Abstract
In 1937 Faber & Faber published the first literary effort by David Jones, a Welshman who until that time had been known primarily as a painter, illustrator, and engraver. The book, entitled In Parenthesis, defied easy characterization with its unusual mix of poetry and prose, but this did not stop T.S. Eliot from penning an admiring introduction. In Parenthesis was Jones’s attempt to make sense of the events he had witnessed as a soldier in the First World War. Using literary techniques that Eliot himself had pioneered in The Waste Land, Jones tried to give his war experience meaning by linking it to a pattern of mythical references. He even used the image of the waste land to describe the war landscape that he had inhabited, thus adapting for his own purposes the symbol that Eliot had made an iconic representation of the modern condition. Yet Jones’s use of myth was not merely an attempt to impose order on “the futility and anarchy which is contemporary history,” as Eliot had famously described “the mythical method.”1 For Jones myth was much more that a source of literary form: it was a narrative matrix in which religious truths were accumulated and preserved throughout the ages. Myth could not only bring order to a work of literature, it could also disclose a perennial spiritual order that existed independently of the artist.
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Notes
T.S. Eliot, “Ulysses, Order and Myth,” The Dial 75 (November 1923): 483.
For typical examples of this tendency to focus on a select few canonical modernists see David Spurr, “Myths of Anthropology: Eliot, Joyce, Lévy-Bruhl,” PMLA 109, no. 2 (March 1994): 266–80
K.J. Phillips, “Jane Harrison and Modernism,” Journal ofModern Literature 17, no. 4 (spring 1991): 465–76
Lee Oser, The Ethics of Modernism: Moral Ideas in Yeats, Eliot, Joyce, Woolf and Beckett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). See also notes 3 and 4 below. Notable exceptions to this tendency have tended to come from scholars pursuing or incorporating gender-based analysis. See, for example
Ruth Hoberman, Gendering Classicism: The Ancient World in Twentieth-Century Women’s Historical Fiction ( Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997 )
Jane Garrity, Step-daughters of England: British Women Modernists and the National Imaginary ( Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003 )
Jane Goldman, Modernism, 1910–1945: Image to Apocalypse ( New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 ).
Tim Armstrong, Modernism: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005) is also exemplary in considering canonical writers alongside lesser known figures.
See Michael Bell, Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 ).
Andrew Von Hendy, The Modern Construction of Myth ( Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002 ), 137–38.
Richard Barber, The Holy Grail: Imagination and Belief ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004 ), 297.
Jewel Spears Brooker, Mastery and Escape: T.S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism ( Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994 ), 11.
T.S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism ( London: Faber and Faber, 1933 ), 130.
T.S. Eliot, The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, ed. Lawrence Rainey ( New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005 ), 71.
See T.S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets ( London: Faber and Faber, 1957 ), 122.
Qtd. in Morine Krissdottir, John Cowper Powys and the Magical Quest (London: Macdonald and Jane’s Publishing Group Ltd., 1980), x.
Glen Cavaliero, John Cowper Powys: Novelist ( Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973 ), 183.
See, for example, John Cowper Powys, Petrushka and the Dancer: The Diaries of John Cowper Powys, 1929–1939, ed. Morine Krissdottir ( Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 1995 ), 15.
John Cowper Powys, The Complex Vision ( New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1920 ), 111.
John Cowper Powys, Autobiography ( London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1934 ), 104.
Mary Butts, The Crystal Cabinet: My Childhood at Salterns ( Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 1988 ), 33.
See Roslyn Reso Foy, Ritual, Myth, and Mysticism in the Work of Mary Butts: Between Feminism and Modernism ( Fayetteville, AR: The University of Arkansas Press, 2000 ), 60.
Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004 ), 118.
Alan Jacobs, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis ( New York: Harper Collins, 2005 ), 196.
Qtd. in Charles Williams, The Image of the City and Other Essays, ed. Anne Ridler (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), xxviii.
Roma A. King, “The Occult as Rhetoric in the Poetry of Charles Williams,” in Charles A. Huttar and Peter J. Schakel, eds., The Rhetoric of Vision: Essays on Charles Williams ( Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1996 ), 165.
See Scott McLaren, “Hermeticism and the Metaphysics of Goodness in the Novels of Charles Williams,” Mythlore 24, no. 3–4 (winter–spring 2006): 5–6.
Arthur Edward Waite, The Hidden Church of the Holy Graal (London: Rebman, 1909); revised as The Holy Grail, its Legends and Symbolism: An Explanatory Survey of Their Embodiment in Romance Literature and a Critical Study of the Interpretations Placed Thereon ( London: Rider and Co., 1933 ), 534.
Charles Williams, War in Heaven ( London: Victor Gollancz, 1930 ), 37.
Charles Williams, “The Figure of Arthur,” in idem and C.S. Lewis, Arthurian Torso ( London: Oxford University Press, 1948 ), 83.
David Jones, “The Myth of Arthur,” in idem, Epoch and Artist ( London: Faber and Faber, 1959 ), 243.
See Alex Owen, The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern ( Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004 ).
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© 2013 Matthew Sterenberg
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Sterenberg, M. (2013). “The Grail Is Stirring”: Modernist Mysticism, the Matter of Britain, and the Quest for Spiritual Renewal. In: Mythic Thinking in Twentieth-Century Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137354976_3
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