Laura Nee

Projecting Welsh Identity in Niall Griffiths’ Stump

The novels of the contemporary British writer Niall Griffiths document life on the margins of Welsh society.  In his forth novel, Stump, the protagonist is a one-armed man from Liverpool in England.  He is a recovering alcoholic who has fled from his hometown to Aberystwyth in Wales in order to escape the wrath of gang boss, Tommy. In the novel, the action moves between England and Wales and all of the characters are situated both literally and metaphorically on the margins.  As a seaside town, Aberystwyth occupies a liminal space beyond the rules and regulations of respectable urban society, where the characters are free to explore new identities.

In this paper, I will discuss the ways in which both geographical and psychic dislocations in the novel are symbolized by fractured identities, as well as physical and mental disabilities, with particular reference to the ‘phantom limb’.  Drawing on Silvan Tomkins’ argument that the phantom limb phenomenon occurs when ‘those who have lost an arm or a leg through amputation continue to experience the presence of the limb, though they know it is no longer there’ , I will explore how the disabled body of the Welsh nation is projected onto the physically disabled body of the protagonist. In so doing, I will propose that, in Stump, the phantom limb can be seen as a metaphor for Wales as a postcolonial nation.

Laura Nee is a second year PhD student at Cardiff University in Wales.  She is writing her thesis on the figure of the outsider in the work of the contemporary novelists Niall Griffiths, Ian McEwan and Irvine Welsh, and the gendered and political implications of such alienation.  Her research is concerned with how a comparative approach to this specific trope in the work of an English, a Scottish and a Welsh writer reveals the tensions and aporia within conceptions of ‘Britishness’ in contemporary fiction.