makes in Notes on Thought and Vision, 1 I wish to claim that H.D., like Woolf, radically shifted the burden of theory from a conceptual to a perceptual dimension, and simultaneously from a divisive to an integrative style and view. In what follows, therefore, focusing for the most part on the very bold theoretical propositions H.D. Underpinning Woolf’s description-whose visual dimension is crucially reinforced by her use of the light metaphor-is a vital shift in conception: as she theorizes about fiction writing, Woolf turns away from the separateness induced by a “systematic arrangement” of thoughts which would illuminate experience from without, and favors instead an “enveloping” contact with the substance of experience itself. It is not distinct from the very conditions that make it possible and make it appear what it is. Mind supermind santa barbara series#For according to Woolf: “Life is not a series of gig lamps systematically arranged, but a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” By Woolf’s account, life is not made up of separate events which it would be the work of consciousness to detach from the flux of experience on the contrary, life appears to be this unsystematic flux itself. A quote from Woolf’s text might serve to illustrate the shift in theoretical focus I wish to perform here, all the more so since the metaphor of light used by Woolf strongly echoes H.D.’s own preferred set of images, in a way I hope to show is central to the question of the American writer’s theoretical gaze. In her account of Notes on Thought and Vision, Friedman herself draws an interesting parallel between this text and Virginia Woolf’s “Modern Fiction,” an essay actually written in the same year as H.D.’s. (.)ĢHowever, I would like to place H.D.’s “theorization” of modernity in a different light and, in fact, to use the light metaphor (in all possible senses of this word) as a key to understanding the relationship between theory, aesthetics and liminality that H.D. may have been directly influenced by Woolf. 2 I am not in the least trying to suggest here that H.D.renounced the idea of publishing her text after (.) 1 They were so boldly innovative that, in fact, H.D.herself as- in keeping with the overarching metaphor of Penelope’s Web she uses-“the weaver whose (pro)creative agency embodies a modernity to which women implicitly have privileged access.” ( Ibid., 18) I certainly agree with Friedman when she argues that H.D.’s Notes on Thought and Vision may be seen as an “exemplary signpost for H.D.’s theorizations of modernity,” helping us to understand H.D. She concludes her analysis by substantively linking the marginal, and simultaneously liminal, quality of H.D.’s experiment in theoretical writing with the blurring of gender that constitutes one of this text’s primary tenets. “establishes a revelatory poetics akin to but different from Joycean epiphanies and Woolfian moments of being.” Thus, she not only “defines a modernist gynopoetic” but “also performs it.” (Friedman, 1990, 11) Friedman’s focus is clearly on the fragmentary nature of H.D.’s radically nonstandard text-a creative prose essay whose genre and gender hybrid offers, the critic contends, an early and remarkable example of écriture féminine. 1In her path-breaking study of Hilda Doolittle’s prose works, Penelope’s Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.’s Fiction, Susan Stanford Friedman describes the American writer’s essay entitled Notes on Thought and Vision as her earliest attempt (1919) at formulating an alternative modernist poetics, purporting to counterbalance (if not counter) the emphatically male, distinctly Poundian, kind of manifesto so clearly exemplified by the Imagist, Vorticist and Futurist texts of the 1910s, all characterized by a theoretical energy that often verges on the aggressive.
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