The rhythm of memory: a reading of poetic rhythm in David Jones's ...

Rhythm of Memory 1The rhythm of memory: a reading of poetic rhythm in DavidJones’s In ParenthesisThe memory lets escape what is over and above—as spilled bitterness, unmeasured, poured-out,and again drenched down — demoniac-pouring:who grins who pours to fill flood and super-flow insensately,pint-pot — from milliard-quart measure.IP, 153These lines from the beginning of the fifth and last part of David Jones’s In Parenthesis (a partitself entitled “The Five Unmistakable Marks”) seem to say something about what the memorycannot do under certain conditions of intense pressure. With their obvious cumulative cadence,they provide a series of images of what the memory “lets escape” and they come to rest in atraditional metaphor of the memory as a recipient —a homely enough “pint-pot”—, placed inincongruous, grotesque proximity to the “milliard-quart measure” from which it is to beoverwhelmed.The occasion for this statement of the memory’s incapacity is the immediate run up to themurderous assault on Mametz Wood carried out as a diversion by the British Army in June 1916.The troops are indeed about to be taken “over and above” into the open down before the wood,swept by enemy fire, walking and not running, rifles held up in the “high port position”. Joneshimself was at Mametz Wood and received a gunshot wound in the legs very much like John Ball,the central character in In Parenthesis. He returned to the front after recovering, and was therethrough to the end of the war. He had gone to France in 1915. In Parenthesis ends on a signaturequotationfrom the Chanson de RolandThe geste says this and the man who was on the field … and who wrote the book … the man whodoes not know this has not understood anything.IP, 187The writer of the text presents his credentials and with them, a challenge to the reader, who must“know” an initial fact before he can claim understanding of “anything”.War literature produced by combatants frequently gives rise to debate about such things asauthority, representivity, accuracy, scope, etc. And the horizon of expectation around such textsis also governed by similar considerations. The most widespread of these is probably the questionof scope. This is commonly dealt with in terms of genre to the effect that only an epic, a text ofepic dimension, can do justice to something like World War 1. Much hinges on what is meant by“epic” and because there has been much talking at cross purposes on precisely that point, thewhole question is a vexed and not always fruitful one. However, one problem always remains for

Rhythm of Memory 3• the dynamics of metaphor, whereby the “pint-pot”, as already suggested, figures thememory seen as a container but also the individual soldier as a bodily entity so immenselyvulnerable and fragile over and against the massive anonymous force he is up against• the dynamics of intertextuality, a very important aspect of In Parenthesis as a whole; thehypotext in this case is Luke 6, 38 (KJV): “Give, and it shall be given unto you; goodmeasure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into yourbosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again”.To quote the passage is to see how severely the co-text in In Parenthesis wrenches it out ofline with its origin. Where the gospel text is all about interpersonal justice and benigndisproportion, in In Parenthesis the subject is injustice and the disproportion is malignant• the dynamics of inversion which follow on from the previous point, since the rules of thekingdom of heaven described in the gospel are quite literally perverted so as to becomethe demoniac pouring of all hell let loose.My repeated use of the word “dynamics” is programmatic. What I mean by rhythm is inseparablefrom the idea of movement and the spatialisation it implies. The passage back and fro betweentext and hypotext, with the shifts this passage also involves, apprehended spatially anddynamically, relates on the same level, to all the other figurative or logical movementsconstituting the space of the text. Rhythm, then, is not something the text has at one point oranother, some localisable phenomenon, rhythm is what the text is and what it does. This is whatone might call the holistic vision of rhythm put forward by Henri Meschonnic throughout hisCritique du rythme, and in other works, such as Poétique du traduire. Meschonnic’s approach torhythm in translation, for example, can be summed up in the axiomatic title he uses for an articleof his: “translating is no such thing if you don’t render the rhythm you receive” 1 (La Tribuneinternationale des langues vivantes, N° 30, novembre 2001). And because translating is always reading,what applies to the former, has validity for the latter. Whereas exception might justifiably betaken to a statement which said something like “reading isn’t reading unless you read therhythm”, “reading the rhythm” is certainly a different kind of reading.This conception of rhythm as what the text is and what it does, leads into a further key concept,that of system, understood not, of course, in the restricted “mechanical” sense, often suggestiveof fixity, that it sometimes has, but organically, as a combining of elements that relate to and aremodified by each other. A further critical value of envisaging text as system lies in the perspectiveof the text as inclusive of the act of reading. The reader-in-the-text – in fabula – is of course afamiliar figure of reception criticism, which shifts around the once traditionally accepted roles or

Rhythm of Memory 5how glad we thought we were to step outside its brackets at the end of ’18…” (IP, xv). Jonesdoes not develop the surprising suggestion of an illusion in the words “how glad we thought wewere”, so that they close the preface of the poem with a diffuse sense of critical distance. Theimage of “stepping out of the brackets” is also a spatial one, which gives more than a hint of therhythmic conception behind the whole textual enterprise. The text emerges, it seems, not at all asa memoir but as a conflation. Memory itself has no rhythm, or rather, it is not of rhythm. It is thestuff that dreams, nightmares, obsessions are made of, and in that sense, it is reiterative andrecessive: language perhaps, but hardly discourse. Mere rehearsal of memory is equally a-rhythmic: discourse, but hardly more. What Jones suggests, with his dual image of seduction andparadoxical time brackets, is a blueprint for rhythmic intercourse. The process of writing and theexperience written of are historically conflated, in that the first reiterates the second. And thisreiteration concerns the paradoxical nature of both, in as much as each moves from margin tocentre, from the accidental to the necessary. It should be clear that whether or not Jones is“telling the truth” about how In Parenthesis came to be written or about how he and othersconsidered the “brackets” of the war, is irrelevant. Fiction or actual fact, it makes no difference,because the real point is the dynamic nature of the relationship established between text andhistory. The text functions not as a memoir might, in the a-rhythmia of memory, but by makingits discourse into rhythm.Before I attempt to show how In Parenthesis reads in terms of this “rhythmicisation” of memory,it is necessary to make some further points about the structure and scope of this text. AsDilworth points out “structure is not […] the first thing a reader notices in a poem by DavidJones” (13). This is because of the length and plethoric nature of the texts. Jones wrote of TheAnathemata, quoting the 9 th century historian Nennius, “‘I have made a heap of all I could find’”(Ana, 9). But despite this suggestion of uncontrolled shape, his texts tend to be super-structured,they deploy several levels of construction. The scope of this paper of course precludes anyattempt to describe such multiple level structuring in In Parenthesis. What can be usefully said hereis that the overall narrative structure of this seven part text consists of an asymmetricalmovement of advance towards and departure from the battlefield of Mametz Wood (or simplythe Wood, since the name Mametz is not actually used in the text). The other structuringelements of the poem, that can, for convenience, be grouped together under the very generalheading of mythic, depend on and relate to this narrative basis.Jones’s elaborate approach to structure is a clear sign of the impetus towards meaning that drivesthe entire project of In Parenthesis, and, as one might expect, lies at the heart of its rhythm. Mostof the protagonists of In Parenthesis are either killed or wounded in the action at the Wood, and

Rhythm of Memory 6one of the final images of the text is the arrival of new reserve troops “younger men / youngerstriplings” moving in to “bear up the war”. (IP, 187). In this way, the text closes on thesuggestion of an accelerated reduplication, figuring what Jones regarded as a movement towardsabsurdity. That the book’s brackets and its scope, should end here, on the threshold of the threatof meaninglessness, is symptomatic. Paul Fussell has argued in The Great War and Modern Memory,that it was only “the disappearance during the sixties and seventies of the concept of prohibitiveobscenity” that gave what he calls “the ritual of military memory” a “new dimension” (334).What he means by this is that instances of sexual behaviour such as buggery and deviancesvarious, become available as critical metaphors for the nature of warfare. Obscenity metaphorisesabsurdity. (Pat Barker explores this avenue in her World War I trilogy of novels starting with TheGhost Road, published in 1995). As it happens, Jones deals specifically, in the preface to InParenthesis, with the question of “impolite words”, explaining how he has been forced to“consider conventional susceptibilities” and how this hampered him “because the whole shape ofour discourse was conditioned by the use of such words”. He goes on to develop an astonishingargument to the effect that the repetition and “skilful” use of them “gave a kind ofsignificance[…] to our speech” and that their “juxtaposition in a sentence, and when expressedunder poignant circumstances, reached real poetry” (IP, xii). This is no less than an argument forthe production of poetic rhythm, which is seen as arising from the conjunction of linguistic skill,tradition, circumstance and emotion and is productive of meaning. Jones’s final point on thesubject is this: “I say more: the ‘Bugger! Bugger!’ of a man detailed, had often about it the ‘Fiat!Fiat!’ of the Saints” (IP, xii). One could hardly be at a greater distance from the strategy of usingobscenity to metaphorise absurdity: the whole impetus, so clearly described, works in theopposite direction, towards the creation of meaning. In the text of In Parenthesis, there are, indeed,virtually no “impolite words”. If then they were, as Jones maintains, so much a part of thesoldiers’ speech, their absence constitutes so many blanks in the text, so many spaces that cry outfor what Jones calls the “efficacious formula” (IP, xii), or, elsewhere, the “efficacious word”.Now, mispronouncing or eliding “efficacious” in just the right way produces one of the absententities, just as verbalising the first syllable gives the eff of effing: (pace Paul Auster who used thesame trick in Moon Palace), a common euphemism of the same word. And so the trajectory of theadjective rises, as it moves from euphemism, through paronomasic parody, to linguisticappositeness (the word as performative), and finally to the ultimate level of sacramentality (anextension of performativeness).The impetus of In Parenthesis towards meaningfulness as opposed to meaninglessness involvesseeing words themselves as texts, as rhythm. I have just referred to the trajectory of the adjective

Rhythm of Memory 7“efficacious”. What I should now like to show is that, far from being a metaphorical impositionof my own, the notion of trajectory and the image the word conjures up can be read as rhythmicdevices. To do this, I shall examine certain aspects of narrative patterning that revolve around thename and “doings” (for want of better word) of the poem’s central character, John Ball.A loose, biographically orientated reading of In Parenthesis would suggest that Private John Ball isthe writer in disguise, and he is certainly given some of the characteristics (for example, fumblingincompetence) Jones attributes to himself; he is also wounded in the same way Jones himself was.But to read John Ball thus, or only thus, is not to read the rhythm! As might be expected in amilitary context, Ball is frequently referred to by number as “01 Ball”; his full number being25201. This numerical identity has an immediate, conventionally comic application, in that this isthe regiment known as the “London-Welsh”, and the duplication of Joneses and Williamsesmakes the use of numbers a necessity independently of army usage. But the combination of nameand number, foregrounded comically, enters into other patterns, of which more presently. JohnBall is a Londoner, which gives him capital importance, but he “shares” his central narrativeposition with two Welsh counterparts. One is Corporal Aneirin Lewis, steeped in Welsh lore: hebears the name of the 7 th century Welsh poet, Aneirin, author of the epic Y Gododdin (known tous in 13 th century MS); the other is referred to only by a nickname as Dai Greatcoat, and even, asDai de la Cote Male Taile, after the manner of Malory in Le Morte d’Arthur (an importanthypotext for In Parenthesis). Lewis is killed in the artillery bombardment preceding the attack onthe Wood, but Dai, who in Part 4 (entitled “King Pellam’s Launde”) utters a mighty poetic boast,just disappears. Ball is wounded in the leg (like many heroes of myth) and is thus the only one ofthe three who survives, and the only one to complete, in the flesh, the full narrative movement ofadvance to and departure from the field.. Although the regiment’s “going up”, first to the frontline and later to battle, has several intertextual paradigms (one ironic example being The Pilgrim’sProgress), Ball’s intertextual identity, unlike that of Aneirin Lewis or Dai Greatcoat, remainsdiffuse until the end of the poem. It is in his retreat from the field that it emerges, in a mixture ofseriousness and parody that ultimately becomes an unexpected apotheosis of his name as text, asrhythm.Ball leaves the Wood crawling on all fours; as he “goes down”, he decides – a serious step for asoldier to take – to abandon his rifle; slung round his shoulder, it gets in his way and becomestoo heavy to bear. But the weapon is also a parodic burden (in both senses of the word); it hangsround the neck “like the Mariner’s white oblation” and like Durendal, Roland’s sword, “It is notto be broken on the brown stone under the gracious tree” (IP, 184). The episode of hesitation iscomposed of memory snatches from training sessions about the soldier’s relation to and care of

Rhythm of Memory 8his weapon, with Sergeant Major O’Grady shouting out, among other things, “Marry it man!Marry it!” (IP, 183) and the final decision itself is sealed with :But leave it—under the oak.leave it for a Cook’s tourist to the Devastated Areas and crawlas far as you can and wait for the bearers.IP, 186 [sic for the absence of capital letter at “leave”]In other words, the rifle becomes a complex written and oral text of memory and action. In thediegesis, it is deposited as an unbearable burden, but beyond this, it can indeed be seen as anoblation, a rhythmic offering for future eyes. The weapon is, by epic convention, a metonymy forthe warrior. Here, it marks the conclusion of Ball’s trajectory in the field of war and theincipience of his textual adventure. Ball carries the rifle and leaves it, but the rifle contains hisname, simply because a ball is a bullet, and Ball’s bullet in the legs is self-inscription. To put itdifferently, Ball is on the receiving end of a trajectory that spells his name, just as the name, as weshall see, “describes” the trajectory. The episode of Ball’s wounding reads as follows:And to Private Ball it came as if a rigid beam of great weightflailed about his calves, caught from behind by ballista-baulklet fly or aft-beam slewed to clout gunnel-walkerbelow below below.IP, 183The overall motif-cum-dynamic here, like that of the passage I quoted at the start, isdisproportion, a sense of which arises from the images used. But what really binds theseapparently disparate images together and makes them into rhythm is the system developed fromthe name which combines cause and destination: “Ball” is in ballista (the huge crossbow-likeweapon) and in baulk (pronounced /bawk/ or /bawlk/ and meaning, amongst other things, a largebeam), but by paronomasia, “ball” is also in “below below below”, where the huge beam knocksthe unwary walker. The double image of ballista hurling its huge bolt and sail beam swinging hardround clearly expresses the image of a trajectory; “below” signals the fall of Ball, but of coursederives its relevance not from the diegesis itself, but only from the text of memory, from themetaphor of the ship implicit in that of the sail beam. Thus the poetic rhythm of memory!In this complex, Ball’s name marks, as I say, point of departure, impact and resting place. But initself, it accomplishes a trajectory very close to that of the “efficacious word”. First, somenumber symbolism: Ball is ’01 Ball: this alternation of nought, or zero, and one, or individual, canbe understood as a cipher of his rhythmic identity. He is no one in the sense that he is fiction, yetin the text he is an individual. The number play relates him to the “world”. The sum of the first,elided, part of his number, 252 is 10, which provides a mirror image of 01, but could also be seenin terms of a downward pointing parabola. I should add here that this figure or shape highlights

Rhythm of Memory 9Ball’s textual identity, but it also reproduces what I shall show in a moment is a key shapethroughout In Parenthesis. Finally, the full sum of Ball’s number is of course, eleven, figuring(literally) the last two letters of the name. In British number slang, eleven is “legs eleven”: theseare infantry soldiers, they “go up” to the front and into battle “on legs”, and Ball’s wound in theleg, however biographical it may be, is thus a symbolic one. But the relevance of the symbol isnot external, to symbolic meaning in general, as it were, but internal and rhythmic.It will be helpful at this point, to look the opening lines of In Parenthesis, as an illustration of howeverything starts with the complex of number and name and their interplay:’49 Wyatt, 01549 Wyatt.Coming sergeant.Pick ’em up, pick ’em up—I’ll stalk within yer chamber.Private Leg . . . sick.Private Ball . . . absent.’01 Ball, ’01 Ball, Ball of No.1.Where’s Ball, 25201 Ball—you corporal,Ball of your section.IP, 1 4Even the section number enters the number dance. The “’em” in “pick ’em up” is of course thelegs, but Private Leg, never again mentioned, is “sick”: he functions as a proleptic joke. Ball’smilitary inefficiency – he is late on parade and has his name taken – is poetic efficacy. He is bothabsent and present. The apparently realistic character anecdote starting the text in fact charges itin a different way, by introducing the dynamics of rhythm into the name. And so it is that Ball isalso the object his name designates, the pivotal ball-bearing on which the text turns. This imagereiterates the 10—01 combination previously mentioned. There is more, however. Ball’s firstname, John, is a double one in the sense that, like Jack, it has a generic use, applicable to any“John” whose name you don’t know, while it at the same time designating an individual. As aLondoner surrounded by Welshmen, John Ball is also, by paronomasia, a parodic, John Bull,whose name incongruously calls up a type he in no way represents. Finally, Private Ball’s nameand rank together do the same thing as the “efficacious word”, they euphemise another of theabsent entities, those “impolite words” the poet tells us he had to omit.I have traced the trajectory of the word “efficacious” from euphemism, through paronomasicparody to linguistic appositeness. The trajectory of the name of Ball moves through the samestages: from euphemism (a form of disguise, of course), to the comic parody the vowels of thename suggest, and thence to the series of metaphorical manipulations that encapsulate the historyand fate of the character. Opened up and spatialised, the name is transformed into situation andnarrative. It becomes a textual machine, a text in itself; it is, as we have seen the weapons –theballista-baulk– and the projectile, and, in the form of the rifle, betokens the offering of the text. In

Rhythm of Memory 10as much as In Parenthesis is made of a double wealth of personal and literary memory, its rhythmcan be seen as a rifling of the canon of memory. Which is why concluding remarks will be allabout trajectories and will try to show the validity of this metaphor.As might be expected from a war narrative, In Parenthesis describes several instances of artillery orrifle fire. But not only are these strategically placed in the narrative, but they are accompanied byechoes and parody so that they become a system. I can do little more here than give a shortoutline.• In Part 2, occurs what Dilworth calls the “primal” (412) shell burst (IP, 23). I shall returnto this.• In Part 3, Ball observes flares mounting from British and later from German trenches:“lights elegantly curved above his lines” (IP, 50).• In Part 3 occurs the epitome of the meaningless action as a nervous John Ball, on nightsentry duty, fires his rifle at nothing but the empty darkness out over No Man’s Land (IP,53-54).• In Part 4, the whole idea of artillery is parodied as the soldiers suggest a bombardment ofthe Christmas Day issue of unpalatable army tobacco: “Heave that bull-shit to Jerry, tinand all, for a happy Christmas—it’ll gas the sod.” (IP, 72). A parodic parabola thatincludes the paronomasic joke on Ball’s name.• In Part 4, a number of different shell trajectories are described:: duds, shrapnel, shellsfalling short.• In Part 7, where “muck rains down from heaven” (IP 164), Ball momentarily findshimself in the “navel” of the Wood, at a centre of calm (like Melville’s Ahab in the quietheart of the maelstrom of cachalots). This place is determined by two things: the drippingpercolation of human blood from the vegetation and, high above, “trundling projectiles”that “intersect their arcs at zenith” (IP, 181). Significantly enough, this centre is reachedonly shortly before the “ballista-baulk” of Private Ball’s wound in the leg and the crawl tothe close of the narrative. The narrative centre is determined not by its central place in thedisposition of the narrative but by virtue of its relationship to what might be called arhythmic signature, the trajectory of artillery shells passing and “intersecting” above. Thecentre, where blood percolates and drips down is also a place upon which John Ballstumbles and in which he stumbles when the bullet’s trajectory strikes him down.

Rhythm of Memory 11The entire isotopy of trajectories has its origin in the doings of war, and, in that sense is part ofmemory. But what memory retains is essentially the point or the moment of impact. What thepoem does is to use the shape of the trajectory, not only to produce with it the type of variationto be found in the passages I have just glanced at, but as a shape of the narrative and a shaping ofnames. Over and against this shaping, which involves, as I have tried to show, an involution ofcause and effect, the poem produces its own text by conjugating material that may well be seen asmemory with the memory of texts from the canon of literature. Because the text comes in thisway to be metaphorically assimilated to the abandoned, offered rifle, it can indeed be seen as aprocess of “rifling”, that is of ransacking both memory and the literary canon and as a trajectoryin itself. This is the process that I think can justifiably be called the rhythm of memory.I shall conclude with an epilogue reading of the “primal” shell-burst in Part 2 of the poem (IP,23-24). The passage is unfortunately far too long to quote fully. It narrates the first occasion onwhich Ball experiences artillery fire. The shell-burst itself is only a part of the picture and thoughits violence is evident and clearly chronicled, what is, perhaps, more to the point is that the shelllands amongst mangolds, turning their churned pulp into a euphemism of the blood spilled laterin the wood. The final image of the sequence, in which the “sap of vegetables slobbered thespotless breech-block of N°3 gun”, is not merely a proleptic detail but, more essentially, arhythmic statement, a metaphor of the rhythmic association of effect and potential cause (theironically “spotless” artillery piece is capable of inflicting exactly the same damage), and ametaphor of the trajectory / shape of the entire narrative. I have used the term shell-burst, butwhat the page and a half long text really describes is trajectory. It transforms parenthesis intoparabola; the arrival of the shell and its explosion erupt into Ball’s existence, bringing at the sametime a hyper-charge of meaning (analogous, of course, to the overloaded rifle around thewounded Ball’s neck) and at the same moment, an image of the meaninglessness of warfare.Interestingly enough, the shell is described as hurtling “out of the vortex, rifling the air…” (myitalics); its oncoming force is textualised by an accumulation of epithets, the hyperbole of whichis clearly mimetic :an on-rushing pervasion, saturating all existence; with exactitude, logarithmic, dial-timed,millesimal—of calculated velocity, some mean chemist’s contrivance, a stinking physicists destroyingtoy. (IP 24)But there is a system of balances here: to this accumulation of epithets and actions and thevariety of different fields they predicate, corresponds a list of insignificant minutiae perceived byBall in the “highly alert” state the influence of the shell’s approach produces in him: “the tilt of abucket, the movement of a straw, the disappearing right boot of Sergeant Snell …”. One list

Rhythm of Memory 12encounters and is modified by another; so that the text exists in the rhythm of these encounters,not in any abstract perception of the magnitude of the event, nor in an emotional reaction to it.The shell-burst ends in anti-climax; all it mangles is mangolds. But though anti-climax completesby a fall the trajectory of the shell, it is not an isolated shape in the trajectory of the text. Thearrival of the shell is preceded by a scene in which Lieutenant Jenkins asks Ball for a match.Searching clumsily through his pockets, Ball scatters their contents on the ground. This gives riseto the first enumeration of the sequence, more a lost-property list than an (epic) catalogue. Thisexposure or “revelation” of the contents of Ball’s pockets constitutes a proto anti-climax, and thefeeble match flare that follows, as Jenkins hunches his shoulders to nurture the flame, can be readas a parodic equivalent /anticipation of the shell-burst. Thus the two parts of the scene cohere ina mirror relationship, based on disproportion.Among the objects Ball drops is a “latch-key” to “Stondon Park”, his home in London. Lyingthere incongruously in a French farmyard., it becomes,. as in the closing sequence of The WasteLand, the key of memory, it lets memory into the “remembered” scene and layers it with thetopoi of the lost enclosure (Stondon Park) and the mythic, perhaps illusory, promise (or threat)of a door to be opened.It is characteristic of Jones’s deployment of rhythm that the linking element between the twoparts of the scene should be language. Because he forgets to say “sir” to Lieutenant Jenkins, Ballis subjected to Sergeant Snell’s “favourite theme” on how to address commissioned officers. Ballwaits patiently for Snell’s “eloquence” to “spend itself”, which makes its “flow” strictlysimultaneous with the shell’s arrival, so that the two trajectories (like the two words Snell / shell)intersect. This of course turns the shell-burst into another kind of incongruous climax, set off bythe unstated yet evident irony whereby Snell, for all his admonishing eloquence, fails to warn Ballof the danger, and plunges for safety, leaving him exposed to it alone. And this solitariness, is ofcourse, how Ball’s trajectory in the wood ends and how the text itself begins to inscribe itsrhythm.Michael HINCHLIFFE, Université de Provence.Works citedDILWORTH, Thomas. The Shape of Meaning in the Poetry of David Jones. Toronto and London:University of Toronto Press, 1988.FUSSELL, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York and London: Oxford UP, 1975.JONES, David. In Parenthesis. London: Faber, 1937. (Abbr. IP)

Rhythm of Memory 13—. The Anathémata. London: Faber, 1952. (Abbr. Ana)MESCHONNIC, Henri. Critique du rythme. Anthropolgie historique du langage. Lagrasse: Verdier,1982.—. Poétique du traduire. Lagrasse: Verdier, 1999.1“Traduire n’est pas traduire si on ne rend pas le rythme qu’on a reçu”2“Mais alors que chacun n’a que son passé, le poème passe de je en je. Il est ce discours qui peut reconnaître le passédes autres. Il n’arrache pas seulement un peu de vivre à l’oubli. S’il est autre que du souvenir, c’est que le rythme estune actualisation du sujet, de sa temporalité” (87)3The text of In Parenthesis is preceded by a dedication, in the form of an inscription, to “the memory of those withme in the covert and in the open…etc.”..4Cf. the poet Thomas Wyatt (1503?-42) who wrote : “They flee from me that sometime did me seek/ With nakedfeet stalking in my chamber:”