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The Humble in 19th- to 21st-Century British Literature and Arts

 | 
Isabelle Brasme
, 
Jean-Michel Ganteau
, 
Christine Reynier

Part Four. Precariousness

The Ship of Fools: Precarious Lives in 1660s/1980s England

Corina Stan

Résumé

The story spun by Robert Meriel in Rose Tremain’s novel Restoration (1989) moves from the extravagance and debauchery of Charles II’s Court, through Bidnold, where Merivel is appointed Overseer of the Poor, to the bedlam at Whittlesea, where he tries to cure the ill and forgotten. The multifaceted figure of the humble, which emerges from the novel’s self-conscious familiarity with Foucault’s narrative of the great confinement, transcends its situated historical complexity, pointing to the reality of homelessness in 1980s London.

Texte intégral

1The title of Rose Tremain’s novel Restoration. A Novel of Seventeenth-Century England (1989) refers to Charles II’s reign, symbolically inaugurated by the Act of Oblivion (2 May 1660), which pardoned those who had removed the king’s father from the throne in 1649, officially annulling and thus legally ‘forgetting’ the Interregnum. Samuel Pepys, the well-known diarist of the time, symptomatically referred to the year 1660 as the twelfth year of Charles II’s reign, as if the Civil War, the fall of the monarchy or Charles’s exile had never happened.

2The characters in Rose Tremain’s novel Restoration seem only too pleased to forget the recent past, and thus to engage in private and collective acts of oblivion: Robert Merivel, a medical student, is rewarded for the ‘miraculous healing’ of Charles II’s favorite dog and becomes the King’s Fool. As the fictive husband of the second royal mistress, who has to be concealed from Court, Merivel is offered and enjoys a sumptuous residence at Bidnold. His life of privilege comes to an end, however, when he falls in love with his fictive wife; repudiated by the King, he becomes a caretaker in an asylum where he tries hard to change. But Merivel the Fool cannot be completely obliterated by Robert the responsible doctor, so he succumbs to the charms of a mentally ill patient, Katharine, and has to leave with her when she becomes pregnant. The story ends with the King restoring him a (circular) room in his former residence at Bidnold, for the man he has become and the life he saved in the Great Fire of London.

  • 1 Rose Tremain, Restoration. A Novel of Seventeenth-Century England (1989; New York: Penguin, 1994) 4
  • 2 Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris: PUF, 1968) 26.

3The incongruity between the reader’s expectation of the narrative of Charles II’s exile and restoration, and this trivial story of repudiation and presumed moral restoration is apparent in the first pages, which make no secret of the novel’s casting in the role of main character of the Fool, an anti-heroic and frivolous entertainer: ‘This is how you might imagine me,’ Merivel introduces himself: ‘at table, rustling with laughter in a gaudy suit, my migrant hair flattened by a luxuriant wig, my freckles powdered, my eyes twinkling in the candlelight, my pudding being ejected from my mouth by that force within me which snorts at sobriety and is so greedy for foolishness.’1 Soon, however, the story turns out to be a repetition in disguise: Merivel’s name recalls the sobriquet ‘merry monarch’ that the historical Charles II earned himself; Merivel is a paper-groom just as Charles was temporarily a paper-king; the significance of the political Restoration is as questionable as the moral one; as for the Act of Oblivion, which inaugurated Charles Stuart’s reign, for Merivel the Fool it refers to the sexual act, of which he makes almost a second profession. ‘Ce qui répète,’ one reflects with Deleuze in Différence et répétition, ‘ne le fait qu’à force de ne pascomprendre”, de ne pas se souvenir, de ne pas savoir ou de n’avoir pas conscience.’2 Tremain is aware of the repetition; but what is the purpose of such elaborate disguises?

4A passage from Christopher’s Hill work on the English revolution offers us a useful glimpse into the world-shattering effects of the events put under erasure:

  • 3 Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1965) 5–6. Chr (...)

For as long as history recorded, there had been kings, lords, and bishops in England. The thinking of all Englishmen had been dominated by the established Church. Yet, within less than a decade, successful war was levied against the King; bishops and the House of Lords were abolished; and Charles I was executed in the name of his people. How did men get the nerve to do such unheard-of things? [. . .] The act of 1649 was so uniquely shocking that on hearing of it, we are told, ‘women miscarried, men fell into melancholy, some with consternations expired.’3

  • 4 A parody: going both along (formally, a story of exile), and against the official version of histor (...)

5William Harvey, the well-known scientist of the time, is reported to have told a priest that during Cromwell’s Protectorate, the cases of mental illness had largely outnumbered those of any other kinds of malady. The reader suspects that Tremain, by having Robert Merivel first appointed Overseer of the Poor, then work in an asylum, maps out the social field of a revolution whose effects, repressed by official decree, very likely remained palpable in the psyches and bodies of the lower classes. Indeed, as the following pages will intimate, Merivel’s exile among the poor and the confined not only re-enacts History in the mode of farce—in the etymological sense of going both along and against the official version of historical events (formally, a story of exile and restoration, yet exposing its ideological content: the erasure of the past)—but it also engages critically with the very project of the historical Restoration, that of confining an uncomfortable past to oblivion.4 The novel thus narrates a different story of the Restoration, uncovering, beyond the dazzling spectacle of Court life, the multifaceted figure of the humble.

Faces of the Humble

6The initial setting of the novel, Whitehall, deceptively points to a revisionist reading of the recent history: the revolution is forgotten, we are plunged in the frenzy of events, where History seems to be made, where men and women enjoy pleasurable ‘acts of oblivion,’ eager to disburden themselves of the puritanical denial of the flesh during Cromwell’s Protectorate. ‘The truth is,’ Merivel says, ‘that when the King returned, it was as if self-discipline and drudgery had exploded in a clap of laughter. I became much too excited by and greedy for life to spend much of it at work’ (9). He develops an almost sickly obsession with the King, keen to live within his divine sphere, to have a share in the making of History: ‘I am, at this moment that you glimpse at me, a rather popular man’ (3). He evokes proudly the numerous games of Cribbage and Rummy, the musical evenings and soirées dansantes: ‘Women found me hilarious and in magnificent numbers allowed me to tickle not only their humours but their charming and irresistible centres of pleasure, and I seldom slept alone’ (18). This post-lapsarian picture of Restoration court culture is familiar to readers of Paradise Lost, where Milton contrasts the innocent love of Adam and Eve with. . . court amours,

  • 5 John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; New York: Penguin Popular Classics, 1996) Book IV, 763–770, 106.

Mixed dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball,
Or serenade, which the starved lover sings
To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain.5

  • 6 Fernand Braudel, Écrits sur l’histoire (1969), quoted by Paul Ricœur in Temps et récit, vol. 1, L’i (...)

7Merivel’s narrative aims to make us privy to history just ‘like its contemporaries felt it’; in Fernand Braudel’s paraphrase of the contemporary, as ‘ [une histoire] brûlante encore [. . .]. Un monde aveugle, comme tout monde vivant, comme le nôtre, insouciant des histoires de profondeur, de ses eaux vives sur lesquelles notre barque file comme le plus ivre des bateaux.6

8Merivel discovers the underside of the royal space of visibility and spectacle at Bidnold where, appointed Overseer of the Poor by Sir Nicholas Hogg, he learns that society is ‘disfigured by the presence of the poor.’ He must make no mistake when labeling them as Incapable, Capable, or Lazy, lest he should ‘waste [the judges’] precious time’ (124). ‘At all events,’ perorates Hogg, ‘he must not beg. He must find other means.’ These means are the small amounts of money or gifts dispensed occasionally by the Overseer, hence the ‘reason only men of substance are elected to the position of Overseer, so that their own livelihood is not one whit inconvenienced’ (125). Hogg completes the picture of harmonious social organization with the evocation of the workhouses in Norwich, where the able poor are happy and grateful spinning ‘and thus receiving charity not only for their arms and fingers, which are at work, but also for their undeserving legs, which are idle’ (126).

  • 7 Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1961; Paris: Gallimard, 2000) 84.

9The conversation between Sir Nicholas Hogg and Sir Merivel evokes a historical reality that Tremain skillfully weaves into her novel: in England workhouses were placed under the responsibility of judges, who appointed so-called guardians of the poor tasked with distributing small gifts of money and food. Already in the sixteenth century, Oxford professor Juan Luis Vives defined poverty as afflicting not only those who lack money, but whoever does not have health, physical or mental strength.7 And in 1683, Sir Matthew Hale’s Discourse Touching Provision for the Poor articulated eloquently the new, moral significance of making poverty invisible, a task of the first order for the English as Christians (Foucault 83). Poverty had to be eradicated because it was the living manifestation of society’s weakness, pointing an accusing finger at the failure of English people to fulfill their Christian duties.

10In approaching his task, Merivel falls back on his scientist’s reflexes and records observations about the poor in the hope of finding a logical solution. His ‘method’ recalls Bacon’s histories, premised on the idea that collecting data about a phenomenon (the winds, for instance) was the first step to induction. But Merivel’s social-turned-scientific mission yields puzzling observations: they are numerous, even more so in the capital; they are susceptible to fall ill or become lunatics; they are perceived as a different race by the upper classes; Jesus’s view of their nobility is in stark contrast with the conviction of the nobles that the poor are naturally wicked. ‘There is an interesting dichotomy between His belief in their nobility and the Nobility’s belief in their inherent wickedness’ (126), he quips, aptly capturing the historical shift described by Foucault from a view of poverty caught in a dialectic of humility and glory before the seventeenth century, to a ruthless rapport with a moral law owned by the upper classes:

Une expérience du pathétique allait naître qui ne parle plus d’une glorification de la douleur, ni d’un salut commun à la Pauvreté et à la Charité ; mais qui n’entretient l’homme que de ses devoirs à l’égard de la société et montre dans le misérable à la fois un effet du désordre et un obstacle à l’ordre. (Foucault 83)

11Merivel’s findings are instrumental in mapping out the social landscape of the humble, invisible and silenced, in contrast to the spectacle of human folly he had known intimately as the King’s Fool.

12Although Merivel still enjoys a certain social status and privilege, he feels deprived of the King’s presence and therefore cast away from the Court. Life appears in all its precariousness, Merivel finding himself on a spectrum of dispossession that includes all those ‘incapable, capable, and lazy’ outcasts he is expected to categorize, some of them so poor that their very lives can fade into non-existence.

I had some vague notion of searching for the two Paupers, not with the intention of asking anything from them or indeed endeavouring to place them with one of Justice Hogg’s three categories, but merely of regarding them face to face and seeing what state of misery or despair I could determine in them. In the near darkness, one of them holding a small lantern on a pole, they had struck me as people in terrible need, their face cadaverous, their eyes fearful. In their masses, I beheld, unmoved, such poor folk in London, yet the sight of these two, a man and his wife in rags, had troubled me sufficiently to send me wandering in the wood in search of the hovel in which I supposed them to live.
I found nothing. Indeed the air in the wood was so still, it was difficult to imagine it disturbed by any living breath. (137, my emphasis)

  • 8 For an eloquent analysis of vulnerability as a continuum, which also ends with a discussion of care (...)
  • 9 One of the stakes in the Foucault-Derrida exchange is the question of empowerment that Gayatri Spiv (...)
  • 10 Is this Tremain’s clin-d’œil to George Young’s famous quip ‘that the homeless are what you step ove (...)

13Dismounted, looking for the paupers as human beings rather than as individuals to be rigorously labelled and thus dehumanized, Merivel seeks a face-to-face encounter with them, driven by the memory of their wretchedness on a previous occasion. Reduced to cadaverous faces and fearful eyes, they alert to the etymological kinship of the humble with the earth, the humus; their disappearance confirms not only its origin, but also its likely fate, if regarded within a paradigm of economic and social exclusion.8 Merivel reflects on the inadequacy of the ‘care’ extended to the poor by the institutions he represents: ‘As I remounted, I told myself that, were I in condition of wretchedness, I would not seek out the Overseers in their wigs and wanton finery, but rather beat pains to conceal myself from them by whatever means I could devise’ (137). Compounding invisibility—self-imposed, out of fear of the authorities, but also forced upon the poor through confinement—, the novel also subtly alludes to the silencing of the humble when Merivel is perplexed by a beggar who is mentally healthy but unable to speak because his tongue was cut: which one of Hogg’s categories should he fit in? Readers familiar with Jacques Derrida’s questioning of the logic of Foucault’s project in Histoire de la folie to allow unreason speak in its own voice—with its own tongue, one might paraphrase—no doubt appreciate Merivel’s perplexity.9 ‘The task wearied me even before I had begun it,’ Merivel admits before he joins his wife in the Music Room, letting her voice ‘drive from [his] mind all contemplation of the homeless and the needy’ (128).10

  • 11 Hans Wilmar Geppert, ‘In imaginären Exil. Anmerkungen zu Tradition, Moderne und Postmoderne im hist (...)

14Such delightful avoidance is no longer possible at Whittlesea, where he experiences acutely a sense of exile. This is an important notion in the economy of the novel: not only because it casts Merivel’s story in a palimpsestic relationship with the historical exile of Charles II, but also because it brings into focus the tension between two temporalities that define the experience of characters in Restoration. In an essay on contemporary historical fiction, Hans Wilmar Geppert aptly describes exile as the ‘metaphor of a time-aporia, of a painfully experienced difference that breaks the continuity of history between the time of the individual life and the ungraspable time of the world, of which one can have only a negative experience.’11 Geppert’s insight resonates with Merivel’s experiences: still at Whitehall, his life and the time of History appear to be one and the same; at Bidnold, occasionally he indulges his nostalgia—‘At such moments of despondency, I long not merely to see the King, but to be the King, surrounded as he is by people pressing one upon another to lay offerings at his feet’ (143)—but eventually he accepts the revelation of their non-coincidence, the reality that he is subject to historicity, that is, vulnerable, just like anyone else; moreover, that the genuine experience of time is that of the long duration. As Braudel would put it, under the influence of the quiet weight of time, history gains an intelligibility entirely opposed to the frenzy of events, ‘une sagesse discrète’ (Ricœur 188). That both space and time are different for the humble is something Merivel learns when he visits the house of an old patient, ‘the low, thatched dwelling where this unfortunate Wise Nell leads a most strange crepuscular life, so dark is her house, so low its ceilings and small its windows’ (152); ‘one among many persecutions endured by the poor’ he realizes, is that ‘they are persecuted by their own rooms.’ Spending the night at Rosie Pierpoint’s house, he also understands ‘this small matter: that the poor use time differently from me. They are unable to prolong day with manufactured light, the cost of candles and oil being too great’ (186).

15It is this other version of the Restoration period that Rose Tremain’s novel seeks to ‘restore,’ shedding light on the many kinds of dispossession that the humble were subjected to: poverty, social exclusion, sickness, mental illness, abandonment, death. At first sight, the novel’s protagonist Robert Merivel is a Janus-faced figure: Merivel the Fool’s carefree laughter becomes muted as he progressively changes into Robert the responsible doctor. His experiences, however, bring into focus the many faces of the humble, which populate a whole spectrum of precariousness. That in the figure of the humble are collapsed many different forms of dispossession is also the central argument of Michel Foucault’s narrative of the great confinement (‘le grand renfermement’); let us turn briefly to the novel’s engagement with it.

The Ship of Fools: a History of Madness in the Seventeenth Century

16Braudel’s use of Rimbaud’s drunken boat metaphor to refer to histoire brûlante as contemporariness aptly introduces an image intimately linked to Histoire de la folie: a ghostly boat floats along the novel, just as it traverses Foucault’s narrative. Charles II’s court is like a ship of foolish people, living in unselfconscious debauchery—a Narrentanz on a drunken boat. This is the Renaissance form of folly praised by Erasmus: no longer emerging from the entrails of the earth and incarnating itself in the monsters of Hieronymus Bosch, notes Foucault, but manifesting itself in man, in his self-abandon, foolish arrogance, debauchery and vice. Charles II’s court is reminiscent of Bosch’s stultifera navis, except that here the mast is the King himself, who sets the tone to the generalized promiscuity.

17We catch a glimpse of the ship of fools again when Robert Merivel reaches the asylum: Whittlesea is a nightmarish vessel populated by living dead. ‘It is like a drowned place, a shipwrecked place’ (196), Merivel describes it, sheltering people ‘deemed by their families to have died already’ (257), as his Quaker friend Pearce explains. His words echo Foucault’s: ‘c’est vers l’autre monde que part le fou sur sa folle nacelle; c’est de l’autre monde qu’il vient quand il débarque’ (Foucault 26). In this sense, Merivel’s description of the hospital is hardly metaphorical: ‘this Fenland place, which is a place quite outside the world that we inhabit here’ (341). An oak in the middle of the yard stands for the mast of the ship: at the Renaissance, this was the forbidden tree, the tree of promised immortality and of sin. Around this mast unfolds a mad dance, a delirious frenzy whose only silent rule is self-oblivion. Once again, Restoration invests differently the Narrentanz that Brant made famous: Robert tries to make the inmates dance, so that they forget their afflictions and re-integrate the harmony of the world: ‘This is a whirling dance. So why do you not whirl and turn and jump, or do anything you will? Pretend you are leaves flying, or children skipping’ (254). The outcome recalls an important scene in Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade, a play-within-a-play about the French Revolution, a scene that makes apparent the repressed truth of a revolution that has yet to happen for the lower classes. Merivel remembers: ‘I knew by the end of the fifth tarantella that everyone was moving, trying to spin and whirl and clapping their hands;’ as in Marat/Sade, the dance ends with ‘some trying to sing and some wailing and some shrieking like the devil’ (255).

18The boat, as Foucault shows, is no longer the joyful vehicle of a folly that Erasmus derided from the heights of his Olympus, but the establishment of an incarceration: ‘La voilà amarrée solidement, au milieu des choses et des gens. Retenue et maintenue. Non plus barque, mais hôpital’ (Foucault 63). The asylum confines those who did not take well the aberrations of recent history, but also, as Foucault points out in his narrative of the great confinement, those vagrants, beggars and vagabonds who were the by-product of the Enclosures, a shameful class of ‘masterless’ people who had to become invisible—the outcasts Merivel had to categorize in his capacity as Overseer of the Poor. As Foucault puts it,

[ce geste] organise en une unité complexe une nouvelle sensibilité à la misère et aux devoirs de l’assistance, de nouvelles formes de réaction devant les problèmes économiques du chômage et de l’oisiveté, une nouvelle éthique du travail, et le rêve aussi d’une cité où l’obligation morale rejoindrait la loi civile, sous les formes autoritaires de la contrainte. (Foucault 80)

  • 12 Quoting Sydenham, Foucault shows that the efforts of scientists in the eighteenth century revolved (...)
  • 13 Hayden White, Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: John (...)
  • 14 Giorgio Agamben, ‘What is the Contemporary? ’ in ‘What Is an Apparatus? ’ and Other Essays, trans. (...)
  • 15 Saint Augustine’s terms, discussed by Ricœur.

19In Restoration, Tremain goes beyond the seventeenth century when Merivel, now Robert the doctor, shows himself critical of the methods used with the inmates and proposes alternative ones, inspired by his own experience. In the long duration of his time at Whittlesea, when not much happens in terms of plot but certainly a lot in terms of a ‘discrete wisdom,’ he has the opportunity to reflect on his own ‘foolishness’ by studying pathological madness. All such afflictions, he learns, have a Before and an After moment, and it is important to understand the ‘steps’ that led from the former to the latter. Paradoxically, this gazing backward (to the Before) that he proposes in view of curing madness represents a step forward in the historical narrative: as Foucault shows, it was only in the eighteenth century that the ‘negative truth of madness’ was replaced by the positive truth of the knowledge one could gather about its dérèglement, in other words, that the ‘philosophical path’ was replaced by the historical one.12 Madness, it turns out, is a question of emplotment, just as history-writing: and with both, there is an always renewed necessity to reconfigure, to re-interpret, or, to use Hayden White’s term, to re-emplot.13 ‘I like you, Merivel,’ the King had once said, praising his exquisite sense of the contemporary: ‘You are a man utterly of our times.’ Merivel, it turned out, grew far too close to the spirit of the times, to the point where he was blinded by it. ‘You are dreaming, Merivel,’ the King later observed and cast him away, thus encouraging him to become a contemporary in Giorgio Agamben’s sense, of untimeliness:14 that is, to register the shock between the time of the soul and the time of the world;15 between the time of arrogance, and the long duration of humility; between the time of ‘now’ and the wisdom of broader narratives, with ampler potential for emplotment.

20At the end of the novel, the King takes ownership again of the Bidnold residence: ‘Bidnold is to be a ship now,’ he says, ‘the place in which, from time to time, I can sail away from care. [. . .] It is the place where I shall come to dream’ (368). History repeats itself; the King exiles himself on a ship, this time a vessel of dreams: the ship, like madness, a floating signifier in Restoration. ‘Now you can teach me something about madness: ’ the King summons again his former Fool, a humble subject who can share the wisdom of his exile. The invitation solicits narrative (emplotment), which requires a capacity to live simultaneously in multiple temporal dimensions (the present and the narrated time), as well as to conjoin Merivel the Fool and Robert the doctor.

21The story’s narrative arc, which follows the journey of the ‘ship of fools’ along the continuum of human precariousness revealed to Robert Merivel—as the King’s Fool among the vain and oblivious, as a castaway at Bidnold among the poor and the oppressed, as an outcast at Whittlesea among the ill and forgotten, and finally as someone whose modest wisdom is worth a King’s attention—shows eloquently, as represented below, that Rose Tremain’s novel is committed to narrating a different version of the events that became the historical Restoration’s repressed unconscious. This version is haunted, at every step, by the multifaceted figure of the humble. The novel thus offers an exploration not only of the two opposite terms folly/humility, but also the different relationships we might encounter moving along an arc around Greimas’s semiotic square.

  • 16 Rose Tremain, quoted in Sarah Gristwood, ‘Merivel, A Man of Our Time,’ We Love This Book, last acce (...)
  • 17 Rose Tremain, ‘Guardian book club: Rose Tremain on Restoration,’ The Guardian Books Podcast 9 Novem (...)

22Why did the Restoration gain special legibility in the late 1980s? Rose Tremain herself thought of her novel as a ‘fictional response to the climate of selfishness and material greed that began to prevail in our society during the Thatcher years.’16 In an interview for The Guardian with Claire Armitstead and John Mullan, she speaks of the contrast between the arduous decade of the 1970s and the materialism of the 1980s, when people were spending a lot of money on food, clothes, and going out; this prompted her to look at another period when some of the same things were happening, when ‘all eyes turned in the direction of acquiring things’ and she found the Restoration. If we tend to see the Interregnum in monochromatic tones, Tremain explains, the period after 1660 was that of scarlet and gold, when, as Samuel Pepys put it, a clap of laughter exploded over England.17 But Tremain also admits that ‘for a novelist the contemporary world is extremely hard to seize because it moves so fast;’ in light of this remark, the possibility presents itself that the affinity she sensed between the two time periods is richer, and that her novel goes beyond the portrayal of indulgent materialism as characteristic of both epochs.

Figure 1 – The seventeenth century, our contemporary: emplotment, untimeliness, worlding.

Figure 1 – The seventeenth century, our contemporary: emplotment, untimeliness, worlding.
  • 18 See the housing minister Jan Gow’s letter of 6 November 1984 to Margaret Thatcher, discussed in Asa (...)
  • 19 Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London: Harper Collins, 1993) 603–604. This passage co (...)

23The underside of the materialism she points out is a reality familiar not only to the characters of Restoration, but also to her readers in the 1980s: Under the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher, unemployment rose to levels unprecedented since the Great Depression, poverty went up, accompanied by a massive elevation of the crime rate. Most relevant, however, in the context of the connection with the seventeenth century, is the increase in home ownership—a positive development for its beneficiaries, but also the cause of rising homelessness, since the council homes were sold and not replaced.18 The similarity with the enclosure of the Commons and the ensuing population of ‘masterless’ individuals deprived of sustenance is striking, just as the moral condemnation that in both contexts characterized the excluded as a nuisance to society: a much quoted passage from The Downing Street Years deplores the ‘persistent tendency in polite circles to consider all the “roofless” as victims of middle-class society, rather than middle class-society as victim of the “roofless.”’19

24This reversal of perspective in Thatcher’s memoir throws in high relief the ideological biases of representation, an aspect Tremain illustrates in the related themes of plotting and emplotment. It is perhaps no wonder that at a time when the Conservative party wanted to impose a univocal version of History, the period of the Civil War and the Restoration presented itself to the historical novelist as a time that illustrated the degree to which the interpretation of historical events can be inflected ideologically: if before 1649 the King’s sanctity had never been publicly breached, anti-royalists hoped that his beheading would put an end to what they called ‘the corrupted monarchy of man on Earth’ and entertained millenarian expectations; Cromwell was supposed to replace the Anti-Christ, or Satan, as Charles I came to be called, and, through a godly reformation of the English people’s lives, to lead them to the promised land and the Restoration of the kingdom of Christ. Restoration, there was, in 1660—not of God, but of the Stuarts, so History had to be re-written again: Charles I was now compared to Jesus Christ and publicly declared a martyr. The Act of Oblivion ensured that history followed its predestined course, undisturbed by inconsequential incidents. Thus in a relatively short interval, the same events acquired contradictory meanings, suggesting to the attentive chronicler that one can hardly write a neutral record of history, and that no one can have monopoly over it.

25Tremain captures this phenomenon and conveys it both thematically and formally, in the five possible beginnings that her narrator toys with, and by exploring different ways of experiencing time: first in the frenzy of events, then in the longer duration of a humbler temporality, and finally in the mode of narrative (Merivel’s, but also via the novel’s kinship with Foucault’s Histoire de la folie, which distends time to several centuries). Finally, the novel intimates a sense of contemporariness that involves living in multiple temporalities synchronically and in full awareness of the possible ways of emplotting the present. It is precisely this way of being a contemporary that was necessary during Thatcher’s regime—one that recycled the libertarian rhetoric of the not-so-distant past, the 1960s, enjoining the appreciation of freedom, no longer understood as freedom from authority or as freedom of self-expression, but as individualism, free-market competition, precarious social welfare, and much diminished social cohesion. When the King, at the end of the novel, asks Merivel to teach him about madness, the narrator gains full awareness of where the humble wisdom of history lies: living one’s present self-consciously, with an eye to its imbrication in broader narratives. Tremain’s novel intimates that challenging the status quo and imagining a different kind of politics is possible only if one has a relation of untimeliness to one’s own time, and if one lives with the awareness of its worlding.

Notes

1 Rose Tremain, Restoration. A Novel of Seventeenth-Century England (1989; New York: Penguin, 1994) 4.

2 Gilles Deleuze, Différence et répétition (Paris: PUF, 1968) 26.

3 Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1965) 5–6. Christopher Hill quotes here from W. Sanderson, A Complete History of the Life and Reigne of King Charles (1658).

4 A parody: going both along (formally, a story of exile), and against the official version of historical events (exposing the ideological content: erasure of the past). See Margaret A. Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern and Post-modern (London: Cambridge UP, 1993).

5 John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667; New York: Penguin Popular Classics, 1996) Book IV, 763–770, 106.

6 Fernand Braudel, Écrits sur l’histoire (1969), quoted by Paul Ricœur in Temps et récit, vol. 1, L’intrigue et le récit historique (Paris: Seuil, 1983) 187.

7 Michel Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1961; Paris: Gallimard, 2000) 84.

8 For an eloquent analysis of vulnerability as a continuum, which also ends with a discussion of care vs empowerment politics, see Guillaume Le Blanc, Que faire de notre vulnérabilité? (Paris: Bayard, 2011).

9 One of the stakes in the Foucault-Derrida exchange is the question of empowerment that Gayatri Spivak famously captured in her question ‘Can the subaltern speak? ’ With its critique of what we might term, anachronistically, an inadequate ‘politics of care,’ Tremain’s novel also surreptitiously raises the question of the possibility of a politics of empowerment, relevant to the social climate of the late 1980s.

10 Is this Tremain’s clin-d’œil to George Young’s famous quip ‘that the homeless are what you step over when you come out of the opera’?

11 Hans Wilmar Geppert, ‘In imaginären Exil. Anmerkungen zu Tradition, Moderne und Postmoderne im historischen Roman,’ in Andrea Bartl, Jürgen Eder, Harry Fröhlich, Klaus-Dieter Post, Ursula Regener, eds., In Spuren gehen. . .’ Festschrift für Helmut Koopmann (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1988) 359–374, my translation. Geppert takes for axiomatic the rapport between exile and the historical novel (fn. 2, 360).

12 Quoting Sydenham, Foucault shows that the efforts of scientists in the eighteenth century revolved around classifying maladies, following the model of botanists in their treatises on plants. Similarly, Robert’s revolutionary ideas about the treatment of mental illness develop against the background of his friend Pearce’s botanical and gardening preoccupations. Restoration thus steps ahead of its narrated historical time, thus distending the long duration of exile to the even longer perspective of the narrative of the history of madness.

13 Hayden White, Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1973).

14 Giorgio Agamben, ‘What is the Contemporary? ’ in ‘What Is an Apparatus? ’ and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009).

15 Saint Augustine’s terms, discussed by Ricœur.

16 Rose Tremain, quoted in Sarah Gristwood, ‘Merivel, A Man of Our Time,’ We Love This Book, last accessed at www.welovethisbook.com/features/merivel-man-our-time on 12 June 2015.

17 Rose Tremain, ‘Guardian book club: Rose Tremain on Restoration,’ The Guardian Books Podcast 9 November 2012, last accessed at www.theguardian.com/books/audio/2012/nov/09/rose-tremain-book-club-podcast on 12 June 2015.

18 See the housing minister Jan Gow’s letter of 6 November 1984 to Margaret Thatcher, discussed in Asa Bennett, ‘Margaret Thatcher’s Ministers Warned Her That Housing Cuts Would Cause Crisis,’ The Huffington Post 3 January 2014, last accessed at www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/01/03/margaret-thatcher-housing_n_4537251.html on 12 June 2015. For a more comprehensive analysis of Thatcherism see Geoffrey K. Fry, The Politics of the Thatcher Revolution. An Interpretation of British Politics, 1979–1990 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), and, more specifically on homelessness as inherited from the 1980s, David Cowan, ‘Reforming the homelessness legislation,’ Critical Social Policy 18.4 (1998): 435–464.

19 Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London: Harper Collins, 1993) 603–604. This passage corrects her famous claim that ‘there is no such thing as society [. . .] there are only individuals and families,’ to suggest that those families that do make up middle-class society are entitled to homes, and are in no way responsible for the ‘roofless.’

Table des illustrations

Titre Figure 1 – The seventeenth century, our contemporary: emplotment, untimeliness, worlding.
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Duke University

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