David Jones: Establishing the Claims to Greatness

532 T.H. ADAMOWSKI Eliot thought that modern self-reflexiveness would lead to unsustainable nervous tension, and he may yet prove to be correct. In the meantime, all one can do is to take note of what Gilbert Hottois has called the 'inflation of language' in modern thought and the way in which this inflation distances those who are at home with it from those who are not. Those who are not read 'public fiction' (Steinbeck, Davies, Ross, Updike, et al). Those who are read Joyce, Faulkner, Gaddis, and Sollers. But this huge privilege accorded to language is at the threshold of the geriatric ward of ideas (its youth was spent in the nineteenth century, with Flaubert). This greying 'language privilege' is now being accorded, more widely than ever, to the act of writing criticism itself. For that reason few (of a certain age) will regret that Leitch spends more time on J. Hillis Miller than on T.S. Eliot (fit retribution for a poet who disseminated so much 'difficulty') - one likes to read about one's teachers and shamans. They will think it 'natural' that a criticism sensitive to language and indifferent to the 'common reader' should receive so much attention. But somewhere in the womb of time is the person who will, one day, cure the fetishism of language, revealing it, perhaps, to be late modernity's version of the 'mechanical metaphor' of the eighteenth century or the 'organic metaphor' of Romanticism. That is, he or she will analyse it - the only 'cure' Eliot could suggest for the 'disease' of Romanticism - perhaps by attending to the social needs it satisfies in the technico-pedagogical intelligentsia (Marxists - or Mannheimians take heart!) The analyst may be a poet-critic (or a philosopher not raised to admire the 'tutorial method' of Oxford or the mores of Black Forest peasants). And when this analytic coup de main is administered another generation may look back on the Age of Language as the latter looks back on those generations that thought language was as transparent a medium as Jacoby seems to think it is (in this respect, Leitch's is the more rewarding book). But perhaps they will be less patronizing than those who are now so alert to language that (as Jacoby knows and as Leitch does not) it has left them tongue-tied. David Jones: Establishing the Claims to Greatness W.J. KEITH Thomas Dilworth. The Shape of Meaning in the Poetry of David Jones University of Toronto Press 1988. xiv, 434, illus. $47.50 Thomas Dilworth's ambitious, scholarly, detailed, closely argued, and brilliant book is the latest as well as the most sustained attempt to insist on David Jones's claim to an equal place with T.5. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce in the pantheon of literary modernism in English. Like most of Jones's admirers, Dilworth is convinced of his major status but is acutely aware of the difficulty involved in gaining for him the recognition he deserves. Jones was the last of the UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1989 DAVID JONES 533 four to appear in print (In Parenthesis was not published until 1937), butit is false to conclude from this that he was in any way derivative or that his contribution was less original than theirs. By that time, however, Eliot, Pound, and Joyce had all established themselves as modern giants; as a result, both academics and general readers have been alike reluctant to invest time and effort in the mastery of another, decidedly 'difficult' writer. This is a pity, since Jones can offer certain literary and intellectual satisfactions that the others do not provide. His writings cohere in a way that (it is now surely agreed) Pound's Cantos do not; besides, they are refreshingly free from the contamination of disreputable politics. Again, his religious position, which contributes in large measure to this coherence, is broader in range and ultimately more 'human' than Eliot's; Jones may have been a hermit in his later years, but he was never an ascetic. And, although a serious study of his work leads into some challenging and neglected scholarly areas, his allusions are...