The Fate of Narrative in David Jones's Anathemata

PATRICK DEANE The Fate of Narrative in David Jones's Anathemata In '955, three years after the publication of David jones's Anathemata, critical attempts to domesticate the work by generic classification had so proliferated - and proved so fruitless - that one writer, john Petts, found it necessary to warn readers that another sort of approach was called for: 'Confronted by his peculiar art we must abandon the usual yardsticks and plumblines by which we try to assess the stature and depth of artists in an established tradition or a known school, for as both artist and writer he is unclassifiable and without precedent' (p 10).' Some heard the message, and some evidently did not. When jones'searlier book, In Parenthesis, was published in the United States in '962, the collision between one reviewer's desire to classify and the work's resistance to classification produced a dazzling light-show of critical language: 'this extraordinary meditation on trench warfare, this account, this novel, this poem, this crowded and precisely ordered frieze and mural, this many-choired orchestration of echoes from the islands' remote past ... ' (Paulding, p 45). The lesson was soon learned, the desire to classify jones's work by genre and influence was sublimated, and it became critical orthodoxy to observe that The Anathemata in particular is 'entirely individual' (Corcoran, p 77). And in ways that are not the concern of this essay, this became the common ground for applauding - and disparaging - David jones. When George Steiner argued in 1965 that jones's work should be considered 'among prolegomena to future forms' (p 390), he had in mind not only its resistance to classification, but also coincident with this, its eschatological focus. For Steiner, the future meant 'the other side of history' (p 38,), and proceeding from the view that all generic distinctions are historically rooted, he reasoned that the literature of post-history (if it is to exist at all) would be generically unrecognizable. Although his prime concern was with the forms literature would take in a Marxist Utopia, he perceived that the issue was a general one - and one that could be illuminated by any writing pointing to, and beyond, the fulfilment of time. This is presumably why David jones, a Roman Catholic, found himself in the company of another writer of Catholic sympathy - Charles Peguy cited pOSitively in an essay dedicated to Georg Lukacs, a Marxist. Steiner's poit'lt - that there is a close, indeed causal, relationship between a writer's eschatological preoccupation and the generic unclasUNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 57, NUMBER 2, WINTER 1987/ 8 DAVID JONES'S 'ANATHEMATA' 307 sifiability of his work - is of crucial importance to David Jones, and for reasons more complex than have so far been recognized. Jones himself said that 'the "parts that are united in one" in an art-work may be, for some, the most convincing analogy which they can get in this world ofthe "proportioned parts" of the heavenly city, to delight in which, religion says, is part of our redeemed destiny' (Dying Gaul, p 135). One is not surprised, therefore, to find him attempting to 'redeem' the time-bound act of reading The Anathemata by making use of non-chronological methods of organization, suchas association and parataxis. This naturally frustrates our refractory desire to uncover a 'plot' - in what Jones calls the 'English' sense of that word (Inner Necessities, p 75): a fabula, a 'timeoriented course of events' (Eco, p 27) - and we find ourselves unable to say precisely what the work is 'about: or more particularly what it is 'doing.' Progressive verbs of the latter sort are disconcertingly inappropriate , because so much ofJones's effort is concentrated upon counteracting time in its two most immediate manifestations, historicity and syntax. That enterprise is made more rather than less troubling to the reader by the way in which the larger segments of the poem are disposed. A general preoccupation with pre-history (section I) is replaced by the meditation on antiquity (section II), which modulates into the first of two sea-voyage descriptions; the second of these (section III) is set later than the first, and is succeeded by two sections (IV and v) set...