Searching Vainly for Connection in the Place of Separation: David Jones’ ‘In Parenthesis’
“These sit in the wilderness, pent like lousy rodents all the day long; appointed scape-beasts come to the waste-lands, to grope; to stumble at the margin of familiar things – at the place of separation.” Reading this slim novel-poem-memoir hybrid is like reading a book-length Waste Land without any of the lofty ambiguity. In Parenthesis …