The Fate of Narrative in David Jones's Anathemata

Abstract

In 1955, three years after the publication of David Jones's Anathemata, critical attempts to domesticate the work by generic classification had so proliferated—and proved so fruitless—that one writer, John Petts, found it necessary to warn readers that another sort of approach was called for: 'Confronted by his peculiar art we must abandon the usual yardsticks and plumblines by which we try to assess the stature and depth of artists in an established tradition or a known school, for as both artist and writer he is unclassifiable and without precedent' (p 10). Some heard the message, and some evidently did not. When Jones's earlier book, In Parenthesis, was published in the United States in 1962, the collision between one reviewer's desire to classify and the work's resistance to classification produced a dazzling light-show of critical language: 'this extraordinary meditation on trench warfare, this account, this novel, this poem, this crowded and precisely ordered frieze and mural, this many-choired orchestration of echoes from the islands' remote past ... ' (Paulding, p 45). The lesson was soon learned, the desire to classify Jones's work by genre and influence was sublimated, and it became critical orthodoxy to observe that The Anathemata in particular is 'entirely individual' (Corcoran, p 77). And in ways that are not the concern of this essay, this became the common ground for applauding—and disparaging—David Jones.