Urban Palimpsests' - When Novelistic and Architectural Languages Merge in Penelope Lively's City of The Mind

3/15/22, 11:07 AM ‘Urban Palimpsests’: When novelistic and architectural languages merge in Penelope Lively’s City of the Mind
Études britanniques
contemporaines
Revue de la Société dʼétudes anglaises contemporaines
52 | 2017
Confluences
Historical confluence(s)
‘Urban Palimpsests’: When

novelistic and architectural
languages merge in Penelope
Lively’s City of the Mind
« Des palimpsestes urbains » : Quand les langages architecturaux et romanesques se rencontrent dans City of
the Mind de Penelope Lively
Christian Gutleben
https://doi.org/10.4000/ebc.3545
Résumés
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Français English
Tel qu’il est conçu par Andreas Huyssen, le concept de palimpseste urbain convoque les
Cetechniques
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littéraires et
pour comprendre l’espace urbain et en faire un tissu autant topographique
que donne
vous mental. leUne telle lecture
contrôle sur de la ville, qui mêle outils architecturaux et littéraires, voilà
précisément ce qu’entreprend Penelope Lively dans City of the Mind (1991) où s’opère à merveille
ceux que vous souhaitez
la confluence entre ville et esprit, espace et imagination, structure urbaine et structure
romanesque.activer
Dans le pluralisme historique et esthétique inhérent à la métaphore du palimpseste
urbain se trouve l’aspect le plus manifeste de la ville postmoderne, espace ontologiquement
pluriel. Mettre en récit plusieurs strates du passé peut donc représenter un travail mnésique
✓ Tout accepter
indispensable, mais, comme Madhu Dubey le signale fort judicieusement, lire la ville
métaphoriquement comme palimpseste, kaléidoscope, collage ou pastiche comporte le danger
d’un décodage ludique qui passerait sous silence les enjeux idéologiques de toute politique ou de
toute✗poétique
Tout refuser
urbaine. En se concentrant sur le projet thatchérien des Docklands et en
privilégiant les perspectives de témoins variés et inattendus, City of the Mind, au contraire,
souligne les dimensions politiques et éthiques de la métropole de l’esprit, d’une géographie
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postmoderne indissociable d’une vision éthique de la vie sociale.
The concept
Politique de of ‘urban palimpsests’
confidentialité is used by Andreas Huyssen to convey ‘the conviction that
literary techniques of reading historically, intertextually, constructively and deconstructively at
the same can be woven into our understanding of urban spaces as lived spaces that shape our
https://journals.openedition.org/ebc/3545 1/9
collective imaginaries’ (Huyssen 7). Such a perusal of the city combining literary and
architectural tools is precisely what Penelope Lively undertakes in City of the Mind (1991) and it
is this confluence of city and mind, space and imagination, urban planning and fiction planning
which this paper sets out to analyse. The historical and aesthetic plurality inherent in the trope of
the urban palimpsest constitutes the most obvious aspect of the postmodern city conceived as
“both material and imaginative spaces” (Bentley 186). Thus focusing on various urban pasts may
well represent an indispensable memory work but, as Madhy Dubey perceptively warns, to read
the city metaphorically as palimpsest, kaleidoscope, collage or pastiche also means ‘to read it
fetishistically [and] to become blind to the coordinates of power’, these metaphors suggesting
misleadingly ‘a utopian space of free play between heterogeneous social elements’ (Dubey 105,
198). In City od the Mind on the contrary, because the narrative focus is on an architectural
project in the Docklands, the epitome of a Thatcherite venture, and because the urban witnesses
originate from diverse social strata, the political and ethical dimensions of the cities of the mind
are foregrounded and will be similarly emphasised in this study proving that ‘urbanism forms the
inescapable horizon of any ethical vision of contemporary social life’ (Dubey 230).
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés : City of the Mind, éthique, hétérogénéité, Penelope Lively, palimpseste, politique
urbaine, pluralisme esthétique, Thatcher, travail mnésique, urbanisme postmoderne
Keywords: aesthetic plurality, City of the Mind, ethics, heterogeneity, Penelope Lively, memory
work, palimpsest, postmodern city, Thatcherism, urban politics
Texte intégral
1 In the very first pages of Penelope Lively’s City of the Mind, London is perceived by
its main focaliser, the architect Matthew Halland, as ‘a kaleidoscope of time and mood’,
a ‘babble’ made of ‘the talk of everytime and everywhere’, a ‘jigsaw of time and
reference’ (Lively 3-4). Such a juxtaposition of metaphors immediately signals distinct
textual priorities and invites certain hermeneutic possibilities. From a formal point of
view first, the images, mental representations and constant disruptions of perception
created by the extensive use of metaphors seem to point to an aesthetic or even poetic
type of novelistic undertaking. If one now looks at the semantic aspect of the
metaphors, the kaleidoscope, the babble and the jigsaw all convey the idea of plurality
(of images, of sounds or of fragments) as if to self-reflexively proclaim the
postmodernist emphasis on syncretism and multifariousness. In addition, the
insistence on the plurality of ‘time and mood’, on ‘everytime and everywhere’, and on a
‘jigsaw of time and reference’, respectively reflect the importance of intermingled
historicities and literary modalities, of a globalised chronotope and of intertextual and
intermedial networks, so much so that these opening metaphors might appear like the
typical or stereotypical markers of a postmodernist exercise in globalised aesthetics and
intertextual ludism, the perfect illustrations of ‘the pluralizing rhetoric of
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postmodernism’ (Hutcheon 66). The eclecticism implicit in this postmodernist
pluralism has been famously criticised as ‘the degree zero of contemporary general
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culture’ (Lyotard 80) and as ‘largely apolitical’ (Newman 172). It is this potential lack of
vous donne le contrôle sur
a political dimension in the metaphorical depiction of the metropolis in City of the
Mind thatactiver
this paper will address and seek to disprove, trying on the contrary to show
that Lively’s literary city subtly updates the social and political agenda of a progressive
urbanist.
2 ✓ Toutthe
Because protagonist is an architect and because the bulk of the novel follows his
accepter
thoughts and visions, the presentation of the city constantly reveals an awareness of the
multiple pasts
✗ Tout in the city, the streets or the buildings. Such a layered perception of time
refuser
and space cannot but recall the concept of ‘urban palimpsests’ conceived by Andreas
Huyssen in order to translate ‘the conviction that literary techniques of reading
Personnaliser
historically, intertextually, constructively and deconstructively at the same time can be
woven into
Politique de our understanding of urban spaces as lived spaces that shape our collective
confidentialité
imaginaries’ (Huyssen 2003, 7). What Huyssen advocates and what Lively illustrates is
a dialectical interbreeding, in other terms a confluence, of architectural representation
and literary devices, urban planning and fiction planning, space and imagination, city
and mind. As Huyssen further explains, ‘the trope of the palimpsest is inherently
literary and tied to writing, but it can also be fruitfully used to discuss configurations of
urban spaces and their unfolding in time without making architecture and the city
simply into text’ (2003, 7). This palimpsestic decoding of the city and encoding of the
text, also noted and analysed by Catherine Lanone,1 has primarily structural
consequences, the stratified nature of the city’s architecture representing en abyme the
narrative layers of the novel. London’s architecture displaying simultaneously ‘Gothic
cathedrals, . . . Greek temples, . . . Victorian stucco, twentieth-century concrete, a
snatch of Georgian brick’ (3) is then a metaphor or a specular image of the novel itself
composed as it is of various narratives from the Elizabethan times to the twentieth
century. That the structure of the city reflects or inspires the structure of the novel is
also evident in the presentation of the city’s temporal layout according to which
‘centuries and decades rub shoulders in a disorder that denies the sequence of
time’ (66). This temporal anarchy, typical of postmodernist structures of entropy,2 is
distinctly replicated in the haphazard intermingling of Matthew’s story and scraps of
narratives relating Frobisher’s sixteenth-century Arctic exploration, Richard Owen’s
palaeontologist’s experiments, the desperate efforts of a World War II air-raid warden
and the quest for survival of a child of the timeless slums. The ‘sequence of time’ is then
indeed disrupted and replaced by a sense of non-linearity: ‘this is the city, in which
everything is simultaneous’ (24); ‘There is no sequence in the city, no then and now, all
is continuous’ (210). Not only does this temporal flux coincide with the quintessentially
postmodern ‘liquid time’ (Bauman 9) and with Paul Virilio’s thesis that ‘the historic and
classic time of succession’ has been overruled by the new concept of
‘instantaneity’ (Virilio 137), but the crucial implication of this deconstructed
sequentiality is that the dichotomous opposition between past and present is shattered
and the new instantaneity perforce acknowledges, and is even defined by, the presence
of various temporal strata.
3 Also deriving from the principle of urban palimpsests, ‘the city’s system of
rebirth’ (Lively 109) is treated as an iterative process which triggers off the celebration
of ‘how the city lifts again and again from its own decay’ (109). Once more, this
thematic phenomenon is matched by a literary phenomenon, for the rebirth of the
urban fabric is correlated with the rebirth of the urban novel, City of the Mind being yet
another ‘adaptive reuse’, to borrow a phrase often adopted in architectural
contexts (Ellin 176), of the London novel. Such a reconsideration of the urban literary
tradition might be said to answer the contemporary ‘call to re-everything—rehabilitate,
revitalize, restore, renew, redevelop, recycle, renaissance and so forth’ (Ellin 18), it
mainly allows Lively to write after or alongside previous London writers such as
Wordsworth, Dickens or Woolf,3 thus once again evidencing her novelistic art of
integration, accretion or interfusion. Telling or retelling London also means considering
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the city as a narrative subject and indeed the parallel thematisation of the city and the
protagonist suggests an ontological similarity between the spatial and the fictional
Ceentities,
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between the human protagonist and the geographical protagonist. That
Matthew and London should be the main two anaphoric subjects manifestly shows that
the narrative is (at least) double just as the thematic interest is (at least) double. Quite
activer
logically, the narrativisation of the city as protagonist cannot be restricted to a single
temporality or a single modality and the multi-faceted nature of the referential subject
✓ Tout accepter
is mirrored in the formal apparatus comprising it. Probably because the heterogeneity
of the city comprises evil and cruelty, it exerts an ‘awful fascination’, an oxymoron
repeated twice (71, 129) to refer to the inextricable antitheses at play in the spectacle of
✗ Tout refuser
the synthetic city. The protean nature of the inexhaustible topic of the metropolis is
then the dominant factor which presides over the conception of the novel as a
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palimpsest of references, a kaleidoscope of images and a babble of languages.4
4 Naturally,
Politique the plurality of both theme and structure has also aesthetic consequences,
de confidentialité
the perception of multiple echoes in the urban web resulting in a celebration of
diversity in the textual web: ‘He sees, too, that the city speaks in tongues: Pizza Ciao,
King’s Cross Kebab, New Raj Mahal Tandoori, Nepalese Brasserie […] East India Docks,
Surrey Docks, Canary Wharf, Millwall’ (3, 13). It is no coincidence that Lively should
start with an onomastic inventory since the proper names, which are supposed to
epitomise the arbitrariness of the signifier, are here exhibited for the variety and
exoticism of the signifiers, the extremely diversified phonemes and the paratactic
syntax ending up by performing not a descriptive or a pragmatic function but poetic
one. As might be expected, enumerations constitute the privileged device employed to
underline the richness of the metropolis, the seemingly endless chain in the linguistic
field supposedly suggesting or mimicking the seemingly endless chain in the referential
field: ‘The names alone have resonances that range over time and the globe—the spice
trade, India tea, rice, copra, jute, clippers, coal and timber’ (13); or else ‘Japanese
teapots, Indian dhurries, Tibetan prayer wheels, baskets from Hong Kong, silverware
from Mexico, clothing from everywhere’ (33). As can be seen in these catalogues from
here and elsewhere the city becomes the world, the world has become the city: ‘the
place is not just itself—it is a reflection of the rest of the globe’ (176). The symphony of
foreign names and references is then just the most ostentatious sign of a globalised
aesthetics according to which the literary borrowings like the architectural influences
are, in the text’s very own words, ‘international, multicultural, eclectic’ (33). Such a
politics and a poetics of worldwide integration brings us back to the novel’s central
metaphors of ‘a medley of styles’, an ‘urban stew’, ‘a cornucopia of image’ (66, 177, 215).
What is striking in these urban tropes ‘is the systematic double scope of the metaphoric
semantics, applying simultaneously to the city and the text, the referential and the
fictional space’. As a consequence, ‘the city is aestheticised and the text is urbanised,
and the affinity between the novel of geography and the geography of the novel centres
around the distinctly postmodernist principle of amalgamation’ (Kohlke and Gutleben
10). Perhaps the most compelling and most frequent image is that of the ‘cement
mixers’ (7, 14, 24, 92, 185, 215) which might be construed as a syllepsis signifying a
medley of modes and codes, a mixture of ingredients, the literary equivalent of the
architectural pasticcio.
5 The combination of London and fiction, the city and narrativity, architecture and
literature, that is, the city of the mind, appears then to amount to a celebration of ‘the
dizzying plurality of contemporary urban living’ (Bentley 175). As summarised by Nick
Bentley, ‘the complexity of contemporary urban space is thereby rendered in the
postmodern novel through a pluralization of space, time and discourse’ (186) and it is
precisely such an aesthetics of plurality or eclecticism that much contemporary
criticism, be it in the architectural or literary field, finds fault with. Edward Soja most
famously denounced ‘a numbing depoliticization of fundamental class and gender
relations and conflicts’, adding that postmodern geographies are ‘so fragmented and
filled with whimsy and pastiches [that] the hard edges of the capitalist, racist and
patriarchal landscape seem to disappear’ (Soja 246). In her study of postmodernist
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architectures, Diane Ghirardo regrets that the urbanists of the 1980s, that is, the
referential time of Lively’s novel, should have given up any hope of social change and
Cethat
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only dream they entertained was of a financial type.5 And Madhu Dubey,
certainly the fiercest critic, vehemently warns that ‘to “read” the city solely at the level
of visual forms is to read it fetishistically, to be blind to the coordinates of power that
activer
are all the more insidious because they are concealed by the different visual
appearances of postmodern cities’ (106-107). When the postmodern city, he goes on, is
✓ Tout
‘imaged as accepter
matrix, kaleidoscope, collage or bricolage’, and all these metaphors are
emphatically present in City of the Mind, then it ‘often prefigures a utopian space of
free play’ (Dubey 198), the implication being that tropes and games conceal the social
✗ Tout refuser
and political scandals of these spectacular spaces. However, as Lively’s novel
demonstrates, such a poetics of diversity, such a praise of urban stimuli, such a
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figurative language, need not necessarily exclude or shun an ethical, social or political
duty as can
Politique de be seen, primarily, in its particular embodiment of historical responsibility.
confidentialité
In that respect, it must first of all be stated that the metaphor of the palimpsest is
misleading for, as the pervasive actualisation of the concept of liquid time makes clear,
and as Lanone has also noted,6 the various tales are not superimposed but intermingled
and the link between the embedding narrative of late twentieth-century London and the
embedded narratives situated in different historical periods is not one of sequentiality
or successiveness but one of continuity. It is Matthew’s architectural mind which
establishes the connections between London’s present places and London’s past stories,
these micro-narratives of yesterday deriving from, as much as they explain, the urban
spaces of today. Like the city itself which ‘streams away into the past’ (76), the past
narratives seep into the present account to form a testimonial whole, a multi-voiced
archive concretising the symbiotic relation between then and now, thus refusing to
privilege any temporal course and shattering any possibility of presentism or nostalgia.
And since the same nameless heterodiegetic voice handles all the narratives, it seems
that the text itself enacts or performs the temporal mingling and the function of
anamnesis which Maffesoli deems intrinsic to postmodernist art.7
6 The narrative and historical continuity has a particularly ethical weight when it links
Matthew’s privileged and pluralistic world to the world and vision of minor, anonymous
and ill-treated actors of history. The narrative fragments concerning a roving timeless
slum child, a second World War air-raid warden and a sixteenth-century Inuit bear
upon the same geographical spaces crossed by Matthew, they are literally part of the
main narrative but they do not work as reflexive or specular passages, rather they
provide complementary testimonies, alternative versions of the urban experience. The
sum total of these metropolitan accounts constitutes a mnemonic archive that becomes
truly historical precisely because it is acutely aware of the erasures of history. The text’s
plurality is then not only a celebration of narrative and aesthetic diversity it is also at
the service of an ethics of historical truth. When Lively writes: ‘[t]hrough [Matthew
…], the city bears witness’ (3), her choice of words reveals a clear determination to
signal her ethical mission for ‘to bear witness’, according to specialists Felman and
Laub, means expressly ‘to take responsibility for truth’ (Felman and Laub 204).
Similarly, the novel’s observation that ‘[t]he ravished landscapes and blighted lives,
incapable of testimony, slide into oblivion’ (196) reads like an ironical acclaim of its
own achievement since the principle of successive, complementary, embedded
testimonies represents a struggle against historical oblivion and a record or a
restitution of ‘blighted lives’. Because this memory text is written in the present tense
and addressed to a present narratee and because it incorporates the perspectives of
various forms of otherness, it ‘readjusts the relationship between reader and text, so
that reading is restored as an ethical practice’ (Whitehead 8). According to Ricœur,
such an ethics of testimony points out ‘an ethico-political problem because it has to do
with the construction of the future: that is, the duty to remember consists not only in
having a deep concern for the past, but in transmitting the meaning of past events to
the next generation’ (Ricœur 9). City of the mind is thus part of ‘our mnemonic culture’
which, Huyssen perceptively notes, is fundamentally paradoxical insofar as it is of an
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archival nature but ‘marks its vital difference from the archive by insisting on novelty,
the novelty of no longer fetishizing the new’ (Huyssen 6)—and, one wishes to add, of no
Celonger
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fetishising the past.8
7 In addition to the ethical, and possibly political, value of the micro-narratives of the
past, the extracts dedicated to Rose, the homeless and parentless child of the streets,
activer
engraft a markedly social dimension. If one construes her description—‘[s]he is a pair of
eyes and ears concentrated upon survival. She is also a yawning belly, ice-cold hands
and✓feet’
Tout(35)—, one cannot but notice that the successive and almost excessive
accepter
synecdoches reduce her to a physical being, that is, to a fundamentally immanent state.
Moreover, the explicit mention of her struggle for survival deliberately recalls a form of
✗ Tout refuser
social Darwinism thereby hinting at the animal nature of her primitive existence. It is
mainly through her position ‘close to the gutter […] down here’ (34) that Rose clashes
Personnaliser
with Matthew and his panoramic vision. In the gutter, as opposed to the postmodern
buildingsdewhich
Politique Matthew plans or redesigns, one cannot have a bird’s-eye view and
confidentialité
indeed Rose cannot perceive the city’s medley of cultural references and historical
allusions. For Rose, there is no plurality, no palimpsest, just here and now, just one
temporality, just one space: ‘The child does not know of elsewhere’ (35). So, the
juxtaposition of Rose’s pragmatic vision and Matthew’s intertextual perception
manifestly underscores ‘the undemocratic pattern of urban life’ (Marcuse 245) and
confirms Terry Eagleton’s verdict that ‘the rich are global and the poor are local’
(Eagleton 225). For David Clarke, ‘freedom to act’, obviously embodied by Matthew,
‘amounts to the capacity not to remain tied in place, the ability to traverse space at will’,
whereas ‘lack of freedom’, manifestly exemplified by Rose, involves the inability to
overcome the ‘constraints of space’. His conclusion is strikingly similar to Eagleton’s:
‘The “globals” and the “locals” inhabit increasingly separate worlds, characterized by
their differential spatial and temporal opportunities’ (Clarke 193). Lively’s art of inlaid
narratives discloses then also social contrasts which amount to an ideological claim for
urbanist reformation.
8 The most blatant presence of a sociopolitical dimension resides in the description of
Matthew’s professional project, that is, at the point of convergence between literary and
architectural concerns. In the diegetic present of the novel, Matthew is taking part in
the designing and construction of a glass building in Docklands and the site is
particularised in the following way: ‘here the profoundly arrogant assumption was
being made that you could bulldoze the past, replace it with new constructions and
expect the result to be anything other than the semblance of a place’ (90). The phrase
‘the semblance of a place’ inevitably evokes the idea of simulacrum and indeed this
architectural signifier imitating other architectural signifiers seems to partake of
Baudrillard’s order of simulation, of hyperreality, of ‘an architecture of deception’ (128).
What is noteworthy is that the objective markers of internal focalisation disappear in
this depiction and Matthew becomes then a potential target of the novel’s warning
against oblivion or exclusion. As an architect of historical and cultural connections
contributing to the erasure of the past, Matthew would then embody the paradoxical
situation of the democratic urbanist of the elite—or even of the novel’s paradoxical
aesthetics of plurality reserved for singular groups.
9 But of course it is mainly the site itself which is meaningful since Docklands
represents the epitome of a Thatcherite neoliberal megaproject whereby the industrial
and popular past is wiped out and replaced by a mercantile and gentrified present.9 In
this reinvention of London, in this creation of a new history, the glittering facades and
booming denizens de facto exclude ethnic minorities or underprivileged social classes.
The project brought to view the liberal conception of politics according to which the
state supports private investors and property developers, a system which put the
architects in the position of servants of the free market. City of the Mind is aware of
these capitalistic premises since it calls Matthew’s Docklands building ‘a temple of
commerce’ (124), a traditional metaphor to denounce a form of godless godliness, of the
religion of money, and above all since it castigates the inhuman structure financing and
profiting from the project: ‘behind the Group was money, pure and simple, flickering in
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green figures on VDU’s, stacked up in columns on print-outs, assessed and quantified
in sheets of newsprint’ (32). The capitalised (and capitalistic) Group is clearly presented
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allegory of Capital, a modern Mammon, anonymous, digitalised and
disincarnated and therefore dehumanised. Importantly, this passage seems again
independent from Matthew’s point of view and the third-person narrator implies then
activer
the inclusion of the architect in the postulate of this undemocratic building, this empty
present, this ‘urban wasteland’ (Newland 216).10 The heterodiegetic narrative thus
✓ Tout complements
constantly accepter the architect’s vision or lack of vision as if the novelistic
discourse served to counterbalance the urbanist’s contradictions,11 as if the narrator’s
clear-sightedness were used as a foil or a corrective to the postmodernists’ architectural
✗ Tout refuser
betrayals.
10 In the final analysis, the sociopolitical force of this apparent celebration of urban
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diversity stems from the choice of the protagonist as an architect of the 1980s. Through
his contribution
Politique to Docklands’ glitzy architecture for the financiers and the gentry
de confidentialité
Matthew is clearly introduced as a postmodernist designer and is as such automatically
opposed to the modernist architects and their quasi utopian project of an egalitarian
and democratic form of urbanism. The novel’s very interest in the apprehension and
transformation of London confirms then Dubey’s contention that today ‘urbanism
forms the inescapable horizon of any ethical vision of contemporary social life’ (Dubey
230). In City of the Mind, the contemporary architects rewrite the city in a certain way
and the contemporary novelist rewrites the city in a radically different way. The
convergence or confluence of the two versions and visions of the city generates a
warning and a struggle that are both ethical, insofar as they concern the responsibility
of the writer and of the reader, and political, insofar as they affect the very organisation
and conception of the metropolis. The cautioning element pinpoints exclusive
proceedings and loss of connection (with history and with the people) and the fight
consists precisely in reestablishing these connections and in practicing an art of
inclusiveness. Matthew’s aesthetic vision of an eclectic urban whole and a synthetic
present is then taken up by the novel to suggest an additional syncretism, this time in
the social field.
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Notes
1 ‘Matthew ne peut appréhender la ville que comme un palimpseste, ne cesse de lire, par
métonymie, d’autres façades qui s’agencent et se recomposent à partir de fragments préservés et
enchâssés dans d’autres structures’ (Lanone 56). The conception of the city as palimpsest has
almost become a staple of postmodernist criticism as can be seen in David Harvey’s definition of
postmodern urbanism as ‘a conception of the urban fabric as necessarily fragmented, a
“palimpsest” of past forms superimposed upon each other’ (Harvey 66).
2 It is Patrick O’Neil’s contention that entropy constitutes postmodernism’s working metaphor in
thematic as well as structural terms (O’Neil 1990).
3 For the intertextual references to Wordsworth and Woolf, see Lanone (54-56) and for the
acknowledgment of Dickens the explicit mention of ‘hard times’ (Lively 208) seems telling
enough.
4 As such, the protean aesthetics can be likened to the concept of ‘proteophilia’ which Clarke
deems inseparable from the flâneur and which is defined as the love of ‘multiform, allotropic
phenomena’ (Clarke 83).
5 ‘De la fin des années 1970 jusqu’aux années 1980, ils [les architectes postmodernes]
abandonnèrent toute aspiration au changement social, non seulement par la forme, mais
complètement. . . . Un trop grand nombre d’architectes impétueusement postmodernes des
années 1980 semblaient n’incarner aucun rêve, hormis celui de la richesse et de la
puissance’ (Ghirardo 26-27).
6 ‘[L]a cité de Lively n’est donc pas un tout composé de strates, mais un flux potentiellement
anarchique’ (Lanone 64).
7 ‘L’autre aspect d’un tel postmodernisme est la référence aux racines. . . . Et ce dans un
processus d’anamnèse : Souviens-toi d’où tu viens, d’où tu tires ta force. En quelque sorte le
rappel qu’il n’y a de dynamique, de croissances possibles, qu’à partir des racines’ (Maffesoli 166,
original italics).
8 As such, City of the Mind can be said to steer clear of ‘the infatuation with the past’ which Nan
Ellin associates to ‘the postmodern reflex’ arguing that ‘[i]n its collective manifestation, the
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nostalgic impulse might be understood as a response to rapid change’ (124).
9 For a thorough description of the sociopolitical context of Docklands see Ghirardo (176-194).
Ce10site utilise des
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1991 novel et with London’s urban fabric, Iain Sinclair also depicts Docklands
dealing
in terms
vous donneof loss, lifelessness
le contrôle surand marketisation: ‘No beggars, no children, no queues, no buses.
The city
ceux queofvous
the future, this swampland Manhattan, this crystal synthesis of capital, is already
souhaitez
posthumous: a memorial to its own lack of nerve’ (Sinclair 276-277).
activer
11 The ambiguity of Matthew’s actions can be traced in his endeavour to reestablish the building’s
connection with the past. However, far from celebrating the manufactural roots of Docklands, the
architect chooses the model of Frobisher’s boat as a decorative emblem for his construction, thus
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Gutleben, « ‘Urban Palimpsests’: When novelistic and architectural languages merge in
Penelope Lively’s City of the Mind », Études britanniques contemporaines [En ligne], 52 | 2017,
mis en ligne le 01 juin 2017, consulté le 15 mars 2022. URL :
http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/3545 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ebc.3545
Cet article est cité par

Cheshmehzangi, Ali. (2021) Urban Memory in City Transitions. DOI:
10.1007/978-981-16-1003-5_2
Auteur
Christian Gutleben
Christian Gutleben is currently Professor of English Literature at the University of Nice Sophia
Antipolis where he has been General Editor of the journal Cycnos since 2010. He has published
numerous articles on Victorian and contemporary literature, edited or co-edited several volumes
(on Love’s Labour’s lost, Jane Eyre, Thomas Hardy, The Power and the Glory, Dylan Thomas…)
and written three monographs (on the English campus novel, on Graham Greene and on the
neo-Victorian movement). He is co-editor of Neo-Victorian Series, a series published by
Rodopi/Brill, and is in charge, with Marie-Luise Kohlke, of a collection of six volumes on neo-
Victorianism, four volumes being already published, the fifth being due in early 2017 and the last
volume being scheduled for late 2017.
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