Who Speaks for Wales? Nation, Culture, Identity: The Centenary Edition by Raymond Williams (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Who Speaks for Wales? Nation, Culture, Identity: The Centenary Edition by Raymond Williams M. Wynn Thomas Who Speaks for Wales? Nation, Culture, Identity: The Centenary Edition. By Raymond Williams. Ed. by Daniel G. Williams. Cardiff: University of Wales Press. 2021. xviii+ 398 pp. £18.99. ISBN 978–1–78683–706–6. Reviewing The Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales in 1986, Raymond Williams deeply regretted that British literary specialists had habitually ignored the country's rich vernacular literature stretching back to the sixth century. This could be explained, he added, only by 'the fact of several centuries of political domination, and of a consequent cultural indifference, often punctuated by aggression' (p. 279). It is tempting to reach for the same explanation when confronted with the enduring obstinate refusal of British critics to take Williams's Welshness seriously. When Williams entitled his celebrated semi-autobiographical novel 'Border Country', he correctly identified the character of his native region in the Welsh Marches, where two societies and their cultures confronted and cross-fertilized each other. 'It was a place to find intimations of complexity', he wrote (p. 65), a perfect incubator for a mind that progressed to complex meditation on the social formations subtly and decisively inflecting individual identities. And it alerted him to the bewildering variousness and hybridity of modern Welsh identity. It was in 1979 that Williams emerged from his political closet and roundly declared himself to be a 'Welsh European', confessing that he had come to sympathize less with the English Left than with a European Left that had shown far greater understanding of the claims not only of marginalized classes but of marginalized peoples, such as the Basques and the Welsh. It is Williams's readiness to align himself with such that provides the solid basis for Daniel G. Williams's claim that he had developed into an anti-colonial thinker. Any attempt to comprehend this radical realignment of allegiance needs to be set in the context of political events in Wales, as well as in England, at that particular time. The phrase 'Welsh Europeanism' seems to have been first used in the 1930s by Saunders Lewis, the Catholic leader of a Plaid Cymru that was deeply conservative in outlook. For him, it was part of a project of recreating the religious and cultural unity that Europe had enjoyed before the Protestant Reformation and its bastard offspring, the individual nation state. [End Page 622] By the 1970s, however, Plaid had been reborn as a party well to the Left of Labour that was devoted to a kind of decentred communitarian socialism, and it actively sought solidarity with similar nationally based movements of the Left across Europe. Williams accordingly sought refuge from the moribund centrism of the English Left and the rise of a xenophobic Thatcherite neo-Liberalism in the company of intellectuals of the alternative Left in Wales. One of the most prominent was Ned Thomas, a committed Europhile nationalist who was founding editor of the important intellectual journal Planet, which regularly featured articles on beleaguered minorities from Brittany and Euskadi to Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Another important figure was Dafydd Elis Thomas, one of the most prominent and charismatic of the new young left-inclining leaders of Plaid Cymru. And like them, Williams supported movements to safeguard the Welsh language, which he regarded as important to English-speakers as well as Welsh-speakers. The role that culture had played historically in the maintenance of Welsh identity reinforced Williams's belief that it should not be viewed in the traditional Marxist way as a mere epiphenomenon of economic relations. It was as much a producer as a product. His comments on this formative process are strikingly pertinent: All significant shapes move, even if it is only a move to a new confirmation. The shape of Wales, more than most, is in constant movement, and this is of course unsettling. But our experiences have been so dynamic and so shifting that if the shapes had not changed we should now be wholly adrift: adrift of ourselves. (p. 58) Applicable to contemporary Wales, these observations are nowadays even more applicable to its once powerful neighbour...