Postmodernism and the Ontological Dominant: The Poetics of Integration in Peter Ackroyd's The House of Doctor Dee

This article proposes an analysis of Peter Ackroyd's The House of Doctor Dee (1993) in the light of two different dichotomies: Brian McHale's epistemological (cognitive) / ontological (postcognitive) dominant and John Vernon's garden / map dynamics. The House of Doctor Dee is constructed around a series of strategies closely related to the postcognitive worldview, strategies which have come to be associated with postmodernist aesthetics and which can as well be regarded as confirming and developing ideas and devices already present in previous works by the same author. Significantly, the techniques in what McHale calis the postmodernist repertoire can be said to be based on the same integrative principie that rules Vernon's garden, the latter being an image of wholeness which stands in direct opposiüon to the splitting rationale of the map. Vernon's dynamics of integration, together with McHale's ontological structures, become in my analysis the key to understanding Ackroyd's novel, while simultaneously suggesting an interesting perspective from which to approach postmodernist literature as a whole. For about two decades now, "postmodernism" has been a key word in the vocabularies of not only literary theorists but also political scientists, philosophers, artists, media theorists, sociologists, etc. Almost twenty years ago, though, the American critic and writer John Barth (1966: 66) declared it to be a term "awkward and faintly epigonic, suggestive less of a vigorous or even interesting new direction in the oíd art of storytelling than sometbing anticlimactic, feebly following a very hard act to follow". In 1980, the term was beginning to enter the full range of human sciences, and still carried clear aesthetic connotations. 106 Revista Alicantina de Estudios ingleses Thus, for Barth, postmodernism is a continuation but modification of cultural modernism, a way of "telling stories". Though by now postmodernism as a concept has spilled out of the boundaries of literary critical debate, it still carnes with it, as Patricia Waugh (1992: 1) points out, this idea of telling stories, but stories that have become indistinguishable from what was once assumed to be knowledge (scientific "truth", ethics, law, history...). Postmodernism, Waugh adds, has also invented its own genealogy or, rather, it has constructed genealogies. Accordingly, just as there is a variety of theoretical precursors and historical trajectories so there are many postmodernisms. In his quest for an all-encompassing theory of postmodernism, Brian Metíale discusses several approaches to the subject by critics as well-known as Jean Fran^ois Lyotard, Richard Rorty, Hayden White, Christopher Norris, Gerald Graff, David Lodge, Christine Brooke-Rose and John Barth, among others. Significantly, their respective accounts of postmodernism appear in McHale's analysis as "postmodernist stories" (1992: 19-37), a phrase he uses in an attempt to trivialize the more serious connotations of the term "theory". In this light, it does not come as a surprise when McHale refers to his versión of the myth of the postmodernist breakthrough as "my own story" (1992: 32-33; 272) or when he presents it as deriving from a work by Dick Higgins (1978)—poet, composer, performance artist, and sometime small-press publisher— which is fashioned in the form of a tale, that is, as another story. McHale devises his well-known proposalby extrapolating Higgins' distinction between cognitivism andpostcognitivism (1978:101) to afield—literary fiction—that Higgins does not take into consideration (at least explicitly). Thus, McHale suggests that postmodernist literature foregrounds its ontological structure as opposed to modernist literature, which is based on an epistemological dominant. Modernist literature is centred around the pursuit of knowledge, asking (cognitive) questions such as: "How can I interpret this world of which I am a part? And what am I in it?" Postmodernist works, on the other hand, foreground the plurality of ontologically distinct worlds as they elicit (postcognitive) questions such as: "Which world is this? What is there to be done in it? Which of my selves is to do it?" (McHale 1992: 32-34,146-47, mdpassim; see also 1987: xii, 3-25, and passim). The novel I intend to analyse here—Peter Ackroyd's The House of Doctor Dee (1993)—should be placed on the postcognitive/postmodemist side of the line, as it is constructed around a series of strategies closely related to the postcognitive worldview, strategies which have come to be associated with postmodernist aesthetics, and which can as well be regarded as confirming and developing ideas and devices already present in previous works by the same author. This is not to say, however, that there is no place in the novel for what Higgins first and McHale later cali "cognitive questions". As McHale's terminology suggests, the matter we face has to do with "dominants", that is, groups of features which are not the only thing there is in a work but which are given relevance over something else, thus setting the tone of the novel we happen to be reading and leading our interpretation along certain paths. Accordingly, in the first part of this paper, I will analyse the process by which the ontological dominant takes over the epistemological one in The House of Doctor Dee. In Postmodernism and the Ontological Dominant 107 the novel's context, the distinction epistemological-ontological can be further explained in the light of what John Vernon (1973) calis "structures of splitting" and "structures of wholeness". Thus, in the second part of my study, the main characters' trajectory in their respective quests for knowledge is presented as an evolution from separation to integration. Moreover, wholeness, as opposed to splitting, is not only the outcome of the protagonists' process of learning but also the principie at the core of Ackroyd's novel. And, to a great extent, isn't it also the principie on which postmodernist literature can be said to be based? The House of Doctor Dee begins with the contemporary narrator-character, Matthew Palmer, moving to an oíd house which he has just inherited from his recently deceased father. As he soon learns, the house in Clerkenwell did once belong to one of the most famous magicians in the time of Elizabeth I—Dr John Dee. The second chapter, which is not "Two" but "The Spectacle", tums out to be narrated by Dr Dee himself and, accordingly, the events recounted there are set in the narrator's lifetime—the sixteenth century. Moreover, the novel's structure is based on this alternation between different narrative voices and chronological periods, as happens in Hawksmoor (1985) and Chatterton (1987). Matthew's chapters are set in 1993 and are numbered —from "One" to "Seven"— while Dr Dee's take place in Renaissance England and present chapter-headings related to the events told in each section. The novel closes with "The Vision", an all-inclusive chapter which could be defined as a combination of historical periods, plot lines and narrative voices —Matthew's, Dr Dee's, and even Peter Ackroyd's. The first chapters of the novel are enoughfor us to approach its main characters' quests for knowledge in the light of the epistemological dominant. The epistemological dominant usually gives raise to novéis that resemble detective fiction —the epistemological genre par excellence— in the sense that their plots take the form of a quest for a missing or hidden item of knowledge. The protagonist is a "cognitive hero" and the story revolves around problems related to the accessibility and circulation of knowledge, the individual mind's grappling with an elusive or occluded reality (McHale 1992: 147). Both Matthew Palmer and John Dee are cognitive héroes. Matthew himself is a professional researcher, and so is his cióse friend Daniel Moore. At the time the novel opens, Matthew is carrying out a piece of research on Elizabethan costume for a theatrical company, which, once again, has sent him backwards to the past. Significantly enough, his job, he explains, has led him to view the past in general as his own present, while he has in turn come to perceive the present moment as part of the past (HD 13). The discovery that the place his father has left him was owned by such an intriguing figure as Dr Dee, together with the uncanny atmosphere of the house itself, awakes in him a growing desire to know more details about John Dee, who becomes, from that moment on, Matthew's private obsession, and the main object of his quest. A strong desire to recupérate the past leads not only Matthew's but also Dee's activities as described in the sections narrated by each of them. If, for Matthew, the past is Dr Dee's life and work, for Dee it has to do with the (re-)discovery of the lost city of London, a mystical place founded by the mythical forefathers of the English race —godlike men, giants of spiritual power, who inhabited the earth before the Flood (HD 190). The possibility of having access to their records and controlling their spiritual power haunts Dr Dee as that would provide him with the key to the essence of things and people or, what 108 Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses is the same, the key to mint gold and créate life without the help of any womb (HD 77, 104). Having explained the premises under which Matthew's and Dr Dee's respective quests begin, we could now ask ourselves whether the outcome corresponds to the questers' initial objectives. In his postscript to The Ñame ofthe Rose, Umberto Eco (1984:54) describes his novel as "a mystery in which very little is discovered and the detective is defeated". Although, to a great extent, William of Baskerville can be said to discover the truth, he does so not by logical deduction —as a successful detective would have done— but, rather, by mere chance: "There was no plot", William said, "and I discovered it by mistake I arrived at Jorge through an apocalyptic pattern that seemed to underlie all the crimeSi and yet it was accidental. I arrived at Jorge seeking one criminal for all the crimes and we discovered that each crime was committed by a different person, or by no one. I arrived at Jorge pursuing the plan of a perverse and rational mind, and there was no plan, or, rather, Jorge himself was overeóme by his own initial design and there began a sequence of causes, and concauses, and of causes contradicting one another, which proceeded on their own, creating relations that did not stem from any plan. Where is all my wisdom, then? (1983: 492) Similarly, both Matthew and Dr Dee discover a truth about themselves and about the world, but they do so accidentally, by pursuing the wrong goals and then recognizing their mistakes. As their quests gradually change their respective foci, the novel's epistemological component is invaded by something else. What rushes in is in fact ontological structure and thematics, or, in other words, McHale's postmodernist poetics. This is not to say, I insist, that the story is evacuated of its epistemological questions but, simply, that other questions are f oregrounded to the point that the reader him/herself comes to partake in the kind of dynamics they posit. In this light, The House of Doctor Dee can be said to draw on several of the strategies which McHale includes in what he calis the "postmodernist repertoire", and which are therefore related to the ontological dominant of "What world is this?...". He groups them into two categories: firstly, strategies that stage confrontations among two or more worlds, thus focusing attention on the boundary or interface between them; and, secondly, strategies that destabilize the projected world of the novel itself, thus foregrounding the very process of world construction (McHale 1992:151-52). I willfollow this classification in order to analyse the way in which postmodernist devices are used in Ackroyd's work. The most conspicuous ontological confrontation in The House of Doctor Dee is the one between the novel's fictional world and real-world historical fact. In this respect, The House of Doctor Dee may be said to repeat the pattern of Ackroyd's previous novéis as well as that of all the works included in what Linda Hutcheon first called "historiographic metafiction", a phrase meant to designate "those well-known and popular novéis which are both intensively self-reflective and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages" (Hutcheon 1988: 5). As Hutcheon further explains, the incorporation of Postmodernism and the Ontological Dominant 109 historical events in this kind of novel is by no means innocent. In fact, historiographic metafiction plays upon the truth/lie opposition with regard to historical records as it acknowledges "the paradox of the reality of the past but its textualized accessibility to us today" (Hutcheon 1984: 114, italics in the original). It is on account of the fact that books constitute the only possible access to the past that Dr Dee praises his library as one of the most precious things in his kingdom (HD 63). Living among books, as he (and Matthew himself) does, is like living within the past. But living within the past in this manner, that is, understanding past ages, becomes in turn the only way to master the present (HD 67). This comes cióse to what Matthew feels when working with "oíd books and oíd papers", a task which throws light upon both himself and the immediate world around him (HD 13). It is through a particular text —"a thick oíd book. . . printed anno 1517"—that Dr Dee has learnt about and come to believe in the lost city of London. Though he has no doubt as to its existence, it is only in the book that he finds it, and not even there, as, according to Dee's narration, the work in question was stolen, taken from him when he was imprisoned by Queen Mary's order on the charge of being a conjurar (HD 66). Similarly, though the house to which he has just moved constitutes Matthew's main "door" to the Renaissance owner of the place, it is in the English History Library that he tries to "find John Dee" (HD 129). But to no effect. The only conclusión he reaches after his thorough research of the library's records is that "the past is difñcult", not to say ungraspable. As he explains to Daniel, every book he has read has a different Dr Dee and none of them are alike (HD 136). Accordingly, Ackroyd's is just one more versión of the complex controversial figure that Dr John Dee once was, and for us still is. The presence of real-world historical personages in a fictional text —Dr Dee, but also his wife, Edward Kelly, or, for that matter, Peter Ackroyd himself, whose voice we hear in the last chapter— is a case of what Eco (1979: 229) has called "transworld identity". Transworld identity is always a sign of the penetration of one world by another, the violation or, rather, the blurring of an ontological boundary. In The House of Doctor Dee, as is the case with countless other historiographic metafictions, this is the boundary between reality and fiction but also, partly as a consequence, the boundary that separates characters and chronological periods. I will explain this point further in what follows. After reading the first chapters of the book, the reader has enough data to distinguish the two narrative voices—one is Matthew's, the other, Dr Dee's—as s/he is explicitly informed about the time in which the events narrated take place and, abo ve all, on account of the fact that each narrator uses his own idiolect. Moreover, Matthew speaks contemporary English, while Dr Dee speaks early Modern English. Inserted within Matthew's narrative are the documents he finds in the house, produced by people living there at different ages (from the seventeenth century onwards) and so, written in "several different hands and scrawled across various types of paper" (HD 219). Likewise, Dr Dee's sections are "contaminated" with the Latin of his studies as a medievalist, as well as with the popular, lower-class speech of several characters —John Overbury (Dee's oíd assistant in "The Hospital"), Edward Kelly, Dee's servants, etc.— and of the numerous rhymes inserted throughout these sections, not to mention the "canting" dialect of the vagrant 110 Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses (Philip Jennings) who unexpectedly appears in Dee's garden and speaks in "some ancient tongue of the country" unknown to Dee (HD 70). As Mikhaü Bakhtin or Michel Foucault would put it, different languages, different registers of the same language construct the world differently or, in other words, they each construct different worlds. However, as happens with the distinction between fact and fiction, all fhese worlds become one in the novel. Thus, Dr Dee's scryer is able to listen to pieces of conversation between Daniel and Matthew, just as the latter perceives distinctly some of the words uttered by Dee and Edward Kelly, and even answers to what he thinks is a person standing behind him when he is looking at Dee's crystal globe in the British museum (HD 248). If words/language share this transworld identity, the same happens with the characters' lives. The experiences a person goes through constitute that person's life, and they anchor him/her to a particular period in time, as well. By contrast, what we find in the novel is that the same events are shared by different people living in different ages. This goes beyond the fact that Matthew and Dee have striking biographical traits in common—they are both self-centred, solitary, and even unsociable men, in love with books and the past, in bad terms with their respective fathers, etc. Thus, just as John Dee succumbs to the charms of a whore —Marión— the day when his father dies (HD 120), Matthew hires a prostitute—Mary— shortly after his father's death (HD 173). Moreover, Dee is somehow allowed to see them as Matthew defiles her in the house basement (HD 217), which is in turn the very same place where Daniel and Matthew's father performed their sexual rituals (HD 172). Likewise, if on page 136 Matthew breaks a pigeon's wing (by throwing at it a book on the life and works of Dr Dee) and furiously beats it until it dies, the (same?) dead pigeon with "a single wing" appears some pages later in the mouth of Dee's cat (HD 159). Many other things recur throughout the two narrators' accounts. The tune "Fortune, My Foe" is first sung by Dee, on a night walk at the end of the second chapter, and then by the vagrant in Dee's garden (HD 71). Later on, Matthew finds himself repeating the words of a song he had heard that moming as he sat in the oíd house, a song which, to his best knowledge, is called "Fortune, My Foe" (HD 142). Among the documents that Matthew's father had preserved, he finds the story of an early twentieth-century writer tormented by the fear that everything he writes are plots and words stolen from some other source. He seems to have lived in Dee's house as well, where he has just finished a book on the strikes and riots in eighteenth-century London, a book which turns out to have already been written by someone else (HD 222-24). Significantly, Daniel Moore is also writing a book on a subject related to London radicalism. Whether or not it is the same book, or whether the former is or is not included in the latter, the topic (the "anxiety of influence", the impossibility of being original, etc.) recalls other versions of it in Ackroyd's works to the point that, after so many coincidences, the reader is tempted to say with Dr Dee that "One and One is all alone, and even more shall be so" (HD 103). Everywhere we look, what we had initially perceived as separation, tensión or confrontation dissolves in a pervading (transworld) unity. One is all and all is one. In sum, there are several worlds, but they are all the same. Further considerations can be added to this conclusión, considerations that are related to the second group of strategies in McHale's "postmodernist repertoire". The above-mentioned world, which is Postmodernism and the Ontological Dominant 111 many —Dr Dee's and Matthew's, past and present, history and story— but is one, is no other than the world of the novel, which self-consciously calis attention to its own fictional status. "Writing a novel", Eco tells us, "is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Génesis" (Eco 1984: 20). The "cosmos" of The House of Doctor Dee has its own demiurge, who is Peter Ackroyd. As could be expected from a postmodernist novel, the position he occupies is far from being that of an author who keeps himself aloof from his work, "paring his fingernails". Ackroyd is behind his novel and, what is more, he is also within it. Just as Dee makes his the Hermetic principie that "What is above also lies below, what is below is also above" (HD 77), so Ackroyd illustrates in The House of Doctor Dee the postmodernist conviction that the way in, so to say, is the way out: as reality is levelled with fiction, there is no breach between the real world and the world of the novel. No wonder, then, that its author is both without and within it. It is in the last chapter of The House of Doctor Dee that the author joins his characters. It is also there that he acknowledges his difficulties to sepárate what there is of history from what there is of invention in the pages we have just read. However, he also reveáis himself as a craftsman, a world-maker: "Just as he [John Dee] took a number of mechanical parts and out of them constructed a beetle that could fly [in "The Spectacle"], so I have taken a number of obscure texts and have fashioned a novel from their rearrangement" (HD 275). Such a statement calis attention to the author's three main facets: as researcher, as imaginative creator, and last but not least, as deviser of patterns. In addition to being inseparable from the novel's contení, its form has been contrived in such a way that it reinforces the work's main themes while simultaneously foregrounding its fictional nature. Interestingly enough, just as the Uves of Dr Dee and Matthew seem to criss-cross and coincide at several points, the chapters they nárrate are not simply juxtaposed but carefully concatenated. Thus, the closing sentence of each chapter reappears at the beginning of the next one (until "Five"), or, alternatively (from "Five" to "Seven"), two chapters laten Different in status, the last section—"The Vision"— breaks the chain and stands apart from the rest. Among the elements and techniques that may contribute to flaunting a novel's fictional quality, McHale (1992: 155) pays special attention to mirror reflections and mise-enabyme structures. In The House of Doctor Dee, the house where most of the action takes place conspicuously synthesizes all the novel is. As Matthew first sees the house building he concludes that it must have been rebuilt or restored in several different periods. In fact, he is able to distinguish older and younger parts just as the reader can perceive the alternation in the novel between chapters set in the far past of the sixteenth century from others set in the nearer past of 1993. As has been pointed out, though, both characters and events somehow break temporal boundaries, creating, rather, a feeling of atemporality. In the same way, the house, which belongs to different ages, is actually "not of any one period" (HD 2), as if all temporal dimensions had flown into it and lingered there waiting for every successive inhabitant (HD 82). Past, present and future meet within the walls of its three-level structure. Likewise, the reader of the novel can follow Matthew moving backwards in time to find Dr Dee, while the latter seems to be moving forwards, towards Matthew's present (which he sees in a visión). Matthew's present is Dee's future; Dee's 112 Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses present is Matthew's past; and they are all the reader's present as s/he meets every temporal dimensión simultaneously in the act of reading. All times, then, meet in the house, and in the book. When talking to Daniel about his initial (bibliographical) research on John Dee, Matthew utters some words that may have a curious effect on the reader: "I held up the book with the portrait of Dr Dee on its cover. 'Reader', I said, 'this is the beginning and the end'" (HD 137). The book Matthew refers to strangely resembles The House of Doctor Dee, which also has a portrait of Dr Dee on the cover. Once this connection is established, the words which follow may lead us to consider that it is the book we have in our hands that is "the beginning and the end", which points to circular temporality (cf. "The Vision") but also to world-inclusiveness in the sense that there is a world within the novel's first and last pages, and that that world —a fictional world which can no longer be opposed to a "real" one— is all there is. According to Dee's theories, each material thing contains the world within it, it is "the visible home of universal power or congregation of powers" (HD 133). Moreover, man is a miniature replica of the world, a microcosm: "all [is] within us . . . what exists in heaven and earth exists also within the human frame" (HD 58). Significantly, as Matthew points out, the house "resembled the torso of a man rearing up, while his arms still lay spread upon the ground on either side" (HD 3). If we add to this the fact that, as the Behmenists believed, and according to Daniel's explanation, "the universe itself [has] the shape of a single person" (HD 45), what we have is a sort of House/World/Book all at once. To a great extent, architecture is the art "that most boldly tries to reproduce in its rhythm the order of the universe which the ancients called 'kosmos'" (Eco 1983: 26). Dr Dee's house no doubt reproduces the kind of universe his sixteenth-century owner believed in and which now becomes Matthew's, as it once was that of its other inhabitants (members, in this sense, of the same "spiritual family"). This doubling of the world of The House of Doctor Dee by the world-within-the world which is the house of Dr Dee opens up a kind of abyss of potentially infinite regress which becomes particularly conspicuous when Dr Dee himself has a visión of someone "writing upon a theme concerning me and my books" and is eventually able to "see" a thick volume "which had on its first page my house as its title in great letters" (HD 71). This volume en abyme, being the very same book we are reading, would repeat the process thus laying bare the complexity of the novel's ontological structure: