‘Infidelity to an Impossible Task’: Postmodernism,Feminism and Lyn Hejinian's ‘My Life’

This extract is from a correspondence that took place between the American ‘Language’ poets Susan Howe and Lyn Hejinian in the mid-1980s. ¹ It is part of a lengthy exchange in which the two influential writers attempt to articulate the web of cultural, theoretical and aesthetic issues involved in constructing a feminist poetics. The measured confusion suggested by this letter can be read through the debates within the literary feminism of the period which was struggling to negotiate competing versions of self-hood and their freight of assumptions about the political and aesthetic implications of a woman writer's ‘syntax’. These choices have been subsequently narrated through the seemingly over-determined division between the mimesis and materialism of ‘Anglo-American’ feminism and the ludicism associated with continental psychoanalytical philosophy. (Gallop, 1991; Moi, 1985) The eschewing by contemporary experimental poets such as Howe and Hejinian of these models – the revisionist lyrical ‘I’ of the female poet and the disruptive ‘feminine ecriture’ – suggest a correspondence between their work and the radical scepticism informing the anti-foundationalist critiques of gender that came to dominate literary feminism in the following decade. One of the first book-length introductions to innovative poetry by women suggests just such an association when it notes that it is ‘not subject to fixed boundaries, but rather, as Joan Scott understands it: socially constructed in discourse, or as Judith Butler would say, continually ‘performed’. This writing takes part in a language-orientated epistemology by redescribing – in a lively spirit of play – the relations of power that gender signifies’ (Simpson, 2000: 23).

Such a cursory chronology conceals significant anxieties about literary feminism's ability to form a politics. What Jacqueline Rose described as its ‘dual discursive inheritance’ in the 1980s – a striving for both cultural affirmation and theoretical critique – had the effect of muddying any certainty about where cultural meaning for literature could be located (Rose, 1998). The struggle for authorship, the schismatic vocabulary for discussing literary ‘form’, the activities associated with publishing and pedagogy, the experience of the reader, all became contested sites of critical analysis with well-developed and specific (and sometimes mutually exclusive) methodologies. These debates remain pertinent, if perhaps less explicit and less schematic, more than a decade on. This paper considers the ways in which assumptions about self, reading and form have been absorbed and mediated by the current anti-foundationalist ‘third-wave’ of feminist literary criticism. My analysis of contemporary experimental literature's re-signification of gendered relations of ‘power’ seeks, in other words, to make explicit the particular discursive implications that ‘play’ has been assumed to possess. The discussion introduces and outlines the work and the critical reception of the poet Lyn Hejinian, contending that her struggling with these questions suggests a mode of literary production and consumption that is able to demonstrate an awareness of its theoretical and cultural economies, of a need to refigure the relations of affirmation and critique.

Hejinian was born in post-war US and has been an active member of the experimental poetry community that began to evolve in the late seventies and early eighties in the Bay Area of San Francisco, California. This community, associated with the ‘Language writing’ movement (named after the journal L=A = N = G = U = A = G = E), established itself as an avant-garde alternative to the dominant poetic being taught in creative writing programmes and published by University Presses. ² The mainstream's privileging of the private, lyric self was disdained by Language writers as being unable to provide a political and literary response to the complex range of pressures that postmodern theory, consumer culture and an ascendant rightwing politics posed to the Left in America in this period. Hejinian was extremely active in the construction of this community. She was especially significant for attempting to simultaneously create a theoretical and practical community, to fulfil the rhetoric of Language writing's own agenda. As well as contributing to collaborative works, she co-edited, with Barrett Watten, the influential journal Poetics Journal and was solely responsible for Tuumba Press, without which many poets of this period would have not been published. In addition to supporting a discussion of the possibilities of a gendered dynamic for Language writing, which the exchange between Howe and Hejinian is testimony to, Hejinian was also vigorous in attempting to make Language poetry's literal poetic community aware of the gendering of its own practices. However, this was a battle that was, as the records of her correspondence held in UCSD's Mandeville collection makes clear, lengthy but largely private (Vickery, 2000).

Hejinian's poetic and critical work has been centrally concerned with the theoretical, cultural and epistemological issues involved in representing self. Her thesis is that to explore and expand the limitations of language is to explore and expand our experience of life itself. Language is, she writes in ‘The Rejection of Closure’, ‘one of the principal forms our curiosity takes. It makes us restless’, it is only by virtue of it that we ‘negotiate our mentalities and the world; off balance, heavy at the mouth, we are pulled forward’ (Hejinian, 1984a: 139). The constant irony of Hejinian's work is that her mistrust of selfhood is off-set by a desire to articulate the specificity of her own subjective experience. In a more recent essay, she employs the word ‘person’ to explain this apparent contradiction.

Hejinian's aim in writing is to discover the ‘agency’ that exists in the articulation of everyday existence: to exploit the point at which the subject's own self-evident knowledge of experientiality and the subject's discursive constructedness collide.

This assumption, that the exposure of the artifice of representation produces agency, is one upon which the apparently disparate discourses of the experimental poetics of Language writing and of anti-foundationalist feminism are able to converge. Hejinian, in keeping with both of these discourses, connects her manipulation of the line between ‘construction and experience’ to a praxis capable of resonating beyond the text. In ‘The Rejection of Closure’ she explicitly states that the ‘open’ text ‘invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies’ (Hejinian, 1984a; 134). The essay also demonstrates caution about the apparently wide-reaching cultural efficacy of this activity. ‘It is impossible’ she notes in its final pages, ‘to discover any string or bundle of words that is entirely free of possible narrative or psychological content. Moreover, although the ‘story’ and ‘tone’ of such works may be interpreted differently by different readers, nonetheless the readings differ within definite limits. While word strings are permissive, they do not license a free-for-all’ (ibid. 140).

One of the central ways in which the ‘limits’ of language play are made specific in Hejinian's writing is through her awareness of literature's ‘social contract’, genre (Jameson, 1981). She most consistently draws upon autobiography – her most famous text is simply entitled My Life. The genre is, as seminal commentators such as Philip Lejeune have pointed out, based on a relationship between reader and writer in which the former is promised by the latter to be told the truth about their lives (Lejeune, 1989). Such suppositions about writing, reading and truth are, as many feminist critics have demonstrated, evocative of the broader feminist dilemma toward the differentiated theoretical and cultural implications of literature. On the one hand, autobiography's assumptions about the self-knowing subject who possesses a transparent, expressive language appear theoretically naive, steeped in the discredited assumptions of modernity and yet, on the other, the continued existence of the desire to read autobiography as autobiography suggests the cultural appeal and importance of narrative, identification, self-expression and referentiality. In a relatively early essay ‘Language and Realism’ Hejinian engages with this debate, in a way quite at odds with the emerging orthodoxy, by detailing the complexities of realism. She suggests that it attempts to understand questions that are both ‘metaphysical’, (‘the nature of the Real, the relationship of the Real to Appearances, the distinction between the simulacrum and the original’) and ‘ethical’ (‘the relationship of Art to Truth’ and an insight into how ‘literature can and should be useful’ (Hejinian, 1984b: 128)). Hejinian's articulation of this classic literary dilemma takes refuge in a surprisingly instrumental language. She is less invested in the ‘subversive’ tropes of femininity and experimentation – the work of Irigaray is, for example, cited and dismissed as essentialist in ‘The Rejection of Closure’ – than with renewing the cultural possibilities of representation.

Although her poem My Life, published in two versions in 1981 and in 1987, is the most important example of Hejinian's exploration of these warring impulses, other poems written in this period attest to her close scrutiny of the expectations of the genre. ‘Redo’ and ‘The Guard' ³ – both published in 1984, the mid-point between the first and second My Life – are explicitly concerned with the act of self-narrative. ‘The Guard’ seems to represent the construction of the written self as an act of hesitant authority against a threatening and nihilistic world. The first stanza, for example, ends by considering the possibilities of the self within such an inhospitable climate.

Identity is placed under excessive pressure: it is only ‘skin’ that can contain character. The inevitable fragmentation of self and meaning that results from such an observation produces not pleasurable play but loss and putrefaction and, ultimately, emotional paralysis and procrastination.

‘Redo’ shares this quietly anxious tone, extending it to a reflection about what an autobiographical projection of self involves. The first stanza suggests that ‘Her autobiography/is ninety percent picaresque. // While thus moralising all we have done/ is shout/ the name of someone we know’. A tension is created between the poem's narrating impulse and its relationship with the reader who, the text seems to fear, may simply be deafened by the personalization of the account. The poem goes on to mock its own claims to embrace the reader in light of this.

The autobiographical intimacy with the reader is represented here as quixotically untenable. The poem almost falls into a shamed solipsism, as if realizing that in breaking down and complicating its own assumptions then it breaks down and complicates the relationship with the reader. Moreover, the poem suggests that this perceived failure is the product of its untenable ambitions, its ‘infidelity to an impossible task’. Toward its end it suggests, ‘People / think I have written an autobiography/ but my candour is false (l hear a few shots slouching at my realism)’. The poem seems to face the painfully impossible demands of the reader it creates, as it both derides as naive the hope for ‘candour’ and yet acknowledges its own move toward ‘realism’.

This apparent desire to possess agency without reverting to credulity has, of course, been central to the attempts of many postmodern and feminist thinkers. In her much-discussed critique of Judith Butler's failure to adequately provide for agency Seyla Benhabib, for example, has appealed to the advantages of narrative over performance as a framework for rendering such a possibility. This interlocutory model of self, Benhabib claims, is reliant not on a reclamation of the foundations of modernity but on the psychodynamic and intersubjective ‘capacity to go on, to retell, to re-member, to reconfigure’ (Benhabib, 1999: 338). The assumptions about the implications of such a narrative-driven representation of self are, however, implicitly antagonistic to Hejinian's descriptions of the expansive cultural possibilities of experimentation. In a lengthy footnote in a recent essay, Benhabib rejects the avant-gardist assumption

The conclusion to the paper, that ‘the mark of a great work of art is to hold together in a single intuition those complex conceptual relationships that it is the task of philosophical reflection to disentangle’ is, at best, ambiguous in the light of this assertion (Benhabib, 1999: 358). It could mean that avant-garde art is not great art, that the intuition that all art offers has no political use, or that it is only through the act of philosophical explication – through acts of teaching and exegesis – that its conceptual contributions become apparent.

The large body of Hejinian criticism that has emerged in recent years has, unsurprisingly, explored not these rather equivocal implications of Hejinian's hesitant desire to ‘go on, to retell’ but the more confident and pleasurable manipulations of autobiography to be found in My Life. A central critical approach has stressed the use of specifically feminized/feminist tropes that are perceived to subvert the masculinist and linear assumptions of the genre. The critic Hilary Clark, for example, suggests that Hejinian narrates herself to ‘show us the ways by which a woman writer remembers when she challenges dominant discursive practices and traditional notions of what is significant and worthy of inclusion in the writing of a life’ (Clark, 1991: 316). Similarly, Craig Douglas Dworkin has argued that the “small squares’ of Hejinian's fragmented text correspond to the patchwork aesthetic that some critics have also identified with women's writing’. This fragmented style, Dworkin goes on to argue, allows the reader to ‘luxuriate in the romance of the vanished’ rather than ‘long for the telos of a unified, encapsulated story’ (Dworkin, 1995: 67).

The activity of this liberated reader, luxuriating in textual absences, is given even greater significance in the critical readings which Hejinian's writing received from writers associated with experimental poetics. An essay on My Life by the critic Juliana Spahr suggests that it turned autobiography into a convincing response to the crisis facing the fragmenting subject of modernity. Spahr draws explicitly on the work of Judith Butler to theorise the text: ‘Butler urges an examination of the systems that have constructed these categories […]Hejinian's work is in many ways an active resignification’ (Spahr, 1996: 114). Spahr extends these claims to agency, combines Language poetics and Butler's anti-foundationalism, when she argues that My Life's attempts to conjoin the writer and the reader has fundamental cultural implications, that ‘ignoring readerly agency has been a frequent limitation in the way in which literary criticism figures the relationship between the postmodern and the political’. Hejinian's text overcomes these aporias of politicizing the postmodern, Spahr suggests, by constructing a ‘model of subjectivity [which] denies essentialist notions of the subject at the same time that it cultivates readerly agency by opening up an anarchic space for reader response’ (Spahr, 1996: 148).

For a writer with Spahr's impeccable pedigree, a graduate of SUNY Buffalo's Poetics Writing programme (explicitly identified with an avant-garde or experimental tradition), a rising star of contemporary poetry (her text Response was selected by Hejinian to be one of the winners of 1995 National Poetry series) this reading contains few surprises. Spahr willingly draws attention to some of the difficulties of realizing a cultural significance for this, acknowledging that, ‘the issue remains whether this agency can be transformed into some other, socially reformative mode. I cannot answer this question or provide empirical evidence of a concrete social change stemming from a reader-centred work’ (Spahr, 1996: 155). Such a hesitation occurs because, although her assumptions about literary form are very different to Seyla Benhabib's, she shares her reluctance to explain how their cultural claims (or counter-claims, in the case of the latter) for these particular representative forms can be assumed. ⁴

Hejinian's narration of the postmodern self can be read, the remainder of this paper argues, as an attempt to reconcile the formal opposition implicit in the assumptions of critics such as Butler/Spahr and Benhabib. Hejinian's struggle with these dichotomies becomes apparent when the contexts – the overlapping publics her writing addresses – are foregrounded. For many critics My Life's imagined reader is not actually the reader of autobiography but the reader of Language writing. That this should be so is, in many ways, the point of Language writing. As the critic Christopher Beach recently argued, it is the readings and institutions that support the avant-garde text that maintain its radical status. Beach defends the avant-garde status of Hejinian's texts not because of the implications of its aesthetic forms ‘but in terms of its contestatory strategies and cultural positionings […] there are real consequences to a poetic practice that attacks bourgeois notions of the subject and this subject's relation to discursive formations’ (Beach, 1997: 72). It is not the innovative style of Hejinian's poetry that allows it its revolutionary status, Beach asserts, but its construction of an alternative reading community. Language poetry was important, in other words, because of its ability to create a group of readers who know how to attribute significance to this difficult material. Indeed, Language writing's ability to constitute itself as a reading community has been one of the most significant, albeit potentially contradictory, developments in American poetry of the past thirty years. Hejinian, in particular, has received much critical attention. The blurb inside the back cover of the second edition of My Life proclaims, notes that ‘first publication in 1980 My Life achieved international acclaim and quickly sold out. The second edition is now in its third print and is taught in high schools, colleges and universities throughout the United States and America’. Hence Language movement's success has come about through, rather than in opposition to, what Alan Golding has described as its ‘provisionally complicit’ relationship with the dominant institutions of American poetic culture (Golding, 1995).

It is Hejinian's negotiation of this ambivalent cultural positioning, her production of readers as social subjects who can straddle the divisions between Language writing and the ‘mainstream’ and between realism and the avant-garde, that I want to finally examine. I want to suggest that her writing disrupts the modes within which it is most easily positioned, that it is more complicated than simply an ‘attack [on] bourgeois notions of the subject and this subject's relation to discursive formations’ (Beach, 1997: 72). It is, I want to suggest, also an attempt to reconstruct the subject in the face of these formations and that this act of agency, which is both symbolic and cultural, is significant in terms of Hejinian's contributions to the assumptions within both postmodern-feminism and Language writing.

My Life enacts its desire for reconstruction in its clear insistence that there is, or at least there is an acceptable desire for, a humanist or ‘real’ centre to the poem. It is this, the role of desire and the pleasure of identification that the text displays, that Hejinian's generic allegiance to autobiography most obviously demonstrates.

This citation is taken from one of the additional eight stanzas which Hejinian wrote for the second edition of the poem and which are meant to represent the eight years of Hejinian's life that passed between the two publications. Like much from these supplementary stanzas, it can be read through its retrospective analysis of the effects which narrating her life, in My Life, has given to the poet. Hejinian is both admitting her desire for a sense of self and also acknowledging that the production of this ‘realist’ self is a literary effect. Far from decrying realism as naive or reactionary, then, this stanza elucidates its continued attractions and compares it to the poetic society, ‘across the street’, that is made to sound, with its ‘pawing wind’ and ‘clouds pastures’ almost sheeplike in its monotony. ‘Of course’, a narratorial voice sharply interjects, ‘I wanted to be real !’ Words share, the text then seems to immediately suggest, the same bad press as the stereotypical wife: their control over us prevents us from experiencing and exploring the freedom that we desire. Yet the irony that this enigmatic coupling is also steeped in (the reader knows Hejinian is unlikely to participate in such a cliched and sexist image of marriage) implies that this is an image of words or wives which is quite misplaced; that their apparently custodial role over us is something that we actually choose and find more pleasurable than its alternatives – that they are something that can allow us to be ‘real’.

The simple finality of Hejinian's judgement on the children's story of the Emperor's New Clothes turns upon the same point of finely tuned irony. The fairytale is about ‘mass delusion and the power of advertising’ but to know only this is to forget that, as Hejinian suggests in the first of these final eight stanzas, ‘We like the tailor and we like the child, but we do not like the naked emperor’ (Hejinian, 1987: 92). Hejinian does not simply reject the act of mass delusion – ‘we like the tailor’, because this is as enjoyable as the unmasking of delusion – ‘ we like the child’. What Hejinian seems to object to is the vanity of those who think that they can control these things, that they can be made this simple or stable, that they can serve power so easily – ‘we do not like the Emperor.’

What Hejinian seems to be advocating in place of the Manichean either/or choice between recognizing artifice or being seduced by mass delusion (and there is an obvious analogy here between the dichotomy of mimetic versus experimental representations) are the intricacies and pleasures that exist within the place of tension between the two. My Life can be placed within the breach that operates between the rhetoric of the active reader of the self-conscious text and the narrative and identification that the work of many women writers has long relied upon. Hejinian's recent essay ‘Reason’ provides a clearer account of her negotiation of the ‘dilemmas’ of deconstruction for feminists. The phrase ‘along comes something – launched in context’ threads throughout it as an echo of her attempt to conjoin articulation and context in ways that can avoid both the emptiness of a postmodern negativity and the positivist assumptions that have been constructed as the alternative. One way of reconciling this all too familiar tension, Hejinian suggests, is through the use of ‘reason’ which can operate ‘in the border between concepts – and again between several interdependent pairs of concepts. Reason may even constitute such a border zone’ (Hejinian, 2001). For Hejinian, reason (which she compares to Lyotard's differend), makes our relationship with ‘context’ a continual and active process: ‘context is a past with a future. ⁶ That is the sense of the phrase this is happening. That is what gives us a sense of reason’. Hejinian's practice of a context-specific ‘reason’ functions as an alternative description of the struggle between experience and construction, between realism and abstraction.

Such an example suggests two things for an anti-foundationalist feminist poetics. On the one it implies that the rather weary schisms around politics and form, that have dominated literary studies since the high modernist moment of Adorno and Lukács, continue, unabated but reclothed, in feminist thought. At its worst such a scenario would suggest that the debates within contemporary gender studies about agency and representation have actually produced nothing more than a vocabulary for discussing literary style and innovation, that Rose's warning against a literary feminism capable of producing nothing more than an aestheticisation of its own politics has come true a dozen years on. Of course, the picture is actually more complicated than this. Hejinian's refusal to side with the choices apparently offered to her by feminism's necessary negotiation with theory – described by Nancy Fraser as a ‘series of mutually reinforcing false antitheses’ (Fraser, 1995: 71) – also suggests its success in exploiting these intellectual and cultural changes rather than accepting them as either stalemate or ruse. Hejinian's intervention in these debates is actually important, I think, because of the way in which it traces the difficulty of its engagement. Hejinian's writing, career, and critical reception crucially show this difficulty to be a complex process that involves an attention to authorial representations, to the possibilities of textual experimentation, and to the cultural sites that legitimize the production of meaning for these things. Hejinian demonstrates not simply that feminism is able to reconcile agency with its critique, but that such a possibility requires an engagement with the varied contexts – Nancy Fraser's ‘weak’ publics – that continue to make feminism's attention to literature meaningful.