Works Cited

NOTES

[1] The use of the word ‘wound’ here is with deliberate metaphorisation of the narrative tradition as a (primarily phallocentric) body where the female poetic voice (here, H.D.’s) serves to be the marker of female sexuality, the corporal ‘wound’. The textual-sexual dynamics of the poem and of the history of Leda representation have been explored later in the essay.

[2] A common argument within Leda scholarship attempts at positioning a sexual authorial binary in the way rape comes to be represented. Male poets (predominantly Yeats and Lawrence within Modernism) have been held in contrast to female poets in that the former inadequately appropriate the victim position while their inherent maleness drags the ‘event’ into a discourse of violence, whereas the latter reclaim the rape by insinuating a more tender seduction and consensual playfulness. See Helen Sword for a critical description of the way the act of rape almost comes to be elided in H.D.:

If H.D.’s poetry and fiction tend to dwell long and hard on themes of memory, regret and betrayal and particularly on the sexual and psychological victimization of women by men, the “Leda,” in adamantly avoiding such themes, becomes instantly suspect by virtue of its omissions. How, we must ask, could a poet so well versed in both real-life and literary injustice portray a rape scene that admits no trace of ugliness or terror? One reply, of course, is that H.D. was merely following fin-de-siècle precedent, echoing rather than questioning familiar representations of the story as a romance rather than as a rape; her poem, after all, was published two years before Yeats would thematize mythic violence in “Leda and the Swan,” nine years before the publication of Lawrence’s strange, swampy swan poems. (314)   

[3]  Quoted in. In Sword, 313-14.

[4] One could read the swan as the fragment which becomes the point of origin in the imagination of the whole, in an inclination of H.D.’s Modernist disposition. As befits a Modernist fragment, the swan continues to retain a sense of totality it belongs to, the past it comes from. Zeus is then not an arbitrary instance of a god descending upon a mortal – he becomes a metaphor in a formal sense, his ‘swanness’ is in excess of the swan he is. Robert Snukal provides a validation for this in his claim that “Leda is being raped not only by a god, but by history as a god.” (Sword 307) One should then question perhaps as to what happens to this notion of the swan as a fragment within Post-Modernism. Does the swan become an ‘orphan fragment’ trying to compose its (absent) past in the very act of rape? If H.D.’s poem examines how history becomes rape for Leda, will a Postmodern text mark how rape becomes history? Leda and Zeus would presumably take on the role of characters independent of larger metaphysical brackets, composed entirely in the act of representation.

[5] I argue here for the consciousness of materiality of the medium that was particularly acute for the Modernists. (This is also pursued towards the end of the essay.) The colours that H.D. uses in her poetry, and their movement within the body of the poem become a material representation of the eroticism that is embedded in signification. The red and the purple of the evening heat mimic the hues of the swan. And when the late sunbeam touches the lily, flecking it with colour, I argue that what is in fact happening is a transfer of the touch from Zeus to the lily, although the two bodies are not yet in contact.

[6]  As discussed later, the process of extracting purple invoked an exceptional stress of resources, both manual and material, thus making it available only to royalty. I read this as the moment in which purple moves from being material itself to pure signifier. The connotations of regal lineage associated with the colour make it an appropriate association for Zeus. However, I think H.D. is deliberately engaging with the process by which signification comes into play here – Leda is violated not by the swan but by his swanness, the rape is the representation. This perhaps also holds an echo with Rilke’s notion of ‘becoming swan’; Zeus in H.D. transcends the ‘truth’ of the body, conflating the sublime, symbol and substance in his subjectivity.

[7] Aristotle, in his treatise On Colours, discusses an alternate method of dye-production using purple-fish, one that does not escape the inherent violence. “When in dyeing purple they put in the purple colouring matter from the vein of the purple-fish, at first it turns brown and black and hazy; but when the dye has been boiled sufficiently, a vivid, bright violet appears.” (10)

[8] If one is to transpose the Yeatsian image of ‘indifferent beak’ (refer end of this footnote) onto H.D.’s purple perpetrator, one should perhaps look at retrospective accounts of the way in which the colour came to be laden with its signification of callousness. “One modern source states that purple dye of murex was manufactured really very simply. The murex were piled in heaps and left to die, and from these dead decaying sea snails the purple liquid ran off and was collected. Also, it is stated that the supply was over-fished so that the Phoenicians had to find new beds of murex. This of course was not generally the case… The eggs of murex have great survival value and moreover the supply of purple never met the demand in ancient times.” (Jensen 108) See “Leda and the Swan,” as quoted in Kossman, 17. 

[9] “The different shades of crimson and violet depend on differences in the strength of their constituents, while blending is exemplified by mixture of white and black, which gives grey. So a dusky black mixed with light gives crimson… But a vivid bright violet is obtained from a blend of feeble sunlight with a thin dusky white… [A] great quantity of light blended with primary black gives crimson. Add vividness and lustre, and crimson changes to flame-colour.” (On Colours 3-4)

[10] As compared, for instance, to the bull that spirits away Europa, or even for that matter, the eagle that rapes Ganymede, the swan does not immediately conjure images of masculine violation or the potential to petrify the woman into submission. In fact, what it comes most close to doing is providing an ‘aestheticisation’ of the rape. Helen Sword argues using Bram Dijkstra’s analysis, “Pastoral depictions of Leda as the swan’s acquiescent lover characterize women as ‘other-than-human’ creatures, craving still the ‘animal pleasures’ that men have transcended, are to be despised as well as feared; at the same time, the swan-god’s ‘assertive act of rape’ allows male artists to control such dangerous femininity by returning Leda to woman’s supposedly ‘predestined submission to the abject position of male authority (307).”

[11]  Nolan’s obsessive engagement with the Leda motif (the link is to some of his works) produces a complex and comprehensive picture of the radical possibilities ensconced in the interaction of the two actors within this cultural imaginary. Because a study of the complete Nolan oeuvre would require critical intervention outside the scope of this essay, I have chosen to bracket all but one of his paintings on Leda. The specific rationale behind this choice has to do, to some extent, to the historical moment within which it was produced – one of his earliest Ledas, one that is produced close to the primary Dalí I am looking at. But also, especially crucially, in this particular painting, Nolan inserts the problematic of the sexed body in a way no other artist does – he dislocates the moment of sexual ambiguity onto the body of Leda rather than the swan, as is discussed in the main text. This marks a transfer of the violence of discourse itself that works at least two levels.  One, the dialectic of male representation compromising the bodily integrity of the female rape victim is thrown into a conundrum – here we have a male artist reimagining the possibility of a recovered maleness in the position traditionally accorded to the female casualty of patriarchal representation and perpetration. Secondly, in an almost Rilkean fashion, Nolan articulates the violence of the female wound as not that of rape but of birth, thus visualising Leda as producing history rather than being caught up helplessly in its machinery.

[12] Freud discusses the nature of sexual attraction between a male child and his mother, the “Oedipal complex”. The mother becomes the primary sexual object for the infant during the phallic stage of psychosexual development due to a complex libidinal interaction within the child. The desire for the mother is accompanied by a simultaneous hatred for and fear of the father who threatens to castrate.  One can read an enactment of this psychic drama in Nolan’s painting, but through an inversion. For Freud, the maternal ‘transforms’ into the erotic. In Nolan, the traditionally held sexual liaison between the rapist and his victim comes to be re-imagined as the atavistic connection between a mother and her child. This is also an important site for examining split subjectivities – most redactions of the rape show Zeus and Leda in the moment of coitus, thus representing the (albeit forced) internalisation of the former by the latter when two bodies become one. If one reads the parturition dialectic in Nolan, what we in fact have is the moment of expulsion of (the child) Zeus from (the mother) Leda, where the singular placenta-unified body becomes two.

[13] In a discussion on Nolan’s style from around the 1960’s, Merlin James discusses how “when his work is compelling, the economy is one of differences played against each other to maximum effect, not of a single quality given full rein. In a sense, the ‘illustrated’ content itself becomes a formal or quasi-formal element, and within the overall mechanism of the work, the viewer is aware of appreciating it in a detached manner (as well as perhaps ‘receiving’ it as a primary message) (646).”

[14] For more on a related text, see Hoyt Trowbridge’s essay on the presence of the sublime in Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan”. “Sublimity, according to Longinus, is the quality in writing from which ‘the greatest poets and writers have derived their eminence and gained an immortality of renown.’ Its effect is ‘transport,’ a conquest of the reader or hearer, uplifting the mind by its overpowering force, filling it ‘with joy and vaunting, as though it had itself produced what it has heard.’ Sublimity is the ‘echo of a great soul,’ communicated to the reader through speech (119).”

The Yeatsian swan draws a close parallel to Dalí’s representation, particularly in the way the human subject seems to be aggressively contracted into submission before the ‘divine’ presence. Says Trowbridge, “[Yeats’] bird is allegorical; as in other poems of his, the swan is a symbol of passion, which he conceives as a supernatural force, shattering in its power, which flashes upon mankind from above, revealing an unearthly glory and splendor and fusing the human with the divine (121).”

[15] Within a patriarchal order of representation, writing takes on a predominantly phallocentric function that emphasises upon singularity of interpretation. In Nolan’s subversion of the notion of the fixed femaleness of Leda’s body, he produces a challenge to the hegemony of the ‘one’ (and thus, to androcentrism) through plurality, temporality and diffusion of the sexual.

[16]    Quoted in Kossman, 16.

[17] Rilke’s poetry appears to pre-empt Nolan’s aesthetics of mapping sexual difference in corporeality. In Rilke, the swan appears to undergo a sexual redoubling of sorts, sequentially occupying a female subjectivity that is entered into by Zeus and in turn, entering Leda in his maleness. The body in discourse then comes to be fractured by a shifting multiplicity of sexes.

[18] “Inspiration, as its best, signifies a positive, generative influence, a fertilizing encounter of human and divine energies. But although poets and mystics throughout history have figured creative and religious inspiration in terms of shared union and shared sexual ecstasy, the dark side of inspiration is violation, a violent overwhelming of self by Other that finds its sexual analogy in rape. As the Leda myth itself dramatizes, the rape analogy is an uncomfortable one for male and female writers alike, for it posits a sexual cosmogony that characterizes the inspiring Other as male and thus explicitly feminizes the inspired poet…

[Rilke’s] poem offers an emphatically male point of view: it reverses the rape-by-the-Other by suggesting that, if the myth be read as a fable of poetic inspiration, Zeus, rather than Leda stands in the poet’s role. Thus the story enacts, not the poet’s violation by an inspiring Other, but his own visionary penetration of his poetic object.” (Sword 305-06, 309)

[19] See footnote 18 directly above.

[20]  See footnote 12 on the Oedipal complex above.

[21] See also Freud’s analysis of the ‘Wolfman’ case where he explains how the (imagined) act of watching the parents have sexual intercourse, seeing them enact the ‘primal scene’ becomes one of the most vulnerable pathways to psychosis. The trauma associated with this primeval voyeurism produces a deep-seated terror in the child, who recognises this as the moment of sexual difference as well as death.

[22] “‘Naked, and comparing myself to my schoolfriends, I discovered that my penis was small, pitiful and soft,’ Dalí told Andre Parinaud in 1976 for what became The Unspeakable Confessions Of Salvador Dali.

‘I can recall a pornographic novel whose Don Juan machine-gunned female genitals with ferocious glee, saying that he enjoyed hearing women creak like watermelons. I convinced myself that I would never be able to make a woman creak like a watermelon.’

Having a small penis is a common self-criticism among men, of course, but biographer Ian Gibson, having scoured Salvador’s adolescent writings with a magnifying glass, said he’d found ample evidence in the frank outpourings that the young Dalí’s relationship with his first girlfriend had suffered because of his shortcoming and he ended up masturbating frequently.

Presumably the ‘revelation’ is important to art historians trying to track the meaning of Dalí’s paintings, in which masturbation, like the tower, was a regular theme. (n.p.)” 

[23] See also Dalí’s 1954 painting Young Virgin Auto-Sodomized by the Horns of Her Own Chastity which shows a nubile naked girl poised fluidly across a railing which itself dissociates into fragments as one looks at the painting. The subject appears to be poised to be penetrated anally, with varying imaginations of phallic devices training against and in the place of her buttocks. Dali’s reference to ‘auto-sodomy’ implies a breakdown of the necessary duality that characterises sexual encounter as the subject and object of sexual desire/intervention collapse into one body. The problematic of texture, as in the musical instrument mentioned above, is re-encountered here – do the fragments of the metal railing represent the cold, steely nature of a brutal dildo, or does their pliant form indicate a formal adaptability to the needs of the virgin?

[24] For Dali’s earlier work on this relationship, follow his 1927 treatise “Sant Sebastia”. His writing appears to mark a departure from personal mythology of the erotics of pain by drawing up a sanitising distance between him and the subject. “A familiar icon in Renaissance painting and homoerotic literature, St. Sebastian is usually represented as a semi-naked, handsome youth tied to a tree, his tortured flesh pierced by the arrows of his martyrdom. In his article, Dali uses the figure of the saint to propose a new artistic perspective of ironic distance, a mathematical objectification of emotions, a kind of rigorous ‘deshumanizacion’ of a traditional icon of pain and suffering. The pathetic – the saint in agony – becomes geometric, abstract, precise, a signifier of serene, indifferent artistic control.” (Cate-Arries 13-14)

[25] “The childbirth metaphor is a controversial one that has been both selected and rejected by contemporary feminist theorists, critics, and writers. On the one hand, French theorists who promote the concept of l’ecriture feminine insist on a poetic of the female body. As Helene Cixous writes, ‘women must write through their bodies.’ Women, ‘never far from ‘mother’’, write in ‘white ink’. Using the birth metaphor itself, Cixous describes ‘the gestation drive’ as ‘just like the desire to write: a desire to live self from within, a desire for a swollen belly, for language, for blood.’ On the other hand, feminists oppose modes of thought they consider biologically deterministic, essentialist, and regressive. Examination of [the cultural resonance of the childbirth metaphor, gender difference in the metaphor’s meaning as constructed in the process of reading, gender difference as reflected in the process of writing reveals] that women writers have often risked the metaphor’s dangerous biologism in order to challenge fundamental binary oppositions of patriarchal ideology between word and flesh, creativity and procreativity, mind and body.” (“Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor” 50-51)

This allows a complication of Nolan’s “Leda”. Would Friedman’s argument that the childbirth metaphor seems to be a trope exclusively associated with women writers imply that the only way in which Nolan can legitimise his assumption of a female art object in the act of parturition is by either decocting the symbol to an image, or by reproducing the very textual codes of patriarchal oppression that the shock-value of the painting negates? Does the woman viewer then also hold a more privileged access to the text than either the male viewer or the male artist?

[26] On Dalí’s formulation of the Surrealist Object. Finkelstein in “The Incarnation of Desire” writes:

Even Breton’s objets oniriques were still a proposal, albeit one that proved to be more fecund and lasting for Dalí than most. Breton envisaged the effect of his proposed dream-objects in terms of a discrediting of ‘reasonable’ beings and objects that would demolish the ‘detestable concrete trophies’ that encumber man’s life (Points du jour 24). What Breton’s text remained oblivious to at that point was the erotic dimension. It was the concept of symbolic functioning (fonctionnement symbolique) that was to introduce this dimension, providing Dalí with a mechanism that would animate this new form of expression and help channel his erotic preoccupations. As defined by Dalí in “Objets surrealistes,” the objets a fonctionnement symbolique, “lending themselves to a minimum of mechanical functioning, are based upon phantasms and representations that are likely to be provoked by the realization of unconscious acts.” These acts correspond to “distinctly characterized erotic fantasies and desires,” and Dalí argues further that the “incarnation of those desires, their objectification through substitution and metaphor and their symbolic realization, all constitute a process of sexual perversion, which resembles, in all respects, the process involved in the poetic act” (Oui 1178). (“The Incarnation of Desire” 118)

[27] Dalí’s imagination of the 1961 nude Leda also marks an important iconographic transition from the 1949 Leda Atomica. The former is clearly an image of a tender seduction that is virginal in its absence of touch. The forms of both Leda and the swan are well-defined, the shapes concrete and the details sharp. In contrast, the latter has a shadowy form, the swan is a strategic splatter of paint, and the background is saturated with indefinite shapes and fumes in black and yellow.

[28] A glimpse of this is offered in the set of four Ledas he produced between 1948 and 1974. The first, Leda Atomica, shows Leda and the swan in a loving repose, virginally just distant from each other. Almost the antipode to H.D.’s “Leda”, this painting does not contend with the issue of touch at all, except through negative definition. Unlike H.D.’s poem where the moment of convergence of the swan and the lily is textually anticipated in the union of landscape elements that precede it, Dalí’s text does away with touch altogether. The image of Gala as Leda is poised in free floatation over a pedestal that is not grounded, the swan hovers beside her, wings syncopated to the curve of her arms, not in touch with it, and the sea floats over the land like a translucent skin. The composition is informed by the principle of quantisation of matter – the idea that all matter is made up of discreet elements (quanta) that provide an illusion of continuity that the eye perceives.

Another stylised representation, a 1954 Dalí Nude, in Contemplation Before the Five Regular Bodies Metamorphized into Corpuscles, in Which Suddenly Appears the Leda of Leonardo Chromosomatized by the Visage of Gala could help ‘fix’ a paranoiac motivation to this complex of images. The central focus of the text is a collection of ‘corpuscles’ suspended above the kneeling figure of Dalí by the sea. The still molecular entities project a surprising visual of the face of Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic Leda, provoking a disruption of motion into stillness.

See also Dalí’s 1958 Madonna where “he paints two different overlapping subjects in a profusion of pink and grey dots” There is a similar technique in play here. “The disintegration of the surface and the subjects into rows of pulsating dots arose from Dalí’s interest in nuclear physics in the late 1950’s. The technique is actually a visualization of the concept of antimatter, releasing tremendous amounts of energy. Here, Dalí plays on this theory by creating a painting in which the image dissolves and reorganises itself.” (Messinger 62) Iconographically, the images of da Vinci’s Leda and Dalí’s Mary appear startlingly similar, drawing parallels of the rape to the Annunciation. (I am excluding a more detailed discussion on the subject of the Annunciation for the purpose of this essay – the interaction of religion and sexuality is a complex project that requires a wholly separate line of argumentation.)

[29] David Hopkins, in his review of Leda Atomica, draws an interesting photographic parallel to this formal organisation, stating that it appears “to be assembled from photographic images in precisely the way that art students are sometimes advised to avoid, leading to deadening pictorial effects. All of this could be offset, however, by the fact that Dalí actively sought to be anti-aesthetic. He famously described his images as ‘instantaneous colour photography done by hand’.” (844)

[30] “When we ourselves use the words ‘woman’ and ‘man’, ‘female’ and ‘male’, ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’, therefore we are deploying what we, too, understand as artificial, socially determined signifiers. But we are also always using these terms both to explore their changing resonances and to examine the ways in which such changes in meaning affected the lives and lives of the writers we have chosen to study. On the one hand, therefore, we do not regard biographical speculations as irrelevant to our enterprise, since we assume that the concepts ‘female’ and ‘male’ have an impact on human experience which has always… been gendered. On the other hand, we seek to locate the text in its sociocultural context, since we believe, too, that the concepts ‘female’ and ‘male’ are inextricably enmeshed in the materiality and mythology of history, which we have found, has almost always been experienced as gendered.”  (“Sexchanges” 722)

[31]    Quoted in Kossman, 16-17.

[32] In “A Child is Being Beaten”, Freud explicates how children fantasise about being chastised by the father, and derive erotic pleasure from this imagined enactment of punishment. Though Lawrence, by all accounts, disagreed with Freud, it appears at least in his poetry, that he is after all submitting to an almost universal experience of psychical struggle against conflicting desires for the father.

[33] Lawrence’s painting could also be read as a somewhat bizarre repositioning of the gaze at Michelangelo’s sixteenth-century work Leda and the Swan. While the latter uses the profile, thereby opening up the visual field to the spectator and allowing a shared space to exist between Leda and Zeus, Lawrence incriminates the viewer as the perpetrator. The viewer (specifically in his intercepted gaze) is positioned where Leda’s head should be, thus participating directly in the visual violation of her bodily integrity. This is the closest substantive parallel one finds to the interpretation-as-discursive-rape paradigm.

[34] This accentuates the issue of the body in art, especially in contention with representation of two figures in a conjugal position, but belonging to different species. In terms of the Modernist impulse towards ‘cross-talk’, this alignment of the male body over the female, the rapist’s over the victim’s, the swan over the girl brings in the problematic of weight. The discourse of rape is inextricably linked to power; the question of corporeal enforcement becomes almost the pre-given variable when it comes to representing violation. In the case of Leda, however, the image of one body brutally weighing down another becomes incongruous with the available visual of the downy underbelly and the ruffled plumage of the swan. The strategy deployed is the imagination of space. Nolan and Dalí have upright figures, with the latter privileging the swan, and the former, Leda. Lawrence has supine figures, but with the swan occupying the traditional missionary position. The placement of one body over the other such that the dominant occults the recessive allows room for the alignment to remain skewed. Authorial responsibility towards verisimilitude is covered by the positioning of one body to overlap the other.

The problem of weight, and its associated political underpinnings, is sublimated thematically. Dalí’s swan is a fearsome spectacle – the featureless face arched back in orgasmic triumph, the invasive wing span, the eagle-like talons leave no scope for the viewer to imagine anything but the transcendental experience of terror. Nolan works through association. The inversion of our conditioned reading of the rape, Leda not as victim, or as consensual participant but as the perpetrator as poor Zeus is reduced to an infantile, almost foetal apparition of himself, conduits the horror of the rape along an alternately sexed pathway. Lawrence’s representation is perhaps the most conventional of all – the obliteration of the Leda figure in the painting is also her erasure from the discourse of power that she is dragged into occupying.

[35] Dalí, in his exposition of the paranoiac-critical method, looked at how the obsessive paranoia forms a framework that helps cohere completely aleatory elements into a composite whole. Zeus’ obsessive desire for Leda is what composes this concert of contradictory components – the unholy consortium of the bestial, the human and the divine, rendering it an artistic, and by extension, an aesthetic-ethical felicity.

[36] “Is her body a linguistic term in (male) language? Does her body express or repress a (female) language of its own? When she organizes ideas, does she organize, organicize, or even orgasmicize herself as a subordinate clause in the syntax of patriarchy? Given such an organization of thought, how can she come thoughtfully to terms with her own terminology? If the Phallus is the magic wand (or want) that opens the gates of language, if the Name-of-the-Father is the password into the palace of rational discourse, what name, what wand (or want), what password can safeguard her rites of passage? Neither metaphorical nor metaphysical, her appraisal of sexual linguistics is both personal and political, founded not in experimental speculation but in experiential reality.” (“Sexual Linguistics”, 517)

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Text copyright 2012 Srishti Krishnamoorthy