Artists in Dylan Thomas's Prose Works: Adam Naming and Aesop Fabling by Ann Elizabeth Mayer (review)

HUMANITIES 321 of words and to beat them now life of Cwmdonkin 322 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 ment from the exemplaryalphabet of the hornbook (the 'Christ-cross row') to the burden and promise of narrative (a 'cross of tales'). On a secular level, Thomas rehearses the roles of artist as madman, novice in the discipline ofhermeneutics, exile, forger, quester, romanticist, avant-gardist, and self-parodist. As Mayer presents them, Thomas's fictions read like the coded journals of a provincial torn between challenge and assent to the conventions of cultural production. Curiously, Mayer is silent about other anxieties of Thomas that her quotation of his work suggests. His possessive gendering - 'manshape,' 'man's meaning,' 'man's time,' 'man's manuscript,' 'man's minerals,' and 'the fortune of manhood' - and Freudian references to the 'tower' (empty in 'The Tree'), fingering,'the pencil tower' CThe Orchards'), giving birth through the pencil, to the 'sea-tower' and the associated peril of the 'spiked maiden,' to the 'tower of words' he wishes to erect and bring down, to the unavailability of 'a virgin word ... willing to be what we make it,' provoke in her no dismay. With these models of the artist Thomas joins Emerson and Renoir, among others. In Portrait, Thomas Wlclots his ego and settles for the status of outsider with his 'proper [own] voice.' Adventures in the Skin Trade charts further trading in literary skins. Its hero goes up to London (as Thomas did in 1933), where he encoWlters gender ambiguity (present also in the 'mandressed women' of 'Quite Early One Morning') in the pubs and clubs. He is repelled. The metropolis is, apparently, dangerous to identity. Thomas himself returned to Swansea despite the voice in 'The Map of Love' that insists 'you shall never go back.' Mayer sees the result, Under Milk Wood, as a work of reconciliation in which the artist is now a common man. Having neither plot nor story, Mayer's Under Milk Wood is carnivalesque and dialogic, a 'return to place as source' where harmony is effected in the 'democratization of the lyric.' Thomas 'goes back to, or beyond, the romantics to retrieve the communal rhythms of the folk tradition that predated written literature. He leaves behind the individual psyche responsible for romantic proclamations.' The presence in Uareggub (a pseudoWelsh formation that is an English anagram for 'buggerall') of black eyes, appeals for the law (a govemingnarrative) to control Polly Garter, and P.C. Attila Rees and his truncheon, may make some readers pause at Mayer's sense of it as 'heaven on earth.' It is just the sort of place the sexually unconventional charactersinAdventures have fled. Llareggub,postmodern and pre-literate, a place where 'the reader or audience is as much an artist, participating in the dialogue that is creation/ has 'paradoxes' in spades. Mayer is nothing if not provocative in her progress through her texts, but the nostalgic invention of an organic society, the 'democratized lyric' in a monograph on prose, and the reader as artist in the verbally created Llareggub are provocations many will 'resist. (JOHN LAVERY) ...