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Abstract
This essay shows how David Caute’s historical novel Comrade Jacob (1961) and Caryl Churchill’s play Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (produced by the Joint Stock Company in 1976) participate in the ‘reinvention of the question of Utopia’ (Jameson) through a rediscovery of the political, social and religious ideals of Winstanley and the Diggers in the seventeenth century. Reframing the question of utopia in terms of Jacques Rancière’s notion of the redistribution of the sensible, the essay focuses on the specific formal strategies through which Caute and Churchill intimate the vision of a malleable world, open to the emergence of a collective identity, the redistribution of property and the reconfiguration of meanings.
Notes
1. In parallel to her collaboration with the Joint Stock Company, Churchill worked with the Monstrous Regiment on the production of another play set in the seventeenth century, Vinegar Tom (1976), about the witchcraft trials and gender politics in the 1970s.
2. To divide the sensible (partager le sensible) is ‘to parcel out spaces and times so as to create a shared world that includes different allotments. The sensible’s distribution provides to thought its picture of the world, supplying the evidence of what can be conceived, discussed and disputed. The conceivable in turn structures what presents itself to thought as a possibility for further thought and/or action. In its very givenness, it supplies possible courses of action, forms of relation, as well as new thoughts and sensible configurations. The distribution of the sensible thus ultimately defines, for Rancière, the field of possibility and impossibility’ (Tanke, Citation2011: 2).
3. For an analysis of the enduring legacy of these events, see also Blair Worden (Citation2001).
4. Jameson eloquently highlights Brecht’s critique: ‘where Lukács charged “modernist” writing with formalism because of its use of such fragmented techniques as interior monologue or montage, it was actually Lukács himself who had fallen into a deluded and timeless formalism, by attempting to deduce norms for prose purely from literary traditions, without regard for the historical reality that encompasses and transforms all literature in its own processes of change’ (Aesthetics and Politics, Presentation II, 63).
5. I offer a comprehensive analysis of this debate in the introductory chapter of my forthcoming book The Art of Distances or, A Morality for the Everyday.
6. I have in mind Caute’s Citation1964 Communism and the French Intellectuals 1914–1960. For a critical perspective on this book, see the reviews by J.G. Weightman in Commentary Magazine (1 March Citation1965), and by Nicole Racine-Furlaud in Revue française de science politique (Citation1965).
7. For a thorough analysis of Caute’s place among historians and the reception of his political novels, see Schäffner (Citation2007: 3–4).
8. In Fredric Jameson’s words, ‘the imagination of Utopia … places the Utopian fantasist in two distinct worlds at the same time and generates a unique kind of discomfort by the seemingly irreconcilable demands it makes to disengage absolutely from what is[,] at the same time that one cleaves absolutely to the being of the world as some ultimate limit’ (Jameson, Citation2000: 388).
9. The novel even takes the charge of ressentiment seriously, allowing a complex portrait of Winstanley to emerge: his affair with the parson’s wife from whom he accepts money, his attraction to Robert Coster’s wife, Judith, his own self-doubt –
10. While initially pleased at the prospect of a screen adaptation of his novel, Caute distanced himself from the film version produced by Brownlow and Mollo, especially because they glossed over the religiosity of the character (Caute, Citation2008).
11. Gaskill had just left the position of artistic director at the Royal Court, and Stafford-Clark had directed the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh (1966–1970), which disbanded in 1972 and from which the Joint Stock would inherit some of their experimental methods. Usefully putting things in context, Rob Ritchie highlights the uniqueness of the Joint Stock: ‘at the National, star casting and glossy programme notes were more evident than a critical approach to the classics; at the Royal Court, assembling each production on an ad hoc basis with a minimum of rehearsal limited the scope for artistic development’ (1987, 14); on the other hand, ‘the underground had become the fringe’ with the formation of groups with specific agendas such as 7:84, the Women’s Theatre Group, Gay Sweatshop.
12. And, as I have shown in the previous section, it is Caute who elevates Winstanley to the status of a figure of historical significance and casts him at the centre of his novel.
13. In a brief contribution to Rob Ritchie’s volume about the Joint Stock Company, Churchill credits Norman Cohn’s Pursuit of the Millennium, in particular the appendix of Ranter writings, with the inspiration for the play. She also read Christopher Hill, A.L. Morton on the Ranters, as well as a variety of archival materials, especially pamphlets, the preserved writings of the Ranter Abiezer Coppe – Cobbe in the play – and Laurence Clarkson, the record of the Putney debates, Biblical psalms, and, anachronistically, nineteenth-century poetry set to music, such as Walt Whitman’s Song of the Open Road (Ritchie, Citation1987: 119).
14. See my essay ‘The Ship of Fools: Precarious Lives in 1660s/1980s England.’ The Humble in 19th- to 21st-Century British Literature and Arts. Eds. Isabel Brasme, Jean-Michel Ganteau and Christine Reynier. Montpellier: Presses de la Méditerranée, 2016, forthcoming.