H.D.'s Poetry: 'The Meanings That Words Hide' by Marina Camboni (review)

Abstract

236 Reviews Musselwhite aims to read Hardy's tragic novels in terms ofthe differentkinds of so? cial order described by Deleuze and Guattari, and in terms such as the 'body without organs', the 'megamachine', Autrui, and so on. In addition he offers,as a corrective to the anti-psychoanalyticpolemic of Anti-Oedipus, an analysis ofthe 'phantasm' de? rived from the work of Laplanche and Pontalis?pointing out that Deleuze's earlier work (especially Logic du sens) was in fact founded on the notion of the phantasm, the ambiguous imprinting, a writing and rewriting, which represents the interface between social construction and the biological drives of the body. Musselwhite's richly informed argument takes us in many directions: into an ana? lysis of the 'territorial' order represented by Henchard, cruel, paternalistic, and attached to oral tradition, versus the 'despotic' written order of the modernizer Farfrae in The Mayor of Casterbridge; into an analysis of just what an attachment to?and a dissolving of the self into?the heath might mean in Return of the Native. But the core of the book is a series of analyses of a central phantasm originating in the figure of the hanged woman Martha Brown, whom Hardy saw executed in 1857; linked in turn to historical memories of the torture and execution of Mary Channing in 1706, a story which Hardy returned to obsessively. Musselwhite sees the body of Mary Channing as underlying the cruel theatre of The Mayor of Casterbridge and its fascination with feminine excess, on the one hand, and feminine self-control on the other (Elizabeth-Jane). He argues that the spectre of the dead woman underlies the idealized, marmoreal, and temporally repeated object of desire in The Well-Beloved, the idealization of Christminster injude the Obscure, and the representation of Tess as akin to Freud's 'magic writing block', a surface on which is inscribed a constantly re-formed collection of impulses. Sometimes Musselwhite threatens to overreach. The assertion that the contradic? tions and savage patterning oijude the Obscure represent the totality of capitalism is not really sustained (it might be true but how could one disprove it?). And in general, if one wanted to offera critique of the notion of the phantasm, it would be that the extent to which it represents a historical (rather than individual) trauma remains unclear . His meditation on the notion of 'translation' injude the Obscure can represent, to my mind, a problematic literalization of a metaphorical structure. But one would not want him to be any less bold a critic, and even when he is pushing an argument towards extremity he often manages to convince the reader by the scholarly surefootedness with which he traces linguistic details, sources, revisions, and structural resonances; or finds in texts discordant elements and clumsiness which he is surely right in seeing as evidence of Hardy's trauma. Royal Holloway, University of London Tim Armstrong H.D.'s Poetry: 'The meanings that words hide'. Ed. by Marina Camboni. New York: AMS Press. 2003. xix + 2o8pp. $74.50. ISBN 0-404-61594-5. H.D.'s poetry and prose continue to generate a broad range of critical interest. H.D.'s Poetry: 'The meanings that words hide' is an examination of the early imagist work but also the lesser-known poems of the middle and late years. The editor, Marina Cam? boni, has gathered together essays from some of the most important and influential scholars working on H.D. today. Evident in this collection is the way in which critics are developing new interpretative strategies for engaging with this writer's work as well as evolving and adapting some of the strategies firstformulated in the groundbreaking criticism of Rachel Biau DuPlessis, Susan Gubar, and Shari Benstock. Based on a one-day colloquium held at the University of Macerata, contributions from Ita? lian, American, and British scholars lend the collection an appropriately international MLR, ioi.i, 2006 237 perspective on a poet whose work draws on a number of cultural sources, both ancient and modern. In a tripartite division, the firstgroup of essays engage with H.D.'s early lyrics. Diana Collecot's ' "She too is my poet": H.D.'s Sapphic Fragments...