The Language of Inquiry

Materials (for Dubravka Djuric)

Materials (for Dubravka Djuric) On April 2, 1990, the Serbian poet Dubravka Djuric wrote to me from Belgrade with some interview questions for a short essay to accompany her translations into Serbian of sections from My Life. The essay, interview, and translations appeared in the journal Polja in December 1990. The questions were fairly basic, as was appropriate for their context, but in looking back over them now, I particularly appreciate Dubravka Djuric’s interest in the relationship between social materiality and literary praxis. The point that there is such a relationship (that poetry is a socially material practice), and that I had exploring it in mind, is one of the obvious features of My Life, the work with which Djuric was most concerned. But I would argue that the baring (and bearing) of social materiality was fundamental to Language writing generally, though how this was carried out differed very much from text to text. Poetry’s embrace of language is not uncomplicated, of course. On the one hand, writing cannot help but transport into itself at least some of the ideological material that comes with the language in which it occurs; the language has been saturated by ideology, it is not at all an objective ground. On 161 the other hand, Language writing often attempts to block that ideology (by jamming the system or by cutting the flow of communication, for example) or to embarrass it (by subjecting it to disclosure and critique). In other words, literary devices—disjuncture, the use of parallelism rather than sequence, ellipses, the incorporation of brutal discourse into work, code shifting, and indeed all devices that accomplish a semantic shift—were used with political intent, and both social and literary material regimens were brought into confrontation. The political character is not inherent in the devices but in the intention motivating their use. A central concern of writing that views such devices as socially material is not subjectivity but agency. dubravka djuric: Could you tell me about your first poems and other writings, about the fields of interest that were initial and important for you in your beginnings? lyn hejinian: One of the too rarely considered features of what we term language is its multiple character, its polymorphism . Language is qualitatively different from other artistic mediums in that it isn’t, strictly speaking, one thing, a single type of material. Language consists of a vast array of strategies and situations for discovering and making meaning . It not only exists in multitudes of context, it is multitudes of context. My first “writings” were made when I was nine or ten years old, and they were unremarkable in themselves. This isn’t surprising, since I in fact didn’t particularly care what it was I was writing. I never, for example, thought that words could capture the world or capture my experience (although perhaps during my adolescence I thought that 162 / The Language of Inquiry writing might be able to apologize for my existence), and I was never engrossed in “looking for the right word” for something. Instead, my earliest inspirations were my father ’s typewriter and the two stacks of paper, one clean and the other covered with type, on either side of it. My father, during the first decade or so of my life, spent the evenings and weekends writing a series of novels. None of them was ever published. He also worked as a university administrator , first at the University of California and then at Harvard University, and when I was around ten years old he abandoned novel-writing and returned to an earlier interest in painting. I was given his typewriter. My earliest writings were, strictly speaking, typing. I was happy to type almost anything, and although I wrote some poems and a short picaresque novel in the guise of a diary kept by a ten-year-old boy (it is no doubt significant that I wrote in the unmarked first person, that is, as a boy), the writing activity that I remember most clearly and with the most pleasure was a series of melodramas based on a popular radio show called “Bobby Benson and the B Bar B.” I wrote the plays in collaboration with a friend, and if I remember correctly, she made up the stories and I simply typed what she dictated to me. I’ve always had difficulty making up plots, perhaps because I have...