“In preparation for my reading of Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd, an episode from Cysgod y Cryman and some presuppositions.”

Border signs

- Islwyn Ffowc Elis in Artists in Wales (1971)

 I am reading an episode of the 1953 novel by Islwyn Ffowc Elis, Cysgod y Cryman.[1] The young English doctor Paul Rushmere drives over the Welsh border in a car. He is on his way from Liverpool to visit the Vaughan family at their home, Lleifior. He is poised on the brink of a successful career as a surgeon, and is engaged to marry Greta Vaughan, the daughter of a rich Welsh farmer.

 Rushmere drives past the border at 70 mph in his expensive car, a Gloria. The speed gives him a moment of freedom, cleansed of his daily work. However, he does not drive so fast that he does not notice, as he passes the border, the sign saying

 by the side of the road. The sign is passed, and the text then turns to Rushmere's reflections on the problems involved in marrying a Welsh woman. The main problem seems to be the cultural difference between England and Wales; and his departure point is the sign he has just passed:
 

 Ac yr ydym yn dod i Gymru, meddai wrtho'i hun. Pwy oedd am wybod? Sylwodd wrth basio fod y bwrdd wedi gogwyddo tua'r gwrych, fel petai rhywun wedi rhoi hergwd sbeitlyd iddo. Eitha peth ag ef hefyd. Onid oedd Cymru'n ddigon gwahanol ym mhob ffordd heb ei hysbysebu ar ei ffiniau?

^{. . . . . . . . . . . .}

And we are coming to Wales, he said to himself. Who wanted to know? In passing he noticed that the board had leant towards the hedge, as if someone had given it a spiteful shove. Serve it right too. Wasn't Wales different enough in every way, without announcing it on its borders? [40]

 What attracts me first of all is that there are at least two types of passage here. Rushmere passes the border of Wales and the text passes from one type of narration to another. One passage is overlaid on the other, with a resulting discrepancy. The text actually allows Rushmere to pass the sign before it lets him read it:
 

 Nid arafodd y Gloria wrth ei basio, ond yr oedd Paul Rushmere yn ddigon cyflym i ddarllen arno'r ddeuair freision:

^{. . . . . . . . . . . .}

The Gloria did not slow down in passing, but Paul Rushmere was quick enough to read on it the two words in capital letters: [39]

 So the border crossing comes before the narrative turn. This handling of time creates a little fold, the text of the sign tucked inside. We cannot tell if the text

 is a reproduction of the sign, or of Rushmere's reading of the sign.

 There are three overlapping stories here: 1. the reader reads the text; 2. Rushmere crosses the Welsh border; and 3. Rushmere experiences his own "inner" journey, narrating to himself as he drives. This last story is part of the larger story of future marriage; this episode contains such elements as the cleansing power of speed, the reading of the road sign, the questioning of the sign (a countersigning), the reading of Wales, etc. This is a reflection and an internal dialogue which makes possible the use of the 1st person plural in "Ac yr ydym yn dod i Gymru" - "And we are coming to Wales" - and also the rhetorical questions that follow.

 Rushmere's internal reading also contains a passage, with its own discrepancy. This discrepancy is not a fold, but a spacing: it is the conjunction "Ac" - "And". I will return to the slight delay involved in countersigning later. Suffice it to say that there is only one ac here. Rushmere reveals only one of the "ands" in the two possible phrases "Wales and England" and "England and Wales". The Welsh border is Welsh from whichever direction he approaches it.

 At least two points to keep in mind: 1. national and textual boundaries are superimposed within the text; 2. the reader reads about a reading (a "diagnosis", to use a word taken from later in the text[2]). Or perhaps two interrelated readings - one of the border, and one of the nation. One hinges onto the other.

Crossing (out) the border

 1. Ac yr ydym yn dod i Gymru ("And we are coming to Wales"): the repetition of what we have already learned from the sign initiates a certain irony. "You don't say!" might be the appropriate reply.

 2. Pwy oedd am wybod? ("Who wanted to know?"): if taken literally, we would answer by trying to find out who would want to know - but Rushmere's claim is that nobody wants to know, or rather, more exactly: that nobody wants to be told. But even given that "Pwy oedd am wybod?" is a rhetorical question, there is no way of knowing that Rushmere in fact wants the verb gwybod to mean "have made known to" rather than just "know". Only the next question makes clear that he does not mean to say that nobody wants to know that they are in Wales, that there is no use in knowing.

 3. Onid oedd Cymru'n ddigon gwahanol ym mhob ffordd heb ei hysbysebu ar ei ffiniau? ("Wasn't Wales different enough in every way, without announcing it on its borders?"): Rushmere wants us to answer: "Yes, of course there is no reason to announce the borders of Wales when Wales announces itself."

 Now, it would be possible to destabilize the irony of the first sentence ("Ac yr ydym yn dod i Gymru"), by isolating it from the following sentences as they stand in the text. There could, say, be quite another reason for choosing to delete signs announcing a nation at its borders. What if Rushmere had said "Pwy oedd i wybod?" instead of "Pwy oedd am wybod?"? Asking "Who was to know?" instead of "Who wanted to know?" would introduce a significant change of context. It would effectively question the status of the Welsh border as anything but an arbitrary point in a hedge: "smotyn gwyn llachar yn y gwrych" - "a bright white spot in the hedge" [39]. Instead of asking whether there was any point in announcing the Welsh border when Wales is so different in every way, he could have asked whether the Welsh border should at all be announced when one cannot see the difference between the one side and the other (it's the same hedge, after all). This would still keep the irony of "Ac yr ydym yn dod i Gymru" - "And we are coming to Wales".

 Rushmere wants to suppress the sign announcing the border, but as I have just shown, the provisionary undecidability of "Ac yr ydym yn dod i Gymru" shows that he could have at least two different reasons for doing so. One, born out by the following question, is that the sign is superfluous; the other is that the sign is not in accordance with its surroundings. The latter interpretation may be undercut by the context, but somehow it will not go away (I will return to it later). For the time being however, I will concentrate on the first interpretation, aware that it figures the truth of the nation as something disclosable (for it is already disclosed), rather than something approachable through mimetic resemblances (of signs to their surroundings).

Cleansing

- William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

 Rushmere clearly believes in epistemological economy. If Wales is different, then that announces itself; it does not need announcing in the form of signs. We know it already. The logic of this wish for economy is one of crossing out and of semiotic hygiene or cleansing, and these operations necessarily involve certain counterintuitive effects.

 Cleansing, and being cleansed, is a recurrent figure in Rushmere's way of thinking. I have already described how Rushmere feels cleansed by his journey in the Gloria:
 

 Teimlai'r awel yn blingo'r arogleuon ysbyty oddi ar ei wallt a'i ddillad. Yn lle rhengoedd o nyrsus yn cerdded hyd loriau'i ymennydd yr oedd coed a physt telegraff a gwartheg yn pori'n ddu ac yn wyn yn yr hafddydd. Yr oedd aroglau angau'n treio o'i ffroenau ac yn ei le yr oedd aroglau bywyd.

^{. . . . . . . . . . . .}

He could feel the breeze peeling the smells of the hospital from his hair and his clothes. Instead of rows of nurses walking along the floors of his mind there were trees and telegraph poles and cattle grazing black and white in the summer day. The smells of death ebbed from his nostrils and instead there were the smells of life. [39]

 He feels like a "ddyn newydd" - a "new man" [39]. Also, while driving, he does some cleaning himself:
 

 Er mwyn tynnu'r llwch oddi ar y ffenest flaen pwysodd ar fotwm bychan, ac o chwistrell fach gromiwm ym môn y ffenest saethodd dwy ffrwd fain o dd[[breve]]r dros y gwydr a'i olchi.

^{. . . . . . . . . . . .}

To get the dust off the front window, he pressed a small button, and from a small chromium jet at the bottom of the window two fine streams of water shot across the glass, washing it. [39]

 These two events of being cleansed and cleansing reveal the complexities of an opposition very important to this text: that between nature and modernity, which for the moment makes the passage from England to Wales work in Rushmere's favour. Rushmere is cleansed by the journey from city to countryside, but also by the fact that he is travelling in that symbol of modern technology, the car (the breeze mentioned is produced by the speed of the car itself). And then he himself has to clean this cleansing technology with the help of the car's built-in technological details. He is cleansed by nature and speed, but the windscreen has been dirtied.

 After crossing the border, he reflects upon the sign of the border, Wales itself, and then upon his love for Greta. He attempts an explanation:
 

 Yr oedd y Gymraes yn newydd, yn rhan o'r byd gwyrthiol anghynefin y tu faes i'r ysbyty.

^{. . . . . . . . . . . .}

The Welshwoman was something new, part of the wonderful, unfamiliar world outside the hospital. [40]

 This newness is clearly something of a fetish, because he has (it appears) often had relationships with foreign women before [41]. He has preferred to forget them quickly, to cleanse them from his mind - his love for Greta will no doubt help him here. The irreducible tension here however lies in Greta having held his attention for so long - one might ask whether she is in fact that new any more. The second novel of the diptych, Yn Ôl i Leifior (1956), makes clear that his love certainly does not last for long after marriage. Again, his fear of repetition (which caused him to move on so quickly from woman to woman) and his desire for the new are inscribed in a complex discourse of modernity.

 Or perhaps, as he suggests at first, the attraction lies in being beguiled by "ryw hud Celtaidd o'i chwmpas" - "some Celtic enchantment around her" [40]. This can only be cleansed away by the reduction entailed by the "newness" explanation. In the end, he is unable to decide.

 These reflections on his love for Greta develop into an evaluation of her whole household. He places himself in the position of his own parents, and develops a dialectic of negative and positive critique. This follows a rhythm typical of his reflections in this episode: a sort of pros-and-cons analysis. Concerning Greta's family, Rushmere points out both their general respectability, and their imperfections. These latter he wants to cleanse away, in case they should spread like cancer to the whole situation. Greta herself seems to be predisposed to a very abstract form of "ethnic cleansing":[4]
 

 Wedi cael ysgol yn Nolgellau yr oedd ei moesau a'i Saesneg yn ddigon da. Yr oedd yn gwisgo'n chwaethus, yn cerdded yn fonheddig. Fe wnâi Lerpwl y gweddill.

^{. . . . . . . . . . . .}

Schooled in Dolgellau, her manners and her English were good enough. She dressed tastefully, and walked with nobility. Liverpool would do the rest. [42]

 Lleifior and the Vaughan family are honourable, of course, but somewhat rustic:
 

 Nid oedd y lawntiau'n ddigon melfedaidd, na'r gro ar y dreif yn ddigon glân oddi wrth gudynnau powld o laswellt. Ac wedi mynd i mewn i'r tfl, yr oedd yn amau ar dro fod rhywbeth tebyg i aroglau llwydni yn y parlyrau, ac ambell sawr rhy amaethyddol yn treiddio o'r ceginau yn y cefn.

^{. . . . . . . . . . . .}

The lawns were not velvety enough, neither was the gravel on the drive clean enough of bold tufts of grass. And upon entering the house, he suspected from time to time that there was something like the smell of mildew in the parlours, and an occasional touch of something too agricultural penetrating from the kitchens in the back. [42]

 Rushmere's discomfort is founded on small imperfections, smells, dirt of which the house should have been cleansed (even Mrs. Vaughan's English "wedi casglu mwy nag ychydig o rwd" - "had collected more than a little rust" [42]). Almost predictably, this cleansing is involved in problems of modernity:
 

 Yr oedd chwaeth Mrs. Vaughan mewn dodrefn a llenni hefyd wedi sefyll ddeugain mlynedd yn ôl. Petai'n cael achos i fynd â'i rieni rywbryd i Leifior, ac yr oedd yn si[[breve]]r y câi, fe fuasai'n caru i bopeth yno fod wedi symud yn llwyrach gyda'r oes.

^{. . . . . . . . . . . .}

Also, Mrs. Vaughan's taste in furniture and curtains had come to a standstill forty years ago. If he had cause to bring his parents to Lleifior sometime, and that he was sure to have, he would have loved everything there to have moved more completely with the times. [42]

 Here Rushmere wants to cleanse away the past, or rather, the slight discrepancy involved in Mrs. Vaughan's delayed taste.

 This whole figure of cleansing becomes so dominant in this section of the book that one wonders in the end whether Henri Vaughan's pacifism (so tangled and problematic [43]), and the presence of the ex-POW farm-hand Karl (who should have disappeared in the burning desert of the war in North Africa), must also be washed away and rubbed out.[5] But it is a figure regulated by three powerful and interconnected figures:

 1. Modernity. Rushmere is stereotypical of the modern doctor. He not only asks for hygiene, but also diagnoses by a filtering, a cleansing away of various symptoms. His main desire is to rid, or cleanse, the body of disease. He is also stereotypical of the modern Englishman, who wants to clean away any signs of Wales (either be they border signs or that collection of Welsh signs, the Welsh language). In both cases we might talk of paranoia, in the sense of over-reaction against foreign bodies, dirt.

 2. Dialectics. What Rushmere does in his reflections is to grapple with the truth, attempt to attain knowledge, through a rhetorical analysis, for and against. In each case the rhythmic diagnosis peters out in small aporias, either not reaching an answer, or presenting an exception. This general suppression of the oppositions presented is also repeated in the last paragraph of the chapter:
 

 Fodd bynnag, yr oedd Paul heddiw, ar ddydd a oedd yn gymaint o Fehefin, a'r Gloria isel yn hollti'r tes o'i flaen, yn barod i faddau llawer i Leifior am ei fod yn gartref i Greta. Ac wrth adael Henberth gysglyd o'i ôl ac anelu trwyn hir y modur tua chromen borffor Moel yr Afr, fe aeth amheuon a phryderon Paul Rushmere yn bethau bychain iawn.

^{. . . . . . . . . . . .}

Today however, on a day which was so June, and the low Gloria cleaving the haze before him, Paul was prepared to forgive Lleifior a lot for being Greta's home. And leaving sleepy Henberth behind him and bending the long nose of his motor towards the purple dome of Moel yr Afr, Paul Rushmere's doubts and worries became very small things. [43]

 Here, Rushmere cleans away all his problems by suppressing and forgetting all the tangled contradictions he has just been thinking about. His reaction on being faced with the inaccessible in others (nations, love objects) is to replace them with an aestheticized landscape.

 3. Psychoanalysis. It is in the description of the household that the desire for cleanliness becomes susceptible to the most vulgar of Freudian analyses. Rushmere, victim of an anal-retentiveness brought on by post-war modernity. Or rather, by being too strongly bound to his parents. His father is a county health-officer [41], inspector of medical purity; and Rushmere's whole reading of Greta's household, and partly of Greta herself, is justified by the question of what his parents will think. Rushmere is a suppressive character ready for self-deconstructive backfire (over-cleanliness just produces more dirt) or for regular self-destruction. In the sequel, he is killed by drinking and driving - as it happens, on another journey from Liverpool to Lleifior - and this is behaviour not expected of a doctor.[6]

 The psychoanalytical dimension has certain ramifications for the whole episode on other planes. The dialectic contrasts Wales and Greta, Greta being an exception among the Welsh:
 

 Yr oedd yn sicir ei fod yn iawn [am y Cymry], ond nid oedd mor sicir fod pob un o'r Cymry cynddrwg. Wedi'r cyfan, yr oedd ar ei ffordd i weld Cymraes.

^{. . . . . . . . . . . .}

He was sure that he was right [about the Welsh], but not so sure that each one of the Welsh were that bad. After all, he was on his way to see a Welshwoman. [40]

 But the narrative is then cleansed of this dialectic. The journey to Greta is also a journey to Wales, and both Greta and the Welsh countryside are seen as cleansing agents and reliefs from life in Liverpool. The passage from reflection on border sign and the reflection on Wales suppresses the difference between Wales and the Welsh. But this suppression covers over strong tensions between the Welsh landscape, the Welsh people, and Greta Vaughan (caught between the two). The journey from Liverpool to Greta is chiastically figured to the journey from England to Wales:
 

 Yr oedd ei bryniau gleision yn wahanol i strydoedd blinion Lerpwl, ond yr oedd hynny'n dda. Nid cystal oedd fod ei phobl yn wahanol i'r bobl yr oedd ef yn ennill ei damaid yn eu mysg.

^{. . . . . . . . . . . .}

Its green hills were different from the tiresome streets of Liverpool, but that was good. It was not so good that its people were different from those among whom he earned his living. [40; my italics]

The switch of this chiasmus is produced by Rushmere's desire for something Welsh. In fact, the difference between England and Wales may not have been constituted for Rushmere as such before the point (described in a flashback within his reflections) that he tells his father about Greta:
 

 Pan soniodd am Greta wrth ei dad, saethodd aeliau hwnnw i fyny bron i'w wallt. "A Welsh girl? Good Heavens, what's come over you, my boy?"

^{. . . . . . . . . . . .}

When he mentioned Greta to his father, the latter's eyebrows shot almost up to his hair. "A Welsh girl? Good Heavens, what's come over you, my boy?" [41]

 Before this point, the contrast between Liverpool and the Welsh countryside is a contrast internal to England, because the countryside of Wales and Welsh culture have not as yet been conflated.

 In one respect, the problems revealed in this unravelling posit the subject of these meditations as an effect of their figurations. The process is similar to that found by social theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno as regards anti-Semitic paranoia.[7] For them, Rushmere would be subject to the "half-education" in which[8]
 

 all words [border signs, for example] become part of the delusive system, of the attempt to possess through the mind everything for which experience is inadequate [...]. Half-education, which [...] hypostasizes limited knowledge as the truth, cannot stand the now intolerable gulf between within and without, between [...] appearance and essence. [195- 6]

 Rushmere, in passing the border sign, has to face the division between the thought and the un-thought necessary in any representation of nation. For Adorno and Horkheimer, "paranoia is the symptom of the half-educated man" [195],[9] and comes about when the subject is constructed through a morbid form of false projection in which reflection is absent. In general:[10]
 

 Between the true object and the undisputed data of the senses, between within and without, there is a gulf which the subject must bridge at his own risk. In order to reflect the thing as it is, the subject must return to it more than he receives from it. [188]

 For the paranoiac:[11]
 

 When the subject is no longer able to return to the object what he has received from it, he becomes poorer rather than richer. He loses the reflection in both directions: since he no longer reflects the object, he ceases to reflect upon himself, and loses the ability to differentiate. [189]

 Witness the progressive failure of Rushmere's reflections.

 Only in his desire does Rushmere realise the difference between himself and the Welsh. The logic of this desire reveals more about the self in that logic's tension with the self. For when Rushmere attempts his reading of the Welsh (following on his rhetorical questions [40]), this reading is not simply a contrastive reading of Wales as different from England. His representation of Welsh culture is figured by a lack of access: as a culture of people "anodd eu deall" - "difficult to understand"; with hidden treasures; with a language which closes off external access; a culture which takes the form of a cult ("cwlt gwerin" - "a folk cult"); bottled off ("wedi'i ail-fragu a'i gostrelu" - "re-brewed and bottled"); shifty and too drunken to be open to rational investigation. Wales is a cryptic entity. Wales is in effect only to be known through inscriptions such as border signs.[12] Rushmere's logic is too rigorous. The self-reflexivity of the Welsh culture which he constructs alongside a contrast to England produces an enclosed economy which forces upon itself the only possible signifier of self-ownership: the proper name. This is the only way he can know the other.

 It is this proper name, materialised as the sign at the border, which Rushmere wants to cross out. Unfortunately, the logic of crossing out is a messy, dirty logic, as can be seen by the failures of the dialectical, criss-cross movements of this whole section of the text. Trying to clean away the sign, Rushmere only makes it more obvious. And in countersigning, he is forced to sign himself ("cross himself"), not only reconfirming the sign, but also identifying himself.[13] The border sign seems arbitrary, but becomes vital to Rushmere's whole project and to his own problems of identity.

Approaching Wales

 Rushmere wants to suppress the sign announcing the border, but what he also suppresses and asserts at the same time is the difference between geography and culture, between the homonymous Cymru ("Wales") and Cymry ("Welsh people"). From his rhetorical hinge to his further meditations, the u is substituted by a y [40], transforming the topic from Wales to its people - and, to use a convenient metaphor, its culture. For Rushmere, these are subsumed, in which case he reads the road sign as just misplaced, literally too far away from the real thing. Or even unplaceable: the proper name "CYMRU / WALES" always being out of place, improper. It is a lie, because it does not resemble its immediate surroundings.

 In the approach to Wales, one arrives at the Welsh somewhat after one has crossed the border: the border is displaced, and replaced by a gradual approach  - and one cannot know exactly when one has crossed the border. By "merely rushing" past, Rush- mere shows that his accusation that the sign is superfluous is undermined by the arbitrary positioning this superfluousness produces. As he "de- limits" Wales, placing limits while apparently removing them, he reveals that his play of national undecidability is already inscribed in the specificity of the Welsh border.

 In this way, the whole Welsh border loses some of the nature of a geographical entity, and becomes more of an event, or a series of events. Each crossing of the border is accompanied by a countersigning of some sort, and this countersigning itself produces a small gap. Between the border sign and the countersign one might find a few seconds, a certain physical distance (if one is travelling at 70 mph), and an ac ("and") - opening an unmappable zone within the border.[14]

A novel

 However, such considerations should not lead one too quickly to the conclusion that Rushmere's reflections are totally spurious. They are rather already inscribed in the Welsh border, and that for a very good reason having to do with the origins and constantly renewed circumstances of this border. It is this already inscribed logic which finds expression in the novelistic discourse when Rushmere's failed attempt at suppression of the border sign is prefigured in the sign itself:
 

 Sylwodd wrth basio fod y bwrdd wedi gogwyddo tua'r gwrych, fel petai rhywun wedi rhoi hergwd sbeitlyd iddo. Eitha peth ag ef hefyd.

^{. . . . . . . . . . . .}

In passing he noticed that the board had leant towards the hedge, as if someone had given it a spiteful shove. Serve it right too. [40]

 Note also that the sign is placed at a turn - that figure of continuity and change in one - in the road:
 

 Draw, yn y tro nesaf yn y ffordd, ymddangosodd smotyn gwyn llachar yn y gwrych.

^{. . . . . . . . . . . .}

Ahead, at the next turn of the road, a bright white spot appeared in the hedge. [39]

 It is the Welsh border itself (not just the novelistic discourse) which produces the gaps and deferments which figure Rushmere's discourse; and also far more specific effects, not general to all borders, and undoubtedly connected to the special position Wales has as a "principality", a dependency.

 Rushmere is carried past the border mark by his transport, a car, without being stopped for any red tape business, passport protocol - he does not have to show or sign anything. The question is: what would have happened if Rushmere had been forced to stop? Asked to show some sort of identification? Would he then have been able to defer his reflection until a point a little longer down the road? Would the gap between the limits of Wales and its culture be closed, both projected down onto the border of a nation-state?[16]

 Rushmere's unease comes from the division of the trait of Welsh culture into distinctive feature (culture) and drawn limit (border) - he wants to affirm the feature, but at the same time deny the limit.[17] This limit which is undoubtedly presided over by the law. But had he been faced with the law, had the law been "present" in the form of customs officials and immigration police, perhaps this unease would have been replaced by some other unease: the fear of being turned back.

 The reason I wish to focus on the sign, this road sign which seems so insignificant, like any other sign along a road, and even more useless, since it supplements the cultural features it announces, lies in its very contingency. It is somehow different from its possible substitutes - passport control, customs house, electric fence - it does not have the weight to constitute a non-ambivalent limit between two nations, a clear difference between England and Wales. One effect and one sign of this is the dominant unidirectionality of this border. This is, after all, historically the border of the Welsh Marches: Marchia Wallia, not Marchia Anglia. The border sign says it all: its bilinguality gives only a simulacrum of the truly translative border sign which provides one name each for the two languages on each side of the border. A border like, say, the German-French border will no doubt display all kinds of invaginations; but at least it has a double name. And this is the crux: even I, when writing in English, call it the Welsh border, and that's all.[18] It is precisely because of this that this border signifies the specific otherness of a certain genre of nations, nations without states of their own.

 At the beginning of this reading, I picked up on the point that the road sign "CYMRU / WALES" marks passages over both national and textual boundaries. Thus, the problem of the "fictionality" of Rushmere's reflections might be turned on its head. Rather than being destabilized by its "fictionality", Rushmere saying what he has to say has implications for the possibilities of at all producing a multiple or polyphonic discourse within the novel. One of the qualities of Cysgod y Cryman and its sequel, Yn Ôl i Leifior, are the very suspensions in which the reader is held with regard to which enunciative positions (political, religious, moral) can be identified with the narrator. These suspensions are held in place by the shifts (border-crossings) which take place in genres or modes of discourse, for example from "account" (Rushmere crosses the border) to "reflection" (Rushmere reflects on the border).[19] It is the possibility of crossing textual borders which constitutes the novel in its ideal form as a mixing of genres. Neither would the novel described by Benedict Anderson as a "technical means of `re-presenting' the kind of imagined community that is the nation" survive without this modal polyphony.[20] This episode from Cysgod y Cryman raises question of how the connection between novelistic discourse and national representation is inscribed in the Welsh context.

 And coming to the text or the nation from outside (instead of examining internal traits), Rushmere's road sign is not unlike the word "novel" (or "nofel") on the title page of a book like Cysgod y Cryman. At the approach to the text - this text containing a textuality previous to such signs, but only isolated as a text by such announcements, such announcements being part of the legal protocol which assures the text's status as a text - the reader meets a sign saying "novel". And yet, the novelistic status of text is waiting to be reaffirmed after the reader has completed her approach. So this sign can be read as superfluous; either that or a necessary warning to remind the reader that the reality of the novel is not the same as the reality of the world. The irony of Rushmere's paranoid unease is that of a reader aware of both possibilities.

Allegories of nation and text

 - Claudio Magris, Danubio (1986)

 Many of the problems with the "fictionality" of the novel stems from the fear brought to bear on this difference between reality and the text; or more precisely, between the text of the world and the text of the work, between the inside and outside of the book or narrative or whatever. Readers will tend to suppress and thus reaffirm the signs of this difference each time they read a work of literature. This gap between suppression and affirmation shows the dynamics of the gap between world and work. Strangely, each work, producing as it does textual worlds, has world-nature given to it, while the world, being too big and formless, loses world-nature. The suppression and affirmation of difference between world and work follows the rhythm of reading, a rhythm provided for by the protocols of textual genre.

 My shift from Rushmere and Wales to reader and text suggests that the difference between genres can be figured also by the difference between nations. An allegorical reading of this kind is productive because at each turn it leaves a new residue to be reintroduced into the allegorical economy. An illustration: on the return journey from genre to nation, it might be observed that Rushmere believes (or is forced to believe) that his own, English, culture somehow has the neutrality of the World, of reality.

 Each turn of this allegorical reading will suggest certain discussions which I will be opening up in the rest of this dissertation:

 1. It presupposes that nation is subject to various figural representations, for example, the metaphor of text. It will be my job to show that the intimate relationship of genre to nation is not limited to this metaphor, but also opens for other figures - bodies, houses - which in turn may figure genres and texts.

 2. It brings into play a psychoanalytical dimension in which a) both genre and nation are approached via border crossings - to be broached by certain protocols, b) the fully constituted genre or nation also asks something of its reader, and ultimately c) selves are constituted by these protocols - not only the protocols of nationality, but also those of textual and literary genres. Knowledge is regulated by the uncanny logic of the border sign and accompanying splittings of the border.

 3. It points to the possibility of figuring certain genres and certain types of nation as radically other, with their otherness hinged onto the protocols met at their borders. In the Rushmere episode, the border sign points to its own insignificance, and thus reaffirms itself as a marker of a radical difference between England and Wales (as entities belonging to two different genres of nations). This reaffirmation can take place as a countersigning, but while this act of countersigning must be inherent to all border crossings, this does not necessarily mean that it does not differentiate between them. A border mark has its own textuality, and might differentiate between different kinds of border, not only between the two sides which follow each and every border.

 The possibility of difference between different kinds of border must, following the nation-text allegory, also apply to the textual universe. In some (realist) texts, say, the world of the work is easily confused with the world outside the work, and announcements like the word "novel" written on the title page are so suppressible that they are often left out. In other (fantastic) texts, the approach to the world of the text is much more abrupt; the difference between the world of the text and the world outside is affirmed immediately after a possible announcement of genre.

 In the rest of this dissertation I will be exploring what one might have thought would be such an "abrupt" text. It is a text, also by Islwyn Ffowc Elis, which precisely because it is a science-fiction text, itself crosses the border into Welsh literature. It is also, at the same time, a text which contains many crossings from nation to nation.

Some presuppositions

 While the status of Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd as "literature" has been put in doubt - not least by the author itself - it is an important book in the Welsh literary canon. It was widely read on its publication, and has provoked much discussion and criticism - addressing as it does problems highly relevant to its readership (Welsh-readers highly concerned with problems of national identity). It will probably never gain access to an international literary canon. I hope however that this dissertation may contribute to its putative entrance into a critical canon of books which raise important questions about what literature is, and more specifically, about the connection between literary genre and other forms of identity.

 My reading is divided into three parts concentrating in turn on problems of reading, nation and genre. The first part (reading) reads Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd for the book's own theory of reading, and provides terms necessary for the discussion in the other two parts (nation and genre). In one sense, the last two parts branch out independently from the first, and one might claim that this dissertation is really two dissertations, one on nation, and one on genre. The part on reading provides however the basis for various allegorical bridges between nationality and textuality, binding them together in a way made more explicit in my epilogue, where I examine the connection between nation and genre under the influence of a proposed "poetics of the border". If the parts on nation and genre seem open-ended, it is because I have delayed each their endings to this conclusion.

 On the way, my reading opens up to discussions taking place within various academic fields and disciplines. First and foremost, I address a discussion taking place on the forms of literary representation most useful to the politics of the nation. To this end I also have to engage in debates taking place 1. outside literary studies, on the nation, on the practice of politics, and on the kinetics of modernity[21] - and 2. inside literary studies, on genre itself. On the nation side, I cannot avoid (nor do I wish to avoid) an entanglement with the problems of uneven power relationships as set forth by the last decade or two of development within post-colonial studies and more specifically, work with so-called "minority" cultures. On the genre side, I have had to take a welcome diversion into science-fiction studies - welcome because science fiction has long been a major interest to me. This diversion - here wholly secondary to my main purpose - also involves Tzvetan Todorov's writings on the fantastic, an involvement I feel is justified by the special configuration science fiction takes within Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd.[22]

 I also hope that my reading contributes to Welsh criticism and literary history, and to the study of Welsh nationalism and national identity.

 In this delineation of the none-too-disciplined field of debate into which I enter - and in the preceding discussion which lays the basis for a border poetics, a field which is in the making - I have already hinted at some of the suppositions which enable the following reading. Here follow some further clarifications:

 1. Reading. Throughout the dissertation, I attempt to read Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd from within a deconstructive tradition (the word "tradition" of course implying an unavoidable self-difference which I will be returning to in my discussion of nation). This means here that I am committed to being open to the singularity of the text, to letting the text itself define how it is to be read, to giving the materiality of the text a part to play in a "thematic" reading, to ignoring any attempted divorce between "theory" and "practice", and to reading rhetorically with the help of implicit allegorical connections between reading, nation, and genre. I have also made wide and not always explicit use of the writings of Jacques Derrida, especially three texts from widely removed parts of his career: "La double séance" (for its Mallarméan discussion of the articulation of the text by internal and external gaps and veils), "La loi du genre" (for its discussion of the connection between genre and textual borders), and "L'autre cap" (for its discussion of political identity and "heading").[23] My views on the responsibility (or lack of it) of the literary institution are also based for the most part on Derrida's discussion in Derek Attridge's interview, "This Strange Institution Called Literature".[24]

 2. Nation. Studies of the nation and of nationalism tend towards two extremes. On the one hand, a realist like Ernest Gellner attempts to strip away the symbolic language of nationalism (seen as ideological and false) in order to gain access to the actual social processes behind the establishment of modern nation-states;[25] on the other, somebody like Benedict Anderson (in Imagined Communities) is mostly interested in the symbolic dimension of nationhood - how nations are created with the help of different forms of representation (such as the novel). Both approaches presuppose a paradoxical view of history where on the one hand a reinvented tradition is used to legitimise the nation, and on the other, historical continuities are denied in order to produce the disconnected time of the homogeneous nation.

 All nations (like all things and concepts) are subject to a crisis of representation. They attempt to cross over this gap by using symbols, maps, censuses, parliaments, budgets, heroes, characters, languages, national literatures, histories, academic studies and literary genres (to name a small selection). Placing myself thus within the "symbolic" camp of nation studies, I privilege in my discussion those representations which destabilize the national homogeneity they were harnessed to reinforce. The time-travel paradoxes of Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd are suitable means of exposing the inherent instability of national borders, delineations and identities. I try however to avoid the attractions of the "exposé" of national ideology; I cannot discount the possibility that internal differences in an identity in fact shore up that identity.

 Wales has a special status as a "nation", seeing that what government it has is not a representative government. The border crossed by Paul Rushmere defines in its uncanny doublings the uneven power relationship between England and Wales, which in turn leads to doublings and splits in identity typical of a colonial or minority situation. Welsh people experience a split between Welshness and "Britishness", between their identity in their own eyes and in the eyes of others. Representation is split between a direct mimesis and a shifty mimicry. Examination of external and internal borders leads to similar conclusions.

 This is the view of nation current in post-colonial studies, for example in the work of Edward Said and Homi K. Bhabha. And as Bhabha suggests, these uncanny splittings are by no means limited to colonies and minorities.[26] Arguments developed within the study of a stateless nation have a certain applicability to all nations. All nations are in the process of becoming. The most apparently stable and homogeneous nation is built around an internal colonialism; its nationalism is only invisible because it is all-pervasive.

 3. Genre. European Classicism brought with it an attempt to sort literature into three classes: epic, drama and lyric. This genre triad constituted the whole of literature, and other marginal or hybrid forms (the novel and Elizabethan drama, for example) were to be kept outside this canon. The classicists were inspired by Plato and Aristotle, who had divided "literature" into two or three classes according to its relationship to reality; and drama again by stylistic criteria into comedy and tragedy. Other forms, such as the classical novel and the pastoral, were kept outside this classification, and one of the main weaknesses of the classicist co- option of Plato and Aristotle was that the lyric genre had not been clearly established in its modern form before the Renaissance.

 By the 1900s, the classicist triad had disintegrated - today it only survives as a set of ideal archetypes only productive within a limited literary sphere (which, it must be noted, certainly did not contain Welsh literature until recently). Benedetto Croce's denial of the relevance of genre to literature is symptomatic of this disintegration, but the earlier German romantics had already set a confusion of the triad in motion. By making epic, drama and lyric into archetypes, they opened for a multiplicity of genre mixtures and hybrids as the product of underlying forms. Their interest in hybrid and marginal genres like Elizabethan drama, the novel, and the fragment prefigures a later privileging of these and many other genres which grow in the cracks in and around the triad: the prose-poem, the autobiography, the short story, etc. The growing dominance of the novel also brings with it its modern and popular sub-genres - like science fiction. Indeed, a confusion between the use of genre in terms of literary genre and genre painting ("painting of the everyday life of the people") produces a modern usage, genre literature, meaning prose written within these popular genres.[27]

 My usage of the term genre is for the most part the same as a modern writer on genre like Alastair Fowler, in his 1982 Kinds of Literature.[28] His theory of genre is the consequence of the modern fragmentation of genre systems like the triad. Genres are now seen as uncountable in number, always appearing, changing, mixing and infecting each other. A- historical archetypes are not accepted, and nor are divisions like that between "theoretical" and "historical" genres suggested by a structuralist genre-theorist like Tzvetan Todorov.[29] Significantly, Fowler does not see genres as "permanent classes but as families subject to change" [v]. Genre is seen as a form of intertextual development which is regulated by fuzzy-edged "repertoires" of characteristics rather than singular criteria. This is a dynamic view of genre, which sees as its task "identifying and communicating rather than [...] defining and classifying" [38]. The denial of a totalitarian triad is accompanied by a denial of the unitary genre identity of any particular work, allowing (and this is crucial to my own argument) genres to partake in works (in mixtures and what Fowler calls "modulations") rather than the other way around. This means that genre becomes an unavoidable intertext in the reading of any text: while the conception of genres implicit in the triad is denied, Fowler does not share Croce's scepticism to genre. His historical perspective also shows that a proliferation of always changing literary genres is certainly not limited to the modern period.

 Fowler's position is complemented by the almost contemporary "La loi du genre" by Jacques Derrida - it is as if Derrida's essay takes many of Fowler's arguments to their rigorous extremes. Derrida begins with a polemic against Gérard Genette's distinction between genres and modes. The distinction - central to Genette's 1977 article "Genres, «types», modes"[30] - is similar to that between historical and theoretical genres, for Genette thinks that the genre triad is really a triad of modes - that is to say, a- temporal or a- historical categories - and accuses especially the romantics for confusing genre and mode. Derrida cuts right to the quick of Genette's structuralist approach by resolving the distinction into a descriptive/normative opposition, and his deconstruction of this pair ultimately leads to his declaration (in a reading of a piece by Maurice Blanchot) that the "law of genre" is mad. For my purpose, it suffices to say that genres are always being modalised and modes are always being "genred" in a movement which has no static definition.

 The law of genre being inherently unstable, Derrida writes of genre borders being undelimitable, of being "floodgates" (suggesting Fowler's changeability of genre). Borders are always open to creative or cancerous degenerescence; to infoldings or invaginations; and to a logic of taking part without belonging. Most importantly, his way of allowing genres to take part in texts (Fowler's "modulations") at the same time as texts take part in genres turns around this conception of the border as splittable and foldable. In reading a text (such as the Blanchot text Derrida reads) for genre, 1. parts of the text end up both inside and outside the text at the same time; and 2. textual and genre borders become two sides of the same problem.

 The boundaries of a text are for Derrida not only at the beginning and the end of the text, but in effect wherever the reader may meet the text. The intertextual dimension of genre which allows for productive reading (according to Fowler) creates for Derrida unstable borders between the genre markings in a text and the rest of the text. Any signs which tell the reader about the genre of a text partake in the generality of that genre, and are momentarily removed from the singularity of the text itself. Genre marks take part without belonging in the text, and one result is that the reader can never trust a genre mark to tell the final truth about the text. Neither do genre marks belong to genre, however, and from the perspective of the text they only quote genre.

 An integral part of Derrida's argument is that literary genres are only one genre of genre, one type of types - in French and indeed English, genre can mean simply "kind" - and that the "law" of genre is the law of all kinds of kind. This leads me on to the infections which may take part between nationality and genre - both two kinds of kind. All through my dissertation there are references to Benedict Anderson's powerful correlation between the modern nation-state and the realist novel, and part of my task is to answer the question whether the use of a non-realist mode (or genre) in Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd is appropriate to a nation which is not a nation-state, or whether this use in fact threatens Anderson's incisive but admittably sketchy thesis. I have left this discussion to my epilogue on nation and genre, which details various other competitors to Anderson's nation-novel, such as Doris Sommer's nation-romance and Fredric Jameson's nation-allegory.

 I also leave a traditional "overview of previous research" concerning Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd to my discussion of the book's genre reception at the end of the "Genre" part of my reading. I do this to avoid unnecessary reduplication; but I must hasten to point out that I have my qualms about thus cutting my own reception off from previous work as if it was somehow bigger and better. Such disconcerting effects are to be expected as I cross the border into Welsh literary criticism, but I hope they are only momentary.

Footnotes now endnotes

2. On the pacifism of Greta Vaughan's brother Henri, near the end of the chapter: "O bob problem o ddiagnosis a wynebodd Paul Rushmere erioed, hon oedd y ddyrysaf" - "Of all the problems of diagnosis which Paul Rushmere had ever faced, this was the most tangled" [43].

3. The complex but rather fossilised rhetoric of "Eitha peth ag ef hefyd" - literally "An extreme thing with it/him too" - is not relevant to my purpose at the moment.

4. My use of the term "ethnic cleansing" reveals an ironic twist to both the kind of atrocities to which it came to refer while I wrote this dissertation and to the assimilation of immigrant culture. I do not intend it flippantly.

5. Paul himself has faced Rommel's army "am fisoedd eirias ar dywod Affrica" - "for burning months in the African desert" [43]. Which explains his antagonism towards both Henri and Karl.

6. See chapter 7 [89- 105] of Elis, Yn Ôl i Leifior (Aberystwyth: Gwasg Aberystwyth, 1956).

7. The chapter "Elemente des Antisemitismus: Grenzen der Aufklärung" [177- 217] in Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (1944; Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1969). Trans. by John Cumming as "Elements of Anti-Semitism: The Limits of Enlightenment" [168- 208] in Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1993).

8. "Ihm [the Halbgebildeten] werden alle Worte zum Wahnsystem, zum Versuch, durch Geist zu besetzen, woran seine Erfahrung nicht heranreicht, [...]. Halbbildung, die im Gegensatz zur bloßen Unbildung das beschränkte Wissen als Wahrheit hypostasiert, kann den ins Unerträgliche gesteigerten Bruch von innen und außen, von individuellem Schicksal und gesellschaftlichem Gesetz, von Erscheinung und Wesen nicht aushalten" [205].

9. "[...]; Paranoia ist das Symptom des Halbgebildeten" [205].

10. "Zwischen dem wahrhaften Gegenstand und dem unbezweifelbaren Sinnesdatum, zwischen innen und außen, klafft ein Abgrund, den das Subjekt, auf eigene Gefahr, überbrücken muß. Um das Ding zu spiegeln, wie es ist, muß das Subjekt ihm mehr zurückgeben, als es von ihm erhält" [198].

11. "Indem das Subjekt nicht mehr vermag, dem Objekt zurückzugeben, was es von ihm empfangen hat, wird es selbst nicht reicher sondern ärmer. Es verliert die Reflexion nach beiden Richtungen: da es nicht mehr den Gegenstand reflektiert, reflektiert es nicht mehr auf sich und verliert so die Fähigkeit zur Differenz" [199].

12. The possibility of a representational history is also mentioned: "Yr oedd llyfrau'r Cymry'n llawn o feddwi, a thwyllo, a phlant siawns" - "The books of the Welsh were full of drunkenness, of deceit, and of illegitimate children" [40]. But Rushmere figures this history as hidden by the hypocrisy of Welsh teetotalism.

13. Countersign: "1. A sign or signal used in reply to another sign; spec. a private signal, usually a word, given or to be given to a soldier on guard by any one entitled to pass; [...] 2. A special sign or mark put on something for the purpose of authentication, identification, or reference" [OED].

14. In this zone, one might also find placed the Cymry di-Gymraeg ("the Welsh without Welsh") and Welsh literature in English. See M. Wynn Thomas' suggestively titled Internal Difference: Literature in 20th-century Wales (Cardiff: UWP, 1992). - Simon Brooks points out to me that Rushmere's doubling of the border is complemented on the other side of the border by Greta Vaughan's story in the sequel Yn Ôl i Leifior (1956). Alienated from Rushmere in their married life in Liverpool, Greta opens up the zone of Welsh life in Liverpool, by going to the Welsh-speaking chapels there and to meetings of the nationalist party Plaid Cymru.

15. Curiously written in Welsh, though even more curiously, his father's comments are left in English [41].

16. Thus the utopian theme of Welsh nationalism surfaces at the border. This utopian use of the border is prefigured in Islwyn Ffowc Elis' own background: he cites later his upbringing "less than two miles from the border" as the cause of his nationalism. "For generations, most of my compatriots had crossed the border from Wales into England without realizing it. But I always realized it. For me, at quite an early age, it had become not a border but a frontier." Elis was brought up in one of the few areas where the limits of Welsh language use (and culture) and the Welsh border nearly coincide: "I had only to climb one of our high Berwyn hills to look down on the English plain. We in our mountain valleys spoke Welsh. They on the plain spoke English" [144]. - Elis, "Islwyn Ffowc Elis", in Artists in Wales, ed. Meic Stephens (Llandysul: Gomer, 1971): 143- 58. - The fictional landscape of the Lleifior farm in Cysgod y Cryman is also placed near the border, in Sir Trefaldwyn.

17. I use Derrida's distinction between the two meanings of trait, which he implies always infect each other. - Derrida, "La loi du genre" (1980), in Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986): 249- 87.

18. The title of this introduction is of course commonly found at the borders of Wales; I have also seen a variant, "CROESO 'NôL" ("WELCOME BACK"), painted on a wall on the British Rail approach to Caerdydd. This latter inscription reaffirms the irreversibility of Welsh border-signs. One invests rather more in coming to Wales and leaving Wales than coming to England or leaving England at the borders involved. Note also that Caerdydd is not on the border of Wales anyway, opening a zone between the graffiti "sign" and the actual border.

19. Cysgod y Cryman does not only display a multiplicity of voices, but also one of focus - of personal stories. It is perhaps no simple coincidence that Rushmere is the second young male character to enter the story by the way of a ride to Lleifior in an expensive car. His opponent in political inclination, the Welsh-speaking socialist Henri Vaughan appears in a car driven by his sister Greta from the station at Henberth just after entering the narrative.

20. Anderson, Imagined Communities (1983; extended and revised, London: Verso, 1991) [25].

21. A field which Paul Virilio has given the name dromology. - Virilio, Vitesse et politique: Essai de dromologie (Paris: Galilée, 1977); trans. by Mark Polizzotti as Speed and Politics: An essay on dromology (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986).

22. If there is a hint of apology here, it is because the over-use of Todorov in science-fiction studies has lead to his devaluation there. - Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastique (1970; Paris: Seuil/Points, 1976). Trans. by Michael Howard as The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1973; Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975).

23. Derrida, "La double séance" [215- 346], a chapter in La dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972). Trans. by Barbara Johnson as "The Double Session" [173- 285], in Dissemination (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981). - "La loi du genre" has a complicated publishing history with many different versions of the text, the most complete of which is that in Derrida, Parages (Paris: Galilée, 1986): 249- 87. Other versions I have used are as follows: the French/Swedish parallel texts version, "La loi du genre / Genrens lag", Kris 16 (september 1980): 4- 41; Avital Ronnell's English translation, "The Law of Genre", Critical Inquiry 7.1 (Autumn 1980): 55- 81; a selection in Norwegian trans. by Birger Clemens Baardsen as "Genrens lov", in Fransk åpning mot fornuften: en postmoderne antologi, eds. Knut Ove Eliassen, Jørgen L. Lorentzen, and Arne Stav (Bergen: Ariadne forlag, 1988): 125- 47; and a revised but also abridged version of Ronell's translation, "The Law of Genre", in Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992): 211- 52. - "L'autre cap: mèmoires, réponses et responsabilités" (1990), in L'autre cap suivi de La démocratie ajournée (1990; Paris: Minuit, 1991): 11- 110. Trans. by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael B. Naas as "The Other Heading: Memories, responses and responsibilities", in The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992): 4- 83.

24. Attridge, "`This Strange Institution Called Literature': An interview with Jacques Derrida", in Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992): 33- 75.

25. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983).

26. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).

27. It is common for example to distinguish between "genre" science fiction and the work of various authors attempting to write science fiction acceptable to a "higher" literary aesthetic or to otherwise transgress the boundaries of the genre. See the entry under "Genre SF" in John Clute and Peter Nicholls, eds., The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1983; 2nd edition, London: Orbit, 1993).

28. Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An introduction to the theory of genre and modes (1982; Oxford: OUP/Clarendon Press, 1985).

29. Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastique [18- 9]; trans. The Fantastic [13- 4]. - For Fowler's critique, see Kinds of Literature [46].

30. Genette, "Genres, «Types», Modes", Poétique 32 (Novembre 1977): 389- 421. Revised as Introduction à l'architexte (Paris: Seuil, 1979), trans. by Jane E. Levin as The Architext: An introduction (Berkeley: U of California P/Quantum, 1992).