In Parenthesis – What is it?

David Jones's In Parenthesis is a work that defies easy categorisation. My edition clocks in at over 220 pages if you include Jones's extensive endnotes, features seven parts or chapters, and is composed of (mostly) left-aligned prose of regular line-length. All of which seems to suggest that Jones's World War I narrative is a novel.

The good people at Faber & Faber seem to disagree, though.

Cover art isn't the only factor that complicates our reception of In Parenthesis as a novel though. The sheer density of allusion and variety of rhythmic features also suggest that sections of In Parenthesis are, in fact, works of poetry. 

In Part 4 of the text, for instance, Dai Greatcoat delivers a lengthy speech:

I am '62 Socrates, my feet are colder than you think
on this
Potidaean duck-board.
   I the adder in the little bush
whose hibernation-end
undid,
unmade'victorious toil:
In ostium fluminis.
At the four actions in regione Linnuis
                             by the black waters. (p. 80)

This text demands close attention – there are footnotes to consult, classical references to unpick, and mid-sentence line-breaks to consider – offering a reading experience that is perhaps closer to that a poem than a novel.

So how can we go about deciding what In Parenthesis is? George Szirtes defines poetry as a form in which 'the presence burns more than the narrative drive.' If we accept this definition as true, then it seems as though In Parenthesis could be quite confidently categorised as a work of poetry rather than a novel. Jones's depictions of trench warfare and military life are vividly rendered, while the causal conditions that drive these military men to action are comparatively muddled.

But would a causally sensible narrative be appropriate for a depiction of the Great War? In Part 6, John Ball and his company advance over no man's land, marching through the din of gunfire to arrive at a shallow trench opposite enemy lines:

Rain clouds thickened to wintry dark across the summer night, broke a soaker over them, more confused them where some sought with inutile tools to deepen against his retaliatory fire. Or some just curled up and chanced it. […] When daylight fully came they were withdrawn across the open, which seemed silly, and he obviously saw them and put across Wooly Bears [heavy German shrapnel] low over them scampering like disturbed game. (pp. 147 – 148)

Before long, Ball and company withdraw even further, giving up the ground they have painfully gained just hours before. At no point in this self-cancelling exercise have these soliders known where they were  or what they were doing there, but it is clear that the cost has been high:

God knows what it was all about, but they moved you back again that evening to another field of bivouac.
And you saw the whole depth of the advance and gauged the nature of the contest yard by yard, and made some estimate of the expenditure and how they'd bargained for each hundred feet with Shylock batteries. You marked how meshed intricacies of wire and cunning nest had played sharp tricks on green and eager plaintiffs. They lay heaped for this bloody suing. (pp. 147-148)

Perhaps In Parenthesis does favour presence over narrative drive, or perhaps the historical narrative that it is depicting simply doesn't make sense.

Of course, David Jones is far from the only modernist writer to have tested the boundaries of formal convention. Virginia Woolf's shorter writings, for instance, frequently operate at the boundary between short story and poetry. 'Monday or Tuesday' and 'Blue and Green' could both be read as short pieces of prose poetry, and it's clear from Woolf's critical writing that she was very much aware of this liminal quality in her work. 

In 'Modern Fiction' (available online here), she argues that:

[The writer] has to have the courage to say that what interests him is no longer "this" but "that": out of "that" alone must he construct his work. For the moderns "that", the point of interest, lies very likely in the dark places of psychology. At once, therefore, the accent falls a little differently; the emphasis is upon something hitherto ignored; at once a different outline of form becomes necessary, difficult for us to grasp, incomprehensible to our predecessors. […] The emphasis is laid upon such unexpected places that at first it seems as if there were no emphasis at all […] But it is impossible to say "this is comic", or "that is tragic", nor are we certain, since short stories, we have been taught, should be brief and conclusive, whether this, which is vague and inconclusive, should be called a short story at all. 

In a sense, then, writers such as Woolf and her 'modern' contemporaries were engaged in the creation of hybrid forms that could serve as better vessels for the jarringly new experience of modernity. But unlike the key canonical figures of the modernist movement, Jones actually experienced the first great war of modernity in person. As such, it is perhaps unsurprising that his need for formal experimentation seems especially urgent, and that his text should defy our attempts at definition.

James Nouch