Happy unbirthday, Dylan Thomas!
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Version 0 of 1. Increasingly we’re being asked to identify days of the year with specific authors, rather as the Catholic church identifies them with saints. But these proliferating commemorations often don’t follow the traditional pattern – centenaries or other major anniversaries of the births or deaths of writers who are then forgotten about (except by their posthumous fan clubs) for another 50 years. The recent tendency is to also pick out unbirthdays and random birthdays, and to celebrate these days more often or more publicly. One such initiative is the inaugural International Dylan Thomas Day, whose timing may surprise anyone who raised a glass to the poet’s 100th birthday in October (in fact, peculiarly but revealingly, 14 May has been chosen as “the date Under Milk Wood was first read on stage” in New York in 1953). Discernible is a reluctance to let Thomas go gently into the usual relative oblivion after last year’s centenary, but also an eagerness to give Wales an annual festival celebrating a supreme national author comparable to England’s Shakespeare’s birthday, Ireland’s Bloomsday and Scotland’s Burns night: “I’ve enjoyed celebrating Burns night over the years and often wanted to celebrate Dylan Thomas in the same way,” said Cerys Matthews, applauding it. Related: Why Dylan Thomas deserves his international Day Literary anniversary events that reflect corporate or personal agendas in this way are far from new. The mother of all such festivities, the Shakespeare Jubilee of September 1769 (impressively an unbirthday and an unanniversary, as it supposedly commemorated the Bard’s birth in April 1764) also provided a career boost to its organiser, the actor David Garrick, while Bloomsday and Burns night, which originated as gatherings of disciples, have latterly been embraced by the tourism industry. Today’s ventures, though, are more likely to do so openly and from the outset - as with this week’s urgings (by notebook and travel gear maker Moleskine) to mark the late Bruce Chatwin hitting 75, and the preposterous candle-blowing (by Stieg Larsson’s publisher, Quercus) for the birthday of Lisbeth Salander, a fictional character, a fortnight ago. The title and date of International Dylan Thomas Day – set up and run by Literature Wales, and “funded by Welsh government” – testify to organisers’ eyes firmly fixed on America. Here celebration is also commodification, with Thomas (pictured) at once an ambassador, export and poster boy for Visit Swansea Bay. A hidden agenda can also be seen behind literary (and other) Google Doodles, a form of anniversary-marking that fits the recent pattern (most eccentrically mark random birthdays: Ngaio Marsh’s 122nd, say, or Gabriela Mistral’s 126th) and trumps the conventional kind in impact - there will be 3.5bn searches, the company estimates, during each doodle’s one-day reign. The selection of authors may well reflect the enthusiasms of individual toilers in the Googleplex, and such recognition undoubtedly provides a splendid publicity bonanza. But the choices – notably international, often obscure – make other statements besides “Like” when seen together: they say that Google is sophisticated, scholarly and loves the humanities (not merely a bunch of tech geeks), and a global enterprise (equally likely, for example, to feature Asia or Latin America’s literary stars as America’s) rather than one with horizons limited to Silicon Valley or the US. Just as Garrick was also selling himself when he organised the Shakespeare Jubilee, so Google is simultaneously promoting itself whenever it celebrates late greats such as Marsh, the most recent author to be feted with a doodle. |