Elizabeth Bishop and the Art of Still Life
p. 153-167
Résumés
One of the most striking features of Bishop’s visual imagination is her sense of scale. From her earliest poems her attention to the excess of scale, overwhelming the human dimension, is obvious. Her poems’ unique perspectives disturb certainties. The contrast between minuteness and gigantism may have to do with public space and its encroachment on intimacy. She explores the arrangement and disruption of the personal world through her interest for the genre of the still life, favored by the Dutch painters she admired. In her attention to objects she both defamiliarizes the everyday and reasserts its value. This vision involves a cross-cultural approach, allowing a sensitivity to the contradictory dimensions of the human approach to objects, as in “Jeronimo’s House” and its tension between tragic vanitas and the festive mood; between “rhopography”— the down-to-earth display of the stuff of life, the “culture of the table”— and the transcendental conversion of poor materials into numinous riches. “Filling Station” displays the dialectic between a feminine space of the domestic and the masculine space of the outdoors, of movement and stress in which the modalities of the conversion of nature to culture, ironically exposed, become provisional under the patient gaze of the poet. The still life moment is not about contemplation—it achieves a function, destabilizes our assumptions, it introduces the anxiety of mortality. In “12 O’Clock News,” in a process comparable to the treatment of everyday life by surrealist sculptors, the transfiguration of scales allows the artist’s table to turn into a battlefield, suggesting metaphorically the struggle between the creative and the rational mind, while the voice of the “news” displaces the voice of the poem. Eventually, far from enduring through time, still life objects point to the art of losing (“One Art”), rearranging a shallow space of human intimacy.
L’une des caractéristiques les plus notables de l’imagination visuelle de Bishop est son sens de l’échelle. Depuis ses premiers poèmes son attention aux proportions excessive, qui écrasent la dimension humaine, est évidente. Les perspectives originales de ses poèmes remettent en cause les certitudes. Le contraste entre le minuscule et le gigantesque renvoie à l’espace public et à sa façon d’empiéter sur l’intimité. Elle explore l’arrangement et le dérangement du monde personnel par son intérêt pour la tradition de la nature morte, qu’affectionnaient les peintres flamands qu’elle admire. Son attention aux objets défamiliarise le quotidien tout en en réaffirmant la valeur. Cette vision comporte une dimension trans-culturelle, qui favorise une sensibilité aux dimensions contradictoires de l’appréhension humaine des objets, comme dans « Jeronimo’s House » avec la tension qui s’y exprime entre la vanitas tragique et le mode festif ; entre la « rhopographie » (la mise en évidence prosaïque des réalités quotidiennes, la « culture de la table ») et la conversion transcendantale de l’humble matière en richesse spirituelle. « Filling Station » explore la dialectique entre un espace féminin du domestique et l’espace masculin de l’extérieur, du mouvement, de la tension dans lequel les modalités de la conversion de la nature en culture, ironiquement déployées, sont frappées d’inconsistance sous le regard patient de la poésie. Le moment de la nature morte ne relève donc pas de la contemplation ; il accomplit une fonction, déstabilise les présupposés, introduit l’angoisse de la mortalité. Dans « 12 O’Clock News », selon un procédé qui rappelle le traitement des objets quotidiens par les sculpteurs surréalistes, la transposition des échelles permet à la table de l’artiste de se transformer en champ de bataille, ce qui suggère métaphoriquement la conflit entre les dimensions créatives et rationnelles de l’esprit, tandis que la voix du bulletin d’informations bouscule la voix lyrique. Finalement, loin de symboliser la permanence face à la temporalité, les objets de la nature morte pointent vert l’art de perdre ( « One Art »), où s’aménage un espace fragile d’intimité humaine.
Texte intégral
1An exclamatory “Look!” runs all through Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III. And one of the most fascinating features of Bishop’s visual imagination from the beginning is her sense of scale. She invites us to imagine “the tiniest green hummingbird in the world,” but also to pity a “giant toad”: “I am too big, too big by far.” The “enormous turtles” of “Florida” (CP 32-3) are “helpless and mild,” but Bishop generally dislikes outsized things when they are man-made, and subverts the human tendency to align size with a scale of value. She may be intrigued by the “large bad picture” suspended between “commerce and contemplation,” (CP 12) but she is enamored of the little Nova Scotia painting in “Poem” (CP 176-7), “a sketch for a larger one,” “about the size of a dollar bill,” which tenders memories of Great Village.
2From early in her career Bishop’s attention to excesses of scale seems to have something to do with urban experience, and with modernity in general. Modernism’s superhuman scale: the ten-foot face on the giant silver screen, the skyscraper and the universalist style in architecture, the Fascist state and its looming statue, had overwhelmed the individual, human scale. (We feel this threat again, of course, as we wrestle with the image of falling trade towers, the ubiquitous portraits of Sadam Hussein, globalization that leaves us feeling placeless). Bishop begins her poetic career just after an era of ecstasy over the magnitude of human technological achievement, just when the world had awakened with a jolt from its materialist dream. Her early city poems suggest a fragile human dimension beneath the vast facades of steel and cement. In “Love Lies Sleeping,” for instance, she manages to feel tenderness toward “the immense” city of New York, by miniaturizing the scene within her apartment window, her personal space. The city becomes “a little chemical garden in a jar” which “trembles and stands again, pale blue, blue-green, and brick.”
3Scale in Bishop is deeply tied to perspective (to the designation of near and far) and to the ways modernity, technology and capitalism have complicated individual perspective, collapsing distance and proximity while eroding intimacy. Bishop uses the phenomenon of disrupted scale to comment on or counteract these effects. For instance, as Bishop drives along highways “from the country to the city,” she imagines the landscape as one continuous harlequin body, a suffering body tortured by the foolish, dreamlife of the city’s demonic “brain” and insatiable, corrupt “heart.” As Susan Stewart has pointed out in her book On Longing, the giant body often figures the public realm, the realm of the state or of technology, while miniaturization (as in “Love Lies Sleeping”) figures the personal interior. In a later poem, “Night City” in which the city is seen “from a plane” the little chemical garden has become a chemical inferno, mapped onto a human body turned inside out to expose “diaphanous lymph, /bright turgid blood.” The industrialists’ acts of pollution become, from the aerial perspective of the poet, acts of despair; she reads the immense features of the landscape as the marks of personal lament: “A pool of bitumen one tycoon wept by himself… another cried a skyscraper up.”
4Nature’s size can sometimes remind us of the limits of human mastery and power. Bishop catches a “tremendous fish” but the victory is in the letting go; this fish will not become part of a still life arrangement. The psychic “weed” is “immense,” shattering the deadly certainty of the speaker’s dream in “The Weed” (CP 20-1); in “Brazil, January 1, 1502” (CP 91-2) the invading Portuguese and the modern North American tourists, are shrunken and absorbed, “tiny as nails,” into the “giant web” of the jungle. The poor know best what is true of all of us, that we are “specklike” squatters in the vast mansion of rain. But if nature can be a corrective to the outsized ambitions of human mastery, there remains the problem of defining a scale of order and arrangement that satisfies us individually, and this is where Bishop often turns to the art of still life.
5Throughout Bishop’s poetry we find a desire to recalibrate experience with reference to a human scale that neither defeats nor inflates our sense of order and control. In literature the lyric satisfies this need; the equivalent genre in the visual arts is still life, especially for so object oriented a poet as Bishop. In her lyrics Bishop draws on still life motifs to explore the arrangement and derangement of the personal world, and the relationships between the personal and the social and public. For still life is a threshold genre, the place where culture’s organization of the material world enters the personal realm, and the place where the individual displays herself in relation to that cultural order.
6Bishop was an amateur painter and still life was one of her favorite genres. In her watercolors and drawings we see her fascination with scale and perspective. Consider her watercolor of a stove diminished by a pot of flowers— presumably the flowers are larger because they are closer to us, but in the absence of perspective lines Bishop has used primitive technique to convey an emotional logic. The floor becomes a table and physical scale is adjusted to convey a subjective scale of value. Her painting of pansies beside a pile of books indicates her ability in a more naturalistic scale and conveys her instinctive association of word and image. Bishop admired the artist Joseph Cornell, the subject of the poem “Objects and Apparitions” (CP 275-6), which she translated from Octavio Paz; she made artwork “boxes” of her own, clearly inspired by his practice of gathering “minimal, incoherent fragments” and making creations out of ruins. Cornell lived in New York about the same time as Bishop and his cut out images of matinee idols, ballerinas, birds, bubbles, souvenirs and miniature architectural images suggest a similar desire to bring the city into a personal scale. But his still-lifes are Victorian bell jars, within which he creates a childlike personal infinite based on fantasy and romance. Bishop’s still life, even at its most surreal, relies less on the alchemy of the imagination. Hers are not alternative worlds but commentaries on this one. The baby faces in her box construction, for instance, unlike the dolls in Cornell’s dream boxes, represent the tragic condition of real children (specifically, infant mortality in Brazil)—an imaginative gesture aligned more with William Blake’s Songs of Innocence than with art by Joseph Cornell.
7If she shares Cornell’s fascination with reordering the scale and value of material objects, then, she departs from him in her emphasis on the poetry of the everyday. Her eye is less for the extraordinary, the miniature sublime, than for the common things we overlook, but which can tell us who we are. Of course distortions of scale can defamiliarize the everyday—Bishop was, like Cornell, influenced by surrealist experiments with still life. But like W. H. Auden she uses disjunctions of scale to show how the public enters the private realm, how little common things are related to large, public phenomena. The personal space is not, for Bishop, an escape from the crowd into the pleasures of bourgeois individualism or romantic fantasy. But she nonetheless reasserts the value of the personal, the domestic, the everyday, in light of an overwhelming drive of culture toward the salient, the institutional, the instrumental. In this sense Bishop is comparable to Dutch artists—inviting us to look at and value low-plane reality: the sound of clogs in” Questions of Travel” (CP 93-4), the almanac and the teakettle of “Sestina” (CP 123-4), the “arctics and overcoats, lamps and magazines” in “In the Waiting Room” (CP 159-161). This is the trivia, ephemeral, entropic stuff of still life representation, which art historians have called “rhopography.”
8Still life is the art of things—not things in nature but things as we order them for our use and display. Bishop knows that while we may want materiality to precede culture, to be the ground of ideas and the anchor of identity, we inevitably experience things within culture, within semiotic and ideological structures. Still life often suppresses the work of culture as it displays the goods of culture. These arrangements seem given rather than made. And indeed, while things are never things in themselves, yet they are never fully of us either. The table is the primary site of material culture for the art of still life—even more than the hearth, it is the sign of home, the site of conversion from nature to culture, raw to cooked. The table is the sign too of consumption and display, the two sides of cultural desire, the shelf being a related, prior site. In these relatively shallow spaces (compared to the landscapes Bishop imagines) local orders become defined in relation to material flux. Things bespeak the culture that produces them, its relationship to nature, and the place of individuals within that culture.
9In the seventeenth-century Dutch world most still life celebrates an affluent, bourgeois existence and national confidence of a productive culture able to import goods from distant places, proud of its secular learning but also anxious about its spiritual health. The historian Simon Schama speaks, in this regard, of an “embarrassment of riches.” Bishop greatly admired and imitated the Dutch art of describing, but the cultures she represents are very different, thus her still life aesthetic is nothing like the Dutch. What makes Bishop’s still life images even more complex is that she looks as an outsider, at cultural positions different from her own. Still life in her poems thus offers a refracted mirror, in which we see ourselves reflected, as well as the very different world to which these displays bear witness.
10Bishop’s poetry of material culture is often an investigation of class, and always, more broadly, of economy and the balance of nature and culture as a sign of status. She makes us aware of the differences of class between her audience and her subjects. At the same time her imagination is drawn to the aesthetic impulse arising within poor and working class life; she discovers the affective power of the minimal or tattered object. (Indeed, their poverty is part of the beauty of these arrangements for her.) Some of her descriptions recall American trompe-l’œil artists of the 19th century, especially John Peto, whose “rack painting,” Poor Man’s Store (its faded reds, greens and blues) anticipates the beautiful melancholy of her Key West images. Bishop’s prose description of the Key West barbershop window in which she first saw a painting by Cuban primitivist Gregorio Valdes, is itself a kind of rack painting: “The picture leaned against a cardboard advertisement for Eagle Whiskey, among other window decorations of red-and-green crepe-paper rosettes and streamers left over from Christmas and the announcement of an operetta at the Cuban school—all covered with dust and fly spots and littered with termites’ wings.” (CPr 51) Do the ornaments and luxuries of culture here evoke a vanitas (the still life tradition that reminds us, through symbols of time and erosion, of our mortality)? This society has little for sale and can afford even less. But we are reminded even more of the vanity of human wishes by the pathetic display, the “clutter of trophies” throughout “Faustina, or Rock Roses” (CP 72-4). That poem unambiguously evokes the Vanitas tradition, reminding us of the entropy to which all culture is subject, even for those socially designated masters, like the white woman who employs Faustina. The colorful little barbershop window frames a culture that refuses to be defined by necessity—that may escape into drink (“Eagle Whiskey”), but may also embellish its dark world with rosettes and operettas. Pathetic? Not as pathetic as the house of the more affluent white woman in “Faustina,” whose visitor, the narrator of the poem, is embarrassed “not by nakedness, though perhaps by its reverse,” not by proximity to nature but by the effort to deny it in the all-white still life exhibit of “talcum powder, the pills, the cans of ‘cream, ’” that promise to ward off mortality. There is no sense of home or hospitality in that morbid environment. Bishop’s still lifes can display, then, poverty amidst riches or riches amidst poverty.
11The mixture of festivity and vanitas complicates our reading of “Jeronimo’s House” (CP 34), Bishop’s poem in the voice of a Cuban Emigré in Key West. He celebrates life even in the poorest circumstances, and finds aesthetic abundance within spare circumstances. But as the poem delights in visual display and vibrant color, it highlights the precariousness and transience of this domestic order, the proximity of luxury to necessity, thus adding a note of melancholy. What complex relationship to this display does Bishop create for her relatively affluent, Northern audience? What role does the still life of the minimal play in a culture marked by excesses of number and scale? Does the scene in Jeronimo’s house claim an imaginary, spiritual economy within a spare material economy? Does the poem therefore objectify Jeronimo and his household, making them available for the aesthetic contemplation of the better-endowed reader? Yet for Bishop, unlike Cornell, the material economy is never forgotten.
12We do not see Jeronimo, who creates this order—but we hear him, and his contemplation of the order he has created is different from our own. The Roman word for still life, xenia, means both host and guest, and he is both host and guest of this scene, audience, that is, to his own theater. But we are also his guests, audience, through Bishop, to his performance. We are aware immediately of the vibrant color—scarlets, pinks, greens, blues, aluminum; and the baroque variety of shape as well: ferns, French horns, looping Christmas decorations, woven wicker, lattice work on the veranda (aural echo in the flamenco music). As so often in the still life tradition, all the senses are suggested within the visual field, smell and taste from the food, sound from the radio, adding to the feeling of abundance. Jeronimo’s rhetoric denotes his pride and pleasure in the order he has created: his “fairy palace” “endowed” with spiritual worth by himself as ruler, though materially poor and minute. Cornell’s palace in a box comes to mind, though it postdates this poem. Miniaturization makes this whole house, not just its contents, part of a still life—with its “little center table.” This ornate and vibrant variety, addressed to the imagination, does not dispel the material poverty of the “perishable clapboards,” or the general ephemerality of the paper materials, that mark the thin border between this home and the chaos of the weather, the hurricane. The attention to number throughout the poem contrasts this to an aesthetic of abundance—how many of us can enumerate our belongings? Four chairs, ten beads, two palm leaf fans, four pink tissue paper roses, one fried fish (for how large a family, one wonders, since he mentions only the “smallest baby” we infer several others in this 3 room house?)—These are spare numbers against the “lottery numbers” and their dream of quick affluence (the same force of chance, in contrast to feeble manmade order, that brings the more likely hurricane). The lineation of the poem reinforces the insubstantiality of the scene, but at the same time allows the eye to register each item, connected by “and and and.” Why did Bishop choose to set this poem in double columns (as she did not, say, for “Night City” [CP 167-8] which also has very short lines)? The single page seems important to the sense of a finite space. The poem stresses the proximity of the culture of the table to the disorganized and even threatening presence of nature—the sense of the raw strong here within the cooked. The house, Jeronimo tells us, is a kind of “wasp nest,” an ad hoc “affair” of “chewed up paper glued with spit.” The decorations retain their origin in nature—the ferns planted in sponges, the palm leaf fans. The little allowance for decoration at Christmas becomes the ornament that must sustain them throughout the year. Yet even here, display and aesthetic pleasure, not just necessity and use value, order the objects.
13How are we to feel about this display? John Peto’s rack paintings sometimes include a sign “important information inside.” What kind of information is this poem alluding to with its display of objects? We can read these images for their political pathos. Here is poor Jeronimo, barely getting by in Key West, pathetically celebrating the Cuban struggle against Spain (in the parade for Jose Marti). How liberated is he? He will be moving soon—unable to pay the rent? Yet Bishop is clearly attracted to this primitive aesthetic—not as an insider but as an outsider—coming from the world of excess in New York City and its hubristic “fantastic triumph” over nature. Bishop seems to align her art with Jeronimo’s. The poem even draws attention to its own making in relation to the order Jeronimo has made—the “writing paper lines of light” remind us that all of this display rests upon the poem itself, ephemeral as the chewed up paper house—poetry as something ad hoc, papier mache of the past. But if one direction of the poem is toward “rhopography”—the display of the stuff of life, what is ephemeral, trashy, and everyday—another is clearly toward “megalography”—the conversion of poor materials to numinous riches. The poem seems to hover between these impulses, between rhopography and megalography, between economics and imagination, between the melancholy of John Peto and fantasy of Jospeh Cornell.
14The paternal Jeronimo presides over his own private world (emasculated though he may be within the economic structure of the wider culture). But the space of still life is, as art critic Norman Bryson has shown, primarily a feminine space, the space of the domestic, of nurture, of the table, of rest, of nature converted to culture, as opposed to the masculine space of the road, the outdoors, of violence, of work and agency, of movement and stress, of animal impulse. This “dazzling dialectic” defines the structure of “Filling Station” (CP 127-8). The speaker, coming from the road, approaches a male tableau (father and sons handling fuel pumps) with anxiety. The “saucy” (sexual) father and sons in their “monkey suits” are not yet human. They must be “civilized” by the feminine principle. But as the speaker’s gaze shifts toward the porch and the world of still life, the “disturbance” is calmed. The animal element (now benignly embodied as a dog in a chair) is made “comfy.” Bishop stresses that the domestic space is not an independent realm—the wickerwork is “grease impregnated,” but sexuality has become family. The demotic still life scene on the porch offers a “note of color” within this study in grays and blacks.
Some comic books provide
the only note of color—
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of a set), beside
a big hirsute begonia. (CP 127, ll. 21-7)
15The combination of books and flowers is a topos of still life arrangement— Bishop herself painted such an image. Here we do not have august bound volumes of classic still life, but comic books; instead of an elegant floral arrangement we have a “big hirsute begonia,” reminding us of the hairy males who live there. The conversion of nature to culture is provisional. The decorative element seems indeed “extraneous” and a little ridiculous. Yet this is an affirmation of both the comic spirit and the aesthetic impulse, for calming the animal in us, and offering respite from the anxious drive of a technology. Is the comedy of the poem condescending to the people who live at the filling station? Perhaps at first, but the speaker-beholder is drawn to this aesthetic arrangement, “dim” though it may be—she (we suspect a female beholder from the knowledge of the decorative) interrogates the arrangement, but also recognizes and enjoys it, becoming an insider. The speaker pauses to note detail—the parentheses in the poem (“part of a set”) providing a typographical equivalent to the stillness of still life, the arrangement suspended from the forward movement of travel. She forgets the road in the theater of the still life. The language of the speaker mirrors the still life incongruities, introducing words like “taboret” and “hirsute” (like the baroque elements of Jeronimo’s house) into the colloquial world of comfy and saucy, rhyming oily with doily. The still life moment is here seen as a calming force, addressing not function, but the ornament, which quiets the “high-strung” life of the road. Thus still life in Bishop is performative rather than constative.
16We might read the last two stanzas of “Filling Station” as an ecphrasis. Still life, a spatial art in which human agency is removed, suppresses narrative. But especially in the verbal arts still life motifs can evoke a curiosity of narrative. What is the story behind the objects? Who made this order? The comic books visually provide a note of color, but who provides the comic books? The verbal here does not compete with the visual but complements it. We see this particularly in the end of the poem, where the verbal and visual coincide in the oil cans lined up to read “so—so—so,” reminding us of the way poetry converts purposive language to pleasurable sound. If we must leave the domestic world of still life and return to the world of “high strung automobiles,” we can be calmed, at least, by the aesthetic order.
17In the poems we have examined so far the space of still life affirms the domestic world, offering a human scale of order and comfort against larger forces that threaten the individual. Still life is based on “the culture of the table,” that site of transmission from public to personal space and conversion of raw to cooked. Still life traditionally presents the cultural organization of the material as something given and ample—a utopia of consumption. But Bishop’s art of the everyday includes the “surrealism of everyday life.” As Helen Vendler has argued, in the midst of Bishop’s domestic world one finds the uncanny. The art of the object, subjected to animation, peculiar lighting, shifts of scale and perspective, and incongruous metaphor, is central to this affect. Here the culture of the table repulses the beholder. We do not have the Dutch “still leven” but a literal nature morte. Bishop evokes the mood of Vanitas, that element (marked in skulls, broken jars, torn papers, low candles) reminding us that all our provisions are conditional and that material wealth is not equivalent to spiritual health. Bishop works both ends of this vanitas association. In “First Death in Nova Scotia” the dead become associated with consumption and food (death is caught in a structure of desire); in “Going to the Bakery” food becomes associated with death and disease (desire is repulsed by knowledge of the economic decay). In both poems still life becomes a way of exploring large social and ontological questions on a personal scale.
18“First Death in Nova Scotia” (CP 125-6) describes a “laying out,” a wake, but the morbid display suggests still life’s imagery of a feast and alludes to its structure of desire. The bird on the table is not a pheasant or turkey but a “stuffed loon;” the table on which it rests has become a winter landscape, a “frozen lake.” The coffin itself “was a little frosted cake,” and the whole scene suggests a starved desire: the loon caressable but uncaressed, eyeing the little cake-like coffin as if wishing to consume it. Lurking in the poem too, since the scene is described from a child’s point of view, are fairytale fears of adults eating children. (Did Uncle Arthur kill not only the bird but also young Arthur himself?) Still life painting often involves the representation of several modes of being—natural and artificial, animate and inanimate, representational and “real”—on the same plane. This becomes a source of confusion for the beholder in “First Death” as she struggles to understand the various modes of presence and absence in the scene in relation to human mortality. The speaker longs for narrative transformation—Arthur has been invited to join the Royal couples presiding in the photograph—but agency is interrupted—Jack Frost has dropped the brush—and all the figures are frozen in a still life moment.
19In “Going to the Bakery” (CP 151-2) we have another form of vanitas and the opposite perversion of the still life image. This time the scene is not home but the street—the world of the market and its window displays. Food stall images are common in Dutch still life, mirroring a predomestic stage of material culture. In these images facts of labor and economic exchange disappear and we see only a limitless supply of goods, as if there for the taking. But in Bishop’s “Going to the Bakery” the goods can never become part of a nurturing domestic reality, even for the beholder who can afford to purchase them. The hunger surrounding the plenitude contaminates it, shocking bourgeois complacency. Sight becomes infected with the truth of a troubled economy where everything is rationed and adulterated. As with many of Bishop’s poems, her unique perspectives trouble the surface and expose truths suppressed in normal perspectives.
the round cakes look about to faint—
each turns up a glazed white eye.
the gooey tarts are red and sore. (CP 151, ll. 17-19)
20This grotesque bakery-as-hospital ward is seen in moonlight—but such is also the light of the imagination, exposing certain truths within the everyday. Bishop’s surrealist technique of defamiliarization leads not to the fantastic, but to the real—to the dysfunctional and inhumane conditions of society. This is moonlight far from Joseph Cornell’s cosmic slot machines and romantic treasure chests.
21“Things hurry away from their names” in Joseph Cornell’s boxes, in Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades, and also in Bishop’s uncanny still lifes; this happens especially through transfigurations of scale. But for her they do not always hurry toward fantasy and privacy. As we have seen, Bishop conflates issues of proximity and distance with issues of scale in order to link personal and public. In “12 O’Clock News” (CP 174-5) she expands her writing desk to the scale of landscape. The table as a scene of vocation is another familiar trope of traditional still life (the philosopher’s study, the artist’s studio). By describing the objects of her creative activity—typewriter, inkbottle, and typewriter eraser—as features of a war zone, she suggests the turmoil of the creative mind from the point of view of a hegemonic rational, mind. The voice of the twelve o’clock news (which echoes the voice of wartime bureaucracy) displaces the lyric voice. Rhetorical point of view and visual perspective align as the “tiny principality” is seen from the angle of aerial reconnaissance, rather than from the intimate perspective of the writer. Bishop liberates objects from their quotidian, functional meaning and consequently releases the dream work of the personal and social psyche. The “superior vantage point” of the news report thus exposes the numen of objects (the inkbottle in particular) even while it dissociates itself from spiritual affect. Bishop’s personification of the typewriter eraser produces the reverse effect of Claus Oldenberg’s sculpture “The Typewriter Eraser,” now in front of the National Gallery of Art in Washington1. Bishop’s typewriter eraser as “a unicyclist-courier” and “native” of the land of creativity, lies in a fallen, pathetic state defeated by the forces of normative reality. Oldenberg, in contrast, gives us a comic monument to the bureaucratic mind, an anachronism of cold war technology, absurd in a postmodern, computer culture.
22In “Twelve O’Clock News” as in many of the poems of Geography III, Bishop resists a steady, dichotomous calibration of objects (small converted to large) instead unsettling the scale of large and small several times over— for by what size is the world of the psyche measured? As she says of the typewriter eraser, “Alive, he would have been small, but undoubtedly proud and erect, with the thick, bristling black hair typical of the indigenes.” Several standards of measure-physical, spiritual, political—are at play here. As a personified object the typewriter has been transformed by the poet from something handsized to something humansized; but the “superior vantage point” of the rationalist diminishes the cyclist-figure as a racial subaltern, putting the human back into the state’s gigantic, invisible hand. Ultimately, then, this still life, like so many, stands at the juncture of the personal and the public. As an image of objects in an intimate, personal space, it points toward the world of the individual; as an image of vocational objects, it points toward the social position of the artist, which itself resembles the position of indigenous societies under the scrutiny of a hegemonic power.
23We have examined Elizabeth Bishop’s affinities with the art of still life (and more generally the art of the object) especially in its attention to material culture, and to the surrealism of everyday life, as conveyed through estrangements of scale and perspective. Before we leave the topic of still life I’d like to bring up one more function that has particular relevance to Bishop’s work: the function of memory. Still life stands against time and flux; it is inherently memorial. The objects of still life are souvenirs signifying lost (or imagined) context of origin. In this way, again, still life both suppresses and evokes narrative. Memory is of course a problematic mental process in Bishop, defining the continuity of self, but linked inevitably to both pain and nostalgia. Removed from time and place, souvenirs represent an always-future past, a presence that marks an absence, an idealized past that has no experiential origin. Crusoe at the end of “Crusoe in England” surveys the objects from his island days with a hopeless sense that their numen cannot be retrieved. They fail as still life, presenting neither order nor nostalgic meaning. Finally, Bishop’s imagination breaks with still life: objects belong to flux, not to a still moment; if objects are invested with human value, they do not ultimately belong to us: the mother’s watch, the lost door key, of “One Art” like all material things, “are filled with the intent to be lost.” But if the art of still life must yield to the art of losing, the souvenir is not without value altogether. As Bishop returns at the very end of her life to remember Brazil once more, she is more willing to acknowledge the pleasures of nostalgia. “Santarem” (1978) etched in the blue and gold of memory, is a fictive Eden, if an embattled and demotic one. She can’t stop there, but the poet finds a souvenir, something she sees in another display:
In the blue pharmacy the pharmacist
had hung an empty wasps’ nest from a shelf:
small, exquisite, clean matte white,
and hard as stucco. I admired it
so much he gave it to me. (CP 186, ll. 64-68)
24What is there to admire? Obviously this object—homely, ephemeral— has associations for Bishop with the town’s charming church (“Cathedral, rather.”) The wasp nest is a miniature version of an already modest, perishable architecture (subject to lightning). It resonates, too, with Jeronimo’s home, that “fairy palace… my gray wasps’ nest” and thus with poetry itself, that “chewed up paper glued with spit” which houses the sting of life. Bishop knows this souvenir has no inherent value and has little more chance against the ravages of time than it did in nature—her fellow traveler Mr. Swan, a romantic attuned to a sublime scale, who “wanted to see the Amazon before he died” asks “what’s that ugly thing?” But if he gets the last word in the poem, his view does not prevail. It simply marks the limits of the speaker’s power over things. The generic affinities with still life and poetry are too strong. The keeping of poetry, like the keeping of still life, does not denote mastery over material things, let alone over landscapes. Both remove objects from experience and reconfigure them in an artificial space. But they mark out a space—shallower than landscape, but more intimate, more human—in which the material world is arranged and encoded for the individual beholder.
Notes de bas de page
1 Claus Oldenberg, Typewriter Eraser, Scale X, model 1998, fabricated 1999 painted stainless steel and fiberglass, 602.61 x 387.35 x 345.44 cm www.nga.gov/cgi-bin/pinfo? Object= 108119+0+none, Oct. 17, 2006.
Auteur
-
Bonnie Costello
Boston University
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