‘Urban Palimpsests’: When novelistic and architectural languages merge in Penelope Lively’s City of the Mind

• Published in: Études britanniques contemporaines Vol. 52; no. 52
• Main Author: Gutleben, Christian
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée 29-05-2017; Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
• Subjects: aesthetic plurality; City of the Mind; ethics; heterogeneity; memory work; Penelope Lively; politique urbaine; urbanisme postmoderne; pluralisme esthétique; palimpseste; memory work; aesthetic plurality; City of the Mind; ethics; heterogeneity; Penelope Lively; urban politics; postmodern city; Thatcherism; palimpsest; Thatcher; éthique; hétérogénéité; travail mnésique
• ISSN: 1168-4917; 2271-5444
• DOI: 10.4000/ebc.3545

The concept of ‘urban palimpsests’ is used by Andreas Huyssen to convey ‘the conviction that literary techniques of reading historically, intertextually, constructively and deconstructively at the same can be woven into our understanding of urban spaces as lived spaces that shape our collective imaginaries’ (Huyssen 7). Such a perusal of the city combining literary and architectural tools is precisely what Penelope Lively undertakes in City of the Mind (1991) and it is this confluence of city and mind, space and imagination, urban planning and fiction planning which this paper sets out to analyse. The historical and aesthetic plurality inherent in the trope of the urban palimpsest constitutes the most obvious aspect of the postmodern city conceived as “both material and imaginative spaces” (Bentley 186). Thus focusing on various urban pasts may well represent an indispensable memory work but, as Madhy Dubey perceptively warns, to read the city metaphorically as palimpsest, kaleidoscope, collage or pastiche also means ‘to read it fetishistically [and] to become blind to the coordinates of power’, these metaphors suggesting misleadingly ‘a utopian space of free play between heterogeneous social elements’ (Dubey 105, 198). In City od the Mind on the contrary, because the narrative focus is on an architectural project in the Docklands, the epitome of a Thatcherite venture, and because the urban witnesses originate from diverse social strata, the political and ethical dimensions of the cities of the mind are foregrounded and will be similarly emphasised in this study proving that ‘urbanism forms the inescapable horizon of any ethical vision of contemporary social life’ (Dubey 230).