H. D., Imagiste Synesthete

In 1895, German physician Max Nordau published Degeneration, a book containing scathing remarks about the prevalence of smell, taste, and touch in literature. These senses, Nordau proclaimed, belonged to an "epoch anterior to man" and were the purview of beasts, not of respectable writers (503).¹ Nordau found synesthesia, or "joint perception," equally worthy of condemnation ("synaesthesis").² Writing that featured synesthesia—such as plays where lines were paired with perfumes, colored lights, or musical notes—was evidence of social decline, of "moral insanity, imbecility, and dementia" among writers and their audiences (Nordau viii). While Degeneration predicts that the valorization of synesthesia and the lower senses will end with the advent of the twentieth century, sensory experimentation in writing persisted.³ This article concerns itself with one such sensory-rich, twentieth-century novel, H. D.'s roman à clef HERmione. In HERmione, H. D. confronts and contests the sensory norms upon which Nordau, and society at large, rest their biases and aversions. In HERmione, synesthesia is not reductive but productive: through it, H. D. destabilizes distinctions between high and low, normal and abnormal, human and nonhuman. Similarly, in HERmione the lower senses are not degenerative but generative: they offer new ways of sensing and new modes of being through which H. D. subverts the sensory status quo.

To understand how HERmione troubles sensory norms, we must first understand traditional sensory classifications. Cultural historian Constance Classen, who specializes in the history of the senses, explains that in the West the senses have long been gendered, typically to the detriment of women. Traditional sensory narratives divide the senses by gender and afford men privileges that women are denied. Such narratives associate men, for instance, with the privileged senses of sight and sound, which are in turn associated with reason. These "distance" senses have been perceived to enable men to engage in "'distance activities,' such as traveling and governing" (66). In contrast, smell, taste, and touch, the "proximity" senses, have been imagined to confine women to the home, since these so-called lower senses are inherent in household duties (66). Smell, taste, and touch are often conceived of as being more embodied than sight or sound and, in this way, more befitting women, whose minds have long been considered less developed than men's. Heteronormative narratives, by reinforcing gender binaries, reinforce these so-called sensory norms. Such narratives suggest that coupling men with women results in the perfect balance of reason and emotion, pragmatism and sensuality. In the twentieth century, women's increasing social mobility and political agency put pressure on these narratives. Once-contained female bodies—with their smells and sounds, and the threat of their touch—were more public, more visible, and more contaminating.⁴ As twentieth-century women transgressed traditional sensory categories, they demanded new sensory identifications.

Modernist writers played a central role in rethinking sensory paradigms and reimagining the senses. In Modernism: A Cultural History, Tim Armstrong acknowledges the work of H. D. and Virginia Woolf as evidence that "a heightened sensitivity to sensation is central to modern experience" (90). Likewise, Ralf Hertel, who studies literary depictions of the senses, notes that "[i]n the modern period, with its technical extensions of the senses and its overflow of stimuli, perception itself becomes the focus of literary investigation" (176). Such investigations are the subject of modernist criticism, much of which fruitfully attends to the privileged senses of sight and sound.⁵ More recently, however, modernist scholarship, such as Abbie Garrington's Haptic Modernism: Touch and the Tactile in Modernist Writing, reflects an interest in the less-studied, lower senses. Garrington examines how "modernist texts—literary, scientific, philosophical and journalistic—return with unprecedented alacrity to the haptic experiences of the human body" (50). Touch, Garrington claims, is central to the modernist experience, an integral means by which modernist subjects come to know themselves and their worlds. In reclaiming touch's centrality, Garrington refashions the "base sense," as Aristotle called it, as a foundational sensory modality, "a scaffold on which the other senses are built" (18).⁶ " To study touch," she proclaims, "is to study the whole body in its carnal, fleshly reality" (19...