‘Not going back, but ... exile ending’: Raymond Williams’s Fictional Wales

Abstract

That Raymond Williams, generally so prolific, only published five novels during his lifetime once marginalised his fiction. But we now listen to what Williams was eager to tell us, that the published work is only a small part of his fictional output. In 1978, when three novels had appeared, he stressed that he had ‘given relatively far more time, in comparison with what became visible and valued, to fiction than to any other form of writing’. Williams, then, had written three unpublished novels, seven versions of Border Country and five of The Fight for Manod because ‘all along there have been certain things pressing on me, which I could simply find no alternative way of writing’.¹ The novels, that is, are not simply fictionalised accounts of Williams’s central theories, whether of ‘culture’ or ‘the knowable community’, but make statements of a different kind and in a different way. Stephen Knight makes the point succinctly:

the novels are not something of a hobbyish aside ... nor do they merely offer an occasional gloss on the state of argument in his analytic oeuvre.... They are, rather, a modally different, internally consistent and — most crucially — a humanly realised version of the interpretative life’s work of Raymond Williams.²