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  • Changing the Sjuzet: Lyn Hejinian’s Digressive Narratologies
  • Srikanth Reddy (bio)

Jacques. One day, there was this little boy who was sitting under the counter in a laundry, crying his eyes out. The laundryman’s wife got tired of the noise, so she said:

“Come, child, what are you crying for?”

“Because they want me to say A.”

“And why don’t you want to say A?”

“Because the minute I’ve said A, they’ll want me to say B.”

Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist and His Master

In Diderot’s anecdote of the little boy in the laundry, alphabetical order serves as a figure for the regulatory social order of Enlightenment. For the unruly child, to utter the letter A would not only compel this speaking subject to articulate the obligatory B that must follow; it would pledge him as well to a schoolroom abecedary of instruction, discipline, and orthodoxy. The comedy of this anecdote lies, of course, in the weeping boy’s conflation of his ABC’s with a coercive institutional order. But the child’s rejection of alphabetical progression—“the minute I’ve said A, they’ll want me to say B”—also sets into motion a small parable of sequence and consequence that reflects the overall philosophical and literary concerns of Jacques the Fatalist. Throughout the novel, Diderot’s characters grapple with the fatality of consequence, endlessly cogitating, for instance, upon the philosophical problem of causation: “Postulate a cause and an effect will follow. A trivial cause will produce a trivial effect. A passing cause will produce a [End Page 54] passing effect. An occasional cause will produce an occasional effect. A cause that is blocked will produce a reduced effect” (220). Jacques’s recitation of this scholiastic litany rhetorically reflects the great chain of causation that binds this inveterate fatalist. On the level of literary form, however, Jacques the Fatalist gleefully disregards protocols of sequence and consequence within the conventions of novelistic prose in the period, from its opening paragraph—in which Diderot’s narrator mocks readerly expectations of destination and purpose: “Where were they coming from? From the nearest place. Where were they going? Does anyone really know where they’re going?” (3)—to its garden of forking plots, to its plural closure in three separate but equal endings.1 In the end, the little boy in the laundry’s stubborn refusal to utter the fatal A that would symbolize his entry into the world of the written word precludes any sort of literary resolution whatsoever to his schoolroom impasse. But Diderot, as a citizen in the republic of letters, employs digression as a literary method for interrogating the philosophical premises of fatalism, playfully dismantling Enlightenment narratologies of rational order and linear progression in the process.

Though fatalism may seem more like a psychological condition than a philosophical school today, the work of a self-professed literary fatalist like Lyn Hejinian illuminates the enduring complexities of sequence and consequence in contemporary American poetics. Constructing a poetry of “illogical sequiturs and logical / nonsequiturs” in collections such as her recent homage to Diderot, The Fatalist, Hejinian proposes a new, digressive logic of discursive sequence within the medium (65).2 Indeed, the movement with which she is commonly associated, the “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E” poets, bears embedded within the typography of its name an [End Page 55] implicit critique of abecedarian progression; in the subversive schoolroom of these writers (where L, N, G, U, and E all equal A), it is easy to imagine the little boy of Diderot’s parable happily singing his LBZ’s. This is not to suggest that Hejinian rejects out of hand all notions of consequence and causation; the irreversible undertow of mortality, for example, is keenly felt throughout her work. (Toward the end of The Fatalist, Hejinian writes of an acquaintance who finds herself nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita that “M is not a careerist but an adventurer / dressed for colder cities and soon / she will be N,” intimating that this character’s ultimate destination is, like everybody’s, the terminal Z of mortality [78].) Rather than dismissing all notions of sequential progression entirely...

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