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A Prophet as Unreliable Narrator RewritingArise EvansMatthew Francis aa Aberystwyth University English and Creative Writing Penglais AberystwythSY23 3DY United KingdomPublished online 06 Aug 2010

To cite this article Matthew Francis (2010) A Prophet as Unreliable Narrator Rewriting Arise Evans NewWriting The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing 72 161-171 DOI101080147907262010497557

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A Prophet as Unreliable NarratorRewriting Arise Evans

Matthew FrancisAberystwyth University English and Creative Writing PenglaisAberystwyth SY23 3DY United Kingdom

The theme of the reliability or unreliability of narrative is important in both earlymodern and postmodern texts The Welsh prophet and Royalist propagandist AriseEvans (1607 -) is a prototypical unreliable narrator his autobiographical writingscontain many unbelievable events including miracles and visions Evans seeks toestablish the reliability of his account by personal revelation and experience byappeal to scriptural authority and by magical lore Nevertheless much of itsattraction to a contemporary reader lies in the fragility of its narrative authorityand the comic and imaginative possibilities this opens This unconscious feature ofthe text can be compared to the deliberate narrative strategies of postmodern novelssuch as Vladimir Nabokovrsquos Pale Fire I am using Evansrsquos story as the basis of anovel-in-progress The Book of the Needle employing him as an unreliable narratorlike Nabokovrsquos Charles Kinbote Drawing on both postmodern and earlier metafic-tion I am creating a fictive text by Evans on the subject of tailoring whichcontinually breaks down in the manner of Pale Fire or Tristram Shandy This alsogives me the opportunity to explore early modern textual conventions and in sodoing liberate my own writing

doi 101080147907262010497557

Keywords fiction writing metanarrative

In the summer of 1660 the Welsh prophet and Royalist propagandist AriseEvans sat down in his study in Long Alley Blackfriars to begin work on thelongest and least typical of his writings The Book of the Needle He was in hisearly fifties For the last few years he had been a full-time writer supportedthough not handsomely by two shadowy figures in league with the Royalistcause William Satterthwaite and Samuel Starling (Hill 1991 73) Now withtheir political aims satisfied their support had dried up and Evans was left tofend for himself The new book an introduction to the tailoring trade for thebenefit of apprentices and their parents began in typical seventeenth-centuryfashion with a scriptural vindication of his other profession

If it be true that a man must have a trade it is also true that he must haveclothes and so must his wife and his children else they would beeverywhere naked to their great shame and discomfort The trade oftailoring then answers to a general need and it is one of great antiquityand respectability The first tailor was Adam for he sewed fig-leavestogether to make aprons as did also his wife Eve who was thus the firstseamstress In this they disobeyed the will of God and therefore it mayseem that tailoring was the Original Sin of which the divines speak or at

1479-07261002 161-11 $20000 ndash 2010 Taylor amp FrancisINT J FOR THE PRACTICE AND THEORY OF CREATIVE WRITING Vol 7 No 2 2010

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least the Second Sin following that of pilfering fruit And it may beindeed but the Lord sanctioned it hereafter for when he cursed thewoman to bring forth children in pain and to harken to her husband andthe man to eat bread in the sweat of his brow the Lord himself madecoats of skins sewn together and clothed them Thus was the Lord Godthe second tailor and thus was tailoring the only thing in the world to beinvented by man first and God afterwards And ever since that timetailors have been curious men given to dreams above their station1

(Evans 1661 1)

Evans had served his tailoring apprenticeship in Chester In 1629 at the ageof 22 he received his indentures and went to London to work as ajourneyman Soon afterwards he began to prophesy subject to visions sincehis youth he was called by God to announce the catastrophe of the Civil Warthat was about to befall the nation At first reluctant to obey this summons herealised he had no choice when he looked up from his shopboard one day andfound an angel standing in front of him

I beheld the angel of the Lord all in white standing upon the shop-boardwith a flaming sword in his hand ready to destroy me if I did any longerneglect to do the work of God at which apparition I was amazed andsuddenly laying the work aside leapt off the shop-board told the Masterthat I had a business to do I knew not of in the morning that must needsbe done desiring him to excuse me and the man was content to let me goSo fearful was I that as I came home to my lodging I looked every minutefor fire from Heaven to fall upon me and thrust me into Hell for myrebelling against God in neglecting his work And coming to my lodgingin Salisbury Court I got pen ink and paper and began to write directingmy matter in all submission to the Kingrsquos Majesty (Evans 1653 13)

Concerned at the harm that might befall the king Evans went to GreenwichPalace to deliver his petition which was graciously accepted and no doubtthrown away Afterwards he haunted the palace for two days

And when I saw a Bishop or a Doctor passing by I followed them totheir chambers intending to deliver my mind in a sober way to some ofthem but they ran from me and their servants kept me out of theirchambers by force (Evans 1653 17)

His subsequent prophetic career led to his meeting the Earl of Essex OliverCromwell the Speaker of the House of Commons William Lenthall the Jewishleader Manasseh Ben Israel and many politicians prophets astrologers anddivines It caused him to be imprisoned twice and to publish fifteen or sixteenbooks Soon this son of a west Wales sheep farmer the kind of man who ageneration earlier would probably not have known how to read and writehad become a celebrated author

Then I became mighty famous for all the people both high and low thathad seen my book or heard of it beholding the effect thereof came to meso thick that I was not able to answer it but gave them books to the poorgratis the others paid me (Evans 1660 12)

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And why am I so pestered with the people that I cannot rest but all theday long answer them And why are my books gone over all the earthand translated into all languages that I am troubled to answer men thatcome from Turkey from Italy from Germany from Spain yea and fromall parts of the world where Englishmen go (Evans 1654 np)

Then finally came the event for which Evans had been hoping and prayingsince the execution of Charles I in 1649 an event which he had alreadyprophesied several times setting a date for it and being publicly humiliatedeach time it failed to come about as he had predicted King Charles II whomhe regarded as the representative of God on earth was restored to the throneThe turmoil of the preceding 20 years was brought to an end and with it hisown reason for prophesying Hence his abrupt change of subject-matter

I will say more about The Book of the Needle but it is time to backtrack a littleIf the story I have just told seems unbelievable it is in part because myaccount contains a blatant lie The best excuse I can offer is that as a creativewriter the telling of lies is in my job description Arise Evansrsquos last knownwork is an epistle from the summer of 1660 to Charles II congratulating him onhis restoration and describing some of his own political and propheticactivities of the previous year after that he disappears from history He didnot write The Book of the Needle that is the title of a novel I am writing aboutArise Evans and his world

The purpose of my lie was to draw attention to a theme that was of greatimportance in Arise Evansrsquos day and is equally so in our own the reliability orunreliability of narrative When anyone tells us anything whether orally or inwriting or print we have to make the difficult decision whether to believethem or not do their words correspond to objective realities in the materialworld or are they deliberately or otherwise deceiving us There is also a thirdpossibility we must take into account the speaker or writer may be in JLAustinrsquos formulation trying lsquoto do things with wordsrsquo performing a verbalaction in which truth or falsity are beside the point (Austin 1962) As readersas scholars and simply as human beings we spend much of our intellectualenergy on this task bringing to it our knowledge of the world and how itworks our knowledge of psychology in general and of the psychology of theindividual who addresses us and most significantly for us in the arts andhumanities our knowledge of the conventions governing various modesof discourse We expect lies in fiction we do not expect them in academicessays but on the other hand in this postmodern age the transgression isperhaps not as shocking as it might have been a few years ago For one of themajor preoccupations of postmodernism is its exploration of the relationshipbetween textuality and truth and the challenge it offers to any simplisticformulation of it

One mode of fiction that reacts to our postmodern sense of the interweavingof text and reality is metafiction In a metafictional novel the author mayappear as a character as Paul Auster (1987 7) does in The New York Trilogy orstill more disconcertingly the reader may be addressed directly and told whathe or she is doing as in Italo Calvinorsquos (1992) If on a Winterrsquos Night a Travellerwhich begins lsquoYou are about to begin reading Italo Calvinorsquos new novel If on a

A Prophet as Unreliable Narrator Rewriting Arise Evans 163

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winterrsquos night a travellerrsquo (3) In both cases a person we think of as belonging tothe lsquorealrsquo world is startlingly introduced into the fictional one But is it the realperson at all We have no way of knowing if the real Paul Auster did any ofthe things he describes himself as doing in his text but we can be sure weourselves did not have the adventures we get up to in Calvinorsquos adventureswhich begin with our purchasing a series of defective books and continue intoan outrageous international conspiracy-thriller So this is a fictional self butthe idea that we can so easily acquire a fictional self through the mereoperation of language is itself disorientating Metafictional authors play othertricks too They may tell us stories within stories within stories until we findit hard to remember which story we are in at any given time a trope known asmise-en-abyme Or they may draw attention to the materiality of the book weare reading to its white pages and black letters its margins and coversdissolving the fictive world just when we were happily losing ourselves in itAll these devices disturb our sense of the simple oppositional relationship oftruth and fiction (Waugh 2003)

With so much instability introduced into the narrative so many possibilitiesof going astray it is hard for the reader to know what to believe or moreaccurately what to accept and what to reject on the fictive plane of the textThis uncertainty reminds us that fiction has a long tradition of unreliablenarration the narrator who tells us the story may be misleading us consciouslyor unconsciously Perhaps the most famous example is the governess in TheTurn of the Screw when she tells us of her encounters with the ghosts of PeterQuint and Miss Jessel and of their influence on the children in her chargewe do not know whether to accept her word or to assume she is insane anissue the critics have debated for many years Like us these critics are wellaware that the governess the children and the ghosts are Jamesrsquos inventionsand never existed in the first place nevertheless they instinctively seek adeterminate interpretation just as we do when faced with conflicting accountsof a real-life situation Finding the solution knowing the truth is somethingwe are mentally programmed to want to achieve and we carry this instinctinto the fictive world with us only to find that the complexity of Jamesrsquosnarrative frustrates it (Booth 1983 366367)

Unreliable narration and metafiction are closely related in the interpretivechallenges they present and frequently crop up together for example inVladimir Nabokovrsquos novel Pale Fire This takes the form of a 999-line narrativepoem in heroic couplets by a fictional American poet John Shade who hasrecently been murdered together with copious notes by an editor who tells ushe was Shadersquos close friend a gay academic named Charles Kinbote As weread the notes a story develops Kinbote is a citizen of a small northernEuropean republic called Zembla which has recently suffered a revolutioncausing its king Charles the Beloved to flee into exile (This Charlesincidentally much resembles Arise Evansrsquos hero Charles II of England andeven shares the same regnal number) Kinbote writes of the King in the third-person but it is not long before we realise that they are one and the sameHowever Kinbote is the most unreliable of narrators What does his elaboratestory really have to do with Shadersquos poem which seems to be an account of afairly ordinary though not untroubled American literary life A simple word

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like lsquooftenrsquo or lsquotodayrsquo in the text of the poem sets Kinbote off into pages offantastic but irrelevant anecdote (Nabokov 1973a 7881 126131) Is this nota symptom of madness We begin to notice things Kinbote himself is unawareof When at a cocktail party he overhears a conversation between Shade andtheir hostess on the subject of a local lunatic it seems obvious to us that it isKinbote they are talking about (Nabokov 1973a 188) A Russian called Botkinhis name a version of Kinbotersquos with the syllables reversed is sometimesmentioned perhaps this apparently minor character rather than Kinbote orCharles the Beloved is the real deluded narrator (Nabokov 1973a 125)

This at any rate was Nabokovrsquos own explanation of his novel in aninterview he gave shortly after its publication (Nabokov 1973b 74) Butunreliable narrative resists such authoritative accounts even when they comefrom the author critics of Pale Fire drawing on textual evidence in the novelhave suggested other interpretations some for example argue that the truenarrator is John Shade who has himself invented KinboteBotkin and thewhole Zemblan fiction and dictated both poem and notes from beyondthe grave (Boyd 1991) The uncertainties do not stop even there The novelbeing metafictional contains clues to its own fictive nature at the end of hisnotes Kinbote writes lsquoI may assume other disguises other forms I mayturn up yet on another campus as an old happy healthy heterosexualRussian a writer in exile sans fame sans future sans audience sans anythingbut his artrsquo (Nabokov 1973a 236) This reminds us that Kinbotersquos storybizarre as it is echoes that of its ultimate author Vladimir Nabokov who wasdriven into exile by the Russian revolution and whose father the liberalpolitician Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov was like Shade killed by anassassin attempting to murder someone else The fiction constantly threatensto dissolve into reality leaving the reader uncertain which is which anuncertainty epitomised by the novelrsquos use of mirror imagery and its play withnames like Shade (in its multiple senses of shadow ghost and darkness) andZembla (or semblance)

Historians of metafiction trace it back through Tristram Shandy at least as faras Don Quixote it is not an invention of the postmodern era (Waugh 2003 70)Nor is the unreliable narrative postmodern in origin as my brief discussion ofThe Turn of the Screw shows Nevertheless they seem to fit particularly wellwith the mood and concerns of our age and the terms themselves are of fairlyrecent origin lsquometafictionrsquo was first used by the writer William H Gass todescribe his own practices and those of some of his contemporaries in 1970while lsquounreliable narrationrsquo was coined by the critic Wayne C Booth in his1961 study The Rhetoric of Fiction (Waugh 2003 2 Booth 1983 339-74)

Leaving aside my own intervention how much of Arise Evansrsquos story canwe believe Our main source for most of the events in his life is Evans himselfabove all in the two pamphlets An Eccho to The Voice from Heaven (1653) and To

the Most High and Mighty Prince Charles II An Epistle (1660) Many of the thingshe tells us in these texts seem at the very least unlikely There are forexample those childhood experiences of the supernatural I mentioned Here ishis account of one of them

A Prophet as Unreliable Narrator Rewriting Arise Evans 165

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And once having occasion to go over a high place called Bwlch RywCredire and having come to the top where the dark clouds about me bythe wind were driven swiftly I being fearful in that place elevated myprayer the more And through the fervency of my prayer andvehemency of the wind and clouds I was lifted above the earth andcarried up a space in the clouds as I went on my way (Evans 1653 56)

Such miraculous incidents occurred throughout his life or so he tells usOnce he was locked up in his motherrsquos house in Wrexham in an attempt tokeep him from prophesying friends of the family fearing his intemperateutterances would bring trouble starved him and deprived him of sleep in anattempt to weaken his resolve and silence him But God intervened to savehim

As I lay on my bed the third day in the morning expecting some kind ofdeliverance from God there came in at the window a round cloud incolour like unto the rainbow abiding upon me a quarter of an hour and Iwas so revived as if I had eaten all the delicates in the world And after aquarter of an hour the cloud departed out at the window and ascendedout of my sight (Evans 1653 21)

These are the kind of adventures we might expect to read of in a magicrealist novel but Arise Evans is no fictional character and he insists thateverything he tells us is true

Questions of authority were of great importance then as now Among thecompeting discourses of that era were the Royalist Episcopalian beliefsassociated with the King and his party the Catholicism that held sway overmuch of continental Europe and was associated with Charlesrsquos French QueenHenrietta Maria and numerous varieties of Puritanism Evans believedpassionately in the RoyalistEpiscopalian doctrine and continued to do soeven after it was eclipsed by King Charlesrsquos defeat and execution Throughoutthe years of the Civil War and Commonwealth he insisted that God wasspeaking to him directly not only telling him which beliefs were right andwhich wrong but also giving him information denied to ordinary people Hewas endowed with the ability to foretell the future Such claims are usuallymet with scepticism today and his seventeenth-century listeners weresceptical too though sometimes for different reasons While we might doubthim because of his reliance on the supernatural they asked him why a tailorand the son of a sheep farmer claimed to know more about Godrsquos will thanordained and educated ministers of the church lsquoYou are no ministerrsquo they toldhim and lsquothe King will take no notice of you being an unlearned manrsquo (Evans1653 12 16) But Arise maintained that he had authority for his prophecies itcame from what all his rivals whatever their ideological position acknowl-edged as the ultimate source of all earthly authority God himself And thisauthority was confirmed by personal revelation and experience by Biblicalreference and by what we may loosely call magical lore

Firstly Arise maintained that he had direct personal experience of Godthrough such events as the miracles I have just described2 These showed thatGod had a special purpose for him one which he had no right to refuse as the

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angelic visitation that took place while he was sewing on the shopboard madeclear God also imparted his message directly by speaking to him in lsquoalaudable sharp shrill hasting voice near mine earrsquo (Evans 1653 10) Suchunverifiable accounts were more likely to be taken seriously in Arisersquos daythan in our own above all by the very people he most wanted to impress hischief opponents the Puritans Their religion emphasised the individualrsquospersonal relationship with God which bypassed social institutions andhierarchies and was at the core of religious experience While social andhierarchical elements were undoubtedly important in Puritanism thisemphasis on the individual tended to be democratic liberating and sub-versive It was also a spur to narrative the period of the Commonwealth wasan age of great literary activity much of it based on spiritual autobiography orpersonal diaries and journals often by men like Arise of humble originsSuddenly everyone was telling their story a story more often than not of Godmade manifest in human lives It was not unusual either for such manifesta-tions to take the kind of miraculous form they took in Arisersquos own story Inrecounting miracles that tended to confirm the church and monarchy ratherthan undermine them he was striking a shrewd political blow against one ofthe most potent sources of Puritan authority the personal narrative in sodoing however he may inadvertently have helped to establish the idea ofsuch narratives as fundamentally unreliable

The second confirmation of Arisersquos divine authority was his ability tosupport his case with scriptural references The voice that called him in hisroom in Blackfriars sent him to the Bible lsquoGo to thy bookrsquo The Bible was openon the table and Arisersquos eyes fell straight away on a message that confirmedhim in his role as a prophet This is an example of the sortes Biblicae themagical use of scripture as a method of divination But in Arisersquos case it wasaccompanied by a more unusual supernatural power the total recall ofscriptural texts

[I]mmediately upon this I had another understanding that the Scripturecame all of a sudden into my mind as if I had learned them by heartwith another understanding of them than I had before for before Ilooked on the Scripture as a history of things that passed in othercountries pertaining to other persons but now I looked upon it as amystery to be opened at this time belonging also to us and my tonguebecame fluent my answers so ready that all who knew me were amazedat it And whereas before I could say little or nothing in dispute nowwithin three days I had all the Scriptures at command and gave uponthem such an exposition that none could contradict me (Evans 1653 11)

In an age when the Bible was regarded as the ultimate authoritative textthis was a formidable power and this more than anything was the reason hewas so often listened to with respect by important men like Cromwell (Hill1991 59) If you could cite the Bible in support of your arguments it was noteasy to dismiss them It did not as I have mentioned stop him getting intotrouble from time to time but even then his virtuoso use of this ability couldcause consternation in his enemies When he was on trial at the Old Bailey thejudge no less a man than the Recorder of the City of London tried to cap

A Prophet as Unreliable Narrator Rewriting Arise Evans 167

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Arisersquos quotations from Scripture Arise tells us lsquowhen I got him to speak thatlanguage I tossed him from place to place until he was ashamed that withanger he bade the keeper take me awayrsquo and at the next session theRecorder sent his Deputy in his place to avoid an embarrassing recurrence ofthe incident (Evans 1653 39)

The third confirmation of Arisersquos authority came from magical lore inwhich he was steeped and to which his own unstable personality addedlayers of complexity As Keith Thomas and others have pointed out this wasan age fascinated by prophecy A confused body of lore was disseminated inpamphlets attributed to mythical figures like Merlin Mother Shipton and thefictitious Master Truswell the Recorder of Lincoln This consisted of crypticmessages about characters called The Chicken of the Eagle The White Kingand The Dreadful Dead Man The astrologer and prophet William Lilly anacquaintance and rival of Arise claimed that the Dreadful Dead Man wasCharles I while the Chicken of the Eagle was Cromwell (Thomas 1997389442) Arise became involved in these prophetic arguments alwaystwisting them so that they prophesied success for the Royalists and failurefor anyone who opposed them At the same time he added his own personalbrand of word-magic based on the Welsh landscape of his youth Cadair Idrisfor example he translates quite spuriously as Arise Charles (instead of Chair ofIdris) making the mountain itself prophetic of the Restoration so that thevillage of Maes y Llan Cadair Idris where he once lived becomes charminglyArise Charles Church in Field (Evans 73)

Arise then is constantly trying to assert his authority to lay claim to being areliable narrator In his time just as in ours that was no easy task with somany different ideologies in conflict many people argued with him anddisputed his version of the truth all the more so because like CharlesKinbote much of what he said seemed insane Besides in that Christiansociety some claims were beyond the pale for everybody In 1656 a Quakercalled James Nayler was deemed to have impersonated Christ by riding intoBristol on a donkey For this blasphemy he was whipped branded on theforehead and his tongue pierced with a hot iron (Hill 1991 75) Arise onlynarrowly escaped a similar fate when publicly arguing with Puritanopponents in Spitalfields A Presbyterian minister Thomas Edwards reportedthat a Welsh tailor called Evans was telling people he was Christ (Hill 199154) Arise denied in his writings that he had ever said this the most he wouldadmit to was having said that Christ was speaking through him Theaccusation was serious enough though to cause the Puritans to drive himaway from Spitalfields they chased him down the street and when peoplecame out of their houses to see what was the matter the shouted exclamationlsquoThere goes Christ Stop himrsquo nearly caused a riot (Evans 1653 37) It was anapocalyptic period and no doubt some of those who heard the cries believedthem to be literally true (Hill 1991 60) Arise took refuge in a church wherethe sermon happened to be about the Second Coming causing still moreconfusion among the pursuers who had entered after him This led to hisarrest and temporary confinement in Newgate and Bridewell Prisons and thethreat of removal to the asylum Bedlam The incident is a good example both

168 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

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of the credulity of the period that allowed him much of the time to flourishand of its limits

It is a truism that writers turn to historical fiction because they find in itsomething that relates to their own era Arise Evans prophet madman andprototypical unreliable narrator is a Charles Kinbote of his time a figure whocould have stepped straight out of the pages of a postmodern novel It istherefore not surprising that I want to put him into one I will conclude thisessay by saying something about how I am going about it The first problem Ihad to face was the familiar one of third-person versus first-person narrativeThe answer seemed simple it is Arisersquos voice that fascinates me so thenarrative has to be first-person full of the ironies and unwitting self-revelations I so enjoy in a novel like Pale Fire But Arise has already told hisstory a story that for the most part I want to retell how then can I avoidsimply repeating his own words Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1978 8) hasargued that fiction is not a direct mimesis of the real word what it imitatesrather is other modes of discourse letters diaries autobiographies orsimply a person talking to us Pale Fire as we have seen is a novelmasquerading as an annotated long poem That suggested the possibility ofa book that was not on the surface trying to tell Arisersquos story Another criticalperception that helped me at this point was Viktor Shklovskyrsquos (1965 2829)observation on Tristram Shandy that Sternersquos aim is to slow down the actionand thus defamiliarise it as a metafictional first-person narrative closer toArise Evansrsquos time than to our own Tristram Shandy seemed a useful model forwhat I had in mind Putting these ideas together then I hit on the idea of TheBook of the Needle What if Arise had attempted following the Restoration andthe completion of his prophetic pamphlets to write a book about tailoringSurely his own obsessions and life story would have continually interruptedthe task the way Tristram is interrupted in his life story by digressions andphilosophical speculations or the way Kinbote is interrupted in his annotationof Shadersquos poem by his obsessive delusions about Zembla

Basing my novel on early modern sources is giving me the opportunity torethink some of the assumptions I would normally make about books andtheir structure In the seventeenth century marginal notes were an importantelement of the text Arise uses them typically to give Biblical support for hisarguments and sometimes to gloss some of his peculiar word-magic withWelsh place names Other writers used the marginal symbol of a pointingfinger or fister to draw attention to passages they considered particularlyimportant This suggests a slightly different attitude to text from that of themodern novel with its single wide column of print a book that has so muchgoing on in the margin is potentially pluralising its narrative running the riskthat the notes will compete with the main text Yet it is in such practices of self-taught early modern authors like Arise telling their stories in a rough-and-ready way without regard to unity that we see the novel itself start to emergea hybrid shapeless exuberant form packed to overflowing with anecdote andsubjective impressions Only much later was it to develop the confidentconventions we are familiar with Now postmodernism makes us question theconventions of the novel suggests other approaches than the classic model of amixture of dialogue and descriptive prose in which action and authorial

A Prophet as Unreliable Narrator Rewriting Arise Evans 169

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comment blend seamlessly to form a harmonious work of art Such a modelhad not yet emerged at the time Arise was writing so that in attempting toengage with his view of text I am simultaneously trying to liberate my own

CorrespondenceAny correspondence should be directed to Matthew Francis (mwf

aberacuk)

Notes1 I have modernised Evansrsquos spelling in quotations used in the text2 From now on I shall follow Hill in referring to him by his first name

References

Auster P (1987) The New York Trilogy City of Glass Ghosts The Locked Room LondonFaber and Faber Ltd

Austin J (1962) How to Do Things With Words JO Urmson (ed) Oxford OxfordUniversity Press

Booth W (1983) The Rhetoric of Fiction (2nd ed) Chicago and London University ofChicago Press

Boyd B (1997) Shade and Shape in Pale Fire On WWW at httpwwwlibrariespsuedunabokovboydpf1htm (Accessed 234 2010)

Calvino I (1992) If on a Winterrsquos Night a Traveller W Weaver (Trans) London MinervaEvans A (1653) An Eccho to the book called A voyce from heaven by Arise Evans showing

how in the years 1633 34 and 35 he forewarned the late King courtiers and commons of thegreat ruine of all the three nations and that the king should be put to death according tohis visions and prophesies also his exhortation now to the Parliament and all people forsetting up the Kings son in his stead according to that old unparallelrsquod prophesie of MTruswell recorder of Lincoln here opened which likewise declareth the things past presentand to come chiefly the revolution and dissolution of this state with the exaltation of theKing in the present year of grace 1653 London Early English Books Online NationalLibrary of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eeboimage154414

Evans A (1654) The Euroclydon vvinde commanded to cease or A quenching of the fiery dartsby Scripture-arguments declarations and visions Being a moderate vindication of hisHighness the Lord Protector from the popular aspersions first accasioned [sic] against him bythe malice of the Presbyterians and now blown up by all parties Also something in behalfeof the desolate Church and King Charles which declares hopes of union between himand his Highness the Lord Protector with an apology of the author concerning the year 1653and many other things discovered London Early English Books Online NationalLibrary of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eebocitation99862435 (Accessed 234 2010)

Evans A (1660) To the most high and mighty prince Charles the II By the grace of God Kingof Great Britain France and Ireland defender of the faith ampc An epistle written and humblypresented for His Majesties use and enlightning of the nation Early English BooksOnline National Library of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eebocitation99868963(Accessed 234 2010)

Evans A (1661) The Book of the Needle or a compendium for the vse of prenticesand journeymen aptly designrsquod to instruct them in the more perfect accomplishment ofsewing cutting fitting pressing and botching ampc ampc with some commemorations ofthe late time of confusion callrsquod the Great Rebellion and Commonwealth of England andof his part in bringing all to a joyous resolution by Arise Evans tailor and prophet EarlyEnglish Books Online National Library of Zembla On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboampmcf_id xrieebocitation99868666 (Accessed104 2010)

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least the Second Sin following that of pilfering fruit And it may beindeed but the Lord sanctioned it hereafter for when he cursed thewoman to bring forth children in pain and to harken to her husband andthe man to eat bread in the sweat of his brow the Lord himself madecoats of skins sewn together and clothed them Thus was the Lord Godthe second tailor and thus was tailoring the only thing in the world to beinvented by man first and God afterwards And ever since that timetailors have been curious men given to dreams above their station1

(Evans 1661 1)

Evans had served his tailoring apprenticeship in Chester In 1629 at the ageof 22 he received his indentures and went to London to work as ajourneyman Soon afterwards he began to prophesy subject to visions sincehis youth he was called by God to announce the catastrophe of the Civil Warthat was about to befall the nation At first reluctant to obey this summons herealised he had no choice when he looked up from his shopboard one day andfound an angel standing in front of him

I beheld the angel of the Lord all in white standing upon the shop-boardwith a flaming sword in his hand ready to destroy me if I did any longerneglect to do the work of God at which apparition I was amazed andsuddenly laying the work aside leapt off the shop-board told the Masterthat I had a business to do I knew not of in the morning that must needsbe done desiring him to excuse me and the man was content to let me goSo fearful was I that as I came home to my lodging I looked every minutefor fire from Heaven to fall upon me and thrust me into Hell for myrebelling against God in neglecting his work And coming to my lodgingin Salisbury Court I got pen ink and paper and began to write directingmy matter in all submission to the Kingrsquos Majesty (Evans 1653 13)

Concerned at the harm that might befall the king Evans went to GreenwichPalace to deliver his petition which was graciously accepted and no doubtthrown away Afterwards he haunted the palace for two days

And when I saw a Bishop or a Doctor passing by I followed them totheir chambers intending to deliver my mind in a sober way to some ofthem but they ran from me and their servants kept me out of theirchambers by force (Evans 1653 17)

His subsequent prophetic career led to his meeting the Earl of Essex OliverCromwell the Speaker of the House of Commons William Lenthall the Jewishleader Manasseh Ben Israel and many politicians prophets astrologers anddivines It caused him to be imprisoned twice and to publish fifteen or sixteenbooks Soon this son of a west Wales sheep farmer the kind of man who ageneration earlier would probably not have known how to read and writehad become a celebrated author

Then I became mighty famous for all the people both high and low thathad seen my book or heard of it beholding the effect thereof came to meso thick that I was not able to answer it but gave them books to the poorgratis the others paid me (Evans 1660 12)

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And why am I so pestered with the people that I cannot rest but all theday long answer them And why are my books gone over all the earthand translated into all languages that I am troubled to answer men thatcome from Turkey from Italy from Germany from Spain yea and fromall parts of the world where Englishmen go (Evans 1654 np)

Then finally came the event for which Evans had been hoping and prayingsince the execution of Charles I in 1649 an event which he had alreadyprophesied several times setting a date for it and being publicly humiliatedeach time it failed to come about as he had predicted King Charles II whomhe regarded as the representative of God on earth was restored to the throneThe turmoil of the preceding 20 years was brought to an end and with it hisown reason for prophesying Hence his abrupt change of subject-matter

I will say more about The Book of the Needle but it is time to backtrack a littleIf the story I have just told seems unbelievable it is in part because myaccount contains a blatant lie The best excuse I can offer is that as a creativewriter the telling of lies is in my job description Arise Evansrsquos last knownwork is an epistle from the summer of 1660 to Charles II congratulating him onhis restoration and describing some of his own political and propheticactivities of the previous year after that he disappears from history He didnot write The Book of the Needle that is the title of a novel I am writing aboutArise Evans and his world

The purpose of my lie was to draw attention to a theme that was of greatimportance in Arise Evansrsquos day and is equally so in our own the reliability orunreliability of narrative When anyone tells us anything whether orally or inwriting or print we have to make the difficult decision whether to believethem or not do their words correspond to objective realities in the materialworld or are they deliberately or otherwise deceiving us There is also a thirdpossibility we must take into account the speaker or writer may be in JLAustinrsquos formulation trying lsquoto do things with wordsrsquo performing a verbalaction in which truth or falsity are beside the point (Austin 1962) As readersas scholars and simply as human beings we spend much of our intellectualenergy on this task bringing to it our knowledge of the world and how itworks our knowledge of psychology in general and of the psychology of theindividual who addresses us and most significantly for us in the arts andhumanities our knowledge of the conventions governing various modesof discourse We expect lies in fiction we do not expect them in academicessays but on the other hand in this postmodern age the transgression isperhaps not as shocking as it might have been a few years ago For one of themajor preoccupations of postmodernism is its exploration of the relationshipbetween textuality and truth and the challenge it offers to any simplisticformulation of it

One mode of fiction that reacts to our postmodern sense of the interweavingof text and reality is metafiction In a metafictional novel the author mayappear as a character as Paul Auster (1987 7) does in The New York Trilogy orstill more disconcertingly the reader may be addressed directly and told whathe or she is doing as in Italo Calvinorsquos (1992) If on a Winterrsquos Night a Travellerwhich begins lsquoYou are about to begin reading Italo Calvinorsquos new novel If on a

A Prophet as Unreliable Narrator Rewriting Arise Evans 163

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winterrsquos night a travellerrsquo (3) In both cases a person we think of as belonging tothe lsquorealrsquo world is startlingly introduced into the fictional one But is it the realperson at all We have no way of knowing if the real Paul Auster did any ofthe things he describes himself as doing in his text but we can be sure weourselves did not have the adventures we get up to in Calvinorsquos adventureswhich begin with our purchasing a series of defective books and continue intoan outrageous international conspiracy-thriller So this is a fictional self butthe idea that we can so easily acquire a fictional self through the mereoperation of language is itself disorientating Metafictional authors play othertricks too They may tell us stories within stories within stories until we findit hard to remember which story we are in at any given time a trope known asmise-en-abyme Or they may draw attention to the materiality of the book weare reading to its white pages and black letters its margins and coversdissolving the fictive world just when we were happily losing ourselves in itAll these devices disturb our sense of the simple oppositional relationship oftruth and fiction (Waugh 2003)

With so much instability introduced into the narrative so many possibilitiesof going astray it is hard for the reader to know what to believe or moreaccurately what to accept and what to reject on the fictive plane of the textThis uncertainty reminds us that fiction has a long tradition of unreliablenarration the narrator who tells us the story may be misleading us consciouslyor unconsciously Perhaps the most famous example is the governess in TheTurn of the Screw when she tells us of her encounters with the ghosts of PeterQuint and Miss Jessel and of their influence on the children in her chargewe do not know whether to accept her word or to assume she is insane anissue the critics have debated for many years Like us these critics are wellaware that the governess the children and the ghosts are Jamesrsquos inventionsand never existed in the first place nevertheless they instinctively seek adeterminate interpretation just as we do when faced with conflicting accountsof a real-life situation Finding the solution knowing the truth is somethingwe are mentally programmed to want to achieve and we carry this instinctinto the fictive world with us only to find that the complexity of Jamesrsquosnarrative frustrates it (Booth 1983 366367)

Unreliable narration and metafiction are closely related in the interpretivechallenges they present and frequently crop up together for example inVladimir Nabokovrsquos novel Pale Fire This takes the form of a 999-line narrativepoem in heroic couplets by a fictional American poet John Shade who hasrecently been murdered together with copious notes by an editor who tells ushe was Shadersquos close friend a gay academic named Charles Kinbote As weread the notes a story develops Kinbote is a citizen of a small northernEuropean republic called Zembla which has recently suffered a revolutioncausing its king Charles the Beloved to flee into exile (This Charlesincidentally much resembles Arise Evansrsquos hero Charles II of England andeven shares the same regnal number) Kinbote writes of the King in the third-person but it is not long before we realise that they are one and the sameHowever Kinbote is the most unreliable of narrators What does his elaboratestory really have to do with Shadersquos poem which seems to be an account of afairly ordinary though not untroubled American literary life A simple word

164 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

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like lsquooftenrsquo or lsquotodayrsquo in the text of the poem sets Kinbote off into pages offantastic but irrelevant anecdote (Nabokov 1973a 7881 126131) Is this nota symptom of madness We begin to notice things Kinbote himself is unawareof When at a cocktail party he overhears a conversation between Shade andtheir hostess on the subject of a local lunatic it seems obvious to us that it isKinbote they are talking about (Nabokov 1973a 188) A Russian called Botkinhis name a version of Kinbotersquos with the syllables reversed is sometimesmentioned perhaps this apparently minor character rather than Kinbote orCharles the Beloved is the real deluded narrator (Nabokov 1973a 125)

This at any rate was Nabokovrsquos own explanation of his novel in aninterview he gave shortly after its publication (Nabokov 1973b 74) Butunreliable narrative resists such authoritative accounts even when they comefrom the author critics of Pale Fire drawing on textual evidence in the novelhave suggested other interpretations some for example argue that the truenarrator is John Shade who has himself invented KinboteBotkin and thewhole Zemblan fiction and dictated both poem and notes from beyondthe grave (Boyd 1991) The uncertainties do not stop even there The novelbeing metafictional contains clues to its own fictive nature at the end of hisnotes Kinbote writes lsquoI may assume other disguises other forms I mayturn up yet on another campus as an old happy healthy heterosexualRussian a writer in exile sans fame sans future sans audience sans anythingbut his artrsquo (Nabokov 1973a 236) This reminds us that Kinbotersquos storybizarre as it is echoes that of its ultimate author Vladimir Nabokov who wasdriven into exile by the Russian revolution and whose father the liberalpolitician Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov was like Shade killed by anassassin attempting to murder someone else The fiction constantly threatensto dissolve into reality leaving the reader uncertain which is which anuncertainty epitomised by the novelrsquos use of mirror imagery and its play withnames like Shade (in its multiple senses of shadow ghost and darkness) andZembla (or semblance)

Historians of metafiction trace it back through Tristram Shandy at least as faras Don Quixote it is not an invention of the postmodern era (Waugh 2003 70)Nor is the unreliable narrative postmodern in origin as my brief discussion ofThe Turn of the Screw shows Nevertheless they seem to fit particularly wellwith the mood and concerns of our age and the terms themselves are of fairlyrecent origin lsquometafictionrsquo was first used by the writer William H Gass todescribe his own practices and those of some of his contemporaries in 1970while lsquounreliable narrationrsquo was coined by the critic Wayne C Booth in his1961 study The Rhetoric of Fiction (Waugh 2003 2 Booth 1983 339-74)

Leaving aside my own intervention how much of Arise Evansrsquos story canwe believe Our main source for most of the events in his life is Evans himselfabove all in the two pamphlets An Eccho to The Voice from Heaven (1653) and To

the Most High and Mighty Prince Charles II An Epistle (1660) Many of the thingshe tells us in these texts seem at the very least unlikely There are forexample those childhood experiences of the supernatural I mentioned Here ishis account of one of them

A Prophet as Unreliable Narrator Rewriting Arise Evans 165

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And once having occasion to go over a high place called Bwlch RywCredire and having come to the top where the dark clouds about me bythe wind were driven swiftly I being fearful in that place elevated myprayer the more And through the fervency of my prayer andvehemency of the wind and clouds I was lifted above the earth andcarried up a space in the clouds as I went on my way (Evans 1653 56)

Such miraculous incidents occurred throughout his life or so he tells usOnce he was locked up in his motherrsquos house in Wrexham in an attempt tokeep him from prophesying friends of the family fearing his intemperateutterances would bring trouble starved him and deprived him of sleep in anattempt to weaken his resolve and silence him But God intervened to savehim

As I lay on my bed the third day in the morning expecting some kind ofdeliverance from God there came in at the window a round cloud incolour like unto the rainbow abiding upon me a quarter of an hour and Iwas so revived as if I had eaten all the delicates in the world And after aquarter of an hour the cloud departed out at the window and ascendedout of my sight (Evans 1653 21)

These are the kind of adventures we might expect to read of in a magicrealist novel but Arise Evans is no fictional character and he insists thateverything he tells us is true

Questions of authority were of great importance then as now Among thecompeting discourses of that era were the Royalist Episcopalian beliefsassociated with the King and his party the Catholicism that held sway overmuch of continental Europe and was associated with Charlesrsquos French QueenHenrietta Maria and numerous varieties of Puritanism Evans believedpassionately in the RoyalistEpiscopalian doctrine and continued to do soeven after it was eclipsed by King Charlesrsquos defeat and execution Throughoutthe years of the Civil War and Commonwealth he insisted that God wasspeaking to him directly not only telling him which beliefs were right andwhich wrong but also giving him information denied to ordinary people Hewas endowed with the ability to foretell the future Such claims are usuallymet with scepticism today and his seventeenth-century listeners weresceptical too though sometimes for different reasons While we might doubthim because of his reliance on the supernatural they asked him why a tailorand the son of a sheep farmer claimed to know more about Godrsquos will thanordained and educated ministers of the church lsquoYou are no ministerrsquo they toldhim and lsquothe King will take no notice of you being an unlearned manrsquo (Evans1653 12 16) But Arise maintained that he had authority for his prophecies itcame from what all his rivals whatever their ideological position acknowl-edged as the ultimate source of all earthly authority God himself And thisauthority was confirmed by personal revelation and experience by Biblicalreference and by what we may loosely call magical lore

Firstly Arise maintained that he had direct personal experience of Godthrough such events as the miracles I have just described2 These showed thatGod had a special purpose for him one which he had no right to refuse as the

166 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

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angelic visitation that took place while he was sewing on the shopboard madeclear God also imparted his message directly by speaking to him in lsquoalaudable sharp shrill hasting voice near mine earrsquo (Evans 1653 10) Suchunverifiable accounts were more likely to be taken seriously in Arisersquos daythan in our own above all by the very people he most wanted to impress hischief opponents the Puritans Their religion emphasised the individualrsquospersonal relationship with God which bypassed social institutions andhierarchies and was at the core of religious experience While social andhierarchical elements were undoubtedly important in Puritanism thisemphasis on the individual tended to be democratic liberating and sub-versive It was also a spur to narrative the period of the Commonwealth wasan age of great literary activity much of it based on spiritual autobiography orpersonal diaries and journals often by men like Arise of humble originsSuddenly everyone was telling their story a story more often than not of Godmade manifest in human lives It was not unusual either for such manifesta-tions to take the kind of miraculous form they took in Arisersquos own story Inrecounting miracles that tended to confirm the church and monarchy ratherthan undermine them he was striking a shrewd political blow against one ofthe most potent sources of Puritan authority the personal narrative in sodoing however he may inadvertently have helped to establish the idea ofsuch narratives as fundamentally unreliable

The second confirmation of Arisersquos divine authority was his ability tosupport his case with scriptural references The voice that called him in hisroom in Blackfriars sent him to the Bible lsquoGo to thy bookrsquo The Bible was openon the table and Arisersquos eyes fell straight away on a message that confirmedhim in his role as a prophet This is an example of the sortes Biblicae themagical use of scripture as a method of divination But in Arisersquos case it wasaccompanied by a more unusual supernatural power the total recall ofscriptural texts

[I]mmediately upon this I had another understanding that the Scripturecame all of a sudden into my mind as if I had learned them by heartwith another understanding of them than I had before for before Ilooked on the Scripture as a history of things that passed in othercountries pertaining to other persons but now I looked upon it as amystery to be opened at this time belonging also to us and my tonguebecame fluent my answers so ready that all who knew me were amazedat it And whereas before I could say little or nothing in dispute nowwithin three days I had all the Scriptures at command and gave uponthem such an exposition that none could contradict me (Evans 1653 11)

In an age when the Bible was regarded as the ultimate authoritative textthis was a formidable power and this more than anything was the reason hewas so often listened to with respect by important men like Cromwell (Hill1991 59) If you could cite the Bible in support of your arguments it was noteasy to dismiss them It did not as I have mentioned stop him getting intotrouble from time to time but even then his virtuoso use of this ability couldcause consternation in his enemies When he was on trial at the Old Bailey thejudge no less a man than the Recorder of the City of London tried to cap

A Prophet as Unreliable Narrator Rewriting Arise Evans 167

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Arisersquos quotations from Scripture Arise tells us lsquowhen I got him to speak thatlanguage I tossed him from place to place until he was ashamed that withanger he bade the keeper take me awayrsquo and at the next session theRecorder sent his Deputy in his place to avoid an embarrassing recurrence ofthe incident (Evans 1653 39)

The third confirmation of Arisersquos authority came from magical lore inwhich he was steeped and to which his own unstable personality addedlayers of complexity As Keith Thomas and others have pointed out this wasan age fascinated by prophecy A confused body of lore was disseminated inpamphlets attributed to mythical figures like Merlin Mother Shipton and thefictitious Master Truswell the Recorder of Lincoln This consisted of crypticmessages about characters called The Chicken of the Eagle The White Kingand The Dreadful Dead Man The astrologer and prophet William Lilly anacquaintance and rival of Arise claimed that the Dreadful Dead Man wasCharles I while the Chicken of the Eagle was Cromwell (Thomas 1997389442) Arise became involved in these prophetic arguments alwaystwisting them so that they prophesied success for the Royalists and failurefor anyone who opposed them At the same time he added his own personalbrand of word-magic based on the Welsh landscape of his youth Cadair Idrisfor example he translates quite spuriously as Arise Charles (instead of Chair ofIdris) making the mountain itself prophetic of the Restoration so that thevillage of Maes y Llan Cadair Idris where he once lived becomes charminglyArise Charles Church in Field (Evans 73)

Arise then is constantly trying to assert his authority to lay claim to being areliable narrator In his time just as in ours that was no easy task with somany different ideologies in conflict many people argued with him anddisputed his version of the truth all the more so because like CharlesKinbote much of what he said seemed insane Besides in that Christiansociety some claims were beyond the pale for everybody In 1656 a Quakercalled James Nayler was deemed to have impersonated Christ by riding intoBristol on a donkey For this blasphemy he was whipped branded on theforehead and his tongue pierced with a hot iron (Hill 1991 75) Arise onlynarrowly escaped a similar fate when publicly arguing with Puritanopponents in Spitalfields A Presbyterian minister Thomas Edwards reportedthat a Welsh tailor called Evans was telling people he was Christ (Hill 199154) Arise denied in his writings that he had ever said this the most he wouldadmit to was having said that Christ was speaking through him Theaccusation was serious enough though to cause the Puritans to drive himaway from Spitalfields they chased him down the street and when peoplecame out of their houses to see what was the matter the shouted exclamationlsquoThere goes Christ Stop himrsquo nearly caused a riot (Evans 1653 37) It was anapocalyptic period and no doubt some of those who heard the cries believedthem to be literally true (Hill 1991 60) Arise took refuge in a church wherethe sermon happened to be about the Second Coming causing still moreconfusion among the pursuers who had entered after him This led to hisarrest and temporary confinement in Newgate and Bridewell Prisons and thethreat of removal to the asylum Bedlam The incident is a good example both

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of the credulity of the period that allowed him much of the time to flourishand of its limits

It is a truism that writers turn to historical fiction because they find in itsomething that relates to their own era Arise Evans prophet madman andprototypical unreliable narrator is a Charles Kinbote of his time a figure whocould have stepped straight out of the pages of a postmodern novel It istherefore not surprising that I want to put him into one I will conclude thisessay by saying something about how I am going about it The first problem Ihad to face was the familiar one of third-person versus first-person narrativeThe answer seemed simple it is Arisersquos voice that fascinates me so thenarrative has to be first-person full of the ironies and unwitting self-revelations I so enjoy in a novel like Pale Fire But Arise has already told hisstory a story that for the most part I want to retell how then can I avoidsimply repeating his own words Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1978 8) hasargued that fiction is not a direct mimesis of the real word what it imitatesrather is other modes of discourse letters diaries autobiographies orsimply a person talking to us Pale Fire as we have seen is a novelmasquerading as an annotated long poem That suggested the possibility ofa book that was not on the surface trying to tell Arisersquos story Another criticalperception that helped me at this point was Viktor Shklovskyrsquos (1965 2829)observation on Tristram Shandy that Sternersquos aim is to slow down the actionand thus defamiliarise it as a metafictional first-person narrative closer toArise Evansrsquos time than to our own Tristram Shandy seemed a useful model forwhat I had in mind Putting these ideas together then I hit on the idea of TheBook of the Needle What if Arise had attempted following the Restoration andthe completion of his prophetic pamphlets to write a book about tailoringSurely his own obsessions and life story would have continually interruptedthe task the way Tristram is interrupted in his life story by digressions andphilosophical speculations or the way Kinbote is interrupted in his annotationof Shadersquos poem by his obsessive delusions about Zembla

Basing my novel on early modern sources is giving me the opportunity torethink some of the assumptions I would normally make about books andtheir structure In the seventeenth century marginal notes were an importantelement of the text Arise uses them typically to give Biblical support for hisarguments and sometimes to gloss some of his peculiar word-magic withWelsh place names Other writers used the marginal symbol of a pointingfinger or fister to draw attention to passages they considered particularlyimportant This suggests a slightly different attitude to text from that of themodern novel with its single wide column of print a book that has so muchgoing on in the margin is potentially pluralising its narrative running the riskthat the notes will compete with the main text Yet it is in such practices of self-taught early modern authors like Arise telling their stories in a rough-and-ready way without regard to unity that we see the novel itself start to emergea hybrid shapeless exuberant form packed to overflowing with anecdote andsubjective impressions Only much later was it to develop the confidentconventions we are familiar with Now postmodernism makes us question theconventions of the novel suggests other approaches than the classic model of amixture of dialogue and descriptive prose in which action and authorial

A Prophet as Unreliable Narrator Rewriting Arise Evans 169

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comment blend seamlessly to form a harmonious work of art Such a modelhad not yet emerged at the time Arise was writing so that in attempting toengage with his view of text I am simultaneously trying to liberate my own

CorrespondenceAny correspondence should be directed to Matthew Francis (mwf

aberacuk)

Notes1 I have modernised Evansrsquos spelling in quotations used in the text2 From now on I shall follow Hill in referring to him by his first name

References

Auster P (1987) The New York Trilogy City of Glass Ghosts The Locked Room LondonFaber and Faber Ltd

Austin J (1962) How to Do Things With Words JO Urmson (ed) Oxford OxfordUniversity Press

Booth W (1983) The Rhetoric of Fiction (2nd ed) Chicago and London University ofChicago Press

Boyd B (1997) Shade and Shape in Pale Fire On WWW at httpwwwlibrariespsuedunabokovboydpf1htm (Accessed 234 2010)

Calvino I (1992) If on a Winterrsquos Night a Traveller W Weaver (Trans) London MinervaEvans A (1653) An Eccho to the book called A voyce from heaven by Arise Evans showing

how in the years 1633 34 and 35 he forewarned the late King courtiers and commons of thegreat ruine of all the three nations and that the king should be put to death according tohis visions and prophesies also his exhortation now to the Parliament and all people forsetting up the Kings son in his stead according to that old unparallelrsquod prophesie of MTruswell recorder of Lincoln here opened which likewise declareth the things past presentand to come chiefly the revolution and dissolution of this state with the exaltation of theKing in the present year of grace 1653 London Early English Books Online NationalLibrary of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eeboimage154414

Evans A (1654) The Euroclydon vvinde commanded to cease or A quenching of the fiery dartsby Scripture-arguments declarations and visions Being a moderate vindication of hisHighness the Lord Protector from the popular aspersions first accasioned [sic] against him bythe malice of the Presbyterians and now blown up by all parties Also something in behalfeof the desolate Church and King Charles which declares hopes of union between himand his Highness the Lord Protector with an apology of the author concerning the year 1653and many other things discovered London Early English Books Online NationalLibrary of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eebocitation99862435 (Accessed 234 2010)

Evans A (1660) To the most high and mighty prince Charles the II By the grace of God Kingof Great Britain France and Ireland defender of the faith ampc An epistle written and humblypresented for His Majesties use and enlightning of the nation Early English BooksOnline National Library of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eebocitation99868963(Accessed 234 2010)

Evans A (1661) The Book of the Needle or a compendium for the vse of prenticesand journeymen aptly designrsquod to instruct them in the more perfect accomplishment ofsewing cutting fitting pressing and botching ampc ampc with some commemorations ofthe late time of confusion callrsquod the Great Rebellion and Commonwealth of England andof his part in bringing all to a joyous resolution by Arise Evans tailor and prophet EarlyEnglish Books Online National Library of Zembla On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboampmcf_id xrieebocitation99868666 (Accessed104 2010)

170 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

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ber

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And why am I so pestered with the people that I cannot rest but all theday long answer them And why are my books gone over all the earthand translated into all languages that I am troubled to answer men thatcome from Turkey from Italy from Germany from Spain yea and fromall parts of the world where Englishmen go (Evans 1654 np)

Then finally came the event for which Evans had been hoping and prayingsince the execution of Charles I in 1649 an event which he had alreadyprophesied several times setting a date for it and being publicly humiliatedeach time it failed to come about as he had predicted King Charles II whomhe regarded as the representative of God on earth was restored to the throneThe turmoil of the preceding 20 years was brought to an end and with it hisown reason for prophesying Hence his abrupt change of subject-matter

I will say more about The Book of the Needle but it is time to backtrack a littleIf the story I have just told seems unbelievable it is in part because myaccount contains a blatant lie The best excuse I can offer is that as a creativewriter the telling of lies is in my job description Arise Evansrsquos last knownwork is an epistle from the summer of 1660 to Charles II congratulating him onhis restoration and describing some of his own political and propheticactivities of the previous year after that he disappears from history He didnot write The Book of the Needle that is the title of a novel I am writing aboutArise Evans and his world

The purpose of my lie was to draw attention to a theme that was of greatimportance in Arise Evansrsquos day and is equally so in our own the reliability orunreliability of narrative When anyone tells us anything whether orally or inwriting or print we have to make the difficult decision whether to believethem or not do their words correspond to objective realities in the materialworld or are they deliberately or otherwise deceiving us There is also a thirdpossibility we must take into account the speaker or writer may be in JLAustinrsquos formulation trying lsquoto do things with wordsrsquo performing a verbalaction in which truth or falsity are beside the point (Austin 1962) As readersas scholars and simply as human beings we spend much of our intellectualenergy on this task bringing to it our knowledge of the world and how itworks our knowledge of psychology in general and of the psychology of theindividual who addresses us and most significantly for us in the arts andhumanities our knowledge of the conventions governing various modesof discourse We expect lies in fiction we do not expect them in academicessays but on the other hand in this postmodern age the transgression isperhaps not as shocking as it might have been a few years ago For one of themajor preoccupations of postmodernism is its exploration of the relationshipbetween textuality and truth and the challenge it offers to any simplisticformulation of it

One mode of fiction that reacts to our postmodern sense of the interweavingof text and reality is metafiction In a metafictional novel the author mayappear as a character as Paul Auster (1987 7) does in The New York Trilogy orstill more disconcertingly the reader may be addressed directly and told whathe or she is doing as in Italo Calvinorsquos (1992) If on a Winterrsquos Night a Travellerwhich begins lsquoYou are about to begin reading Italo Calvinorsquos new novel If on a

A Prophet as Unreliable Narrator Rewriting Arise Evans 163

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winterrsquos night a travellerrsquo (3) In both cases a person we think of as belonging tothe lsquorealrsquo world is startlingly introduced into the fictional one But is it the realperson at all We have no way of knowing if the real Paul Auster did any ofthe things he describes himself as doing in his text but we can be sure weourselves did not have the adventures we get up to in Calvinorsquos adventureswhich begin with our purchasing a series of defective books and continue intoan outrageous international conspiracy-thriller So this is a fictional self butthe idea that we can so easily acquire a fictional self through the mereoperation of language is itself disorientating Metafictional authors play othertricks too They may tell us stories within stories within stories until we findit hard to remember which story we are in at any given time a trope known asmise-en-abyme Or they may draw attention to the materiality of the book weare reading to its white pages and black letters its margins and coversdissolving the fictive world just when we were happily losing ourselves in itAll these devices disturb our sense of the simple oppositional relationship oftruth and fiction (Waugh 2003)

With so much instability introduced into the narrative so many possibilitiesof going astray it is hard for the reader to know what to believe or moreaccurately what to accept and what to reject on the fictive plane of the textThis uncertainty reminds us that fiction has a long tradition of unreliablenarration the narrator who tells us the story may be misleading us consciouslyor unconsciously Perhaps the most famous example is the governess in TheTurn of the Screw when she tells us of her encounters with the ghosts of PeterQuint and Miss Jessel and of their influence on the children in her chargewe do not know whether to accept her word or to assume she is insane anissue the critics have debated for many years Like us these critics are wellaware that the governess the children and the ghosts are Jamesrsquos inventionsand never existed in the first place nevertheless they instinctively seek adeterminate interpretation just as we do when faced with conflicting accountsof a real-life situation Finding the solution knowing the truth is somethingwe are mentally programmed to want to achieve and we carry this instinctinto the fictive world with us only to find that the complexity of Jamesrsquosnarrative frustrates it (Booth 1983 366367)

Unreliable narration and metafiction are closely related in the interpretivechallenges they present and frequently crop up together for example inVladimir Nabokovrsquos novel Pale Fire This takes the form of a 999-line narrativepoem in heroic couplets by a fictional American poet John Shade who hasrecently been murdered together with copious notes by an editor who tells ushe was Shadersquos close friend a gay academic named Charles Kinbote As weread the notes a story develops Kinbote is a citizen of a small northernEuropean republic called Zembla which has recently suffered a revolutioncausing its king Charles the Beloved to flee into exile (This Charlesincidentally much resembles Arise Evansrsquos hero Charles II of England andeven shares the same regnal number) Kinbote writes of the King in the third-person but it is not long before we realise that they are one and the sameHowever Kinbote is the most unreliable of narrators What does his elaboratestory really have to do with Shadersquos poem which seems to be an account of afairly ordinary though not untroubled American literary life A simple word

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like lsquooftenrsquo or lsquotodayrsquo in the text of the poem sets Kinbote off into pages offantastic but irrelevant anecdote (Nabokov 1973a 7881 126131) Is this nota symptom of madness We begin to notice things Kinbote himself is unawareof When at a cocktail party he overhears a conversation between Shade andtheir hostess on the subject of a local lunatic it seems obvious to us that it isKinbote they are talking about (Nabokov 1973a 188) A Russian called Botkinhis name a version of Kinbotersquos with the syllables reversed is sometimesmentioned perhaps this apparently minor character rather than Kinbote orCharles the Beloved is the real deluded narrator (Nabokov 1973a 125)

This at any rate was Nabokovrsquos own explanation of his novel in aninterview he gave shortly after its publication (Nabokov 1973b 74) Butunreliable narrative resists such authoritative accounts even when they comefrom the author critics of Pale Fire drawing on textual evidence in the novelhave suggested other interpretations some for example argue that the truenarrator is John Shade who has himself invented KinboteBotkin and thewhole Zemblan fiction and dictated both poem and notes from beyondthe grave (Boyd 1991) The uncertainties do not stop even there The novelbeing metafictional contains clues to its own fictive nature at the end of hisnotes Kinbote writes lsquoI may assume other disguises other forms I mayturn up yet on another campus as an old happy healthy heterosexualRussian a writer in exile sans fame sans future sans audience sans anythingbut his artrsquo (Nabokov 1973a 236) This reminds us that Kinbotersquos storybizarre as it is echoes that of its ultimate author Vladimir Nabokov who wasdriven into exile by the Russian revolution and whose father the liberalpolitician Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov was like Shade killed by anassassin attempting to murder someone else The fiction constantly threatensto dissolve into reality leaving the reader uncertain which is which anuncertainty epitomised by the novelrsquos use of mirror imagery and its play withnames like Shade (in its multiple senses of shadow ghost and darkness) andZembla (or semblance)

Historians of metafiction trace it back through Tristram Shandy at least as faras Don Quixote it is not an invention of the postmodern era (Waugh 2003 70)Nor is the unreliable narrative postmodern in origin as my brief discussion ofThe Turn of the Screw shows Nevertheless they seem to fit particularly wellwith the mood and concerns of our age and the terms themselves are of fairlyrecent origin lsquometafictionrsquo was first used by the writer William H Gass todescribe his own practices and those of some of his contemporaries in 1970while lsquounreliable narrationrsquo was coined by the critic Wayne C Booth in his1961 study The Rhetoric of Fiction (Waugh 2003 2 Booth 1983 339-74)

Leaving aside my own intervention how much of Arise Evansrsquos story canwe believe Our main source for most of the events in his life is Evans himselfabove all in the two pamphlets An Eccho to The Voice from Heaven (1653) and To

the Most High and Mighty Prince Charles II An Epistle (1660) Many of the thingshe tells us in these texts seem at the very least unlikely There are forexample those childhood experiences of the supernatural I mentioned Here ishis account of one of them

A Prophet as Unreliable Narrator Rewriting Arise Evans 165

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And once having occasion to go over a high place called Bwlch RywCredire and having come to the top where the dark clouds about me bythe wind were driven swiftly I being fearful in that place elevated myprayer the more And through the fervency of my prayer andvehemency of the wind and clouds I was lifted above the earth andcarried up a space in the clouds as I went on my way (Evans 1653 56)

Such miraculous incidents occurred throughout his life or so he tells usOnce he was locked up in his motherrsquos house in Wrexham in an attempt tokeep him from prophesying friends of the family fearing his intemperateutterances would bring trouble starved him and deprived him of sleep in anattempt to weaken his resolve and silence him But God intervened to savehim

As I lay on my bed the third day in the morning expecting some kind ofdeliverance from God there came in at the window a round cloud incolour like unto the rainbow abiding upon me a quarter of an hour and Iwas so revived as if I had eaten all the delicates in the world And after aquarter of an hour the cloud departed out at the window and ascendedout of my sight (Evans 1653 21)

These are the kind of adventures we might expect to read of in a magicrealist novel but Arise Evans is no fictional character and he insists thateverything he tells us is true

Questions of authority were of great importance then as now Among thecompeting discourses of that era were the Royalist Episcopalian beliefsassociated with the King and his party the Catholicism that held sway overmuch of continental Europe and was associated with Charlesrsquos French QueenHenrietta Maria and numerous varieties of Puritanism Evans believedpassionately in the RoyalistEpiscopalian doctrine and continued to do soeven after it was eclipsed by King Charlesrsquos defeat and execution Throughoutthe years of the Civil War and Commonwealth he insisted that God wasspeaking to him directly not only telling him which beliefs were right andwhich wrong but also giving him information denied to ordinary people Hewas endowed with the ability to foretell the future Such claims are usuallymet with scepticism today and his seventeenth-century listeners weresceptical too though sometimes for different reasons While we might doubthim because of his reliance on the supernatural they asked him why a tailorand the son of a sheep farmer claimed to know more about Godrsquos will thanordained and educated ministers of the church lsquoYou are no ministerrsquo they toldhim and lsquothe King will take no notice of you being an unlearned manrsquo (Evans1653 12 16) But Arise maintained that he had authority for his prophecies itcame from what all his rivals whatever their ideological position acknowl-edged as the ultimate source of all earthly authority God himself And thisauthority was confirmed by personal revelation and experience by Biblicalreference and by what we may loosely call magical lore

Firstly Arise maintained that he had direct personal experience of Godthrough such events as the miracles I have just described2 These showed thatGod had a special purpose for him one which he had no right to refuse as the

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angelic visitation that took place while he was sewing on the shopboard madeclear God also imparted his message directly by speaking to him in lsquoalaudable sharp shrill hasting voice near mine earrsquo (Evans 1653 10) Suchunverifiable accounts were more likely to be taken seriously in Arisersquos daythan in our own above all by the very people he most wanted to impress hischief opponents the Puritans Their religion emphasised the individualrsquospersonal relationship with God which bypassed social institutions andhierarchies and was at the core of religious experience While social andhierarchical elements were undoubtedly important in Puritanism thisemphasis on the individual tended to be democratic liberating and sub-versive It was also a spur to narrative the period of the Commonwealth wasan age of great literary activity much of it based on spiritual autobiography orpersonal diaries and journals often by men like Arise of humble originsSuddenly everyone was telling their story a story more often than not of Godmade manifest in human lives It was not unusual either for such manifesta-tions to take the kind of miraculous form they took in Arisersquos own story Inrecounting miracles that tended to confirm the church and monarchy ratherthan undermine them he was striking a shrewd political blow against one ofthe most potent sources of Puritan authority the personal narrative in sodoing however he may inadvertently have helped to establish the idea ofsuch narratives as fundamentally unreliable

The second confirmation of Arisersquos divine authority was his ability tosupport his case with scriptural references The voice that called him in hisroom in Blackfriars sent him to the Bible lsquoGo to thy bookrsquo The Bible was openon the table and Arisersquos eyes fell straight away on a message that confirmedhim in his role as a prophet This is an example of the sortes Biblicae themagical use of scripture as a method of divination But in Arisersquos case it wasaccompanied by a more unusual supernatural power the total recall ofscriptural texts

[I]mmediately upon this I had another understanding that the Scripturecame all of a sudden into my mind as if I had learned them by heartwith another understanding of them than I had before for before Ilooked on the Scripture as a history of things that passed in othercountries pertaining to other persons but now I looked upon it as amystery to be opened at this time belonging also to us and my tonguebecame fluent my answers so ready that all who knew me were amazedat it And whereas before I could say little or nothing in dispute nowwithin three days I had all the Scriptures at command and gave uponthem such an exposition that none could contradict me (Evans 1653 11)

In an age when the Bible was regarded as the ultimate authoritative textthis was a formidable power and this more than anything was the reason hewas so often listened to with respect by important men like Cromwell (Hill1991 59) If you could cite the Bible in support of your arguments it was noteasy to dismiss them It did not as I have mentioned stop him getting intotrouble from time to time but even then his virtuoso use of this ability couldcause consternation in his enemies When he was on trial at the Old Bailey thejudge no less a man than the Recorder of the City of London tried to cap

A Prophet as Unreliable Narrator Rewriting Arise Evans 167

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Arisersquos quotations from Scripture Arise tells us lsquowhen I got him to speak thatlanguage I tossed him from place to place until he was ashamed that withanger he bade the keeper take me awayrsquo and at the next session theRecorder sent his Deputy in his place to avoid an embarrassing recurrence ofthe incident (Evans 1653 39)

The third confirmation of Arisersquos authority came from magical lore inwhich he was steeped and to which his own unstable personality addedlayers of complexity As Keith Thomas and others have pointed out this wasan age fascinated by prophecy A confused body of lore was disseminated inpamphlets attributed to mythical figures like Merlin Mother Shipton and thefictitious Master Truswell the Recorder of Lincoln This consisted of crypticmessages about characters called The Chicken of the Eagle The White Kingand The Dreadful Dead Man The astrologer and prophet William Lilly anacquaintance and rival of Arise claimed that the Dreadful Dead Man wasCharles I while the Chicken of the Eagle was Cromwell (Thomas 1997389442) Arise became involved in these prophetic arguments alwaystwisting them so that they prophesied success for the Royalists and failurefor anyone who opposed them At the same time he added his own personalbrand of word-magic based on the Welsh landscape of his youth Cadair Idrisfor example he translates quite spuriously as Arise Charles (instead of Chair ofIdris) making the mountain itself prophetic of the Restoration so that thevillage of Maes y Llan Cadair Idris where he once lived becomes charminglyArise Charles Church in Field (Evans 73)

Arise then is constantly trying to assert his authority to lay claim to being areliable narrator In his time just as in ours that was no easy task with somany different ideologies in conflict many people argued with him anddisputed his version of the truth all the more so because like CharlesKinbote much of what he said seemed insane Besides in that Christiansociety some claims were beyond the pale for everybody In 1656 a Quakercalled James Nayler was deemed to have impersonated Christ by riding intoBristol on a donkey For this blasphemy he was whipped branded on theforehead and his tongue pierced with a hot iron (Hill 1991 75) Arise onlynarrowly escaped a similar fate when publicly arguing with Puritanopponents in Spitalfields A Presbyterian minister Thomas Edwards reportedthat a Welsh tailor called Evans was telling people he was Christ (Hill 199154) Arise denied in his writings that he had ever said this the most he wouldadmit to was having said that Christ was speaking through him Theaccusation was serious enough though to cause the Puritans to drive himaway from Spitalfields they chased him down the street and when peoplecame out of their houses to see what was the matter the shouted exclamationlsquoThere goes Christ Stop himrsquo nearly caused a riot (Evans 1653 37) It was anapocalyptic period and no doubt some of those who heard the cries believedthem to be literally true (Hill 1991 60) Arise took refuge in a church wherethe sermon happened to be about the Second Coming causing still moreconfusion among the pursuers who had entered after him This led to hisarrest and temporary confinement in Newgate and Bridewell Prisons and thethreat of removal to the asylum Bedlam The incident is a good example both

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of the credulity of the period that allowed him much of the time to flourishand of its limits

It is a truism that writers turn to historical fiction because they find in itsomething that relates to their own era Arise Evans prophet madman andprototypical unreliable narrator is a Charles Kinbote of his time a figure whocould have stepped straight out of the pages of a postmodern novel It istherefore not surprising that I want to put him into one I will conclude thisessay by saying something about how I am going about it The first problem Ihad to face was the familiar one of third-person versus first-person narrativeThe answer seemed simple it is Arisersquos voice that fascinates me so thenarrative has to be first-person full of the ironies and unwitting self-revelations I so enjoy in a novel like Pale Fire But Arise has already told hisstory a story that for the most part I want to retell how then can I avoidsimply repeating his own words Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1978 8) hasargued that fiction is not a direct mimesis of the real word what it imitatesrather is other modes of discourse letters diaries autobiographies orsimply a person talking to us Pale Fire as we have seen is a novelmasquerading as an annotated long poem That suggested the possibility ofa book that was not on the surface trying to tell Arisersquos story Another criticalperception that helped me at this point was Viktor Shklovskyrsquos (1965 2829)observation on Tristram Shandy that Sternersquos aim is to slow down the actionand thus defamiliarise it as a metafictional first-person narrative closer toArise Evansrsquos time than to our own Tristram Shandy seemed a useful model forwhat I had in mind Putting these ideas together then I hit on the idea of TheBook of the Needle What if Arise had attempted following the Restoration andthe completion of his prophetic pamphlets to write a book about tailoringSurely his own obsessions and life story would have continually interruptedthe task the way Tristram is interrupted in his life story by digressions andphilosophical speculations or the way Kinbote is interrupted in his annotationof Shadersquos poem by his obsessive delusions about Zembla

Basing my novel on early modern sources is giving me the opportunity torethink some of the assumptions I would normally make about books andtheir structure In the seventeenth century marginal notes were an importantelement of the text Arise uses them typically to give Biblical support for hisarguments and sometimes to gloss some of his peculiar word-magic withWelsh place names Other writers used the marginal symbol of a pointingfinger or fister to draw attention to passages they considered particularlyimportant This suggests a slightly different attitude to text from that of themodern novel with its single wide column of print a book that has so muchgoing on in the margin is potentially pluralising its narrative running the riskthat the notes will compete with the main text Yet it is in such practices of self-taught early modern authors like Arise telling their stories in a rough-and-ready way without regard to unity that we see the novel itself start to emergea hybrid shapeless exuberant form packed to overflowing with anecdote andsubjective impressions Only much later was it to develop the confidentconventions we are familiar with Now postmodernism makes us question theconventions of the novel suggests other approaches than the classic model of amixture of dialogue and descriptive prose in which action and authorial

A Prophet as Unreliable Narrator Rewriting Arise Evans 169

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comment blend seamlessly to form a harmonious work of art Such a modelhad not yet emerged at the time Arise was writing so that in attempting toengage with his view of text I am simultaneously trying to liberate my own

CorrespondenceAny correspondence should be directed to Matthew Francis (mwf

aberacuk)

Notes1 I have modernised Evansrsquos spelling in quotations used in the text2 From now on I shall follow Hill in referring to him by his first name

References

Auster P (1987) The New York Trilogy City of Glass Ghosts The Locked Room LondonFaber and Faber Ltd

Austin J (1962) How to Do Things With Words JO Urmson (ed) Oxford OxfordUniversity Press

Booth W (1983) The Rhetoric of Fiction (2nd ed) Chicago and London University ofChicago Press

Boyd B (1997) Shade and Shape in Pale Fire On WWW at httpwwwlibrariespsuedunabokovboydpf1htm (Accessed 234 2010)

Calvino I (1992) If on a Winterrsquos Night a Traveller W Weaver (Trans) London MinervaEvans A (1653) An Eccho to the book called A voyce from heaven by Arise Evans showing

how in the years 1633 34 and 35 he forewarned the late King courtiers and commons of thegreat ruine of all the three nations and that the king should be put to death according tohis visions and prophesies also his exhortation now to the Parliament and all people forsetting up the Kings son in his stead according to that old unparallelrsquod prophesie of MTruswell recorder of Lincoln here opened which likewise declareth the things past presentand to come chiefly the revolution and dissolution of this state with the exaltation of theKing in the present year of grace 1653 London Early English Books Online NationalLibrary of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eeboimage154414

Evans A (1654) The Euroclydon vvinde commanded to cease or A quenching of the fiery dartsby Scripture-arguments declarations and visions Being a moderate vindication of hisHighness the Lord Protector from the popular aspersions first accasioned [sic] against him bythe malice of the Presbyterians and now blown up by all parties Also something in behalfeof the desolate Church and King Charles which declares hopes of union between himand his Highness the Lord Protector with an apology of the author concerning the year 1653and many other things discovered London Early English Books Online NationalLibrary of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eebocitation99862435 (Accessed 234 2010)

Evans A (1660) To the most high and mighty prince Charles the II By the grace of God Kingof Great Britain France and Ireland defender of the faith ampc An epistle written and humblypresented for His Majesties use and enlightning of the nation Early English BooksOnline National Library of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eebocitation99868963(Accessed 234 2010)

Evans A (1661) The Book of the Needle or a compendium for the vse of prenticesand journeymen aptly designrsquod to instruct them in the more perfect accomplishment ofsewing cutting fitting pressing and botching ampc ampc with some commemorations ofthe late time of confusion callrsquod the Great Rebellion and Commonwealth of England andof his part in bringing all to a joyous resolution by Arise Evans tailor and prophet EarlyEnglish Books Online National Library of Zembla On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboampmcf_id xrieebocitation99868666 (Accessed104 2010)

170 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

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winterrsquos night a travellerrsquo (3) In both cases a person we think of as belonging tothe lsquorealrsquo world is startlingly introduced into the fictional one But is it the realperson at all We have no way of knowing if the real Paul Auster did any ofthe things he describes himself as doing in his text but we can be sure weourselves did not have the adventures we get up to in Calvinorsquos adventureswhich begin with our purchasing a series of defective books and continue intoan outrageous international conspiracy-thriller So this is a fictional self butthe idea that we can so easily acquire a fictional self through the mereoperation of language is itself disorientating Metafictional authors play othertricks too They may tell us stories within stories within stories until we findit hard to remember which story we are in at any given time a trope known asmise-en-abyme Or they may draw attention to the materiality of the book weare reading to its white pages and black letters its margins and coversdissolving the fictive world just when we were happily losing ourselves in itAll these devices disturb our sense of the simple oppositional relationship oftruth and fiction (Waugh 2003)

With so much instability introduced into the narrative so many possibilitiesof going astray it is hard for the reader to know what to believe or moreaccurately what to accept and what to reject on the fictive plane of the textThis uncertainty reminds us that fiction has a long tradition of unreliablenarration the narrator who tells us the story may be misleading us consciouslyor unconsciously Perhaps the most famous example is the governess in TheTurn of the Screw when she tells us of her encounters with the ghosts of PeterQuint and Miss Jessel and of their influence on the children in her chargewe do not know whether to accept her word or to assume she is insane anissue the critics have debated for many years Like us these critics are wellaware that the governess the children and the ghosts are Jamesrsquos inventionsand never existed in the first place nevertheless they instinctively seek adeterminate interpretation just as we do when faced with conflicting accountsof a real-life situation Finding the solution knowing the truth is somethingwe are mentally programmed to want to achieve and we carry this instinctinto the fictive world with us only to find that the complexity of Jamesrsquosnarrative frustrates it (Booth 1983 366367)

Unreliable narration and metafiction are closely related in the interpretivechallenges they present and frequently crop up together for example inVladimir Nabokovrsquos novel Pale Fire This takes the form of a 999-line narrativepoem in heroic couplets by a fictional American poet John Shade who hasrecently been murdered together with copious notes by an editor who tells ushe was Shadersquos close friend a gay academic named Charles Kinbote As weread the notes a story develops Kinbote is a citizen of a small northernEuropean republic called Zembla which has recently suffered a revolutioncausing its king Charles the Beloved to flee into exile (This Charlesincidentally much resembles Arise Evansrsquos hero Charles II of England andeven shares the same regnal number) Kinbote writes of the King in the third-person but it is not long before we realise that they are one and the sameHowever Kinbote is the most unreliable of narrators What does his elaboratestory really have to do with Shadersquos poem which seems to be an account of afairly ordinary though not untroubled American literary life A simple word

164 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

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like lsquooftenrsquo or lsquotodayrsquo in the text of the poem sets Kinbote off into pages offantastic but irrelevant anecdote (Nabokov 1973a 7881 126131) Is this nota symptom of madness We begin to notice things Kinbote himself is unawareof When at a cocktail party he overhears a conversation between Shade andtheir hostess on the subject of a local lunatic it seems obvious to us that it isKinbote they are talking about (Nabokov 1973a 188) A Russian called Botkinhis name a version of Kinbotersquos with the syllables reversed is sometimesmentioned perhaps this apparently minor character rather than Kinbote orCharles the Beloved is the real deluded narrator (Nabokov 1973a 125)

This at any rate was Nabokovrsquos own explanation of his novel in aninterview he gave shortly after its publication (Nabokov 1973b 74) Butunreliable narrative resists such authoritative accounts even when they comefrom the author critics of Pale Fire drawing on textual evidence in the novelhave suggested other interpretations some for example argue that the truenarrator is John Shade who has himself invented KinboteBotkin and thewhole Zemblan fiction and dictated both poem and notes from beyondthe grave (Boyd 1991) The uncertainties do not stop even there The novelbeing metafictional contains clues to its own fictive nature at the end of hisnotes Kinbote writes lsquoI may assume other disguises other forms I mayturn up yet on another campus as an old happy healthy heterosexualRussian a writer in exile sans fame sans future sans audience sans anythingbut his artrsquo (Nabokov 1973a 236) This reminds us that Kinbotersquos storybizarre as it is echoes that of its ultimate author Vladimir Nabokov who wasdriven into exile by the Russian revolution and whose father the liberalpolitician Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov was like Shade killed by anassassin attempting to murder someone else The fiction constantly threatensto dissolve into reality leaving the reader uncertain which is which anuncertainty epitomised by the novelrsquos use of mirror imagery and its play withnames like Shade (in its multiple senses of shadow ghost and darkness) andZembla (or semblance)

Historians of metafiction trace it back through Tristram Shandy at least as faras Don Quixote it is not an invention of the postmodern era (Waugh 2003 70)Nor is the unreliable narrative postmodern in origin as my brief discussion ofThe Turn of the Screw shows Nevertheless they seem to fit particularly wellwith the mood and concerns of our age and the terms themselves are of fairlyrecent origin lsquometafictionrsquo was first used by the writer William H Gass todescribe his own practices and those of some of his contemporaries in 1970while lsquounreliable narrationrsquo was coined by the critic Wayne C Booth in his1961 study The Rhetoric of Fiction (Waugh 2003 2 Booth 1983 339-74)

Leaving aside my own intervention how much of Arise Evansrsquos story canwe believe Our main source for most of the events in his life is Evans himselfabove all in the two pamphlets An Eccho to The Voice from Heaven (1653) and To

the Most High and Mighty Prince Charles II An Epistle (1660) Many of the thingshe tells us in these texts seem at the very least unlikely There are forexample those childhood experiences of the supernatural I mentioned Here ishis account of one of them

A Prophet as Unreliable Narrator Rewriting Arise Evans 165

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And once having occasion to go over a high place called Bwlch RywCredire and having come to the top where the dark clouds about me bythe wind were driven swiftly I being fearful in that place elevated myprayer the more And through the fervency of my prayer andvehemency of the wind and clouds I was lifted above the earth andcarried up a space in the clouds as I went on my way (Evans 1653 56)

Such miraculous incidents occurred throughout his life or so he tells usOnce he was locked up in his motherrsquos house in Wrexham in an attempt tokeep him from prophesying friends of the family fearing his intemperateutterances would bring trouble starved him and deprived him of sleep in anattempt to weaken his resolve and silence him But God intervened to savehim

As I lay on my bed the third day in the morning expecting some kind ofdeliverance from God there came in at the window a round cloud incolour like unto the rainbow abiding upon me a quarter of an hour and Iwas so revived as if I had eaten all the delicates in the world And after aquarter of an hour the cloud departed out at the window and ascendedout of my sight (Evans 1653 21)

These are the kind of adventures we might expect to read of in a magicrealist novel but Arise Evans is no fictional character and he insists thateverything he tells us is true

Questions of authority were of great importance then as now Among thecompeting discourses of that era were the Royalist Episcopalian beliefsassociated with the King and his party the Catholicism that held sway overmuch of continental Europe and was associated with Charlesrsquos French QueenHenrietta Maria and numerous varieties of Puritanism Evans believedpassionately in the RoyalistEpiscopalian doctrine and continued to do soeven after it was eclipsed by King Charlesrsquos defeat and execution Throughoutthe years of the Civil War and Commonwealth he insisted that God wasspeaking to him directly not only telling him which beliefs were right andwhich wrong but also giving him information denied to ordinary people Hewas endowed with the ability to foretell the future Such claims are usuallymet with scepticism today and his seventeenth-century listeners weresceptical too though sometimes for different reasons While we might doubthim because of his reliance on the supernatural they asked him why a tailorand the son of a sheep farmer claimed to know more about Godrsquos will thanordained and educated ministers of the church lsquoYou are no ministerrsquo they toldhim and lsquothe King will take no notice of you being an unlearned manrsquo (Evans1653 12 16) But Arise maintained that he had authority for his prophecies itcame from what all his rivals whatever their ideological position acknowl-edged as the ultimate source of all earthly authority God himself And thisauthority was confirmed by personal revelation and experience by Biblicalreference and by what we may loosely call magical lore

Firstly Arise maintained that he had direct personal experience of Godthrough such events as the miracles I have just described2 These showed thatGod had a special purpose for him one which he had no right to refuse as the

166 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

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angelic visitation that took place while he was sewing on the shopboard madeclear God also imparted his message directly by speaking to him in lsquoalaudable sharp shrill hasting voice near mine earrsquo (Evans 1653 10) Suchunverifiable accounts were more likely to be taken seriously in Arisersquos daythan in our own above all by the very people he most wanted to impress hischief opponents the Puritans Their religion emphasised the individualrsquospersonal relationship with God which bypassed social institutions andhierarchies and was at the core of religious experience While social andhierarchical elements were undoubtedly important in Puritanism thisemphasis on the individual tended to be democratic liberating and sub-versive It was also a spur to narrative the period of the Commonwealth wasan age of great literary activity much of it based on spiritual autobiography orpersonal diaries and journals often by men like Arise of humble originsSuddenly everyone was telling their story a story more often than not of Godmade manifest in human lives It was not unusual either for such manifesta-tions to take the kind of miraculous form they took in Arisersquos own story Inrecounting miracles that tended to confirm the church and monarchy ratherthan undermine them he was striking a shrewd political blow against one ofthe most potent sources of Puritan authority the personal narrative in sodoing however he may inadvertently have helped to establish the idea ofsuch narratives as fundamentally unreliable

The second confirmation of Arisersquos divine authority was his ability tosupport his case with scriptural references The voice that called him in hisroom in Blackfriars sent him to the Bible lsquoGo to thy bookrsquo The Bible was openon the table and Arisersquos eyes fell straight away on a message that confirmedhim in his role as a prophet This is an example of the sortes Biblicae themagical use of scripture as a method of divination But in Arisersquos case it wasaccompanied by a more unusual supernatural power the total recall ofscriptural texts

[I]mmediately upon this I had another understanding that the Scripturecame all of a sudden into my mind as if I had learned them by heartwith another understanding of them than I had before for before Ilooked on the Scripture as a history of things that passed in othercountries pertaining to other persons but now I looked upon it as amystery to be opened at this time belonging also to us and my tonguebecame fluent my answers so ready that all who knew me were amazedat it And whereas before I could say little or nothing in dispute nowwithin three days I had all the Scriptures at command and gave uponthem such an exposition that none could contradict me (Evans 1653 11)

In an age when the Bible was regarded as the ultimate authoritative textthis was a formidable power and this more than anything was the reason hewas so often listened to with respect by important men like Cromwell (Hill1991 59) If you could cite the Bible in support of your arguments it was noteasy to dismiss them It did not as I have mentioned stop him getting intotrouble from time to time but even then his virtuoso use of this ability couldcause consternation in his enemies When he was on trial at the Old Bailey thejudge no less a man than the Recorder of the City of London tried to cap

A Prophet as Unreliable Narrator Rewriting Arise Evans 167

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Arisersquos quotations from Scripture Arise tells us lsquowhen I got him to speak thatlanguage I tossed him from place to place until he was ashamed that withanger he bade the keeper take me awayrsquo and at the next session theRecorder sent his Deputy in his place to avoid an embarrassing recurrence ofthe incident (Evans 1653 39)

The third confirmation of Arisersquos authority came from magical lore inwhich he was steeped and to which his own unstable personality addedlayers of complexity As Keith Thomas and others have pointed out this wasan age fascinated by prophecy A confused body of lore was disseminated inpamphlets attributed to mythical figures like Merlin Mother Shipton and thefictitious Master Truswell the Recorder of Lincoln This consisted of crypticmessages about characters called The Chicken of the Eagle The White Kingand The Dreadful Dead Man The astrologer and prophet William Lilly anacquaintance and rival of Arise claimed that the Dreadful Dead Man wasCharles I while the Chicken of the Eagle was Cromwell (Thomas 1997389442) Arise became involved in these prophetic arguments alwaystwisting them so that they prophesied success for the Royalists and failurefor anyone who opposed them At the same time he added his own personalbrand of word-magic based on the Welsh landscape of his youth Cadair Idrisfor example he translates quite spuriously as Arise Charles (instead of Chair ofIdris) making the mountain itself prophetic of the Restoration so that thevillage of Maes y Llan Cadair Idris where he once lived becomes charminglyArise Charles Church in Field (Evans 73)

Arise then is constantly trying to assert his authority to lay claim to being areliable narrator In his time just as in ours that was no easy task with somany different ideologies in conflict many people argued with him anddisputed his version of the truth all the more so because like CharlesKinbote much of what he said seemed insane Besides in that Christiansociety some claims were beyond the pale for everybody In 1656 a Quakercalled James Nayler was deemed to have impersonated Christ by riding intoBristol on a donkey For this blasphemy he was whipped branded on theforehead and his tongue pierced with a hot iron (Hill 1991 75) Arise onlynarrowly escaped a similar fate when publicly arguing with Puritanopponents in Spitalfields A Presbyterian minister Thomas Edwards reportedthat a Welsh tailor called Evans was telling people he was Christ (Hill 199154) Arise denied in his writings that he had ever said this the most he wouldadmit to was having said that Christ was speaking through him Theaccusation was serious enough though to cause the Puritans to drive himaway from Spitalfields they chased him down the street and when peoplecame out of their houses to see what was the matter the shouted exclamationlsquoThere goes Christ Stop himrsquo nearly caused a riot (Evans 1653 37) It was anapocalyptic period and no doubt some of those who heard the cries believedthem to be literally true (Hill 1991 60) Arise took refuge in a church wherethe sermon happened to be about the Second Coming causing still moreconfusion among the pursuers who had entered after him This led to hisarrest and temporary confinement in Newgate and Bridewell Prisons and thethreat of removal to the asylum Bedlam The incident is a good example both

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of the credulity of the period that allowed him much of the time to flourishand of its limits

It is a truism that writers turn to historical fiction because they find in itsomething that relates to their own era Arise Evans prophet madman andprototypical unreliable narrator is a Charles Kinbote of his time a figure whocould have stepped straight out of the pages of a postmodern novel It istherefore not surprising that I want to put him into one I will conclude thisessay by saying something about how I am going about it The first problem Ihad to face was the familiar one of third-person versus first-person narrativeThe answer seemed simple it is Arisersquos voice that fascinates me so thenarrative has to be first-person full of the ironies and unwitting self-revelations I so enjoy in a novel like Pale Fire But Arise has already told hisstory a story that for the most part I want to retell how then can I avoidsimply repeating his own words Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1978 8) hasargued that fiction is not a direct mimesis of the real word what it imitatesrather is other modes of discourse letters diaries autobiographies orsimply a person talking to us Pale Fire as we have seen is a novelmasquerading as an annotated long poem That suggested the possibility ofa book that was not on the surface trying to tell Arisersquos story Another criticalperception that helped me at this point was Viktor Shklovskyrsquos (1965 2829)observation on Tristram Shandy that Sternersquos aim is to slow down the actionand thus defamiliarise it as a metafictional first-person narrative closer toArise Evansrsquos time than to our own Tristram Shandy seemed a useful model forwhat I had in mind Putting these ideas together then I hit on the idea of TheBook of the Needle What if Arise had attempted following the Restoration andthe completion of his prophetic pamphlets to write a book about tailoringSurely his own obsessions and life story would have continually interruptedthe task the way Tristram is interrupted in his life story by digressions andphilosophical speculations or the way Kinbote is interrupted in his annotationof Shadersquos poem by his obsessive delusions about Zembla

Basing my novel on early modern sources is giving me the opportunity torethink some of the assumptions I would normally make about books andtheir structure In the seventeenth century marginal notes were an importantelement of the text Arise uses them typically to give Biblical support for hisarguments and sometimes to gloss some of his peculiar word-magic withWelsh place names Other writers used the marginal symbol of a pointingfinger or fister to draw attention to passages they considered particularlyimportant This suggests a slightly different attitude to text from that of themodern novel with its single wide column of print a book that has so muchgoing on in the margin is potentially pluralising its narrative running the riskthat the notes will compete with the main text Yet it is in such practices of self-taught early modern authors like Arise telling their stories in a rough-and-ready way without regard to unity that we see the novel itself start to emergea hybrid shapeless exuberant form packed to overflowing with anecdote andsubjective impressions Only much later was it to develop the confidentconventions we are familiar with Now postmodernism makes us question theconventions of the novel suggests other approaches than the classic model of amixture of dialogue and descriptive prose in which action and authorial

A Prophet as Unreliable Narrator Rewriting Arise Evans 169

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comment blend seamlessly to form a harmonious work of art Such a modelhad not yet emerged at the time Arise was writing so that in attempting toengage with his view of text I am simultaneously trying to liberate my own

CorrespondenceAny correspondence should be directed to Matthew Francis (mwf

aberacuk)

Notes1 I have modernised Evansrsquos spelling in quotations used in the text2 From now on I shall follow Hill in referring to him by his first name

References

Auster P (1987) The New York Trilogy City of Glass Ghosts The Locked Room LondonFaber and Faber Ltd

Austin J (1962) How to Do Things With Words JO Urmson (ed) Oxford OxfordUniversity Press

Booth W (1983) The Rhetoric of Fiction (2nd ed) Chicago and London University ofChicago Press

Boyd B (1997) Shade and Shape in Pale Fire On WWW at httpwwwlibrariespsuedunabokovboydpf1htm (Accessed 234 2010)

Calvino I (1992) If on a Winterrsquos Night a Traveller W Weaver (Trans) London MinervaEvans A (1653) An Eccho to the book called A voyce from heaven by Arise Evans showing

how in the years 1633 34 and 35 he forewarned the late King courtiers and commons of thegreat ruine of all the three nations and that the king should be put to death according tohis visions and prophesies also his exhortation now to the Parliament and all people forsetting up the Kings son in his stead according to that old unparallelrsquod prophesie of MTruswell recorder of Lincoln here opened which likewise declareth the things past presentand to come chiefly the revolution and dissolution of this state with the exaltation of theKing in the present year of grace 1653 London Early English Books Online NationalLibrary of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eeboimage154414

Evans A (1654) The Euroclydon vvinde commanded to cease or A quenching of the fiery dartsby Scripture-arguments declarations and visions Being a moderate vindication of hisHighness the Lord Protector from the popular aspersions first accasioned [sic] against him bythe malice of the Presbyterians and now blown up by all parties Also something in behalfeof the desolate Church and King Charles which declares hopes of union between himand his Highness the Lord Protector with an apology of the author concerning the year 1653and many other things discovered London Early English Books Online NationalLibrary of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eebocitation99862435 (Accessed 234 2010)

Evans A (1660) To the most high and mighty prince Charles the II By the grace of God Kingof Great Britain France and Ireland defender of the faith ampc An epistle written and humblypresented for His Majesties use and enlightning of the nation Early English BooksOnline National Library of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eebocitation99868963(Accessed 234 2010)

Evans A (1661) The Book of the Needle or a compendium for the vse of prenticesand journeymen aptly designrsquod to instruct them in the more perfect accomplishment ofsewing cutting fitting pressing and botching ampc ampc with some commemorations ofthe late time of confusion callrsquod the Great Rebellion and Commonwealth of England andof his part in bringing all to a joyous resolution by Arise Evans tailor and prophet EarlyEnglish Books Online National Library of Zembla On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboampmcf_id xrieebocitation99868666 (Accessed104 2010)

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like lsquooftenrsquo or lsquotodayrsquo in the text of the poem sets Kinbote off into pages offantastic but irrelevant anecdote (Nabokov 1973a 7881 126131) Is this nota symptom of madness We begin to notice things Kinbote himself is unawareof When at a cocktail party he overhears a conversation between Shade andtheir hostess on the subject of a local lunatic it seems obvious to us that it isKinbote they are talking about (Nabokov 1973a 188) A Russian called Botkinhis name a version of Kinbotersquos with the syllables reversed is sometimesmentioned perhaps this apparently minor character rather than Kinbote orCharles the Beloved is the real deluded narrator (Nabokov 1973a 125)

This at any rate was Nabokovrsquos own explanation of his novel in aninterview he gave shortly after its publication (Nabokov 1973b 74) Butunreliable narrative resists such authoritative accounts even when they comefrom the author critics of Pale Fire drawing on textual evidence in the novelhave suggested other interpretations some for example argue that the truenarrator is John Shade who has himself invented KinboteBotkin and thewhole Zemblan fiction and dictated both poem and notes from beyondthe grave (Boyd 1991) The uncertainties do not stop even there The novelbeing metafictional contains clues to its own fictive nature at the end of hisnotes Kinbote writes lsquoI may assume other disguises other forms I mayturn up yet on another campus as an old happy healthy heterosexualRussian a writer in exile sans fame sans future sans audience sans anythingbut his artrsquo (Nabokov 1973a 236) This reminds us that Kinbotersquos storybizarre as it is echoes that of its ultimate author Vladimir Nabokov who wasdriven into exile by the Russian revolution and whose father the liberalpolitician Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov was like Shade killed by anassassin attempting to murder someone else The fiction constantly threatensto dissolve into reality leaving the reader uncertain which is which anuncertainty epitomised by the novelrsquos use of mirror imagery and its play withnames like Shade (in its multiple senses of shadow ghost and darkness) andZembla (or semblance)

Historians of metafiction trace it back through Tristram Shandy at least as faras Don Quixote it is not an invention of the postmodern era (Waugh 2003 70)Nor is the unreliable narrative postmodern in origin as my brief discussion ofThe Turn of the Screw shows Nevertheless they seem to fit particularly wellwith the mood and concerns of our age and the terms themselves are of fairlyrecent origin lsquometafictionrsquo was first used by the writer William H Gass todescribe his own practices and those of some of his contemporaries in 1970while lsquounreliable narrationrsquo was coined by the critic Wayne C Booth in his1961 study The Rhetoric of Fiction (Waugh 2003 2 Booth 1983 339-74)

Leaving aside my own intervention how much of Arise Evansrsquos story canwe believe Our main source for most of the events in his life is Evans himselfabove all in the two pamphlets An Eccho to The Voice from Heaven (1653) and To

the Most High and Mighty Prince Charles II An Epistle (1660) Many of the thingshe tells us in these texts seem at the very least unlikely There are forexample those childhood experiences of the supernatural I mentioned Here ishis account of one of them

A Prophet as Unreliable Narrator Rewriting Arise Evans 165

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And once having occasion to go over a high place called Bwlch RywCredire and having come to the top where the dark clouds about me bythe wind were driven swiftly I being fearful in that place elevated myprayer the more And through the fervency of my prayer andvehemency of the wind and clouds I was lifted above the earth andcarried up a space in the clouds as I went on my way (Evans 1653 56)

Such miraculous incidents occurred throughout his life or so he tells usOnce he was locked up in his motherrsquos house in Wrexham in an attempt tokeep him from prophesying friends of the family fearing his intemperateutterances would bring trouble starved him and deprived him of sleep in anattempt to weaken his resolve and silence him But God intervened to savehim

As I lay on my bed the third day in the morning expecting some kind ofdeliverance from God there came in at the window a round cloud incolour like unto the rainbow abiding upon me a quarter of an hour and Iwas so revived as if I had eaten all the delicates in the world And after aquarter of an hour the cloud departed out at the window and ascendedout of my sight (Evans 1653 21)

These are the kind of adventures we might expect to read of in a magicrealist novel but Arise Evans is no fictional character and he insists thateverything he tells us is true

Questions of authority were of great importance then as now Among thecompeting discourses of that era were the Royalist Episcopalian beliefsassociated with the King and his party the Catholicism that held sway overmuch of continental Europe and was associated with Charlesrsquos French QueenHenrietta Maria and numerous varieties of Puritanism Evans believedpassionately in the RoyalistEpiscopalian doctrine and continued to do soeven after it was eclipsed by King Charlesrsquos defeat and execution Throughoutthe years of the Civil War and Commonwealth he insisted that God wasspeaking to him directly not only telling him which beliefs were right andwhich wrong but also giving him information denied to ordinary people Hewas endowed with the ability to foretell the future Such claims are usuallymet with scepticism today and his seventeenth-century listeners weresceptical too though sometimes for different reasons While we might doubthim because of his reliance on the supernatural they asked him why a tailorand the son of a sheep farmer claimed to know more about Godrsquos will thanordained and educated ministers of the church lsquoYou are no ministerrsquo they toldhim and lsquothe King will take no notice of you being an unlearned manrsquo (Evans1653 12 16) But Arise maintained that he had authority for his prophecies itcame from what all his rivals whatever their ideological position acknowl-edged as the ultimate source of all earthly authority God himself And thisauthority was confirmed by personal revelation and experience by Biblicalreference and by what we may loosely call magical lore

Firstly Arise maintained that he had direct personal experience of Godthrough such events as the miracles I have just described2 These showed thatGod had a special purpose for him one which he had no right to refuse as the

166 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

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angelic visitation that took place while he was sewing on the shopboard madeclear God also imparted his message directly by speaking to him in lsquoalaudable sharp shrill hasting voice near mine earrsquo (Evans 1653 10) Suchunverifiable accounts were more likely to be taken seriously in Arisersquos daythan in our own above all by the very people he most wanted to impress hischief opponents the Puritans Their religion emphasised the individualrsquospersonal relationship with God which bypassed social institutions andhierarchies and was at the core of religious experience While social andhierarchical elements were undoubtedly important in Puritanism thisemphasis on the individual tended to be democratic liberating and sub-versive It was also a spur to narrative the period of the Commonwealth wasan age of great literary activity much of it based on spiritual autobiography orpersonal diaries and journals often by men like Arise of humble originsSuddenly everyone was telling their story a story more often than not of Godmade manifest in human lives It was not unusual either for such manifesta-tions to take the kind of miraculous form they took in Arisersquos own story Inrecounting miracles that tended to confirm the church and monarchy ratherthan undermine them he was striking a shrewd political blow against one ofthe most potent sources of Puritan authority the personal narrative in sodoing however he may inadvertently have helped to establish the idea ofsuch narratives as fundamentally unreliable

The second confirmation of Arisersquos divine authority was his ability tosupport his case with scriptural references The voice that called him in hisroom in Blackfriars sent him to the Bible lsquoGo to thy bookrsquo The Bible was openon the table and Arisersquos eyes fell straight away on a message that confirmedhim in his role as a prophet This is an example of the sortes Biblicae themagical use of scripture as a method of divination But in Arisersquos case it wasaccompanied by a more unusual supernatural power the total recall ofscriptural texts

[I]mmediately upon this I had another understanding that the Scripturecame all of a sudden into my mind as if I had learned them by heartwith another understanding of them than I had before for before Ilooked on the Scripture as a history of things that passed in othercountries pertaining to other persons but now I looked upon it as amystery to be opened at this time belonging also to us and my tonguebecame fluent my answers so ready that all who knew me were amazedat it And whereas before I could say little or nothing in dispute nowwithin three days I had all the Scriptures at command and gave uponthem such an exposition that none could contradict me (Evans 1653 11)

In an age when the Bible was regarded as the ultimate authoritative textthis was a formidable power and this more than anything was the reason hewas so often listened to with respect by important men like Cromwell (Hill1991 59) If you could cite the Bible in support of your arguments it was noteasy to dismiss them It did not as I have mentioned stop him getting intotrouble from time to time but even then his virtuoso use of this ability couldcause consternation in his enemies When he was on trial at the Old Bailey thejudge no less a man than the Recorder of the City of London tried to cap

A Prophet as Unreliable Narrator Rewriting Arise Evans 167

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Arisersquos quotations from Scripture Arise tells us lsquowhen I got him to speak thatlanguage I tossed him from place to place until he was ashamed that withanger he bade the keeper take me awayrsquo and at the next session theRecorder sent his Deputy in his place to avoid an embarrassing recurrence ofthe incident (Evans 1653 39)

The third confirmation of Arisersquos authority came from magical lore inwhich he was steeped and to which his own unstable personality addedlayers of complexity As Keith Thomas and others have pointed out this wasan age fascinated by prophecy A confused body of lore was disseminated inpamphlets attributed to mythical figures like Merlin Mother Shipton and thefictitious Master Truswell the Recorder of Lincoln This consisted of crypticmessages about characters called The Chicken of the Eagle The White Kingand The Dreadful Dead Man The astrologer and prophet William Lilly anacquaintance and rival of Arise claimed that the Dreadful Dead Man wasCharles I while the Chicken of the Eagle was Cromwell (Thomas 1997389442) Arise became involved in these prophetic arguments alwaystwisting them so that they prophesied success for the Royalists and failurefor anyone who opposed them At the same time he added his own personalbrand of word-magic based on the Welsh landscape of his youth Cadair Idrisfor example he translates quite spuriously as Arise Charles (instead of Chair ofIdris) making the mountain itself prophetic of the Restoration so that thevillage of Maes y Llan Cadair Idris where he once lived becomes charminglyArise Charles Church in Field (Evans 73)

Arise then is constantly trying to assert his authority to lay claim to being areliable narrator In his time just as in ours that was no easy task with somany different ideologies in conflict many people argued with him anddisputed his version of the truth all the more so because like CharlesKinbote much of what he said seemed insane Besides in that Christiansociety some claims were beyond the pale for everybody In 1656 a Quakercalled James Nayler was deemed to have impersonated Christ by riding intoBristol on a donkey For this blasphemy he was whipped branded on theforehead and his tongue pierced with a hot iron (Hill 1991 75) Arise onlynarrowly escaped a similar fate when publicly arguing with Puritanopponents in Spitalfields A Presbyterian minister Thomas Edwards reportedthat a Welsh tailor called Evans was telling people he was Christ (Hill 199154) Arise denied in his writings that he had ever said this the most he wouldadmit to was having said that Christ was speaking through him Theaccusation was serious enough though to cause the Puritans to drive himaway from Spitalfields they chased him down the street and when peoplecame out of their houses to see what was the matter the shouted exclamationlsquoThere goes Christ Stop himrsquo nearly caused a riot (Evans 1653 37) It was anapocalyptic period and no doubt some of those who heard the cries believedthem to be literally true (Hill 1991 60) Arise took refuge in a church wherethe sermon happened to be about the Second Coming causing still moreconfusion among the pursuers who had entered after him This led to hisarrest and temporary confinement in Newgate and Bridewell Prisons and thethreat of removal to the asylum Bedlam The incident is a good example both

168 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

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2014

of the credulity of the period that allowed him much of the time to flourishand of its limits

It is a truism that writers turn to historical fiction because they find in itsomething that relates to their own era Arise Evans prophet madman andprototypical unreliable narrator is a Charles Kinbote of his time a figure whocould have stepped straight out of the pages of a postmodern novel It istherefore not surprising that I want to put him into one I will conclude thisessay by saying something about how I am going about it The first problem Ihad to face was the familiar one of third-person versus first-person narrativeThe answer seemed simple it is Arisersquos voice that fascinates me so thenarrative has to be first-person full of the ironies and unwitting self-revelations I so enjoy in a novel like Pale Fire But Arise has already told hisstory a story that for the most part I want to retell how then can I avoidsimply repeating his own words Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1978 8) hasargued that fiction is not a direct mimesis of the real word what it imitatesrather is other modes of discourse letters diaries autobiographies orsimply a person talking to us Pale Fire as we have seen is a novelmasquerading as an annotated long poem That suggested the possibility ofa book that was not on the surface trying to tell Arisersquos story Another criticalperception that helped me at this point was Viktor Shklovskyrsquos (1965 2829)observation on Tristram Shandy that Sternersquos aim is to slow down the actionand thus defamiliarise it as a metafictional first-person narrative closer toArise Evansrsquos time than to our own Tristram Shandy seemed a useful model forwhat I had in mind Putting these ideas together then I hit on the idea of TheBook of the Needle What if Arise had attempted following the Restoration andthe completion of his prophetic pamphlets to write a book about tailoringSurely his own obsessions and life story would have continually interruptedthe task the way Tristram is interrupted in his life story by digressions andphilosophical speculations or the way Kinbote is interrupted in his annotationof Shadersquos poem by his obsessive delusions about Zembla

Basing my novel on early modern sources is giving me the opportunity torethink some of the assumptions I would normally make about books andtheir structure In the seventeenth century marginal notes were an importantelement of the text Arise uses them typically to give Biblical support for hisarguments and sometimes to gloss some of his peculiar word-magic withWelsh place names Other writers used the marginal symbol of a pointingfinger or fister to draw attention to passages they considered particularlyimportant This suggests a slightly different attitude to text from that of themodern novel with its single wide column of print a book that has so muchgoing on in the margin is potentially pluralising its narrative running the riskthat the notes will compete with the main text Yet it is in such practices of self-taught early modern authors like Arise telling their stories in a rough-and-ready way without regard to unity that we see the novel itself start to emergea hybrid shapeless exuberant form packed to overflowing with anecdote andsubjective impressions Only much later was it to develop the confidentconventions we are familiar with Now postmodernism makes us question theconventions of the novel suggests other approaches than the classic model of amixture of dialogue and descriptive prose in which action and authorial

A Prophet as Unreliable Narrator Rewriting Arise Evans 169

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comment blend seamlessly to form a harmonious work of art Such a modelhad not yet emerged at the time Arise was writing so that in attempting toengage with his view of text I am simultaneously trying to liberate my own

CorrespondenceAny correspondence should be directed to Matthew Francis (mwf

aberacuk)

Notes1 I have modernised Evansrsquos spelling in quotations used in the text2 From now on I shall follow Hill in referring to him by his first name

References

Auster P (1987) The New York Trilogy City of Glass Ghosts The Locked Room LondonFaber and Faber Ltd

Austin J (1962) How to Do Things With Words JO Urmson (ed) Oxford OxfordUniversity Press

Booth W (1983) The Rhetoric of Fiction (2nd ed) Chicago and London University ofChicago Press

Boyd B (1997) Shade and Shape in Pale Fire On WWW at httpwwwlibrariespsuedunabokovboydpf1htm (Accessed 234 2010)

Calvino I (1992) If on a Winterrsquos Night a Traveller W Weaver (Trans) London MinervaEvans A (1653) An Eccho to the book called A voyce from heaven by Arise Evans showing

how in the years 1633 34 and 35 he forewarned the late King courtiers and commons of thegreat ruine of all the three nations and that the king should be put to death according tohis visions and prophesies also his exhortation now to the Parliament and all people forsetting up the Kings son in his stead according to that old unparallelrsquod prophesie of MTruswell recorder of Lincoln here opened which likewise declareth the things past presentand to come chiefly the revolution and dissolution of this state with the exaltation of theKing in the present year of grace 1653 London Early English Books Online NationalLibrary of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eeboimage154414

Evans A (1654) The Euroclydon vvinde commanded to cease or A quenching of the fiery dartsby Scripture-arguments declarations and visions Being a moderate vindication of hisHighness the Lord Protector from the popular aspersions first accasioned [sic] against him bythe malice of the Presbyterians and now blown up by all parties Also something in behalfeof the desolate Church and King Charles which declares hopes of union between himand his Highness the Lord Protector with an apology of the author concerning the year 1653and many other things discovered London Early English Books Online NationalLibrary of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eebocitation99862435 (Accessed 234 2010)

Evans A (1660) To the most high and mighty prince Charles the II By the grace of God Kingof Great Britain France and Ireland defender of the faith ampc An epistle written and humblypresented for His Majesties use and enlightning of the nation Early English BooksOnline National Library of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eebocitation99868963(Accessed 234 2010)

Evans A (1661) The Book of the Needle or a compendium for the vse of prenticesand journeymen aptly designrsquod to instruct them in the more perfect accomplishment ofsewing cutting fitting pressing and botching ampc ampc with some commemorations ofthe late time of confusion callrsquod the Great Rebellion and Commonwealth of England andof his part in bringing all to a joyous resolution by Arise Evans tailor and prophet EarlyEnglish Books Online National Library of Zembla On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboampmcf_id xrieebocitation99868666 (Accessed104 2010)

170 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

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And once having occasion to go over a high place called Bwlch RywCredire and having come to the top where the dark clouds about me bythe wind were driven swiftly I being fearful in that place elevated myprayer the more And through the fervency of my prayer andvehemency of the wind and clouds I was lifted above the earth andcarried up a space in the clouds as I went on my way (Evans 1653 56)

Such miraculous incidents occurred throughout his life or so he tells usOnce he was locked up in his motherrsquos house in Wrexham in an attempt tokeep him from prophesying friends of the family fearing his intemperateutterances would bring trouble starved him and deprived him of sleep in anattempt to weaken his resolve and silence him But God intervened to savehim

As I lay on my bed the third day in the morning expecting some kind ofdeliverance from God there came in at the window a round cloud incolour like unto the rainbow abiding upon me a quarter of an hour and Iwas so revived as if I had eaten all the delicates in the world And after aquarter of an hour the cloud departed out at the window and ascendedout of my sight (Evans 1653 21)

These are the kind of adventures we might expect to read of in a magicrealist novel but Arise Evans is no fictional character and he insists thateverything he tells us is true

Questions of authority were of great importance then as now Among thecompeting discourses of that era were the Royalist Episcopalian beliefsassociated with the King and his party the Catholicism that held sway overmuch of continental Europe and was associated with Charlesrsquos French QueenHenrietta Maria and numerous varieties of Puritanism Evans believedpassionately in the RoyalistEpiscopalian doctrine and continued to do soeven after it was eclipsed by King Charlesrsquos defeat and execution Throughoutthe years of the Civil War and Commonwealth he insisted that God wasspeaking to him directly not only telling him which beliefs were right andwhich wrong but also giving him information denied to ordinary people Hewas endowed with the ability to foretell the future Such claims are usuallymet with scepticism today and his seventeenth-century listeners weresceptical too though sometimes for different reasons While we might doubthim because of his reliance on the supernatural they asked him why a tailorand the son of a sheep farmer claimed to know more about Godrsquos will thanordained and educated ministers of the church lsquoYou are no ministerrsquo they toldhim and lsquothe King will take no notice of you being an unlearned manrsquo (Evans1653 12 16) But Arise maintained that he had authority for his prophecies itcame from what all his rivals whatever their ideological position acknowl-edged as the ultimate source of all earthly authority God himself And thisauthority was confirmed by personal revelation and experience by Biblicalreference and by what we may loosely call magical lore

Firstly Arise maintained that he had direct personal experience of Godthrough such events as the miracles I have just described2 These showed thatGod had a special purpose for him one which he had no right to refuse as the

166 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

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angelic visitation that took place while he was sewing on the shopboard madeclear God also imparted his message directly by speaking to him in lsquoalaudable sharp shrill hasting voice near mine earrsquo (Evans 1653 10) Suchunverifiable accounts were more likely to be taken seriously in Arisersquos daythan in our own above all by the very people he most wanted to impress hischief opponents the Puritans Their religion emphasised the individualrsquospersonal relationship with God which bypassed social institutions andhierarchies and was at the core of religious experience While social andhierarchical elements were undoubtedly important in Puritanism thisemphasis on the individual tended to be democratic liberating and sub-versive It was also a spur to narrative the period of the Commonwealth wasan age of great literary activity much of it based on spiritual autobiography orpersonal diaries and journals often by men like Arise of humble originsSuddenly everyone was telling their story a story more often than not of Godmade manifest in human lives It was not unusual either for such manifesta-tions to take the kind of miraculous form they took in Arisersquos own story Inrecounting miracles that tended to confirm the church and monarchy ratherthan undermine them he was striking a shrewd political blow against one ofthe most potent sources of Puritan authority the personal narrative in sodoing however he may inadvertently have helped to establish the idea ofsuch narratives as fundamentally unreliable

The second confirmation of Arisersquos divine authority was his ability tosupport his case with scriptural references The voice that called him in hisroom in Blackfriars sent him to the Bible lsquoGo to thy bookrsquo The Bible was openon the table and Arisersquos eyes fell straight away on a message that confirmedhim in his role as a prophet This is an example of the sortes Biblicae themagical use of scripture as a method of divination But in Arisersquos case it wasaccompanied by a more unusual supernatural power the total recall ofscriptural texts

[I]mmediately upon this I had another understanding that the Scripturecame all of a sudden into my mind as if I had learned them by heartwith another understanding of them than I had before for before Ilooked on the Scripture as a history of things that passed in othercountries pertaining to other persons but now I looked upon it as amystery to be opened at this time belonging also to us and my tonguebecame fluent my answers so ready that all who knew me were amazedat it And whereas before I could say little or nothing in dispute nowwithin three days I had all the Scriptures at command and gave uponthem such an exposition that none could contradict me (Evans 1653 11)

In an age when the Bible was regarded as the ultimate authoritative textthis was a formidable power and this more than anything was the reason hewas so often listened to with respect by important men like Cromwell (Hill1991 59) If you could cite the Bible in support of your arguments it was noteasy to dismiss them It did not as I have mentioned stop him getting intotrouble from time to time but even then his virtuoso use of this ability couldcause consternation in his enemies When he was on trial at the Old Bailey thejudge no less a man than the Recorder of the City of London tried to cap

A Prophet as Unreliable Narrator Rewriting Arise Evans 167

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Arisersquos quotations from Scripture Arise tells us lsquowhen I got him to speak thatlanguage I tossed him from place to place until he was ashamed that withanger he bade the keeper take me awayrsquo and at the next session theRecorder sent his Deputy in his place to avoid an embarrassing recurrence ofthe incident (Evans 1653 39)

The third confirmation of Arisersquos authority came from magical lore inwhich he was steeped and to which his own unstable personality addedlayers of complexity As Keith Thomas and others have pointed out this wasan age fascinated by prophecy A confused body of lore was disseminated inpamphlets attributed to mythical figures like Merlin Mother Shipton and thefictitious Master Truswell the Recorder of Lincoln This consisted of crypticmessages about characters called The Chicken of the Eagle The White Kingand The Dreadful Dead Man The astrologer and prophet William Lilly anacquaintance and rival of Arise claimed that the Dreadful Dead Man wasCharles I while the Chicken of the Eagle was Cromwell (Thomas 1997389442) Arise became involved in these prophetic arguments alwaystwisting them so that they prophesied success for the Royalists and failurefor anyone who opposed them At the same time he added his own personalbrand of word-magic based on the Welsh landscape of his youth Cadair Idrisfor example he translates quite spuriously as Arise Charles (instead of Chair ofIdris) making the mountain itself prophetic of the Restoration so that thevillage of Maes y Llan Cadair Idris where he once lived becomes charminglyArise Charles Church in Field (Evans 73)

Arise then is constantly trying to assert his authority to lay claim to being areliable narrator In his time just as in ours that was no easy task with somany different ideologies in conflict many people argued with him anddisputed his version of the truth all the more so because like CharlesKinbote much of what he said seemed insane Besides in that Christiansociety some claims were beyond the pale for everybody In 1656 a Quakercalled James Nayler was deemed to have impersonated Christ by riding intoBristol on a donkey For this blasphemy he was whipped branded on theforehead and his tongue pierced with a hot iron (Hill 1991 75) Arise onlynarrowly escaped a similar fate when publicly arguing with Puritanopponents in Spitalfields A Presbyterian minister Thomas Edwards reportedthat a Welsh tailor called Evans was telling people he was Christ (Hill 199154) Arise denied in his writings that he had ever said this the most he wouldadmit to was having said that Christ was speaking through him Theaccusation was serious enough though to cause the Puritans to drive himaway from Spitalfields they chased him down the street and when peoplecame out of their houses to see what was the matter the shouted exclamationlsquoThere goes Christ Stop himrsquo nearly caused a riot (Evans 1653 37) It was anapocalyptic period and no doubt some of those who heard the cries believedthem to be literally true (Hill 1991 60) Arise took refuge in a church wherethe sermon happened to be about the Second Coming causing still moreconfusion among the pursuers who had entered after him This led to hisarrest and temporary confinement in Newgate and Bridewell Prisons and thethreat of removal to the asylum Bedlam The incident is a good example both

168 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

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of the credulity of the period that allowed him much of the time to flourishand of its limits

It is a truism that writers turn to historical fiction because they find in itsomething that relates to their own era Arise Evans prophet madman andprototypical unreliable narrator is a Charles Kinbote of his time a figure whocould have stepped straight out of the pages of a postmodern novel It istherefore not surprising that I want to put him into one I will conclude thisessay by saying something about how I am going about it The first problem Ihad to face was the familiar one of third-person versus first-person narrativeThe answer seemed simple it is Arisersquos voice that fascinates me so thenarrative has to be first-person full of the ironies and unwitting self-revelations I so enjoy in a novel like Pale Fire But Arise has already told hisstory a story that for the most part I want to retell how then can I avoidsimply repeating his own words Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1978 8) hasargued that fiction is not a direct mimesis of the real word what it imitatesrather is other modes of discourse letters diaries autobiographies orsimply a person talking to us Pale Fire as we have seen is a novelmasquerading as an annotated long poem That suggested the possibility ofa book that was not on the surface trying to tell Arisersquos story Another criticalperception that helped me at this point was Viktor Shklovskyrsquos (1965 2829)observation on Tristram Shandy that Sternersquos aim is to slow down the actionand thus defamiliarise it as a metafictional first-person narrative closer toArise Evansrsquos time than to our own Tristram Shandy seemed a useful model forwhat I had in mind Putting these ideas together then I hit on the idea of TheBook of the Needle What if Arise had attempted following the Restoration andthe completion of his prophetic pamphlets to write a book about tailoringSurely his own obsessions and life story would have continually interruptedthe task the way Tristram is interrupted in his life story by digressions andphilosophical speculations or the way Kinbote is interrupted in his annotationof Shadersquos poem by his obsessive delusions about Zembla

Basing my novel on early modern sources is giving me the opportunity torethink some of the assumptions I would normally make about books andtheir structure In the seventeenth century marginal notes were an importantelement of the text Arise uses them typically to give Biblical support for hisarguments and sometimes to gloss some of his peculiar word-magic withWelsh place names Other writers used the marginal symbol of a pointingfinger or fister to draw attention to passages they considered particularlyimportant This suggests a slightly different attitude to text from that of themodern novel with its single wide column of print a book that has so muchgoing on in the margin is potentially pluralising its narrative running the riskthat the notes will compete with the main text Yet it is in such practices of self-taught early modern authors like Arise telling their stories in a rough-and-ready way without regard to unity that we see the novel itself start to emergea hybrid shapeless exuberant form packed to overflowing with anecdote andsubjective impressions Only much later was it to develop the confidentconventions we are familiar with Now postmodernism makes us question theconventions of the novel suggests other approaches than the classic model of amixture of dialogue and descriptive prose in which action and authorial

A Prophet as Unreliable Narrator Rewriting Arise Evans 169

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

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] at

08

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ovem

ber

2014

comment blend seamlessly to form a harmonious work of art Such a modelhad not yet emerged at the time Arise was writing so that in attempting toengage with his view of text I am simultaneously trying to liberate my own

CorrespondenceAny correspondence should be directed to Matthew Francis (mwf

aberacuk)

Notes1 I have modernised Evansrsquos spelling in quotations used in the text2 From now on I shall follow Hill in referring to him by his first name

References

Auster P (1987) The New York Trilogy City of Glass Ghosts The Locked Room LondonFaber and Faber Ltd

Austin J (1962) How to Do Things With Words JO Urmson (ed) Oxford OxfordUniversity Press

Booth W (1983) The Rhetoric of Fiction (2nd ed) Chicago and London University ofChicago Press

Boyd B (1997) Shade and Shape in Pale Fire On WWW at httpwwwlibrariespsuedunabokovboydpf1htm (Accessed 234 2010)

Calvino I (1992) If on a Winterrsquos Night a Traveller W Weaver (Trans) London MinervaEvans A (1653) An Eccho to the book called A voyce from heaven by Arise Evans showing

how in the years 1633 34 and 35 he forewarned the late King courtiers and commons of thegreat ruine of all the three nations and that the king should be put to death according tohis visions and prophesies also his exhortation now to the Parliament and all people forsetting up the Kings son in his stead according to that old unparallelrsquod prophesie of MTruswell recorder of Lincoln here opened which likewise declareth the things past presentand to come chiefly the revolution and dissolution of this state with the exaltation of theKing in the present year of grace 1653 London Early English Books Online NationalLibrary of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eeboimage154414

Evans A (1654) The Euroclydon vvinde commanded to cease or A quenching of the fiery dartsby Scripture-arguments declarations and visions Being a moderate vindication of hisHighness the Lord Protector from the popular aspersions first accasioned [sic] against him bythe malice of the Presbyterians and now blown up by all parties Also something in behalfeof the desolate Church and King Charles which declares hopes of union between himand his Highness the Lord Protector with an apology of the author concerning the year 1653and many other things discovered London Early English Books Online NationalLibrary of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eebocitation99862435 (Accessed 234 2010)

Evans A (1660) To the most high and mighty prince Charles the II By the grace of God Kingof Great Britain France and Ireland defender of the faith ampc An epistle written and humblypresented for His Majesties use and enlightning of the nation Early English BooksOnline National Library of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eebocitation99868963(Accessed 234 2010)

Evans A (1661) The Book of the Needle or a compendium for the vse of prenticesand journeymen aptly designrsquod to instruct them in the more perfect accomplishment ofsewing cutting fitting pressing and botching ampc ampc with some commemorations ofthe late time of confusion callrsquod the Great Rebellion and Commonwealth of England andof his part in bringing all to a joyous resolution by Arise Evans tailor and prophet EarlyEnglish Books Online National Library of Zembla On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboampmcf_id xrieebocitation99868666 (Accessed104 2010)

170 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

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3 N

ovem

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2014

angelic visitation that took place while he was sewing on the shopboard madeclear God also imparted his message directly by speaking to him in lsquoalaudable sharp shrill hasting voice near mine earrsquo (Evans 1653 10) Suchunverifiable accounts were more likely to be taken seriously in Arisersquos daythan in our own above all by the very people he most wanted to impress hischief opponents the Puritans Their religion emphasised the individualrsquospersonal relationship with God which bypassed social institutions andhierarchies and was at the core of religious experience While social andhierarchical elements were undoubtedly important in Puritanism thisemphasis on the individual tended to be democratic liberating and sub-versive It was also a spur to narrative the period of the Commonwealth wasan age of great literary activity much of it based on spiritual autobiography orpersonal diaries and journals often by men like Arise of humble originsSuddenly everyone was telling their story a story more often than not of Godmade manifest in human lives It was not unusual either for such manifesta-tions to take the kind of miraculous form they took in Arisersquos own story Inrecounting miracles that tended to confirm the church and monarchy ratherthan undermine them he was striking a shrewd political blow against one ofthe most potent sources of Puritan authority the personal narrative in sodoing however he may inadvertently have helped to establish the idea ofsuch narratives as fundamentally unreliable

The second confirmation of Arisersquos divine authority was his ability tosupport his case with scriptural references The voice that called him in hisroom in Blackfriars sent him to the Bible lsquoGo to thy bookrsquo The Bible was openon the table and Arisersquos eyes fell straight away on a message that confirmedhim in his role as a prophet This is an example of the sortes Biblicae themagical use of scripture as a method of divination But in Arisersquos case it wasaccompanied by a more unusual supernatural power the total recall ofscriptural texts

[I]mmediately upon this I had another understanding that the Scripturecame all of a sudden into my mind as if I had learned them by heartwith another understanding of them than I had before for before Ilooked on the Scripture as a history of things that passed in othercountries pertaining to other persons but now I looked upon it as amystery to be opened at this time belonging also to us and my tonguebecame fluent my answers so ready that all who knew me were amazedat it And whereas before I could say little or nothing in dispute nowwithin three days I had all the Scriptures at command and gave uponthem such an exposition that none could contradict me (Evans 1653 11)

In an age when the Bible was regarded as the ultimate authoritative textthis was a formidable power and this more than anything was the reason hewas so often listened to with respect by important men like Cromwell (Hill1991 59) If you could cite the Bible in support of your arguments it was noteasy to dismiss them It did not as I have mentioned stop him getting intotrouble from time to time but even then his virtuoso use of this ability couldcause consternation in his enemies When he was on trial at the Old Bailey thejudge no less a man than the Recorder of the City of London tried to cap

A Prophet as Unreliable Narrator Rewriting Arise Evans 167

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2014

Arisersquos quotations from Scripture Arise tells us lsquowhen I got him to speak thatlanguage I tossed him from place to place until he was ashamed that withanger he bade the keeper take me awayrsquo and at the next session theRecorder sent his Deputy in his place to avoid an embarrassing recurrence ofthe incident (Evans 1653 39)

The third confirmation of Arisersquos authority came from magical lore inwhich he was steeped and to which his own unstable personality addedlayers of complexity As Keith Thomas and others have pointed out this wasan age fascinated by prophecy A confused body of lore was disseminated inpamphlets attributed to mythical figures like Merlin Mother Shipton and thefictitious Master Truswell the Recorder of Lincoln This consisted of crypticmessages about characters called The Chicken of the Eagle The White Kingand The Dreadful Dead Man The astrologer and prophet William Lilly anacquaintance and rival of Arise claimed that the Dreadful Dead Man wasCharles I while the Chicken of the Eagle was Cromwell (Thomas 1997389442) Arise became involved in these prophetic arguments alwaystwisting them so that they prophesied success for the Royalists and failurefor anyone who opposed them At the same time he added his own personalbrand of word-magic based on the Welsh landscape of his youth Cadair Idrisfor example he translates quite spuriously as Arise Charles (instead of Chair ofIdris) making the mountain itself prophetic of the Restoration so that thevillage of Maes y Llan Cadair Idris where he once lived becomes charminglyArise Charles Church in Field (Evans 73)

Arise then is constantly trying to assert his authority to lay claim to being areliable narrator In his time just as in ours that was no easy task with somany different ideologies in conflict many people argued with him anddisputed his version of the truth all the more so because like CharlesKinbote much of what he said seemed insane Besides in that Christiansociety some claims were beyond the pale for everybody In 1656 a Quakercalled James Nayler was deemed to have impersonated Christ by riding intoBristol on a donkey For this blasphemy he was whipped branded on theforehead and his tongue pierced with a hot iron (Hill 1991 75) Arise onlynarrowly escaped a similar fate when publicly arguing with Puritanopponents in Spitalfields A Presbyterian minister Thomas Edwards reportedthat a Welsh tailor called Evans was telling people he was Christ (Hill 199154) Arise denied in his writings that he had ever said this the most he wouldadmit to was having said that Christ was speaking through him Theaccusation was serious enough though to cause the Puritans to drive himaway from Spitalfields they chased him down the street and when peoplecame out of their houses to see what was the matter the shouted exclamationlsquoThere goes Christ Stop himrsquo nearly caused a riot (Evans 1653 37) It was anapocalyptic period and no doubt some of those who heard the cries believedthem to be literally true (Hill 1991 60) Arise took refuge in a church wherethe sermon happened to be about the Second Coming causing still moreconfusion among the pursuers who had entered after him This led to hisarrest and temporary confinement in Newgate and Bridewell Prisons and thethreat of removal to the asylum Bedlam The incident is a good example both

168 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

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] at

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ovem

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2014

of the credulity of the period that allowed him much of the time to flourishand of its limits

It is a truism that writers turn to historical fiction because they find in itsomething that relates to their own era Arise Evans prophet madman andprototypical unreliable narrator is a Charles Kinbote of his time a figure whocould have stepped straight out of the pages of a postmodern novel It istherefore not surprising that I want to put him into one I will conclude thisessay by saying something about how I am going about it The first problem Ihad to face was the familiar one of third-person versus first-person narrativeThe answer seemed simple it is Arisersquos voice that fascinates me so thenarrative has to be first-person full of the ironies and unwitting self-revelations I so enjoy in a novel like Pale Fire But Arise has already told hisstory a story that for the most part I want to retell how then can I avoidsimply repeating his own words Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1978 8) hasargued that fiction is not a direct mimesis of the real word what it imitatesrather is other modes of discourse letters diaries autobiographies orsimply a person talking to us Pale Fire as we have seen is a novelmasquerading as an annotated long poem That suggested the possibility ofa book that was not on the surface trying to tell Arisersquos story Another criticalperception that helped me at this point was Viktor Shklovskyrsquos (1965 2829)observation on Tristram Shandy that Sternersquos aim is to slow down the actionand thus defamiliarise it as a metafictional first-person narrative closer toArise Evansrsquos time than to our own Tristram Shandy seemed a useful model forwhat I had in mind Putting these ideas together then I hit on the idea of TheBook of the Needle What if Arise had attempted following the Restoration andthe completion of his prophetic pamphlets to write a book about tailoringSurely his own obsessions and life story would have continually interruptedthe task the way Tristram is interrupted in his life story by digressions andphilosophical speculations or the way Kinbote is interrupted in his annotationof Shadersquos poem by his obsessive delusions about Zembla

Basing my novel on early modern sources is giving me the opportunity torethink some of the assumptions I would normally make about books andtheir structure In the seventeenth century marginal notes were an importantelement of the text Arise uses them typically to give Biblical support for hisarguments and sometimes to gloss some of his peculiar word-magic withWelsh place names Other writers used the marginal symbol of a pointingfinger or fister to draw attention to passages they considered particularlyimportant This suggests a slightly different attitude to text from that of themodern novel with its single wide column of print a book that has so muchgoing on in the margin is potentially pluralising its narrative running the riskthat the notes will compete with the main text Yet it is in such practices of self-taught early modern authors like Arise telling their stories in a rough-and-ready way without regard to unity that we see the novel itself start to emergea hybrid shapeless exuberant form packed to overflowing with anecdote andsubjective impressions Only much later was it to develop the confidentconventions we are familiar with Now postmodernism makes us question theconventions of the novel suggests other approaches than the classic model of amixture of dialogue and descriptive prose in which action and authorial

A Prophet as Unreliable Narrator Rewriting Arise Evans 169

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comment blend seamlessly to form a harmonious work of art Such a modelhad not yet emerged at the time Arise was writing so that in attempting toengage with his view of text I am simultaneously trying to liberate my own

CorrespondenceAny correspondence should be directed to Matthew Francis (mwf

aberacuk)

Notes1 I have modernised Evansrsquos spelling in quotations used in the text2 From now on I shall follow Hill in referring to him by his first name

References

Auster P (1987) The New York Trilogy City of Glass Ghosts The Locked Room LondonFaber and Faber Ltd

Austin J (1962) How to Do Things With Words JO Urmson (ed) Oxford OxfordUniversity Press

Booth W (1983) The Rhetoric of Fiction (2nd ed) Chicago and London University ofChicago Press

Boyd B (1997) Shade and Shape in Pale Fire On WWW at httpwwwlibrariespsuedunabokovboydpf1htm (Accessed 234 2010)

Calvino I (1992) If on a Winterrsquos Night a Traveller W Weaver (Trans) London MinervaEvans A (1653) An Eccho to the book called A voyce from heaven by Arise Evans showing

how in the years 1633 34 and 35 he forewarned the late King courtiers and commons of thegreat ruine of all the three nations and that the king should be put to death according tohis visions and prophesies also his exhortation now to the Parliament and all people forsetting up the Kings son in his stead according to that old unparallelrsquod prophesie of MTruswell recorder of Lincoln here opened which likewise declareth the things past presentand to come chiefly the revolution and dissolution of this state with the exaltation of theKing in the present year of grace 1653 London Early English Books Online NationalLibrary of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eeboimage154414

Evans A (1654) The Euroclydon vvinde commanded to cease or A quenching of the fiery dartsby Scripture-arguments declarations and visions Being a moderate vindication of hisHighness the Lord Protector from the popular aspersions first accasioned [sic] against him bythe malice of the Presbyterians and now blown up by all parties Also something in behalfeof the desolate Church and King Charles which declares hopes of union between himand his Highness the Lord Protector with an apology of the author concerning the year 1653and many other things discovered London Early English Books Online NationalLibrary of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eebocitation99862435 (Accessed 234 2010)

Evans A (1660) To the most high and mighty prince Charles the II By the grace of God Kingof Great Britain France and Ireland defender of the faith ampc An epistle written and humblypresented for His Majesties use and enlightning of the nation Early English BooksOnline National Library of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eebocitation99868963(Accessed 234 2010)

Evans A (1661) The Book of the Needle or a compendium for the vse of prenticesand journeymen aptly designrsquod to instruct them in the more perfect accomplishment ofsewing cutting fitting pressing and botching ampc ampc with some commemorations ofthe late time of confusion callrsquod the Great Rebellion and Commonwealth of England andof his part in bringing all to a joyous resolution by Arise Evans tailor and prophet EarlyEnglish Books Online National Library of Zembla On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboampmcf_id xrieebocitation99868666 (Accessed104 2010)

170 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

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Arisersquos quotations from Scripture Arise tells us lsquowhen I got him to speak thatlanguage I tossed him from place to place until he was ashamed that withanger he bade the keeper take me awayrsquo and at the next session theRecorder sent his Deputy in his place to avoid an embarrassing recurrence ofthe incident (Evans 1653 39)

The third confirmation of Arisersquos authority came from magical lore inwhich he was steeped and to which his own unstable personality addedlayers of complexity As Keith Thomas and others have pointed out this wasan age fascinated by prophecy A confused body of lore was disseminated inpamphlets attributed to mythical figures like Merlin Mother Shipton and thefictitious Master Truswell the Recorder of Lincoln This consisted of crypticmessages about characters called The Chicken of the Eagle The White Kingand The Dreadful Dead Man The astrologer and prophet William Lilly anacquaintance and rival of Arise claimed that the Dreadful Dead Man wasCharles I while the Chicken of the Eagle was Cromwell (Thomas 1997389442) Arise became involved in these prophetic arguments alwaystwisting them so that they prophesied success for the Royalists and failurefor anyone who opposed them At the same time he added his own personalbrand of word-magic based on the Welsh landscape of his youth Cadair Idrisfor example he translates quite spuriously as Arise Charles (instead of Chair ofIdris) making the mountain itself prophetic of the Restoration so that thevillage of Maes y Llan Cadair Idris where he once lived becomes charminglyArise Charles Church in Field (Evans 73)

Arise then is constantly trying to assert his authority to lay claim to being areliable narrator In his time just as in ours that was no easy task with somany different ideologies in conflict many people argued with him anddisputed his version of the truth all the more so because like CharlesKinbote much of what he said seemed insane Besides in that Christiansociety some claims were beyond the pale for everybody In 1656 a Quakercalled James Nayler was deemed to have impersonated Christ by riding intoBristol on a donkey For this blasphemy he was whipped branded on theforehead and his tongue pierced with a hot iron (Hill 1991 75) Arise onlynarrowly escaped a similar fate when publicly arguing with Puritanopponents in Spitalfields A Presbyterian minister Thomas Edwards reportedthat a Welsh tailor called Evans was telling people he was Christ (Hill 199154) Arise denied in his writings that he had ever said this the most he wouldadmit to was having said that Christ was speaking through him Theaccusation was serious enough though to cause the Puritans to drive himaway from Spitalfields they chased him down the street and when peoplecame out of their houses to see what was the matter the shouted exclamationlsquoThere goes Christ Stop himrsquo nearly caused a riot (Evans 1653 37) It was anapocalyptic period and no doubt some of those who heard the cries believedthem to be literally true (Hill 1991 60) Arise took refuge in a church wherethe sermon happened to be about the Second Coming causing still moreconfusion among the pursuers who had entered after him This led to hisarrest and temporary confinement in Newgate and Bridewell Prisons and thethreat of removal to the asylum Bedlam The incident is a good example both

168 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

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of the credulity of the period that allowed him much of the time to flourishand of its limits

It is a truism that writers turn to historical fiction because they find in itsomething that relates to their own era Arise Evans prophet madman andprototypical unreliable narrator is a Charles Kinbote of his time a figure whocould have stepped straight out of the pages of a postmodern novel It istherefore not surprising that I want to put him into one I will conclude thisessay by saying something about how I am going about it The first problem Ihad to face was the familiar one of third-person versus first-person narrativeThe answer seemed simple it is Arisersquos voice that fascinates me so thenarrative has to be first-person full of the ironies and unwitting self-revelations I so enjoy in a novel like Pale Fire But Arise has already told hisstory a story that for the most part I want to retell how then can I avoidsimply repeating his own words Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1978 8) hasargued that fiction is not a direct mimesis of the real word what it imitatesrather is other modes of discourse letters diaries autobiographies orsimply a person talking to us Pale Fire as we have seen is a novelmasquerading as an annotated long poem That suggested the possibility ofa book that was not on the surface trying to tell Arisersquos story Another criticalperception that helped me at this point was Viktor Shklovskyrsquos (1965 2829)observation on Tristram Shandy that Sternersquos aim is to slow down the actionand thus defamiliarise it as a metafictional first-person narrative closer toArise Evansrsquos time than to our own Tristram Shandy seemed a useful model forwhat I had in mind Putting these ideas together then I hit on the idea of TheBook of the Needle What if Arise had attempted following the Restoration andthe completion of his prophetic pamphlets to write a book about tailoringSurely his own obsessions and life story would have continually interruptedthe task the way Tristram is interrupted in his life story by digressions andphilosophical speculations or the way Kinbote is interrupted in his annotationof Shadersquos poem by his obsessive delusions about Zembla

Basing my novel on early modern sources is giving me the opportunity torethink some of the assumptions I would normally make about books andtheir structure In the seventeenth century marginal notes were an importantelement of the text Arise uses them typically to give Biblical support for hisarguments and sometimes to gloss some of his peculiar word-magic withWelsh place names Other writers used the marginal symbol of a pointingfinger or fister to draw attention to passages they considered particularlyimportant This suggests a slightly different attitude to text from that of themodern novel with its single wide column of print a book that has so muchgoing on in the margin is potentially pluralising its narrative running the riskthat the notes will compete with the main text Yet it is in such practices of self-taught early modern authors like Arise telling their stories in a rough-and-ready way without regard to unity that we see the novel itself start to emergea hybrid shapeless exuberant form packed to overflowing with anecdote andsubjective impressions Only much later was it to develop the confidentconventions we are familiar with Now postmodernism makes us question theconventions of the novel suggests other approaches than the classic model of amixture of dialogue and descriptive prose in which action and authorial

A Prophet as Unreliable Narrator Rewriting Arise Evans 169

Dow

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ded

by [

Nor

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ster

n U

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] at

08

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ovem

ber

2014

comment blend seamlessly to form a harmonious work of art Such a modelhad not yet emerged at the time Arise was writing so that in attempting toengage with his view of text I am simultaneously trying to liberate my own

CorrespondenceAny correspondence should be directed to Matthew Francis (mwf

aberacuk)

Notes1 I have modernised Evansrsquos spelling in quotations used in the text2 From now on I shall follow Hill in referring to him by his first name

References

Auster P (1987) The New York Trilogy City of Glass Ghosts The Locked Room LondonFaber and Faber Ltd

Austin J (1962) How to Do Things With Words JO Urmson (ed) Oxford OxfordUniversity Press

Booth W (1983) The Rhetoric of Fiction (2nd ed) Chicago and London University ofChicago Press

Boyd B (1997) Shade and Shape in Pale Fire On WWW at httpwwwlibrariespsuedunabokovboydpf1htm (Accessed 234 2010)

Calvino I (1992) If on a Winterrsquos Night a Traveller W Weaver (Trans) London MinervaEvans A (1653) An Eccho to the book called A voyce from heaven by Arise Evans showing

how in the years 1633 34 and 35 he forewarned the late King courtiers and commons of thegreat ruine of all the three nations and that the king should be put to death according tohis visions and prophesies also his exhortation now to the Parliament and all people forsetting up the Kings son in his stead according to that old unparallelrsquod prophesie of MTruswell recorder of Lincoln here opened which likewise declareth the things past presentand to come chiefly the revolution and dissolution of this state with the exaltation of theKing in the present year of grace 1653 London Early English Books Online NationalLibrary of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eeboimage154414

Evans A (1654) The Euroclydon vvinde commanded to cease or A quenching of the fiery dartsby Scripture-arguments declarations and visions Being a moderate vindication of hisHighness the Lord Protector from the popular aspersions first accasioned [sic] against him bythe malice of the Presbyterians and now blown up by all parties Also something in behalfeof the desolate Church and King Charles which declares hopes of union between himand his Highness the Lord Protector with an apology of the author concerning the year 1653and many other things discovered London Early English Books Online NationalLibrary of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eebocitation99862435 (Accessed 234 2010)

Evans A (1660) To the most high and mighty prince Charles the II By the grace of God Kingof Great Britain France and Ireland defender of the faith ampc An epistle written and humblypresented for His Majesties use and enlightning of the nation Early English BooksOnline National Library of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eebocitation99868963(Accessed 234 2010)

Evans A (1661) The Book of the Needle or a compendium for the vse of prenticesand journeymen aptly designrsquod to instruct them in the more perfect accomplishment ofsewing cutting fitting pressing and botching ampc ampc with some commemorations ofthe late time of confusion callrsquod the Great Rebellion and Commonwealth of England andof his part in bringing all to a joyous resolution by Arise Evans tailor and prophet EarlyEnglish Books Online National Library of Zembla On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboampmcf_id xrieebocitation99868666 (Accessed104 2010)

170 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

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] at

08

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3 N

ovem

ber

2014

of the credulity of the period that allowed him much of the time to flourishand of its limits

It is a truism that writers turn to historical fiction because they find in itsomething that relates to their own era Arise Evans prophet madman andprototypical unreliable narrator is a Charles Kinbote of his time a figure whocould have stepped straight out of the pages of a postmodern novel It istherefore not surprising that I want to put him into one I will conclude thisessay by saying something about how I am going about it The first problem Ihad to face was the familiar one of third-person versus first-person narrativeThe answer seemed simple it is Arisersquos voice that fascinates me so thenarrative has to be first-person full of the ironies and unwitting self-revelations I so enjoy in a novel like Pale Fire But Arise has already told hisstory a story that for the most part I want to retell how then can I avoidsimply repeating his own words Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1978 8) hasargued that fiction is not a direct mimesis of the real word what it imitatesrather is other modes of discourse letters diaries autobiographies orsimply a person talking to us Pale Fire as we have seen is a novelmasquerading as an annotated long poem That suggested the possibility ofa book that was not on the surface trying to tell Arisersquos story Another criticalperception that helped me at this point was Viktor Shklovskyrsquos (1965 2829)observation on Tristram Shandy that Sternersquos aim is to slow down the actionand thus defamiliarise it as a metafictional first-person narrative closer toArise Evansrsquos time than to our own Tristram Shandy seemed a useful model forwhat I had in mind Putting these ideas together then I hit on the idea of TheBook of the Needle What if Arise had attempted following the Restoration andthe completion of his prophetic pamphlets to write a book about tailoringSurely his own obsessions and life story would have continually interruptedthe task the way Tristram is interrupted in his life story by digressions andphilosophical speculations or the way Kinbote is interrupted in his annotationof Shadersquos poem by his obsessive delusions about Zembla

Basing my novel on early modern sources is giving me the opportunity torethink some of the assumptions I would normally make about books andtheir structure In the seventeenth century marginal notes were an importantelement of the text Arise uses them typically to give Biblical support for hisarguments and sometimes to gloss some of his peculiar word-magic withWelsh place names Other writers used the marginal symbol of a pointingfinger or fister to draw attention to passages they considered particularlyimportant This suggests a slightly different attitude to text from that of themodern novel with its single wide column of print a book that has so muchgoing on in the margin is potentially pluralising its narrative running the riskthat the notes will compete with the main text Yet it is in such practices of self-taught early modern authors like Arise telling their stories in a rough-and-ready way without regard to unity that we see the novel itself start to emergea hybrid shapeless exuberant form packed to overflowing with anecdote andsubjective impressions Only much later was it to develop the confidentconventions we are familiar with Now postmodernism makes us question theconventions of the novel suggests other approaches than the classic model of amixture of dialogue and descriptive prose in which action and authorial

A Prophet as Unreliable Narrator Rewriting Arise Evans 169

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

08

55 0

3 N

ovem

ber

2014

comment blend seamlessly to form a harmonious work of art Such a modelhad not yet emerged at the time Arise was writing so that in attempting toengage with his view of text I am simultaneously trying to liberate my own

CorrespondenceAny correspondence should be directed to Matthew Francis (mwf

aberacuk)

Notes1 I have modernised Evansrsquos spelling in quotations used in the text2 From now on I shall follow Hill in referring to him by his first name

References

Auster P (1987) The New York Trilogy City of Glass Ghosts The Locked Room LondonFaber and Faber Ltd

Austin J (1962) How to Do Things With Words JO Urmson (ed) Oxford OxfordUniversity Press

Booth W (1983) The Rhetoric of Fiction (2nd ed) Chicago and London University ofChicago Press

Boyd B (1997) Shade and Shape in Pale Fire On WWW at httpwwwlibrariespsuedunabokovboydpf1htm (Accessed 234 2010)

Calvino I (1992) If on a Winterrsquos Night a Traveller W Weaver (Trans) London MinervaEvans A (1653) An Eccho to the book called A voyce from heaven by Arise Evans showing

how in the years 1633 34 and 35 he forewarned the late King courtiers and commons of thegreat ruine of all the three nations and that the king should be put to death according tohis visions and prophesies also his exhortation now to the Parliament and all people forsetting up the Kings son in his stead according to that old unparallelrsquod prophesie of MTruswell recorder of Lincoln here opened which likewise declareth the things past presentand to come chiefly the revolution and dissolution of this state with the exaltation of theKing in the present year of grace 1653 London Early English Books Online NationalLibrary of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eeboimage154414

Evans A (1654) The Euroclydon vvinde commanded to cease or A quenching of the fiery dartsby Scripture-arguments declarations and visions Being a moderate vindication of hisHighness the Lord Protector from the popular aspersions first accasioned [sic] against him bythe malice of the Presbyterians and now blown up by all parties Also something in behalfeof the desolate Church and King Charles which declares hopes of union between himand his Highness the Lord Protector with an apology of the author concerning the year 1653and many other things discovered London Early English Books Online NationalLibrary of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eebocitation99862435 (Accessed 234 2010)

Evans A (1660) To the most high and mighty prince Charles the II By the grace of God Kingof Great Britain France and Ireland defender of the faith ampc An epistle written and humblypresented for His Majesties use and enlightning of the nation Early English BooksOnline National Library of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eebocitation99868963(Accessed 234 2010)

Evans A (1661) The Book of the Needle or a compendium for the vse of prenticesand journeymen aptly designrsquod to instruct them in the more perfect accomplishment ofsewing cutting fitting pressing and botching ampc ampc with some commemorations ofthe late time of confusion callrsquod the Great Rebellion and Commonwealth of England andof his part in bringing all to a joyous resolution by Arise Evans tailor and prophet EarlyEnglish Books Online National Library of Zembla On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboampmcf_id xrieebocitation99868666 (Accessed104 2010)

170 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

Dow

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ded

by [

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ovem

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2014

comment blend seamlessly to form a harmonious work of art Such a modelhad not yet emerged at the time Arise was writing so that in attempting toengage with his view of text I am simultaneously trying to liberate my own

CorrespondenceAny correspondence should be directed to Matthew Francis (mwf

aberacuk)

Notes1 I have modernised Evansrsquos spelling in quotations used in the text2 From now on I shall follow Hill in referring to him by his first name

References

Auster P (1987) The New York Trilogy City of Glass Ghosts The Locked Room LondonFaber and Faber Ltd

Austin J (1962) How to Do Things With Words JO Urmson (ed) Oxford OxfordUniversity Press

Booth W (1983) The Rhetoric of Fiction (2nd ed) Chicago and London University ofChicago Press

Boyd B (1997) Shade and Shape in Pale Fire On WWW at httpwwwlibrariespsuedunabokovboydpf1htm (Accessed 234 2010)

Calvino I (1992) If on a Winterrsquos Night a Traveller W Weaver (Trans) London MinervaEvans A (1653) An Eccho to the book called A voyce from heaven by Arise Evans showing

how in the years 1633 34 and 35 he forewarned the late King courtiers and commons of thegreat ruine of all the three nations and that the king should be put to death according tohis visions and prophesies also his exhortation now to the Parliament and all people forsetting up the Kings son in his stead according to that old unparallelrsquod prophesie of MTruswell recorder of Lincoln here opened which likewise declareth the things past presentand to come chiefly the revolution and dissolution of this state with the exaltation of theKing in the present year of grace 1653 London Early English Books Online NationalLibrary of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eeboimage154414

Evans A (1654) The Euroclydon vvinde commanded to cease or A quenching of the fiery dartsby Scripture-arguments declarations and visions Being a moderate vindication of hisHighness the Lord Protector from the popular aspersions first accasioned [sic] against him bythe malice of the Presbyterians and now blown up by all parties Also something in behalfeof the desolate Church and King Charles which declares hopes of union between himand his Highness the Lord Protector with an apology of the author concerning the year 1653and many other things discovered London Early English Books Online NationalLibrary of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eebocitation99862435 (Accessed 234 2010)

Evans A (1660) To the most high and mighty prince Charles the II By the grace of God Kingof Great Britain France and Ireland defender of the faith ampc An epistle written and humblypresented for His Majesties use and enlightning of the nation Early English BooksOnline National Library of Wales On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboamprft_idxri eebocitation99868963(Accessed 234 2010)

Evans A (1661) The Book of the Needle or a compendium for the vse of prenticesand journeymen aptly designrsquod to instruct them in the more perfect accomplishment ofsewing cutting fitting pressing and botching ampc ampc with some commemorations ofthe late time of confusion callrsquod the Great Rebellion and Commonwealth of England andof his part in bringing all to a joyous resolution by Arise Evans tailor and prophet EarlyEnglish Books Online National Library of Zembla On WWW at httpgatewayproquestcomopenurlctx_verZ3988-2003ampres_idxrieeboampmcf_id xrieebocitation99868666 (Accessed104 2010)

170 International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing

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Hill C (1991) Change and Continuity in Seventeenth Century England New Haven andLondon Yale University Press

Nabokov V (1973a) Pale Fire Harmondsworth Penguin BooksNabokov V (1973b) Strong Opinions New York McGraw-HillSmith B (1978) On the Margins of Discourse The Relation of Literature to Language

Chicago and London University of Chicago PressShklovsky V (1965) Sternersquos Tristram Shandy Stylistic Commentary In L Lemon L

and Reis M (Trans and Ed) Russian Formalist Criticism Four Essays pp 2557Lincoln University of Nebraska Press

Thomas K (1997) Religion and the Decline of Magic Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenthand Seventeenth Century England London Weidenfeld amp Nicolson

Waugh P (2003) Metafiction The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (2nd ed)London and New York Routledge

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