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 Image Courtesy Estate of David Jones |
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A Collection of Essays Introduction by Kathleen Henderson Staudt
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The work of David Jones as poet and as artist offers a unique case study in the ways that an artist meets the challenges of modern culture. A veteran of the great war, trained in post-impressionist art theory and apprenticed as a stone carver to Eric Gill, Jones brings to his work a commitment to the task of the artist and the process of making -- to what he calls “artefacture” or “artifice.” His work reveals a complex and acute cultural awareness, both of the challenges of Imperialism and “technocracy” in the mid-twentieth century and of his own personal roots in artistic and literary modernism, Celtic culture and Catholic Christianity. What we meet in reading a text or viewing a work by David Jones is an artist in the process of making, and aware of the dynamic character of a work of art. We are not so much deciphering or admiring a finished product as we are discovering traces of the activity of making, in this artist’s particular experience, an activity that he associates with a sacred dimension of human life. The essays in this collection explore in various ways the meeting of culture and artifice in Jones’s work, reflecting what it is like to inhabit David Jones’s poetry and visual art and what implications his work has for poetry and the arts in the 21st century. What we might call the practice of artifice anchors Jones’s poetics; he is interested in the persistence of human beings’ tendency to engage in acts of making, and in the way that those acts of making create meaning, whether or not the context is explicitly religious. In a BBC lecture entitled “Use and Sign” he notes that human beings have become expert in making things that are useful, but worries that this utilitarian urge may be obscuring what he calls “the nature of man,” which “demands the sacramental.” We make things for practical purposes, but we also make things “for a sign” This practice of sign-making, which we are calling “artifice” (the art of making “arte-facere”) As human beings, he asserts, we are “sign-makers,” and our making involves signification. But if artifice and sign-making are centerpieces of his poetics, then the integrity of the signs made, and the intertextual web of referentiality that signs imply, is threatened his time as in ours. Jones is unusually qualified to appreciate the cultural problem because his personal heritage in Welsh culture is compromised by his native language being English, the language of the imperial civilization that has assimilated elements of Celtic culture but also forgotten a great deal of it. In a posthumously published essay entitled “On Some Difficulties of a Welsh Writer whose Language is English”, he notes that the poetic language of any culture relies on cultural associations between words and whole bodies of lore and background. And these associations, these depths and “deposits,” as he calls them, no longer exist when the writer’s language is no longer English. So where the modernists acknowledged a “break” between modernity and traditional cultural values and symbols, Jones is notifying a break within language itself which separates the artist from his audience. For Jones the act of making encompasses other acts of making, belonging to the cultures of Celtic world and of Rome. (Dilworth, Hunter-Evans). His work foregrounds the interweaving of artifice and culture in various ways, and this is interweaving is the focus of this collection of essays. The Essays collected here are by scholars who have spent many years immersed in David Jones’s work and read it as it teaches us to read it -- a self-referential world aware of itself as artifice and engaging understandings of culture that were critically important in the Modernist era and in our own time. Conversations among these scholars teach us to read this work for the unique angle it offers on Modernity and on situation of poets and artists in the cultural fragmentation of what Jones called our own time’s “placeless cosmocracy.” __________________________________________________ Articles for David Jones: Culture and Artifice In providing the introduction to this volume of essays on David Jones’s literary and visual arts, the line of argument presents a resume of the collection and its overall significance in the 21st Century. By giving a brief introduction to each consecutive essay the theme of cultural significance in relation to the corpus of artifacts in Jones’s poetic and painterly oeuvres consolidates the collective findings of the individual contributions. Ultimately, this overview explores David Jones’s
cultural theory and how his creative works meet the
challenges of modern culture. Gregory
Baker This is an edition with commentary of the address
Jones wrote on the occasion of being awarded this
honorary degree. Unable to attend the ceremony, he
nevertheless offers some rich reflections. Jones’s
address shows him at work attempting to rationalize
for a more public audience the ‘intermuddle’ of
history where there converged those ‘three highly
complex and usually dissevered “things”: Wales,
Catholic Christianity and the central role of art and
literature in modern British society. Jasmine Hunter-Evans
David Jones, the Anglo-Welsh poet, artist and
essayist, envisioned culture as a linear, living,
direct link between past and present. In his defence
of both the continuity and unity necessary to the
survival of culture, Jones used the concept of the
Bridge to represent the entire cultural heritage of
Britain. In doing so, Jones created a complex vision
of culture which he used to reveal the destructive
effect of mechanisation, commercialisation and
secularisation upon the ability of modern man to
access his own past. In reaction to this severance
between the culturally rich past and the moribund
modern civilization, in his words ‘the Break’, Jones
set himself up as a ‘bridge-builder’ who could
re-establish the continuity of Britain’s cultural
tradition. As Jones claimed, artists were ‘“showers
forth” of things which tend to be impoverished, or
misconceived, or altogether lost’ and their role was
to pursue ‘the maintenance of some sort of single
plank in some sort of bridge.’ This paper investigates
Jones’s conceptions of ‘the Break’ and ‘the Bridge’
and reveals how, in his defence of British cultural
heritage, Jones turned to ancient Rome. Relying on a
vast foundation of published and archival sources,
including essays, letters, and poetry, this paper
uncovers Jones’s reliance on Rome in his defence of
the central position of Welsh culture within British
culture as a whole. Reimagining British culture as a
‘Bridge’ allowed Jones the ability not only to fight
for the inclusive, diverse, shared nature of Britain’s
inheritance, but also to give artists a special
position in the protection and revivification of
culture without which, Jones feared, modern man would
lose his humanity.
In an unpublished letter of 1928 (now in the
National Library of Wales), David Jones wrote that he
did not believe in any ‘Catholic Arts’, and outlined
his general position on art over five closely written
pages. This explanation presents the earliest version
of Jones’ sacramental aesthetic. It was an aesthetic
that Jones had started to develop while still an art
student at Westminster from1919-21, and that began to
take a more formal shape during his years at Ditchling
and Capel-y-ffyn. The core position he outlined was
one that he continued to reflect on and refine for the
remainder of his life. What began in 1928 as a
sacramentalist aesthetic had, by 1935, developed into
a specifically incarnationalist position. By the time
he began the construction of The Anathemata,
it had become a theory grounded in, and employing the
language of, Eucharistic theology, most notably
anamnesis and transubstantiation. Moreover, as his
theory developed between 1935 and 1949, it came to
have a direct impact on the construction of The
Anathemata. Drawing on the extensive unpublished
letters and writings deposited at LLGC, Aberystwyth,
this paper has two purposes. The first is to examine
the development of Jones’ Eucharistic theory and to
interrogate the terms he employed when speaking of
art. It is a complex theory with implications for
criticism but one that is largely unexamined. The
second is to explore the direct impact of those
theories, particularly as they developed between 1935
and 1949, on both the construction of The
Anathemata and on its final shape. Kathleen Henderson Staudt Beginning with Jones’s paradigmatic encounter with
a celebration of the Mass on the western front in
1917, this essay concerns the centrality of artifice
or ‘acts of Ars’ in Jones’s poetics, drawing
on theological insights from Maurice de la Taille and
David Tracy. It offers a reading of a key passage on
the Cross in The Anathemata, placing it in
dialogue with W.H. Auden’s meditations on the Passion
in his poetic sequence Horae Canonicae.
(Includes images from The Anathemata) Thomas
Dilworth This essay explores the importance in Jones’s work
of ‘Celticity’, a cultural aesthetic that values
‘inclusiveness; intimate, affectionate particularity;
Aristotelian realism (in contrast to Platonic
idealism); textural richness, and a sense of
movement.’ It argues that for Jones these qualities
are also essential to British culture and especially
to those aspects of British Literature most important
to Jones, particularly in the work of Shakespeare, the
Metaphysical Poets, Smart, Blake, Coleridge, Lewis
Carroll, Hopkins, and Joyce. Malcolm
Guite The central theme of this essay is the concept of
the Incarnation, and how it may be perceived as a
metaphor for the artist-poet’s creative inclinations
whether operating on his concept of painting or
poetry. In examining David Jones’s three major volumes
of poetry in conjunction with a wide range of
observations from scholarly texts on poets whom Jones
admired and referenced, the local habitation together
with the ‘intimate creatureliness of things’, gains
primacy over the mechanized, technocratic corporations
of this post-industrial age in its capacity for being
simultaneously temporal and timeless. Paul
Robichaud One of the most striking features of Jones’s
cultural theory is his view of humanity defined by our
disposition to make. His notion of artifice
encompasses all human making, from the fine arts to
basic tools, on a spectrum ranging from the
‘gratuitous’ to the ‘utile’. Jones’s understanding of
the ‘gratuitous’ is (approximately) anything made for
its own sake, rather than for pragmatic reasons, but
as the origins of the word suggest, it is closely
connected with the freely given, divine creation and
ongoing gift of grace. For Jones, all human artifacts
are ‘signs’, but the more gratuitous the artifact, the
more significance it has. Nonetheless, all human
sign-making, whether verbal, gestural, or material,
reveals what Jones regards as our basic nature and
affinity with the divine. This essay focuses on
Jones’s representations of artifice and making within
the poetry itself, analyzing in particular In
Parenthesis (1937), The Anathémata (1952),
and the poems in The Sleeping Lord (1974). William F
Blissett Reflections from the ‘dean’ of David Jones studies
on his friendship with David Jones, his years of study
of Jones’s work, which takes account of a number of
the themes and concepts covered by the current authors
represented in this proposal. There is also a plea for
the future: that David Jones should be repositioned
and re-assessed in relation to academic study. Being a
visual and literary artist, he deserves to have a
central place in Modernism, alongside Pound, Joyce,
Woolf and Eliot. Moreover, owing to his primary
interest as an artist, Jones cannot be included in any
of the modern or postmodern ‘isms’, but stands alone
as a painter who expressed his own unique and vivatic
vision. Finally, the author suggests topics which he
believes could be addressed by future scholars of
David Jones. Additional David Jones resources on the web:
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