The rhythm of memory: a reading of poetic rhythm in David Jones's ...

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Rhythm of Memory 8his weapon, with Sergeant Major O’Grady shouting out, among other things, “Marry it man!Marry it!” (IP, 183) and the final decision itself is sealed with :But leave it—under the oak.leave it for a Cook’s tourist to the Devastated Areas and crawlas far as you can and wait for the bearers.IP, 186 [sic for the absence of capital letter at “leave”]In other words, the rifle becomes a complex written and oral text of memory and action. In thediegesis, it is deposited as an unbearable burden, but beyond this, it can indeed be seen as anoblation, a rhythmic offering for future eyes. The weapon is, by epic convention, a metonymy forthe warrior. Here, it marks the conclusion of Ball’s trajectory in the field of war and theincipience of his textual adventure. Ball carries the rifle and leaves it, but the rifle contains hisname, simply because a ball is a bullet, and Ball’s bullet in the legs is self-inscription. To put itdifferently, Ball is on the receiving end of a trajectory that spells his name, just as the name, as weshall see, “describes” the trajectory. The episode of Ball’s wounding reads as follows:And to Private Ball it came as if a rigid beam of great weightflailed about his calves, caught from behind by ballista-baulklet fly or aft-beam slewed to clout gunnel-walkerbelow below below.IP, 183The overall motif-cum-dynamic here, like that of the passage I quoted at the start, isdisproportion, a sense of which arises from the images used. But what really binds theseapparently disparate images together and makes them into rhythm is the system developed fromthe name which combines cause and destination: “Ball” is in ballista (the huge crossbow-likeweapon) and in baulk (pronounced /bawk/ or /bawlk/ and meaning, amongst other things, a largebeam), but by paronomasia, “ball” is also in “below below below”, where the huge beam knocksthe unwary walker. The double image of ballista hurling its huge bolt and sail beam swinging hardround clearly expresses the image of a trajectory; “below” signals the fall of Ball, but of coursederives its relevance not from the diegesis itself, but only from the text of memory, from themetaphor of the ship implicit in that of the sail beam. Thus the poetic rhythm of memory!In this complex, Ball’s name marks, as I say, point of departure, impact and resting place. But initself, it accomplishes a trajectory very close to that of the “efficacious word”. First, somenumber symbolism: Ball is ’01 Ball: this alternation of nought, or zero, and one, or individual, canbe understood as a cipher of his rhythmic identity. He is no one in the sense that he is fiction, yetin the text he is an individual. The number play relates him to the “world”. The sum of the first,elided, part of his number, 252 is 10, which provides a mirror image of 01, but could also be seenin terms of a downward pointing parabola. I should add here that this figure or shape highlights
Rhythm of Memory 9Ball’s textual identity, but it also reproduces what I shall show in a moment is a key shapethroughout In Parenthesis. Finally, the full sum of Ball’s number is of course, eleven, figuring(literally) the last two letters of the name. In British number slang, eleven is “legs eleven”: theseare infantry soldiers, they “go up” to the front and into battle “on legs”, and Ball’s wound in theleg, however biographical it may be, is thus a symbolic one. But the relevance of the symbol isnot external, to symbolic meaning in general, as it were, but internal and rhythmic.It will be helpful at this point, to look the opening lines of In Parenthesis, as an illustration of howeverything starts with the complex of number and name and their interplay:’49 Wyatt, 01549 Wyatt.Coming sergeant.Pick ’em up, pick ’em up—I’ll stalk within yer chamber.Private Leg . . . sick.Private Ball . . . absent.’01 Ball, ’01 Ball, Ball of No.1.Where’s Ball, 25201 Ball—you corporal,Ball of your section.IP, 1 4Even the section number enters the number dance. The “’em” in “pick ’em up” is of course thelegs, but Private Leg, never again mentioned, is “sick”: he functions as a proleptic joke. Ball’smilitary inefficiency – he is late on parade and has his name taken – is poetic efficacy. He is bothabsent and present. The apparently realistic character anecdote starting the text in fact charges itin a different way, by introducing the dynamics of rhythm into the name. And so it is that Ball isalso the object his name designates, the pivotal ball-bearing on which the text turns. This imagereiterates the 10—01 combination previously mentioned. There is more, however. Ball’s firstname, John, is a double one in the sense that, like Jack, it has a generic use, applicable to any“John” whose name you don’t know, while it at the same time designating an individual. As aLondoner surrounded by Welshmen, John Ball is also, by paronomasia, a parodic, John Bull,whose name incongruously calls up a type he in no way represents. Finally, Private Ball’s nameand rank together do the same thing as the “efficacious word”, they euphemise another of theabsent entities, those “impolite words” the poet tells us he had to omit.I have traced the trajectory of the word “efficacious” from euphemism, through paronomasicparody to linguistic appositeness. The trajectory of the name of Ball moves through the samestages: from euphemism (a form of disguise, of course), to the comic parody the vowels of thename suggest, and thence to the series of metaphorical manipulations that encapsulate the historyand fate of the character. Opened up and spatialised, the name is transformed into situation andnarrative. It becomes a textual machine, a text in itself; it is, as we have seen the weapons –theballista-baulk– and the projectile, and, in the form of the rifle, betokens the offering of the text. In
Page 1: Rhythm of Memory 1The rhythm of mem
Page 5 and 6: Rhythm of Memory 5how glad we thoug
Page 7: Rhythm of Memory 7“efficacious”
Page 11 and 12: Rhythm of Memory 11The entire isoto
Page 13: Rhythm of Memory 13—. The Anathé

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