METAPHORICAL WAYS OF NARRATING THE CITY. LONDON - A MACROMETAPHORICAL CITY

We are condemned to wander – critically, emotionally, politically, passionately – in a world characterized by an excess of sense which, while offering the chance of meaning continues to flee ahead us. This is our world, our responsibility, our only chance. In this paper, we see that the metropolis narrated by Peter Ackroyd and Penelope Lively is above all ‘a myth, a tale, a character, a living-body’, an imaginary construct, ‘a telling’ that helps some of us to locate our home in postmodernity. To inhabit a city is to be immersed in a common experience. It is the chatter of the city that now maintains this site of a discourse and dialogue. In the metropolis, it becomes necessary to form a new sense of ethics in its multiple and differential histories. The Mind - being it of the Reader or of the Writer - is eventually the site of sense.