David Jones and Rome by Jasmine Hunter Evans;

Author:Jasmine Hunter Evans; [Hunter Evans, Jasmine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192638595
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2022-01-04T00:00:00+00:00

Yet there is more depth to Jones’s ‘associations’ in this passage. In taking the quotation not from Homer’s Greek Iliad but from Aeneas’s vision within Virgil’s Latin Aeneid, Jones also reminds us of the central position of Aeneas and Rome in the Western tradition. In Aeneas’s dream which he re-tells to Dido, the ghostly Hector passes onto him not only the Penates (household gods), which represent the culture of the Trojans, but also his position as leader, as he commands Aeneas to lead the exiled Trojans to found a new city which will become Rome, a duty which will involve Aeneas’s own sacrifice of his relationship with Dido (II, 293–295). Jones thus represents the continuity between the ancient Greek, Roman, and Christian traditions through the figures and sacrifice of their heroes, Hector, Aeneas, and Christ, and through the passing on of spiritual and cultural inheritance both in their narratives and across the wider myth these seminal texts preserve about the Western past. Within Rome, founded by Aeneas on the Trojan heritage bequeathed by Hector, Christianity was born, and through the Christian tradition the modern West received both a classical and Christian inheritance. In this way, Rome sits at the centre of Jones’s vision of Western culture but it also has a special relationship with Britain and Wales. Whenever Jones contemplates Troy, his connective mind draws him to the myth of Britain’s Trojan heritage in which, through Hector, Aeneas, and the Trojan ‘Brute’, who becomes the first king of Britain, London was ‘Troy Novant’ and Wales the ‘Enclosure of the Children of Troy’.77

Jones’s inscriptions, Wilcockson argues, had the potential to draw in ‘the entire cultural inheritance of the British Isles […] in a profusion of hints and suggestions’.78 In particular, these works highlight the ways in which Christianity, Roman literature, and the Latin language encapsulated elements of the pagan cultural past and preserved them for the future. The meanings of the inscriptions are developed as complex and entangled webs of cultural allusion, functioning on many levels, with the connectivity between epochs reinforced by repetitions in time through the actions of figures, the confluence of signs, and the presence of ritual, religion, and art throughout human history. The form and content of the inscriptions testify to the centrality of Rome in Jones’s visualisation of culture and in his attempts to revivify that culture in modernity. They stand, as do his other works, as part of his response to the fragmentation and decline he perceived in the cultural tradition and attest to his desire to create new cohesion and wholeness in his art. It was a response which, in intimate and subtle ways, was shaped by his longstanding friendships and dialogues with three thinkers—Dawson, Knight, and Eliot. Within Jones’s particular theory of cultural renewal the potential to rebuild the unity and continuity of the Western tradition would be contingent upon a comprehensive reimagining of Rome’s historical, cultural, and symbolic relationship with both Britain and Wales.

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