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Durham E-Theses H.D.'s Helen in Egypt : origins, processes and genres. Tarlo, Harriet Ann Bowen How to cite: Tarlo, Harriet Ann Bowen (1994) H.D.'s Helen in Egypt : origins, processes and genres., Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/1039/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk H.D.'S HELEN IN EGYPT ORIGINS PROCESSES GENRES Thesis submitted for the PhD. in English Literature at the University of Durham HARRIET ANN BOWEN TARLO SCHOOL OF ENGLISH UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM 1994 The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without his prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. i 1 2 SEP 1995 HARRIET TARLO H.D.'S HELEN IN EGYPT: ORIGINS, PROCESSES, GENRES ABSTRACT In the prelude to this thesis I introduce H.D.'s own very individualistic Hellenism. In the Origins section, I concentrate on the composition of the multiple characters of Helen in Egypt, both from original Greek sources and from contemporary ideas of classical and anthropological scholarship. I argue that the cosmology of the poem draws heavily on Greek, Egyptian and Tibetan legends of the underworld, suggesting that it can be read as an after-life adventure among spirits in a transitional state between life and death. In the second section of the thesis, Processes, I concentrate on how Helen's stream-of-consciousness, especially her remembering process, forms the structure of the poem. Helen in Egypt is also shaped, I argue, by a process of ritualistic roleplaying between characters which serves to explore essential human schemata. Showing how H.D. subverts traditional epic heroism in Helen in Egypt, I analyse the alternative occult and dialectical process of spiritual quest which takes place in the poem. Resolution, I argue, can only ever be momentary and experiential, focused on "supernormal" states of mind or the ritualistic ecstasy of the Mysteries. My third section, Genres, is concerned with issues of classification. I examine in detail the question of voice in Helen in Egypt: I discuss the complex multi-functioning nature of the prose voice, Helen's voice, and the other voices of the poem, and examine their polyphonic interaction. Finally, I review the poem as a whole. Refuting the usual classification of Helen in Egypt as an epic poem, I suggest that the text radically and self- consiously breaks down the borders of the three classical genres, epic, lyric and drama. I measure the poem instead against the yardstick of modernity and draw my final conclusions in that context. ii Acknowledgments Very many thanks to... Diana Collecott, my supervisor, always generous with her knowledge, necessarily rigorous and unfailingly inspiring. John Thor Ewing, for conversations in comparative mythology, grammatical sense and consolation. The women who attended the H.D. Reading Party in Cornwall, 1990-1994, whose input to this work is present at every level. My mother, (another) Helen; father, Leonard, sisters; Jane and Emma, and all my forbearing friends for their sustaining support. The British Academy, for three years funding and a bursary to travel to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without her prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. CONTENTS Prelude The Greek, H.D., and Helen in Egypt 1 ORIGINS Chapter 1 The Origins of H.D.'s Helen 34 Chapter 2 Divine Beings and Deathly Origins 66 PROCESSES Chapter 3 States of Mind 101 Chapter 4 Remembering and Schematising 135 Chapter 5 The Questing Process 170 GENRES Chapter 6 Voice, Polyphony and Identity 205 Chapter 7 The Genres of Helen in Egypt 239 Notes 262 Bibliography 290 iv ....literature itself is never anything but a single text: the one text is not an (inductive) access to a Model, but entrance into a network with a thousand entrances; to take this entrance is to aim, ultimately, not at a legal structure of norms and departures, a narrative or poetic Law, but at a perspective (of fragments, of voices from other texts, other codes), whose vanishing point is nonetheless ceaselessly pushed back, mysteriously opened: each (single) text is the very theory (and not the mere example) of this vanishing, of this difference which indefinitely returns, insubmissive. (Barthes, S/Z 12) IT Prelude H.D., the Greek and Helen ist fgYPt Greece is a spirit. (P 94) Helen in Hellas forever. (HE 190) [T]he lines of this Greek poet [Euripides] (and all Greek poets if we have but the clue) are to-day as vivid and as fresh as they ever were, but vivid and fresh not as literature ... but as portals, as windows, as port-holes I am tempted to say that look out from our ship, our world, our restricted lives on to a sea that moves and changes and bears us up, and is friendly and vicious in turn. (NEITGLP I:Helen 9) Between September 1952 and December 1955, when she was in her late sixties, H.D. wrote Helen in Egypt. H.D.'s Helen was not born in that text, but had been an intrinsic element of her lifelong Hellenism. We can trace a continuum, a thread of meditation on Helen, that runs parallel to H.D.'s involvement with Greek language, literature and culture. Helen in Egypt is the fruit of that involvement, for, despite the influence of other cultures, both ancient and modern, this late work was, as I shall show, a return to "the Greek." This prelude aims to establish a sense of the context and history of Helen in Egypt by tracing H.D.'s early involvement with the Greek, and by showing how the figure of Helen was intertwined with H.D.'s Hellenism from her earliest . writing days. Like a musical overture, it introduces key motifs of this work, serving to "prepare the way for" and "foreshadow" ideas explored more fully in the chapters to come (OED definition of "prelude"). I am inclined to agree with Meryl Altman that H.D. is in danger of becoming a "prisoner of biography," so the rest of this thesis will not be as much concerned with H.D.'s life as this first piece (Altman 39). Here however I establish, as far as possible, H.D.'s knowledge of Greek literature and her own peculiar brand of Hellenism, necessary background for the rest of my argument. H.D.'s first recorded work on the Greek, dated in her "Autobiographical Notes" as taking place in 1910, consisted of the composition of original poems modelled on Andrew Lang's translations of .Theocritus, Bion and Moschus.1 1 These poems were written for Frances Gregg, and the Lang translations were given to her by Ezra Pound (AN; ETT 36). In this year of 1910-11, when H.D. was in her mid-twenties, her engagement to Ezra Pound was terminated, her relationship with Frances Gregg was at the height of its intensity and, in 1911, she was to travel to Europe for the first time. Both Pound and Gregg were important in the earliest days of her involvement with the Greek, Pound as bearer of books, and Gregg as inspiration for H.D.'s early poetry modelled on Greek Lyric. In End To Torment, her late memoir of Pound, H.D. quotes from one of these early love poems: 0 hyacinth of the swamp-lands, Blue lily of the marshes, How could I know, Being but a foolish shepherd, That you would laugh at me? (ET7' 36) What appealed to H.D. in Theocritus' poems was precisely what appealed to Lang: the authentic quality of both the detail of flower and stream and the song- like verse (Lang, intro. 17-19). However, it was not only lyric that inspired the young H.D. While still at school, as she records in her Tribute to Freud, she saw "my first real Greek play, done by students at the university" (one of these students was Pound) (TF 186).2 A letter to Gemma D'Auria confirms that the play was Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis and that this production first "awakened" her to Greek drama. 3 The Greek language became a reality for her: "I felt I had heard Greek at last," she wrote in the same letter. Even earlier than this, it was through fairy-tale that H.D. had first met the Greek spirit: The Greek came most vividly to me when I was seven; it was a Miss Helen who read us Tan glewood Tales, Friday afternoon at school. These stories are my foundation or background, Pandora, Midas, the Gorgon-head -- that particular story of Perseus and the guardian Athene. (TF 186-7)4 Fairy-tale and drama then preceded H.D.'s "official" poetic origins in Greek lyric and, as we shall see, they retained their influence on her work throughout her career.