(lecture held at Tømte 17.11.95. The reading is a basic version of the reading in the first chapter of my Dr. art. dissertation)

The first thing I have to say is that I am not a historian - I come in fact from a department of comparative literature. I start off this short talk then with a literary reading, in acknowledgement of this disciplinary difference. However, I realise that you all have a desire for history, a desire which I will try to cater for, and I must take the opportunity of apologising for any infelicities I may commit in my forays into history, me, a non-historian.

We start then with a reading of a short episode in a Welsh-language novel by the author Islwyn Ffowc Elis, the novel being Cysgod y Cryman, from 1953. I will hurriedly contextualize somewhat. 1. Islwyn Ffowc Elis was at this time an active member of the Welsh nationalist party, Plaid Cymru. 2. The 1950s were a turning point in the development of Welsh nationalism - I will come back to this later. 3. This novel is written in a mixture of two popular genres, the family saga and the nurses romance, though added to these we also find a strong element of political debate. (The use of popular genres points to Miroslav Hroch's lecture yesterday, where, according to him, the Welsh failure to attain "fully-fledged" nationhood is a result of a lack of control over communications. Elis revises the cultural project of Welsh nationalism - from the construction of a high literature to the writing of popular works. He wishes thus to wrest from the English language a monopoly on "light reading", and to establish an internal literary circulation outside of the "high").

But back to the fiction. In the second half of chapter 4, we, the readers, follow the impressions of the young English doctor Paul Rushmere as he drives his fast car, a Gloria, from Liverpool to Wales. He is on his way to the large farm of Lleifior, to meet the daughter of the family, the nurse Greta Vaughan, to whom he is engaged to be married. As he nears the border of Wales he feels that his life at work in the hospital is cleansed from him, preparing him for life in the country. The wind blows through his hair - this is a convertible he's driving - and he washes the windscreen with the car's built-in water jets (as a doctor, he has a vested interest in hygiene).

Then he sees a white spot ahead of him, by the side of the road. He keeps up his speed of 70 mph, but still manages to read the words "CYMRU / WALES" on the sign (Cymru is the Welsh word for Wales), announcing the border. He also notices that the sign is leaning somewhat to the side, as if somebody has given it a shove.

This is where it gets interesting. I will read out a short, translated excerpt for you.

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

C Y M R U

W A L E S

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? [42]

As at any border, I believe, we experience here very many ambiguities. I won't go into too much detail, but it should be clear that the sentences following the words "CYMRU / WALES" in the text present a rhetorical complex of formidable proportions, with their leap from singular to plural, with their knowing-the-answers-already type of questions, with a double negative. I won't give a full analysis here; suffice it to say that Rushmere wants to wash away the sign, and possibly - as the reader finds out later - also the border, and even all signs of Welshness. And the most interesting ambiguity lies implicit in his reasons for wanting to wash away the sign. One reason might be that there is no difference between the two sides of the border, that the hedge is the same hedge on both sides of the white spot, that nothing has changed. However, Rushmere is clearly aware of the difference between England and Wales. Wales is precisely something different, something, quote "hard to understand" [42], something strange. Wales is so different that it announces itself, and does not need a sign to announce it.

Yet the differences which Rushmere cites, concerning language, drinking habits, morals, and which make Wales for him into such a strange and cryptic entity, are differences which are unlocatable at any geographical border. Passing by the white spot in the hedge, Rushmere enters into an in-between zone; it will be some time before he actually experiences any of the signs of Welshness which he mentions. And even then he will not be able to locate a precise boundary of Welshness. Before his car, instead of speeding up, is actually brought to a halt on the drive at Lleifior.

Traditionally, this zone is called the Welsh Marches, after the Marcher lordships which were established there by the Norman invaders. Today it has become what is known as "anglicized" Wales, home of what was once called "Anglo-Welsh" literature, though today the term "Welsh writing in English" is preferred (see the introduction to Lloyd 1994). Beyond it we find the "Bro Gymraeg", the region of Welsh, where Welsh is spoken by a larger proportion of the local population. The border between the two is, as the Rushmere-episode indicates, somewhat ill-defined.

Interestingly, there is no narrative description of this in-between zone in the text. The narrative is totally preoccupied with Rushmere's lengthy meditations until he arrives at the turn-off for Lleifior. This might perhaps be a sign of wishful thinking on the side of the text. What would happen if this in-between zone simply did not exist? If the difference between England and Wales could be located unambiguously at the Welsh border? If Rushmere had to stop the car, instead of speeding up; if he had to wave his passport or something?

Some of you may have guessed by now that in presenting us with a border which has been split into two, the text has produced an allegory of, yes, cultural nationalism with its unlocatable differences on the one hand, and political nationalism with its territorial boundaries on the other. In Rushmere's rhetorical sentences, this allegory is very tellingly played out in an almost unnoticeable glide between the words "Cymry" and "Cymru". They are homonyms, pronounced in exactly the same way; but one is spelt with a "y" at the end and means "Welsh people", and the other is spelt with a "u" and means "Wales".

So, in this text, published at a crucial moment in the history of the Welsh nationalist party (officially the "Welsh National Party"), cultural and political Wales glide into one another in a classically nationalist fashion. But this is a by no means unproblematic project, given the existence of an Anglicized zone in Wales, and the wishful thinking we find in this text seems inherent to the whole futuristic temporality of so-called "proto-nationalism".

Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist Party, came into existence in 1925; partly in response to the events in Ireland in 1922, and partly as a renewal of previous nationalist activities untenable in the face of British militarist patriotism and suffering during and directly after the Great War (to name only two of various possible reasons). We're talking here about a small, somewhat elitist party, dominated in its policies by a small number of strikingly original individuals. Most important was Saunders Lewis, the major figure of both Welsh-language politics and literature of this century, who deliberately set out to create a culturalist nationalist party. In total defiance of what modern scholars like the late Ernest Gellner describe as the principle of nationalism, "that the political and the national unit should be congruent" [1983:1], Lewis dismissed the idea of creating a Welsh nation-state out of hand, as a romantic folly. His aim was to preserve rural Welsh language and tradition, and in particular a rural economy, against the threats of large-scale capitalism and socialism. He advocated small-scale private ownership, redistribution of wealth, and deindustrialization, following the early Marx in his attack on the dehumanization of the proletariat. Lewis wanted however to remove the problems of the proletariat precisely by removing the proletariat itself.

Thus Plaid Cymru was not to attempt to propagate the nationalist cause in the industrialized and largely Anglicized parts of South-East Wales, and Saunders Lewis, in his not-very-Welsh conversion to Catholicism in 1934, wished to connect Wales more to the mediaeval past, what he called "The Welsh Æsthetic" [1927:15- 41]. Significantly, this mediaeval past provided arguments for seeing Wales as part of a European federation of peoples, not a Europe of nation-states. This explains partly why Welsh nationalists today are still ardently "pro-Europe". Though this federalism is of course also an attempt to pre-empt the power of the Parliament of Westminster in London. Indeed, for many years, the Plaid followed the policy that any Plaid candidates to win a seat in that Parliament would leave this seat vacant, so as to avoid any outside access to their politics.

So here we have, rather strangely, a nationalist political party decidedly against the creation of a national state, though the seeds of a more political nationalism appear to lie ironically in the eagerness of Saunders Lewis to identify economics as a central part of the texture of Welsh culture, a material culture, so to speak. Economic control could however only come with political power. His companion, D. J. Davies, who had spent much of his life on the road in America as a hobo and trade-union activist, was sympathetic to the small-scale capitalist anarchism of Lewis, but insisted on making an attempt to bring over industrial South-East Wales to the nationalist cause, and to discuss the question of territoriality. By 1930, the official party policy was to make Wales into a dominion of the British Empire, like Canada. To cut a long story short, Saunders Lewis was forced to resign as president in 1939, though, as we shall see, he remained an active voice in Welsh nationalist politics for many years to come.

During the last couple of weeks I have spent much of my time hidden away in the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, reading through a run of the Plaid's Welsh-language monthly journal, Y Ddraig Goch, covering the 1950s. Some loose impressions. There is still a lot of culturalism there, and one can read regular complaints that there is not enough discussion of economic matters at the Plaid summer school. However, it is quite clear that the weight has shifted to a more parliamentary line, the Plaid increasingly acting like a political party. A constant flow of articles pointing to the success of various other small nations in the world - and especially to the Scandinavian countries, as it happens - signals a shift towards a policy of independence. More and more effort is directed towards attracting non-Welsh-speaking Welshmen to the party, and towards the end of the decade, the English-language journal of the party, The Welsh Nation, is published more frequently than the Y Ddraig Goch [Evans 1995:167]. The Plaid continually gains strength in elections, and instigates a "Parliament for Wales"-campaign. Members start collectively owned dairies and farms, and discussion bears a strong utopian slant. This utopian urge, by the way, culminates in the 1957 publication, by the Plaid, of Islwyn Ffowc Elis' fourth novel, a piece of science fiction with the title Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd - "A Week in Wales to Be".

The 1950s thus figure a strong turn in Plaid policy and importance. Rhetorically, this turn is personified in the figure of Gwynfor Evans, the party president from 1945 to 1981. His leadership signals both a heightened political activity in the parliamentary sense, and a conclusive adherence to the political modernities of pacifism, of European federalism, of environmentalism, along with nuclear power, and of social democracy on a Scandinavian model. It is however the last period when both political and cultural aspirations find themselves combined overtly in one single nationalist movement in Wales. By 1958, a columnist in Y Ddraig Goch, writing under the name Sion y Pwyswr, is able to write (I quote in translation):
 

We want a Welsh Parliament to have the same right to the land and nation of the Welsh people as an English parliament will have to the land and nation of the English.

And in 1966, the president of the party, Gwynfor Evans, had become the first Plaid Cymru Member of Parliament with his victory in the Carmarthen by- election.

Just before this, however, in 1962, Saunders Lewis proclaimed in his highly influential BBC radio lecture of that year that "the language is more important than self-government". This lecture, under the title of "Tynged yr Iaith" - "The Fate of the Language" - signalled an important split in the Welsh nationalist movement, with Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg - the Welsh Language Society - being formed as a direct consequence. The Cymdeithas yr Iaith and other smaller organisations took over much of the culturalist struggle of the Plaid, and with it, the Plaid's tradition of non-violent direct action. Plaid Cymru was then left with the job of slowly increasing the number of nationalist MPs at Westminster and developing a broadly social-democratic political and economic policy. Sold out to statism, as some would say.

We thus find in the period I have described a certain choreography of political and cultural nationalisms within the nationalist movement itself. But to limit my description to specifically nationalist organisations would be to create an incomplete picture of the development of a Welsh national identity in this century. The 1950s are a period during which Wales gains in political and economic identity outside nationalist activity, though perhaps in disjunctive response to that activity.

It is important to realise that Wales had before this no official political identity in the United Kingdom. The only official institutions identified with a Welsh nation were specifically cultural institutions, like the University of Wales, establishing its first colleges in 1893, the National Library of Wales, established in 1907, and the National Museum, in 1927. The only other thing to unite the Welsh besides nationalist sentiments existing within small sections of the population would be a sense of history and a recourse to a difference from the English clearly drawn out in the Middle Ages. (Myself, I surprised to learn that only in 1959 was the red dragon flag officially adopted as a national flag for Wales.)

In the 50s however, more and more political institutions were defined as bringing precisely "Wales" under their jurisdiction. Significantly, in 1951, a Welsh Gas board was established [? 1951]. And in the same year, in response to what was felt as a increasing electoral threat from Plaid Cymru, Wales was given its own minister in Westminster by the government.

At first this post was shared with that of the Home Secretary; later, in 1964, the post of Secretary of State for Wales was introduced to the Cabinet, and from small beginnings, a large bureaucracy based in the new Welsh Office in Cardiff came into existence. Today, there is a whole plethora of government-appointed bodies, so called "quangos" like the Welsh Development Agency, whose areas of power are defined by the Welsh border. And there are also significant exceptions to this rule, privatized utilities like telephone, rail and electricity, which divide Wales into areas centred around English cities. (Again, this is an example of what Hroch refers to as a lack of control of communications. 1. While living in Aberystwyth last year, my electricity was supplied by Manweb, based in Manchester. 2. In 1963, railway closure begin in Wales; now there hardly any lines which don't run in the direction of London.)

I have now arrived back at what one might call the ambiguity of the Welsh border. An institution like the Welsh Office is essentially a part of a British strategy of control. The Welsh Secretary is not elected by the people living within the Welsh borders, though he has much of the executive power available in Wales. He is chosen by the government in power in London. Lately, he has usually belonged to the Conservative Party, a party which culled only 6 out of the 38 Welsh seats in the last British election.

Simultaneously, however, the Welsh Office and these other executive bodies create a stronger sense of political and territorial identity in Wales (quite apart from fuelling the anti-imperialist and pro-democracy arguments of Plaid Cymru and Cymdeithas yr Iaith).

Paul Rushmere, the English doctor, crosses the Welsh border in a novel published in 1953. At that time, this border signalled very few shifts in political power, and we imagine that this is how Rushmere wishes it to be. Rushmere is of course partly a stereotypical enemy image or fiendebilde, as one says in Norwegian, so the text might be said to steer its ideal reader in the opposite direction, towards a statist nationalist vision of mimetic correspondence between culture, executive power and territory. But as I have indicated in my historical digressions, this mimetic moment in Welsh nationalism is a limited resource, at its strongest in the 1950s.

Driving from England to Wales, Rushmere figures the transition as one between the everyday, the neutral and the prosaic (on the one hand); and the mysterious, the cryptic and the exotic (on the other). It is as if he moves from the "real" world into a "fictional" country. There is a strange unidirectionality about the Welsh border. Indeed, this unidirectionality is borne out by the very fact that I refer to it idiomatically as the Welsh border, and not the English-Welsh or Welsh-English border. As long as Wales remains a nation without a state of its own, people will call it "the Welsh border" even when they are travelling to England. (According to a friend of mine in London, Jeremy Morgan, who used to spend his holidays in Wales in the 1950s, the post-war roadsign shortage meant that there was only one sign on roads crossing the Welsh border, saying precisely "CYMRU / WALES".) The border becomes a interesting indicator of the specificity of a nation without a state.

A nation without a state? Perhaps in 1953. But today, as one of the most interesting of post-modern nationalists in Wales - Dafydd Elis Thomas - has pointed out (I believe): Wales is a nation with a state. It's just that this state, the Welsh Office and a bundle of quangos, has a highly ambiguous connection to the Welsh. Neither does it reflect Welsh culture except in the most macroeconomic sense, nor does it represent Welsh people in the democratic sense. If we started off with Saunders Lewis mixing culture with economics in his interest in the material culture of rural Wales, at the other end of this spectrum of the political and the cultural we must surely find the Welsh Office mixing politics and ethnicity in its negative allegory of the political identity of geographical Wales.

Paul Rushmere is on his way to the farm Lleifior, actually the imposing estate of an ancient Welsh family. This is another case of what I called wishful thinking on the part of the novel. Like post-colonial Norway, post-colonial Wales has no aristocracy of its own. I mention this right at the end of my talk to give a hint of what is to come. The rise of a Welsh-speaking middle-class has lent prestige to the Welsh language, and has, with the help of the new Welsh-language media and education establishment moved the focal point of Welsh-language culture away from Y Fro Gymraeg - where Welsh-speakers top in percentages of local populations - and to the great cities of Swansea and Cardiff - where Welsh-speakers top in absolute numbers per square kilometre [Aitchinson 1994:91,94]. The tensions involved in this hardly expected turn in what we might call the ongoing crisis of representation in the Welsh nation must continue or be resolved, perhaps at some point providing new figurations of the gap between cultural and political borders.

References

[UWP = University of Wales Press = GPC = Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru]

?, 1951. "Nwy Cymreig." Y Ddraig Goch. XXV.7 (Gorfennaf). p.4.

David L. Adamson, 1991. Class, Ideology and the Nation: A theory of Welsh nationalism. Cardiff: UWP.

John Aitchinson, and Harold Carter, 1994. A Geography of the Welsh Language 1961-1991. Cardiff: UWP.

John Davies, 1985. "Plaid Cymru in Transition." The National Question Again: Welsh political identity in the 1980's. Ed. John Osmond. Llandysul: Gomer. p.124-154.

John Davies. A History of Wales. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993.

Islwyn Ffowc Elis, 1953. Cysgod y Cryman. Aberystwyth: Gwasg Aberystwyth. (Page references to 1990 edition, Llandysul: Gomer.)

Islwyn Ffowc Elis, 1957. Wythnos yng Nghymru Fydd. Caerdydd: Plaid Cymru.

Gwynfor Evans, 1995. "Hanes Twf Plaid Cymru 1925-1995." Cof Cenedl X: Ysgrifau ar Hanes Cymru. Ed. Geraint H. Jenkins. Llandysul: Gomer. p.153-184.

Ernest Gellner, 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell.

Saunders Lewis, 1927. Williams Pantycelyn. London: Foyles. (Page references to 1991 edition, Caerdydd: GPC.)

Saunders Lewis, 1962. Tynged yr Iaith. (1985 ed. Talybont: Y Lolfa / English version, 1971, in Planet 4.)

Lloyd, David T. (ed.), 1994. The Urgency of Identity: Contemporary English-language poetry from Wales. Evanston, Il.: TriQuarterly Books (Northwestern University Press).

John May. Reference Wales. Cardiff: UWP, 1994.

Sion y Pwyswr, 1958. "Trwm ac Ysgafn." Y Ddraig Goch. XXX.1 (Ionawr). p.2.