A Look at Peter Ackroyd's Novel Chatterton

Even in death, a person cannot escape the inevitable: being memorialized, and it is in monuments that one is forced into a second death. It is the death of the other that the act of memorializing kills. Though the intent of memorializing is not to destroy the person, but to honor them, the simple act of remembering erases the events that transpired within the scope of that person's life, and pares them down to a moment in time. It is in that monument that the second death occurs. The forced monument, a replication of the real, becomes the other for the person being memorialized. This replication then allows itself to become a forced monument-how the real is remembered. The real no longer exists, leaving the replication to remain. This other will then be recalled and distorted throughout the years by memory, causing the death of the other, as seen in Peter Ackroyd's Chatterton.

Within Chatterton, the characters are found to be obsessed with memorializing either Chatterton himself, or themselves, but Henry Wallis took to canvas, creating a memorial in oil. George Meredith, the model for Wallis' portrait, remarks on how Wallis monuments the death of Chatterton. "You're a Resurrectionist, Henry. You can bring the dead to life, I see." (Ackroyd, 156) With these words, Meredith explains how the other is created. Wallis paints what he thinks resembles Chatterton, fashioning what the other will be. Though Wallis is hoping to monument the death of Chatterton, he is instead creating another death of Chatterton, by rewriting how history actually characterized him. Because of this portrait, Chatterton suffers not only his physical death, but a figurative one as well.

The portrait of Meredith as Chatterton is what most will come to recognize as Chatterton himself. This portrayal of Chatterton reinvents the perception of the poet, which is exactly what memorializing a poet does. Accordingly to Bennett and Royle: "...the act of remembering, of monumentalizing the poet, is also an act of hiding, disguising, defacing him, and they remind us that this is precisely what we do when we bury the dead: burying them we honor them, but at the same time we hide them from sight..." (Bennett and Royle, 46) By Wallis using Meredith, he defaces the actual image of Chatterton, replacing it with someone else, and within this monument, Wallis destroys Chatterton as he memorializing him. Replacing the actual face of Chatterton with another allows the world to view Chatterton as Wallis saw him, not as he was. Chatterton, the man, is now a far gone idea, and has been replaced by the image that Wallis created on his canvas: Chatterton's other.

The continuous recalling that monuments also asks the viewer to replicate it in their minds, creating another death; they associate it with a man who it does not represent and therefore is not characterized appropriately. However, it is in the memories where the representation becomes skewed. Each views the portrait differently, recalling in different hues and lighting, distorting the image. The distortion in memory constantly reinterprets the image, changing the lines and blurring the edges, in which the image that it once was is not available to recall. It has now changed, and the original image has been erased. Meredith remarks on this in the novel, as he models for Wallis. "And what do you see? The real? The ideal? How do you know the difference?" (Ackroyd, 133)

This distortion of the real and the other blend well together, in that, most cannot decipher between the two. It is here that the poet is buried, with his own words, within his own art, hidden, and though he is remembered, he is never truly captured in memory. The real can never fully be captured, despite the monumental efforts put forth to reproduce it. Wallis' attempt to recreate the death of Chatterton, and the passion he had for his literature is never fully captured. Instead, the portrait represents a moment in his life, and then becomes the image that most associate with Chatterton, the man. The knowledge of the portrait not being Chatterton, but Meredith, creates a death for the monument that Wallis created, because the viewer is aware that the portrait is not Chatterton. The other has replicated itself into another monument of Meredith and Wallis remembering Chatterton's death. Chatterton no longer exists within the frame of the canvas, though his name is associated with the portrait.

Monumenting, however genuine and sincere, can never wholly remember the person or event in question. It is in death that monuments find life, and it is that life that they eventually kill.

Ackroyd, Peter. Chatterton. New York: Random House, 1989.