Fathers and Phantoms: Revealing the Unconscious Residues in Raymond Williams&amp;#x2019;s &lt;i&gt;Border Country&lt;/i&gt;

Clare Davies

doi:10.16995/wwe.4.2

Abstract

This article explores Raymond Williams’s first novel, Border Country, by tracing its origins back to earlier, unpublished versions of the work that are housed in the Richard Burton Archives. Adopting Williams’s concept of the ‘residual’, this article suggests that Border Country is haunted by textual residues left over from those unpublished drafts. Focusing on the key theme of fatherhood, the article argues that an anxiety over uncertain paternity is the textual unconscious of Border Country. Combining close readings of the novel and its earlier drafts with a psychoanalytic approach (using Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok’s idea of the phantom), this article demonstrates that the theme of uncertain paternity which troubles the novel’s representation of the father-son relationship had its inception in the earlier drafts. By taking this psychoanalytic approach, the article seeks to broaden the interpretative framework through which we can read Williams’s still under-appreciated novels. It also begins to re-evaluate Williams’s work through an engagement with his extensive archival material.

Highlights

Digital Preservation: The Open Library of Humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the CLOCKSS scholarly archive service
The major catalyst for Williams’s completion of the novel was the death of his father Harry Williams in 1958; while the novel is multi-layered, it is the portrayal of a father-son relationship that is at the heart of the novel
The writing of the fictional father Harry Price was not based wholly on Williams’s own father, Harry Williams, as we can see: Harry is not my own father, because a lot of him went into Morgan too

Summary

Clare Davies

In Border Country, this results in a kind of doubling with, as several critics have suggested, Morgan Rosser acting as Harry’s antithesis and as an alternative father to Will/Matthew.[4]. The residual, alongside categories he calls dominant and emergent, is one part of the tripartite structure that Williams uses to describe the process of cultural change: the residual is that ‘which has been formed in the past, but is still active in the cultural process’.7. Applying this concept to the process of writing, the residual can become a way to interrogate the novel’s textual unconscious, as the novel contains many textual residues still active (albeit muted) that were formed in the earlier versions.

Fathers and Phantoms

Uncertain Paternity

Fatherhood in Border Village and Brynllwyd

Incestuous Haunting

Conclusion