Hope and Aesthetic Utility in Modernist Literature by DeJong Tim;

Author:DeJong, Tim;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2020-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

The momentary link here between ancient creator and contemporary receiver designates the ways in which art is, for H.D., trans-historical: first, in the consonance it sparks between them (a consonance we could also call the transmission of identity); and second, in its transformative capacity: its ability, in the act of communicating beauty, to teach its audience how to see the world in aesthetic terms.

5 Trilogy and the Necessity of Aesthetic Utility

In what space remains, I would like to apply the core arguments set out in this chapter to a reading of H.D.’s long poem Trilogy. In what follows, I will show how H.D.’s theory of art – buttressed by and explained, again, in light of Attridge’s work – bears upon, and finds its full articulation in, the poem that has become her most critically esteemed. Doing so will reveal the precise nature of the hope in her work: quixotically modernist, far from fatalistic, and grounded in an assertion of the reality of aesthetic utility.

Trilogy is about the necessity of artistic creation in the face of outside pressures antithetical to it: where such creation originates, how it persists, and what its effects might be in the as-yet-undecided future. The Walls Do Not Fall, the first of its three parts, begins by describing war-torn London during the blitz: “rails gone (for guns) / from your (and my) old town square: // mist and mist-grey, no colour.”43 London, seen by many as the apex of Western civilization, is beset by destructive forces: “ruin opens / the tomb, the temple” (Trilogy, 3). The war has intruded into the realms of the past and of the sacred, so that “the shrine lies open to the sky” (Trilogy, 3). Amid this setting of despair and the fatalism it threatens to invite, another power lurks, this one much more beneficent:

so, through our desolation,

thoughts stir, inspiration stalks us

through gloom. (Trilogy, 3)

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