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

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