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H.D and Modernity

 | 
Hélène Aji
, 
Antoine Cazé
, 
Agnès Derail-Imbert
, 
et al.

“All France is a book”: Literary Geographies and Otherness in Asphodel

Claire Conilleau

Texte intégral

  • 1 M. Bradbury, “Second Countries: The Expatriate Tradition in American Writing,” p. 15.
  • 2 C. Kaplan, Questions of Travel. Postmodern Discourses of Displacement, passim.
  • 3 From a cursory perspective, in this book there are 42 occurrences of “France” (and only 18 for both (...)

1As Malcolm Bradbury notes, “[a] marked element of geographical displacement lies behind modern writing.”1 H.D. chose a life of self-exile which undergirds her oeuvre and her palimpsestic vision of time, space, and identity. Composed in 1921-1922, Asphodel is an experimental Künstlerroman whose diegesis covers the years 1911-1919 and plays on the “modernist trope of exile”2 as it traces the quest for identity and the birth as a writer of H.D.’s character, Hermione, throughout Europe. H.D. is typically associated with London and Greece, but in Asphodel, she recasts France and French elements as playing a seminal role in her autographical poetics.3 In contrast to the short diegetic time spent by Hermione in France, the country, its language, history and culture do shape the story. By focusing on the opening of the novel, I would like here to examine how France and its culture and language in Asphodel create a dialectics of continuity and discontinuity, building freely on the porosity between “here” and “there,” and allude to how this novel in many ways prefigures the style of Trilogy.

Textual France

2The opening pages of Asphodel show Hermione as both reader and writer-in-the-making. I’d like to show that the French landscape is read by the narrator through the prism of French intertexts before it is experienced, so that literary geography precedes actual geography. One example of this is when, upon arriving on the borderline landscape of Le Havre, Hermione is struck by the interconnectedness of life and literature. Madame Dupont, a fellow passenger on the cross-over, reminds Hermione of Maupassant:

France already on the boat had come true… […]. Things happened out of Maupassant, any Maupassant story might come true, Boule de Suife [sic], fat pretty cocotte in the railway carriage going to bed with the Parisian officer (Bouile de Souife was it? [sic]) and then everyone cutting her afterwards… that was France, de Maupassant was true. Literature was true. If de Maupassant was true then life and letters met, were not sub-divided, hermetically shut apart. (Asphodel, 4)

  • 4 Given H.D.’s attention to names, it is worth pointing out that Madame Dupont’s generic name means “ (...)

3This intertext achieves more than the characterization. The reference plays on a spatial parallel (the closed space of the railway carriage in Maupassant and the boat cabin in Le Havre in Asphodel) and also prefigures the characters’ move to Rouen where Maupassant’s story starts out. Further, Hermione feels what she has read in books has become true, and this posits the connection between life and literature as the core of H.D.’s poetics.4

  • 5 “Boule de Suife,” “Bouile de Souife” (4); “Boule de Souife” (6).
  • 6 J.J. Lecercle, “La stylistique deleuzienne et les petites agrammaticalités,” p. 275, my translation

4There are inaccuracies in her reference to Maupassant. There is one factual mistake (the officer is Prussian, not Parisian) as well as several spelling errors that can be considered meaningful since editor Robert Spoo retained them. H.D. provides three alternative spellings to the title of Maupassant’s story as Hermione’s memory fails her.5 In his analysis of minor grammatical deviations— following Deleuze’s remarks on the writer as a ‘foreigner in his language’— Jean-Jacques Lecercle concludes that these disruptions in the linguistic order defamiliarize language for “suddenly what was obvious becomes problematic and thus visible”.6 I am thus tempted to see the addition of one or two i’s and a final e to the title of Maupassant’s story as a way to inscribe individuality and gender— “e” being one of the suffixes that usually indicate feminine nouns in French—as the focus of this female Künstlerroman from the start. Hermione’s encounter with France therefore sees the return of the “ghosts of modernity” (to borrow Jean-Michel Rabaté’s phrase). H.D. recycles past texts in this autobiographical novel narrated in the present tense, defacing them to make them her own.

  • 7 J. Kristeva, “A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident,” p. 298.

5By situating the birth of her poetic vocation in France, H.D.—perhaps displacing the French epithet (“Imagiste”) Pound stamped her with—anticipates Julia Kristeva’s comment that “Writing is impossible without some kind of exile. Exile is already in itself a form of dissidence, since it involves uprooting oneself from a family, a country or a language”.7 France in Asphodel occupies this role of creative estrangement.

6Sightseeing acts as a means to ply between places, eras, and languages in a novel that foils the stories of female initiation. While visiting Marie-Antoinette’s bucolic retreat, the Petit Trianon, Hermione dwells on the ‘special relationship’ between France and America from an autobiographical perspective: “The Marquis de Lafayette staying at the old house the Farrands’ grandmother used to have. He stayed there I mean. […] We had heliotrope roots and cuttings from their garden, from the Grange that was named the Grange after the estate of the Marquis de Lafayette. So I was always near, near France.” (Asphodel, 24) The literal otherness that the foreigner illustrates is revealed to have always already been intimate. The autobiographical impulse in H.D.’s writing incites her to find connections between personal and human history in a practice that prefigures Freud’s dream-work and its two-fold primitiveness, as well as the poetic imperative that animates Trilogy: “chasm, schism in consciousness / must be bridged over.” (Trilogy, 1998, 49) H.D. has an equally atavistic perception of place echoing a vision of time as discontinuous yet overlapping: “Paris is, has always been Paris. Athens rather. Paris brings one’s mind to a fine point of illumination, of discrimination. One can see and feel and act all at once in Paris. In Paris one is one whole being, mind, body and soul as the Greeks were. In Paris I saw clearly.” (Asphodel, 51)

A Different Identity: The Kinship of Vision

  • 8 Etymologically, “atavism” derives from the Latin atavus, meaning “ancestor.”
  • 9 S. Friedman, Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction, p. 173.

7H.D.’s atavistic archaism is manifest through the resurgence of different historical female figures, such as “the witch of Orléans,” (Asphodel, 9) whom the character claims as her forerunner.8 But H.D.’s atavism does not preclude any sense of modernity for she orchestrates a resurgence of ghosts to regenerate and relate people’s stories and places. Visiting the square in Rouen where Joan of Arc died, Hermione experiences an uncanny sense of kinship with what Susan Stanford Friedman calls “the spirit of female rebellion and the martyrdom of female difference,”9 whose fate encompasses that of mythological figures as well as Hermione’s:

It was (wasn’t it) our duty to come and see the spot. It said so in the guide book. No monument. Nothing. France was all her monument. O queen, Artemis, Athene. You came to life in Jeanne d’Arc. She’s a saint now. I’d be a saint if I let them get to me. So would Fayne Rabb. I don’t want to be burnt, to be crucified just because I ‘see’ things sometimes. (Asphodel, 10).

8The absence of a visible monument and the palimpsest of female figures seem to announce Trilogy’s Lady carrying “the blank pages / of the unwritten volumes of the new.” (Trilogy, 1998, 103)

9The gift of vision, or prophecy, is what connects these women but also embodies the poet’s disruptive force which Hermione has yet to fully accept. The witch, a metaphor for female homosexuality in H.D., is at the junction between power and danger, between visible and invisible. George/Ezra lectures Hermione about her relationship with Fayne: “She’s done things to you. You’re not the same. Altered imperceptibly. […] You and she would have been burned in Salem for witches—”. (Asphodel, 50) Seeing Joan of Arc’s traceless tomb triggers Hermione’s memory of reading about French History:

It was out of a book. Horrible long pages of French History crowded in between Physical Geography and the Latin or Geometry… […] she had wanted to crown the king at Orléans. And they had caught her. Caught her. Trapped her with her armour and her panache and her glory and her pride. They had trapped her, a girl who was a boy and they would always do that. They would always trap them, bash their heads like broken flowers from their stalks, break them for seeing things, having ‘visions’ seeing things like she did and like Fayne Rabb. This was the warning. (Asphodel, 9)

10The pronoun “her” enables to shift the focus from Joan of Arc to Hermione (nicknamed Her), and further with the plural “they.” Several chapters later, Hermione reuses similar language to predict her and Fayne’s future because they, too, have the gift of prophecy: “They will catch us when they know that we are ahead of them. Bash out our brains. Stench of flesh roasting, roasting fumes rising above Rouen.” (Asphodel, 37) Announcing the apocalyptic destruction by fire of “The Walls Do Not Fall,” H.D. here expounds that being at the avant-garde implies an awareness of one’s connection to the past and that honoring one’s gift is a dangerous undertaking.

  • 10 J.M. Rabaté, 1913: The Cradle of Modernism, p. 97.

11H.D.’s modernity hence subscribes to what Rabaté defines as “an active synthesis of the past and the present which can only be obtained by ‘great labor. ’ The novelty claimed by modernism emerges from the consciousness of a past heritage.”10 But H.D. distorts, subverts and recharges this foreign legacy to stage her own mise en abyme of otherness.

“Mademoiselle’s French is charming [...] but not quite always fresh”

  • 11 G. Steiner, Extraterritorial, Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution, p. 27.
  • 12 Ibid., p. viii.
  • 13 T. Todorov, “Bilinguisme, dialogisme et schizophrénie,” p. 11-12.
  • 14 H. Meschonnic, Modernité Modernité, p. 35.

12The modernist experience of self-exile incites the artist to dwell on the frontier, to haunt the limits of language, and to open up to other languages in order for the writer to become—in George Steiner’s words—this “guest [...] whose job is to stay vulnerable to the manifold strange presences.”11 But what happens when this strange presence is that of a foreign language coexisting with the writer’s native language? The discontinuous effect that the collision between past and present produces within the continuity of an autobiographical narrative is mirrored by H.D.’s treatment of linguistic otherness. One could say that a “linguistically unhoused”12 H.D. crafts a dialogism, in Tzvetan Todorov’s sense of a “co-presence” of two modes of discourse as well as the conversation the two languages enter into.13 The recurrent use of French words in the novel is revealing in this respect. Often, Hermione mixes freely, and without transitions, English and French, not so much to retreat in a foreign language as to incorporate its strangeness, all the while claiming the reader’s attention. As Hermione is told by a French waiter, “Mademoiselle’s French is charming [...] but not quite always fresh” (Asphodel, 18); so H.D.’s project is not so much “to ‘make it new, ’ but to make it unknown,” to borrow Henri Meschonnic’s definition of modernity.14 One instance of Asphodel’s linguistic dialogism is the following incident:

Small boys looking like thin anaemic little girls […] shouted after them, ‘Engl-eesh. Engl-eeesh. Beef-steak. ’ […] The little boys had persisted and shouted until Hermione had had to turn, stick her tongue out at them, thank them, Messieurs for their hearty welcome to their beautiful patrie where in America they were all taught French children were so polite vous savez […]. (Asphodel, 6)

  • 15 G. Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 109.

13H.D.’s style here has an obvious element of local color: the children’s quoted speech is a transcription of their French accent when speaking English—a regional marker of sorts. But more intriguing is H.D.’s use of a hybrid narrative mode and the italics (traditionally indicating a foreign word) which are used for emphasis only, thereby visually blurring the distinction between different languages and jeopardizing each language’s status as what Deleuze calls “a homogenous system in equilibrium.”15 So much so that upon reading, one is sometimes perplexed as to the language being used and whose voice is being heard, which creates an effect of discontinuity within the apparent uninterruptedness of the sentence. H.D.’s writing goes beyond the mere cohabitation of languages as they commingle and dialogue with each other.

14In fact, H.D. stages this blurring of the boundary between dissemblance and identity in language to profit from the creative value of errors and mistranslations. When Hermione goes to the market, the meaning of the word “livre” baffles her; nevertheless it brings about a fruitful musing about writing:

“Brrrr sous la livre—Brrrr sous la livre” went on and on and on. A raucous voice persisted that something was some number of sous (brrrrring over it) the livre and what was a livre anyhow. Livre, livre. A book. A book. It was all a book. They had wandered out of a world into a book. […] Livre. “But a livre is a book isn’t it? What is a livre anyhow?” (Asphodel, 5)

  • 16 In End to Torment, H.D. writes of Pound “There is a sense of his pounding, pounding (Pounding)” (H. (...)

15The misunderstanding operates at the level of sounds as well as semantics, the wall separating the extradiegetical world and the diegesis is torn down as reality is intruded upon by literary imagination. Once Hermione has identified the contextual meaning of “livre,” she asserts the permeability of life and literature: “All France is a book. Brrr sous la livre. A livre. A book. No it was a pound of plums in a paper bag…” (Asphodel, 55) It is the English translation of “livre” that allows the emergence, between the signs, of Ezra Pound.16 H.D.’s love of sound and word play is manifest here and will culminate in Trilogy where the redemptive Osiris is broken down to “zrr-hiss,” the onomatopoeia of German bombs. (Trilogy, 1998, 58)

  • 17 G. Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 109.

16The dialogism between languages invites us to consider her writing in light of Deleuze’s definition of style as a foreign language. Deleuze sees this as part of the process of “minorization” of language. The great writers “make the language take flight, they send it racing along a witch’s line, ceaselessly placing it in a state of disequilibrium, making it bifurcate and vary in each of its terms […].”17 Indeed, when one looks at how H.D. writes as “a foreigner in the language” in a literal sense, one can see that she makes “language itself scream, stutter, stammer.” (Asphodel, 110) A final instance of this stuttering in French is Hermione’s words upon first setting foot on French soil: “Havre, Havre. This was Havre, Havre. Havre.” (Asphodel, 6) As it voices the reality of this toponym, this clustered repetition acts as an incantation and hints at the symbolic value her expatriation will hold in reaching a “haven, / heaven.” (Trilogy, 1998, 59).

Conclusion

17France and French things in Asphodel are exploited as a textual material which is preexistent to Hermione’s immediate reality. By conjuring up several intertexts and distorting them in the process, H.D. reenacts her birth as a writer and reclaims it from Pound. The encounter with otherness—foreign writers, landscape, history and language—is significant in her atavistic aesthetic that strives to find co-incidences between personal and national history, autobiography and collective memory. As Hermione reflects, “Words darting in and out and every word related so that everything you saw and every word you say relates, weaves on to another.” (Asphodel, 25, emphasis added) H.D.’s use of the French language literalizes her “minorization” of language and is also an exploration of the associative method at work in Trilogy, as with the lines quoted from fragment 8 of “Tribute to the Angels” used to open this conference: “marah-mar / are melted, fuse and join // and change and alter, / mer, mère, mere, mater, Maia, Mary.” (Trilogy, 1998, 71)

Notes

1 M. Bradbury, “Second Countries: The Expatriate Tradition in American Writing,” p. 15.

2 C. Kaplan, Questions of Travel. Postmodern Discourses of Displacement, passim.

3 From a cursory perspective, in this book there are 42 occurrences of “France” (and only 18 for both “America” and “England”) while “Paris” is mentioned 25 times—approximately half the number of references to “London” (53), where more than half the novel takes place.

4 Given H.D.’s attention to names, it is worth pointing out that Madame Dupont’s generic name means “Bridge.”

5 “Boule de Suife,” “Bouile de Souife” (4); “Boule de Souife” (6).

6 J.J. Lecercle, “La stylistique deleuzienne et les petites agrammaticalités,” p. 275, my translation.

7 J. Kristeva, “A New Type of Intellectual: The Dissident,” p. 298.

8 Etymologically, “atavism” derives from the Latin atavus, meaning “ancestor.”

9 S. Friedman, Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction, p. 173.

10 J.M. Rabaté, 1913: The Cradle of Modernism, p. 97.

11 G. Steiner, Extraterritorial, Papers on Literature and the Language Revolution, p. 27.

12 Ibid., p. viii.

13 T. Todorov, “Bilinguisme, dialogisme et schizophrénie,” p. 11-12.

14 H. Meschonnic, Modernité Modernité, p. 35.

15 G. Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 109.

16 In End to Torment, H.D. writes of Pound “There is a sense of his pounding, pounding (Pounding)” (H.D., End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound, 1980, p. 8). This word-play is also used in Tribute to Freud about Freud, in an allusion The Merchant of Venice: “his pound of flesh” (H.D., Tribute to Freud, p. 70).

17 G. Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 109.

Auteur

Claire Conilleau holds an agrégation in English and is just finishing a PhD in American Modernist Literature at the University of Paris 3-Sorbonne Nouvelle where she currently is a Research and Teaching Fellow (ATER). Her doctoral research focuses on the manifold notion of displacement (textual, spatial, linguistic, sexual) in the poetry and prose works of H.D., Laura (Riding) Jackson, and Djuna Barnes.

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