The Rejection of Closure
In her essay, Lyn Hejinian takes up a key distinction in American poetry since the 1950s, between “closed” and “open” forms. Charles Olson, in his epoch-making manifesto “Projective Verse,” defined closed verse as “the verse print bred” (and that literary magazines continued to publish), while he advocated open forms in which one perception “must move, instanter, on another.” Hejinian’s rethinking of this distinction—and the cultural politics of its period—involves both revisionist and innovative arguments. In separating openness and closure in poetry, she refuses their merely formal distinction. Regular stanzas and metrical forms are not necessarily closed if their language is productive of open horizons of interpretation, and it would be reductive to see open forms as simply those that look like open fields or processual streams. Invoking the Russian Formalists, Hejinian shows how form can be radically constructive of new meaning, and how language’s nonidentity with the world it incompletely names is located at the heart of form’s constructive potential. In seeing the language/world relation as central to the rejection of closure, Hejinian takes up, but finds limited, the French feminist poetics of desire, even though gender was elided in Olson’s account. Her argument is a fundamental contribution to the shift from a subject-centered to a language-centered poetics.
[… ] In writing, an essential situation, both formal and open, is created by the interplay between two areas of fruitful conflict or struggle. One of these arises from a natural impulse toward closure, whether defensive or comprehensive, and the equal impulse toward a necessarily open-ended and continuous response to what’s perceived as the “world,” unfinished and incomplete. Another, simultaneous struggle is the continually developing one between literary form, or the “constructive principle,” and writing’s material. The first involves the poet with his or her subjective position; the second objectifies the poem in the context of ideas and of language itself.
The axes across these two areas of opposition are not parallel. Form cannot be equated with closure, nor can raw material be equated with the open.1 I want to say this at the outset and most emphatically, in order to prevent any misunderstanding. Indeed, the conjunction of form with radical openness may be a version of the “paradise” for which the poem yearns—a flowering focus on confined infinity.
It is not hard to discover devices—structural devices—that may serve to “open” a poetic text, depending on other elements in the work and by all means on the intention of the writer. One set of such devices has to do with arrangement and, particularly, rearrangement within a work. 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. The writer relinquishes total control and challenges authority as a principle and control as a motive. The “open text” often emphasizes or foregrounds process, either the process of the original composition or of subsequent compositions by readers, and thus resists the cultural tendencies that seek to identify and fix material, turn it into a product; that is, it resists reduction.
It is really a question of another economy which diverts the linearity of a project, undermines the target-object of a desire, explodes the polarization of desire on only one pleasure, and disconcerts fidelity to only one discourse.—Luce Irigaray2
“Field work,” where words and lines are distributed irregularly on the page, such as Robert Grenier’s poster/map entitled “Cambridge M’ass” and Bruce Andrews’s “Love Song 41” (also originally published as a poster), are obvious examples of works in which the order of the reading is not imposed in advance. Any reading of these works is an improvisation; one moves through the work not in straight lines but in curves, swirls, and across intersections, to words that catch the eye or attract attention repeatedly.
Repetition, conventionally used to unify a text or harmonize its parts, as if returning melody to the tonic, instead, in these works, and somewhat differently in a work like my My Life, challenges our inclination to isolate, identify, and limit the burden of meaning given to an event (the sentence or line). Here, where certain phrases recur in the work, recontextualized and with new emphasis, repetition disrupts the initial apparent meaning scheme. The initial reading is adjusted; meaning is set in motion, emended and extended, and the rewriting that repetition becomes postpones completion of the thought indefinitely.
But there are more complex forms of juxtaposition. The mind, said Keats, should be “a thoroughfare for all thoughts.”3 My intention (I don’t mean to suggest I succeeded) in a later work, “Resistance” (from “The Green”), was to write a lyric poem in a long form—that is, to achieve maximum vertical intensity (the single moment into which the Idea rushes) and maximum horizontal extensivity (Ideas cross the landscape and become the horizon and the weather). To myself I proposed the paragraph as a unit representing a single moment of time, a single moment in the mind, its content all the thoughts, thought particles, impressions, impulses—all the diverse, particular, and contradictory elements that are included in an active and emotional mind at any given instant. For the moment, as a writer, the poem is a mind.
To prevent the work from disintegrating into its separate parts—scattering sentence-rubble haphazardly on the waste heap—I used various syntactic devices to foreground or create the conjunction between ideas. Statements become interconnected by being grammatically congruent; unlike things, made alike grammatically, become meaningful in common and jointly. “Resistance” begins:
Patience is laid out on my papers. Its visuals are gainful and equably square. Two dozen jets take off into the night. Outdoors a car goes uphill in a genial low gear. The flow of thoughts—impossible! These are the defamiliarization techniques with which we are so familiar.
There are six sentences here, three of which, beginning with the first, are constructed similarly: subject—verb—prepositional phrase. The three prepositions are on, into, and in, which in isolation seem similar but used here have very different meanings. On is locational: “on my papers.” Into is metaphorical and atmospheric: “into the night.” In is atmospheric and qualitative: “in a genial low gear.” There are a pair of inversions in effect here: the unlike are made similar (syntactically) and the like are sundered (by semantics). Patience, which might be a quality of a virtuous character attendant to work (“is laid out on my papers”), might also be “solitaire,” a card game played by the un-virtuous character who is avoiding attention to work. Two dozen jets can only take off together in formation; they are “laid out” on the night sky. A car goes uphill; its movement upward parallels that of the jets, but whereas their formation is martial, the single car is somewhat domestic, genial and innocuous. The image in the first pair of sentences is horizontal. The upward movement of the next two sentences describes a vertical plane, upended on or intersecting the horizontal one. The “flow of thoughts” runs down the vertical and comes to rest—“impossible!” (There is a similar alternation between horizontal and vertical landscapes in other sections of “The Green.”)
One of the results of this compositional technique, building a work out of discrete intact units (in fact, I would like each sentence itself to be as nearly a complete poem as possible), is the creation of sizeable gaps between the units. The reader (and I can say also the writer) must overleap the end stop, the period, and cover the distance to the next sentence. “Do not the lovers of poetry,” asks Keats, “like to have a little Region to wander in where they may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous that many are forgotten and found new in a second reading…. Do not they like this better than what they can read through before Mrs. Williams comes down stairs?”4 Meanwhile, what stays in the gaps, so to speak, remains crucial and informative. Part of the reading occurs as the recovery of that information (looking behind) and the discovery of newly structured ideas (stepping forward).
In both My Life and “The Green” the form (grossly, the paragraph) represents time. Conversely, in Bernadette Mayor’s Midwinter Day, time is the form—imposed, exoskeletal. The work was written according to a predetermined temporal framework; it begins when the “stop-watch” was turned on (early morning, December 22, 1978) and ends when time ran out (late night of the same date).
It’s true I have always loved projects of all sorts, including say sorting leaves or whatever projects turn out to be, and in poetry I most especially love having time be the structure which always seems to me to save structure or form from itself because then nothing really has to begin or end.—Bernadette Mayer5
Whether the form is dictated by temporal rules or by numerical rules—by a prior decision that the work will contain, say, x number of sentences, paragraphs, stanzas, or lines, etc.—it seems that the work begins and ends arbitrarily, and not because there is a necessary point of departure or terminus. The implication (correct) is that the words and the ideas (thoughts, perceptions, etc.—the material) continue beyond the work. One has simply stopped because one has run out of fingers, beads, or minutes, and not because a conclusion has been reached or “everything” said.
The relationship of form, or the “constructive principle,” to the “materials” of the work (its ideas, the conceptual mass, but also the words themselves) is the initial problem for the “open text,” one that faces each writing anew. Can form make the primary chaos (i.e. raw material, unorganized information, uncertainty, incompleteness, vastness) articulate without depriving it of its capacious vitality, its generative power? Can form go even further than that and actually generate that potency, opening uncertainty to curiosity, incompleteness to speculation, and turning vastness into plenitude? In my opinion, the answer is yes; this is, in fact, the function of form in art. Form is not a fixture but an activity.
In an essay entitled “Rhythm as the Constructive Factor of Verse,” Jurij Tynjanov writes:
We have only recently outgrown the well-known analogy: form is to content as a glass is to wine…. I would venture to say that in nine out of ten instances the word ‘composition’ covertly implies a treatment of form as a static item. The concept of ‘poetic line’ or ‘stanza’ is imperceptibly removed from the dynamic category. Repetition ceases to be considered as a fact of varying strength in various situations of frequency and quantity. The dangerous concept of the ‘symmetry of compositional facts’ arises, dangerous because we cannot speak of symmetry where we find intensification.6
(Compare this with Gertrude Stein’s comment in “Portraits and Repetitions”: “A thing that seems to be exactly the same thing may seem to be a repetition but is it…. Is there repetition or is there insistence. I am inclined to believe there is no such thing as repetition. And really how can there be…. Expressing any thing there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis.”)7 Tynjanov continues:
The unity of a work is not a closed symmetrical whole, but an unfolding dynamic integrity…. The sensation of form in such a situation is always the sensation of flow (and therefore of change)…. Art exists by means of this interaction or struggle.8
Language discovers what one might know, which in turn is always less than what language might say. We encounter some limitations of this relationship early, as children. Anything with limits can be imagined (correctly or incorrectly) as an object, by analogy with other objects—balls and rivers. Children objectify language when they render it their plaything, in jokes, puns, and riddles, or in glossolaliac chants and rhymes. They discover that words are not equal to the world, that a shift, analogous to parallax in photography, occurs between things (events, ideas, objects) and the words for them—a displacement that leaves a gap. Among the most prevalent and persistent categories of jokes is that which identifies and makes use of the fallacious comparison of words to the world and delights in the ambiguity resulting from the discrepancy:
—Why did the moron eat hay?
—To feed his hoarse voice.
—How do you get down from an elephant?
—You don’t, you get down from a goose.
—Did you wake up grumpy this morning?
—No, I let him sleep.
Because we have language we find ourselves in a special and peculiar relationship to the objects, events, and situations which constitute what we imagine of the world. Language generates its own characteristics in the human psychological and spiritual condition. Indeed, it nearly is our psychological condition. This psychology is generated by the struggle between language and that which it claims to depict or express, by our overwhelming experience of the vastness and uncertainty of the world, and by what often seems to be the inadequacy of the imagination that longs to know it—and, furthermore, for the poet, the even greater inadequacy of the language that appears to describe, discuss, or disclose it. This psychology situates desire in the poem itself, or, more specifically, in poetic language, to which then we may attribute the motive for the poem.
Language is one of the principal forms our curiosity takes. It makes us restless. As Francis Ponge puts it, “Man is a curious body whose center of gravity is not in himself.”9 Instead it seems to be located in language, by virtue of which we negotiate our mentalities and the world; off-balance, heavy at the mouth, we are pulled forward. […]
Language itself is never in a state of rest. Its syntax can be as complex as thought. And the experience of using it, which includes the experience of understanding it, either as speech or as writing, is inevitably active—both intellectually and emotionally. The progress of a line or sentence, or a series of lines or sentences, has spatial properties as well as temporal properties. The meaning of a word in its place derives both from the word’s lateral reach, its contacts with its neighbors in a statement, and from its reach through and out of the text into the outer world, the matrix of its contemporary and historical reference. The very idea of reference is spatial: over here is word, over there is thing at which the word is shooting amiable love-arrows. Getting from the beginning to the end of a statement is simple movement; following the connotative by-ways (on what Umberto Eco calls “inferential walks”) is complex or compound movement.
To identify these frames the reader has to ‘walk,’ so to speak, outside the text, in order to gather intertextual support (a quest for analogous ‘topoi,’ themes or motives). I call these interpretative moves inferential walks: they are not mere whimsical initiatives on the part of the reader, but are elicited by discursive structures and foreseen by the whole textual strategy as indispensable components of the construction. —Umberto Eco10
Language is productive of activity in another sense with which anyone is familiar who experiences words as attractive, magnetic to meaning. This is one of the first things one notices, for example, in works constructed from arbitrary vocabularies generated by random or chance operations (e.g., some works by Jackson Mac Low) or from a vocabulary limited according to some other criteria unrelated to meaning (for example, Alan Davies’s a an aves, a long poem using only words without ascenders or descenders, what the French call “the prisoner’s convention,” either because the bars are removed or because it saves paper). It is impossible to discover any string or bundle of words that is entirely free of possible narrative or psychological content. Moreover, though the “story” and “tone” of such works may be interpreted differently by different readers, nonetheless the readings differ within definite limits. While word strings are permissive, they do not license a free-for-all.
Writing develops subjects that mean the words we have for them.
Even words in storage, in the dictionary, seem frenetic with activity, as each individual entry attracts to itself other words as definition, example, and amplification. Thus, to open the dictionary at random, mastoid attracts nipplelike, temporal, bone, ear, and behind. Turning to temporal we find that the definition includes time, space, life, world, transitory, and near the temples, but, significantly, not mastoid. There is no entry for nipplelike, but the definition for nipple brings over protuberance, breast, udder, the female, milk, discharge, mouthpiece, and nursing bottle, and not mastoid, nor temporal, nor time, bone, ear, space, or word. It is relevant that the exchanges are incompletely reciprocal. […]
The “rage to know” is one expression of the restlessness engendered by language.
As long as man keeps hearing words
He’s sure that there’s a meaning somewhere
says Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust.11
It’s in the nature of language to encourage, and in part to justify, such Faustian longings. The notion that language is the means and medium for attaining knowledge (and, concomitantly, power) is, of course, old. The knowledge toward which we seem to be driven by language, or which language seems to promise, is inherently sacred as well as secular, redemptive as well as satisfying. The nomina sint numina position (i.e., that there is an essential identity between name and thing, that the real nature of a thing is immanent and present in its name, that nouns are numinous) suggests that it is possible to find a language which will meet its object with perfect identity. If this were the case, we could, in speaking or in writing, achieve the “at oneness” with the universe, at least in its particulars, that is the condition of complete and perfect knowing.
But if in the Edenic scenario we acquired knowledge of the animals by naming them, it was not by virtue of any numinous immanence in the name but because Adam was a taxonomist. He distinguished the individual animals, discovered the concept of categories, and then organized the species according to their various functions and relationship in a system.
What the “naming” provides is structure, not individual words.
As Benjamin Lee Whorf pointed out, “every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are culturally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyses nature, notices or neglects types of relationship and phenomena, channels his reasoning, and builds the house of his consciousness.”12 Whorf goes on to express what seem to be stirrings of a religious motivation: “What I have called patterns are basic in a really cosmic sense.” There is a “PREMONITION IN LANGUAGE of the unknown vaster world.” The idea
is too drastic to be penned up in a catch phrase. I would rather leave it unnamed. It is the view that a noumenal world—a world of hyperspace, of higher dimensions—awaits discovery by all the sciences [linguistics being one of them] which it will unite and unify, awaits discovery under its first aspect of a realm of PATTERNED RELATIONS, inconceivably manifold and yet bearing a recognizable affinity to the rich and systematic organization of LANGUAGE.13
It is as if what I’ve been calling, from Faust, the “rage to know,” which is in some respects a libidinous drive, seeks also a redemptive value from language. Both are appropriate to the Faustian legend.
Coming in part out of Freudian psychoanalytic theory, especially in France, is a body of feminist thought that is even more explicit in its identification of language with power and knowledge—a power and knowledge that is political, psychological, and aesthetic—and that is identified specifically with desire. The project for these French feminist writers is to direct their attention to “language and the unconscious, not as separate entities, but language as a passageway, and the only one, to the unconscious, to that which has been repressed and which would, if allowed to rise, disrupt the established symbolic order, what Jacques Lacan has dubbed the Law of the Father.”14
If the established symbolic order is the “Law of the Father,” and it is discovered to be not only repressive but false, distorted by the illogicality of bias, then the new symbolic order is to be a “woman’s language,” corresponding to a woman’s desire.
Luce Irigaray:
But woman has sex organs just about everywhere. She experiences pleasure almost everywhere. Even without speaking of the hysterization of her entire body, one can say that the geography of her pleasure is much more diversified, more multiple in its differences, more complex, more subtle, than is imagined…. That is undoubtedly the reason she is called temperamental, incomprehensible, perturbed, capricious—not to mention her language in which “she” goes off in all directions.15
“A feminine textual body is recognized by the fact that it is always endless, without ending,” says Hélène Cixous: “There’s no closure, it doesn’t stop.”16
The narrow definition of desire, the identification of desire solely with sexuality, and the literalness of the genital model for a woman’s language that some of these writers insist on may be problematic. The desire that is stirred by language is located most interestingly within language itself—as a desire to say, a desire to create the subject by saying, and as a pervasive doubt very like jealousy that springs from the impossibility of satisfying these yearnings. […]
When I’m eating this I want food…. The I expands. The individual is caught in a devouring machine, but she shines like the lone star on the horizon when we enter her thoughts, when she expounds on the immensity of her condition, the subject of the problem which interests nature. —Carla Harryman17
If language induces a yearning for comprehension, for perfect and complete expression, it also guards against it. Thus Faust complains:
It is written: “In the beginning was the Word!”
Already I have to stop! Who’ll help me on?
It is impossible to put such trust in the Word!18
Such is a recurrent element in the argument of the lyric: “Alack, what poverty my Muse brings forth …”; “Those lines that I before have write do lie …”; “For we / Have eyes to wonder but lack tongues to praise….”19
In the gap between what one wants to say (or what one perceives there is to say) and what one can say (what is sayable), words provide for a collaboration and a desertion. We delight in our sensuous involvement with the materials of language, we long to join words to the world—to close the gap between ourselves and things—and we suffer from doubt and anxiety from our inability to do so.
Yet the incapacity of language to match the world permits us to distinguish our ideas and ourselves from the world and things in it from each other. The undifferentiated is one mass, the differentiated is multiple. The (unimaginable) complete text, the text that contains everything, would in fact be a closed text. It would be insufferable.
A central activity of poetic language is formal. In being formal, in making form distinct, it opens—making variousness and multiplicity and possibility articulate and clear. While failing in the attempt to match the world, we discover structure, distinction, the integrity and separateness of things. As Bob Perelman writes:
At the sound of my voice
I spoke and, egged on
By the discrepancy, wrote
The rest out as poetry.
(“My One Voice”)
NOTES
1 For the sake of clarity, we can say that a “closed text” is one in which all the elements of the work are directed toward a single reading of the work. Each element confirms that reading and delivers the text from any lurking ambiguity. In the “open text” all the elements of the work are maximally excited; it is because ideas and things exceed (without deserting) argument that they have been taken into the dimension of the poem.
2 Luce Irigaray, "This Sex Which Is Not One," trans. Claudia Reeder, in New French Feminisms (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 104.
3 John Keats to Benjamin Bailey, 8 October 1817.
4 Ibid.
5 Bernadette Mayer to Lyn Hejinian.
6 Jurij Tynjanov, “Rhythm as the Constructive Factor of Verse,” in Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska, eds., Readings in Russian Poetics (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Contributions, 1978), 127–28.
7 Gertrude Stein, “Portraits and Repetitions,” in Writings and Lectures, 1909–1945, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz (Baltimore: Penguin, 1971), 104.
8 Tynjanov, “Rhythm as the Constructive Factor of Verse,” 128.
9 Francis Ponge, The Power of Language, trans. Serge Gavronsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 47.
10 Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 32.
11 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, trans. Randall Jarrell (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976), 137.
12 Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1956), 252.
13 Ibid., 247–48.
14 Elaine Marks, "Women and Literature in France," Signs 3, no. 4 (Summer 1978), 835.
15 Luce Irigaray, New French Feminisms, 103.
16 Hélène Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?” Signs 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1981), 53.
17 Carla Harryman, “Realism” in Animal Instincts: Prose Plays Essays (San Francisco: This, 1989), 106.
18 Goethe, Faust, 61.
19 Lines excised from Shakespeare’s sonnets, nos. 102, 115, and 106.
PUBLICATION: Excerpted from Women and Language (1984), 4:134–43.
KEYWORDS: language; feminism; Russian poetics; formalism.
LINKS: Lyn Hejinian, “An American Opener” (PJ 1), “La Faustienne” (PJ 10), “Hard Hearts” (PJ 2), “The Person and Description” (PJ 9), “Strangeness” (PJ 8); Bruce Andrews, “Total Equals What: Poetics and Praxis” (Guide; PJ 6); Jean Day, “Moving Object” (PJ 9); Laura Moriarty, “The Modern Lyric” (PJ 7); Alexei Parshchikov, “New Poetry” (PJ 8); Jim Rosenberg, “Openings: The Connection Direct” (PJ 10); Viktor Shklovsky, “Plotless Literature: Vasily Rozanov” (Guide; PJ 1); Barrett Watten, “Missing ‘X’: Formal Meaning in Crane and Eigner” (PJ 2); Ellen Zweig, “Feminism and Formalism” (PJ 4).
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); A Thought Is the Bride of What Thinking (Berkeley: Tuumba, 1976); Writing Is an Aid to Memory (Berkeley: The Figures, 1978); My Life (Providence, R.I.: Burning Deck, 1980); Oxota: A Short Russian Novel (Great Barrington, Mass.: The Figures, 1991); The Cell (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1992); The Cold of Poetry (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1994); Happily (Sausalito, Calif.: Post-Apollo, 2000); A Border Comedy (New York: Granary, 2001); The Fatalist (Richmond: Omnidawn, 2003); Saga/Circus (Richmond: Omnidawn, 2008); The Book of a Thousand Eyes (Richmond: Omnidown, 2012); with Michael Davidson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten, Leningrad: American Writers in the Soviet Union (San Francisco: Mercury House, 1991); with Rae Armantrout et al., The Grand Piano.