Reading In-Between Language, Image, and Things in the Writing of Lyn Hejinian

Reading In-between Language, Image, and Things in the Writing of Lyn Hejinian

Marina M. Mihova

A thesis submitted in fufilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

UNSW

School of the Atis and Media

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

December 2012 THE UNIVERSITY Of NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet Surname or Family name: Mihova l=irst name: Marina Other name/s: Mihova Abbreviation fOI' degree as given in the University calendar PhD

School: School of Arts and Media Faculty: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Title: The dream of "La Faustienne"- Reading in-between language, image, and things in the writing of Lyn Hejinian

Abstract

This dissertation examines a terrain of liminality evident in the works of American poet, Lyn Hejilnian. whose writing utilizes imagery (ranging from the verbally visual to the explicitly graphic) and a form of Steinian materiality, in the development of a poetic which moves away from the domain of textual representation towards a new form of realism which challenges existing notions of ideology and perception.

Drawing upon W.J.T. Mitchell's t.heories of visuality and Gaston Bachelard's theorization of the on,eiric qualities of writing. as well as on Freudian dream theory, this thesis maps out how the cross disciplinary dimensions ofHt!jinian's poetry, render into being a speaking female subject.

Chapter one provides a contextual framework for Hej inian's writing, articulating the integral role notions of community and collaboration play in the development of a form of writing situated within a space of in-between. It examines the significant influence of L=-A=N=G=U=t\ :=G- E poetics on Hejinian as a key participant of the Language poetry group. while moving at the same time away from a focus on the specifics of her relation to the group, towards an analysis of hc:r broader writing oeuvre as conversant with a phenomenology of dreams and as a development of a multimodal textuality, distinct from the li nguistically centered focus of Language poetry.

Chapters two and three present a case for the significance of the visual and the material throughout Hejinian 's writing career, as key textual elements in the composition of a language of experience. This experience-focused !language, through thematic concern and philosophical inquiry comprises an active representation of female knowledge and desire, which as Hej inian argues throughout her essay ·'La Faustienne". has. not by inadvertence but by definition (Hejinian. The Language of Inquiry: 249), been excluded from the narratives of Western history.

Chapters five and six illustrate the multimodal female rhetoric developed in preceding chapters as being a language modeled upon a phenomenology of dreaming. Having been the subject of limited critical attention, Hejinian's published and unpublished literature on dreams, comprises the central focus of the final two chapters of this dissertation in the development of the chapters' central claim that, through the composition of a muhimodal language, framed and executed through the avenue of experience, Hejinian's writing project seeks to locate the voice of La Faustienne.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to sincerely thank Lyn Hejinian for her inspiring poetry which motivated me to seek further knowledge of new and alternative models of writing and embodied a point of association for me between my initially competing loves for the visual arts and English literature. I would like to express my further gratitude for her generous permissions which enabled me to cite from her personal papers stored at the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego as well as from a selection of her visual materials.

I am exceedingly grateful to my supervisor Dr. Brigitta Olubas for her creative vision, invaluable advice and direction, patient instruction and time. I thank her also for her thorough reading of my many chapter drafts. I extend my appreciation and thanks to my co-supervisor Associate Professor Anne Brewster for her constructive feedback throughout the course of my tenure. I am also most appreciative for her reading of my penultimate draft.

I give grateful acknowledgement to the University of New South Wales for the grants and funding firstly of an Australian Postgraduate Award which enabled my study and secondly of the Postgraduate External Research Program which facilitated my travel to the University of California in San Diego to conduct research through the archives of Lyn Hejinian.

I further extend my gratitude to the staff at the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California for their warm welcome, consideration and patience during the course of my archival research.

I offer my sincere appreciation and regards to my family and friends who have supported me and believed in me during the completion of this project – to my mum Tatiana, my dad Miho, my sister Nadia and also to my good friend Jacqui. Finally I would like to profoundly thank my partner Clyde Gonsalvez, for his enduring spirit, patience, positivity and encouragement throughout.

The Dream of “La Faustienne” – Reading In-between Language, Image and Things in the Writing of Lyn Hejinian

CONTENTS

Introduction

Terrain of In-between 1

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 5 Philosophical Inquiry – Language of In Between 10 In Reverie of Stein – A Visuality in Language 19 A Material Encounter 32 Assembling Knowledge 39

Note – Textual Analysis

Lyn Hejinian’s Reader 47

Chapter One

In-between Life and Text – Subjectivity/Collectivity 54

A Life Recorded 62 My Life 80 Leningrad 94 Letters Not About Love 110 Add-Verse 111 Letters and Archives 112 Commitment to an In-between 118

Chapter Two Image as Word – Reading Visuality 120

A Steinian Visuality 138 My Life 146 The Lake 155 Water 163 Saga/Circus 187 Image as Language – A Poetics of Female Experience 193

Chapter Three Word and Thing – Tactile Experience 195 Things 202 Strangeness/ “The Uncanny” 205 Writing Artist-Books 211 The Lake 216 Words as Objects 221 Collecting 224 Collecting Miniatures 228 Happily 232 Slowly 239 Assembling Knowledge 245

Chapter Four Dream Language –New Knowledge – Action, Metaphor, Female 247

“Strangeness” 256 Silence – Seeing Through the Dark of Night 270 “La Faustienne” 276 Recent work on Dreams 283 “The Dream Department” 284 “Dreaming Something Else” 288 The Cell 291 Individuals 298

Chapter Five

Dreams – Visual Language – Female Knowledge: Reading between Hejinian’s published and unpublished work on Dreams 305

Sleeps: An Arterial River 310 Visuality – Seeing at Night 315 Recuperating the Silenced Female Voice – Morality and Fairy Tales 320 Travel 326 The Wide Road 337

Conclusion

A Life Recorded Through a Thousand Eyes 344

Bibliography 353

Terrain of In-between Introduction

Euphemism, ellipsis, digression, delay and then night at last never going on ahead slides by side by side with narrative one, narrative two, narrative three, narrative four, sound track to sight track with variation attained…1

– Lyn Hejinian

Like many a returning traveler, we are in the presence of things to come to terms with as we float back to a yet more familiar sky. “Things” is that ordinary word meaning lost to present knowledge. And floating is a mode of returning, which is determined by a sense of loss, or conversely and identically, by a sensation of having occupied a space in the proximity of a retrievable object. Just as if one were trying to explain oneself to a stranger. Thus, as figures, traveling and returning meet. 2

– Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian

I would argue that one of the functions of art is to bring dreams and other works of the imagination into the space of appearance.3 – Lyn Hejinian

1 Hejinian, L., Slowly, Berkeley: Tuumba Press: 2002: 28 2 Harryman, C. / Hejinian, L., The Wide Road: United States: Belladonna Books: 2011: 47‐48 3 Hejinian, L., “Continuing Against Closure”, JACKET (co‐production with SALT magazine), July 2001: (14): (page numbers not available), World Wide Web ‐ http://jacketmagazine.com/14/hejinian.html : last accessed ‐ 19/02/2011

Sustained by constant travel across fractal borders and dispositions, American experimental poet Lyn Hejinian encounters the strange and uncomfortable, the uncharted and unknown, the minor detail, all that is encompassed in a fleeting moment, documenting and recording, leaving a detectable and simultaneously ephemeral and perishable readerly trail, enlightening and awakening the sleeping eye and gently closing the wide-wake all- knowing one as she brings to life, through the stitching of dreams in words of pictures and pictures of words, of objects tangible and intangible as “things”, the female language of

Scheherazade. This thesis engages in a process of detective investigation, following threads and trails through repeated fragments of explication, poetic theme and process and re-emergent appearances throughout the prolific body of writing which constitutes Lyn

Hejinian’s expansive poetic project as it weaves into being the hypothesis that what emerges through a mirrored and temporal expansion of these textual elements is an essence and a presence of a female subject. Elements of dream processes and dream theories emerge throughout Hejinian’s writing practice as thematic and structural textual components and often are contextualized with notions of materiality, visuality and female subjectivity. This thesis traces and examines in depth these linkages which thus far have been the focus of limited critical attention.

This thesis further explores a terrain of liminality evident in the works of Hejinian, whose poetic practice utilizes imagery extensively, ranging from the verbally visual to the explicitly graphic. Drawing upon W.J.T. Mitchell’s theories of visuality and upon Gaston

Bachelard’s theorization of the oneiric qualities of writing, as well as on Freudian dream theory, this thesis maps out Hejinian’s reflections upon dreams, visuality and the material 2 world, in an attempt to establish how the cross-disciplinary aspects evident in her poetry function to create a female form of writing. “La Faustienne”, Hejinian’s key essay addressing notions of gender and their inevitable implication within systems of knowing, will be addressed throughout chapters four and five of this thesis. In “La Faustienne”,

Hejinian explicates that:

Throughout the literature of the frontier, the intrepid Faustian discovers a virgin landscape and penetrates its wilderness. In the encounter with the landscape… the unknown is imagined as an animate (though supine) other, and she is female. The female element in this trope, then, is not the knower but the site of knowledge, its object and embodiment – that which is to be known.4

Hejinian consequently asks, “Is knowledge itself, then, La Faustienne?”5 Through this question, she genders the concept of knowledge as female in a form of linguistic reclamation for the female writing subject.

This bold characterization, of knowledge as female, functions in synchronicity with

Hejinian’s hybrid form of writing which features an interweaving of visual and material elements. These part-images/part-objects created in Hejinian’s texts render the female self created in this text-reader negotiation not a coherent subject, but rather a non-subject who both challenges the hegemonic discourse of feminine occupations and activity, and immerses the reader him/herself in that process in a fragmented way. Ultimately her writing creates a site of potentiality. This thesis classifies Hejinian’s multimodal approach to writing as conversant with her development of the female character of La Faustienne

4 Hejinian, L., “La Faustienne”, The Language of Inquiry: Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press: 2000: 240 5 Ibid. 3 who is modeled upon a heroine who tells tales at night in order to save her life.

Consequently it explicates Hejinian’s writing as a dreamscape – as a visually wealthy process deeply intertwined with language.

Hejinian’s experimentation with a hybridity in writing is often executed in collaboration with other poets and visual artists, pointing to the importance of community and collectivity. This prominence of the notion of collectivity as well as experimentation with a multiplicity of genres and mediums in Hejinian’s work emphasizes a process rather than product orientated poetry which circulates around the associative relationships that it establishes both textually and inter-personally with both co-creators and readers. This thesis aligns this process-orientated poetry with notions of dreaming. Hejinian describes dreams as “…an active, even busy, border between the sleeping person and that same person awake… [concluding that]… [they] are, in this sense, not a place but a dynamic.”6

Dreams feature often as subject matter within both Hejinian’s creative work and her scholarly writing. While a concern with the work of dreams can be found across Hejinian’s oeuvre, it finds its fullest expression in her unpublished work. Her exchange of letters

(housed at the University of California, San Diego) with other Language poets, such as

Bob Perelman and Kit Robinson suggest that her writing practice is strongly integrated and concerned with the creative, as well as visual, capacities of dreams. In consideration of these exchanges, this thesis articulates and locates the presence and significance of

Hejinian’s regard for dreams within both her published and unpublished work.

6 Hejinian, L., “Barbarism”, The Language of Inquiry: 327

Furthermore it establishes key associations between these two streams of published and unpublished writing. Hejinian’s essay “La Faustienne” focuses significantly on the idea of a ‘night language’ as being an inherently female one. This thesis situates this notion of a female night language in context with Hejinian’s visually and materially informed language with the aim of illustrating how her writing practice, through the avenue of dreams and multimodality in language, makes significant textual and epistemological progress in the development of a women’s writing.

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E

Lyn Hejinian is most frequently associated with the postmodern American movement which emerged during the 1970s and 1980s and is formally referred to as

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E7 poetry. This poetry was primarily concerned with a redefining of the textual parameters of language and more specifically, with the concept of words as being individually relevant to the meaning sustained within a text – significant within themselves and not purely for their function as structural components within the greater scheme of larger textual bodies such as sentences and paragraphs. Works of Language poetry engage, quite ironically and self consciously, with the exaggeration or highlighted

7From here on in the term “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E” will be written as Language. “Language writing gets its name… from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, edited by Andrews and Bernstein (a photocopied and stapled pamphlet that concentrated on poetics rather than poetry)” Spahr, J., Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity: Tuscaloosa and London: The University of Alabama Press: 2001: 61 5 incorporation of formal language features. The aim of this highlighting of formal textual elements was to enable a shift away from more standardized methods of writing. The work’s heightened use of formal language features “…is less a matter in ingenuity and manner, of elaboration and elegant subterfuge, than the recognition that a poem or painting or performance text is a made thing – contrived, constructed, chosen – and that its reading is also a construction on the part of its audience.”8 As Marjorie Perloff suggests, the

Language poets sought to develop a language with a tactile disposition, securely situated as a structure, built and woven within and throughout the parameters of its reading subject.

Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews, editors of the bimonthly L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E journal, first published in 1978, explicate the movement and simultaneously, the journal’s social and political imperatives, stating that:

One major preoccupation of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E has… been to generate discussion on the relation of writing to politics, particularly to articulate some of the ways that writing can act to critique society. Ron Silliman’s early essay, “Disappearance of the Word/ Appearance of the World,”… applies the notion of commodity fetishism to conventional descriptive and narrative forms of writing: where the word – words – cease to be valued for what they are themselves but only for their properties as instrumentalities leading us to a world outside or beyond them, so that words – language disappear, become transparent, leaving the picture of a physical world the reader can then consume as if it were a commodity.9

The Language poets’ preoccupation was to untangle the written text from, what they considered to be, a status of commodity – as a carrier of fixed ideological meaning – and to recharge it with a capacity for action and speaking valency. Hejinian explains her own

8 Perloff, M., Radical Artifice; Writing Poetry in the Age of Media, London: University of Chicago Press Ltd.: 1991: 27‐28 9 Andrews, B./ Bernstein, C. (Eds.), The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, United States of America: Southern Illinois University Press: 1984: xi 6 political motivation within the Language project in an interview with Larry McCaffery and

Brian McHale, stating that:

Collective action for me began with the civil rights movement… Next came the women’s movement, and then the antiwar movement. All three of those called for a reassessment of the structures of understanding and opinion – which are both partly language, or largely language – and through language, a reassessment of the social structures themselves.10

This thesis acknowledges Hejinian’s involvement within the Language movement and explicates this involvement as instrumental to her development of a socially concerned writing persona which, in its experimental quality, strives to construct an ethically driven textuality. Hejinian’s involvement within the Language community fuelled a practice of collaborative endeavor, signifying a self awareness inextricable from the context of a larger community. This context of communal and collaborative engagement within the processes of writing anticipates the process of philosophical inquiry which has become deeply imbedded within Hejinian’s writing purpose. Working within the Language community marks within Hejinian’s writing an understanding of the self as contingent and continually evolving, elucidating the beginnings of a writing oeuvre steeped in thematic travelling and movement in-between sites of particularity – highlighting a focus on the concept of in-betweeness and detracting from the definitive nature of the specific. These tendencies of evolution and contingency throughout the poetry of Language writers are encapsulated by Hejinian’s claim that, “in experimental poetry, aesthetic discovery is

10McCaffery, L./ McHale, B., “A Local Strangeness: An Interview with Lyn Hejinian” in Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors: Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press: 1996: 138 7 congruent with social discovery. New ways of thinking (new relationships among the components of thought) make new ways of being possible.”11

Hejinian’s philosophically motivated writing, situated within a space of in-between, echoes

Victor Turner’s anthropological usage of the term ‘liminal’12 in her development of a writing which seeks to amplify and execute a new form of Realism. Hejinian’s redeveloped notion of Realism finds its basis not in re-creating a likeness to reality through representation, but rather upon a form of associative connectivity. Hejinian’s development of a liminal poetics places focus on the relationships and points of connectivity between words, textual elements and audience in the pursuit of a Steinian form of Realism, which draws not upon the markers of conventional Realism which seeks to create a near exact image of the real, but rather aims to construct what Deleuze and Guattari have termed as a

“rhizome” with the real. Kate Fagan articulates a sense of connectivity between Hejinian’s poetics, Stein’s writing, and Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophies, as she argues that:

Hejinian’s analyses in “Two Stein Talks” of Steinian perception appear to share philosophical and syntactical ground with Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomic models of thinking… Convergences emerge… from something that she calls “a present relativity across the porous planes of writing.”13

11 Hejinian, L., “Barbarism”, The Language of Inquiry: 322 12 See – Turner, F., ““Hyperion to a Satyr”: Criticism and Anti‐structure in the Work of Victor Turner, in Ashley, M. K. (Ed.), Victor Turner and the Construction of Cultural Criticism: United States of America: Indiana University Press: 1990 13Fagan, K., “‘Constantly I write this happily’: Encountering Lyn Hejinian”, Dissertation, University of Sydney: 2002: 271 – Hejinian, L., “Language and Realism” in “Two Stein Talks”: The Language of Inquiry: 101 – cited in text 8

Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome “…can be connected to anything other, and must be… ceaselessly [establishing] connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.”14 Hejinian’s rhizomic writing project branches out into various modalities amongst which the visual and material emerge as prominent. These multimodal facets contribute to and expand her writing project, which in its philosophical endeavor can be read collectively as a prolific documentation of Hejinian’s life. This thesis argues that this documentation, through its hybrid modalities, emerges in the format of a dream language, hinged upon Hejinian’s inquiry into a night language and subsequent proposition of that language belonging to the female subject – which Hejinian argues has been silenced throughout the greater course of

Western literary history. The rhizomic nature of such a night language is signaled by

Hejinian in “La Faustienne” as she states:

I have wanted to write in the dark, so to speak, when the mind must accept the world it witnesses by day and out of all data assemble meaning. The writing would do so – assemble (a Faustian project) and, in its way, make knowledge (the work of La Faustienne).15

This created knowledge stands for Hejinian in opposition to Faust’s procedural assemblages, as it holds in its grasp the capacity for an inexhaustible spectrum of observations from “all data”, enabling like the rhizome a site of ceaseless possible connections.

14 Deleuze, G. / Guattari, F., A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, The Athlone Press Ltd.: Great Britain: 1988: 7 15 Hejinian, L., “La Faustienne”, The Language of Inquiry: 250 9

Philosophical Inquiry – Language of In Between

Kate Fagan explicates the philosophical endeavor of Hejinian’s writing project as a development and a progression from poetry towards a field of poetics, arguing that:

Tropes of “borders” and “boundaries” flourished in Hejinian’s writings during the 1990s, often to signal epistemological and linguistic engagement with spaces between: between genres, forms, locations, public and private discourse, languages, subjectivities, and modes of object-apprehension… Hejinian has matched her major poetical works – often book length serialized poems comprising numerous interlocking parts – with critical essays, many exploring links between writing poetry and developing a poetics.16

Fagan’s thesis examines Hejinian’s development and participation within a writing community through Hejinian’s prolific letter writing and archiving practices, both of which are central to the execution of such a communal literary discourse. Her examination of

Hejinian’s philosophical and epistemological project is supported by Hejinian’s own documentation of her interest in the work of William James. In an interview with Larry

McCaffery and Brian McHale she states: “I’m especially interested in his approach to the psychology of consciousness and cognitive perceptions.”17

Hejinian’s engagement with the theories of William James – in the development of a writing concerned with consciousness – is central to the understanding of her work which stems beyond the written word on the page towards a process of experience. Fagan’s

16Fagan, K., “‘Constantly I write this happily’: Encountering Lyn Hejinian”: 5 17Hejinian, L. Cited in McHale, B. / McCaffery, L., “A Local Strangeness: An Interview with Lyn Hejinian”, Some other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors: 127 10 detailed investigation into the nature of Hejinian’s epistemological writing, facilitated through an engagement with border zones and unchartered literary terrain, is of key significance to the content of my thesis which builds upon Fagan’s claims in its examination of a sense of visuality and materiality. The latter constitute border zones, through their alternative modality, within Hejinian’s work. These border zones have been the focus of very limited critical attention to date. In addition to an examination of the visual and multimodal hybridity within Hejinian’s writing project, this thesis identifies

Hejinian’s engagement with a discourse of dreams and writing at night as a further dimension of inquiry into states of consciousness within the writing process. Her experimentation with the dreaming subject, whilst appearing peripheral throughout her published work, emerges more prominently throughout her personal papers housed at the

Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California in San Diego. The vast and cumulative expanse of Hejinian’s archives parallels not only her published works of poetry, but also the multiplicity and fragmentation common to the processes within dreams. Hejinian’s prolific writing of letters, which comprise a significant portion of her papers stored in the archives, creates a further parallel between the character of La

Faustienne and Hejinian herself, as a writing female subject. Hejinian claims that “the greatest of all night works is the one called The Thousand and One Nights… with its chains of tales and concentricities of tales within tales… told by a woman to postpone her death by holding a man in narrative suspense”18. This claim echoes the multidimensional scope of her personal papers and inter-related published works as a framework for a

18 Hejinian, L., “La Faustienne”, The Language of Inquiry: 251 11 multiplicity of associations in correlating tales and events comprising both Hejinian’s personal experience and poetic practice.

Hejinian’s engagement with the dream process is further demonstrated through peripheral references to Sigmund Freud throughout her published work and, more explicitly, throughout her archived papers. Whilst she does direct the reader towards a consideration of Freud in her published work, it occurs through a more peripheral pathway and emerges via the avenue of a concern with a consciousness in writing, in consideration of the work of William James, which takes precedence over that of Freud. This sidelining but persistent presence of Freudian dream theory is exemplified through the clause “if Freud is correct”, in the following excerpt from Hejinian’s essay “Barbarism”. In a comparative explication between dreams and border zones, Hejinian argues that:

Like a dream landscape, the border landscape is unstable and perpetually incomplete… The border is occupied by ever-shifting images, involving objects and events constantly in need of redefinition and even literal renaming, and viewed against a constantly changing background… the border experience is interior to the psyche as well as being external and social. That is, dreams can be taken as examples of interior…border encounters, or as experiences on the border that arise within the unconscious, either harboring (if Freud is correct) all that is …repressed, or (if contemporary neuropsychologists are correct) doing epistemological work – processing information… making sense.19

The dream landscape, as defined in this essay “Barbarism”, emerges for Hejinian as a pertinent trope for the definition of a shifting space of in-between. Hejinian’s choice of title for her essay “Strangeness”, further directs the reader towards Freud, as it echoes the title and content of his essay “The Uncanny”; both texts sharing the thematic concern of an

19 Hejinian, L., “Barbarism”, The Language of Inquiry: 327 12 estrangement from the familiar. Freud’s often poetic treatment of the dream process, and his avid utilization of the arts, illustrated by his claim that, “…works of art… exercise a powerful effect on me, especially those of literature and sculpture…”20 as a key focus through which he illustrates his various psychological theories, permeates Hejinian’s work.

This intersection between the poetic and the artistic with dreams which occurs throughout

Freud’s work is also identifiable throughout Hejinian’s writing processes – of multimodality and a night-time language – through which she brings to life a speaking female subject. A central concern of this thesis is to articulate an associative thread between the structures of dreams and those of Hejinian’s writing project.

Ann Vickery has extensively studied the phenomenon of the archive, with particular focus on the archives of Lyn Hejinian. Dever, Newman and Vickery’s The Intimate Archive, presents a detailed consideration of the phenomenon of the archive and presents an argument for it to be regarded as a form of writing or as a genre itself, as opposed to what it has been most commonly appreciated for, being the documentation of some form of historical truth. The Intimate Archive presents the complicated situation of the archive as being equally, if not more, mediated than a standard work of fiction, regardless of its tendency towards candid revelation and intimate reflections. Dever, Newman and Vickery argue that:

20 Freud, S., “The Moses of Michelangelo” in Sigmund Freud Volume 14 – Art and Literature (Dickson, A. / Strachey, J., Eds.), England: Penguin Books: 1990: 253 (English translation first published in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho‐ Analysis: London – in Volume XIII, 1955)

As Lyn Hejinian contends, the ‘we’ of collaboration might best be thought of as the ‘we of supervention, the we of surprise’, in foregrounding the tensions between self and other. Archival research, like collaboration, relies on encounters, as well as the need to discover linkages and to test the limits and modes of history making.21

The challenge archives present to modes of history making, as addressed by Dever,

Newman and Vickery, signals a significant facet of Hejinian’s work. The always, at least semi-autobiographical, status of both Hejinian’s published and personal/archived materials enhances the sense of connectivity between Hejinian herself and the central character developed in her essay “La Faustienne”. In keeping an extensive archive and archiving, in a sense, through her serialized poetry, Hejinian challenges the boundaries of historical enterprise. What are we reading, and how truthful or reliable is it? Is there such a thing as simple as truth? Whose truth are we reading? Through her archives and similarly, though her poetry, Hejinian is writing herself as a woman into history whilst simultaneously challenging the parameters of that history more broadly, indirectly articulating a response to Susan Howe’s claim that, “If you are a woman, archives hold perpetual ironies. Because the gaps and silences are where you find yourself.”22 The ambience of silence activated through the practice of writing at night permeates the vast amount of Hejinian’s work which is concerned with dreams and the development of a female rhetoric. This female rhetoric articulates a silence which, by means of the body of work which is Hejinian’s archive, is questioned significantly via an extensive focus on the speaking female subject emerging through silent genres such as letter writing, but also through writing and

21Dever, M. / Newman, S. / Vickery, A., The Intimate Archive: Journey Through Private Papers, National Library of Australia: Canberra ACT: 2009:2 ‐ Hejinian, L., letter to Karen Kahn, 5 January 1994, Papers of L. Hejinian, Mandeville Special Collections Library, Geisel Library, University of California, San Diego, MS 74/23/13 ‐ cited in text 22Howe, S., The Birth‐mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History, Hanover: University Press of New England: 1993: 158 14 literature more broadly. By keeping continual records, both through publication and privately, and by engaging in continual collaborative conversation with others, Hejinian enacts a practice of encounter. This conversational method of textual representation encourages her reader to question and attempt to decode and read into the content, format and wider context of her work, rendering that act of decoding, or active reading, an integral component to the textual experience. In addition to encouraging an active readership,

Hejinian, by modeling her writing practice upon the reading of archives as a series of encounters, places herself on record. Whilst she self-reflexively articulates the irony of the archive for the silenced female subject, she simultaneously reverses that irony through the publication of autobiographical and semi-autobiographical texts, articulating herself, as an active female speaking subject. In addition to this vocalization of the silent female subject,

Dever, Newman and Vickery argue the point developed thoroughly by Vickery in her book

Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing, that:

While literary history records an author’s published contributions to literary culture, archival materials might also reveal the larger dynamics of the literary scene and the other equally significant roles through which women actively forged that culture.23

Hejinian’s collective body of archived letters is further expanded as her letters feature in the archives of other women writers from the same period in time as well. Her letters to poet Susan Howe evidence considerable discussion of gender politics. Hejinian’s archive also features a vast amount of correspondence with other writers, many of whom were instrumental in the formulation of the Language writing group during the 1970s and 1980s.

Hejinian’s letters provide a significant insight into, and illustration of that literary scene.

23 Dever, M. / Newman, S. / Vickery, A., The Intimate Archive: Journey Through Private Papers: 11 15

Vickery’s Leaving Lines of Gender offers a detailed account of these correspondences, particularly between the women involved in the formation of experimental literary groups such as the Language group of writers, arguing that “while male Language writers focused predominantly on the dangers of commodity fetishism, an equal number of women writers took gender as an object of critique.”24 Vickery examines trends between experimental women writers and highlights significant ventures which established correspondences between these writers, which further articulated the presence of a collective women’s scene, within the Language writing group which is not made particularly explicit compared to the more widely known concerns of such literary scenes. She argues that:

In order to publish, innovative women writers were forced to start their own printing presses or journals… Lyn Hejinian founded Tuumba Press, featuring writers like Fraser, Susan Howe, and Barbara Baracks in the first series… Many of these ventures grounded or ran concurrently with Language writing projects, ensuring a rich cross-fertilization of ideas.25

Vickery’s Leaving Lines of Gender serves as a point of departure for this thesis through its articulation of an at times inexplicit feminist trend within the Language writing group, highlighting the fact that the notion of gender was of key concern within experimental writing groups and within the work of female poets like Hejinian, who do not immediately appear to engage with gender as a central theme throughout their writing endeavors.

Vickery addresses this semi-apparent feminist tendency within Hejinian’s work, as she explains that:

24Vickery, A., Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language writing, Hanover: Wesleyan University Press: 2000: 7 25 Ibid: 8‐9 16

Throughout the late seventies to late eighties, Hejinian and Howe engaged in an ongoing dialogue on feminism and its relation to their writing and to their everyday life… …Hejinian, although certainly attracted to particular concepts such as the open text, had a relation to French feminism as ambivalent as it was enthusiastic.26

By focusing on the very tactile mediums and practices involved in the processes of running small printing presses and publishing journals, Vickery brings the genre of women’s writing into close association with an essence of visuality and materiality, highlighting the tactile mediums and intricate practices involved in the processes of publication as vibrant avenues for a female form of representation and expression. Reading between the lines of

Language poetry’s central focus upon the capacities of language, there emerges an inexplicit but persistent feminist trend, within the arena of publication, hosting a particular female vernacular, which permeates a vast portion of Hejinian’s published and unpublished writing ventures.

Oren Izenberg identifies within the Language writing group a strong trend of collaborative texts, specifically focusing his analysis on Leningrad, by Davidson, Hejinian, Silliman and

Watten. Collaboration is a method of inquiry which Hejinian retains and develops throughout her writing career as a process of inquiry harnessed to trace the female subject.

This tracing is not executed with the aim of rescuing or reviving the female subject from some inherent place of doom. Rather, it is activated with the aim of locating her and commencing the project of writing her into being. Izenberg argues that:

26 Ibid: 53‐54 17

The central interest of the “radical” poetry of the tradition of which Language poetry is a part is not social justice but the truth or ontological basis of the social; it means neither to represent particular interests in order to create opportunities for sympathetic identification, nor to create the social structures that allow for adjudication between interests, but rather to offer an approach to the profound problem of determining in virtue of what can be said that persons are to begin with.27

Hejinian, in the broader context of her work, in the same vein as Izenberg’s argument about Leningrad, does not explicitly critique with a goal of implementing or encouraging social justice, but rather, by conducting an ontological study of the social more broadly through the utilization and integration of varied media and genres, attempts to cast a new understanding of the female subject into being.

Kate Fagan articulates this notion of ontology through a focus upon the epistemological and philosophical scene of inquiry within Lyn Hejinian’s writing. She examines Hejinian’s letter writing amidst her broader writing practice to propose a method of approaching

Hejinian’s work, as a work of poetry intertwined with an ethics. Fagan argues that:

During a period that nominally encompasses the years 1976 to 2002, Hejinian has produced a prolific array of written texts that develop an exquisitely detailed, highly methodical, inclusive, and materially sensate poetic. Hejinian’s poems and poetical essays calibrate poetry’s potential as an investigative and unequivocally philosophical medium. They inhabit a border zone between poetics and ethics, partly by exploring linkages between compositional choice and epistemological dilemma; between poetic forms, descriptive language, perceptual experience, and the reach of thought’s improvisation.28

27 Izenberg, O., “Language Poetry and Collective Life”, Critical Inquiry: (30:1):Autumn 2003: 159 28 Fagan, K., “‘Constantly I write this happily’: Encountering Lyn Hejinian”: 2002: 4 18

In the development of her argument regarding a feminist undercurrent to the broader writing project that is Language writing, Ann Vickery establishes certain associations between tactile mediums and women’s innovative literary ventures. This thesis develops a hypothesis based upon the work of Lyn Hejinian with the argument that her writing project, consisting of all her writing endeavors – poetic, critical, published and unpublished

– serves as a self-reflexive and self-conscious, experimental and always-questioning, writing of herself as a woman and as a writer. This writing process is activated through prolific literary volume and highly intricate and complicated poetical inquiry, into the histories from which she, as metonymical of other women throughout Western histories, has been omitted.

In Reverie of Stein – A Visuality in Language

Dever, Newman and Vickery’s conceptualization of the notion of collaboration as a method of “foregrounding tensions between self and other” is expanded throughout

Hejinian’s individual work ethic as she implements the collaborative framework of working collectively with other people, to instigating a collaborative relationship between various modalities of writing. An ambience of visuality has been evident within Hejinian’s work throughout the course of her writing career, perhaps the earliest traces of which were

19 witnessed through the beautiful and meticulously assembled publications from her own printing press, Tuumba. Hejinian’s aesthetic tendencies, articulated early in her writing career – through her Tuumba publications – evolve into her latter involvement in the writing and production of numerous limited edition artist-books, such as the collaborative texts, Individuals (1988, with Kit Robinson), The Traveler and the Hill and The Hill (1998, with Emilie Clark) and Chartings (2000, with Ray DiPalma). In addition to these, Hejinian has also contributed to the writing and production of various rare folios such as These

Blossoms Will Be Gone in a Week – a collaborative printing exercise conceived of in 1998, with the poetry within the folio composed by the full-time and guest faculty at The Jack

Kerouac School (The Department of Writing and Poetics as Naropa University). Hejinian’s writing practice is significantly informed and inclusive of the visual, both verbally through her particular treatment of poetic language and graphically through the incorporation of visual imagery and a visually enticing aesthetic in several of her published texts.

Hejinian’s explanation, in an interview with Craig Dworkin, that “part of the things…

[she] liked about Tuumba Press was that it was letterpress on beautiful paper – and then roughly stapled… [and] they only cost a couple of dollars”29, signals a significance of aesthetics within her work. Hejinian’s further explanation that “… certainly the Tuumba edition of a work was not the final publication, it was a way of getting news out… Tuumba press published the first books of lots of people”30 renders the material and visual qualities of her work as integrally imbedded textual components which are not utilized with the

29Dworkin, C. D., “Roughly Stapled: An Interview with Lyn Hejinian”, originally published in Idiom #3: 1995 – Accessed at Hejinian author page at Electronic Poetry Centre: 1996 – World Wide Web ‐ http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/hejinian/roughly.html ‐ no pagination: last accessed ‐ 22/10/2012 30 Ibid. 20 intention of creating expensive and rare commodities or art objects, but rather as a visually enriched and colourful concept of language.

Hejinian’s use of verbal imagery and art in the structure of her poetic writing is identified and explicated by Amy Myrick in her essay “The Obvious Analogy is with Music: Art and

Music in Lyn Hejinian’s My Life”, as she identifies structural and stylistic similarities between Hejinian’s writing and methods of visual and musical composition, simultaneously drawing a comparison between the free association format of Hejinian’s writing to that of the painting style and methodology of Surrealist art. Myrick argues that:

While Hejinian alludes to photography, her writing can also be read photographically in several ways. First, she uses vivid visual imagery in some passages to create snapshots of her memories. Also, her use of fragmentation allows readers to view each sentence like a photograph. Each one captures a complete thought or idea. The pages of Hejinian’s work are filled with photographic snapshots of her life. Some of them call to mind vivid mental pictures.31

Visual culture theorist W. J. T. Mitchell addresses the concept of such verbal and mental pictures, arguing that, “the literary treatment of pictures is, of course, quite unabashed in its celebration of their uncanny personhood and vitality, perhaps because the literary image does not have to be faced directly, but is distanced by the secondary mediation of language.32 Hejinian draws upon just such a sense of uncanny vitality attained through a literary treatment of the visual in the attempt to render knowledge strange and through that

31 Myrick, A., “'The Obvious Analogy Is with Music': Art and Music in Lyn Hejinian's My Life”, Publications of the Mississippi Philological Association, 2006: 70 32Mitchell, W.J.T., What do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press: 2005: 31 21 strangeness evoke a new encounter separated somewhat from pre-existent ideology.

Myrick argues that Hejinian’s heightened engagement with musical and visual modalities within her work have enabled her to express and address, through the literary mode, a different level of consciousness, often not accessible, and substantially new to the medium of writing. She argues that:

By borrowing Surrealism’s free association and disjunction, she questions the traditional ways in which we make associations and creates new and unusual ones… Her point is that humans think through association. However, when they bind themselves to traditional modes of association, they limit their ability to truly express themselves and thereby, limit their ability to construct their reality.33

Myrick’s argument that the visual and musical incorporations evident throughout

Hejinian’s writing have an ontological resonance is of key relevance to this thesis in its endeavor to demonstrate the phenomenological relevance of Hejinian’s work as a hybrid modality concerned not with methods of representation, but through experimentations in presentation, in the construction of a concept of textual reality, inextricable from the lived experience.

This inquiry into representations of the real and the reality/ realness of representation evokes an understanding of Hejinian’s writing as being stylistically indebted to the work of

Gertrude Stein34, to whom Hejinian acknowledges a stylistic affiliation, stating that:

33Myrick, A., “'The Obvious Analogy Is with Music': Art and Music in Lyn Hejinian's My Life”: 78 34 Kate Fagan’s dissertation, “‘Constantly I write this happily’: Encountering Lyn Hejinian”: 2002, addresses in detail the many parallels between Stein’s and Hejinian’s writing, and lives, articulating Stein’s significant influence on Hejinian. 22

I read some of Stein early on, and then I didn’t read any for years and years until Marjorie Perloff wrote an article pointing out how obviously I was influenced… I don’t think I was so much influenced as intensely respectful – with some reservations too.35

Stein, like Hejinian, was writing in the midst of an active literary and artistic community, in the company of many avant garde modernist artists and writers. Her experimental writing was conversant with, and addressed, the same themes and representational queries that circulated throughout the contemporary art scene of the time – namely methods of representing what was conceived of as reality. Stein’s attempt at a redefinition of existing notions of realism was a significant precursor to Hejinian’s writing which further develops this approach towards realism through the formulation of writing as reality articulated by

Hejinian in explanation of her own essay “If Written Is Writing”. Here she states that “the writtenness of it was important, since I wanted to propose writing as a material manifestation, an embodiment, of desire for reality.”36 Within this construct of reality through writing, also like Stein, Hejinian often implicitly, situates a speaking female subject. Ann Vickery addresses the avenue of realism in Stein’s work through an explication of the notion of the postmodern biography, as she argues that:

Postmodern biography is a mode of writing that self-consciously emphasizes the role of the social imaginary in constructing various narratives about the person… Postmodern biography may be viewed as attempting to focus on the writing rather than the written: the very act of describing a person proves the means by which the agency of subjectivity may be recouped… Like Hejinian… Stein… [,was] involved in exploring the epistemic boundaries of one’s self through performative acts or construction and reconstruction.37

35 Hejinian L., in McHale, B. / McCaffery, L., “A Local Strangeness: An Interview with Lyn Hejinian”: 145 36 Hejinian L., The Language of Inquiry: 26 37 Vickery, A., Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing: 2000: 234 23

Hejinian’s postmodern autobiography My Life, in line with the majority of her work which functions, at least partially, as autobiographic in a Steinian fashion, centralizes focus on the writing itself as opposed to the final written product, enabling her, in Vickery’s terms, to

“recoup” the “agency of subjectivity”. This thesis reads through the intricacies of

Hejinian’s writing to locate throughout an inextricable, though often implicit, feminist trend, geared towards the articulation of a female subject.

In Hejinian’s “Two Stein Talks” we are introduced to Gertrude Stein’s significant influence on Hejinian as a writer. This influence is articulated through an essentially imagist vocabulary which highlights Stein’s writing as a practice significantly informed by, and integrated with, an understanding of the visual. In “Language and Realism”

Hejinian traces and explains the influence of realism, for Stein, through the practice of writers Emil Zola and Gustave Flaubert and modernist artists like Cézanne, and in

“Grammar and landscape” she develops a conceptualization of Stein’s perception of the written text as analogous to the concept of the painted landscape. In an introduction to the two talks in her collection of essays, The Language of Inquiry, Hejinian establishes an association between the concepts of the visual and the feminine, as she speaks of her father in the context of her introduction to Stein, who represented for her a successful female writer. Hejinian reveals that her father “... Chaffee Earl Hall Jr., an aspiring writer (he became an academic administrator and a notable painter), wrote to Gertrude Stein.”38 She explains that though she does not have a copy of the letter sent by her father, she does have the response letter, written by Stein’s partner Alice B. Toklas.

38 Hejinian, L., The Language of Inquiry, (Introduction to “Two Stein Talks”): 83 24

Though the nature of Stein’s stylistic influence on Hejinian’s writing philosophies emerges more coherently in the talks themselves, Hejinian clearly expresses a strong regard for

Stein as she writes:

Gertrude Stein was a canonical figure in the culture of my father. And in a profound sense, I credit him not only with the origin of my own interests in Gertrude Stein, but also with a sense of my own artistic possibilities. Thanks to my father’s crediting Gertrude Stein, a woman, with genius, I took it that gender would not be a bar to my own attempts to be a writer.39

Her father’s admiration for Stein’s writing signals for Hejinian a form of reclamation of the predominantly masculine utilization of the term, “genius”, (for example Freud’s claim towards Da Vinci, that “he was a universal genius...”40), to incorporate female writing also, encouraging her to pursue her desire to become a writer.

In “Language and Realism” Hejinian highlights Stein’s treatment and understanding of the notion of realism. She elucidates that though Stein did not take on board exact methods employed by realist writers like Flaubert to create a near-exact replica of reality, perhaps due to concerns of that being the ultimate in artifice, Stein did pursue the idea of depicting reality. Hejinian outlines Stein’s approach to realism, highlighting the idea that for Stein,

“... language is an order of reality itself and not a mere mediating medium – that it is possible and even likely that one can have a confrontation with a phrase that is as

39 Ibid: 84 40 Freud, S., “Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood” in Sigmund Freud Volume 14 – Art and Literature, Penguin Books: England: 1990: 151 ‐ (Present English translation first published in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho‐ Analysis: London) ‐ in Volume XI (1957) 25 significant as a confrontation with a tree, chair, cone, dog, bishop... .”41 This notion of a confrontation in language, as in life, signals Hejinian’s own engagement with a reality that is inextricable from language, echoing her justification behind the writing of The Guard, which can be extended towards her broader writing oeuvre, that:

The situation of The Guard is a phenomenological one, an unstable situation involving perceiver, perception (or perceiving), perceived, and the various meanings of their interrelationships… By “the perceived,” I mean not only objects, but also events, emotions, ideas, and the various interconnections that bind them within the world. I assume the reality of everything.42

Hejinian furthers her analysis of Stein, arguing that “in the course of being detected, things

– that is, objects, events, and ideas – that seem arbitrary and indiscriminate are rendered logical and relevant.”43 What she utilizes from her reading and understanding of Stein is an order of reality within language, defined by a form of objectivism or materiality which renders the words on the page as objects for encounter, each one bearing an aura of its own and its own network of denotative and connotative vectors. Kate Fagan examines Stein’s influence on Hejinian’s objectivist tendency in writing, arguing that:

Gertrude Stein’s inventions have shown Lyn Hejinian much about an aesthetics of perception as contextualised by problems of descriptive language. Stein wrote of and in context, extending sentence dimensions until the vast, minute changes and details of present “reality” could become a literal procedure – a worldly composition.44

41 Hejinian, L., “Two Stein Talks”, The Language of Inquiry: 90 42 Ibid: “Language and “Paradise””:61 43 Ibid: “Two Stein Talks”: 91 44 Fagan, K., “‘Constantly I write this happily’: Encountering Lyn Hejinian”: 108 26

Rendering the word as object, through both a specialized treatment of language and through the aestheticising of literary texts, enables a redefined textual encounter integral to

Hejinian’s hybrid writing method which travels towards the development of a formulation of a new method in textual experience, situated within a context of presence or currency as opposed to one of latent reflection. This focus on the material or the worldly gives her writing an extended sense of sincerity to the world ‘as is’ at any given moment, less subject to the bias of reflection integral to more linear narrative forms. Perhaps the most prominent example of this form of textual encounter can be identified in Hejinian and

Clark’s artist book The Lake which confronts the reader first and foremost as an object – too bulky and graphically captivating to be considered primarily as a written work.

In her second essay titled “Grammar and Landscape”, Hejinian outlines the significance of a comparison of language with the notion of landscapes in a conceptualization of Stein’s work as she states that:

Landscape, in and of itself, is a model of longevity. It has the virtue of being complete, and so of seeming permanent – eternal. As a form, therefore, it is solemn and vacant, because nothing can match it. No condition, or set or array of conditions, achieves a finalized form of landscape – which makes landscape an exemplary case, a spread of examples.”45

The notion of the landscape is one steeped in visual traditions and is significant in the understanding of the imagist tendency which permeates a vast extent of Hejinian’s writing.

As a linguistic metaphor, the notion of the landscape for Stein frames the written text as eternal and simultaneously liminal – as one loaded with endless possibility. Hejinian’s

45 Hejinian, L., “Two Stein Talks”, The Language of Inquiry: 105 27 articulation of Stein’s use of the landscape model in writing as a figure of evolution, currency and non-permanence permeates the fabric of her own writing practice, made evident through the multiple editions of her autobiography, My Life, and the ever-growing expanse of her personal archived papers. Stein’s landscape framework is further reinforced through Hejinian’s strong use of repetition throughout individual texts but also throughout the wider context of both her published and unpublished work. A reading of Hejinian’s writing through an understanding of Stein’s landscape of language allows for a conceptualization of Hejinian’s work as cumulative and continually subject to change with a capacity for capturing a realistic snapshot of any moment in time with historical and contextual temporal integrity. Hejinian’s personal archive, constantly expanding as

Hejinian writes new work and engages in new correspondence, illustrates her conceptualization of Stein’s notion of landscape as a non-finalized and ever-evolving spread of examples. New additions to the archive continually alter the conceptual landscape it inhabits. Similarly, Hejinian’s continual work in progress, My Life, is continually shifting as a landscape, through the variable contributing elements which construct its disposition, namely, Hejinian’s actual life, written additions to the text and its contextual situation.

The notion of the aesthetic, requiring both visual and material considerations, is an inextricable and significant element comprising the language of Hejinian’s poetic practice.

Her texts composed through an interweaving of graphic and verbal forms of imagery are the subject matter for an extended textual analysis in chapter two of this thesis. The arenas of the visual and material are an ideal integration into Hejinian’s poetic practice as they 28 harbor the capacity for articulating an essence of female silence. The visual image and the held object, devoid of words, are automatically silent. Their integration into the poetic text enables Hejinian to articulate female silence and to render the female subject with speaking capacity.

Although visuality and materiality are prominent factors within Hejinian’s work, they have predominantly been examined through a literary lens. Charles Altieri for example, argues against the objectification of poetry within radical poetics as he states:

I think we need a notion of absorption that does not collapse rhetoricity into materiality but keeps attention focused on the rhetorical project carried out by the poem… The more fully the text absorbs us, the more fully it actually works against its own specific materiality.46

Altieri’s argument, though concerned with the material, is predominantly focused upon the linguistic formulation of that materiality and its implications for poetry. Similarly, Juliana

Spahr gestures towards the configuration of visuality in Hejinian’s My Life, in her argument that, “My Life’s refusal to reflect a single image of the autobiographical subject encourages readers to take on agency and to question the changes in perception, knowledge, and thinking they undergo in this autobiographical encounter.”47 The visual, and in this particular instance, the notable absence of the visual, are addressed by Spahr as an expanded reflection upon Hejinian’s treatment of the autobiographic subject. Though

46 Altieri, C., “Some problems about agency in the theories of radical poetics”, Contemporary Literature, 1996: (37:2): 231 47 Spahr, J., “Resignifying Autobiography: Lyn Hejinian's My Life”, American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography, 1996 March: (68:1): 147 29

Hejinian’s utilization of notions of both the visual and the material are integrally interwoven with questions of subjectivity and readerly reception, this thesis expands beyond an analysis of their integration with language in an analysis of Hejinian’s persistent use of both graphic (not purely verbal) visuality and tactile (not purely phenomenological) material mediums throughout her writing practice. This thesis examines the significance of

Hejinian’s immediate and preliminary use of the visual and material prior to addressing the modalities’ integration and resonance within literary and theoretical frameworks.

This thesis argues that Hejinian’s experimental, and visually and materially charged language is in fact tightly interwoven throughout the fabric of a broader writing project, necessitating further research and examination of the aesthetic tendencies throughout her work. The select few critics who have chosen to focus on the aesthetic principles which permeate Hejinian’s writing, articulate significant facets of her oeuvre which require further examination. Nicky Marsh reproaches Hejinian scholars like Hilary Clark and

Craig Dworkin for not focusing on Hejinian’s hesitant desire to ‘go on, to retell’, but rather on “…the more confident and pleasurable manipulations of autobiography to be found in

My Life… ”48 This thesis ventures further into these avenues, contending that what Marsh terms as “pleasurable manipulations”, in fact signals a greater tendency towards the visual and the material throughout Hejinian’s broader project of work requiring more significant attention than it has been attributed to date.

48 Marsh, N., “‘Infidelity to an Impossible Task’: Postmodernism, Feminism and Lyn Hejinian’s ‘My Life’”, Feminist Review: 2003: (74): 74 30

Craig Dworkin offers us the most in-depth analyses of Hejinian’s writing with consideration of the visual and the tactile. Through his comparison of Hejinian’s My Life and the traditional nineteenth-century American practice of quilt making, Dworkin addresses the text’s central concepts concerned with medium/form, subject/object, history/memory and gender. His utilization of the metaphors of the quilt and quilt making, constructs a positive reclamation of domestic female activity and artistic form. This comparison is illuminated as he writes that:

… there are long… lines behind every idea, and with a constant reduction of tension in the connecting string, these lines travel through the text like a needle stitching through fabric and leaving the trace of its passage in an ever-lengthening thread.49

Dworkin’s comparative association of Hejinian’s autobiography with the traditional practice of quilt making, in addition to its reference to both domestic and communal female activity, draws upon the notions of history and memory in the composition of a metaphor which places Hejinian’s experimental poetic in conversation with a broader context of female histories.

In addition to this, he situates Hejinian’s echo of the visual and the material in her linguistic assemblage of My Life, within the realms of visual culture (citing visual culture theorist, Lippard) as he makes his claims that, “coinciding with the renewed production of quilts that erupted with the Bicentennial, “the new wave of feminist art [that] began around

49Dworkin, C. D., “Penelope Reworking the Twill: Patchwork, Writing, and Lyn Hejinian’s My Life”, Contemporary Literature: 1995 (Spring): (36:1): 76 31

1970” incorporated the quilt as one of its primary visual metaphors (Lippard 32)50, and concurrently, quiltlike forms appeared in the art works of women sculptors and collagists

(Schapiro 306) 51.”52 By situating Hejinian within the realms of both visual culture and feminist cultural practice, Dworkin establishes a valuable association between Hejinian’s work, visuality, materiality and the female subject.

A Material Encounter

The conceptualization of the material object within Hejinian’s writing enables an understanding of a form of embodied materialism representative of the phenomenological position of the writing subject and text as inseparable from lived experience. This focus on the material enables a further integration of text and reader, in the writing of a form of ethics-based poetry (addressed earlier) and of a broader life-time literary project, comprised by a multiplicity of multi-modal writing ventures and the assembling of archive materials. An understanding of the correlation between the elements of visuality and materiality within Hejinian’s work provides entry into a conceptualization of her writing

50 Lippard, L. R., “Up, Down, and Across: A New Frame for New Quilts” in Robinson C. (Ed.), The Artist and the Quilt, New York: Knopf: 1983: 32 ‐ cited in Dworkin, C. D., “Penelope Reworking the Twill: Patchwork, Writing, and Lyn Hejinian’s My Life”, Contemporary Literature: 66 51 Schapiro, M., “Femmage” in K. Hoffman (Ed.), Collage: Critical Views, (Studies in the Fine Arts Criticism), Ann Arbour: UMI Research Press: 1989: 306 – cited in Dworkin, C. D., “Penelope Reworking the Twill: Patchwork, Writing, and Lyn Hejinian’s My Life”, Contemporary Literature: 66 52Dworkin, C. D., “Penelope Reworking the Twill: Patchwork, Writing, and Lyn Hejinian’s My Life”, Contemporary Literature: 66

32 project as a form of dream language. This dream language, highly imagistic, immediate

(unfiltered through waking consciousness), and strange (rendered through material encounter as new), serves in the illustration of what Hejinian boldly argues is the female position in the Western literary tradition (discussed previously).

Hejinian addresses the material in several ways. Primary amongst these is her account of

Stein’s treatment of the object as having a capacity for enhancing an experience of reality in language and Stein’s desire to “… understand things not in isolated rigidity, which falsified and monumentalized conditions which were fluid, but as present participants in ongoing living – outpouring, fountainous living.”53 Charles Bernstein’s essay “Professing

Stein/Stein Professing” ideally illustrates the relevance of Stein’s poetics to a poetics like

Hejinian’s that is concerned with a sense of the material within language. Bernstein argues:

I think this is the meaning of Stein’s great discovery – call it invention – of “wordness” in the last section of The Making of Americans and in Tender Buttons: satisfaction in language made present… where language is not understood as a code for something else … a kind of eating or drinking or tasting, endowing an object status to language, if objects are realized not to be nouns; a revelation of the ordinary as sufficient unto itself...54

Stein’s writing, in recognizing a certain objective and material quality of language, enables the conceptualization of a very experiential form of expression which renders an encounter with things ordinary as strange, new and extraordinary.

53 Hejinian, L., “Two Stein Talks”, The Language of Inquiry: 101 54 Bernstein, C., A Poetics: Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press: 1992: 143 33

Another primary materialist poetic influence for Hejinian was the late-modernist poet

George Oppen associated with the objectivist tradition of the 1970s, who as Peter Nicholls argues “...pertains most directly to the features of Hejinian’s [poetry]... It may be argued... that Oppen registers a shift in late modernism by trying to specify the ethical rather than political dimension of aesthetics.”55

The modernist shift recognized by Nicholls, often regarded as encompassing ‘difficult’ literature, emerges through a specific focus on the faculties and capacities of language itself as opposed to ideological implications, commonly inscribed through the narrative format. Hejinian argues against the perception of such literature as ‘difficult’. She borrows

Louis Zukofsky’s ‘sincerity’ concept, and states that “… on the contrary, it is the material manifestation of the work’s mutability, its openness... a forming, a manifestation of what the Objectivists would have termed its “sincerity” – the ethical principle by which the poet tests words against the actuality of the world…” 56 For Hejinian, the Objectivist principles enable a “sincere” form of writing in the sense that it is based in the actuality of being.

This is illustrated in part through Hejinian’s claim, citing Peter Nicholls, that, “Language, employed as an instrument of sincerity, puts one not in relation but in a relation that involves “exposure to the claims of others…. For ‘sincerity’ is not so much a true account of one’s inner feelings…, as an acceptance of what exceeds the self.””57 Hejinian suggests

55Nicholls, P., “Phenomenal Poetics: Reading Lyn Hejinian”, in Delville, M. / Pagnoulle, C. (Eds.), Mechanics of the Mirage: Postwar American Poetry, Liège, Belgium: Liège Language and Literature, English Department: Université de Liège: 2000: 245 56 Hejinian, L., “Barbarism”, The Language of Inquiry: 331 57 Ibid: 332 ‐ Nicholls, P., “Of Being Ethical: Reflections on George Oppen,” Journal of American Studies 31: 1997: (2): 160 – cited in text 34 that such a “sincere” concept of writing, through an encounter with objects, enables a method of representation which serves as an acknowledgement of the world – a recording of things as they are at any one given moment in time. Citing Peter Nicholls’ argument, she states that ““... for Oppen, “the point was that a poetics founded on the

(philosophically) simple recognition of actuality… might offer a way of acknowledging the world and others without seeking to reduce them to objects of knowledge.””58Language, processed through a filter of objectification through an engagement with word specifics such as letters and sounds and less so with their connotative capacities – their meanings – but also more simply through a listing of certain objects (e.g.: Marigolds, nasturtiums, snapdragons, sweet William, forget-me-nots, replaced by chard, tomatoes, lettuce, garlic, peas, beans, carrots, radishes – but marigolds”59), anchors Hejinian’s poetics within the reality of existence and grants her writing an objective status, less subject to the authorial instruction and direction common to more narrative orientated forms of literature. The material elements which emerge throughout Hejinian’s literature, both verbally (through language) and physically (through an incorporation of tactile elements not often associated with works of literature), provide an element of integrity to an experimental writing format which, as will be examined throughout the course of this thesis, seeks to, and has the capacity to, articulate an active and audible female subjectivity.

58 Ibid. 59 Hejinian, L., My Life: 119 35

Hejinian’s treatment of notions of the material emerges to some extent through her reading of materialist phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In her essay “Language and

Paradise” Hejinian directs the reader to Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of

Perception, citing his argument that “in trying to describe the phenomenon of speech and the specific act of meaning, we shall have the opportunity to leave behind us, once and for all, the traditional subject-object dichotomy.”60 Though there is appeal for her in the notion of destabilizing this dichotomy – made evident through her claims that “such a statement would seem to refute the notion that language is always and inevitably mediate… [and]

…it serves as a guide to phenomena…”61 – Hejinian also reveals where Merleau-Ponty’s theory falls short of her conceptualization of language as she argues that it “…stands as a guard against our being “ultimately at one” with… [phenomena], since language is the principle medium through which we objectify things and our experience of them… It’s through language, after all, that we discover our nonautonomous being.”62 Hejinian’s materially and visually wealthy language utilizes Merleau-Ponty’s concept as a platform from which she commences her own extended conceptualizations of language, not simply signaling a challenge to fixed subject-object delineations but also moving us towards an understanding of language and writing as integral factors comprising the reader’s experience both intra- and extra-textually. Kate Fagan’s argument that, “though seductive in its promise of radical flight into extra-subjective states of being, Merleau-Ponty’s avowal resists the mediate nature of language”63, suggests the necessity for a different approach with respect to the materiality of Hejinian’s writing project. Hejinian’s argument

60 Merleau‐Ponty, M., The Phenomenology of Perception, (Smith, C., Trans.): London: Routledge & Kegan Paul: 1962: 174 – cited in Hejinian, L., “Language and “Paradise””, The Language of Inquiry: 69 61 Hejinian, L., “Language and “Paradise””, The Language of Inquiry:69 62 Ibid. 63 Fagan, K., “‘Constantly I write this happily’: Encountering Lyn Hejinian”: 110 36 for a principal mediative function of language makes necessary a conceptualization of the material as a vital component within her writing whereby the very basic units of the word and even the letter need to be conceived of as bearing material significance. Fagan directs us towards such a conception through an analysis of Hejinian’s The Guard which applies to a significant portion of Hejinian’s other works also, as she argues that, “positioning her poem between worldly phenomena and perceptual processes, Hejinian scrutinizes language as the “principle medium” through which we discover both separateness and linkage.”64

It is in light of Hejinian’s directive inquiry for the consideration of the “mediate” situation of language (as conceptualized by Fagan) as being located between theory and thing, that this thesis provides an analysis of Hejinian’s approach towards materiality through the alternate avenue of Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory”, which unlike Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, renders language and things with subjective capabilities. In his essay “Thing

Theory” Brown conceptualizes the phenomenology of things as he argues that:

We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us… when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested… The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.65

Brown’s illustration of the confrontation between the perceiving subject and the object which ceases to perform its expected functions when it breaks down provides a framework through which Hejinian’s objectivist language can be better understood. This objectivist

64 Ibid. 65Brown, B., “Thing Theory”, Critical Inquiry: (28:1): Things: Autumn 2001: 4 37 language is illustrated by her experimental poetic which isolates words, phrases and sentences as individually significant textual elements, as well as by her publishing practices and involvement in the writing of artist-books and her inclusion of tactile textual elements throughout her writing practice. Through this textual objectification Hejinian expands the textual capacities of her poetry. Johanna Drucker examines one example of

Hejinian’s involvement in the writing of an artist-book as she addresses her 1988 text,

Individuals, written in collaboration with Kit Robinson. Drucker explicates the extended potential of Hejinian and Robinson’s choice of artist-book format as she argues that,

“…each “page” is in essence two pages, a top and a bottom strip, on which the text of one poet is printed letter press. The articulation of the dialogue becomes an exchange of spaces, as well as linguistic remarks, through the sequence of the book.”66 Drucker’s analysis illustrates how Hejinian, in rendering her text as thing, expands the conversational capacities of her written poetry.

In challenging conventional formats of poetic language and language more broadly through modes of hybridity and linguistic experimentation, Hejinian creates a confrontational site of potentiality and encounter between the reading subject and the literary text. Her language and her writing practice more broadly are processed through a

‘thing’ filter, emerging strange and consequently new. Brown’s ‘thing’ charges the static object with subjective capabilities which in analytical application towards Hejinian’s work in chapter three of this thesis, enables the conceptualization of a self-reflexive polyvalent

66 Drucker, J., The Century of Artists’ Books, New York City: Granary Books: 1995: 143 38 literature concerned with consciousness; a literature communicative and interactive with its reader at multiple levels.

Assembling Knowledge

Hejinian’s expansive use of different modalities throughout her writing practice and her engagement with a multiplicity of genres such as the artist-book and the personal archive, comprise a broad assemblage of a form of knowledge which parallels the knowledge of La

Faustienne conceptualized in her essay addressed at the commencement of this introduction. In “La Faustienne” Hejinian postulates into being a female form of knowledge and renders it analogous with a form of night-time writing; as a writing emergent from the darkness of sleep – a language synonymous with the polyvalent and multifaceted structure of dreams. Hejinian explicates her motivations behind the “La

Faustienne” essay as the early precedent to her most recently published book The Book of a

Thousand Eyes, 2012, as she writes, “I have wanted to write in the dark, so to speak, when the mind must accept the world it witnesses by day and out of all data assemble meaning.

The writing would do so – assemble (a Faustian project) and, in its way, make knowledge

(the work of La Faustienne).”67 This claim enables the conceptualization of Hejinian’s

67 Hejinian, L., “La Faustienne”, The Language of Inquiry: 250 39 multiplicity of writing ventures and modalities as contributory to a larger writing project exemplary of her early anticipation of an assembled spread of examples comprising the open, ever-growing and fluid female knowledge of La Faustienne.

Hejinian’s visual and material tendencies throughout her writing endeavors, made evident through her experimental treatment of language as thing, her writing and involvement in the creation of artist-books and her own publishing and printing ventures, formulate an approach to textuality which bridges the literary and the experiential. Patterns emerge throughout the fabric of Hejinian’s visual and material poetry which are recorded and amplified through her personal archives. What emerges as a result of these points of connectivity throughout the body of her work is a collection of strange, new and different forms of knowledge unbound by the constraints and ‘anticipation of certainty’ of historical record and narrative progression. Hejinian’s concern with the making and recording of knowledge is prolific and is strongly, though not always clearly, interwoven with the notion of gender. This inexplicit gendered concern and presence within Hejinian’s work is articulated in “La Faustienne”, where she argues that:

A... central figure in the narrative of knowledge… is Faust. In one form or another, the Faust figure has dominated the quest for knowledge, and Faustian desire has driven the encyclopedic enterprises which have been undertaken in the name of that quest – the most obvious being Western science... In folklore …as in science… one typically ends up with a model in which the quest for knowledge is a male enterprise and the keeper of the known is woman… leaving female desire hidden... by definition... The greatest of all night works is the one called The Thousand and One Nights… with its chains of tales and concentricities of tales within tales... together with all that there is in them of wonder and instruction... told by a woman to postpone her death by holding a man in narrative suspense… her name is Scheherazade... In the face of knowledge, Faust is silenced. Scheherazade’s

position is the reverse of this… …for Scheherazade danger lies in silence... Where Faust sells his soul for knowledge, Scheherazade saves her life by offering it.68

Hejinian’s essay “La Faustienne” signals and directs the course of the two concluding chapters of this thesis. It takes as its premise a selection of key themes which emerge peripherally throughout Hejinian’s body of writing comprised by her published works, critical essays and archived materials. Gender, silence, knowledge and writing at night emerge through the fabric of “La Faustienne” as central concerns in Hejinian’s quest to find the male Faust’s (as the seeker of knowledge) female counterpart. These themes emerge simultaneously throughout the broader body of Hejinian’s writing materials. This thesis maps and addresses these corresponding thematic concerns throughout her work in the proposition that what she achieves through her hybrid writing project is an embodiment of knowledge as female. In “La Faustienne” Hejinian articulates Faust’s female counterpart through the character of The Thousand and One Night’s Scheherazade as the beholder and epitome of knowledge. This knowledge is represented as initially silent and is exercised and brought to life during the darkness of night. Tracing the female language of

Scheherazade simultaneously with the corresponding element of a language emergent from night-time and dreams throughout the corpus of Hejinian’s work, fosters throughout this thesis, the establishment of fruitful and significant points of connectivity which to date, have not been the concern of focused critical inquiry.

68 Ibid: 235‐260 41

The latter half of this thesis (chapters four and five) renders the concept of the dream as central and significant to an understanding of Hejinian’s broader writing project. It examines her interaction with dream concepts throughout a notable selection of both her published and unpublished materials. Though prolific, these dream threads throughout her work are inexplicit. A reading of Hejinian’s personal archives highlights the profound and significant element of the dream and a night-time concept of writing in her broader oeuvre.

Her published work concerned with dreams retains as its focus a structural appropriation of the multi-faceted and non-directive model of the dream process, emphasizing only linguistic and structural aspects of dream. However, a different, thematically driven focus emerges through a reading of Hejinian’s archives. Although there are several short published pieces concerned with dreams written by Hejinian, in addition to “La

Faustienne”, her essay “Strangeness” is the only other extensive published text which directs the reader towards an understanding of dream concepts. In “Strangeness”, Hejinian muses that, “the very writing down of a dream seems to be the act of discovering it (one

“remembers” more and more as one writes until one wonders it’s the writing itself that

“dreams”)... .”69 Dreaming in “Strangeness” is of linguistic value to Hejinian, examined as content for an intuitive and self-conscious model for writing.

Hejinian’s collection of poetry The Cell, likewise emerges from night time musing and dream reflections, however, this is not made explicit to the reader and only emerges from

Hejinian’s archives. Kate Fagan claims that “The Cell remains unparalleled in Hejinian’s

69Hejinian, L., “Strangeness”, The Language of Inquiry: 33 42 oeuvre as a work about the consciousness of consciousness.”70 Fagan addresses the undercurrent of dreams in Hejinian’s writing of The Cell, however, focuses more acutely on their situation in Hejinian’s participation in a correspondence (The Cell was written through conversations/ poetic exchanges with Kit Robinson) and her development of an ethics of writing rather than as a focus for inquiry within themselves. The prolific body of published and unpublished literature by Hejinian concerned and referential of dreams or a night-time language includes her essays “La Faustienne” and “Strangeness” and her unpublished work Sleeps housed at the Mandeville archives at UCSD, which emerged to be published as the most recent Hejinian text The Book of a Thousand Eyes. These are only a few of the works which comprise an associative arterial network throughout the corpus of

Hejinian’s writing. This dream-focused network has escaped extended critical attention to date and constitutes the object of inquiry throughout this thesis.

Within Hejinian’s works examined throughout the final two chapters of this thesis, concerned with the notions of dreams and a female subjectivity, a trend of extended fairy tale references surfaces both through poetic content and structure, signaling the relevance and significance of the fairy tale story telling mode in Hejinian’s quest to locate “La

Faustienne”. A consideration of Hannah Arendt’s theory of action within narrative emerges through Hejinian’s appropriation and treatment of the genre of the moralizing fairy tale as one that highlights the role of the often didactic storyteller. Arendt argues that:

Action reveals itself fully only to the storyteller… who indeed always knows better what it was all about than the participants. All accounts told by the actors

70Fagan, K. “‘Constantly I write this happily’: Encountering Lyn Hejinian”: 248 43

themselves, though they may in rare cases give an entirely trustworthy statement… become mere useful source material in the historian’s hands and can never match his story in significance and truthfulness… Even though stories are the inevitable results of action, it is not the actor but the storyteller who perceives and “makes” the story.71

Arendt’s account of the storyteller as creator renders him/her and his/her use of language as active contributors and assemblers of meaning. The storyteller engages with language to create a primary site of action in the compilation of meaning. Hejinian’s active night language which emerges through varied conversant interactions with the events of dreams and fairy tales, often featuring a central female character, places Arendt’s actor in the potent position of storyteller, developing further Hejinian’s phenomenological dynamics of a writing which bridges the gap between text and experience, and enabling a possibility to reflect upon the writing of women within the pages of history.

Arendt’s notion of the active female story-teller identifiable throughout a vast selection of

Hejinian’s night inspired work theoretically, initially challenges but ultimately supports, feminist historian and mythographer, Marina Warner’s chapter titled “The Silence of the

Daughters” in her book From the Beast to the Blonde. Warner theorizes Shakespeare’s

King Lear adapted from the folk tale Love Like Salt with particular focus on Lear’s youngest daughter Cordelia who expresses her love for her father with the least embellishment and theatricality, retaining an air of silence in her modest response to her father’s request for his three daughter’s expressions of their love for him. Warner argues that, “in wordlessness lies sincerity; as a mute object, Cordelia speaks from the heart, as

71 Arendt, H., The Human Condition (2nd Ed.), Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press: 1958: 192 44 even her name suggests. Words are lies – Hamlet, too, curses their fraudulence; he hears speech as a ‘promise-crammed’ and knows it to be insubstantial as air…”72 What is initially pronounced as insolence in Cordelia’s response is redeemed by what Warner argues to be an expression of sincerity. This notion of sincerity in silence recuperates the female’s capacity for speech through the underlying theme of wisdom. In addition to supporting Hejinian’s notion of sincerity through a materiality in language, as addressed earlier in this introduction, Warner’s claim is also paralleled by Hejinian’s development of a female language through the avenue of dreams (as a language emergent through the darkness of a sincere and unfiltered night-time consciousness). Hejinian’s dream-orientated works function in the articulation of the silencing of the female subject throughout the narratives of Western literature and history and result in the development of a realistic active speaking female subject.

The first three chapters of this thesis formulate a framework for approaching Lyn

72 Warner, M., From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers New York: The Noonday Press: 1994: 390

45 emerges through an analysis of both Hejinian’s published and unpublished writing materials.

Lyn Hejinian’s Reader:

Note – Textual Analysis

There is in the work a mental activity profoundly engaged in objective forms; and there is, at another level, forsaking all forms, a subject which reveals itself to itself (and to me) in its transcendence over all which is reflected in it. At this point, no object can any longer express it, no structure can any longer define it; it is exposed to its ineffability and in its fundamental indeterminacy. …It seems then that criticism, in order to accompany the mind in its effort of detachment from itself, needs to annihilate, or at least momentarily to forget, the objective elements of the work, and to elevate itself to the apprehension of a subjectivity without objectivity.73

For me, however, there lay especial significance in the fact that the spiritual development of which I speak was not an exclusive feature of philosophy. Each literary text, whether essay, novel, or poem, had a point of departure; each organized language grew out of an original moment of awareness, adjusted itself then according to the successive points it subsequently touched upon. In this realm there was no basic difference between literary and philosophical texts. All literature was philosophy for me, each philosophy was literature.74

– Georges Poulet

73Poulet, G., “Phenomenology of Reading”, New Literary History “New and Old History”: (1:1): October, 1969: 68 74Poulet, G., “The Self and the Other in Critical Consciousness”: “Poulet on Poulet”, Diacritics: (2:1): Spring, 1972: 48

Prior to commencing the first chapter of this thesis, I address briefly the complication which arises when conceptualizing the reader of Lyn Hejinian’s work. The continually shifting tense in Hejinian’s writing results in non-fixed subject-object relationships and functions significantly to incorporate the reader in the very fabric of her syntax. Juliana

Spahr explicates this complication arguing that:

… Hejinian works rigorously against a capitalized “Self” or any stability of the self… Instead of offering full multiple identities, My Life is a process-centered work that calls attention to the methods by which the autobiographical subject is constructed by both author and reader… She does not deny multiple subjectivity; as her work shows, she challenges readers to move beyond it, to embrace it as just the first step towards a resignification of the subject. Hejinian’s work, through its concern with representation, its mix of the false and the true, and its fluctuations, attempts to expand fundamentally our concept of subjectivity.75

Due to this complex situation of multiple and expanded conceptualizations of subjectivity throughout Hejinian’s writing, I draw upon the theory of literary critic Georges Poulet whose account of literary critique proposes and supports an initial entryway into any text through a highly personalized and experiential filter. Taking into account Hejinian’s implicit and integral incorporation of her readers into her writing, Poulet’s theories purporting complete textual immersion prove, in Hejinian’s instance, to be highly pertinent.

75 Spahr, J., “Resignifying Autobiography: Lyn Hejinian's My Life”, American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography: 1996 March: (68:1): 147‐148

Poulet theorizes a type of readership/criticism to be located in a reading that extracts the mechanisms for reading through the body of the written text and makes them manifest for the reader through a form of self reflexivity by the author. On many occasions Hejinian’s subject matter provides guidelines for the reader as to how they might approach and engage with her poetry. For example, in My Life, Hejinian writes, “I got it from Darwin,

Freud, and Marx. Not fragments but metonymy. Duration. Language makes tracks…”76 and in A Border Comedy this sense of an author guide occurs even more explicitly as

Hejinian includes a “Sources” list for every chapter throughout her text (a technique more common to critical than poetic writing), listing “conversations and other texts that have often contributed material to this work.”77 The type of reader described and conceptualized by Poulet in his text “Phenomenology of Reading” provides a dynamic for reading

Hejinian’s writing as one might conduct a Freudian dream interpretation – not through a series of fragmentations and inconclusive disparate elements but through a type of investigative philosophy – one based upon the principle of metonymy whereby, the reader would engage with the various textual elements to deduce their emergent reading by decoding in their own mind what the various elements might signify. He/ She would potentially engage with the philosophies of the famous thinkers listed as well as follow the instruction to not read the writing as a series of disconnected fragments but rather as an abstract but nonetheless, connected entity. The two key aspects of this reading process, when applied to Hejinian’s work, which separate it significantly from more standard reading processes is a heightened focus on the act of investigation and a higher scope of difference in relevant textual elements. For example, textual features such as covers, fonts

76 Hejinian, L., My Life, Kobenhavn & Los Angeles: Green Integer: 2002: 53 77 Hejinian, L., A Border Comedy, New York City: Granary Books: 2001: 213 49 and images, all bear relevance to the overall code of the text and require careful consideration and seemingly minor inter-textual referencing can present for the reader increased levels of meaning.

Poulet’s ideal reader/critic ought to detach him/herself from the intertexts and various potential guidelines for reading and simply engage at a more immediate level with the text, even if only momentarily, in order to connect with its ultimate potential. The reader/critic, for Poulet, ought to be completely immersed within the text before embarking upon in- depth critical inquiry. This immersion within an experiential form of reading is essential when approaching Hejinian’s writing. The reader ought to feel and experience the power of the text through their own subjectivity before proceeding to extensively decode and interact with the overarching subjectivity/ presence of another.

According to Poulet“…criticism must… lay stress above all on the first encounter of self with its own being: all criticism is first and foremost a criticism of consciousness.”78 If criticism is first and foremost to be a criticism of consciousness, the reader must firstly, prior to responding to, know and experience that sense of consciousness. Hejinian’s reader, when approaching her work, is confronted firstly by an ethics of reading and philosophical inquiry whereby he/she develops a method of reading and approaching the text almost before or if not, then simultaneously with, discovering the actual content of the text.

78 Poulet, G., “The Self and the Other in Critical Consciousness”, Diacritics: 50

Hejinian’s frequent citation and mention of philosophers and theorists encourages a particular reader-specific reading practice dependent upon a specific text’s individual reader and that reader’s context. In light of this the textual analysis throughout the course of this thesis is at times strongly personalized. So whilst I risk being partial to my own perceptions and immediate responses, they are by virtue of the text and the philosophy at hand, the most sincere and accessible in my responses to Hejinian’s writing and my analysis of her reading audience.

For Poulet the reader/ critic approaching any piece of literature ought to immerse him/herself in the initial moment of contact with the text – in that experience that might be described as being ‘beyond words’ – in order to construct a comprehensive and thorough understanding and critique of the writing in question. Because of Hejinian’s experimental and abstract approach to language whereby she herself acknowledges her work’s anchorage within experience and reality, Poulet’s methodology for literary critique becomes productive in analysis of her work. If Hejinian’s reader is to approach the written text with a preconceived notion of structured narrative flow and the expectation that the text’s content will easily manifest before them, he/she will encounter some difficulty. If however he/she engages primarily with Poulet’s “original moment of awareness”79 and at a later stage responds to his/her own consciousness in experiencing the text, a far more productive and comprehensive understanding/encounter is likely to emerge.

79Poulet, G., “The Self and the Other in Critical Consciousness”: “Poulet on Poulet”, Diacritics: 2: 48 51

Hejinian postulates her approach towards poetics in her introductory text to her collected essays in The Language of Inquiry as she writes:

…in reading over these essays, I realize that I have tended to cast poetics into the role of how and why a poet works, elaborating her reasoning and reasons. Poetics, in this respect, seems as much a philosophical realm as a literary one. But it is a pragmatic realm, nonetheless; the reasons and reasoning that motivate poet (and poem) are embedded in the world and in the language with which we bring it into view. The resulting praxis is addressed to phenomenological and epistemological concerns. But it is also a denotatively social and therefore political practice. Poetry comes to know that things are. But this is not knowledge in the strictest sense; it is rather, acknowledgement – and that constitutes a sort of unknowing… This acknowledging is a process, not a definitive act; it is an inquiry, a thinking on… The language of poetry is a language of inquiry, not the language of a genre. It is that language in which a writer (or a reader) both perceives and is conscious of the perception. Poetry, therefore, takes as its premise that language is a medium for experiencing experience.80

As Hejinian explains here, poetry is a form of writing involved with the notion of experience two-fold. Like Poulet, she recognizes within writing an imbedded experiencing of experience. As her hypothetical poetry reader is rendered as simultaneously

“perceiving” and being “conscious of the perception”, so too Poulet’s ideal critic should assert Poulet’s claim that “…each organized language [grows] out of an original moment of awareness, [adjusting] itself then according to the successive points it subsequently

[touches] upon.”81 Other genres, primarily those concerned with some form of narrative, are generally formulated through the experience of the narrating or narrated subject. The key focus of such texts is on story itself rather than on the evolution and formulation of that story (how the story came to be). In the critiquing of any written text Poulet argues for

80 Hejinian, L., The Language of Inquiry: 3 81 Poulet, G., “The Self and the Other in Critical Consciousness”: “Poulet on Poulet”, Diacritics: 2: 48

52 an immersion into the experience of encountering that text with a focus on the initial merging between text and reader. In critiquing a method of writing such as Hejinian’s with inquiry and experience situated at the core of its function, Poulet’s call for a critique first and foremost of consciousness becomes beneficial.

With subjective states of consciousness occupying a central concern throughout Hejinian’s work, my sometimes personalized form of textual analysis is rendered as only one of many possible entry-ways of inquiry into her writing projects. There is no claim that my reading of her writing is strictly definitive and conclusive. It is a certain response geared to evolve and be built upon in assimilation with the texts’ key philosophical functions. My critique is also an inquiry.

In-between Life and Text – Subjectivity/Collectivity

Chapter One

From Shklovsky to Adorno, Language writers drew on many sources to emphasize the importance of language in the construction of social reality and their claim that: “new ways of thinking […] make new ways of being possible”82 – Jacob Edmond

This thesis utilizes the dissipation of the most active and productive period (during the

1970s and 1980s) of the Language group of writers under that particular classification, as a departure point into Hejinian’s more personalized writing projects. This chapter will highlight the key characteristics of the Language movement which Hejinian retains as inextricable elements of her broader body of work which continually addresses and challenges existing notions of subjectivity. Both her poetry and prose complicate conceptualizations of ‘self’. Hejinian, a self professed long-time student of William James, states in an interview with Larry McCaffery and Brian McHale that:

I’m especially interested in his approach to the psychology of consciousness and cognitive perceptions. The radical introspecting and the descriptions of the results that are his investigative instruments are not unlike Freud’s, but James’s interest is in consciousness and perception, rather than in the unconscious. As a writer, I’m particularly interested in consciousness, or in the consciousness of being conscious which seems central to poetry.83

82 Edmond, J., “A Meaning Alliance”: Arkady Dragomoshchenko and Lyn Hejinian’s Poetics of Translation: The Slavic and East European Journal: Autumn 2002: (46:3): 553 – Hejinian, L., “Barbarism”, The Language of Inquiry: 322 ‐ cited in text. 83Hejinian, L., in interview with McHale, B./ McCaffery, L., Some other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors: 127 54

Hejinian articulates here something highly pronounced throughout the structure of her writing; a prominent concern with epistemology. Questions about knowledge and knowledge acquisition are situated at the heart of her corpus. Philosophical inquiry is central to Hejinian’s phenomenological poetic format. This chapter will address her approach towards subjectivity through an analysis of her poetic autobiography My Life as well as engage in analyses of Hejinian’s involvement in various collaborative projects.

Subsequently it will develop the proposition that these projects expand upon her concepts/notions of ‘self’ as being inextricably bound with notions of community and language. Through her early involvement with the Language poets the idea of collectivity has been prominent throughout her writing, bringing to the fore the suggestion that existence in isolation is in fact an impossibility. Much evidence is present in Hejinian’s work to suggest the primacy of community and collective life as critical to understanding her concept of subjectivity.

In order to facilitate clearer comprehension of these notions of community and subjectivity there is need for a certain understanding of the sense of contingency that underlies the very concept of collective thought as something that is inherently intertwined with multiplicity and change by virtue of the difference that separates us all from one another. Hejinian’s writing urges us towards understanding the world as incomplete and in a constant state of flux. As she writes in a letter to her mother Carolyn Andrews, dated May 1990, “[the] concept of completeness is absolutely without substance in the world – the world is

55 perpetually incomplete.”84 This hypothesis makes it difficult to analyze Hejinian’s poetry in terms of conventional considerations of space and time. As the world is conceptualized as ‘perpetually incomplete’ focus is drawn toward a notion of a writing that is constantly in a state of being written.

In this chapter I will introduce and expand upon an understanding of the concept of the liminal; a term connotative of the transitional – that which is at a boundary or threshold.

Liminality as a term with an anthropological and cultural studies background, is ideally suited to addressing Hejinian’s work which exists on a multiplicity of levels in a state of in-betweeness and not only within the literary format. Hejinian’s work transcends the literary into the lived and challenges the margins that separate language from life. With her work encompassing community and collective projects as a central life force to her writing, her practice extends beyond the boundaries of the published text to include the quasi- genres of archiving, letter writing and communication more broadly as instrumental to the formulation of a liminal and subjunctive poetic practice.

Hejinian’s writing allows for interpretation but not for stasis. Liminality is a term which refers to that which has occurred or is occurring however not through the avenue of fact or definition but through one of dynamism. Hejinian addresses the concept of liminality as she reflects that:

84 Hejinian, L., letter to Andrews, C., 11 May 1990, [74, 1A, Carolyn Andrews (2U)] – cited in Fagan, K. “In co‐ respondence: reading Lyn Hejinian's letter archives”: 47 56

Current literary interest in knowledge… finds itself in what social theory might call a liminal period – at a threshold… The question of boundaries, of possible shifts or displacements along them, and the question of what is being bounded (or unbounded) are preeminent ones. If we are indeed in a liminal period, then the border is not out there somewhere at the edge of the frame but rather it is here at the zero degree, where the x and y coordinates meet. It is a site of encounter, a point of transition. The marginal is all around…85

As Hejinian explains, the term ‘liminal’ has history within social theory. It is often traced to the writing of cultural anthropologist Victor Turner. Turner’s son, poet and scholar,

Frederick Turner argues that:

For [Victor Turner] cultural reality originated in the hot, liquid, protean fertility of communitas, anti-structure, “experience” in Dilthey’s sense, charismatic liminality, “betwixt and between” the settled and solid states of social routine. This fecund seedbed would be sheltered from any charge of blasphemy by the plea that all action in this space was “only” subjunctive, only, so to speak, in quotation marks.86

The concept of the liminal promotes a reading of dynamism as it focuses on the site of encounter between any two or more textual elements; on the activity that occurs for example between sentences and words, text and image, reader and author. As Manuel Brito argues in favour of Perelman and Silliman’s conceptualizations of the ‘new sentence’, “...

[the] juxtaposition of words which may arise within the sentence, causing ambiguities and a destabilization of the relation between signifier and signified;... a combination of this type of sentences makes numerous possible interpretations for the dislocations and

85 Hejinian, L., “La Faustienne”, The Language of Inquiry: 234 86 Turner, F., “ “Hyperion to a Satyr”: Criticism and Anti‐Structure in the Work of Victor Turner” in Ashley, M. K., Victor Turner and the Construction of Cultural Criticism: Between Literature and Anthropology: Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press: 147‐148 57 different allusions formulated.”87 This sentence structure is prominent throughout

Hejinian’s writing. Focus is often drawn to the relationships and activity that is created between textual elements:

And if I feel like a book, a person on paper, I will continue.88

Perelman and Silliman’s conceptualization permeates the fabric of Hejinian’s writing. Her destabilization of the relationship between signified and signifier are epitomized in the above example from My Life as the signifier “I” and the signified “book” are unconventionally interwoven with the signifier feeling into and becoming the signified as opposed to standing as separate from it. The ‘new sentence’ functions to metaphorically align the animate feeling subject with the inanimate material object to the effect of dispersing delineating notions between subject and object and complicating and consequently narrowing the apparent gap which exists between the reading subject and the textual object – the book in his/her hands.

Hejinian’s utilization of the ‘new sentence’ format emergent from Language poetics is formulated and conceptualized as being less about direct and realistic representation and more about process and creation. As Kate Fagan argues, “realism, Lyn Hejinian seemed to

87 Brito, M., “Questioning the limits of language: The New Sentence in Ron Silliman’s poetry and poetics”, Jacket Magazine: 2009: (39): 11 (online pagination) 88 Hejinian, L., My Life: 2002: 106 58 be suggesting, could be recuperated by a process-orientated poetry that took contextual change and perceptual activity as its key dynamics – a poetics of encounter, perhaps.”89

Hejinian’s redeveloped approach to realism explicated by Fagan as ‘a poetics of encounter’ situates itself within reality through the activated encounters which emerge as a result of the complication of subject-object relationships. As the subject becomes intertwined with and is rendered as object, a series of encounters are enlivened, resulting in the creation of a form of realism. Through the active relationships which subsequently take place between individual textual elements and also the reader, the text is continually evolving and radiating outwards towards the semantics of the surrounding world.

This redefined sense of realism inspired by a Steinian approach to writing (to be addressed in greater detail in chapter three of this thesis) is expanded by Hejinian’s multitude of collaborative writing projects across various genres. Her involvement in the Language community and in a multitude of collaborative works has resulted in a continuous dialogue with fellow poets and artists, both through the various creative projects concerned and through the communications which take place around these projects. Many of these exchanges which formulate the context of such collaborative works are recorded in letter format and stored in the Hejinian archives at The University of California in San Diego.

Notions of community and context are of primary significance to developing a broad understanding of Hejinian’s writing practice as once situated on the liminal cusp between the written and the lived experience.

89 Fagan, K. “‘Constantly I write this happily’: Encountering Lyn Hejinian”: 30

One example of this liminal and collaborative situation was recently documented by

Hejinian herself in a publication on fellow Language poet Bob Perelman in Jacket

Magazine (to be addressed in greater detail in chapter four) wherein she explains a process they came up with and agreed to engage in together. Hejinian explains;

Our method would involve changing each other’s dreams. To begin, we would each record a dream and send it to the other, who would then enter the dream – really enter it: not as in “you were in my dream last night Bob” but right there, dreaming it too... We would each insert sentences, images, even whole paragraphs or new scenes, into the other’s dream. We envisioned a sequence of these dreaming and intervening collaborations. … The project was willfully perverse in conception. And its play – like so much play – was based on a fiction; an impossibility made possible fictively. It is only in fictions, or in dreams, that two people dream a single dream.90

Central to this explication is a focus on the notion of the “fictive” which renders

“impossibility… possible.” Hejinian and Perelman respond to each other’s excerpts of dream-inspired writing to the effect of making the impossibility of two people dreaming the one dream, possible. This possibility is enabled through the avenue of textual impositions and intersections into the materials of consciousness and cognition. In other words, it is formulated as the dreams which fuel the writing process simultaneously impact and influence the writers’ dreams. Hejinian suggests on some level that indeed it is only through what we experience in contact with others that renders a certain moment into being and formulates our perception of reality. Her joint project with Perelman highlights the complication of the written text and the experienced moment. As the words exchanged between the two poets enter their recipients’ states of consciousness they are rendered with

90 Hejinian, L., “Dreaming Something Else”, Jacket Magazine: 2010: (39): 1 (online pagination) – World Wide Web ‐ http://www.jacketmagazine.com/39/perelman‐hejinian.shtml : last accessed ‐ 10/06/2010 60 the potential to further permeate the poets’ subconscious levels of thought and possible dream materials. As they alter each others’ dreams textually through the embellishment of poetic intercession, there exists the possibility that they may indeed also alter the nature of their dreams to be.

By taking up the phenomenon of dreaming and bringing it into play with processes of writing and collaboration the significance of the liminal to Hejinian’s process-orientated poetry is once more reinforced. She challenges the boundaries of the speaking subject through collaboration and anchors her experimentation with subjectivity in earlier works to a redefined notion of realism; one situated at the crux of activity and experience.

In this chapter I will examine prose and poetic texts by Hejinian as well as the notion of the archive, with some examination of Hejinian’s personal papers that are most explicitly hinged upon notions of the liminal, to explain and justify the latter’s relevance and necessity as a concept which facilitates our recognition of a potential in her writing which has not yet been explicated in terms of a dream-like assemblage. Such an analysis will enable the demonstration of an integral connection between the experienced moment and the written text in Hejinian’s work.

A Life Recorded

Lyn Hejinian’s archived materials housed at the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California in San Diego91 include one hundred and nineteen archive boxes of Lyn Hejinian’s papers produced between 1966 and 2004. The papers in the archive feature manuscripts and annotated typescripts of Hejinian’s published and unpublished poetry, drafts for several of her books of poetry, notebooks and critical writings. The archive also features some of her translations, collaborations, editorial projects, lecture and teaching materials and audio-recordings of her poetry readings and talks. This expansive accumulation of literary and personal material illustrates ideally the nexus examined throughout the body of this chapter between the representational and life itself within Lyn Hejinian’s writing practice.

Hejinian has stated that it is not her ‘self’ but her life that she would like remembered. In an interview with Dubravka Djuric, Hejinian states that:

Poetry is an ongoing project; it must be so if it is to be accurate to the world. Long forms of any kind, and serial forms in particular, emphasize this fact. Serial forms also permit one to take the fullest possible advantage of the numerous logics operative in language. These logics provide us with the ways of moving from one place to another, they make the connections or linkages that in turn create pathways of thinking, forming patterns of meaning (and sometimes of meaning’s excess, incoherence).92

91 Will from this point onward be referred to as UCSD 92 Hejinian, L., cited in “Materials (for Dubravka Djuric)”: The Language of Inquiry: 167 62

In consideration of this, Hejinian’s archives stored at UCSD can be considered as analogous with her autobiographical project My Life (published as a series of texts, each a revision/ reversion of the previous and structurally correspondent with Hejinian’s age at the time of writing). Both the My Life texts and the archived materials are documentations of Hejinian’s life which in their fragmentation and their rhizomic93 reading pattern provide a sort of accuracy to the world. They are consistent with the processes of change and the instability of narrative (a sense of not knowing) which formulate the dynamics of lived experience. The archive, through its sheer volume and through its variety of materials

(with variations in handwriting) encourages selective and fragmented reading.

The abstraction of language and grammar and the unclear chronology within My Life achieve a similar outcome. In addition to the tropological association between these two bodies of text, Hejinian’s archiving practice is significantly interwoven with her writing practice in numerous other ways. Dever, Vickery and Newman argue (with specific reference to the archive of Australian writer Aileen Palmer) that, “one of the most disorientating characteristics of the archive is the difficulty in determining what type of document one is reading. Letters, for example, subsequently reveal themselves to be chapters or fragments of epistolary novels.94 Hejinian’s archive shares some common ground with this observation. Though perhaps not as unclear with the distinctions between letter and published text being relatively easy to distinguish, there are various gray areas

93Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the Rhizome and claim that, “any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be” in ‐ Deleuze G. / Guattari, F., A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: 7 ‐ will be expanded upon at a later stage in this chapter. 94 Dever, M. / Newman, S. / Vickery, A., The Intimate Archive: Journey Through Private Papers: 9 63 where text and life become quite entangled. Perhaps the most prominent example of such an encounter is Hejinian’s dream correspondences with both Kit Robinson and Bob

Perelman. Hejinian engages in long term epistolary exchanges with her contemporaries from which several published texts have emerged. In these letters the poets exchange dreams as well as poetry emergent from dreams. The ongoing correspondence between

Hejinian and Robinson evolves into published writing (Hejinian’s The Cell, 1992 and

Hejinian & Robinson’s Individuals, 1988) which renders that initial exchange of letters almost an early fragment of the published works. At this point the letters and the context of the initial dreams become a potentially noteworthy focus for examination.

Another such curious intersection occurs in Hejinian’s inclusion of a typescript of her mother’s autobiography Faraway Island: Childhood in Kodiak95 within her archive.

Within the pages of this autobiography there is a photograph of “The Carolyn-Frances” which was a whaling ship harbored on the shores of Kodiak Island and which played a significant role in her mother’s memories, instigating several stories within the text. The

“Carolyn-Frances” bears a striking resemblance to the title image painted by Emilie Clark to Hejinian’s sea saga “The Distance” in her published text Saga/ Circus. There exists an interesting overlap between Hejinian’s mother’s life, Hejinian’s own life and both their writings. The ship in question shares its name with both Hejinian’s mother and Hejinian whose first name Lyn is in fact short for Carolyn.

95 Andrews, C., autobiography typescript ‐ Faraway Island: Childhood in Kodiak: Papers of L. Hejinian, Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego, MS 74/120/11 64

96 Hejinian, L. (Clark, E. ‐ Artist), Saga/Circus, Richmond & California: Omnidawn Publishing: 2008: 91 65

Such associations and points of intersection between Hejinian’s published poetry and her archived materials render Hejinian’s archive as rhizomic with her life and her published writing, diffusing perceptions of archives, broadly speaking, as separate and objective historical records of the life of any given individual. Dever, Newman and Vickery argue that:

Any contemporary discussion of archival research must begin by acknowledging the epistemological pressure placed upon the concept of ‘the archive’ in recent years. This pressure has marked a turn away from the positivist understanding of archival repositories as being mere storehouses of records, toward considering the status of the archive as a significant element in our investigations… …beyond being a receptacle for ‘the stuff of history’, the archive has its own history, shaped as much by specific cultural and political pressures as by accident and serendipity.98

With archives such as Hejinian’s it is important to undertake such an understanding as proposed by Dever, Newman and Vickery in order to examine the external and internal mechanics functioning throughout the fabric of the entire body of the archive. In addition to this, taking into consideration Hejinian’s self-conscious and ongoing archiving practice, it becomes necessary to examine her archives as rhizomic continuums of her life’s writing project and not merely as separate documentation. Within Hejinian’s writing which can thus potentially be conceptualized as a life-long serial work, the implications of the female gender become an important consideration. Dever, Newman and Vickery cite Elizabeth A.

Meese’s argument, that:

97 Carolyn Andrews autobiography typescript (Hall, R. ‐ Photographer) ‐ Faraway Island: Childhood in Kodiak: Papers of L. Hejinian, UCSD: MS 74/120/11 98 Dever, M. / Newman, S. / Vickery, A., The Intimate Archive: Journey Through Private Papers: 10 66

The discovery, publication, and analysis of women’s archival material are a necessary beginning to the reassessment of women’s place in the literary canon and of the canon itself. Specifically, women’s archival materials can aid in clarifying the assumptions that underlie canonization and devising new, more inclusive criteria; in discovering additional writers and works deserving of literary attention and repute; and in developing fuller contexts in which to understand women’s lives and works.99

Hejinian’s active and self conscious effort to build up a personal archive through her continual contribution to her archives in the Mandeville Special Collections Library at

UCSD and her desire for attention to be given to archives as a genre in their own right, indicates her efforts to write not only herself but herself as a female writer into being and

‘on record’. In an implicit response to what may be interpreted as an exclusion of female writing from the grand narratives of the canon of English literature, Hejinian’s archiving practice functions as a willful insertion of herself, a female subject, into historical record.

In addition to this and perhaps of greater significance to Hejinian’s project of communal and collaborative writing is the fact that such an extensive and prolific archiving venture recognizes the very circle of people which formulate the writer’s community.

Hejinian’s archived letters move beyond the bounds of her own personal archive into the archives of other women writing at the same time. Her letters to poet Susan Howe evidence considerable discussion of gender politics. Hejinian’s archive also features a vast amount of correspondence with other writers, many of whom, like Hejinian and Howe, were instrumental in the formulation of the Language writing group. Her letters provide

99 Meese, A. E., ‘Archival Materials: The Problem of Literary Reputation’, in Joan E. Hartman and Ellen Messer‐Davidow (Eds.), Women in Print 1: Opportunities for Women’s Studies Research in Language and Literature: New York: Modern Language Association: 1982: 37‐38 – cited in Dever, M. / Newman, S. / Vickery, A., The Intimate Archive: Journey Through Private Papers: 11 67 significant insight into and illustration of that literary scene and place on record a specific moment in time.

With the notion of experience as a central theme, Hejinian’s writing in being integrated with archival records as well as in being largely autobiographical, is not only informed by philosophical analysis but is also ideally suited to it. The liminal nature of her writing practice is best conceptualized through Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the rhizome which they explain, “...ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences and social struggles”100. They extend the topic by theorizing that “…the book is not an image of the world [rather] it forms a rhizome with the world…”101 As “The rhizome is an anti-genealogy…”102 it is process orientated. The concept of the rhizome can be utilized when exploring and seeking to analyze the way something functions in and as a part of the world through its historical path and anticipation of its future direction without bearing excessive reference to the cause and effect and definitive destination which often formulate chapters of human history and literary narrative. Hejinian’s writing functions more as ‘a part of’ and in

‘interaction with’ and less as a ‘representation of’ the world. The key element of her works is not located in what those works represent but in the interactions created amidst juxtapositions of textual elements and also between the inevitable variations in readerly receptions. Echoing Stein’s rhizomic writing practice as well as the poetics of her contemporary Language poets, Hejinian’s poetry, much like Deleuze and Guattari’s

100 Deleuze, G. / Guattari, F., A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: 7 101 Ibid:11 102 Ibid. 68 rhizome, has no definitive beginning or conclusion, but rather functions in a territory of

‘in-between’ located at the site of activity between two fixed points of reference; a process which she explicates in her address of the ‘liminal’ (cited in the introduction to this thesis).

What distinguishes Hejinian’s experimentation with a sense of the liminal in language is her expansion of her linguistic parameters to extensively include elements of visuality and materiality as well as her prolific engagement with states of consciousness and in particular her focus on dreams which will comprise the central focus of the two concluding chapters of this thesis.

This ambience of the dream permeates a broad spectrum of Hejinian’s writing. My Life for example, opens with the lines “A pause, a rose, something on paper... A moment yellow, just as four years later, when my father returned home from the war, the moment of greeting him, as he stood at the bottom of the stairs, younger, thinner than when he had left, was purple...”103 From the very beginning the reader faces an experimental configuration of time – “a moment, just as four years later” – with no certainty in what moment in time he/she is located. Moments are rendered through colours rather than through time. The paratactic logic seizes the reader and invites interaction through an invitation to assemble to a great extent, their own coherence of story and feeling. This associative paratactic process features a dream-like sense of causality; one not subject to standard forms of chronology and reason. Hejinian explains this process in her essay

“Reason” in arguing that:

103 Hejinian, L., My Life: 2002: 7 69

Reason itself operates in the border between concepts – and may even constitute such a border. The term names simultaneously two lines of causation, that of the reason for... and that of the reason to... These reasons are often related... But there are situations in which the two lines of causation are completely unconnected, of which the most readily described motivate the events that we dream.104

As Hejinian proceeds to explain in “Reason”, through the example of a pillow falling on her face and a concurrent dream of being crushed, there are often events that occur and give colour to others through a connection in context when they were never intended for the cause and effect line of events in any particular circumstance. This example creates and allows for a type of dreamscape in reality by encouraging recognition of unlikely points of connectivity between elements as that between the pillow and the dream of being crushed.

What associations might the moments “yellow” and “purple” trigger in the reader’s imagination? Hejinian’s sentences are paratactic and often don’t have a pronounced noun and verb as for example, in the lines, “Pretty is as pretty does”105 and “Hence, repetitions, free from all ambition”106. These word assemblages composed from real life events but specific to none, permeate, much like in Hejinian’s and Perelman’s dream exchanges, into the reader’s consciousness and consequently rely upon his/her imaginative contribution for the actualization of the text’s purpose and meaning. What emerges from this text/ reader negotiation is a form of dream-like reading model whereby certain images and fragments

104Hejinian, L., “Reason”, The Language of Inquiry: 341 105 Hejinian, L., My Life: 2002: 7 106 Ibid. 70 from the text enter the reader’s mind with the effect of triggering various associative and associated responses.

This chapter will examine Hejinian’s best known text, her autobiographical prose-poem

My Life, as a study of a singular subjective experience. This study will then be brought into comparison with a selection of collaborative projects in which Hejinian has participated as well as with her extensive letter writing practice as recorded in her personal archives, with the aim of demonstrating a consistency in process throughout the varied genres and modalities which comprise Hejinian’s writing oeuvre. This will serve as a platform from which I will launch my argument that Hejinian’s writing can be conceived of as one extensive body of work through which she records a female subjectivity through the documentation of life – ‘her life’.

Juliana Spahr argues that “despite the relentless challenging of the subject in twentieth- century theory, it is still a cliché that autobiography is the place where the conventions of representation are narrative, where text “uncovers” a visible and essentially legible self”107 and critiques critics like “Susan Groag Bell and Marilyn Yalom,,, [who] introduce their collection Revealing Lives: Autobiography, Biography and Gender by claiming that the importance of autobiography is that it smoothes over the difficulties of the postmodern world through its relation to the real...”108 How can autobiographic writing be written with

107 Spahr, J., “Resignifying Autobiography: Lyn Hejinian's My Life”, American Literature: 68 (1): 140 108 Ibid. 71 integrity if it elides the very context of its writing? If anything ‘smoothes over’ a

‘difficulty’, can it really be classified as existing with sincerity? Lyn Hejinian as a result of such discourse has been caught in what Spahr refers to as a “double bind”109, particularly in regard to My Life being both an experimental and autobiographical text. Caught between the difficulties of being both female and writing in a postmodern and poststructuralist context, it becomes difficult to decipher the nature and historical accuracy of Hejinian’s work. Spahr further argues that “... while language writing tends to be anti-confessional and antirealist, Hejinian’s work does not reject these modes but rather insists that alternative means of expression are necessary to represent truly the confessional or the real.”110 This thesis contends that this is indeed the case and that this conceptualization is necessary for understanding the notion of subjectivity executed in Hejinian’s writing and further that Hejinian’s composition of subjectivity is formulated through Deleuze and

Guattari’s notion of “nomad thought” which Brian Massumi, in his foreword to their text A

Thousand Plateaus, explicates as follows:

Nomad thought replaces the closed equation of representation, x = x = not y (I = I = not you) with an open equation: …+ y + z + a +… (… + arm + brick + window + …). Rather than analyzing the world into discrete components, reducing their manyness to the One of identity, and ordering them by rank, it sums up a set of disparate circumstances in a shattering blow. It synthesizes a multiplicity of elements without effacing their heterogeneity or hindering their potential for future rearranging…111

Hejinian’s writing operates more through Deleuze and Guattari’s nomad theory as a cumulative, expansive and ever-growing network of writing rather than through the

109 Ibid. 110 Ibid. 111 Deleuze G. / Guattari, F., A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: xiii

72 derivative logic of more standard narrative texts. In engaging in this rhizomic format of writing Hejinian dispels the necessity for a sense of causality as she creates a form of poetry that simply states “this is so.” Though language is central to Hejinian’s practice, her rhizomic writing functions somewhat within an imagist and painterly dimension providing for the reader separate elements which comprise an overall ambience or atmosphere but one that ultimately remains open to readerly interpretation. The absence of a line of causality and definitive outcomes enables the reader to create his/her own reasoning more liberally. This exemplifies a redefined sense of realism; one that occurs in real time with the reader. Different from the idealistic realism of the nineteenth century and the dramatic realism of the confessional poets of the 1950s and 1960s, Hejinian’s realism is one that exists within a constant state of being written and read.

It has been argued that this cumulative form of writing might render Hejinian’s poetry inaccessible. Though its abstract nature may be considered confusing at a glance, Hejinian argues that:

What makes the idea of the collaborative person... or persons, so appealing is that it opens up enormous possibilities for diffusion and multiplicity of points of view... It also seems undeniable to me that in a funny way feeling oneself as many selves or as many persons is more accurate.112

Christopher Beach reproaches particular critics as he argues that “part of the problem with the stance of a mainstream reviewer like Jarman vis-a-vis poetry like Hejinian’s... is the

112 Hejinian, L. in McHale, B./ McCaffery, L., Some other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors: 135 73 lack of an adequate critical vocabulary and an adequate theoretical and historical framework for discussing such work…”113 suggesting that “what Jarman does most effectively, through his reference to Hejinian’s status as a Language poet, is to frame her project as somehow oppositional to the mainstream, as a somewhat intriguing but suspicious “other” on the margins of the poetic scene.”114 Indeed, it is not only critics like

Jarman who encourage an “other-ing” of experimental literature. Beach, himself, in accusing certain critics of not having a sufficient critical vocabulary or historical knowledge, shuns readers and does little to promote more widespread reading of more experimental literature. Though Hejinian’s work is motivated by complicated thought, it does not necessitate a specific critical awareness or particular historical knowledge to be read and experienced. Upon opening My life for the first time I was perplexed, not in the sense that I had no means of entry into the text but simply by its sheer aesthetic and structural difference from other literature I had previously encountered. I saw words before me; words which diffused into colour and dispersed outward as ambiance. I was not aware of the context and motivating factors behind such a writing but I did know what each and every word denoted in my consciousness. Harriet Tarlo argues in favour of the experimental in literature, claiming that, “…radical experiment in art can in fact be seen as radically democratic. No one has the reading tools already intact with which to tackle this kind of work... The reader is invited in... to have their own experience, within the space

113 Beach, C., “Poetic Positionings: Stephen Dobyns and Lyn Hejinian in Cultural Context”, Contemporary Literature: 1997, Spring: (38:1): 13 (online pagination) 114 Ibid. 74 this work creates…”115 Every reader may be invited in; not just the well educated or informed reader.

Hejinian’s experimental writing, with its ephemeral imagery and paratactic logic, provides for readers a reading experience comparable to Freudian dream analysis whereby each and every individual factor comprising the dream bears significance on and is an entryway into the arena of the text. Freudian critic Michael Michael presents a formulaic analogy of

Freudian dream analysis which I contend parallels the method through which the reader encounters Hejinian’s writing. Michael argues that:

... there are a number of factors that increase the epistemological validity of [Freud’s method of] interpretation: (i) how striking the connections are; the more striking, the more likely the interpretation; (ii) the number of elements unified by a particular association: the more elements unified by a particular association, the more likely the interpretation; (iii) the number of links in the chain of associations: the smaller the chain the more likely the interpretation.116

Hejinian’s predominantly autobiographical writing hosts a vast network of self-reflective citations, repetitions and inter-textual references, not only throughout individual texts but throughout the broader stream of her writing practice. Much like Michael’s summation of the practice of Freudian dream analysis, a reading for the “striking connections”,

“particular associations” and “links in the chains of associations” in both Hejinian’s vein of thought but also in the reader’s, are integral to the ambiance attained by the reader through the experience of encountering Hejinian’s texts. One example of such associations at the

115 Tarlo, H., “Provisional Pleasures: The Challenge of Contemporary Experimental Women Poets”, Feminist Review: Summer 1999: (62): 96 116 Michael, M., “On the validity of Freud’s dream interpretations”, Science Direct: 2008: (39): 58 75 individual and immediate textual level is the repetition of phrases like “A pause, rose, something on paper”117 and “As for we who “love to be astonished””118. Both phrases are repeated in varied contexts throughout the course of My Life. The reader is prompted through the avenue of the phrase’s recurrent entries in the text, to weave into being some association or reading into, the relevance of their textual linkage and inter-connectedness.

A more widely spanning example which draws on the broader fabric of Hejinian’s writing project which will be addressed in greater detail throughout the concluding chapter of this thesis, is Hejinian’s recurrent reference to the character of La Faustienne both literally and indirectly, in a wider context of recurrent engagement with a notion of night-time writing and dreams.

Hejinian’s My Life provides valuable insight and innovation into the portrayal of one’s own subjectivity. Liminal in several regards, it is situated on the cusp of poem, prose and autobiography. It challenges the boundaries surrounding writing, artwork, book, thing and ultimately self. Being small in size and experimental in its aesthetics, this autobiographical text written by Hejinian at age thirty-seven, in thirty-seven sections, each comprising thirty-seven sentences to parallel each year of her life, revised eight years later with eight new sections and eight new sentences to each previous section in accordance with her age eight years on from the writing of the initial text, significantly challenges the status of writing as a form of ‘representation of’ the real as it executes an act of ‘being’ real. As there is no direct line of narrative, there is little in the form of definitive and prescriptive

117 Hejinian, L., My Life: 2002: 7 118 Ibid: 10 76 writing. In addition to being interactive in nature by encouraging readerly creativity in interpretation, the physicality of the text also plays a part in the experiential quality of the text. The specific format of these aesthetic components of text will be explored in greater depth in later chapters. I progress now to the concept of experience generated through the liminal nature of Hejinian’s writing. In particular, I progress towards the concept of gender as I demonstrate how the heightened process of experience evoked by this kind of writing enables an empowered speaking position for the subject. Specifically, I examine how it can empower the female subject.

The concept of a text functioning through a process of experience as opposed to narrative is significant in the portrayal of gender as it enables many possibilities for portraying a female subjectivity; one not necessarily defined by specific tropes of femininity. As Ann

Vickery has argued, “Hejinian sought to move away from the gender categories of

“masculine and “feminine” as given oppositional differences. She was joined by writers such as Johanna Drucker in viewing French feminism’s sexualized imagery as utopic and reductive.”119 Vickery cites Drucker’s statement that, “to hide ourselves inside of language, to claim the body against the law as if it were our own, to use the tropes of sensation, fluidity, reception – these are positions I do not find viable in the face of the realities of women’s real lives.”120 Critic Nicky Marsh in a similar vein to Drucker, reproaches

Hejinian scholars such as Hilary Clark, Craig Dworkin and Juliana Spahr for not focusing on Hejinian’s hesitant desire to ‘go on, to retell’, but rather on “…the more confident and

119 Vickery, A., Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing: 54 120 Ibid: Drucker, J., “Women/Writing/Theory: What Is at Stake?”,Raddle Moon: (11): 1992: 18 ‐ cited in text 77 pleasurable manipulations of autobiography to be found in My Life.”121 One example she draws on is Dworkin’s argument “…that the ‘small squares’ of Hejinian’s fragmented text correspond to the patchwork aesthetic that some critics have also identified with women’s writing.”122 Both Drucker and Marsh critique the feminization of such writing which draws symbolic or metaphoric associations with what some may consider indicative of ‘being feminine’. It is true that aspects of Hejinian’s writing correspond well with French feminist thought in that it appears cyclical, non-linear, fractured and pregnant with the terminology and symbolism often associated with femininity, and this theory is useful, though not all encompassing, when addressing Hejinian. There is a further dimension to her work which moves beyond the arena of femaleness towards a method of representation which through some acknowledgement of such tropological associations formulates both a recital of and a challenge towards, prescriptive and fixed female identities.

Recently progressing more boldly toward the visual through her published work (the visual is interwoven throughout the entire fabric of Hejinian’s writing life) – for example through her collaborative work with artist Emilie Clark but also in her own poetic writing –

Hejinian, through a hybridity of mediums, demonstrates a sense of ambiguity towards a fixed model of feminist thought such as the somewhat essentialist focus of French feminism. This ambiguity develops into a form of dream language that has not yet been the focus of extended critical attention. Mapping out and pin-pointing the presence and

121 Marsh, N., “‘Infidelity to an Impossible Task’: Postmodernism, Feminism and Lyn Hejinian’s ‘My Life’”, Feminist Review, 2003: (74): 74 122 Ibid: Dworkin, C. D., “Penelope Reworking the Twill: Patchwork, Writing, and Lyn Hejinian's My Life”: 58‐ 81 – cited in text 78 function of this language within Hejinian’s writing is vital to understanding not only her practice but also the experience of ‘being female’ that emerges in a different way to that which has been argued for by critics to date.

The nature of experience is central to Hejinian’s formulation of a representation of the female subject with a focus not on the particularities of a given subject but upon the experiences comprising that subject’s being. By virtue of this, in “The Person and

Description” Hejinian argues that “there is no self undefiled by experience, no self unmediated in the perceptual situation...”123 She conceptualizes the notion of selfhood as a contingent phenomenon constantly mediated by perception and experience. However, in that mediation, a subject still exists – not as a fixed entity but as a shifting and constantly evolving one. Clair Wills in such an instance argues for:

... reading against the grain of the poets’ own descriptions of their projects. For example ...Hejinian has argued in many interviews and articles that her work attempts to articulate a new understanding of the subject, divorced from notions of self-expression… However, it would be a mistake to read this as an argument for total self-alienation and the absence of any form of subjectivity whatsoever. Instead Hejinian emphasises the dynamic nature of subjectivity…124

This thesis, in agreement with Wills, contends that Hejinian’s writing does in fact develop and emphasize “the dynamic nature of subjectivity.” This ‘subject dynamism’, particularly geared towards the female subject, is achieved through an engagement with a multiplicity of representational modalities such as the visual and material. The female subject is an

123 Hejinian, L., “The Person and Description”, The Language of Inquiry: 2000: 203 124 Wills, C., “Contemporary Women’s Poetry: Experimentalism and the Expressive Voice”, Critical Quarterly: 1994: (36:3): 42 79 inevitable theme throughout all of Hejinian’s work which is always at least in part, autobiographical. Hejinian signals this inevitability of the autobiographic as she argues that, “humans repeat themselves not only in the sense that history is said to do so, and not simply because they are given to habit, but because in telling of things, they tell of themselves. “In fact,” as Paul Valéry notes, “there is no theory that is not fragment, carefully prepared, of some autobiography.””125 An analysis of the following excerpts from

Hejinian’s My Life illustrates how this multi-faceted concept of subjectivity is actualized throughout Hejinian’s autobiography.

My Life

125 Hejinian, L., “Language and “Paradise””, The Language of Inquiry: 75 – Valéry, P., The Art of Poetry, (Folliot, D., Trans.), New York: Bollingen Foundation and Pantheon Books: 1958: 58 – cited in text 80

126

Pages fifty-five to fifty-seven in My Life have a particular focus on the female experience with the words “womanhood”, “girl” and “mother” cited on the very first page. These three pages provide readers with a rare glimpse of Hejinian’s experience, formatted through paratactic observation as opposed to narrative. In the phrase, “The plump but uncertain girl grew righteous with the love of the puce horizon”, Hejinian speaks about herself quite naturally in the third person and provides readers with the image of one looking in on the experience of another. This in effect is what she asks the reader to do, namely to join in the experience of the text by announcing through self reflexivity that her own view of her life is no more truthful or accurate than the reader’s. This allows interactivity on a level that a

126 Hejinian, L., My Life: 2002: 55‐57 81 standard narrative text may not facilitate. The processes of liminality enlivened through the implementation of changing speaking positions, intertwining genres and various visual and paratactic techniques, enable Hejinian to communicate her experience with acute sincerity.

The reader’s entry into this particular section is facilitated as are most other sections in the book, via the blank square in the top left hand corner of the page. It is almost where one would insert a photograph were it a captioned biography of a given individual. In the corner is the phrase, “Any photographer will tell you the same”127. This section offers a snapshot into the experience of Hejinian as an adolescent girl but highlights that like any other representation, what is to be understood by the reader will indeed and can only ever be a partial, personalized interpretation. This is achieved through the foregrounding of the concept of the photographer. A photographer most often has a third person perspective, only being able to capture a vision through his/her own seeing. As Mitchell has argued,

“photography is a record of what we see, or a revelation of what we cannot see, a glimpse of what was previously invisible. Photographs are things we look at, and yet, as Barthes also insists, “a photograph is always invisible: it is not what we see.””128 This argument does not serve to detract from the value of the photographic record as depicted through a photographic lens. Rather it suggests that the photographic image is a glimpse of a moment in its split second glory of being recorded. It signifies to us a moment which may never again be recaptured identically. It does not devalue the historicity or actuality of the photographic image of a given moment as depicted – as having occurred – rather it signals

127 Ibid: 55 128Mitchell, W. J. T., What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images: 274 ‐ Barthes, R., Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, (Howard, R., Trans.), New York: Hill & Wang: 1981: 6 – cited in text 82 the split second ephemeral passing of captured moments. This concept of ‘momentary occurrence’ is what constitutes our experience of life, for indeed every moment comes to pass. Hejinian reflects upon this notion utilizing twentieth century philosopher Hannah

Arendt’s theory of the ‘polis’ to assist her theorization as she argues that:

In ancient Greek thought, and hence for many political theorists of social space even today... [a] common place is political in character. It constitutes the polis. The political in this sense is not adjudicating and legislating but coming into appearance, and the polis is the “space of appearance”: the space for “the sharing of words and deeds.” The polis is, as Hannah Arendt puts it, “the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people living together for this purpose... To be deprived of it means to be deprived of reality...”129

Both Hejinian and Arendt conceptualize a space of temporary existence as being what constitutes our perception of reality. It is in conversation with others that we come into existence. That existence may never be recorded or re-experienced in an identical way.

Like the concept of photographic record, we are constantly changing and creating new realities. By suggesting the presence of an image and simultaneously reflecting upon the nature of reception and human interaction by foregrounding a third person perspective as a primal receptor of the space of appearance, Hejinian renders her experience as being at least in part, the reader’s experience also. She does this through the very act of denouncing the lived experience’s capacity for ever truly being recaptured or retold. Consequently, she implicates readers in the process of that experience and invites them to draw their own associations with the images and words denoted. In reading Hejinian’s writing we, like

129 Hejinian, L., “A Common Sense”, The Language of Inquiry: 365‐366 – Arendt, H. The Human Condition: University of Chicago Press: Chicago: 1989: 198‐99 – cited in text 83 drifting particles, enter the arena of the common dream or the polis and continue a tale located in a perpetual state of being written – of constant creation.

On page fifty-five from the included excerpts Hejinian introduces herself as an adolescent girl with an opinion on religion as she writes that, “Somewhere during the transition from childhood to womanhood, a girl is likely to become interested in religion... They asked my mother to correct my views or to keep me at home.” Through the possessive “my mother” the reader might assume that Hejinian is the one with the views that have been reprimanded however she does not explicitly take ownership of them due to the constant change in speaking position and due to the format of paratactic recount. All we experience is a sequence of statements such as “Blindmen sell brooms”, “From hypochondria come sentences and memory” and “In California the shadows are very dark and cool, the sunlight hot and bright”. The sentences become quite abstract and the reader may here begin to draw personal associations from what such words may mean to them to a greater extent than they might in a more standard narrative or poetic text.

The speaking voice may be female. We gather a sense of the speaker’s gender from lines previously cited and from further down the page as Hejinian writes that “the plump but uncertain girl grew righteous with love of the puce horizon. It is hard to turn away from moving water. Often gruff and bellowing, always female, but not always feminine.” There is no specific “I” in this section nor through the greater body of the text and yet the mere presence of the words “female” and “feminine” call upon the reader to make associations

84 with a female experience. A further effect of this associative reading process with no direct line of narrative propelling the written text and through it being structured instead as a series of statements and observations is that the reader begins to understand more through feeling derived through word association as opposed to story and event. This occurs as a result of the constant creation of ambiance through verbally imagistic and incomplete sentences such as “Irritated by motorbikes”, “The dance is best seen from the upper balcony”, “The sunrise falls through the windows” and “The horses in the dewy field overlope”. There is no direct narration but rather a series of potentially relatable words and sentences subject to the reader’s personal experiences and subsequent textual interpretations. Marjorie Perloff identifies this technique of narrating through association as opposed to chronological specifics as she argues that:

As against the conventional autobiography, Hejinian’s everywhere undermines sequence: b does not follow a, and the connectives are often missing. And further, this is an autobiography that provides almost no direct reference to the basic facts… True we can surmise that the story opened some time in the early forties, since the narrator’s father is returning from the war… But even these central events remain shadowy, peripheral – events that take place, so to speak, at the outer edges of the screen whose real focus is on something else.130

The reader may for example, group the set of activities of motorbike riding, dancing and horse riding or the spatial relationships between windows and balconies, or the environment created through the sunrise and the dewy field however he/she can only come away from the text with a feeling derived through a combination of personal word associations with little knowledge of specific textual details. Perloff accounts for this incorporation and negotiation of the reader into the mechanics of the text as she continues

130 Perloff, M., Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media, London: University of Chicago Press Ltd.: 1991: 166 85 her argument with the claim, “that something else may be defined as the creation of a language field in which “identity” is less a property of a given character than a fluid state that takes on varying shapes and that hence engages the reader to participate in its formation and deformation.”131 The reader may potentially acquire some information about

Hejinian but the reliability of this information is not strong. Not because Hejinian has been untruthful but because the text works in real time with the context of the reader as from glimpses of memory new experiences are generated. In this sense the text becomes a duo- biography – a symbiosis of texts, one written, one felt – as readers become significantly implicated in the processes of the text. This dual experience of the autobiographic work echoes Hejinian’s conceptualization of the “open text” which she argues is:

… open to the world and particularly to the reader. It invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies. It speaks for writing that is generative rather than directive.132

The associative fragments which comprise Hejinian’s autobiographic writing function on the level of what Deleuze and Guattari explain as “…the short term memory [which]… is in no way subject to a law of contiguity or immediacy to its object; it can act at a distance, act or return a long time after, but always under conditions of discontinuity, rupture and multiplicity.”133 The text is autobiographic by virtue of a redefined realism. Like the concept of the short-term memory, it does not dissociate the author from the autobiography but rather re-establishes the nature in which it is portrayed. It is depicted not as a strictly

131 Ibid. 132 Hejinian, L., “The Rejection of Closure”, The Language of Inquiry: 43 133 Deleuze, G. / Guattari, F., A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: 16 86 structured narrative but rather as a sequence of recollections emergent in the author’s memory at the time of writing. In this conceptualization of writing lies a strong sense of integrity as there is no claim to a particular string of events shaped by one’s own remembering. The writing exists in a state of fragmentation and currency however not one devoid of reference to the past. What it provides as variant to the conventional autobiographic text is a conceptualization of the individual as a contingent phenomenon; one that is dependent, variable and constantly evolving. Subjectivity occupies a liminal terrain.

This conceptualization of a liminal and contingent subjectivity offers significant opportunity for the representation of female subjectivity and agency. However, one might question whether it is beneficial to formulate a female subjectivity based upon notions of contingency when the notion of a speaking female subject is itself new and tentative when situated against the backdrop of the male dominated, greater body of Western literature and history. Citing Janet Todd, Caroline Bergvall begins to address this question:

“If there is no woman in the representations of history, only representation itself, there is no one to liberate. Feminism as simply the complex play of humanist ideology…can easily be dematerialized into an anachronism”. In that sense, if feminist theory markedly fails to address the aesthetic implications of (post)modernism, the deconstructionist project itself falls short of truly invoking a change in the mental patterns governing gender identification.134

134 Bergvall, C., “No Margins to This Page: Female Experimental Poets and the Legacy of Modern”, Fragmente: (5): 1993: 37 ‐ Todd, J., Feminist Literary History, New York: Routledge: 1988: 80 – cited in text 87

Whilst not explicitly making the point, Bergvall anticipates the suggestion that there is a marked discrepancy between feminist thought, particularly that of the French feminists and contemporary experimental poetic practice. Bergvall highlights the necessity for a shift in feminist thinking in order to enhance the potential of a highly potent form of writing – one that experiments with form and pushes the boundaries of representation itself.

Though there is no explicit association between Hejinian’s writing and a formal feminism,

I believe that it holds potential for the acknowledgement of a female subjectivity. In a retrospective response to a panel paper she had delivered in the mid nineteen eighties titled

“Who Is Speaking?”, Hejinian wrote that “the question ‘Who is speaking?’ was intended as a challenge to a perceived style of asserting power... It was directed not at any specific group of persons but at the problem of power itself... the discussion did not constitute a rejection of power...... it aspired to an increased impersonal freedom for everyone.”135

Hejinian’s writing harnesses this notion of an impersonal freedom for everyone. Such a freedom can be powerful in the process of textually locating and establishing a strong and speaking female subject. Hejinian’s work not only addresses notions of being female but also ones of protest and resistance. It does this not through a direct reference and narration but rather through a listing of words connotative of femininity and simultaneously strength, such as “womanhood”, “girl”, “mother”, “female”, “feminine”, “grandmother”, “she”,

“righteous”, “gruff”, “bellowing”, “correct” and “successful”. The assemblage of such

135 Hejinian, L., “Who Is Speaking?”, The Language of Inquiry: 31 88 words over the course of three pages does not prescribe or argue a particular point. As the reader engages with the text they become enmeshed in a personal mediation of the words before them in what Perloff terms the “…fluid state that takes on varying shapes and that hence engages the reader to participate in its formation and deformation.”136 Words denotative of ‘female’ are placed in contact with an array of ‘power’ words such as

“bellowing” and “successful”. The reader receives an empowered message about the female by simply reading these words in the same comparative context and the remaining task of textual association and interpretation is dependant of their own imaginative freedom.

Hejinian has explained that she would prefer for her ‘life’ to be remembered instead of her

‘self’ stating that, “Personhood comes to one through living a life. To explain what it is or what it is ‘like,’ to be a person requires a long account... Our individuality, in fact, is at odds with the concept of some core reality at the heart of our sense of being...”137 It is in fact through a presence in relation with others, through what Arendt describes as “the space of appearance”, that the being actually comes into realization – into actuality. In this sense, for Hejinian to portray for us her inner world through first person narration and through direct ownership would in some sense lack integrity or be incongruent with the processes of life. By engaging in a paratactic, self reflexive and liminal concept of writing

Hejinian allows the reader to more closely interact with her work. In her conceptualization of the ‘open text’ she explains that the text is:

136 Perloff, M., Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media: 166 137 Hejinian, L., “The Person and Description”, The Language of Inquiry: 201 89

...by definition... open to the world… It invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies… Reader and writer engage in collaboration from which ideas and meanings are permitted to evolve... The open text... foregrounds process...138

My Life executes Hejinian’s outlined parameters for the open text in being formulated as a liminal ground between reader and writer where the processes that emerge as a result of that relationship are primary. A further textual component (to be addressed in greater depth in chapter three of this thesis) which indicates an engagement with this notion of the liminal within the written text is that of Hejinian’s strong sense of the material which emerges predominantly through her publishing practices but also through the broader fabric of all her writing ventures. The tactile object situated at the crux between the two dominant realms encompassing the reader during his/her reading experience – those of his/her experience of the physical world and his/her engagement with a particular text, is of primary relevance when addressing Hejinian’s experience centered writing – the book being an epitome of inter-mediate phenomena as it enters the psyche of its reader only by first being held. Poulet describes the notion of the book’s medial situation between object and information in his argument that:

Books are objects. On a table, on bookshelves, in store windows, they wait for someone to come and deliver them from their materiality, from their immobility… …take a book, and you will find it offering, opening itself. It is this openness of the book which I find so moving… Such is the initial phenomenon produced whenever I take up a book, and begin to read it. At the precise moment that I see, surging out of the object I hold open before me, a quantity of significations which my mind

138 Hejinian, L., “The Rejection of Closure”, The Language of Inquiry: 273 90

grasps, I realize that what I hold in my hands is no longer just an object, or even simply a living thing. I am aware of a rational being of consciousness…139

Phenomenologist Bill Brown’s “Thing Theory” postulates a theoretical position in regards to physical objects as ‘things’ (to be addressed more extensively in chapter three) which when applied in analysis of Hejinian’s materialist tendency throughout her writing, furthers our understanding of the parameters of her liminal textual endeavors. Brown argues that, “…things is a word that tends, especially at its most banal, to index a certain limit or liminality, to hover over the threshold between the nameable and the unnameable, the figurable and the unfigurable, the identifiable and the unidentifiable…”140

My Life does not only become tangible through its mimicry or suggestion of photographic text as discussed earlier, it also generates significance as an object or thing through its size and format. As a very small and compact book the text asserts itself as a stand-alone object separate from the featured writing within. In consideration of Brown’s theory, this object- like status of My Life – the book – renders the text within the arena of the liminal. The haptic quality of this small hand-sized text, through its already linguistically devised liminal positioning, is directed even further towards the arena of the in-between through the expansion of its potential contexts of reading. Being easily transportable increases its likelihood of being read anywhere at any time. This expands the horizons of the text even further beyond the collaboration between writer and reader, into collaboration with the

139 Poulet, G., “Phenomenology of Reading”, New Literary History “New and Old History”: (1:1): October, 1969: 53‐54 140 Brown, B., “Thing Theory”: 4‐5 91 influence from the wider world as a result of context. The time and place of reading this text may influence the act of reading significantly. This potential increase in the text’s receptive backgrounds increases its situation within the experience of the world of the reader which, as a process, echoes Roland Barthes’ observation that, “the text: it produces, in me, the best pleasure if it manages to make itself heard indirectly; if, reading it, I am led to look up often, to listen to something else...”141 Hejinian’s writing both through its fragmented and association-dependant language and through its material considerations, compels the reader to do exactly what Barthes outlines in his conceptualization of the pleasurable text – to “look up often” and engage with the surrounding world.

Hejinian’s writing exists within a liminal frame as a result of an unwillingness to subscribe to the established specifics of any one genre or medium. This experimentation allows for many textual assemblages to take place between writer, reader, text and context. These assemblages have the potential to locate and give voice to the previously silent spaces of

English literature. Through the experimental autobiography My Life, Hejinian disengages from traditional autobiographical formats in order to place herself as a female subject on record as continually living and participating in an active experience – not merely as someone who has lived and recorded that life. As the very title of the text suggests, it is not merely Hejinian’s life that the reader comes into contact with, it is also their own, enlivened through the personal pronoun “My”. As the reader processes Hejinian’s poetically recorded experiences, he/she is not able to take on the role of passive recipient.

141 Barthes, R., The Pleasure of the Text, United Kingdom: Basil Blackwell Ltd.: 1990:24‐5

Though the reader may not be able to recount a specific narrative from having read the text, during the actual act of reading and handling the text, he/she becomes inevitably and actively engaged with a subjective female experience. This is the experience of continually possessing and processing knowledge which (to be addressed in chapters four and five of this thesis) for Hejinian, comprises the silent space of the female.

For the purposes of the current chapter, My Life provides readers with an understanding of

Hejinian’s concept of the subject as an active, contingent and liminal phenomenon tightly interwoven with and inextricable from language and the written text.

Leningrad

In May 1983, when I left for the first trip to the Soviet Union, the third issue of Poetics Journal, on “Poetry and Philosophy,” edited by Barrett Watten and myself had just come out. Originally the trip seemed coincidental to our literary life in the United States, and maybe it would have been if conditions in the Soviet Union had been different. But because of the particularly oppressive political atmosphere felt by artists of all kinds during the early 1980s in the Soviet Union, an intense and intimate intellectual “underground” existed.142

– Lyn Hejinian in Leningrad

Charles Altieri asks the question “does the reader really need restoring? Are there any major traditional works that encourage readerly passivity, or demand readers any one predetermined conclusion by refusing to allow the reader space for engaging what the work has made available to them as a possible condition of the self or world?”143 This thesis argues that there is indeed a significant difference between how one might read a chronologically and narrative driven poem and a Hejinian text. The experimental and iconoclastic textual strategies of Language writers like Hejinian de-familiarize reading practices, demanding a certain amount of work in their reading. When reading through a chronological narrative with a defined beginning and end, the reader may not be

‘demanded’ to come to a predetermined conclusion however their understanding of the story line will be strongly influenced and limited by the parameters of time and action as

142Hejinian, L., in / Davidson, M. / Hejinian, L. / Silliman, R. / Watten, B. Leningrad, San Francisco: Mercury House: 1991: 4 143 Altieri, C., “Some problems about agency in the theories of radical poetics”, Contemporary Literature, 1996: (37:2): 211

94 structured and intended by the author. Hejinian’s poetry enables a heightened interactivity between reader, writer and other intermediary textual elements. Arguably the most dramatic example of this is the 1989 documentary poetic text Leningrad where multiple subjectivities, poetics, politics and ethics are all brought into cooperation within a liminal terrain, combining various concerns simultaneously and placing the reader at the fore-front of the textual function.

The reader undergoes a re-conceptualization through Hejinian’s work, from a seeker and recipient of knowledge to a state of experience within and amidst knowledge. As Hejinian draws together the realms of experience and representation, language creates the person and the person alters, perpetually interprets, changes and reinterprets that language. It is a format of writing closely intertwined with a notion of consciousness and experience. As

Kate Fagan has argued:

Throughout her writing career Hejinian has concerned herself with the dilemmas and borders that might comprise a poetical “ethics.” Is poetry limited to making ethical “representations,” or can it actively undertake the difficult work of an ethics? Where might it locate these investigations, in formal and material terms?144

By involving the reader in the compositional processes of the text, Hejinian transcends the boundary between “ethical representations” into the actual work of an ethics. As the reader is no longer positioned on the safe side of the material presented but rather is drawn right into the crux of operations of the text, the powerful work of an ethics is enlivened. By

144 Fagan, K., “‘Constantly I write this happily’: Encountering Lyn Hejinian”: 63

95 being drawn into deciphering textual specificities through indefinite connections between various textual elements (which evolves as a reading strategy for a writing ungoverned by the conventional rules of narrative and poetry), especially when approaching a historically significant timeframe such as the Russian Perestroika period (which took place during the late 1980s – a significant contextual element in the composition of the collaborative text

Leningrad), there emerges a demand of some historical knowledge or research on behalf of the reader in order for him/her to engage thoroughly with the potential of and information throughout the text. Contrary to the readerly passivity of more conventional forms of writing questioned by Altieri, the writing within Leningrad is a primary example of how

Language influenced writing calls for a different form of awareness. Though the reader can read the text without significant external knowledge, they will not encounter a fixed narrative but rather a myriad of varied experiences. In that process he/she is encouraged, if not to do some research, then at the very least to assemble a certain sense of knowledge from the varied textual components. This sourcing of information external to the text and assemblage of internal textual data echoes Hejinian’s introductory paragraphs to her essay

“Who is Speaking” in The Language of Inquiry throughout which she postulates and summarizes the integral association which exists between her approach to poetry and the notion of an ethics. She argues that:

…the fact of the matter is that the world requires improving (reimproving) every day. Just as one can’t prepare an all-purpose meal and dine once and then be done with the preparation and consumption of food forever, so one cannot come to the end of the fight for social justice and ecological safety, for example, forever. Victories are particular, local and almost always temporary. To improve the world, one must be situated in it, attentive and active; one must be worldly. Indeed worldliness is an essential feature of ethics. And, since the term poetics names not

just a theory of techniques but also attentiveness to the political and ethical dimensions of language, worldliness is essential to a poetics.145

Hejinian’s account for the work of an ethics within poetry renders the poetic as inextricable from the political however it also evades the risk of seeming dogmatic by placing emphasis on a notion of ever-changing worldliness by virtue of which, politicized viewpoints, whilst significant, are situated within a constant state of change or evolution. Beyond the active reader/writer relationship which emerges from the structure of the text, a form of ethics governs the entire compositional process of such collaborative writing which demands a conceptualization of the entire writing process from the events and contextual setting which may have initiated the production of the text to the published entity to be encountered by readers in the book format. Politically charged and experimental in form and content, Language writing like Hejinian’s crosses a boundary from the representational into that of the lived experience. Oren Izenberg describes this process with an included citation by Leningrad co-author, Watten, arguing that:

Language poets imagine literary culture as the kind of thing that anthropologists would be interested in. That is, Language poets regularly represent Language poetry as more than just the sum of its practitioners, poems, institutions, and theories. As Watten suggests, “a community of writers” shares “a collective state of mind” that unites those disparate embodiments.146

The Language school originated as an avant-garde movement situated in opposition to political events, at the heart of which was the Vietnam War. As Fagan explains:

145 Hejinian, L., “Who is Speaking?”, The Language of Inquiry: 31 146Izenberg, O., “Language Poetry and Collective Life”, Critical Inquiry, 2003, Autumn: (30:1): 138 – Watten, B., Total Syntax: Carbondale: Ill: 1985: ix – cited in text 97

Alongside its glorified (and violent) national status, the conflict in Vietnam underscored a change in political, media and language technologies. Lyn Hejinian is one amongst several Language School poets who have drawn attention to “Vietnam” as a primary zone of resistant mobilisation and cultural politicisation… within American art practices of the 1970s…147

Fagan further illustrates Hejinian’s politically concerned poetry as she cites Hejinian:

“Collective action began for me with the civil rights movement… Next came the women’s movement, and then the antiwar movement. All three of those called for a reassessment of the structures of understanding and opinion – which are both partly language, or largely language – and through language, a reassessment of the social structures themselves.”148

Several Language poets, Hejinian amongst them, were also in contact with Russian underground writers writing at the time of Soviet reform during the late 1980s and early

1990s, out of which emerged the text Leningrad, written in collaboration with Michael

Davidson, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten and Hejinian. From these contacts also emerged

Hejinian’s correspondence with Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoschenko upon which the

1998, Jacki Ochs’ film Letters Not About Love149 (to be discussed in a later section of this chapter) was based. The film features various dream-like recollections from both poets as they each in turn respond to particular exchanges of words.

147Fagan, K., “‘Constantly I write this happily’: Encountering Lyn Hejinian”: 48 148 Ibid: 48‐49 ‐ Hejinian, L., “A Local Strangeness: An Interview with Lyn Hejinian,” McCaffery, L./ McHale, B., Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors: 138 – cited in text 149 Ochs, J., (Screenplay & Director), Letters Not About Love (Film): Performed by Lili Taylor and Victor Nord, Videocassette: New Day Films: 1998 98

150

Of course, an illusion of any encounter with the other world is that there is a universal “person,” like Robinson Crusoe perhaps, to present the account of its unknown. For reasons having to do with the figure of the “person” in American Poetry, the four poets writing here have in large part dispensed with any notion of the universality or separateness of the place from which such an “I” speaks...151

– Barrett Watten in Leningrad

150Davidson, M. / Hejinian, L. / Silliman, R. / Watten, B. Leningrad, San Francisco: Mercury House: 1991: (preliminary pages) ‐ Icons representing each writer were inspired by textile patterns from the book, Revolutionary Textile Design, Viking Press: 1984 151 Watten, B., in Davidson, M. / Hejinian, L. / Silliman, R. / Watten, B., Leningrad: 23

The politically motivated and collaborative writing process of Leningrad illustrates

Hejinian’s contingent subject explicated throughout this chapter’s textual analysis of My

Life, as situated within an expanded context; within a writing community. This expansion marks out a wider arterial network of borders within which Hejinian’s liminal writing exists and furthers its associative potential. I will address the first of these examples briefly as their broader underpinning concern with the visual within Hejinian’s writing practice will be a central focus in chapter two of this thesis.

The text Leningrad is situated between the written and the visual as it utilizes images throughout as a key component for conveying experiences. Throughout the text the reader is presented with photographs of central Leningrad locations and communal and individual photographs which motivate the written responses of the four contributors. The pictures are not merely add-ons that serve as supplementary material to the writing. Nor is the writing a mere caption for the images. The two work in symbiosis to create an unusual space – one that is situated in neither realm specifically. The text exists ‘in-between’ as the writers complement each other’s purpose with the greater task not only of portraying an experience but also of urging a continued response from the reader. The second and perhaps primary form of visuality in the text is seen in the emblem reproduced on the previous page. The image as Izenberg explains, is inspired by “...a 1930’s Soviet textile pattern...” and “each poet’s contribution is marked, not by a name, but by one quarter of

[the] glyph...”152 The subjectivity of the poets involved is dispersed and in a sense

152 Izenberg, O., “Language Poetry and Collective Life”: 141 100 disowned as the text is allowed and freed to exist as an entity in its own right and in correspondence with readerly reception. He observes that:

In one fell imagistic swoop, the glyph identifies what would otherwise appear to be scattered fragments as one single poem; it unifies four individual poets into one collective authorial entity; and finally its very motif signifies the unification of two nations into one verse culture that seems to be at once the sign and product of a culture endowed with an almost magical capacity for productivity.153

The image serves a purpose strongly integrated with the written text as it deflects attention from the specific author and propels it toward the text as whole. In fact, not only does the glyph draw attention to the wider body of the text but also to the Soviet context within which it was written. This sense of unity between individuals and nations signified by the glyph propels me to a secondary sense of liminality encapsulated within Leningrad – that situated between experience and text. Representation once more seeps past the paper and ink and becomes a very integral aspect of this work. The poets involved in the project fuse their voices into one indistinct speaking entity. As the glyph is divided into quarters, each quarter becomes the individual poets’ insignia included alongside the written material of the individual writers in substitute of their authorial name. The glyph itself, selected from a

Soviet textile pattern, expands this collaborative network even further by allowing for connective associations to be drawn between the American poets involved and their

Russian host nation. As Izenberg argues, “What initially appears ...[as] a... severe reduction of the lyric’s traditional resources for representing complexly individuated psychological states... is actually a reorientation of poetry toward the sort of performance suitable to a

153 Ibid: 143 101 theory of the mind that pre-exists purposes.”154 The fusion between authors which occurs by the method of the glyph is one amidst various other techniques throughout the text which appear to be abstract and to somehow reduce the capacity of what could potentially have been written as a very thorough and densely detailed and specific historical narrative.

However, such a reduction does not in fact occur. Instead, what the text achieves is a re- conceptualized format of representing a specific context, perhaps in even greater detail, in consideration of a larger not-easily defined context synonymous with the redefined realism of Hejinian’s My Life. The variety and lack of specificity in terms of the various poetic recounts as well as the included photographs assist in the manufacturing of an essence of what the experience of 1980s Russia would have been like as opposed to a definitive recount of what exactly it was like. By incorporating the glyph as an intermediary element combining various separately authored components, the position of the author is complicated with the effect of once again enhancing the reader’s interactivity with the text.

It is unlikely that one would remember the exact correspondence between author and glyph particle, hence, it becomes difficult to keep track of who is speaking. Subsequently questions regarding who is speaking are replaced by an experience of the text that does not seek causal connectivity and justification.

Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of the short term memory proves ideal in explaining the mechanics of a form of writing unmotivated by causality as they explain that:

154 Ibid: 157 102

The splendour of the short term idea [is that] one writes using short term memory, and thus short term ideas, even if one reads or rereads using long-term memory... Short term memory includes forgetting as a process; it merges not with the instant but instead with the nervous, temporal and collective rhizome.155

This comparison of the format of the short term memory as rhizome (a continuously growing horizontal underground stem with lateral shoots and adventitious roots at intervals156) is contrasted with that of a tree which Deleuze and Guattari explain to be an arborescent and hierarchical system with “centers of significance and subjectification...”157

The activity that Hejinian’s reader engages in is akin to that of the short term memory.

They draw on experiences from their own lives in a fractured and sporadic manner based upon inspiration they receive from the text before them. The text is multifaceted in meaning and abstract in form. No two individuals and hence, interpretations, may be the same and as a result, the texts formulated, though they might not be written, are situated in the format of interpretation. The sentences in Leningrad appear to be less fractured and abstract than those in My Life and the fracturing process is executed differently. Rather than by juxtaposing individual words and sentences, fracture and assemblage are achieved through authorial juxtaposition. As the reader progresses through the experiences of the four poets, he/she is left to his/her own devices as to how he/she will construct logic or sense especially at moments of authorial change. For example, Hejinian’s conclusion to a section of text – “Suddenly from behind her he saw a trolley coming around the corner – he was fighting to free the little girl’s foot – then at the last minute he pulled off his

155Deleuze, G. / Guattari, F., A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: 16 156 Soanes, C. /Stevenson, A. (Eds.), Concise Oxford English Dictionary (11th ed. Revised): Oxford University Press: Oxford: 2006: 1234 157Deleuze, G. / Guattari, F., A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: 16 103 greatcoat and threw it over the child’s head, to spare her the sight of the instrument of her death”158, is potentially relatable to Silliman’s section of text which follows. Silliman continues from this section writing, “The image of the gold spire shimmering, reversed in the water. The implosion begins.”159 The connection between the segments of writing is not explicit. It is the reader’s responsibility to make their own associations. Hejinian’s concluding remark is not entirely separate from Silliman’s introductory one as both are rendered as visually significant spectacles. Hejinian’s is one of a horrific accident with an act of concealing sight and Silliman’s also evokes a sense of visuality as he describes a type of “image”. The absence of an exact narrative connection between the two leaves a sense of ambiguity as to the association between the two.

Dividing lines between readers and writers are rendered increasingly faint as one becomes involved in such a writing process. It is perhaps no coincidence that leading up to the

Leningrad conference that took place in 1989 “One participant, radical analyst Felix

Guattari, was refused admission to the USSR outright. The one overt collective political act of the conference itself, beyond its own sheer existence, was a letter protesting

Guattari’s exclusion.”160 Although Guattari was refused entry into the country and hence limited in terms of his participation in this particular conference, this very event is documented in a key text that emerged from the conference. Regardless of whether or not this was included in the text as an act of protest the experience and fact of the event live on

158 Hejinian, L., in Davidson, M./ Hejinian, L. / Silliman, R. / Watten, B. Leningrad: 55 159 Silliman, R., in Davidson, M./ Hejinian, L. / Silliman, R. / Watten, B. Leningrad: 55 160Ibid: 13‐14

104 open for readerly interpretation and experience. Such is the power of words and of this style of associative and contextually aware writing. Not only is the reader exposed to events as they occurred but linkages begin to emerge between writer, theorist and reader.

The reader becomes immersed in the realm of the text as he/she engages more explicitly with the events of the life of the author as opposed to the author him/herself as a coherent self. The events discussed have been portrayed poetically and hence serve no direct or perhaps more appropriately, historical, purpose but rather one of providing knowledge, information, and inspiration. Theorists, poets and other key figures included whether directly or through peripheral mention, formulate a contextual expansion and documentation of a community. Such writing encourages action; perhaps not an immediate and direct form of action but one congruous with a process of assemblage. Once the reader becomes enmeshed within the building process of such an assemblage, in commencing a reading practice which stems beyond the experience formulated between him/ her-self and the immediate text, an expansive network is rendered into being. Much like the rhizomic structure theorized by Deleuze and Guattari, Language writing is a process and an ongoing experience. It is a network that flows through publishing houses, printing presses, academic institutions, movies, music, archives, critical and philosophical theory and its potential is vast. What its proponents, the poetical texts discussed throughout the course of this thesis, achieve or encourage, is an active reading process that moves beyond the relationship between the reader and any one specific text and into a realm of many others.

These texts postulate reading and knowledge as processes integral to the understanding and conceptualization of life itself. As Davidson explains within the text: 105

Physical contact is a pervasive cultural fact. And among them, conversation is more than a vehicle of information; it is a way of life. The intensity of debate, discussion, and argument is visible in all aspects of Soviet life – not the least at our conference, where issues of communication, community, and consciousness are the order of the day.161

This observation is a well suited analogy for Hejinian’s poetry and the context of

Language writing more broadly from which her literary practice stems as debates, discussions, arguments, and numerous other forms of interaction that bring people into the

‘space of appearance’ are at the very heart of her poetic oeuvre. One significant example of this formulation of communities is Hejinian’s Tuumba Press. As Vickery explains:

Like so many other Language writers, Lyn Hejinian actively promoted the practice of community through collaborations, reading groups, and more informal discussions. Running for eight years (1976 ˗ 1984), Tuumba Press was a way in which she could more explicitly support the emergent Language writing community.162

In Leningrad there are two key comments from Davidson which demonstrate this notion.

Davidson explains that “...the environment in which history happens is a discursive as well as a physical space, and every attempt to contain one is an implicit summoning of the other”163 and “...it is this dimension – art’s ability to intervene in, not simply on, the rhetoric of power – that we retain from the Russian tradition.”164 It is exactly through the avenue of community and collective work which render the text open to the reader, that the four poets involved in the writing of Leningrad intervene in the rhetoric of power.

161 Davidson, M., in Davidson, M./ Hejinian, L. / Silliman, R. / Watten, B. Leningrad: 19‐20 162 Vickery, A., Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing: 62 163Davidson, M., in Davidson, M./ Hejinian, L. / Silliman, R. / Watten, B., Leningrad: 20 164 Ibid: 21 106

Leningrad builds upon concepts of subjectivity and context introduced in My Life as it expands outwards and encapsulates the significance of the notion of community. The former introduces the fractured and contingent nature of the self and the latter brings to light the subject of that contingency – the communal. By stemming outwards into the context of the reader vis-a-vis the inclusion of real events – via poetic genre – through a representation in the format of what Deleuze and Guattari term the “short term memory”,

Hejinian’s writing is one that invites the reader into that writerly community that is simultaneously the context and the subject of her writing. As Izenberg very accurately explains:

The central interest of the “radical” poetry of the tradition of which language poetry is a part is not social justice but the truth or ontological basis of the social... [It] offer[s] an approach to the profound problem of determining in virtue of what it can be said that persons are there to begin with.165

Throughout Leningrad we witness an occupation of this central concern through a material and visual process – one that branches out to the domain of the reader beyond the call of language and through a blurring of the boundaries between poetry and ethics. Experience is vigorously moved beyond the previously separate realms of reader and author and is placed within and around the central text. In this liminal terrain between experience and writing lies the seed of a more vast scope of representation as a wider variety of subjectivities and experiences become depictable. This occurs in My Life through the construction of various powerful avenues for the representation of a female subjectivity; avenues free from particular subscriptions to defined notions of femininity. In Leningrad,

165 Izenberg, O., “Language Poetry and Collective Life”: 159

107 through the practice of collaboration (cultural and interpersonal), we are able to hear voices from both sides behind the silence of the Cold War, as the poets involved recount not only their own experiences of Russia but also those of others that they come in contact with.

Barrett Watten provides an account of this through his observation that “with the other side as our antagonist, the Cold War desire for a way out could only mean, in identifying with the unknown and forbidden, a denial of oneself... this book is not in any sense a single- voiced narrative of what “I” saw and did on our trip.”166 Through functioning on this plane in-between reality and the written text, the reader is exposed to historical occurrence without or perhaps at the very least, with less, influence from a directive and narrative authorial voice, becoming more greatly implicated in the processes of representation.

From the authorial integration of the reader into the mechanics of the text, emerge concepts of community, context and readerly assemblage which are of critical importance to understanding Hejinian’s writing as a phenomenon with indistinct boundaries, breaching beyond the confines of the official published texts attributed to her by name. The many contributing factors which constitute her writing map out a terrain which bridges the realm of the reader and that of the written text, subsequently occupying an experiential space and encouraging a broader sense of reading and understanding. This process is extended through Hejinian’s collaborations with an array of artists – film makers, musicians, visual artists and other poets throughout the body of her writing career. Hejinian’s texts are by design, the work of an ethics resultantly contributing to a different reading model; one dependent upon a wider consciousness of consciousness beyond the sphere of the writing

166 Watten, B., in Davidson, M. / Hejinian, L. / Silliman, R. / Watten, B, Leningrad: 25 108 itself. Such a model of reading, liminally situated between the text and the world around that text, requests a broad overview of Hejinian’s collaborative work as well as of her prolific archiving practice which I will introduce at the conclusion of this chapter and will engage with in more significant detail throughout the latter chapters of this thesis. The following pages feature an early and more recent example of the collaborative and interrelated processes which comprise Hejinian’s poetics

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Letters Not About Love

The 1998 Jackie Ochs film Letters Not About Love is a poignant example of the growth of the concept of community, significant in Hejinian’s writing as a liminal terrain hinged upon the pillars of the person, community, language and the ‘space of appearance’ as theorized by Arendt, and discussed earlier. Letters Not About Love was inspired by and based upon written correspondence that took place between Lyn Hejinian and Russian poet

Arkadii Dragomoschenko following the 1989 Leningrad experience which facilitated the meeting between the two. As Ray Privett argues:

…while it is occasionally referred to as “a film by Jacki Ochs,” Letters Not About Love itself and its press kit almost completely avoid any auteurist pretences, instead emphasizing the contributions of all those who worked on this film that were determined in many ways not by Ochs herself but instead by the associations of poets, jazz musicians, and others.167

The film furthers notions of community by taking as inspiration the correspondence between two poets and enlisting many others to create an essence that pays homage to the literary culture of the collaborators involved. To further the list, one must take into account the dramatization of the various recollections throughout the film intertwined with actual video inclusions specifically of Hejinian as a young girl. Also, in the conceptualization of this inter-textual equation we must take into consideration the title of the film and the

167 Privett, R., “Cold War Recovery: Letters Not about Love”, Senses of Cinema (online archive): World Wide Web: http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/8/letters.html: 2000: 6: last accessed ‐ 30/06/2009 110 film’s appropriation of the correspondence based, letter format from Viktor Shkolvsky’s

1923 text Zoo, or Letters Not about Love.

Add-Verse

Add-Verse as is described on the website comprising this literary venture, is:

…a two part project by Allan Graham and Gloria Graham which was made in conjunction with twenty five poets between September 2003 and October 2005. Beginning in Cambridge, England, documentation of visual and audio was collected by travelling to the natural circumstance of each poet’s location.168

The project featuring Hejinian as one of the poets involved utilizes multiple media formats from the spoken and written word, the photographic image, to the World Wide Web, to create a dynamic and engaging conversation between significant modern day methods of representation. Bringing into collaboration not only various modes of media but also the subjectivities and poetic responses of a multiplicity of poets, this project is a relatively recent example of the prolific nature of collaborative writing and a suitable example of the nature in which it continues its expansion.

168Graham, A. / Graham, G., Add‐Verse (online project) ‐ World Wide Web ‐ http://www.add‐verse.info/ : last accessed ‐ 13/04/2010

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Two artists intertwine excerpts of poetry recited by the featured poets and collaborate to present these excerpts as a networked project. This networking takes place physically through the specific layout presented on the web page. The various elements of the project are displayed for readerly selection though the reading process itself has no strict chronology. The reader would approach this text in a very similar way that one would a

Hejinian poem. Contingent upon a case of personal preference and temporal situation amidst other possible contextual influences, a reading path for this text is not established or prescribed. The reader takes on the active role of assembling meanings through his/her chosen navigational course. Situated on the liminal thread between media formats and subjectivities, such a text utilizes modern representational formats to continue a Language inspired tradition of communal and collaborative textuality.

Letters and Archives

I love to write letters. I love to receive them. And I still write lots of them. I really do think the letter is a literary enterprise, and I always did even when I wasn’t thinking of being archived. My contemporaries and I have always insisted that our poetry is grounded in the world – and that’s really a place where the grounding can begin, the first workings out in stages of ideas, with the relationship of ideas to other things in life preserved.169

– Lyn Hejinian

169 Hejinian, L., in Interview with Bellamy, D., “The Eternal Repository”, Chain: 1995, Spring: (2): 19 112

To expand the domain of the liminal in the writing of Lyn Hejinian, as it has been framed throughout the course of this chapter, there are two more contested and somewhat intertwined genres of writing that must be addressed. Contestation to their plausibility as genres emerges as no clear distinction exists between the notion of the memoir of the every-day and that of the formal and stylized written project; two often conflicting veins of writing brought into conversation through the practices of archiving and letter writing.

Hejinian states in an interview with Dodie Bellamy about her archived letters at UCSD that, “... I would like to see archived materials taken really seriously as a genre...”170 The intensely personal dimension attached to non-fictional letter writing is the most probable cause for the archived letter to not be regarded as an object of literary interest as strongly as it is one of historical value. This very separation and Hejinian’s desire to see it regarded more as a genre furthers the situation of Hejinian’s writing as a phenomenon that occupies a vast terrain which draws strong association between the written text and the lived experience and challenges the notion of an objective historical narrative. As Kate Fagan argues:

Epistolary enthusiasm might be Lyn Hejinian’s way of perpetuating an ethical poetics... In letters, Hejinian acknowledges her loyalty to various communities and demonstrates the importance of community to her sense of poetical praxis... She... uses epistolary exchanges as a way of imagining, provoking, and writing those communities into being. Letters enable Hejinian to occupy and move within a series of contradictions or active boundaries, places of passage.171

170Ibid. 171Fagan, K., “In co‐respondence: reading Lyn Hejinian's letter archives”, Mantis, 2000: (1): 31‐32 113

Fagan concludes in citation of Hejinian herself – “Each of our lives – it’s brief, and it’s so easily lost in the middle of everybody else’s lives, and plus all the other things in the world... records of lives I think are of enormous value... I do want there to be a record, not of me, but of the life.”172 Recording is central to Hejinian’s writing. She works in response to and simultaneously in dialogue, with real events. This does not serve to provide a historical record but rather, it abstractly documents and builds upon events that have taken place to represent an occurred reality as continually occurring.

Letter writing for Hejinian, is a practice beyond that of her poetic and critical works which similarly to those, occupies a liminal zone both textually and metaphorically. Letters exist as a phenomenon of exchange between two people, two contexts and two localities. As letters to real people in real time they are historical but as material contributory to her creation and conceptualization of poetic community, they may also be regarded as textual.

Hejinian’s letters are indeed as Fagan suggests, places of passage; passage between the real and the textual – blurred spaces of contact that enable an understanding far greater than that of the more common closed text173 which further enforce the significance of the notion of the in-between as an important component of Hejinian’s writing oeuvre.

I conclude this chapter with a glimpse at Craig Dworkin’s electronic archive Eclipse which houses various copies of original texts and features a significant number of Hejinian texts.

172 Hejinian, L., in Interview with Bellamy, D., “The Eternal Repository”: 32 (electronic pagination) 173Hejinian, L., in “The Rejection of Closure”, The Language of Inquiry: 43, argues that – “The open text... foregrounds process... and thus resists the cultural tendencies that seek to... fix material, turn it into product... it resists reduction and commodification.” 114

As a phenomenon situated between the most modern of media (the World Wide Web) and the less recent (print on paper), Dworkin engages with the community of Language poets to record and document many of the original Language texts that were featured in limited edition chapbooks and other small scale publications, simultaneously creating a new type of text contingent upon the various implications of new media formats. Dworkin explains that his reason for commencing the archive was witnessing a presentation on Language poetry from a recent scholar which demonstrated that the speaker had never seen an actual copy of the work that he was referring to. Simultaneously, he wanted to make the original materials available for teachers engaging with this form of writing.

Dworkin makes the observation that “... to archive inked paper as digital media is a curiously paradoxical attempt to stay the ephemerality of one medium through media that are even more tenuous, mutable, and prone to the sheer unrecoverability of technical obsolescence.”174 The actions involved in preserving the texts involved comprise an ironic dual process because as Dworkin explains, making the writings digitally available often requires damaging of the original copies to ensure well aligned and realistic duplicates.

One such process is the removal of centre staples. It might be contested that this process of preservation defeats the purpose of the archive as a place that houses and preserves existing documents. Whilst this may be the case, this thesis argues for a re- conceptualization of this perception and reception of the archive. Dworkin’s Eclipse captivates the irony that is present throughout Hejinian’s writing; an irony that treads a border line between the real and the textual and makes the value of the text more relevant

174 Dworkin, C. D., “Hypermnesia”: Boundary 2: 2009: (36:3): 84 115 to readers, enabling a wider scope of readable possibilities. Such an archive, much in the same vein as Hejinian’s writing, simultaneously critical and creative, is once more illustrative of a border – between the original and the latter. As Dworkin argues:

Every material aspect of a text – layout, typeface and font, binding, ink, et cetera – produces a full semantic charge. As decades of communications theory and textual editing have reiterated, media and physical support are not incidental to the meaning of a text; rather, they are – in themselves – an inextricable part of that meaning.175

Hejinian’s work, as I have illustrated through an analysis of several texts that she has been involved in creating, individually and collaboratively and has influenced peripherally, occupies a liminal zone between the real and the textual. In the production of these texts she engages with aspects from varying media forms and formats of representation to create engaging works which involve and reiterate the significance of context. Though such a form of writing may not serve a strict historical purpose of providing real and primary information, it does motivate elements from real life events together with imagist, tangible and tactile media to create a metaphysical connectivity to the lived experience which serves a form of dual function combining the literary with the philosophical. This combination renders Hejinian’s work within a complicated contextually driven inter- textual network which holds the potential to impact readers in a significant way through its redefined approach to realism and its subsequent implications for an understanding of consciousness.

175 Ibid: 85

116

It is useful to frame Hejinian’s work as fulfilling an archival purpose, not in the sense that it preserves events with an aspect of exactitude but rather in the Derridean sense as referred to by Dworkin whereby he states that, “the archivist produces more archive, and that is why the archive is never closed. It opens out onto the future.”176 Hejinian motivates and engages in a multifaceted network of events, subjectivities, genres, and media to create work formatted much like a dream whereby seemingly unrelated particles come in contact with one another. As she explains in her essay “Reason”, “the context is the medium of our encounter, the ground of our becoming present at the same place at the same time.”177

Through this formulation Hejinian places many aspects into play not only with one another but also with readers. Although they are being delivered through text on paper, the linguistic medium and formatting techniques mobilized and discussed throughout the course of this chapter, place the reader into considerably direct contact with what has been

(historically/ temporally passed) and enable a surge of interaction to take place, rendering both reader and event present in simultaneous place and time as they enter the “space of appearance”.178

176 Derrida, J., Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, ( Prenowitz, E., Trans.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 1996: 68 – cited in ‐ Dworkin, C. D., “Hypermnesia”: Boundary 2: 58 177Hejinian, L., “Reason”, The Language of Inquiry: 342 178 Arendt, H., in The Human Condition, Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press: 1958: 199 – argues that: The space of appearance comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action, and therefore predates and precedes all formal constitution of the public realm ande th various forms of government, that is, the various forms in which the public realm can be organized. 117

Commitment to an In-between:

This chapter has served the purpose of explicating the broad paradigms which extend beyond the published text into the heart of the context which surrounds and is as much a part of the writing that comprises Lyn Hejinian’s work, articulating notions of the liminal and the experiential as key textual considerations necessary to a holistic understanding of

Hejinian’s broader writing oeuvre.

An understanding of community and collaboration as well as of multi-modal/ inter-generic/ and interdisciplinary approaches to writing are critical for comprehending the liminal junction that renders Hejinian’s project more as an accumulation and documentation of knowledge as opposed to a strictly delineated writing venture.

A situation at such a junction enables Hejinian to write and record beyond the confines of established convention, particularly in respect to traditional conceptualizations of history and literature. This freeing from convention assists in the devising of a writing project that offers a re-conceptualized approach to realist representation which in effect has empowering implications for the writing of a female subjectivity. The central character comprising the female subject within Hejinian’s work is derived from her documentation of herself/ her personal experience. What emerges as a result of this documentation both

118 through her published works and through her letters and archives, is a very prolific account of a female life placed on record with great subtlety and simultaneous conviction.

I now move to the second chapter of this thesis which will pursue the prolific presence of an imagist ambience throughout Hejinian’s writing. Specifically, I will examine the significant expanse of visual components evident throughout her literary materials. This examination will expand upon my hypothesis commenced within this chapter regarding

Hejinian’s redefined notions of realism as collaborative and grounded within the mechanics of the world (not merely as an image of the real world) and upon this realism’s implications for a textual visuality and the consequent conceptualization of a female subjectivity.

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Image as Word – Reading Visuality

Chapter 2

In formulating a “prolonged” or “continuous” present (consisting in turn of “an including everything” and “a beginning again and again within a very small thing”) as a compositional method, Stein had discovered something fundamental about the way time exists at the interior of a human life; it is within living that time has its sources. This was a discovery which she found to be essential to the art of portraiture. 179

– Lyn Hejinian

Cave paintings, hieroglyphs, and the Chinese Han and Japanese Kanji logograms all illustrate an ever-present nexus dating thousands of years back in time, between writing and the visual image. As linguists Blair, Collins, and Finegan explicate, “long before they developed writing, humans produced graphic representations of the objects that surrounded them.”180 Throughout the history of the phenomenon of writing, there exists a sense of intricate connectivity between the way in which we see the world and the methods by which we write about these visions. In the Western literary tradition one of the most prolific and well known writers of inter-generic literature is William Blake (1757-1827)

179Hejinian, L. (Introd.) to Stein, G., Three Lives, Kobenhavn & Los Angeles: Green Integer: 2004: 23 – C R. Stimpson/ Harriet Chessman (Eds.), “Composition as Explanation,” in Gertrude Stein: Writings 1903‐1932: New York: Library of America: 1998: 524‐25 – cited in text. 180 Blair, D. /Collins, C. / Finegan, E., Language: Its Structure and Use (2nd edition), Australia: Thomson Learning: 2002 120 with his writing and illustration of the Illuminated Books. David Bindman explicates

Blake’s hybrid creative practice, arguing that:

Blake’s distinctive achievement in the Illuminated books derives ultimately from his ability to create a unity out of the potentially fragmentary aspects of his life, by refusing to be confined within the professional compartments of printmaking, painting and poetry. Life, work and art were to be indivisible, united by the idea that all art was a form of prayer. Blake’s passionate sincerity and spiritual ambition were always at war with material circumstances, but he was able to bring an almost superhuman energy and technical ingenuity to his desire to give concrete expressions to his visions.181

Bindman’s conceptualization of Blake’s hybrid practice which combined multiple modalities (visual, tactile and written) characterizes multi-modal work as possessing a certain ‘super’ quality. His argument that in bridging across and between the confines of specific disciplines Blake’s work acquired an almost “superhuman energy” and demonstrated “technical ingenuity” signals the notion of a certain potency within multimodal work emergent perhaps from the imbedded recognition of an ‘other’ format within the work’s fragmentary and dualistic nature.

As a result of the dramatic impact of the industrial revolution the twentieth century witnessed a powerful resurgence of inter-disciplinary and multi-modal work. This occurred as a result of attempts to redefine and account for the rapid evolutions and alterations which were occurring politically, ecologically and commercially during the late nineteenth

181 Bindman, D. (Introd.) to Blake, W., William Blake, The Complete Illuminated Books, New York: Thames and Hudson in Association with The William Blake Trust: 2005: 8 121 and early twentieth, centuries. Paul Valéry succinctly captures the essence of the significant changes resultant from this contextual framework, arguing that:

Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and the habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor time has been what it was from time immemorial.182

During this significant period of change the situation for women was also shifting.

Stallworthy and Daiches explicate that:

The position of women… was rapidly changing during this period. The Married Woman’s Property Act of 1882, which allowed married women to own property in their own right; the admission of women to the universities at different times during the latter part of the century; the fight for women’s suffrage, which was not won until 1918 (and not fully won until 1928) – these events marked a change in the attitude toward women and in the part they played in national life as well as in the relation between the sexes, which is reflected in a variety of ways in the literature of the period.183

Amongst these women who comprised a small but significant component of the literary scene of the twentieth century was Gertrude Stein to whom much of Hejinian’s writing is stylistically indebted. Stein’s writing challenged through words what art was challenging through media and subject matter at the time; namely methods of representing what was

182 Valéry, P. (Manheim, R. Trans.), “The Conquest of Ubiquity”, Aesthetics: New York: Pantheon Books: 1964: 225 183 Daiches, D. / Stallworthy, J. in Abrams, M. H. / Greenblatt, S./ Stallworthy, J. (Eds.), The Norton Anthology of English Literature : The Twentieth Century (Seventh Edition: Volume 2C), New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company: 2000: 1898 122 conceived of as reality. Paul Wood explicates the great divide which persisted throughout the course of the twentieth century between modern avant-garde and realist art as he highlights the persistent polarization of the two modes of art. Wood argues that, “Western theorists of the Modern Movement in art maintained this notion of polarity – that avant- garde art and realist art faced each other antagonistically across an unbridgeable gap. They, however, praised the avant-garde while criticizing ‘realistic’ figurative art as retrograde.”184 Wood highlights a potential challenge to these two standardized conceptualizations through the writing of Russian modernist painter Kazimir Malevich as he argues that:

… [a] possibility, which neither of the contending orthodoxies appeared to understand, was perhaps understood by a third minority tradition… Kazimir Malevich wrote of Suprematism, the abstract art movement he pioneered during the First World War, that ‘Painting is paint and colour… such forms will not be repetitions of living things in life but will themselves be a living thing. A painted surface is a real, living form.’185

Stein’s attempt at a redefinition of existing notions of realism in writing echoes Malevich’s tendencies in the realm of visual art. This approach to realism understood by the minority tradition of Suprematism, was a defining precursor to Hejinian’s writing (as is signaled by

Hejinian herself in her published “Two Stein Talks” to be examined at a later stage in this thesis), which furthers this experienced based approach to realist representation in the formulation of a writerly reality. Within this alternative, textually-based disposition of reality comprised by experimentation in language, Hejinian, also like Stein, endeavors to

184 Wood, P., “Realisms and Realities”, in Fer, B., Batchelor, D., Wood, P., Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art between the Wars, New Haven & London: Yale University Press: 264 185 Ibid: ‐ Malevich, K., “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: the new painterly realism”, 1915, in Bowlt, J. (Ed.), Russian Art of the Avant‐Garde: Theory and Criticism, New York: The Viking Press: 1976: 129‐ 130 – cited in text 123 articulate and situate a speaking female subject. Alternatively however to Stein’s predominantly language-based ventures, Hejinian’s work exhibits often indirectly and translucently, a persistent integration of the visual throughout the fabric of her writing oeuvre.

The visuality of Hejinian’s practice expands her poetic and literary community beyond the circles of poetry and literature as she collaborates and corresponds with an array of visual artists, film makers and musicians. Graphics and visuality have been evident within

Hejinian’s work throughout the course of her writing career, emerging through the publications from her own printing press Tuumba as well as through her involvement in the writing and production of numerous limited edition artist-books such as the collaborative texts, Individuals (1988, with Kit Robinson), The Traveler and the Hill and

The Hill (1998, with Emilie Clark) and Chartings (2000, with Ray DiPalma). In addition to this, Hejinian has contributed to various rare folios such as These Blossoms Will Be Gone in a Week – a collaborative printing exercise conceived of in 1998, with the poetry within the folio composed by the full-time and guest faculty at The Jack Kerouac School (The

Department of Writing and Poetics at Naropa University) which is currently home to the

Chandler & Price Platen Press operated by Hejinian to produce her Tuumba Press publications. In an interview with Brian McHale and Larry McCaffery, Hejinian refers to an early involvement with the visual arts as she recounts that:

I went to Harvard and took one half-year writing course which was viciously destructive; I stopped writing for a year and a half after that. I probably wasn’t writing very well, I should say by the way, but anyway this writing course was just

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vicious. So I decided to become a painter for about a year and a half. I painted vast oil paintings that are long gone.186

Though Hejinian returned to writing following those one and a half years, her study of art persistently permeates and remains prominent and current throughout her poetic and publishing practices. In the same interview Hejinian continues in support of the sense of visuality within her work as she states:

Although I love painting, I’m not sure how much it has influenced me apart from inspiration. Film has influenced me more, not actually as I watch it but as I imagine how it’s constructed. The idea of a sequence of single frames is an exciting notion to me from a compositional standpoint: you get this, then you get this, then you get this... It’s the stopping between that’s really interesting, exhilarating to me, and makes me want to write something (though not something about film).187

Ample evidence supporting the presence and significance of a visuality within Hejinian’s work beyond the advent of the texts themselves is available though it remains clear that it emerges not as a separate or secondary medium in support of Hejinian’s poetry but rather as an integrated and integral part of the writing itself. As Hejinian describes her inspiration drawn from film, the visual can be conceived of as a form of stimulus for her linguistic endeavors rather than as an illustrative tool or as finished product.

186 McCaffery, L./ McHale, B., “A Local Strangeness: An Interview with Lyn Hejinian in Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors: 144 187 Ibid: 143 125

The first Hejinian text to explicitly illustrate this integration between the visual image and the written text was the 1972, self published, The Grreat Adventure. This very early text indicates quite clearly the multimodal method with which she approaches her work. The

Grreat Adventure features the use of diagrams, stamps, coloured markers, collage and photography in a text which is comprised of a documentation of an experiment conducted by Hejinian and her brother Doug Hall which consisted of the attachment of questionnaires to balloons, the releasing of those balloons into the atmosphere and a collection of the various responses from onlookers and recipients of the balloons. What appear to be the actual handwritten returned responses are also included in the text contributing to its multimodal disposition. The Grreat Adventure signals the commencement of a writing career strongly concerned with the potentials of a form of visuality within language. Since then, Hejinian’s sense of visuality intrinsic to her writing, has evolved beyond the format of a multimedia assemblage (though it is far more than that) as a tightly interwoven aspect of her very language, as she collaborates with visual artists in the writing of several visual- linguistic hybrid texts and develops a language strongly dependent upon the usage of verbal imagery. My Life’s opening lines, “A moment yellow, just as four years later, when my father returned home from the war, the moment of greeting him, as he stood at the bottom of the stair, younger, thinner than when he had left, was purple...”188 exemplify this format of verbal imagery as Hejinian instead of describing in specific detail the intricacies of the particular moment at hand, utilizes the less-explicit qualities of the verbal image to render a moment in colour and broaden the parameters of readerly interpretation and interaction with the text.

188 Hejinian, L., My Life: 2002: 7 126

189

Hejinian’s sense of the visual evident in her published material, also emerges significantly in her publishing ventures, most explicitly perhaps in the opening of her own publishing press Tuumba which commenced operation during the 1970s. Kate Fagan and Ann

Vickery articulate the significant role Hejinian undertook in the structural and aesthetic facets of the texts published by Tuumba. Ann Vickery explains that:

Tuumba books have always been noted for their impressive presentation, which involve a combination of carefully chosen fonts, sizing, covers, illustrations and ink colours. Tuumba postcards were also meticulously designed… Hejinian negotiated

189 Hejinian, L., The Grreat Adventure: self published: 1972 (no pagination) 127

each postcard design with its author. She found the material for her postcards at Willits printing, salvaging scraps when she was working there.190

Fagan also stresses the significance of notions of the visual and material made manifest through Hejinian’s early publishing venture as she explains that:

Each chapbook is distinguished by high production values and paper quality, and Hejinian traded on “rarified” status and a non-commodity aesthetic by hand- numbering the limited 450 copies of each edition. The designs were entirely her own, though various local artists contributed cover images.191

Fagan further supports her claim in citation of Hejinian’s claim that, “I thought of publishing as an extension of my writing and thinking about writing, as an expansion of the ground for aesthetic discovery. And I thought of it too, too as an extension of aesthetic responsibility.”192

190Vickery, A., Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing: 68 191 Fagan, K., “‘Constantly I write this happily’: Encountering Lyn Hejinian”: 50‐51 192 Hejinian, L., “Lyn Hejinian/ Andrew Schelling: An Exchange”, Jimmy and Lucy’s House of K6: 1986: 3 – cited in Fagan, K., “‘Constantly I write this happily’: Encountering Lyn Hejinian”: 51 128

193

The Tuumba books and all associated materials were intricately designed and published with special attention to visual and tactile detail. Their immaculate presentation rendered each publication with a sense of completeness and objectivity within itself. Hejinian’s attention to visual detail is interwoven throughout her writing ventures from her publishing practice to her poetic endeavors. It is necessary to understand this visuality as a connecting point between the two aspects of Hejinian’s career as both writer and publisher. The imagistic concern which emerges through both avenues is prominent and requires attention beyond the scope of acknowledgement and identification. This chapter will attribute significance to the visual within Hejinian’s writing practice as an instrumental facet to the portrayal of a female subjectivity.

193Owen, M. poem featured on ‐ Tuumba Press Postcard: Papers of L. Hejinian, Mandeville Special Collections Library, Geisel Library, University of California, San Diego, MS 74/51/20

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Hejinian’s current publishing venture conducted in collaboration with Travis Ortiz, is testament to the need for critics and readers to progress from the existing, predominantly language focused analyses of Hejinian’s writing to address her broader practice through a more holistic lens, taking into consideration the vast variety of writing endeavors which constitute her literary career and life more broadly. The Atelos project is predominantly concerned with alternative literature which engages with a hybridization of modalities. As the website for the project explains:

All the works published as part of the Atelos project are commissioned specifically for it and each is involved in some way with crossing genre boundaries including, for example, those that would separate theory from practice, poetry from prose, essay from drama, the visual image from the verbal, the literary from the non- literary and so forth.194

Hejinian’s focus upon publishing non-definitive genres of writing concerned with trespassing established traditional literary boundaries signals the necessity for an examination of the hybridity within Hejinian’s own literature which exists between her lived experiences, correspondence and published poetic and critical writing as well as of what is the central focus of this chapter, the correlation and establishment of a simultaneously visual and literary language.

This hybrid multimodal form of language has become significantly more pronounced in recent years through Hejinian’s collaborative projects with Emilie Clark. In the 1998 text

194 Hejinian, L. / Ortiz, T. Atelos (publishing venture) website ‐ World Wide Web ‐ http://www.atelos.org/info.htm : last accessed ‐ 18/01/2011 130

The Traveler and The Hill, and The Hill, Hejinian composed poetry to be featured on alternate pages to prints produced by Emilie Clark. Clark’s artwork featured within the text was also part of her own ongoing mixed media project The Weekly Series. In their 2000, collaborative text The Lake, the delineation between the role of artist and poet becomes less explicit as both Hejinian and Clark work within their specialized area but also exchange roles to work in each other mediums. Hejinian produces part of the artworks included and Clark partially takes on the role of poet, significantly challenging coherent distinctions between the written and the visual text. The inclusion of both poetry and imagery across the span of each page within the text further complicates a process of distinction and requires of the reader a more open reception to the reading process; one that facilitates the dynamics of a hybrid visual/linguistic text.

The distinction between the visual and the written is often unclear throughout Hejinian’s writing as the two often separate modalities are fused into one language apparatus. This absence of, or blurred distinction between the two representational modes necessitates the development of an alternative reading modal which enables a concurrent and correlative reading of the two. J. J. Long’s reflection upon the hybrid writing of W. G. Sebald that,

“…photography no longer forms part of the paratextual apparatus, but is integrated into the fabric of the narrative…”195 exemplifies another such writing and develops an integrated reading method which addresses both the visual and the textual as corresponding and equally significant components of the text.

195 Long, J. J., “History, Narrative, and Photography in W. G. Sebald’s “Die Ausgewanderten”, The Modern Language Review: (98:1): January 2003: 118

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In Hejinian’s and Clark’s The Lake this interweaving occurs through the choice in font for the writing within the text. Appearing animated and handwritten, it gravitates towards the context of the visual in its distinction from more conventional typesets. The interweaving of the two mediums also occurs through the placement of the writing on the page with spatial consideration of the placement of the imagery as contributory to the function of the image rather than as a citation. The words on the page are not explicatory of the visual components. Rather, as a new set of language constituents, their placement requires consideration in regards to the overall meaning of the text. Hejinian and Clark address the evolution of this interweaving process in their description of the processes of their collaborative project as they explain that:

…the lake figures both as a literal and a metaphorical landscape. We were interested in the interrelationships, simultaneities, and the extents of layers… We imagined the lake as a site and described such a site as being constituted by all possible responses to it. We worked from early morning to late at night, taking breaks to walk along the lakeshore or go out into the lake in a kayak, photographing along the way…196

Hejinian and Clark describe their perception of the physical landscape of a particular lake as comprising all possible responses to it. The pictures and words which are written and created as a part of this project are considered to formulate the landscape itself, not merely being external responses or reflections but an integral contribution to the language of the text. They address the functions of writing or painting or photography all under the umbrella term of ‘responses’. Much in the way that the initial landscape of the lake is a phenomenon that is confronted by Hejinian and Clark, the written text The Lake, also

196Hejinian, L. /Clark, E., World Wide Web: www.granarybooks.com/books/lake/the.lake1.html : last accessed ‐ 23/03/2010 132 becomes a phenomenon to be confronted by readers. The Lake is conceptualized as being more than a mediating medium between the textual and literal lake; it in fact becomes a landscape in its own right, destined to initiate and inspire a myriad of phantasmic images in the reader’s mind. The method of how this initiation occurs will constitute an extended textual analysis of The Lake in a latter portion of this chapter.

Before commencing my analysis of the visuality within Hejinian’s writing practice, I must configure an understanding of the terms visuality and imagery in acknowledgment of the very long history of the relation between language and image and the debate regarding their differences and similarities. Claire Pajaczkowska argues that:

Within contemporary writing the battle between word and image has been fought for a long time, usually taking the form of an imperialist struggle for ownership of territory, the territory being the power to define academic disciplines... These arguments claim that the image is a separate and more primary form of communication than language, that it is truer, and that its special truth cannot really be discussed in language.197

The argument regarding the capacities of both mediums of language and image is extraordinarily vast and it is not the object of this thesis to take a specific stance in regards to the superiority of either one. It is my purpose however to provide an account of

Hejinian’s negotiation of the two and I offer insight into her collaborative interweaving of mediums through an analysis of an excerpt from a text titled Illustrated Letters: Artists and

197 Pajaczkowska, C., “Structure and Pleasure” in Bird, J. /Curtis, B. / Mash, M. / Putnam, T. / Robertson, G. / Stafford, S. / Tickner, L. (Eds.), The Block Reader in Visual Culture, London & New York: Routledge: 1996: 34

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Writers Correspond. This text examines the personal correspondence of several significant figures in both the fields of writing and visual art as it illustrates occasions when practitioners from both mediums turn to an alternate means of portraying their message.

Such situations emerge when one medium of representation is insufficient to comprise the authors’ intended meaning and is subsequently exchanged for another. In the text’s foreword, Francine Prose argues that:

When language proves insufficient, inadequate for the purpose of intricate and accurate description, even the most articulate of... writers abandon the word for the line and begin to draw… Antoine de Saint-Exupéry mails his mother a drawing of a dog he saw in Casablanca, while Van Gogh sends his brother Theo an extraordinary rendering of the sort of Brabant peasant woman who would soon appear in The Potato Eaters... But just as often there are occasions on which pictures simply will not do and the painters and writers... remember how useful– and necessary–language is when one wants to express all possible nuances of emotion and experience...198

Both writing and visual representation have specific and varied capacities for the portrayal of meaning and either one may be more or less appropriate for certain experiences based upon the context and disposition of the writing individual. In other words, some representations are best made in a particular medium. The merging of language with a variety of visual mediums in Hejinian and Clark’s writing takes advantage of the full scale of possibilities enabled by both mediums and comprises an expanded language.

198 Prose., F. (Foreword) in Ayala, R./ Guéno, J., Illustrated Letters: Artists and Writers Correspond: New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.: 1999: 13 134

Language itself also comprises a form of literary visuality which can be identified throughout Hejinian’s corpus of writing even in literature that does not as The Lake does, explicitly engage with graphic media. W.J.T. Mitchell argues that “Images are also… mental things, residing in the psychological media of dreams, memory, and fantasy; or they are linguistic expressions that name concrete objects that may or may not be metaphoric or allegorical.”199 He considers what the difference might be between an image and a picture and discusses these differences suggesting that perhaps the most basic distinction is the tactile nature of the picture as opposed to that of the image as he argues that:

You can hang a picture, but you cannot hang an image. The image seems to float without any visible means of support, a phantasmic, virtual, or spectral appearance. It is what can be lifted off the picture, transferred to another medium, translated into a verbal ekphrasis, or protected by copyright. The image is the “intellectual property” that escapes the materiality of the picture when it is copied.200

The image is a form of immaterial essence which emerges and remains in large part, with its beholder. It embodies the role of metaphor in being intended for the portrayal of a certain likeness, the power and effect of which can only ever be truly known to the individual reader. The creation of imagery, both verbal and graphic, in attaining its full potential in the mind and eye of its beholder through an intangible presence, formulates an ideal format of representation in terms of a metaphysical writing with consciousness and experience as its key concerns. By incorporating two mediums of representation structurally dependant on the use of imagery (those of graphics and poetry), Hejinian’s

199Mitchell, W. J. T., What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images, Chicago & London: 84 200 Ibid. 135 writing transcends the genre of written and oral poetry into what might be classified as a kind of genre of the lived experience. This genre is enabled through the more active role required of the reader as viewer, assembler and/or mediator across these modalities.

Hejinian’s practice of engaging both verbal and graphic imagery throughout her poetic practice results in the creation of a form of phantasmagoria as referred to by Margaret

Cohen in her discussion of Walter Benjamin’s use of the term in his incomplete opus magnum The Arcades Project. Cohen provides an alternative definition to the terminology which differs considerably from its original proposition which was concerned with the analysis of commodity culture. This alternative description is ideal for conceptualizing the visuality of Hejinian’s writing. Cohen argues that:

Benjamin... provides us with an alternative way to understand the illuminations of phantasmagoric manifestation. Pano-rama, the Passagen-Werk Konvolut [was] devoted to popular forms of 19th- century visual spectacle... One of these spectacles, the "phantasmagorical experience" or, as it was also called, the phantasmagoria, was literally illuminating. Using a movable magic lantern called a phantoscope, it projected for its spec- tators a parade of ghosts.201

Benjamin’s phantasmagoria as described in this instance serves as an illuminator of spectacle and resonates with Hejinian’s collaborative and dialogical project with Leslie

Scalapino titled Sight. In her introduction to the text, which explicitly engages with writing based upon the phenomenon of sight, Hejinian explains the parameters of their work as inclusive of a vast array of what might be conceptualized as sightings as she writes that:

201 Cohen, M., “Walter Benjamin’s Phantasmagoria”, New German Critique: 1989: (48): 90 136

Our only constraint was that each response – each poem – would have two parts and that in each poem there should be some reference to, or presentation of, something actually seen. But we never limited the scope of what might be considered a sight or sighting. ...I... included occasional dream images and many other purely mental pictures, concentrating in particular on those mental pictures... that seemed to flash into view in response to your words.202

Hejinian’s visual approach to writing enacts this form of phantasmagoria as it concerns itself with a continual illumination of images comprised through a plethora of origins emerging not purely from a standard visual format but also through avenues such as verbal and dream imagery. The textual analyses within this chapter of my thesis demonstrate the functioning of this visuality through Hejinian’s wider body of work through an examination of texts demonstrative of the varying degrees of graphic and verbal imagery in three separate Hejinian texts. These analyses serve to illustrate that the visual, though employed in varying degrees and formats by Hejinian, achieves a uniform effect which renders her use of a sight-oriented modality as an extended linguistic apparatus employed in the writing of a poetics of experience.

The phantasmagoria which permeates Hejinian’s writing project is indebted to some degree to the poetics of Gertrude Stein. The following segment of this chapter addresses some uncanny similarities between the two authors and examines what Hejinian drew upon from Stein’s practice through a brief synopsis of two talks she delivered on Stein’s work.

202 Hejinian, L./ Scalapino, L., Sight: Washington, DC: Edge Books: 1999: (No pagination to Introduction) 137

A Steinian Visuality

As was previously addressed in the opening chapters of this thesis, Hejinian’s early exposure to Stein as a canonical cultural figure during her father’s time whose work was much admired by her father, made a lasting impression on her. His admiration for Stein’s work cleared for Hejinian any concern she may have had about becoming a female writer.

A later re-introduction to Stein through the avenue of an article by Marjorie Perloff (also addressed in the introductory stages of this thesis) articulating a strong likeness between the work of the two writers (Hejinian and Stein), further asserts the significance of Stein’s influence on Hejinian as a writer.

There are several almost uncanny similarities between the lives of Hejinian and Stein that in addition to the direct source of acknowledgement from the former towards the latter create a curious intersection and border. This border ‘strangely’ (as in the strange confrontations within the border-based phenomenon of dreams – addressed throughout

Hejinian’s essay “Strangeness”203 to be examined in further detail in chapter four of this thesis) furthers insight into Hejinian’s writing style. This insight renders Hejinian’s work as inextricable from real life experience and collaborative input, whether it is direct or inter-textually attributed, of a broader writing community. The prominent parallels between the lives of Stein and Hejinian are explained by Kate Fagan as she argues that:

203 Hejinian, L., in The Language of Inquiry: 136 – explicates that: “”Strangeness” addresses “knowledge of sensible realities,” and makes its case for the value of that (and for poetry’s role in achieving it) via analogy with a certain tradition of scientific work.” 138

There are fascinating intersections here: a proto-feminist identification with American female literary innovation, alongside an influential paternal figure whose cultural “scene” had already collectively “canonized” Stein, notwithstanding the general unavailability within America of Stein’s printed works.204

In a footnote to this paragraph Fagan further explains that “Lyn Hejinian coincidentally studied in Radcliffe College, the undergraduate women’s college at Harvard University, where Gertrude Stein had been a scholar seventy years previously.”205 In consideration of these parallels highlighted by Fagan as well as of the respect Hejinian expresses for Stein, it becomes necessary that the similarities between their writing styles be addressed. Having written the preface to Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives (1904) published by Green Integer in

2009, Hejinian’s interest in Stein is made further apparent. In the preface to Three Lives which explores the lives of three women in a fractured style not entirely dissimilar to that employed by Hejinian in her writing of My Life, Hejinian explains that “Stein had invented a mode of iteration to indicate not recurrence but phenomenological occurrence, the perpetual coming into being through accumulated instances of the person that is.”206 A conceptualization of Hejinian’s negotiation of the visual and the linguistic can begin with the terms language and composition. Hejinian’s configuration of both these terms can be linked to her interaction with the literature of Gertrude Stein. During a residency at New

College of California in the spring of 1985, Lyn Hejinian presented the two talks on

Stein’s work mentioned previously, titled “Language and Realism” and “Grammar and

Landscape”. In these talks Hejinian locates a form of scientific logic or realism in Stein’s

204 Fagan, K., “‘Constantly I write this happily’: Encountering Lyn Hejinian”: 44 205 Ibid. ‐ Hejinian, L., “Three Lives,”, Language of Inquiry: 275 – referred to in text 206 Hejinian, L., (Introd.) to Stein, G., Three Lives (First published as Three Lives: Stories of the Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena, New York, The Grafton Press: 1909), Kᴓbenhavn & Los Angeles: Green Integer: 2004: 47 139 writing as she pursues her argument outlined in the preface to her talks in The Language of

Inquiry that, “to use science as a model for artistic researches into reality remained at the heart of the various “realisms” that emerged from the mid-nineteenth century on, culminating perhaps, in Gertrude Stein’s work.”207 Stein’s literature as dually informed by logics of both scientific reality and visuality, underpins a significant facet of Hejinian’s writing oeuvre.

Stein’s reputation within the world of visual art is well known. She was an avid collector purchasing many works of art amongst which were featured pieces by Cezanne and

Picasso. She hosted many evenings showcasing her collections to her contemporaries, writers and artists alike. Vincent Giroud provides a snapshot of the art scene which comprised a significant chapter in Stein’s life:

As a frequent visitor to the rue de Fleurus, where Leo and Gertrude… began the habit of holding open house on Saturday evenings from nine o’clock onward, Picasso could not but be struck, and therefore stimulated, if not to say challenged, by the two great examples of modern portraiture the Steins had recently acquired and hung on their walls: the portrait of Madame Cézanne and Matisse’s Woman with the Hat… 208

The influence from the sphere of visual arts on Stein’s work is undeniable. She was close friends with many famous twentieth century figures whose associations with Stein constitute a significant portion of the content of her autobiographical text The

207 Hejinian, L., The Language of Inquiry: 85 208 Giroud, V., “Picasso and Gertrude Stein”, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin: 2007, Winter: (64:3): 18‐19 140

Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Prominently featured amongst these writers is Pablo

Picasso who executed the famous Portrait of Gertrude Stein in 1906.

Hejinian’s two essays on Stein signal her own interest in the development of a new form of realism based on an interaction with the world as opposed to the more conventional representation of it. Stein’s influence on Hejinian is useful in understanding Hejinian’s oeuvre better, as one committed to both actual and theoretical incorporations of visual and tactile modalities in the development of a particular form of writing. Such writing challenges the boundaries between representations and real life with a slight but significant undertone which functions towards the location and articulation of a speaking female subject.

The first of Hejinian’s talks on Gertrude Stein highlights Stein’s keen association and interaction with concepts of realism that were circulating during the early twentieth century. Hejinian explains that Stein did not take on board various methods employed by writers such as Flaubert – to create a near exact replica of reality – perhaps due to concerns that such an execution might embody the ultimate in artifice. However, she further elaborates that Stein did pursue the idea of depicting reality and she located that depiction in the idea that “... language is an order of reality itself and not a mere mediating medium –

141 that it is possible and even likely that one can have a confrontation with a phrase that is as significant as a confrontation with a tree, chair, cone, dog, bishop...”209.

Hejinian expands on this concept as she argues that “in the course of being detected, things

– that is, objects, events, and ideas – that seem arbitrary and indiscriminate are rendered logical and relevant.”210 This ‘reality’ that Hejinian observes in Stein’s writing infiltrates the stylistic structures underpinning her own poetic practice. She incorporates Stein’s enlivened approach to language through awareness of the significance of each individual textual element as a morpheme. How this occurs will be illustrated through my textual analysis of Hejinian’s My Life and The Lake which constitutes the latter portion of this chapter.

In Hejinian’s second talk on Stein titled “Grammar and Landscape”, she outlines the value of a comparison of language with the notion of landscapes when it comes to considering

Stein’s format of writing:

209 Hejinian, L., “Two Stein Talks”, The Language of Inquiry: 90 210 Ibid: 91 211 Ibid: 105 142

As a model for writing, the notion of landscape allows for a permanent process of activity.

By understanding the text to be a form of landscape, Stein and Hejinian both encourage a non-definitive reading process which enables a great “sincerity” (a term intricately considered by Hejinian in discussion of Objectivist poetry) in representation. This sense of

“sincerity” emerges from the openness evoked through the landscape metaphor as a model for writing. Landscapes encompass everything which constitutes their disposition at any given moment in time and hence are more aptly and sincerely representative as opposed to linear, directive and intentional in nature. The all-encompassing nature of the landscape metaphor is characterized by always being open to changes in perspective and contextual evolution through progressions in time. Hejinian illustrates the character of activity and currency within the landscape metaphor through citation of Stein’s association between the notion of the landscape and the genre of the play:

“The landscape has its formation and as after all a play has to have formation and be in relation one thing to the other thing and as the story is not the thing as any one is always telling something then the landscape not moving but being always in relation, the trees to the hills the hills to the fields the trees to each other any piece of it to any sky and then any detail to any other detail, the story is only of importance if you like to tell or like to hear a story but the relation is there anyway. And of that relation I wanted to make a play and I did, a great number of plays.”212

The metaphor of the landscape epitomizes Hejinian’s entire writing project. She writes herself into being as a female subject through a collection of writing avenues consisting of her personal archived correspondence and her published and unpublished poetry, essays and publishing and collaborative ventures. Each of these genres can be perceived as being the elements comprising Hejinian’s writerly landscape. Her archived materials alone

212 Stein, G., “Plays” in Stimpson, C. R./ Chessman, H. (Eds.), Gertrude Stein: Writings 1932‐1946, New York: The Library of America: 1998: 267 – citied in – Hejinian, L., “Two Stein Talks”, The Language of Inquiry: 110 143 comprise a cumulative enterprise situated within a constant process of change. Any contributions and exclusions comprise alterations and expansions to the landscape which is her personal papers which embodies an exponential inscription of Hejinian as a writing female subject. Two further prominent examples of this cumulative process are embodied by Hejinian’s autobiographical My Life of which there are multiple editions, neither one entirely complete as each edition correlates to Hejinian’s age at the time of writing and her most recently published text The Book of a Thousand Eyes (to be examined in chapter five of this thesis), which has been in a process of being written for a significant number of years and assembles ideas and writings which exist and flow throughout the stream of a significant portion of Hejinian’s writing ventures. In addition to these examples the metaphor of the landscape functions on a more microcosmic level within her individual texts, in particular her poetry, through a multi-modal and hybrid visual-linguistic nexus also formulating a spread of examples – a collaboration of individual elements correlating in the creation of conversational and active landscape. The specificities of how this occurs will be addressed through textual analysis in the latter part of this chapter.

In employing a visually wealthy language executed through the use of both graphic and verbally imagist textual constituents and informed by the concept of the Steinian landscape, Hejinian risks a return to existing theories that have plagued the female in regards to notions of visual representation. As Mitchell argues:

The paintings’ desire, in short, is to change places with the beholder, to transfix… the beholder, turning him or her into an image for the gaze of the picture... This effect is perhaps the clearest demonstration we have that the power of pictures and

144

of women is modeled on one another, and that this is a model of both pictures and women that is abject mutilated and castrated… The power they want is manifested as lack, not as possession.213

In partaking in an image-informed and -engaged process of writing Hejinian re-awakens a discourse of visuality in relation to the female subject and re-possesses some of the lack

Mitchell conceptualizes. The lack of figurative visual representation is paradoxically where

Hejinian’s visually informed language and method of representation regains its initial speaking power. By integrating imagery with language and simultaneously engaging with what is at least a semi-abstract graphic visuality, Hejinian disassociates her writing from associations with lack and inadvertently challenges Mitchell’s claim of lack as comprising the power held by both pictures and women. Mitchell illustrates his analogy with

Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Tale”:

… Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Tale” staged a narrative around the question, “What is it that women most desire?” This question is posed to a knight who has been found guilty of raping a lady of the court, and who is given a one-year reprieve on his death sentence to go in quest of the right answer… The knight hears many wrong answers from the women he interviews – money, reputation, love, beauty, fine clothes, lust abed, many admirers. The right answer turns out to be… “mastery” by right or consent, and the power that goes with superior strength or cunning. The official moral of Chaucer’s tale is that consensual, freely given mastery is best… What is the moral for pictures? If one could interview all the pictures one encounters in a year, what answers would they give? Surely, many of the pictures would give Chaucer’s “wrong” answers: that is, pictures would want to be worth a lot of money; they would want to be admired and praised as beautiful; they would want to be adored... But above all they would want a kind of mastery over the beholder.214

213 Mitchell, W. J. T., What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images: 36 214 Ibid: 35‐36 145

The hybridization of word and image within Hejinian’s writing into a correlative language demands effort and understanding by the reader and does not merely render the texts’ subject as desirous. Hejinian’s female subject, rendered into being through a discursive relationship between images and words, activates a process of acquisition of desired mastery as outlined by Mitchell. The words which comprise the poetry of Hejinian’s visually informed texts and her treatment of graphic imagery (to be addressed in the upcoming textual analyses) attribute speaking valency to a genre (that of the visual image) which throughout the course of Western history has acquired an equivalence or association with notions of silence, desire and lack. As a result, in addition to retaining the function of desiring, Hejinian’s female subject progresses towards speech and the beholder/reader desires to engage her in conversation.

My Life

Hejinian’s autobiographical text My Life integrates processes of the visual image with the written word to acknowledge a silence and articulate a speaking female voice. Juliana

Spahr argues that, “My Life’s refusal to reflect a single image of the autobiographical subject encourages readers to take on agency and to question the changes in perception,

146 knowledge, and thinking they undergo in this autobiographical encounter.”215 Through the function of the white squares included at the beginning of various segments of text at the top left hand corner of select pages, Hejinian acknowledges the silencing of the female voice in the history of the Western literary tradition as signaled by Mitchell’s conceptualization of the desire and lack of both women and pictures. The female subject throughout the course of this tradition, has most often been rendered an object for admiration but rarely a speaking subject.

Hejinian illustrates her acknowledgement of this silencing by placing the squares where the autobiographical writer would traditionally include a photograph and through the absence of the expected image refuses to subscribe to a practice of visually presenting the female subject. Consequently she attributes greater significance to what the omitted subject has to say as opposed to how they might appear. Hejinian argues against the process of silencing in her essay “La Faustienne” – which conceptualizes a specifically female voice through the development of the Faustian figure’s female counterpart – stating that,

“otherness, personified as a female object, has been often and notoriously depicted in painting and, of course, more coarsely, in pornography. Supine and secretive, naked but inscrutable, woman lies under the male gaze.”216 The absence of a picture and its substitution with the white squares filled with text demonstrates Hejinian’s development of a female voice through the insertion of language into an empty silent space which in the

215 Spahr, J., “Resignifying Autobiography: Lyn Hejinian's My Life”, American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography: (68:1): 147 216 Hejinian, L., “La Faustienne”, The Language of Inquiry: 240 147 more traditionally formatted autobiographic memoir may have featured an inactive silent image of the autobiographical subject.

Through the constant and repetitive denial of image and the subsequent alternative of the insertion of words, Hejinian launches a very present, active and speaking female voice by literally filling the visual space with language as she writes the female, in this particular instance, herself, into being. This occurs through the deliberate omission of visual imagery and its consequent substitution with written language. Through this process the female is transported from the domain of visual object to a position of speaking subject. The mechanics of this format of writing in My Life are exemplified in the following excerpt from the text.

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217

Here Hejinian substitutes the inherent omitted graphic image within the white square with a linguistic claim of authority, outlining for the reader that they will have to decipher her written language-based profile. The female on page sixty-one in My Life is identified through the feminine third person pronoun “she”. It is unclear who the subject is and the reader is unable to identify who it may be through any means other than the process of presuming that he/she is reading an autobiographical text on the basis of the text’s title signifying a ‘life’ and deducing that it is the life of its author “Lyn Hejinian”. Without this fact it is easy to forget who the specific subject of the text is, however, her gender is inescapable. This affirmation of female presence occurs throughout the course of text in a

217 Hejinian, L., My Life: 2002 : 61 149 fashion similar to that illustrated on page sixty-one. The reader senses that he/she is reading the experience of a woman from the very first non-italicized line of this excerpt:

“A man is tall, a mountain is high, the sky’s the limit.”218 The male figure is placed on par with places situated elsewhere away from the speaking subject. Similarly to how one might observe that a mountain is high the speaking voice here observes that a man is tall and establishes a premise by which the reader can presume that the speaker in observing a male figure is, herself, not male. This becomes more complicated through the address of the female subject on this page as “she”. It is a plausible argument that the speaking voice is as likely to be male as it is female because of that seeming third person omniscient narration.

What challenges this argument and anchors the speaking voice as female is the experiential narration that is linked with the pronoun “she” – “She was trapped in the elevator panting in plenty of air”. The alliteration between “panting and plenty” renders this experience as being that of the speaker as it evokes a sense of shortness of air and makes the experience of the “she” more intimately felt and in closer proximity to the speaker than that of the male textual figure. To further this anchorage there is also a first person narration on the page which is fused into the third person narration of “she” – “At the time, I saw my life as a struggle against my fate, that it, my personality” immediately precedes the line “She was trapped in the elevator panting in plenty of air.” An association between the struggling “I” and the trapped “She” becomes apparent. Hejinian creates an image of herself presenting an image of herself by appropriating this fusion between her experience narrated directly and through a third person perspective, being also her own. In effect, through this

218 Ibid. 150 sympathetic alignment between the first and third person narrations, Hejinian paints her own portrait in words and self-reflexively makes explicit that it is she, a female, who is constructing her profile and who possesses control over the nature of her own portrayal.

The faculty of sight is of primary significance in this excerpt of text which is made evident through the italics featured in the top left hand corner of the page with the use of the word

“showed”. Something was made visible/ able to be seen. Hejinian’s use of the word

“profile” denotes either a painting or photograph of a given object or individual. In this excerpt Hejinian utilizes the graphic layout of the page (the white sectioned squares), language denotative of sight and verbally imagist language in both first and third person narrations, to self-reflexively establish herself as the artist behind the images purposefully evaded in graphic form and alternatively created verbally. This verbal substitution of a potentially graphic image grants language a primary role within the text and transforms what could have been an object for observation into a speaking subject in conversation.

Hejinian’s prominent engagement with the notion of silence evoked through the motif of the implied image is complicated and does not merely conclude that women throughout the course of Western history have been silenced. Rather she engages the notion of silence itself and through the avenue of language exposes its intricacies in a way similar to that outlined by mythographer Marina Warner in her analysis of Shakespeare’s play King Lear.

Warner argues that:

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Silence is not entirely absence, but another kind of presence… Cordelia’s lack of words generates truth, as will be borne out in the course of the tragedy, in a way that outpourings like Goneril’s and Regan’s mask it. But is it that ideal area truthfulness, the page beyond metaphors? Or does even silence, and in particular the silence of Cordelia and her sisters in muteness, whirr and hum? Do history and morals and values and prejudices interrupt the silence – ‘interrupt’ hardly being the mot juste – do they rather make up the silence? Is there something scrawled even on the page beyond metaphors, something ringing in the blankness of the heroine’s true speech?219

Hejinian’s white squares, framing words as opposed to images, converse with questions like Warner’s, outlining the complicated dimension of the silent space occupied by the female and executing a willful writing which highlights that even within silence there is voice.

The descriptions on page sixty-one from My Life accompanying the space of the white square elucidate a mental image of a repressed woman through a series of lines connotative of entrapment and exhaustion such as “the spare was flat”, “running down”, “I saw my life as a struggle against my fate”, “she was trapped in the elevator”, “more than horse work on worse hills” and “they were driven indoors by the bees”. The flow of these occurrences is constant from the beginning of the page without the relief of pause for contemplation as might be provided through a paragraph break. The feeling of repression is further enhanced through the intertwining of the paratactic listing of words such as “Personal, oblige, running down” and sentences such as “She was trapped in the elevator panting in plenty of air”. Abstract sentences such as “Wounded by gossip’s rat-a-tattle”, without a clear subject

219 Warner, M., From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers: The Noonday Press: New York: 1994: 391

152 and object, and non-conventional punctuation such as the replacement of the expected question mark with a full stop in the line “When you open a letter do you hope for a check.” in addition to the use of parataxis, create the effect of continual pressure. The constant rolling on of words without the refuge of traditional punctuation and textual pause create a feeling and verbal image of breathlessness. This paratactic structuring of the text disables a coherent narrative flow in exchange for a series of imagistic statements that build onto each other rather than being processed and diffused through a narrative filter.

However, the image that is created of the subject through the italicized writing within the white square and the reference to visuality render these negative and repressive experiences as descriptive and narrative-like but not ultimately definitive and comprising of the female subject herself. The female subject is rendered as separate from the narratives which underpin her experiences and historical definitions more broadly. These stories/ experiences remain separate to the female subject who is a painter or creator of her own destiny.

Graphically, the “She” featured in the first italicized line on this page has control over the contents of the text by being visually hierarchically situated at the top left hand side of the page in a position superior to all other textual elements. The salient diagonal location of the pronoun enables it to assert a prominence over the remaining contents on the page.

Verbally, the representation of the textual subject is always depicted in the past tense.

Images of events that have already occurred and are now there to be observed, separate the speaking subject from potentially disempowering stories from the past. This is made evident on this particular page and elsewhere in the text as the subject expresses herself in 153 the first person: “At the time, I saw my life as a struggle against my fate…” and “Each time we entered the Metro in Paris I read the small sign which reserved the large facing double seats nearest the door for soldiers and veterans…” The “I” of the text speaks reflectively through her construction of images from the past, creating a separation of repressive experiences passed and the power of expression and speech in the present.

Though the experiences themselves are denotative of repression and defeat, the speaking female subject remains unaffected by their nature.

This separation is further enhanced at the end of the page when the female subject, in this case presumably Hejinian, brings the reader back to the visuality and materiality of the page through the words “letter” and “paper” as she reminds him/her that they are reading an image she has constructed of herself. Hejinian has taken the visual medium and manipulated it to create a feeling of absence and silence through the graphic feature of a simple white square which she subsequently fills with a myriad of words and descriptions, creating a mixture of tones through linguistic experimentation. As Craig Dworkin has observed, “In these ways, facts and images slowly and indirectly accumulate until

Hejinian’s life is ultimately sketched in broad and erratic brushstrokes.”220 This accumulation propels Hejinian’s My Life into the realm of the visual regardless of the immediate lack of actual graphic imagery. This is executed as she purposefully disconnects from the figurative visual image and actively chooses to exclude it from the pages of her autobiographic text. The complete absence of visual figures throughout her autobiographic

220Dworkin, C. D., “Penelope Reworking the Twill: Patchwork, Writing, and Lyn Hejinian's My Life”, Contemporary Literature, 1995, Spring: (36:1): 72

154 text and her compilation of verbal imagery in her portrayal of facts and occurrences, return the text back towards an embrace of the visual realm. Hejinian’s negotiation of these two domains of the written and seen is brought to the fore toward the conclusion of the excerpt in question as she writes, “Writing maybe held it, separated there to see.” Though the reader reads these words, he/she is ultimately returned to a notion of the visual through the word “see”. This reintroduction to the realm of sight is significant for the female subject of the text as Hejinian attempts to redefine the concept of visual representation and subsequently re-associate the feminine with an imagistic discourse. Hejinian retains the powerful elements of the visual image (the capacity to capture entire scenes through individual words and graphics) and redevelops the negative (historical discourse that has defined the female image as desirous and inactive) as she creates through a hybrid writing format, a speaking female subject.

The Lake

The co-authored text by Lyn Hejinian and visual artist Emilie Clark, The Lake marks for

Hejinian a more definitive and bold embrace of the visual image as the text ventures more explicitly towards a use of the graphic visual. My textual analysis of The Lake will provide 155 an account of how this expanded visual approach to writing functions within Hejinian’s oeuvre as an extension of her linguistic vocabulary and further enables the avenues for the representation of a female subjectivity. The Lake engages with a notion of the visual differently to My Life as it is comprised by the visual image and the written word and functions in negotiation between the two as both modalities work in dialogue with one another not only through verbal subject matter but also through the spatiality of the page.

This traversing from the predominantly language orientated text of My Life towards a more explicitly visual form of writing does not indicate for Hejinian a shift in medium. Rather, it signals an expansion and a broadening of her linguistic apparatus furthering the fusion between the two modalities of writing and image in the formulation of a dream-like language which presides throughout her work as an ideal format of representation for a female subjectivity.

The language of The Lake is very closely interwoven with a discourse of dreams and significant parallels exist between the visuality of The Lake and a Freudian account of the visual. Sigmund Freud relied extensively on the analysis of works of art and literature in his explication of specific psychological phenomena and a significant number of Freud’s essays engage with works of both art and literature in an illustration of his various theories.

In “The Moses of Michelangelo” Freud emphasizes his regard for the creative as he explicates that, “…works of art do exercise a powerful effect on me, especially those of

156 literature and sculpture...”221 The visual aspect of The Lake but also Hejinian’s language more broadly, proves to be tightly interwoven with Freudian theories of the visual phenomena often made manifest in dreams. Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, though not as its primary focus, explores the creative capacity of the sleeping human mind to conjure up features in dreams which are metaphorically significant as he proposes his theories of wish fulfillment and censorship that occur as the human mind attempts to communicate to its deepest unfulfilled desires. Marie-Dominique Garnier makes the argument that within

Freud’s psychological theories and his commentary of and on his dreams there exists:

…a form of ‘dream writing’…a porous runaway writing, ready to question the implicit rules of textuality and its binary formations: warp and weft, signifier and signified, paradigm and syntagm, metonymy and metaphor.222

It is that which Garnier identifies in Freud’s work as a “porous runaway writing” which questions “the implicit rules of textuality and its binary formations”, that Hejinian’s writing employs through visual parameters to develop a textual embodiment of the female subject. Hejinian incorporates the use of the visual image in the development of a hybrid and experimental writing format which challenges existing ideology and provides new ways of representing and perceiving a textual female presence. Her incorporation of this interpretation of Freudian dream theory and dreams more broadly throughout her work – highly significant and comprising thematically, a vast portion of her writing materials not

221 Freud, S., “The Moses of Michelangelo” in Dickson, A. (Ed.) / Strachey, J. (Trans & Ed.), Sigmund Freud Volume 14 – Art and Literature, Penguin Books: England: 1990: 253 (Present English translation first published in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho‐Analysis: London in Volume XIII: 1955)

222 Garnier, M., “Writing dreaming: Freud, Fliess, Fluff and Cixous, Journal of European Studies: (38:4): 365 157 yet extensively addressed by critics to date – will be addressed in greater detail in chapters five and six of this thesis. For the scope of this chapter however, I limit my analysis to

Hejinian’s response to and incorporation of Freudian ideology concerned with the notion of the visual image.

Freud’s approach to visuality in the processes of dreams is useful for developing an understanding of Hejinian’s own interest in the arena of dreaming: many of her approaches towards a form of visuality in language and the development of the female voice indirectly pay homage to Freud’s model for the interpretation of dreams as well as his essays concerned with works of art and literature (to be addressed in greater detail in chapters four and five of this thesis). Particularly relevant to an understanding of the dream-like visuality in Hejinian’s work is Freud’s argument from The Interpretation of Dreams that:

Dreams construct a situation out of… images; they represent an event which is actually happening… But this feature of dream-life can only be fully understood if we further recognize that in dreams – as a rule, for there are exceptions which require special examination – we appear not to think but to experience; that is to say, we attach complete belief to the hallucinations.223

Freud hypothesizes here that when the human mind dreaming, formulates images that render the dream experience with a heightened degree of believability, the function of these images seduces the dreamer into strongly felt experience through hallucination.

Freud’s argument from The Interpretation of Dreams, “that in dreams… we appear not to

223Freud, S., The Interpretation of Dreams – (4th Impression), (First published 1954.), Strachey, J. (Trans & Ed.): London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.: 1971: 50 158 think but to experience…” is evident in Hejinian’s usage of graphic textual elements as she engages her reader significantly within the experiential mechanics of the text. Through this the reader is provided with various forms of visual and textual apparatus to engage him/her in experience with and not merely readership of, her writing. In this experience the reader is brought into closer proximity with the text beyond what he/she encounters as words on the page towards a state of reading which engages him/her more thoroughly through a textuality contingent upon his/her capacity for introspection and imagination. Further illustrating the significance of the visual image to the dream process, Freud argues that:

…dreams think essentially in images; and with the approach of sleep it is possible to observe how, in proportion as voluntary activities become more difficult, involuntary ideas arise, all of which fall into the class of images.224

Hejinian’s work, especially in The Lake, features abstract graphic imagery which sometimes functions in conversation with the poetry on the page and sometimes individually without a verbal counterpart. This imagery favors involuntary thought and emotional response as opposed to analytical reading due to the apparent absence of narrative progression. The images and words, both collectively and separately, do not at some point cohere into a logical story. Rather, they operate at the more immediate level of experience and consequently produce an essence of more images within the mind of the reader. This mimics Freud’s imagistic characterization of the dream process as “[thinking] essentially in images” and renders The Lake a type of dream text.

224 Ibid: 50 159

Hejinian and Clark conceptualize their writing of The Lake, explicating that:

We imagined the lake as a site and described such a site as being constituted by all possible responses to it. We worked from early morning to late at night, taking breaks to walk along the lakeshore or go out into the lake in a kayak, photographing along the way…225

In consideration of Hejinian and Clark’s textual conceptualization indirectly referential of

Freud’s “experience”-based theorization of the dream image, the development of a textual reception grounded in experience and immersion which stems beyond the standard parameters of critical reading becomes necessary. In order for the reader to completely immerse him/herself in an understanding of such a format of writing, I return once more to the experience centered ethics of reading as conceptualized by George Poulet of his initial contact with any piece of writing as he explains:

I am aware of a rational being of consciousness; the consciousness of another, no different from the one I automatically assume in every human being I encounter, except that in this case the consciousness is open to me, welcomes me, lets me look deep inside itself, and even allows me, with unheard-of licence, to think what it thinks and feel what it feels.226

The reader of The Lake in the essence of the Freudian dreamer becomes subject to the visuality of the text at hand in a process of experience susceptible to involuntary thought and in order to engage with the text more thoroughly, the reader must embrace a Poulet form of logic and approach to critical reading which is one of immediate and utter

225Hejinian, L. /Clark, E., World Wide Web ‐ www.granarybooks.com/books/lake/the.lake1.html : last accessed ‐ 23/03/2010 226 Poulet, G., “Phenomenology of Reading”, New Literary History “New and Old History”: October, 1969: (1:1): 54 160 immersion. Hejinian’s use of visual elements within her writing promotes an instinctive and experience-focused readerly response, removed from the restrictions and impositions of narrative time which can often encourage a more calculated and directed reading path.

Through their design of the external, visible and tangible aesthetic of The Lake, Hejinian and Clark interact with a phantasmic and dream-like terrain of in-between. Hejinian explains this notion of in-between through a conceptualization of the border as she writes that:

Like a dream landscape, the border landscape is unstable and perpetually incomplete. It is a landscape of discontinuities, incongruities, displacements, dispossession. The border is occupied by ever-shifting images, involving objects and events constantly in need of redefinition and even literal renaming, and viewed against a constantly changing background.227

The situation of The Lake amidst a multitude of borders renders it well geared to contend with and simultaneously encourage shifting responses and meanings. This notion of shifting is in fact one of the text’s key concerns. From an immediate and initial glance at the text this in-betweeness is made visible. The photographs featured inside occupy a boundary between the visual image and the real world. This occurs at an immediate level through the photographic claim of capturing images of real life experience and becomes more complicated as notions of real and represented are entangled in what Roland Barthes describes as “the photographic paradox [which] can… be seen as the co-existence of two

227 Hejinian, L., “Barbarism”, The Language of Inquiry: 327 161 messages, the one without a code (the photographic analogue), and the other with a code

(the ‘art’, or the treatment, or the ‘writing’, or the rhetoric of the photograph)…”228

Through Barthes’s conceptualization of the photographic paradox, the boundary occupied by The Lake is extended beyond a basic situation between the image and the world as it is directed once more towards a textuality through the claim that the “reality” within the photographic image is also a construct comprised by a form of language. By being placed in conversation with other forms of media as well as with language, the photographic images within The Lake, announce the inextricable rhetoric which comprises not only text but also reality and within that, pleas that the text be experienced and not merely read.

The colours also function in-between the extremities of midnight black and zinc white consisting of a colour scheme of numerous shades of grey. The thick pages of the book situate the text somewhere in between material object and readerly text. The collaged aesthetic of each individual page also contributes to that effect. The collaged photographs, paintings, drawings and words, through their vast variety and stark visual juxtaposition of surface qualities, evoke a desire from the reader to run his/her fingers over the surface of each page. Furthermore, as will be discussed in chapter three of this thesis, the shape and size of The Lake also challenge how the reader might approach this text. The physical parameters of the text are relatively larger than the standard novel or poetry book and it is square shaped as opposed to the more conventional rectangular shape of books, rendering the individual pages of the text, as well as the text in its entirety, in the image of one or a

228 Barthes, R., Image Music Text, New York: Hill and Wang: 1977: 19

162 series of mounted paintings. The Lake is situated upon several borders between lived experience and the written text through an engagement with a multitude of media formats which individually and in conversation with one another question the formal reading process and propose an intertwined and inseparable experience of textuality and reality.

This process, enlivened through the correlation of word and visual image, grants the text a phantasmic and visually illuminating (as argued by Cohen of Benjamin’s phantasmagoria, earlier in this chapter) quality which situates it structurally on a par with the visual language of dreams.

Water

The writing of The Lake as a phantasmic text that functions through processes similar to those of dreams was achieved through the incorporation of one significant metaphor which operates within a multiplicity of textual and philosophical parameters; that of water. A body of water can be seen to occupy a surface boundary between dry land and the ocean or underwater. A lake in particular, being not as susceptible to ebbs and flows and rapid currents as various other bodies of water, can also be conceived as a reflective surface. As a reflective surface it can be conceptualized as an intermediate site between the world as 163 we experience it and the world as we see it. A lake can be perceived as nature’s mirror, reflecting back at the world a fairly static image of what is presented before its waters.

This reflective and all-encompassing character of the physical nature of lakes is utilized by

Hejinian as she describes and explains the method by which Gertrude Stein approached her own writing as a phenomenon which was just as much representative as it was simultaneously constitutive of the world which it aimed to represent. What Hejinian acknowledges as being the compositional strength of Stein’s writing has a definite presence within the mechanics of The Lake. Hejinian explains:

She conceived of her work not as a medium for emptying herself of ideas nor as a formalized language holding the contents of the objects which emptied themselves into it, but of the writing as “the thing that was them” – which means that things take place inside the writing, are perceived there, not elsewhere, outside it. It is the nature of meaning to be intrinsic, in other words, as the meaning of any person is, of me, is me, the person. That is how the poem means. Concentric circles draw more and more in as they radiate out; more and more lake is contained by the stone.229

Through this explanation Hejinian addresses the notion of a kind of writing which generates life within its body much like a lake encompasses an entire world in the form of the image it reflects back to the world. She conceives of the lake as an ecological body which though generally appearing still, is disturbed, in this case by the “stone” which generates “concentric circles”. This disturbance of the stone is rendered an inextricable

229 Hejinian, L., “Two Stein Talks”, The Language of Inquiry: 105

164 element of the body of the lake in the same manner that the individual textual elements which constitute the text The Lake are significant in its composition. The concentric circles

Hejinian identifies in Stein’s writing are figuratively made manifest in The Lake through the various modalities and individual textual elements which form the text. Their interaction textually as well as with the world of the reader reflected back towards the text, triggers the formulation of new images. These new formulations highlight the impossible delineation between reality and reflection/ representation as the worlds of the reflected and the reflective are intertwined.

Phenomenologist Gaston Bachelard theorizes the processes of ecological bodies and their significance in harnessing and explaining the language of poetry and also of dreams as he argues for the existence of a natural poetry both in our dreams and in the natural landscape of our world. He suggests certain potency exists in the correlation between the elements of organic substance, dream and poem. Bachelard’s ideas concerning these three notions – in particular his theories developed in his book Water and Dreams: An Essay On the

Imagination of Matter, in which he devotes significant attention to describing the phenomenology of the bodies of water contained in lakes – can be identified in Hejinian and Clark’s The Lake. Bachelard philosophizes that:

The lake is a large tranquil eye. The lake takes all of light and makes a world out of it. Through it, the world is already contemplated, already represented. It too might say, “The world is my representation of it.” Near the lake, we understand the old physiological theory of active vision. Active vision implies that the eye projects

165

light, that it illuminates its images by itself. It is understandable, then, that the eye may be desirous of seeing its visions, that contemplation may also be will.230

Bachelard’s philosophy on lakes is useful for understanding Hejinian’s and Clark’s development of The Lake and can assist in adequately explaining and describing the incorporation of this particular body of water as a primary example of the essence of the visual within Hejinian’s work. Both reader and writer engage in a process of active vision as defined by Bachelard through his explanation of the lake taking in “all of light” and making “a world out of it.” Bachelard’s analogy of the lake as being an eye, as a reflective surface that already has formulated worlds present within it, grants the human eye some power. Although the eye is often conceived of as a ‘static recipient’ of visual images,

Bachelard’s comparison renders the human eye and its images as active with the claim that the world is the eye’s representation of it and in that representation exists some ocular autonomy and subsequently, authority.

Throughout The Lake, the writers, Hejinian and Clark, create a text which functions not as a representation of reality but as reality itself, granting the reader authorial credit in his/her mediated reception of that reality. Through Bachelard’s conceptualization of the eye as an active agent in the construction of meaning, both the eyes involved in the function of the text comprised by the text The Lake and by the reader’s eye, are enlivened and awarded agency. This occurs as the reader collates and responds to the partially abstracted imagery

230Bachelard, G., Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, (First published in French as L’Eau et les réves, essai sur l’imagination de la matiére in 1942 by Librairie José Corti, Paris), Dallas Texas: The Dallas Institute Publications: 1983: 28 166 throughout the text in combination with the poetic text alongside. Subsequently the reader encounters the text as he/she gazes upon the various inter-generic features of the text as one might staring into the reflection of a lake, and assembles them in his/her own instinctive way. The reader’s contemplation of the text hence also becomes a very active exercise of will. His/ Her interpretation of and response to the text becomes the text’s temporary meaning; his/her embodiment of Bachelard’s concept of ‘active vision’.

This involvement and activation or bringing to life of the reader, through a correlation between dream-like images which through a Freudian lens can be described as engulfing the reader within the realm of the experienced/believed hallucination and through

Bachelard’s analogy between the already knowing lake and the human eye, locates

Hejinian and Clark’s The Lake within a tricky terrain of representation which calls for a certain sense of perception located peripherally to that which can be explained through language. This phenomenon can be better understood through Hannah Arendt’s conceptualization of Heidegger’s approach to reading. Arendt argues that:

Heidegger not only assumes…that every work bears in itself a specific unspoken quality, but that this unspoken quality forms its essential core… thus quasi-empty, the space that lies in between, around which all things revolve... Heidegger positions himself in this place, in the middle of the work, where the author precisely is not, as if this were the spared space for the reader or listener. From here, the work re- transforms itself from the result-orientated… printed word into a living speech, open to… possibility of response and protest. It yields… dialogue, and… the reader no longer comes from outside, but rather participates... (XV/13, 353)231

231 Weigel, S., “Poetics as a Presupposition of Philosophy: Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch”, Telos: 2009, Spring: (146): 107 (Arendt’s Denktagebuch cited in text) 167

The phenomenology of the body of a lake can be more thoroughly understood through

Arendt and Heidegger’s notion about the space of the reader whereby, in the unspoken or the inarticulate vision suggested and evoked by the metaphor, the very essence of a text exists. A lake as a natural phenomenon can be said to speak through its silence. It is always already there – a fixed space that is eternally shifting – like an existing text filled with readerly potential. A lake, like the human eye, is already all there, permanently reflective.

However, what others can see reflected within the surfaces of these, will always be significantly different depending on the observers’ varying dispositions and viewpoints. As

Bachelard explains, “the lake or pool or stagnant water stops us near its bank. It says to our will: you shall go no further: you should go back to looking at distant things, at the beyond.

While you were wandering, something here was already looking on.”232

A Lake is nature’s ideal embodiment of the silent space of the metaphor, as addressed by

Arendt through her reflections on Heidegger, as a waterscape which reflects predominantly imagery and not sounds. This visual quality attributed to lakes is oppositional to the poetry of more turbulent waters such as running river rapids and crashing oceanic waves. The poetry of a lake as conceived of by Bachelard is rendered active from the moment one is urged to stop near its bank, to look at and begin to see beyond the surface of the water through one’s own understanding and associations. The onlooker of a lake’s surface is situated within the silent space of the metaphor armed with the potential of language. A lake, as opposed to producing oral poetry by and of itself, as is the case with other bodies

232 Bachelard, G., Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter: 28

168 of water, urges its onlooker to produce his/her own poetry in response to what the lake portrays.

Such an ephemeral conceptualization, attuned to Hejinian’s perception of dreams or the phantasmic, through a heightened sense of readerly experience emergent from the highly imagistic capacities of reflective lake waters, demanding thorough immersion and participation on the reader’s behalf, encourages the reader to conceive an active space with a greater scope for interpretation. Indeed, as with any text, the reader is presented with bounds within which he/she may interpret but the possibility for variation or what might be referred to as a type of active imagination is far greater. Clark and Hejinian’s The Lake encourages a heightened sense of an active imagination as a text steeply dependent on readerly reflection. The text is based upon nature’s ultimate producer of metaphors (a lake whose reflective images are never truly their viewed subject but metaphors of a kind) and functions in much the same vein by requesting the reader assemble the metaphors of the text simultaneously as they create their own metaphors in that assemblage process. As the reader casts his/her gaze upon the page’s waters, his/her turning of the pages becomes the stone generative of concentric circles which radiate outwards and inwards until “more and more lake is contained by the stone”233; more and more ideas and actions are potentially held within and generated by the reader’s turn of the page.

233 Hejinian, L., “Two Stein Talks”, The Language of Inquiry: 105 169

There is some degree of power held in a particular way in the observation of such a body of water which is exemplified in Bachelard’s personification of the lake in his claim that

“the world is my representation of it.”234 Like the phantasmic or the dream image, as conceptualized by both Freud and Hejinian, it is not merely descriptive in its reflections but is also instigative. A lake has the power of reflecting our own self back towards us with the addition of the contextual imposition of the temporally, atmospherically, and physically contingent waters. Atmosphere and time constantly affect the water’s surface quality and consequently, continually assert the presence and continual change of context which in static imagery and mirror reflections as well as in general everyday observations is easily missed and can often be unrecognized in the analysis of meaning. The water’s surface harbors the ability to reflect the onlooker’s reflection back towards him/her with the added effect of a continually shifting context. It is this continual and rapid shift in context which shifts the reflective water’s surface from mere description towards action.

Both lake and eye continually generate images and it is this generative process which renders them active. The seer looks into the water and sees the endless flux of occurrences at a pace that allows him/her to continually construct his/her visions without settling on definitive conclusions. By this I mean that, in staring into such a body of water, one is in a sense, for a certain duration of time, constantly constructing an image; an ever changing vision. In a way, there is no time for contemplation; not enough for one to formulate a descriptive response to what one is seeing. The reader’s response is inadvertently, due to a

234 Bachelard, G. Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter: 28

170 continually changing context, attached to a sense of immediacy or currency. This change in context occurs textually within the pages of The Lake through the many possible correspondences between graphic textual elements and poetic text. The reader is invited to read for metaphors much the same way the lake’s onlooker is asked to pause in front of the still waters and see something beyond, whether it be reflectively or perhaps even beneath the water’s surface. Lyn Hejinian herself provides an account of such a formulation of time through an analysis of Dante’s Divine Comedy as she makes the argument in her essay

“Language and Paradise” that:

…Paradise can only be experienced in silence. Dante, in other words, must cross the poem and then exit it at the very point where it is “Paradise,” since the poem, as such, even as it admits the poet into vivid realms of experience, will always be rendering that experience approximate and bordered by the very language in which it exists.235

Hejinian argues that Dante overcomes the bounds of language which limit the representation of experience by traversing to notions of imagery as she cites the lines from

Dante’s poem:

The Tree

stands up aching in the sun (12)236

She makes the case that:

235 Hejinian, L.,“Language and “Paradise””, The Language of Inquiry: 65‐66 236 Alighieri, D., The Divine Comedy: I Hell, Sayers, D. (Trans.), New York: Penguin Books: 1984 – cited in Hejinian, L., “Language and Paradise”, The Language of Inquiry: 66 171

This and the several following lines of the poem attempt to cast time into visual and hence spatial imagery. The idea was to point out vertical and horizontal traces of time’s passage or of the events which could only occur over time. Recognizing the occurring inherent to things – recognizing that they could only exist after “taking some time” – produced an increasingly dense accrual of moving images, until “The sky was packed//which by appearing endless seems inevitable.” (13) 237

Imagery has the capability of overcoming more conventional understandings of time to enable a better method of representation of the unknown or incomprehensible. In Dante’s

Divine Comedy a notion of paradise occupies this unknown terrain which he encompasses and describes through the utilization of what Hejinian describes as the “dense accrual of moving images.” In The Lake, through the accrual of both visual and verbal imagery,

Hejinian and Clark also cross into this terrain of visual and spatial imagery in order to convey a notion of time passing and deliver their reader into the realm of experience. Like

Hejinian’s more verbal poetry, this text functions on a level of parataxis whereby various qualities and observations are listed, with the difference here being in the listing process.

Rather than listing purely verbal imagery through the avenue of language, Hejinian here broadens her representational apparatus to include the realm of the visual as her observations become painterly, being drawn and photographic in nature as well as verbal.

The assemblage of images, textures, colours and also words is not descriptive in the way of realism whereby a certain subject, object or landscape is re-created with a strong degree of visual likeness. Rather, as in the majority of Hejinian texts, we witness a turn toward a

237 Hejinian: “Language and Paradise”, The Language of Inquiry: 66 ‐ Alighieri, D., The Divine Comedy: I Hell – cited in text

172 reality generated through a series of interactions existent between textual elements, and in the reader’s negotiation of these, between the reader and author. As in Kate Fagan’s reflection cited previously, “realism, Lyn Hejinian seemed to be suggesting, could be recuperated by a process-orientated poetry that took contextual change and perceptual activity as its key dynamics – a poetics of encounter, perhaps.”238 As Fagan suggests, it is through a process-focused poetry that Hejinian redevelops a sense of realist representation.

Although Hejinian incorporates a visual element within her work, she does not do so to replicate any form of physical likeness to any given subject. Rather, she engages with the medium in order to broaden the materials and language through which she may develop an accrual of many images in order to generate a textual dynamic of activity.

This development of dynamism within Hejinian’s work which signals a renewed approach towards realism draws significantly upon a Steinian ethics of writing. Gertrude Stein, together with key visual artists of her time, experimented heavily with redeveloping an approach to depicting the real. She sought to develop a method of representation different to methods which promoted a superficially strong likeness to their subject. Hejinian’s inspiration for her approach towards a realism in writing is evidenced as she explains that

Stein pursued the idea of depicting reality and she located that depiction in the idea that “... language is an order of reality itself and not a mere mediating medium...”239 Hejinian, like

Stein, locates and develops a sense of confrontational activity within the pages of her writing through the multifaceted aspect of interactivity between textual elements, reader

238Fagan, K., “‘Constantly I write this happily’: Encountering Lyn Hejinian”: 30 239 Hejinian, L., “Two Stein Talks”: The Language of Inquiry: 90 173 and author. In The Lake specifically, this occurs through the montage assemblage of each individual page featuring paints, inks, photographs and written words that work in collaboration to mimic the unstable and flickering effect of immediate perception.

Thus far we can begin to conceptualize the significance of a phantasmic and visually charged language in Hejinian’s writing as well as to recognize the congruence between such a process and the concept of water. Hejinian’s and Clark’s graphic and verbal poetry of The Lake, produced through a conversation between words and images on the page, functions through a dream-like modality to engage the reader thoroughly in its imagistic dynamism, simultaneously mimicking the natural poetry always already present and constantly shifting and evolving within the surface observation of lake water. These modalities and concepts are brought to conversation in the formulation of a different genre of poetry which is ideal for the representation of a female voice. Bachelard enables a point of entry into an understanding of how this might be made possible in his text Water and

Dreams discussed earlier, developing his argument about the nature of water toward gender:

Once we understand that for the unconscious every combination of material elements is a marriage, we shall realize why the naïve or poetic imagination nearly always attributes feminine characteristics to water. We shall also see how profoundly maternal the waters are. Water swells springs and causes springs to gush forth. Water is a substance that we see everywhere springing up and increasing. The spring is an irresistible birth, a continuous birth. The unconscious that loves such great images is forever marked by them. They call forth endless reveries… these images, impregnated with mythology, still give life naturally to poetic works.240

240 Bachelard, G., Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter: 14 174

Through an understanding of such a material imagination we can begin to conceive of the body of water as a gendered maternal body. As Bachelard writes, “…natural waters, river and lake waters, even sea waters… take on a milky appearance and metaphors of milk.”241

He establishes a case for a material congruity between the notions of water, femininity, dreams and poetic language and argues for connectivity between these elements that hinge upon the natural female capacity to create life. In the early days of her writing career

Hejinian was cautious about an alignment with French feminism. As Vickery argues:

Hejinian was receptive to certain concepts offered through French feminism, while rejecting other aspects, particularly what she saw as an overly essential argument… Hejinian sought to move away from the gender categories of “masculine” and “feminine” as given oppositional differences.242

However, Hejinian’s project does reminisce partially about French feminism, particularly through her most recent works The Wide Road (written with Carla Harryman) and The

Book of a Thousand Eyes (to be addressed in chapter five of this thesis). French feminism, also like Bachelard, drew upon the material significance of water and its congruity with a form of femaleness. Regardless, Hejinian’s project in its multifaceted disposition is not one of essentialism. I believe her poetic claim to the feminine qualities of water is best explained through her statement that:

To improve the world, one must be situated in it, attentive and active; one must be worldly. Indeed worldliness is an essential feature of ethics. And, since the term poetics names not just a theory of techniques but also attentiveness to the political and ethical dimensions of language, worldliness is essential to a poetics. 243

241 Ibid: 117 242 Vickery, A., Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing: 53‐54 243 Hejinian, L., “Who Is Speaking”, The Language of Inquiry: 31 175

In consideration of this, Hejinian’s project is not one of alignment to a particular strand of feminism but instead functions in acknowledgement of it but also in acknowledgement of the female body’s natural capacity to give life, in simultaneity with its representation and current social, historical and literary conceptualizations. It is for this reason (Hejinian’s explicit and primary interest in an ethics and worldliness in poetics) that I deliver my analysis of the element of water in Hejinian’s work primarily through the phenomenological Bachelardian lens and only secondarily through the avenue of feminist poetics.

Bachelard’s conceptualizations are encapsulated in Hejinian’s writing most specifically throughout The Lake, with its core life force being a body of water. However this element also features significantly in My Life and in Saga/Circus (a text which bears visual and verbal lines of connectivity to both Hejinian’s correspondence with her mother and to her mother’s autobiography.) One line from My Life demonstrates this congruity particularly well – “In a book I read the sentence, ‘the water is as blue as ink,’ which made me regret that so few people use fountain pens.”244 Hejinian draws a parallel between water and ink and subsequently writing or language, echoing Hélène Cixous’ “The Laugh of The

Medusa” in which Cixous argues that, “… a woman is never far from ‘mother’ (I mean outside her role functions: the ‘mother’ as a nonname and as source of goods). There is always within her at least a little of that good mother’s milk. She writes in white ink.”245

Hejinian, like Bachelard and Cixous, makes a material association between language and

244 Hejinian, L., My Life: 2002: 39 245 Cixous, H. (Cohen, K. / Cohen, P., Trans.), “The Laugh of The Medusa”, Signs: 1976: (1:4): 881 176 water as she brings the two into conversation through the image of the fountain pen.

Through a Bachelardian analysis we can conceive of the ink as water that creates the reflective surface of the text that is Hejinian’s writing.

The flow of water as a metaphor which is developed extensively throughout Hejinian’s work in the writing of a female subjectivity, bears inextricable associations with the concept of emotion which occupies a significant amount of the written poetic text of The

Lake, mirroring the maternal water composed visually throughout the text’s pages. The association of the gendered body of water and the development of a female writing with a subtext of emotion echoes an ecofeminist model of understanding as explicated by scholar

Greta Gaard in reference to the work of ecofeminist Val Plumwood. Gaard argues that:

To date, one of the most comprehensive ecofeminist philosophical critiques of the ecosocial problem has been developed by Val Plumwood in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993). …Plumwood describes the oppression of humans and nature as stemming not from a single system… but from a system of interlocking, oppressive structures based on a series of hierarchical dualisms that lie at the heart of Western culture and can be traced back to their origins in Platonic philosophy… As Plumwood has ably demonstrated, Western culture’s oppression of nature can be traced back to the construction of the dominant human male as a self fundamentally defined by its property of reason and the construction of reason definitionally opposed to nature and all that is associated with nature, including women, the body, emotions, and reproduction. Feminists have also argued that women’s oppression in Western culture is characterized by their association with emotion, the body, and nature…246

246 Gaard, G., “Women, water, energy: An ecofeminist approach”, Organization & Environment; June 2001: (14:2): 158 ‐ 159 – Plumwood, V., Feminism and the mastery of nature, New York: Routledge: 1993 – cited/referred to in text 177

Gaard’s association between the female, nature and emotion via Plumwood’s analysis of the societal structures of Western Culture provides an avenue for understanding Hejinian and Clark’s ecologically centered and emotionally themed work. This framework enables an understanding of The Lake as a work which functions not through the dualities noted by

Gaard but rather through a liminal terrain of negotiation of the various modalities of representation as an ideally formatted method for the writing of a female subjectivity.

Some examples of the pervading theme of emotion that appears throughout The Lake include:

“How does one think nonetheless emotions? There is girting on the inside of the sands – Insistently – And the lake returns the pressure.”247

“It is discomfited by emotion at what account? Each rend takes another position – A replacement – Partially”248

“Emotion is meant – with sensation – shapes – where – lake – doesn’t – desist”249

“A particular thinking on a lake – is passing as a lake – is held and then a separate thought – of a lake – the water is the spider – It is tied to the shift – we call centre to the outside – we call excessive – the lake balances away”250

“There are loons in coils and milfoil to disclose – and perhaps it’s all internal”251

“This is guesswork, abduction – Wherever there is – trivia there is – vicissitude and issues – of emotion – guesswork, abduction”252

247 Clark, E. / Hejinian, L., The Lake, New York: Granary Books: 2001: (no pagination) 248 Ibid. 249 Ibid. 250 Ibid. 251 Ibid. 178

Stephanie Sandler argues that “Hejinian’s poetry with its emphasis on pleasure and beauty in recollection, may be compared to that of William Wordsworth…”253 A reverence for the natural world and an imagistic tendency, particularly throughout The Lake with all textual contemplation being based around the natural landscape of a lake, but also throughout her broader writing project, renders Hejinian’s poetry comparative to Romantic poetry. But though there are compelling similarities between Hejinian’s work and Romanticism, her writing functions within a different contextual framework and extends beyond

Romanticism’s strong emphasis on beauty and nature. It does so through a vigorous examination of the possibilities of language and the representation of the female subject.

Comparisons between Hejinian’s work and a sensitivity and sensibility similar to that of the Romantic writers risk revisiting various already existing misconceptions about the female. I wish to make a comparison rather, between the natural ecological materiality and poetry of water and the flow of emotion as conceptualized by Bachelard. These

Bachelardian concepts operate in unison throughout the course of The Lake as various words circulate and visually flow around various forms, enhancing the meaning and method of perception of both.

Through the physical and metaphoric representation of a body of water an experience of being female emerges that is immediate, sudden and indefinite but most importantly, current and active. The focus of the examples from the text that I have included is not strictly based around a particular emotion but rather around the concept and processes of

252 Ibid. 253Sandler, S., “Arkadii Dragomoschenko, Lyn Hejinian, and Persistence of Romanticism”, Contemporary Literature: 2005, Spring: (46:1): 30 179 emotion itself. Articulating specific emotions as being inherently female would result in an unproductive homogenizing effect. Focusing on the concept of emotion instead produces a different result as it assists in the composition of a female writing that mimics the flow of maternal waters as gendered and theorized by Bachelard, constantly giving birth to new life through the conversations which take place between textual imagery and words. As

Cixous argues, “women’s imaginary is inexhaustible, like music, painting, writing: their stream of phantasms is incredible.”254 The reader is equipped with a sense of the nature of emotion rather than with a distinct expressed emotion. Consequently, rather than a static dwelling upon a particular emotion, he/she is encouraged to experience a rolling effect – one of movement and activity – whilst considering the nature of emotion. This rolling effect of continual flow and association is encompassed well in the line “Emotion is meant

– with sensation – shapes – where – lake – doesn’t – desist”255.

254 Cixous, H., “The Laugh of The Medusa”: 876 255 Clark, E. / Hejinian, L., The Lake: (no pagination) 180

256

The verbal image of a non-desisting lake gives the text a sense of openness that is not subject to any definitive destination. The “shapes” addressed within the written text are mirrored diagonally alongside the words through the interwoven images of various water- dwelling creatures. These creatures are drawn in ink as though they are emerging from one to the next through a blurring of the drawn edges defining each one. A sense of flow and inconclusiveness exists in both elements of image and text as they parallel one another in continuity; the imagery – through the blurring of ink lines – and the written text – through

256 Ibid. 181 a verbal image of openness. Poetically, in echo of Bachelard, this type of movement does have an inherent feminine quality. In its contemplative stillness and simultaneous rolling effect, the phenomenology of water throughout The Lake embraces and mimics the silence of the woman’s voice as it has featured throughout the course of Western literature and history. Furthermore, it transforms that voice into a reflective and endlessly active surface which embodies it and gives it sound. Although this process occurs significantly through the language of the text, the broader picture of each page contributes significantly to this effect also.

As I have argued in chapter one of this thesis, Hejinian experiments with the societal role of the female throughout My Life by regularly listing household features in context with mention of her mother and grandmother, as in the lines, “my grandmother was in the kitchen, her hands on her hips, wearing what she called a ‘washdress …’”257 and “my mother stood at the window watching the only lights that were visible…”258. Through her use of linguistic abstraction and contextual experimentation, in terms of where in the text such excerpts are featured, Hejinian challenges the text’s implied female roles and positions. Similarly in The Lake, Clark and herself have taken a societal role commonly associated with the female and have transformed it into a feminine voice. They achieve this through the inclusion of what appears to be a kitchen jar at the centre of the following page from the text. The jar’s salient textual presence is used both spatially and thematically as a creative force and focal point for surrounding textual features.

257 Hejinian, L., My Life: 2002: 16 258 Ibid: 11 182

259

Through the image of the jar, Hejinian and Clark bring to life Cixous’ notion of ‘white ink’, transforming a conventional societal role of the ‘woman in the kitchen’ by incorporating an element of that woman into a broader stream of associations. The cloth that covers the jar creates the impression that it may be an item to be found in a kitchen.

Often the association has been made between the female and her role in the home, the private sphere, the silent space. Through the centering of the jar, Hejinian and Clark revisit and acknowledge that silence. The emptiness of the jar opens the image up for further interpretation as the reader is encouraged to contemplate the picture of the jar in relation to reflective and water-like qualities that are contained within the translucent quality of its

259 Clark, E. / Hejinian, L., The Lake: (no pagination) 183 glass body. The choice to not fill the container with anything enables the jar to be separated from its traditional context of the kitchen and situated within a greater context, that of feminine water.

Three of the six panels reflecting the water’s surface are photographs that have captured an image of it over some rocks. The remaining three panels have been either painted or drawn or etched. They also depict the lake’s surface but from a more forward-view angle as opposed to the topographical angle of the photographs. The drawn panels due to their heightened stylization through the drawing medium, are more self-reflexive of their existence as pictures; their frame-ability. From all of these individual elements emerges a significant juxtaposition of the static and the active; the silent and the heard. This juxtaposition is formulated through the contrast between the processes of photography and drawing/painting. The photographed panels indicate a greater sense of movement because of the detailed surface quality of the water appearing to shimmer in the sunlight as it trickles and creates ripples around rocks that disturb the water’s stillness. The photographic realism of these panels renders them highly detailed, furthering the sense of activity within each panel. A highly developed tonal range from black to white, including also a slight spec of colour, also assists in this feeling of motion. This is achieved through the trickling progression between the various tonalities. The drawn panels and elements, including the centralized jar, appear incredibly still. What occurs as a result of this juxtaposition is an emergence of a form of equality between the seemingly active and the still. In this process all the elements of the page are enlivened and are rendered active through their contrast to other elements of the page. The still, translucent, milky coloured jar becomes a semi- 184 reflective and conversant element of the text in the same way that the reader is encouraged to be. The words on the page mimic the process of the imagery as the words “The water is the spider” and “centre to the outside” evoke a sense of a centralized subject which gradually expands out and is integrated into the greater active scheme of worldly occurrences. The spider-like water is the connecting element which weaves and integrates the “particular thinking on a lake” into the wider scheme of activity on the page. This is expressed verbally through the words in the top right-hand corner of the page and is simultaneously mimicked and reflected through the imagery on the page which although strongly contrasted in various ways, such as through colour and form, maintains a fluid- like quality which is unified through a sense of visual flow created through the rippled curved lines of the photographed, sunlit water as well as through the drawn or etched panels depicting water like curves. As the “lake balances away” so, similarly, does the static silent jar at the centre of the page. The female jar which upon initial viewing is located within the space of the jar itself, begins to ebb outwards and become more dominant/vocal. The bold black lines drawn sporadically across the page also mimic and reflect this process.

Although there is no explicit audible text attributed to this piece of writing, the visual movement across the page, evidenced through the individual fragments of text through their flow-like essence and also through their inter-textual communication, in combination with the fact of the text being a poem (a traditionally oral genre), presses further the presence of a very audible silent voice which finds its vocality within the interaction between the verbal and graphic visuality of the page. Though the poetry of The Lake is not 185 strictly intended to be read aloud as this could compromise the effectiveness of the cross- generic activity between imagery and writing, it nevertheless draws upon the notion of a voice and gives the text life through writing. The poetic genre is also significant for its connectivity to the unconscious. Cixous argues that, “… poetry involves gaining strength through the unconscious and … the unconscious, that other limitless country, is the place where the repressed manage to survive …”260 The poetic language of the text, enhanced through imagistic elements, brings the poetry of The Lake within closer proximity to the unconscious and also develops a very corporeal and visual response to lake waters.

Bachelard encompasses the benefits of such an understanding of water when he writes that,

“strengthened in this knowledge of depth of a material element, the reader will understand

…that water is … a type of destiny that is no longer simply the vain destiny of fleeting images and a never-ending dream but an essential destiny that endlessly changes the substance of the being.”261 By engaging the potential of the synchronicities between dreams, poetry and water, Hejinian and Clark move beyond the terrain of mere reflection towards a process of activity and interaction to deliver the female subject to a place endowed with the potential and inherent capacity for openness and change.

260 Cixous, H., “The Laugh of The Medusa”: 879‐880 261Bachelard, G., Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter: 6 186

Saga/Circus

In Saga/Circus, 2008, Hejinian’s readers once more experience a phantasmic dream-like language of border or in-betweeness. In the text Hejinian once more works with Emilie

Clark but not in complete collaboration. Clark worked on the two watercolor images prior to each of the two chapters/sections of the book. Although the reader does not experience the same graphic sensibility of The Lake, Saga/Circus functions upon very similar principles.

A montage-like effect occurs in the collaboration of chapters arranged in seemingly random order. There is no chapter listing at the front of the book so the many short chapters and their arrangement can be seen as visual devices intended to separate segments but not order them in any expected sequence. We also once more encounter the concept of water not only in the water-like quality of the cover and interior paintings but also in the subject matter of one painting being that of a sailing ship. Water also resurfaces in the written components of various chapters of the text. The following segment from the text once more articulates a type of silence and subsequently directs the reader to the significance of materiality and experience in Hejinian’s work.

187

The Distance has the power of a body Which is the power of death And we are captives of it, busily at work, Because we love life. Yet in the end That life – boundless and immeasurably strong And which we feel so strongly To have taken form for us As our own individual life – Cannot protect us from the sea…262

This extract from the text commences on a note of silence. The “distance” having the

“power of death” referred to in the first two lines signals something far away; something silent. The stillness evoked through the verbal imagery of a body and through the concept of death in the first two lines of the stanza, is enhanced through the contrast with the busy, active, short, monosyllabic words denotative of activity that follow in the subsequent line –

“we are captives of it busily at work.” This pace continues throughout the pages that follow as Hejinian utilizes the processes of emotive expression and paratactic listing to create an essence of noise or sound.

The awareness of our physical body and the more overwhelming presence of the body of the sea direct the reader towards a more experiential form of reading – one that has a corporeal dimension to it. The lines of Hejinian’s poetry in this text are relatively short and they roll into one another quite seamlessly. The many chapters and many short blank

262Hejinian, L., Saga/Circus, Richmond & California: Omnidawn Publishing: 2008: 129 188 spaces inbetween the sometimes chronological, sometimes non-chronological chapters, format a very visual experience. The reader is at liberty to choose in what order he/she would like to read the text, and the many unconventional features such as the listing of chapters, the blank spaces and the images included, encourage the reader to flick through to various different segments of the text to assemble an experience of reality in reading. By this I mean that such a reading process is more authentic to real-life experience which is not always coherently driven by a singular and logical line of narrative. The reading of

Saga/Circus can be equated to the experience of viewing a “flicker book” as a type of broken down animation sequence, but there is a temporal difference as the pace at which the reader turns the pages of Saga/Circus cannot be fast because the reader needs time to engage with the poetry. The process however is similar for the reader is encouraged through chapter titles such as “Chapter on the Side of One, Two, Three”, “Chapter between”, Chapter One”, “Chapter Two” and “Chapter If It’s True” to flick backwards and forwards through the text to assemble an image within their own mind of the essence of the text. This indicates to the reader a type of bridge between his/her reality and the reality of the text. A phantasmic in-betweeness of verbal and graphic images gives the text greater accessibility as it motivates and propels the reader into the momentum and the dimension of the text itself rather than merely toward a reading of it. It is with this active drive and whirlwind effect of ephemeral glimpses of light and insights here and there that various aspects of the text such as the following excerpt become particularly powerful.

189

We are used to being reviled as makers of metaphors And feared. Men have accused us Of witchery, they have accused us of receiving Visitations and crafting Transmutations; we are blamed For changes, the more precise the more terrifying. But fate is Down everyone’s alley, in everyone’s line, Though fulfilling it is involuntary, It follows What follows. They say that …263

This excerpt from Saga/Circus does not directly prescribe anything as it exists as pure observation especially in comparative context to the greater body of paratactic and flickering images throughout the text. In these fragmented observations that are constantly evolving as reflections in water do, is situated a seed for critiquing and potentially redirecting the course of historical events. “Men have accused us of witchery” stands out amidst the remainder of the page as a definitive reference point, being a historical event that has been recorded in time. Situated in the context of other words that do not suggest anything definite, such a line draws the reader in and asks him/her to swim amidst the ebb and flow of the written text and engage with both a specific women’s history – past as well as more recent experience – as integrated and correspondent fragments of women’s experience more broadly. The line stands out as something that has occurred and has been heavily documented and recorded throughout history as a signpost to take specific note of

263Ibid: 114 190 in the sea of other recorded events and observations that are not as widely known by the majority of potential readers.

The artwork below, by Emilie Clark, precedes the second section of Saga/Circus titled

“The Distance”. In addition to contributing to the multifaceted nature of the text, the page in itself embodies what the text in its entirety does more broadly. It denotes a body of water and stands as an image that encapsulates or signifies a type of female subjectivity or perception.

264

264 Ibid. ‐ (Image by Clark, E.): 91 191

Clark’s image establishes a silence before the vocality of written language commences in the pages that follow this section of the text. The image asks the reader to pause and reflect upon the inclusion and significance of the visual image prior to engaging with the written language of the text. As the main subject matter for the visual page, the large ship may be thought of as possessing a masculine energy due to its signification of early exploratory endeavors. Early explorers were predominantly, if not entirely, male. However the nature in which the image has been painted does not coincide with this sense of masculinity. The medium in which it has been created radiates a watercolor aesthetic. The ship is not scientifically detailed as one might expect to see in a history book. Rather, the ship appears gentle and still. However, regardless of this apparent stillness, the image still creates an allusion to water. As the background of the image is not entirely white, a mystical effect is created. The reader can almost feel a gentle sea-breeze behind the ship. Though the ship as a subject matter may seem masculine, the manner in which it has been painted and the surrounding ambience depicted creates a very feminine atmosphere. The page may not in itself entirely denote a type of femininity but it does allude to feminine water and more importantly sets a scene of silence. It acknowledges the silencing of the female throughout history and early scientific endeavor as it sets the scene for an almost scientific collection of feminine experience. In the same vein as Hejinian’s description and characterization of

Stein’s writing as “a... form of landscape... an exemplary case, a spread of examples”265,

Hejinian has assembled in Saga/ Circus an extraordinary array of examples that collectively create a type of landscape. In this landscape the reader can identify the female subject. By virtue of the landscape being eternal and never complete, Hejinian has utilized

265 Hejinian, L., “Two Stein Talks”, The Language of Inquiry: 105 192 the notion of the visual to create a powerful and active speaking female subject for the reader to identify – one that bears references to and echoes the past but also one that fosters a freedom in reading that is non-prescriptive.

Image as Language – A Poetics of Female Experience

This chapter has traced the importance of a sense of the visual throughout the life and writing of Lyn Hejinian in an explication of how that visuality has become an inextricable and significant element comprising the very language of her poetic practice. Her language, formulated through an interweaving of graphic and verbal forms of imagery, constitutes an ideal representative format for the portrayal of a female subjectivity as one that is better equipped to represent spaces of silence than more standardized narratological texts and through those spaces brings forth a spring of words to contrast and inform the silence which has surrounded the female subject throughout Western history.

Hejinian’s language is heavily informed by a phantasmic visuality which engages with a plethora of sightings emergent from many facets of imaginative thought. In the foreground of these sightings is an engagement with mental and dream images which even more so

193 than the hybrid visual/ linguistic textual phenomena that occurs on the physical pages of

Hejinian’s texts, is situated at the phenomenological border of life and text.

Chapter three of this thesis will further expand a conceptualization of Hejinian’s linguistic parameters by including within them a notion of the material.

194

Word and Thing – Tactile Experience

Chapter Three

When the term realism is applied to poetry, it is apt to upset our sense of reality. But it is exactly the strangeness that results from a description of the world given in the terms “there it is,” “there it is,” “there it is” that restores realness to things in the world and separates things from ideology.266

– Lyn Hejinian

Chapter two of this thesis postulated the visuality within Lyn Hejinian’s writing as an extension to her language – as a method of representation which operates in close proximity to the reader and signifies in great depth a sense of realist encounter unachievable through standard narrative forms. The chapter demonstrated through extended textual analysis, how such writing, expanded through visual capacity, is ideally equipped for the representation of a female subject. This chapter will progress from a focus on the visual towards an embodied materialism which while also demonstrative of an expansion of Hejinian’s linguistic parameters, functions more broadly across her writing and publishing practices as a border notion representative of the phenomenological position of the writing subject and text as inseparable from lived experience. Explication of an embedded materiality within Hejinian’s work will commence an illustration of the feminine dream language which elliptically constitutes her writing practice.

266 Hejinian, L., “Strangeness”, The Language of Inquiry: 158

195

In her essay “The Rejection of Closure” Hejinian outlines her materialist conceptualization of writing:

Writing’s forms are not merely shapes but forces; formal questions are about dynamics – they ask how, where, and why the writing moves, what are the types, directions, number and velocities of a work’s motion. The material aporia objectifies the poem in the context of ideas and language itself.267

Though Hejinian’s explanation in this instance addresses the notion of materialism through a focus on words – as she writes just before this extract, in regards to language and its constraints “… in the context of the ever-regenerating plenitude of language’s resources, in their infinite combinations”268 – it is evident what constitutes language for Hejinian is far broader than the words featured between the front and back covers of a text. Language for

Hejinian is comprised by meaning-bearing constituents within and around the published piece of literature, including the very covers, the visual and graphic choices, paper quality and compositional context.

Hejinian acknowledges having been significantly influenced by writers such as Proust,

Melville and Stein, stating in an interview with Manuel Brito that:

...they have been an inspiration and an influence for me. The longevity and the interplay between symmetry and asymmetry, in Proust’s and Melville’s syntax and in Stein’s semantics, must show up in my work. Style is really velocity of thinking

267 Hejinian, L., “The Rejection of Closure”, The Language of Inquiry: 42 268 Ibid. 196

in a landscape of thought. With turns. I immensely admire Proust’s and Stein’s turns.269

The strong objectification of a stylized poetic language made primary to textual content or narrative through the novelistic format, in Proust’s, Melville’s, and Stein’s writing styles, emerges consistently throughout the fabric of Hejinian’s writing practice. Charles

Bernstein’s essay, “Professing Stein/Stein Professing”, encapsulates the relevance of

Stein’s poetics to a form of poetry concerned significantly with a sense of the material within language. Bernstein argues:

I think this is the meaning of Stein’s great discovery – call it invention – of “wordness” in the last section of The Making of Americans and in Tender Buttons: satisfaction in language made present, contemporary; the pleasure/plenitude in the immersion in language, where language is not understood as a code for something else or a representation of somewhere else – a kind of eating or drinking or tasting, endowing an object status to language , if objects are realized not to be nouns; a revelation of the ordinary as sufficient unto itself...270

Bernstein articulates Stein’s separation of textual objects from their characterization as nouns (inactive, fixed and unyielding) as the commencement of a form of evolution of language’s capacities. Static objects for Stein, through Bernstein’s account, are rendered with living qualities not in a personifying sense but through a treatment within language which enables a perception of them as more than mere objects included textually for the purposes of coloring a greater narrative scheme. Stein’s Tender Buttons thoroughly exemplifies this concept of enhancing the value of the material object beyond its object

269 Hejinian, L., in Brito, M. “Comments for Manuel Brito”, The Language of Inquiry: 183 270 Bernstein, C., A Poetics, Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press: 1992: 143 197 status. In the section from Tender Buttons titled “OBJECTS”, Stein lists various objects as subheadings and elaborates the concept of these in a paragraph beneath. In one such example she writes:

A PURSE. A purse was not green, it was not straw color, it was hardly seen and it had a use and the chain, the chain was never missing, it was not misplaced, it showed that it was open, that is all that it showed.271

Stein’s reflection on the simple object of the purse opens a myriad of perceptions and narrative possibilities. Through the mention of colour, the embellishment of the “chain”, and the notions of misplacement and being open, she frames the objects as possessing a story. Rather than the purse being a descriptive and background facet of a particular tale, when addressed under the title of “A PURSE” and given a story to tell, the object itself is empowered with a speaking capacity as it capitalizes spatially – on the page – over the explicative text beneath written in lower case letters. Stein’s writing complicates the distinctions between language and experience through a process of objectification which expands the realist capacities of the written text. In this chapter I address how this realist expansion occurs throughout Hejinian’s writing practice.

Having written the preface to Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives (1904) published by Green

Integer in 2009, Hejinian’s interest and admiration for Stein as discussed previously, is made highly apparent through the parallels between her own writing style and Stein’s. In

271 Stein, G., Tender Buttons, (First published by Marie, C., New York: 1914): New York: Dover Publications: 1997: 10 198 the preface to Three Lives which explores the lives of three women in a fractured style not entirely dissimilar to that employed by Hejinian in her writing of My Life, Hejinian explains that “Stein had invented a mode of iteration to indicate not recurrence but phenomenological occurrence, the perpetual coming into being through accumulated instances of the person that is.”272 According to Hejinian, Stein had developed a style of writing which enabled a perpetual coming into being through the complication/elimination of narrative and consequent substitution with material encounter. Throughout the course of

My Life, Stein’s influence on Hejinian is rendered apparent through Hejinian’s own utilization of this technique of “phenomenological occurrence” as the reader repeatedly encounters an objectification of the written word through phrases such as, “a name trimmed with colours ribbons”273 where the nominal is expanded through the objective. A

“name” becomes “trimmed with colour ribbons” to suggest more than might be made immediately apparent, encouraging the reader to see/read beyond the named primary concept.

Another primary poetic influence for Hejinian was the late-modernist poet George Oppen whose work as Peter Nicholls argues, “...pertains most directly to the features of Hejinian’s

[poetry]...”274 Nicholls argues that, “… Oppen registers a shift in late modernism by trying to specify the ethical rather than political dimension of aesthetics.”275 This shift emerges

272 Hejinian, L., (Introd.) in Stein, G., Three Lives, Kobenhavn & Los Angeles: Green Integer: 2004: 47 273 Hejinian, L., My Life: 2002: 17 274Nicholls, P., “Phenomenal Poetics: Reading Lyn Hejinian”, in Delville, M. / Pagnoulle, C. (Eds.), Mechanics of the Mirage: Postwar American Poetry, Liège, Belgium: Liège Language and Literature, English Department: Université de Liège: 2000: 245 275 Ibid. 199 through a specific focus on the faculties and capacities of language itself as opposed to its politicized intentions most often inscribed through the narrative format. Hejinian refutes perceptions of ethics focused literature as being difficult arguing that:

The difficulty of the work... does not constitute an intransigence; on the contrary, it is the material manifestation of the work’s mutability, its openness... a forming, a manifestation of what the objectivists would have termed its “sincerity” – the ethical principle by which the poet tests words against the actuality of the world, the articulation of our status as presences in common (and only in common) with other presences in the world.276

Hejinian cites Nicholls argument that:

...for Oppen, “the point was that a poetics founded on the (philosophically) simple recognition of actuality – ‘That it is’ – would ultimately concern itself with an equally ‘simple’ and non-agonistic perception of social relationships. Viewed in these terms, poetry might offer a way of acknowledging the world and others without seeking to reduce them to objects of knowledge.”277

For Hejinian, as was the case for Oppen, the recognition of a certain materiality within language, based in the processes and poetic capacities of the language itself, offered a promise of a de-politicized writing format equipped with the capacity of a particular linguistically self-reflexive integrity which would enable a form of representation based within and in conversation with the world as opposed to a commentary on the world. In her essay “Language and Paradise”, Hejinian’s explicatory work of her poetic text The Guard

(a work that meditates on language), she acknowledges also being partially influenced by

276 Hejinian, L., “Barbarism”, The Language of Inquiry: 331 277 Ibid:332 ‐ Nicholls, P., “Of Being Ethical: Reflections on George Oppen,” Journal of American Studies 31: 1997: (2): 160 – cited in text 200

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concepts developed in The Phenomenology of Perception, citing his argument that, “In trying to describe the phenomenon of speech and the specific act of meaning, we shall have the opportunity to leave behind us, once and for all, the traditional subject-object dichotomy.”278

However, as Kate Fagan argues, “though seductive in its promise of radical flight into extra-subjective states of being, Merleau-Ponty’s avowal resists the mediate nature of language.”279 Merleau-Ponty’s argument though seemingly aligned with Hejinian’s poetic endeavors, elides the conceptualization of language as an intermediary factor which influences the very processes of description. Fagan cites Hejinian’s refutation of Merleau-

Ponty’s perspective:

“[Language] serves as guide to phenomena, certainly, bringing us face to face with them, but it stands as a guard against our being “ultimately at one” with them, since language is the principle medium through which we objectify things and our experience of them. But is this... even an accurate characterization of the circumstance of description? It’s through language, after all, that we discover our nonautonomous being. The very fluidity of meaning that we note in the relation of words to things, signifier to signified, makes fluid what might otherwise become rigid.”280

Hejinian’s argument is illustrative of her quest for a fluid perception of differentiation between the material world and the language utilized in the representation and conceptualization of that world. In the process of this quest is situated her reception of the

278 Merleau‐Ponty, M., The Phenomenology of Perception, (Smith, C., Trans.), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul: 1962: 174 – cited in Hejinian, L., “Language and “Paradise”” in The Language of Inquiry: 69 279 Fagan, K., “‘Constantly I write this happily’: Encountering Lyn Hejinian”: 110 280 Ibid: Hejinian, L., “Language and “Paradise””, The Language of Inquiry: 69 – cited in text 201 material world as a notion inextricable from language itself. Her argument for the principal function of language as being actively mediative produces a conceptualization of the material and tactile matter which formulates the physical world as a comprising element of the language which is used in representation. She argues for a reconsideration of the rigid boundaries which delineate real life objects from the objects of language as separate phenomena. For this reason Merleau-Ponty’s perspective whilst contributory to Hejinian’s philosophy of language, is not entirely adequate for the conceptualization of the broad spectrum of her writing project and its material underpinning. Hejinian’s consideration of

Merleau-Ponty’s challenge of the “traditional subject-object dichotomy” is a significant concern within her work that articulates a desire for the loosening of boundaries which predicate the implementation of such definitive delineations. Her argument however, gestures towards an understanding which accounts for the materiality and object-like status contained within language itself.

Things

Hejinian’s objectification of the text and the word can be better understood through the lens of Bill Brown’s Thing Theory. In his essay “Thing Theory” Brown argues that “we look through objects (to see what they disclose about history, society, nature, or culture –

202 above all, what they disclose about us), but we only catch a glimpse of things.”281 He regards things as being charged with certain potency and as encapsulating virtues and possibilities often overlooked in our quest as readers to read the meaning behind any given object or text as opposed to reading the very body of that text. Brown’s conceptualization of ‘thing’ can be paralleled to Hejinian’s concept of the word and the text as unitary wholes that are functional and morphologically charged in themselves as well as in combination and conversation with other words and texts. Often words, like things, are received – as fractions of a larger whole – for their purpose within a greater scheme of progressive events. Words conventionally propel the reader from one sentence to the next by detailing a particular sequence of events in the same way that certain objects have a fixed and expected purpose and are of little significance beyond the parameters of their intended function. Brown re-conceptualizes the phenomenology of things arguing that:

We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily. The story of objects asserting themselves as things, then, is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object relation.282

Brown differentiates between the object and the thing, arguing for the functional value of the former and the existential and confrontational nature of the latter. The object for Brown consists of a fixed subject-object relationship and the object itself morphs into thing only through the process of becoming dysfunctional. Brown argues that it is in this encounter

281 Brown, B., “Thing Theory”: 4 282 Ibid. 203 between the person and the object that a new type of interaction, strange and other to that which takes place between a well functioning object and its user, occurs. Hejinian’s language is rendered into being precisely through this separation from its conventional usage. Her language and her writing practice are processed through a ‘thing’ filter, emerging strange and consequently new. What renders Brown’s Thing Theory a more suitable analytical tool for Hejinian’s writing than Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of

Perception, is Brown’s embrace of a notion of fluidity between the material and the ideological. Brown’s ‘thing’ charges the static object with subjective capabilities and accounts for language as an interwoven facet throughout subject-object relationships. He articulates this through considerations such as, “the question of things becomes a question about whether the literary object should be understood as the object that literature represents or the object that literature has as its aim, the object that literature is”283 and that,

“thoughts are not less physical than objects; thinking is no less physical than acting”284.

Hejinian’s fusion of notions of subjectivity and objectivity, informed significantly through

Stein and Oppen’s poetics, results in a dream-like writing that recalls Freud’s theory of

“The ‘Uncanny’” which addresses the notion of the familiar being rendered strange. This strangeness according to Freud occurs through a vast spectrum of circumstances and emerges as a result of repressed complexes. Indeed, Hejinian’s essay “Strangeness” appears to draw upon Freud’s ‘The ‘Uncanny’” by converting Freud’s understanding of

283 Brown, B., A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press: 2003: 3 284 Ibid: 162 204 conscious fear/ discomfort into a literary enterprise based in consciousness that articulates

“a poetry of consciousness, which is by its very nature a medium of strangeness.”285

Strangeness/ “The Uncanny”

In the conclusion of his essay “The Uncanny” Freud proposes that uncanny feelings can be elicited and articulated through the avenue of literature however, he stipulates that:

The uncanny belonging to the first class – that proceeding from forms of thought that have been surmounted – retains its character not only in experience but in fiction as well, so long as the setting is one of material reality; but where it is given an arbitrary and artificial setting in fiction, it is apt to lose that character.286

Hejinian’s writing practice pertains to Freud’s concept of a material reality in that it is broadly concerned with a form of objectification that is achieved through both literary devices and tactile sensibilities. Though Freud identifies ‘material reality’ more with a narrative realness than a materiality in language, Hejinian’s experimentation with a

285 Hejinian, L., “Strangeness”, The Language of Inquiry: 159 286 Freud, S., “The Uncanny” in Dickson, A (Ed.)/ Strachey, J. (Trans & Ed.), Sigmund Freud Volume 14 – Art and Literature, Penguin Books: England: 1990: 375 (Present English translation first published in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho‐Analysis: London in Volume XVII: 1955) 205 language-based materiality explicitly anchors her writing within real-life experience and within that reality invokes, through a dream-like sensibility, a form of active consciousness. Such a state of consciousness alerts the reader to alternative perceptions and enables new and progressive methods of representation (to be expanded upon further at a later stage in this chapter and in chapters four and five of this thesis).

Hejinian’s multimodal and materially informed writing echoes personal real life experience which in turn involves the reader and his/her responses and evokes the recollection of their own associated life experiences. Within this process there exists a complicated double- edged sense of integrity which is disloyal to the properties of historic record due to an absence of conventionally structured narrative but which is pertinent and alert to the truthfulness of the lived moment of both the reader and writer. It is in this moment of experiential exchange between reader and writer that the notion of the uncanny, albeit altered somewhat (due to the absence of a notion of fear), takes its seat. The notion of the uncanny emerges in the self-referential act which occurs for the reader as he/she is called upon to decipher textual meaning; with limited textual instruction he/she is forced to draw upon personal experience to engage with the essence of the written text. Freud’s account of the notion of the uncanny is echoed throughout Hejinian’s materially and experientially focused work, specifically his argument that:

The most remarkable coincidences of wish and fulfillment, the most mysterious repetition of similar experiences in a particular place or on a particular date, the most deceptive sights and suspicious noises – none of these things will disconcert him or raise the kind of fear which can be described as ‘a fear of something

206

uncanny’. The whole thing is purely an affair of ‘reality-testing’, a question of the material reality of the phenomena…287

Hejinian’s integration of the reader into the fabric of her text through a reliance on free association emergent from an absence of direct and definitive narrative structure, engages him/her in a continual act of “reality-testing” resulting in an alert, current and active reading process which enables a reading beyond the truths of recorded history and widely accepted tradition. In the preface to Writing Is an Aid to Memory Hejinian explains and stipulates the significance of such an active textual model:

I am always conscious of the disquieting runs of life slipping by, that the message remains undelivered, opposed to me... Incessant knowledge and the natural sciences of difficulty, brilliance, complexity, and generosity, to please an entire face, where sorrow by the fact is not true of greatness. Work is retarded by such desire, which is anticipation of its certainty, and hence a desire impossible of satisfaction, in the future despite the grand decision to pull it present. It was that interest as lapse of time, that wanting to put too much in is forgetting, or forgotten calling attention.288

Writing Is an Aid to Memory disposes of a desire for incessant knowledge as it recollects and records life within the crevices located between the brilliant and grandiose events that history traditionally chooses to record. This notion is exemplified in the opening lines of the text.

287 Ibid: 371 288 Hejinian, L., Writing Is an Aid to Memory, Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press: 1996: (Preface – no pagination) 207

289

Hejinian suggests on line four of this page that perhaps it is “utter errors” which often direct courses of action or progression. This claim, made in the opening poem to her numerically ordered collection of works which appear to be one collective whole through the technique of enjambment from one to the next, critiques imposed numbered divisions.

This critique of specific orders, continued through the absence of page numbers throughout the text, attests to Hejinian’s involvement in recording knowledge that lies outside the

289Ibid: (no pagination)

208 bounds of what is broadly considered as constituting relevant and important knowledge.

Commencing the text with the word “apple” and continuing a flow of listing things throughout the body of the text requires the reader’s acknowledgement of the thing/object beyond its functional status. The “apple” in this particular instance is contextualized within a series of words that bear no reference to its edible fruit status. The reader is asked to draw upon their individual knowledge and personal experience to weave a thread of relevance and connectivity between the object of the apple and succeeding words such as

“shot”, “know”, “saying” and “think”. What emerges as a result of this textual process is the active and conscious involvement of the reader in the acquisition of an uncanny and only half familiar form of knowledge, where by he/she can take refuge in the familiarity of basic words such as “apple” but is destabilized by a sense of uncertainty emergent from the lack of immediately apparent and obvious connectivity to other surrounding words. In this uncanny space devoid, of the immediately apparent, the reader is propelled into a state of reality-testing as addressed by Freud whereby he/she commences an encounter with each word at an individual level – as an object in its own right. These encounters with words propel the reader into a space of new understanding not entirely directed by the already existing ideological implications of existing meanings.

In an introduction to her essay “Strangeness” in The Language of Inquiry, Hejinian explains her key considerations of materiality in language and knowledge and she attributes primary significance to the conjunctive spaces within discourse. Hejinian argues:

It is in these transitions that the activity of being is exercised – the work of being in the world... These interrelated transitions form a system of perceptible effects. For 209

James, these are the materials of cognition and hence of consciousness. “Knowledge of sensible realities thus comes to life inside the tissue of experience. It is made; and made by relations that unroll themselves in time.”... In the realm of the political as in that of the material world around us, “knowledge of sensible realities” is vital, and if I have argued that poetic language contributes critically to making realities sensible, it must address both the material character of the political and the political character of the material.290

Hejinian’s explication signals that the parameters of her poetic project span beyond the bounds of language, extending even further into the realms of visuality and materiality.

Owing at least some of its thematic concern to Freud’s “The ‘Uncanny’”, Hejinian’s

“Strangeness” grapples with the matter of dreams and scientific records to complicate and challenge the boundaries which define the reader’s common understanding of what constitutes and separates reality from fiction. Separating herself however from the factor of fear in Freud’s concept of things uncanny, Hejinian creates a mirror of/ mirrored reality in representation with the intent of rendering things anew and altering deeply imbedded perceptions. She confirms this in the conclusion of “Strangeness” when she writes:

When the term realism is applied to poetry it is apt to upset our sense of reality. But it is exactly the strangeness that results from a description of the world given in the terms “there it is,” “there it is,” “there it is” that restores realness to things in the world and separates things from ideology.291

290 Hejinian, L., The Language of Inquiry: 136‐137 ‐ James, W., Essays in Radical Empiricism, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press: 1976: 29 ‐ cited in text 291Hejinian, L., “Strangeness”, The Language of Inquiry: 158 210

Writing Artist-Books

Hejinian’s engagement with a notion of the material throughout her writing emerges through two main courses of action. The first and most explicit of these is her very active role in her publishing venture Tuumba. Extending upon the material facets involved in conducting a small printing enterprise, Hejinian has also been involved in the creating and writing of various artist-books and folios which in format echo the structure and ambience of her more widely circulated published works. Through the avenue of the artist-book

Hejinian’s work confuses perceived boundaries of reality and expands the scope of the lens through which the reader may comprehend the written text. Furthermore, the concept of the printing press signals a literal building of a collection of texts. The hands-on approach involved in the assemblage of Hejinian’s Tuumba Press publications as well as in the publishing of Hejinian’s other (not self-published) literature, results in her texts being rendered “strange” (in comparison to more conventionally mass-produced literature) and ultimately being delivered into a state of “newness”. What emerges as a result, peripherally and in correspondence with the poetry that features within these texts, is the compilation of a form of new knowledge: a literary body of texts purposeful to the concept of encounter.

Tuumba was established in 1976 and functioned up until 1984 producing a total of 50 handset letterpress chapbooks. It was revived and re-opened in 1999. Ann Vickery argues that, “Tuumba became a means... through which Hejinian could develop her interest in the

211 graphic and the physical side of textual production.” 292 Hejinian comments in an interview with Manual Brito that:

I founded Tuumba Press because poetry (like anything else) is meaningless without context, without conditions. Literary life in America isn’t given, it has to be invented and constructed, and this process of inventing and constructing, as I saw it, was simply an extension of my writing, of my being a poet. Small presses, magazines, poetry readings are the constructs of our literary life and provide conditions for writing’s meanings.293

Hejinian utilization of construction terminology to describe her involvement in publishing indicates an approach towards the practice as a means of physically building. Her interest in publishing not only functioned to develop her engagement with more tactile mediums but also served as a building block – as a material element – to assist in her forging a literary career. It is important however to understand Hejinian’s engagement with notions of the material as a purposeful extension of her linguistic parameters that acts to challenge the production of commodities. Hejinian stresses this concern in an interview with Alison

Georgeson, explaining that:

I don’t think of myself as making art objects, and I’m in fact wary of aestheticising anything in my work. I’m working in a field – what you called the LANGUAGE project; I’d call it that too. It’s a project, an undertaking. It’s opposed to commodification and it doesn’t produce commodity art.294

292 Vickery, A., Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing: 72 293 Hejinian, L., “Comments for Manuel Brito”, The Language of Inquiry: 181‐182 294Georgeson, A., “Language Poetry: An Interview with Lyn Hejinian”, Southern Review: Literary and Interdisciplinary Essays: 1994 Sept: (27:3): 288 212

The material component which surfaces through Hejinian’s writing in multiple ways is not intended to create a final product but rather acts to breathe new life into the object as a means of asserting a basis in reality. Kate Fagan further reinforces this notion through her account of the individuated and rare status that was associated with Tuumba Press publications, explaining that:

Hejinian’s Tuumba Press produced hand-crafted chapbooks of innovative poetical writing, and over an 8-year period published a series of 50 new works by 43 American emergent experimental writers… While Tuumbas #1 to #11 were printed with the assistance of a local print-shop at which she worked, Lyn Hejinian soon bought her own non-electric letterpress and began hand-setting type and printing all Tuumba Press booklets and material. Each chapbook is distinguished by high production values and paper quality, and Hejinian traded on “rarified” status and a non-commodity aesthetic by hand-numbering the limited 450 copies of each edition.295

In the production of these publications, Hejinian paid attention to the utmost detail.

Examination of a select few of these early publications, stored at the Mandeville Special

Collections Library, UCSD, reveals that each and every textual element was considered important. This dedication to precision and detail is further evidenced in her collaborative work on artist-books, The Traveler, The Hill and The Hill and The Lake, both of which she created with visual artist Emilie Clark who also illustrated the front cover of Hejinian’s collection of essays The Language of Inquiry and the two images preceding each of the two key segments comprising the text Saga/Circus. Hejinian’s Little Book of A Thousand

Eyes produced with assistance from small press Kavayantra, Chartings (written in collaboration with Ray Di Palma) and Individuals (written in collaboration with Kit

295 Fagan, K., “‘Constantly I write this happily’: Encountering Lyn Hejinian”: 50‐51

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Robinson), are further testament to the significance of the artist-book format which comprises a notable component of Hejinian’s writing practice.

Her involvement with the writing of artist-books, often in collaboration, echoes the

Surrealist movement of the early twentieth century. Johanna Drucker explains that:

Surrealist work in book form was often the result of collaboration, and early productions of dreamlike and hallucinatory verse demonstrate the fluidity with which imagery could be produced at the intersection of these media...... in Surrealist work... each element extends the other so that the finished whole is not a predictable aspect of either part but a new synthesis. ...the principles of surprise and disorientation fundamental to Surrealist aesthetics play themselves out in these works.296

Surrealist referentiality in Hejinian’s work occurs through the avenue of collaborative artist-books which bring image and text into fluid conversation and thereby render their featured content strange and new. This referentiality is furthered by the subject matter of dreams which infuse Hejinian’s writing structurally through the method of transgressing the boundaries between the sleeping and awake person. Surrealist influence in also evident thematically via the poetic constructs emergent from Hejinian’s own dreams such as in the composition of the texts The Cell, Individuals (with Kit Robinson), and Sight (with Leslie

Scalapino). Briony Fer explains that:

...Surrealism was a heterogeneous movement. It included writers, painters, poets and photographers; and later, towards the end of the twenties, it diversified into the

296 Drucker, J., The Century of Artists’ Books, New York City: Granary Books: 1995: 59 214

making of objects and films. In addition, the Surrealists produced a number of magazines, using them as a platform for debate.297

The element of dreams which transpires throughout Hejinian’s writing will be addressed in greater detail in chapters four and five of this thesis. For the purposes of the current chapter, I retain focus upon the concept of collaboration between writers and artists but also between the textual components of language and image. Bill Brown argues in reference to the work of Surrealist painter Salvador Dali, that “although words and things have long been considered deadly rivals… Dali had faith that they could be fused and that

“everyone” would “be able to read from things.””298 Hejinian’s poetry can in a sense be understood as a latent realization of Dali’s aspiration to interweave the potentials of structured language into art/writing as a vital component of textual actualization and not merely as a medium of representation.

297 Fer, B., “Surrealism, Myth and Psychoanalysis”, in Fer, B., Batchelor, D., Wood, P., Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art between the Wars: 172 298 Brown, B., “Thing Theory”: 11 ‐ Dali, S., “The Object as Revealed in Surrealist Experiment”, in Theories of Modern Art, Herschel, B. (Ed.),Chipp: Berkeley: 1968: 424 – cited in text 215

The Lake

Hejinian and Clark’s The Lake, constitutes a collaborative venture expanding beyond the scope of Surrealist collaborative projects, as the poet (Hejinian) and visual artist (Clark) propel the notion of strangeness with the aim of rendering things anew by exchanging roles and engaging with each other’s mediums as well as their own to create a documentary like text – an assemblage of varieties of knowledge acquired from the experience of being amidst the landscape of a lake. Hejinian and Clark explain the processes by which they wrote The Lake, stating that:

In October of 1999, we spent a week together on Lake Wentworth in New Hampshire. Our intention was to begin work on a collaboration that would require us to work in each other's medium as well as our own. We wanted to attempt a work that was site-specific and also time-specific… the lake figures both as a literal and a metaphorical landscape. We were interested in the interrelationships, simultaneities, and the extents of layers; we were thinking about complex emotional and aesthetic terrains along with the literal one we were investigating. We imagined the lake as a site and described such a site as being constituted by all possible responses to it. We worked from early morning to late at night, taking breaks to walk along the lakeshore or go out into the lake in a kayak, photographing along the way…299

The procedure described by the text’s creators constitutes a method of documentation which synthesizes scientific observation with creative endeavor and expands the parameters of realistic representation to explicitly and openly include subjective and expressive faculties. The exchange of roles between the two writers, Hejinian and Clark,

299 Clark, E. / Hejinian, L., World Wide Web ‐ www.granarybooks.com/books/lake/the.lake1.html : last accessed ‐ 23/03/2010 216 and the strong materialist element constituting the work, give an element of experiment and surprise to the text The Lake which challenges the reading process and alters the reader’s experience of the text. This construction of a new/alternative and experimental form of text is rendered through a very tactile format. Hejinian and Clark’s description emphasizes a materialist approach to language not only in regards to the linguistic treatment of that language but also through the very visual and tactile qualities assigned to the text as a whole. This sense of the material is emphasized through the statements, “the lake figures both as a literal and a metaphorical landscape” and “we imagined the lake as a site and described such a site as being constituted by all possible responses to it.”

Describing the text as “a literal landscape” and creating this landscape through an imagining of “all possible responses” to the original inspiration broadens language’s capacities with the genres of drawing, painting, collage, assemblage, and photography as well as the process of handwriting – mediums as important as language in the formulation of responses to the specific source of inspiration. No one medium dominates the method of representation undertaken in the writing of The Lake. Rather, an even ratio of the variety of mediums utilized expands language’s capacities. An incorporation of these tactile art-based mediums within the fabric of the text extends the perception of The Lake as thing.

In A Sense of Things Bill Brown conceptualizes the phenomenon of the book as object through citation of Georges Poulet:

But that urge derived, he says, from the habit of reading – from the operation by which the reader delivers a book from its “materiality” and “immobility,” and makes the “object qua object” disappear: “You are inside it; it is inside you; there is no

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longer either outside or inside”... Indeed, from his point of view, the “omnipotence of fiction” resides in the way reading overcomes the “incompatibility” between “consciousness and its objects”...300

Brown argues, by virtue of Poulet’s theorization of the reader’s capacity to “[deliver] a book from its “materiality” and “immobility””, that we can conceive that fiction derives its polyvalent capacities and power from the negotiation that takes place when the reader begins to read and absorb the text. Brown henceforth conceptualizes reading as the process which overcomes the incompatible relationship between conscious subjects and material objects. The Lake, both as a written text and published object, consciously and continuously draws attention to its physicality and situation as an object. In Bill Brown’s terms, The Lake when read, is continually negotiating subject-object relationships, challenging existing boundaries between the two by constantly placing them in conversation. Through the negotiation of the physicality of the text and the function of processing it as language, the power of the text is expanded as the reader becomes even more tightly embedded within the reading process. The relationship and the intertwining of the text with its reading subject is developed beyond a reading of written/typed language through encounter and interaction with the graphic and tactile qualities of the book which engage not only the reader’s imaginative faculties but also those of touch and potentially associated memory.

300 Brown, B., A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature : 11 – Poulet, G., “Criticism and the experience of interiority”, The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, Macksey, R./ Donato, E. (Eds.), Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press: 1970: 56‐58 ‐ cited in text 218

301

The above extract from The Lake exemplifies the subject-object negotiation which takes place within the pages of the text. The multimedia textual elements comprising the contents of the page are combined in a manner that urges the reader run his/her hand over the surface of the paper. For example, in this particular instance, the abstraction and the coarse, painterly quality of most of the page’s surface is contrasted with the seemingly crystal clarity of the photograph included in the top right hand corner of the page. The ripples of the water and the reflected light within the photographic image function as a stark contrast to the bold, drawn and painted lines which comprise the larger section of the

301 Clark, E. / Hejinian, L., The Lake: (no pagination) 219 page. The realistic crispness of the former separates it from the bold, abstract and non- intricate quality of the latter. On closer examination, the quality of the photograph is in fact not very sharp but rather the contrast with the remainder of the page makes it appear so.

The uniformity of various shades of white, black and grey across the entire surface of the page collate the two separate images and enhance the reader’s desire to decipher the surface quality of the page through the faculty of touch. The words “The lake the look abstractly” featured on the lower half of the page appear to be covered translucently by paint and the dark coloring of the page. They seem to be drowning under the depicted water’s surface. This effect urges the reader to brush the page in the hope of seeing the words with greater clarity and to simultaneously question why it might be that these words in particular are semi-hidden from his/her immediate view. The reader’s subjectivity and simultaneous potential desire to touch are brought into correlation with the object-like status of the book The Lake, resulting in a loosening or dissolution of traditional textual boundaries which often assert the stark separation between the written text and its reading subject.

The text The Lake is heavily weighted and uneasy to hold in comparison to how one might handle a standard-sized poetry book. In addition to this, its thick cardboard pages assist in giving the text its haptic disposition. This objectification helps to evoke the reader’s memory and imagination through the senses of site and touch in addition to his/her response to written language. The object/thing status of The Lake is further emphasized by the statement featured on the second last page of the text which states that, “one thousand copies of which twelve are numbered and signed are accompanied by one of the original 220 drawings.”302 This assertion of the rarity of the published text and the accompaniment of actual drawings isolates each individual book as one of a numbered few which exist in the world. This isolation, in addition to asserting the status of Hejinian’s texts as rarefied commodities, grants an individual identity to each text within this series of published books and further attests to the importance of the physicality of the text as an element which draws the work into the material world of the reading subject.

Words as Objects

Beyond the very tactile component of Hejinian’s publishing practice and her involvement in the writing and making of artist-books, materiality is located in Hejinian’s writing method which, like the process of making books, establishes a subject/object relationship capable of moving language out of the stasis of representation into the domain of activity and experience. The materiality of Hejinian’s language emerges in two prominent ways.

The first of these is through a continual iteration of/ directing towards material objects such as in the lines from My life, “She sat every afternoon in her chair waiting for her headache, exactly as one might sit on a bench awaiting a bus”303, “In a book I read the sentence, “the water is as blue as ink,” which made me regret that so few people use

302 Clark, E. / Hejinian, L., The Lake: (no pagination) 303 Hejinian, L., My Life: 2002: 39 221 fountain pens”304 and “Never give the blindman money without taking one of his pencils”305. The comparative analogy between anticipating a headache

(feeling/sensation/pain) and awaiting a bus (a physical object) and the listing of object- signifying words denotative of tactile writing materials such as the “book”, “fountain pens”, “ink” and “pencils” all in the context of a single page, exemplify Hejinian’s preoccupation with the material. A second method by which the material is asserted lies in the defamiliarization of familiar words that is produced by separating them from their ideological and traditional meaning. One example of this technique occurs in the lines,

“Mischief logic; Miss Chief” whereby Hejinian challenges, complicates or renders anew the notion of mischief with the inclusion of the similar sounding nominal of “Miss Chief.”

The word mischief is altered and personified into being someone’s name, and though the sound of that name may be similar, written as a word on the page, its meaning is entirely other.

Daniel Tiffany’s account of the seventh century secular English poetic form of the riddle establishes a very early point of connectivity between Hejinian’s poetic format and the notion of materiality. Tiffany poses two questions:

...Are there corporeal phenomena analogous to the qualities in language that we judge to be obscure? ...What precisely does obscurity yield in the act of reading – in the absence of clear, cognitive meaning – if not a sense, strange indeed, of poetic materials?306

304 Ibid. 305 Ibid. 306 Tiffany, D., “Lyric Substance: On Riddles, Materialism, and Poetic Obscurity”, Critical Inquiry: 2001, Autumn: (28: 1) : 83 222

Here Tiffany considers the poetic format to be somehow inherently material as he draws a comparison between the objects that answer/ resolve the riddles addressed and the riddles themselves as poetic objects. Tiffany’s account of the “strange” materiality of poetic writing (in particular, riddles) can be extended to Hejinian’s poetry which negotiates the terrain between the tactile object and the perceiving subject by utilizing the element of the word as object with the effect that words are imbued with an element of strangeness and newness; the poetic format being ideal for this purpose.

This process of object complication in Hejinian’s poetry occurs through the disruption of ideological association in her writing, for example through the listing of nouns, adjectives and verbs – at times detached from their conventional usage/purpose in language – as equally positioned sentence constituents. This occurs on page seventeen in My Life for example, as Hejinian writes, “A name trimmed with colour ribbons – They are seated in the shadows husking corn, shelling peas… the leaves outside the window tricked the eye, demanding that one see them, focus on them… backed by the protest of the bright breathless West.”307 Often eschewing the first-person pronoun “I” for the third-person

“they”, Hejinian partially disassociates her-self from the images she formulates as recollections of her life. The recollected events are coloured by the listing of things such as

“ribbons”, “shadows” and “peas”, not as objects but as characteristic descriptive elements, which become collective constituents of the larger but inconclusive image which is

Hejinian’s life. The listing of things and the personal distancing from particular events renders Hejinian’s autobiography a collection of (metaphorically) tactile poetic materials.

307 Hejinian, L., My Life: 2002: 17 223

The use of personification such as in “breathless West” and “demanding leaves” gives life and personality to abstract concepts or inanimate objects, according them active qualities.

The combination of the techniques of parataxis and personification objectifies the ideal and de-objectifies the abstract, situating her poetry within a form of poetic materialism. Such materialism draws on the poetic qualities of the material and the material qualities of poetic form to establish a strange and new method for the recording of knowledge as a collecting phenomenon comprised by an assembling of listed objects and experiences.

Collecting

This process of collecting enacted through Hejinian’s poetry is mimicked and extended across her writing oeuvre including her unpublished and archived work. An understanding of Hejinian’s archives as a collective body of work is supported by Hejinian’s desire for archives to be regarded as a literary genre within their own right, expressed in an interview with Dodie Bellamy – “…I would like to see archived materials taken really seriously as a genre.”308 In addition to embodying a vast repository of letters, Hejinian’s personal archives serve as a thread weaving together all of the elements mentioned which formulate

308 Hejinian, L. in Bellamy, D., “The Eternal Repository”, Chain: 1995, Spring: (2): 19 224 her writing career. This weaving occurs through the mention of specific writings and discussions of them in exchanges of letters as well as through the inclusion of developmental materials such as drafts and notebooks. It is further expanded through the aspect of autobiography. As much of Hejinian’s work is autobiographical, especially My

Life, her archived papers serve as a connecting thread, articulating with greater clarity and more specific detail the often abstract sentences comprising her published autobiography.

The published My Life and the collective of Hejinian’s archived papers are co-responsive, operating in a similar manner regardless of significant structural differences in the two bodies of text.

The corresponding attributes of My Life and Hejinian’s archived papers echo the practice of quilt making as conceptualized by Craig Dworkin in his analysis of Hejinian’s My Life as quilt. Dworkin identifies the object of the quilt in Hejinian’s autobiographic prose-poem as being created through an assemblage/interweaving of textual elements. He achieves this through the paralleling of the processes involved in quilt making and those employed by

Hejinian in the writing of My Life. These parallels can also be extended towards a conceptualization/ understanding of Hejinian’s personal papers. Dworkin presents a compelling comparison of the tactile actions involved in quilt-making and the mental processes of writing, arguing that:

On their interrupted flights to a conclusion, the planes of [narrative] information intersect, collide, and again take flight in such a way that any given sentence will branch out with a geometrically expansive inflorescence until, from the forgetfulness that takes places as readers begin to think of other things, it can no longer be held in the mind and is lost in a palimpsestic blur of references. Thus there are long… lines

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behind every idea, and with a constant reduction of tension in the connecting string, these lines travel through the text like a needle stitching through fabric and leaving the trace of its passage in an ever-lengthening thread.309

This weaving throughout My Life, as identified by Dworkin, made possible through the connective repetition of textual elements such as the white squares which head each section and through sentences such as “A pause, a rose, something on paper”, also occurs throughout Hejinian’s archived papers which are woven into collectivity through their accumulation over time but also through shared reference to Hejinian’s work at any given point in time. Her published work hence may be perceived as one connecting thread which collates and generates a greater whole to be perceived and deciphered by the archive reader. Hejinian’s autobiography is well suited to a materialist analogy because of its presentation (its small size and the white blank squares that head every section) but also because of the fragmented language which as Dworkin suggests ‘constructs’ intersecting

“planes of narrative” as opposed to one coherent chronological line present in more standard forms of autobiography and narrative writing. Her personal papers are similarly formatted through intersecting planes of narrative, however more through the avenue of their cumulative expanse and expansive inter-referentiality. Dworkin’s analogy of the weaving/sewing process in Hejinian’s My Life can be expanded beyond the parameters of the individual text, the lengthening thread moving beyond the isolated autobiographic text to the collective literary ventures which constitute an autobiographic life as recorded in

Hejinian’s prolific engagement with textuality. Through the analogy of the quilt Hejinian’s

309Dworkin, C. D., “Penelope Reworking the Twill: Patchwork, Writing, and Lyn Hejinian's My Life”: 76

226 broader writing project can be understood as a cumulative collection – as a very materially focused enterprise that is hinged upon a collecting of smaller contributory bodies of text.

In support of this notion of a conceptualization of Hejinian’s writing as comprising a collection, Jonathan Ivry establishes an association between Hejinian’s writing and that of

Walter Benjamin. He does this with specific reference to My Life however the association he draws between Hejinian and the notion of collecting is also suited to an analysis of her broader body of writing. Ivry argues that:

Hejinian arrays her sentences before the reader as objects in a collection. The reader may appreciate the scope or quality of the collection, but its true meaning is indexed to the collector, for whom each object radiates a particular significance… In both Hejinian’s and Benjamin’s text, then, memoir is reconfigured as rejecting chronological narrative and instead constructs the past as a constellation arranged from objects in the author’s personal collection.310

By addressing the concept of memoir and the collection of memories and words which populate the body of My Life, Ivry’s notion of collection exemplified by Hejinian’s heavy use of parataxis throughout her writing can be extended beyond the content of the individual text and outwards towards her collective body of work. Each piece within that collection radiates a particular significance and is situated as a recorded moment in time.

Unbound by the constraint of chronological narrative, Hejinian’s works collectively constitute an indexed record, the immediate value and relevance of which is perhaps truly

310 Ivry, J., “The Memoirist as Collector: Lyn Hejinian's My Life and Walter Benjamin's A Berlin Chronicle”, ANQ: a quarterly journal of short articles, notes, and reviews (Univ. of Kentucky, Lexington):2007, Spring: (20:2): 51

227 evident only to her-self and may become clearer for the reader through a reading of her personal archive. The ambiguity however, of the writing process achieved through the abstraction and objectification of the processes of book-making and language use, draws the reader into the role of collecting her art-object like books and within the reading of these books into the process of assembling collections of sentences and words which resonate personally with him/her. This rendering the reader a collector of objects physically implicates him/her into the mechanics of the text. The text is rendered into the realm of the reader and through that process is shifted from a status as object towards that of a subject-object.

Collecting Miniatures

Two Hejinian texts which exemplify this collecting process and comprise a small collection within the broader scheme of accumulated works are her serial poems Happily

(2000) and Slowly (2002). The associations between the two texts which make them suitable for an analysis as a collective unit are apparent both in their physical disposition/appearance and their poetic textuality. The two texts generate a sense of materiality which enables Hejinian to present the abstract notions of ‘happiness’ and

‘slowness’ as tactile things placed, through textuality, into the hands of the reader. I will

228 examine how each of these texts executes this individually but firstly wish to the idea of perceiving them as a small diptych collection; as two parts of a greater whole. This perception calls for an understanding of Hejinian’s strong inter-textual tendency which through tactile and linguistic objectifications weaves together groupings of her writings and through these groupings collectively gathers an assemblage of a different and new form of knowledge which she conceptualizes in part through her essay “La Faustienne” (an extended analysis of “La Faustienne” and, the notion of knowledge as conceptualized by

Hejinian are featured in the two concluding chapters of this thesis). However, for the purposes of my explication of the processes of collecting as comprising at least in part, a new form of knowledge for Hejinian, I refer to Hejinian’s rhetorical question, “Is knowledge itself, then, La Faustienne?” Throughout the course of her essay, Hejinian postulates an understanding of knowledge as female and she casts the character of

Scheherazade from The Thousand and One Nights as the ultimate embodiment of her theory.

Here Hejinian articulates the value of Scheherazade’s message as being enabled through her tales collectively rather than individually: “… one can argue that she establishes epistemological suspense… because, although the stories are in various subtle ways instructive and exemplary, the full (redemptive) effect of the lesson is deferred, since ultimately it is contained in the totality of the tales rather than in any single one of them…”311 Furthermore Hejinian stresses that, “the substance of The Thousand and One

311 Hejinian, L., “La Faustienne”, The Language of Inquiry: 255 229

Nights is a compilation of early Persian transcriptions…”312 These observations direct the reader towards an understanding of her works as a cumulative and collective series.

Very slim and relatively small in size, Happily and Slowly constitute a set of miniature texts, each one only slightly larger than the span of the reader’s hand. These miniature texts are highlighted as being so furthermore due to their juxtaposition to the broad subjects that constitute their titles and thematic concerns. In The Poetics of Space

Bachelard theorizes the space and concept of the miniature, arguing that:

[to]… make others believe, we must believe ourselves. Is it worthwhile, then, for a philosopher to raise a phenomenological problem with regard to these literary ‘miniatures’, these objects that are so easily made smaller through literary means? Is it possible for the conscious-of both writer and reader-to play a sincere role in the very origin of images of this kind?313

Bachelard addresses the nature by which we portray issues or notions of otherness or of an

‘other-worldly’ nature such as that of the miniature; with a sense of perpetual repression, the discourse through which we depict them being the medium of portrayal but simultaneously the dividing barrier which disables the reader from truly entering the realm of the miniature. Although not explicitly addressing the idea of the miniature, Hejinian’s two long poems Slowly and Happily, through a corporealization within textuality, activate the sense of sincerity or accuracy to the world which is the subject of Bachelard’s inquiry.

These two small texts, through their reinforced physical status as miniatures, believably

312 Ibid. 313 Bachelard, G., The Poetics of Space, (First published in French as La poétique de l’space in 1958 by Presses Universitaires de France) Beacon Press: Boston: 1994: 148 230 engage with their large philosophical thematic concerns of joy and time. Consequently they grant the reader a gift of both an active experience of joy and of slowness through the reading process. This notion of the large scale capacity of the miniature is addressed by Lia

Purpura with reference to Susan Stewart’s concept of the miniature. She argues that:

Miniatures are ambitious… In her book On Longing, Susan Stewart uses the example of a miniature railroad to show the relationship between a reduction of scale and a corresponding increase in detail and significance. I recently saw a particularly outrageous example of this "increase in detail" – a Faberge egg, commemorating the Trans-Siberian Railroad which contained a seven car train – and indeed it was the detail that fascinated – the headlights were diamonds, the taillights were rubies – great pains were taken with other jewels – and all was set in motion with a pea-sized golden key.314

Hejinian’s small sized books Happily and Slowly, justify the grandiose themes which are the texts’ subject matter precisely through the avenue of what Purpura identifies as

Stewart’s argument for the “relationship between a reduction of scale and a corresponding increase in detail and significance.” Through the avenue of the miniature, Hejinian convincingly engages with the broad philosophical content of the texts. This is enabled partly through an interactive relationship between the objective and the subjective components of the texts.

314 Purpura, L., “On Miniatures”, (originally published in Purpura, L., On Looking, Sarabande Books: 2006) – accessed at World Wide Web ‐ http://www.creativenonfiction.org/brevity/craft/craft_minis.htm ‐ (no pagination): last accessed ‐ 08/10/2012 – Stewart, S., On Longing, Durham, UK and London: Duke University Press Book: 1993 – referred to in text

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Happily

Hejinian’s Happily builds and encompasses a representation of the emotion of happiness with a strong sense of sincerity to the experienced moment through its verbal content but also through its physical body. As Bachelard has argued within his conceptualization of the

‘miniature’, due to the element of fantasy which separates miniatures from the immediate world of the reader, there is a need for the writer to believe themselves in order to attribute a sense of believability to a miniature-focused work. Through Hejinian’s all-encompassing approach towards this text from its very covers and dimensions to the content within, the reader is presented with an embodiment of the concept of happiness as he/she is encouraged to take part in that concept within an encouragement towards a notion of experiencing happiness.

In harnessing the mode of the miniature, Hejinian renders her physically miniature text as a handheld portion of ‘happily’. She grants the poem a tangibility which is presented to the reader as a small gift intended to activate his/her imagination. In Happily Hejinian achieves tempers the rivalry between words and things by rendering both word and thing as constitutive elements of the one language which in collaboration, function to enhance the possibilities of that language. Kate Fagan addresses the significance of Hejinian’s correlation between words and the material world articulating Hejinian’s negotiation of the terrain between the two. Fagan explains that Hejinian achieves this through the leveling out between the functions of subject and object, arguing that:

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The poem performs a linked series of encounters among things, ideas, commonplace events, and manner of regard. Each of its lines brings subject- and object-worlds into mutual context by staging interactions among three elements: a world being perceived, perceptual inventions and processes, and language… The writing is the encounter – the happening – as much as it responds to what has happened, or what might. Constantly I write this happily… The polyvalent deictic in Hejinian’s opening to Happily encompasses a field of philosophical inquiry, “things” as they happen, a being in writing, and the poem itself. Each is proximate to the others.315

Though Fagan primarily addresses the interior linguistic body of the text (the poetry) her analysis may be further extended to encompass the visual, tactile and physical disposition which also comprise an element of the text’s overall language and enhance the level of encounter which takes place between the reader and the text. This extension may occur in consideration of the juxtaposition of the large abstract theme of happiness with the miniature physicality of the text embodying the theme. The visual aesthetics of the text’s exterior contribute to the element of encounter as the bright colours of the front and back covers mimic a feeling of joy and enter into the dialogue of Happily. The compact book

Happily is very light in weight much like the emotion signified by the poem’s title. The text’s spine and covers designed and drawn by painter and sculptor Simone Fattal, are all, with exception of the three diagonal lines centralized on the front cover and the red writing, the one shade of cadmium yellow; a medium hue with strong saturation which possesses an element of warmth and creates a welcoming affect evoking and stimulating a positive feeling. As visual grammarians Kress and van Leeuwen argue, “[saturation’s] ... key affordance lies in its ability to express emotive ‘temperatures’, kinds of affect… High

315 Fagan, K., “‘Constantly I write this happily’: Encountering Lyn Hejinian”: 56 233 saturation may be positive, exuberant, adventurous....”316 In the instance of Happily, the high saturation of colour on the book’s covers serves this purpose creating an exuberant and positive feel. The simple, red coloured, Times New Roman font is not starkly contrasted with the yellow of the covers but almost seeps into translucency against its background. The blue, red and white diagonal blocks of colour comprising the central image similarly are non-aggressive, with the complementary blue only taking up a small fraction of cover space. The colour blocks constitute a joyful compositional factor; their contrast with the yellow background, ultimately evoking a happy feeling.

In the opening few pages of the text the word “happily” as it is typed on the front cover is meditatively mimicked three times on every second page as the pages of the book direct us toward the linguistic component of the poem, thus the happy sensation evoked from the covers of the text is mirrored numerous times through the repetition of the word “Happily” throughout the body of the text. Hejinian challenges the parameters of the object through an imposed pun as she blurs the boundary between the two possible interpretations of the process that takes place in the reading of this word – of the ‘reader reading happily’ interchangeable with, the ‘reader reading “happily”’. The adverb “happily” when repeatedly read, not as a descriptive word but more as a word/thing within its own right, generates a certain collecting process. The repetition of the word throughout the text in the absence of a structured narrative context results in the reader’s encounter with the word as thing radiating a particular feeling-based significance. The cumulative encounters with the

316 Kress, G. / van Leeuwen, T., Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2nd ed.), London & New York: Routledge: 2006: 233 234 word “happily” as thing, formulate a meditative process which may in effect resonate emotively with the reader.

The status of the object is further developed throughout the poetic content of Happily, asserting the object’s capacity for poetry and the notion of that object-focused poetry embodying a type of sincerity to the real – a type of tangible poetic knowledge, rendered so through materialist affirmation. Page nine from Happily exemplifies how this occurs throughout the text.

317

317 Hejinian, L., Happily, California: The Post‐Apollo Press: 2000: 9 235

Hejinian commences this page by calling forth the idea of a magical prop; a thing. She describes and philosophizes the nature of such a prop throughout seven lines of indented text. The words “stopping of the thought” signify the conclusion of structured chronological thought as they veer towards a notion of “time... becoming attracted to a particular thing (say a branch hanging over a river).” In contrasting “thought” with

“things” Hejinian evokes a phenomenological poetry in existence, assimilating the act of consciousness – thought – with the tactile materiality of things. Hejinian’s poetry claims that the magician’s knowledge – an imperceptible new kind of knowledge, hidden from the audience – exists in the essence of the “thing”. Bachelard conceptualizes such poetry as inherently present within substance when he argues that:

…the voices of water are hardly metaphoric at all;… the language of the waters is a direct poetic reality;… streams and rivers provide the sound for mute country landscapes… ;… murmuring waters teach birds and men to sing, speak, recount;… that there is, in short, a continuity between the speech of water and the speech of man.318

Bachelard argues for the inherent poetic capabilities of water through a certain murmuring which creates sound. He proposes that this sound constitutes the basis for language in living beings. Water as a form of matter constitutes a poetry within itself without having to be written into being – it exists poetically. In the same manner that Bachelard recognizes a type of poetry in water, Hejinian articulates a form of poetry through the presence of things as opposed to merely through the structure of language and narrative – “the magical prop becomes intrinsic to... knowing ‘all that’”. The physicality and process of object

318Bachelard, G., Water and Dreams; An Essay On the Imagination of Matter: 15 236 acknowledgement throughout Hejinian’s text, both through aesthetic considerations and a specific treatment of language, signals a form of poetry within the tactile object of the book itself as a further poetic dimension for consideration beyond the immediate and more apparent poetry of the written text. The thing for Hejinian, prior to having a certain function, is imbued with poetic knowledge and it becomes equally important to consider the extra-textual elements that comprise the interior and exterior of the text as it is to address the less materially focused language within.

On the same page Hejinian writes, “Then seven more days of heavy rain, one drop after another a relay that is all in the passing by what is inside it…” The passing of time is reconfigured from an abstract concept to a relay comprised by “what” is inside it. Time is given a physical presence made up of matter comprising its spatial “inside”. The intangible notion of time is integrated with the concept of thing as Hejinian articulates a poetic knowledge (of the unknown) as relevant and real. Brown postulates a perception of such a poetic capacity within things through a series of rhetorical questions:

Could you clarify this matter of things by starting again and imagining them, first, as amorphousness out of which objects are materialized by the (ap)perceiving subject, the anterior physicality of the physical world emerging, perhaps, as an after effect of the mutual constitution of subject and object, a retroprojection? You could imagine things, second, as what is excessive in objects, as what exceeds their materialization as objects or their mere utilization as objects – their force as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence, the magic by which objects become values, fetishes, idols and totems.319

319 Brown, B., “Thing Theory”: 5 237

Brown asks the reader to perceive things outside of their most common reference frame; that is after their functionality and prior to their objectification in the ordinary scheme of things; to perceive them as the metaphysical presence from which our imagination is triggered and to attribute to them values and situation. In this perception there exists a capacity for imagination – a re-conceptualization of the material as poetic that encourages a seeing beyond what is immediately visible or widely accepted. Hejinian’s text, with particular reference to the page in question, through consideration of Brown’s call to perceive things outside their most common frame of reference, in a sense becomes the

“magical prop” “knowing ‘all that’”. In the absence of narrative clarity, the strong directing towards objects – “magical prop”, “particular thing”, “branch” – and a reiteration of the present moment – “The event is the adventure of that moment” – Happily is adorned with knowledge even the author is unaware the text possesses – the knowledge of current and ever-changing imaginative perception often triggered by individual and varying understandings (of different readers) of particular objects.

The complication of the perceived object within writing as a potentially poetic form, knowledgeable far beyond its physical parameters, in combination with the physical exterior of the text Happily, serves as a metaphysical and philosophical meditation upon and within the notion of Happiness.

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Slowly

Hejinian’s Slowly can be understood as a continuation of the philosophically investigative process commenced in Happily. Published two years later by Hejinian’s press Tuumba, there are many similarities between the two texts. The collective body of Slowly and

Happily bears some similarity to Hejinian’s autobiographical project My Life whereby the first edition of the text published in 1978 when Hejinian was aged thirty-seven, containing thirty-seven sections each comprising thirty-seven sentences, formed a type of collective body with a later edition of the same text revised by Hejinian eight years later in correspondence with her age at the time, containing forty-five sections, each comprising forty-five sentences. The revised autobiography forms an extension of the materialization of the initial text by being a physical manifestation in textual format of the time that had passed since the first publication. The collective body of the two autobiographical texts thus becomes a textually materialized representation of the abstract concept of time. Time is objectified as it is documented in poetry through a mathematical breakdown with a particular number of sections/sentences accounting for a particular amount of time passed.

The separate components comprising the texts correspond to a certain amount of time which would otherwise be difficult to encompass. A standard autobiographical text generally features highlights from one’s life which in turn generate a somewhat idealized and re-generated life story which artificially accounts for the passing of time in aiming to appear accurate and detailed. Hejinian’s autobiographical texts whilst certainly also containing events of her own choosing through an absence of fixed narrative structure, provide a less filtered, non-definitive and ultimately more accurate account of the nature 239 experience; lived experience rarely occurring in neatly ordered form. What occurs as a result of the initial objectification of time into a certain numerical and linguistic structure is the manifestation of a highly poetic text, sincere to its context but also acutely in touch and reminiscent of the abstraction that is time. An abstract notion, objectified and rendered within reach such as in Hejinian’s autobiographical texts, re-embodies and is loyal to its initial abstract status. Happily and Slowly similarly demonstrate an investigation into the notion of time however, through a less schematized and less mathematically structured approach than that applied to the writing of My Life which marks them as components of an alternative and not directly autobiographical, collection. Objectified more by virtue of their exterior aesthetic, haptic quality and object-focused logic than through a numerical structure, the two adverb-titled texts also share an investigation into the characteristic qualities that constitute their titles. The abstract concept of something occurring/ being executed either ‘happily’ or ‘slowly’ occurs through an engagement with notions of materiality when the two text’s physical and poetic bodies are rendered as objects and subsequently, once more as abstract concepts depicted textually.

The first of these two long poems, Happily, progresses more energetically and at a faster pace than Slowly as Happily’s writing is double spaced and more evenly distributed throughout the pages of the text. The title of each text corresponds well with the overall physical and textual bodies of the text. The larger space between written lines results in a more frequent turn of the page and hence a quicker progression through a text of roughly the same length. Slowly, likewise corresponds to the overall theme signified in its title through its physical and visual appearance. By having its lines clustered more closely 240 together, the reader literally will progress through this text at a slower pace. The cover art of Slowly features a black and white photograph taken by Hejinian herself of a collection of stones; their static disposition, further iterating a feeling of ‘slow’. The black and white choice for the photograph is reminiscent of history and memory. This artistic choice lacks the dynamism of colour and therefore mimics the essence of slowness signified by the poem’s title. Similarly, the choice in colour for the entirety of the front and back covers, a deep ultramarine blue, mimics a sensation of calmness and steady progression. The cover design composed by Hejinian’s sister Ree Katrak exudes a slow energy which is mirrored by Hejinian’s poetry throughout the body of the text. With physically similar parameters to

Happily, Slowly should be conceived of as a continuation of a certain poetic project, forming a collective body with the former text.

Collectively, the two texts, Happily and Slowly are complementary, not only in size and style but also in their colours of yellow and blue, comprising a collection by virtue of what

Goethe considered to be two of the most significant colours within the colour spectrum.

Pamela Currie explicates the significance of the two complementary colors in the scheme of Goethe’s theories on color, arguing that:

For Goethe… it was not so much a colorimetric convenience as a proof of his deepest philosophical and metaphysical beliefs. A dualist, in the tradition of Aristotle, he understood color as a product of the opposition between light and darkness. Therefore he saw yellow, the color he considered closest to light, and blue, which was closest to darkness, as a pair of polar opposites fundamental to the world of color… …yellow and blue were capable, according to Goethe, of a… heightening, to orange and violet respectively. If these two heightened forms of the basic colors were mixed together… the result was magenta, which thus ranked as

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the culmination of the whole structure: the dominant color that subsumed the rest within itself.320

As polar opposites signifying light and darkness within the world of colour as is conceptualized by Goethe, the yellow and blue that comprise the exteriors of Happily and

Slowly render the two seemingly thematically opposed texts fundamental elements of a greater “whole structure” which subsumes “the rest within itself”. Happily and Slowly function as a collective whole object.

321

320 Currie, P., “Goethe’s Green: The “Mixed” Boundary Colors in Zur Farbenlehre”, Goethe Yearbook: 2010: 17: 259‐260 242

The poetry that comprises the linguistic body of the text Slowly, as it occurs in Happily, complicates the relationship between subject and object by calling attention to the notion of the material as poetic and once more signifying a new perception of knowledge. This collation between subject and object is exemplified on page twenty-eight of the text in two ways. Firstly it is made evident through the self reflexive objectification of the language techniques employed throughout the text. Hejinian paratactically lists the words

“Euphemism, ellipses, digression, delay…narrative one, narrative two, narrative three, narrative four…” She lists the language terms and techniques as objects and self reflexively identifies them as structural factors of the text – the listing process being exemplary of the digression and delay registered on the list. Rather than disguising the functions of “digression” and “delay” as language techniques deployed to achieve a particular outcome, of potentially ‘slowing’ the text down, Hejinian self-reflexively lists them as though they were material forms used to physically construct the textual body through an assemblage of words.

Once more, through the avenue of paratactic listing, Hejinian names several subjects – her contemporaries, “Leslie Scalapino, Barrett Watten, Clark Coolidge and Bernadette

Mayer…” – as though they were constructive factors contributing to the inter-textual body of the text rather than individually characterized people. This connects the text to a broader contextual framework of creative personalities, but without announcing the significance of the names listed as being those of Hejinian’s contemporaries the text encourages a process

321 Hejinian, L., Slowly, Berkeley: Tuumba Press: 2002: 28 – NOTE: First word on page is the remaining half of the word “invisibly” commenced on the previous page 27 243 of research which takes time and elucidates a feeling of ‘slowness’. The absence of explicatory clarity announces to the reader that in addition to reading a text about things

‘slow’, a further slowness – consisting of the potential for further research – ensues the reading of the text. The reader has little that he/she can read that would provide any insight into the significance of the names featured. Also, through citation of names, Slowly announces its embodiment as a text that contributes to a far larger network of texts and contexts. This inference of inter-textuality and self-reflexivity in combination with the text’s exterior exudes an embodiment of slow progression.

Slowly and Happily are elements of a larger collective body of texts and through a physical and literary negotiation, connect the terrain of the written text to the physical realm of the reader. This initiates an uncanny interaction between the reader and the text through a blurring of the definitive boundaries of both. This blurring occurs as the object status of the text breaches into the realm of the reader and presents to him/her at least in part, an estranged mirror of his/her own self and context through the nature of their textual interpretations. The reader of these texts is presented with a material and phenomenological presence of something happy and something slow – an experience, an encounter. Both texts radiate a “particular significance” as observed of My Life by Ivry and attest to the materialist collective body which comprises Hejinian’s writing practice broadly and in conglomerates. These collections are woven together and brought about from the very small textual element of the word, through sentence structure, and into larger groupings of texts.

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Assembling Knowledge

Hejinian’s involvement in the creating of artist-books and in her own publishing and printing endeavors signifies and mirrors a materialist approach to textuality which bridges the division between literary and physical worlds. Patterns emerge and traces are woven throughout the fabric of her poetry which are recorded and amplified in her personal archives. What emerges as a result of these interconnectivities throughout the body of her work is a collection of strange, new and different forms of knowledge, unbound by the constraints and ‘anticipation of certainty’ of historical record and chronological narrative progression. Hejinian’s making and recording of knowledge is prolific and it is significantly interwoven with the notion of gender. This inexplicit gendered concern and presence in Hejinian’s work is best articulated in her essay “La Faustienne” in which she argues that:

322 Hejinian, L., “La Faustienne”, The Language of Inquiry: 235‐260 245

Hejinian’s writing project constructs a different form of knowledge – one that is inherently female.

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Dream Language –New Knowledge – Action, Metaphor, Female

Chapter Four

…dreams serve as an active, even busy, border between the sleeping person and that same person awake. They are, in this sense, not a place but a dynamic – and it is this dynamic quality that needs to be emphasized, since it helps to locate the border in the middle of things; it highlights the centrality of the border. 323

The greatest of all night works is the one called The Thousand and One Nights… with its chains of tales and concentricities of tales within tales, “together with all that there is in them of wonder and instruction,” told by a woman to postpone her death by holding a man in narrative suspense… her name is Scheherazade…324

– Lyn Hejinian

If you are a woman, archives hold perpetual ironies. Because the gaps and silences are where you find yourself.325

– Susan Howe

323 Hejinian, L., “Barbarism”, The Language of Inquiry: 327 324 Hejinian, L., “La Faustienne”, The Language of Inquiry: 251 325Howe, S., The Birth‐mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History, Hanover: University Press of New England: 1993: 158 247

The first three chapters of this thesis postulated an approach towards reading Lyn

Hejinian’s work as a multimodal form of language supported through collaborative discourse and visual and tactile mediums to achieve a corpus of work which both collectively and individually reads as a form of cumulative knowledge. This knowledge can be read and understood as a form of dream language which through its border status serves to articulate an inherently female modality – a language developed from a history of longstanding silence and receptivity. The associations which I will make throughout the course of the final two chapters of this thesis between dreams, the feminine and the language and body of work which constitutes Hejinian’s writing practice emerge through an analysis of both Hejinian’s published and unpublished works. This chapter will focus primarily on two Hejinian essays. From these essays, I develop my claim that dreams and a conceptualization of a night-time language comprise a significant component of Hejinian’s writing oeuvre. The concluding chapter of the thesis will expand upon the notions and ethics of the dream process through a tracing of the extension of Hejinian’s structural concern with dreams towards a prolific yet inexplicit thematic presence throughout a vast component of her writing endeavors (both published and unpublished).

Hejinian’s published work, explicitly referential of dreams, articulates an experience- focused approach to writing which is steeped in a concern with consciousness and the development of an understanding of language as an integral component of perception and representation. The two key Hejinian essays that formulate the central concern of this chapter are “Strangeness” and “La Faustienne”; the former comprising a form of dream diary within which Hejinian recollects several of her own dreams and reflects upon the 248 dreaming process as a model of writing, and the latter working towards defining a form of feminine night language and knowledge, different and other to what she defines as the male dominated quest for knowledge which has defined the greater body of Western history and literature. “La Faustienne” thematically expands upon her essay “The Quest for

Knowledge” in which it argues that:

Knowledge is based on the experience of the disjuncture between what's seen and what's thought – on the alterations cast by reflection, on thought's own alterity. In fact, if it weren't 'other', at least momentarily, we wouldn't experience it at all, because we wouldn't notice our noting it.326

In “La Faustienne”, Hejinian makes the proposition that the female within the structures of the Western formulation of knowledge can be conceptualized as knowledge itself; as that which the male gendered quest seeks to attain. This rendering of the female as being simultaneously knowledge and other, coheres with Hejinian’s argument in “The Quest for

Knowledge” that knowledge itself is characteristically ‘othered’ as emergent from the disjunctive space between the image and the imagined. As Hejinian argues, “the gap… between the imaginable and the imageable… [is] in fact… very large; the seemingly uninterrupted flow of visible experience, its fluency, is broken up in thought into reflections, and the inner eye, the imaging eye, sees only these.”327 Hejinian’s characterizations of the notion of knowledge as other and of the female as knowledge emerge in her writing through a hybrid model of language which consists of a dream-like structure. This structure is rendered through an integration of the elements of language, image and thing; Hejinian’s choice of The Arabian Night’s Scheherazade, being the

326 Hejinian, L., “The Quest for Knowledge”, The Language of Inquiry: 227 327 Ibid. 249 epitome of that knowledgeable female character as she tells tales at night in order to save her life.

A primary purpose for Hejinian’s utilization of dream concepts within her writing in the development of a language which elucidates a different kind of knowledge is the contrasting function of language between sleeping and waking life. In La Faustienne

Hejinian engages with Pierre Alferi’s “Seeking a Sentence”328, writing the following:

Because we are not innocent of our sentences we go to bed. The bed shows with utter clarity how sentences in saying something make something. Sentences in bed are not describers, they are instigators.329

This poetic excerpt illustrates Hejinian’s understanding of a marked difference in perception between daytime and nighttime language; the former (descriptive in nature) being contrasted with the initiating, instigative and inherently more active latter. Hejinian identifies a significant difference in methods of perception between a sleeping and waking consciousness. A waking consciousness continually consists of conscious response and adaptation which necessitates the sleeping process which, within a sleeping consciousness, enables a language that is current and active instead of re-active. Freud describes such a state of sleeping consciousness in his claim that, “dreams are disconnected, they accept the most violent contradictions without the least objection, they admit impossibilities, they disregard knowledge which carries great weight with us in the daytime, they reveal us as

328 Alferi, P., (Simas, J., Trans.), “Seeking a Sentence”, Poetics Journal: 1998: (10) – as acknowledged in Hejinian, L., “La Faustienne”, The Language of Inquiry: 265 329 Hejinian, L., “La Faustienne”, The Language of Inquiry: 251 250 ethical and moral imbeciles.”330 The nighttime sentence unbound by the constraints of waking consciousness, illustrates with greater clarity the significance of language in the structuring of meaning as the course of dream action is propelled from one element to another through an unconscious associative process driven by the instigative linguistic components comprising the dream. This active capacity of the dream is further expanded through the recollective capacities of the dreamer.

The notion of action being enabled through language and in particular through story-telling is theorized by philosopher Hannah Arendt331. Although not explicitly concerned with dreams, Arendt advocates a theory of action that is useful when considering the notion of a night or dream language as an active or instigative one. Arendt argues that:

…the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of the same boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation. Action… no matter what its specific content always establishes relationships and therefore has an inherent tendency to force open all limitations and cut across all boundaries.332

If we take into account Arendt’s idea of an active language and apply it in analysis of

Hejinian’s dream language that is, if we conceptualize this dream language to be instigative and potentially more active than language constructed predominantly in and about waking life, a method of representation geared with significant capacity and ability

330 Freud, S., The Interpretation of Dreams: 54 331 Hejinian engages with Arendt in her essays “Reason” and “A Common Sense” in The Language of Inquiry – as a philosophical framework to an explication of the focus behind her own approach to poetics as “…an experience of the revitalization of things in the world, an acknowledgement of the liveliness of the world, the restoration of the experience of our experience – a sense of living our life.” (“Reason”: 345) 332 Arendt, H., The Human Condition (2nd Ed.), Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press: 1958: 190 251 to cut across existing historical and literary traditions and misconceptions emerges. An active dream language conceptualized through the Arendtian lens of action (which locates speech as central to the processes of action) enables a form of linguistic liberation which expands the expressive capacities of language. Arendt claims that:

Action reveals itself fully only to the storyteller… to the backward glance of the historian, who indeed always knows better what it was all about than the participants. All accounts told by the actors themselves… become mere useful source material in the historian’s hands and can never match his story in significance and truthfulness… Even though stories are the inevitable results of action, it is not the actor but the storyteller who perceives and “makes” the story.333

Arendt’s account of the storyteller as creator renders him and his use of language as active contributors and assemblers of meaning. The storyteller engages with language to create a primary site of action in the compilation of meaning. Hejinian’s active night language, conceptually postulated through her essays concerned with dreams and thematically activated through a multimodal approach to writing, is rendered doubly active. The primary site of action within the dream experience by the dreamer is rendered as even more active through the avenue of the dreamer being the only possible storyteller/ historian capable of recounting the events of the dream. The individuated capacity of dreams, being only visible to their dreamer, renders them conceptually potent as a model for an active language. As the dreamer becomes the storyteller through taking on both roles of experiencing and simultaneously perceiving and making the story of the dream, the story of the individual subject’s experience whilst subjective, is subsequently, through the lens of Arendt’s active storyteller, also attributed greater accuracy. The impossibility of one

333 Ibid: 192 252 person recounting the dream of another equips the individual’s experience and personal recollections with a greater sense of integrity and believability by being the only recount possible.

In an interview with Alison Georgeson in Southern Review, 1994, Hejinian explains her motives for a sleep inspired work:

I am currently working on a big new project, tentatively called Sleeps334. It was inspired in part by Edward Young’s anguished, insomniac meditation, Night Thoughts, but more by The Arabian Nights. I had been thinking, in so much of my other work, about consciousness – about waking thought, living undertaken with eyes open, and I wanted suddenly to enter the night realm – the dark, blindness, sleep… 335

Hejinian’s explanation continues with a differentiation of writing which occurs during the day and writing which takes place at night:

Where days are experiential (full of event, acquiring information), nights are analytic. Nights process materials acquired by day, endless shaping and reshaping knowledge, making knowledge.336

334 Note: Excerpts from Sleeps are housed in the Mandeville Special Collections Library at UCSD. In an interview with Larry McCaffery and Brian McHale [McCaffery, L. / McHale, B., “A Local Strangeness: An Interview with Lyn Hejinian in Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors: 142] ‐ when asked about her writings comprising a type of life work, Hejinian responds:

“Potentially they all are. I don’t know for sure. I’m starting a new work now called Sleeps that’s inspired by The Thousand and One Nights, and I want there to be a thousand and one poems with each of the poems being different from each other in the way that the tales are different… I’m on number one – but I figure it’s going to take twenty years, if I write one poem a week…”

335 Georgeson, A., “Language Poetry: An Interview with Lyn Hejinian”, Southern Review: Literary and Interdisciplinary Essays: 1994, Sept: (27:3): 289 336 Ibid. 253

Hejinian’s answers in interview with Georgeson reflect on the information acquiring processes of day time experience and the analytic and knowledge-making capacities of language which take place either during or in close temporal proximity to sleep. The processes of night time thought for her constitute an active linguistic formula equipped with a capacity for “making” and “shaping” knowledge as opposed to the narratological and acquiring functions of day time thought. Her experimentation with the language of dreams and a process of writing at night function as methods of inquiry into the ways in which knowledge is both constituted and acquired and as an attempt to redefine the existing parameters of what is broadly accepted (often through the avenue of omniscient historical and literary recount) as being knowledge.

This challenge to the definition of knowledge and Hejinian’s experimentation and broadening of the parameters of language via visual modalities are brought into conversation through the avenue of dreams in Hejinian’s writing. As was discussed in chapter two of this thesis, the visual dimension of Hejinian’s writing contributes toward an understanding of language within her work as being gendered female. The night-time knowledge which she develops throughout several of her works also emerges to serve the purpose of a female subjectivity. The visuality within Hejinian’s works, addressed in previous chapters, re-surfaces through her writing more explicitly concerned with dreams and a night language, signaling a significant parallel between her work on dreams and her experimentation with the visual as key factors in the composition of a female gendered writing.

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Associations between the female, silence and the visual image are examined by visual culture theorist W.J.T. Mitchell who theorizes the desires, goals and processes that take place within pictures. Mitchell makes the case that the phenomenon of the visual image, devoid of a capacity for speech is resultantly female. He argues this by virtue of Fanon’s theory of the subaltern, writing that, “the subaltern model of the picture… opens up the actual dialectics of power and desire in our relations with pictures”337 and that:

…as for the gender of pictures, it’s clear that the “default” position of images is feminine… The paintings’ desire, in short, is to change places with the beholder, to transfix or paralyze the beholder, turning him or her into an image for the gaze of the picture… The power they want is manifested as lack, not as possession.338

Mitchell renders the image as inherently feminine and simultaneously subaltern; as a presence that may arouse desire and be desiring but one that is incapable of speaking. He argues that, “what the picture awakens our desire to see, as Jacques Lacan might put it, is exactly what it cannot show. This impotence is what gives it whatever specific power it has.”339 Hejinian’s writing represents and draws upon the strength of such a dynamic whereby the power of the text is held within its semi-imagistic status, evoking within the reader a desire to see and to know more. Both the verbal and visual imagery present throughout the corpus of Hejinian’s writing and addressed throughout the course of chapter three of this thesis, in combination with a non-directive and non-narrative form of writing, presents her work at least partially as image. Hejinian’s treatment of the visual image, understood through Mitchell’s conceptualization of the subaltern character of images (as desiring and incapable of speech), can be identified as silent/non-speaking however, it is

337 Mitchell, W. J. T., What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images: 34‐36 338 Ibid: 35 339 Ibid: 39 255 within this very silence that it acquires significant strength. Though it does not speak in a directive fashion, Hejinian’s writing can be conceptualized as a site of knowledge – an open ended knowledge equipped with the power to continuously evoke desire for further knowing. This desire is motivated through the non-definitive/non-directive nature of the image-like text.

“Strangeness”

Hejinian’s essay “Strangeness”, structured as a play between recorded dreams and commentary can be conceptualized as a prelude to her development of a new approach towards knowledge (an ethics of seeing/experiencing things anew) and the phenomenon of the dream. “Strangeness” marks a passageway between the literary language which formulates Hejinian’s poetic work and the visuality which permeates the borders of that language. The essay encourages Hejinian’s reader towards her hybrid form of writing informed structurally and also less obviously – thematically by the concept of the dream.

“Strangeness”, originally a talk delivered by Hejinian for a series curated by Bob Perelman at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1979, provides a framework for understanding the dynamics of such knowledge. In reflection on the essay now featured in The Language of

Inquiry Hejinian explains: “I derived the logic motivating the talk very much as I derived

256 that of “Strangeness,” out of associations between poetry and “science” which are not themselves scientific. They are, in fact, tropic, and therefore antithetical to strict scientific methodologies…”340 Exploring the similarities of the essentially descriptive processes which formulate both poetry and scientific record, Hejinian argues a case for the prevalence and significance of sentience in the documentation of scientific knowledge and a science in the documentation of more sentient knowledge, establishing a contingent conceptualization of knowledge as descriptive, indefinite and ever evolving, thereby confirming a claim she makes in her essay “The Quest for Knowledge” that, “Western knowledge itself has been a set of inventions.”341 Hejinian diffuses the strict delineations of scientific and poetic language to enable an understanding of knowledge not as a fixed entity but as a contextual construct, always subject to ideological imposition. This subjection is utilized by Hejinian in the process of articulating knowledge as female, firstly by noting the absence/ silence of the female within the Western tradition and secondly by rendering her present by virtue/recognition of that very absence. What is made possible in this negotiation between the poetic and the scientific is an affirmation of poetry’s capacity for representing the real. Hejinian establishes a congruency between poetry and the realms of dreams and science arguing that, in effect, all are fuelled by a degree of feeling and creativity regardless of how calculated or scientific their methodology may appear – that there is in fact a poetry in mathematics and scientific thought. Hejinian’s interest in the poetic as objectively real, as discussed in chapter three of this thesis, was fuelled by the work of William James. She explains that:

340 Hejinian, L., The Language of Inquiry: 135 341 Hejinian, L., “The Quest for Knowledge”, The Language of Inquiry: 212 257

What interests James (as it interests me) are not so much the things, which simple conjunction leaves undisturbed, but the transitions between them and between them and us… It is in these transitions that the activity of being is exercised – the work of being in the world, perceptible and, in the case of sentient things, perceiving, or, in the case of nonsentient things, susceptible to the influence, the causative capacities, of other things, sentient or not. These interrelated transitions form a system of perceptible effects. For James, these are the materials of cognition and hence of consciousness.342

In this paragraph Hejinian advocates a heightened awareness of consciousness through the examination of or focus upon sites of in-betweeness. She argues that it is what exists within all relationships between all things living and non-living that constitutes this awareness. Though a large portion of “Strangeness” focuses on several of her own dreams and her interpretive work on those dreams, the central focus of her essay’s inquiry remains the subject of consciousness, incorporating the model of dream knowledge as one equipped with the capacity for a more sincere method of poetic representation driven not by strict narrative logic and chronology but by the endless fractal-like capabilities of active metonymic thought. Hejinian’s abstract and open-ended poetry (both throughout her individual poetic texts and through her ever-growing serial poetic structures such as My

Life) mimics her reflection upon the dream construct:

In dreams, the opposition between objectivity and subjectivity is a false one, In fact, the dream’s independence from binarisms like form-content, make-female, now-then, here-there, large-small, social-solitary, etc., is characteristic and makes polarity irrelevant or obsolete. Instead deliberate and complex disintegration, dispersal, and elaboration occur…343

342Hejinian, L., “Strangeness”, The Language of Inquiry : 136 343 Ibid: 141 258

In a key reflection upon her analyses Hejinian states that, “with respect to dream descriptions, psychological interpretation focuses primarily on identification and symbolism (metaphor), but a literary interpretation depends on the metonym (displacement and synecdochic condensation).”344 What is made possible through the literary interpretation of the dream is an understanding which allows for multiplicities and various realities as focus is shifted away from the definitive binary forming language of metaphor towards the open and more generous allowance of metonym which enables a broader spectrum for representational possibilities. Hejinian explicates what she refers to as a

“dispersive” notion of metonymy arguing that, “…even while it condenses thought processes, [it] may at the same time serve as a generative and even a dispersive force”345

Whilst Hejinian’s “Strangeness” focuses peripherally upon ideas that emerge from the phenomenon of dreaming, its central concern with dreams is a structural one, devising from them a metonymic structure for documentation which endows poetic language with a heightened capacity for representing realities. Hejinian turns to dreams and dream interpretations as a method of expression and as a form of linguistic enterprise which is located in closer proximity to a notion of experience and sentience than writing which adheres to the impositions of more strict narrative logic and grammar. Her work in respect to dreams does not focus upon the signs and metaphors which formulate the terrain of the dream for their immediate symbolic and psychological value. Rather, she observes the nature in which things appear and the manner in which she is able to or chooses to

344 Ibid: 149 345 Ibid. 259 recollect them in writing. One of the dreams that Hejinian recalls for the purposes of her talk is “Dream of September 28, 1987” of which she recounts, “A dress, or a woman wearing blue or black. She is a mannequin or a living woman. The figure is seen full-face or maybe in silhouette. A view then or afterwards of a saddle-stitch stapler and a book nearby.”346 In her reflections upon this dream Hejinian states that, “the woman appears first in the dream, and the other three things are elements in a description of her. The dress, stapler, and book are three metonymic entries in a description…”347 There is no significant reflection upon the psychological implications of the potential symbols of this dream featured in “Strangeness”. Instead the essay takes the form of a series of reflections about the nature of Hejinian’s own recall and the structure/language of her dream/dream recall through an analysis of the metonymic value or resonance of the various components of the dream. The woman in question emerges by virtue of the objects which surround her. As the dress, the stapler and the near-by book constitute the remaining content of the dream, the absence of coherent narrative necessitates an associative process between the featured objects through which the dreamer assembles their understanding and visualization of the central female figure. Though focus is sustained upon the linguistic and polyvalent metonymic capacities of the dream phenomenon throughout the dream analyses in

“Strangeness”, the content of this particular dream in which notions of the female, composition/making (the stapler) and language/ literature (the book) are intertwined is noteworthy as it directs the reader’s attention towards the interwoven relationship between these three aspects within Hejinian’s broader writing project. However, regardless of the tantalizing events and symbols of Hejinian’s actual dreams, the central focus of her essay

346 Ibid: 141 347 Ibid: 145 260 is the development of an approach to writing which, through the use of the fragmented format of the dream, challenges traditional approaches in writing such as notions of fixed, stable and unchanging subjects and narratives. What Hejinian’s published work on dreams achieves is a re-conceptualization of language which allows for phenomenological observation as explicated by Kate Fagan in her account of Hejinian’s The Cell – a key work emerging from dreams (to be addressed at a later stage in this chapter). Fagan argues that:

The Cell remains unparalleled in Hejinian’s oeuvre as a work about the consciousness of consciousness. Ideation itself is scrutinized throughout the poem… Hejinian surveys everyday objects – cups and grass, for example – and removes them from ordinary contexts, while maintaining quasi-scientific “veracity” toward phenomenal observation and the intimate “shifting blades” of description.348

The entire “Strangeness” project attests to the argument that the phenomenon of the dream and the questions arising from it within Hejinian’s published materials that are explicitly concerned with dreams, are predominantly linguistic and simultaneously philosophical.

Hejinian argues that, “The very writing down of a dream seems to be the act of discovering it (one “remembers” more and more as one writes until one wonders it’s the writing itself that “dreams”)...”349 She grants the writing process a certain form of autonomy whereby it begins to speak from within itself, separate from the narrative of events. This autonomy resonates with the equation between Hejinian’s writing and the strange situation of the thing as articulated by Brown (discussed in chapter three of this thesis) in his claim that,

348 Fagan, K., “‘Constantly I write this happily’: Encountering Lyn Hejinian”: 248 ‐ Hejinian, L., The Cell, Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press: 1992: 82 ‐ cited in text

349 Hejinian, L., “Strangeness”, The Language of Inquiry: 139 261

“we begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls….350 Dreams, like things, are removed from the impositions of a strict narrative structure to reveal a more authentic representation of life which often does not unfold through neat and coherent ordering. Hejinian’s writing thus emerges as a dream landscape and her interest in dreams devoted to the polyvalent capacities of a metonymic language of listing things creates this landscape. This creation gives rise to a form of poetry with an intrinsic capacity for a realistic representation of consciousness which echoes Stein’s approach to realism in writing which Hejinian explicates in her “Two Stein Talks”:

For Gertrude Stein, landscape was an empty form, or rather a form free of prediction, a vibrational field of reversible effects. The exactitude – the “realism” that she claimed for her analyses (as nameless naming) of single objects in Tender Buttons – could be repeated over and over… And this could be multiplied; there could be many objects and then therefore many relationships…351

Like Stein, Hejinian objectifies her language to enable a multiplicity of textual relationships to emerge which acknowledge the multifaceted nature of experience as being suspended amidst a complex matrix of associations. These relationships do not attest to any fixed form of certainty but remain concerned with the representation of consciousness in writing and defer a specific focus on the phenomenon or the content of the dreams themselves. This notion of an objectification of language is developed in “Strangeness” through an examination of the study of the ancient visually based language of the Egyptian hieroglyphs as Hejinian directs the reader’s attention to the eighteenth century when

350 Brown, B., “Thing Theory”: 4 351 Hejinian, L., “Two Stein Talks”, The Language of Inquiry: 106 262

“…there was a great deal of speculation about the origin of languages, and diverse projects were undertaken in hopes of discovering a universal language in past or present cultures analogous to that which seemed to occur in nature…”352 This inquiry from Hejinian signals a drive within her own research to develop a more open and all encompassing form of writing which finds some basis in existing conceptualizations of imagist hieroglyphic discourse – one which she infers to be better equipped than more standardized linguistic formats to depict experience without the imposition of direction from narrative, grammar and sentence structure. Hejinian outlines in “Strangeness” some early insights that emerged from late seventeenth and early eighteenth century theorists in regards to the concept of the Egyptian hieroglyphs which evidently influence her own visual-linguistic language – a language concerned with an authenticity in documentation – a realism in writing which records occurrence with a heightened sense of sincerity to the event. In particular, she focuses on the work of William Warburton from his 1741 book The Divine

Legations of Moses Demonstrated, quoting Barbara Stafford’s claim that, “Warburton stresses the unmetaphoric, unsymbolic nature of the hieroglyph.” It is, he says, a “plain and simple imitation of the figure of the thing intended to be represented, which is directly contrary to the very nature of a symbol, which is the representation of one thing by the figure of another.”353 Hejinian recognizes in this extract of text the metonymic nature of the hieroglyphs as described by Warburton, subsequently arguing that:

If the single hieroglyph presents a single fragment of natural reality, a “paragraph” or collection of them could only be organized paratactically. Parataxis is significant both for the way information is gathered by explorers and the way things seem to accumulate in nature. Composition by juxtaposition presents observed phenomena

352 Hejinian, L., “Strangeness”, The Language of Inquiry: 154 353Ibid: 155: Barbara Maria Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760‐1840, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press: 1984:311 (cited in text) 263

without merging them, preserving their discrete particularity while attempting also to represent the matrix of their proximities.354

Hejinian’s observation about the metonymic quality of the visual language comprised by the hieroglyphs is of significant value in consideration of the extensive parataxis which constitutes her writing practice. Parataxis is not only present linguistically as in, for example, “A pause, a rose, something on paper”355 but also through the broader context of her cumulative writing enterprise consisting of her poetry, essays, recordings, notebooks, typescripts and her prolific practices of letter writing and archiving. Hejinian’s interest in the Hieroglyphs also attests to the potential of a visual language as bearing the capacity of the polyvalent metonym. The image for Hejinian is indeed, like a hieroglyph, serving a metonymic purpose to enable her to create, similarly to Stein, a landscape of experience through paratactic recount. A visual example (analyzed in greater detail in chapter three of this thesis) of this process is featured in Hejinian and Clark’s The Lake:

354 Ibid:155 355 Hejinian, L., My Life: 7 264

356

The various graphic components of the text, all individuated through the juxtaposition of visual modalities (for example the photographic image versus the painterly brush strokes and the sharp pencil lines), serve a hieroglyphic purpose of documenting a specific particularity of experience which whilst situated in conversation with both the words and other visual modalities on the page, maintain their own specific message and essence as alternate to that of surrounding textual components. The turbulent air of the dark scuffled brush strokes comprising the lower right hand quadrant of the page functions in expressive contrast to the placid lake waters of the photographic image situated in the upper half of

356 Clark, E. / Hejinian, L., The Lake: (no pagination) 265 the page. The contrast between the two visual modes, comprising a visual paratactic recount, negotiates a co-existence which articulates the multifaceted nature of existence.

The visual dimension perceived as an extended linguistic component of Hejinian’s writing and the associative processes of the metonym function in the articulation – through a form of silence (the silence of the image) – of a particular female voice often unheard through more conventional texts of Western history and Literature. Hejinian formulates in her essay “La Faustienne”, an explication of the situation of the female in Western art and literature as other. She achieves this through the proposition of Goethe’s male figure Faust being the ultimate culmination of Western thought as she argues that, “in Goethe’s play…

Faust is the figure of the modern genius – driven, thrilled, libidinous, learned – part

Prometheus, part Picasso, part, Dr. Frankenstein, part Dr. Freud, and part Don Juan – a figure for whom epistemology is an artistic romance and the encyclopedia its masterwork.”357 This conceptualization of Goethe’s characterization as exclusive of a female presence prompts Hejinian to ask the question, “…who is Faust’s female counterpart? Who is La Faustienne?”358 Hejinian resolves her inquiry through the characterization of the female (La Faustienne) as knowledge itself. She argues that “in folklore, then, as in science, if one genders the players in the tropes of Western epistemology, one typically ends up with a model in which the quest for knowledge is a male enterprise and the keeper of the known is woman.”359 However, regardless of this characterization of the female as all-knowing, Hejinian claims that, “this trope seems to

357 Hejinian, L., “La Faustienne”, The Language of Inquiry: 237 358 Ibid. 359 Ibid: 249 266 incorporate aspects of male desire into its imagery while leaving female desire hidden, not through inadvertence but by definition.”360 What emerges from Hejinian’s discussion is a conceptualization of the knowledge-possessing female figure as being simultaneously to knowledgeable, silent – her “desire hidden”. She stands as other in the context of Western civilization. In “The Quest for Knowledge” Hejinian characterizes knowledge itself as other on the basis of its situation at a disjuncture between that which is seen and that which is thought, claiming that, “knowledge is based on the experience of the disjuncture between what’s seen and what’s thought… if it weren’t other at least momentarily, we wouldn’t experience it at all, because we wouldn’t notice our noting it.”361 Ultimately what emerges from examination of Hejinian’s essays “La Faustienne” and “The Quest for

Knowledge” is the claim that knowledge as gendered through the tropes of Western epistemology is characteristically female and simultaneously silent, located at a border between image and language – at a nexus exemplified in Hejinian’s examination of the metonymic and hybrid hieroglyphic method of writing as is signaled in her essay

“Strangeness”. Metonymy as Hejinian explains “…is intervallic, incremental – it exists within a measure.”362 It is through these intervals amidst specific details that a notion of silence (analogous with the female) can emerge to be heard. One example of how this process occurs can be identified on every alternate page of Hejinian and Clark’s The Lake.

360 Ibid. 361 Hejinian, L., “The Quest for Knowledge”, The Language of Inquiry: 227 362 Hejinian, L., “Strangeness”, The Language of Inquiry: 149 267

363

The black pages which serve the purpose of punctuation – moments of pause – throughout the hybrid visual-verbal language of The Lake are exemplary of a certain kind of silence.

These pages, formulating one half of the entirety of the text, being featured on every second page of the book, extend the volume and value of this silence. The translucent swirl which emerges vaguely through the black of these pages mimics the surface quality of water and can by virtue of this be interpreted as metonymic for a lake more broadly, signaling the significance of the silent dark space as a primary thematic concern of the text.

363 Clark, E. / Hejinian, L., The Lake: (every alternate page) 268

The purpose of Hejinian’s poetic visuality, although at first glance abstract (much like the structure of her written poetry), is not to abstract from the real but rather to create a reality within the nexus that is formulated through the reader’s encounter and interaction with her writing by rendering her visuality through a hieroglyph filter whereby each visual element on the page attains autonomy through an objectification as thing. The silence evoked within these black pages enacts the role of Mitchell’s definition of the visual image as female – as lacking and desirous.

The purpose of the black pages throughout The Lake is evidenced through the metonymic capacity of their visuality. The reader is forced to engage with the pages’ pervasive presence through an imposition of pause and its connotative silence throughout the body of the text, attaining understanding of its purpose through the thought processes of association and analysis. He/ She comes to a consciousness of the silent pages’ presence through their inescapable repeated appearance throughout the text. Silence in this instance is countered, not vocally but through presence.

From an analysis of Hejinian’s “Strangeness” thus far, the reader can deduce that she engages with notions of dreaming to harness and explicate her own ideology in terms of writing. Through the phenomenon of dreams Hejinian is able to demonstrate how significantly language is intertwined with a notion of experience. A very strong parallel exists between her conceptualization of dreams with her own writing practice. The reader as the dreamer and simultaneous ‘experiencer’ is implicated in the creative processes of the

269 text. Hejinian utilizes the trope of the hieroglyph to illustrate and/or provide a parallel for the dream process as metonymic – as functioning “…metonymically; it represents as a fragment of concrete nature might.”364 The hieroglyph, as does the phenomenon of the dream, indicates Hejinian’s experimentation with the notion of a visually charged and metonymic language strongly anchored within a notion of concrete reality. Through her description of the phenomenon of the hieroglyph in context with the dream process the reader can identify a focus not on any form of symbolism that may emerge from a particular image but rather, on a very succinct and immediate encounter with reality that is able to capture the unstable and ever changing essence of experience.

Silence – Seeing Through the Dark of Night

Hejinian’s treatment of the visual – as addressed through an examination of the visual- linguistic phenomena of the dream and the hieroglyph in “Strangeness” – is a means of situating the text within a concrete reality and through the conversant analysis of

“Strangeness” with “La Faustienne” and “The Quest for Knowledge” within this thesis, can be understood as a method for articulating and defying the silence of the female within

364 Hejinian, L., “Strangeness”, The Language of Inquiry: 155 270 the Western literary tradition. This approach to the visual throughout Hejinian’s writing can be conceptualized as an attempt to realistically locate the female subject. At the same time it functions as a hybrid phenomenon (connotative of knowledge – as a negotiation between the “imaged” and the “imagined”) through which the female subject speaks.

Reflecting upon the silent space occupied by the writing female subject, Susan Howe argues that, “if you are a woman, archives hold perpetual ironies. Because the gaps and silences are where you find yourself.365 Caroline Bergvall describes Howe’s experimental writing as a method of escaping an enforced silence and argues that Howe’s experimentation is less about defining feminine expression as it is about finding a way around and out of the phallogecentric culture that imposes the silence. Bergvall argues that:

Having thus posited the ideological implications for a female writer to resort to the experimental creation of meaning, Howe approaches it, both in her criticism and in her own poetry, less as providing a definition of feminine expression than as an indication of a female writer’s torturous way to reach around the sublimating silence in which phallogocentric culture has placed her and towards which she is seen as inherently subversive or marginal. Hence Howe considers experimentation less as a pure process of style, practiced in a self-referential ‘echoing space’, than as the site of intersection between the writer’s private frame of reference and the social mythography.366

Bergvall’s argument with regards to Howe can be extended to Hejinian’s experimentation and development of a hybrid visual-linguistic language. Comprising a method of reaching around the culture of existing language structures that marginalize the female writer,

Hejinian’s multimodal approach to language emerges less as a designed or definitive form

365Howe, S., The Birth‐mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History: 158 366Bergvall, C., “No Margins to This Page: Female Experimental Poets and the Legacy of Modern”, Fragmente: (5): 1993: 34‐35

271 of feminine expression as a framework or a philosophy that seeks to articulate and simultaneously evade a silencing of the female subject. Experimentation with aspects of dreams together with the utilization of the visual image is primary to Hejinian’s approach to the silence in question. The notion of the gap or the silent space is acutely relevant when addressing women’s writing and in particular when examining Hejinian’s work. Much of

Hejinian’s writing addresses the notion of the border – as a non-definitive space of inbetween. Her theorization of the border zone is most salient in her conceptualization of the space of dream which, as indicated earlier in discussion of Hejinian’s “La Faustienne”, is tightly interwoven with notions of a speaking female subject. The silence claimed by

Hejinian within the dream space is articulated through a focus on notions of gaps or border zones that emerge in an understanding of the dream process. Hejinian argues that:

Like a dream landscape, the border landscape is unstable and perpetually incomplete… The border is occupied by ever-shifting images, involving objects and events constantly in need of redefinition… The analogy to the dream landscape is apt in another respect; the border experience is interior to the psyche as well as being external and social. …dreams can be taken as examples of interior…border encounters, or as experiences on the border that arise within the unconscious, either harboring (if Freud is correct) all that is …repressed, or (if contemporary neuropsychologists are correct) doing epistemological work...367

The dream landscape as defined in her essay “Barbarism” emerges for Hejinian as a prevalent trope for an essentially non-definitive and constantly shifting space of in- between. It is significant that within this busy and unstable place rendered silent by the constant non-fixed action that constitutes its being, not allowing for a fixed voice to emerge, Hejinian specifies the presence of the ever-shifting image. Through this she signals an association between the notion of silence and the phenomenon of the visual

367 Hejinian, L., “Barbarism”, The Language of Inquiry: 327 272 image and renders them both active concepts through a claim for their constant “need for redefinition”. Silence is also addressed in Hejinian’s prevalent concern with the unconscious mind. The scene of activity created by Hejinian of the unconscious mind as a border zone further evidences the development of a writing which seeks to locate a voice or scene of action within the apparently silent. In this same excerpt Hejinian directs the reader’s attention to Freud and, although with no great specificity, Freud’s “The Uncanny” surfaces translucently as a thematic concern throughout Hejinian’s “Strangeness”. With specific focus on the association between the notions of silence and the visual image, it is important to identify Freud’s focus on the eye in his essay “The Uncanny”. Of particular significance is his analysis of Hoffmann’s story of “The Sand-Man” in Hoffmann’s

Nachtstücken in which he cites a description of the notorious character of The Sand-Man as follows:

He’s a wicked man who comes when children won’t go to bed, and throws handfuls of sand in their eyes so that they jump out of their heads bleeding. Then he puts the eyes in a sack and carries them off to the half-moon to feed his children. They sit up there in their nest, and their beaks are hooked like owls’ beaks, and they use them to peck up naughty boys’ and girls’ eyes with.368

Briony Fer observes that the “uncanniness” of Hoffmann’s tale rests in “…the figure of

‘Sandman’, the father image who punishes children by tearing out their eyes”. She argues that “this appealed to Freud who saw the fear of losing one’s sight as symbolic of the dread of castration.”369 This association between the loss of sight and the menacing father figure impacts a reading of Hejinian’s utlization of the notion of the image. It enables an

368 Hoffmann, E. T. A., Sämtliche Werke, (Grisebach edition, 3.) in Cohen, J. M. (Trans.), Eight Tales of Hoffman, London: Pan Books: 1952 - cited in Freud, S., “The Uncanny”: 349 369 Fer, B., “Surrealism, Myth and Psychoanalysis” in Batchelor, D., Fer, B., Wood, P., Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art between the Wars: 196 273 understanding of her use of the image as an asset in the quest to locate Faust’s female counterpart – the female in respect to knowledge. Hejinian harnesses the parallel Freud draws between the loss of sight and castration (emasculation) through a recurrent focus on the faculty of sight in her poetry. Hejinian and Clark’s imagery featured in the extract from

The Lake exemplifies this focus on sight, as the visual mode interwoven with writing throughout the text seeks to attain some feminine power/leverage against the figure of the menacing father, the faculty of sight augmenting the potentials for meaning and representation within the written text. The resultant abstractions achieved throughout the text, via the juxtaposition of visual modalities, serve to develop a new form of sight – a hybrid, metonymic and linguistically informed female sight. The image and the notion of sight, associated with the Sand-Man tale in Freud’s “The Uncanny”, emerge in Hejinian’s writing as disassociated from masculinity. Hejinian’s treatment of the visual image as indefinite and strange, rendered so through abstraction and linguistic interaction, recuperates the notion of sight from Freud’s “The Uncanny” as a key modality to enable a female representation in writing. Fer also discusses the relevance of the eye image in regards to the Surrealist project arguing that:

Certainly the theme of the eye is recurrent in Surrealist imagery, notably in the opening of the sequence of Un Chien Andalou, a film by Bunuel and Dali where an eyeball is slashed. What is more interesting here, I think, is not so much the direct links to be made, as the key idea that the uncanny is something secretly familiar. It is something that has been repressed… Within the framework, dismembered limbs might evoke the uncanny, but so might a ‘dismembered’ text or image, where the pieces are collaged together in unfamiliar ways.370

370Ibid. 274

This Surrealist frame of reference also resonates with Hejinian’s hybrid writing oeuvre with the notion and presence of the visual image being employed in the creation of what can be identified as the developmental project of a female writing in which the hybridization of visual imagery and poetry function in unison to encompass a metonymic language that is true to the nature of experience and its non-definitive structure. The dismembered limbs of the Surrealist project echoed by Hejinian’s imagistic aspects within her work often function in the activation of a female presence (such as that signified by the white jar image in The Lake , analyzed in chapter two of this thesis). This semblance of a female presence assists in the explication of Hejinian’s utilization of the visual as an attempt to bring out of the shadows of the Western literary tradition the familiar but yet repressed and silenced voice of the female. This enabling of a female voice occurs precisely through the avenue of silence; through an acknowledgement and treatment of it in new and strange ways with the purpose of making a new form of knowledge – of making silence heard.

Assisting this associative claim between the eye and the female text and the notion of a night-time language is Hejinian’s The Little Book of a Thousand Eyes (to be discussed in chapter six of this thesis). The Little Book of a Thousand Eyes is strongly referential of her essay “La Faustienne” which seeks to find Faust’s female counterpart in the embodiment of knowledge, emergent through the phenomenon of telling tales at night. The text features the motif of the eye in multiple repetitions on its front cover.

275

“La Faustienne”

The realm of the dream becomes intertwined with the voice of the female in Hejinian’s essay titled “La Faustienne” which was originally presented as a talk at Temple University in Philadelphia in March 1994. Since then Hejinian has made multiple revisions of her talk which is most recently featured as an essay in The Language of Inquiry. This revisionary practice echoes Hejinian’s broader archiving practice which renders her writing practice, broadly speaking, as serial and ongoing, adding further emphasis to the ongoing developmental process of the articulation of a female language. In “La Faustienne” the phenomenon of dreams becomes intertwined with the female voice as Hejinian creates a concept of the feminine which is disassociated from the prevailing silence which has often pervaded female representation throughout the course of Western history. An example of this silence is articulated by Hejinian through her analysis of Hans Christian Anderson’s tale of the Little Mermaid as she argues that, “the silencing of the fairy tale maiden renders her inner being (her thoughts, her feelings) secret. She embodies her secret; she is a nocturnal inscription, both writer and what’s written in the dark.”371 Hejinian disassociates from the secrecy of this night-time language through the development of a notion of speaking at night as a method of speaking through silence.

In “La Faustienne” Hejinian argues that the female subject has not escaped representation by virtue of some deliberate plan for repression but rather through an extensive ongoing

371 Hejinian, L., “La Faustienne”, The Language of Inquiry: 249 276 process of evasion and non-recognition. According to Hejinian, the female subject has predominantly been featured in the pages of history as a metaphor for male conquest and never as the active party herself. One such example is provided by Hejinian with reference to early images of America whereby, “…America [is] inscribed (even in “her” name, a feminized form of the given name of Amerigo Vespucci) and depicted as a woman – often nude and often, by stylistic implication, virginal.”372 Hejinian subsequently suggests that:

A plausibly central figure in the narrative of knowledge… is Faust. In one form or another, the Faust figure has dominated the quest for knowledge, and Faustian desire has driven the encyclopedic enterprises which have been undertaken in the name of that quest… 373

In consideration of this, Hejinian explores multiple examples where men have been depicted as active in exploration and the search for knowledge and women have been rendered silent which leads her to the proposition that:

The vocabulary and semantics of the metaphors dominating descriptions of exploration and discovery on this continent are explicitly gendered… Throughout the literature of the frontier, the intrepid Faustian discovers a virgin landscape and penetrates its wilderness… The female element in this trope, then, is not the knower but the site of knowledge, its object and embodiment – that which is to be known. Is knowledge itself, then, La Faustienne?374

Hejinian’s key question in this essay indicates significant concerns with the problematic representation of female agency throughout the history of Western literature, which suggests that inscribed in the very fabric of Western knowledge and language exists a

372 Ibid: 241 373 Ibid: 235 374 Ibid: 239‐240 277 construct of the female subject as inactive and removed from “knowing”. Hejinian outlines that knowledge until recent times has been characterized in painting and writing as a predominantly male enterprise. She asks the question of what might then be characterized as female and brings to life, by method of reading between the central lines of existing narratives, Faust’s female counterpart La Faustienne as an embodiment of knowledge itself by virtue of the feminine tropes attributed to sites of knowledge and knowledge itself throughout history. If Hejinian calls upon her readers to imagine the female as an embodiment of knowledge – “…knowledge itself… [as] La Faustienne” – throughout the course of this essay, her greater body of writing can also be understood as a type of cumulative knowledge. She describes such knowledge as “…always concerned with the question, How do you know anything?”375 By virtue of this epistemological concern

Hejinian’s work can be conceptualized and perceived as an ongoing work of comprising a female writing project – as executing the work of La Faustienne.

“La Faustienne” engages in the argument that opposition and dualism exist at the very heart of Western thought (the very means by which these early accounts of being male and female were first formulated) as Hejinian proposes that the most common definitions are acquired by means of contrast to what they are not. It is in acknowledgement of and in disagreement with such methods of definition that she commenced The Book of a

Thousand Eyes throughout the course of which she aims to portray things as being “true of

[their] own accord” and not in opposition to something other. Hejinian has included part of this work in “La Faustienne” and has explained it as follows:

375 McCaffery, L. / McHale, B., Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors: 136 278

The Book of a Thousand Eyes is a night work, in that my interest is in the processes of assimilation and assessment that take place in the figurative dark and silence of night, where opposites as such can’t exist because they always co-exist. I have wanted to write in the dark… when the mind must accept the world it witnesses by day and out of all data assemble meaning. The writing would do so – assemble (a Faustian project) and, in its way, make knowledge (the work of La Faustienne).376

She here describes her writing project with specific reference to The Book of a Thousand

Eyes as being an embodiment of knowledge; as executing by definition of this particular essay, the implicit female role of ‘making’ knowledge. Writing emergent from the silence of the night, in acceptance of the waking world’s contradictions and binaries by virtue of an embrace of the work of the unconscious mind, is rendered a female enterprise.

Hejinian’s example of the silencing of the female through the literary discourse of the fairy tale with reference to the tale of the Little Mermaid in which the central character sacrifices her voice to the Sea Witch in exchange for becoming human, creates a parallel between the silent female and night-time writing – a writing steeped in the depths and the dangerous all-knowing darkness of the unconscious mind. Hejinian acknowledges the silenced female’s position within the records of literature and history as she seeks to locate her and give her a voice through the practice of writing at night.

Marina Warner echoes Hejinian’s example of the Anderson text and also wider concern with the notion of vocalizing a silenced female voice as she examines early accounts of mermaid tales. Warner devotes particular attention to the mermaid-like sirens from

Homer’s Odyssey, arguing that the content of their song “…is knowledge, the threefold

376 Hejinian, L., “La Faustienne”, The Language of Inquiry: 250 279 wisdom possessed by beings who are not subject to time: knowledge of the past, of the present, and of the future.”377 Warner suggests that the literary and historical treatment and evolution of the sirens’ mythical story veers towards a longstanding negative impression of their nature as she argues:

Passion and Poetry: bane and boon. The anxiety about word-music and its lure – the fear of seductive speech – changes character and temper down the centuries, but the sirens’ reputation does not improve. Their connection with carnal danger, with moral breakdown, with potent fictions, with bewitchment, deepens, and, under the influence of the rich Northern mythology about undines and selkies, mermaids and sea-nymphs, they shed their relation to wisdom and retained only their oneness with sex and death – though knowledge of these is a form of wisdom.378

Warner’s argument illustrates the literary evolution of a tale of female wisdom degenerating through time to become a tale of scorn and darkness; the female’s capacity for knowledge and speech being silenced through negative association. Hejinian harnesses this negative characterization of the darkness of female speech and reads within it a nocturnal inscription with a capacity for language as she pursues the task of re-instilling through the darkness of the night, the female’s capacity for speech in her development of the character of La Faustienne. The project of “La Faustienne” permeates a significant portion of Hejinian’s body of works in a process of undoing the mechanics of historical impression and making possible the writing of a female speech.

377 Warner, M., From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers: 399 378 Ibid: 402 280

Arguing that “…context… is the medium of our encounter, the ground of our becoming…”379, Hejinian does not prescribe a particular set of characteristics or stylistic approaches which may render a text as female or feminine and does not subscribe to a particular form of feminism. Rather, she addresses the complicated matrixes of words and stories which render histories into being and by challenging these undoes them. Although her associations with a feminine writing have not always been obvious, in reading her essays the reader can begin to decipher exactly where Hejinian situates the female subject.

Ultimately Hejinian characterizes Scheherazade from the Arabic The Thousand and One

Nights as an embodiment of knowledge and wisdom (based upon Scheherazade’s cunning plan to reveal through language/tales the King’s true character to himself) and a representation of the female as an active speaking subject. Hejinian argues that:

She concludes her essay in defense of Scheherazade’s wisdom and life saving capacity arguing that:

In the face of knowledge, Faust is silenced. Scheherazade’s position is the reverse of this… …for Scheherazade danger lies in silence, death hovers at the edge of dawn on the horizon of light when all stories come to an end, inscribing her end as well. Where Faust sells his soul for knowledge, Scheherazade saves her life by offering it.381

379 Hejinian, L., “Reason”, The Language of Inquiry: 342 380 Hejinian, L., “La Faustienne”, The Language of Inquiry: 251 381 Ibid: 260 281

An association between a night-time language and female speech comprises a complicated negotiation due the unconscious often being characterized as silent and dark. Hejinian acknowledges this potential in her appropriation of the Faust figure as she explains that

“…the Faust story, even in Goethe’s version, is in many respects dreamlike. The figments

– the visions summoned to Faust for his contemplation – are unique; their night visits cannot be replicated. Like dream visions, they are incorrigible but cannot be proved.”382

This impossibility for dreams to be proved results in Hejinian differentiating

Scheherazade’s tales which take place at night to Faust’s dream visions on the basis of the tales being enveloped with a greater sense of waking consciousness through their public context. There is a greater air of wakeful consciousness in the manner in which

Scheherazade’s tales have been framed within the text. Hejinian explains this as she writes that:

The tales of The Thousand and One Nights, though filled with the kinds of transmutations and metamorphoses which occur in dreams, are not private fantasies or psychological displays but public stories – embodying social norms, cultural values, and ultimately moral advice. Scheherazade tells her tales in bed, but their milieu is public.383

The public context which frames Scheherazade’s tales as tales of universal wisdom – the tales of the siren – is where Hejinian renders the potential for the emergence of a female poetry. An active engagement with a contextually and historically imposed darkness bears the seeds for the recuperation of a female speech. Ultimately what Hejinian conceptualizes throughout her essay “La Faustienne” is a kind of wakeful dreaming or a seeing through

382 Ibid:259‐260 383 Ibid: 260 282 the darkness of night which borrows from the dream the possibilities for the phantastic and the strange which enable a representational shift in perceptions due to their emergence from an unconscious or silent place. The strange possibilities which often emerge through the avenue of dreams, sifted through the literary filter of wakeful and conscious writing, enable Hejinian’s conceptualization of a potent silent space. This silent space is rendered analogous to the representation of the female within the contextual frame of the Western literary tradition. Hejinian’s silent space separates from this tradition yet simultaneously functions in acknowledgement of it and its shadows of being unheard as it evolves into a vocal space capable of action.

Recent work on Dreams

“Strangeness” and “La Faustienne” both engage with the dreaming process from a predominantly structural angle. Their key concerns, as illustrated throughout this chapter, circulate around the capacities of the dream or a night-time language as emergent from the depths of the unconscious mind to be perceived as analogous to a wakeful and conscious writing equipped with the potential to document and engage sincerely with experienced reality. Though the structural capacity of dreams and Hejinian’s utilization of them towards the development of a form of wakeful dreaming remain a central concern

283 throughout “Strangeness” and “La Faustienne”, the intensely colorful underlying content, themes and stories interwoven throughout them demand further attention and will consequently comprise the concluding chapter of this thesis. Prior to this, the current chapter concludes with an overview of two more recently published Hejinian works concerned with the concept of dreams. These works are here conceptualized as extensions of a project commenced by Hejinian during the late 1980s which evolved into the publication of her 1992 text The Cell. They are indicative of an ongoing thread of thought concerned with the notion of a night-time language throughout her writing career and add testament to a framework or model for a form of wakeful dreaming in writing which draws on the mechanics of the conscious mind in the acts of both writing and reading.

“The Dream Department”

The process of a wakeful dreaming is further developed in Hejinian’s talk “The Dream

Department” delivered in November 2009 which addresses how literature is taught in the academic sphere. She argues that:

If it is ultimately the function of art to make our lives lively… to save us… from becoming so habituated to ourselves and the things around us that we lose them from our lives – then this is also, surely, the function of the teaching of art – in our case, literary art. And to do this is the function of the “dream department,” as the site of

284

the good polis, and as a collective – and, especially, as a collaborative undertaking.384

Hejinian describes the role of an academic faculty (rendered metaphorically as the “dream department” due to its potential to teach, inspire and also to encourage experimentation and questioning through the avenue of original thought) to be that of enabling lives through the avenue of art to become more “lively” or active. The notion of sleep is extracted from this equation, though not entirely, as the dream process is, through words such as “enabling” and “lively”, rendered as active and consequently as being in a wakeful state. To dispense with any possible confusion between the fact that Hejinian is indeed using the metaphor of dreams in the sense of what occurs at night as we sleep and not in the context of aspirations and goal setting, I make reference to the extract below in which she explains the metaphor of the dream and its relevance to learning:

In our dreams we find familiar things rendered strange; in our dreams, if contemporary neuroscience is correct, our mind takes up work that it can’t do during the day and sets about the work of testing and reorganizing the data and impressions that have come its way in the light of what our world view has been and in such a way as to adjust it – to admit changes. In our dreams we also find that unlikely things tend to forge unnerving but meaningful connections with each other.385

Hejinian’s advocating of the principle of dreaming and its applicability to waking life is based upon the notion of the dream’s ability and tendency to make things strange or unusual and to evoke connections that previously have not been possible or even thought of in the light of full consciousness. This consideration of the dream’s ability to render

384 Hejinian, L., “The Dream Department”, English Language Notes: 2009: (47:1): 13 385 Ibid: 15 285 things strange intertwines with Hejinian’s engagement with the aesthetic focus of the

Russian Formalists and their notion of estrangement. Briony Fer explicates the notion of strangeness with reference to Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky386:

…in Shklovsky’s formulation, the whole point of art as a constructed object was that it did not allow easy recognition, and therein lay the pleasure of aesthetic experience. ‘The purpose of art’, he wrote, ‘is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar’ (‘Art as technique’, p.12). Shklovsky’s emphasis was on displacement, on the ‘making strange’ (ostranenie) or ‘defamiliarizing’ of normal perceptions. The function of art was the deflection of familiar perceptions, not their reflection.387

Hejinian appropriates Shklovsky’s concept of “ostranenie” in the development of a conceptualization of poetic language as a modality which challenges expository language and ideology and renders conventional perceptions anew. She argues that, “the function of art is to restore palpability to the world which habit and familiarity otherwise obscure; its task is to restore the liveliness to life. Thus is must make the familiar remarkable, noticeable again; it must render the familiar unfamiliar.”388 A parallel thus emerges between Hejinian’s conception of poetic language as a vehicle for rendering perception anew and the dream’s capacity for exposing a function, connectivity and activity in thought, inconceivable through the lens of the ideological and purpose driven status of day

386 Jackie Ochs’s Film, Letters Not About Love, based on Hejinian’s extensive correspondence with Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoschenko, in its structure and title draws upon Shklovsky’s 1923 novel, ZOO or Letters Not about Love. 387 Fer, B., “The language of construction and the construction of language” in Batchelor, D., Fer, B., Wood, P., Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art between the Wars: 122 – Shklovsky, V., “Art as technique” 1917 – in Lemon, L. T. / Reiss, M., J., (Trans. and Introd.), Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press: 1965: 12 ‐ cited in text

388 Hejinian, L., “Forms in Alterity: On Translation”, The Language of Inquiry: 301 286 time thought. Ultimately she extracts a notion of being active from the concept of dreams and urges its usage in regards to wakeful writing, acknowledging this in “The Dream

Department”: “…the dreaming in question is a wakeful one – not a muzzy dreaming then but vigorous invention and hard thinking, the kind of dreaming that sustains the creation of virtually all works of art…”389

Hejinian’s talk contrasts the two possible understandings of the word ‘dream’ in a discussion of the role of an academic department in regards to fostering and encouraging learning from students. This contrast emerges from an association between a perceived procedural understanding of the academic with the strange and indefinite essence of the dream, as it challenges the parameters of the role of the academic department. Hejinian selects an analogy with the dreams belonging to sleep and complicates the dreaming of aspiration which takes place in waking life by enhancing its potential capacities through the notions of strangeness and innovation belonging to the dreams of sleep. She utilizes the notion of the dream processes of sleep – the dream associated concepts which render the familiar as strange and open – and subsequently proposes new ground for learning and questioning. The significance of these concepts for Hejinian emerge in the talk as she argues that, “conscious life can’t flourish without diverse and difficult things to encounter and without both time to consider them and temporal models that can foster that consideration.”390 The dream model facilitates a means by which to create and engage with such diversity and difficulty as it encourages a new form of thinking; it proposes a shift in

389 Hejinian, L., “The Dream Department”: 11 390 Ibid:15 287 perceptions. The notion of the strange which emerges from a conceptualization of the dream enables a thinking that is predisposed to openness and originality through an acceptance and an embrace of the unfamiliar. What Hejinian encourages in her speech through an interweaving of the two seemingly separate definitions of the word ‘dream’, is the active process embodied metaphorically through the dreams of sleep in order to foster the other type of dream – that of action and aspiration.

“Dreaming Something Else”

Hejinian’s project of engaging with the notion of the dream as a model for the development of an active writing concerned with a heightened form of consciousness has permeated the fabric of her poetic endeavors from an early stage in her writing career. Her poetry has often been developed from correspondences and personal reflections that emerged from an engagement with dreaming. In her 2009 publication, “Dreaming

Something Else”, Hejinian reflects upon one such correspondence as she explicates her collaborative project with fellow poet Bob Perelman – a project that was based upon actual dreams and related dialogues the two had engaged in. Hejinian explains:

Our method would involve changing each other’s dreams. To begin, we would each record a dream and send it to the other, who would then enter the dream… We would each insert sentences, images, even whole paragraphs or new scenes, into the other’s 288

dream. We envisioned a sequence of these dreaming and intervening collaborations… The project was willfully perverse in conception. And its play – like so much play – was based on a fiction; an impossibility made possible fictively. It is only in fictions, or in dreams, that two people dream a single dream.391

This explication develops a significant scope of possibility for the genre of fictional writing as it parallels the concept of two people sharing a dream to impossibilities being made possible through fictions. The fictive in Hejinian’s explanation, as it evolves through a correspondence emerging from uncertain or indefinite places (Hejinian’s and Perelman’s dreams and imaginations) is situated in a form of reality hinged not upon the specificities of occurrence but rather on a form of interaction through the faculties of imagination. She further explains that while she did actually work from real dreams (“that was my dream.

Or, rather, that, written down as accurately as I could manage, is my record of what I remember of a dream — which was mine…”392) she remains unsure whether Perelman’s contributions to the poem “The Game” or “Fake Dream C” (differently titled in different publications) were really dreamt or a creative exercise on his part:

Bob has suggested that they were [fake]. He has suggested that he made them up. Perhaps he has even said so explicitly. But one could quibble over the meaning of the term “to dream.” My sense is that, far more than I, Bob can dream while awake. I’m not speaking of fantasy life but of combinatorial genius. Over the years, in work after work, he has gotten at some kind of truth in unlikeliness — which is more or less the same as finding the truth of unlikeness.393

391Hejinian, L., “Dreaming Something Else”, Jacket Magazine: 2010: (39:1): (no pagination online) ‐ World Wide Web ‐ http://www.jacketmagazine.com/39/perelman‐hejinian.shtml : last accessed ‐ 10/06/2010 392 Ibid. 393 Ibid. 289

This uncertainty, rendered unreliable through being uncertain, somewhat diverts focus from the content of the text and redirects it towards the exercise in textuality undertaken. It subsequently challenges the boundaries between reality and fiction. The possibilities of the text are rendered into being through the fictive content emergent from the domain of dreams and the imagined as Hejinian recognizes a form of wakeful dreaming in Perelman’s creativity in composing a fake dream. What is rendered central to the text is the sharing and merging of two sets of ideas into one textual framework as the reader reads for points of connectivity and association between themes, events and humorous discords throughout the individual excerpts from the two poets. The confused semi-fictional arena of dream content generates a real-life correspondence which challenges the notion of fiction and encourages an altered perception of reality – one open to the strangeness and absurdity of dreamed events. This conceptualization of the fictive as potentially real and vice versa, provides some insight into Hejinian’s use of the modality of the fairy tale – as a prominent feature throughout several of her works concerned with dreams, to be examined in greater depth in chapter five of this thesis) – as a thematically and culturally loaded fictive genre, charged with a capacity for realist reflection and expression.

The dream correspondences which constitute Hejinian’s literary undertaking with

Perelman span a time frame of ten years, having commenced sometime in the mid-nineteen nineties. This correspondence mirrors a similar process undertaken by Hejinian and fellow poet Kit Robinson several years earlier which resulted in an accumulation of material which was published as Hejinian’s 1992 text The Cell. These cumulative correspondences are an experiment in consciousness as the unconscious mind is brought into the literary 290 equation. Furthermore they signal Hejinian’s extensive consideration and engagement with the possibilities of the dream framework which has occupied a significant time span across her literary career from the early 1990s to present day.

The Cell

Lyn Hejinian’s exchanges of dreams with her contemporary Bob Perelman demonstrate the cumulative expanse of her significant interaction with the notions and processes of sleep and dreams. In February of 2004, Hejinian wrote the following to Perelman:

…I’m going to put in the mail to you the few pages of our “dreams” that I think we’ve finished. Shall we go on with this project? I’d very much like to; as I said at some earlier point, though it’s too soon to say what it’s all about, the project interests me hugely…394

This is indicative of a continuing project which has been published in short extracts in various publications and discussed recently at some length by Hejinian in Jacket

Magazine, however no known or explicitly discussed larger body of writing has emerged as a result of this correspondence. The known parameters of their collaborative writing project (that of exchanging and entering each others’ various recollections based around

394 Papers of L. Hejinian, Mandeville Special Collections Library, Geisel Library, University of California, San Diego, MS 74/ 92/17 – Letter to Bob Perelman (February 23, 2004) 291 dreams, either real or fabricated ones) do however resonate strongly with the exchanges

Hejinian engaged in with Kit Robinson during the late 1980s and early 1990s in the writing of her 1992 text The Cell.

In 1988 Hejinian wrote the following to Robinson:

Even before we decided to make a project together by writing about our dreams and their relationships to writing, I had assigned myself to the project of recording my dreams. I did so exactly as I undertake certain writing projects. In fact, it was (and is) a writing project, in which I wanted to explore, or simply experience, perception and description. The dream is a paradigmatic situation for perceiving and describing, because it is a confined narrative entity but it is utterly indiscrete… Reading your dream and comments, it occurred to me that the dream might also be of the written record of it. In a way, the writing replaces the dream. It’s now the writing that we think about.395

This correspondence eventuated in the publication of The Cell for Hejinian and further collaborative work with Robinson in the artist book titled Individuals.

Both of Hejinian’s collaborations with Robinson and with Perelman involved her recording her dreams as a formulaic approach to the writing of poetry. Hejinian recounted

Perelman’s supposedly fictional accounts of his own dreams in Jacket magazine, as discussed earlier in this chapter. These accounts by Hejinian demonstrate the expanse of her engagement with the oneiric and a similarity in the nature of the collaborative works she participated in writing with both Perelman and Robinson – both sets of collaborative

395 Papers of L. Hejinian: MS 74/ 49/ 16 – Letter to Kit Robinson (December 14, 1988) 292 works functioning as exercises and experiments with the processes of a writing tightly interwoven with consciousness.

Kate Fagan argues that:

The Cell employs a serial, cellular form to scrutinize phenomenological perception and chart the “results.” Grounded in repetition, Hejinian’s compositional technique – “the experimental method” – makes a series of prolonged inquires into links existing between everyday consciousness and language, or sense and description. 396

It is most definitely a fore-grounded concern of Hejinian’s to experiment with the nature of epistemology and question the conscious mind and the associations of language in the construction of what constitutes existence. I argue for an extension of this inquiry with consideration of the time span between the two collaborative ventures of Hejinian’s, one having commenced in 1988 and the other, very similar in its approach, still having been in the process of construction sixteen years later in 2004. This is evidenced in Hejinian’s archived letters and was and perhaps still is of central concern as is illustrated by

Hejinian’s “Dreaming Something Else” contribution to Jacket Magazine in 2010. In total, the span of inquiry and experimentation with the elements of sleep and dreams in

Hejinian’s published work, firstly with Robinson and later with Perelman, constitute approximately twenty years of her writing career and highlight what I argue to be a key motivating force of Hejinian’s overall writing oeuvre both stylistically and conceptually.

396 Fagan, K., “‘Constantly I write this happily’: Encountering Lyn Hejinian”: 249

293

What is the appeal of the dream for Hejinian beyond the writing problematic that dreams and the recording of dreams evoke? The first answer to this question is located in

Hejinian’s approach to language as a medium of representation that moves beyond words on a page, seeping into a multitude of other domains, the most significant of which is that of the visual image.

Hejinian’s experimentation with the visual is made evident very early in her writing career, perhaps most explicitly in her 1970 text The Grreat Adventure. A typescript of the text is available in Hejinian’s archive at UCSD397 which features a paste-up of various visual features within the text before being printed. These features include the pasting in of various photographs, medical diagrams, cut-outs from magazines and comic strips, stamp imprints and various other printing techniques as well as drawings with texta. This particular text very openly and evidently engages with the unifying element of writing and the effects on individual and collective consciousness as Hejinian and her brother Doug

Hall conduct a series of experiments by launching a questionnaire attached to a balloon and releasing that balloon into the atmosphere with the hope of receiving some responses from wherever the balloons may have landed. The various responses, hand-written, are collated and included as a prominent feature of The Grreat Adventure. On an envelope from a folder within the same box in the archive, Hejinian has written the following notes:

Concerning the visual in literature Concerning the process of message 1 the project itself 2 updating of material biographical

397Papers of L. Hejinian: MS 74/ 40/ 7 ‐ (The Grreat Adventure 1970 – paste‐up) 294

3 essay on the (each of) meaning 4 The documents artist as traveler art as a perpetual travelling – verb a process piece, thus is itself not only About (if anything is about anything) but is itself the verb, in action.398

These rough notes articulate an emergent association between the visual, the written and the dreamt in Hejinian’s work. The notes also indicate a significant concern with the visual within literature. Hejinian’s engagement with the processes of visuality and the dream are further integrated in the following extracts from pages eleven through to thirteen of The

Cell:

Eyeball/to /eyeball, a small spot, and its temporary moment/to moment hoarding stasis…

Dream Its theory is good observation but poor prediction…

Outdoors the clouds pour shape and stability into myopic interstices

These Those – between seeing and believing Individualism inspires an individual which disbelieves

Writing, new shivers roll through the mental atmosphere Flopping The hot flotsam of scarlet

398 Ibid: (The Grreat Adventure envelope with holograph notes 1970) 295

nature conceding the falling backward over an apple tree The eye is like a shed of staves A certainty…399

These extracts of text all encourage a visualization that is belonging to the faculty of sleep.

The imagery evoked features ruptures and interruptions and lacks a sense of definitive clarity. The eye is associated with a “shed of staves” which within the reader’s imagination encourages the sighting of a collection of musical notes – strongly contrasted visually as black elements on a white page.

The outdoor clouds are described as “pouring shape” into myopic gaps. This visualization creates a series of juxtapositions between the images and ideas of sky and cloud, blue and white, near and far, and empty and full. The ephemeral substance of clouds which appears to be ever-shifting and unstable is given an active and solid role in filling and providing shape to what Hejinian terms “interstices.” All of these visualizations are associated with the dream process – as a process geared for “observation” – and are also further equated with the physical body of the eye. This listing of ephemeral imagery echoes Freud’s The

Interpretation of Dreams in which he writes:

399 Hejinian, L., The Cell, Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press: 1992: 11‐13 400 Freud, S., The Interpretation of Dreams: 49 296

Hejinian’s poetry evokes a type of reading similar in format to Freud’s concept of the thought processes of dreams. Freud’s description that dreams “think… in images…”401 is mirrored by Hejinian’s visually loaded language written in a highly imagist (both verbally and visually) format. Although The Cell, like many of her other poetic works, does not engage the faculty of sight in an immediate sense, it does so in a secondary way by calling upon the eye of the imagination to draw upon the collected imagery stored in the reader’s memory.

Freud further argues, regarding the image in dreams, that:

… the truth is almost always obscured by the fact that when we recall dreams of this kind to our memory we almost always – unintentionally and without noticing the fact – fill in the gaps in dream images. It is seldom or never that a coherent dream was in fact as coherent as it seems to us in memory.402

This argument not only mirrors the visual juxtapositions of gaps that Hejinian refers to in describing the clouds and the “interstices” that they pour shape into within the body of the poetic text but is echoed by Hejinian’s description of her writing in a letter to her daughter

Anna:

I’d rather be left out of my writing. Because it is the writing itself that fascinates me – what language is, how words interlock with other words, how meanings develop, shift, disappear, emerge again, weaken or grow strong… 403

401 Ibid. 402 Ibid: 46 403 Papers of L. Hejinian: MS 74/ 20/ 19 – Letter to Anna Hejinian (October 18, 1985) 297

The visual image, brought to life and integrated with language in the process of recording a dream and in writing in general, enables a form of liveliness and activity within language.

This liveliness in language is developed further in Hejinian’s discussion of the process of recording dreams in her essay “Strangeness”: “The very writing down of a dream seems to be the act of discovering it (one “remembers” more and more as one writes until one wonders it’s the writing itself that “dreams”) but it is also and problematically the act of interpreting it.”404

The centralization of the visual image throughout Hejinian’s work concerned with dreams and writing at night explicates the writing/making of the artist-book text Individuals which also emerges from Hejinian’s and Robinson’s correspondence on dreams.

Individuals

Engaging in the writing/making of a collaborative text, Hejinian foregrounds conversation as a prominent activity that conceptualizes the phenomenon of existence as a co-operative phenomenon as she reinforces the interactive nexus between reader and writer through the

404 Hejinian, L., “Strangeness”, The Language of Inquiry: 33 298 collaborative engagement with another poet (Kit Robinson). Individuals was published in

1986 as a product of the same collaborative process which cultivated the writing of

Hejinian’s The Cell and highlights, on a more immediate level, the experiential element with which Hejinian engenders a female mode of writing. The dual authorship and the extensive conversation that takes places between the covers of Individuals reinforces the

Arendtian sentiment that, “no human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature’s wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.”405 This understanding of one person’s existence being inevitably dependent upon the existence of others and impossible without the confirmation of and conversation with others is one that fuels Hejinian’s writing and one that brings to the fore the function of a writing that is ever-current and evolving.

The second element which renders Individuals a text focused upon the nature of experience

(a practice which characterizes Hejinian’s project of developing a speaking female subject) is the involvement of various other mediums in the production of the text. These mediums expand the vocabulary of the language of the published book and assist in the creation of an active and interactive reading process. This reading of Individuals is not in any way an attempt to disregard Robinson’s contribution to the writing as a male poet. Rather it recognizes Hejinian’s role in constructing a text strongly comparable with many of her other works of poetry and publishing ventures as a highly imagist, tactile and involving work. These textual facets within Hejinian’s work emerge from the faculty of dreams to colour the vocabulary with which she constructs a female form of language.

405 Arendt, H., The Human Condition: 22 299

Individuals was published in an edition of one hundred and fifty using an accordion-like structure of binding – a variation of one developed and taught by Hedi Kyle which uses the specialty papers of Fuji-Unryu, Fabriano Ingres and Rives. The book was designed and produced by Charles Alexander and Jennifer Beigel and not by Hejinian and Robinson themselves however, the decision to publish their poems in this format is signal enough of the significance of the experiential within the text – an element enhanced by the visual and tactile functions of the unusual binding and the paper stock of the pages of the book.

The ironic title of the text unifies the individual poems of Hejinian and Robinson and presents them in a conversational layout as nearly every poem occupies half a page and is initialed by the poet, mimicking the process of letter exchange the two poets undertook in the conceptual stages of their project. The book itself is subdivided horizontally in halves by pieces of black paper that separate the upper and lower halves of the individual pages, making in effect three smaller pages to every one standard page. This creates a flickering effect reminiscent of early childhood books whereby the various elements on different pages are interchangeable to enable the creation, by the child reader, of a multitude of differing images. The spine of the book being accordion like, expands to further enhance the separateness and simultaneous inter-connectedness and interchangeability of the textual elements of the poems. What this creates is comparable to the navel of Freud’s dream analysis – an intersection point within the dream that is indecipherable. Freud argues that:

There is often a passage in even the most thoroughly interpreted dream which has to be left obscure; this is because we become aware during the work of interpretation that at that point there is a tangle of dream-thoughts which cannot be unraveled and which moreover adds nothing to our 300

knowledge of the content of the dream. This is the dream’s navel, the spot where it reaches down into the unknown… 406

A female domain emerges from this dream-navel site of the unknown – the site of La

Faustienne – seemingly silent but in its silence and incomprehensibility, open to limitless knowledge and possibilities. The black pieces of paper that feature throughout the middle of all the pages of the book much like the alternate black pages within The Lake, further mimic and articulate this notion of silence in executing the function of pause. The reader is encouraged to pause and reflect before proceeding to read the lower half of the page and is subsequently made aware, through the tactile separation between the individual elements of the page, that the segments of the text are significant in their own right and in unison.

The individuated significance of these segments resonates with Hejinian’s treatment of the female voice as being powerful in simply being and knowing without the definitive desirous quest for logic, sequence or causality.

An examination of the following excerpts from the text – two halves of the same page featuring two separate poems by Hejinian – demonstrates how the content of the second poem, though relatable to the first, is not essential to the understanding and meaning that the reader can draw from the first and vice versa. This potential for interchangeability between excerpts (one excerpt can be read in conversation with any other in the book due to the mid-section break-up of the pages) highlights the openness of the text and foregrounds conversation in the structuring of a non-definitive form of knowledge.

406 Freud, S., The Interpretation of Dreams: 525 301

1: Dreams are perfect – it’s illogical to think there could be mistakes anywhere in them 2: Nothing intended 1: But it’s Natural that dreams don’t change enough -so don’t repeat them to other people 2: Not unless you could say the psyche itself is a mistake 1: I posed a question and the psyche popped up 2: Not something one would naturally name Patricia or Josh 1: Some nights I experience very embarrassing assimilations 2: Wide and near, bare and far 1: There’s entertainment in dreams and erudition in reality 2: Strongly competitive urges 1: Immutable information is boring 2: Frustration junkies – they can’t tell a dream from reality

LH 11-4

Government is dizzy without capitals to name More and more, connection takes space and correction Every place the imagination occurs replace it with the word “language” which works It doesn’t drone with anarchy To change the city we must dictate predictions Entire nerves What do you suspect The imagination is congested by the sex

LH 11-7407

The first poem in this section of the text, separated from the second by the black paper, quite explicitly addresses the notion of dreams and the means by which they make

407 Hejinian, L. / Robinson, K., Individuals, Tucson: Chax Press: 1986 (no pagination) – Note: Not a direct image from original text – Page layout is replicated/simulated to give an idea of the text’s format/structure, of three loose segments/papers (two featuring poems and one ‐ the black sheet of paper inbetween them) bound together only by the book’s spine located at the left hand side of the text. 302 themselves manifest. The poem seeks to establish juxtaposition between reality and dream.

The second poem on the page does not address dreams as a subject through any definitive term. Rather, it speaks of the phenomenon of imagination and the connections and subsequent corrections that take place through the processes of the creative mind. The two poems do not feature any explicit combining textual element yet if the reader elects to, he/she is at liberty to expand his/her interpretation to include the border of the black paper as a present but easily removed (due to the cut-up structure of the page) border. The removal of the border would enable an associative reading between the first and second poems. The first poem’s address of the concept of the dream as one that is “perfect” by virtue of being generally incapable of being forcefully changed, can be placed in comparison with the second poem’s treatment of the notion of change and its address of the concept of the imagination as a governing agent possessing the ultimate capabilities of enforcing and implementing change both through the faculty of the waking mind and in the metaphorical selections of the night-time dream language. In addition to these interpretations, an innumerable number of others might emerge as a result of the individuality and difference in readers who might encounter the text.

As Hannah Arendt argues: “plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.”408 Through a fragmented approach to writing which is fueled by an examination of the phenomenon of dreams, Hejinian engages in the creation of an active female language that is capable of encompassing such difference and harnessing the

408 Arendt, H., The Human Condition: 8 303 shifts and drifts in interpretation and understanding necessary for a more open form of writing, representation and reading.

Through Hejinian’s published material concerned with the notion of dreams there emerges a logic geared to develop of a different form of knowledge; a thinking driven by a desire to locate a female subjectivity. Hejinian’s quest for such logic is hinged upon epistemological and philosophical inquiries into the strange and uncanny realm of the, traditionally conceived of as silent and imagistic, space of the dream and upon the development of analogous associations between such a site and the space of the female subject in literary representation. This analogy enables the conception of an active language which renders possible the representation of the previously silenced, inconceivable or even fictive. The final chapter of this thesis will examine how Hejinian’s development of this active language exists and evolves through a network of woven threads throughout her unpublished as well as published works of poetry.

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Dreams – Visual Language – Female Knowledge: Reading between Hejinian’s published and unpublished work on Dreams

Chapter Five

…it is true that the history of science is a history of attempts to “see” the invisible, and as soon as the language in which this is expressed becomes metaphoric, so that we say, for example, that science attempts “to probe nature’s secrets,” it is clear that the possessor and keeper of the secret is, at least, implicitly, female.409

– Lyn Hejinian

The dream process which permeates much of Hejinian’s poetic and critical endeavors threads an intricate and complicated line between her published and unpublished writing.

The notion of the dream constitutes for Hejinian an active border between the sleeping and awake person and between their levels of consciousness. Significant comparisons can be drawn between her conceptualization of the liminal situation of dreams and the terrain of in-betweeness illustrated throughout her wider body of writing. As I have argued throughout the body of this thesis but most specifically in chapter one, Hejinian’s poetic practice functions amidst a plethora of alternative genres, methods and mediums of representation. She describes the dream as “an active, even busy, border between the sleeping person and that same person awake,” “not a place but a dynamic –help[ing] to locate the border in the middle of things… [and] highlight[ing] the centrality of the

409 Hejinian, L., “La Faustienne”, The Language of Inquiry: 245 305 border…”410 It has proven a valuable process to trace Hejinian’s published and unpublished writing on dreams and to explore its conceptual function within a cumulative poetry that comes to comprise a new form of knowledge – one that attempts to locate the literary voice of the female subject. This chapter will build upon the preceding chapter to examine various points of connectivity between Hejinian’s published and unpublished writing on dreams and writing at night in order to demonstrate further the association between the visual, the material and the phenomenon of the dream in her representation of the female subject.

Lyn Hejinian’s personal correspondence, typescripts, manuscripts, drafts, notebooks, poetry recordings and other materials and documents housed at the University of

California in San Diego formulate what she considers to be a viable freestanding genre within its own right – the personal archive. Hejinian expresses this in an interview with

Dodie Bellamy, stating that, “I love to write letters. I love to receive them… My contemporaries and I have always insisted that our poetry is grounded in the world – and that’s really a place where the grounding can begin, the first workings out in stages of ideas, with the relationship of ideas to other things in life preserved.”411 She further affirms this sentiment in her statement that, “…I would like to see archived materials taken really seriously as a genre.”412 It is in consideration of and owing to Hejinian’s high regard for the significance of the archive as a literary genre that the inquiry into the presence of the notion of the dream throughout her archived materials requires more significant attention.

410 Hejinian, L., “Barbarism”, The Language of Inquiry: 327 411 Hejinian, L., in interview with Bellamy, D., “The Eternal Repository”:19 412 Ibid: 24 306

Reading through the materials comprising Hejinian’s archive formulates a reading experience comparative with that of reading her personal autobiography My Life. Though the two bodies of text (the published My Life and Hejinian’s personal archive) are physically significantly different, as the 2002 publication of My Life, being comprised of a total of one hundred and sixty five roughly A6 size pages, bears little in common with the more than one hundred archive boxes, books, recordings and folios stored within the

UCSD archive, the reader processes the two bodies of writing in a similar way, that is to say, selectively. There is no directive instruction for the reader to read either textual body chronologically or in any other particular order for the writing to be effective.

Hejinian is a prolific letter writer, exchanging letters with a vast number of correspondents.

Her archived letters feature exchanges ranging from the mere academic student inquiry to the most substantial exchange of writing, Hejinian’s correspondence with her mother

Carolyn Andrews which spans across a total of nineteen archived folders. Reading the entire contents of Hejinian’s personal archive would require an immense amount of time hence the reader is most likely to enter the archive on a quest to locate the materials which would be relevant to his/her specific inquiries. This individuated and selective reading of archives is conceptualized by Ann Vickery who argues that, “events from the real are taken up and translated through an individual’s imaginary [signaling that]… the genealogist must then negotiate these partial, contradictory, and shifting constructions of poetic community.”413 Vickery here advocates the notion that the deciphering process of archived materials is highly dependent upon the researching individual’s imagination and

413 Vickery, A., Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing: 19 307 interpretation of various events and circumstances, documented as they have been by the person archived. Consequently, even if the researcher was to read through the entirety of the archive, their interpretation and understanding of the materials read would always inevitably be partial and hinged, at least partially, upon the reader’s imaginative faculties.

The reader can best understand Hejinian’s writing both archived and within My Life, through a personal frame of reference. Whilst he/she encounters what in fact constitutes the life of Lyn Hejinian, their first and most prominent point of entry into both bodies of text is through their own lens of interest. My Life encourages this personalized reading format evoked within the archive, predominantly through its sheer volume of word and sentence material and through its paratactical and non-definitive language. Lines such as “from here each day seems like a little boat and all the days are swept and tilted back and forth across an immense and distant bay of blue, gray green” exemplify a language highly dependent on the reader’s personal frame of reference. Their meaning, not explicitly and directly narrated, remains contingent upon the reader’s context and referential association. This does not serve to discredit the historical significance of Hejinian’s archive. Rather it is intended to reiterate that the reading of all writing and the nature of existence is co- dependent on innumerable contributing factors that constitute the moment of writing and reading.

It is because of this notion of the ‘contingent’ that Hejinian’s writing is so well suited to an analogy with dreams. As dreams occur, often in strange circumstances with equally strange occurrences with some reference to one’s life, so Hejinian’s writing progresses, through a seemingly abstract, though not random, method which in its multiplicity and intense 308 sporadic description constitutes a creative formula. This formula communicates with the reader, as dreams do with the dreamer, messages of potential significance which emerge through multiple possibilities of associations. Michael Michael presents an argument for the validity of Freud’s methods for dream interpretation which I argue can be utilized as an approach to reading Hejinian’s abstract and voluminous bodies of work. Michael argues that:

… if Freud applied his method rigorously, then his interpretations may be justified as inferences to the best explanation. A rigorous application of the method will be one where the associations are drawn freely by the dreamer and not suggested by the analyst. Given this, there are a number of factors that increase the epistemological validity of the interpretation: (i) how striking the connections are: the more striking, the more likely the interpretation; (ii) the number of elements unified by a particular association: the more elements unified, the more likely the interpretation; (iii) the number of links in the chain of associations: the smaller the chain the more likely the interpretation.414

Reading for the associations within Hejinian’s work through textual elements such as, for example, repetition as in the frequently used “a pause, a rose, something on paper” in My

Life, through Michaels’s proposition of the significance of association in Freudian dream analysis, encourages the reader to detect and collect such associative links. The reading of

Hejinian’s poetry as well as her archived material, through this associative framework, takes on the shape of Freud’s model for dream interpretation as described and conceptualized by Michael. This chapter traces the striking associations within Hejinian’s work concerned with dreams with the aim of illustrating, the emergence of a female rhetoric.

414 Michael, M., “On the validity of Freud’s dream interpretations”, Science Direct: 2008: 39: 58 309

Sleeps: An Arterial River

In “Strangeness” Hejinian’s interest in the realm of dreams is made manifest as the essay features several of her dream recollections. She explores these dreams primarily for the purpose of monitoring the nature of the language and structure in which she recollects their content and/or narrative. The primary focus of this essay is the language and the predominantly descriptive structuring dynamics which emerge through the dream recollection process. This focus explores a new ethics of writing and perception. Similarly in “La Faustienne”, Hejinian subtly displays an interest the idea of dreams by developing a female character to correspond to that of the male Faust (conceptualized throughout the essay as the seeker of knowledge). As language is the central focus of “Strangeness” so

“the female” is to “La Faustienne”; both essays signal a powerful interest in the terrain of dreams but neither explicitly manifest it. In the version of “La Faustienne” published in

The Language of Inquiry Hejinian explains her motivation for writing a book based upon the concepts of the essay. The title of the book is The Book of a Thousand Eyes which was published in April of this year (2012), eighteen years after “La Faustienne” was first delivered as a talk at Temple University, Philadelphia in March 1994. Hejinian describes her inspiration as follows:

310

day and out of all data assemble meaning. The writing would do so – assemble (a Faustian project) and, in its way, make knowledge (the work of La Faustienne).415

Here Hejinian establishes an inherent connection between her interest in the language of night and an understanding and conceptualization of being ‘female’. Though Hejinian’s concerns with both the language of night or of dreams and with feminisms has never been definitively explicated and perhaps this is owing to the prevalence of contingency throughout Hejinian’s poetic and overall writing project, her association with both concepts simmers beneath the surface of all of her work. Regardless, an explicit alignment with or orientation in terms of either has never emerged with specific articulation.

Hejinian’s argument in “La Faustienne” indicates that for her the male project as it has emerged in the greater body of Western knowledge is one of seeking and assembling meaning. Through identification with postmodern thought and its rejection of binarisms,

Hejinian locates the female project or the role of the female as it has emerged throughout the history of Western thought as being that of embodying knowledge itself.

The Book of a Thousand Eyes was preceded by a small book, printed in limited editions with hard covers on high quality paper and printing techniques, titled The Little Book of a

Thousand Eyes. The Little Book is not widely circulated and like a vast majority of

Hejinian projects is only known to few. Hejinian on several occasions expresses discontent with literary commodification. In interview with Larry McCaffery and Brian McHale when questioned about the perpetually incomplete state of My Life, Hejinian states, “… I don’t

415 Hejinian, L., “La Faustienne”, The Language of Inquiry: 249‐250 311 like commodification of texts – certainly not commodification into a finished product of something called “My Life,” to be concluded when I’m still alive!”416 The limited circulation and theoretically incomplete status of Hejinian’s works suggest a reading of

Hejinian’s writing project broadly as simultaneous and synonymous with her life.

The majority of Hejinian’s published works concerned with dreams address the concept of the dream somewhat peripherally. Their central focus rests upon the structural metaphors drawn from dreams which Hejinian applies to her philosophically driven writing.

However, through a reading of Hejinian’s archived letters, typescripts, notebooks and numerous other materials located at the UCSD Mandeville Special Collections Library, a significantly different scenario emerges. In folder 6 of box 113 in the archive, dated

February 1992 – December 1992, are numerous dream recollections by Hejinian. On

August 21st 1992 Hejinian writes, “Sleeps proceeds. I can’t find the right title for it and I wonder if it will become sleeps by default. In real life, I find myself sleeping deeply, as if to satisfy some longing which waking life either denies or creates.”417 On November 19th she writes, “Working on sleeps” – the one numbered at the moment 98. I’m uncertain of this project. All but 5 or 6 of the first 98 may be very poor. But maybe those were necessary as a prelude to the eventual 1001.”418 Hejinian’s intention to create a work in correspondence and homage to The Thousand and One Nights which she refers to in “La

Faustienne” as being “the greatest of all night works… told by a woman to postpone her

416 McCaffery, L. / McHale, B., “A Local Strangeness: An Interview with Lyn Hejinian in Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors: 141 417 Papers of L. Hejinian: MS 74/ 113/ 6 (August 21st, 1992) 418 Ibid: (November 19th, 1992) 312 death by holding a man in narrative suspense”419 and which would be comprised by one thousand and one sections in total, is made clear. Hejinian had published over a course of many years, short excerpts from Sleeps in various journals including Anthol, Volt, Southern

Review and Hot Bird and only in April of 2012 did a ‘complete’ version of this work emerge as The Book of a Thousand Eyes. This development process of a work over many years further attests to a conceptualization of Hejinian’s entire body of works and archives as a documentation of her life in writing – as an ongoing autobiographical work at odds with a notion of completion and simultaneously a finished product. Hejinian’s motivation behind the work and her methodology are also explicated in an interview with Alison

Georgeson:

I’m currently working on a big new project, tentatively called Sleeps. It was inspired in part by Edward Young’s anguished, insomniac meditation, Night Thoughts, but more by The Arabian Nights. I had been thinking, in so much of my other work, about consciousness – about waking thought, living undertaken with eyes open, and I wanted suddenly to enter the night realm – the dark, blindness, sleep… Where days are experiential (full of event, acquiring information), nights are analytic. Nights process the materials acquired by day, endless shaping and reshaping knowledge, making knowledge… In the end I hope the work will have 1001 sections, representing many approaches to information, memory, experience, thought.420

This interview took place two years following the journal entries previously cited. Though this may seem a significant amount of time, I argue that the Sleeps project only recently having emerged as a complete published work, in fact spans a far wider arterial network

419 Hejinian, L., “La Faustienne”, The Language of Inquiry: 251 420 Georgeson, A., “Language Poetry: An Interview with Lyn Hejinian”, Southern Review: Literary and Interdisciplinary Essays: September 1994: (27:3): 289 313 that includes a notable number of Hejinian’s published works of poetry. Hejinian also describes her Sleeps project in 1996 in an interview with McHale and McCaffery, stating:

I just started a new work now called Sleeps that’s inspired by The Thousand and One Nights, and I want there to be a thousand and one poems with each of the poems being different from each other in the way that the tales are different… I just started – I’m on number one – but I figure it’s going to take twenty years, if I write one poem a week, which would be really a lot of writing. Isn’t that right, twenty years, a thousand and one week?421

The Sleeps project as is indicated in interviews with Hejinian, flows both conceptually and through repetition of various excerpts, structure and characters, throughout the bodies of several of Hejinian’s published works of poetry. This repetition signals a more prolific imbedding of the concepts of dreams and a female night-time language throughout

Hejinian’s writing than what is made most explicit throughout her few published essays on the topic and the individual and (until this year) unpublished work of Sleeps. The most prominent and recognisable amongst these are the texts The Little Book of a Thousand

Eyes, The Traveler, The Hill and The Hill, and A Border Comedy. All three of these works feature textual elements that can also be found in Hejinian’s typescript held at the UCSD archive titled and often referred to as Sleeps. Tracing these elements provides an account of how an active female gendered concept of knowledge emerges throughout Hejinian’s work through an interweaving with notions of visuality and a conceptualization of a night- time language.

421 Hejinian L, in McCaffery, L./ McHale, B., Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors: 142 314

Visuality – Seeing at Night

The Little Book of a Thousand Eyes422 as indicated in the title of the text bears the most easily deciphered connection to the work Sleeps (now The Book of a Thousand Eyes) for which Hejinian drew inspiration from The Thousand and One Nights.423 The most explicit association between the two texts exists in the numerical ‘thousand’ within the texts’ titles.

A less obvious association is located in the word ‘eyes’ which bears an inexplicit reference to the images of nights and sleep when the most prominent physical distinction between what occurs during day time and what occurs at night is enacted through the process of closing one’s eyes. The title does not clarify for the reader whether the work will specifically engage with writing conceived of during the night or explicitly dreamt. Rather, it directs attention towards the idea of sight and of knowledge through the centralization of the concept of the eye – a key Surrealist and Freudian motif. For Freud the loss of sight signaled a form of castration, a form of emasculation which might indicate partially

Hejinian’s choice of the motif to represent an alternatively female sensibility. More relevant to Hejinian’s project of creating a new form of knowledge which she characterizes as “… “Scheherazadian” knowledge – knowledge with creative and redemptive power…”424 is the Surrealist or perhaps more accurately, Dali-esque, assimilation of the image of the eye into his work. In his commentary on the 1997 “Dali & Film” exhibition curated by a group directed by Mathew Gale, Alexandre Werneck observes that:

422 From here on in will be referred to as The Little Book 423 Hejinian L, in McCaffery, L./ McHale, B., Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors: 142 424 Hejinian, L., “La Faustienne”, The Language of Inquiry: 233 315

Perhaps the most interesting suggestion made by the exhibit is that to create his apparitions, Dalí placed observation points throughout his works. Every foreign object works as a magnet to draw the eye, a pointer toward new understanding. Indeed, apparitions appear throughout the exhibit. Each apparition, each alien entity pervading an image, leads to a peculiar dialogue between the eye and what it sees.425

The presence of the eye that serves as a pointer to new understanding in Dali’s work is analogous to Hejinian’s concept of new knowledge which emerges through her essays

“Strangeness” and “La Faustienne”. The prominent visuality present within Hejinian’s writing enables as a plausible claim the idea that the motif of the eye, emergent both visually and thematically throughout her work, also signals towards this notion of a new knowledge.

What emerges during the night in Hejinian’s attempt to create a body of knowledge to be understood as a recognisably female project through her text initially titled Sleeps is a significantly visual type of language which emerges in The Little Book. The Little Book was printed at Kavayantra Press and The Harry Smith Print Shop and The Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado in a limited edition of fifty copies. As the opening page of the text explains:

This book was produced entirely by hand: all text was hand-set, printed letterpress, and handwritten by Brad O’Sullivan. The cover illustration was converted into metal plates and printed letterpress in three stages. The text paper is Frankfurt Cream, the end sheets are Ingres Antique, and the types are Goudy Old Style and Goudy Italic with Goudy Open display. The trade paper editions are bound with

425Werneck, A., “The Apparitions of a Surrealist Eye: Dali and Film”, Studio International ‐ World Wide Web ‐ http://www.studio‐international.co.uk/reports/dali.asp: 17/12/2007: last accessed ‐ 22/05/2012 316

Ingres Antique wrappers; the hardcover editions are covered in Cialinen and Arches text.426

In the opening pages of the text the reader is also informed that fifteen of the total fifty books are bound in boards, are signed and numbered and include a holograph poem by the author. It is evident that The Little Book was published with meticulous attention to detail.

The cover drawing by Jesse Paul Miller, featured within a square border and centrally positioned on the cover of The Little Book, consists of a spread of small yellow coloured eyes positioned across a white page. In addition to featuring a specially designed cover art piece to emphasize the faculty of sight, the content of the work emphasizes the significance of the ability to see and through seeing, to know. The tactility and visuality made prevalent through the development of The Little Book as an artist-book in combination with

Hejinian’s appropriation of the eye motif, direct the reader’s attention to a strange and imagistic form of reading, similar to the reading/ recording of a dream. This visuality emergent through a type of seeing that occurs through the darkness of night as in dreams is mirrored in the poetic content of the text. An example of an intertwining of the visual and the dream is featured in the following excerpt from The Little Book.

426 Hejinian, L., The Little Book of a Thousand Eyes, Boulder, Colorado: Smoke Proof Press: 1996: Opening page 317

427

Hejinian commences this page with a notion of dream memory, conceptualizing the recollection of the dream as “speaking, as a fortune-teller might, with a fortune teller’s hindsight.” A notion emerges from this line of speaking with the hindsight of already possessed knowledge. This sense of speaking from a place of already existent knowledge is reminiscent of Hejinian’s La Faustienne. The association of the dream memory to a sense of consciousness and pre-existent knowledge in correlation with Hejinian’s theorizing of “La Faustienne” testifies to the development of a female concept of language and representation which is prevalent throughout Hejinian’s writing career but in particular

427 Ibid: (no pagination) 318 throughout the series of works addressed in this chapter which flow, through textual association, into the larger stream of writing comprising the Sleeps typescript. In the concluding paragraphs of poetry cited from The Little Book the lines, “We can’t predict if we don’t watch – Watching makes what comes to be watched”, highlight the faculty of sight evoked earlier through the imagery of the eye and the visual essence of The Little

Book as an artist-book. The eye motif is the watchful tool which in effect “make[s]” that which comes to be “watched” – knowledge with “…creative and redemptive power.”428

Johanna Drucker considers the capabilities of the artist-book arguing that:

No single encounter with a successful book closes off its polyvalent possibilities. The sense of limit which an edge, binding, and spine provide is countered by the infinite space of the page and opening, capable of drawing the reader inward in an endlessly expanding experience and association.429

Through a careful interweaving of the visuality and physicality of the text’s exterior and the poetic of The Little Book’s interior, Hejinian executes what she conceptualizes as the creative and generative knowledge of “La Faustienne”, thereby enacting what Drucker theorizes as the expansive and associative experience of the well integrated relationship of the text’s interior and exterior within the successful artist-book.

428 Hejinian, L., “La Faustienne”, The Language of Inquiry: 233 429 Drucker, J., The Century of Artists’ Books: 359 319

Recuperating the Silenced Female Voice – Morality and Fairy Tales

In addition to the significant role occupied by the materiality of the artist-book genre as a medium of multimodal textual integration which expands textual capacity for representation and meaning, Hejinian seeks to recuperate a speaking female subject through an inter-textual interweaving of the fairytale genre throughout the fabric of her night-time works. The Little Book furthermore, together with several of Hejinian’s other artist-book like works, bears a physical similarity to a children’s fairy tale book with its hard covers and aesthetic detailing. However, the use of this genre directs the reader’s attention to the paradox of silence within the phenomenon of the fairy tale and its circulation, as conceptualized by Marina Warner:

The equation of silence with virtue, of forbearance with femininity, does not only hold up an entrancing ideal of loving self-abnegation, harmony and wisdom… It is a paradox frequently encountered in any account of women’s education that the very women who pass on the legacy are transgressing against the burden of its lessons as they do so; that they are flouting, in the act of speaking and teaching, the strictures on female authority they impart: women narrators, extolling the magic silence of the heroic sister in ‘The Twelve Brothers’, are speaking themselves, breaking the silence, telling the story.430

In her use of the fairy tale genre throughout her night-time works, Hejinian exposes this paradox and engages with it for the purposes of articulating a female silence (especially favored in a significant number of tales as signifying virtue) and announces this silence as inadvertently seeping between the crevices of storytelling to exist not as silence but by definition, as a form of knowledge, wisdom and truth. The genre of the fairy tale is a

430 Warner, M., From The Beast to the Blonde: 394 320 problematic one and features as a topic for debate across various fields of inquiry.

However, as children’s literature critics Nodelman and Reimer explain in The Pleasures of

Children’s Literature:

Despite the obvious tendencies of fairy tales toward wish fulfillment, most interpreters of fairy tales suggest that they do, in fact, represent the “truth,” that the fantasy of the tales is a symbolic depiction of the way things actually are. In awakening a sense of wonder, fairy tales teach their audiences to appreciate the mystery of the real world.431

The truth that Nodelman and Reimer address is in fact the mystery of the real world. In terms of Hejinian’s poetry, this mystery is located in the realm of experience and would best be termed in this context, ‘inquiry’. The fairy tale according to Nodelman and Reimer fosters readers’ appreciation of the seemingly inexplicable but nevertheless, real occurrences, presences or experiences in the world that urge and often instigate a process of inquiry. It is this procedure of inquiry which constitutes Hejinian’s approach to the notion of night literature in her attempt to create a female writing through an assemblage of knowledge. This knowledge is collected through mediation between night-time musing, dreams and the processes of writing poetry.

In her attempt to develop and personify this particular type of knowledge as female with the desire to recuperate a speaking female subject, Hejinian engages with a simultaneous embracing and challenging of the notion of the silenced woman. A central theme and interweaving thread which correlates the texts associated with Sleeps throughout this

431 Nodelman, P. / Reimer, M., The Pleasures of Children’s Literature (3rd Edition): United States of America: Allyn and Bacon: 317 321 chapter is that of the fairy tale. In all of the associated texts Hejinian experiments with the concept of the silent female as a prominent trend in a significant number of stories and fairy tales. Hejinian has possibly borrowed from Freud’s negotiation of this subject of the silenced female character in fairy tales, examined in his essay “The Theme of the Three

Caskets”. Freud’s analysis of several popular tales explicates and demonstrates this prevalence of a trend of silent female characters and argues that this silence is as a form of inexorable death – characterized by an infinite knowledge or wisdom. Proceeding from a retelling and examination of several Grimm fairy tales as well as ancient Greek stories and

Shakespearian tales such as King Lear, Freud argues that:

It would certainly be possible to collect further evidence from fairy tales that dumbness is to be understood as representing death. These indications would lead us to conclude that the third one of the sisters between whom the choice is made is a dead woman. But she may be something else as well – namely Death itself, the Goddess of Death…432

Let us now recall the moving final scene, one of the culminating points of tragedy in the modern drama [King Lear]. Lear carries Cordelia’s dead body on to the stage. Cordelia is Death. If we reverse the situation it becomes intelligible and familiar to us. She is the Death-goddess who, like the Valkyrie in German mythology, carries away the dead hero from the battlefield. Eternal wisdom, clothed in the primaeval myth, bids the old man renounce love, choose death and make friends with the necessity of dying.433

Freud’s characterization of the female as a Death-goddess possessing eternal wisdom is analogous to Hejinian’s “La Faustienne” as an embodiment of knowledge. Freud’s essay,

432Freud, S., “The Theme of the Three Caskets”, Sigmund Freud Volume 14 – Art and Literature: 241 ‐ (Present English translations first published in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho‐Analysis: London, in Volume XII (1958) 433Ibid: 246

322 locates a predominant practice of a silencing of female characters and characterizes this silence as a powerful voice – that of death and an all-knowing wisdom similar to the wisdom of the tale of the Little Mermaid. Hejinian’s potential appropriation of this trend is made manifest throughout several of her Sleeps associated works in which she uses fractured fairy tales, challenging and experimenting with the implications and potentials of the silent female protagonist of the fairy tale genre.

For example, in Sleeps Hejinian writes:

There was once a king who had a daughter so wayward and willful in her speech that she always had to have the last word She was a woman against a stream, she was! She never noticed the ocean until she fell into it one day and heard the water say, “I have suffered much because of you, and it is only right that you should suffer now because of me”434

In a similar format in The Little Book, Hejinian writes:

There was once a king who had a daughter and she was such a liar that no one could argue with her “You are the liar,” said the princess In the face of the truth, a person might easily go mad and die, but that doesn’t matter since no one cares435

434 Papers of L. Hejinian: MS 74/ 43/ 2 ‐ From Sleeps papers 435 Hejinian, L., The Little Book of a Thousand Eyes: (no pagination) 323

The relationship between these two passages can be recognized immediately through the characters of the royal fathers and daughters, however the similarities are continued through the method by which Hejinian handles the fairy tale format. In both scenarios the daughter does not abide by convention. In Sleeps she is “wayward” and “willful” and

“always had to have the last word,” thereby countering a conventional silence through the unlikely character of the verbose female. Likewise in The Little Book she is so good a liar that no one can argue with her. Both excerpts are parodies assembled in the appropriated fairy tale format with the aim of acknowledging a gender prescriptive genre and style of historical retelling and both are turned around so that the female foregoing conventional behavior does so without the expected consequence. In the first example the daughter, as a result of being a “woman against a stream” is devoured by the ocean (a trope consistently featured throughout Hejinian’s work which I argue to be specifically female) and regardless of the fact that she is ill-fated, she is in fact returned to a broader and more significant notion and embodiment of woman. In the latter example the daughter’s lying is so established that it may in effect not be considered lying as she is able to convince others that it is they who are the liars as she states, “You are the liar.” In both examples from the two texts in question the female challenges tradition by being as she is often represented to be in historical recollections and tales. However, by rendering both daughters to engage in their prescribed roles of the archetypal scarlet women so consistently, Hejinian acknowledges the position of these women and demonstrates these archetypal roles to be almost humorous. In simply situating them in a conventional scenario and continuing the tale in a matter-of-fact way, she empowers both daughter characters. In the first example she does so by reinforcing the conventional metaphor of the female being comparative

324 with bodies of water as in the Bachelardian argument that, “…the naïve or poetic imagination nearly always attributes feminine characteristics to water.” 436 In aligning the daughter’s character with the well established metaphor of water, Hejinian does not argue the association but rather delves into the power and potential held within such an alignment. Being “a woman against a stream” is rendered ineffective by Hejinian as she surrenders the female character to the oceanic body, mimicking the “La Faustienne” project of not going against the grain of societal imposition but by locating and articulating the female’s position within literary representation, characterizing it as one of strength. By returning this first character to the body of water that she is often aligned with, Hejinian draws on the positive that can emerge from such a course of action which is conceptualized by Bachelard as he writes that, “the spring is an irresistible birth, a continuous birth. The unconscious that loves such great images is forever marked by them. They call forth endless reveries… these images, impregnated with mythology, still give life naturally to poetic works.”437 In the second example from The Little Book Hejinian empowers the female character by enabling her to embrace her role as “liar” so thoroughly that the initial notion of why or how she came to be known as a liar in the first instance is rendered ludicrous.

436 Bachelard, G., Water and Dreams: An Essay On the Imagination of Matter: 14 437 Ibid. 325

Travel

The format of segments from the Sleeps typescript comprised by the fracturing of fairy tales is mirrored in The Little Book and also seeps into another of Hejinian’s works, her collaborative project with Emilie Clark The Traveler, The Hill and The Hill, 1998. An example of this is featured on page 57 of the Sleeps typescript in which the various fragments of text or short stories commence with the following lines:

“There was once a rich farmer’s lad and he was going out wooing…” “There was once a king and that king had heard of a ship that went just as fast on land as on water…” “There was once a charcoal burner who had a son and the son was a charcoal burner too…” “There was once a very poor man who went to sleep in a green field…” “There was once a king who had a daughter so wayward and willful in her speech that she always had to have the last word…”438

In The Little Book this format is mirrored as Hejinian writes on one page:

“Once a man went travelling but there was nothing to see…” “There was once a parson who was so arrogant that…” “There was once a king who had a daughter and she was such a liar…” “There was once a king who had a daughter and she was so beautiful…”439

438 Papers of L. Hejinian: MS 74/ 43/ 2 ‐ From Sleeps papers 439Hejinian, L., The Little Book of a Thousand Eyes: (no pagination) 326

In The Traveler and the Hill and the Hill440 typescript held at UCSD, a very similar writing format is utilized and many of these excerpts from Sleeps and The Little Book are repeated both in format and in content throughout the text. The charcoal burner, the king, the parson and the traveling man stories are all included in THH as well. As these fragments of text are only on average about four sentences long, they tend to be read collectively as a progressive series of reflections. This parataxis of reflections mimics the reading of a journey with the encouragement of a forward movement taking place as a result of quick reflections and resolutions taking precedence over the inherent digressions of narrative which traditionally allow time for contemplation. Although they all, on first reading, appear to be separate and disassociated elements, when read thoroughly they formulate a sense of travel analogous with the processes of dreams. Each and every short tale summarizes the life of the person in question. For example, in one THH typescript held at

UCSD, one short excerpt of text written in the same format as the previous examples proceeds as follows:

There was once a king who was so ill that no one thought his life could be saved Still, they gave him food and drink and had new clothes made for him, since his own had been ruined in his travels Then he climbed on his horse which cantered away along the road and when they reached the gate it was flung open441

This short tale, elliptical in format like the ballad form which it draws on, concludes shortly after commencing, with the king cantering away on his horse through a gate which has been flung open. It seems to be against all expectations that a king should continually

440 The Traveler and the Hill and the Hill will from this point in be referred to as THH 441 Papers of L. Hejinian: MS 74/ 113/ 10– From The Traveler and the Hill papers 327 travel regardless of his ill health. In traveling through the short tales listed paratactically one after the other, the reader develops a series of questions about the conventions that are challenged throughout the text, both structurally through the fractured fairy tales and thematically through the strange twists in the tales narrated. The reading pattern created throughout the reading of these texts mimics the structure of dreams with the strange and unusual always being brought into central focus. In using the processes of things made strange pertinent to dreams, Hejinian aims to revitalize the sense of experience in poetry.

By engaging with the popular medium of the fairy tale and rendering it strange through a series of oddities and unexpected turns in narration, she develops a more sincere representation of the real; an engagement with reality which separates textual elements from ingrained ideologies and renders them anew. In rendering a concept strange and ultimately new again, the experience represented textually is given new life with a greater integrity to that experience as it is separated from surrounding politics.

Throughout the course of these three works Hejinian in several places, writes one or a series of morals to accompany the various stories. In conclusion to the THH typescript excerpts cited previously, Hejinian includes the following:

Moral: According to Western mythology, “The world of the imagination isn’t a gift but a kingdom subject to conquest,” Therefore, when the king is dead, the citizens of the kingdom no longer know whom to approach to ask for a job. But if the vicissitudes of fate are susceptible to willfulness, couldn’t anyone be king? The answer is No.442

442 Ibid. 328

Through the concept of the moral Hejinian once more draws upon a notion of an all knowing wisdom (which she has associated with her character of “La Faustienne”) developed in her search for the female throughout Western literary representation. This format of articulating a moral within the text, whilst synonymous with the structure of fairy tales (suggesting an associative link between the fairy tale and a female language within

Hejinian’s poetry), is strikingly similar to Leonardo DaVinci’s fables and riddles which

Freud describes as being “…cast into the form of ‘prophecies’… almost all are rich in ideas and to a striking degree devoid of any element of wit.”443 Though Hejinian’s tales are not like DaVinci’s in lacking wit, they are rich in ideas and formulate contemporary moralistic fables and riddles in demonstration of a strange and different approach to the creation of female language – one which creates an impression of possessing a certain unspoken knowledge. One example from DaVinci’s tales which features this format of a moral included at a fable’s end is his fable of The Stream:

The Stream A mountain stream, forgetting that it owed its waters to the rain and little brooks, decided to swell until it became as big as a river. So it began to dash itself violently against its banks, noisily tearing away soil and stones in order to widen its bed. But when the rains stopped, the waters shrank. The poor stream found itself caught among the stones it had torn from its banks, and was forced with much labour to hew itself a new path down into the valley. Moral: He who wants too much gets nothing444

443 Freud, S., “Leonard DaVinci and a Memory of his Childhood” , Sigmund Freud Volume 14 – Art and Literature: 221 ‐ (Present English translations first published in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho‐Analysis: London, in Volume XI (1957) 444 DaVinci, L., The Stream: World Wide Web: http://www.lairweb.org.nz/leonardo/fable2.html: last accessed ‐ 1/31/2012 329

Hejinian’s utilization of an explicit moral is seemingly appropriated from DaVinci’s practice of explicating the moral value of a tale alongside the italicized title “Moral” with the key difference of not making her morals, definitive and easily decipherable. In appropriating DaVinci’s practice, she retains some association with DaVinci’s tales, characterized by Freud as “prophetic” and to some extent omnisciently all-knowing however, through an absence of definitive conclusion, she renders and announces her writing as characteristically different. Her writing of morals is polyvalent and

Scheherazadian in nature – knowledgeable and wise, even gnomic, in its inconclusiveness.

The concept of travel emerges throughout Hejinian’s work with dreams as a notion which signals the passing of time through a dream-like sequence. This concept enables the recognition of passing events and triggers the acknowledgement of textual elements that are strange and seemingly out of the ordinary expectations of sequence. However, in addition to this, the notion of travel appears to occupy a greater presence in Hejinian’s poetry, particularly in her work concerned with notions of sleep and words occurring at night. Traveling is rendered significant through the very title of THH as the traveler constitutes the key figure in the work by Hejinian and Clark and travel constitutes the central thematic format of the book, being comprised of sequences of events and outcomes, superficially unrelated in terms of plots or characters but interwoven in progressive order through similarities in structure.

330

The notion of travel is also encountered in The Little Book in excerpts such as the one commencing with the emboldened “Once a man went travelling…”445 The concept of travel in Hejinian’s work has not been the focus of significant critical inquiry with the exception of Jeffrey Gray’s Mastery’s End: Travel and Postwar American Poetry in which he explores Hejinian’s travel poetry comprising her book Oxota (written in context with her travels and experiences in Russia during the late 1980s and early 1990s). Gray argues that:

Toward the end of Oxota, the meaning of that Russian word finally appears… Oxota… is a writer’s hunt, a hunt across text more than territory, but instead of arriving at a “Eureka” moment as the writer finds the mot juste, the hunt ends in an “instance of ignorance”… Because the object of the hunt remains elusive, the hunt continues: the hunt for a common idiom, a “faithful” translation, a successful relation between sign and referent, and ultimately a ground of understanding between English and Russian – all of these objects, finally, mythical.446

Though the travel writing discussed by Gray has a more literal meaning as a consequence of having been written during Hejinian’s actual travelling experiences, the notion of moving across the text and never arriving at a definitive point or location and the simultaneous mythologizing of notions of faithful translations are related to the figurative notions of travel present within Hejinian’s night works. In addition to this, it is worthwhile noting that Oxota, published in 1991, was written in close proximity to another of

Hejinian’s key night works, The Cell. The noteworthy relationship between Oxota and The

Cell is articulated by Kate Fagan as she explains that:

445 Hejinian, L., The Little Book: (no pagination) 446 Gray, J., Mastery’s End: Travel and Postwar American Poetry: Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press: 2005: 215 331

Written between October 1986 and January 1989, The Cell comprises 150 separately dated poems of similar length and form arranged in chronological succession. Oxota: A Short Russian Novel was written over the period December 1989 to February 1991 and comprises 270 poems in a 14-line stanza pattern that Hejinian sources to the iconic verse novel Evegeny Onegin by Alexander Pushkin.447

It is possible that the travel format of Oxota discussed by Gray may have had its beginnings in the night work of The Cell and is continued indefinitely by Hejinian, particularly throughout her works more explicitly concerned with dreams and night such as those stemming from her work Sleeps such as The Little Book and THH. Travel within these latter published texts functions in very similar way to that described by Gray. In

Hejinian’s attempt to write a work synonymous with knowledge and the female in Sleeps and its counterparts, it is important to recognize that travel seems to occur predominantly through the male ‘traveler’. As in THH, the traveler is most often presumably male. As there is no female counterpart to the word traveler in the English language, the word has an inextricable relationship with a male participant. The male gender of the traveler in these works is further enforced in The Little Book through the line previously mentioned, “Once a man went travelling…”448 and also through the various occupations previously listed such as those of the parson, the charcoal burner, the king and the farmer, all of which seem to star as the characters to be introduced first, prior to female characters within most sections. Even if the female is the participant in central focus, she is most often introduced via the avenue of the king father. The key reason for the traveler predominantly being male in these works is more than likely Hejinian’s association with the male throughout history

447 Fagan: ““Constantly I Write This Happily”/ Encountering Lyn Hejinian”: 235 448 Hejinian, L., The Little Book: (no pagination) 332 as being synonymous with Faust as the seeker of knowledge. As Hejinian argues in “La

Faustienne”, “in one form or another, the Faust figure has dominated the romance of the quest for knowledge, and Faustian desire has driven the encyclopedic enterprises which have been undertaken in the name of that quest – the most obvious thing being Western science.”449 Hence, for Hejinian the quest for knowledge, epitomized through the notion of travel, is a male enterprise. It is the manner in which she engages with this notion of travel that situates Hejinian’s female and enables her to create a text of knowledge which renders the female voice into being.

There was once a very poor man who went to sleep in a green field When he woke (early)450 in the morning (he knew that) all the (sleeping) princesses had been dancing since the soles of their shoes were full of holes Then everyone awoke from stony sleep and took his or her right form again451

Included is one such example from the Sleeps typescript where the male character is rendered as traveler as he is the one who awakes and ‘knows’ what the fact of the matter of the situation is. The female characters of this short tale are all princesses who only come to life through the avenue of sleep as they dance in a dream-like state. When both the poor man and the princesses are in a state of sleep, all things are rendered strange as the

449 Hejinian, L., “La Faustienne”, The Language of Inquiry: 235 450 Handwritten insertion into typed text 451Papers of L. Hejinian: MS 74/ 43/ 2 ‐ From Sleeps papers

333 princesses wear the shoes full of holes not as a consequence of poverty but as one of being active and dancing. As all involved in the outlined scenario awake, everyone once more returns to “his or her right form again.” Apart from being a microcosmic depiction of

Hejinian’s overall structure in her night works – a structure of rendering the strangeness of sleep into being and enabling through this avenue an empowered image of the female to surface – Hejinian, in the same style as is explicated by Gray in his analysis of Oxota, establishes a poetic mode with unstable associations between words which bring to light the mythical relationships between the denoted figures of convention and their attached ideological meanings. A further dimension of strangeness develops and the contingency of all meaning is questioned as the poor man awakes, followed by “everyone” awakening.

This confuses the situation as there is no certainty regarding whom this “everyone” refers to.

In February of 2001, Hejinian wrote to her mother and step-father about the evolution of several of the projects discussed thus far:

And what I’ve been working on recently is “The Book of a Thousand Eyes,” a project I began 6 or 7 years ago and that I abandoned one morning (though without realizing it at the time) on the narrow and little-used deck facing the water at your house… That’s where I began what was going to be a one page addition to “The Book of a Thousand Eyes” and evolved into the 300 page A Border Comedy… I’ve returned to “The Book of a Thousand Eyes,” which is an homage to Scheherazade, a “night work” including somniloquays, nighttime philosophizing, hallucinations, accounts or displays of perceptual promiscuity, spectral visions, insomniac lyrics, fantasies (of power; of alternative identities and fantasies in the musical sense…) and of course, dreams.452

452 Papers of L. Hejinian: MS 74/ 56/ 9 – Letter to Carolyn and Ken Andrews (February 1‐6, 2001) 334

It becomes evident from Hejinian’s letter that the night works emergent from the initial typescript of Sleeps and the arterial network of dreams and work inspired by night thoughts, stretch across a vast range of Hejinian’s poetry, extending into the more recent A

Border Comedy. Though seemingly unrelated, A Border Comedy has its beginnings in the night works and as the title suggests, focuses significantly on the notion of borders, the meaning of which Hejinian explicates in significant detail in “La Faustienne” as she argues that, “current literary interest in knowledge… and literary method… finds itself in what social theory might call a liminal period – at a threshold or, to enlarge the metaphorical landscape, along a border.”453 The similarities with the night works continue throughout the body of A Border Comedy as Hejinian pursues the ‘fable and subsequent moral’ format established predominantly throughout THH but also in the other works, commencing book three of the text with the lines:

A TALE DRAWS Follows With chaining effect Power…454

Hejinian further pursues the notion of night and dreams throughout the body of book three in A Border Comedy, writing:

Promptly Innocence increases danger And to the extent that life restores innocence Night after night…455

453 Hejinian, L., “La Faustienne”, The Language of Inquiry: 234 454 Hejinian, L., A Border Comedy: Granary Books: New York: 2001: 41 455 Ibid: 42 335

The inclusion of the “moral” following various phases of writing within book three also solidifies the associations between the night pieces discussed in this chapter and A Border

Comedy, as for example, on page 45 of the text:

Moral: Every revolution has a brim, but this does not mean that every revolution is a hat. Yet every revolution is plucked. And every revolution is a demarcation standing in the wind – but this could be said also of bridges456.

The arterial framework which can be traced throughout a vast array of Hejinian’s writings through the highlighting of parallels and repeated concerns with night-time language, dreams, fairy tales and gender, illustrates a movement towards the development of a female language. A conceptualization of this language is enabled through the notions of strangeness and travel as metaphors for an understanding emergent from new and alternative perspectives. Hejinian’s recently published collaborative text, written in correspondence with fellow Language poet Carla Harryman, The Wide Road, is an articulate compilation of the various ideas which formulate the arterial network illustrated throughout this chapter as it emerges from the sub-texts of inference and archival record in defence of an active, speaking and desiring female subject.

456 Ibid: 43 336

The Wide Road

In Hejinian and Harryman’s picaresque novella The Wide Road, (2011, but commenced in

1991), the central themes addressed throughout the course of this thesis – aesthetics, collaboration, gender, dreams, travel and morality – are brought into correspondence as the authors adopt the Faustian male enterprise of travelling/ seeking/ hunting, and render it their own, embarking on a journey geared towards a focus on the complexities of travel itself rather than towards a specific destination.

Conversation and context are rendered paramount through the ephemeral and non-fixed destination of the text’s literal and thematic pursuit of travel and progression. A duality in the structure of The Wide Road emerges through the avenues of the letter format: following the poetic body at the beginning of the text there is an exchange of letters – a

457 Harryman, C. / Hejinian, L., The Wide Road, Berkeley: Belladonna Books: 2011: 48 337 correspondence between Hejinian and Harryman. This comprises a type of border section between the beginning and the conclusions of the four part text where the reader can attain greater clarity regarding the central thematic concerns of the text. The concluding sections of The Wide Road are comprised by another section of poetry and a conversation-like segment which features a line dividing its pages into two sections titled “Foray” and

“Array”458. This section highlights a dialogue between static representation and active involvement and mimics the structure of an immediate conversation but does not attribute ownership to the speaking subjects, evoking a concluding message of knowledge as contingent and as emergent from context. This contingent conceptualization of knowledge is for Hejinian the domain of La Faustienne, as a form of knowing situated within a multiplicity of contributing factors – in conversation – and removed from the Faustian quest for a fixed meaning or ideology. For something to be known to one, it has to be acknowledged by someone else and emerge in context and in conversation with another which once again echoes Hannah Arendt’s concept of the Polis addressed in chapter two of this thesis.

As has been argued throughout this thesis, the faculty of sight, often a language of silence

– desiring, static and incapable of speech – is integral to Hejinian’s development of a female language as she interweaves visual elements as expansive principles contributive to the context of her prolific writing endeavors. Visuality furthers language’s expressive capacities and indicates the permeating female voice within the fabric of Harryman and

Hejinian’s text. The Wide Road exemplifies an immaculate attention to aesthetic detail,

458 Ibid: 118 338 once more evoking the multiple and integrating textual capacities of the artist-book through the materiality of the special papers of its external covers and endpapers. The endpapers are an intense bright orange colour and parallel the dualistic conversant nature of the text as they embody their role of a secondary cover. The external covers of the text similarly harness the element of duality as the text was published with alternate covers, each publication featuring one of two possible images, drawn by artist Nancy Blum, on its cover.

459

The alternative covers highlight the idea of a non-fixed text which emerges into being through variety and in conversation. The organ-like flower which comprises the cover images breathes life into the text before the reader encounters the poetry within. The

459Harryman, C. / Hejinian, H., The Wide Road, United States: Belladonna Books: Alternate front covers (Artist: Nancy Blum), (Cover Design: HR Hegnauer)

339 visuality of the text’s covers is aptly described by Maria Damon who also notes the parallels between the structure of the text’s aesthetic and literary components:

At first this wand is a bone, knuckled, burled and jointed… I open the front and the drawing continues on the backside: the wand, now a stem, branches into smaller stems that end in huge, pompom flowers made up of hundreds of individual, prism- like blossoms… Restless blossoms/sexual organs/lamps are these, glowing with animated interiority and showy exteriority. In their patterned repetition they riot decorously, intimating the contents of The Wide Road. I know there is another cover too, suggesting the “duplicity” within.460

The organic structures which occupy the text’s front and back covers and continue inside those covers mimic the organic structure of The Wide Road. The poetry and letters within the text, having been written progressively over the course of a decade, require to be read as a cumulative growth which has emerged naturally over time and has not been forcefully composed within a strict time frame. The organ-like drawings also correspond to the notion of organic growth and mimic the prevalence of a female sexuality which permeates the poetry throughout the text, reversing historical definitions of the female as chaste, virtuous, subservient and un-desiring.

The Wide Road can be conceptualized and understood as an outright reversal of the format of the traditional fairy tale – a project commenced by Hejinian throughout her night works

– as it forgoes “the equation of silence with virtue, [and] of forbearance with

460Damon, M., “My Sister/Mysteries, Exegetes’ Delight” – (The Wide Road Commentary) – World Wide Web ‐ http://belladonnaseries.org/thewideroad_damon.html :last accessed ‐ 23/ 07/12 340 femininity…”461 The two poets take what Warner defines as the sexualization which emerged temporally to be known as separate from the original wisdom and knowledge of the female sirens/mermaids throughout the course of literary history and attempt to reverse the course of such knowledge. Throughout The Wide Road, sexuality is inextricably interwoven with textuality in an attempt to reclaim the female’s capacity for speech, desire and wisdom without denigrating any one of these facets. The polyvalent capacity of the artist-book exterior (also reminiscent of the fairy tale format) permeates the writing within as Hejinian and Harryman embody the role of La Faustienne as the knowledgeable

Scheherazade originally cast by Hejinian into the role of Faust’s female counterpart. This is acknowledged and exemplified in the opening pages of the text:

One morning Scheherazade’s whisper reached our ears on the wind cautiously charming our necks as we climbed an exposed and rutted hill. “Even the chill prickling your thighs through course pants is an inducement to continue.”462

Scheherazade’s silence signified by a whisper reaches the writers’ ears as they commence their travel through the pages of the text harnessing from early on a sense of sexuality which continues throughout the course of the text. This sense of sexuality is separated from the sense of ‘wrong doing’ often attributed to women’s sexuality – a concept addressed by

Marina Warner in her discussion of the Sirens from Homer’s Odyssey as being female characters which are often misrepresented as dangerous and evil.

461 Warner, M., From the Beast to the Blonde: 394 462Hejinian, L. / Harryman, C., The Wide Road: 9 341

In The Wide Road the operations of many traditional fairy tales which render the female silent are reversed as Hejinian and Harryman, on their quest to a non-specified somewhere, engage with traditional fairy tale features, water and hair being prevalent amongst these, in a project of rendering into being a desirous, speaking and knowledgeable female subject.

Marina Warner explicates the significant resonance of these two parallel notions of hair and water within fairy tales:

The morphological echo between waves, between the motion of water and of hair, between the varieties of wave, of comber, of rill and curl was famously explored by Leonardo in his notebook drawings; but the aural affinity between the elements of water and the flow of a song, between the sea and music (sound-waves), determines the character of the siren in nineteenth- and twentieth- century fairy tales… The changes to the siren’s voice alter the meanings she conveys; the social context of the story in which she figures, eloquent or silent, modifies the message… The body offers… an alphabet, and the patterns of arrangement, though almost infinite, cluster… like chords, like certain syntagms in language… Fairy tales are of course only one form of narrative that has tackled the all-absorbing issue of sexual attraction, but they have constantly cast and recast the question of the love spell, and looked again and again at the beloved, and how she survives – her silencing, among other trials.463

Hejinian and Harryman in The Wide Road contest the silencing of these female characters as they travel the waves of water and hair, embodying the text and detangling the female from the ideological myths which have rendered her silent.

We write, Dear Men, our messiness broadcasts our tendencies, our capacities, but it can’t conceal our tenderness. Go ahead and call us filthy if you will. We have eyes and a tongue, lips and a navel – we are a triangle in perpetual motion. We didn’t wriggle down the cliff clutching at pungent warm shrubs, riding exciting slabs of hot slate down the slope of the high meadow, arrest our

463 Warner, M., From the Beast to the Blonde: 406‐408 342

careening in the glossy mud of cool creek (we lay for a spell in the stream of water, head on green moss, one leg on the right bank and the other on the left – what enigmas await us in the zone between vegetable and mineral!), climb the trellis at the back of the villa where we were gripped by the thorns of the bougainvillea whose blossoms stuck in our hair, sneak over the roof and around the chimney, and swing down past the windows clinging to the wrought-iron floral grillwork and the edges of the tile cartouche in order to get to this place without getting dirty. But here we are! Be artful, if you will – please clean us.464

The Wide Road’s central characters trudge through a landscape of historically rendered female associations with the natural world through the romantic sceneries of meadows, creeks and flowers to emerge from a silent spell – a suspension in a stream of water – as ornately pretty with blossoms in their hair but inevitably and definitively dirty, having gripped thorns and clung to wrought iron to arrive where they are. Water and hair permeate the fabric of The Wide Road at regular intervals, coloring the female experience with historical resonance and making present the silent fairy tale heroines of stories from the past. Sarcastically calling upon men for an artful clean-up of their messiness, regardless of lengthy stays in pools of water, Hejinian and Harryman reclaim the song of their long lost siren sisters, sexuality and all, recuperating a voice for the silenced female subject.

464 Harryman, C. / Hejinian, L., The Wide Road: 33‐34 343

A Life Recorded Through a Thousand Eyes

Conclusion

Then the fourth night began. Through the open window I heard the falsetto of a singing man. One of the triplets couldn’t sleep and brought me a book to read. She sat on my lap. I opened the book. Once (I began) ….

Why singing threatened a singing man

Once a girl became a nightingale just as the drifting light on that particular late afternoon was turning purple under enormous winter clouds. A moment later a storm began. A dazzling murky wind shattered the shadows of the trees. Is it true that men sing for themselves and not for others? the nightingale girl asked no one and nothing in particular. She has always wondered whether birds were miserable in stormy weather and she was discovering that they were not. She wanted to communicate this information. I have very little to say to myself, she said, and the sound of her voice trembled in the air. The rain swirled like silt in a racing tide refusing to settle.

bird of music word in a well again well word aloud

Birds nest in their omnipotent meditations. What but these are the contents of mature development? A fugitive was running from shadow to shadow below, afraid of… But not story should speak only of the past. We sing to be ourselves tomorrow, the fugitive said to no one or nothing in particular. There was no answering sound. O, he said to himself in the silence of his thoughts, O, inflexible nightmare! I’ve been doomed to silence!

dawns descend on dawns in darks from tree to tree465

465 Hejinian, L., The Book of a Thousand Eyes, California: Omnidawn Publishing: 2012: 19 344

Hejinian’s The Book of a Thousand Eyes published in 2012, coincides in a timely, if not uncanny way, with the conclusion of this thesis. Emerging from Hejinian’s 1994 talk “La

Faustienne” The Book of a Thousand Eyes exemplifies Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomic theorization of the notion of the book:

A book has neither object nor subject; it is made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds. To attribute the book to a subject is to overlook this working of matters, and the exteriority of their relations… In a book, as in all things, there are lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratafication… All this, lines and measurable speeds, constitutes an assemblage… It is a multiplicity.466

The Book of a Thousand Eyes, almost two decades in the making, weaves a thread of connectivity between what is the central focus of this thesis – Hejinian’s engagement with a notion of dreams and a night-time language – in the seeking, deciphering and articulating of the voice of the “…driven, thrilled, libidinous, learned…”467 Faust’s female counterpart,

La Faustienne.

It has been the central motivation of this thesis to follow the many different lines and territories which comprise the assemblage of small conglomerates of Hejinian’s individual works but also, inclusively and by virtue of her personal archives, to establish an understanding of her broader writing project as an assemblage of multiplicities.

Throughout the course of five chapters, this thesis has examined the multiplicity of genres and visual and material mediums which comprise this broader project and has argued that

466 Deleuze, G. / Guattari, F., A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia: 3‐4 467 Hejinian, L., “La Faustienne”, The Language of Inquiry: 237 345 the inherent liminal disposition which constitutes Hejinian’s interweaving of these varieties of representational modes embodies her gradually developed stylized language which is indeed also the open, current, rhizomic and sincere voice of the female subject – of La Faustienne. Furthermore, this thesis has argued that Hejinian’s multimodal approach to writing has been and is conversant with her development of the female character of La

Faustienne – modeled upon the character of Scheherazade from The Thousand and One

Nights, who tells tales at night in order to save her life – and has conceptualized Hejinian’s writing as a dreamscape – as a visually and materially wealthy process intricately interwoven with language.

Establishing an understanding of a concept of the liminal or in-between has been of primary significance in the development of an argument hinged and dependent upon an understanding and negotiating of hybrid forms of writing. Hejinian’s early involvement with Language poetics has been precursory to her writing practice which often collaboratively utilizes the integration of various mediums and genres. These integrations of both people and writing modalities signal the development of a writing medium which centralizes an experiential engagement with the world within which the individual texts are encountered. Hejinian prompts her reader towards an understanding of the written text as conversant with an experience of life as she expresses her admiration for early psychologist William James and simultaneous (though inexplicit) regard for the work of

Sigmund Freud, stating that, “the radical introspecting and the descriptions of the results

346 that are his instigative instruments are not unlike Freud’s, but James’s interest is in consciousness and perceptions, rather than in the unconscious.”468

Hejinian’s engagement with the work of both William James and Freud is key to her development of a method of representation situated within experience; both her own and that of her readers. James’s concern with the primacy of waking consciousness gives life to the majority of Hejinian’s published works which, through a utilization of both visual and tactile mediums and a language-based approach towards materiality, openly and explicitly announce to the reader their willingness for interaction and conscious engagement beyond that enabled through more standard narrative texts. However, alongside this wakeful and self-referential encounter with consciousness, Hejinian’s engagement with Freud’s concern with the unconscious also deeply penetrates the fabric of her writing oeuvre.

Hejinian’s interaction with visual artists and art-based mediums in the collaborative writing of poetry and her simultaneous utilization of a form of materialism functions in the development of a highly engaging and interactive literature which in reverence of

Gertrude’s Stein’s approach to Realistic representation, results in a poetry which while not bearing a direct likeness to reality, in fact enacts a process of being real. This enacting gives Hejinian’s writing a strong sense of accuracy to the nature of experience.

468 Hejinian, L., in McHale, B./ McCaffery, L., Some Other Frequency: Interviews with Innovative American Authors: 127 347

The inexplicit Freudian undercurrent which exists throughout Hejinian’s oeuvre, more openly throughout her personal papers as opposed to published works, permeates through a vast expanse of her writing and corresponds structurally with her utilization of visual and material modalities as developmental of a form of dream or night-time language.

This thesis has taken the dream˗suggestive themes and facets of both Hejinian’s published and unpublished works and has understood them to be complementary to her essay “La

Faustienne” and to a concurrent drive towards the development of a method of representation which makes possible a plausible and sincere vocalization of the female subject who, as Hejinian suggests, has been silenced throughout the course of Western civilization. As has been discussed throughout the course of this thesis, Hejinian argues that:

In folklore, then, as in science, if one genders the players in the tropes of Western epistemology, one typically ends up with a model in which the quest for knowledge is a male enterprise and the keeper of the known is woman. This trope seems to incorporate aspects of male desire into its imagery while leaving female desire hidden, not through inadvertence but by definition.469

Hejinian confirms the female-focused tendency of her night-works in an interview about her recently published work The Book of a Thousand Eyes in which she articulates its association with her essay “La Faustienne” stating that, “the Faust story is about Western man’s rapacious quest for knowledge at all costs; the Scheherazade story is about an

Eastern woman’s generous gift of knowledge to a tyrannical ruler who is made kind and

469 Hejinian, L., “La Faustienne”, The Language of Inquiry: 249 348 wise by it. One can discern the feminist undercurrent here.”470 This undercurrent permeates the broader fabric of Hejinian’s writing however, as it is inexplicit, this thesis has navigated the terrain – visual, material, linguistic, conscious and unconscious – across which Hejinian has vocalized its presence.

One further manifestation of the significance of the female subject to Hejinian’s writing emerges through Hejinian’s choice of cover art for The Book of a Thousand Eyes. The

1967 “untitled collage”, created by Hejinian’s father, Chaffee Earl Hall Jr., features an overlaying of blue and yellow materials seemingly made to take the form of an Eastern woman’s veil as they are placed in circulation around a drawing of a set of eyes.

470Hejinian, L., in Morrison, R., “A Brief Interview with Lyn Hejinian” – for Omnidawn Publishing – World Wide Web: http://www.omnidawn.com/hejinian2/index.htm : last accessed ‐ 09/10/12 349

471

Hejinian’s incorporation of her father’s art is reminiscent of Steinian trends of visuality and materiality that have been addressed over the course of this thesis and that have been echoed throughout the course of Hejinian’s work. This is articulated in an explanatory note preceding her essay “Two Stein Talks” in The Language of Inquiry. Her choice of the work recalls the strong female influence of Stein on her writing and acknowledges the significance of the visual image to her writing practice. Furthermore, Hejinian’s prefatory note stresses the significance of the male in an act of acknowledging her father, which situates her work as empowering for the female but not simultaneously disempowering for

471Hejinian, L., The Book of a Thousand Eyes: (front cover), (front cover image ‐ “untitled collage” by Chaffee Earl Hall (Jr.) – 1967)

350 the male as she states that, “...Gertrude Stein was a canonical figure in the culture of my father. And, in a profound sense, I credit him not only with the origin of my own interest in

Gertrude Stein, but also with a sense of my own artistic possibilities...”472

I draw this thesis to an end with the acknowledgement of the value of and suggestion for further inquiry into the significance of archival research as well as to the broadening of understandings and experiments with the capabilities/capacities of unconscious flights of the imagination enabled by a form of night-writing as executed by Hejinian. Hejinian signals the value of such a night-writing in her description of The Book of a Thousand Eyes in which she states:

I see The Book of a Thousand Eyes as a compendium of “night works”—lullabies, bedtime stories, insomniac lyrics, nonsensical mumblings, fairy tales, attempts to understand at day’s end some of the day’s events, dream narratives, erotic or occasionally bawdy ditties, etc. The poems explore and play with languages of diverse stages of consciousness and realms of imagination. Though they may not be redemptive in effect, the diverse works that comprise The Book of a Thousand Eyes argue for the possibilities of a merry, pained, celebratory, mournful, stubborn commitment to life.473

It is precisely this enabling of “imagination” and “possibilities” through a writing based within a concern with consciousness and experience that has been the central motivating force for the writing of this dissertation.

472 Hejinian, L., The Language of Inquiry: 83 473 Hejinian, L., in Morrison, R., “A Brief Interview with Lyn Hejinian” – for Omnidawn Publishing – World Wide Web: http://www.omnidawn.com/hejinian2/index.htm : last accessed ‐ 09/10/12 351

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352

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Unpublished and archived material by Lyn Hejinian

From Papers of L. Hejinian, Mandeville Special Collections Library, Geisel Library, University of California, San Diego:

MS 74/ 20/ 19 – Letter to Anna Hejinian (October 18, 1985)

MS 74/ 40/ 7 – (The Grreat Adventure 1970 – paste-up)

MS 74/ 40/ 7 – (The Grreat Adventure 1970 – paste-up): (The Grreat Adventure envelope with holograph notes 1970)

MS 74/ 43/ 2 – Sleeps papers

MS 74/ 49/ 16 – Letter to Kit Robinson (December 14, 1988)

MS 74/ 56/ 9 – Letter Carolyn and Ken Andrews (February 1-6, 2001)

MS 74/ 92/17 – Letter to Bob Perelman (February 23, 2004)

MS 74/ 113/ 6 – (August 21st, 1992)

MS 74/ 113/ 6 – (November 19th, 1992)

MS 74/ 113/ 10 – From The Traveler and the Hill, and the Hill papers

MS 74/120/11 – Carolyn Andrews, autobiography typescript – Faraway Island: Childhood in Kodiak

353

Cited by other critics:

Hejinian, L., letter to Kahn, K., (January 5, 1994), Papers of L. Hejinian, Mandeville Special Collections Library, Geisel Library, University of California, San Diego, MS 74/23/13 cited in Dever, M. / Newman, S. / Vickery, A., The Intimate Archive: Journey Through Private Papers, National Library of Australia: Canberra ACT: 2009:2

Hejinian, L., letter to Andrews, C., (May 11, 1990), [74, 1A, Carolyn Andrews (2U)] – cited in Fagan, K. “In co-respondence: reading Lyn Hejinian's letter archives”, Mantis, 2000: (1): 47

354

Published work by Lyn Hejinian cited (collaborative works included)

Hejinian, L., The Grreat Adventure: self published: 1972 (no pagination)

Hejinian, L. / Schelling, A., “Lyn Hejinian/ Andrew Schelling: An Exchange”, Jimmy and Lucy’s House of K6: 1986: 3

Hejinian, L. / Robinson, K., Individuals, Tucson: Chax Press: 1986

Davidson, M. / Hejinian, L. / Silliman, R. / Watten, B., Leningrad, San Francisco: Mercury House: 1991

Hejinian, L., The Cell, Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press: 1992

Hejinian, L., Writing Is an Aid to Memory, Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press: 1996

Hejinian, L., The Little Book of a Thousand Eyes Boulder, Colorado: Smoke Proof Press: 1996

Hejinian, L. / Clark, E., The Traveler and the Hill, and the Hill, New York: Granary Books: 1998

Hejinian, L. / Scalapino, L., Sight: Washington, DC: Edge Books: 1999

Hejinian, L., Happily, The Post-Apollo Press: California: 2000

Hejinian, L., The Language of Inquiry: Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press: 2000

Essays cited from within: Note: Information derived and in part, cited directly from The Language of Inquiry

355

“Strangeness” – Originally one of a series of talks, curated by Perelman, B., delivered by Hejinian at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1979. “Strangeness” was first presented as a talk sponsored by the Kootenay School of Writing, Vancouver, in October, 1988 and was published in Poetics Journal 8: “Elsewhere”, 1989. The essay was translated into Russian by Arkadii Dragomoschenko and selections appeared in Stilistika i Poetika, Moscow State Institute of Foreign Languages, 1989. It was republished in Artes 2, (Swedish Academy, 1990), Revista Canaria de Estudos Ingleses 18 (Universidad de la Laguna, Tenerife, 1989), and in An Anthology of New Poetics, Beach C. (Ed.), (Tuscaloosa: Univ. of Alabama Press, 1998).

“Who Is Speaking?” – Revised version of Hejinian’s contribution to a panel discussion featuring herself, Gloria Frym, Robert Glück and Johanna Drucker at the San Francisco Intersection for the arts on March 26, 1983.

“The Rejection of Closure” – Originally a talk given by Hejinian at 544 Natoma Street, San Francisco, on April 17, 1983

“Language and “Paradise”” – Originally written for presentation at the New Poetics Colloquium organized by the Kootenay School of Writing, in Vancouver, British Columbia, in June 1985. Subsequently was published in Line: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and its Modernist Sources, no.6, Fall, 1985

“Two Stein Talks” –Derived from talks delivered by Hejinian during a three‐night residency at 80 Langton Street (an artistic space in San Francisco). Material from these talks was incorporated into Hejinian’s talks on Gertrude Stein during a residency at New College of California during the spring semester, 1985. These talks on Stein, only slightly different in form and name (“Two Talks on Gertrude Stein”) appeared in Temblor 3, Spring 1986. The essay was reprinted in Revista Canaria de Estudos Ingleses 18 (Brito, M. – Ed.) and was also published in limited edition form by Janet Rodney, at Weaselsleeves Press, 1995.

“The Person and Description” – Originally a paper delivered by Hejinian as part of a three evening event, featuring discussion on “The Poetics of Everyday Life”, curated by Carla Harryman at Small Press Distribution in Berkeley. Most of the papers delivered were published in Poetics Journal 9: “The Person”, 1991.

“Materials (for Dubravka Djuric)” – On April 2, 1990, Serbian poet, Dubravka Djuric wrote to Hejinian with some interview questions for a short essay to accompany her translations into Serbian of sections from Hejinian’s My Life. The essay, interview, and translations appeared in the journal Polja in December, 1990.

“The Quest for Knowledge in the Western Poem” – Originally written in 1992 for presentation at the Naropa Institute’s Summer Writing Program. The essay was subsequently published in Schelling, A. / Waldman, A., Disembodied Poetics, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico: 1995

356

“Comments for Manuel Brito” – This is a set of fourteen questions from scholar and editor Manuel Brito addressed to Lyn Hejinian. Brito conducted similar interviews with several other American poets. The collection of interviews was published in Spain as A Suite of Poetic Voices: Interviews with Contemporary American Poets, (Brito, M., Ed.), Santa Brigida, Spain: Kadle Books: 1992

“La Faustienne” – First presented as a talk at Temple University, Philadelphia, in March 1994, “La Faustienne”, was later revised and published in Poetics Journal 10, in 1998

“Barbarism” – Originally a lecture delivered at Curtin Institute of Technology, Perth, Western Australia in the spring of 1995.

“A Common Sense” – Originally delivered as a paper for the conference, “Gertrude Stein at the Millennium,” on February 5‐7, 1998, at Washington University, in St. Louis, curated by Steven Meyer. “Reason” – This essay was originally written in response to an invitation from Emilie Clark and Lytle Shaw to contribute to the first issue of their journal, Shark I (Clark, E. / Shaw, L. (Eds.), Berkeley, California, 1998) which was devoted to “Prepoetics”. The essay was first presented in a slightly different version, in March 1998, at the Conference on Postmodern Poetry organized at the University of Plymouth (Exmouth, England) by Tony Lopez and Philip Terry.

“Forms in Alterity: On Translation” – Originally a panel response – to a paper by formalist poet and translator of nineteenth‐century Swedish narrative verse, Judith Moffett – during a four day Nobel Symposium on “The Translation of Poetry and Poetic Prose”, in Stockholm in August, 1998, sponsored by the Swedish Academy.

********

Hejinian, L., “Continuing Against Closure”, JACKET (co-production with SALT magazine), July 2001: (14): (page numbers not available), World Wide Web – : last accessed - 19/02/2011

Hejinian, L., A Border Comedy, New York City: Granary Books: 2001

Clark, E. / Hejinian, L., The Lake, New York: Granary Books: 2001

Clark, E. / Hejinian, L., World Wide Web – www.granarybooks.com/books/lake/the.lake1.html : last accessed - 23/03/2010

Hejinian, L., Slowly, Berkeley: Tuumba Press: 2002 357

Hejinian, L., My Life, Green Integer: Kobenhavn & Los Angeles: Green Integer: 2002

Stein, G., Three Lives, (Hejinian, L., Introd.), Kobenhavn & Los Angeles: Green Integer: 2004

Hejinian, L., Saga/Circus, Richmond & California: Omnidawn Publishing: 2008

Hejinian, L., “The Dream Department”, English Language Notes: (47:1): 2009: 11-16

Hejinian, L., “Dreaming Something Else”, Jacket Magazine: 2010: (39:1): (online pagination) – World Wide Web – http://www.jacketmagazine.com/39/perelman- hejinian.shtml : last accessed - 10/06/2010

Harryman, C. / Hejinian, L., The Wide Road: United States: Belladonna Books: 2011

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Hejinian, L. / Ortiz, T. Atelos (publishing venture) website – World Wide Web – http://www.atelos.org/info.htm : last accessed - 18/01/2011

358

Published work by Lyn Hejinian consulted (collaborative works included)

 Armantrout, R. / Benson, S. / Bernheimer, A. / Harryman, C. / Hejinian, L. / Mandel, T. / Pearson, T. / Perelman, B. / Robinson, K. / Silliman, R. / Watten, B., The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, United States: Mode A: 1976 1979

 A Thought is the Bride of What Thinking, Berkeley: Tuumba Press: 1976

 A Mask of Motion, Providence: Burning Deck: 1977

 Gesualdo, Berkeley: Tuumba Press: 1978

 My Life, Providence: Burning Deck: 1980

 The Guard, Berkeley: Tuumba Press: 1984

 Redo, Grenada: Salt-Works Press: 1984

 My Life, Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1987

 The Hunt, La Lasuna: Zasterle Press: 1991

 Oxota: a Short Russian Novel, Great Barrington: The Figures: 1992

 Jour de Chasse ( Trans. of Oxota: a Short Russian Novel), (trans. Alferi, P),: Royaumont: Cahiers de Royaumont: 1992

 The Cold of Poetry, Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press: 1994

 Collom, J. / Hejinian, L., Wicker, Boulder: Rodent Press: 1996

359

 Guide, Grammar, Watch, and The Thirty Nights, United Kingdom: Salt Publishing 1996

 Balashova, E. / Dragomoshchenko, A. / Hejinian, L. Xenia, United States: Sun & Moon Books, 1998

 DiPalma, R. / Hejinian, L., Chartings, Tucson: Chax: 2000

 Collom, J. / Hejinian, L., Sunflower, Great Barrington: The Figures: 2000

 The Beginner, New York: A Spectacular Book: 2001

 The Beginner, Berkeley: Tuumba Press: 2002

 The Fatalist, Richmond/California: Omnidawn: 2003

 My Life in the Nineties, New York: Shark Books: 2003

 Champion, M. / Corbett, W. / Hejinian, L. (Eds.), For Tom & Val, New York: Granary Books, 2004

 Collom, J. / Hejinian, L., Situations, Sings, Princeton, Adventures in Poetry: 2008

 Adnan, E. / Hejinian, L. / Scapppettone, J., Belladonna Elders Series: 5: Belladonna Books: 2009

360

 Bye, R. / Collom, J. / Creeley, R. / Dorn, E. / Fernlinghetti, L. / Guest, B. / Hejinian, L. / Rider B. K. / Mullen, H. R. / Pai, Y. S. / Schelling, A. / Waldman, A. / Whalen, P. / Kavayantra Press / Naropa University / Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, These blossoms will be gone in a week: the Kavayantra Press portfolio project at Naropa University: Boulder, Colorado : Kavayantra Press: Naropa University, 2010

361

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378

Figures (scanned images & texts) – In order of Appearance

1. Cover Art – Marina Mihova

2. Hejinian, L. Saga/Circus, Richmond & California: Omnidawn Publishing: 2008: 91 Artist – Emilie Clark

3. Carolyn Andrews autobiography typescript – Faraway Island: Childhood in Kodiak: Papers of L. Hejinian, Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego, MS 74/120/11 Photographer of “The Carolyn-Frances” – Ree Hall

4. Hejinian, L., My Life, Kobenhavn & Los Angeles: Green Integer: 2002: 55-57

5. Davidson, M. / Hejinian, L. / Silliman, R. / Watten, B. Leningrad, San Francisco: Mercury House: 1991: (preliminary pages) Icons representing each writer were inspired by textile patterns from the book, Revolutionary Textile Design, Viking Press: 1984

6. Hejinian, L., The Grreat Adventure: self published: 1972 (no pagination)

7. Owen, M. poem featured on – Tuumba Press Postcard: Papers of L. Hejinian, Mandeville Special Collections Library, Geisel Library, University of California, San Diego, MS 74/51/20

8. Hejinian, L., My Life: Kobenhavn & Los Angeles: Green Integer: 2002: 61

9. Clark, E. / Hejinian, L., The Lake: New York: Granary Books: (no pagination)

10. Clark, E. / Hejinian, L., The Lake: New York: Granary Books: (no Pagination)

11. Hejinian, L. Saga/Circus, Richmond & California: Omnidawn Publishing: 2008: 91 Artist – Emilie Clark

12. Hejinian, L., Writing Is an Aid to Memory: Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press: 1996: (no pagination)

13. Clark, E. / Hejinian, L., The Lake: New York: Granary Books: (no pagination)

14. Hejinian, L., Happily, California: The Post-Apollo Press: 9

15. Hejinian, L., Slowly, Berkeley: Tuumba Press: 2002: 28

379

16. Clark, E. / Hejinian, L., The Lake: New York: Granary Books: (no pagination)

17. Clark, E. / Hejinian, L., The Lake: New York: Granary Books: (every alternate page)

18. Hejinian, L., The Little Book of a Thousand Eyes, Boulder: Smoke-Proof Press: 1996: (no pagination)

19. Harryman, C. / Hejinian, H., The Wide Road, United States: Belladonna Books: Alternate front covers Artist: Nancy Blum Cover Design: HR Hegnauer

20. Hejinian, L., The Book of a Thousand Eyes, California: Omnidawn Publishing: 2012 Front cover image – “untitled collage” by Chaffee Earl Hall (Jr.) 1967

21. Dream – 7th March 2011 Artist: Marina Mihova

380