Natalie’s Blog

An Overview of Acheson’s “‘Conceived at the Grave’s Edge’: The Esoteric Eschatology of H.D.’s Trilogy“

War literature is often read as art that excludes those who have not come into direct contact with warfare from fully understanding its devastation.  Trilogy, as Susan Acheson argues, seems exclusive or esoteric to only those unwilling to surpass archaic binaries.  In “‘Conceived at the Grave’s Edge’: The Esoteric Eschatology of H.D.’s Trilogy,” Acheson maintains that H.D. restructures religion, largely by drawing upon classical texts, to cope with the mass destruction of World War II.  Acheson’s theoretical frame is somewhat difficult to pinpoint, but can probably be claimed as a combination of comparative and revisionary.  Along the way of showing H.D.’s overhaul of religion and the notion of purpose in life, Acheson illustrates Trilogy as a text that re-envisions history as cyclical, not linear; collaborative, not univocal, and androgynous, not patriarchal.  Thus, sometimes explicitly and sometimes not, Acheson’s framework also crosses into the realm of feminist criticism.

Acheson tells us that Trilogy acts to assuage people’s apocalyptic anxieties.  Death is inevitable and often closer than we would like to think, but it also “contains a promise of life” (188).  Acheson examines H.D.’s challenge to Revelation’s message that history is a linear, finite plot mapped by God.  That said, Trilogy can be somewhat confusing in its insistence on both a massive shift from contemporary trends and a return to old values; it contains both romantic sentiment and revolutionary fervor.  However, Acheson reminds us throughout this article that H.D. was not fully embracing any one previously established philosophy, but rather, she sought to combine different stories and parts of history.  And H.D.’s main means of doing so was language, the tool that Acheson claims wards off a finite ending.  When Trilogy does come to a close, it is with a nativity story.  Besides putting a story of birth at the end of this epic, H.D. subverts traditional notions of finality with formal strategies: she incorporates space, silence, openness, and destablization to make the reader uncomfortable applying any closure to the reading.

From the beginning, Trilogy disrupts order and closure in language by posing a question that is never answered– it pans out as a rejection of the need to find neat, tied-up answers and judgments.  Judgment, in fact, is not “one like a Son of Man”’s power, as Revelation says, but that of “an unbalanced neurotic woman,” as The Flowering of the Rod lyric 12 shows (196).  The Walls Do Not Fall 8 also articulates that her true power lies in being able to “pass judgment / on what words conceal.”  Acheson suggests that Trilogy shows H.D.’s interpretation and slight subversion of Freud’s belief that women should deal with their supposedly inherent penis-envy by becoming mothers, as H.D. has “the Lady” carrying an “unwritten volume of the new” in Tribute to the Angels 38.

Further revising well established texts, H.D. believed that Revelation, because it contains multiple mass destructions, should have been placed at the beginning of the Bible, and that Genesis should follow it as a re-creation of Earth.  H.D. developed this idea from H. S. Bellamy’s The Book of Revelation is History.  This view is said to be echoed in Trilogy, which begins with apocalypse and ends with rebirth in an ox-stall.  Bellamy’s book is not the only one from which H.D. gathered materials for her revisions.  She was also a fan of Dmitri Merezhkovsky’s The Secret of the West, from which H.D. derives much of her revisionary mythopoesis of Atlantis.  Atlantis represents “a lost unity between past and future, Europe and America, dream and history” (Acheson 198).  H.D. saw these shattered connections manifested in the war around her.  That broken vision speaks to her desire to unite opposing binary poles in a fluid realm of being instead of continuing to see people’s relationships severed in aggressive forward motion.

“Build an ark” is a phrase Merezhkovsky uses, referring to a means by which future people will remember knowledge cultivated before them.  H.D. adopts that term in Tribute to Freud and generates a similar notion in Trilogy, a work that advocates an androgynous Christ who, as Merezhkovsky believes it should be, will make “ecstasy” the purpose of life.  Acheson continues to describe a Merezhkovsky stance that H.D. read and took to heart, that “[t]he threat of war is…a result of a religion that substitutes pity for love” (200).  This stance is directly related to the male-female relationship H.D. presents in Trilogy.  Instead of being separated as in the patriarchal Pisces culture, Mary and Kaspar are united by myrrh in The Flowering of the Rod.  The “new sense of woman” in Trilogy emerges from the union of Mary and Kaspar.  This couple’s existence dismisses default patriarchal power because, while they are meant to generally be seen as equal, Mary is actually slightly Kaspar’s superior: the new sense references the scent of her flowers, which provide the basis for his ointment.  However, Mary does not exploit this power; she speaks to Kaspar as an equal, showing the eradication of the competitive split between man and woman.  With the acceptance of the contribution of both genders, H.D. writes over an old story to make one that serves as a more viable coping mechanism.  Ultimately, Acheson makes the case for Trilogy as a text that poses love, unresolved and undissolved, as a reliable religion and stimulus for life.

This article thoroughly exemplifies H.D.’s revisionary mythopoesis, which is certainly helpful in understanding H.D.’s partiality to the palimpsest.  Acheson also makes us privy to the kinds of materials H.D. was reading before and during writing Trilogy.  We also find evidence of H.D.’s feminist ideology at play.  Most importantly, Acheson suggests to us a way to view H.D.’s treatment of death and resistance to indisputable finality.  We might ask how her Christian re-vision intersects with her Moravian background, and what that suggests about texts that discuss Moravianism, like The Gift or any work that involves her mother, a devout Moravian.  Further, I am curious how, if at all, her response to apocalyptic fears affected the reception of Trilogy so soon after World War II.  And as we begin Tribute to Freud, I would like to know more about how H.D. received that psychoanalyst’s patriarchal opinions and reconciled them with her own feminist inclinations.

Work Cited

Acheson, Susan. “‘Conceived at the Grave’s Edge’: The Esoteric Eschatology of H.D.’s Trilogy.” Literature & Theology: An International Journal of Theory, Criticism and Culture, 12.2 (1998 June): 187-204.