Reflections Upon “My [Unreflected] Life”: M. Merleau-Ponty and Lyn Hejinian’s Poetics of “Genetic Phenomenology” in My Life

Abstract

Written as an autobiography, Lyn Hejinian’s prose poem My Life presents a hermeneutic puzzle. The structure of the poem, on the one hand, certainly mirrors a chronological recording of the poet’s life to the year of the composition. When it was first written in 1978, at the poet’s then age of 37, the poem consisted of 37 sections, and each section, of 37 sentences, all unnumbered.¹ But in 1986 when Hejinian revised My Life for the second Sun & Moon edition at the age of 45, she added 8 sections to the book, and, accordingly, 8 new sentences to each section, all inserted into the original text at irregular intervals.² The content of the poem, on the other hand, is certainly much less logical or chronological. Although each section in the sequence suggests a parallel to a corresponding year in the poet’s life and does contain some allusions to emotional, relational, or linguistic features characteristic of that stage of growth in question,³ its reflective engagement with the everyday existence unfolds a nonlinear “field work,”⁴ in which life is perceived, rather contra-autobiographically, as “hopelessly frayed, all loose ends” (ML, p. 15), and a discernible, individual identity or subjectivity constantly “eludes, shifts, and even dissolves,”⁵ giving way to an opaque multiplicity, “a fluid state that takes on varying shapes.”⁶

The very word “diary” depresses me. ... My life is a permeable constructedness.

— Lyn Hejinian, My Life

Theoretical and practical decisions of personal life may well lay hold, from a distance, upon my past and my future, and bestow upon my past, with all its fortuitous events, a definite significance, by following it up with a future which will be seen after the event as foreshadowed by it, thus introducing historicity into my life. Yet these sequences have always something artificial about them.

— M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception