Moran, Mary Hurley.

"The Novels of Penelope Lively: A Case for the Continuity of the Experimental
Impulse in Postwar British Fiction." South Atlantic Review 62.1 (1997): 101-20. JSTOR. Web.

In City of the Mind (1991), realism gives way to the foregrounding of postmodernist ontological
concerns about the nature of reality.
As were the writers of modernist fiction, Lively is more concerned with epistemology and the
interaction between mind and reality than with the external action. Although her plots are
absorbing and well crafted, it is human perception that is her primary focus. She foregrounds
perception by presenting most episodes in her novels from the restricted point of view –
sometimes first-person, sometimes third-person-limited – of individual characters. He approach
would win praise from Henry James, for it accords closely with the practice he advocated of
filtering the action through a character’s center of consciousness. Whenever Lively renders an
episode from a character’s point of view, she carefully hones the scene to fit the consciousness of
that character, including only those details he or she registers and employing a style that
simulates the character’s unique voice and thought process. Pag3 aka 103
Also like the modernists, Lively frequently uses a multiple-points-of-view approach, repeating
the same episode two of more times, each time transmitting it through a different participant’s
consciousness. Citing the Japanese film Rashomon as her inspiration (“Fiction and Reality”), she
calls this technique “kaleidoscopic” narration - an apt description, for it suggests the circular,
recrusive movement and the overlapping quality of the presentations. Pag 3-4 103-104
Lively’s kaleidoscope technique effects an impression of the subjective, solipsistic way each
human being encounters the world and suggests the lack of an objective meaning to reality –
ideas which of course were very much part of the modernist Weltanschauug. Pag 4-5 104 105
[…] In addition to this emphasis on epistemological relativism, another way Lively reveals her
affinity with modernism is in her emphasis on psychological time. Influenced by the ideas of
philosopher Henri Bergson and physicist Albert Einstein, modernist writers sought to
demonstrate in their fiction that “clock” time is merely human, not a natural absolute, construct.
The modernist novel is thus characterized by a fracturing of time, a replacement of chronological
plot with innovative narrative techniques, such as stream of consciousness, intended to mirror the
way the human mind actually experiences reality. This revolution in the portrayal of time has
influenced to one degree or another most subsequent novelists. With Lively the influence can be
seen in her portrayal of the potency of memory and the way one’s memories impinge upon and
are seamlessly interwoven with one’s perceptions. Although, as has been noted, most of her
novels do contain plots, the linearity of the outer narrative is frequently overshadowed by the
circularity and recursiveness of characters’ mental experiences with time. Lively’s characters are
prone to Proustian moments in which an incident or a sensory stimulus triggers an intense mental
reliving of a past experience. In moving from external reality to memory and inner reality, Lively
often shifts to present tense and to first-person point of view, in order to underscore the
memory’s vividness and immediacy. Pag 105
Lively believes that these intensely significant moments become embedded in the strata of one’s
unconscious and thereby become the subject to the kind of Proustian recapturings described
earlier. (SECONDspace) Her characters therefore regard such moments as being perpetually
present and hence “outside time,…moments when the needle gets stuck, when what happens
goes on happening, down the years, aagain and again, recorded messages of glassy clarity”
(Perfect Happiness 2). Because of their timeless, transcendent nature, these moments possess an
almost mystical quality. Lively often endows them with luminosity and describes them in quasi-
religious terms: “silvered” (CofM 113) “enshrined” (218), “moments of perfect grace”(219) pag
107
Like Moon Tiger, City of the Mind departs from realism and contains an architectonic rather
than chronological structure. Although the novel does have a protagonist and a plot -
respectively, fortyish architect Matthew Halland and the developments of his personal and
professional lives – its true subject is the setting : the city of London. Much as Woolf does with
te same city in Mrs. Dalloway, Joyce does with Dublin in Ulysses, and Sandburg does with
Chicago in the poem of that title, Lively foregrounds the city, portraying it as a pulsating,
palpable entity, fueled by the energies of the myriad lives that have been lived within it.
One way Lively creates this impression is through frequent use of metaphor and personification.
For example, she describes the city as “throb[bing]” and “pulsing” (66) and refers to “the weight
of the place” (67). And like Woolf’s London, which sweeps Clarissa Dalloway un in its “waves
of…divine vitality” (Mrs. Dalloway 9), Lively’s sweeps Matthew up in its “current” (1), its
“torrent” (114), and its “streaming allusive purpose” (87).
Another technique Lively uses to suggest the city’s palpability is a frequent cataloguing of the
stimuli that bombard Matthew’s senses as he traverses its streets. Like Joyce’s Bloom, Matthew
is a peripatetic protagonist whose job involves much crisscrossing of the urban landscape, and as
Joyce too does, Lively highlights the sensory impressions the protagonist ingests in these
peregrinations – the “cacophony of sound that runs the whole gamut from Yddish to Urdu”; the
pastiche of architectural styles, including “Victorian stucco, twentieth-century concrete, a snatch
of Georgian brick”; and the medley of cooking odors from such ethnically diverse restaurants as
“Pizza Ciao, King’s Cross Kebab, New Raj Mahal Tandoori, Nepalese Brasserie” (3). Pag 112
Matthew’s traversing of London effects an impression not only of the city’s variegated, richly
textured quality but also of its web-like nature: the way its inhabitants’ individual lives are
inextricably and imperceptibly interconnected. Lively demonstrates this by her accasional
cinematic-like practice of sliding from close-up view of Matthew;s activities to an aerial
perspective, from which we can observe “the city’s mysterious intestinal life” (76) and detect the
mazelike pattern Matthew creates as his path intersects with the paths of other people.
The web of lives to which Matthew’s is linked includes those of past, as well as present,
inhabitants of London. To demonstrate this, Lively juxtaposes a variety of time periods,
interweaving the main narrative with segments from four sub-narratives about earlier Londoners:
Jim Prothero, a volunteer neighborhood warden during the World War II blitz whose territory
was several blocks in the old City of London; a Victorian waif named Rose who roamed the
alleys around Covent Garden searching for food; the nineteenth-century paleontologist Richard
Owen, whose home was located in what is now the Royal College of Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inn
Fields; and Martin Frobisher, the Elizabethan navigator who set sail from the Thames in search
of the Northwest Passage. Lively uses a series of hinges, or reflexive motifs to link the main
narrative to these sub-narratives. The hinge is usually a sensory stimulus or emotion
experienced by Matthew that is similar to one experienced by an earlier denizen of the
neighborhood in which he finds himself. For example, just after Matthew, strolling through
Covent Garden, is seized by un upbeat urge to purchase a posy of violets, the scene cuts to little
Rose, who sniffs out the hopeful fragrance of violets among the more pervasive smell of garbage
and sewage. Lively’s method is to play out the scene from the sub-narrative and then to return to
the main narrative and pick up where it was left off. The effect is an impression of the sub-
narrative as occurring simultaneously with the main narrative although on a different ontological
plane, since Matthew is not cognizant of it.
This method, then, destroys the novel’s illusion of realism. The insertion of the sub-narratives
results in ontological uncertainty and undermines conventional assumptions about the nature of
time. Pag 113
In City of the Mind she does this in order to demonstrate the Einstein-like notion that time is a
function of space. That is, the various parts of London Matthew travels across embody and
reverberate with the experiences of prior inhabitants, and so in a sense those past times still
exist. Old buildings are particularly powerful containments of the past, as is frequently pointed
out in this novel. For example, when Matthew pays a business visit to a neighborhood
characterized by Victorian architecture, we are told, “It is 2:21, and Matthew Halland is at last
reaching Cobbham Square. It is also, in another sense, 1823, when the square was built” (23).
Because London, like many old cities, contains a motley assortment of architectural styles, with
ancient and modern existing side-by-side, it offers a particularly apt demonstration of this post-
Einsteinian notion of time. It is no surprise, then, that the city constitutes one of the most popular
models for the architectonic novel, with Joyce’s Dublin and Durrell’s Alexandria being prime
examples (Spencer 14).
Another ontological issue this novel examines is the relationship between mind and world,
or between subject and object. In her less radical fiction Lively posits the existence of an
external reality, although she stresses that this reality is always subjectively experienced. But in
her more radical works the ontology of external reality becomes more problematic. As we have
seen, Moon Tiger […..] In City of the Mind we are presented with a paradoxical perspective
on the relationship between human consciousness and external reality: we are reminded
again and again in various ways that a human being is both “a pinpoint in infinity, and a
universe” (122), “of no great significance, and yet omniscient” (2).
Lively achieves the former perspective – of the individual as being a transient speck in a reality
outside of and larger than him/herself – by her occasional portrayals of cosmic vastness: a
character will gaze up at the night sky or out at the expansive sea PAG 114 and will suddenly
feel dwarfed, insignificant, and adrift. But contending with this perspective is that of the
world as being subservient to the individual, in that reality is structured and made
meaningful only through the operations of the human mind. The novel’s title, City of the
Mind, captures this idea, and Matthew himself endorses it with his many insights about how the
city is a code or key or literary and historical index for the trained eye whereas for the untrained
eye it is merely a “pile of bricks” (26). “This city,” he explains to a colleague, “is entirely in
the mind. It is a construct of the memory and of the intellect. Without you and me it hasn’t
got a chance” (7). With its unresolved mind-world paradox, City of the Mind keeps in the
foreground question about the ultimate nature of reality and hence subverts the novel’s realism.
Pag 115
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