A Public History of the Dividing Line: H. D., the Bomb, and the Roots of the Postmodern

Abstract

This essay explores the entanglements of aesthetic discourse and public policy in the aftermath of America's dropping of the atom bomb. While H. D.'s ”Trilogy”, written in London during the German bombing, has been treated critically as a war poem, the major works that followed-especially ”Helen in Egypt” and ”Tribute to Freud”-offer a far more critical and more nuanced vision of the artist in wartime and in the aftermath of war. Poised at the historical turn from modernism to postmodernism, both works conduct provocative interventions into the literary canon and are suggestive of the complex dynamics of mid-20th-century American foreign policy and literary identity. Ostensibly a recasting of a lost pre-Homeric text, ”Helen in Egypt” anticipates the shift to a decisively postmodern lyricism, with its displaced subjectivity and lacunae and its implicit rethinking of the western literary canon. In its investigative tone and its insistence that modern war functions not as a rupture but as a continuity within literary and sociopolitical life, H. D.'s vision of the lyric has never been more relevant.