Peter Ackroyd’s The House of Doctor Dee and the Antinomies of Postmodern Historical Fiction

Peter Ackroyd’s The House of Doctor Dee and the Antinomies of Postmodern Historical Fiction Buell Wisner (bio) I: The Antinomies of Postmodernism In The Seeds of Time (1994), Fredric Jameson tests the possibility that the antinomy represents the characteristic habit of thought in postmodernism. In the philosophical tradition, antimony is defined as a formulation of two statements—both logical in themselves—that nevertheless negate one another. The most famous example is undoubtedly Kant’s: “The world has a beginning; the world has no beginning.” Kant demonstrates the validity of each conclusion, yet between them there is no middle ground, no potential for resolution of any kind. An antinomy, then, can be understood as a kind of logical “block,” a closure of the dialectical possibilities inherent in other forms of contradiction. In Jameson’s critique, the antinomy can be seen as a “stalled or arrested dialectic” that provides both thesis and antithesis yet which precludes synthesis. If we extend this description to the philosophy of history, the antinomy exemplifies a failure of “the dialectic” proposed by Marxist historicism. The static oppositions of the antinomy—especially when applied to historical thinking—seem to make the structure itself symptomatic of what Jameson sees as the spatial (as opposed to narrative) logic of global capitalism (6). In this unprecedented historical situation, the antinomy would appear to counter the older, Marxian vision of a historical process driven by the emergence and resolution of contradictions. Therefore, the antinomy seems characteristic of the ideology of late capitalism, a mode of production dedicated to historical stasis that (in the 1990s, at least) gave rise to claims of the “end of history,” the “end of the dialectic,” and to the multifarious illusion that “there was no alternative” to so-called free market capitalism. This essay examines the relationship between antinomy and the postmodern historical imagination. I will begin by re-stating—and affirming—Jameson’s well-known argument that postmodernity itself should be defined in terms of the ideological limitations on “our” ability to think historically. At the root of this imaginative failure one finds an antinomy that delineates the relationship between the Past and the Present, and arguably any two historical periods. The thesis of this antinomy can be formulated as follows: The Past and the Present are radically different. The ontological distance between them cannot be represented (narratively). This is the logic [End Page 299] that undergirds the “total” history of the mid-twentieth-century Annales school historians, who generally eschewed narrative to focus on the complexities of a given historical period, and also the practices of the human sciences that do not typically account for narrative (such as archaeology). The antithesis, meanwhile, could be formulated thus: There is no past. What we call “the past” is simply a re-formulation of the present, a mirror for contemporary preoccupations and concerns. This ideology, of course, underlies many forms of postmodernism, including nostalgia, in which history seems to be mostly a matter of fashion. If this antinomy is accurate, then representing the continuity between past and present, the processes by which one becomes the other, is fraught with challenges if it is not altogether impossible (Jameson, in some of his more polemical moments, has said as much). Yet many of the more sophisticated historical novels published from the 1960s to the end of the century suggest that authors were well aware of this particular antinomy and that it inspired a considerable amount of anxiety among them. In fact, the antinomy seems to have generated many of the characteristic structures of postmodern historical fiction, including the dual-plot novel (A. S. Byatt’s Possession, for instance) and the novel of historical detection (such as John Fowles’s A Maggot). This essay focuses on a historical novel by Peter Ackroyd, whose works obsessively consider the opposition between past and present in an effort to think dialectically (though not from a materialist perspective) about historical time. His novel The House of Doctor Dee (1994) proves a fascinating case study in this context. II: Postmodern Historical Fiction Before we can examine the ways in which The House of Doctor Dee responds to the antinomial anxieties of the postmodernist historical imagination, we...