God Save the Canon: Tradition and the British Subject in Peter Ackroyd's English Music

 
The most striking feature of Peter Ackroyd's novel English Music (1992) is the incongruity between its postmodern narrative tactics and the conservative ideal of British identity it celebrates. Employing tropes closely associated with postmodern fiction, Ackroyd's novel presents the story of the main character, Tim Harcombe, as a series of set-pieces in which he inhabits storylines and landscapes drawn from a number of classic English writers and painters such as Daniel DeFoe, William Blake, and Charles Dickens. In contrast to an eclectic style usually associated with the celebration of diversity and an acknowledgment of contingency, however, the novel champions a tradition of white male English artists that is decidedly conservative. The disparity between style and ideology here has been the subject of much of the early criticism of the novel. Michael Levenson, for example, wryly notes that "Ackroyd is the Tory postmodernist. Now we know there can be such a thing" (32). And in a detailed reading of the Ackroyd's narrative strategy, Jim Collins argues that "The intertextual infrastructure of Ackroyd's novel is as elaborate as The Name of the Rose," but it ultimately "serves as the basis of an extended exercise in cultural restoration, resulting in a bizarre amalgamation of Umberto Eco and Allan Bloom" (61). English Music thus forces the reconsideration of the supposedly inherent link between a postmodern interrogation of traditional forms of representation and a celebration of cultural diversity.

Ultimately, however, the novel may be most interesting as part of a brand of intellectual conservatism that runs from T.S. Eliot through Harold Bloom. Stressing the overwhelming authority of tradition, English Music celebrates a timeless national spirit reflected in British art and literature, and mystifies this spirit by presenting it as an irrational and ungovernable force working throughout history. As he weds this mystified concept of national character to British artistic heritage, Ackroyd at once dramatizes Eliot's spatialized model of literary inheritance and aligns himself with recent defenders of the Western canon. While Ackroyd is more explicitly nationalist than Harold Bloom, the difference between the two is finally one of degree and not kind, for English Music illuminates how the celebration of an allegedly transcendent tradition works to support a conservative cultural agenda: reacting to the perceived threat of an increasingly diverse, multi-cultural society, Ackroyd spatializes British literary tradition in an attempt to recuperate the cultural legacy of the white English male.

Set in early twentieth-century England, English Music is the coming of age story of Tim Harcombe, the son of a faith healer and magician named Clement. The novel traces Tim's relationship with his father through a series of events that conspire to separate and reunite them several times. The primary subject of the book concerns Tim's attempt to make sense of his past and, in particular, to understand the healing powers that are unleashed when he and his father are in contact. The book consists of nineteen chapters: the odd chapters contain a realistic, first-person narrative of Tim's relationship with his father, while the even chapters record Tim's flight into other worlds, composed of scenes and characters drawn from the work of classic English writers and painters. In the course of the novel, for example, Tim inhabits Pilgrim's Progress and Alice in Wonderland simultaneously; he enters Dickens's world (where he meets the author working on his fiction), Crusoe's island, a series of paintings depicting English landscapes, the life of musician William Boyd, and Conan Doyle's detective fiction. All these works represent what Tim, following his father, calls "English music"—art that reflects the essential character of English culture.

In adopting writing styles and characters from an array of English writers such as Defoe, Blake, and Dickens, Ackroyd presents a thoroughly textualized historical referent—a defining characteristic of postmodern historiographic fiction, according to Linda Hutcheon's seminal study The Poetics of Postmodernism. For Hutcheon, novels such as E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime (1975) and Timothy Findley's Famous Last Words (1981) continually call attention to their own artifice: stressing that the world they represent is "both resolutely fictive and undeniably historical" (142), these works refuse the pretense of unmediated access to the referent. Findley's novel, for example, depicts Ezra Pound interacting with Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, a character from Pound's poem of that name. Here the novel does not deny the material existence of Ezra Pound; rather, Hutcheon argues that it unsettles any attempt to make an easy ontological distinction between Pound as the "object of history" (the referent) and as the "object of perceptions" (the empirical, physical man) (145). By questioning this distinction, novels such as Famous Last Words present the referent, and thus historical knowledge, as a discursive construct.

Like Findley's novel, English Music blurs the distinction between the real and the fictional; it juxtaposes the two worlds that Tim inhabits—one a realistically described early twentieth-century London, the other a fanciful landscape in which Tim becomes a character in the stories of earlier authors. Chapter One ends, for example, with Tim falling asleep as his father reads to him, and Chapter Two begins with Tim meeting Christian from Pilgrim's Progress. Undercutting the distinction between the fictional and the factual, the novel encompasses both the realistic story of Tim's youth and the fantastic tales he enters. [1] As Tim simultaneously inhabits the fictional worlds of Alice and Wonderland and Pilgrim's Progress, the novel depicts an environment literally composed of words: he sees a small house that has

 
Tim here questions the relationship between language and reality, the word and the world. Seeing a landscape composed of language, he ultimately reflects on his place in this scene: "'But what am I doing here?' he asked of no one in particular. 'And how can I find out who I am?'" (32). [2] Emphatic in his use of the personal pronoun, Tim shows that his confusion stems from his self-consciousness as a realistic character in an imaginary setting. The challenge to these boundaries encourages him to consider his position as a subject constituted by language and wonder how he can go about discovering his identity.

Along with disputing the transparency of the historical referent, English Music also challenges the humanist conception of the unified individual. Describing a landscape made of words, Ackroyd emphasizes the discursive nature of his characters' experiences: they know themselves, their world, and their past primarily through language. Discussing the representation of subjectivity in postmodern novels, Brenda Marshall contends that works such as Michel Tournier's Friday (1969) stress the constitutive role language plays in identity formation: consequently, "There is no way to gain access to some inner and pure self, because there is no such self" (97). Instead, the novels develop a concept of the subject as "the site of conflict and contradiction, constructed and altered through language and social formation" (97). Defining the subject as a "site" of conflict and contradiction, Marshall notes the attenuation of the humanist individual as a source of meaning and action, and the splintering of the unified, singular self. Developing a similar critique of the individual, Ackroyd's novel depicts characters who cannot master the language that shapes their identities. [3]

Given the textualization of the world, Tim believes that his sense of self depends upon his ability to control language; however, his assumptions are undercut by the play of signifiers in his adventures in Wonderland. When he hears characters chanting words and phrases in a nonsensical way, he reflects that he will have to explain to them that "words must have some meaning after all" (39). His adventures suggest, though, that he is not the master of these meanings. When he happens upon the Red Queen asking questions and listening to their echo, he hears this exchange:

 
The Red Queen hopes to use language as a means to arrive at a rational or logical truth. But returning to her via the echo, her own words mock this attempt, ultimately driving her to shout in frustration, "I shall scream," to which the echo replies, "Ice cream" (30). This absurd response undercuts her imperious demand for a truth outside language as rational meaning gives way to the playful linguistic surface of the text. Foiling the Queen's attempt to reach a logical truth, the play of signifiers upsets her assumption that she can manipulate words for her own ends.

Depicting characters who cannot employ words as a means to extra-linguistic truth, Ackroyd undercuts their position as individuals capable of freely determining their fate. Like the Red Queen, characters throughout English Music realize that they do not control language, but are constituted as subjects and in some measure controlled by it. When Christian from Pilgrim's Progress complains of his sorrows, Alice observes, "It's all his fancy....He likes the words. If there were no words, he wouldn't feel a thing" (39). Her remark indicates that language does not reflect reality—such as Christian's emotional state—but creates it: words do not represent experience; they enable characters to have it. Furthermore, the novel reveals the limited power characters have to direct the discourse that shapes them. The Mad Hatter, for example, counsels Alice that "You must always ask from words where they want to go before you use them" (39). Highlighting the characters' lack of power over the language that constitutes them, the novel undercuts their position as autonomous individuals.

In challenging the autonomy of the humanist individual, English Music might be expected to promote the liberal politics Linda Hutcheon finds in earlier postmodern historiographic metafiction. For Hutcheon, works such as D.M. Thomas' The White Hotel (1981) challenge the tropes of realist narratives, which encourage readers to master textual details in a coherent, non-contradictory interpretation: this reinforces the position of both the protagonist and the reader as consistent, self-determining individuals—a position traditionally defined as white and male. In contrast, by depicting the self as a "process and as the site of contradiction," The White Hotel refuses to offer the reader a comfortable perspective from which to master the text (167). Thomas frustrates the reader's attempt to achieve a "totalizing concept of the protagonist's subjectivity" by presenting conflicting, irreconcilable accounts—in multiple genres—of Lisa Erdeman's life and her execution at Babi Yar (159). In particular, as it depicts Sigmund Freud's treatment of Lisa's hysteria, The White Hotel reveals how Freud's limited knowledge of Lisa and his paternalistic attitude toward her undercut his pretense to objectivity. According to Hutcheon, in this challenge to the universal reason of the white European male, the novel "teaches us to recognize difference" (159). Works like Thomas's novel thus have a liberating political effect as they force the reader to confront a contradictory and self-questioning representation of subjectivity.

While it challenges the notion of a unified, self-determining individual, English Music marks a radical shift from the depiction of subjectivity in The White Hotel and other early postmodern fiction, for it presents characters whose identities are determined and whose lives are shaped by a mystified historical force. Like Thomas's novel, English Music does not present characters who are compelled by material forces, whether social or historical. Refusing to revert to an older model of the subject, Ackroyd doesn't describe characters who are "subject to" a corporeal power: the novel eschews, for example, a simplistic theory of economic determinism in which the class of the characters settles their fate. Instead, the novel posits an idealized vision of English tradition as an inescapable spiritual force, reflected in British art, that defines the careers, the loves, and the neuroses of the characters.

Ackroyd introduces this mystified tradition in several scenes in which characters realize that their actions are constrained by an unseen power. Despite their intuition that they don't freely decide the course of their lives, characters throughout the novel confront their limited insight into the forces that shape them. In the appropriation of Great Expectations, for example, Pip learns that Miss Havisham is not his benefactor, and this leads him to question the basis of his identity:

 
When he thought that Miss Havisham supported him, Pip had a sense of self, for he believed that he directed his life with his individual will. Upon discovering that Charles Dickens—a stranger—decides his fate and so "possesses" him, he becomes a "dreadful mystery" to himself, sent rushing through the world by forces he cannot fathom. Ackroyd here establishes a sense of the self as an enigma, and poses the central question of the novel: who—or what—fashions the inheritance that forms the characters as subjects?

In answer to this question, Ackroyd suggests that the characters' fates are decided by an immaterial force working through English artistic tradition. In several metafictional scenes in the novel, this force is symbolized by the figure of an author writing the story the characters inhabit; for their part, the characters realize that their lives are encoded in a text written by an author who cannot be known. In the parody of Arthur Conan Doyle's fiction, for example, Tim and the detective Austin Smallwood discover the author of their adventure as he pens its conclusion. Tim recognizes the writer as a younger version of his father, and Smallwood comments that

 
While Tim and Smallwood here locate the person who literally drafts their lives, the novel makes it clear that Tim's fate has not been decided simply by a particular author-father. Rather, Ackroyd describes the individual who writes the tale or fathers the child as an incomplete manifestation of a general historical force. Claiming to be "very much part of English tradition," Smallwood cites John Locke as he claims that such a "tradition is no less true because there is nothing in the world that fully represents it" (124). The author-father figures in the novel reflect the spirit of an English tradition never fully realized in a single person or work of art. So Tim's life is scripted not simply by his "real" father, but by those who authored or fathered a grand English artistic tradition—a tradition that determines the texts that are written and the social roles inhabited by characters. To understand Ackroyd's mystification of the spirit of Albion as a decisive force in his characters' lives, it is necessary to examine how tradition has been reconceived from a post-structuralist perspective.

In an essay titled "Radical Democracy," Chantal Mouffe envisions tradition, in terms borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein, as "the set of language games that make up a given community" (40). Mouffe here defines community as a discursive entity, and suggests that it is comprised of an argument about what constitutes tradition. The emphasis on competition in Mouffe's theory reflects Alisdair MacIntyre's vision of tradition as a site of contention: MacIntyre claims that would-be-inheritors of a tradition must construct interpretations, in the form of narratives, that legitimate their particular conception of it:

 
Rather than seeing it as a fixed or stable set of values reflected in common cultural practices, MacIntyre describes tradition as a site of competition between rival interpretations, each arguing for its legitimacy. Mouffe adopts a similar vision of tradition in her attempt to formulate a politics of postmodernity: for Mouffe, the deconstruction of belief in a common cultural heritage has potentially radical political consequences. It results in a proliferation of conflicting interpretations of tradition, and this represents an opportunity for greater democracy as people, with various ethnic, sexual, and religious identities, vie to legitimate their perspectives on history.

In outlining her theory of the argumentative nature of tradition, however, Mouffe ultimately relies on reason as the means to judge the validity of competing narratives. Locating democratic possibilities in the deconstruction of Enlightenment standards of universal reason, Mouffe claims we must get beyond the false dichotomy between absolute truth or utter relativism. Simply because we cannot attain mathematical certainty about a social or ethical issue does not mean that we cannot distinguish between perspectives:

 
Note Mouffe's terms here: "reasonable" opinion, "rational" choice. In critiquing universal reason as the basis for judging social and ethical issues, she argues that local reason, originating within a specific community, can provide standards for discerning the value of a particular truth claim.

 
So the argument about what constitutes a valid provisional truth is carried out in the framework of custom, and the rules of conduct of a given society are contingent, historically grounded within this local tradition. While maintaining that the deconstruction of universal reason need not result in utter relativism, however, Mouffe does not anticipate the emergence of narratives that ground their claims for legitimacy on the mystification of history. [5]

Novels such as Famous Last Words, The White Hotel, and English Music help dismantle a traditional, positivist model of historiography, which inscribes the referent in a cause-effect sequence and grounds its claim for legitimacy on a progressive narrative. [6] This critique has led to a proliferation of historical narratives, each asserting its validity: as Brenda Marshall notes, we speak "now of 'histories' instead of History" (147). While taking part in an argument, however, these conflicting interpretations need not be grounded on reasonable opinion or rational choice. Given the pluralization of history, how much cultural power or authority can a black or hispanic writer claim by admitting the contingency and historicity of his or her perspective? In the context of narratives competing to justify their value, the appeal to local reason or a contingent tradition cannot support a compelling argument for the necessity of a particular point of view. Consequently, while helping to discredit a model of history grounded in an appeal to universal reason, English Music mystifies the past in order to suggest the necessity of its position. Specifically, Ackroyd mystifies history in this novel in order to support a conservative ideal of English art as transcendent.

Ackroyd mystifies English artistic tradition in the concept of English music he develops throughout the novel. Discussing the home-schooling he received from his father, Tim notes that the subject of his lessons was always English music, by which his father meant "not only music itself but also English history, English literature and English painting" (21). This tradition represents the presence or persistent influence of the master works of British culture. As he listens to his father's lessons, he imagines that "...all those things comprised one world which I believed to be still living" (21). These grand works of English culture reflect an eternal, unchanging spirit of Albion: repeatedly, Tim asserts that while the surface of things change, an essential Englishness remains. As an older man, looking at the urban landscape of his youth, he says, "...I believe I could make out the shape of forgotten buildings" (1). Within the multiple, shifting impressions of a world in constant flux, he discerns intimations of an immortal English character. Detective Smallwood reinforces this lesson by telling Tim that

 
Echoing Smallwood's description of the immutable pattern, Tim describes English art as "almost a secret inheritance" that exists in a continuous present (22). Effacing the histories of these works as they merge into "one world" (21), Ackroyd's novel emphasizes the enduring influence of an atemporal tradition.

In this mystification of English art as a timeless order of master works, Ackroyd develops a spatialized vision of tradition strikingly similar to that described in T.S. Eliot's essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Suggesting that literature has a "simultaneous existence" and comprises a "simultaneous order," Eliot argues that the grand works of Western literature form an "ideal order among themselves...." (5) He emphasizes the eternal presence of works such as Homer's Odyssey and Dante's Inferno, and attempts to isolate the essential artistic quality of monumental works of literature: in so doing, he strips tradition of its foundation in linear history, and redefines it as an atemporal order to which a new poet aspires. Eliot here rebuffs any critical attempt to understand the historical circumstances—of the artists or their audiences—that influenced the production of the literary work. Charging him with ahistoricism, many critics have dismissed Eliot's ideal order as conservative or even reactionary. In his essay "What is Tradition," for example, Gerald Bruns describes Eliot's concept as a "pantheon or five-foot shelf whose order is periodically adjusted to make room for new members. Eliot's is still your basic museum-piece theory of tradition..." (7). While offering an accurate assessment, Bruns downplays the influence not only of Eliot's vision of tradition, but also of his reconception of how tradition is bequeathed.

In spatializing literary history, Eliot transforms the means by which tradition is passed on. For Eliot, a poet cannot simply claim tradition as a birthright: "It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor" (4). Reflecting his Protestant upbringing, this essay suggests that you must earn tradition by hard work. At the time he wrote "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Eliot was newly expatriated, and attempting along with Ezra Pound and others, to establish himself as a writer in England—a nation with a culture that, because of his roots in New England, he could not claim to have inherited. Unable to proclaim himself heir to a grand European literary legacy, Eliot redefines it as something that cannot be inherited. Insisting that a poet "must develop or procure the consciousness of the past," he spatializes literary tradition, and this allows him not only to define the works that belong in the pantheon, but to justify his place in it (4).

While Ackroyd does not argue that tradition must be earned by great labor, he does—like Eliot—spatialize a particular literary history in order to justify his claim to it. Eliot could not inherit a European literary tradition because of his eccentric position in regard to that culture: he was not born to the manor of Shakespeare or Dante. In the early 1990's, Ackroyd finds himself in an analogous position as his claim to a grand literary heritage is contested. Given the deconstruction of a rationalist model of historiography and challenges to any attempt to define a single, monolithic culture as "common," Ackroyd can no longer assume the privilege formerly bestowed as a birthright to the white English male. Because English culture has been pluralized and revealed to be a construct, he is in danger of inhabiting an eccentric position in a culture that he must feel was once his without question. So the deconstruction of a common culture ensures that not only marginalized people need to make a case for their appropriations of tradition, but the middle-class, white English male also must construct an argument to ground his identity and legitimize his interpretation of tradition. Like Eliot, Ackroyd spatializes a literary tradition to defend his claim to inherit it.

Unlike Eliot, however, Ackroyd employs his spatialized concept of tradition to support a nationalist agenda. In "Tradition and the Individual Talent," Eliot—prompted by the desire to escape a provincial American upbringing—attempts to preserve a broadly defined Western cultural heritage. The works that comprise the simultaneous order of his pantheon are drawn from "the whole of the literature of Europe and within it the whole of the literature of his [the poet's] own country" (5). He presents the local writing of a nation as part, and only part, of the larger canon of European literature. In marked contrast, Ackroyd celebrates an exclusively British literary tradition utterly independent of the European heritage Eliot emphasizes. While unbound by temporal constraints, the tradition upheld in English Music is contained within the boundaries of Britain. The writers Ackroyd appropriates—Mallory, Defoe, Blake, Dickens—do not reflect the mind of Europe, but the mind of England. Ackroyd thus adapts Eliot's concept of tradition to support a conservative nationalism. Constructing a canon of master works that essentially excludes women and post-colonial writers, the novel celebrates the artistic legacy of the white English male.

Developing a mystified conception of English art, Ackroyd promotes a tradition that defines the subject positions inhabited by his characters. In this sense, English Music reflects Chantal Mouffe's definition of tradition as "the set of discourses and practices that form us as subjects" (40). The competition among the discourses that compose a tradition is important because the subject positions formed will define potential political actions: according to Mouffe, humans are constructed as subjects by "already existing discourses, and that it is through this tradition which forms us that the world is given to us and all political action made possible" (39). However, while Mouffe here emphasizes the plurality of the discourses competing to construct subjects, Ackroyd's novel does not admit its contingency or even acknowledge the possibility of alternative perspectives: the novel depicts characters who are defined by one discourse—English music. Reflecting an undying spiritual essence, this artistic tradition prescribes the subject positions open to characters and so determines the course of their lives. Portraying English music as a reflection of the atemporal English character, Ackroyd constructs and champions a conservative, patriarchal vision of British identity.

The subject position that Ackroyd models in his characters is essentially white and male. In the nine chapters of the novel based on the works of earlier writers, each generally appropriates the styles and characters of one or two works. These appropriations reflect a list of long dead white English males. In his headnote to the novel, Ackroyd claims that the "scholarly reader" will recognize his references to passages drawn from the works of Thomas Browne, Thomas Malory, William Hogarth, Thomas Morley, Lewis Carroll, Samuel Johnson, Daniel Defoe and others; he then suggests that the "alert reader" will understand why he has made these references. After reading the novel, however, the alert reader is led not so much to an understanding as to a question: in a work of such scope, comprised of so many appropriations, how can Ackroyd justify the almost complete exclusion of women writers? In her review of the novel, Alison Lurie notes that "Wuthering Heights and The Mill on the Floss get half a paragraph each" (7). Ackroyd's refusal to grant women a significant place in his tradition seems inconceivable given the enormous influence of nineteenth century female novelists such as Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, and George Eliot. [7] In light of the canonical status of so many female writers, Ackroyd's rejection of women from his pantheon underscores the fact that his tradition, the discourse that he insists forms his characters as subjects, is resolutely patriarchal.

And in fact, Ackroyd shores up his masculine literary tradition not only in the writers whose work he appropriates, but also in his depiction of the mystical relationship between Tim and his father. In his work as a magician and faith healer, Tim's father often calls his son to place his hands upon an afflicted member of the audience. At first in awe of what he believes to be his father's capacity to cure, Tim slowly realizes the power resides mainly in himself, but generally only in the presence of his father. Aside from one scene—in which Tim heals his Grandmother's palsy by embracing her—the strength to heal exists in the connection between father and son: neither generally can exert the power alone. After his father dies, for example, Tim follows in the family footsteps by joining the circus as a magician, but he never again exhibits the ability to heal. Indicating that supernatural power abides in the relation of father and son, the novel underscores the patristic nature of the "secret inheritance" passed on through English music.

Moreover, in advancing this patriarchal concept of British national identity, English Music presents characters who have little power of agency. Mystifying a conservative artistic tradition, the novel defines the English character from the perspective of the white Anglo-Saxon male. Ackroyd suggests that this tradition is an inescapable inheritance; the characters can't contest his ideal vision of Englishness. The overpowering influence of this tradition is evident in Tim's dependence on his father. Often involuntarily repeating his words, Tim realizes that his sense of self hinges on his "father's presence" (45, 106). Losing direction in his life when separated from him, Tim has trouble finding a career and often spends his time trying to locate his dad. His father's authority represents the general sway the past has over the present in this novel. Its stranglehold on the characters' behavior is apparent in the chapters based on appropriations of earlier works: in them, Tim literally loses first-person control of his life as he becomes a third-person character in storylines drawn from Bunyan, Defoe, Dickens, and others. Forfeiting the power of agency, Tim discovers that his actions are directed by a spiritual force reflected in English art and literature.

English Music reinforces the authority of the past as it portrays the power the dead over the living. Considering the audiences at his father's healing act, Tim sees a "a world dominated by the dead. By spirits of the past" (8). Like the former buildings whose shape Tim can see in newer ones, the spirits of the dead inhabit the living, often dwarfing their existence in the present. With his healing ability, Tim senses the specters hovering above individuals in the crowd: "There were occasions when they were made up only of outlines...that were so sharply distinguished from the light that the people seemed to be bound by thin wires which trembled in the confined air" (3). Depicted as puppets, the people are controlled by apparitions that are more fully present than those they haunt. Stressing the vital energy and the persistent influence of these ghosts, Ackroyd further mystifies the grand English tradition as an overwhelming spiritual force to which the characters must submit.

At first glance, the nationalist agenda behind Ackroyd's defense of this mystified tradition seems to put him at odds with current champions of the Western canon, particularly Harold Bloom. Arguing for the centrality of the works of Shakespeare and Dante, The Western Canon (1994) represents Bloom's attempt to codify a tradition of master-works based on purely aesthetic standards. Claiming to judge the merit of a work by its influence on succeeding generations of writers, he argues for the "autonomy of imaginative literature" (10) and consistently denies the importance of social or political context. In fact, he claims to reject both

 
The insistence here on the ideological neutrality of canonical literature suggests Bloom's debt to Eliot's spatialized concept of literary history. But in his eagerness to escape being labelled a reactionary, Bloom describes himself as a consistent iconoclast who was "roused to fury" (518) by the "neo-Christian New Criticism of T.S. Eliot" (520). At face value, this vehement defense of aesthetic autonomy appears quite remote from Ackroyd, who celebrates a tradition of white male English artists.

Despite Bloom's disavowal of ideology, though, how different is his conservatism from that of Peter Ackroyd? Like Ackroyd, Bloom employs post-structuralist tactics in his attempt to recuperate a canon of classic literature. Although he rails against Post-structuralists, Feminists, Marxists, and others in the School of Resentment, he grounds his vision of canon formation on a concept of reading that clearly reflects contemporary theory: he asserts that "Any strong literary work creatively misreads and therefore misinterprets a precursor text or texts" (8). Here Bloom does distinguish himself from Eliot and the New Critics as he undercuts the notion of an originary meaning embedded within the structure of the work. According to Bloom's theory, the critic's job is not to find an immutable human truth in the text, but to examine the way that every great text presents a successful misreading of a precursor. Consequently, the entrance exam for admittance to Bloom's canon is the author's will-to-power over his or her influences. The Nietzschean echoes in this theory of literary agon further link Bloom to the work of theorists such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault—for these and other post-structuralist critics too draw on Nietzsche's critique of Enlightened modernity and his vision of history as a battle for discursive power. Like Ackroyd's use of intertextuality and his critique of the humanist subject, Bloom employs post-structuralist tactics as he promotes an agenda that is conservative in the most literal sense: for him, preserving a body of classic work is a transcendent activity that surpasses all ideological considerations.

Despite his insistence on aesthetic autonomy, however, Bloom's canon is hardly ideologically neutral: in fact, his project ultimately has overtones of the nationalist ideology he claims to abhor. In denying the relevance of literary politics, Bloom contends that the "defense of the Western Canon is in no way a defense of the West or a nationalist enterprise" (40). While he is certainly correct that the individual texts in his canon do not toe any ideological line, his defense of the canon rests on assumptions that are clearly Western—and particularly American. Discussing the importance of inventiveness in canonical works, he argues that "Originality becomes a literary equivalent of such terms as individual enterprise, self-reliance, and competition, which do not gladden the hearts of Feminists, Afrocentrists, Marxists...." (21) Note the democratic-capitalist resonance of the phrase "individual enterprise" and the Emersonian ring of "self-reliance": the qualities that he adamantly proclaims universal, and that make a work canonical, sound suspiciously like prototypical American values of individualism and self-determination. Bloom does scrupulously avoid any explicit nationalist claims. But given the American values he associates with literary genius, his argument that they are transcendent and that celebrating them is in "no way" a defense of the West is patently absurd. Consequently, his elegy for the Western canon seems far more ideologically charged—and much closer to Ackroyd's conservative nationalist ideal—than it might at first appear.

However, although Bloom and Ackroyd advance similar conservative cultural agendas, Bloom ultimately envisions a degree of agency for the contemporary writer engaged in a struggle with his or her precursors. Emphasizing that all great works are misreadings of previous texts, Bloom stresses that the mark of a canonical work is its "strangeness, a mode of originality that either cannot be assimilated, or that so assimilates us that we cease to see it as strange" (3). Writers such as Shakespeare and Dante have achieved an enduring influence that can be measured by the number of writers who feel compelled to struggle against them. Predicated on a theory of difference, Bloom's canon reflects an author's desire to distinguish herself from the shadow of a previous work—hence Bloom's assertion that "each ambitious writer is out for himself alone" and ultimately wants "to advance his own interests, which center entirely upon individuation" (27). [8] The central concern here is how a writer misreads a precursor and thus achieves a degree of freedom and expresses his or her individuality.

In contrast to the struggle for individuation at the heart of Bloom's theory, English Music demonstrates the irresistible authority of English tradition. [9] Although Ackroyd does attempt, in the conclusion, to rescue his characters from a crippling anxiety of influence, he ultimately reinforces the overwhelming strength of tradition. While the story begins with Tim's assertion that he has returned to the past, it closes with his claim, "...I no longer need to open the old books. I have heard the music" (399). Since the spirit of Albion reflected in English music remains constant, Tim believes he has been freed from the burden of looking back. Ackroyd suggests that because his inheritance can't be escaped, Tim doesn't have to make choices about what aspects of tradition to preserve or disregard: everything he says or does is informed by the English past. This has led Del Ivan Janik to claim that "Timothy's 'haunting' by the spirit of English art, music, and literature is enriching and ultimately liberating" (176) because it leads to the "realization that time is a continuum that transcends individual consciousness" (177). I would argue just the contrary: in this attempt to relieve the characters of their subjection to the past, the novel actually reinforces the sway of a tradition that will determine their fates no matter what they do. In fact, English Music never recovers the possibility of agency for the characters—without a choice in the adoption of tradition, they can't step beyond the bounds of a patristic inheritance that defines them as subjects of England. In terms of agency, this represents the inverse of Bloom's argument, for he claims that "the anxiety of influence cripples weaker talents but stimulates canonical genius" (11). Ackroyd's novel seems to offer an example of a weaker talent, for both he and his characters lose the agon with tradition: what is significant in English Music is not what distinguishes the present from the past, but what remains—the spirit of Albion that scripts the characters' lives no matter how they struggle against it.

The distance between the novel's opening and closing quotations—between the nostalgic urge to return to the heroic past and the desire to escape its oppressive influence—reflects a central, unresolved tension: Ackroyd champions a grand artistic tradition and a conservative ideal of English identity; however, by mystifying the tradition to save it, he sacrifices his characters' power of agency. In Tim's assumption of his father's job as circus magician, the novel dramatizes the mystical power Ackroyd ascribes to the past: because any apparent change is superficial, any fight with a ghost of the past, a father, or a literary predecessor is futile. The eternal spirit of Albion absorbs all challenges. The novel indicates that no matter how the characters act, their fates will be circumscribed by their essential British identity; put simply, they are always already English. Ultimately, Tim's declaration that he need not look to the past is a rationalization: in a world dominated by the spirits of dead fathers, he inhabits a shallow present dwarfed by the specter of the past.

Defining a subject position that his characters cannot escape, Ackroyd promotes a particular conservative vision of English art and English identity. He attempts to recenter his concept of Englishness by linking it to a mystical force working through artistic history. In so doing, Ackroyd aligns himself with conservative cultural critics, from T.S. Eliot to Harold Bloom, who attempt to define and champion a canon of literature. Like Bloom, Ackroyd adapts Eliot's spatialized concept of literary history in order to conserve a tradition he believes is being assailed by the drive toward diversity and multi-culturalism. While Ackroyd does distinguish himself from Eliot and Bloom by advancing an unabashedly nationalist agenda, English Music reveals how an allegedly transcendent tradition works to uphold a conservative ideology. In this way, the novel attests to the true plurality of this postmodern moment: here, even the white English male must argue for the legitimacy of his vision of identity, and a tradition formerly thought to be dominant must be presented as marginalized in an attempt to shore up its authority.

Works Cited

Ackroyd, Peter. Chatterton. London: Hamilton, 1987.

—. English Music. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992.

—. Hawksmoor. London: Hamilton, 1985.

Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1994.

Bruns, Gerald. "What is Tradition?" NLH 22 (1991): 1-21.

Coetzee, J.M. Foe. New York: Viking, 1986.

Collins, Jim. Architectures of Excess. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Doctorow, E.L. Ragtime. New York: Random House, 1975.

Eliot, T.S. "Tradition and the Individual Talent." The Sacred Wood. London: Methuen, 1920.

Findley, Timothy. Famous Last Words. Toronto and Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin. 1981.

Finney, Brian. "Peter Ackroyd, Postmodernist Play, and Chatterton." Twentieth Century Literature 38.2 (Summer 1992): 240-61.

Hutcheon, Linda. The Poetics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1988.

Janik, Del Ivan. "No End of History: Evidence from the Contemporary English Novel." Twentieth Century Literature 41.2 (Summer 1995): 160-89.

Lee, Alison. Realism and Power: Postmodern British Fiction. London: Routledge, 1990.

Levenson, Michael. "Tradition and the National Talent." The New Republic. 208 (Jan 18, 1993): 29-32.

Lurie, Alison. "Hanging Out with Hogarth." NYT Book Review 97 (Oct 11, 1992): 7.

MacIntyre, Alisdair. "Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science." The Monist 60 (1977): 453-72.

Marshall, Brenda. Teaching the Postmodern. NewYork: Routledge, 1992.

Mouffe, Chantal. "Radical Democracy: Modern or Postmodern?" Universal Abandon. Ed. Andrew Ross. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.

Onega, Susan. "Interview with Peter Ackroyd." Twentieth Century Literature 42.2 (Summer 1996): 208-20.

Thomas, D.M. The White Hotel. New York: Viking, 1981.

Tournier, Michel. Friday. Trans. Norman Denny. New York: Pantheon, 1969.

White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1987.

1. Del Ivan Janik has argued that the famous artists such as Dickens who appear in the novel do not represent real historical figures, but are "projections of Timothy's subconscious, composed from the materials of his reading and his father's unconventional tutelage" (176). Locating Tim's subconscious as a "source" for such characters reinforces just the kind of ontological distinctions I see the novel as challenging. For example, the novel foregrounds Tim's status as a linguistic referent in all the chapters: it asks the reader to consider why Tim appears "realistic" in some chapters and "fictional" in others when he exists only as a referent in English Music.

2. In her reading of Ackroyd's Hawksmoor, Alison Lee claims that the detective in the novel is a "discursive construct, and can only be known textually, even by himself" (69). In English Music, Tim is also presented as a textual construct; moreover, as I will argue, Ackroyd employs Tim's textual status to define the limited position of agency he occupies as the heir to a grand English literary tradition.

3. This clearly reflects a central theme in Ackroyd's fiction. In discussing the notion of subjectivity developed in Hawksmoor, Alison Lee investigates how Ackroyd undercuts a "humanist assumption of individual human essence, expressed in (and thus prior to) language" (56).

4. In his essay "Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative, and the Philosophy of Science," MacIntyre claims that historians "must acknowledge that the tradition of historiography is partly, but centrally, constituted by arguments about what history is and ought to be..." (461)

5. Anticipating one problem with Mouffe's position, Alisdair MacIntyre suggests that the participants in an argument about tradition do not necessarily share any epistemological assumptions: they "disagree as to how to characterize their disagreements....They disagree as to what constitutes appropriate reasoning, decisive evidence, conclusive proof" (461). We cannot presume, then, that those making an argument would concur about what counts as "reasonable opinion" or "rational choice," in Mouffe's terms.

6. For a study of the form of historical narratives, see Hayden White's The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. White contends that narrative is "always a figurative account, an allegory" (43); it transforms historical referents by imposing "patterns of meaning that any literal representation of them as facts could never produce" (45).

7. In fact, in her interview with Peter Ackroyd, Susan Onega asked him about the exclusion of women from his vision of English tradition. Although he answered, "I know, that's a problem" (216), he ventured no plausible explanation for his neglect of female novelists—a disregard all the more puzzling in the case of a writer such as Virginia Woolf, clearly part of the visionary tradition he admires.

8. Bloom's insistence on individuation and originality reveal the extent to which his really represents a Western canon. As even the slightest acquaintance with Eastern art, specifically from a Zen tradition, will show, the celebration of agon or competitiveness is hardly a universal value.

9. In an essay on Ackroyd's Chatterton, Brian Finney perceptively analyzes how the novel revises the notion of the "anxiety of influence": while Bloom emphasizes the poet's struggle to deny his/her influences and develop a unique voice, Ackroyd insists that all writing is inevitably a quotation. (253) My concern here, though, is how Ackroyd uses appropriation to define an English tradition that constrains the agency of his characters.