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

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