Commentaire de texte : * * *Hawksmoor* *chapter* 2 p28-29
Hawksmoor is a novel, or more precisely a detective fiction, written by Peter Ackroyd and first published in 1985. This novel is written in a post-modern way, with a totally different notion of space, time and aesthetic. The extract we are going to comment upon has no link, at first sight, with the preceding chapter and the following one. It counts the story of a class of children visiting London and their guide teaching them its history. When one first reads that story, it is quite complex to understand the meaning of this sudden intervention of it in the middle of another story. How the narrator succeeds in creating a relation between two different stories? How does he succeed in connecting past and present? We are going to analyse how the structure of this extract echoes the general structure of the whole book, then we will see how this structure leads to the gothic aspect dominating the book as a representation of mindscape, to end on the notion of sublime exposed here which is also present through the novel.
The novel is built with architectural details, in this extract the architectural aspect is shown through the description of the church but also of the streets of London. This architectural aspect conveys a feeling of reality, emphasized here by the third person narrative, but it is important to notice that this third person narrative is contrasted by a focalization on the guide and the way she teaches her students, almost on the way she thinks, and how she perceives the external world, as the reader goes on he realizes that he enters her mind gradually. This is the case in the whole novel when the reader becomes aware of the fact that the narrator’s voice is not always reliable. The role of the guide here echoes the role of Dyer in the other story, with a sort of domination over the students, they learn from her knowledge as Wren does. That notion of superiority on knowledge is shown through...