Fragmentation of the body and the end of identity

Abstract

This concluding chapter is concerned with attempts during the 1640s at denying the R/reality of warfare, the imposition of a recognizable narrative frame and categorical pattern onto an essentially uncontrolled and uncontrollable event. In particular, I ask was the execution of the King a rupture point for Royalism or did it lead loyalists to retreat into recognizable structures of narrative and trope? Many of the techniques and tropes I will be delineating are very familiar and used throughout history. In fact, the themes of this concluding section – the act of forgetting, the disjunction between experience and memory, and the avoidance of traumatic re-enactment – are often taken to be quintessentially human; as Derrida asks, ‘Why am I denied narration?’1 However, it seems that the unsettling effects of war are tied into something that is definably Royalist; indeed, examination of responses to warfare allows us further insight into the loyalist mind and a way to interrogate Virilio’s ‘personality’ of war. The anxiety inherent in the encounter with the Roundhead other is transmitted throughout Royalism and undermines a sense of wholeness, meaning and coherence. The sense of dislocation and problematic justification of normality is resonant in all Royalist work at some level or other. The desire to turn chaos into a theatrical narrative which expels difference and transgression underpins the discourse of Royalism.