Peter Ackroyd, Kitsch and the Logic of Impersonal Imitation

This paper purports to analyse the ways in which Peter Ackroyd uses (in his own terms) the specifically Catholic modalities of kitsch, in accordance with the prescriptions of impersonality dear to modernist aesthetics, as an adjunct to the traditional powers of intertextuality and hypertextuality (such as plagiarism, parody and above all pastiche). In fact, what lies at the heart of Ackroydian kitsch is the imitation of pre-existing literary and aesthetic models as reproduced on a different, cheaper material privileging the ways of congruence over the higher demands of sublimity. Through kitsch, what Ackroyd favours is the impersonal execution of English music in a highly emotional tone whose symptom is the apparent prevalence of the what over the how. This should allow us to assess Ackroyd’s contribution to the field of contemporary English letters as favouring continuity over rupture, and more specifically as a continuous emotional execution of the secular impersonal tradition of English letters and culture.