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JOHN X. COOPER The Writing of the Seen World: David Jones's In Parenthesis Visual description is an old and honoured part of narrative and poetic technique on which critics in our time rarely linger. Perhaps this is so because it is taken for granted that all great writers share in common the art of catching in words the 'look' of a place, the decor of a gesture, or the swift sketch that opens a face. Among the many felicities of a wellwrought tale none is more magical, even if, from the perspective of a total aesthetic response, a little modes!, than the pleasure of 'seeing' a vivid picture emerge in the mind's eye. Thankless is the task of trying to rank writers by this particular aspect of their talent; yet just as all writers have their individual tones, characteristic verbal rhythms, and unique perceptual and cognitive processes, so too we can discern the particular ways in which they shape visual material. No modern work is more characteristically visual, aT, to use the more general word, sensuous, than David Jones's In Parenlhesis. A good part of Jones's effort seems to have gone into the skilful construction of a vivid, realistic war landscape with figures.' Of course, Jones's care in representing 'in vivid images, the sights and sounds and smells of the trenches'2is not the be-all of his work. The 'shape' which Jones makes in words has a richly elaborated sensuous basis and from it emerge the mythological-legendary, liturgical, social, and literary superstructures that correspond to his larger intentions. Yet the extraordinary power of his total representation has been recognized as originating in its stark realism, its precise, detailed, palpable rendering 'of the misery and terror, the boredom and companionship, of the soldiers' experience'.' Thus, while acknowledging with Jeremy Hooker that In Parenlhesis 'weds myth and realism' (20), I want to put the mythic to the side and concentrate on a particular aspect of the work's realism: Jones's consummate skill in visual imaging. It would be easy to say that Jones's descriptive talent proceeds from his training as a painter and graphic artist. These skills, although they may sophisticate the eye, do not necessarily teach how visual observations can be translated into words. Yet the fact that he is a paintersuggests that the visual has a much greater impact on him than on the visually untutored . But again is this necessarily true, and even if it is, does it simplify the rendering of the seen in words? A more reliable tack is to see the UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME XLVIII, NUMBER 4, SUMMER 1979 0042-0247179/0800-°3°3 $01.50/0 © UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS 1979 )04 JOHN X. COOPER visual element as a necessity determined by the war experience itself. The situation that the work dramatizes is alien and strange; its locale is unnatural; the structure of feeling that the experience determines shifts away from the quotidian and emotionally stable conventions of orderly civil life towards affective zones of a different climate. The cold, wet landscape, terror, privation, and the palpable pressure of 'Somewhere ahead of them death's stopwatch ticks'4 define forms of feeling, action, and reaction that are inherently unbalanced. If it is true that, like nature and vacuums, the mind abhors disequilibrium, then the immediate objective of life, under these conditions, is to neutralize their disruptive potential, to right, in short, a wry world. The several critics of In Parenthesis all agree that the mythical and liturgical materials of the writing are in fact modes of orientation within the utter chaos of war, modes that parallel the rigid military codes, written and unwritten, which control army life,' thus teasing order from disorder by connecting the experiential uncertainties of the fron t to larger cultural and historical continuities. Isn't it natural then to see the many passages of visual description as vehicles of the same intention? Indeed, the visual level of the narrative is not merely an appropriate background that 'can be taken for granted'· and against which the more essential symbolic dramas are played out, but the experiential ground from which those dramas...

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