Changing the future through literature begins when individuals are encouraged to have independent thoughts and personal involvement. Lyn Hejinian's My Life, emphasizes the importance of readerly agency and mixing genres. She believes in an open text and resistant reading as a means for including her audience. Lyn Hejinian wrote her autobiography as a poem. Stretching both genre barriers and challenging the norm for poetry, and an autobiography. By writing about her life in a non-traditional way, she opened many opportunities for her readers to experience her language as it was meant to be interpreted by that particular individual. Hejinian "invites participation" with an open text; where new movements can be made from a more personal connection to a work of literature.
The article by literary scholar Juliana Spahr recognizes that Lyn Hejinian's writing has "unusual lyricism and a descriptive engagement with the everyday" (141). Spahr takes note of the way that Hejinian differs from traditional poetry and autobiographies. Hejinian does not defy traditions, but simply tries to stretch the norm and plays with other opportunities for interpretation.
But while language writing tends to be anticonfessional 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. Her work, centrally concerned with biography and autobiography, explores and complicates the relationship between alternative, nonstandard writing practices and subjectivity that the generic conventions of biography and autobiography often smooth over (141).
In My Life, Hejinian writes about her life but does so without chronological order. She tells her story with memories and descriptions of smells and situations throughout her life, but fails to stop and tell her readers exactly what date it was or who she was with. Her book is made up of poems, all starting off with short titles in the beginning. She makes references throughout about significant times in her life and significant people but every detail shared is poetic and leaves her readers with the ability to feel what she felt at that time in her life. This chaotic writing helps her readers to have less direction, and more freedom to fill in their own associations.
In My Life, Hejinian tells of her life but leaves enough details out, for her readers to fill in the blanks with their own interpretations and emotions.
I'll just keep myself from picking up the telephone, in order to get some work done. What memory is not a 'gripping' thought. Only fragments are accurate. Break it up into single words, charge them to combination. So we go into the store shopping and get, after awhile, you know, contralto! Thinking about time in the book, it is really the time of your life. I was experiencing love, immensely relieved. It was, I know, an unparticular spirit of romance (55).
Hejinian gives the ideas that perhaps she was anxiously in love. As a reader this poetry tells her autobiography and she is describing a time in her life. She is straying from the traditional, and allowing her readers to relate to their own "gripping memories" or the way that someone feels when they are relieved when they "experience love". Spahr again relates this idea;
It mixes autobiographical confession and language-centered aphorism, poetry and prose, moving unchronologically through reminiscence and observation, through past and present. Most crucially, My Life turns reading into an act of choosing among multiplicities. It is reader-centered in that it requires its readers to bring multiple interpretations to the work (142).
As Spahr points out, Hejinian values the notion of allowing her readers to take on readerly agency and responsibility. Hejinian uses imagery and very vivid descriptions, but does not force her readers to see and feel specifically what she sees and feels, but for them to come to their own conclusions.
Spahr recognizes also that because Hejinian stretches the traditional form of an autobiography with a beautiful use of poetry. Again Spahr reinforces this by saying "…the life of My Life constructs itself partially through vivid, sometime poignant moments of story and detail, moments that almost fulfill readerly expectations about what an autobiography 'should' be" (143). Hejinian uses many different types of descriptions all mixed throughout her book. She references similar events and people without giving context. She does this to refrain from giving away her subjectivity and so anyone who may read My Life , can find something in it to relate to, regardless of their differing life experiences. This readerly agency that Spahr associates with Hejinian's values is also important as mentioned that "My Life guides its readers to moments in which they are invited to recognize and use their own agency in the act of reading" (149).
This way of reading to Hejinian creates responsible active readers. It makes people who are interested in noticing the ways that language plays within itself. She wants her readers to think creatively, rather than closed mindedly. This mixing of autobiography with poetry starts this transformation. Readers stop taking what they read for granted. It makes people actively care and take their interpretation as a valuable extension of what Hejinian "intended" for her readers to absorb. Spahr helps to conclude that,
This act of giving readers the power to cultivate their own readings in the space of autobiography should be central to the discourse about the political necessity of the postmodern work. Critical avoidance of the reader's potential for resistant reading of autobiography plays into the reductive cliché that autobiographies are only works about the subjectivity of the author and not textual products of the world at large (153).
The linguistic writer Terry Threadgold writes from the perspective of a second wave feminist scholar. She writes about how poetic language functions generally speaking. She argues in her article that as women poets and writers begin to express themselves, there is a move towards better acknowledgement of contexts across all disciplines. Linguistics is moving away from a patriarchal perspective and to a less "oppressive" stance for all women. Threadgold supports that linguistics has most always been "written as patriarchal, the law of the father and therefore as necessarily oppressive of women"; and defines further about linguistics historically that,
the common understanding of 'linguistic' is very much limited to certain logical, philosophical and American structuralist understandings of what 'linguistics' as theory/metalanguage might mean, so that, for example, speech act theory, on its own, becomes a theory of language and performance in some contexts, and all linguistics is rejected in others (86).
This concept again comes up from Threadgold's perspective, that when people start looking at language in a different form, there are movements towards better understanding. Threadgold is saying that when women begin to say things and speak up, when they have not before, history begins to shift. Women gain power in the world through the use of language.
Similarly to the way that Hejinian tries to let her readers have the power to interpret her autobiography in the way they see appropriate for that individual, Threadgold also insists that seeing language in new ways from a more feminine view allows for progressive changes to happen. Women writers' challenging the traditional ways of writing makes room for change. This concept is applied by Threadgold by saying "Metaphorically, this intervention is an important one because it stops constructing women as the victims of language or 'scripts', and suggests they have the power to rewrite them" (87). Threadgold also describes language as an institution. When thinking about language as an institution, and the deconstruction of that institution, woman make shifts in the ways that institution functions in the public sphere.
Threadgold also makes note to the anatomical differences between men and women and the physical implications that influence the gender differences within their different language works. Threadgold references this saying
Minds must, then, be sexually differentiated, multifaceted, realising the complexity and difference of the bodies of which they are ideas; 'Female minds will be formed by socially imposed limitations on the powers and pleasures of female bodies' {Lloyd 1989:21} (100).
Women naturally have different perspectives from men, from the ways that their bodies function, to the ways that their brains function. This directly influences the ways and places that their writings come from, and how their writings are prejudiced. This natural difference between males and females connects to the ways that genre interacts. Because there is a flux in the ways that both genders are represented through literature in the public sphere, there is also a flux in the ways that their genres are portrayed also. Females are obviously different from males, and their writing will reflect those differences.
Threadgold makes discusses genre, and the ways that with mixing genre and their positions in literature. She says,
Text, produced in social interaction, never occurs without a generic shape and some kinds of interpersonal or rhetorical purpose...I came to understand genres…as text types which specified a position of enunciation, typical modes of address and possible positions for an audience, and constrained textual and intertextual labour, the work of making text (96).
When a reader, regardless of their gender reads a work that has many functions, and is a mixed genre, it leaves multiple ways in which that reader will interpret the literature. It begins to let audiences have a place of their own in what they get out of the reading; and it also starts avenues for change and new ways of thinking for both men, and women.
In her book, The Language of Inquiry, Lyn Hejinian takes Theodor Adorno's quote, "To write poetry after Auschwitz is an act of barbarism", and replies to the contrary. Adorno was implying that having any kind of "babbling" of any kind after such an immense tragedy in world history is silly and barbaric. Hejinian believes that,
Poetry after Auschwitz must indeed be barbarian; it must be foreign to the cultures that produce atrocities. As a result, the poet must assume a barbarian position, taking a creative, analytic, and often oppositional stance, occupying [and being occupied by] foreignness---by the barbarism of strangeness (326).
In order to not allow terrible things to happen in the world, people must change the thoughts of the past, improve their views, and expand awareness. Hejinian advocates for making meaning and discussions towards change. Hejinian views the power of language, "The language of poetry is a language of inquiry, not the language of a genre…Poetry, therefore, takes as its premise that language is a medium for experiencing experience" (3). Leaving room for experiences and interpretations for readers encourages change. It begins to let readers have a place in their understanding.
Hejinian describes this open interpretation as an open text. Her definition is "The open text is one which both acknowledges the vastness of the world and is formally differentiating. It is form that provides an opening" (41), also she describes it as
The 'open text,' by definition 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 (43).
Hejinian does not encourage a reader "free for all" (51), but does want her readers to cross boundaries to think beyond what she is explicitly saying, and take away something completely personal. She insists that her audience is just as important in the language exchange as she is. Hejinian arranges words on the page, but what her readers do with those words in their imaginations is a thoughtful and creative experience all its own.
Lyn Hejinian establishes through her autobiography My Life, that keeping your audience involved in the literature is very important to what they take away from their reading. Hejinian's belief in an open text celebrates interpretation and participation. Change happens when people are challenged and are encouraged to think individually. It is critical to think creatively and actively to improve upon then known. Mixing genres allows readers to see concepts in new ways. It stretches thinking and creates effective worldly readers. This readerly agency means for improvement and changing the ways that people think. Lyn Hejinian's My Life, makes progress towards changing the future of literature and thought that is open for all kinds of new ideas and personal connections.
Hejinian, Lyn. "Introduction," "Barbarism," and "Rejection of Closure." The Language of Inquiry. Los Angeles: U of California P, 2000. 1-6, 40-58, 318-36.
Hejinian, Lyn. My Life.Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2002.
Threadgold, Terry. "Rewriting Linguistic Poetics: The Trace of the Corporeal." Feminist Poetics: Poiesis, Performance, Histories.London: Routledge, 1997. 85-109.
Spahr, Juliana. "Resignifying Autobiography: Lyn Hejinian's My Life." American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography68:1 (1996 Mar), 139-59.
