Sunday, November 13, 2011

Subjectivity in Section Four of H.D.'s "The Walls Do Not Fall"

H.D. seems to advance a notion of subjectivity worth examining in section four of "The Walls Do Not Fall." She uses an extended metaphor in which coral represents the self. This metaphor allows her access to a number of generative concepts that she explores in provocative ways. One of these is continuity:

continuous, the sea-thrust
is powerless against coral

H.D. points toward the perpetual tension between the motion of the sea and the coral's growth. The coral continues to grow despite the friction of the sea that threatens to wear down and dissolve it. In the poem's overt historical aspect (as a WWII poem), continuity suggests the fortitude of Londoners to survive the Blitz. On another level, the continuity explored here suggests life's inexorable striving, the persistence of being despite the dangers presented by the world. Other sea life exhibits this same perserverance:

the shell-fish:
oyster, clam, mollusc

is master-mason planning
the stone marvel

The poem calls attention not just to the continuous production and proliferation of sea life, but to those forms that maintain themselves due to their hard exteriors. In order to withstand the world, one must form a tough exterior. Although this unyielding surface is necessary, she contrasts it with a central softness:

yet that flabby, amorphous hermit
within, like the planet

senses the finite,
its limits its orbit

of being, its house,
temple, fane, shrine

Successful existence, from this perspective, requires a balance of soft and hard, malleable and rigid. H.D. imagines a finite subject. But one doesn't get the sense that this is a "windowless Monad" in the Leibniz sense, for the subject is constantly testing its boundaries and interacting with the world, acting through a relation with the world rather than as a discrete self. The soft center is separated from the world by its hard exterior, but it is, at the same time, always projecting out into that world.

The self is made up of these soft/hard contrasts. Given H.D.'s interest in Freudian psychoanalysis, one might extend this set of oppositions to include the unconscious and the conscious. There are desires within us that are amorphous in their unknowability; we can only guess their contours when they emerge. To extend the analogy to Freud's psychoanalytic topology is perhaps warranted given the direction H.D. chooses to develop her contrasts:

it unlocks the portals
at stated intervals:

prompted by hunger,
it opens to the tide-flow

Trusty Wikipedia tells me that coral reproduces sexually by releasing gametes around the full moon. Rather than existing as self-authorizing selves, complete with their own agency, the examples of sea life that H.D. discusses are beholden to a physical world that generates their desire. She describes a "hunger" that cannot be denied; the "tide-flow" caused by the full moon demands a physical response. The subjectivity H.D. describes is continuous, finite, and sexual, but it must always relate with a world that compels it in certain ways. Rather than (what I argue is) the traditional modernist subjectivity that forgoes sensual desire in order to maintain (the illusion of) unity and order, H.D. develops a more dependent and relational model.

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