Content area
Abstract
David Jones's Anathemata remains problematic in terms of prevailing assumptions about literary form and the long poem in particular. Although criticism no longer takes it for granted that the work's form is directly attributable to the influence of Eliot, Joyce and Pound, the idea persists that it will prove amenable to domestication according to one critical norm or another.
This thesis sets out from Jones's assertion that, notwithstanding superficial resemblances, his "writings" have an "altogether different point of departure" from those of other writers. By working through arguments made in his prose writings, the first chapter reveals that Jones's belief in the uniqueness of every work of art grows out of the conviction that literary or visual form is directly traceable to the specific ideology of the artist. In Jones's case the ideology is religious--particularly, Roman Catholic--and his aesthetic develops through an analogy between art and the sacraments. From this point onwards the thesis attempts to demonstrate the ways in which the form of The Anathemata is produced by the intention to make a sacramental, or "effective" re-calling of the writer's world-view.
The second chapter pursues one crucial element of the sacramental analogy, namely the "materiality" which the text must assert in order to function as what Jones calls a "valid sign." It discusses the "presence" of the composing author, and the extent to which the work reveals itself as an attempt at narrative discourse. In the third chapter, a discussion of Jones's intentional ambiguity and pervasive use of parataxis, the resistant objectivity of the text is demonstrated to be a linguistic reality.
In the final chapter it is argued that content and form together make a "shape" that is an analogue for creation conceived according to Jones's Thomistic world-view. The final requirement of the sacraments--that they cause what they signify to be "here and now operative"--is satisfied by the way in which the resistant text refuses to comply with the reader's temporal expectations, compelling him, for the duration of the reading, to participate in an atemporal recomposition of history and reality.
