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My Nation's Soul Ghent University Faculty of Arts and Philosophy ―MAIR THAN MY AIN SOUL – MY NATION‘S SOUL‖ CULTURAL IDENTITY IN DAVID JONES‘S IN PARENTHESIS AND HUGH MACDIARMID‘S A DRUNK MAN LOOKS AT THE THISTLE August 2014 Paper submitted in partial Supervisor: fulfilment of the requirements for prof. dr. Koenraad the degree of ―Master in de Taal- Claes en Letterkunde: Nederlands - Engels‖ by Simon De Craemer 1 Contents 1. Introduction......................................................................................................................... 2 2. Cultural Identity.................................................................................................................. 3 3. Hugh MacDiarmid‘s A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle.................................................... 6 3.1 MacDiarmid and the Scottish Renaissance ................................................................. 6 3.2 The Celtic element and the Caledonian antisyzygy..................................................... 8 3.3 Synthetic Scots and Scottish diversity....................................................................... 12 3.4 Analysis of A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle ......................................................... 16 4. David Jones‘ In Parenthesis .............................................................................................. 29 4.1 Cultural identity in Wales.......................................................................................... 29 4.2 Jones‘ identity............................................................................................................ 33 4.3 Analysis of In Parenthesis......................................................................................... 38 5. Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 52 6. Works Cited ...................................................................................................................... 54 21 745 words 2 1. Introduction "Should Scotland be an independent country?" As the 2014 Scottish independence referendum draws near, an electorate of more than four million people are urged to think about this controversially formulated1 question. For such a terse query, it seems remarkable how vast and complex the answer can be, taking into account economics, politics, and not in the least, the cultural and national identity of the Scottish people, of which the nature is also a contentious topic.2 Such cultural and national self-identification is a remarkable aspect of human nature that has been decisive in shaping the world we live in – and it still is. Particularly at the dawn of the previous century, nationalism and the thirst for a strong national-cultural identity dominated the entirety of Europe. It should be no surprise, then, that some of the literature that spawned from this particular zeitgeist reflected such desires for a ‗collective self- identification‘. But the Hegelian concepts of national identity and cultural common ground (Moland 2011: 8) as a basis for independence were heavily problematised after the First World War ravaged Europe and the Treaty of Versailles redrew many countries‘ borders. With the rise of modernism, literary authors sought to reconsider the nature of these concepts in their writings, often accompanied by manifestos and other clarifications in (avant-garde) periodicals and pamphlets. A unique case is encountered in the poems of David Jones and Hugh MacDiarmid, pseudonym of Christopher Murray Grieve. Both were modernist poets who served during the First World War (the first writer as a soldier, the latter with the medical corps), and both clearly vocalized a distinct form of self-identification within their nation in their most famous works, In Parenthesis and A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle, respectively. While Jones mainly wanted to define the outlines of his personal, mixed Anglo-Welsh heritage within the context of his war experiences, MacDiarmid‘s revolutionary diatribe in ‗synthetic Scots‘ primarily sought to emancipate the Scottish nation from England, towards which MacDiarmid was notoriously xenophobic. In tandem with his literature, he also made several political efforts to introduce home rule for Scotland: MacDiarmid was a founding member of the National Party of Scotland, precursor to the present-day SNP. At the height of nationalist discourse in Western Europe (In Parenthesis was published in 1937, A Drunk Man debuted in 1 ―The Scottish Government has been forced to change the wording of the question that will be put to voters in next year‘s independence referendum after the Electoral Commission concluded its preferred option was biased towards a ‗yes‘ vote‖ (Wright 2013). 2 As proven by the many opinion pieces on the subject, e.g. ―The union belongs to the Scots, it's at the heart of our cultural identity‖ (Linklater 2014). 3 1926), both works sought to identify what defined the people that wrote and read it, and it is on these ―borders of culture and conflict‖ (Soltau 2011: 1) that In Parenthesis and A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle are situated. This dissertation will venture to specify exactly how MacDiarmid and Jones culturally identified themselves, their people and their country. It will do so by close-reading their most famous work and putting those findings against the backdrop of their biographies and statements on cultural identity. Attempting to outline exactly how these modernist authors viewed their cultural heritage is an ambitious goal, and the complexity of such an enquiry should be apparent. Even before considering the hardships of capturing subtle subtext in a genre as elusive as modernist poetry, the matter of ‗cultural identity‘ itself seems problematic enough. A clear-cut definition for the term has been pursued by social and cultural studies alike, and especially since postcolonial times the debate has become highly charged. Further adding to the problematic nature of the term are later developments in social theory, with some researchers proposing that some of the distinctive backbones which ―defined the social and cultural world of modern societies for so long […] gender, sexuality, race, class and nationality - are in decline, giving rise to new forms of identification and fragmenting the modern individual as a unified subject‖ (Hall 1996: 1). Such a fragmentation seems particularly interesting when we consider the modernist nature of the poetry that will be analysed, as these works were themselves a reaction to obsolete conceptions of cultural identity in their times. A final example of the problematically complex question of cultural identity is featured in works like Jean-Francois Bayart‘s aptly titled treatise The Illusion of Cultural Identity, in which Bayart searches to abolish ―the assumption that a so-called ‗cultural identity‘ […] corresponds to a ‗political identity‖ (Bayart 2005: ix). Again, such notions on cultural identity seem specifically appealing considering MacDiarmid‘s political background. It is because of this clearly problematic nature of the term, then, that some attention will also be given to its use in this dissertation. 2. Cultural Identity ―We all write and speak from a particular place and time, from a history and a culture which is specific. What we say is always ‗in context‘, positioned‖ (Hall 1990: 222). The nature of man is such that he builds up a specific sense of identity within a collective through the sharing of these contexts, these histories, these cultures. In sociology and cultural studies the phenomenon has been dubbed ‗cultural identity‘, an umbrella term encompassing a large 4 number of diverse components including ethnicity, gender, class, language, religion, custom and beliefs (Clarke 2008: 510). Because of this large area of study, research towards the term tends to be interdisciplinary, with academic efforts in fields as diverse as sociology, theology, cultural theory and linguistics, to name a few. Benedict Anderson‘s celebrated 1983 book Imagined Communities offers innovative insights into the origins of cultural identities and nationalism. Relating their development mainly to the technological development of the printing press, he states that newspapers and novels helped create the kernel of national consciousness, mainly because of their influence on the emergence of standardised language (Anderson 1991: 44). However, the premise of the book is perhaps the most important statement of all; Anderson argues that large communities, such as nations, are more often than not ‗imagined‘, i.e. socially constructed, as the different members of such (large) communities usually have no contact with one another yet perceive themselves as members of the social group. In his excellent book Nationalism and Modernism, Anthony D. Smith offers some criticism to Anderson‘s theory, the most important of which may be the following questions: “How can emphasis upon imagination and the imagined community enable us to grasp the power of the nation and nationalism? 'Imagination' certainly helps us to understand how easily the concept of the nation can be spread and transplanted; but why should it be spread, and why should it (the nation) be transplanted?” (Smith 2013: 137) Even though cultural identity is made up out of a variety of determinants, in the case of David Jones and Hugh MacDiarmid the focus will be specified towards a handful of distinct components, in the light of the particular context of the poems. Cultural identity in
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