Mapping the Labyrinth: The UR-Anathemata of David Jones

DAVID Jones, the British poet and painter, once remarked that soldiers in The Great War were of two types: those who feared being buried alive in the trenches, and those who feared death on the open plains. Wounded at Mametz Woods in 1915, he counted himself among the latter, so much so that his post-war life was marked by an everincreasing agoraphobia complicated by an intense need to surround himself with possessions redolent of significance.

It was not simply that he called the rooms in which he lived "dugouts" and filled them with his paintings, manuscripts and books;' creating enclosed havens extended to his art. Paul Hills notes that a common gesture in his paintings is the creation of space that offers "a sense of safe enclosure" and Jones (31), speaking of his preferred method of painting, wrote in 1935 that "I like looking out on the world from a reasonably sheltered position" (Hills 56).2 While a concern with enclosures is visible in his paintings, his regard for the "sheltered position" is even more important in his poetry.3

Irrespective of the origins of his fears, Jones, like many modernists, divides experience into a system of radical opposition: past counters present, culture resists civilization, gratuity opposes utility. Concerned with cultural crisis, a crisis Jones labeled "The Break" (DG 41-49), many modernists conceptualize such oppositions in temporal terms-often by upholding a past culture, now lost, that in its wholeness opposes a fragmented modern world.

While Jones, too, constructed an idealized culture to counter a failed present, he differed from his contemporaries in how he depicted the tensions that he felt threatened the contemporary west. A visual artist first, he characteristically frames his oppositions in spatial terms. Whether in the geography of No-Man's Land, where "there was no help for them on that open plain" (SL 104), or in his rendering of Imperial Rome as a sprawling "megalopolis that wills death" (SL 13), exterior spaces most often exemplify the traits of civilization: empire, conformity, alienation. As embodied in Jones' representation of rural Wales and Celtic culture as the "hedges of illusion" (SL 63), interior spaces serve as refuges for the threatened values of local culture: community, tradition, the sacral.

In sketching the uneasy boundary between the interior and exterior, Jones' poetry continually employs images of demarcation: the trenches of The Great War, the city walls of Troy, the limes of the Roman Empire, the natural boundaries-the rivers and mountains-of Wales. Walls and boundaries, though, serve two opposed purposes in Jones' poetic universe: one is to protect an endangered culture, "that known enclosure" (SL 56), by serving as "hedges . . . round some remnant of us" (SL 63); the other is to serve the interests of imperialism as "the walls that contain the world" (SL 10). Equally problematic is his depiction of the center. In presenting beleagured cultures, Jones evokes the "prepared high room" (A 53) of Holy Thursday, the burial mound, the cave, the earth as repositories for all that is in danger of being lost "in the December of our culture" (SL 64). Conversely, the center is the locus of imperial power, where "an inner cabinet plot the mappi mundi" (SL 40) and impersonally send out "the routine decrees" (SL 40) that govern the "Urbs, throughout orbis" (SL 50). The centripetal protective enclosure "gather[s] all things in" (SL 61) as "the holy mound / [the] fence within the fence" (SL 64). Imperialism's centrifugal center extends outward seeking to "liguidate the holy diversities" (SL 62) by levelling local cultures "to the world plain" (SL 55) and by dispersing that which culture would preserve.

While a concern with interior and exterior spaces is evident throughout his career, his poetry underwent a profound shift during the Second World War when Jones undertook a poetic project centered around the Roman Catholic Mass. Unable to finish the work, he later used parts in The Anathemata and from the rest he "hoped to make . . . a continuation, or Part II of The Anathemata" (A 15). In spite of later repeated efforts to complete the project, only some middle-length "fragments" appeared, which he later collected in The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments. After his death, Rene Hague and Harman Grisewood edited the unpublished poetry and presented The Roman Quarry and Other Sequences. While The Roman Quarry and Other Sequences never recovered the entire project, the edition made clear Jones' view that all of his work was part of "a wideranging poem which he was never able to complete" (RQ XIV).4 Even The Anathemata, whose title until the corrected proof was "Part of The Anathemata," is only one section of the whole, hence its subtitle: "fragments of an attempted writing."

RECENTLY, I have recovered from the David Jones Archives two long, interwoven poems written by Jones between 1940 and 1946.5 The first, a 77-page narrative composed between 1940 and 1943, contains "The Tutelar of the Place" and all of the Roman poems published in The Sleeping Lord in what is often close to their final forms. The second, a 143-page narrative/meditation written between 1943 and 1946, uneasily combines its narrative predecessor and early versions of the Celtic poems from The Sleeping Lord. The second half of this work is almost identical to "The Roman Quarry" sequence. The text written between 1943 and 1946 not only is the Ur-version of The Anathemata, but also forms the spine for his later "continuation, or Part II of The Anathemata." The development of the first narrative into the second meditation initiated a shift in form that ultimately resulted in The Anathemata. The narrative that Jones wrote between between 1939 and 1943 is structurally identical to In Parenthesis. Like its predecessor, it is a long narrative poem marked by a spatial center. In early 1943, though, Jones introduced an extensive insertion into what was an already narratively finished work. This insertion was the first in a series of additions that Jones introduced into his work, a series in which each subsequent insertion was embedded within the previous one. With each new insertion, the work moved farther away from narrative and closer to the associational, allusive and geometric structure that marks The Anathemata. By the time Jones made his final addition, allusive density had replaced narrative continuity and the last insertion is an intricate web of allusions. In the process, the emerging poem became an interior space itself, a repository for all that Jones believed to be threatened by contemporary civilization: