Apostolic Actuality: David Jones and Sublimation

This chapter explores how the work of David Jones (1895–1974) inscribes, in both visual art and poetry, a struggle to sustain itself as a “location of cultural experience” (in Winnicott’s phrase) in the aftermath of trauma. It focuses on the sexual dimension of Jonesian trauma, looking especially at how psychoanalytic debates on sublimation, one of Freud’s least developed ideas, open different ways to read Jones. It is argued that to explore his artwork and writing it is necessary to clarify the status of the shifting psychoanalytic engagement with aesthetic experience, from Freud to Winnicott and then Laplanche. Sublimation is shown to be unsustainable as a single concept, as the various modalities of artistic practice in relation to sexuality in Jones are explored. Jonesian art is seen as a complex defence mechanism illuminated by Winnicott’s theory of play and infantile experience, and also by Laplanche’s re-reading of sublimation as a pathway for the ego to defend itself against the unconscious in its properly sexual, traumatic dimension. Yet another possible understanding of sublimation in Jones’s work is also examined, in which sublimation appears as an aesthetic encounter with the sexual other as such.