Objectivist Form and Feminist Materialism in Lyn Hejinian’s My Life

Abstract

As we have seen in the preceding chapters, social values are necessarily encoded in the form of a literary work. Literary form is, ultimately, a structure that displays the results of literary labor, and labor occurs within a social totality. One always works within a given social setting, regardless of the type of work one does. Some literary forms work to reveal labor, and some to conceal it. A polished sonnet may appear effortless, even if it took dozens of revisions to achieve. On the other hand, the procedural forms that we have examined in the preceding chapters tend to lay bare the labor involved, and concomitantly to reflect working conditions in a postindustrial society. Moreover, as we have seen, procedural forms need not be produced by politically engaged poets to register a social critique. An ideologically uncommitted poet like Ted Berrigan, a leftist like David Antin, and a Marxist like Ron Silliman can all produce work that encodes the labor process, and it is up to the critic to place this labor within a larger social and historical framework. In this final chapter, we will encounter a variation on the political continuum: a poet who is informed by a Marxian critique of commodity fetishism, but who also attempts to think beyond the language of production and consumption. Lyn Hejinian’s use of procedural form in My Life highlights the arbitrary, repetitive nature of postindustrial labor, and her treatment of commodities highlights the reification of labor.