Depth and Control in David Jones' In Parenthesis
Amid the litany of praises acclaiming David Jones' achievement since his death in 1974, only one major dissent has been registered, to my knowledge, against In Parenthesis. In The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell is critical both of Jones and his poem. While he respects him as a 'modern genius' and 'a remarkable talent', he ambivalently castigates him as 'odd', 'unassignable', and 'a turgid allusionist' (1). In Parenthesis, Fussell says, is 'curiously ambiguous and indecisive', (2) and is marked by 'rhetorical uncertainty and dramatic inconsistency' (3). The poem, Fussell maintains in effect, is lacking in meaning because it is confused in its intentions, and incoherent because it is over-laden with intractable material.
Contrary to the position Fussell has taken, I believe that In Parenthesis is a profound and coherent statement about modern war, and that a substantial case can be made for both the poet's depth of meaning and control over its organically-fused structure.
In Parenthesis, if it is anything, is a profound work. It has unusual depth. It is a product of two complex cerebral functions: (1) reflection and the play of the imagination on the poet's experience as an infantryman on the Western Front: an extreme condition, prolonged, marked by danger, suffering, privation and loss, unparalleled in history to that time; and (2) subsequent omnivorous reading and more reflection on the literature and history of individual and collective military experience reaching back to antiquity. Through this juxtaposition of the experience of the past with that of the present, Jones focuses out attention on the panoramic range of feelings human beings express in the throes of war. By comparing the past to the present, Jones emphasizes the supreme value of human life. His compassion and tenderness are implicit. The juxtaposition precludes the need for special pleading, giving the poem an objectivity that makes possible an unusual maturity of outlook. He exalts neither duty nor sacrifice: his stance is basically commemorative. His consistent approach is to invite, indeed, force the reader to make, in his stead, the actual protest against the murderousness of war. Peter Levi has said that there are passages of In Parenthesis that he cannot read without tears (4). The poem remains dispassionate; the sensitive reader cannot be but moved.
In forcing the reader to protest rather than doing it for him, Jones is unlike any other World War I poet. When we compare the objectification of trench experience in Jones' poem to the subjectification found, for example, in Sassoon and Owen, we quickly recognize the primacy of the response against war internalized in the reader over the response externally imposed. We have long ago relegated Sassoon's war poems, though not his war prose, to the music hall of propaganda; and Owen's poetry, however valuable for its innovative techniques and its consummate use of irony, nonetheless has a very limited range: the appeal to pity is foreshortened in its effectiveness. Little more than Owen's personal agony comes through his poems, whereas the profundity of Jones' work is in his moving from the particular to the general in articulating one of humankind's unresolved major problems throughout all of recorded history .We are not likely to discover much that is new in Owen's corpus; In Parenthesis, like James Joyce's Ulysses has in its multilayered lines considerable potential for exploration, renewal and further discovery.
It is to the multilayering that we must now turn our attention with respect to coherence. Because of the juxtaposition in Jones' poem of past and present, of myth with day-to-day occurrences, of liturgy with military function, readers continue to raise questions about confused organization in the poem. Fussell complains that the fusion of romance and reality ails, the 'New Matter of Flanders and Picardy' resists subsumption into the 'Old Matter of Britain'; that readers don't always know who's speaking, and to whom'; and that ‘Some of the poem is badly overwritten, just as the frontispiece drawing by Jones is too crowded with everything he can recall as relevant: a dead body, wire-pickets, rats, barbed wire, a tunic, a steel helmet, an ammunition belt, sandbags, blasted trees, mules, carrying parties, bully-beef tins, shattered houses, chicken-wire netting, and an entrenching tool' (5). We should remember, perhaps, that Picasso's 'Guernica' is also cluttered.
Keeping Fussell's strictures in mind, we find that several well-known critics of modern war poetry have sought to locate keys to the elusive structure. John H. Johnston in English Poetry of the First World War, Bernard Bergonzi in Heroes' Twilight, and Jon Silkin in Out of Battle have described the structure variously as being marked by a 'complex sensibility',(6) or an 'ideogrammatic method',(7) or 'temporally indistinguishable elements'(8) in a 'recordation' (9). The terms which keep recurring in their conjectures are 'juxtaposition', which we have used here, 'mirroring', or reflection, and, most importantly, the term 'simultaneous' for simultaneous action, and 'simultaneity'.
None of these critics puts any special emphasis on 'simultaneity', a term familiar to us in relativity theory. I am convinced, however, that the means to understanding the structure of In Parenthesis are in the literary usages of relativity, and that these usages may be employed to demonstrate coherence in Jones' poem. Simultaneity is primary. There is a special temporal aspect to In Parenthesis. Indeed, the title itself marks off the context of the poem in the time and space of the poet's experience, which is to say that the juxtaposition of disparate events: the Battle of Catraeth in the sixth century with the Battle of the Somme in the twentieth century, is legitimized by the commonality of the military experience, and more explicitly by the commonality of the futility of sacrifice and the suffering in combat.
Jones tells us in his 'Preface' that the Western Front was 'a place of enchantment', (10) which is to say that, the poem's linear progression of events notwithstanding, the temporal and spatial conditions of the front defied linear reality. Already trained as an artist, Jones not only perceived the distinction but was profoundly affected by it the rest of his life. In this respect, he literally anticipates the development of atomic warfare in the 'Preface':
We feel a rubicon has been passed between striking with a hand weapon as men used to do and loosing poison from the sky as we do ourselves. We doubt the decency of our own inventions, and are certainly in terror of their possibilities. That our culture has accelerated every line of advance into the territory of physical science is well appreciated but not so well understood are the unforeseen, subsidiary effects of this achievement. (p.xiv)
For example, the much heralded scene at the close of Part 2 when a shell explodes while John Ball is being reprimanded for his failure to address an officer properly is described in the terms of its approach and impact as though it were an atomic explosion:
...in a stillness charged through with some approaching violence -registered not by the ear nor any single faculty -- an on-rushing pervasion, saturating all existence; with exactitude, logarithmic, dial-timed, millesimal – of calculated velocity, some mean chemist's contrivance, a stinking physicist's destroying toy. Out of the vortex, rifling the air it came -bright, brass-shod, Pandoran; with all-filling screaming the howling crescendo's up-piling snapt. The universal world, breath held, one half second, a bludgeoned stillness. Then the pent violence released a consummation of all burstings out; all sudden up-rendings and rivings-through - all taking-out of vents - all barrier-breaking, all unmaking. Pernitric begetting - the dissolving and splitting of solid things. (p. 24)
Both in his subsequent writings and in his personal letters(11) Jones' concern with the negative uses of physical science is demonstrated. In the conclusion to 'Notes on the 1930's', published in 1965, he quotes the passage from the 'Preface' carried above, and adds, ‘But I do not think there has been any radical change in direction but rather a vast extension and unprecedented acceleration of the technologies referred to.'(12)
It hardly needs stating that the 'vast extension and unprecedented acceleration' of technology is a direct product of relativity physics. To return to the main thesis, Jones' presentation of events in the poem, particularly combat, reflects his perception of aspects of relativity as a result of the conditions peculiar to the Western Front. Simply put, the context is one of simultaneous occurrence. Experiencing simultaneity, it was natural for him to juxtapose identical experiences in time and space.
The superimposition of history and myth upon the contemporary literal event - which is itself all-encompassing - by those techniques to which Fussell objects: the shifting anonymity of speakers and listeners, and what we may call the 'clutter effect' in the frontispiece, for example, is an approach increasingly employed, principally, though not exclusively, in contemporary serious fiction. The bare bones narrative of In Parenthesis is similar to the bare bones narrative of Geoffrey Firmin's last day of life and his death in Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, and to the bare bones transmogrification of Tyrone Slothrup from man into pig in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. What happens to Private John Ball is just as inconsequential as what happens to Firmin and Slothrup. It is the universal concern for suffering humankind in all three authors that is simultaneously elaborated within their fleshed -out narratives. It transcends simple linear distinctions and the discontinuity and fragmentation that relativity theory tells us we must accept, despite our discomfort over the 'clutter effect' of Jones' frontispiece or the use of simultaneous occurrence at the front. Clutter and simultaneous occurrence are analogous: the random interaction of particles is inescapable.
Simultaneous occurrence is the key to structural coherence. The relativity theory, as literary people employ it, concentrates on the principles of simultaneity and uncertainty, and the invalidation of the principle of causality. Modern combat, where simultaneous action closes in on the participant, provides us, microcosmically, with one of our most convincing demonstrations of multiplicity, or clutter, in the universe; of the futility of planning actions based upon previously acquired temporal and spatial measurements; and of the breakdown between cause and effect. Causes are generated and set into motion, only to collide with one another, modifying effects. This was the nature of the Western Front though we have been slow to recognize it. In Parenthesis is authentic in its reflection of Jones' distillation of that experience.
It was the poet's task artistically to bring order out of that particular chaos, remaining true to the circumstances encountered. While the poem may appear to some to be haphazard, it is, in fact, structured coherently by virtue of its adherence to the principles by which we now understand the universe to operate: the primacy of simultaneity, the uncertainty of measurement, and the invalidation of causality. This may make for a text that is difficult to deal with since we tend to resist the impact of relativity in our lives, but the problem is basically our own, not the poet's. The text is structurally sound. Just as profundity is present, so, too, is coherence.
For all of his omnivorous reading, David Jones probably never formally encountered theoretical physics. Neither did Picasso, but he moved into his Cubist period about the same time Einstein announced the special theory of relativity. If the formal ideas were au courant just after the turn of the century, they were even more prevalent some decades later when Jones began writing his poem. For all of his attraction to antiquity, Jones has, it seems to me, in terms of the profundity of his thought and the coherence of his structure achieved through his informal exposure to relativity, placed himself in the midst of the most audaciously accomplished writers of our time.
NOTES
1 Fussell (1975), p. 144.
2 Ibid, p. 146.
3 Ibid, p. 153
4 'The Poetry of David Jones', Agenda, Vol. 5, Nos. 1-3 (1967), 86.
5 Fussello pp. 153-154.
6 Johnston (1964), p. 292.
7 Bergonzi (1965), p. 202.
8 Silkin (1972), p. 316.
9 Ibid., p. 321.
10 In Parenthesis (New York: Viking Press, 1961), p. x. Subsequent references are to this edition and are noted in the text.
11 David Jones (Cardiff, 1975), p. 50.
12 The Dying Gaul and Other Writings (London, 1978), p. 49.
(Joseph Cohen is Professor of English, Newcomb College, Tulane University, New Orleans.)
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