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

Helen in Egypt situates itself with respect to Pound's poem as the latter's textual unconscious, insisting on and exploring those spaces of the personal and psychological which tend to be repressed in the Cantos. H.D.'s epic argues that war is due to repression, the cultivation of an ethos of egocentric strength that requires the repression of the maternal. In Achilles's case, this means the sea, Thetis, the flowing, unbounded, vulnerable realm of experience that would undermine the iron discipline of the warrior. According to the mythic logic behind the figure of Achilles, he becomes the apotheosis of the warrior ideal precisely because his mother is the sea: the extreme powers of repression necessary for him to forget the maternal dialectically transform him into the model of military rigidity. This is a self-perpetuating ethos: the repression that makes possible the warrior manifests itself in violence and war, which in turn motivate the need for the warrior. What is left out is the "feminine," not simply all those designated "women," which might just as well cover all manner of "inferior" classes of peoples, but the whole sphere of the personal, of those human relations requiring a degree of surrender of the ego and the possibility of the transformation and interpenetration of selves. The Achilles' heel in all this is that he has a mother, manifest as Helen, the supposed cause of the war justifying the boys' need to busy themselves as repressed war machines. Helen is the cause of the Trojan War, since as a sort of eidolon for Thetis, she is the Achilles that Achilles must deny in order to become Achilles(6) - which is why Helen is the central issue yet always appears as deflected to the margins of the war. In Helen in Egypt, Achilles is "killed" when he exchanges a look with Helen up on Troy's walls, a gaze he describes as "shimmering as light on the changeable sea" (54). In other words, he sees Thetis as himself mirrored in Helen's eyes, a reflection that will be repeated for a final time when he washes up on the beach in Egypt. Achilles in fact melts or is scattered and immediately finds himself transported from the dry plains of Troy to a boat crossing the sea to Egypt, identified with the death ship of Osiris - who was similarly scattered, then reassembled by the Egyptian Thetis, Isis, and reborn as Horus, who in characteristic mythic logic then becomes both husband and son.

If we consider this reading of Achilles and the Trojan War as a psychological allegory in relation to Pound and the Cantos, we discern some interesting parallels. Pound's "poem including history" is predominately concerned with historical, economic, and political materials on the assumption that herein lies the sickness of Western culture that must be made transparent so that the spiritual and aesthetic values that are the proper focus of living can achieve full potential. The fact that in strictly quantitative terms, the historical materials tend to overwhelm and obscure the more spiritual concerns, which presumably are the underlying impetus of the Cantos, is symptomatic of Pound's perception of the dire state of modern culture and the threatened role of the artist-poet within modernity. Pound's commitment to clearing up the social superstructure in order for rather simplistically valorized natural energies to freely unfold themselves leads him to reject the unconscious. As many commentators have argued, Pound's anti-Semitic, sexist, and authoritarian views are grounded in the need to separate out clarity, the spiritual light that is such a central presence in his poem, from all manner of intermixture and contamination. Pound's manichaeism became increasingly entrenched under the pressure to commit himself and his poem to the trend of contemporary history, to throw in his lot with a pragmatic manifestation of the improved society he envisioned. This above all required the suppression of the anarchic impulses of the unconscious, and the Cantos of the late 1920s through the 30s would see an increased emphasis on Enlightenment figures of right reason, such as John Adams and Confucian emperors. But of course the Cantos are everywhere marked by repression, as it is surely one of the most mixed, oblique, and contaminated of literary works.