« And in the sky, the dead and dancing sky, there are a million yesterdays » : l’horizon du passé dans City of the Mind de Penelope Lively

Abstract

In City of the Mind, Penelope Lively probes into spatial and temporal horizons as she revisits the topos of the city of London as palimpsest. The protagonist, Matthew Halland, is an architect facing contemporary problems (such as a corrupt real estate developer) in a transient city filled with flickering lights and encroaching ads; but he is also haunted by the past, whether his own broken marriage or the city’s complex past. Lively maps the past as a series of loopholes, as the text seamlessly shifts to the Blitz, Victorian London, or the Inuit brought back by Frobisher. Thus the Arctic motif adds a significant twist to the narrative, as it may be connected both with the traditional metaphor of the frozen heart and with a reassessment of national, as well as personal, identity.

Keywords

• P. Lively
• architect
• collage
• haunting
• horizon
• modernism