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- Title
MATERIA POETICA: READING DAVID JONES'S "THE ANATHEMATA" AS SACRED PALIMPSEST.
- Authors
Penny, William Kevin
- Abstract
David Jones's epic poem "The Anathemata" attempts to document patterns of signs as proof of the existence of the supernal within the temporal world. Part of what the author engaged in producing in his work was a notional ekphrasis, or the visual interpretation in writing of sacred and performative Christian ritual. To achieve his thematic objectives, Jones relied on a reader's knowledge of the religious and sacrificial narrative that exists outside the poem's representative collection of temporal images that included symbols, historical references, and other material--or what the poet termed "deposits." Jones employed methods associated with palimpsest and erasure, techniques with which the writer was intimately familiar and align "The Anathemata" with the visual arts. Jones's unique approach to poetic composition with its distinct method of "cross-over" can therefore be evaluated from both a visual arts perspective and within the context of post-structural theory. Traces of other signifiers in the temporal symbols and signs the poet adopts guarantee that they must always be read "under erasure," or sous rature. Framed by the Eucharistie cycle the work portrays, the stylistic approach is compromised by a pervasive narrativist orthodoxy steeped in romanticism, further complicating interpretation. Notwithstanding such apparent inconsistencies, reading the epic as a subtle dialectic involving a palimpsest of erasures and the imprinting of new "signs" coterminous with Jones's Weltanschauung and unifying vision can be spiritually illuminating. How the poet skirts the contradictions related to confusion of media to achieve a compelling Christian story can also be investigated on the basis of such affiliated processes.
- Subjects
PALIMPSESTS; ANATHEMATA, The (Poem); JONES, David, 1895-1974; ROMANTICISM; RADICAL orthodoxy (Theology)
- Publication
Religion & Literature, 2013, Vol 45, Issue 3, p115
- ISSN
0888-3769
- Publication type
Article