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

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)