‘The voice speaking, desired, awaited’: Jack Lindsay’s 1649, Textual Form and Communist Historiography

This article examines the 1938 historical novel 1649: A Novel of a Year by the Anglo-Australian communist polymath Jack Lindsay in the context of the politics of the Popular Front, and identifies the aesthetic and historiographic debates questions that inform Lindsay’s inventive rendition of the historical novel. The novel may be considered in light of what Lindsay later called his desire ‘to use the novel to revive revolutionary traditions’, as well as his ‘struggle to achieve an understanding of the Novel while writing novels’. Lindsay’s novel figures a reality becoming prosaic: it reproduces contemporary textual sources – tracts, pamphlets, newspapers – as part of its meditation on a nascent print culture whose products circulate in processes that mirror the increasingly conspicuous flow of commodities. In this sense, the novel offers a marxist reflection on its own conditions of possibility in emergent bourgeois culture, as well as intervening in the vexed question of the Civil War as a ‘bourgeois revolution’. The novel however seeks to capture a dialectical method of representing the revolution that acknowledges defeat while rearticulating the utopian content of the defeated radicals, a practice integral to Lindsay’s vision of popular history as a transhistorical dialogue. That utopian content is transmitted through two forms: popular song, which acts to supplement political writing; and the heroic portrayal of the Leveller John Lilburne on trial, whose conduct exemplifies praxis conceived as a unity of word, thought and action.

The Church of the Abandoned Christ: David Peace's 'Red Riding Quartet' and the Wreck of the White Ship

David Peace’s novel Nineteen Seventy-seven concludes with the hack journalist Jack Whitehead being granted a terrifying apocalyptic vision, seconds before he is trepanned with a Phillips screwdriver by the sinister Reverend Martin Laws. Included in this vision is a curious reference to the wreck of the White Ship, a maritime disaster in 1120 that drowned William Atheling, heir to the English throne, and ultimately doomed England to years of civil war. This article explores Peace’s strange use of the shipwreck in his “Red Riding Quartet,” particularly the way he links it—in the quartet’s final volume, Nineteen Eighty Three—to a revisionist account of the aftermath of the crucifixion that leads a wounded Christ to a tragic death in the cold waters of the English Channel.