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Published to mark the centenary of Roald Dahl’s (Welsh) birth, Roald Dahl: Wales of the Unexpected breaks new ground by revealing the place of Wales in the imagination of the writer known as ‘the world’s number one storyteller’. Exploring the complex conditioning presence of Wales in his life and work, the essays in this collection dramatically defamiliarise Dahl and in the process render him uncanny. Importantly, Dahl is encountered whole – his books for children and his fiction for adults are read as mutually invigorating bodies of work, both of which evidence the ways in which Wales, and the author’s Anglo-Welsh orientation, demand articulation throughout the career. Recognising the impossibility of constructing a monolithic ‘Welsh’ Dahl, the contributors explore the compound and nuanced ways in which Wales signifies across the oeuvre. Roald Dahl: Wales of the Unexpected takes Dahl studies into new territory in terms of both subject and method, showing the new horizons that open up when Dahl is read through a Welsh lens. Locating Dahl in illuminating new textual networks, resourcefully offering fresh angles of entry into classic Dahl texts, rehabilitating neglected Dahl texts, and analysing the layered genesis of (seemingly) familiar works by excavating the manuscripts, this innovative volume brings Dahl ‘home’ in order to render him invigoratingly unhomely. The result is not a parochialisation of Dahl, but rather a new internationalisation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783169429 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Wales Press |
| Publication date: | 08/15/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 594 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Roald Dahl
Wales of the Unexpected
By Damian Walford Davies
University of Wales Press
Copyright © 2016 The contributorsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78316-942-9
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Defamiliarising Dahl
Damian Walford Davies
1. Plural Dahl
Quentin Blake's cover illustration, drawn specially for this collection of essays, envisions an uncanny meeting. The young Roald Dahl – seven years old, perhaps, a new boy at the Cathedral School in well-heeled Llandaff, north-west of Cardiff – looks up with open-faced receptivity and inquisitiveness at his older self. The adult Dahl, not locked in garrulous conversation, it seems, but gazing intently down at himself, has a discernible stoop, the result of spinal trauma sustained when his Gloster Gladiator crashed in the Western Desert of Libya in September 1940. His features are in shadowed profile beneath his wide-brimmed hat. Boy (which is how the young Dahl would sign himself in two years' time in letters home from his English prep school in Weston-super-Mare) stands with his adult self, south-east of Llandaff Cathedral. The building's spire – damaged by a German parachute mine in the Cardiff Blitz in January 1941 – divides youth from age. The spire also seems to serve here as a sightline for the young Dahl's gaze, up to his six-foot-six, global-brand future. Quentin Blake has drawn the lofty figure resting on a tall stick that appears to offer a challenge to his younger self to measure up. Wearing his short-sleeved school shirt and maroon tie (still the school's colour), we encounter Boy fresh, perhaps, from perpetrating the fabled 'Great Mouse Plot' at Mrs Pratchett's local sweetshop. The stick he holds in his right hand conjures the cane with which he will soon be thrashed by the headmaster – a beating that will prompt his outraged Norwegian mother, Sofie Magdalene, to remove her son to 'an English school' in 1925.
The adult Dahl looks like an English countryman – a persona he inhabited (and ironised) from the late 1940s onwards as he established himself in a pastoral enclave around Great Missenden in Buckinghamshire. From here, this 'eccentric Arcadian', fêted in New York literary circles, regarded the 'inner citadel of literary London' (Donald Sturrock's formulations) with a mixture of scepticism, aversion and envy. The persona of English maverick is unsettled and rendered uncanny in Blake's image by the Welsh location and by the fact that those long legs of Dahl's (which made the cockpits of fighter planes such tricky places) seem firmly rooted in Welsh soil. Further pluralising Dahl's cultural identity in the drawing is the fact that Blake's representation of the adult Dahl summons a pivotal figure in his early life: Joss Spivvis (his real name, Jones), the ex-Rhondda Valley miner who served as the Dahl family's gardener at their Llandaff villa, Cumberland Lodge – a stone's throw from the imagined location of the drawing.
But perhaps Boy and author are conversing, after all. Alternating between English and Norwegian, the adult Dahl might be relating a narrative about the 'boom bang woomph wham rat-tat-tat-tat-tat' terror and thrill of aerial combat over Greece and Palestine, or telling his young self how the cathedral spire reminds him of the New York buildings that 'tapered off into a long sharp point – like an enormous needle sticking up into the sky' (in the words of James and the Giant Peach). Perhaps they are discussing voyages out – Boy's imminent passage in a paddle steamer across the Bristol Channel from Cardiff docks to Weston, the journey of a later self to Dar es Salaam in Tanganyika to work for Shell, and Dahl's multiple crossings and flights to America – as well, of course, as the question of homecomings.
2. Dahl the Unhomely
The complex dynamics of Quentin Blake's image suggestively figure the paradoxes, hybrid identities, cultural and cartographic triangulations, multiple self-inscriptions and revisions that are excavated in Roald Dahl: Wales of the Unexpected, which is published to mark the centenary of Dahl's birth at Villa Marie in Fairwater Road, Llandaff, on 13 September 1916. Breaking new ground in its engagement with a writer now universally known as 'the world's number one storyteller', this collection of essays sets itself the task of defamiliarising Dahl and rendering him uncanny in both biographical and literary terms by exploring the place of Wales in his imagination and the complex registrations of his (Anglo-)Welsh alignments across the full range of his output. The eight essays published here reveal Wales to be a conditioning, paradigmatic presence – a crux – in Dahl's work, despite the fact that he was permanently resident in Wales only for the first nine years of his life.
Reading Dahl through a Welsh lens, and identifying the Welsh lenses through which Dahl himself sought a purchase on the world, are a means of contesting and correcting the received image of him as an 'English' writer. As Ann Alston and Heather Worthington emphasise in this volume, Dahl's anglocentrism was certainly reinforced by the cultural values of his Repton education and by those of his officer class during the war (and, in a different form, by his own subsequent performance of the countryman persona). However, these social and cultural allegiances are forever ironised in Dahl's work. Seeking to identify the Welsh genetics of his imagination, the essays in this volume are in tune with Dahl's own commitment, in his fiction for both adults and children, to the unexpected, to making strange. From the beginning of his writing career, Dahl was fascinated by in-between states and excentric perspectives. The early stories of Over to You (1946) can be read as psychologisations of difference, in particular those pieces in which Dahl inhabits the compound meta-perspectives and traumatised consciousness of the fighter pilot. Though the adult fiction of Someone Like You (1953), Kiss, Kiss (1960) and Switch Bitch (1974) was increasingly saturated in the grotesque and macabre, it retained a core element of the uncanny in the form of doublings, misrecognitions and hybrid and metamorphosed selves. The fantasy worlds of his fiction for children were fed by, and in turn fed into, the disordering conflation of realism, magic realism, fable and metafictional alienation effects that jolt the reader into new subject positions in the adult fiction. Wales of the Unexpected sets out to explore the link between Dahl's residual, interstitial Anglo-Welsh identity and the destabilising ironies, indeterminacies and hybridities of his work.
Dahl's latest biographer, Donald Sturrock, has valuably sought to excavate the plural cultural alignments and connected geographies of Dahl's work. Sturrock emphasises the importance of Dahl's formative relationship with America, to which he was posted as Assistant Air Attaché in 1942 and which he was to make his home in the early 1950s. He commuted restlessly between Buckinghamshire and New York in the late 1950s with his wife, Patricia Neal, and returned there frequently thereafter. As Sturrock emphasises, success was usually achieved in the US (not, however, without charges of vulgarity and tastelessness) before it was attained, with considerable effort, in Britain. One might go further and speak legitimately of Dahl as an Anglo-American writer – or, in more nuanced terms (acknowledging his status as 'misfit' and 'outsider'), his negotiation of an Anglo-American persona. Sturrock also lays great emphasis on what he sees as modalities of a 'gipsy' persona that Dahl self-consciously embraced as an expression of his free spirit and as a mode of resistance to cultural institutionalisation. Dahl's Welsh birth, his boyhood in Radyr and Llandaff on the outskirts of Cardiff, and his father Harald's trajectory from Norway through Paris to the world's greatest coal-port have been duly noted – the facts are there in Dahl's Boy: Tales of Childhood (1984). However, there has hitherto been no sustained attempt to go beyond the descriptively factual to calibrate Dahl's Anglo-Welshness and explore the dynamics of his multidimensional identification with Wales across the oeuvre.
The essays in the present book argue for the existence of a complex (Anglo)Welsh orientation in Dahl's work, which enhances our sense of the vital excentricity – the creative decentredness – identified by Sturrock. That hyphenated identity – necessarily bound up with Dahl's Norwegian heritage and with a vacillating Americaphilia – is a crucial element of a sensibility that was energised by cultural in-betweenness and which forever felt the need to relativise, and thus ironise, centres of authority and belonging. Considering 'the influence of northern European folk-tales' on the young Dahl, whose summer holidays were spent in Christiania (Oslo) and on the island of Tjøme, Norway (his Easter holidays were spent in Tenby), Jeremy Treglown in his 1994 biography remarks that 'Witches, and "hags" in general, took a particular hold. Not that in the 1920s you had to be Scandinavian, or a boy brought up in a matriarchy, to be scared of witches – particularly in druidical Wales.' What exactly druids have to do with witches is unclear, and the cultural cliché at the end is not enlightening. However, Treglown rightly implies that in the Dahls' bilingual household in Wales, Norwegian cultural allegiances and those elements of the cultural and natural environments of Wales with which he came into contact complicated Dahl's fraught English/British identity. They were factors of unbelonging. Recognising the ways in which his Anglo-Welshness was a productively troubling element of his cultural identity leads us to a more nuanced diagnosis of the reasons why he stood, to the end of his life, outside the pale of urbane English culture and in a tensely creative relation to American cultural hegemony.
In the title of the present volume (doubled uncannily from Kevin Mills's essay), 'Wales' puns with the unsaid 'tales', making the strangeness, the twists-in-the-tail, of that late-Dahl literary and TV brand, Tales of the Unexpected, the very matter of his Anglo-Welsh subjectivity. The essays in this book suggest that Dahl himself must, at some level, have been fascinated and exercised by the unexpectedness of Wales's presence in his work, its unexorcisable, necessary returns, and its role in sustaining both the dissenting energies of his imagination and those aspects of his worldview that were complicit with power. Hyphenisation is key. Wales of the Unexpected does not set out to identify some essentialist 'Welsh Dahl' (though that term is deployed – stringently – in the book). Rather, the contributors are concerned with more complex and plural cruxes of identity, with dynamics of acceptance and rejection, registration and elision, and with a sense of belonging that also grasps the reality of deracination. Further, the readings of Dahl offered in this volume identify multiple geographical locations in his life and work that suggestively triangulate with Wales and with his Anglo-Welsh affiliations. Bringing Dahl 'home' cannot result in a parochialisation, regionalisation or 'devolution' of Dahl since his very unhomeliness militates against such claustral emplacements.
Academic engagements with Dahl's work began to appear in earnest in the 1990s, shortly after his death. It was 2012, however, before the first academic collection of essays – edited by Ann Alston and Catherine Butler – appeared from Palgrave. The ten essays in that volume range widely over his writings for children, representing second-generation Dahl criticism in their analysis of Dahl's linguistic inventiveness, his inflection of the fairy tale paradigm, his contribution to the feminist project, the place of the 'Criminal' in his work, his resistance to a conservative 'commodification of fantasy', filmic adaptations of his work and the interpretative power of Quentin Blake's illustrations. This pioneering volume was a much-needed intervention. At the same time, Catherine Butler acknowledged in her Introduction that Dahl scholars were engaged in remedial work: 'the field of Dahl studies is an underpopulated one, and a single volume of essays can only begin the task of remedying that state of affairs.' Further, recognised in the Palgrave collection is the absence of explorations of the vital link between the children's books and the fiction for adults – categories that remain unhelpfully (and unaccountably) compartmentalised in the critical literature, whose conceptual ambition this volume seeks to enhance.
On reading the manuscript of James and the Giant Peach, Dahl's agent, Sheila St Lawrence, declared: 'I think you've done the undoable, crossed the border between adult and juvenile.' It was a border that Dahl – a serial crosser of cultural borders – was to regard as necessarily permeable throughout his career. Extending holistic encounters with Dahl's work into new territory, Wales of the Unexpected establishes alignments of uncanny force between Dahl's adult fiction, the fiction for children and for young adults, and his verse for young readers, reading these bodies of work as mutually invigorating modalities of the author's conflicted engagement with the world and with inherited literary traditions. Crossing the 'border' identified by St Lawrence has its parallel in Dahl's penchant – analysed in this volume by Carrie Smith – of 'passing material between fiction, essays and what one might call "creative autobiography" or "autobiografiction"'. Further, that boundary crossing (or dialectic) can also be seen as a necessary aspect of Dahl's negotiation of the hyphen between 'Anglo' and 'Welsh'. The identification of Matilda as 'both child and grown-up all rolled into one' in the second full draft of Dahl's novel of 1988 (held in the archive of the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre at Great Missenden) might be seen as Dahl himself, late in his career, serving notice of the need to attend to the uncanny hybridity of his oeuvre in which a hyphenated identity is always in, and at, play.
3. Frames and Registrations
As with their plural subject, so with the methods, approaches and angles of entry of the essays in Wales of the Unexpected. Engaged in creative interchange with one another, they encounter Dahl's work through a variety of conceptual and theoretical lenses. Dahl's own challenge to received paradigms is enacted in each contributor's willingness to push Dahl studies into new territory in terms of both subject and method, and Dahl emerges defamiliarised from each engagement. The volume offers intertextual embeddings of Dahl's work in wider Welsh literary networks, traditions and structures of feeling alongside close readings of textual ghosts and 'betrayals' in Dahl's short stories. Historicist-deconstructionist contextualisations that amplify the lost biographical and cultural resonances of Dahl's texts interact with ground-breaking excavations of the Dahl archive and bold reinterpretations of core Dahlian motifs and figurations in the light of his Welsh experience, resourcefully recuperated. At the volume's close, an analysis of Dahl's movement across the borders of translation speaks to a 'creative-critical' performance of a physical journey across a number of local borders, with Dahl as the multiform quarry.
The variety of encounters with Dahl profiled above ensures that the danger of fixing a 'Welsh Dahl' is avoided. As a number of the contributors emphasise, Wales in Dahl's work is an elusive phenomenon, often legible only by inference or by creative triangulation with other, more explicitly summoned, locations. Certainly, Wales of the Unexpected is concerned with those moments in Dahl's work when Wales is directly (if always knottily) invoked. At the same time, the contributors emphasise that Wales and Welshness in Dahl's work are often inscribed as indeterminate, conflicted and paradoxical traces. Thus each is concerned to tackle different registrations of Wales in Dahl's work. Carrie Smith tracks Wales through the archive at Great Missenden and finds it inscribed, erased, redrafted, euphemistically refigured and elided again, but always undeniably present. Indeed, in her essay, Wales itself emerges as archival and palimpsestic – the very matter of revision (and of revisioning). Mapping Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – with a measure of Dahlian play – in relation to the Welsh industrial novel, Tomos Owen argues that Dahl's book of 1964 (not published in the UK until 1967) seems powerfully to summon certain categories of Welsh industrial fiction only to negate them, leaving them as conditioning absences. Kevin Mills reveals the ways in which Wales tantalisingly, hauntingly, 'rings for attention' in the echoing 'textual interstices' of Dahl's short stories. In his discussion of the significance of the aerial perspectives of the fighter pilot and acts of troubled 'homing' in Dahl's work, Richard Marggraf Turley establishes Dahl's war experience as constituting a trauma that evinces a 'compulsive desire for representation'. Wales itself emerges as a phenomenon that compulsively seeks representation in Dahl's work (the link between Wales, trauma and loss is multiply suggestive). In being fended off, Wales asserts itself. Relying on the evidence afforded by the manuscripts of Matilda, my own essay seeks to unpack a nodal point of personal and public trauma in the novel that achieves a density of expression in and around a quotation from Dylan Thomas in which Dahl's lost Welsh past and his fear of the future are deeply embedded. Ann Alston's and Heather Worthington's engagement with The BFG (1982) reveals the interpretative horizons that open up when a classic Dahl text, with its paradoxical ethics of resistance and control, are viewed anew through a Welsh lens in terms of a cultural allegory of difference and assimilation. Here, Anglo-Welsh identity is characterised by its very 'slipperiness' – in cultural-linguistic as in textual terms. A Dahl who speaks in Welsh translation is Siwan Rosser's subject. When read in the native tongue of his country of birth, the global cultural brand is found to be 'not quite himself', uncannily reoriented by the conditions of the target literary field, a voice both 'foreign and familiar', resisted and naturalised. Conducting – or rather being conducted by – a psychogeographical dérive that extends the cartography of his previous explorations of Cardiff and its hinterlands and which enhances the volume's acts of geographical and cultural relocation, Peter Finch follows 'the Dahl scent' through landscapes and a built environment that are themselves palimpsests. He finds 'Welsh Dahl' to be a spectral presence, to be called into being at one point only by means of a word game, his name and identity the product, it seems, only of naming others.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Roald Dahl by Damian Walford Davies. Copyright © 2016 The contributors. Excerpted by permission of University of Wales Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements,List of Contributors,
1 Introduction: Defamiliarising Dahl Damian Walford Davies,
2 Inscription and Erasure: Mining for Welsh Dahl in the Archive Carrie Smith,
3 How Sweet Was My Valley: Willy Wonka and the Welsh Industrial Novel Tomos Owen,
4 Wales of the Unexpected: Kiss, Kiss Kevin Mills,
5 Homes, Horizons and Orbits: Welsh Dahl and the Aerial View Richard Marggraf Turley,
6 Dahl and Dylan: Matilda, 'In Country Sleep' and Twentieth-century Topographies of Fear Damian Walford Davies,
7 'There is Something Very Fishy about Wales': Dahl, Identity, Language Ann Alston and Heather Worthington,
8 Dahl-in-Welsh, Welsh Dahl: Translation, Resemblance, Difference Siwan M. Rosser,
9 Dahl's Cardiff Spaces Peter Finch,