Saturday's Silence: R. S. Thomas and Paschal Reading

SATURDAY’S SILENCE

WRITING WALES IN ENGLISH

CREW series of Critical and Scholarly Studies

General Editors: Kirsti Bohata and Daniel G. Williams (CREW, Swansea University)

This CREW series is dedicated to Emyr Humphreys, a major figure in the literary culture of modern Wales, a founding patron of the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales. Grateful thanks are due to the late Richard Dynevor for making this series possible.

Other titles in the series

Stephen Knight, A Hundred Years of Fiction (978-0-7083-1846-1)

Barbara Prys-Williams, Twentieth-Century Autobiography (978-0-7083-1891-1)

Kirsti Bohata, Postcolonialism Revisited (978-0-7083-1892-8)

Chris Wigginton, Modernism from the Margins (978-0-7083-1927-7)

Linden Peach, Contemporary Irish and Welsh Women’s Fiction (978-0-7083-1998-7)

Sarah Prescott, Eighteenth-Century Writing from Wales: Bards and Britons (978-0-7083-2053-2)

Hywel Dix, After Raymond Williams: Cultural Materialism and the Break-Up of Britain (978-0-7083-2153-9)

Matthew Jarvis, Welsh Environments in Contemporary Welsh Poetry (978-0-7083-2152-2)

Harri Garrod Roberts, Embodying Identity: Representations of the Body in Welsh Literature (978-0-7083-2169-0)

Diane Green, Emyr Humphreys: A Postcolonial Novelist (978-0-7083-2217-8)

M. Wynn Thomas, In the Shadow of the Pulpit: Literature and Nonconformist Wales (978-0-7083-2225-3)

Linden Peach, The Fiction of Emyr Humphreys: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (978-0-7083-2216-1)

Daniel Westover, R. S. Thomas: A Stylistic Biography (978-0-7083-2413-4)

Jasmine Donahaye, Whose People? Wales, Israel, Palestine (978-0-7083-2483-7)

Judy Kendall, Edward Thomas: The Origins of His Poetry (978-0-7083-2403-5)

Damian Walford Davies, Cartographies of Culture: New Geographies of Welsh Writing in English (978-0-7083-2476-9)

Daniel G. Williams, Black Skin, Blue Books: African Americans and Wales 1845–1945 (978-0-7083-1987-1)

Andrew Webb, Edward Thomas and World Literary Studies: Wales, Anglocentrism and English Literature (978-0-7083-2622-0)

Alyce von Rothkirch, J. O. Francis, realist drama and ethics: Culture, place and nation (978-1-7831-6070-9)

Rhian Barfoot, Liberating Dylan Thomas: Rescuing a Poet from Psycho-Sexual Servitude (978-1-7831-6184-3)

Daniel G. Williams, Wales Unchained: Literature, Politics and Identity in the American Century (978-1-7831-6212-3)

M. Wynn Thomas, The Nations of Wales 1890–1914 (978-1-78316-837-8)

SATURDAY’S SILENCE

R. S. THOMAS AND PASCHAL READING

WRITING WALES IN ENGLISH

RICHARD MCLAUCHLAN

© Richard McLauchlan, 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form (including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication) without the written permission of the copyright owner. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.

www.uwp.co.uk

British Library CIP Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78316-920-7

eISBN 978-1-78316-922-1

The right of Richard McLauchlan to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover image: R. S. Thomas c.1985. Photograph by Gerallt Llewelyn, reproduced by permission.

To my parents

CONTENTS

Series Editors’ Preface

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction

1Divine Silence and Theological Language

2A Poetic Theology of Suffering

3Silence, Epiphany and Hope

4Prayer

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

The aim of this series, since its founding in 2004 by Professor M. Wynn Thomas, is to publish scholarly and critical work by established specialists and younger scholars that reflects the richness and variety of the English-language literature of modern Wales. The studies published so far have amply demonstrated that concepts, models and discourses current in the best contemporary studies can illuminate aspects of Welsh culture, and have also foregrounded the potential of the Welsh example to draw attention to themes that are often neglected or marginalised in anglophone cultural studies. The series defines and explores that which distinguishes Wales’s anglophone literature, challenges critics to develop methods and approaches adequate to the task of interpreting Welsh culture, and invites its readers to locate the process of writing Wales in English within comparative and transnational contexts.

Kirsti Bohata and Daniel G. Williams

Founding Editor: M. Wynn Thomas (2004–15)

CREW (Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales)

Swansea University

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book began life as a Cambridge University doctoral thesis, and I would like to thank the trustees of the Crosse Studentship within Cambridge’s Faculty of Divinity, and those of the Bethune-Baker Studentship in Theology at Pembroke College, for the financial support that allowed me to carry out my research. I would particularly like to thank my supervisor, Revd Dr Gregory Seach, for the time he offered, and the care he showed, both to me and this project. His depth of perception and constant encouragement have been invaluable. I also owe a great debt to Dr Henry Marsh for showing me that the scholar’s approach is no barrier to the love of poetry. Thanks, too, to Prof. David Ford, who helped me start out in the field of theology and literature, and to Prof. Robin Kirkpatrick, who responded with great insight to the draft chapters of the thesis. I must thank Prof. Tony Brown of the R. S. Thomas Study Centre, Bangor University, for allowing me access to the Centre’s materials. His friendly welcome in Bangor and assistance during the editorial process have been greatly appreciated. And I am deeply grateful to Dr Rowan Williams and Prof. M. Wynn Thomas, who acted as examiners for the thesis, for their critical comments and enthusiasm to see this work in print.

I must also thank Jon Mackenzie, Ruth Jackson, Raphael Cadenhead, Nicki Wilkes, Matthias and Vicki Grebe, Sam and Christine Kimbriel, Giles Waller, Alex Englander, Mark Knight, Javier Garcia, Philip McCosker, Jay Parini, Mikey Wood, Will Ferguson, and Sabrina Pilarczyk for their friendship and support. I am hugely appreciative of the community at Blackfriars, Cambridge, for providing a much-needed spiritual home during the writing of the thesis. I would also like to express my gratitude to Rajashree Dahnaraj and her husband, Simon Hancock, for putting a roof over my head during the final stages of my work.

Permission to quote the poems of R. S. Thomas has kindly been granted by Gwydion Thomas. Poems, however, which have appeared in Thomas’s Selected Poems 1946–1968 (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1986) and Collected Later Poems 1988–2000 (Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books, 2004) are reprinted here by permission of Bloodaxe Books, though I cite them from their original publications in the present volume. I am very grateful to Dr Suzanne Fairless-Aitken at Bloodaxe for her assistance in arranging this. The close readings of ‘The Prayer’ in chapter 1, and of ‘Sea-watching’ and ‘Waiting’ in chapter 4, have appeared, with a few variations, in an earlier essay of mine under the title, ‘Saturday Prayers: R. S. Thomas and the Search for a Silent God’, in Poetry and Prayer: The Power of the Word II, eds Francesca Bugliani Knox and John Took (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 169–85 (Copyright © 2015), and are here reprinted by generous permission of the publishers.

Finally, my thanks must go to my family and particularly my parents, Grahame and Rosaly McLauchlan, who have given me all the educational opportunities I could have hoped for, and, more importantly, show me what it is to love God and neighbour. This book is dedicated to them.

ABBREVIATIONS

(For full bibliographical details see Bibliography)

Works by R. S. Thomas

Works by Other Authors

All Scriptural quotations are taken from the Authorised (King James) Version.

All Greek citations from the New Testament are taken from the Nestle-Aland 28 Edition of the Novum Testamentum Graece, which can be accessed online at nestle-aland.com.

INTRODUCTION

The Christian doctrine of sanctification is constituted, in part, by the claim that the life of the believer will be transformed according to the paschal pattern of death and resurrection. At the heart of this movement is the purifying silence of Holy Saturday, to which the Gospel writers bear witness by their own silence concerning the events – or, rather, non-events – of this day.¹ On Holy Saturday all speech about God and his engagement with humanity is brought to nothing; or, to use more boldly participatory language, it lies dead in the grave with the Son of God. All that humanity may have meant by divine power, sovereignty and love is silenced in the silence of this death. It is this silencing, however, that forms the precondition for authentic re-creation, since it opens a space where God is free to reveal himself as he is, rather than as we would have him be, and to transform without the disruptive clamour of our misshaping words. To begin to speak again of divine power, sovereignty and love will be a difficult and disturbing task in the face of the fact that the Creator ‘of all things visible and invisible’ has died a sinner’s death on a cross and is buried in a tomb. Here, then, is the ground of what the New Testament calls metanoia: often translated as ‘repentance’ but which can be understood more literally as ‘change of mind’ in the sense of having one’s way of thinking renewed.² This being the case, Christian existence requires a consistent return to, and participation in, this day of transforming silence.

This book argues that an attentive reading of certain poems by R. S. Thomas provides an opportunity for such a return, and even such participation. It is my contention that to confront the silence from which a poem comes and to which it goes, and which, furthermore, is inscribed within its words and within the page’s blanks, is to open oneself to the possibility of being refashioned according to the three-day story that forms the focus of Christian commitment and salvation. The silences of the poems may be viewed, I suggest, as re-presentations of the silence between Good Friday and Easter. In other words, they are able to make present for the reader the transforming silence of Holy Saturday,³ a silence which demands to be wrestled with, travelled through, and returned to, in a way that may have radical consequences. This book therefore argues that the activity of reading the poems may become a practice of spiritual discipline that draws the reader ever further into the paschal events. As I shall show, this practice allows for more responsible readings of Scripture and of the world, an improved quality of attentiveness, and – because fashioned by means of engagement with the unique type of open-ended thinking expressed in Thomas’s poetry – an entrance into a way of thought that seeks always to open up rather than foreclose. To think with the poems, I contend, is to be made more aware of the transcendent horizon of human existence.

I thereby seek to offer a distinctive contribution to Thomas scholarship. Certainly much has been written on Thomas’s theological ideas, and on the significance of the form in which they are presented, but rarely has the emphasis fallen primarily on the theological or spiritual relevance of the activity of reading itself as a practice of spiritual discipline. Rarely, too, has a study of this kind occurred in sustained dialogue with the history of Christian thought; few commentators have approached the texts as literary critics and as theologians, as thinkers trained in the theological tradition. And while silence repeatedly enters into the scholarly discussion, I have yet to find that silence connected to history’s central day of silence, Holy Saturday. By drawing these fresh approaches together a new perspective will emerge that sees the essentially paschal character of the practice of reading the poems: a metanoia for the reader, achieved by means of a transforming encounter with the silence of Holy Saturday. This book therefore opens up largely unexplored territory for literary and theological debate.

Although the activity of reading will be the primary focus of my assessment, and I will refer to the person in engagement with the poems as ‘the reader’ (since this is how we shall encounter the poems throughout the chapters), I do not wish to obscure the important role of listening in the poetic encounter with silence. Though a number of commentators⁴ and Thomas himself⁵ consider the poems to work better visually than they do aurally, I find both aspects to be vital. The visual effect is indeed striking, but so too is the manner in which, when reading aloud, the breakages and silences of the poems manifest themselves – as one pauses to take a breath, for example, or as one registers the syntactical disruption through line-endings and stanza-breaks. Therefore, where a poetic device is particularly important for its aural effect, it will also be acknowledged.

This is to say something important about form. In his recent study of the development of Thomas’s poetic style, Daniel Westover notes: ‘Much has been written about Thomas’s spiritual themes … What has scarcely been addressed, however, is the fundamental relationship between Thomas’s spirituality and his poetic style.’⁶ In support of his own project, which seeks, in part, to redress such neglect, Westover also refers to M. Wynn Thomas’s reminder: ‘we need constantly to be aware of the theology of his style’.⁷ The poetry, not just in its content but in its form too, is theology.⁸ Westover therefore goes on to perform a masterful analysis of the manner in which Thomas’s style – the formal crafting of his poems – embodies certain theological perspectives.⁹ In particular, much is said concerning the manner in which Thomas ‘destabilize[s] the reading experience’, since God, for Thomas, ‘should be discussed in terms of disintegration and fragmentation.’¹⁰ While Westover, to some extent, falsely dichotomises Thomas’s theological insights with central convictions within the Christian tradition¹¹ (and later I aim to show some of the deep affinities between Thomas and certain strands of this tradition), he importantly highlights the participatory function of the poems¹² and the profound role that silence plays in the reader’s engagement with them.¹³ However, Westover is clear at the outset of his book that, considering the apparent lack of attentiveness to Thomas’s poetic style within Thomas scholarship,¹⁴ there is much more to be said on these issues: ‘this … is necessarily a pioneering expedition, one that seeks to begin a conversation, not conclude it.’¹⁵

In addition to the new perspective I seek to offer on the paschal character of the reading process itself, the present study continues the conversation Westover begins by means of the detailed attention I show to the formal, stylistic elements of the poems. Having said that, I am not as interested in Thomas the man as is Westover; his book is, after all, a ‘Stylistic Biography’.¹⁶ My interest lies with the poems themselves and the significance of engagement with them for Christian existence. Thomas continues to prove an enormously intriguing figure, understandably, and it is rare to find a publication on his work that does not seek to inform its readers more about Thomas himself. This book, however, presents an argument that does not, in most cases, rely on biographical information nor does it aim at providing new insights into Thomas’s character. The argument relates just as much to (and could be constructed by) those who only have access to the poems as it does to those who also possess knowledge of Thomas’s personal life. Both in the construction of the argument and in its end, knowledge of Thomas the man is not of the first importance.¹⁷

This also means that I have, for the most part, chosen not to concern myself with the vexed question of who and what Thomas had and had not read. Thomas was candid about his own, fairly substantial, theological blind-spots. Thinkers that a theologically literate reader would reasonably assume were central to Thomas’s work, if simply presented with his poems, often turn out to be largely unknown to Thomas or unread by him. He claimed to have no knowledge of patristics,¹⁸ did not read much St John of the Cross because he could not read Spanish (and was turned off by John’s ‘nuptial’ themes),¹⁹ and found Kierkegaard theologically unappealing in many respects.²⁰ My reading of Thomas’s poems, however, will not be restricted by these admissions. Where relevant theological resonances occur I explore them irrespective of Thomas’s actual knowledge of the thinker or issue. Lying behind this method is the conviction that a poem’s meaning (and what reading the poem does to the reader) cannot be reduced to what the poet meant (and hoped to achieve for the reader).

In line with this, it is important to highlight that Thomas’s description, in interview,²¹ of the New Testament and the Resurrection as ‘metaphor’ need not obliterate a study of this kind. Apart from the fact that the argument is based on the poems and not the poet, Thomas’s use of this word does not necessarily imply that the historical events at the foundation of Christianity are irrelevant. Rather, his point appears to relate to the notion that the communication or transmission of these events requires a certain type of language in order that it can represent what Thomas calls their ‘imaginative truth’. And this language will inevitably, according to Thomas, arise as metaphor, since these events are fundamentally ‘unsayable’.²² To present Thomas’s comments in this way is not to try and wrestle him into a form of orthodoxy that he himself denied,²³ but it is to say that Thomas was deeply committed to the truth of Christianity, particularly as it was encountered by the imagination. It is no easy task to try and spell out what conception of ‘truth’ is at play here, of course. What seems clear, however, is that the language of metaphor in no way cheapens this truth.²⁴ Rather, it challenges us – as this book will show – to question our use of language when it comes to God’s interaction with creation.

One final point before I expand on the substance of the argument. I have chosen to avoid a strictly chronological approach to the poems. Instead, I view Thomas’s body of work as a whole, which one can dip in and out of as one pleases, allowing earlier poems to be read in light of later ones and vice versa. I do not look for stages or progressions through the work, therefore. This is because a linear reading, in my opinion, restricts the possibilities for a genuinely ‘stereophonic’ reading to emerge (the meaning and significance of which is discussed below).²⁵ Naturally, this means that certain phases or themes in Thomas’s corpus are underrepresented in the following pages. There are paschal dimensions to be traced in the famous Prytherch poems, for instance; there is a certain presence of grace in the beautiful poems, both before and after her death, to his wife Elsi.²⁶ While I have chosen to focus on those poems which, in my opinion, most directly justify a paschal reading, I would encourage the reader to return to these other ‘groupings’ in light of this reading and to discover for him- or herself how far these too reveal the dynamic I am exploring. It may also be interesting to question to what extent there is a development in Thomas’s work in terms of this paschal framework. What would a chronological study of the corpus reveal? But, as I have said, this is not my concern in the present work.

Returning to the argument, it is important to clarify that the silence we encounter in the poems is perhaps better considered as the silence faced by Jesus’ followers on the first Holy Saturday than as the silence experienced by Jesus in the grave. While Christian formation does require that we be ‘buried’ with Christ, it is unclear (except, perhaps, in baptism) exactly how this participation ought to occur, particularly when we bear in mind these words from Hans Urs von Balthasar (whose influence on my project will be discussed shortly):

The danger is very real that we, as spectators of a drama beyond our powers of comprehension, will simply wait until the scene changes. For in this non-time, there appears to be no possibility of following him who has become non-Word … We are not told whether it is possible to follow the Son through the chaos of a world that is falling apart, or whether all that remains is the anguished following of the gaze of Mary as her Son disappears into the inaccessible darkness where no one can reach him.²⁷

It could be argued on the basis of these words that what it means for us to pass through the ‘night’ of Christ’s death is to experience this separation from Christ as he descends to a place we cannot go.²⁸ Jesus’ own abandonment (I use this word cautiously) into the hell of Godforsakenness is, in some far minor way, participated in by his disciples insofar as they, too, are forsaken by their Lord, who goes to the