be brought into discussion within this text-based paper. For Peter Ackroyd the great distance between words and reality reveals a condition of undecidability which he continuously traces and retraces in a play between the representations of the physical world and its past. What language comprehended as writing, rather than language understood as voice, does is to challenge any simply received notion of a correspondence between what we call words and what we call “reality”. Language is a spectral trace of the past in the present, some kind of ludic communication where meaning and identity are always displaced and ever open to interpretation. There is a fear of the world and its values being turned upside down by radically different ways of seeing, so inimical to those complacent Anglo-Saxon habits of reading identified and explored by the novelist in many of his works, those under discussion included.

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