H.D.’s Freudian Poetics: Psychoanalysis in Translation by Dianne Chisholm

Abstract

essay, or that the three other Confederation poets received “significant pub­ lic attention” earlier? Rather than an arrangement that sometimes seems arbitrary, Heath’s “audience of intermediate skills” (“Foreword,” Series 3, 8) might well have benefitted from the stronger sense of historical development that a more straightforward chronological ordering would have provided. As Texan folk-singer Michelle Shocked advises, “the secret of a long life is knowing when it’s time to go” ; perhaps this is also the secret of a good critical series. Notwithstanding its value as a resource for teachers and students of Canadian literature, the Profiles series may have run its course. For one thing, it has been eclipsed by more sophisticated series such as ECW’s Canadian Writers and Their Works as well as the Canadian volumes of the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Moreover, the Profiles series is fuelled by a cultural nationalism — authors linked by an insistent and assumed common “Canadianness” — that more skeptical users of these reference books may find naïve, quaint, almost, and no longer entirely convincing. As a literary bonding agent, “Canadianness” is perhaps thinner glue than it once was; the time warp which Heath’s sentimentally appointed “colourful album” of this country’s literary history now finds itself in would certainly suggest this to be the case. Je a n e t t e lynes / Lakehead University Dianne Chisholm, H.D. ’s Freudian Poetics: Psychoanalysis in Translation (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992). ix, 286. $38.95 (U.S.) cloth, $14.95 (U.S.) paper. For Foucault, Marx and Freud were modernity’s “founders of discursivity,” producing not only their own texts but also “the possibilities and the rules for the formation of other texts. . . . [T]hey both have established an endless possibility of discourse.” 1 Chisholm gives us a compelling analysis of a case of discursive elaboration traceable to the history of Freud’s immense influ­ ence on modernist culture. In undertaking “the first full-length reading of the intertext ‘H.D.-Freud,’ or . . . H.D.’s translation of Freud” (1), Chisholm covers H.D.’s major works, from those written before her analysis with Freud in 1933-1934 {Her, Kora and Ka, Nights), to those written in the ten years after that analysis ( The Giß, The Walls Do Not Fall, Tribute to the Angels), to the “delayed analysis” of Tribute to Freud (1944), which H.D. pursues and in some sense completes in Flowering of the Rod and Helen in Egypt (1952— 1956). In the course of reading H.D. with texts by Derrida, Cixous, Irigaray, and Bersani, Chisholm displays an intimate familiarity with the full range 368 of Freud’s work, from The Interpretation of Dreams to the late essay, “Con­ structions in Analysis.” One comes away with an enhanced sense of both the complexity of H.D.’s oeuvre and the ludicrous inadequacy of the label by which H.D. has come to be known in her traditional anthologized form: “H.D., Imagiste” (as Pound dubbed her). The label “H.D., Freudienne,” however, would be equally reductive. The major claim of the book is that H.D.’s work accomplishes a sustained and large-scale critical revision of Freud, hence Chisholm’s method of fol­ lowing the vicissitudes of “intertextual appropriation, application, and in some cases, subversion of the father of psychoanalysis” (219). Certainly, as Chisholm richly shows, H.D.’s oeuvre can be read as a poetic translation of Freudian psychoanalysis, but Chisholm is often ambiguous about the ex­ tent to which H.D., at any given point in her writing, was consciously (or unconsciously) rewriting Freudian texts and ideas. One might consider in this regard a representative example of Chisholm’s comparative method, in which the act of placing texts in apposition is enough to mobilize the play of “translation” and intertextuality: The “structural allegory” of H.D.’s long poem Helen in Egypt, Chisholm observes, “seems to derive less from Euripi­ des’ metaphorical palimpsest than from Freud’s ‘mystic writing-pad’ ” (176). The poem “is itself a mnemonic device, a mystic writing” that “elaborates and extends Freud’s textual metaphor” even as it “reverses the dynamic outlined” in Freud’s essay (176...