Ex-centric Voices: The English Language Short Story in Wales

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The short story has been a major form of literary expression for the English-language writers of Wales, especially as an English-language literary tradition emerged in the first-half of the twentieth century; a number of Wales's most distinguished writers including Alun Lewis, Dylan Thomas, Rhys Davies and Gwyn Thomas have used the form extensively and successfully. But there has as yet been no systematic consideration as to why this should be, what it is about the form that appealed, and continues to appeal, to the Anglophone Welsh writer. Nor has there been an examination of what this short fiction reveals, directly and indirectly, about the experience of Welsh identity in English (the experience of some 75-80% of Welsh people) in the period. The present study will be the first book-length analysis of the significance of the short story form in Wales, by a theorized examination of the work of a range of the major practitioners in the genre, with a view to establishing recurring features of the genre, including literary techniques as well as thematic concerns, and to suggesting reasons for such features.In his influential study of the genre, The Lonely Voice (1963) Frank O'Connor, himself a distinguished short story writer, suggested that the short story characteristically expresses the experience of what he sees as marginalized communities, and individuals within such communities, groups with a sense of limited social, political and cultural power. Later theorists writing on the short story have tended to follow and develop O'Connor's view. In particular, Clare Hanson (Re-reading the Short Story, 1989) has suggested that the short story frequently deals with what she sees as 'ex-centric' cultural groups, 'outside the main centers of power [...] not part of official or 'high' cultural hegemony'; she suggests that the short story seems frequently to have been the form of expression of the exile, 'The writer who longs for a return to a home culture which is denied him'. This seems directly relevant to the experience of the Welsh writer in English; s/he feels a sense of marginality, geographically, culturally and politically; s/he is English-speaking, yet not English, and is also aware of being 'unhomed' from his/her native tradition by being unable, because of social change and English-language education, to speak the language spoken by their ancestors and, frequently, older members of their families. They write in English, but the Welsh language and culture remain in earshot. The study interrogates and develops Hanson's notion of the the short story writer as being 'unhomed' by considering the short story in Wales in terms of Freud's essay on the Unheimlich, usually translated as the 'Uncanny'' or the 'unhomely'. Freud sees the experience of the Uncanny as being rooted in a sense of unease in one's identity, an insecurity as to how one relates to one's surrounding world, an unease which might be momentary or more deep-rooted. The Uncanny, as Freud and his recent British commentator, Nicholas Royle (The Uncanny, 2003) indicate, can result from a sense of that which is familiar becoming unfamiliar or vice versa. This sense of defamiliarization from the surrounding world is indeed repeatedly manifested in the short story in Wales, e.g. in the surrealism of Dylan Thomas and Glyn Jones, and in the repeated insecurity of identity experienced by the protagonists of Alun Lewis. It is a manifestation, the study argues, of the wider sense of marginality and cultural insecurity experienced by the Welsh writer in English. This marginality is also manifested, for instance, in a thematic concern with states of isolation or 'homelessness' and use of hybrid registers--literary English, local colloquialism, vernacular elements of residual Welsh--which may be be seen to relate this writing to modes of hybridity which critics like Homi Bhabha have seen as characterising postcolonial literatures.