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Scaling war: poetic calibration and mythic measures in David Jones’s In Parenthesis

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posted on 2023-06-09, 04:24 authored by Hope WolfHope Wolf
David Jones’s In Parenthesis (1937) counters the reduction of the First World War to shorthand metaphors. The poem foregrounds how cliché, idioms and proverbs, transported to the battlefield, literalise. Drawing attention to the violence figured in everyday language, Jones faces a conundrum: How to call for a recalibration of the scale by which experience is measured without invoking ‘sense of proportion’, and, in so doing, laying down a universalising law? The question arises from consideration of the breaking of measuring instruments in the poem, and also Jones’s depiction of those who attempt to impose abstract standards unilaterally upon others. A partial resolution to the problematic connection between proportion and conversion is found in myth. Mythical analogy makes for a long and complex process of weighing up. Jones’s frustrations with the measuring instruments available to him can be linked to a more general attempt, one that has been associated with modernism, to find new representational modes. In Parenthesis seeks out means of communicating the excessive quality of war experiences without falling back on conventions and aggressive hyperbole.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Pages

280.0

Book title

The First World War: literature, culture, modernity

Place of publication

Oxford

ISBN

9780197266267

Series

Proceedings of the British Academy

Department affiliated with

  • English Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Editors

Kate McLoughlin, Santanu Das

Legacy Posted Date

2016-12-14

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2016-12-14

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