Abstract
Speaking of Sappho, H.D., the modernist poet, is at once concerned with the body and its ability to “terribly” sabotage the voice, the “coming glory,” of the master poet (Wise 59). In this description from The Wise Sappho, H.D.’s guide to the poetic vocation, the poet aligns the “impersonal” with the disembodied “song” or “spirit;” conversely, she locates “personality” within the world of the body and social relations. In this state of impersonality, the poet holds the bard-like authority to “mark” or “presage” history and the future, but this ability does not preclude her place in the world among “fellow beings,” a condition that also disables the scope of the poet’s voice, or authority. In light of this contradiction, this chapter examines H.D.’s theory of impersonality as it self-consciously explores the poetic vocation and its relation to authority. As do her contemporaries, most notably Ezra Pound, H.D. promotes poetry as the subject of authoritative, impersonal mastery. In ABC of Reading (1934), for example, published well after Notes on Thought and Vision and The Wise Sappho (1919), Pound announces his intention of writing pages “impersonal enough to serve as a text-book” for how to study poetry.2 This use of the word “impersonal” suggests that poetry can be objectively learned through meticulous study, by following a set of rules or principles that lead to poetic authority. Unlike the work of Pound, however, H.D.’s own oeuvre suggests her acute awareness of the potential problems of this sort of impersonality; she self-consciously explores the problems and dynamics of an impersonal method that erases individual distinction, or personality, precisely through an intense engagement with others that presupposes a personality in the first place.
A song, a spirit, a white star that moves across the heavens to mark the end of a world epoch or a presage to some coming glory. Yet she is embodied-terribly a human being, a woman, a personality as the most impersonal become when they confront their fellow beings.
—H.D.1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See H.D., Notes on Thought and Vision and The Wise Sappho (San Francisco: City Lights, 1982), 59; hereafter referred to as Notes and Wise.
See Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1960), 11, hereafter abbreviated as ABC.
See H.D., “The Mask and the Movietone,” in Close Up: Cinema and Modernism, ed. James Donald, Anne Friedberg, and Laura Marcus (London: Cassell, 1999), 115–16, hereafter referred to as “Mask.” The essay is the third of a series of essays called The Cinema and the Classics, which H.D. wrote for the journal in 1927.
See Walter Benjamin, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 231. While Benjamin speaks of a different genre of film, his preoccupations with the “cult of the movie star” are similar to H.D.’s concerns about the welding of voice and image. The difference is that H.D.’s utopian version of an impersonal cinematic apparatus dissolves the relation Benjamin sees between cinema and personality. For Benjamin, the “separable, transportable” aspects of the film image contribute to cinema’s “spell of the personality,” whereas H.D. sees these very characteristics as essential for maintaining the integrity of the unwelded image (231). See also Christina Walter, “From Image to Screen: H.D. and the Visual Origins of Modernist Impersonality,” Textual Practice 22.2 (June 2008): 291–313. Walter comments more extensively on H.D.’s film criticism, arguing that H.D. imagines an ideal spectator—distinct from the average moviegoer—who views the “filmic image” not as a “transparent mirror of reality,” but as a “mediated creation and projection.” The result is a state of hypnosis that allows the spectator access to the “unconscious mindbody systems that produced that state” (303).
Lawrence Rainey’s Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale UP, 1999) has challenged feminist critics of the 1980s for their role in fabricating a version of H.D. who conforms to their ideals. While this intervention is laudable, Rainey ultimately offers little positive change for H.D. scholarship, particularly in his denouncement of her as a mere “coterie poet,” a “distinctly modernist fable,” whose dependence on her lover Bryher’s lifelong patronage of “endless bounty” contributed to the “vacuity” of her poems (148–49). Offering strictly numerical evidence concerning H.D.’s “miniscule corpus of non-fiction,” Rainey, oddly contending that one must have produced large quantities of literary criticism to rightly be considered a modernist, further claims that H.D. vigorously refrained from interactions with a wider public and showed little impetus to “engage in dialogue with contemporaries” (54).
See Cassandra Laity, H.D. and the Victorian Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), ix, hereafter abbreviated as HDVF.
See also Eileen Gregory, “Rose Cut in Rock: Sappho and H.D.’s Sea Garden,” in Signets: Reading H.D., ed. Rachel Blau Duplesis and Susan Stanford Friedman (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991), 129–54. For Gregory, H.D.’s “familiarization” of her chosen muse, Sappho, positions the modernist poet in opposition to masculine authority by affirming her interest in “women’s community and erotic connections” (132).
To return to Maud Ellmann’s observations in The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987), a book that established Eliot and Pound as the conservative spokesmen for the doctrine, the outcome of impersonality was always a conservative “ethics of personality” that served to reinforce the authority of the poet and forge a reactionary link to tradition.
See Sharon Cameron, Impersonality: Seven Essays (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007), 145, hereafter referred to as Impersonality.
See Daniel Tiffany, Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995), 11, hereafter referred to as Radio. Furthermore, in A Memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska (New York: New Directions, 1970), Pound defines the image as a “radiant node or cluster … from which, and through which, and into which, ideas are constantly rushing” (92). This vortex also corresponds to the process which is particular to the imagist poem: “In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective” (89).
See H.D., Collected Poems, ed. Louis L. Martz (New York: New Directions, 1983), 5, hereafter abbreviated as CP.
See Susan Stanford Friedman, Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008), 34. Friedman distinguishes the impersonality of H.D.’s poetry and the personal nature of her prose. This contrast, she argues, “privileges poetry over prose, the end over the means to an end, her ‘real self ’ over her ‘personal self,’ clairvoyance over sensibility, and art over therapy” (34). However correct Stanford Friedman is in identifying some of the programmatic differences between H.D.’s poetry and prose, my own reading of H. D’s poetry departs from this account, arguing that the poem itself dialectically deconstitutes and reconstitutes the personal self.
Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981), 139, hereafter referred to as Pursuit.
See Erin G. Carlston, Thinking Fascism: Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998), 9, hereafter referred to as Thinking.
Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), hereafter referred to as Phenomenology, defines meaningful space as maintaining a sense of order “whereby the position of things becomes possible” (243). I return to this definition of space throughout the book in discussing a central modernist anxiety about impersonality as a spatial phenomenon, which surrounds the precarious dialectic it sees between the dissolution and reconstitution of space.
See Pound’s introduction to and translation of Remy de Gourmont’s The Natural Philosophy of Love (London: Quartet Books, 1992), xi, hereafter referred to as Natural.
I borrow the term “prosthetic modernism” from Tim Armstrong’s Modernism: Technology and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 77, which I also discuss in Chapter 1.
See Betsy L. Nies, Eugenic Fantasies: Racial Ideology in the Literature and Popular Culture of 1920s (New York: Routledge, 2002), 67, which explores H.D.’s “troubled, ambivalent relation to eugenics” but does little to theorize the larger socioaesthetic assumptions embedded in such thought. Nies notes H.D.’s discomfort with the eugenicist embrace of the Nordic “classical body as an icon of perfection that had survived the ravages of time,” standing “above the teeming immigrant masses whose bodies were depicted in the popular press as misshapen and deformed, small and swarthy, unlike the Nordic who rose above the crowd” (77–78). Nies’s description of this particular trend in statuary underscores the ambivalence of H.D.’s poem. H.D.’s explicit politics were of course antifascist, as
Georgina Taylor argues in H.D. and the Public Sphere of Modernist Women Writers, 1913–1946 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001).
See Victor Smirnoff, “The Masochistic Contract,” in Essential Papers on Masochism, ed. Mary Ann Fitzpatrick Hanly (New York: NYU Press, 1995), 66, hereafter referred to as “Masochistic,” an anthology offering a comprehensive history of developments in the study of masochism, beginning with Freud.
In his analysis of Freud in Masochism in Sex and Society (New York: Black Cat, 1962), originally published in 1941 as Masochism in Modern Man, Theodor Reik addresses the “paradox of masochism” as a spatial fracturing of the personality arising from the simultaneous attempt to both assuage and pursue pain. For Reik, masochism actualizes a split in the personality as people “consciously desire to avoid pain and at the same time strive for it unconsciously” (4).
See Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1962), 35. See also “Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,” SE 14 (1915): 111–140, where Freud defines masochism spatially as related to the movements of the ego. In arguing that masochism is actually sadism turned around on the subject’s own ego, Freud suggests that sadism transforms into masochism when the subject returns to the narcissistic object as a means of incorporating an extraneous ego. This process does not occur outside the scopophilic process of looking, in which the subject’s own body is the object of this gaze. This essential splitting in space forms the heart of Freud’s theory of masochism.
See Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty (New York: Zone, 1991), 20, hereafter abbreviated as CC.
My point here is not to dismiss H.D.’s interest in other women or her bisexuality. Rather, a term such as “Sapphic,” as employed by Laura Doan and Jane Garrity in their introduction to Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women, and English Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2006), better describes H.D.’s relation to sexuality. Representative of the “profound shifts—in terms of visibility, intelligibility, and accessibility—that occurred as a result of the growing public of sapphism in modern Anglophone cultures between the two World Wars,” the “multiple meanings of term,” the two assert, distance “us from more rigid contemporary categories of identity” (2, 3).
See T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in Selected Poems (New York: Harcourt, 1930), 11.
This discomfort stems from what Leo Bersani, in The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis and Art (New York: Columbia UP, 1986), describes as psychoanalysis’s contribution to the “mythologizing of the human as a readable organization” (83). H.D.’s poetry indicates her uneasiness over the prospect of a mappable self but likewise cannot imagine a self that is completely unreadable. This is also the subject of her memoir Tribute to Freud (New York: Pearson, 1956). In this text, H.D. struggles with the project of subsuming her intensely personal responses to Freud’s personality and genius within the impersonal rubric of analysis.
H.D.’s destabilization of the hetero/homo binary characterizes an impersonal poetics that attempts to move, in Tim Dean’s words, “beyond sexuality,” much in the same way that it also moves beyond sensuality (Smirnoff). Such a movement, according to Dean in Beyond Sexuality (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000), provides a solution to the primary challenge facing queer theory, which involves “the consequences of defining oneself and one’s politics against norms as such” (226). Dean asserts that moving “beyond sexuality” entails a nonpsychological understanding of sexuality that disarticulates it from “identity, from the self and from personhood” (272).
While the poems of H.D.’s Sea Garden are not conventionally “narrative,” they do, as I will argue similarly of D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, destabilize conventional aspects of form in ways that challenge heternormative paradigms of literary structure designed, as Judith Roof argues in Come as You Are: Sexuality and Narrative (New York: Columbia UP, 1996), to reassure readers with a sense of meaning and stability.
Copyright information
© 2012 Rochelle Rives
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rives, R. (2012). The Impersonal Contract. In: Modernist Impersonalities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137021885_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137021885_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-43773-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-02188-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)