Abstract
This paper examines the poetics of H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) in terms of a set of phenomenological concerns that have been explored philosophically in the work of Jacques Derrida and Martin Heidegger. Foremost among these concerns is the significance of writing, understood as either a counter to verbal discourse or as the basis for a new poetics. This concern is abundantly evident in the author’s late work, Trilogy, a long meditation on history and spiritual beginnings that casts light on the personal commitments of the poet. The paper compares Derrida’s opposition between speech and writing to Heidegger’s criticism of traditional metaphysics while sustaining the importance of phenomenology to both positions. After offering an analysis of the poem, the paper considers the significance of plurality to the evocation of community and to the implied cosmology that the poem itself would have us consider and affirm.
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
Notes
- 1.
Susan Stanford Friedman, Psyche Reborn: The Emergence of H.D. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), p. 210.
- 2.
Albert Gelpi, “Re-membering the Mother: A Reading of H.D.’s Trilogy,” in Signets: Reading H.D. (Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1990), p. 334.
- 3.
Susan Gubar, “The Echoing Spell of H.D.’s Trilogy,” in Signets: Reading H.D., 1990 p. 305.
- 4.
See Plato, Phaedrus, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 274c–277b, pp. 520–22.
- 5.
See especially Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981a), pp. 78–84, 102–17.
- 6.
Derrida is concerned with “the general problematic of the relation between the mythemes and the philosophemes that lie at the origin of western logos.” Ibid. 86. But Derrida also refers to how history requires “the philosophical difference between mythos and logos,” thus indicating that the project of opposing these two things is historical rather than intrinsic to logos as a liminal entity. The problem for Derrida is that Platonism is governed by the opposition between signifier and signified, so that the logos of metaphysics is destined to be depleted of writing when it follows a certain trajectory. Ibid., 112. Nonetheless, since Derrida does not argue that “there is a Platonic text, closed upon itself, with its inside and outside,” readers of Plato are never prevented from discovering how the trace of writing exceeds the closure of metaphysics, to the degree that the philosophical text is approached with patience and attentiveness. Ibid., 130.
- 7.
- 8.
Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” Margins of Philosophy, pp. 3–15.
- 9.
Ibid., p. 15.
- 10.
Martin Heidegger, “The Anaximander Fragment,” Early Greek Thinking (New York: Harper and Row, 1975), p. 37.
- 11.
Ibid., pp. 41–42.
- 12.
Ibid., p. 51.
- 13.
H.D. The Walls Do Not Fall, Trilogy (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1973), p. 6.
- 14.
Ibid., p. 19. The combination of these cultural features, particularly in voices that are impossible to identify with single traditions, indicates that Trilogy as a whole demonstrates Hellenistic “syncretism” on a profound level. The concept of religious syncretism is defined in Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), p. 20. References to Hermes in the poem suggest Hellenistic influences, perhaps in combination with the Gnostic legacy. But Jonas has emphasized how this strain in late Greek religion was often imbued with “a cosmic pantheism far removed from the violent denunciations of the physical universe so characteristic of the Gnostics.” Ibid., p. 147. Jonas’s entire discussion of Hermes Trismegistus can be related to this aspect of the poet’s later work. Ibid., 147–73.
- 15.
Ibid., p. 16.
- 16.
Ibid., p. 27.
- 17.
Ibid., p. 25.
- 18.
- 19.
Susan Gubar, “The Echoing Spell of H.D.’s Trilogy,” in Signets: Reading H.D., p. 306.
- 20.
H.D., Tribute to the Angels, Trilogy, pp. 85, 87.
- 21.
Ibid., p. 104.
- 22.
Ibid., pp. 101, 103.
- 23.
Ibid., pp. 101, 105.
- 24.
H.D., The Flowering of the Rod, Trilogy, pp. 141, 169–71.
- 25.
H.D., Tribute to Freud (New York: Pantheon Books, 1956), pp. 152–54.
- 26.
Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 430.
- 27.
Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), p. 37.
- 28.
Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, p. 439.
- 29.
Paul Ricoeur, “The Question of the Subject: the Challenge of Semiology,” The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays on Hermeneutics (London: Athlone Press, 2000), p. 244.
- 30.
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1976), p. 73.
- 31.
Joseph Riddell, The Turning Word: American Literary Modernism and Continental Theory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), p. 41.
- 32.
Jean-Luc Nancy, “Of Being Singular Plural,” Being Singular Plural (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 38.
References
Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1981a. Plato’s pharmacy. In Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson, 161–171. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 1981b. Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago.
Derrida, Jacques. 1982. Différance and Signature event context. In Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass, 1–27. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 307–330.
Friedman, Susan Stanford. 1981. Psyche reborn: The emergence of H.D. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Gelpi, Albert. 1990. Re-membering the mother: A reading of H.D.’s Trilogy. In Signets: Reading H.D, ed. Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, 318–335. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Gubar, Susan. 1990. The echoing spell of H.D.’s Trilogy. In Signets: Reading H.D, ed. Susan Stanford Friedman and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, 297–317. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1975. The Anaximander fragment. Early Greek Thinking. Trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi, 13–58. New York: Harper and Row.
H.D. 1956. Tribute to Freud. New York: Pantheon Books.
H.D. 1973. Trilogy. New York: New Directions Publishing.
H.D. 1982. The gift. New York: New Directions Publishing.
Jonas, Hans. 1963. The Gnostic religion: The message of the Alien God and the beginnings of Christianity. Boston: Beacon.
Morris, Adalaide. 1986. Autobiography and prophecy: H.D.’s the gift. In H.D.: Woman and poet, ed. King Michael, 227–236. Orono: University of Maine at Orono.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2000. Of being singular plural. In Being Singular Plural. Trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne, 1–99. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Plato. 1989. Phaedrus. The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. Trans. R. Hackforth, 475–525. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1970. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Trans. Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1976. Interpretation theory: Discourse and the surplus of meaning. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press.
Ricoeur, Paul. 2000. The question of the subject: The challenge of semiology. In The conflict in interpretations: Essays in hermeneutics, ed. Idhe Don, 236–266. London: Athlone Press.
Riddell, Joseph. 1991. The turning word: American literary modernism and continental theory, ed. Mark Bauerlein. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Melaney, W.D. (2016). Cosmology in H.D.’S Trilogy: Poetics, Logos and Trace. In: Tymieniecka, AT., Trutty-Coohill, P. (eds) The Cosmos and the Creative Imagination. Analecta Husserliana, vol 119. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21792-5_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21792-5_19
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-21791-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-21792-5
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)