H.D.'s Freudian Poetics

ELT 37 :1 1994 begging. This occurs in part because the individual discussions themselves stray from technique to consider thematics at length but also because impressionistic description at times stands in for a more rigorous analytical cogency. Nor is the book free from major lapses in reference. At this date one cannot justify citing the now superseded Jean-Aubry edition of Conrad's letters rather than Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies's Collected Edition, or Aldous Huxley's edition of D. H. Lawrence's letters rather than the recently completed Cambridge Edition, or the 1966-1967 edition of Woolfs collected essays rather than Andrew McNeUlie's scholarly edition in course of publication. A list of the primary works of Virginia Woolf that provides only the date of convenient (and textuaUy defective) paperback reprints also suggests a basic indifference to or naivete about textual matters. In the end, Galef s eminently readable study has some worthwhüe local insights, offers a number of suggestive arguments, and boasts a genuinely useful, if somewhat circumscribed, chapter on Heart of Darkness . What one misses intensely, however, is a greater awareness of pertinent criticism, more penetrating connections to other works by the writers under discussion, and some indication of the influences operating on their conception and portrayal of character. The connection to the drama made in the title is little pursued, and no attention is paid to dialogue or free indirect discourse, both crucial in the presentation of character. WhUe Galef s work displays intelligence and critical sophistication , in general much that needs to be developed and much that could be pursued remains in embryo. More carefuUy polished and thoroughly revised, the essays on Howards End and Jacob's Room might have been two substantial articles (the chapter on Heart of Darkness appeared recently in the Journal of Modern Literature). But they have apparently fallen victim to academic Realpolitik in longing for the stardom of book publication, fifth business in the job-tenure-promotion game. As was said long ago, books have their fates. J. H. Stape _____________ Chiba University, Japan H.D.'s Freudian Poetics Dianne Chisholm. H.D.'s Freudian Poetics: Psychoanalysis in Translation . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. viii + 286 pp. Paper $14.95 IT IS A CENTRAL PARADOX of much psychoanalytic criticism that, even whUe reducing virtually every literary device or trope to a 106 BOOK REVIEWS function of the individual psyche, it so often loses sight of the real human beings behind such textual maneuverings. Dianne Chishohn's new book on H.D.'s "Freudian poetics," for example, traces in exhausting detaU H.D.'s encounters with Freud as text but conveys little sense of the poet's personal interactions—including two intensive periods of psychoanalysis in 1933-1934—with the man whom she only half-ironically called "the Master." Chisholm, noting in the introduction to her book that H.D.'s "life among the analysts has [already] been documented," clearly regards coverage of such "old biographical ground" as redundant and unnecessary; she prefers to focus instead on how H.D. "applies certain analytic skUls that she acquires through writing in order to expand her autobiography and to displace the dissatisfying and disabling normative life story by which she had come to know and judge herself" (emphasis Chishohn's). But Chishohn's refusal to consider the more personal dimensions of that supposed life story"—the human side of the literary construct known as H.D.—leaves her vulnerable to charges, such as the one made in a review by C. J. Fox, that her study appears "clinically aloof" when contrasted, for instance, with the compelling immediacy of Richard Aldington's wartime letters to H.D. (7XS, 19 March 1993). WhUe Fox, who clearly privileges biography over theory, is overly hasty in dismissing Chishohn's dense but often rewarding book, the medical metaphor is by no means unjustified; if H.D., as Chisholm argues, attempts to cure the UIs of Western culture (including psychoanalysis itself) with a mystical "anodyne" or "pharmakon of writing," Chisholm, by contrast, approaches her subject matter armed with the cold, antiseptic scalpel of the post-Lacanian critic. Chisholm skillfully dissects several of H.D.'s most...