Twentieth-Century Autobiography by Barbara Prys-Williams

MLR, 101.4, 2006 1101 an authoritative truth available to either reader or critic, represented by the reliance on paternal guidance within a family unit. Interestingly, it is in Finnegans Wake that Thurston finds fully realized the denunciation of thismanner of certainty, and he con nects to it Joyce's own scepticism of psychoanalysis, amethod which threatened the nature of Joycian epiphany bymaking all impulse subject to conscious understanding. Thurston here deserves credit formaking theWake so central to his understanding of Joyce. Like many other readings, however, his sees this novel as the furthest extension of many of the author's enduring preoccupations, creating as it does a time outside history, perhaps even a time outside time. But Thurston's approach is refreshing in that he considers both Joyce's thematic and aesthetic concerns in his final work. The Wake offers more than enigmatic reflections on family dynamics, language, gender, and tradition; the way it iswritten can be imagined as an extension of Stephen's musings inA Portrait of theArtist as a YoungMan. In this way, Finnegans Wake best captures Joyce's mischievous 'play' in first etching and then defacing meaning. While Thurston is concerned with the experience by which we encounter Joyce, it cannot be said that he seeks to enrich this experience, in any practical sense. His own style is unapologetically opaque, combining psychoanalytic jargon, multilingual phrases, and fragments from Joyce's novels. Thurston can never resist aWakeian pun, creating for readers of Joyciania a familiar and tiring pidgin of twisted and bro ken phrases. This final observation might provide the greatest irony in his approach. While attempting to escape the aggrandizement of the critical industry grown up around Joyce, he too relies on its oldest stratagem. Thurston claims that unlike al most all similar users of passages from the Wake, however, he provides the proper context for his quotations, never sacrificing cunning for substance. One must give him this, at the very least: he fully and successfully engages some of Joyce's most difficult material without ever flinching. UNIVERSITYOFLETHBRIDGE, ALBERTA,CANADA CRAIG MONK Twentieth-Century Autobiography. By BARBARA PRYS-WILLIAMS. Cardiff: University ofWales Press. 2004. xii+ i88 pp. ?14.99. ISBN O-7083-I89I-6. In this volume in theWriting Wales inEnglish series, Barbara Prys-Williams assesses the literary self-representations of seven twentieth-century writers: Rhys Davies, Margiad Evans, B. L. Coombes, Ron Berry, Gwyn Thomas, R. S. Thomas, and Lorna Sage. Informed as it is by psychoanalytical theory, the discussion is consis tently lucid and probing and often insightful; the section on Ron Berry, in particular, ismoving in its detailed analysis of the manner in which Berry fused the derelict history of twentieth-century Rhondda life with his own in his History isWhat You Live (Llandysul: Gomer, I998), and the chapter on R. S. Thomas finely conveys the colour and tone of the poet's self-explorations. Unexpectedly, perhaps, this chapter does not deal with R. S. Thomas's twoWelsh language autobiographical texts Neb (i 985) and Blwyddyn yn Lln ( I990), or with the English-language translations of them which have since appeared (see Autobi ographies, ed. by JasonWalford Davies (London: Dent, I997)), but with his autobio graphical poetry and prose-poem compilation The Echoes Return Slow (I988). Nor is it the only incidence in this book of material being chosen for analysis which does not belong straightforwardly to the autobiographical genre. The chapter on Margiad Evans is primarily concerned not with Autobiography (1943) or A Ray of Darkness (I952), two overtly autobiographical books by Evans, but with The Wooden Doctor (1933), ostensibly a fiction towhose heroine, Arabella Warden, Evans gave some ex periences which were manifestly her own, such as the composition of her first novel 1102 Reviews Country Dance, and an emotional history which Evans's biographers have since iden tified as hers. To my mind, Prys-Williams's unexpected choices have enriched her study, but itmight have been interesting to hear more about the rationale behind such decisions, particularly given that she spends some time discussing the consequences for readers of her discovery that B. L. Coombes's ostensibly autobiographical These Poor Hands (I939) was initially conceived of as a novel and...

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