Miracles of Connection: Mapping and the Poetics of Site
p. 33-60
Résumés
By creating textual spaces for the poetic intersection between different times, identities, and places, Bishop’s poetry maps a territory for the reading process. To Bishop, maps are “sites” that challenge a central locus of meaning and significance and create networks of connections, intensifying our awareness of similarities and correspondences that may remain unseen in a linear perspective. By denying closure and finite boundary lines, site destabilizes a place and introduces flux. The specific sense of place that site generates seems to tie the past and the present, creating a nexus of otherwise separate identities. Once stripped of their conventional function, paintings or a family Bible, for instance, may become sites that open up to memory and recollection. As objects felt to hold a plenitude, they both preserve the past and at the same time unfix and transform it. This feature which turns them into crossroads of diverse meanings, identities and times, grants them the ability to evoke nostalgia and erase it almost simultaneously, thus highlighting Bishop’s continual and multifaceted wavering between modernism and postmodernism.
In keeping with this view of the poem as a crossroads, as a nexus of possibilities, Bishop privileges as significant links to the past faded objects which are on the verge of total disappearance—or objects which, being continually displaced from their original context, are transformed by being exiled into new territories. A case in point is “Poem,” where diverse times, people, and also works of art, are seen to intersect through the act of mapping which temporarily unsettles the boundary lines between estrangement and familiarity, self and other, text and painting, thus ultimately toppling our notions of centrality and marginality. Indeed this article insists that Bishop’s poetics displays a strong sense of responsibility and communal awareness by foregrounding margins and decentered voices or pictures in an act of commemoration which strives to find space for what is on the verge of being lost and annihilated by the destructive powers of time and social systems. In “Poem” Bishop asserts that the past holds the future, and the text itself, being traversed by all possible times and places, becomes the very metaphor of the reading process, where, as Barthes says, “the reader is the space on which all quotations that make up writing are inscribed.” Likewise multiple points in time interact in the poem “The Moose,” which defies the notion of any static, fixed “home” and selfhood by constructing a dynamic sense of self whose metaphor may be found in the bus, a crossroads of identities, places and voices which, like the painting in “Poem,” becomes a site, a point of intersection, a passage of other points in time, space, and memory.
En créant des espaces textuels permettant l’intersection de temps, d’identités, et de lieux hétérogènes, la poésie bishopienne cartographie le territoire de la lecture. Aux yeux de Bishop, les cartes sont des « sites » qui interrogent tout lieu central de production du sens et de la signifiance et créent un réseau de connexions, nous rendant plus sensibles aux ressemblances et aux correspondances qui, dans une perspective linéaire, échappent au regard. En refusant toute clôture et toutes frontières définies, le site déstabilise la notion de lieu en la soumettant au flux. Le sentiment du lieu qu’engendre le site semble lier passé et présent, liant des identités autrement distinctes. Une fois dépouillés de leur rôle conventionnel, tel tableau ou une vieille Bible de famille, par exemple, peuvent devenir des sites qui s’ouvrent à la mémoire et au souvenir. En tant qu’objets dépositaires d’une plénitude, ils préservent le passé et le mettent en mouvement pour le transformer. Ce trait qui fait d’eux des carrefours de sens, d’identités, et d’époques divers, leur confère l’aptitude de susciter et presque simultanément d’effacer la nostalgie, mettant en lumière la constante hésitation de Bishop entre modernisme et post-modernisme.
Conformément à cette conception du poème comme carrefour, comme lien entre les possibles, Bishop privilégie ces liens significatifs avec le passé que sont les objets estompés, au bord de la disparition totale, ou encore ceux qui, étant constamment déplacés de leur contexte original, sont transformés par leur exil dans de nouveaux territoires. « Poem » est un texte exemplaire, de ce point de vue. Temps, personnes, et œuvres d’art viennent à s’y croiser par l’entremise de la cartographie qui bouscule temporairement la frontière entre étrangeté et familiarité, moi et autre, texte et peinture, achevant de renverser les notions mêmes de centre et de marge. La poétique bishopienne manifeste un sens réel de la responsabilité et une conscience communautaire en mettant en valeur marges, voix, et images décentrées dans un acte de commemoration qui s’efforce de trouver un espace pour ce qui est sur le point d’être perdu et anéanti par le pouvoir destructeur du temps et des systèmes sociaux. Dans « Poem » Bishop affirme que le passé contient le futur, et le texte même, étant traversé par tous les temps et les lieux possibles, devient la métaphore du processus de la lecture où, selon la formule de Barthes, « le lecteur est l’espace où s’inscrivent […] toutes les citations dont est faite une écriture ». De même une multitude de points temporels intéragissent dans « The Moose », qui défie toute notion de demeure et d’identité statiques et fixes en construisant un sentiment du moi dynamique, métaphorisé par le bus, carrefour d’identités, de lieux et de voix qui, tel le tableau dans « Poem », devient un site, un point d’intersection, un lieu ou circulent d’autres points dans le temps, l’espace, et la mémoire.
Texte intégral
1Curiously, Bishop opens the door to her recollected childhood through a textbook on maps. Like “The Map,” opening North and South, The “Lessons” opening Geography III, her most autobiographical volume of poetry, indeed map a territory for the reading process. The “Lessons” may be taken as a kind of instruction to the reader. The call is to treat the poems not necessarily as historical documents, but as spaces created for the poetic intersection between different times, identities, and places. The self emerging in the poems is therefore not an historical figure, but a simultaneous being holding multiple times, identities, and places. The last line of “The Map,”— “more delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors,” is clearly echoed and reinforced here. The spatial arrangement replaces or alternates with the temporal one.1
2Bishop’s poems often illustrate her fascination with the creation of this “map” quality; a surface of multiplicity, a “site” opening out to places, times, and identities in ways that challenge a central locus of meaning and significance. This “site” perspective allows a bridging over distances, and a bringing together of isolated particles. It creates a nexus of connections, intensifying the awareness of similarities and correspondences that may remain unseen in a linear perspective. A “site” arrangement denies any closure and finite boundary lines. Each point on the map is a potential gate for yet other points, and each optional connection is a transient speculation, a momentary revelation that may dissolve in the face of other connections. One cannot fully absorb the abundance of possibilities; while some will be realized, others may simply never surface.
3Site destabilizes a place; challenging its set boundaries and introducing flux into what has traditionally been conceived as static and fixed. Like time, space in Bishop’s poetry is fluid and unfixed. The dimensions of time and space seem to merge, creating a spatio-temporal “site” in which all times, and all places seem to coexist rather than fuse. Bishop’s site poetics does not situate us at a melting point because individual voices, times, and places interacting with each other seem to retain the ability to “remember” their past.
4In some of Bishop’s poems, objects such as maps, paintings, or the family Bible lose their conventional function and open up to memory and recollection, turning into a kind of “entry vehicles” through which the object transforms into a site, creating a space in which autobiography and identity questions seem to find a place and a resonance. Bishop seems to exemplify in her poems what Bollas describes as “Mnemic Objects,” or “conservative objects […] [that] can be said to have a lexical function when we employ them to “speak” our idiom through the “syntax of self experience.” (Being a Character 19). Bishop’s translation of “Objects & Apparitions” by Octavio Paz is yet another link to her obsession with objects holding a plenitude:
Monuments to every moment,
Refuse of every moment, used:
Cages for infinity.
[…]
Minimal, incoherent fragments
The opposite of History, creator of ruins,
Out of your ruins you have made creations. (CP 275)
5Bollas further discusses the “preserved self states that prevailed in a child’s life when he could not comprehend a nonetheless self-defining experience within the family atmosphere. These ‘subjective objects’ […] are a vital part of our investment in the world. Through this type of projective identification we psychically signify objects, but as they retain their own intrinsic value they can be said to occupy an intermediate area between the conventional use or understanding and our private one” (20-21). Bishop’s objects, of course, are not necessarily authentic ones. While the family Bible studied in “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” is definitely an existing historical artifact, other objects may simply invoke an air of authenticity; Bishop may intentionally fabricate them. Such is, for example, the painted book-jacket of Geography III. Furthermore, while Bishop’s objects may occasionally seem to bear an “intrinsic value,” they nonetheless remain open to alternative acts of interpretation depending on shifting contexts. In other words, they both preserve the past and at the same time unfix and transform it. It is this feature which grants them the ability to evoke nostalgia and erase it almost simultaneously, thus bringing to the fore Bishop’s continual and multifaceted wavering between modernism and postmodernism.
6Perhaps the most striking Mnemic object in Bishop’s oeuvre is Bishop’s family Bible. The title of “2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” directly refers to the Bulmers’ (Bishop’s maternal grandparents) massive leather bound illustrated Bible which was on display in the Elizabeth Bishop exhibit in Acadia University in September 1998. On the title page of that Bible (published in 1872—probably a wedding gift for Elizabeth Bishop’s grandparents) are all the words of the title of the poem. In between the pages there are all sorts of little flower petals and pressed leaves.
7As in other poems, such as “Poem,” the artifact becomes a site, a crossroads of diverse meanings, identities and times traversing the object at hand. Here a family Bible seems to be the object turning into a nexus of ideas and times. Unlike “Poem,” “Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” does not let us know the exact context or status of the object we observe in the poem. Readers familiar with Bishop’s “objects”2 can relate the poem to an actual “thing,” but Bishop herself chose to leave that connection vague. The family Bible is thus both a relevant, vibrating presence, and at the same time a somewhat veiled or vanishing point of reference.
8The title page of the Bible is exactly the one Bishop places as the poem’s title, and yet there are no quotation marks, no indication of such a connection; a rather peculiar fact, considering Bishop’s strong sense of the epigraph as seen in other poems in all of her books of poetry. Why should Bishop leave out the clarifying reference? What made her decide to “steal” this spectacular title and present it as her own? Although it seems that the title is grafted here, I would argue that in a way it is Bishop’s own title. Intensely internalized throughout the years, it has become part of her. Consciously or unconsciously, Bishop here presents to her readers a grafted line, a string of words so well embedded in memory, it can no longer be ascribed to the world outside the mind of the speaker.
9In more ways than one this act of grafting is relevant to the poem as a whole, as it speaks of cultural constructs and the way we move through them. Especially significant in this context is the Bible, its images and scenes, and the constant “should” note accompanying its reading throughout the poem. But this act of grafting recalls also the Barthian view of the text as a passage, as a crossroads made of diverse quotations, each leading us elsewhere.3 Bishop’s choice to leave the title page intact, without necessarily explaining to her readers its status, recalls the first page of Geography III and her use of actual “Lesson” pages “grafted” from past textbooks. Curiously, it is not only the object as such which turns into a site in the poems, but also the very words inscribed in it. While a textbook turns into a poem in the first case, the somewhat commercial, self-promoting title page becomes a very different title in the other case—a title of a poem. The emphasis is not necessarily on a lasting meaning associated with a fixed line of words, but rather on a fluid, changing meaning, dependent on context and shifting networks.
10Such fluctuating readings alert us of Bishop’s questions about the process of reading poems. One does not usually stop after a first exposure; the complexity and obscurity of some of the poems, on the one hand, and their suggestive texture and language, on the other, are designed to call for yet another visit. These recurrent visits are not always linear and do not necessarily begin with the beginning and end with the ending of the poem. Rather, one may pick a line, or a passage, or read the whole poem again—is there a binding rule? Thus, although we usually refer to the experience of reading as a linear one, linearity is just one option out of many. The poem is thus a spatial, simultaneous universe, suggesting multiple options of excursion, diverse routes, and alternating destination points. A revisiting of the poem turns each line, each phrase or metaphor into a “site” leading to other sites, other lines. One is constantly reminded of other texts, other poets, and other forms of using language. A site means that the line of the poem or the poem as a whole may be viewed as a crossroads, as a nexus of possibilities far more complex than the linear one.4
11Creating a nexus of tentative interpretations or impossible arrivals imposes on the reader a call to move to other sites—one is constantly reminded of other routes, of more places and points of attraction, because those that are given may offer “a meager diet of horizon” (“Arrival at Santos,” CP 89). One wants more space to move through, more horizons to ponder. Paradoxically, each “meager” horizon may turn into a site of abundance, a point of excess born out of some initial deprivation. Can we reconstruct the poem’s “initial” scope after reading it, or are we forever drifting onwards, unable to reconstruct an original sense of “meagerness”? Is there a way of telling the “original” poem from the plenitude it leads to, or is reading an evolutionary process, where we constantly crave for more?
12 While both “The Map” and the first page of Geography III exemplify some of Bishop’s site poetics, I will explore this issue more fully in this section through a reading of “Poem” and “The Moose,” and a reading of relevant passages from Bishop’s prose memoirs which illuminate similar dynamics.
13As with the first page of Geography III, in “Poem” (CP 176) the past is not a private property, a secluded territory owned by a subject recoverable through acts of recollection, but a space opening in the poem through an intensive observation of what may first seem a rather marginalized, almost forgotten detail. Bishop is particularly interested in faded objects on the verge of total disappearance, as significant links to the past. What can be more marginalized than a faded page of an almost lost old text-book, or the tiny painting, “handed collaterally to owners/who looked at it sometimes, or didn’t bother to,” as described in “Poem”?
14“Poem” mirrors “The Map.” Both poems follow an intensive reading of a visual “text.” “The Map” illustrates how maps become poems, and also, how poems turn into maps. In the other case, a painting is studied in a “Poem,” thus allowing us once again to see how one becomes the other through the reading of the poem. The map, we have seen, may turn into a painting, and here the painting too is map-like, offering its own legend, where “tiny cows” are “two brushstrokes each.” Both employ a system of signification, a game of correspondence between a sign and its referent.
15The poem begins by throwing us right into the world of mapping and measuring. The “little painting” is both about “the size of an old-style dollar bill,” and “has never earned any money in its life.” Ironically, although Bishop says in an interview, “something need not be large to be good” (Monteiro 240), size and value do seem to merge in this kind of scaling. It is as if the two qualities, smallness and worthlessness, interact so that one becomes a metaphor of the other.
16As is usual with Bishop, objects are continually displaced from their original context, exiled into new territories, and thus transformed. Similar to the act of mapping, artifacts are continually transposed into other geographies, away from their “natural” settings. Thus, the painting is right from the start translated into the world of commerce and money: being the size of a dollar bill, while ironically having no money value at all. The dollar bill, on the other hand, is a colorful, picture-like object, with its “whites, gray greens, and steel grays.” But in “Poem,” the painting is exiled into yet another territory, language, transforming the pictorial “view” into words and phrases. Such an exile, like map-making, has to do with a great deal of compression. The painting, “(a sketch for a larger one?),” introduces the map-like quality of downscaling. “About the size of an old-style dollar bill,” “this little painting,” “tiny cows,” a half inch of blue sky,” and “this literal small backwater,” all render a sense of smallness and compression. Questions of space paradoxically relate also to the owner’s complaint: “I’ll probably never/have room to hang these things again,” and echo “The Map,” where language, or naming, seems to demand too much space, causing confusion and misrepresentation. I requote:
the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains
— the printer here experiencing the same excitement
as when emotion too far exceeds its cause. (CP 3)
17These lines tell us that in both the poem and the map, places have no space. Both map and poem hold an abundance which “exceeds” the word, the name, the demarcated territory drawn on the paper.
18While “The Map” introduces “Newfoundland” as its familiar point, here “It must be Nova Scotia.” There is no lettering on the painting, but the details disclose the place. Although the viewer recognizes the place, or imagines she does, there are still questions that remind us of the map-reader of “The Map,” and of the tendency of a place recalled to turn into yet another “new-found-land.”
Elm trees, low hills, a thin church steeple
— that gray-blue wisp—-or is it?
19And:
A speck like bird is flying to the left.
Or is it a flyspeck looking like a bird?
20 In both poems the act of studying the map or painting is a process of discovery. Nothing is a given, final, closed detail, but one which has to be defined as the process of reading or observing takes place. As in “The Monument,” an unknown visual field emerges through the act of observation. It is not a telling of some seen reality, a verbal description of some existing image, but a forming of one through reading. That is why only in the third stanza, after a long, colorful, account of the picture we suddenly read:
Heaven, I recognize the place, I know it!
It’s behind—I can almost remember the farmer’s name.
21Indeed—another “new-found-land.”
22In “The Garden of Boccaccio,” Coleridge’s sense of “entering” the space of childhood rendered through the picture in the poem resembles Bishop’s cry in the midst of “Poem”:
Gazed by an idle eye with silent might
the picture stole upon my inward sight.
A tremulous warmth crept gradual o’er my chest,
As though an infant’s finger touch’d my breast.
[…]
Thanks, gentle artist! now I can descry
Thy fair creation with a mastering eye,
And all awake!
[…]
I see no longer! I myself am there! (350)
23Both poems are processes of discovery, real or imagined, leading from the artifact into the lived experience. The “infant’s finger” suggested by Coleridge, and his former “inward sight” take us back to Bishop’s famous “infant sight” at the close of “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance”: “and looked and looked our infant sight away” (CP 59).
24However, while in Coleridge’s poem the speaker seems to fully abandon himself in the artifact: “I see no longer/I myself am there, “Bishop never stops “seeing,” and her observations constantly throw her back to the surface, blocking her way “to the interior” (“Arrival at Santos,” CP 90). Her sense of separateness and difference from the scene is apparent when she places “then” against “now”:
Those particular geese and cows
are naturally before my time
25and in the last line: “The yet to be dismantled elms….”
26Bishop’s poem interweaves all possible times: the time depicted in the painting, the time of painting, “a sketch done in an hour,” the past remembered by the speaker, which is dissimilar to the particular past shown, the present moment of observation, and even the future- past in the line just quoted. Are there any other tenses left out? Probably yes. All of them “coincide” in the poem, as Bonnie Costello rightly notes, “but do not resolve into a unity.” And “the unitary visual space of the picture… does not recuperate a single past but evokes a diversity of moments for the beholder” (230).
27As the lines accumulate on the page, the autobiographical stance seems to confer a new value on the “minor family relic,” the “[u]seless and free” artifact— “a sketch done in an hour, ‘in one breath’” “—a new value, other than the one comparable to ‘an old style dollar-bill’”. While the map denounces the historians, suggesting that “more delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors,” here familial, personal rather than political history regains some of its value, offering an added significance to the otherwise useless painting. The painting is invested with meaning because of its sentimental quality, because it paints the past, and because it has its own history.
28In the third stanza, Bishop “quotes” an actual or imagined transaction between donor and recipient of the painting, exposing some of the sad truths of the painting’s own history: its worthlessness, its travel in the family (reminding us of Bishop’s own travelling in the family, her being “handed down” from one relative to the other?), its undecidable ownership:
Would you like this? I’ll probably never
have room to hang these things again
Your Uncle George, no, mine, my Uncle George,
he’d be your great-uncle, left them all with Mother
when he went back to England
You know, he was quite famous, an R. A. . . . (CP 177)
29“The Map” probes the relationships between land and water, while “Poem” probes family relations. “My Uncle George,” “your great Uncle George,” “Mother”—all are family members, relatives taking part in this historical transaction where the painting changes hands. The poem evokes a confusion about such relationships: “your uncle George, no, mine, my uncle,” but at the same time it also establishes a new relationship with this unknown Uncle George—” We both knew this place, /apparently, this literal small backwater, /looked at it long enough to memorize it, our years apart.”
30The sense of place seems to tie the past and the present, creating a nexus of identities where they are separate otherwise. It is not the family name which brings the speaker and her uncle together, but their sharing of the same knowledge of a place—
… How strange. And it ‘s still loved,
or its memory is (it must have changed a lot).
Our visions coincided—” vision” is
too serious a word—our looks, two looks:
art “copying from life” and life itself,
life and the memory of it so compressed
they’ve turned into each other. Which is which?
31The place fuses times and identities, becoming a site where “visions,” or rather “looks,” as Bishop so typically corrects herself, coincide. “Look” is a less ambitious word than “vision,” and Bishop’s correction here is no different from other points in her poetry where the poem self- adjusts to an on-going process of structuring. Just as the knowledge of the place intensifies as the lines progress, so does Bishop’s diction transform and readjust itself so as to sound real, truthful, clean of over-presumptuous overtones. Bishop is not afraid to include such clichés as “in one breath.”5 She deliberately weaves her diction with that of others she has heard, but she refrains from any slippage towards the pompous. The adjustments, though, become part of the texture, suggesting an ongoing search, a mutative poetry which seems to forever correct itself, looking for new and better ways of expression. Lensing notes Bishop’s “tendency to correct herself within her poems: to state an idea and then to edit and reformulate it as part of the poem’s text” (112). Bishop exposes her process of selection, her choice of words and the reasons behind it—thus sharing with us her poetics in a way; illustrating her preference for what she calls “poetry in action.” A poetry in which one tries to portray “not a thought, but a mind thinking” since “an idea separated from the act of experiencing it is not the idea that was experienced. The ardor of its conception in the mind is a necessary part of its truth” (One Art 11-12).6
32It is often argued that Bishop discloses very little information about her poetics. But critics may often find their answers in the poems themselves, although the general tendency is to look for unpublished material, letters, interviews, journals and notebooks. “Poem” is a wonderful example of this because, to begin with, it introduces a generic “poem” through the title, already inviting us, so it seems, to explore questions of that kind. Strangely, Bishop insists on “Poem” rather than “Painting,” (as she does with “Large Bad Painting” for example). Why “Poem”?
33“Poem” seems to self-reflexively examine its own genesis, its own brush strokes. But perhaps the most striking aspect of Bishop’s poetics in “Poem” is its act of map-making by introducing a point of spatial intersection between different individuals, living at different historical times. The nexus created in the poem illustrates how poetry is a way of map-making, through the continual act of bridging and connecting that which is otherwise separated. It is through the joining of such distinct personalities and times that the “Poem” comes into being.
34But then, there is another kind of bridging taking place here—the one beginning in the painting and evolving into a poem. Or perhaps beginning and ends are not quite sufficient terms, since as in other maps, what one observes here is not a linear but a simultaneous existence of diverse times, people, and also works of art. Rather than an evolutionary passage from the lived moment, to the painting, and then to a poem, we may regard the “Poem” as that which enacts them all. The scene “painted” has to be recreated by a careful act of study. Recognition is mixed with questions, doubts, and observations about technical issues. Moreover, the painting is first presented as an object, a “family relic,” “handed along collaterally to owners/who looked at it sometimes, or didn’t bother to.” What emerges as the “view” is filtered by cultural, social, familial, and artistic contexts. There is no static point from which the painting is seen, just as there is no definite or clear “origin” for any “Poem”—
Well, it takes an infinite number of things coming together, forgotten, or almost forgotten, books, last night’s dream, and experiences past and present—to make a poem. (One Art 621)
35In a letter to Frani Blough (July 9, 1936) Bishop writes:
The books I really like to read best are always those I take away from someone else who is halfway through them… (One Art 44)
36What is “in” the book, the “content,” is ultimately entangled with the context of its reading. There are no unmapped texts, and in a similar way, there are no unmapped readers. We cannot approach a text free of social or cultural screens. Bishop’s “liking” here seems to spring from the fact that someone else she knows has already begun the process of reading. It is almost as if her reading extends that of others, as if they somehow connect through the text they share. Indeed, the text resembles the piece of scenery evoked in “Poem„” as both fields of vision seem to absorb their onlookers, to somehow bind them through their “looks.”
37A nexus of family relationships, where lost connections are redefined, and bonding is established between blood relations who are strangers, “Poem” seems to connect to “Traveling in the Family,” by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, one of the Brazilian poets Bishop admired and translated. Here we read about a meeting with “the shadow of my father.”
The narrow space of life
crowds me up against you,
and in this ghostly embrace
it’s as if I were being burned
completely, with poignant love.
Only now do we know each other!
Eye-glasses, memories, portraits
flow in the river of blood.
Now the water won’t let me
make out your distinct face,
distant by seventy years. (CP 248)
38“The imagination does have its own geography,” says Bishop at one point (Monteiro 101), and one way of understanding it is by reading “Poem” and Andrade’s poem as examples of this opening of space for imaginary meeting points extending through time and identities. It is in this “ghostly embrace” taking place in some imaginary territory that family connections are redefined, making up, perhaps, for past feelings of estrangement and alienation: “Only now do we know each other.”
39Helen Vendler calls the process of the poem “domestication”: “a strange terrain becomes first recognizable, then familiar, and then beloved.”7 “Domestication,” or “the turning of some “strange terrain” recognizable, familiar, and then beloved is connected to mapping. It is by the act of mapping that we master a foreign land, and it is by studying the maps that we become familiar with a place, though we do not necessarily love it. Mapping occupies the space between what Vendler calls the “domesticated” and the “strange,” because it is there that we begin to waver between the boundary lines of estrangement and familiarity.
40Domestication may suggest containment and constriction, but nothing could be further from Bishop’s act of map-making, which keeps us always alert to unweaving and dispersion. Yet, domestication implies at the same time a sense of belonging, a home bringing together those who are otherwise isolated individuals. In Harrison’s terms, we may refer to Bishop’s “construction of subjectivities that are at their core relational.”8 In other words, what Vendler and Harrison seem to suggest is that Bishop’s poetry creates threads and connections, turning a strange terrain into a familiar landscape by drawing lines from one point to the other, by making us aware of how we inhabit a place with others like us, rather than drift alone. Bishop’s closed places, like the “Waiting Room,” or the bus in “The Moose,” are sites in which identities seem to be compressed into each other, made to realize new connections, some comforting and others horrifying. As with many other polarities, Bishop will explore the terms of those “coming together” again and again in her poems. At some points the wish is indeed to be absorbed into the pattern, as if to be held by someone, but often enough there are points of suffocating fear, where both identity and separateness seem to be devoured by entangling webs.9
41In “Poem” the “strange” moment of finding yourself entangled with others is an exciting one:
Life and the memory of it cramped
dim, on a piece of Bristol board,
dim, but how live, how touching in detail
— the little that we get for free,
the little of our earthly trust. Not much.
About the size of our abidance
along with theirs: the munching cows,
the iris, crisp and shivering, the water
still standing from spring freshets,
the yet-to-be dismantled elms, the geese. (CP 176)
42“Which is which” is a key question in Bishop’s poetry which continually challenges boundary lines, wavering between North and South, the strange and the domesticated, or other binary oppositions she refuses to resolve or choose from. But Bishop seems to know very well “which is which,” even while asking it. “The imagination does have its own geography” may be read in this context as her wish to keep fluid boundary lines in some restraint. In “Poem” the evoked sense of place, the very specific childhood memory is never entirely dissociated from the sense of a present moment of an observing “I-eye.” The poem enacts a multitude of times and scenes, but as it does so, it also keeps its eye open to the way this illusion of place and time is recreated by the painting. Could it be that Bishop’s control over “which is which” is the key to her embracing of some shared space and identity in “Poem”?
43Bishop keeps her diverse “times” in place, as we have seen, and in fact almost everything may finally drift to its own “place,” even the two looks mentioned in the last stanza. The look of the artist, this time Bishop’s (“which is which?”), carefully draws the lines separating the illusion from its making:
Elm trees, low hills, a thin church steeple
— that gray-blue wisp—or is it? In the foreground
a water-meadow with some tiny cows;
two brushstrokes each, but confidently cows;
two minuscule white geese in the blue water,
back-to-back, feeding, and a slanting stick.
Up closer, a wild iris, white and yellow,
fresh-squiggled from the tube. (CP 176)
44Exposing the brushstrokes, or the color “fresh- squiggled from the tube,” Bishop marks the boundary line between “art” and “life,” securing a sense of distance from the perceived scene. No illusion is safely guarded from other looks, actual or imagined. “Poem” studies a painting, seeing both cows and brushstrokes, both image and technique, and knowing “perfectly well” “which is which.”10
45Bishop keeps her eye open to the dividing line between the illusion and its making, between the received painting and the brushstrokes composing it, and further, between the poem and its own “brushstrokes,” its poetics. “Poem,” as the title clearly shows, is a poem and not a painting. The painting is only one of the poem’s “brushstrokes,” part of its machinery; it makes a poem, but is not the poem itself. Just as the person looking at the painting can see the illusion as merely a combination of brushstrokes, while still seeing the “cows,” the “geese” or the “sky,” so is the poem: an illusion of unity or theme, made out of diverse multiple components, each leading somewhere else, each deserving its own “Poem,” each having the potential to be demarginalized in newer acts of mapping, where “Canada [is] the same size of the world, or the other way around” (“Primer Class,” CPr 10).
46Instead of looking for a center, Bishop’s look often drifts to the marginal, the small-sized, the worthless, the forgotten “detail,” from which a new construct may emerge. “[H]ow live, how rich in detail” says Bishop apropos of the “dim” sketch. The sketch, itself a marginalized, almost lost “detail,” is rescued here along with its own details, especially those “yet to be dismantled elms.” If details are often muted by larger maps they are incorporated into, here they finally speak. But there are other acts of rescue here. The painting will find “room” in Bishop’s poem. It will be saved from oblivion, and in doing so it will rescue the dignity of Uncle George. It will also rescue from oblivion the scenery of Nova Scotia in some particular past, and lastly, it will inhabit a poem. There is nothing grand or particularly heroic in these acts of affection, but then, as Bishop herself says: “I’m not interested in bigscale work as such. Something needn’t be large to be good” (Monteiro 24).
47Bishop’s poetics stress margins and decentered voices or pictures in an act of commemoration which strives to find space for what is on the verge of being lost and annihilated by the destructive powers of time and social systems. It is thus a poetry with a strong sense of responsibility and communal awareness. This is the other end of mapping; the realization that one is not a center, but rather shares her place or time with others. Against the horrifying sense of being tricked into a predetermined position, this perspective has the merit of suggesting a sense of strength associated with a notion of some communality of existence. This is in fact in one line with Nancy Chodorow’s theories about the relational which is fundamental to female subjectivity. In Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory, Nancy Chodorow maintains that “feminine personality comes to define itself in relation and connection to other people more than masculine personality. (In psychoanalytical terms, women are less individuated than men; they have more flexible ego boundaries)” (56). The results of such subjectivity are varied: “women’s relational self can be both a strength or a pitfall in feminine psychic life, as it enables empathy, nurturance, and intimacy, but can also threaten lack of autonomy and dissolution of self into others (186). To map, in that sense, is also to find some power in being connected.11
48“The yet to be dismantled elms” of “Poem” reinforce Bishop’s tendency to view the past as holding the future. Bishop’s prophetic past is never a utopian island innocent of what is yet to come, but a territory vibrating with memories of the future. A very similar stance is found in “Memories of Uncle Neddy,” an autobiographical prose piece. The narrator, in Brazil, has just been sent the portraits of her late uncle Neddy, and his sister— her mother. The portraits were made when they were still young children. Throughout the piece, Bishop’s strong sense of “the yet to be dismantled” man, the trenchant knowledge of time, destruction and man’s fall are embodied in the framed portrait. The awareness of time and decay is strengthened by Bishop’s close attention to “molds and mildews,” the physical reminders of processes of disintegration and loss.
I love the dry-looking, gray-green dust, like bloom on fruit, to begin with, that suddenly appears here on soles of shoes in the closet, on the backs of all the blacks of all the black books, or the darkest ones, in the bookcase. And I love the black shadow, like the finest soot, that suddenly shows up, slyly, on white bread, or white walls. The molds on food go wild in just a day or two, and in a hot, wet spell like this, a tiny jungle, green, chartreuse, and magenta may start up in the corner of the bathroom. That gray-green bloom, or that shadow of fine soot is just enough to serve as a hint of morbidity, attractive morbidity, —although perhaps mortality is a better word. (CPr 227-8)
49Exchanging “morbidity” for “mortality,” Bishop seems to suggest not merely the physically decaying, but also the aberrant, the gruesome, and the eccentric—some of uncle Neddy’s characteristics’ as the prose piece illustrates. “I realize only now that he represented ‘the devil’ for me, not a violent, active Devil, but a gentle black one, a devil of weakness, acquiescence, tentatively black, like the sooty mildew” (228).
50Bishop treats her “here” and “now” as containers about to explode with the abundance of multiple points in time and space. Here is a partial list of the abundance called “Uncle Neddy”—
And Uncle Neddy, that is, my Uncle Edward, is here. Into this wildly foreign and to him, exotic setting, Uncle Neddy has just come back, from the framer’s. Only of course it isn’t really Uncle Neddy, as he was, not as I knew him. This is “little Edward,” before he became an uncle, before he became a lover, husband, father, or grandfather, a tinsmith, a drunkard, or a famous fly-fisherman—any of the various things he turned to be. (CPr 228)
51 The “Memories” will indeed tell some of the stories related to the various “versions” of Uncle Neddy, but the telling is never cordonned off in time and space, as all other possible times and places keep traversing the text, suggesting their own outlook on any particular point of “here” and “now.” The past is always in a way a kind of memory of the future, as it is filtered through an awareness of what is to become of people and places. Uncle Neddy who “never went anywhere in his life except possibly two or three times as far as Boston” is “now” “here, on the other side of the Equator.” He
will continue to exchange his direct, bright-hazel, child’s looks, with those of strangers—dark-eyed Latinos he never knew, who never would have understood him, whom he would have thought of, if he had ever thought of them at all, as “foreigners.” How late, Uncle Neddy, how late to have started on your travels! (250)
52Bishop insists on treating the “framed” person not as a static “painting,” but as another “version” of the historical figure, uncle Neddy. More specifically, Bishop’s study of the picture, as other acts of study in her poems, is a metaphor of the reading process, where, as Barthes says, “the reader is the space on which all quotations that make up a reading are inscribed” (“The Death of the Author,” 171).
53A different site may be found in “The Moose” (CP 169-173). Unlike the painting or the old textbook—objects of observation, static artifacts one can carefully observe—the bus is a moving set of frames through which alternating scenes are glimpsed.
54Although Bishop claims that “The Moose” is about a “childhood recollection,”12 I would argue that the poem travels “elsewhere,” exploring other phases of time. Bishop’s autobiographical stance defies the notion of any static, fixed “home” and selfhood. It is characterized by Continual flow and changeability as is also clear in “Crusoe in England” and other poems, especially in Geography III. Although “The Moose” reads like a linear narrative (Vendler, Part of Nature 110), it actually comprises multiple times and identities, just as selfhood is constructed of a moving multitude of voices and visions, a forever migrating “bus” whose passengers’ stories mingle and interchange:
The passengers lie back.
Snores. Some long sighs.
A dreamy divagation
Begins in the night,
A gentle, auditory,
Slow hallucination…
In the creakings and noises,
an old conversation
— not concerning us,
but recognizable, somewhere,
back in the bus;
Grandparents’ voices
Uninterruptedly
Talking in Eternity;
Names being mentioned,
Things cleared up finally;
What he said, what she said,
Who got pensioned;
deaths, deaths and sicknesses;
the year (something) happened.
She died in childbirth.
That was the son lost
When the schooner floundered.
55Multiple points in time interact in the poem: the time of travel, the various past incidents evoked by the passengers, the childhood memories of the speaker, the time of the moose, and the time of narration. We may point at the speaker as a disembodied voice, as one of the “us,” or perhaps as the woman who “climbs in/with two market bags, /Brisk, freckled, elderly.” The passengers, “real” and mythological (“talking in Eternity”), the woman with bags, the woman seen for an instant as she “shakes a tablecloth/out after supper,” the speaker’s grandparents—all seem to take part in this autobiographical account, traversing the scene and constructing a dynamic sense of self in which they are all somehow embedded.
56Bishop’s poem alerts us to questions of framing and foregrounding. The bus window is a moving frame through which one looks at some passing scenery. Both eye and object are in motion, and there is no point of a fixed perspective. Are we on the bus and viewing the scenery from within? Are we watching the bus as it journeys through the landscape from some distant perspective? There is no way of telling in the first part of the poem. Both vantage points are possible. We view the bus from some distance in the following lines:
Through late afternoon
a bus journeys west,
the windshield flashing pink,
pink glancing off metal,
brushing the dental flank
of blue, beat-up enamel;
down hollows, up rises,
and waits, patient, while
a lone traveller gives
kisses and embraces
to seven relatives and a collie supervises.
57In the next lines, however, we are watching the scenery from within:
On the left, a red light
swims through the dark:
a ship’s port lantern.
Two rubber boots show,
illuminated, solemn.
A dog gives one bark.
A woman climbs in…
58 Once situated inside, we are transported to other evoked interiorities, such as the grandparents’ home, their featherbed, their kitchen, and other suggested “homes” along the way. Holding this “dreamy divagation” of voices and scenes, the bus may be seen as a metaphor of the self, a crossroads of other identities, places and voices which, like the painting in “Poem,” becomes a site, a point of intersection, a passage of other points in time, space, and memory. Passing through the scenery of Nova Scotia on its way to Boston, the bus may be regarded as a kind of a moving interiority whose boundary lines constantly open to what lies “elsewhere.” The eye does not rest on a static object of observation but rather becomes part of that moving interiority, while at the same time observing it from the outside.
59In a similar way, Bishop’s autobiographical stance defies any claims for either a purely “childish” or a purely mature perspective. Although not a named, identified “character” in the poem, the child is first of all strongly embedded in the landscape of childhood, impressively depicted in the first part of the poem. Bishop’s story “In the Village,” an autobiographical account of her childhood years in Great Village, written when Bishop began writing the poem, depicts scenery similar to that of the poem.13 A bus journeying from Nova Scotia would pass across similar views, as indeed Bishop’s first part of the poem clearly shows—we almost have the prose version here of the poem’s long “ride” through the Nova Scotian childhood scenery of Bishop.
60But where is the child herself? To ask that question we must also ask: where is the speaker in the poem? Critics often worry about where to place the speaker, but I agree with Goldensohn that “the answer to the poem’s perspective apparently lies in not putting herself in at all, except the usual, hovering, invisible, and disembodied voice” (254).14 Keeping her place fluid and unbound, Bishop as child is not a colonized, definable entity, but a continually “new-found-land,” a territory in flux rather than a fixed point on the map. The child surfaces, for example, when seeing the moose:
Some of the passengers
Exclaim in whispers,
Childishly, softly,
“Sure are big creatures.”
“It’s awfully plain.”
“Look! It’s a she!”
61Restoring what Bishop calls an “infant sight” (“Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” CP 59), these lines evoke not a named individual, but a “childish” viewpoint, just as the stories of death and illness delineate both Bishop’s biography and a universal narrative of loss.
62Bishop’s more specific, historical childhood surfaces when the memories of her grandparents and their warm “featherbed” peacefully mingle with the voices heard in the bus. Yet aside from the more obvious mentioning of the “dim lamp light in the hall, /down in the kitchen, the dog/tucked in her shawl” there is a drifting towards some comfort, in which “it’s all right…/even to fall asleep/just as on all those nights.” And moreover, the very “auditory slow hallucination” in which “names [are] being mentioned” and things [are] cleared up finally; what he said what she said” takes the speaker a long ride to those days of “In the Village,” when as a child she overheard bits and pieces from the words of the grown-ups. Some of the things she heard were secrets, forbidden hidden “truths,” others, merely things “being mentioned” which comprise a sense of “home,” a kind of umbilical cord connecting a self to a community.15
63 The moose recalls Bishop’s fascination with Pascal’s Pensées— “I find them so full of magnet-sentences that accumulate strayed objects around them” (One Art 55). The “strayed objects” in “The Moose” are perhaps not only the sounds and visions accumulating around the memory of the moose, but the very “strayed” self who finds connection with other “strayed” individuals as they are all magnetized to the same spectacle, feeling “joy.”
Why, why do we feel
(We all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?
64A very moving question, in a very moving poem. If the moment of epiphany is there, it is not necessarily the moment of the moose, but rather the moment of this sense of joy in which some communal emotion is so clearly felt and named.16 In a poetry so clean of named emotions, it is joy that is foregrounded and captures the center of the canvas at this point of the poem. As in “Poem,” the communal sense of identity is positive and joyous.
65Bishop’s autobiographical story is, among other things, a story about concealing secrets, cloaking horrors with shiny surfaces whose aim is to hide and shelter. The child herself becomes a carrier of secrets. Going to the post office to send packages to her mother in the sanatarium, she constantly hides the side of the envelope showing the address. The story is soaked with the oppressive burden of this secret knowledge which, indeed like the scream, seems to “hang there forever.” There are screams, cries, and whispers behind closed doors, and “upstairs” in the forbidden territory of the mother. “In the Village” masterfully weaves the known with the unknown, the painful secrets withheld, and the recurring rituals of concealment and repression which structure everyday life in the village. Nothing in the story allows a falling on an idealized vision of childhood, which comprises innocence and purity. Poignantly, the repressed knowledge is vibrantly present not only to the reader, or to the mature narrator, but also to the very child depicted in the story. Likewise, in “The Moose,” the sense of “it’s all right now to fall asleep” does not point at a moment of naive security, but rather at a state of peacefulness gathering in the midst of painful stories of “deaths, deaths, and sicknesses” narrated, paradoxically, “in the old featherbed, /peacefully, on and on.” “In the Village” exposes the intersection between the most painful and the most reassuring and comforting childhood scenes and sounds. At the close of the story, it is clear both voices—the scream of the mother and the “beautiful sounds, from the blacksmith’s shop”—are sounds cherished by memory:
66All those other things—clothes, crumbling postcards, broken china; things damaged and lost, sickened or destroyed; even the frail almost-lost scream— are they too frail for us to hear their voices long, too mortal?
Nate!
Oh, beautiful sound, strike again! (CPr 274).
67Similarly, the closing lines of “The Moose” turn the “otherworldly,” somewhat frightening moose into a “homely,” “safe,” desired presence which only “flickers” for a short while and is then “gone.” “And it’s still loved, or its memory is,” as the speaker of “Poem” reflects. Moreover, The bus carries the passengers from the familiar landscape into the inscrutable and unknown dark woods, just as the many stories and tales of death and insanity somehow penetrate the unknown via the known, using “names” and the “things cleared up finally” to handle what is otherwise completely chaotic and unmanageable. Names and “things” which “clear up finally” what cannot be cleared are all human creations designed to domesticate what howls out there unnamed and unknown. “Home/wherever that may be” is, among other things, this very effort to carve some clarity in the chaos of death, insanity and sickness.
68It took Bishop over twenty years to complete “The Moose.” She began writing the poem in Brazil, in 1951, at the time she was writing autobiographical stories, and it was published in 1972. “It was written in bits and pieces over a number of years and finally, it all came together” (Monteiro 73). “I had the beginning, the incident with the moose, it really happened, and the very end; and the poem just sat around” (Monteiro 85). The final product can hardly be seen as a reflection of one incident. Instead, we may point at the poem as a site, a space waiting to be inscribed by a growing wave of autobiographical moments, a “prospectus,” in Barthes’ words, as he speaks of Fourier who
Never describes his books as anything but the heralds of a perfect book, which he will publish later… The annunciation of the book (the Prospectus) is one of those dilatory maneuvers which control our internal utopia. I imagine, I fantasize, I embellish, and I polish the great book of which I am incapable. (“From Roland Barthes,” 424)
69Bishop’s “internal utopia” finally materializes as the poem gets written. Is that Geography III?
Works cited
70Barry, Sandra. An Archival Guide to her Life in Nova Scotia. Hantsport, Nova Scotia: Lancelot Press Limited, 1996.
71Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Image-Music-Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
72Barthes, Roland. “From Roland Barthes.” A Barthes Reader. Edited with an introduction by Susan Sontag. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983.
73Bishop, Elizabeth. Collected Prose. Ed. Robert Giroux. London: Chatto & Windus, 1994.
74Bishop, Elizabeth. One Art: Letters. Selected and edited by Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994.
75Bishop, Elizabeth. The Complete Poems: 1927-1979. New York: The Noonday Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.
76Bollas, Christopher. Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992.
77Chodorow, Nancy J. Feminism and Psychoanalytic Theory. New Haven: Yale UP, 1989.
78Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Coleridge’s Poems. London: Dent & Sons Ltd., 1963.
79Doreski, Carole Kiler. Elizabeth Bishop: The Restraints of Language. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.
80Foucault, Michel. “On Other Spaces.” Diacritics vol. 4 (Spring, 1986): 22-27.
81Goldensohn, Lorrie. Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of Poetry. New York: Columbia UP, 1992.
82Harrison, Victoria Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetics of Intimacy. New York: Cambridge UP, 1993.
83Lensing Lensing, S. George. “Elizabeth Bishop’s Self-Defined Poetics.” The Worcester Review vol. XVIII 1 & 2 (1995): 109-121.
84Monteiro, George, ed. Conversations with Elizabeth Bishop. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1996.
85Page, Barbara. “Elizabeth Bishop and Postmodernism.” The Wallace Stevens Journal. Special Issue: Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop. New York: A publication of the Wallace Stevens Society, Inc. Vol. 19, Num. 2 (Fall 1995): 166-179.
86Vendler, Helen. Part of Nature, Part of Us: Modern American Poets. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1980.
87Vendler, Helen. “The Poems of Elizabeth Bishop.” Critical Inquiry 13: 4 (Summer 1987): 825-838.
Notes de bas de page
1 In “Of Other Spaces,” the shift to the spatial perspective is discussed by Foucault: “The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and suspension, of crisis and cycle, themes of the ever- accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world […]. The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein” (20). On related issues see Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies (1990).
2 See, in particular, Sandra Barry’s Elizabeth Bishop: An Archival Guide to her Life in Nova Scotia.
3 “A text,” says Barthes, “is not a line of words releasing a single theological meaning… but a multi dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture” (“The Death of the Author” 146).
4 This, of course, is true of other texts too, but in poems, perhaps more than in other forms of writing, this accessibility to other texts becomes much more visible and felt. While other forms of writing may seem to hold on to the illusion of distinctiveness, retaining an air of a closed unit developing peacefully along its own set passage, poems often do the opposite—manifesting their plurality and multiplicity by making these a significant aspect of their build-up.
5 These are quotations without quotations marks. And they resemble the title page of “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” because they, too, are grafted strings of words, automated phrases Bishop includes in her work.
6 The quotation is from M. W. Croll’s article, “The Baroque Style in Prose,” in Studies in English Philology. Bishop inserts it in one of her letters (letter to Donald, E. Stanford, November 20, 1955).
7 This, however alternates at the close of the poem with “dismantling,” with a sense of “disaster confronted, with whatever irony” (Vendler, Part of Nature, Part of Us, 105).
8 “These subject-subject relations” says Harrison, “need not be and are often not between people, nor are they necessarily between clearly demarcated entities at all.” Furthermore, the connection may be established even though the figures are unconscious of it, and “[t]he relations need not be contained within the border of the poem” (9-10).
9 “Home” may also be realized as prison. “In the Waiting Room” is perhaps the most striking example of the sense of horror associated with such a realization. “What similarities— […] held us all together/or made us all just one?” (CP 160-1), is a question accompanied by fits of extreme fear and panic. While both “In the Waiting Room” and “Poem” mention the strangeness of this moment of identity, they differ in the way this strangeness is experienced.
10 In “Elizabeth Bishop and Postmodernism,” Barbara Page discusses Bishop’s persistent questioning of the relationships between Nature and art:
For forty years at least, Bishop held in mind a figure that focused her unresolvable inquiry into relations between the natural and the artificial. This figure first appeared in a notebook of the 1930s as a title accompanied by a text: “Grandmother’s Glass Eye: an Essay in Style.” Eventually, the title acquired some pages towards an essay, and then in her 1977 Guggenheim application, Bishop proposed to write a poem called “Grandmother’s Glass Eye.” In the draft essay she writes of her maternal grandmother: “Quite often the glass eye looked heavenward, or off an angle, while the real eye looked at you.” She then remarks, “The situation of any grandmother strikes me as rather like the situation of the poet: the difficulty of combining the real with the decidedly un-real; the natural with the unnatural; the curious effect a poem produces as being… normal as sight and yet as synthetic, as artificial, as a glass eye.” (171-2)
11 For another source on women’s autobiographical writings see The Private Self, edited by Shari Benstock. A sense of separateness and individuality, according to this source, is connected with autobiographical writings, and is thus more typical of men. Women, on the other hand, like other minorities, see themselves more as part of a group and develop a relational, communal self-concept; a collective identity which grants them strength. Hence, they are less likely to tend to autobiographical writings. But against this argument, one may ask, for example, what is the scope of autobiographical writing, and how it is connected with a clear definition of the boundaries of the self. Autobiographical writings such as Bishop’s clearly defy the more traditional emphasis on a given, definable self, and continually open the boundaries of subjectivity to the world and to other subjectivities.
12 In a letter to Frederick Nims (October 6, 1979), Bishop writes about “The Moose”: “a lot of the poem is about ‘childhood recollections’—I almost say it in so many words. If they [students] can’t figure that out, they shouldn’t be in college—THERE!” (One Art 638). The “event” described, though, accords with a more mature phase in Bishop’s life: the trip on the bus, as she comments, took place as late as 1946, and yet she insists the poem deals with childhood.
13 “There are the tops of all the elm trees in the village and there, beyond them, the long green marshes, so fresh, so salt. Then the Minas Basin, with the tide halfway in or out, the wet red mud glazed with sky blue until it meets the creeping lavender wet -water. In the middle of the view, like one hand of a clock pointing straight up, is the steeple of the Presbyterian Church. We are in the “Maritimes” but all that means is that we live by the sea” (CProse 264).
14 Such hovering presence recalls, once more, the presence of the mother’s scream in “In the Village” which “hangs over that Nova Scotian village… hangs like that, unheard, in memory—in the past, in the present, and those years between” (CPr 251). “In the Waiting Room” similarly deals with an unmanageable scream, which, like the self in the poem, cannot be placed.
15 In one of the scenes of “In the Village” the narrator, as child, finds herself in a similar context to that of “The Moose” and its “old conversation/—not concerning us.” Observing her grandmother and her younger aunt “unpacking her [the mother’s] clothes, her things” (CPr 254), she notices that amongst these things are some postcards. As the child “run[s] the tip of [her] finger over the rough, jeweled lines on the postcards, over and over” she also notices how the grown up others in the room “hold things up to each other and exclaim, and talk, and exclaim, over and over.
‘There’s that cake basket.’
‘Mrs. Miles…’
‘Mrs. Miles sponge cake’…
‘She was very fond of her.’
Another photograph—‘Oh, that Negro girl! That friend.’
‘She went to be a medical missionary. She had a letter from her, last winter. From Africa.’
‘They were great friends.’ (256)
16 My reading of Bishop’s moment of epiphany in the poem disagrees with Doreski’s. While her reading of epiphany centers on the emergence of the Moose, I argue that it is the joy experienced by “all of us” which triggers that moment. Bishop’s stance is hardly the intentional attempt Doreski hints at when she claims that “though suspicious of the romantic hejira and the epiphany, Bishop employs their strategies while avoiding the moment of commitment to the ineffable and infinite” (53). To say that, one would have to assume a conscious design to frustrate the readers’ expectation. Such assumption, however, ignores the crux of the dialogue between Bishop and romanticism; the repressed yet persistent wish to conquer the otherworldly, rather than mock a naive reader. Impossible epiphanies are not the “message” of any Bishopian texts but rather an inevitability, a blockage rather than some “trick” played by a juggler. Bishop’s landscapes often lure the reader into a quest for meaning, but their ultimate unfolding as more surface and their “no entry” signs do not necessarily point at a jeering speaker, but rather at a conversational one—a poet whose quest is just as human and “real” as ours. There are no ultimate points of destinations, no arrivals and resolutions for any of the participants in the poetic exchange, including the speaker. Assuming that Bishop intentionally employs romantic strategies in order to defy them would ultimately mean the achievement of some destination point, an arrival at some “complete comprehension” Bishop so utterly disagrees with.
Auteur
-
Sara Meyer
University of Haifa
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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