“I am a Wire Simply”: Morse Code, H. D.’s Asphodel, and Modernist Posthumanism

H. D.’s prose novel Asphodel has often been discussed in terms of its codes of lesbian desire. A posthumanist lens, however, can instead illuminate the ways that informational code operates throughout the novel. In this article, I use N. Katherine Hayles’s theories on the dialectics of pattern/randomness to parse how Asphodel’s Hermione engages in a machinic identity with Morse code’s technologies and universal language. Although this language ultimately fails, it nonetheless becomes a heteroglossia that allows Hermione to communicate and express herself in varied ways. I thus posit that, in using the technologies and literary techniques of the early twentieth century to initiate these engagements, Asphodel exhibits a particularly modernist posthumanism.