Just a bit about H.D.

since I felt the class I just had on her left many things unresolved. I'm wondering if we might read H.D.'s strategies in Trilogy as akin to those of Derrida in that she examines the minute (the detail, the strange sound patterns, etc. until we get a new vision of the "major." There can be no dispute that H.D. tackles major themes in Trilogy; the title alone announces this and throughout the text she alludes to major figures. In order to reconfigure these major notions or world views she turns her attention to the minute: etymological and paratactic play, the particulars of symbols, jars, scarves and walls.

Now I want to turn to what Rachel BlauDuPlessis said about the last scene of the long poem as anti-climatic. The poem ends with the Mary figure wrongly attributing the source of a fine fragrance to the myrrh that Kaspar brought; actually, "the fragrance came from the bundle of myrrh / she held in her arms" (172). I'm not sure if I am prepared to argue, with Rachel, that this is so much anti-climatic as it performs a function of commentary or elucidation on the rest of the work. The sealed jar brought by Kaspar, although it is not the source of the scent, causes the Mary figure to reflect and recognize the scent that was already being given off. In other words, the woman remains naive, even at the end, that she (at least metonymically) is the source of her own pleasure. The scent was there all along; it merely needed calling attention to.

I am inclined to read this ending as a way in which H.D. asserts that the revolutionary possibilities she posits in her text were in the mythology (and the signs) all along which just might answer what I see as the question which frames the whole text: "we wonder what saved us? what for?" (4).