Permission to Wonder: The Palimpsestic Interplay of H.D. & Freud

Abstract

The modernist writer H.D. was Freud’s analysand in 1933 and 1934 and friend until his death in 1939. This article examines letters, biographies, memoirs, and archival material to trace the interplay between H.D.’s palimpsestic poetics in Trilogy (1973) and Freud’s writing of his last book, Moses and Monotheism (1939) – a work that he was composing throughout the duration of his friendship with the poet. In this book, Freud situates Jewish history as a survival narrative centred on the figure of Moses. Known as one of his most ‘literary’ texts, Moses and Monotheism retraces the life of Moses in a multi-layered narrative that shares in the palimpsestic impulses of H.D.’s writing. This article argues that Freud draws from the revisionist strategies so central to H.D.’s worldview and writerly ethos in order to place creativity and resilience at the heart of Moses and Monotheism.