Proustian closure in Wallace Steven's "The Rock" and Elizabeth Bishop's "Geography III."

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1998 by C.K. Doreski

Robert Duncan, in the spirit of these late poems of Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop, offered his own reading of the utter ordinariness of mortality and immortality in "The Quotidian": "Here, in the foyer of my age, / the passing of the storm remains upon the page / where I reread myself and all / that once befell comes once again to fall. / It is a text of after-images" (14). Duncan, as Bishop had before him, had to come to terms with the long shadow of Stevens and seemed to concur with his predecessors that the referential task of the poet's final pages was to confer primacy upon the quotidian. His rereading of Stevens's and Bishop's "infinite efforts" should assure readers of more than the aesthetic and temperamental continuities between poets(23); exploring intertextual parallels between "The Rock" and Geography III illuminates the presence of Stevens's poetic and thematic complexities in Bishop's less aggressively figurative poems.

Bishop, however, evades the closure toward which Stevens seems to strive and Duncan subsequently longs for. Although she was one of the readers to whom Stevens finally relinquished his poems, and one whose own work acknowledges his canonical gestures, she distrusted the act of canon making represented by collecting one's poems - even as she distrusted poetry itself.(24) In refusing personal and aesthetic finality (the fixed canon, "flown" knowledge), she embraced readerly notions ("flowing" knowledge) of process and renewal. Further, in rejecting the notion of poetic authority many critics have found expressed in Stevens's work, Bishop implicitly rejected the closure that such authority imposes both on the poem and, at least by analogy, on the poet.(25)

The shared "firm rhetorical control, overt moral authority, and sometimes by a fairly strict economy of means" (Bloom xi), identified by Harold Bloom as the source of commonality between Stevens and Bishop, would mean little without the audacity, confidence, and awareness, on the one hand, and the signature, nervous resistance to finality, on the other, Bishop brought to her work. Geography III in its reenactment and implied critique of Stevens's "The Rock" bears witness to Bishop's willingness to pit the "flowing" of her "art" against the "flown" of his "planet" with confidence in her own recognition and stature.(26)

NOTES

1 See Benjamin (Illuminations 262): "Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well."

2 As Vendler explained: "His 'impersonal reticence,' as his daughter names it, kept him very much out of sight" (Part of Nature 15) - but not to Bishop. In a letter written on the official letterhead of the Library of Congress, Bishop wrote to Loren MacIver and Lloyd Frankenberg on Apr. 19, 1950: "I was rather pleased about Wallace Stevens, weren't you? even though I had cast my vote for Cummings" (One Art 200; Editor Robert Giroux incorrectly inserts "getting the Pulitzer Prize"; Stevens had won the National Book Award for Auroras of Autumn).