Sunday, July 1, 2012

The Living Dead in Section Two of H.D.'s "The Walls Do Not Fall"

In section two of "The Walls Do Not Fall," H.D. sets up a stark contrast between good and evil: "Evil was active in the land, / Good was impoverished and sad."  The setting, described in the first section, is still WWII, and more specifically the bombing of London.  So the reader is encouraged to see the references to good and evil as specific historical references to the Allies and Axis powers.  However, H.D. is not concerned with historical explication.  Instead, she moves from the large-scale historical forces toward an investigation of the poet's responsibilities:

your rhythm is the devil's hymn,

your stylus is dipped in corrosive sublimate,
how can you scratch out

indelible ink of the palimpsest
of past misadventure?

In a way, this is the question the poem as a whole tries to answer: how can one break the pleasant inertia of stillness and begin creating?  As many H.D. scholars have pointed out, Trilogy is not just a reaction to the difficulties of war; it is also an examination of creativity.  H.D. had experienced a long period of creative difficulty leading up to the writing of Trilogy (though she wrote several novels in the period that unpublished in her lifetime).  What she could do with her "stylus" was an anxious question for her at the time.  And it seems important that she was able to unleash her creative powers within the context of good and evil.

Underneath this surface reading, however, we are forced to ask about her characterizations of good and evil.  That is, how can good be so ill-equipped to care for itself?  She points out that good was "smug and fat."  Good requires some intensive rejuvenation.  In short, good is not good on its own.  It needs an active force to keep it going.

For me, as a psychoanalytic critic, this means we must seek the drive and the repression at work in this dynamic situation.  Without being able (at this point) to provide a reading of Trilogy in its entirety, I must read this second section against the first, in which the speaker confronts a destructive war.  Therefore, it seems that physical danger itself is the motivating force.  The possibility that death may seek out the speaker from the sky, unknown and unbidden, is what drives the creative efflorescence H.D. experiences.

While this, by itself, seems fairly obvious, there are a few directions we can take this.  First, death should be viewed primarily as the imposition of finality.  I argue that human motivation, which includes poetic creation, is based on strategies to deny or delay finality.  I use this term rather than "death" because finality is conceptual while death is too frequently reserved for the physical.  Images of movement, continuation, activity, or struggle counteract finality; it sounds far-fetched to say that they counteract death.

The second way to read this section of the poem is to think of the productive (though oxy-moronic) concept of the living dead.  For that is what H.D. gives us in her depiction of the "good": impoverished, sad, smug, fat.  They are alive but they are not truly living.  It is as if they have ground to a halt, and it is the terror from the sky that causes them to spring to life -- and causes H.D. to begin her creative endeavors again.