“Like a Thief Returning to the Shelf”: The Givens of Autobiography in Lyn Hejinian’s My Life

Marjorie Perloff argues that Lyn Hejinian’s prose-poem My Life comprises an autobiography which “provides almost no direct references to the basic facts—what city the poet lives in, where her father works, where she goes to school, whom she marries, how old her children are, and so on” (121–22). The facts we do learn remain “shadowy, peripheral—events that take place so to speak at the outer edges of the screen whose real focus is on something else” (121–22). Perloff defines that “something else” as “the creation of a language field in which ‘identity’ is less a property of a given character than a fluid state that takes on varying shapes and that hence engages the reader to participate in its formation and deformation” (121–22). The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that Perloff’s claim that “identity” is less a property of a given character and more of a fluid state is problematic. Re-examination of Perloff’s argument facilitates a more nuanced way of considering Hejinian’s text, which explores the nature of identity and the autobiographical project. In this article, a re-reading of Hejinian’s text will reveal that many of the interpretive difficulties pertaining to writing and reading autobiography take the form of what could be called an “impasse of explanation,” corresponding to Derridean aporia. It will also be suggested that understanding autobiography as often aspiring to the status of a gift might make it possible to move beyond that impasse of explanation which autobiography often engenders.

To consider Perloff’s argument, it is useful to examine a specific passage from My Life, which was written in 1978. This early version of the text consisted of thirty-seven sections, corresponding to Hejinian’s age at the time, with each section containing thirty-seven sentences. In 1986, Hejinian revised the text so that it contained forty-five sections, each containing forty-five sentences, corresponding to her age at this stage of composition (Perloff 117). The passage to be examined here is taken from the twelfth section of the 1987 version, and comprises the forty-third to forty-fifth sentences in that section: “He had stolen a tin of nuts and given them to me and now I had to return them to the store, like a thief returning to the shelf, but I managed to pull it off and put them back. The romance of the vanished. I had begun to learn, from the experience of passionate generosity, about love” (50–51). This passage details what Perloff would probably classify as shadowy, peripheral facts. The events described do not offer the kind of information that Perloff would call a “basic fact,” and their description is elusive (121). However, this passage demonstrates problems in Perloff’s claim about the portrayal of identity in My Life. The “he” in the passage above is unnamed, but may be a young boy with a romantic interest in Hejinian, who has stolen a tin of nuts for her in her twelfth year. While she appreciates the gesture, calling it “passionate generosity,” she tries to redress the act and therefore could be perceived to be uncomfortable with it. But why does Hejinian feel that she has to return the tin of nuts to the shelf? That auxiliary verb “had” takes on something of the force of a moral imperative. And why does Hejinian compare herself to a thief? It is not particularly thief-like to return stolen property. In any case, the act of returning the tin to the shelf is not theft but redresses an act of theft not even her own. This passage deals with complex concepts of agency, responsibility, and ownership in relation to one’s own identity and actions, and those of others.

Perloff’s characterization of identity in the text as a fluid state may be justified by that unspecified male pronoun and by Hejinian’s sense that it is incumbent on her to undo an act of theft performed by another person. Additionally, the difficulties...