David Jones: Medievalism, Eucharist and Art Practice

• Main Authors: Michael John Hemsley, 漢明遠
• Other Authors: Fanfan Chen
• Format: Others
• Published: 2016
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/55758844924707177937

博士 === 國立東華大學 === 英美語文學系 === 104 === The Catholic British artist-poet David Jones (1895-1974) expressed a wish to reconnect contemporaries to lost or fading cultural traditions. This thesis examines both the poetry and art, focusing especially on the late collection The Sleeping Lord. It begins by dealing from three points of view with Jones’s approaches to history, making and the role of the artist. The first is that of Spenglerian dualism and morphology of history, the second of neoscholastic theory of art, and the third the nature, structure and meaning of the Eucharist. These lead to a ‘centre’: an analysis of the poem “The Sleeping Lord” which foregrounds its large scale visual form, and tentatively proposes that there is a Eucharistic ‘Circle and Cross’ image implied within it. To complete an interpretive arch, two approaches new to Jones studies are then enlisted in order to bring under scrutiny Jones’s professed aim to be part of ‘some kind of bridge’. The first draws on the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur to help show how Jones overcomes Spenglerian pessimism by realizing three-fold mimesis and engaging with living tradition. The second is built on the blending of considerations of imagination and the Incarnation which makes up Owen Barfield’s conception of the evolution of human consciousness toward what he called ‘final participation’. Jones’s bridge is found to reach back not to so-called ‘dead’ medieval values, but to living ones, and to offer a route forward into possible futures opened up by both Eucharistic remembering and man’s vocations as artistic maker and enjoyer of made things. Keywords: David Jones, neo-scholasticism, Eucharist, Paul Ricoeur, Owen Barfield