Dylan Thomas’s In the Direction of the Beginning: Towards or beyond meaning?

George Morgan

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Résumé :
This article, focussing “In the Direction of the Beginning”;, on an early “symbolic”; short story by Dylan Thomas, attempts to unveil an underlying mesh of meaning, mostly auto-referential in character, whereby the poem literally becomes the writer’s own world with its spaces, processes, dimensions and dynamics. “Reality”; is thus perceived in terms of the creative experience unfolding on and in the page.  Thomas’s writing is shown to be a multi-layered complex featuring various strategies aimed at attracting and retaining the reader’s interest while simultaneously deconstructing the linear meaning in a series of creations and de-creations, which are a mark of Thomas early prose as of much of his poetry. Emerging through this surface level of pseudo-narrative and indecipherable imagery, the auto-reflexive stratum provides less a meaning than a formal structural underpinning and a new symbolic dimension allowing an indefinitely variable and ultimately ungraspable interplay of word and image. The insight provided by this story is perhaps most useful as an approach to the creative process underlying Thomas’s poetry.
Date de publication : 2005-06-25

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George Morgan, « Dylan Thomas’s In the Direction of the Beginning: Towards or beyond meaning? », Cycnos, 2005-06-25. URL : http://epi-revel.univ-cotedazur.fr/publication/item/708