Mapping the Labyrinth: The UR-Anathemata of David Jones

things which tend to be impoverished, or misconceived, or altogether lost or wilfully set aside in the preoccupations of our present intense technological phase. (DG 17)

Constructed out of and simultaneously preserving the deposits of the culture, the Ur-Anathemata and its successor, The Anathemata, are metasigns.

In the "Preface" to The Anathemata, Jones, citing Nennius, wrote "I have made a heap of all that I could find" (A 1). It seems that Jones was alluding to a rather specific heap, one that would not only embody his concerns with civilization and culture, exterior and interior but one that would also resist civilization: the protective labyrinth.6 An evocative cultural allusion, the labyrinth dominated Jones' imagination between 1940 and 1946. Steeped in the labyrinth's complex of symbolic associations, he was acutely conscious of its dual uses as temenos, the sacred enclosure, and Daedalian labyrinth, the maze prison.

The labyrinth, though, came to be more than an evocative cultural symbol. Jones also saw the labyrinth as a geometric shape and a physical structure through which those symbolic associations were made manifest. While the narrative poetry before 1943 employs the trope of the labyrinth, the later poetry attempts to approach its structure.7

In 1934, David Jones, as part of the treatment for his first severe breakdown, visited Jerusalem where he saw British troops of occupation. Writing in 1971 to Saunders Lewis, he recalled that at first these soldiers reminded him of his own service. Suddenly, though, their riot shields and batons evoked "not the familiar things of less than two decades back" when he served, "but rather of two millenia close on." In those British soldiers of occupation in Palestine, he suddenly saw their Roman predecessors. From this experience,

not only The Anathemata, but best part of all his various later pieces, such as "The Wall," "The Tribune's Visitation," "The Fatigue," and even in roundabout ways "The Dream of Private Clitus" and "The Tutelar of the Place," derived. (DGC 57)

His experience in Jerusalem was the beginning of the narrative poem.

The narrative poem that Jones wrote between 1940 and 1943 concerns Roman soldiers on the Walls of the Antonia in Jersualem on Holy Thursday. Moving through the middle night watch, it is concurrent with the Passion in Gethsemane. Opening in the Upper Room at the Last Supper, it soon shifts to the Walls where two soldiers are coming on guard: Crixus, a twenty-year veteran, and Oenomaus, a younger conscript. Looking out over Jerusalem, they reflect on their lot as soldiers of occupation, on the nature of empire and on their roles in the workings of the "world city." The first half of the poem ends with Crixus offering a prayer to the Great Mother that celebrates local cultures and asks her to protect them "in the days of the central economies" (SL 63), a prayer Jones published as "The Tutelar of the Place." Immediately after this, a bugle blows, the middle watch ends, and a centurion, Brasso Olenius, enters who details them to the next day's execution. Brasso, the "fact man," speaks for empire, closing the poem with a speech to his men in the guardhouse where he initiates them into the nature of empire, a speech later published as "The Tribune's Visitation."