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.

Julia Kristeva and the Abject

Julia Kristeva argues that the abject is not an object opposite the ego, but it is that part of the subject rejected by the superego. It is the rejected part of being which exists alongside the subject. Kristeva grounds the abject in the pre-object phase of separation from the mother:

"Abjection preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be" (10).

The abject is an instance of the failure of the symbolic to organize experience. The examples of the abject that Kristeva finds in twentieth century writers are related to an uncovering of a breakdown in the symbolic order, a passing away of stable meaning. She points out that Dostoyevsky's abject is found in both murder and suicide; for Proust it is in the proximity of the sounds of sex and death, the inevitability and uncleanliness of sexual intercourse. These are proximities of boundaries; these boundaries replicate the one between the self and other. Kristeva calls it "boundary-subjectivity," and credits twentieth century writers with the disruptions of narrative that reveal the abject. While Kristeva doesn't exactly celebrate the abject, she calls attention to its ability to reveal "the bankruptcy of the fathers" (172).

Claude McKay and the Ghosts of our Heritage

It is fascinating to open the Selected Poems of Claude McKay after first perusing poetry anthologies. First, the anthologies have been very selective. The second edition of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry features five poems by McKay; Twentieth-Century American Poetry edited by Gioia, Mason, and Schoerke has six; the Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry has a whopping twelve.

The anthologist's imperative to be selective, however, forces these unfortunate editors to decide which McKay they want to present. While all the notes agree that McKay's most important and influential work was comprised of angry yet controlled poems of social protest against racism and racial violence, there's another McKay that has gone missing: a poet so firmly shaped by the experiences of the landscape of his youth that he remains haunted by memories of place. McKay's childhood in Jamaica roils just beneath the surface, and his early Songs for Jamaica explores the ruptures of past into present.

"North and South" begins "O sweet are tropic lands for waking dreams!" These tropic lands burst into the conscious mind as the speaker inhabits a much different place. For example, the speaker in "Home Thoughts" imagines a connection back to the island:

Oh something just now must be happening there!
That suddenly and quiveringly here,
Amid the city's noises, I must think
Of mangoes leaning to the river's brink

There's a sort of synchronicity that allows the adult to overlay his current urban surroundings with the Caribbean of his youth. The speaker experiences two places simultaneously. This is its own sort of doubling; though the speaker is still one, he inhabits and is acted upon by two worlds.

I think this sort of synchronicity or dual subjectivity establishes an important argument that can help us read his more well-known protest poems. The adult is shot through with unconscious memories of the past; he cannot deny or erase his heritage. In fact, the poem "Heritage" begins:

Now the dead past seems vividly alive,
And in this shining moment I can trace,
Down through the vista of the vanished years,
Your faun-like form, your fond elusive face.

The important question about youth, then, is what sort of spirit is released into the future. In perhaps his most well-known poem, a sonnet called "The Lynching," McKay's final couplet is: "And little lads, lynchers that were to be, / Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee." The most wrenching lines of the poem, and the ones that cause such outrage, are those that condemn the next generation to the sins of their fathers. If McKay's boyhood yields "O sweet are tropic lands for waking dreams!", then one shudders to imagine the worlds that lads in "The Lynching" will inhabit in the future.

William Wordsworth and the Double

Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads is justly read and reread by generations of literature students. Each time I read it I find more to contemplate; the things I thought I understood develop new complexities. The idea that strikes me this time through the text is Wordsworth's attempt to define what a poet is:

"[...] a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them. To these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present; an ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which [...] resemble the passions produced by real events [...]."

The part that grabs my attention is Wordsworth's claim that poets are "impelled to create" passions. Poets are naturally expected to be creative, but Wordsworth allows them a level of imagination that borders on fabrication. Poets are "delighted" to recognize the manifestation of their passions in the natural world, and their poems recreate the passions. But what does such a recreation entail?

Wordsworth's use of the term "conjure" is particularly subtle, suggesting one the one hand that something is merely recollected and on the other hand that it is actually brought forth. He says that "the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind." Both the poet, who is temporally separated from the original experience, and the reader, who never experienced it, gain an emotion that actually exists in the mind.

This "existence" can either be viewed as either obvious or radical. I believe it's radical. Those who favor the belief that the existence of emotion in the reader is obvious are perhaps mistaking emotion for "understanding." Language conveys information (in complicated ways, of course), but to encounter something through the distance of the intellect, to confront an idea, is different than to experience emotion.

There's a bit from the second book of "The Prelude" that exhibits how thoroughgoing this creation is:

A tranquillizing spirit presses now
On my corporeal frame, so wide appears
The vacancy between me and those days,
Which yet have such self-presence in my mind,
That, musing on them, often do I seem
Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself
And of some other Being.

This brings me to the double, of course. Two Wordsworths interact with one another, the later shaping the earlier through recollection, but the earlier always shaping the later by the addition of experiences. How often do we see this figuration in literature? It seems foundational to poetry as well as subjectivity itself. Doubling reenacts the process of individuation. And, if doubling is forever occuring, then individuation is not an act safely relegated to the past but an ongoing process. We are not individuals; we are perpetually individuating, experiencing whatever joys or traumas accompany this process.