“Encompassing Unboundedness”:  Desire and Collaborative Authorship

in Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian’s “The Wide Road”

by Shawna Ferris

“Sometimes the best way to undo a trap is to take it apart quietly without calling attention to it”—so write Carla Harryman and Lyn Hejinian in their provocative prose piece “The Wide Road”(61).  In this text, Harryman and Hejinian profess a shared interest in the possibilities of “measuring” desire (56).  However, their text also playfully “measures,” or “take[s] apart” questions of collaborative authorship.  In fact, while the authors never directly indicate any intention of doing so, “The Wide Road” offers a variety of intriguing answers to Michel Foucault’s famous question regarding the power and voice of the author in any text: “What matter who’s speaking?” (115).

  With Foucault’s question in mind, I examine the double authorship of “The Wide Road,” as it is expressed in the text’s physical layout on the page, and in Harryman and Hejinian’s exploration of what appears here as distinctly “female” forms of desire.  Throughout my discussion I explore the effects of the interplay between the double columns in which Harryman and Hejinian write “The Wide Road.” In doing so, I note the echoing of a variety of words, phrases, and themes from one column to the next, and I analyze the implications of the text’s heteronormativity in relation to the desire it purports to measure and the collaborative authorial relationship/s it illustrates. 

While “The Wide Road” simultaneously exhibits and critiques forms of authorial power, the consciousness with which Harryman and Hejinian signal their collaborative authorship here effectively “takes apart” the process of writing collaboratively.  Indeed, even as they take on—quietly or not—the task of measuring something as intangible as desire, Harryman and Hejinian question the possibility of finite definitions and take apart the single author’s traditional, finite authority.  Figure 1 is the first page of “The Wide Road” as it appears in the feminist journal Tessera’s “Feminist(s) Project(s)” issue.  One of the three co-editors of this issue introduces Harryman and Hejinian’s text as one that “call[s] attention to [its] own materiality, establishing relations that disrupt reading as consumption and require productive reading processes.”  In “The Wide Road,” the editor suggests, “the reader is invited to make sense of formal juxtapositions” ( Henderson 9).  Another co-editor of this issue notes that Harryman and Hejinian “muse about desire and self-representation” (Moyes 11).  Interestingly, while these introductory comments clearly highlight significant aspects of Harryman and Hejinian’s text, none of the editors use the word “collaborative” to describe “The Wide Road.”  This omission implies the text’s collaborative authorship is self-evident and/or not an important aspect of this text’s “project”; and I take issue with this omission.

While the text indeed highlights its own “materiality,” and while Harryman and Hejinian’s double-column format disrupts reader expectations, indeed requiring us “to make sense of formal juxtapositions” (Henderson 9), “The Wide Road” also constitutes a playful performance of collaborative authorship.  Though both authors’ names appear on the title page, and though the two columns and their respective titles clearly reflect this double authorship, neither author specifically claims either of the columns as her own.  Harryman and Hejinian overtly intervene in and problematize reader expectation as, though the two columns appear side-by-side (and this format is consistent throughout the piece)—just as the authors’ names appear side-by-side under the title—“An Essay” (the left column of each page) is distinct from “Another Essay” (the right column of each page).  Thus, though a Western reader’s first impulse is to read down the left column and then move to the right and do the same, readers quickly discover that they must instead ‘jump’ from the bottom of the left column on one page to the top of the left column on the next page.  Readers must likewise read the right column of one page and then ‘jump’ over to the right column on the next page. 

In my experience, this exercise involves some slippage.  I regularly catch myself reading a word or sentence from a right column after finishing a left column or, because the language in the two columns is often similar, my eye drifts across the page and reads a word or two from the opposite column even as I try to read only one column.  Thus Harryman and Hejinian encourage readers to read each essay with a constant awareness of the other essay beside it on the page—much as, when we drive along a road, we are reminded (by the presence of others on the road, or by the empty lanes which could be occupied by others) that others also drive there.

This playful performance of dual authorship is also evident in the narrative voices and the language of the two essays which comprise “The Wide Road.”  Though the essays are visually distinct, the narrative voice of each column is often plural.  In both essays the speakers regularly eschew use of the singular pronouns “I” or “one” in favour of “we.”  This plurality of voice suggests not only the potentially collaborative authorship of each essay, but also the authors’ inclusion of their readers in the writing, or “measuring,” and sharing involved in this text.  The text thus becomes more plural than the two columns and two authors’ names would lead us to believe.  “Let’s imagine,” the speakers of “An Essay” invite us in their first sentences, “that desires are perceptions. . . . and yet we aren’t looking for ultimate or even penultimate pleasures, choosing instead to go on with our desires” (56-57).  The speakers continue in this inclusive manner until, at the bottom of their third page they finally say, “Between the man and the woman rolls the inchoate river of desire.  And this river, according to our thesis is voracious” (58).  With the words “our thesis,” the speakers identify themselves more explicitly as the “we” and “our” of their essay.  However, each essay’s consistent employment of inclusive plural pronouns until the “our thesis” “moment” in the  text, inevitably suggests inclusion, or collectivity of voice throughout.

Thus the speakers of these essays challenge their readers to engage with and interpret their texts even as they, the speakers, perform collaboration.  Though Harryman and Hejinian’s names on this title page indicate that the authors are “present” and important in this text, the authors’ subsequent refusal to use singular pronouns, their refusal to claim authorship/ownership of either one of the columns, playfully echoes and answers Michel Foucault’s questioning of the author’s traditional authority in his/her text.  “What matter who’s speaking?” Harryman and Hejinian echo.  And then they answer:  “It doesn’t matter.  We’re speaking.  We, the authors who are and are not here because ‘we’ includes ‘you’, our readers; even as we use ‘we’ to indicate our voices, themes, and theses in ‘The Wide Road.’” Harryman and Hejinian thus theorize and perform collaborative authorship.  Consequently, the “double” format and “plural” authorial voice in “The Wide Road” “take[s] apart” the traditional single author’s, or artist’s, “unique” and often “omnipotent” voice in his/her text.

That Harryman and Hejinian theorize and measure desire as they perform and theorize collaboration begs discussion here as well.  Though neither of the essays in “The Wide Road” directly addresses eroticism in the collaborative process, Harryman and Hejinian’s choice to measure desire in this collaborative piece reflects contemporary theories of same-sex literary collaboration.  In his book Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration, Wayne Koestenbaum claims that “Desire is a mist, only partially decipherable, that rises from the collaborative page” (177).  Koestenbaum goes on to illustrate ways in which a number of seminal collaborative authorial relationships reflect the homoeroticism and/or homosexuality Koestenbaum sees as necessarily present in same sex collaborations.  Though Koestenbaum specifically theorizes male-male collaboration, he also provocatively suggests that such desire may also be evident in woman-woman collaborative texts.  He writes, “An entire book could discuss. . .female (and lesbian) collaboration” (13).  Harryman and Hejinian’s “The Wide Road,” published four years after Koestembaum’s important book, may in fact contribute a portion of the theoretical exploration he envisions for women’s collaborative relationships. 

Certainly Harryman and Hejinian’s exuberant exploration of unlimited desire in this text creates a certain “mist” on these collaborative pages.  In fact, in reading “The Wide Road,” readers may sense not simply the “mist” of desire Koestenbaum finds in the texts he examines, they may actually feel the spray which precedes the mist as waves of desire roll across these pages.  As the speakers of “Another Essay” warn us in their first few pages, “even the mention of desire causes desire to commence measuring itself and its implements of measure are as various as the imagination” (57, emphasis added).  And “An Essay” echoes, “What we see at any given moment, the out-stretched so-called field of vision, is bounded only by invisibility. . . . To be mobile and desirous is to be unbounded among distinct things” (57).  Already then, desire is “unbounded,” invisible, immeasurable—unless we are willing to place boundaries on imaginative possibilities.

Recognizing the necessity of imagining unboundedness as a way to open to desire as a motivator, “mediating the interplay of sensation with knowledge” (56), the speakers of “An Essay” write:  “Vivo con el estomago aqui/ y el Corazon otro lado del rio (I live with my stomach here/ and my heart on the other side of the river” (57).  They later expand this river metaphor such that it becomes not simply the space dividing aspects of the self, but rather the means of bringing sensation and knowledge together to create unlimited imaginative possibilities: desire.  The river is thus described as “voracious, always redolent of more” (60).  This voraciousness, or unboundedness, is most effectively illustrated in “Another Essay” as the speakers describe a woman’s passionate physical and metaphysical response to the first touch of a new lover.  They write,

she experienced the entire universe as being sucked into her lamp-lit body, bouncing and mingling among her sexual organs with limitless tensing, tickles, and ostentatious pressures.  Now, with every increment of motion within, her desire to expel the inhaled universe into an explosion of song sliding down the bows of a viola through the coal-ridden creases of earth rocketing back out in flame and river-lashing liquid became an object in itself. (60)

As this passage so effectively illustrates, desire is unbounded, immeasurable, and infinitely present in this text.  While it can be channelled, felt moving along and through bodily paths, expressed momentarily in words, it is also potentially un-containable, even irrepressible once triggered.  Desire is both a “mist” and, periodically, a spray that rises from these pages and drenches this collaborative project and its readers.

As such, however, Harryman and Hejinian’s desirous text dabbles in essentialism.  The authors’ repeated invocations of duplicity, even multiplicity, as a uniquely female state of being, thinking, and desiring problematize even their double authorship as yet another possible incarnation of the essentialism apparent in “The Wide Road.”  In “The ‘Risk’ of Essence,” Diana Fuss writes, “Essentialism is classically defined as a belief in true essence—that which is most irreducible, unchanging, and therefore constitutive of a given person or thing”(2).  My discussion is primarily concerned with essentialism insofar as Harryman and Hejinian’s text appears to envision a universal female essence—based in the female body—which may then be seen as a universally female experience of desire.  Lines such as, “We are an unusual creature, since we are set apart from loneliness compositionally” (“Another Essay” 59) reflect the dual authorship of the text even as their descriptions of their desirous subject matter suggests their investment, at least for the space of “The Wide Road,” in an essentialized form of “female” desire.  A kind of “female” desirous, artistic, and intellectual experience advocated by French theorist Luce Irigaray and other feminist advocates of l’écriture feminine. 

In “This Sex Which is Not One,”  Irigaray writes, “Woman ‘touches herself’ all the time. . . for her genitals are formed of two lips in continuous contact.  Thus, with herself, she is already two—but not divisible into one(s)—that caress each other” (351).  It is precisely a new interest in this autoerotic caress, Irigarary suggests, that can help women to experience jouissance, or the innate pleasures of life and sexuality.  In doing so, as Ann Rosalind Jones explains, Irigaray and others emphasize that women “can then speak about [their jouissance] in the new languages it calls for, they will establish a point of view (a site of différence) from which phallogocentric concepts and controls can be seen through and taken apart, not only in theory, but also in practice” (358). 

That lesbianism, for Irigaray and many others, facilitates women’s experience of jouissance and their production of l’écriture feminine is the point at which we should return to Harryman and Hejinian’s “The Wide Road.”  As the sex wars waged within feminism’s ranks throughout the 1970s and ‘80s taught us, while feminist essentialism has given us a much deeper understanding of women’s sexuality, it often relies too heavily on traditional binary oppositional paradigms (man/woman, lesbian/heterosexual, right/wrong), and can thus be deeply divisive.  And while the exuberance and desire evident in Harryman and Hejinian’s prose can draw us in and ask us to consider more intimately the ways in which desire informs and motivates us, the speakers’ occasional grounding of this exuberance and intimacy in female physiology warrants closer consideration.

Though the speakers of “Another Essay” never specify that the “we” they describe is distinctly female, the speakers of “An Essay” are not as ‘careful.’  “An amazing memory—voluptuous and tenacious—is part of our physiological strength and maturity,” they write (60).  They then ask, “[I]s it true that what we write of [i.e. desire] is engendered by the tenacious impulse to possess, consume, absorb fluidly and indiscriminately and thus confirm or register what has been noted men most fear in women?  In other words, their encompassing unboundedness?” (61).  The relationship the speakers of “An Essay” construct between female physiology and a corresponding female desire to “consume,” “absorb fluidly,” and to form “diverse and multiple associations” (61), suggests this question is a rhetorical one.  Harryman and Hejinian risk essentializing female experience—an almost inevitably reductive and thus dangerous rhetorical maneuver—in order to vividly explore and to “measure” desire.  The speakers of “An Essay” thus posit femaleness as the prolific counterpart to more bounded, or ‘rigid’, phallic, “male” methods of desiring.  Thus “The Wide Road” dabbles in a form of essentialism that has proven dangerously divisive in traditional Western culture and in so many contemporary political debates.

That said, before we throw out this bath water, we must first recognize that there may still be one or two babies in it.  Because most of the essentialist rhetoric noted above is extracted from only one column (the left one) in “The Wide Road,” and because the other column illustrates “unbounded” desire through specific examples which may be seen to centre around women only incidentally—or because of the sex of the authors—“Another Essay” can also be read as one which responds to and undoes the essentialism inherent to “An Essay.”   The plural pronouns throughout “Another Essay” neither generalize “female” desire nor directly exclude anyone from its celebratory expression.  However, as noted above, “Another Essay” and “An Essay” share authorship, physical proximity on the page, and can be experienced “simultaneously” by their readers.  Thus even if one chooses to read “Another Essay” as a counter-essentialist text, “An Essay” keeps gender essentialism in sight in “The Wide Road.”       

Just as Harryman and Hejinian’s explorations of desire risk and perhaps anticipate condemnation from critics of essentialism, their simultaneous theorizing of desire and collaboration acknowledge, and perhaps anticipate, controversy surrounding woman-woman collaboration in feminist theory.  In “Strange Bedfellows: Feminist Collaboration,” Carey Caplan and Ellen Rose discuss their own collaborative relationship.  They consistently describe their collaborative texts as “lesbian” texts, even as they repeatedly emphasize the metaphorical nature of this descriptor.  “In ‘real’ life, we are not lovers,” they write.  “Our metaphor envisions a reciprocal, nonhierarchical yearning for mutual fulfilment.  It describes the dynamic of desire, energy, and euphoria that switches on when we are actively collaborating” (550).  Caplan and Rose insist that their collaborative, metaphorically lesbian “we” is unified, that “‘she’ and ‘I’ metamorphose into ‘we’,” and that “‘We’ emerges from the space between [their] individual, different voices, its meaning elusive, dispersed, always deferred, never unitary” (548-9).  “Strange Bedfellows,” published the same year as “The Wide Road,” may serve as a useful map of Harryman and Hejinian’s collaborative project.

The first page of “The Wide Road” offers an incarnation of the “elusive,” collective, yet “never unitary” collaborative voice Caplan and Rose describe.  The language and subject matter of the two columns intersect and play off of one another, echoing words and images back and forth across the page.  “Our task is paradoxical and thus ornamentally sexual,” the speakers of “An Essay” inform us.  Across the page, the narrating “we” of “Another Essay” illustrate just such a sexual, paradoxical task: “[W]e embrace all but possess only air,” they write (56).  On this page as well, the two essays overlap significantly, and can be read as one essay through the first two lines of text across both columns. “Let’s imagine that desires are Too often curtailed!  Too often perceptions more than motives, abandoned!  Too often speechless!” (see figure 1, image of page 56).  As these first sentences indicate, even as Harryman and Hejinian write together about desire, their text performs a collaborative relationship in which collaborating voices are unitary but not unitary, a relationship whose subjects only imagine that their desires are “curtailed.” For such erotic desires are not curtailed in this essay.  The authors write together, as mutually desirous subjects.  The way I read these lines, the voices of “Another Essay” interrupt and blend with the voices of “An Essay” to add an exultant spark of controversy to the calm suggestion that we “imagine” desires.

Though the columns do not, in my reading, dovetail so neatly again, they continue to echo and anticipate one another throughout the “The Wide Road”—as though the subjects of this text walk a “wide road” together, moving in the same direction, but not always walking at the same pace.  One column notes, “Our many love objects are incomparable,” while the other, on the same page, muses that “[m]easuring desire is never a quantifying of lovers” (57).  The left column describes a “river of desire” rolling between a man and a woman; and the right column echoes this river metaphor in its description of desire as “currents of effect and possibility like Phlegethon [a river of fire in Hades], in flames and engendering whatever is to come, the objects and events of our desire” (58-9).  Later, the speakers of “An Essay” say, “But to see (or sense—we, among other things sleepers, don’t mean to unduly privilege the eyes)” (61).  And “Another Essay” echoes these images of vision and sleep on the next page, as the speakers describe a woman as a “detached observer in a dream” who observes a “noisy group of sleepers” (61). Finally, the essays converge again as they draw to a close.  Invoking the road image of the title, the speakers of “An Essay” describe a “bird on the wire singing ‘chirp tic tic’ and the hard shadow of the telephone pole wobbling beside it. . . . The air is warm, eddies of humidity are stirred up here and there by bees, . . . Beside the road is a man in a hat plowing the field of vision” (64).  The speakers of “Another Essay” echo and continue this very sexual juxtaposition of phallic and feminine, male and female, as they write an imagined woman’s diary: “Menstrual bleeding reminds me that I may not care about any of this tomorrow. . . . I still prefer the universe to Philip; even though my cavities are filled with extra holes” (64).  And so the erotic interplay of authorial voice and textual subject matter concludes in parallel and/or intersecting positions: plural female voices imagining romantic exchanges between male characters and some version of themselves.

Significantly, both essays in “The Wide Road” ultimately work to position desire as a current of passion flowing from female subjects to the male objects of their desire.  In fact, despite the potentially “lesbian” nature of Harryman and Hejinian’s joint authorship and the sexy, desire-filled result of this collaborative relationship, the heterosexual relationships with which “The Wide Road” concludes make the text almost insistently heteronormative as they recall all of the male/female relationships through which desire is explored and women’s sexual responses are illustrated in both essays.  “An Essay” initially describes a man “staring at [a] woman cooking as if she were a priest at Mass” and notes that “Between the man and the woman rolls an inchoate river of desire” (58).  Next comes an encounter between a woman and a male mausoleum guard, an encounter that concludes with the comment that “if it had been we instead of she. . . we might have made a date with the guard to meet us after work” (59). “An Essay” later closes with the image of the nameless man dropping his plow and running to assist the women who have stumbled on the road (64). 

Likewise, the speakers in “Another Essay” begin by describing an erotic encounter between women on a horse and a man who hands them a pornographic book while a policeman looks on (58).  This essay later explores the ways in which desire forms and informs the actions of a woman they describe as “our protagonist, who. . . shares our profession,” in her relationship with a man she meets and with whom she falls in love.  Though the diary entries the speakers imagine for this lonely woman initially indicate that she must leave him to experience the ecstatic freedom of “the universe,” the essay concludes with the man returning and agreeing to play “third fiddle” “to the universe and to [the woman’s] theoretical writings” (64).  As the man runs toward the women in the final paragraph of “An Essay,” Philip and the “lonely woman” try to ‘make a go of it’ in the final paragraphs of “Another Essay”—and “The Wide Road” closes as an insistently heterosexual, even heteronormative text, despite its woman-woman authorship. 

 This heteronormativity in “The Wide Road” again suggests Harryman and Hejinian’s awareness and anticipation of the ways that woman-woman collaboration has been and continues to be read.  This insistently ‘heterosexualized’ exploration of desire recalls Caplan and Rose’s repeated assertions that their collaboration represents only a metaphorical lesbian relationship.  Indeed Harryman and Hejinian’s text asserts a similarly conscious rejection of lesbianism in the “real” lives of its authors, even as its collaboration demonstrates a merging of, or intercourse between authorial voices.

In her book Writing Double, Betty London notes that, “women’s collaborations have been haunted by what Terry Castle has called the ‘apparitional lesbian’—a phantom figure that both reveals and conceals lesbian possibilities” (64).  London continues, “[T]he discourse that surrounds women’s joint writing has inevitably turned on transgressive sexuality, introducing the specter (sic) of lesbianism at the site of women’s textual productivity” (64).  Despite the jouissance of “The Wide Road” and/or its participation in the tradition of l’écriture feminine, the “apparitional lesbian” seems to haunt Harryman and Hejinian just as it haunts Caplan and Rose.  In writing collaboratively, Harryman and Hejinian produce a text that critics like Koestenbaum or even Caplan and Rose may read as “lesbian.”  And just as Caplan and Rose deny any “real” lesbianism, the ‘insistent heterosexuality’ of “The Wide Road” perhaps addresses and attempts to exorcise this same spectre in Harryman and Hejinian’s textual relationship.  However, the text of “The Wide Road” both encourages and undermines the efforts of those critics who would read Harryman and Hejinian’s collaborative prose as evidence of more than a metaphorical lesbian relationship between its two authors.  Subsequently, “The Wide Road” performs and invites readers to theorize collaborative authorship more extensively.

At this point in my discussion, I am left with a number of new questions about Harryman and Hejinian’s desirous, collaborative project.  Does the self-conscious “unboundedness” of two (female) voices playing off one another throughout the text only to posit, in the end, very similar visions of desire, suggest that agreement is the desirable end of women’s collaborative projects?   Is this similarity of vision instead constructed so overtly in order to beg this very question?   After all, as I have argued in this paper, the consciousness with which Harryman and Hejinian present and perform their collaborative text indicates that “The Wide Road” must be read both as a measurement of desire and as a taking apart of the collaborative process.  As Harryman and Hejinian write in “The Wide Road,” “Sometimes the best way to undo a trap is to take it apart quietly without calling attention to it” (61).  Though Harryman and Hejinian’s collaborative relationship performatively “undoes” traditional ideas of authorial voice and playfully encourages readers to join them in measuring the un-measurable, their text is simultaneously limited, or “trapped,” by its own heteronormativity and gender essentialism.  Perhaps then, the similar conclusions these essays reach suggest subtly—or “quietly”—that we continue theorizing this project, working to escape normative notions about desire, sexuality, and women.