Seaward: H.D.'s 'Helen in Egypt' as a response to Pound's 'Cantos.' - woman author Hilda Doolittle; long poems

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1998 by Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas

The opening headnote's somewhat peculiar assertion that Helen was "transposed or translated" rather than "transported" to Egypt already hints that the poem will concern itself more with questions of writing and reading than asserting the authority of one narrative over others. To begin with at least, the poem seems to propose that the "present" of the poem has Helen in the Temple of Amen, and the body of the poem consists of her recollections and reconstructions of her past. Clearly this is a theater of reverie in which the imaginary and the "real" freely interpenetrate. If we privilege this moment with Helen in the Temple, we find that she is reading hieroglyphics on the walls, although she does not know the script. The fascination of Egyptian hieroglyphics is that they present themselves as natural language, signifying without being understood, so that Helen-H.D. is reading a language she does not understand, "the indecipherable Amen-script" (21). This is emblematic of H.D.'s poetry in which the image vibrates signification but the dictionary is missing. On the one hand, the hieroglyph-image is irreducible to a single, static meaning; while on the other, there is the possibility that the meanings are no more than subjective projections - the hieroglyph can mean anything and thus nothing. In this situation of too much or too little signifying, the reading (or writing) is endless, a constant process of revision with no guarantee of "progress." In contrast with Pound, whose image is relatively static and takes on further meaning through juxtaposition, H.D. constantly returns to an image to unfold through rereading further possibilities. Meaningfulness resides in the wandering reading itself, compounded by the participation of others in the reading, or as Duncan has remarked on H.D.'s hieroglyph: "Here, to experience is to read, to be aware involves at once the senses and the translation into language of our own" ("H.D. Book, 2": 28). Consequently, if the poem is concerned with Helen's sense of identity, it is discovered in this interminable process of rereading, by others as well as herself, which is why Helen "herself is the writing" (22).(19) Achilles's transforming sea journey also proves to be a process of reading as he "measured the stars / with the sway of a ship's mast" (205; also 58, 59, 274) - learning to decipher the stars from a free-floating position.

Taking a closer look at the overall sequence of Helen in Egypt, one might suggest that a general development can be discerned, although it is more like devolution. I suspect that most readers would agree that each of the three major parts of the poem becomes increasingly difficult to keep in focus, which is more than merely a matter of accumulated complexity. In fact, it is not at all clear that the poem attempts to consecutively build on itself. The first part, "Pallinode," is the easiest to follow because it is appropriately the most argumentative, including the critique of war outlined previously. "Pallinode" also contains another defense, that of Clytemnestra for murdering Agamemnon in retaliation for the sacrifice of their daughter to appease the gods for his own sacrilege. However, Helen's justification of her sister repeats patriarchy's own logic: patriarchy's crime against Clytemnestra has created its mirror image in her, and consequently her "justice" ultimately serves to perpetuate the logic of violence she would condemn. At this point there is the first appearance of the voice or eidolon of Thetis herself, telling or speaking through Helen: