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know, like they were obsessed” (GFL, 16). It is as if Spenser was talking about himself and some of the other characters from his story as they all give way, or even become addicted, to some irrational obsessive mania, be it filming a book, seeking sexual adventures, fighting an abstract conspiracy or tracing the identity of their new internal voice. The connection between the literary and the occult is made clear during the séance Audrey attends and where, with the feeble help of Miss Norman, an irritable, businesslike parody of a spiritualist who is ironically described as a “clairvoyant and spiritual counselor […] well-known in the mediumistic circles for her pragmatic approach to the spirit world, which she tended to address as if she were a customer in Harrods” (GFL, 38), she passes out and starts uttering the words of Amy Dorrit, in spite of the fact that she has never read Dickens’s novel. Later she even has fits during which she “becomes” Little Dorrit, and “she would kneel on the floor, and pray for her father and for herself, pray to God that they would reap their just reward and that it would not be taken from them” (GFL, 113). It is only after his own experience of being rejected, misunderstood and abandoned that Tim begins to appreciate, if not envy, Audrey’s quest, feeling he also “needed guidance, and he would take it from wherever it came” (GFL, 143). The recourse to “institutional” esotericism is depicted as the desperate escapist act of those at odds with the pressures of stressful and alienating city life, rather than a serious means of its comprehension. The occult and the mystical therefore play a twofold role in the novel: while Spenser’s epiphanies when he comes to see himself as part of London’s supra-temporal spiritual continuum enable him to better understand the city and his own position in it, Amy’s psychotic possession has a devastating effect upon her as she grows more and more insecure and paranoid about her own identity. In Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem the motif of the occult is introduced through the character of a Jewish-German scholar, Solomon Weil, an expert in the Cabbala and owner of a large library of esoteric texts. Ironically enough, Ackroyd makes this fictional character befriend another German thinker living in London whose materialistic worldview is much more remote from Weil’s spiritualism, Karl Marx. The two elderly men get on surprisingly well and they meet at Weil’s place in order to exchange ideas on various matters of Judaic traditions and cabbalistic teachings. Although Weil correctly assumes that Marx’s sudden interest rather disguises his attempt “to atone for his vindictive assaults upon his own old faith” (DLLG, 64), he finds this atheist revolutionary a pleasant and erudite companion for conversation. In his late search for his once
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rejected native spiritual tradition, the novel’s Marx lets the Limehouse “magician” enlighten him about the intricate relationship between the visible and invisible worlds. As this explication sounds too foreign to Marx, Weil soon turns the conversation to their common interest, the music hall and its songs, to illustrate his abstract ideas on a concrete, and more accessible, example, pointing to the similar metaphorical imagery in music hall and cabbala terminology, as well as the fact that these music halls often occupy the sites of former chapels and churches. He then proceeds to clarify how the visible materialises the invisible through reference to one of the most famous legends of ancient Jewish lore – the golem – in order to exemplify that the material realm can be seen as a mere projection of the spiritual one, a visible manifestation of human hopes, wishes, expectations and beliefs, and that it is therefore essential to look underneath the visible surface in order to fully understand the world around: “Of course we do not have to believe in golems literally. Surely not. […] But then what do we do? We give it life in our own image. We breathe our own spirit into its shape. And that, don’t you see, is what the visible world must be – a golem of giant size” (DLLG, 68), he explains in the scene climaxing Ackroyd’s conceit of making Marx a confused pupil of a fictional mystic. The Golem, Weil implies, does not exist physically but only in the narratives which provide it with a tangible shape, thus being “only a textual trace, a shared, communal memory, given life only through the articulation of its possibility.”49 And so, when after Weil’s murder the public imagination, though on a false textual premise, nicknames the homicidal force “the Limehouse Golem,” identifying it as an incarnated emblem of the city’s miserable condition, the search for the killer assumes the larger, mythical dimension of “a search for the secret of London itself” (DLLG, 88), thus echoing the message of the lesson Weil delivers to the famous philosopher. A related approach can be found in The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, in which Ackroyd ascribes esoteric tendencies to the Romantic poets Shelley and Byron during their and their friends’ visit to the dungeon of the fictitious Chateau de Marmion at Lake Geneva: while the former experiences vivid, tormenting visions and almost swoons, the latter, inspired by the raging storm outside, organises a séance, believing that “[a]ll lakes are haunted […] Large bodies of water attract lost souls” (CVF, 367). Most importantly, without any historical evidence Ackroyd makes John Polidori, Lord Byron’s personal physician and a would-be 49 Jeremy Gibson and Julian Wolfreys, Peter Ackroyd: The Ludic and Labyrinthine Text, 205.
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writer, a devout occultist who not only uses exorcism in treating his master’s ailments, but who is also well acquainted with the ancient wisdom of renowned cabbalistic texts, such as that of the creation of the golem. He reveals his interest in the mystery of this mythical artificial “creature of the Kabbalah, made of dust and red clay” (CVF, 306), by telling the company the legend of Rabbi Loew and claiming he maintains a correspondence with certain Jewish scholars in Prague in an effort to learn the secret ritual words which, when pronounced directly to the golem, are supposed to bring it in or out of life. His most captivated listener is Victor Frankenstein, who foolishly believes that he could make use of these words in order to deactivate his monster, and so he pleads with Polidori to find them out for him as soon as possible. However, the reader cannot be sure if this account is reliable as it is all described by the, at that time, semi-insane Frankenstein, and thus Polidori’s discovery of the exact wording of the magic spell may be a product of the narrator’s sick imagination, as is the existence of his killing creature itself. As in The Great Fire of London and Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, the occult matters appear to be treated ironically in the novel, as the séance turns out to be an almost comical failure and the teaching of the Jewish lore proves useless in stopping the monster, but Ackroyd rather demonstrates what happens if they are appropriated by those who are not sufficiently suited to handle them properly, such as unbelievers, lunatics, opportunist converts and keen amateurs. Hawksmoor presents a more complex and thorough, though by far no less ambiguous, treatment of the theme of occultism, as it derives from the recent popular “rediscovery” of Nicholas Hawksmoor as one of the most unacknowledged and misinterpreted figures in the history of English architecture. Ackroyd’s version of the architect is wholly fictitious since, as he admits, Dyer’s language and thoughts are “a patchwork of other people’s voices as well as my own […], an echo from about three hundred different books as well as my own.”50 His rendering of this myth is very much indebted to Iain Sinclair’s 1975 book Lud Heat. In this quasi-treatise Sinclair proposes a well-elaborated, symbolic arrangement of Hawksmoor’s London churches, forming cryptic geometrical patterns of lines of force, consisting mostly of triangular and pentacle figures, possessing and emanating energies which can negatively affect the lives of those who happen to inhabit the areas where they intersect. Although he admits that these churches are only one of many systems of energies 50 Patrick McGrath, “Peter Ackroyd: Interview.”
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