Alongside the constant preoccupation with the issues of intertextuality and literary history, there are of courseother concerns in Ackroyd's fiction. His themes, in fact, encompass a wide range of human matters: what it is to be a human being; how people live, think and behave throughout the centuries, especially in a city as large, dark and threatening as London. Ackroyd's novels (with the exception of First Light and Milton in America) are all more or less novels about London: its peculiar characteristics, its streets and alleys, its places imbued with history. Ackroyd writes about the people who inhabit the great city, both past and present, the famous and the infamous, men and women, even gay or straight, showing that, regardless of its long line of history, the city and its people have changed remarkably little during the centuries. In novels as varied as The Great Fire of London, Hawksmoor or The House of Doctor Dee special attention is being paid to the sidelines and the outer edges of society: the poor, the outcast, the madmen, the whores, the weird and the criminal. The circularity of time and the human fascination with the supernatural are, moreover, themes that often bring a certain mysticism or a gothic element into Ackroyd's fiction, but frequently this kind of darkness is balanced by the subtle humour, the ironic insights, deriving from Ackroyd's sharp eye for the absurdities and peculiarities of human behaviour. Although Ackroyd's characters cannot always be said to be very 'realistic', they remain recognizable enough to provide us with a range of human experience.
However, even as Ackroyd writes about many different subjects - indeed, he likes to try something new in every novel - there is still a clear sense of continuity in his works. It is true that after Chatterton, with novels such as First Light and The House of Doctor Dee, Ackroyd pushed his by now more familiar themes, art and literature, somewhere in the background, while concentrating more on other issues: the contrast between country life and city culture, for example, or the clash between rural mythologies and the methods of science in First Light, and the more sinister aspects of the human psyche and the occult - spiritism, alchemism, magic, clairvoyance - in The House of Doctor Dee (supposedly based on the life of an Elizabethan alchemist). Still, even in these works Ackroyd has by no means rejected his poststructuralist world view, and in English Music and in Dan Leno & the Limehouse Golem he once again resurfaces with his critical examination of the past literature and his emphasis on the intertextual view of art - now in Dan Leno extending itself into new areas, such as the relationship between language, culture, and the human subject.
My explicit purpose in bringing Dan Leno as part of this study is to show that even as he is moving into new areas, Ackroyd, even in his later novels, almost ten years after Chatterton and twenty years after the manifesto, Notes for a New Culture, is still largely occupied with the same issues: revising literary canons and applying poststructuralist ideas. Instead of repeating himself, however, I hope to show that even in these more familiar issues Ackroyd is able to find new areas and new significances to explore. Thus in the remaining chapters I will concentrate on the following aspects which I find to be at the centre of Dan Leno: its constant literary criticism and its self-conscious construction upon earlier texts (4.1.); its specific attack against literary realism (4.2.); and finally, the theme that runs like a thread throughout the novel - the intertextual self (4.3.).
Dan Leno & the Limehouse Golem is the most complex and the most disturbing novel Ackroyd has written so far. On the surface it looks like a more than usually sinister crime novel, with a plot that involves an excess of blood and gore: murders of two prostitutes, a mutilation of a Jewish scholar, and slaughters of two entire families on the Ratcliffe Highway of Limehouse, London. Yet this gruesomely entertaining and morally shocking crime plot is primarily a convenient novelistic device to attach other, deeper ideas and themes to the work. The fact that the police investigation, curiously enough, centres on suspects as varied as Karl Marx, George Gissing and Dan Leno brings a whole cluster of other dimensions to the text: Karl Marx, the father of the Communist Party, stands for Socialism and the struggle to alleviate the sufferings of the poor; George Gissing, the author of novels such as Workers in the Dawn (1880) or The Nether World (1889), represents Realism and Naturalism; and Dan Leno, a famous music-hall comedian, "the funniest man on earth" (DL: 193), symbolizes popular theatre and, by analogy, the idea of an intertextually defined self.
Thus, what at first glance may have appeared as mere sinister entertainment (Dan Leno is very readable indeed) turns out to be a very complex and very challenging novel. This complexity is further enhanced by the fragmentation of the structure, the breaking up of chronology and the employment of a number of stylistic techniques, including omniscient narrating, first person narrative, diary entries, courtroom documents, newspaper reporting and quotations from critical essays. The narration, moreover, is deliberately misleading as regards the identity of the murderer (in his posthumous diary, John Cree confesses to the murders, but then again his wife, Elizabeth, claims to have written it), and the reader finds himself constantly baffled by what is historical fact and what is purely invented. The crime novel, then, is at the same time a historical novel, a novel of ideas, a sort of black bildungsroman, and despite its atmospherically historical setting, the London of 1880s, it is also a contemporary, postmodern work. In fact, every historical novel reflects its own time as well.
Characteristically, however, Dan Leno is also a work of oblique literary criticism. This time Ackroyd's critical eye mainly concentrates on Realism and Naturalism (4.2.), but he also re-examines the work of Thomas De Quincey. In the novel where most characters are involved with texts of some sort - either reading, writing or stage acting - Ackroyd makes his characters read De Quincey's essays. In the Reading Room of the British Museum, Karl Marx takes down from the shelf Dialogues of Three Templars on Political Economy by Thomas De Quincey (195). Dan Leno becomes interested in the famous 18th-century clown, Joseph Grimaldi, and so reads De Quincey's essay on pantomime, 'Laugh, Scream and Speech' (193). George Gissing writes his first public essay, 'Romanticism and Crime', and extols Thomas De Quincey's impassionate prose:
I might turn for a suggestive analogy to Thomas De Quincey's essay "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts", which is justly celebrated for its postscript on the extraordinary theme of the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1812 when an entire family was butchered in a hosier's shop. (...) The Marr murders of 1812 reached their apotheosis in the prose of Thomas De Quincey, who with purple imagery and soaring cadence has succeeded in immortalizing them. (...) He is primarily concerned with the fatal figure of John Williams, of course, but he takes care to place his creation (for that is what the murderer essentially becomes) before a scenery of a massive and monstrous city; few writers had so keen and horrified a sense of place, and within this relatively short essay he evokes a sinister, crepuscular London, a haven for strange powers, a city of footsteps and flaring lights, of houses packed close together, of lacrymose alleys and false doors. (35-40).
On the one hand, the coincidence that all these characters should read De Quincey's essays exemplify the novel's great theme of hidden connections in the apparent chanceful nature of the world, but on the other hand, this also serves to remind us of the importance of Thomas De Quincey. Dan Leno, true enough, makes only passing references to the most famous work of the writer, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (38-9), but it revives our interest in those works of "the great author" (190) that are not so widely read any longer. Ackroyd especially makes us turn back to the essay, 'On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts'. This is not simply because Gissing's essay is quoted at length in the novel, but more specifically, because Ackroyd's own central crime plot is borrowed from Thomas De Quincey.
There is thus an intricate relationship between Dan Leno and Thomas De Quincey, especially his murder essay and its dramatic postscript. Ackroyd borrows quite happily all the interesting elements from De Quincey's murder story: the ominous atmosphere of approaching doom; the narration from the murderer's point of view and the access to the killer's disturbed mind; as well as the parallels between murder and acting, together with the theatrical imagery which depicts the murderer very much like an artist in crime. Ackroyd even goes so far as to use the same setting (two houses on the Ratcliffe Highway, East London) and the same method of murder (the use of a mallet and a razor to crush the victims' skulls and cut their throats).
However, even as he reinvents the murder plot, Ackroyd wisely takes precaution to distance himself from Thomas De Quincey: all this borrowing is quite justified in the fact that Ackroyd makes his murderer, too, read 'On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts'. As this text becomes part of the psychological reality of the character, there is no reason why Ackroyd should not imitate De Quincey's work in such an open manner: being so influenced by the essay, in fact, the murderer (which the newspapers dub the 'Limehouse Golem')begins to imitate it in his own actions. Thus a curious thing happens: at the same time as Ackroyd is able to construct his plot on borrowed material, there occurs a significant thematic changebetween Ackroyd's novel and De Quincey's murder story. Dan Leno retains the theme of the connection between artistry and murder(in fact, it further develops it), but at the same time it shifts its emphasis elsewhere: it highlights its own intertextual position and thematizes intertextuality itself; the theme of texts influencing our thinking and behaviour (the idea of the intertextual 'self') becomes more important than the murder plot.
According to Manfred Pfister (in Plett, 1991: 214), this kind of foregrounding and thematizing of intertextuality as the work's central constructional principle is a feature of postmodern intertextuality. An application of David Cowart's (1993) theory, however, may explain more satisfactorily what has happened here: Dan Leno and De Quincey's essay have a kind of 'symbiotic' relationship with each other where both texts benefit from the closeness of the contact. Ackroyd's novel savours of all the merits of Thomas De Quincey's macabre tale, at the same time as it makes enough thematic changes to boast its individual position. Similarly, De Quincey's essay loses nothing in the process but enjoys a renewed interest as we realise, somewhat ironically, what an extraordinary effect it creates on Ackroyd's antihero. There is, indeed, something darkly humorous in the murderer's comments to the reader: "I can heartily recommend this work. Is that not what they say?" (DL: 30-1).
Like Chatterton, then, Dan Leno is a novel that advertises its own intertextuality. This is typical of postmodern fiction, which has an obsession of self-consciously revealing the fact that it is quoting. This type of fiction which is openly based on other texts could be called'literature of the second degree' as a distinction from those more naive works that attempt to hide their sources. The artist who plainly bases his work on pre-existing material may risk being thought 'unoriginal' (Cowart, 1993: 11), but on the other hand such an artist may be said to master the tradition he is part of and so be able to play games with it. Most of the major novels of the postmodern era could be said to be part of this category.
Naturally, all Ackroyd's novels reveal their indebtedness to earlier texts. Dan Leno, however, makes a special virtue of this: since Ackroyd's work aims to re-create the spirit of nineteenth-century London - involving a multitude of historical figures such as Marx, Leno, Gissing, and Oscar Wilde, too - it suits Ackroyd's purposes to quote from his sources every now and then for effects of historical 'accuracy':
The early autumn of 1880, in the weeks just before the emergence of the Limehouse Golem, was exceptionally cold and damp. The notorious pea-soupers of the period, so ably memorialized by Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle, were quite as dark as their literary reputation would suggest. (DL: 43).
This, however, may be said to parody history writing: Ackroyd bases his knowledge of the pea-soupers on the authors he is actually referring to but at the same time pretends that his novel is more than fiction, i.e., historically accurate knowledge. Like Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), which inserts historical texts to the fiction and uses footnotes to create an illusion of credibility (Hutcheon, 1989: 84), so does Ackroyd incorporate other contextual material, including newspaper reports (DL: 216-18) and courtroom documents (e.g. 9-10) for effects of documentary value. Yet the irony in Ackroyd's case is that one cannot be 100% certain - unless one goes through all the labour of checking out - which of these quotations are genuine and which are invented since Ackroyd takes special care to make his annexations look authentic:
The Morning Advertiser of the 3rd October, 1880, carried the following announcement on its front page (216)or
All extracts from the trial of Elizabeth Cree, for the murder of her husband, are taken from the full reports in the Illustrated Police News Law Courts and Weekly Record from the 4th to the 12th of February, 1881 (9).
As always, the division between fact and fiction becomes problematic in Ackroyd's parody of history writing, but there is perhaps a further irony in the already-quoted pea-souper example, since Ackroyd, with his reliance on fiction writers such as Doyle and Stevenson, may even be "parodically exacting revenge for some historians' tendency to read literature only as historical document" (cf. Hutcheon, 1989: 84).
Whatever the case, the effect remains that Ackroyd foregrounds his intertextuality. The very name of his main character, Lambeth Marsh Lizzie (or Elizabeth Cree after her marriage) recalls the title of W. Somerset Maugham's novel, Liza of Lambeth (1897). Indeed, it seems likely that Ackroyd has based his character on Maugham's heroine. At least the parallels are obvious: both are stories of a young woman gone astray; the heroine in both books is the only child of a religious, hypocritical mother who mistreats her; both women oppose their mother's will; and both have lived all their childhood in poverty in Lambeth approximately in the same period. Both novels, moreover, share the theme of popular theatre influencing the lives and behaviour of the urban masses, which however is taken to extremes in Dan Leno, and which is also where the two stories begin to differ: Ackroyd makes his character join Dan Leno's theatrical group, after which similarities are hard to find.
On the whole, Liza of Lambeth appears to be the general starting point in Dan Leno. But as Ackroyd mixes it with Dan Leno's music hall scenes, De Quincey's murder plot and the biographical episodes of George Gissing and Karl Marx, the final outcome bears little resemblance to the initial model - or any single models, for that matter. The novel is a strange combination of different texts and different plots, where Maugham's innocent heroine, for example, turns into a callous murderer who kills her mother and all the other people who get in her way. (She may well be the 'Limehouse Golem', too, but this is not revealed until the end.) The most likely explanation for what has happened here is that Ackroyd has deliberately retained a distant resemblance to Liza of Lambeth in order to parody it in a strange, dark way: Ackroyd exaggerates the book's scenes of poverty and degradation (e.g. 11-6) and adds an 'improbable' crime plot so as to mock Maugham's 'realistic' fiction. Liza of Lambeth is just the kind of novel for Ackroyd to ridicule, since beneath its apparent realism (the use of demotic language and the stock imagery of filth, drunkenness and domestic violence) it has a rather unimaginative plot which relies on unconscious models of stage melodrama and popular romances that have nothing to do with the kind of higher literature Ackroyd is promoting in his works, novels and biographies.
Ackroyd may well have parodied Maugham's first novel in Dan Leno, but far more important is the stance in general the novel displays against Realism and Naturalism. According to Bradbury (1993) the last hundred years or so that have marked the development of the modern British novel have been characterized by the critical attitude novelists have adopted against their Victorian predecessors. The Victorian heritage of 'realist' writers such as George Eliot, Charles Dickens or some of Henry James is still so strong that British novelists even today tend to respond to it, both paying homage to their predecessors and criticizing them. Ackroyd, of course, is no exception: it is no coincidence that Dan Leno is set in the 1880s, for example; this is the period of the high peak in realism and naturalism in Britain; a period when novels were becoming so life-like that Oscar Wilde, in 'The Decay of Lying' (1889), complained that "no one can possibly believe in their probability" (Intentions: 8. See also Bradbury, 1993: 27). 1880 is also the year when Emile Zola wrote his naturalist manifesto, The Experimental Novel, and this is also the decade when George Gissing wrote his pessimistic novels about the miseries of urban slums (Coustillas, P. and Partridge, C. ed., 1972: 1-21).
In Dan Leno the issue of realism is mostly explored through the figure of George Gissing. He was a Yorkshire radical, a naturalist and a realist, writing novels more concerned with a bitter social cry than a form of art (Bradbury, 1993: 22). Married to an alcoholic, Nell, who "earned her drink by prostitution" (DL: 111), Gissing's own life was far from happy, as he lived in poverty himself, forced to rely upon the cheap rewards of journalism after his first novel, Workers in the Dawn, sold only 49 copies during the first six months of its publication (111-2). "He was an idealist who believed that, in the best theatrical tradition, he could 'rescue' Nell" (111) by marrying her, but this was a 'delusion' that almost brought him to the gutter. As Ackroyd writes,
This sounds like a mere melodrama from the London stage, something which might be performed on the boards of a 'theatre of sensation' like the Cosmotheka in Bell Street, but it is a true story - the truest story George Gissing ever completed. (112).
The life of George Gissing offers an interesting case for Ackroyd to explore since here he sees a man whose own life was more interesting than his art.Ackroyd infuses sympathy for the poor novelist at the same time as he is ready to condemn his realism. This may be a paradox, but an even greater one is the fact that he also sees Gissing's life in terms of "melodrama", even as he compares him to a "modern outcast, who might have come from the pages of Emile Zola" (111).
Such paradoxes may best be explained by looking at realism itself. In literary history realism is usually associated with the effort of the novel in the 19th century to "establish itself as a major literary genre" (Fowler, R. ed., 1973: 155). The assertion was that "far from being escapist and unreal, the novel was uniquely capable of revealing the truth of contemporary life in society" (ibid). This new role of the novelist led to detailed reportage and often excessive description of people's everyday life, their physical surroundings and the social and economic bases of the contemporary society. "The virtues pursued were accuracy and completeness of description" (ibid), and the underlying assumption was that language can represent the 'real' (Selden, R. ed., 1988: 41). Naturalism went even further in its goals of elaborate documentation and scientific objectivity and, since it rested on an analogy to the scientific method, Emile Zola was able to "see no further need for the imagination" (ibid: 42).
However, as Ackroyd shows in his novel, such an ideal of literature is itself mixed up in a paradox:
There was...one difficulty and it was, appropriately, a stylistic one; despite Gissing's interest in realism and unstudied naturalism, his own prose encompassed the romantic, the rhetorical and the picturesque. Within the narrative of Workers in the Dawn, for example, he had bathed the city in an iridescent glow and turned its habitants into stage heroes or stage crowds on the model of the sensation plays in the penny gaffs. Even now, as he settled in his small room and began looking through his notes on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, he might have noticed that he referred to it as a 'towering Babylonian idol' which 'faces out towards the heaving masses'.
This was not the language of a realist. (DL: 137).
The difficulty with the realistic style, supposed to be 'objective' and 'transparent', may have been Gissing's problem, but Ackroyd implies that the same awkwardness plagues literary realism as a whole: although realism assumes that there is a one-to-one relationship between language and 'reality', it is itself bound to the conventions of writing, including questions of style, form, plot and structure, with the beginning, the middle and the end - qualities that are not found in the 'world' but which are imposed upon representations of it. Even as it records and catalogues the physical minutiae of everyday life, realist fiction is unable to escape the underlying models of writing or the devices of plotting, if it is to be readable at all. Dan Leno shows that realists like George Gissing, in their social, historical, moral or scientific purposes, largely neglectedform and ignored tradition, with the unfortunate result that they unconsciously reverted to easy models of lower art, such as "melodrama" (112) or "sensation plays" (137). Beneath the social or historical subject matter lay an inferior form of art.
Dan Leno, in other words, criticizes realism because of its lack of self-consciousness, but it goes further than that: it undermines the assumption thatlanguage can represent the 'real' and instead, like Baudrillard (1983) or Hutcheon (1988), suggests that possibly far more than 'reality', language represents other texts. Thus we notice, for example, that when John Cree, another aspiring realist in the book, plans to write a novel about urban poverty and "the crime and disease which it engendered" (44) he does not go to the streets to collect his material but, instead, his first place of study is the Reading Room of the British Museum:
He had reserved a copy of Plumstead's History of the London Poor and Molton's A Few Sighs From Hell. Both books were concerned with the life of the indigent and the vagrant in the capital, and for that reason they were of especial interest to him. (44).
By coincidence, John Cree sits between George Gissing and Karl Marx, and they, too, exemplify the same idea that texts are quite as much, or more, based on other texts as the 'reality' they are supposed to depict:
Karl Marx was dividing his attention between Tennyson's In Memoriam and Bleak House by Charles Dickens. (...) Now he was once again contemplating the composition of a long poem, which was to be set in the turbulent streets of Limehouse and entitled The Secret Sorrows of London. (...) He was reading the last instalment of Bleak House, and had reached that point where Richard Carstone asks, on his deathbed, 'It was all a troubled dream?' Marx seemed to find the remark interesting, and wrote on a sheet of lined paper, 'It was all a troubled dream'. (45-6).
Similarly, Gissing himself seeks inspiration from other "books and pamphlets" (45), but what all these examples essentially underline is the fact that realism, like any other genre, is based on a set of conventions. Ackroyd exposes the intertextuality behind literary realism and makes us see that, besides its sociohistorical subject matter, there is hardly anything special about it. Even the subject matters themselves tend to revolve around certain conventionalized areas, such as low and middle class life, which is something that is turned into parody in Dan Leno: it itself employs some of the stock items of 'realistic' fiction, including details of poverty and drunkenness, social degradation and the suffering of the labouring masses, scenes of people dressed in rags, children naked and half-starved, stray dogs eating "scattered remnants of rubbish or excrement" (243-6).
Indeed, parts of Dan Leno read like novels of social protest - just like the darkest scenes in North and South by Mrs Gaskell or Dickens's Hard Times - and this is exactly the point: Ackroyd piles up heaps of imagery which bring about the illusion of 19th-century realism. He provides plenty of background information of the sociohistorical scene of late 19th-century London so that a kind of fictional illusion of the 19th-century world begins to take shape. Yet this 'realistic' illusion is at the same time problematized by the very use of intertextuality: Ackroyd's 'realistic' passages do not greatly differ from some of those by Dickens, Gaskell or George Gissing, for instance, but as they are written more than one hundred years after the novel's setting, 1880, they are by necessity based on other texts, novels, history books, biographies, etc. Ackroyd's 'realism' is learned and imitated from other books, which suggests that so is much of the realism of the 19th-century novelists. As Hutcheon (1988: 125) has put it, "realism is a set of conventions...representation of the real is not the same as the real itself." Kathy Acker goes even further by saying that "Our reality...is other texts" (O'Donnell, P. and Davis, R. ed., 1989: 175). Of course, Peter Ackroyd affirms these postmodern views of language and reality in Dan Leno, and applies these ideas both in his themes and his practices.
Thus, it is more than obvious that despite its imitation of realism, Dan Leno is not a realistic work itself. Not even 19th-century readers would consider the novel as a whole very 'life-like' - it is far too 'improbable' for that. And as for 20th-century readers, we may recognize the conventions of realism in it, but eventually we will pay attention to the deliberate artistry of the book, its blatant intertextuality and its highly patterned construction as a work of art. Yet ironically, it is most often at the very application of the conventions of realism that the novel undermines its realistic impressions. Ackroyd, for example, arrests his narration of George Gissing's affairs with this comment:
In the novels which Gissing subsequently wrote, there are often coincidental events and chance encounters; when asked about these devices he generally declared that 'this is what happens' or 'this is the way life is'. (DL: 121).
Immediately after this, however, Ackroyd applies Gissing's method of writing and arranges a chance encounter himself, remarking that Gissing "may have been correct in [his] assumption but he was also speaking from direct experience: as he now walked through Limehouse Causeway towards Scofield Street, for example, he saw his wife running across the road ahead of him." (121). Ackroyd foregrounds the conventions of realism by literally spelling them out, but when he actually makes such coincidental events and chance encounters one of the most conspicuous features of his novel, Dan Leno teases the reader's credulity to the limits: all the hidden connections and complex interrelations between different characters and their lives; the curious coincidence that most characters come across Thomas De Quincey's essays; the fact that Marx, Leno and Gissing become the prime suspects of the murders; the strange parallels between Joseph Grimaldi, Dan Leno, Lambeth Marsh Lizzie or even Charlie Chaplin; the chanceful results of one insignificant event leading to a whole series of other episodes - all these features, chances and coincidences, accumulateto incredible proportions in the novel, thus parodying Gissing's 'realism' - ironically, by using his own methods.
Quite clearly, then, Dan Leno does not even try to be a realistic work since, on the contrary, it does not believe that language can truthfully and objectively represent the 'real'. All such attempts are seen to fail in Ackroyd's novel:
Charles Dickens and certain 'problem novelists' had described the horrors of urban poverty before, but these accounts were characteristically sentimentalised or sensationalised to take accounts of the public taste for Gothic effects. Newspaper reports were not necessarily more accurate, of course, since they tended to follow the same patterns of melodramatic narrative. (268).
Similarly, Lambeth Marsh Lizzie tells the story of her life to other characters, not as it is previously shown to happen, but the way it is more plausible to them - the way the other characters expect to hear it:
I told her [Doris] that my parents had died when I was very young, that I had earned my living as a seamstress in Hanover Square, and that I had run away from a hard mistress before I had found lodgings with a sail-maker in Lambeth Marsh. After that, I had been found by Uncle and Dan Leno. Of course she believed my story - who would not? - and throughout my narrative she patted my hand and sighed. At one point she began to cry, but then wiped her eyes, saying, 'Pay no attention to me. It's just my way.' (81).
Both examples emphasize the theme that different discourses - like newspaper reports or stories of our past - constitute their own sphere of reality; we either accept or do not accept them, despite the complex relationship they have with the 'real world'. The conventions dictate what is appropriate in a discourse and what is not and, like in Chatterton, 'truth' is a highly relative concept, largely dependent upon aesthetic concerns of representation. Still, this is by no means inconsequental since, as we are shown in the novel, in the worst case human life may be at stake: Elizabeth Cree is sentenced to death for the murder of her husband on the grounds of two conflicting representations of events. The prosecution (157-8) and the defence (187-9) have their own very different versions of the death of John Cree, implying that at least one of them has to be false. Predictably, however, we notice that they both go wrong in their pursuit of making a convincing, realistic case. Elizabeth Cree is hanged, but is it really for the right crime(s)?
Ultimately, the failure of representation in the face of conventions is reflected in the construction of the novel. John Cree's diary entries, Elizabeth's first person narrative, the newspaper reports, the courtroom speeches, even the omniscient narration - all these have an ambiguous and uneasy relation with each other. None of these can be completely trusted; they all portray different and often conflicting versions of the events so, finally, it is up to the reader to construct his own 'truth' of what 'really' happened in the novel. The identity of the Limehouse Golem may well be revealed at the end of the novel, but still the reader doubts, even looks back to the text, and asks: how did this happen?
In this respect, Dan Leno is ingenious in its construction. It is so complex, fragmented and multi-layered that it can be explained in many different ways, without hardly arriving at an exhaustive interpretation. In its polymorphous quality it resembles the Limehouse Golem itself: the name the newspapers give to the mysterious killer after a shapeless monster of ancient Jewish mythology, a creature made of red clay, varying its appearance at will (4, 216), becomes another symbol of poststructuralist ideas in Ackroyd's fiction. As the fictional Karl Marx explains, the golem must be read in an allegorical sense, with the ancient monster as an emblem of "the visible world...a golem of giant size; we give it life in our own image. We breath our own spirit into its shape" (68). The world, in other words, takes the exact shape we impose on it by words; we see what we want to see; reality is what we describe it to be - just like Ackroyd's novel itself. Whether it is a crime novel, a historical novel, another London novel, or a novel of ideas, a work of literary criticism, even a novel about Marxism and realism, popular culture and social issues, it is up to the reader to decide. There are as many interpretations as there are readers.
In this study I have emphasized the importance of intertextuality and literary history in Ackroyd's fiction. Therefore, it is only natural that I should see his works, Dan Leno included, in the shape of these terms. Like any other researcher, I have found what I have looked for but, on the one hand, in my emphasis on intertextuality I have also followed the signs in Ackroyd's writing itself: the ventriloquism in The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, the themes of plagiarism and forgery in Chatterton, or the anxiety of influence in English Music. (In addition to its father and son theme, English Music has direct references to "palimpsest" (12) and "allegory" (28) to support its intertextual explanation.) My analysis, therefore, cannot be completely unfounded and, as we have seen, Dan Leno displays many of the familiar tendencies, with its plain construction upon earlier texts and its parody and criticism of realism.
There is one further aspect in Dan Leno, however, which I take to be central in the novel and which I think underlines the significance Ackroyd pays to the poststructuralist ideas of textuality, art and world. This has to do with the postmodern, textualized view of the 'self', and it concerns both Dan Leno, the music-hall comedian, and the Limehouse Golem, too, as we shall soon see in this final chapter of my study.
Let us begin by continuing the discussion of the Limehouse Golem.
Nietzche once said that "There are no facts, only interpretations" (quoted in Colby, ed., 1991: 6), and this is exactly the idea behind the reappearance of the mythological creature in the streets of 19th-century London. After the newspaper reports of the inhuman massacres in the Limehouse region, the reading public in Dan Leno earnestly comes to believe that a shapeless monster, Golem, is at work, since this is what the newspapers, in their sensationalism, choose to call the murderer. (The name derives from the coincidence that the killer has left the severed penis from the mutilated body of Solomon Weil upon an open page of a book, "decorating a long entry on the golem" (DL: 6).) Thus, becoming familiar with the scoops, people begin to see signs of the monster everywhere around them: in the passing shadows, in the strange shapes or in the unfamiliar noises:
Mrs Jennifer Harding...claims to have seen the creature lapping blood in the shambles by Smithfield before making its way past St Bartholomew's Hospital. An itinerant match-seller, Anne Bentley, has been in a hysterical condition ever since Friday last, when she was apparently taken up by a pale creature with no eyes. (...) She claims that the Golem 'unpeeled' her and 'guzzled her' like a piece of fruit; she now believes that she is with child, and is fearful of giving birth to a monster. (...) Mrs Buzzard who owns a chair-making establishment in Curtain Street was disturbed...by a 'shadow' which...followed her everywhere until she ran shrieking into Shoreditch High Street. (217-8).
On the one hand, these newspaper reports are Ackroyd's satire against 'objective' journalism - with certain details "embellished, or on occasions invented, in order to ensure more notoriety for what were already gruesome accounts" (6-7) -but on the other hand, these eye-witness reports simply speak for the idea that 'reality' is not fixed or constant, but takes the shape we give to it in our interpretations. That is why Anne Bentley is able to see the man who raped her as the golem itself, and that is why "the unfortunate woman has been confined to Shadwell Asylum" (217).
Clearly, then, it is not inconsequental how we interpret the world, but the essential point here is that the interpretation has less to do with our senses or perception than the tradition or texts that actually constituteour interpretation. The sensory data we obtain from the world has no meaning in itself until it is interpreted. The interpretation, however, depends on our cultural and textual knowledge of the world, and this knowledge in its turn gives form to our perception. We do not, therefore, make sense of the world by virtue of our innate individual reason or deduction, as Descartes once believed (cf. Saariluoma, 1992). Instead, our experience of 'reality' is determined by the cultural tradition, texts and discourses we are exposed to in our lives. The experiencing self has lost its Cartesian unity and individuality; the poststructuralist 'self' is dispersed, fragmented and, most of all, intertextually defined (ibid).
According to Saariluoma (1992) this kind of 'postindividualistic' view of the 'self' is typical of postmodern writing, which opposes the individualism displayed in realism and modernism. In postmodernism the 'self' is too weak and non-coherent to hold together reality, or any consistent experience of reality (ibid: 20). That is why postmodern writers, like Ackroyd, have turned away from realist attempts to portray the world. Instead, they have problematized reality, showing that it is experienced through language, various discourses, ideologies, cultural institutions, art, etc. (ibid: 31). The postmodernists have turned their attention to language as such; they show that the human 'self' does not exist prior to language, but is actually subjected to it. Rather than controlling language, language itself tends to control us.
Ackroyd himself has theorized about "The Uses of the Self" in his essay, Notes for a New Culture (1976: 64-89), where he expresses very similar ideas about the 'self' and its relation to language. He has used these ideas throughout his fiction, notably in The Great Fire of London and Chatterton, but it is finally in Dan Leno where such themes really become prominent: not only do the reading public see the world in terms of newspaper scoops, but almost all the other characters, too, are shown to be intertextually defined. We have already seen the influence of Thomas De Quincey upon the murderer, and the degree which the brutalities are modelled upon De Quincey's account of the Ratcliffe murders, but exactly the same pattern can be found in other characters as well: Elizabeth's mother, for instance, sees her life in terms of religious discourse - literally, since she has pasted the walls of their two rooms with the pages of the Bible. Almost everything she says in the novel can be traced to Biblical origins or other religious sources:
'Oh God my help in ages past. Be now the water to comfort me in my affliction.' These were no more than the words she had learned by rote from the hymnal, and I [Elizabeth] laughed as she passed her tongue across her lips. I could see the sores upon it. (...) How she prayed and moaned while we worked, repeating all the bunkum she had learned from the Reverend Style who kept a chapel on the Lambeth High Road. One moment it was 'God pardon me for my sins!' and then it was 'How I am exalted!' (12, 14).
Similarly, Dan Leno, 'The Funniest Man On Earth', wishes to "understand the conditions which had, in a sense, created him" (193). He reads The Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi as well as Thomas De Quincey's essay on the famous clown, thus identifying with him and seeing parallels between Grimaldi's and his own life. He, as it were, becomes him: when he lays sick and dying he repeats, word for word, Grimaldi's farewell speech, "while those around his deathbed believed he was delirious" (193-6).
Ackroyd, in other words, emphasizes that we are products of our culture, and no more than that. Like Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose, where the characters' world-view is directly related to the religious books they have been reading, or the medieval culture that is surrounding them (Saariluoma, 1992: 187-92), Ackroyd shows that our thoughts, dreams, and behaviour reflect our cultural and textual experience. We are what we read; everything we do or say has its complex origins in textual or cultural sources. "Sometimes I believe that I am made of ink and paper", Karl Marx says (92). In the vein of Saussure, Ackroyd stresses the primacy of language system (langue) over its individual users (parole): that which has already been said is easier to repeat than trying to formulate new ideas. New ideas, moreover, are hardly more than new combinations of already existing discourses (see 3.1.), and when we fall short of the comfort of tradition - when faced with a totally new situation, for example - we are at a loss, or at least feel uneasy: Solomon Weil, a Jewish scholar, is "perplexed" when he first meets Karl Marx, an atheist and a revolutionary (64-5). He does not quite know what to think of the new situation, and Karl Marx, too, was "perhaps...even too polite" (64). The two German émigrés begin to exchange theories and speculations in weekly meetings, but the situation remains odd enough for them to create a certain awkwardness in their manners: the handshake in the English fashion, the exaggerated apologies for being late, and the interesting "argot of German and English, with the occasional use of Latin or Hebrew terms for an exact or particular sense" (65).
Likewise, Dan Leno finds himself uncertain in a new situation. The great comedian is forced to step out of his stage character when he comforts Peggy, a surviving relative of the butchered family: "He could find only the most frail and timid words of comfort now, whereas on the stage he could have delivered a great tirade of sorrow before spoofing his own grief" (206). At the lack of models of behaviour, Leno feels "cramped and restless" in the small room, but soon he finds a way out: he reverts back to his theatricality and announces, "'And do you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to set you up in a nice little clothes business a long way away from here.'" (206). Dan Leno takes the subject position the situation offers him, and immediately he is more animate: "Leno was always adept at giving directions, and it was as if he were leading her through a rehearsal" (207).
As with Dan Leno above, Ackroyd is especially interested in the ways how our lives are affected by forms of art. He quotes 'The Truth of Masks' by Oscar Wilde: "The true dramatist shows us life under the conditions of art, not art in the form of life" (DL: 281/Intentions: 256). Ackroyd applies this idea throughout his novel - ironically, in the case of Oscar Wilde, too: Ackroyd claims that Wilde wrote the quoted words when he remembered a scene in the 'realistic' play, The Crees of Misery Junction; "a true story" based of the lives of John and Elizabeth Cree that is performed at the end of the novel (267-82). Ackroyd, in other words, suggests that his own mock-realistic play in his mock-realistic novel caused Oscar Wilde to comment on realism in his famous essay! (This is not the only intertextual joke in Dan Leno: with a straight face, Ackroyd informs us that "The murders in Limehouse led indirectly to The Picture of Dorian Gray, written by Oscar Wilde some eight years later", and "They also inspired the famous sequence of paintings by James McNeill Whistler, 'Limehouse Nocturnes'", 164.)
Clearly Ackroyd has a distinct and individual sense of humour, but it is apparent in the case of George Gissing as well: despite all his efforts in realism, Gissing cannot escape the conditions of art even in his own life:
[S]ometimes he looked upon...[his miserable surroundings] as a form of experiment, with his own life as a self-conscious exercise in realism. He had been reading Emile Zola's volume of essays, The Experimental Novel, published a few months earlier, and it had confirmed all his latent faith in 'naturalisme, la vérité, la sciencé' - to the extent that he congratulated himself on leading a thoroughly modern and even literary life. In such a light even Nell could be considered a heroine of the new age. (136).
The portrait of the naturalist, who not only fails in his realism, but whose own life reflects the texts and fictions he has been reading is funny in its gentle mockery of the writer. Seeing his own life through the models of art, Gissing mixes reality with fantasy, but there is also an added irony here since, in the light of the poststructuralist view of the 'self', Ackroyd's own treatment of Gissing seems to be particularly 'realistic' in the novel.
Perhaps the funniest scenes in Dan Leno are, however, when Ackroyd shows us life (or the 'self') under the conditions of melodrama or popular forms of theatre: John Cree, Elizabeth's husband, is a "man of ungovernable lust" (224). But as his wife declines to have sex with him, or with anybody else, Elizabeth hires a maid, Aveline Mortimer, hoping that "nature [will] take its course" (226), as it soon does. Elizabeth changes her plans, however, after her husband has accused her of ruining his unfinished play, so she arranges a scene of "domestic tragedy" (254) in her house in order to control her husband:
I recognised all the signs - the sudden silences, the whisperings, the blushes, and, most important of all, the fact that he never looked at her during breakfast. I allowed a month to pass and then, at the beginning of December, I boldly stepped into his room without knocking upon the door: there they were upon the bed, as I had expected, lying with one another. 'Shame upon shame's head!' I cried out. He was quite distraught and jumped from the bed, while she simply looked at me and smiled. 'So this has come to pass!' In my excitement I echoed one of the phrases from The Northolt Tragedy. 'This is the fruit of my marriage!' I left the room and, banging the door behind me, began to weep as loudly as I could. Now I had him, tied with bonds stouter than cord. I would no longer be the guilty one. He would plead with me, praying for forgiveness, and at last I would be the master in my own house. (254).
Through Elizabeth, Ackroyd exposes the theatricality of marital discord in a most amusing way. Yet she is a disturbed woman, seeing all the world - even her marriage - as a stage: "she played the part of a wife perfectly, and yet in the very definition and completeness of her role there was an air of strangeness", (227). So as might be expected, through the eyes of Elizabeth Ackroyd offers us many insights into the theatricality of our culture, especially in instances such as court of law procedures (the judge, with his black cap, "looked like Pantaloon in the pantomime", 209), the public executions (in the theatrical fashion, Elizabeth exclaims, "Here we are again!" when she is hanged, 2), or the rituals of the Roman Catholic church:
[E]ven before I met my husband, I knew a great deal about the Roman ceremonies. Many of the hall folk were Catholics - my old friend Dan Leno used to say that it was in the blood. He saw a connection between Rome and the pantomime, as I did after a time. Sometimes he took me to mass at Our Lady of Suffering off the New Cut. It was such fun. (264-5).
The theatricality of human behaviour and the idea of the intertextual 'self' are closely intertwined in the novel but, essentially, these themes are woven around the crime plot, in which the poststructuralist 'self' - the influence of Thomas De Quincey upon the murderer - is inseparable from the theatricality of the killings themselves. As the inspector Kildare says to Dan Leno:
'[T]he odd thing is that the murderer must have read it ['On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts'] before he killed your friend. There are too many resemblances for it to be entirely natural.'
'So you think he may have been a literary man?'
'An educated man, certainly. But perhaps he was an actor playing a part. (...) Everything is very messy and very theatrical. It is a curious thing.' (204-5).
For the police, however, the Limehouse murders remain a mystery. All the clues and the signs point in many different directions but, with the lack of a unifying factor, the case is too complex and confusing to solve by means of human reason and deduction; in postmodern literature the 'self' is too weak to support such infallible, individualistic characters like Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot that appear in the more traditional forms of detective story. In the postmodern thriller, like Hawksmoor, the murder investigation usually fails, or is only impartially or accidentally solved, as in The Name of the Rose or Dan Leno (cf. Saariluoma, 1992: 205).
However, like in any good 'whodunnit', the identity of the killer is finally revealed to the reader. All the hidden connections in the suspects' lives lead to one place, which is given a symbolically significant position in the novel: the Reading Room of the British Museum. This infinite source of ideas and influences becomes a kind of ultimate intertextual meeting place in Dan Leno; a place where the characters' lives and destinies are strangely intertwined:
[T]he Reading Room was the true spiritual centre of London where many secrets might finally be revealed. (...) All participants in the mystery, willing or unwilling, had come to this place - Karl Marx, George Gissing, Dan Leno and, of course, John Cree himself. (...) Dan Leno had encountered Joseph Grimaldi here, and had thereby found his inheritance;...Karl Marx had studied here for many years, and out of his books had created a giant system;...here George Gissing had been led towards the mysteries of Charles Babbage's analytical machinery;...here her [Elizabeth's] husband had dreamed of future fame. (269-70).
The Reading Room becomes a place of almost mystical quality in Ackroyd's novel: this is the meeting point between various texts and discourses; this is where the roots of all the events in the book derive from; this is a giant library which can "be said to have affected the course of human history" (124); and this may also be the place Ackroyd has in mind when he writes, "And perhaps there was...a place where perpetual, infinite, London would one day be found" (246). If indeed the Reading Room is it (or is it Ackroyd's novel?) then in such a place "nothing need be lost. Not one voice, or laugh, or threat, or song...but it reverberate[s] through eternity" (246).
However that may be, the Reading Room does in any case have a profound influence upon the lives of Ackroyd's characters, shaping their very identities, and providing the material for their thoughts and ideas. Still, if the Reading Room - as the key to the hidden connections and the clue to "many secrets" (269) - can be seen to symbolize intertextuality itself, then Dan Leno, as a master of different stage identities, becomes the perfect representative of the poststructuralist, dispersed 'self':
[H]e played so many parts that he hardly had time to be himself. And yet, somehow, he was always himself. He was the Indian squaw, the waiter, the milkmaid, or the train driver, but it was always Dan conjuring people out of thin air. When he played the little shop-keeper, he made you see the customers who argued with him and the street arabs who plagued him. When he murmured, in an aside, 'I'll just go and unchain that Gorgonzola' you could smell the cheese and, when he pretended to shoot it and put it out of its misery, you could see the rifle and hear the shot. How they all roared when he first appeared on the stage; he would run down to the footlights, give a drumroll with his feet, and raise his right leg before rigging it down with a great thump upon the boards. Then suddenly he was the sour-faced spinster on the look-out for a man. (108-9).
Poststructuralists, such as Saariluoma (1992), tend to see the 'self' not as a fixed unity but more like a flux or a process which adapts to different situations and discourses it encounters. In this sense Dan Leno, the master of masks and poses, is an excellent example of the intertextual, postmodern 'self' since, as Uncle puts it, "He is endless" (109); there is no part Dan Leno could not play. His identity is hidden behind the masks he assumes but, then again, this exactly is his identity - a multitude of different selves. Of course Dan Leno is a special case, an extraordinarily good actor, but still there is an analogy to be drawn to all of us: are we not all playing different parts in our lives? Do not we all have different masks? At least in his biographies Ackroyd portrays his objects of study, especially Dickens and Eliot, in all their different roles and identities, without even trying to impose one unified personality or self on his elusive subjects. Ackroyd implies that there are many sides, many personas, in all of us.
As might be expected, Dan Leno is also a great imitator and parodist, so it is quite typical of Ackroyd to make him one of the central characters in his novel, thus acknowledging his greatness and showing homage to him: "'They talk of Tennyson and Browning', Austin used to say, 'and I am the last person to deny the genius of these two gentlemen, but believe me...Mr Leno is it.'" (108). Ackroyd is fascinated by this little man - after all, he had already appeared in The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (LT: 117). What especially appeals to Ackroyd is the versatility of Dan Leno, but at the same time he also suggests that possibly far more than Gissing's novels of social protest, or Karl Marx's lofty ideas of "the greatest good of the greatest number" (118), it was really popular comedians like Dan Leno who, more than a hundred years ago, with their ditties, spoofs, popular songs and comical patter, made the lives of the poor and the working class a little brighter, offering relief and escape from the harsh conditions of 19th-century reality. There is a marvellous scene in Dan Leno where George Gissing watches workers in a manufactory "proceeding up and down the staircase for eternity, as they slowly sang in unison...that old melody from the halls, 'Why Don't They Have the Sea in London?' (245).
Perhaps, then, like in Thomas Chatterton, Peter Ackroyd sees an image of himself in Dan Leno. At least he resembles Leno in many respects: in his skills in imitation and parody; in his ability to assume many personas and identities in his art; in his artistic impersonality and his almost endless versatility as a writer. Indeed, there is hardly anything Ackroyd has not tried yet: he is a novelist, biographer, poet and a critic. He is a film and book reviewer and he has prepared programmes for television. In his novels he has combined his talents, mixing art with criticism, literary theory with novelistic entertainment, in a most creative way. He has drawn his subjects from the fields of history and literature, and he has utilized the great tradition before him, while at the same time re-examining and even changing that tradition. In his fiction he has given his own interesting contribution to the poststructuralist debates about textuality, art and world but, ultimately, his greatest gifts may be seen in his superb stylistic imagination and his outstanding skills as a formidable pasticheur. Against the grain of so many other postmodernists who have claimed that originality is dead (e.g. Hutcheon, 1988) Ackroyd has gone one step further and redefined originality (see 3.1.). By so doing, and by his own imitation of others, Peter Ackroyd has proved to be quite inimitable himself, being now one of our most exciting and original authors, a man at the height of his powers.