地方所需的沉思：喬麗葛拉罕的生態詩

Abstract

本文嘗試以梅洛龐蒂的哲學闡釋普立茲獎得主美國詩人喬麗葛拉罕的生態詩。為求完整呈現其生態詩觀，本文挑選葛拉罕較具代表性的詩集，包括《植物與幽靈的混合體》（1980）、《侵蝕》（1983）、《美的結束》（1987）、《永不》（2002）、《海變》（2008），分三章討論。第一章探討葛拉罕早期三本詩集中對於理性和笛卡兒式主體的批評。如同梅洛龐蒂，葛拉罕質疑理性和科學方法將事物客體化和抽象化。在葛拉罕的早期詩中，邏各斯中心和科學方法不僅造就了封閉的自我，也否定了自然的內在價值。第二章討論葛拉罕如何在晚期的作品《永不》中探尋一種替代理性的方法來認識自然，並根據梅洛龐蒂的肉身主體重新建構有別於笛卡兒式我思的自我概念。許多學者認為葛拉罕的詩作過度晦澀，並將其晦澀視為《永不》的重大缺陷。本文將為《永不》的晦澀辯護，分析詩人如何巧妙地利用讀者在面對晦澀時產生的心理狀態彰顯詩中含意。第三章討論葛拉罕最新的生態詩集《海變》中以梅洛龐蒂的存有論為基礎，延伸結合生態系統中能量循環與物質交換的概念，勾勒出自我與非人類他者和諧共存的可能。This thesis explores the ecopoetry of Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet Jorie Graham through the lens of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. Examining 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), the thesis argues that Graham’s poems show an increasing urge for embeddedness and embodiment (both thematically and stylistically) which resonates with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and ontology. Graham’s poems suggest the current ecological crisis can be understood as the collective failure of humanity to perceive our interdependence with the human and nonhuman other. While her early poems problematize purely rational approaches to the world which place us outside of nature, her later poems try to enact bodily encounters with things in the natural world as an alternative way of engaging the world. Chapter One discusses the links between Graham’s early poems and Merleau-Ponty’s critique of the Cartesian subject-object bifurcation and its reinforcement in science. 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. Chapter Two then investigates the way Graham’s Never enacts bodily encounters with the nonhuman others as an alternative way of engaging nature and how it reinvents the notion of the self based on Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh. This chapter also discusses Graham’s difficult style. While many critics saw the difficulty as a flaw of Never and Graham’s poetry in general, I would argue that it helps foreground the irreplaceability of things in the natural world. Finally, Chapter Three examines the way Sea Change takes the experience of fleshly encounters as the basis for understanding and imagining our interdependence with the global ecosystem.