Dots, Specks and Stains in Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetry
p. 113-129
Résumés
The mildew stains that proliferate in a variety of domestic settings depicted throughout Bishop’s poetry are metaphors of the porosity of the borders separating the sphere of individual ownership from the peripheral world of social outcasts, as well as the poet’s own intimacy from her Brazilian lover’s otherness. They also function quite literally as touches of pigment that Bishop catches in the act of being applied to the canvas of the phenomenal world, in a gesture that does not so much imitate as pre-date and conceivably preempt the visual artist’s own intervention in the realm of the visible. Indeed, as we observe in “The Fish” or “At the Fishhouses,” surfaces in Bishop’s descriptions often turn out to be the primary locus where the drama of the poem—of an essentially visual nature—unfolds, especially when they are endowed with a prismatic, flickering quality which, in pointillist fashion, sets light into motion, redirecting the reader’s attention away from the poem’s narrative or philosophical theme, towards the theatrical potential of pure color. As she follows the way in which small touches of light invest representational space, Bishop uncovers the scopic dimension of desire, which involves a surrender of the beholder’s mastery to a preexisting gaze that lurks in the visible fabric of the world in the form of dots, specks, or stains. One of Bishop’s most unsettling poetic discoveries is precisely this preeminence of the scopic object inviting the viewer to lay down his/her own gaze, notably in such ekphrastic poems as “Seascape,” where Bishop acknowledges that another artist’s perspective precedes her own, but also in texts like “Crusoe in England” where the anamorphic spots strewn all over the island reduce the beholder to a punctiform being whose paradoxically anonymous signature is contained in the dots which connect fragments of partially erased quotes, thus revealing his dependence on the missing signifier of his own mortality.
Les taches de moisissure qui prolifèrent dans divers cadres domestiques décrits à travers la poésie de Bishop métaphorisent la porosité des frontières qui séparent la sphère de la propriété individuelle du monde périphérique des exclus, ou aussi bien l’intimité du poète de l’altérité de sa maîtresse brésilienne. Ces taches fonctionnent également de manière tout à fait littérale comme autant de touches de couleur que Bishop saisit dans l’acte même où elles s’appliquent à la toile du monde phénoménal, en un geste qui imite moins qu’il n’antidate et ne préempte l’intervention du peintre dans le champ du visible. De fait, comme nous l’observons dans « The Fish » et « At the Fishouses », les surfaces, dans les descriptions de Bishop, s’avèrent souvent le lieu privilégié de déroulement du drame — de nature essentiellement visuelle — qui se joue dans le poème, notamment lorsqu’elles sont dotées d’un aspect scintillant et prismatique qui, à la manière des pointillistes, met la lumière en mouvement et fait reculer au second plan le thème narratif ou philosophique au bénéfice du potentiel théâtral de la couleur. Au fur et à mesure qu’elle suit la façon dont les pointes de couleur investissent l’espace de la représentation, Bishop dévoile la dimension scopique du désir, qui suppose que le spectateur renonce à sa maîtrise au bénéfice d’un regard qui lui préexiste, dissimulé dans le tissu visible du monde sous forme de points, de macules, et de tâches. Une des découvertes poétiques les plus singulières de Bishop réside précisément dans cette prééminence de l’objet scopique qui invite le spectateur à déposer son regard, notamment dans des poèmes ekphrastiques comme « Seascape », où Bishop reconnaît que la perspective d’un autre artiste précède la sienne, mais aussi dans « Crusoe in England », où les taches anomorphiques éparpillées sur l’île réduisent le spectateur à un être punctiforme dont la signature paradoxalement anonyme tient entre les points de suspension qui relient des fragments de citations à demi effacées, révélant ainsi sa dépendance vis-à-vis du signifiant absent de sa propre condition mortelle.
Texte intégral
1In this paper I hope to show how Bishop’s poetic eye captures reality in the act of imitating the gesture of the painter’s brush and how it reproduces this gesture. What touches of color are to the painter, dots, specks and stains are to the material world Bishop depicts in the act of adorning itself with objects and creatures that are cast over it like a dusting of pigment or like the small strokes or dots of color used by the pointillists in order to recreate the shimmer of atmospheric light. This reference to Neo-impressionism is not only warranted by Bishop’s self-explanatory allusion to the “pink Seurat bathers” in her early poem “Pleasure Seas,” where swimmers in a pool are reduced to “beds of bathing caps: white, lavender, and blue” (CP 195); it is also justified by her insistent focus on surfaces or substances capable of decomposing the spectrum, surfaces whose lustre, like the “lovely opalescent ribbon” Bishop’s “Giant Snail” (CP 141) leaves behind, sets light and color into motion. As I shall try to demonstrate two moments can be isolated in Bishop’s handling of this paradigm. The first corresponds to the application of color: the painter’s movement is captured as dots, specks and expanding or sometimes iridescent stains are seen being sprinkled over surfaces. The second, however, corresponds to motion yielding to a fascination with the gaze as that particular object which comes to be deposited in the canvas of the poem. Around this pivotal function a dialectic of motion and stasis thus progressively emerges.
2 In the chapter of her Questions of Mastery that she devotes to Bishop’s poeticization of organic process Bonnie Costello points out her fondness for “molds and mildews,” her delight “in the advance of these transmogrifying growths over the domestic protections of walls, furniture, clothing” (47) as exemplified in Bishop’s prose text, “Memories of Uncle Neddy”:
I love the dry-looking, gray-green dust, like bloom on fruit, to begin with, that suddenly appears here on the soles of shoes in the closet, on the backs 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 on a hot, wet spell like this, a tiny jungle, green, chartreuse, and magenta, may start up in a corner of the bathroom. (CPr 228)
3The proliferation of mildew stains does not only carry what Bishop in the same text calls hints of “attractive morbidity.” It also bears witness to the porosity of the borders that separate inside from outside and thus bespeaks the traveller’s willingness to allow her domestic space to be colonized by a foreign body in the same way as, a foreign body herself, she encroaches upon the Brazilian land and culture. The reciprocity thus established is consonant with the awareness of the political ambiguities of ownership that Bishop exhibits in such poems as “Manuelzinho” (CP 96-99) or “Squatter’s Children” (CP 95), where the children—both native to and dispossessed of their own land—are significantly mentioned as “a specklike girl and boy” while their temporary house and their little dog appear likewise as “[…] a specklike house, [and a] dancing yellow spot, a pup” (emphasis added). In their punctiform status Bishop’s children seem predestined to haunt that indeterminate space between belonging and expropriation emblematized in “Twelfth Morning; or What You Will” (CP 110-1) by the fence which, since it “no longer defines fixed differences” (Costello 40), is emblematically made up of dotted lines reflected in the suspension points at the end of the fourth stanza:
The fence, three-strand, barbed-wire, all pure rust,
three dotted lines, comes forward hopefully
across the lots; thinks better of it; turns
a sort of corner…
4This porosity or reciprocity is Bishop’s own answer to the violation of the pristine Brazilian landscape by the Portuguese conquerors narrated in “Brazil, January 1, 1502” (CP 91-2) where parasitic growths, like mildew, weave delicate screens in order to conceal Brazil’s otherness from its invaders:
The rocks are worked with lichens, gray moonbursts
splattered and overlapping,
threatened from underneath by moss
in lovely hell-green flames.
5The Christian conquerors, contrariwise, rip away “into the hanging fabric” and by the same token prove incapable of apprehending this new land without the filter of “old correspondences,” as they read their own visions of hell into Brazil’s primeval scenery. Bishop, conversely, welcomes those stains and growths that remain obstinately undecipherable and, therefore, inappropriable. Like the speaker of “Song for the Rainy Season” (CP 102), she favors a house
[…] with a wall
for the mildew’s
ignorant map;
darkened and tarnished
by the warm touch
of the warm breath,
maculate, cherished
6It is hardly surprising, then, if blotches of lichen also provide Bishop with the central trope which irradiates throughout her love poem “The Shampoo” (CP 84), addressed to the Brazilian Lota de Macedo Soares with whom Bishop also shared her living space for several years. In the poem’s first stanza, the lichen that spreads on the rocks like “explosions” in “gray, concentric shocks” reminiscent of the moon’s craters punningly anticipates Lota’s strands of white hair (by alluding to the collocation “a shock of white hair”) which being themselves compared to shooting stars—i.e. meteorites whose impact may be seen on the lunar surface—, refer the reader back to the initial trope as well as forward, to the final comparison of Lota’s hair “battered and shiny like the moon.”
7That in a given context, stains may thus become eroticized, will be worth bearing in mind further below when we try to explore their role as versions of the gaze qua object. At this point I would simply like to stress that besides their materializing a model of non-linear, rhizomic progression, the specific fascination that stains seem to exert on Bishop lies in the almost imperceptible process of literal and—as in the previous example—metaphorical becoming that they allow her to capture. Bishop thus affords her reader a view of natural colors being applied in slow motion, as it were, or conversely fading away, like the temporary mark left by water on the pavement in “Love Lies Sleeping” (CP 17),1 or, in “The Armadillo” (CP 103-4), like those fire balloons whose glow is—once again in the form of a pink stain or fleck— fleetingly reflected on the owl and the armadillo as they escape from the scene:
[…] We saw the pair
of owls who nest there flying up
and up, their whirling black-and-white
stained bright pink underneath, until
they shrieked up out of sight.
The ancient owls’ nest must have burned.
Hastily, all alone,
a glistening armadillo left the scene,
rose-flecked, head down, tail down.
8As Blasing points out, by depicting the objective world in the act of adorning itself and sometimes even borrowing from the realm of human techniques and artifacts Bishop “overturns the hierarchical dualities of subject and object, inside and outside, center and periphery, original and copy [and] repeatedly questions the priority and authority of experience over representation” (105). Bishop’s subversion of those dichotomies is intimately linked to her recurrent focus on representation, not as an end product but as an on-going activity, and more specifically, to her interest in those visual transformations that are reminiscent of the painter’s or the etcher’s gestures as they apply the first dab of paint on the canvas or press the burin against the plate. Thus in “Anaphora” (CP 52) the progression of the day can be followed on faces where the mark it leaves is depicted in terms borrowed from the art of engraving and suggesting a sprinkling of dots2:
More slowly falling into sight
and showering into stippled faces,
darkening, condensing all his light;
9Likewise, “A Cold Spring” (CP 55), disturbingly merging the vernal and the funereal, begins with “grave green dust” being sprayed over the addressee’s “aimless hills,” followed by dogwood spreading like a stain that contaminates the woods (“Greenish-white dogwood infiltrated the wood”), then by lilacs which, scattered like snowflakes, are echoed later on in the volume by the “snowfall of daisies” and the “little white churches […] dropped into the matted hills/like lost quartz arrowheads” (“Cape Breton,” CP 67). Bishop concludes this ambivalent ode to spring with a flight of fireflies captured in their initial ascent, like innumerable points of light whose first appearance against the backdrop of the night is perceived as an offering, thus seemingly endowing nature with the power to imitate human agency:
And your shadowy pastures will be able to offer
these particular glowing tributes
every evening now throughout the summer. (CP 56)
10Whether in the form of the barnyard mud “glazed […] with red” where the farmer’s lantern leaves “a pacing aureole” in “The Prodigal” (CP 71) or of the bird-droppings that edge “like illumination in silver” the leaves of the mangrove trees in “Seascape” (CP 40), the stains that dot Bishop’s poems are no inert blotches, nor are they simply in charge of adding a metamorphic or dynamic touch to otherwise static descriptions. Indeed, “The Fish” (CP 42) is a striking example of how the dramatic potential of light may assert itself at the very expense of narrative progression and shift the focus away from the action proper toward apparently insignificant visual details. Here Bishop topples yet another hierarchy: that which, in conventional prose fiction, subordinates descriptive detail to action. One might well argue that in this short narrative the moment when the drama reaches its apex is preeminently conveyed in visual terms through the sudden iridescence spotted by the speaker in the rainbow-like pool of bilge at the bottom of her boat rather than in her actual decision to “let the fish go.” Indeed the main purpose served by this somewhat anticlimactic ending is to identify the real confrontation staged thoughout her poem—one involving not so much the speaker and the fish as her gaze and the spectrum of colors first reflected in the animal’s body (said to be covered with “shapes like full-blown-roses/stained and lost though age,” ll. 14-5) then in the stain of bilge whose hues eventually spread to the entire boat. Stains and the colors that they generate is where most of the poem’s theatricality is concentrated.
11The element of surprise which is one of the most frequently noted characteristics of Bishop’s poetry may thus also lodge itself in such the unlikely medium of stains which are also apt to become a locus of unpredictability. In “Filling Station” (CP 127), for instance, the various details of the scenery being all stained with oil or grease, preserve a paradoxical translucency of sorts, so that it is the few clean items mentioned in the last three stanzas which stick out like stains against a “thoroughly dirty” backdrop. In the same topsy-turvy logic the smutch on the bedspread in “Sunday, 4 A.M.” (CP 129) is compared to “black-and-gold gesso.” Gesso, however, is normally a kind of plaster used as a ground for painting. As in the preceding poem Bishop thus emphasizes the stain’s aptitude not only to blot out surfaces but also in its own right to serve as a surface against which other details will be brought into light: she stresses the stain’s essential complicity with light in its prismatic, flickering dimension.
12I would now like to explore the interesting kinship which thus emerges between dots, specks and stains in Bishop’s poetry and Lacan’s discussion of the point of light as a means to approach the workings of the scopic drive brought under scrutiny in Seminar XI. Thus far I have tried to show how Bishop often draws our attention to that transitional moment when small touches of color or light are seen in the act of investing the representational space as well as to the gesture that presides over this process. Of particular relevance here is Lacan’s own observation that “the creator participates in nothing more than the creation of a little dirty deposit, a succession of dirty little deposits juxtaposed to one another. It is through this dimension that we are within scopic creation—the gesture as a motion given to be seen.” (107).3 More specifically this motion partakes of what Lacan calls “desire to the other,” the desire addressed by the painter to the spectator, to whose contemplation the painter offers his work. What remains to be determined, however, is what, beyond the little blotch of paint, is thus being “deposited.”
13One tentative answer may be found in the first section of Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses” (CP 64), a poem whose setting owes its specific light to the various elements of the natural world which cast over it a sort of kaleidoscopic veil, namely the “emerald moss,” the “iridescent flies” crawling on the wheelbarrows, the “bright sprinkle of grass,” and more importantly the “beautiful herring scales” that line the fish tubs and seem to lend their silvery shine to the whole picture. This central visual detail finds a more than coincidental echo in the examples adduced by Lacan in order to ascertain how, in the natural world already, the sovereignty of the scopic object proclaims itself prior to any seeing subject’s apprehension of the visual field: “If a bird were to paint, would it not do so by letting its feathers drop, a snake, its scales […]? What accumulates here is the first act of the deposition of the gaze.” (104)
14One might ask here what justifies the equation drawn by Lacan between the scales of a snake and this sovereign gaze. As it turns out, it is the dot-like shape of the scales as well as their ability to reflect light which dictates the analogy. In Seminar XI Lacan tells a fishing anecdote in which he sees an empty sardine can floating in the ocean. His companion’s innocuous remark that he can see that shiny object while it cannot, prompts Lacan’s observation that even though it cannot see him, it nonetheless looks at him. Lacan then adds:
I am not simply that punctiform being identified with the geometric point from which perspective is grasped. True, at the bottom of my eye, something is painted. True, the painting is in my eye. But I am in the painting too. Light looks at me, and thanks to this light something is painted at the bottom of my eye. […] In what presents itself to me as the space of light, the gaze is always some alternation of light and opacity. It is always that shimmer which was at the heart of my little story. (89-90)
15In Bishop’s poetry, this interconnectedness between the shimmering dot and the gaze is illustrated in at least three instances where points of light are directly associated with scopic imagery. Thus in “While Someone Telephones” (CP 78) Bishop rhymes “fireflies” with “eyes” in lines whose content confirms an equivalence that the form already suggests:
And while the fireflies
are failing to illuminate these nightmare trees
might they not be his green gay eyes.
16Likewise in “Electrical Storm” (CP 100) Bishop echoes Shakespeare’s and Eliot’s “those are pearls that were his eyes” in comparing the nacreous surface of hailstones to dead eyes:
One pink flash;
then hail, the biggest size of artificial pearls.
[…]
The Lent trees had shed all their petals:
wet, stuck, purple, among the dead-eye pearls.
17Finally in “The Riverman” (CP 105), quite interestingly a hymn to the phallic snake Luandinha, “the worms/with tiny electric eyes/turning on and off and on” seem to directly echo Lacan’s aforementioned depiction of the gaze as “some alternation of light and opacity.”
18As a poetic description may be strewn with dots, specks or stains, so a monarch’s dress may be embroidered with a sprinkling of ornamental eyes as in “Britannia Rules the Waves” (CP 203). Even those families from the American South that emigrated to Brazil, seem to involuntarily emulate Bishop who writes in “Santarem” (CP 186) that “they left occasional blue eyes.”
19Throughout the examples just quoted, I would argue that we witness what Lacan calls a laying down of the gaze through the agency of the eye where it originates, a gesture whose kinship with the artist’s handling of color is evidenced in “The Man-Moth” as well as, later on in Bishop’s career, “Poem: ”
[the Man-Moth] thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,
proving the sky quite useless for protection.
[…]
he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage
to push his small head through that round clean opening
and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.
(CP 14)
Up closer, a wild iris, white and yellow,
fresh-squiggled from the tube. (CP 176)
20As the recurrent image of the tube of paint indicates, what the painter lays down on the canvas can be indifferently represented as a small moon-like hole or a white and yellow iris: each time it is the gaze which is being thus deposited, assuming a dot-like shape on the canvas—a gaze that precedes and preempts the man-moth’s photographic eye (“his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him”) as it initially preempts Bishop’s own look in “Poem,” where not only her Uncle George’s iris stares at her but also, following the poem’s sylleptical logic, the flyspeck in the last lines of the second section:
A specklike bird is flying to the left.
Or is it a flyspeck looking like a bird? [emphasis added]
21That Bishop’s uncle was probably no master in the technical sense of the word, say, like the Raphael of “Seascape,” matters little here. What is, on the other hand, relevant is the presumption of mastery that any painting, good or bad, triggers in the beholder insofar as, being the repository of a gaze, it invites him/her to rest his/her eye in the painting. This is why according to Lacan the artist “depositing” his gaze in the painting is “a sovereign act, […] since it materializes itself and, by virtue of this sovereignty, will nullify, exclude, render ineffectual all that which, coming from elsewhere, will present itself before this product” (104 [my emphasis]).
22On what grounds exactly does this sovereignty assert itself? Lacan’s premise, based on anthropological findings concerning the belief in the “evil eye,” is that the eye is the locus of a “virulent, aggressive function” (108), the bearer of “the deadly function of being gifted with a separating power” (105). In the painting where the artist’s own omnipotent gaze is embedded, however, that function temporarily comes to rest. The viewer surrenders it precisely because in the artwork, the painter’s gaze is phallically erected. Hence the fascination triggered in the viewer by the painting, and more specifically by the way in which the painting invites the onlooker to follow the dynamics of the painter’s gesture up to its own resting point, to the stasis in which it inevitably ends, and where the gaze proper emerges as a fascinating object. Lacan explains: “the gaze in and of itself not only terminates motion but freezes it. […] At the moment when the subject stops, suspending his gesture, he is mortified. The anti-life, anti-motion function of this terminal point is the fascinum, and it is precisely one of the dimensions where the power of the gaze directly exerts itself.” (107) The viewer’s gaze thus relinquishes its deadly power—that power which is notably embodied in the imaginary belief in the “evil eye”—and acknowledges itself as castrated in front of the painter’s almighty gaze. It is to this extent that the contemplation of a painting operates, in Lacan’s words, “the junction of the imaginary and the symbolic” (107).
23An interesting dialogue may be initiated between the function of the stain within the complex Lacanian problematic of the gaze and the poetic persona’s apprehension of the visual field in Bishop’s “Crusoe in England.” To start with, it is worth pointing out that Crusoe’s long monologue seems occasioned by the birth of a small island as seen through a sailor’s binoculars:
A new volcano has erupted,
the papers say, and last week I was reading
where some ship saw an island being born:
at first a breath of steam, ten miles away;
and then a black fleck—basalt probably…
rose in the mate’s binoculars
and caught on the horizon like a fly. (CP 162)
24The poem thus begins with a chance encounter between the hypertrophied look of a sailor and the “black fleck” which emerges in the middle of the sea. It encapsulates that dialectic of movement and stasis in which, according to Lacan, the instant of seeing is caught: first the island rises in the mate’s binoculars, then movement yields to fascination, stasis, and possibly death when it catches “on the horizon like a fly” and stands erect. These lines are programmatic for at least two reasons. First we notice the phallic overtones associated with the emergence of the island, which nonetheless—and, as I would argue, therefore—appears as an almost infinitesimal speck. Second, one might contend that at least until Friday’s arrival, Crusoe’s solitary condition excluded the presence of a “mate.” His situation is thus the exact reverse of this initial scenario: throughout most of the poem Crusoe is himself the insula exposed to a gaze that is as evasive as it is omnipresent.
25In Looking Awry Zizek comments on Lacan’s Seminar XI in terms which I believe are directly pertinent to Bishop’s poem: “Phallic,” the critic argues, “is the point of anamorphosis in a picture: the element that, when viewed straightforwardly, remains a meaningless stain, but which, as soon as we look at the picture from a determined lateral perspective, all of a sudden acquires well-known contours” (90). Crusoe’s turtles are avatars of this meaningless stain: seen from a certain angle, they resemble “folds of lava,” but eventually they “prove/to be more turtles.” The same is even more true of the snail shells strewn under the trees of Crusoe’s island: “at a distance, /you’d swear that they were beds of irises” (CP 164, ll. 74-5). Thus by virtue of the double meaning of the word “iris,” the anamorphic phallic element of the picture conveyed to us by Crusoe, that “meaningless stain that ‘denatures’ it, rendering all its constituents ‘suspicious,” as Zizek (91) calls it, becomes closely associated with the signifier of the gaze.
26 To the extent that this duplicity of appearances makes interpretation a necessity and opens up “the ground of the established, familiar signification,” it introduces an “oscillation between lack and surplus meaning [which] constitutes the proper dimension of subjectivity. In other words, it is by means of the ‘phallic’ spot that the observed picture is subjectivized” (Zizek 91). This oscillation is observable in the Wordsworthian quote that Bishop brings into play in Crusoe’s monologue:
the poems—well, I tried
reciting to my iris-beds,
“They flash upon that inward eye,
which is the bliss…” The bliss of what? (CP 164)
27Here indeed, surplus meaning is sought by Crusoe in another text that might be brought to bear on his present predicament. Simultaneously, however, Crusoe’s memory gap creates a deficit that nullifies the interpretive added value generated by the quote. The word “solitude” which would enable Crusoe to understand the extent to which Wordsworth’s lines concern him—i.e., quite literally, the extent to which they regard his own situation— is the one signifier for which dots are substituted. The dots thus exactly function as that “signifier without signified” which “renders possible the effects of the signified” (Zizek 91): they look back at Crusoe from the void in meaning that they delineate in the same way as his anamorphic snails-as-irises dotted around the “one variety of tree” may also be said to gaze at him. They are a punctuation sign that betokens the mastery of the gaze-as-dot over Crusoe’s own punctiform being.
As soon as the subject tries to accommodate himself to this gaze, he becomes that punctiform object, that evanescent point of being with which the subject merges his own demise. Therefore, of all the objects in which the subject may recognize his dependency in the register of desire, the specificity of the gaze is its elusiveness. That is why, more than any other object, it fails to be recognized, and this may be why also the subject so conveniently symbolizes his own vanishing and punctiform status in the illusory awareness of seeing himself in the act of seeing himself, where the gaze is elided. (Lacan 79)
28 Bishop’s Crusoe is thus dependent on a missing signifier, situated in the other text, a signifier which, by allowing him to connect the other text with his present condition, would make the Other answerable. Instead what the dots exhibit is his “dependency in the register of desire” on a gaze that surrounds him, but with which there is no possible transaction, as evidenced, in section 7 of the poem, by Crusoe’s inability to capture it in the eyes of the billy-goat: “I’d grab his beard and look at him./His pupils, horizontal, narrowed up/and expressed nothing, or a little malice,” and at the end of the poem, in his own beloved knife: “now it won’t look at me at all/The living soul has dribbled away./My eyes rest on it and pass on.”
29In his discussion of the scopic drive Juranville assimilates the gaze to a master-signifier manifesting the “impalpable presence of the dead peering through the window of the sky” (182). Assoun likewise stresses that the gaze per se was always “‘hidden behind the world’ and always gazing at the subject who, by simply existing within the realm of the visible, exposes himself to the invisible, empty gaze of night and death” (96). That the sovereignty of the gaze ultimately points to the agency of death as the master-signifier is already hinted at, in “At the Fishhouses,” by the presence of “melancholy stains, like dried blood” which convey to the onlooker a memento mori later echoed in Bishop’s evocation of the sea as an “element bearable to no mortal.” This may also be gathered from the numerous instances in Bishop’s poetry where glittering surfaces and dot-like details which, in pointillist aesthetics, serve to recreate the shimmer of atmospheric light, convey a sense of threat, and are associated with visions of impending death or corruption. Thus in the early poem “Wading at Wellfleet” (CP 7) we read that “This morning’s glitterings reveal/the sea is ‘all a case of knives.’” Similarly in “From the Country to the City” a lethally seductive power is perceived in the highway “imagined at night as a demonic clown” (Costello 41):
As we approach, wickedest clown, your heart and head,
we can see that
glittering arrangement of your brain consists, now,
of mermaid-like,
seated, ravishing sirens, each waving her hand-mirror; (CP 13)
30 In “The Unbeliever,” the sea’s destructive potential is directly connected to its sparkling aspect: “The spangled sea below wants me to fall./It is hard as diamonds; it wants to destroy us all.” (CP 22). With their predictable “specks of birds/suspended on invisible threads above the Site” or their “scenes arranged in cattycornered rectangles/or circles set on stippled gray,” the vignettes found in Bishop’s old family Bible prefigure (both in their subject and in the engraving technique used to produce them) the Collegians at St Peter’s “crisscrossing the great square with black, like ants,” i.e., seen from a bird’s eye view that gently mocks the vanity of their comings and goings. More significantly, these specks of birds surrounding a holy Site associated with man’s redemption, are reflected in the scars that dot the faces of “the little pockmarked prostitutes” in the brothels of Marrakesh, and thus ultimately bear the seal of human corruption and mortality.
31In “Florida” (CP 32-3) likewise, the dilapidated seascape is studded with punctiform descriptive details functioning as so many intimations of mortality and decrepitude. Thus the mangrove roots “when dead strew white swamps with skeletons, /dotted as if bombarded, with green hummocks.” The scavengers seen “drifting down, down, down, /over something they have spotted in the swamp” (my emphasis) associate the theme of decay with the action of spotting in the double sense of the verb: compared to “stirred-up flakes of sediment” (emphasis added) the buzzards conjure up the now obsolete meaning of the word “flake” which used to designate a blemish, flaw, or fleck (OED): as they spot a possible prey, they too, are spots floating in the air. “The careless corrupt state is all black specks,” Bishop writes in the poem’s second section: those black specks are but avatars of the vacant gaze that stares at the poet and the reader from the Florida beaches, transformed by the poetic eye into the theater of a dehumanized vanitas where in the turtles’ “large white skulls with round eye-sockets” they may indirectly, if not anamorphically, read a memento mori addressed to them by dint of the comparison, “twice the size of a man’s.” It simultaneously is and is not the subject’s destiny which is thus mapped out in the Florida landscape where, like specks of light, “After dark, the fireflies map the heavens in the marsh,” i.e., draw in the air a pattern which gestures toward meaning, yet falls short of imparting any. To this extent “the gaze is the master reduced to the status of object […]. It is the master-signifier when it no longer signifies.” (Juranville 182)
32Bishop’s frequent use of ekphrasis amply demonstrates that visual artifacts do not inscribe the poet’s eye in “the register of the eye as made desperate by the gaze” (Lacan 106). Instead, Bishop’s exphrastic poems show her attempting to partially identify with the preexisting gaze which those artifacts conceal, as can be inferred from the final section of “Poem” (CP 177):
Our visions coincided—” visions” is
too serious a word—our looks, two looks:
art “copying from like” and life itself,
life and the memory of it so compressed
they’ve turned into each other. Which is which?
33Clearly in these lines, Bishop toys with the hypothesis of that “coincidence of the subject’s view with the gaze of the big Other” in which Zizek (108) sees a definition of perversion as a form of denial of symbolic law. That this must remain a hypothesis is borne out by the fact that Bishop’s encounter with her uncle’s gaze is mediated by a fully acknowledged third, namely the agency of memory itself, then of the familiar voice which resonates in the poems italicized fourth section. Additionally, Bishop’s fondness of multiple perspectives counteracts whatever attempts may be traced in her poetry to identify with “the incomparable monster, i.e. the painter’s gaze, which claims to impose itself as being, all by itself, the gaze” (Lacan 104). The preceding remarks on death-as-master-signifier aimed to show that the writing subject too falls at least partially under this gaze. Finally insofar as dots, specks and stains proliferate in her writing, Bishop also implicitly points to the impossibility of isolating the gaze in its absolute singularity, let alone of becoming one with it.
34Throughout Bishop’s work we see the poet on the lookout for those albeit transient moments when the techniques of writing and painting overlap, as in “Large Bad Picture” where the birds dotted on the painting fortuitously resemble graphemic signs:
And high above them, over the tall cliffs’
semi-translucent ranks,
are scribbled hundreds of fine black birds
hanging in n’s in banks. (CP 11)
35Indeed, the natural kinship between the act of writing and that laying down of the gaze which defines the painter’s gesture, may be gathered from an analogy drawn by Bishop herself in “12 O’Clock News” (CP 174-5), where the scales not of a snake, but of a fish once again play a pivotal role: “The escarpment that rises abruptly from the central plain is in heavy shadow, but the elaborate terracing of its southern glacis gleams faintly in the dim light, like fish scales.” In this “comic-surreal description of Bishop’s desktop” (Colwell 172), this scrap of a rather unlikely news report is tellingly juxtaposed with the word “typewriter: ” a metaphorical link thus connects the keys of the poet’s typewriter and the terracing of the landscape, itself compared to fish scales. Following the transitive logic of comparison subsumed under metaphor, we are led to the conclusion that as fish scales lend their gleam to the escarpment’s southern glacis, so the letters that make up the poem dispense their own shine to its texture. It is, therefore, not only the preeminence of the gaze over the beholder that is highlighted, but ultimately the writer’s own subjection to the agency of the letter. In Bishop’s writings, dots, specks and stains are thus much less unexplored vistas into some invisible beyond than masks of the evanescent gaze that peers from within the poetic canvas they punctuate, like so many reminders of the eye’s precarious sovereignty.
Works cited
36Assoun, Paul-Laurent. Le Regard et la voix. Paris: Anthropos, 2001.
37Bishop, Elizabeth. The Collected Poems. 1927-1979. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990.
38Blasing, Mutlu Konik. American Poetry: The Rhetoric of its Forms. New Haven & London: Yale UP., 1987.
39Colwell, Anne. Inscrutable Houses: Metaphors of the Body in the Poems of Elizabeth Bishop. Tuscaloosa & London: U. of Alabama P., 1997.
40Juranville, Alain. Lacan et la philosophie. Paris: PUF, 1984.
41Lacan. Le Séminaire XI. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse. Paris: Seuil, 1973.
42Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry. Cambridge, Mass & London: MIT Press, 1992.
Notes de bas de page
1 “The water dries/light-dry, dark-wet, the pattern/of the cool watermelon.”
2 The OED defines stippling as a technique used to create “gradations of shade or colour by means of dots or small spots, so as to produce gradations of tone.”
3 All translations of French works quoted in this article are mine.
Auteur
-
Axel Nesme
Université Lyon 2
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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