Mapping the Labyrinth: The UR-Anathemata of David Jones

The first insertion into the narrative forms a gyre that, reminiscent of a unicursal maze, spirals into a center and then returns out again along the same path. The surface level-the watch on the wall-stops on Ms. 66 when Crixus comments on the recruit's horn playing and later re-starts on Ms. 67 when he mentions it again. Just inside these two exterior points fifteen pages apart are the opening and then closing references to the invasion of Britain. Inside of these, in turn, are the opening and closing images of the ships off the coast. Bracketing the Celtic material are dual references to the road builders. When the poem moves into the Celtic landscape, it leaves the classical world with allusions to the underworld rivers of the Cocytus and Acheron. Leaving the Celtic and returning to the Roman, it alludes to the Styx and to the Ivory Gate. At the center are stone megaliths. For the first half of the insertion, the movement is inward and downward. On reaching the stone chamber, the direction turns outward and upward. Just as in travelling through a unicursal maze, we pass the same markers on our way out from the center that we encountered on our way in. Completed in the fall of 1943, the first insertion set the pattern for the next two. Not only were both inserted between Ms. 66 and Ms. 67 of the surface narrative, but the second was inserted into the first and the third into the second. A passage from an early draft outlines his method and the labyrinth's direction:

All of Jones' works, even his insertions, are marked by spatial centers. At the center of the first insertion is the stone cairn where the speaker asks who is memorialized by the stones just before the text returns to the surface. The second insertion, a fourteen-page section of Celtic material labelled 66H1 through 66H14, explores this. Out of this material came "The Hunt" and the original version of "The Sleeping Lord," his hymn to the guardian of the land who is metamorphosed into the land in which he is buried. This second addition continued the geological and cultural striation begun in the first insertion as Jones delved more deeply into the Celtic deposits.

The principal purpose of a temenos is to protect the sacred object by enclosing it. The second insertion is, as mentioned, introduced at the burial chamber, the spatial midpoint of the first insertion. In adding his Celtic material between the two lines on the megalithic cairn, Jones, in effect, embedded his Celtic material in the stone cairn, itself a structure that encloses and protects.

In the first insertion the speaker asks

after which the text moves back to the surface. In the second insertion the voice continues to interrogate the stones at this point:

Using the Medieval Welsh tale of "The Hunting of the Boar" from Culhwch ac Olwen as a frame, Jones examines Britain's cultural layers, bringing together the megalithic deposits and the waves of invaders. Continuing the interrogative mode introduced in the first addition, the second continues: