The Rejection of Closure

“The Rejection of Closure” was originally written as a talk and given at 544 Natoma Street, San Francisco, on April 17, 1983.(1) The “Who Is Speak­ing?” panel discussion had taken place several weeks earlier, and with the “Poetry & Philosophy” issue of Poetics Journal (volume 3) about to come out, Barrett Watten and I had just decided to devote Poetics Journal 4 to the theme of “Women & Language.”(2) Within the writing community, discus­sions of gender were frequent, and they were addressed both to percep­tible practical problems (instances of injustice) immediately affecting people’s work and lives and to longer-term questions of power and, in particular, the ethics of meaning.

Carla Harryman’s signal work, The Middle, was published this same year. Originally given as a talk, it is an organizationally radiant critique (one might even say trashing) of conventional (patriarchal) power structures.(3) In The Middle, the power of authority gives way to the power of invention, with its plenitudes of focus, and to the power of performance. The subject position is in the middle—an uncontainable presence making meaning.

In “The Rejection of Closure,” I give no examples of a “closed” text, but I can offer several. The coercive, epiphanic mode in some contemporary lyric poetry can serve as a negative model, with its smug pretension to uni­versality and its tendency to cast the poet as guardian to Truth. And detec­tive fiction can serve as a positive model, presenting an ultimately stable, calm and calming (and fundamentally unepiphanic) vision of the world. In ei­ther case, however pleasurable its effects, closure is a fiction, one of the amenities that falsehood and fantasy provide.

But if we have positive as well as negative models for closure, why reject it? Is there something about the world that demands openness? Is there something in language that compels and implements the rejection of closure?

I can only begin a posteriori, by perceiving the world as vast and over­whelming; each moment stands under an enormous vertical and horizontal pressure of information, potent with ambiguity, meaning-full, unfixed, and certainly incomplete. What saves this from becoming a vast undifferentiated mass of data and situation is one’s ability to make distinctions. The open text is one which both acknowledges the vastness of the world and is formally differentiating. It is form that provides an opening.—Lyn Hejinian

Two dangers never cease threatening
the world: order and disorder.
     Paul Valéry, Analects

Writing’s initial situation, its point of origin, is often character­ized and always complicated by opposing impulses in the writer and by a seeming dilemma that language creates and then cannot resolve. The writer experiences a conflict between a desire to sat­isfy a demand for boundedness, for containment and coherence, and a simultaneous desire for free, unhampered access to the world prompting a correspondingly open response to it. Curi­ously, the term inclusivity is applicable to both, though the connotative emphasis is different for each. The impulse to bounded­ness demands circumscription and that in turn requires that a dis­tinction be made between inside and outside, between the rele­vant and the (for the particular writing at hand) confusing and irrelevant—the meaningless. The desire for unhampered access and response to the world (an encyclopedic impulse), on the other hand, hates to leave anything out. The essential question here concerns the writer’s subject position.

The impasse, meanwhile, that is both language’s creative con­dition and its problem can be described as the disjuncture be­tween words and meaning, but at a particularly material level, one at which the writer is faced with the necessity of making for­mal decisions—devising an appropriate structure for the work, anticipating the constraints it will put into play, etc.—in the con­text of the ever-regenerating plenitude of language’s resources, in their infinite combinations. Writing’s forms are not merely shapes but forces; formal questions are about dynamics—they ask how, where, and why the writing moves, what are the types, di­rections, number, and velocities of a work’s motion. The mate­rial aporia objectifies the poem in the context of ideas and of lan­guage itself.

 

These areas of conflict are not neatly parallel. Form does not necessarily achieve closure, nor does raw materiality provide openness. Indeed, the conjunction of form with radical openness may be what can offer a version of the “paradise” for which writ­ing often yearns—a flowering focus on a distinct infinity.

For the sake of clarity, I will offer a tentative characterization of the terms open and closed. We can say that a “closed text” is one in which all the elements of the work are directed toward a single reading of it. Each element confirms that reading and delivers the text from any lurking ambiguity. In the “open text,” mean­while, all the elements of the work are maximally excited; here it is because ideas and things exceed (without deserting) argument that they have taken into the dimension of the work.

Though they may be different in different texts, depending on other elements in the work and by all means on the intention of the writer, it is not hard to discover devices—structural de­vices—that may serve to “open” a poetic text. One set of such devices has to do with arrangement and, particularly, with re­arrangement within a work. The “open text,” by definition, is open to the world and particularly to the reader. It invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies. It speaks for writing that is generative rather than directive. The writer relinquishes total control and challenges authority as a principle and control as a motive. The “open text” often emphasizes or foregrounds process, either the process of the original composition or of subsequent compo­sitions by readers, and thus resists the cultural tendencies that seek to identify and fix material and turn it into a product; that is, it resists reduction and commodification. As Luce Irigaray says, positing this tendency within a feminine sphere of dis­course, “It is really a question of another economy which diverts the linearity of a project, undermines the target-object of a de­sire, explodes the polarization of desire on only one pleasure, and disconcerts fidelity to only one discourse.” (4)

“Field work,” where words and lines are distributed irregu­larly on the page, such as Robert Grenier’s poster/map entitled Cambridge M’ass and Bruce Andrews’s “Love Song 41” (also origi­nally published as a poster), are obvious examples of works in which the order of the reading is not imposed in advance.(5) Any reading of these works is an improvisation; one moves through the work not in straight lines but in curves, swirls, and across intersections, to words that catch the eye or attract attention repeatedly.

Repetition, conventionally used to unify a text or harmonize its parts, as if returning melody to the tonic, instead, in these works, and somewhat differently in a work like my My Life, chal­lenges our inclination to isolate, identify, and limit the burden of meaning given to an event (the sentence or line). Here, where cer­tain phrases recur in the work, recontextualized and with new em­phasis, repetition disrupts the initial apparent meaning scheme. The initial reading is adjusted; meaning is set in motion, emended and extended, and the rewriting that repetition becomes post­pones completion of the thought indefinitely.

But there are more complex forms of juxtaposition. My inten­tion (I don't mean to suggest that I succeeded) in a subsequent work, “Resistance,” was to write a lyric poem in a long form—that is, to achieve maximum vertical intensity (the single moment into which the idea rushes) and maximum horizontal extensivity (ideas cross the landscape and become the horizon and weather).(6) To myself I proposed the paragraph as a unit representing a single moment of time, a single moment in the mind, its content all the thoughts, thought particles, impressions, impulses—all the di­verse, particular, and contradictory elements—that are included in an active and emotional mind at any given instant. For the mo­ment, for the writer, the poem is a mind.

To prevent the work from disintegrating into its separate parts—scattering sentence-rubble haphazardly on the waste heap—­I used various syntactic devices to foreground or create the conjunction between ideas. Statements become interconnected by being grammatically congruent; unlike things, made alike gram­matically, become meaningful in common and jointly. “Resis­tance” began:

Patience is laid out on my papers. Its visuals are gainful and equably square. Two dozen jets take off into the night. Out­doors a car goes uphill in a genial low gear. The flow of thoughts—impossible! These are the defamiliarization tech­niques with which we are so familiar.

There are six sentences here, three of which, beginning with the first, are constructed similarly: subject—verb—prepositional phrase. The three prepositions are on, into, and in, which in iso­lation seem similar but used here have very different meanings. On is locational: “on my papers.” Into is metaphorical and atmo­spheric: “into the night.” In is atmospheric and qualitative: “in a genial low gear.” There are a pair of inversions in effect here: the unlike are made similar (syntactically) and the like are sundered (semantically). Patience, which might be a quality of a virtuous character attendant to work (“it is laid out on my papers”), might also be solitaire, a card game played by an idler who is avoiding attention to work. Two dozen jets can only take off together in formation; they are “laid out” on the night sky. A car goes up­hill; its movement upward parallels that of the jets, but whereas their formation is martial, the single car is somewhat domestic, genial and innocuous. The image in the first pair of sentences is horizontal. The upward movement of the next two sentences de­scribes a vertical plane, upended on or intersecting the horizon­tal one. The  “flow of thoughts” runs down the vertical and comes to rest—“impossible!”

The work shifts between horizontal and vertical landscapes, and the corresponding sentences—the details of each composed on its particular plane—form distinct semantic fields. (In fact, I would like each individual sentence to be as nearly a complete poem as possible.)

One of the results of this compositional technique, building a work out of discrete fields, is the creation of sizable gaps between the units. To negotiate this disrupted terrain, the reader (and I can say also the writer) must overleap the end stop, the period, and cover the distance to the next sentence. Meanwhile, what stays in the gaps remains crucial and informative. Part of the reading oc­curs as the recovery of that information (looking behind) and the discovery of newly structured ideas (stepping forward).

In both My Life and “Resistance,” the structural unit (grossly, the paragraph) was meant to be mimetic of both a space and a time of thinking. In a somewhat different respect, time predeter­mines the form of Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day. The work begins when the clock is set running (at dawn on December 22, 1978) and ends when the time allotted to the work runs out (late night of the same day). “It’s true,” Mayer has said: “I have always loved projects of all sorts, including say sorting leaves or what­ever projects turn out to be, and in poetry I most especially love having time be the structure which always seems to me to save structure or form from itself because then nothing really has to begin or end.”(7)

Whether the form is dictated by temporal constraints or by other exoskeletal formal elements—by a prior decision, for ex­ample, that the work will contain, say, x number of sentences, paragraphs, stanzas, stresses, or lines, etc.—the work gives the impression that it begins and ends arbitrarily and not because there is a necessary point of origin or terminus, a first or last mo­ment. The implication (correct) is that the words and the ideas (thoughts, perceptions, etc. —the materials) continue beyond the work. One has simply stopped because one has run out of units or minutes, and not because a conclusion has been reached nor “everything” said.

The relationship of form, or the “constructive principle,” to the materials of the work (to its themes, the conceptual mass, but also to the words themselves) is the initial problem for the “open text,” one that faces each writing anew. Can form make the pri­mary chaos (the raw material, the unorganized impulse and in­formation, the uncertainty, incompleteness, vastness) articulate without depriving it of its capacious vitality, its generative power? Can form go even further than that and actually generate that potency, opening uncertainty to curiosity, incompleteness to speculation, and turning vastness into plenitude? In my opinion, the answer is yes; that is, in fact, the function of form in art. Form is not a fixture but an activity.

In an essay titled “Rhythm as the Constructive Factor of Verse,” the Russian Formalist writer Yurii Tynianov writes:

We have only recently outgrown the well-known analogy: form is to content as a glass is to wine….I would venture to say that in nine out of ten instances the word “composi­tion” covertly implies a treatment of form as a static item. The concept of “poetic line” or “stanza” is imperceptibly removed from the dynamic category. Repetition ceases to be considered as a fact of varying strength in various situations of frequency and quantity. The dangerous concept of the “symmetry of compositional facts” arises, dangerous because we cannot speak of symmetry where we find intensification.(8)
 

One is reminded of Gertrude Stein’s comparable comments in “Portraits and Repetitions”: “A thing that seems to be exactly the same thing may seem to be a repetition but is it.” “Is there repe­tition or is there insistence. I am inclined to believe there is no such thing as repetition. And really how can there be.” “Express­ing any thing there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis.” (9)

Tynianov continues:

The unity of a work is not a closed symmetrical whole, but an unfolding dynamic integrity. . . . The sensation of form in such a situation is always the sensation of flow (and therefore of change).... Art exists by means of this interaction or struggle.(10)

Language discovers what one might know, which in turn is always less than what language might say. We encounter some limitations of this relationship early, as children. Anything with limits can be imagined (correctly or incorrectly) as an object, by analogy with other objects—balls and rivers. Children objectify language when they render it their plaything, in jokes, puns, and riddles, or in glossolaliac chants and rhymes. They discover that words are not equal to the world, that a blur of displacement, a type of parallax, exists in the relation between things (events, ideas, objects) and the words for them—a displacement produc­ing a gap.

Among the most prevalent and persistent categories of jokes is that which identifies and makes use of the fallacious comparison of words to world and delights in the ambiguity resulting from the discrepancy:

—Why did the moron eat hay?
—To feed his hoarse voice.

 —How do you get down from an elephant?
—You don't, you get down from a goose.

—Did you wake up grumpy this morning?
—No, I let him sleep.

Because we have language we find ourselves in a special and peculiar relationship to the objects, events, and situations which constitute what we imagine of the world. Language generates its own characteristics in the human psychological and spiritual conditions. Indeed, it nearly is our psychological condition.

This psychology is generated by the struggle between language and that which it claims to depict or express, by our overwhelming experience of the vastness and uncertainty of the world, and by what often seems to be the inadequacy of the imagination that longs to know it—and, furthermore, for the poet, the even greater inadequacy of the language that appears to describe, dis­cuss, or disclose it. This psychology situates desire in the poem itself, or, more specifically, in poetic language, to which then we may attribute the motive for the poem.

Language is one of the principal forms our curiosity takes. It makes us restless. As Francis Ponge puts it, “Man is a curious body whose center of gravity is not in himself.”(11) Instead that center of gravity seems to be located in language, by virtue of which we negotiate our mentalities and the world; off-balance, heavy at the mouth, we are pulled forward.

I am urged out rummaging into the sunshine, and the depths increase of blue above. A paper hat on a cone of water. . . . But, already, words. . . . She is lying on her stomach with one eye closed, driving a toy truck along the road she has cleared with her fingers.(12)

Language itself is never in a state of rest. Its syntax can be as complex as thought. And the experience of using it, which in­cludes the experience of understanding it, either as speech or as writing, is inevitably active—both intellectually and emotionally. The progress of a line or sentence, or a series of lines or sen­tences, has spatial properties as well as temporal properties. The meaning of a word in its place derives both from the word’s lat­eral reach, its contacts with its neighbors in a statement, and from its reach through and out of the text into the outer world, the matrix of its contemporary and historical reference. The very idea of reference is spatial: over here is word, over there is thing, at which the word is shooting amiable love-arrows. Getting from the beginning to the end of a statement is simple movement; fol­lowing the connotative byways (on what Umberto Eco calls “in­ferential walks”) is complex or compound movement.

To identify these frames the reader has to “walk,” so to speak, outside the text, in order to gather intertextual sup­port (a quest for analogous “topoi,” themes or motives). I call these interpretative moves inferential walks: they are not mere whimsical initiatives on the part of the reader, but are elicited by discursive structures and foreseen by the whole textual strategy as indispensable components of the construction.(13)

Language is productive of activity in another sense, with which anyone is familiar who experiences words as attractive, magnetic to meaning. This is one of the first things one notices, for example, in works constructed from arbitrary vocabularies generated by random or chance operations (e.g., some works by Jackson Mac Low) or from a vocabulary limited according to some other criteria unrelated to meaning (for example, Alan Davies’s a an av es, a long poem excluding any words containing letters with ascenders or descenders, what the French call “the prisoner’s convention,” either because the bars are removed or because it saves paper). It is impossible to discover any string or bundle of words that is entirely free of possible narrative or psy­chological content. Moreover, though the  “story” and “tone” of such works may be interpreted differently by different readers, nonetheless the readings differ within definite limits. While word strings are permissive, they do not license a free-for-all.

Writing develops subjects that mean the words we have for them.

Even words in storage, in the dictionary, seem frenetic with ac­tivity, as each individual entry attracts to itself other words as defi­nition, example, and amplification. Thus, to open the dictionary at random, mastoid attracts nipplelike, temporal, bone, ear, and behind. Turning to temporal we find that the definition includes time, space, life, world, transitory, and near the temples, but, significantly, not mastoid. There is no entry for nipplelike, but the definition for nipple brings over protuberance, breast, udder, the female, milk, discharge, mouthpiece, and nursing bottle, but again not mastoid, nor temporal, nor time, bone, ear, space, or word. It is relevant that the exchanges are incompletely reciprocal.

and how did this happen like an excerpt
   beginning in a square white boat abob on a gray sea . . .
                                    tootling of another message by the
             hacking lark . . .
as a child
                                  to the rescue and its spring . . .
              in a great lock of letters
                    like knock look . . .
                                       worked by utter joy way
                                 think through with that in minutes
already
                                slippage thinks random patterns
                                 through
                                      wishes
             I intend greed as I intend pride
                         patterns of roll extend over the wish (14)

The “rage to know” is one expression of the restlessness en­gendered by language. “As long as man keeps hearing words / He’s sure that there’s a meaning somewhere,” as Mephistopheles points out in Goethe’s Faust.(15)

It’s in the nature of language to encourage and, in part, to jus­tify such Faustian longings.(16) The notion that language is the means and medium for attaining knowledge and, concomitantly, power is, of course, old. The knowledge toward which we seem to be driven by language, or which language seems to promise, is inherently sacred as well as secular, redemptive as well as satisfy­ing. The nomina sint numina position (that there is an essential identity between name and thing, that the real nature of a thing is immanent and present in its name, that nouns are numinous) suggests that it is possible to find a language which will meet its object with perfect identity. If this were the case, we could, in speaking or in writing, achieve the “at oneness” with the uni­verse, at least in its particulars, that is the condition of complete and perfect knowing.

But if in the Edenic scenario we acquired knowledge of the animals by naming them, it was not by virtue of any numinous immanence in the name but because Adam was a taxonomist. He distinguished the individual animals, discovered the concept of categories, and then organized the various species according to their different functions and relationships in the system. What the “naming” provides is structure, not individual words.

As Benjamin Lee Whorf has pointed out, “Every language is a vast pattern-system, different from others, in which are cultur­ally ordained the forms and categories by which the personality not only communicates, but also analyses nature, notices or ne­glects types of relationship and phenomena, channels his reason­ing, and builds the house of his consciousness.” In this same es­say, apparently his last (written in 1941), titled “Language, Mind, Reality,” Whorf goes onto express what seem to be stirrings of a religious motivation: “What I have called patterns are basic in a really cosmic sense.” There is a “PREMONITION IN LANGUAGE of the unknown, vaster world.” The idea

is too drastic to be penned up in a catch phrase. I would rather leave it unnamed. It is the view that a noumenal world—a world of hyperspace, of higher dimensions—awaits discovery by all the sciences [linguistics being one of them] which it will unite and unify, awaits discovery under its first aspect of a realm of PATTERNED RELATIONS, inconceivably manifold and yet bearing a recognizable affinity to the rich and systematic organization of LANGUAGE.(17)

It is as if what I’ve been calling, from Faust, the “rage to know,” which is in some respects a libidinous drive, seeks also a redemp­tive value from language. Both are appropriate to the Faustian legend.

Coming in part out of Freudian psychoanalytic theory, espe­cially in France, is a body of feminist thought that is even more explicit in its identification of language with power and knowl­edge—a power and knowledge that is political, psychological, and aesthetic—and that is a site specifically of desire. The project for these French feminist writers has been to direct their atten­tion to “language and the unconscious, not as separate entities, but language as a passageway, and the only one, to the uncon­scious, to that which has been repressed and which would, if al­lowed to rise, disrupt the established symbolic order, what Jacques Lacan has dubbed the Law of the Father.”(18)

If the established symbolic order is the “Law of the Father,” and it is discovered to be not only repressive but false, distorted by the illogicality of bias, then the new symbolic order is to be a “woman's language,” corresponding to a woman’s desire.

Luce Irigaray writes:

But woman has sex organs just about everywhere. She experi­ences pleasure almost everywhere. Even without speaking of the hysterization of her entire body, one can say that the ge­ography of her pleasure is much more diversified, more mul­tiple in its differences, more complex, more subtle, than is imagined. . . . “She” is indefinitely other in herself. That is undoubtedly the reason she is called temperamental, incomprehensible, perturbed, capricious—not to mention her lan­guage in which “she” goes off in all directions.(19)

“A feminine textual body is recognized by the fact that it is always endless, without ending,” says Hélène Cixous: “There’s no clo­sure, it doesn’t stop.”(20)

The narrow definition of desire, the identification of desire solely with sexuality, and the literalness of the genital model for a woman’s language that some of these writers insist on may be problematic. The desire that is stirred by language is located most interestingly within language itself—as a desire to say, a desire to create the subject by saying, and as a pervasive doubt very like jealousy that springs from the impossibility of satisfying these yearnings. This desire resembles Wordsworth’s “underthirst / Of vigor seldom utterly allayed.”(21) And it is explicit in Carla Harryman’s “Realism”:

When I’m eating this I want food….The I expands. The individual is caught in a devouring machine, but she shines like the lone star on the horizon when we enter her thoughts, when she expounds on the immensity of her condition, the subject of the problem which interests nature.(22)

If language induces a yearning for comprehension, for perfect and complete expression, it also guards against it. Thus Faust complains:

It is written: “In the beginning was the Word!”
Already I have to stop! Who’ll help me on?
It is impossible to put such trust in the Word!(23)

This is a recurrent element in the argument of the lyric: “Alack, what poverty my Muse brings forth…”; “Those lines that I be­fore have writ do lie…”; “For we / Have eyes to wonder but lack tongues to praise….”(24)

In the gap between what one wants to say (or what one per­ceives there is to say) and what one can say (what is sayable), words provide for a collaboration and a desertion. We delight in our sensuous involvement with the materials of language, we long to join words to the world—to close the gap between ourselves and things—and we suffer from doubt and anxiety because of our in­ability to do so.

Yet the incapacity of language to match the world permits us to distinguish our ideas and ourselves from the world and things in it from each other. The undifferentiated is one mass, the dif­ferentiated is multiple. The (unimaginable) complete text, the text that contains everything, would in fact be a closed text. It would be insufferable.

A central activity of poetic language is formal. In being formal, in making form distinct, it opens—makes variousness and multiplicity and possibility articulate and clear. While failing in the attempt to match the world, we discover structure, distinc­tion, the integrity and separateness of things. As Bob Perelman writes:

At the sound of my voice
I spoke and, egged on
By the discrepancy, wrote
The rest out as poetry.(25)

 

NOTES

(1) “The Rejection of Closure” was included in Writing/ Talks, ed. Bob Perelman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), and, following suggestions from Barrett Watten, in revised form in Po­etics Journal 4: “Women & Language” (May 1984). More recently, it was anthologized in Onward: Contemporary Poetry & Poetics, ed. Peter Baker (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), and extracts appear in Postmodern Ameri­can Poetry: A Norton Anthology, ed. Paul Hoover (New York: W. W. Nor­ton and Co., 1994). The essay has been translated into Serbian by Du­bravka Djuric, and that version appeared in Gradina 2-3 (1991; Nis, Yugoslavia).

(2) Poetics Journal  4: “Women & Language” (May 1984).

(3) Carla Harryman, The Middle (San Francisco: Gaz, 1983), 4. The Middle was republished in Writing/ Talks, ed. Perelman.

(4) Luce Irigaray, “This sex which is not one,” tr. Claudia Reeder, in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 104.

(5) Robert Grenier, Cambridge M'ass (Berkeley: Tuumba Press, 1979); Bruce Andrews, Love Songs (Baltimore: Pod Books, 1982).

(6) At the time this essay was written, “Resistance” existed only in manuscript form. A large portion of it was eventually incorporated into “The Green” and published in The Cold of Poetry (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1994).

(7) Bernadette Mayer to Lyn Hejinian, letter (1981?).

(8) Yurii Tynianov, “Rhythm as the Constructive Factor of Verse,” in Readings in Russian Poetics, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Contributions, 1978), 127-28.

(9) Gertrude Stein, “Portraits and Repetitions,” in Gertrude Stein: Writings 1932-1946, ed. Catharine R. Stimpson and Harriet Chessman (New York: Library of America, 1998), 292, 288.

(10) Tynianov, “Rhythm as the Constructive Factor,” 128.

(11) Francis Ponge, “The Object Is Poetics,” in The Power of Lan­guage, tr. Serge Gavronsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 47.

(12) Lyn Hejinian, My Life (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1987), 14-15.

(13) Umberto Eco, Introduction to The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 32. This book was of great help to me as I was considering the ideas expressed in this essay; I was especially interested in Eco’s emphasis on generation (creativity on the part of both writer and reader) and the polygendered impulses active in it.

(14) Lyn Hejinian, Writing Is an Aid to Memory (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1996), parts 2 and 12.

(15) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe’s Faust, Part One, tr. Ran­dall Jarrell (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976), 137.

(16) This idea is reiterated in My Life, one of the several forms of rep­etition in that work. (See My Life, 46).

(17) Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1956), 252, 248, 247-48.

(18) Elaine Marks, in Signs 3, no. 4 (Summer 1978), 835.

(19) Luce Irigaray, “This sex which is not one,” 103.

(20) Hélène Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?” in Signs 7, no. 1 (Autumn 1981), 53.

(21) William Wordsworth, “The Prelude” (1850 version), Book VI, lines 558-59, in William Wordsworth: The Prelude 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H. Abrams, and Stephen Gill (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979), 215.

(22) Carla Harryman, “Realism,” in Animal Instincts (Berkeley: This Press, 1989), 106.

(23) Goethe, Goethe’s Faust, Part One, 61.

(24) Lines excised from Shakespeare's Sonnets, nos. 102, 115, and 106.

(25) Bob Perelman. “My One Voice,” in Primer (Berkeley: This Press, 1981), 11.