David Jones and The Anathemata: Life as Art
So that to the question: What is this writing about? I answer that it is about one's own 'thing', which res is unavoidably part and parcel of the Western Christian res, as inherited by a person whose perceptions are totally conditioned and limited by and dependent upon his being indigenous to this island. In this it is necessarily insular; within which insularity there are the further conditionings contingent upon his being a Londoner, of Welsh and English parentage, of Protestant upbringing, of Catholic subscription.
With these words from his Preface to The Anathemata,(1) David Jones cogently summarized the unity of his life and most ambitious work of art. He had coalesced in his epic poem the two formative events: his birth in 1895 of a Welsh father and English mother, and his conversion to Catholicism in 1921. Just as In Parenthesis (1937) had portrayed the agony of the specific period of World War I, The Anathemata would occupy the rest of his life after the war and conversion and would be correctly subtitled as 'fragments of an attempted writing', which he called 'an exact description of it' (T A, 14). Even at his death in 1974, Jones was working on a sequel to the work published in 1952, but this second poem was actually appearing in still more fragments in The Sleeping Lord (1974) and pieces published occasionally by Agenda magazine, including The Kensington Mass and recently The Roman Quarry (1981). In The Anathemata, Jones had embarked on a life-long documentation of his life and beliefs, but more, as the grapplings at faith which nurtured his quest for total selfjustification.
When Jones quoted the historian Nennius, to say 'I have made a heap of all that I could find' (TA, 9), he rightly applied the method of the Historia Brittonum to his own endeavour. The 'heap' included his life's work as an artist and maker of inscriptions, merging a rediscovered reverence for the res of Britain, both as Roman and Welsh. Indeed, The Anathemata intimately evokes his Welsh heritage, as mythic font or what he often termed 'materia poetica', and as literal matter for his verse. That Jones meticulously supplied glosses for the meanings and pronunciation of the Welsh terms and allusions revealed a desire to explicate as well as guarantee that his cultural ethnicity would be recaptured for an audience which, like himself, had to search for a receding past increasingly less meaningful to the modern world. The epic thus joined his father's half with his mother's Wales intimately bound to the Romanization of Britain and sharing one island -but it went still further. Jones sought to merge both traditions with a third, the joining of Christianity to a once savage and secular greatness. He attempted this through his new-found faith, a Catholicism which had subsumed him as he felt it had indelibly transformed his ancestral homeland.
Jones, then, used The Anathemata as a quintessential anamnesis. The poem became his constant labor and an emblem of his life: self-generating apologia, never ceasing quest to elucidate 'the principle that informs the poetic art, a something which cannot be disengaged from the myths, deposits, matiere, ethos, whole res of which the poet is himself a product' (TA, 20). Through the poem's eight sections, Jones enunciated in overlapping sequences what he found as the essentials of his faith, namely, the Supper of the Lord, the Cross of redemption, the co-redeemer Virgin, and the union of the human family. These elements in verse, as for him personally, centered on a central mystery, the Roman liturgy as the literal anamnesis, the 'effective recalling' of beloved things (TA, 21 ), the return of the Christ through the act of recalling the Supper-Cross sacrifice and sacramental presence, one which unified all men by way of continual incarnation. Jones was obsessed with this mystery in his private faith and sought to define it publicly for a now-alienated world, especially Britain, by a process of historical synthesis.
The faith of David Jones, coinciding he believed with his everyday existence, thus informs The Anathemata and its essentially liturgical dimensions. Foremost is the sacrificial death of Christ on Calvary as the fulfillment of the Supper and its perfect and inevitable complement and ratification. The consequential theme of the 'hill' and its cross is manifestly present in each section of the poem. Almost as equally prevalent is the traditional belief that the Virgin Mary, by virtue of her consenting fiat expressed to the plan of salvation, acts as a 'co-redemptrix', a partner with Christ in the composite acts of redemption. Included in the act of Christ are all men, as brothers of Christ and children of the Virgin. Hence proceeds the cosmic concern of Jones in his evocation of global and immediate ancestors (including his parents in the dedicatory inscription), his human brothers both living and dead, and the sacredness with which he regards their deaths. The recalling of the dead, often utilized, is thus another major supporting strain, in the more inclusive image of Christ encompassing all of time in his co-terminous liturgical act and salvific mission. This 'sprawl of the pattern' in The Anathemata is difficult to discern, but it does constitute a structure of sorts and reinforces Jones's initial and repeated emphasis on the fragmentary nature of his undertaking:
To reinforce something already touched upon: I regard my book more as a series of fragments, fragmented bits, chance scraps really, of records of things, vestiges of sorts and kinds of disciplinae, that have come my way by this channel or that influence. (TA, 34)
As the painter he was, Jones fashioned a 'coat of many colours' out of 'Pieces of stuffs that happen to mean something to me'.
Poetic materials, from personal life and preserved history, mirror the life's search for fulfillment and attempt for definition of self. Poem and life share a fluid reality: 'If it has a shape it is chiefly that it returns to its beginning… that you won't make much sense of it one bit unless you read the lot' (TA, 33). That the poem was never 'complete' is emblematic of a life never 'finished', a searching never consummated. As art, The Anathemata shares its methodology with Finnegans Wake, which Jones read regularly, both for Joyce's interwoven myth and contemporary reality, the attempt to remake' scripture', and the wonderful manufacture of the word as conveyor of the mystery of anamnesis(2). And as with the Wake, Jones specified that his verse must be sounded, having 'an oral and aural intention' (TA, 35). Here his title was perfectly appropriate, to show by way of the pun that anathemata with dualistic origins signified first cursed and later sanctified things: '...the blessed things that have taken on what is cursed and the profane things that somehow are redeemed...Things set up, lifted up, or in whatever manner made over to the gods' (TA, 28-29).
Jones saw human life as a process of sign, a signifying of the sacred through the profane, god becoming man and man redeeming the mundane to share in godliness. Liturgical transubstantiation as a pervasive image in The Anathemata unites the poet's earthly struggle with the event viewed as irrevocable in human history, the mingling with man of a transcendent act. It matters symbolically that the epic is pan myth, unconfirmed but at least possible and usable by the poet as justifying the recreation: the coming of Jesus and the ancient faith to Britain with Joseph of Arimathea, the confluence of the Welsh Mabinogion with the Incarnation, the Virgin as archetype for every version of the Earth Mother. Myth and historical record, cosmic past and specific present are joined as the poet seeks to understand his present condition through its merger, or more precisely as rediscovery of merger, with the past.
Struggling with this aspiration until his death in 1974, Jones dedicated his later life to the project as an 'exact description' of his human existence, an attempt to find order and relevance in the material world. From his perspective it was a process of calling up what he felt in his Britannic bones were the true foundations for his own accidental appearance in this place and this time. That this task assumed the onus of bard and prophet was for David Jones his mission to our century and his own integration into the inspired tradition of poiesis, remaking the world for all men, and for each man, into a new image of the eternal promise of rebirth.
NOTES
1 David Jones, The Anathemata, Compass Books edition (New York: Viking Press, 1965), p. 11. Further references cited as TA with page numbers from this edition. Except for the final three pages, pagination agrees with earlier editions (London: Faber and Faber, 1952; New York: Chilmark Press, 1963).
2 When I visited with him in 1967, Jones often remarked on his admiration for and affinity with the work of James Joyce. At this time he also expressed approval for my thesis on The Anathemata, noting that it was the first long study of his poem which he had read in English. The study was later published in summary form as: " The Anathemata of David Jones: Notes on Theme and Structure", Twentieth Century Literature, 15 (1969), 105-113.
(Leo M. J. Manglaviti is Assistant Professor, English, The Pennsylvania State University, Dunmore, Pennsylvania.)
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