In the poet's last work, Lola the Interpreter, she treats her readers as true interlocutors, inviting them into the act of interpretation alongside her.
The act of interpretation is usually situated as a recovery—of original meaning and authorial intent. The goal is to translate what is unfamiliar into something legible, adding clarity until other readers reach consensus. Lyn Hejinian’s posthumous work, a book-length prose poem titled Lola the Interpreter, does just the opposite: Instead of trying to close the gap between writer and reader, it invites us to play in a terrain of language. Every line vibrates with alternative meanings, daunting the reader with its multiplicity. Tracing the evolution of Hejinian’s experimental style from My Life (1980), her most celebrated work, to Lola the Interpreter, her final book, we can see a lifelong endeavor to craft a text that is open enough to let the world in.
Hejinian was a leading figure in the Language poetry movement, a loose tradition that emerged in the Bay Area and New York City in the 1970s that included Charles Bernstein, Bernadette Mayer, Leslie Scalapino, Hannah Weiner, Fanny Howe, and many others. Frustrated with lyric poetry and “its smug pretension to universality and its tendency to cast the poet as guardian to Truth,” the Language poets sought to highlight the materiality of language and the reader’s role in the process of meaning-making. In her essay “The Rejection of Closure,” first delivered as a talk in 1983, Hejinian writes about the difference between a closed and an open text. While a closed text tries to impart a single meaning, an open text is one in which “all elements of the work are maximally excited” and multiple interpretations are made possible. The invitation is extended to the reader to fill in the gaps and fissures, a dynamic process that is “generative rather than directive.”
The “I” in Hejinian’s writing never asks for deference or obedience, but she does ask us to come with her as she stretches the semantic possibilities of a sentence. “A simile is like the happy smile with which Narcissus comes face to face with his beautiful self at a woodland pool,” she writes in Lola the Interpreter. In one line, Hejinian seamlessly compares a simile to a smile to a mirror, using prepositional phrases to make affective leaps across time and space, uniting unlike clauses and trusting the reader to form the connective tissue. Or consider this passage from My Life:
The artichoke has done its best, armored, with scales, barbed, and hiding in its interior the soft hairs so aptly called the choke. I suppose I had always hoped that, through an act of will and the effort of practice, I might be someone else, might alter my personality and even my appearance, that I might in fact create myself, but instead I found myself trapped in the very character which made such a thought possible and such a wish mine.
This succession draws a parallel between an artichoke and the speaker’s metamorphosis, how the armor that protects her from external incursion can also be the form that constricts. In her next line, she writes, “Any work dealing with questions of possibility must lead to new work,” extracting the word possible from the previous sentence and placing it in a new context, showing the inevitability of transformation despite herself.
While inconclusive on a macroscopic level, Hejinian’s sentences are microscopic landscapes, each one testing the sentence’s ability to contain experience. Or, as she puts it, “Language which is like a fruitskin around fruit.” The poet Tim Wood describes the effect of Hejinian’s prose poems as “all volta”: Instead of a vertical inflection of power where the writer is the producer and the reader is the consumer, her writing establishes a horizontal relationship in which the reader is equally active in the act of knowledge production. If language is an ideological tool that wields and transmits power, then the Language poets sought to invent new formal modes that could act as critiques of this relationship, revealing the presuppositions with which we arrive at the text. Instead of treating language as a transparent window onto meaning, Hejinian invites us to look at the window itself.
My Life, Hejinian’s best-known work, is an experimental autobiography and book-length prose poem that was first published in 1980. Hejinian wrote it when she was 37 years old; it is composed of 37 sections, each one 37 sentences long. The strict numerical structure is contrasted with an indeterminacy of memory. Some lines are aphoristic: “Memory is the money of my class.” Others are “I” statements that refuse to disclose biographical information: “I turn to look out the window, my attention drawn to the yellow truck in the sunlight.” Even as they accumulate, Hejinian’s declarations fail to cohere into a unified identity. Rather than describing the events of her life—her college graduation, the birth of two children, her marriage to the jazz musician Larry Ochs, not to mention the numerous books of poetry she had published by then—she writes only about the peripheries of experience: “transitions, transmutations, the endless radiating of denotation into relation.” She doesn’t provide a sequence of events in which the speaker overcomes adversity and becomes more actualized. The self, if it exists, can only be seen in its impermanence.
My Life is a field recording of the moments when an “I” was disarmed by beauty, often in scenes of quietude and domesticity. The sentences are not causally linked, though they are connected through slant association, every line a displacement of the prior one. “I was coming home from a late literary event and heard a commotion at the corner 7-Eleven (consciousness and poetry). ‘Do you know what middle-class people expect from poetry?’ said Parschchikov later in Moscow, ‘a glimpse of eternity.’” Much of Hejinian’s writing is temporally dislocated, skipping through space-time to show how an inquiry can find its answer much “later.” While each of the 37 passages in My Life gives the illusion of a year, the time that passes within them is hazy or up for debate. Hejinian went on to update the book in 1987, appending the previous version so that there were 45 sections with 45 lines each; and in 2003, she published a separate extension called My Life in the Nineties. These multiple successors suggest an endless continuity in which completion is neither desirable nor attainable. In my experience, reading My Life reminds me of one feeling in particular: that of hearing a voice in a dream, one you think is sharing a vital piece of advice that you’ll forget once you wake up, and you’ll spend the rest of the day feeling thwarted.
If My Life is invested in remembrance as a private project, Lola the Interpreter remakes the fractured self of Hejinian’s previous work into something that can only be experienced in relation to others. Hejinian’s posthumous book is a prose poem in which a cast of quasi-characters in the Bay Area “interpret” one another’s lives. It is less inward, more external, invested in a world-making that shows its individual characters in states of beauty and precarity as they navigate a cascade of political catastrophes: the affordable-housing crisis, environmental collapse, police brutality, and the casualization of labor within and outside of academia. Unlike My Life, which was more reflective and diaristic, Lola the Interpreter shows an “I” in flux, with unseen forces that continually make and undo the self. It is as if Hejinian were testing out the limits of what it would mean for a text to be as open as possible without collapsing into singularity, forming an endlessly unfolding web of intertextual relations.
The speaker in Lola contemplates freedom’s meaning when all definitions are determined by their associations with other definitions, an interdependency that seems to undermine what freedom is. The speaker’s friend Zander Dallas offers his own insight, pointing out the difference between poetry and reason:
Zander Dallas declares one evening that for him the supreme value is reason. Why then is he a scholar of poetry? We are in a bar on a side street five blocks from the plaza where, moving three pretzel loops from a small bowl on the table between us, I ask him that question. “I believe in reason,” he says, “but I don’t believe in poetry.” The pretzels are as pure as cactus.
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The “I” and Zander make concessions and polish their thoughts until they arrive at a mutually agreed-upon truth. This kind of dialectical thinking shows how two people in an antagonistic relationship still need each other, especially in instances of collective action. In this debate, the simile “the pretzels are as pure as cactus” acts as a reversal of Zander’s claim, a reverence for language’s ability to put two things in a relationship with each other without explanation. As soon as we arrive at a concrete truth, the foundation on which that truth is built is eroded by poetry. Just as the deconstructionists believed in language as a system of signs in which the meaning of one sign is always deferred to another—being has no meaning without nothingness, light has no meaning without shadow—Lola the Interpreter tells us that there is no such thing as identity in private solipsism.
Hejinian was a creative-writing professor in the English department at the University of California, Berkeley, for over two decades, where she advised many PhD students, led reading groups, and was active in local and campus politics. She was a founding member of the UC Berkeley Solidarity Alliance in 2009, protesting against the university’s privatization and budget cuts. The alliance worked with other East Bay groups on organizing rallies, marches, freeway blockades, the Occupy Cal protests, and the takeover of the Port of Oakland. Hejinian also cowrote and coedited books with writers within and outside the academy, including Leslie Scalapino, Etel Adnan, Jennifer Scappattone, and Ron Silliman. She surrounded herself with collaborators and interlocutors, and the classroom’s influence as an imaginative space is evident in much of her late work.
A few of the characters in Lola the Interpreter are featured in her earlier Positions of the Sun, a set of interlocking essays published in 2018 that navigate the waves of dissent and protest that took place in the Bay Area before the 2008 financial crisis. We meet more than 70 characters over the course of Positions, loosely based on people Hejinian encountered—friends, family, neighbors, students, colleagues—as they learn to live with one another amid capitalism’s slow and acute violences. The essays are indicative of Hejinian’s late style, which was invested in probing the relationship between politics and aesthetics while still treating the quotidian as a site of philosophical inquiry, gravitating from the interactions between sentences to the interactions between people. “Linkage has taken on a political valence,” she writes, “both on the ground and as a means for understanding what comes (is coming) to pass, what the roots of it are, and what is at stake.”
As the characters in Lola the Interpreter argue with each other about psychoanalysis and the color of the sky, the book’s central intent comes into focus: It’s a blueprint for how to think with and against each other, and what it means to wholly disagree with someone’s position while remaining unequivocally on their side. “Internal contradictions are everywhere,” Hejinian notes; “whether or not you find them intolerable is yet to be determined.” It can be frustrating to read a book without desire or conflict, where nothing progresses or develops, because it makes traditional modes of reading useless. Lola the Interpreter is filled with citations ranging from Nietzsche to Camus and from Aristotle to Wittgenstein. Whenever I believe something in it to be true, its verity is undercut or negated. “And here we realize,” Hejinian observes, “that we are getting off on personal subjection: we are getting fucked by the text. The disintegration of ego is going to continue.”
While this sounds like the foundation for an antagonistic relationship between the writer and the reader, I believe there is also something utopian in Hejinian’s fluidity. Lola the Interpreter shows that the forms we’ve come to think of as concrete and eternal could crack open at a moment’s notice, and something else might come shining through. We will never be able to touch the source of that light, not in its entirety, because it comes from a vanishing point—but that we can receive it at all seems like something worth staying for. “What you can’t discover is the limit of possibility,” Hejinian writes, “which must always remain undiscovered.”
Angie Sijun LouAngie Sijun Lou is a writer living in New York. Her work has previously appeared in Bomb, Fence, Joyland, and elsewhere.