Memories beyond memory

The immemorial place

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles

of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

― Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities

4.1. Memories beyond memory

4 . 1 . 1 . C h e d d a r M a n a n d T r o i a N o v a

Brutus, beyond the setting of the sun, past the realms of Gaul, there lies an island in the sea, once occupied by giants. Now it is empty and ready for your folk. Down the years this will prove an abode suited to you and to your people; and for your descendants it will be a second Troy. A race of kings will be born there from your stock and the round circle of the whole earth will be subject to them.

Thus, according to Historia Regum Britanniae (c.1136), written by the twelfth-century bishop and historian Geoffrey of Monmouth, prophesies

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the goddess Diana to Brutus, great-grandson of the legendary Trojan hero Aeneas, who has left Troy with his fleet of Trojan exiles and sails in search of a new land in which to settle (Geoffrey 1966, 65). And it so happens that Diana’s predictions come true as Brutus finally, after a long and violent voyage, arrives at the promised island, at that time still called Albion.

Brutus is excited by the great natural riches of the island. With his men, he drives the few extant giants into mountain caves and divides the land

— renamed Britain after his own name — among his comrades. His people are henceforth called Britons.

There still remains one important task for Brutus to perform: he needs to build a capital for this newly occupied beautiful island. Thus, according to Geoffrey (1966, 73–74),

[i]n pursuit of this plan, he visited every part of the land in search of a suitable spot. He came at length to the River Thames, walked up and down its banks and so chose a site suited to his purpose. There he built his city and called it Troia Nova. It was known by this name for long ages after, but finally by a corruption of the word it came to be called Trinovantum.

Over the following centuries, the city witnesses yet a couple of other name changes: from Trinovantum to Kaer Lud, Lud’s City, named after King Lud

— the mythical brother of the British chief Cassivelaunus, defeated by Jul-ius Caesar in 54 BCE — and later to Kaerlundein, after which, “[i]n a later age, as languages evolved, it took the name London” (ibid., 106). The epon-ymous King Lud, for his part, is given his final resting place near the city walls he rebuilt, and the nearest gateway is known today as Ludgate.

Although during earlier centuries Geoffrey’s chronicle was often con-sidered authentic history, some critics realized its mostly fictional nature

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as early as the twelfth century (Thorpe 1976, 17, 28) ³⁴. Still, from the start, it had an enormous influence and soon became an important source and inspiration for medieval poets, dramatists, and other authors not just in Britain but also on the Continent, where a Norman translation, Roman de Brut, was made already in 1155. In addition to the tale of Brutus and his fellow Trojans, a significant part of the work is dedicated to the story of King Arthur, and thus the Norman translation was especially important in its introduction of the Arthurian legend into European literary tradition, resulting in a stream of prose romances by Chrétien de Troyes and other twelfth- and thirteenth-century French poets and reverberating through the centuries even to this day (BA, s.v. “Arthurian legend”).

More myth than history, Geoffrey’s account of the arrival of Brutus at the shores of Albion and his building of the New Troy on the banks of the Thames thus belongs to the large group of various founding myths, told in order to establish an ancient and eminent background for a nation or a city.

However, in the context of the present research subject, the story of Brutus can also be read as one version of immemorial collective memory: a transgenerational remembrance — albeit in this case a mythical one — passing from generation to generation and enduring over centuries, possi-bly even millennia. As such it represents one of the two possible modes of immemorial collective memory to be discussed in the following: the myth-ical mode, based on various local or collective histormyth-ical myths, and the mode of real history, based on documented or otherwise verifiable histori-cal or prehistorihistori-cal facts.

34 Although most of Historia Regum Britanniae is undeniably fictional, history still

“keeps peeping through the fiction” (Thorpe 1976, 19). For instance, many of the names are real and historical and many of the places can be pinned down on the map. In addition, recent archaeological discoveries have thrown new light on Geoffrey’s alleged flights of fancy (Thorpe, 18–19).

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Thus, in the early dawn of the immemorial memory of Britain and Lon-don, there looms, next to the mythical Brutus the Trojan, a miscellaneous cluster of shadowy figures from British history and prehistory, including Normans, Vikings, Anglo-Saxons, Romans, and Celts as well as the ten thou-sand year old Cheddar Man, whose skeleton was found in 1903 in a cave in Cheddar Gorge in Somerset and who may be considered the symbolic start-ing point of continuous modern British settlement (Davies 2000, 3–5;

Stringer 2006, 225–230).³⁵ Even the primeval humans found in Swans-combe and Boxgrove — 400 000 and 500 000 years old respectively and belonging to an earlier species of Homo, Homo heidelbergensis — have their place in this mixed bunch of ancient Britons, even though their stays

— and thus any continuity with modern times — were cut short by ad-vancing glaciers (Stringer 2006, passim)³⁶.

All these mythical and real ancestors are part of the (pre)historical base on which later generations have built their shared memories. They are also part of the foundation for the local — and nationwide — mythol-ogy in Maureen Duffy’s Capital (1975, henceforth referred to as C) and Pe-ter Ackroyd’s The House of Doctor Dee (1993, henceforth referred to as HDD), to be discussed in this chapter. In addition, both Duffy and Ackroyd have approached the history and mythology of their country also in their non-fiction writing, Duffy in her concise study of English and British his-tory, England: The Making of the Myth from Stonehenge to Albert Square (2001), and Ackroyd in several of his historical and biographical studies,

35 When Cheddar Man’s mitochondrial DNA was compared to local samples from the present-day Cheddar village, several close matches were found (Stringer 2006, 229). Although modern contamination of the ancient DNA cannot be totally ruled out, there still exists “an unbroken chain of people” between Cheddar Man and modern Britain and, consequently, at least a symbolic continuity from his days to the present, whereas the earlier settlers were swept away by glacial periods.

36 Even earlier artefacts and traces have lately been found on the coast of Suffolk and Norfolk, stretching the prehistory of human occupation in Britain as far as 700-800 000 years back (Stringer 2006, 62–77).

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most lately in his six-part history of England, of which the fourth volume, Revolution, was published in October 2017.

Consequently, although the primary subject of this study is genius Lon-dinii, in this chapter, the perspective is on occasion briefly widened to in-clude also the spirit of England / Britain, as both Duffy and Ackroyd fre-quently make an explicit connection between the two. However, the main focus will still be on place and the relationship between place, memory and the spirit of place — not on any national thematics per se. Thus, in the fol-lowing pages, I shall first briefly explore the similarities and differences between the concepts of memory, history, and myth, before focusing on the novels of Duffy and Ackroyd in chapters 4.2. and 4.3. respectively. The last chapter, 4.4., will then conclude the discussion.

4 . 1 . 2 . M e m o r y , h i s t o r y , a n d m y t h

Of the various modes of memory presented in chapter 3, especially that of collective memory becomes essential when addressing the concentric cir-cles of topographical genii in Duffy’s and Ackroyd’s novels. Although, over-all, memory in its various forms dominates the discussion during this study, in the present chapter, however, also the demarcation between col-lective memory and history as well as the relationship of them to myth will be referred to. The main reason for this lies both in the double nature of the immemorial collective memory mentioned above and in the partly syn-ecdochic linkage between the country and its capital city in Duffy’s and Ackroyd’s novels, which has its own ramifications as to the roles of memory, history, and myth in shaping the genius Londinii.

The relationship between collective memory and history as well as the affinities and differences between collective memory and myth have been discussed by various authors and, in general, the interrelationship of the

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three neighbouring concepts is seen as a continuum, with collective memory residing somewhere in the middle, “between the push and pull”

of myth and history (Margalit 2002, 63). Like a myth, collective memory

“provides stories that members of a group share and through which they can identify salient characteristics of the kind of people they believe them-selves to be”, but, at the same time, it also makes claims to historical truth (Poole 2008, 157–158). Whatever the actual truth-value of these stories and memories, through them the group invents itself as a community, cre-ating a “deep, horizontal comradeship”, which according to Benedict An-derson (2006, 7) is typical of an “imagined community”, either a nation or a smaller community.

The few interpretative differences mainly concern the relative position of collective memory on this historico-mythological scale. For instance, Av-ishai Margalit deems the pull of myth stronger than that of history, and thus, for him, a shared memory is a “closed memory”, where “the only line of memory leading to [the remembered] event is the one authorized by the tradition of the community as its canonical line of memory” (Margalit 2002, 60). This standpoint resembles that of a traditionalist, for whom “the memory itself matters a great deal, while its veracity counts for less” (Mar-galit 2002, 61). However, if we accept the claims of collective memory to reach the actual, historical past, then its veracity may also be doubted and

— like history — it can be criticized, adjusted and corrected (Poole 2008, 158). Otherwise, it becomes part of the community’s mythology — as does the “closed memory” defined by Margalit (ibid.).

Still, despite its openness to alteration and modification, collective memory is not purely identical to history, for it is not only a chronicle of historical facts but also a foundation for group identity (ibid.). The content of history and memory may be roughly the same but their perspective is not. As “raw material” (Le Goff 1992, xi) for history, memory is “always

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written in the first person”, whereas “the goal of history is that it be written in the third person” (Poole 2008, 159; see also Samuel 1994, ix; Trigg 2011, 96).³⁷

Pierre Nora (1996, 3) expresses similar views on the differences be-tween memory and history in his General Introduction to Realms of Memory, a gargantuan collaborative endeavour, which tries to locate the

“sites of memory” — lieux de mémoire — of French national identity:

Memory and history, far from being synonymous, are thus in many respects opposed. Memory is life, always embodied in living societies, and as such in permanent evolution, subject to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of the distortions to which it is subject, vulnerable in various ways to appropriation and manipulation, and capable of lying dormant for long periods only to be suddenly reawakened.

History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always prob-lematic and incomplete, of what is no longer.

The personal and subjective first-person viewpoint of memory — both in-dividual and collective — is the reason why my analysis of Duffy’s and Ackroyd’s immemorial place and its genius loci uses collective memory in-stead of history as the main interpretative tool. Approaching immemorial local and regional past via the meandering path of subjective collective memory instead of the paved road of recorded history is in accordance with the phenomenological foundation of humanistic geography, which emphasizes the importance of our personal, subjective experience of place as the basis for the perception of the spirit of the place.

37 Raphael Samuel (1999, ix) sees the juxtaposition of memory and history as a

“legacy of Romanticism”. For him, history is a “hybrid form of knowledge” that

“syncretiz[es] past and present” as well as “memory and myth” (ibid., 443).

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4.2. Walking on bones in