Schizophrenic Border and Viral Optics in Raymond Williams's Border Country

Abstract

This essay examines Raymond Williams’s autobiographical novel Border Country, the first novel of his ambitious “Welsh Trilogy.” The aim of the essay is twofold. Firstly, it analyzes the unsettling issue of how a bio-regional place (native place) shapes polyvalent identities in a historically changing environment and how the boundary that crisscrosses the passages of life is redrawn through narrative re-circumscription and optical revision. Secondly, the essay calls this trope of internalizing “border-crossing” into question in the context of global diaspora and critically problematizes Williams’s identity politics as schizophrenic split from British post-colonial empire.