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George Oppen and Lyn Hejinian

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George Oppen and Lyn Hejinian 6O I rnr HUMANITIES REVIEW SPR]NG 201I pETER NrcHoLLs NUMERousNEss AND rrs Drscor{TENTS I 6l dates her interest in Oppen back to 1968, and it's clear from this material that she returned to a concentrated study of his work in the early nineties.2 The lecture, Numerousness and Its called originally'O s Affirmation'and subsequently retitled 'The Numerousi remains unpublished, but in 1998 Hejinian produced two other essays, 'Barbarism'and'Rea- Discontents: George Oppen sonl which also take Oppen as a major point of reference for her own meditations on philosophical and phenomenological conceptions of community or'numer- and Lyn Hejinian ousnessi to use Oppen's term.3 His work continues to act as a primary touchstone for Hejinian, as was clear at the 2002 Modernist Studies Association conference in Madison when she gave a paper titled'George Oppen and the Space of Appear- ancei Peter Nicholls , New York Uruversrty ln recent years, Hejinian's fascination with Oppen's work has focussed in- striking feature of Lyn Hejinian's recent work has creasingly on his long serial poem'Of Being Numerous'(she gave a whole course been her development of a series of terms which at the University of lowa based around this text in 1997). This was the title poem permeates both her poetic and critical writings: of the volume which brought Oppen the Pulitzer prize in 1969 and it remains, for words such as'incipiencei 'borderi 'reasoni dilemmai tontexti most readers, his best The Hmeities neview known work.'Of Being Numerousi which builds upon an ear, 'aporial and bccurrence' are deployed to create a termino- Volume g, lssue I lier poem called A Language of New York', has many interrelated concerns: in forty logical matrix in which ideas from theorists such as Hannah Spring 20 I I pp rjo-83 short sections it ranges over life in the contemporary metropolis. it considers the Arendt, Jean-Frangois Lyotard and Jacques Derrida are loosely St. John s Universily possibilities of the new'urban arti and it also recalls Oppen's wartirne experience interwoven. ln long poetic works such as A Border Comedy and Peter Nicholls in Alsace, powerfully connecting this to the current horrors of lhe Vietnarn war * in essays that include'Reason' and'Barbarism' (both collected is a Professor of 'the news / lswar // As alwaysi he writes.a This is, then, a poern with strong pe{*tlca} in The Longuage of lnquiry), Hejinian has been exploring the English at New themes, though the extent to which it can be satisfactorily read through ardy E*r]- possibilities York University and of what might be called a phenomenology of the ventional politicalframe remains questionable. lndeed, Oppen srx€ oh$*rrr$ ffi-a[ received hls B.A. social. I want to suggest in this essay that in addition to the 'Of Being Numerous'wasAn account of being in the world, to srkk ts fti,edry$e{j;i M.A., and Ph.D. fron major theorists l've named, George Oppen has had a particular Cambridge University. one remark among several which suggests in fact that ihe poem sdlijate$ rti {,irt- importance to this project as a poet who explored many of the He has published cerns somewhere at the interface or border between the pollticat a$d tfle F\&rb- problems that currently interest Hejinian. widely on twentieth sophical. ce!lury writing ncluding ln proposing this association I am in part merely trac- Modermsmsi I want to emphasise the importance to both Oppen and l"*ejrnra* *a,a&;s A Literary ing out connections that the poet herself has acknowledged. Guide and George Oppen dnd empirical attention. More than any other poets, involved with ethics, but neither ciogmdr}i r!i,{ Objectivism, of course, has always been a key point of refer- the Fate of Modernism. moralistic nor instructional. To a large extent, they were unable to solve the ethical dt,iernrrtar {:r,** ence for her, and in an unpublished draft of her 1994 George He has received witnessed - for historical rather than for artistic reasonsi Oppen Memorial Lecture, she goes so far as to speak of her- nurnerous of awards 2 Hejinian also engaged in periods of intensive study of Zukofskyt work in rhe seven{ies ano self as'a poet influenced more by the Objectivists than by any and honors, includilg eighties - see Kate Fagan, "'Constantly I Write This Happily": Encountering Lyn Hejinian: unp{.rb- the (University 1 other group of writersil ln her notes for the lecture, Hejinian Arthur Niller Essay lished DPhil dissertatlon of Sydney, 2002), 1 5. Pri:e and d finahst of 3The Languoge oflnquiry (Berkeley. Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2000)" The Modernist Studres 3 1 8-54. 1 Quoted from the collection of Lyn Hejinian's papers held at the Mandev- Association Book Prize. 4 George Oppen: New Collected Poems, ed. Michael Davidson (New York: New Direc- ille Special Collections, University of California at San Diego Library, MSS tions, 2002), 168, 174 (hereafter cited as NCP). 74, Box 44, Folder 35. The note continues by attributing to the Objectiv- 5 The Selected Letters of George Oppen, ed., Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Durham and London: Duke '1990), ists'[t]he sense of scientific method; discontinuities; experiential and University Press, 177 (hereafter cited as 5l). 62 I THE HUMANITIES REVIEW SPzuNG 20I ] PETER NICHOLLS NUMEROUSNESS AND ITS DISCONTEN.TS I 63 idea of a'borderl an intermediary zone, where a clash of opposing concepts can- volvement with the Left since the thirties had made him simirarry aware not be resolved but is supplanted by a lived experience of what Hejinian calls after dency in Marxist practice of a ten- to privirege ideorogy over Derrida 'impasse'or'aporia'. her glosses experiencg and it is crear that ln Oppen Lecture, Hejinian section 9 of 'Of during the period in Mexico the oipens suffered a growing disenchantment Being Numerous'with a series of observations sponsored by Derrida's A porias.The the communist worrd, with both in termsof partf practice and 'experience of the aporiai she says, 'is"a passage, an impossible the poricies of the soviet both and a neces- Union. Their experience demonstrated thaiporiticar thought had sary passage,"which is to say it is both a passage and an impasse, and it is so in be- from Maritains 'existentiarrrvorrd'of become remote being and making, ihut ing an experience simultaneously of border as limit and of border as limitlessness.'6 into a universarising it huJ ougenerated form of knowredge wiose idiom *., i".r""r,"gry The contradictory nature of the 'border'in this sense situates it in the realm of ex- spiracy and surveiilance.rl that of con_ As Burton iatren correctry notes, perience rather than in that of the concept; glossing section 23 of the poem, He- oppen never repudiat_ thoush he was ir,"uituury jinian j,.",', .,iti.. I ;;;; ,.n-. nou speaks of 'an aporia, which will allow us to go beyond the limits of any one ;1n:.# Ti "; uuu,i ns, viewpoint and remain thereiT cruerties,,urra"."p,iln'":}ff,f;".l"#J:ffi 1lTl,1i],Jli;,:i'u,ai,iui, ln the thirties, Oppen had resolved the conflict between politics and poet- Maritain's craim that'poetry has its source in ry by a single-minded commitment to social action, but when he returned to poet- the pre-conceptuar rife of the intetect'offered what n,.rri huu" ,""r"0 u highry attractive arternative ry at the end of the fifties after almost a decade of enforced political silence, it was degraded knowledge that to the was no*,pori,iii14 but most importantly partly at the instigation of Jacques Maritain's Creative lntuition in Art and poetry, a it opened for oppen a way back to poritics grasped ,ideasi as experience rather than as work which evoked an existential world in which the boundaries between politics, wourd arso be the main point rhis of srrtre's seorch for a Method which philosophy and poetics seemed to acquire a new permeability.s lt is quite wrong, I aims think, to argue that'When Oppen put pen to paper again, it was...as an existential- to engender within the framework of Marxism a veritable comprehenstie ist, not as a socialist.'e For Oppen, as for Jean-Paul Sartre, the insights of Marxism and knowing which wirr rediscover man in the sociar worrd existentialism came be regarded and which yriil f*_ to not as incompatible but as complementary, low him in his praxis or, if you prefer, - in the project whrcfi thro.,.,l not least because, as Fredric Jameson notes in his account of Sartre, each called in toward the sociar nrrrr possibres in terms of a defined situsiion. question the priority of thought over ('existentialism principle fui*eni*i.iir being with the that will appear therefore as a fragrnent of the syster.n, whrch ,nas fedaen existence precedes essence, Marxism with the determination of consciousness by of Knowledgs.rs irur.,rddl social reality'io); in this sense, as Sartre would argue in Search for a Method (1960; ln their different ways, English translation 1963), existentialism was a necessary supplement to a post-War sartre and oppen were each r*o**g f{s a i:.,nq,id.is c* au*6;, Marxism which had grown mechanical and economistic. In Oppen! case, his in- lating together forms of interiority and ss a! rs *tw, ,,{ $ro{k omy of subject and object "-,"r,or'u, -the i S,*re}a and to recover insread un*,r5u-.rsucnw 6 'The Numerousl UCSD 74, 44,35 (the inset quotation is from Derrida's Aporias).
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