Hieroglyphs as the Recurring Symbols and Motifs of the Analysand’s Life in “Pallinode”

Throughout “Pallinode,” Doolittle extends this interpretation of the hieroglyph motif to encompass the recurring symbols and motif within Helen’s life, suggesting an affinity between the poetic image and the experienced or remembered one within the text of Helen in Egypt. During her analysis with Freud, she consistently envisioned the two as linked, writing in Tribute to Freud, “Thoughts were things, to be collected, collated, and analyzed, shelved, or resolved.” Doolittle’s concrete images often convey subjective ideas within a poem, and thus lend themselves to interpretation and reinterpretation, retaining an affinity to the evocative images that appear in thoughts and memories. By linking the literary image to the remembered one, she posits “symbol” and “interpretation” as expansive categories, which grow more inclusive as the book progresses.

Doolittle’s concrete images often convey subjective ideas within a poem, and thus lend themselves to interpretation and reinterpretation, retaining an affinity to the evocative images that appear in thoughts and memories.

Additionally, this connection between the literary and the psychological remains prominent in Freud’s own writing, especially throughout texts like The Interpretation of Dreams, from which Doolittle worked during her psychoanalytic sessions. Freud compares the topography of memory to that of a literary work, suggesting that the process of interpretation for both remains similar. He writes in describing the symbols within dreams, “…if, on the contrary, I take the trouble to replace each image by a syllable or work which it may represent by virtue of some allusion or relation. The words thus together are no longer meaningless, but together might constitute the most beautiful and pregnant aphorism.” By suggesting that the written work can often illuminate the text of one’s life, he constructs a similar relationship between the two as that which H.D. puts forth in Helen in Egypt. In both of these works, reciprocity exists between the written image and recurring symbols of one’s existence that would be encountered in psychoanalysis.

Throughout Helen in Egypt, Doolittle depicts her heroine’s life as being riddled with such symbols, for which the hieroglyph motif often serves as a metaphor. She establishes this interpretation of the hieroglyph image in the third poem of the second book of “Pallinode.” Doolittle elaborates in the explanatory prose passage, “Helen herself denies an actual intellectual knowledge of the temple-symbols. But she is nearer to them than the instructed scribe; for her, the secret of the stone-writing is repeated in natural or human symbols…” H.D. implies that, for Helen, the interpretation and reinterpretation of objective symbols remains a familiar process, often resembling the manner in which she considers the recurring symbols and images within her own life. As she transitions to verse, Doolittle writes that such memories function “as if God made the picture/and matched it/with a living hieroglyph.” By making such statements, she suggests that, within Helen’s story, the interpretation of hieroglyphs often illuminates the process of considering the symbols of her own life, namely as hieroglyphs often function as a means by which to evoke both subjective ideas about the heroine’s life and other concrete images derived from memories of Helen’s recent past.

In the poem that follows the prose explanation, Doolittle presents the reader with a series of images that Helen remains unable to interpret subjectively:

Throughout this passage, the poet suggests an engagement, from Helen’s end, with symbols like hieroglyphs that has enabled her to similarly interpret the recurring images within her past. Conveyed in terms of of “tattered scrolls,” a “boat,” and “a great sun’s outline,” this connection between the strange Egyptian friezes and the recurring memories of Helen’s psyche appears as images, for which Helen nearly always fail to evoke a subjective response. In doing so, H.D. conflates Helen’s “instruction” in interpreting the hieroglyphs with an overall ability to access subjective ideas through the objective, an idea that she conveys when the significances of both the images of her life and the hieroglyphs are simultaneously elucidated for her, namely as a doorway to emotions and memories that must be resolved. Throughout the early works in Helen in Egypt, the heroine serves as her own instructor, allowing her to inhabit the roles of both patient and analyst. As her earlier poem states, “this is intuitive or emotional knowledge, rather than intellectual.” The hieroglyph motif, then, comes to represent a greater push and pull between subjectivity and objectivity within the work, as well as the analysand’s ability to negotiate the two.