Literary convictions are, or can be, profoundly influenced by early cultural experience. I believe that my own moral and metaphysical outlook was acquired, in part, through growing up in Wales. Hence my feelings about Wales inhere, and can be discerned, in my literary allegiances and aversions. Essential elements of those feelings are comprehended in what I’ve come to know as hiraeth.

Because of the dizzying variety of contexts in which the word hiraeth has over many centuries been used, it has acquired great complexity of meaning. At its simplest, however, hiraeth is a longing for Wales, expressed by someone formerly but no longer living there. It is, in short, a longing to return.

But returning to a former home is widely recognized as hazardous. Returning at last to Rhymney, Idris Davies was disappointed, as Dafydd Johnston notes:

But his greatest disappointment of all was with the social and cultural life of the region, which he found to be very impoverished in comparison with what he remembered from his youth. As Islwyn Jenkins puts it, there was “no realization of the expected feeling of unity with the rest of the community.” This was no doubt partly the inevitable sense of disillusion felt by any returning exile who has nursed an idealized image of his home over the years.

One question which arises from this is: why should the propensity to nurse such an image of home be apparently so strong among the Welsh? There is, moreover, a very interesting ambiguity in the word “idealized”. A thing may be said to be idealized either because it smothers the reality in a falsifying ideal, or because it reveals the ideal obscured by inessential elements of the reality. But the caveat is clear: you risk disappointment if hiraeth is your motive for returning to Wales.

I am a Welshman, who would like to think of himself as a poet, living in England. Much of my adult life has been permeated by the feeling of hiraeth, a fact I believe all the more securely because for a long time I was only indirectly aware of it. But, what I’d like to discuss initially is the fact that I did some years ago (1986-9), manage to return to Wales as a member of a university English Department. I was very kindly treated and in many ways was happily fulfilled by the return. But in my work I was profoundly balked.

The English Department was riven by a dispute between traditional literary scholars and a group of literary theorists who wanted to displace what they called “the humanistic tradition” (roughly the belief that literature is valuable in proportion as it affords enlightenment, nourishment and reassurance about the nature of reality). It was, and still is, possible to indicate your allegiances in this dispute by whether or not you put inverted commas round such words as “reality”. I didn’t: I think our sense of reality does have an objective sanction. But for many theorists, to say anything like this would have been a demonstration of naivety. The result was that traditionalists like myself expended much energy seeking a philosophical justification for an intuitive consensus which was under attack. If you wanted to promote the appreciation of Wordsworth, say, you couldn’t defer to the authority of good critics, since “authority” was a suspect term — still commonly treated as a synonym for “authoritarian” — and “good” was a value-judgement which some felt it necessary continually to unpack, much as if you couldn’t accept a kindness from someone until you had inspected their credentials.

My aim in relating this is not to revive old controversies, but to ask what significance there might be in the aversion I felt to post-structuralist theory. Of course it may have been to some extent pathological. And equally I concede that “Theory” was a very diverse phenomenon, though the rapidity of its mutations was, paradoxically, one of its unifying traits. True, I wasn’t alone. Empson had told Christopher Norris that he found Derrida (whose name he conflated with Norris’s own as “Nerrida”) “very disgusting, in a simple moral or social way.” And there were in the Department several distinguished proponents of what I hope might be described as an enlightened traditionalism. But we were outnumbered and often dejected. Anti-humanistic theory was at that time borne aloft on a strong tide of professional enthusiasm, which has for some while since been on the ebb. Disliking militant nationalism, I wouldn’t want to suggest that all the pro-theorists were English and all the anti-theorists Welsh; though it does occur to me, on reflection, that much of the steadiest and evidently heartfelt opposition to theory did indeed come from the few Welsh members of the Department. And hence it may be that there is some relation between being Welsh and feeling aversion to post-structuralist theory (and to the more durable cultural relativism of which such theory is, or was, a passing manifestation). Conversely there may also be a relation between values at the heart of hiraeth and values threatened by cultural relativism, and by the academic trends which promote it…