ABSTRACT
Unlike those interpretations of Ackroyd’s novel that view its representation of London in both 18th and 20th centuries in terms of its textual inscription of London’s spaces, this chapter employs Charles Jencks’s concept of double-coding and demonstrates that in addition to revealing the manifold ways in which urban narratives and symbolic systems mediate our access to the city’s past and present, Hawksmoor also suggests very strongly that one can have direct, unmediated access to the urban past, which inheres, among other things, in urban architecture. Drawing on a number of phenomenological theories, the chapter examines Ackroyd’s representation of individuals’ embodied experiences of London’s material structures. Hawksmoor not only textualises and inscribes London, but also draws attention to the ways in which the city’s material structures contribute to the mood, or atmosphere, of a particular urban location. By revealing the phenomenological dimension in Ackroyd’s postmodernist narrative, the chapter not only provides an alternative reading of the novel but also underscores the irreducibility of urban materiality and of embodied experience to textuality. By juxtaposing textualist and phenomenological approaches to urban experience and to urban history in a postmodernist narrative, the chapter reveals their complementarity and helps to pave the way for a rereading of historiographic metafictions for the benefit of both literary scholars and urban historians.
