Jorie Graham and the Complication of Subjectivity

It's productive to read Jorie Graham's Swarm after reading Kristeva, for the concept of boundaries is pointedly interrogated in the series of poems with the title "Underneath." "Underneath (13)" suggests that existing explanatory systems fail:

needed explanation

because of the mystic nature of the theory

and our reliance on collective belief

I could not visualize the end

the tools that paved the way broke

While explanation is broken, it is still needed. What we have has been ossified as myths, like Freud's Oedipus complex. The difficulty becomes enacting a challenge without disestablishing the self. Like the abject, Graham's underneath is ejected from the body and forms a horror beside us, a doubling based on rejection. Graham brings us face to face with the form of this abjection:

this is the mother tongue

there is in my mouth a ladder

climb down

presence of the world

impassable gap

pass

I am beside myself

you are inside me as history

We exist Meet me

While the concept of the abject cannot be laid seemlessly over Graham's poem, the concern with surfaces as boundaries that contain the inexpressible hints at the void within the subject created by abjection. What remains after abjection is an ongoing epistemological struggle in which the one is two and the two are one. When Graham says "you are inside me as history," she insists on retaining the memory of the rejected detritus of being; she recognizes the corpse within us that is also the newborn separated from the mother. Existence is a matter of continually meeting the past and future corpse, the terminal ends of life that resist the efforts of the symbolic realm.