‘The Stream of Life that Will Not Stop’: The ‘Memory of Places’ and the Palimpsestuous Streets of the 19th-Century City

This essay intends to ‘think out of the box’ by showing how the combination of different media can prove an especially apt means to investigate cultural discourse. If the Western imagination of memory has always shown a powerful connection to a diversity of media (the wax tablet, the photograph, the computer), this chapter will be focussed in particular on the representation of the streets of London as palimpsestuous: that is, as places that creatively blur the boundaries separating the present from the past, and the visible from the invisible. In works as diverse as Geoffrey Fletcher's book The London Nobody Knows (1962), its film adaptation by Norman Cohen (1967), and Clare Strand's photographic series Gone Astray (2002-2003), we encounter the belief that the streets of London may be recognized as a privileged site for an exploration of the complex relations between the different cultures inhabiting the present and the past and suspended between transience and permanence. While the palimpsest has proved an invaluable critical tool to investigate post-modernism, these works actually seem to invite us to take up Anna Maria Jones and Rebecca Mitchell's recent suggestion (in their “Introduction” to Drawing on the Victorians: the Palimpsest of Victorian and Neo-Victorian Graphic Texts, Ohio UP, 2017) that we trace the palimpsest back to its 19th-century origins, when it became a powerful metaphor deployed to make sense of the mysterious processes of the human mind. If the palimpsest was believed to be especially apt to describe the interplay of memory and imagination for creative work, it was also often associated with urban (and often, specifically, London) flânerie and with the encounter with the stratified diversity of the metropolitan space. Therefore, putting together a range of diverse and apparently heterogeneous texts, this essay proposes that at the core of the protean fascination with London’s palimpsestuous streets we may find their ability to offer themselves as a mental space, haunted by past images and words and in turn haunting any attempt to erase the ambivalent legacy of the past.