This thesis is a long-overdue study of Graham’s ecopoetics and the first to offer an in-depth analysis of Graham’s environmental themes through the lens of
phenomenology. Of particular interest to this study is the work of Merleau-Ponty, especially his notions of the lived body and the flesh, which he formulated in
Phenomenology of Perception and The Visible and the Invisible respectively.
Graham has openly acknowledged her debts to Merleau-Ponty in her book and interviews.7 However, to date, no scholars have undertaken the task of evaluating the
7 In the interview in The Paris Review, Graham mentioned reading “Stendhal, Marx and Engels, Merleau-Ponty” when growing up in Rome. In a Q&A article in Smartish Pace, Graham also named Merleau-Ponty, among Bergson, Heidegger, Lyotard, Agamben, and Nietzsche as an important
significance of Graham’s poetic responses to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. In my thesis, I examine a number of poems from Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980),
Erosion (1983), The End of Beauty (1987), Never (2002) and Sea Change (2008), and
argue that the poems show an increasing urge for embeddedness and embodiment (both thematically and stylistically) which resonates with Merleau-Ponty’sphilosophical project.
As this thesis suggests, Graham’s poems show that the current ecological crisis can be understood as the collective failure of humanity to perceive our
interdependence with the human and nonhuman other. Her poems problematize purely rational approaches to the world which place us outside of nature, and try to enact bodily encounters with things in the natural world as an alternative way of engaging the world. For Graham, it is only when we have fully inhabited our own bodies that we can better inhabit the earth, since the experience of encounter provides the necessary basis for imagining and understanding our interdependence with others.
Chapter One discusses the links between Graham’s early poems and Merleau-Ponty’s critique of the Cartesian subject-object bifurcation, its reinforcement in the scientific method, and his notion of the lived body experience as an alternative mode of engaging the world. Unlike earlier ecocritics, who believe her early poems to be altogether anthropocentric, I demonstrate that Graham’s early poems problematize logocentrism and the scientific method, specifically how they privilege abstract truth over bodily reality, objectify and isolate the body and the natural world. As a result, things in the natural world are deprived of intrinsic values, and we are faced with the problem of placelessness. Graham’s early poems suggest that our failure to identify with nature and understand our interdependence with it stems from our alienation
philosophical influence.
from our own bodies. In other words, to overcome the problems of isolation and placelessness, we must first reaffirm our own bodily reality and encounter others.
Chapter Two investigates the way Graham’s Never enacts bodily encounters with the nonhuman others as an alternative way of engaging nature and conceiving of selfhood. Drawing on Molly Hadley Jensen’s reinterpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh, I show that in Never the self is understood as a network of lived relations that thrives on exchange with multiple others. In Never, the world of lived relations provides the foundation for the self’s identity and truths. By reaffirming the bodily reality over abstract truth, Never also reaffirms the irreplaceability of the natural world. Finally, this chapter discusses Graham’s poetics of failure, specifically how it risks failure to communicate by suspending reason and simply focusing on reproducing the perceptual experience. While many critics saw Graham’s linguistic style and poetic form as a flaw of Never and her poetry in general, I argue that its difficulty is due to her refusal to abstract and simplify the natural world, and that it helps foreground the irreplaceability of things in the natural world.
Chapter Three examines the way Sea Change takes the experience of fleshly encounters which reveals the self as a network of lived relations as the basis for understanding larger networks of exchange. While Never suggests that the self is interdependent with its surrounding, Sea Change tries to imagine our interdependence with the global ecosystem. In Sea Change, death is understood not as the
disintegration of self, but rather the selfish accumulation of things which disrupts the natural process of circulation. While disintegration is a natural process of ecological circulation, which thrives on reciprocal exchange, global capitalism aims at unlimited accumulation rather than balanced circulation. The chapter also discusses the way Sea
Chang develops an affective language which manages to bypass rational abstraction
and effectively engage the reader with ethical issues.In a time of growing urgency in the worldwide environmental crisis, the importance of ecoliterature and ecocriticism is beyond measure. My hope is not only to illuminate Graham’s ecopoetry, which has largely been ignored, but also to carve out new possibilities for the burgeoning field of ecocriticism, which often displays a tendency to privilege realist fiction and nonfiction over comparatively “difficult”
poetry.
Chapter One Rediscovering the Body
In his 1988 article “Merleau-Ponty and the Voice of the Earth” David Abram observes that the escalating ecological crisis is “the result of a recent and collective perceptual disorder in our species” that prevents us from seeing our “own
embodiment as entirely internal to, and thus wholly dependent upon, the vaster body of the Earth” (“Merleau-Ponty and the Voice of the Earth”). John R. White makes a similar point when he points out that “the ‘outer’ devastation of the environment is in the end a projection of the ‘inner’ alienation we experience from our own animality”
(187). Environmental ethics, White suggests, should not simply be “a question of dealing with the values and norms which apply to ’the environment,’ as if the latter is something extrinsic to ourselves,” but rather include considerations of our own body experience.
This thesis attempts to discuss the ecological crisis with a similar supposition, that the ecological crisis is the result of a collective failure to perceive our
intercorporeality, or interdependence, with the rest of the world and to come to terms with the corporeality of our beings. The primary reason for this failure, this thesis suggests, is the rationalist tradition which places us in a confrontational and alienating relationship with the natural world and our own bodies. By examining the role our body plays in providing a way of understanding our intercorporeality with the rest of the world, I wish to show that many of Jorie Graham’s early poems, instead of endorsing anthropocentrism, as has been argued by previous ecocritics, are highly critical of the ways in which logocentrism and scientific methods abstract the human body and things in the natural world, ignoring their relations with the lived whole to which they belong. As the second chapter will make clear, such understanding of the
early poems will greatly illuminate Graham’s later poems’ attempt to recover the full complexity of the body experience essential for understanding our interdependence with the natural world.
To prepare for my argument, the first part of this chapter will introduce some of Merleau-Ponty’s ideas which serve as the theoretical framework for my discussion of the problems involved in the Cartesian subject and the scientific method, especially his notion of the lived body as an alternative way of conceiving the self and engaging the world. Part two will then examine some of Graham’s early poems which expand on these notions.