“The Grail Is Stirring”: Modernist Mysticism, the Matter of Britain, and the Quest for Spiritual Renewal

Abstract

In 1937 Faber & Faber published the first literary effort by David Jones, a Welshman who until that time had been known primarily as a painter, illustrator, and engraver. The book, entitled In Parenthesis, defied easy characterization with its unusual mix of poetry and prose, but this did not stop T.S. Eliot from penning an admiring introduction. In Parenthesis was Jones’s attempt to make sense of the events he had witnessed as a soldier in the First World War. Using literary techniques that Eliot himself had pioneered in The Waste Land, Jones tried to give his war experience meaning by linking it to a pattern of mythical references. He even used the image of the waste land to describe the war landscape that he had inhabited, thus adapting for his own purposes the symbol that Eliot had made an iconic representation of the modern condition. Yet Jones’s use of myth was not merely an attempt to impose order on “the futility and anarchy which is contemporary history,” as Eliot had famously described “the mythical method.”¹ For Jones myth was much more that a source of literary form: it was a narrative matrix in which religious truths were accumulated and preserved throughout the ages. Myth could not only bring order to a work of literature, it could also disclose a perennial spiritual order that existed independently of the artist.