Ruins, or, The Ethical Logic of Traumatic Capitalism, with Special Reference to Peter Ackroyd

Abstract

Even if Ackroyd revisits some topoi of the romantic vision of Englishness by apprehending ruins in sublime terms, his use of a poetics of ruins is less concerned with a moral or aesthetic function than with an ethical one. The ruins image seems to have evolved from the domain of the predominantly aesthetic, to that of ethics, by which I mean the ethics of alterity inspired by Levinas’s writings, but also the branch of ethics that is very much concerned with care. As may be seen in the conclusion of The House of Doctor Dee where the values of generosity are seen to triumph or in Chatterton, but also in many of Ackroyd’s novels, the ethics of attention to the invisible other are promoted. This invisible other may be that of the socially underprivileged, as made clear in The Great Fire of London or in English Music, but also the other of time and of dominant culture. At the heart of the ultra liberal 1980s et 1990s, by resorting to a poetics of ruins, Ackroyd issues less a warning than an invitation to take into account the vulnerable, traumatised side of an English culture that he has tried to define throughout his œuvre.

Keywords

• P. Ackroyd
• aesthetics
• attention
• care
• Englishness
• ethics