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

To be true to its own proposition, Helen in Egypt must ground itself on the groundlessness of the sea. The poem offers itself as the impossibility of a 300-page lyric, a quest narrative without telos, an epic of negative capability. To keep open possibilities beyond the real as given, it must avoid being confined by its own arguments. To propose an alternative narrative, a transposition of values such that the feminine or maternal replaces the masculine death cult risks simply inversely repeating the cycle of repression. The maternal sea is not proposed as the antithesis of the masculine warrior ethos but its actual basis, which is repressed, thus locking the mind into antitheses. The Great Goddess subsumes all such antitheses, is death as much as birth and love (17); in fact, in H.D.'s work "she" is as likely to appear as Zeus, Amen, God, Proteus "the Nameless-of-many-Names" (106), or Father as Thetis, Isis, Aphrodite, or Mother. Achilles's repression of the goddess is an effort to deny death, to achieve immortality, which is why Thetis is responsible for his famous weak point. The effort to deny death manifests itself in the desire for dominance and violence toward others, a psychological substitute for a sense of immortality. So Helen-H.D. must not stop at offering a defense of herself; she must accept vulnerability as the grounds for an alternative ethos to that of power and dominance, and the first step is to reveal dominance itself as grounded in vulnerability. Vulnerability and its uncertainties become something like the ever-shifting ground of the human condition. Helen in Egypt in a sense acts therapeutically for the poet and on the readers to foster a mode of consciousness beyond argument. The texture of the poem - its constant circularity, folding back on itself, and apparent contradictoriness - is intended to release us from irritable reaching after certainties. H.D. often acknowledges the threat and terror of the dissolution and shedding of old selves her poetry proposes, and the consequent need to pull back and establish some coherence. Her late sequences characteristically proceed in a centrifugal-centripetal manner, most famously emblematized in the image of the seashell in The Walls Do Not Fall, which alternately opens itself up to and closes out the sea tide (CP 512-14).

What is largely lacking in H.D.'s work is a sense of the sinister or of evil, such as one finds in, say, Djuna Barnes or Mary Butts. On the rare occasion when evil is mentioned - "Evil was active in the land / . . . Dev-ill was after us" (CP 511) - it appears too much like medieval allegory for its terror to be convincing. No doubt, this in part explains why some readers feel a thinness in H.D.'s work, presumably reflecting the limitations imposed by the privileged life she lived. On the other hand, this lack of an irredeemably dark side reflects H.D.'s rejection, like Pound and unlike Eliot, of humankind's essential sinfulness, and her understanding of poetry's task as that of acceptance, as promoting an inclusive consciousness. I have been suggesting that for H.D. to identify an other as beyond transformation was to risk locking herself into an antithesis that simply perpetuates history's antagonisms. Pound was an obvious illustration of such entanglement, one in which he described himself as being "furious from perception" - an expression he evidently applied to Hitler (90/606, 104/741).