Edward Thomas and World Literary Studies

Wales, Anglocentrism and English Literature

Andrew Webb

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781783162833
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

Edward Thomas and World Literary Studies offers a revelatory re-reading of Edward Thomas. Adapting Pascale Casanova s vision of world literature as a system of competing national traditions, this study analyses Thomas s appropriation of Anglocentric British literary culture at key moments of historical crisis in the twentieth century: after the First World War, either side of the Second World War, and with the resumption of war in Ireland in the 1970s. It shows how the dominant assumptions underpinning the discipline of English Literature marginalise the Welshness of Thomas s work, before combining this revised world literature model with fresh archival research to reveal how Thomas s reading of Welsh culture its barddas, folk and literary traditions is central both to his creation of an innovative body of poetry and to his extensive, and relatively neglected, prose. This study is groundbreaking in its contribution to recent debates about devolution and independence for Britain's constituent nations.

1

World Literary Studies and Britain

This chapter will briefly summarise Casanova’s theory of world literary space, in so far as it is relevant to this book, and as it is laid out in her 2004 English-language publication The World Republic of Letters. Analysis of her project will then follow, identifying three unresolved contradictions in her work that can be used to challenge the premises on which her idea of international literary space is based: her notion of ‘pure criticism’, her under-used concept of ‘literary capital’ and her invention of an ‘Irish paradigm’. The chapter will conclude with some modifications to Casanova’s set of ideas, offering a revised model that will determine the approach taken in subsequent chapters. While the ensuing discussion might seem at one remove from Wales and from Edward Thomas, its aim in refining her theory is actually to produce a revisionist version on which the analysis of Welsh literary space can subsequently be confidently based.

The potential of Casanova’s study is suggested by the outstanding reviews with which it was greeted on publication in left-wing and liberal intellectual journals in London and New York. Terry Eagleton called it ‘a path-breaking study’ and ‘a milestone in the history of modern literary thought’, while Louis Menand, with characteristic nonchalance, hailed a ‘rather brilliant book’.1 Perry Anderson, hailing Casanova’s attempt ‘to construct a model of the global inequalities of power between different national literatures’, declared that ‘whatever the outcome of ensuing criticisms or objections’, her work is ‘likely to have the same sort of liberating impact at large as [Edward] Said’s Orientalism, with which it stands comparison’.2 But how reliable a guide are such reviews to the usefulness of Casanova’s theory for the task of recovering for Wales a writer usually assimilated to an Anglicised Britain?

Casanova’s international literary space is ruthlessly competitive, composed of a series of linguistic-cultural areas within which there are national literary spaces. The power of each of these national literary spaces depends on its quantity of what Casanova calls ‘literary capital’: the status, prestige, and material infrastructure of its literature. A nation’s literary capital depends on the age of its literature, the number of its national classics, the reputation of the language for literary production, the volume of works produced, the volume of translation into and out of the language, as well as the existence of a professional milieu, a cultivated public, an interested aristocracy or enlightened bourgeoisie, a specialised press, sought-after publishers, respected judges of talent, and celebrated writers (WRL, p. 15). Apart from these material factors, Casanova points out that literary capital is also an ethereal phenomenon: ‘it rests on [the] judgements and reputations’ of key agents within the literary field (WRL, p. 16).

All these factors mean that the national spaces that accumulate the most ‘literary capital’ are those with the oldest and most distinguished literary histories, and those whose historical economic pre-eminence has enabled them to build up the material, educational and cultural attributes to sustain it. A nation’s ‘literary capital’, as Casanova defines it, is therefore relatively dependent on that nation’s political history. Indeed, the nations with the most literary capital are the European nations which, through imperialism, ‘by exporting their languages and institutions’, have followed a policy of ‘linguistic and cultural unification’; the result is a world literary space dominated by ‘linguistic-cultural areas’, each of which ‘preserves a large measure of autonomy in relation to the others’ (WRL, p. 117). Casanova identifies four of these areas, each with its own centre: Barcelona, the cultural capital for Spain and Latin-American nations; Berlin, the main city for German-speaking, northern European nations and non-Germanic central European countries formed after the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire; Paris, central for authors from French-speaking Europe, Africa and Canada; and London and New York, which vie to be the centre of literary culture in the Anglophone world (with London, according to Casanova, coming out on top). In each of these centres, there is a relative literary autonomy, which Casanova defines as a literature that operates more or less independently of the national and political contexts in which it finds itself. Here, texts are judged according to formal literary standards believed by authorities in each centre to be disinterested and purely aesthetic. By far the most important of these literary centres – because, in attracting writers from beyond the Francophone sphere, it also functions as a world literary capital – is Paris.

One critic to attack this premise is Christopher Prendergast, who suggests that ‘London and New York have “overtaken” Paris as the key metropolitan loci in the West’.3 Casanova does acknowledge that today’s literary world is in a ‘transitional’ phase, moving from Parisian dominance ‘to a polycentric and plural world in which London and New York chiefly, but also to a lesser degree Rome, Barcelona, and Frankfurt, among other centers, contend with Paris for hegemony’ (WRL, p. 164). However, it must be acknowledged that her understanding of ‘polycentric’ is, with the exception of New York, a Eurocentric one. Such it certainly seems to Debjani Ganguly, who accuses Casanova of operating a ‘Euro-comparativist template’, one which fails to account for literary centres that may today exist outside of Western Europe and North America, and which does not consider how the world of letters might look from, say, Beijing, Tehran, or Cairo, or even from ‘local’ places, remote from the literary centres, within Western Europe.4 The need to modify Casanova’s theory to account for the perspectives held by those away from Western literary centres, essential if her model is to be useful as far as Wales is concerned, is one of the areas that I consider later in this chapter as part of my own critique of her model.

Casanova narrates the historical development, from the sixteenth century onwards, of national literary spaces in Western Europe, a process that eventually led to the achievement in France, by the end of the nineteenth century, of what she calls an ‘autonomous’ literary field, a space in which literature could ‘determine its own laws of operation’, its writers free from the demands of the French national and political authorities (WRL, p. 37). The creation of ‘literary autonomy’ in France gave other countries concerned about cultural independence ‘no alternative but to try to compete’ (WRL, p. 70). National literary spaces based on this French model, in which ‘literature’ is the product of a classically educated elite, were developed in other Western European nations, including England. An effective challenge to the French model came from Prussian states, in particular from Johann Gottfried Herder, whose influence helped to bring about the second great stage in the formation of international literary space. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, demands for national emancipation became closely connected to demands for linguistic emancipation, and to a new-found interest in the language and culture of the ‘volk’ or people. This second stage had a marked effect on those smaller European languages that had come close to disappearing under political domination, and those that were now only spoken by a peasant population. The role of the writer, grammarian, lexicographer and collector of folk tales was now of paramount importance in the construction of national identity. It is worth pointing out that Casanova’s use of Herder as a basis for modern national identity is hardly new. For decades, critics have been debating the significance of Herder’s concept of the ‘volk’ and its relation to the traditions of ballad collection, the anthologising of folk material and the development of national identity in Europe. What is new is the scale of Casanova’s ambition. She places Herder in a historical narrative that stretches from sixteenth-century France through to what she identifies as a third great stage in the formation of international space: the post-World War Two (and ongoing) period of decolonisation. Here, ‘the newly independent nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, obeying the same political and cultural mechanisms, [have] moved to assert linguistic and literary claims of their own’ (WRL, p. 79).

The second and third stages have changed the structure of international literary space, effectively establishing an opposing pole of attraction to the pole of literary autonomy already established in the great literary centres. This opposition takes the form of a politico-national pole, which has emerged in each of the nations dominated by an external literary centre. According to Casanova, the role of the centre in respect of the nascent national literature is ambivalent. On the one hand, she argues that international centres export literary autonomy. In order to gain recognition at one of the centres (Casanova focuses particularly on writers who ‘make it’ in Paris), an author acquires the latest techniques of modernity, becomes ‘consecrated’ – or gains recognition – at the centre, and then returns to the dominated nation, importing what has been learnt. In this sense, Casanova argues that literary space is transnational. Not only does it have a structure based on centres and peripheries between which writers move, but the power of the centres encourages ‘literary autonomy’ in the nascent national literatures. International literary space is progressively unified along autonomous lines. On the other hand, as Casanova goes on to argue, this ‘universalising’ process is ambiguous. The centres of literary consecration

reduce foreign works of literature to their own categories of perception, which they mistake for universal norms, while neglecting all the elements of historical, cultural, political, and especially literary context that make it possible to properly and fully appreciate such works. (WRL, p. 154)

In the very act of recognition at the centre, there is ‘the ethnocentrism of the dominant authorities [and a] mechanism of annexation’ (WRL, p. 154). However, in spite of their position, and their imprisonment in ‘their own categories of perception’, authorities at the literary centres nonetheless succeed in spreading ‘autonomy’ to writers from dominated nations within their sphere. In order to make it work in a Welsh context, this idea is challenged in my revision of Casanova’s model, and will be dealt with later in this chapter.

The World Republic of Letters, at its heart, is an attempt to examine the range of solutions arrived at by writers from ‘the literarily least endowed countries’ in order to give ‘meaning and justification to [their] works and aesthetic preferences’ and to ‘construct a “generative” model capable of reproducing the infinite series of such solutions on the basis of a limited number of literary, stylistic, and essentially political possibilities’ (WRL, p. 177). To illustrate her model, Casanova sets out her ‘Irish paradigm’, a theoretical and practical framework that makes it possible to recreate and understand writers from dominated literary spaces, and give a comparative analysis of different historical situations and cultural contexts. It presents five consecutive stages through which writers from a dominated national literary space employ a range of strategies that enable them to achieve ‘autonomy’, both from a literary culture that is dominating their work, and from national-political demands within their own, nascent culture. For Casanova, Irish writers from 1890 to the mid-twentieth century provide a clear paradigm of this chronology, one that enables the critic to see a writer’s choice of a particular literary strategy in the transnational context of the dominant, and the dominated, nations, and thereby to recognise, understand and recover the writer for the dominated nation. This also has the effect of undermining and questioning the narrow, single-nation foundations on which the literature of the dominant nation is constructed.

Its first stage centres on the well-known group of Anglo-Irish intellectuals that included W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn, George Moore, George Russell, Padraic Colum, J. M. Synge and James Stephens, all of whom contributed in varying degrees to the project of ‘manufactur[ing] a national literature out of oral practices, collecting, transcribing, translating, and rewriting Celtic tales and legends’ (WRL, p. 305). This project succeeded both in presenting these popular legends through drama, and in evoking an idealised peasantry as a repository of national spirit, and ‘supplying, in English, the foundations for a new national literature’ (WRL, p. 307). A second stage involved the generation of interest in a national language – in the case of Ireland, Gaelic, achieved through the Gaelic League under the leadership of Douglas Hyde and Eoin MacNeill. This break with the English language was an attempt ‘to put an end to the linguistic and cultural ascendancy of the English colonizer’ (WRL, p. 307). It politicised a writer’s choice of language, forcing him to choose between ‘proponents of Gaelic’ (work that would be ‘recognised only in Ireland’) and writing in the coloniser’s tongue, English (which offered the possibility of ‘recognition in London literary circles and beyond’) (WRL, p. 310). Casanova suggests that an important development from this stage occurred in the work of J. M. Synge who, faced with the impossible choice between the extremes of a politicised Gaelic and a coloniser’s tongue, refused to choose.

Casanova’s third stage involves ‘the passage from neoromanticism – the idealization and aestheticization of the peasantry, seen as incarnating the essence of the popular “soul” – to realism – at first rural, then associated with urban life and literary and political modernity’ (WRL, p. 313). In the case of Ireland, this was best exemplified in the urban realism of the plays of Sean O’Casey. The next element in the development of a nascent national literary space is the writer who rejects the nationalist requirements of writing in her/his homeland in favour of exile in an external literary capital, a stage personified for Casanova in the figure of George Bernard Shaw. By moving to London and assimilating himself to British literary space, he found ‘a degree of aesthetic freedom and critical tolerance that a small nation capital such as Dublin, torn between the centrifugal pull of British literary space and internal self-affirmation, could not guarantee’ (WRL, p. 314). In recognising the contribution to Irish literary space of writers like Shaw, who, by emigrating to England, have suffered ‘accusations of national betrayal’ (ibid.), Casanova provides a model whereby those writers who were previously thought to have deserted their nation, contributing only to the literary history of their dominant neighbour, might be recovered for the literary history of the dominated nation. Her work in this area of course follows the (unacknowledged) lead of Irish critics including Declan Kiberd, whose critical work has long created a space in Irish literary history for such writers, including, in particular, Shaw.5

The final stage in the achievement of Irish literary space is exemplified in the work of James Joyce who, ‘exploiting all the literary projects, experiments and debates of the late nineteenth century … invented and proclaimed an almost absolute autonomy’ (WRL, p. 315). Joyce’s ‘whole literary work can be seen as a very subtle Irish re-appropriation of the English language’ (ibid.). He ‘dislocated’ English ‘by incorporating in it elements of every European language’, ‘by subverting the norms of English propriety’, and by ‘making this subverted language of domination [into] a quasi-foreign tongue’ (ibid.). By refusing to choose between the ‘English literary norms’ of London and ‘the aesthetic tenets of the nationalist’ Dublin, he also ‘disrupt[ed] the hierarchical relation between London and Dublin so that Ireland would be able to assume its rightful place in the literary world’ (WRL, p. 316).

By incorporating these literary strategies into her ‘Irish paradigm’, Casanova presents them not as ‘free’ choices available to the writer, but as ones that are themselves grounded in the material and historical context of the emerging nation. Not only does this paradigm provide a way of looking at literature that avoids seeing ‘each literary event, each work of literature [as] reducible to nothing other than itself’ (WRL, p. 320); it also militates against the tendency to see each ‘national particularism’ as a unique manifestation, rather than as a characteristic it might share with other nations. The paradigm also involves a consideration of the different genres in which a writer works. Rather than simply accepting the existence of a set of genres – the novel, poetry and drama, for example – and focusing on one of them, the different stages of the ‘Irish paradigm’ draw attention to the ways in which genres become recognised as literature. Stage one, for example, which considers the littérisation of folk tales, their translation onto the stage, and ways in which they become more widely disseminated, involves the critical consideration of a wide range of forms of writing to which some critical approaches would not ascribe value, including collections of folk tales, popular anthologies and literary journalism.

There are, however, contradictions in Casanova’s model of international literary space, which necessitate alterations to three of its aspects: her notion of ‘literary autonomy’, her concept of ‘literary capital’ and her ‘Irish paradigm’. The three changes made here will enable the revised model to work better in Welsh literary space, and directly inform this study’s critique of Edward Thomas. Firstly, Casanova’s view of the ‘literary autonomy’ exemplified in the ‘pure criticism’ practised by authorities in the centre is, as we have seen, in the final analysis, a benevolent one. They succeed in selecting from those marginalised nations a few writers who ‘make it’ according to the detached, aesthetic criteria they favour. These chosen few are the ones who comprehend the true and unequal structure of world literary space, and who are able to exploit it in order to increase the autonomy of other writers from their own nation. They strategically target success in the literary centre as a way of ‘subvert[ ing] the dominant norms of their respective national fields’ (WRL, p. 109). In other words, their success at the centre enables them to return to the dominated nation to challenge the national-political demands placed on writers from a nascent national literary space. They manipulate the centre’s ‘aesthetic models’, its ‘publishing networks’, its ‘critical functions’, and the prestige the centre bestows, in order to establish a freedom from political and national demands on a writer’s work (ibid.). This is the ‘universalizing literary autonomy’ which, Casanova claims, lies at the heart of international literary space. It is difficult in such a system to overestimate the importance of these centres to writers from the cultural periphery: Casanova argues that ‘every work’ from such areas that ‘aspires to the status of literature’ gains its status ‘solely in relation to the consecrating authorities of the most autonomous places’ (ibid.). ‘In reality’, she declares, continuing her bold claim, ‘the great heroes of literature emerge only in association with the specific power of an autonomous and international literary capital’ (ibid.).

Nonetheless, this aspect of Casanova’s model must be modified. ‘Pure criticism’, through which consecrating authorities at a literary centre recognise certain writers from dominated nations, does not have quite the benevolent effects that Casanova depicts. Instead of allowing the dominated nation to enter the structure of worldwide literary space, it might instead be seen as a tool for the dominant nation’s appropriation of that writer, one which has the opposite effect to that suggested by Casanova: one which sustains the marginalisation ...