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

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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
Page 1: Rhythm of Memory 1The rhythm of mem
Page 5: Rhythm of Memory 5how glad we thoug
Page 9 and 10: Rhythm of Memory 9Ball’s textual
Page 11 and 12: Rhythm of Memory 11The entire isoto
Page 13: Rhythm of Memory 13—. The Anathé

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