Iconography, Hybrid Art and Self-Portrait in H.D.’s Helen in Egypt
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-03-18

H.D.’s Helen in Egypt emerges as a combination of ‘picture writing’ and text (Simpson 67). Through the figure of the mythological Helen of Sparta as her ‘alter ego’ and by breaking any spatiotemporal boundaries, H.D. mentally re-visits the temple of Amen in Egypt as well as that of Thetis in Greece, and re-visualises Helen’s story via the poem’s fragmented, visual mythopoeia, a pictography which imitates the hieroglyphs as well as the images deriving from both temples respectively (Gelpi cited in Hokanson 2016, 332). Furthermore, H.D.’s utilization of the (visual) palimpsest enables her to re-experience Helen’s past by interpreting the ‘hieroglyphlike images’ as well as the images of human figures, objects, and deities depicted in the aforementioned temples through multiple perspectives so as to capture ‘some timeless reality’ that ‘lays beneath the changing visible world’ to invoke Kant’s comment on Cubism (Simpson 67; Kant cited in Cooper 9). By rendering Helen the poet in her poetic text, H.D. offers an alternative way of recovering the past, whereas her use of the palimpsest ‘flattens’ time ‘so that the past is not then but now’, according to Alicia Ostriker, exemplifying how the past can reflect the present and vice versa (28).  


Areti Katsigianni (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens)