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632 PATRICK DEANE David Jones PATRICK DEANE Paul Hills, editor. David Jones, Artist and Poet Warwick Studies in the European Humanities. Aldershot: Scalar Press 1997171 .41 black-and-white illustrations. £39.50 ; us $68.95 'What is unusual about David Jones,' writes Kathleen Henderson Staudt in the last essay included here, 'is that he celebrates the culture of the Christian West, not as the "great tradition" or the one authentic culture that must be renewed and reimposed on a decaying sOciety, but rather as the particular beloved "native culture" that has nurtured him, and as one ofthe many cultures throughout history which have embodied what is most fundamental to human experience, and to humanity's relationship to a larger reality.' One inference to be drawn from this observation is that usually to celebrate 'the culture of the Christian West' is to argue for its singular authenticity and for its absolute value. The charge against which Staudt would defend Jones, therefore, is that his Europeanness was in fact Eurocentrism of the colonial kind, and that to celebrate 'the very things of which one is oneselfmade/ as he put it in his preface to The Anathemata, was to remake the non-Christian, non-European other in his own image. Staudt's fine work on David Jones has always been marked by an acute awareness that there is no way to shield this battle-scarred old soldier from the salvoes and incursions of new critical forces - no way, that is, and still make with any confidence or credibility the sort of claim which Thomas Dilworth has often made and makes here again, that Jones's writings have an enduring and universal claim to greatness. In At the Turn ofaCivilization (1994) Staudt seemed to test Jones against a potentially corrosive feminist critique, and now in this essay it is in anticipation of an assault that might come from the trenches ofpostcolonial critics that she holds him up as a spokesman for historically silenced and marginalized cultures. 1am less confident than she that this poet can in fact be rendered proof against such attack, nor for that matter do I trunk itnecessary that he should be so rendered. One of his earliest memories was of the City Imperial Volunteers on a recruitment ride for the South African War: he grew up when British Colonial power was at its zenith, and was sixteen and studying at the Camberwell School of Art in 1911, the year of the Delhi Durbar. (See 'In Illo Tempore/ in The Dying Gaul and Other Writings.) Despite his adult identification with the subaltern Welsh, he was nevertheless by blood and upbringing in part at least English. How should he - any more than t whose Irish forebears governed an English prison in nineteenthcentury Natal- claim any sort of absolute freedom from the taint of Empire? More interesting is the question of why his critics should wish to make the claim on his behalf; and theansweris surely implicated in their desire to argue his pre-eminence, hls 'greatness,' which in some way is to argue that he transcended his historical circumstances. Thus Dilworth: 'In The Anathemata, Jones made a long modernist, DAVID JONES non-narrative work that is had done this. No writer since has done it' unified. No other writer What lies behind Staudt's the corltID.gel1CY 'rralgrrlents of an attl~mote:d ~AJ,..'t"1,.... ...,· no less prClmJnelnCe comes to writers whose work reE,ponSllve to such not those to whom it seems or irrelevant. So far as I David is not is in some sense-now called to answer. and the cultural and historical co-ordinates within which he wrote, it would be most if the was not di~,co:mt:itiJ1lg 111r'''l'iT'lM::.1 narrative edictum a Caesare can read the lan- 'lAM REDrr ... VIRGO / ... lAM REGNAT APOLLO.' Thus in do pnenOlTleI1la efface their as timeless reasserts itself: 'What's under works up,' as he that proves useful to Kathleen Staudt in her essay. In that concerned with to a hint that at some too, would draw back from a historicization of his life and art; so while she would argue that the 'Christian West' held for...

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