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

Rhythm of Memory 1

The rhythm of memory: a reading of poetic rhythm in David
Jones’s In Par enthesis

         The memory lets escape what is over and above—
         as spilled bitterness, unmeasured, poured-out,
         and again drenched down — demoniac-pouring:
         who grins who pours to fill flood and super-flow insensately,
         pint-pot — from milliard-quart measure.
                                                                                            IP, 153

These lines from the beginning of the fifth and last part of David Jones’s In Parenthesis (a part
itself entitled “The Five Unmistakable Marks”) seem to say something about what the memory
cannot do under certain conditions of intense pressure. With their obvious cumulative cadence,
they provide a series of images of what the memory “lets escape” and they come to rest in a
traditional metaphor of the memory as a recipient —a homely enough “pint-pot”—, placed in
incongruous, grotesque proximity to the “milliard-quart measure” from which it is to be
overwhelmed.

The occasion for this statement of the memory’s incapacity is the immediate run up to the
murderous assault on Mametz Wood carried out as a diversion by the British Army in June 1916.
The troops are indeed about to be taken “over and above” into the open down before the wood,
swept by enemy fire, walking and not running, rifles held up in the “high port position”. Jones
himself was at Mametz Wood and received a gunshot wound in the legs very much like John Ball,
the central character in In Parenthesis. He returned to the front after recovering, and was there
through to the end of the war. He had gone to France in 1915. In Parenthesis ends on a signature-
quotation from the Chanson de Roland

         The geste says this and the man who was on the field … and who wrote the book … the man who
         does not know this has not understood anything.
                                                                                             IP, 187

The writer of the text presents his credentials and with them, a challenge to the reader, who must
“know” an initial fact before he can claim understanding of “anything”.

War literature produced by combatants frequently gives rise to debate about such things as
authority, representivity, accuracy, scope, etc. And the horizon of expectation around such texts
is also governed by similar considerations. The most widespread of these is probably the question
of scope. This is commonly dealt with in terms of genre to the effect that only an epic, a text of
epic dimension, can do justice to something like World War 1. Much hinges on what is meant by
“epic” and because there has been much talking at cross purposes on precisely that point, the
whole question is a vexed and not always fruitful one. However, one problem always remains for

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the “man who was on the field and who wrote the book”, the problem of memory. Between the
field and book, what happens to memory? What is the relationship between the images preserved
in the mind of the man on the field and the text we read in the book? What I would like to do
here is attempt to consider these questions not with genre, but with rhythm in mind.

Before I can do this, I need, to make a certain number of initial points. The first of these is that I
am well aware that the enquiry, as I have just framed it, is an impossible one. Clearly, we have no
access, as readers, to the images in the mind of the man on the field other than as they are given
expression in “the book”. We have only the text, only textualised images, we have no ur-text of
memory with which we could read off initial image over and against its textual “representation”.
Could we compare a diary or a journal with “the book”, this would only shift the problem a little
further up, without fundamentally changing its nature. So we have to start from the conflation of
memory and text. The memory is the text, the text is the memory and there can be no textual
difference between factual and fictional “memory”. However, with a signature-quote like the one
from the Chanson de Roland, we do have a convention whereby something actually experienced is
posited as an origin of the text we read, and the illusion of a contact with that origin becomes
part of the text itself. To put it differently, at the heart of the text lies a “fiction of fact”, which
though not the same thing as fictitious fact, is nevertheless a construction. How this construction
happens is a question we can tackle through rhythm.

The second initial point is, of course, what I mean by rhythm. The answer to that question
should become clear as I proceed. However, to return to the lines I read at the start, one might
be tempted to say, fairly loosely, that they have rhythm. The most striking instance of it might be
seen as that curiously unpunctuated, breathless relative clause that goes: “who grins who pours to
fill flood and super-flow insensately,”. The hyperbolic accumulation has obvious mimetic
purpose and the language is performative: it does precisely what it says. But this alone is not
rhythm, it is a particular cadence, organised by a local system of syntactical arrangement, stress
and alliteration. This cadence is naturally an element of rhythm, yet it is not itself rhythm.
Apprehending the rhythm developed in this passage means taking into account at least the
following elements:

    •   the dynamics of hyperbole signalled in the expression “over and above”, and diversely
        manifested in the passage

    •   the dynamics of sheer disproportion between “pint-pot” and “milliard quart measure”,

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    •   the dynamics of metaphor, whereby the “pint-pot”, as already suggested, figures the
        memory seen as a container but also the individual soldier as a bodily entity so immensely
        vulnerable and fragile over and against the massive anonymous force he is up against

    •   the dynamics of intertextuality, a very important aspect of In Parenthesis as a whole; the
        hypotext in this case is Luke 6, 38 (KJV): “Give, and it shall be given unto you; good
        measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your
        bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again”.
        To quote the passage is to see how severely the co-text in In Parenthesis wrenches it out of
        line with its origin. Where the gospel text is all about interpersonal justice and benign
        disproportion, in In Parenthesis the subject is injustice and the disproportion is malignant

    •   the dynamics of inversion which follow on from the previous point, since the rules of the
        kingdom of heaven described in the gospel are quite literally perverted so as to become
        the demoniac pouring of all hell let loose.

My repeated use of the word “dynamics” is programmatic. What I mean by rhythm is inseparable
from the idea of movement and the spatialisation it implies. The passage back and fro between
text and hypotext, with the shifts this passage also involves, apprehended spatially and
dynamically, relates on the same level, to all the other figurative or logical movements
constituting the space of the text. Rhythm, then, is not something the text has at one point or
another, some localisable phenomenon, rhythm is what the text is and what it does. This is what
one might call the holistic vision of rhythm put forward by Henri Meschonnic throughout his
Critique du rythme, and in other works, such as Poétique du traduire. Meschonnic’s approach to
rhythm in translation, for example, can be summed up in the axiomatic title he uses for an article
of his: “translating is no such thing if you don’t render the rhythm you receive”1 (La Tribune
internationale des langues vivantes, N° 30, novembre 2001). And because translating is always reading,
what applies to the former, has validity for the latter. Whereas exception might justifiably be
taken to a statement which said something like “reading isn’t reading unless you read the
rhythm”, “reading the rhythm” is certainly a different kind of reading.

This conception of rhythm as what the text is and what it does, leads into a further key concept,
that of system, understood not, of course, in the restricted “mechanical” sense, often suggestive
of fixity, that it sometimes has, but organically, as a combining of elements that relate to and are
modified by each other. A further critical value of envisaging text as system lies in the perspective
of the text as inclusive of the act of reading. The reader-in-the-text – in fabula – is of course a
familiar figure of reception criticism, which shifts around the once traditionally accepted roles or

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slots occupied by the trio writer, reader and text on the page. To see the text as rhythm and thus
as system is not merely to juggle hierarchies, or to suggest that the reader, as it were,
“participates” in the text, it is to establish the reader as a constituent of the text, because his/her
reading is no less than a rhythmic act, a process in rhythm.

When Meschonnic argues that the poem is what he calls an inscription of the subject into history,
and correlatively, that the poem is a text that gets handed from “I to I” (cf. Critique du rythme, 85,
87)2, he is saying in effect that the poem is made up of the inter-relationship in rhythm of the
subjectivity of writer and reader. The text on the page is the means and place of this encounter,
and, at the same time, the symbol, the token, of it.

All this is closely related to the question of memory, whether or not the poetic text has to do
specifically with remembering. The framework and the sound and sight patterning devices of
poetry are inevitably bound up with the possible process of committing the text to memory. The
poetic text thus addresses the memory as an active process, itself a part of reading. When in
addition, the text is motivated, as is the case of In Parenthesis, by memory as source material,
compounded by the clearly formulated desire, not only to transmit that memory, but also to
make an act of anamnesis3, then the question of memory and rhythm, of memory in rhythm
becomes an even more essential one.

It is necessary to turn now briefly to the writing of In Parenthesis. The process itself began in the
early 1930s. It was, as Jones himself wrote many years later in 1962, an “experiment” (quoted by
Dilworth, 9). In 1932-33, Jones suffered the first of the two severe mental breakdowns he
experienced, characterised in particular by a painter’s block (Dilworth, 204). Up to this period,
Jones been exclusively a visual artist, so that the inability to paint meant that a central prop of his
sense of identity was threatened. When a neurologist advised him to stop painting, he turned to
writing instead. This was what eventually became In Parenthesis. Jones went on to publish The
Anathemata (1953), an even longer writing than In Parenthesis, while producing material for much
more, together with a considerable body of critical essays. Though writing never occupied him
exclusively, since he resumed painting, drawing and lettering, it nevertheless moved from its
initial marginal position into a central slot. The interesting point about this existential pattern is
that it reiterates Jones’s own expressed perception of the period of World War 1 in his life.
Explaining in the preface to the poem his choice of the title In Parenthesis, Jones suggests a
number of images. One is an image of seduction: “[…] I have written it in a kind of space
between–I don’t know between quite what–but as you turn aside to do something” (IP, xv; my
italics). Another is quite simply a metaphorical application of the idea of parenthesis to the
experience itself: “…and because for us amateur soldiers […] the war itself was a parenthesis –

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how glad we thought we were to step outside its brackets at the end of ’18…” (IP, xv). Jones
does not develop the surprising suggestion of an illusion in the words “how glad we thought we
were”, so that they close the preface of the poem with a diffuse sense of critical distance. The
image of “stepping out of the brackets” is also a spatial one, which gives more than a hint of the
rhythmic conception behind the whole textual enterprise. The text emerges, it seems, not at all as
a memoir but as a conflation. Memory itself has no rhythm, or rather, it is not of rhythm. It is the
stuff that dreams, nightmares, obsessions are made of, and in that sense, it is reiterative and
recessive: 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 and
paradoxical time brackets, is a blueprint for rhythmic intercourse. The process of writing and the
experience written of are historically conflated, in that the first reiterates the second. And this
reiteration concerns the paradoxical nature of both, in as much as each moves from margin to
centre, 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 others
considered 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 and
history. The text functions not as a memoir might, in the a-rhythmia of memory, but by making
its 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. As
Dilworth points out “structure is not […] the first thing a reader notices in a poem by David
Jones” (13). This is because of the length and plethoric nature of the texts. Jones wrote of The
Anathemata, quoting the 9th 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 any
attempt to describe such multiple level structuring in In Parenthesis. What can be usefully said here
is that the overall narrative structure of this seven part text consists of an asymmetrical
movement of advance towards and departure from the battlefield of Mametz Wood (or simply
the Wood, since the name Mametz is not actually used in the text). The other structuring
elements of the poem, that can, for convenience, be grouped together under the very general
heading 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 drives
the entire project of In Parenthesis, and, as one might expect, lies at the heart of its rhythm. Most
of the protagonists of In Parenthesis are either killed or wounded in the action at the Wood, and

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one of the final images of the text is the arrival of new reserve troops “younger men / younger
striplings” moving in to “bear up the war”. (IP, 187). In this way, the text closes on the
suggestion of an accelerated reduplication, figuring what Jones regarded as a movement towards
absurdity. That the book’s brackets and its scope, should end here, on the threshold of the threat
of 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 prohibitive
obscenity” 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 deviances
various, become available as critical metaphors for the nature of warfare. Obscenity metaphorises
absurdity. (Pat Barker explores this avenue in her World War I trilogy of novels starting with The
Ghost Road, published in 1995). As it happens, Jones deals specifically, in the preface to In
Parenthesis, 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 of
our discourse was conditioned by the use of such words”. He goes on to develop an astonishing
argument to the effect that the repetition and “skilful” use of them “gave a kind of
significance[…] to our speech” and that their “juxtaposition in a sentence, and when expressed
under poignant circumstances, reached real poetry” (IP, xii). This is no less than an argument for
the 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 the
subject 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 using
obscenity to metaphorise absurdity: the whole impetus, so clearly described, works in the
opposite 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 the
soldiers’ speech, their absence constitutes so many blanks in the text, so many spaces that cry out
for 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 absent
entities, just as verbalising the first syllable gives the eff of effing: (pace Paul Auster who used the
same trick in Moon Palace), a common euphemism of the same word. And so the trajectory of the
adjective rises, as it moves from euphemism, through paronomasic parody, to linguistic
appositeness (the word as performative), and finally to the ultimate level of sacramentality (an
extension of performativeness).

The impetus of In Parenthesis towards meaningfulness as opposed to meaninglessness involves
seeing words themselves as texts, as rhythm. I have just referred to the trajectory of the adjective

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“efficacious”. What I should now like to show is that, far from being a metaphorical imposition
of my own, the notion of trajectory and the image the word conjures up can be read as rhythmic
devices. To do this, I shall examine certain aspects of narrative patterning that revolve around the
name 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 is
the writer in disguise, and he is certainly given some of the characteristics (for example, fumbling
incompetence) 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 a
military context, Ball is frequently referred to by number as “01 Ball”; his full number being
25201. This numerical identity has an immediate, conventionally comic application, in that this is
the regiment known as the “London-Welsh”, and the duplication of Joneses and Williamses
makes the use of numbers a necessity independently of army usage. But the combination of name
and number, foregrounded comically, enters into other patterns, of which more presently. John
Ball is a Londoner, which gives him capital importance, but he “shares” his central narrative
position with two Welsh counterparts. One is Corporal Aneirin Lewis, steeped in Welsh lore: he
bears the name of the 7th century Welsh poet, Aneirin, author of the epic Y Gododdin (known to
us in 13th century MS); the other is referred to only by a nickname as Dai Greatcoat, and even, as
Dai de la Cote Male Taile, after the manner of Malory in Le Morte d’Arthur (an important
hypotext for In Parenthesis). Lewis is killed in the artillery bombardment preceding the attack on
the 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 of
the three who survives, and the only one to complete, in the flesh, the full narrative movement of
advance to and departure from the field.. Although the regiment’s “going up”, first to the front
line and later to battle, has several intertextual paradigms (one ironic example being The Pilgrim’s
Progress), Ball’s intertextual identity, unlike that of Aneirin Lewis or Dai Greatcoat, remains
diffuse until the end of the poem. It is in his retreat from the field that it emerges, in a mixture of
seriousness and parody that ultimately becomes an unexpected apotheosis of his name as text, as
rhythm.

Ball leaves the Wood crawling on all fours; as he “goes down”, he decides – a serious step for a
soldier to take – to abandon his rifle; slung round his shoulder, it gets in his way and becomes
too heavy to bear. But the weapon is also a parodic burden (in both senses of the word); it hangs
round the neck “like the Mariner’s white oblation” and like Durendal, Roland’s sword, “It is not
to be broken on the brown stone under the gracious tree” (IP, 184). The episode of hesitation is
composed of memory snatches from training sessions about the soldier’s relation to and care of

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his weapon, with Sergeant Major O’Grady shouting out, among other things, “Marry it man!
Marry it!” (IP, 183) and the final decision itself is sealed with :

                   But leave it—under the oak.
         leave it for a Cook’s tourist to the Devastated Areas and crawl
         as far as you can and wait for the bearers.
                       IP, 186 [sic for the absence of capital letter at “leave”]

In other words, the rifle becomes a complex written and oral text of memory and action. In the
diegesis, it is deposited as an unbearable burden, but beyond this, it can indeed be seen as an
oblation, a rhythmic offering for future eyes. The weapon is, by epic convention, a metonymy for
the warrior. Here, it marks the conclusion of Ball’s trajectory in the field of war and the
incipience of his textual adventure. Ball carries the rifle and leaves it, but the rifle contains his
name, simply because a ball is a bullet, and Ball’s bullet in the legs is self-inscription. To put it
differently, Ball is on the receiving end of a trajectory that spells his name, just as the name, as we
shall see, “describes” the trajectory. The episode of Ball’s wounding reads as follows:

         And to Private Ball it came as if a rigid beam of great weight
         flailed about his calves, caught from behind by ballista-baulk
         let fly or aft-beam slewed to clout gunnel-walker
         below below below.
                                                                          IP, 183

The overall motif-cum-dynamic here, like that of the passage I quoted at the start, is
disproportion, a sense of which arises from the images used. But what really binds these
apparently disparate images together and makes them into rhythm is the system developed from
the name which combines cause and destination: “Ball” is in ballista (the huge crossbow-like
weapon) and in baulk (pronounced /bawk/ or /bawlk/ and meaning, amongst other things, a large
beam), but by paronomasia, “ball” is also in “below below below”, where the huge beam knocks
the unwary walker. The double image of ballista hurling its huge bolt and sail beam swinging hard
round clearly expresses the image of a trajectory; “below” signals the fall of Ball, but of course
derives its relevance not from the diegesis itself, but only from the text of memory, from the
metaphor of the ship implicit in that of the sail beam. Thus the poetic rhythm of memory!

In this complex, Ball’s name marks, as I say, point of departure, impact and resting place. But in
itself, it accomplishes a trajectory very close to that of the “efficacious word”. First, some
number symbolism: Ball is ’01 Ball: this alternation of nought, or zero, and one, or individual, can
be understood as a cipher of his rhythmic identity. He is no one in the sense that he is fiction, yet
in the text he is an individual. The number play relates him to the “world”. The sum of the first,
elided, part of his number, 252 is 10, which provides a mirror image of 01, but could also be seen
in terms of a downward pointing parabola. I should add here that this figure or shape highlights

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Ball’s textual identity, but it also reproduces what I shall show in a moment is a key shape
throughout In Parenthesis. Finally, the full sum of Ball’s number is of course, eleven, figuring
(literally) the last two letters of the name. In British number slang, eleven is “legs eleven”: these
are infantry soldiers, they “go up” to the front and into battle “on legs”, and Ball’s wound in the
leg, however biographical it may be, is thus a symbolic one. But the relevance of the symbol is
not external, to symbolic meaning in general, as it were, but internal and rhythmic.

It will be helpful at this point, to look the opening lines of In Parenthesis, as an illustration of how
everything starts with the complex of number and name and their interplay:

         ’49 Wyatt, 01549 Wyatt.
         Coming sergeant.
         Pick ’em up, pick ’em up—I’ll stalk within yer chamber.
         Private Leg . . . sick.
         Private Ball . . . absent.
         ’01 Ball, ’01 Ball, Ball of No.1.
         Where’s Ball, 25201 Ball—you corporal,
         Ball of your section.
                                                                   IP, 14

Even the section number enters the number dance. The “’em” in “pick ’em up” is of course the
legs, but Private Leg, never again mentioned, is “sick”: he functions as a proleptic joke. Ball’s
military inefficiency – he is late on parade and has his name taken – is poetic efficacy. He is both
absent and present. The apparently realistic character anecdote starting the text in fact charges it
in a different way, by introducing the dynamics of rhythm into the name. And so it is that Ball is
also the object his name designates, the pivotal ball-bearing on which the text turns. This image
reiterates the 10—01 combination previously mentioned. There is more, however. Ball’s first
name, John, is a double one in the sense that, like Jack, it has a generic use, applicable to any
“John” whose name you don’t know, while it at the same time designating an individual. As a
Londoner surrounded by Welshmen, John Ball is also, by paronomasia, a parodic, John Bull,
whose name incongruously calls up a type he in no way represents. Finally, Private Ball’s name
and rank together do the same thing as the “efficacious word”, they euphemise another of the
absent entities, those “impolite words” the poet tells us he had to omit.

I have traced the trajectory of the word “efficacious” from euphemism, through paronomasic
parody to linguistic appositeness. The trajectory of the name of Ball moves through the same
stages: from euphemism (a form of disguise, of course), to the comic parody the vowels of the
name suggest, and thence to the series of metaphorical manipulations that encapsulate the history
and fate of the character. Opened up and spatialised, the name is transformed into situation and
narrative. It becomes a textual machine, a text in itself; it is, as we have seen the weapons –the
ballista-baulk– and the projectile, and, in the form of the rifle, betokens the offering of the text. In

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as much as In Parenthesis is made of a double wealth of personal and literary memory, its rhythm
can be seen as a rifling of the canon of memory. Which is why concluding remarks will be all
about trajectories and will try to show the validity of this metaphor.

As might be expected from a war narrative, In Parenthesis describes several instances of artillery or
rifle fire. But not only are these strategically placed in the narrative, but they are accompanied by
echoes and parody so that they become a system. I can do little more here than give a short
outline.

    •      In Part 2, occurs what Dilworth calls the “primal” (412) shell burst (IP, 23). I shall return
           to this.

    •      In Part 3, Ball observes flares mounting from British and later from German trenches:
           “lights elegantly curved above his lines” (IP, 50).

    •      In Part 3 occurs the epitome of the meaningless action as a nervous John Ball, on night
           sentry duty, fires his rifle at nothing but the empty darkness out over No Man’s Land (IP,
           53-54).

    •      In Part 4, the whole idea of artillery is parodied as the soldiers suggest a bombardment of
           the Christmas Day issue of unpalatable army tobacco: “Heave that bull-shit to Jerry, tin
           and all, for a happy Christmas—it’ll gas the sod.” (IP, 72). A parodic parabola that
           includes the paronomasic joke on Ball’s name.

    •      In Part 4, a number of different shell trajectories are described:: duds, shrapnel, shells
           falling short.

    •      In Part 7, where “muck rains down from heaven” (IP 164), Ball momentarily finds
           himself in the “navel” of the Wood, at a centre of calm (like Melville’s Ahab in the quiet
           heart of the maelstrom of cachalots). This place is determined by two things: the dripping
           percolation of human blood from the vegetation and, high above, “trundling projectiles”
           that “intersect their arcs at zenith” (IP, 181). Significantly enough, this centre is reached
           only shortly before the “ballista-baulk” of Private Ball’s wound in the leg and the crawl to
           the close of the narrative. The narrative centre is determined not by its central place in the
           disposition of the narrative but by virtue of its relationship to what might be called a
           rhythmic signature, the trajectory of artillery shells passing and “intersecting” above. The
           centre, where blood percolates and drips down is also a place upon which John Ball
           stumbles and in which he stumbles when the bullet’s trajectory strikes him down.

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The entire isotopy of trajectories has its origin in the doings of war, and, in that sense is part of
memory. But what memory retains is essentially the point or the moment of impact. What the
poem does is to use the shape of the trajectory, not only to produce with it the type of variation
to be found in the passages I have just glanced at, but as a shape of the narrative and a shaping of
names. Over and against this shaping, which involves, as I have tried to show, an involution of
cause and effect, the poem produces its own text by conjugating material that may well be seen as
memory with the memory of texts from the canon of literature. Because the text comes in this
way to be metaphorically assimilated to the abandoned, offered rifle, it can indeed be seen as a
process of “rifling”, that is of ransacking both memory and the literary canon and as a trajectory
in itself. This is the process that I think can justifiably be called the rhythm of memory.

I shall conclude with an epilogue reading of the “primal” shell-burst in Part 2 of the poem (IP,
23-24). The passage is unfortunately far too long to quote fully. It narrates the first occasion on
which Ball experiences artillery fire. The shell-burst itself is only a part of the picture and though
its violence is evident and clearly chronicled, what is, perhaps, more to the point is that the shell
lands amongst mangolds, turning their churned pulp into a euphemism of the blood spilled later
in the wood. The final image of the sequence, in which the “sap of vegetables slobbered the
spotless breech-block of N°3 gun”, is not merely a proleptic detail but, more essentially, a
rhythmic statement, a metaphor of the rhythmic association of effect and potential cause (the
ironically “spotless” artillery piece is capable of inflicting exactly the same damage), and a
metaphor of the trajectory / shape of the entire narrative. I have used the term shell-burst, but
what the page and a half long text really describes is trajectory. It transforms parenthesis into
parabola; the arrival of the shell and its explosion erupt into Ball’s existence, bringing at the same
time a hyper-charge of meaning (analogous, of course, to the overloaded rifle around the
wounded Ball’s neck) and at the same moment, an image of the meaninglessness of warfare.
Interestingly enough, the shell is described as hurtling “out of the vortex, rifling the air…” (my
italics); its oncoming force is textualised by an accumulation of epithets, the hyperbole of which
is clearly mimetic :

         an on-rushing pervasion, saturating all existence; with exactitude, logarithmic, dial-timed,
         millesimal—of calculated velocity, some mean chemist’s contrivance, a stinking physicists destroying
         toy. (IP 24)

But there is a system of balances here: to this accumulation of epithets and actions and the
variety of different fields they predicate, corresponds a list of insignificant minutiae perceived by
Ball in the “highly alert” state the influence of the shell’s approach produces in him: “the tilt of a
bucket, the movement of a straw, the disappearing right boot of Sergeant Snell …”. One list

Rhythm of Memory 12

encounters and is modified by another; so that the text exists in the rhythm of these encounters,
not in any abstract perception of the magnitude of the event, nor in an emotional reaction to it.

The shell-burst ends in anti-climax; all it mangles is mangolds. But though anti-climax completes
by a fall the trajectory of the shell, it is not an isolated shape in the trajectory of the text. The
arrival of the shell is preceded by a scene in which Lieutenant Jenkins asks Ball for a match.
Searching clumsily through his pockets, Ball scatters their contents on the ground. This gives rise
to the first enumeration of the sequence, more a lost-property list than an (epic) catalogue. This
exposure or “revelation” of the contents of Ball’s pockets constitutes a proto anti-climax, and the
feeble match flare that follows, as Jenkins hunches his shoulders to nurture the flame, can be read
as a parodic equivalent /anticipation of the shell-burst. Thus the two parts of the scene cohere in
a mirror relationship, based on disproportion.

Among the objects Ball drops is a “latch-key” to “Stondon Park”, his home in London. Lying
there incongruously in a French farmyard., it becomes,. as in the closing sequence of The Waste
Land, the key of memory, it lets memory into the “remembered” scene and layers it with the
topoi of the lost enclosure (Stondon Park) and the mythic, perhaps illusory, promise (or threat)
of a door to be opened.

It is characteristic of Jones’s deployment of rhythm that the linking element between the two
parts of the scene should be language. Because he forgets to say “sir” to Lieutenant Jenkins, Ball
is subjected to Sergeant Snell’s “favourite theme” on how to address commissioned officers. Ball
waits patiently for Snell’s “eloquence” to “spend itself”, which makes its “flow” strictly
simultaneous with the shell’s arrival, so that the two trajectories (like the two words Snell / shell)
intersect. This of course turns the shell-burst into another kind of incongruous climax, set off by
the unstated yet evident irony whereby Snell, for all his admonishing eloquence, fails to warn Ball
of the danger, and plunges for safety, leaving him exposed to it alone. And this solitariness, is of
course, how Ball’s trajectory in the wood ends and how the text itself begins to inscribe its
rhythm.

                                                  Michael HINCHLIFFE, Université de Provence.

Works cited

DILWORTH, Thomas. The Shape of Meaning in the Poetry of David Jones. Toronto and London:
   University of Toronto Press, 1988.

FUSSELL, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York and London: Oxford UP, 1975.

JONES, David. In Parenthesis. London: Faber, 1937. (Abbr. IP)

Rhythm of Memory 13

—. The Anathémata. London: Faber, 1952. (Abbr. Ana)

MESCHONNIC, Henri. Critique du rythme. Anthropolgie historique du langage. Lagrasse: Verdier,
    1982.

—. Poétique du traduire. Lagrasse: Verdier, 1999.

1 “Traduire n’est pas traduire si on ne rend pas le rythme qu’on a reçu”
2 “Mais alors que chacun n’a que son passé, le poème passe de je en je. Il est ce discours qui peut reconnaître le passé
des autres. Il n’arrache pas seulement un peu de vivre à l’oubli. S’il est autre que du souvenir, c’est que le rythme est
une actualisation du sujet, de sa temporalité” (87)
3 The text of In Parenthesis is preceded by a dedication, in the form of an inscription, to “the memory of those with

me in the covert and in the open…etc.”..
4 Cf. the poet Thomas Wyatt (1503?-42) who wrote : “They flee from me that sometime did me seek/ With naked

feet stalking in my chamber:”