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

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

Deprived of the Stevensian "affluence" of the imagined world, "One Art" contrives an aesthetic from "the poverty of [its] words." The colloquial ("fluster") and literary ("vaster," "realms") cooperate to enumerate the personal and poetic possibilities of possession and abandonment. The "banal," "fleeting," and "sentimental" qualities Benjamin found essential to the Proustian "everyday hour" articulate for Bishop that realm in which "everyone can find . . . his own existence." Unlike the recessional probity of Stevens's "Planet," the stylistic unease of Bishop's villanelle ("movement of a self in a rock") precludes the closure of "remembered time." Even in this final collection, the injunction speaks to the sustenance of her ongoing art.

Though prepared to accept still more loss in her life, Bishop expected her art to generate personal and public lessons even as it checked the flow of private emotion into the public life of the poem with displaced parenthetical utterance. Couched in the form of a lesson, "One Art" eludes the potential bathos of its subject as it imposes private losses, shorn of autobiographical particularity, into the public domain. The currency and urgency of Bishop's actual sorrows resist form and historical remove, so the poem unfolds in a rueful immediacy, although the personal incidentals that occasion it rest in the idle past. Though opening with Stevensian third-person impersonality, the poem disrupts its objectivity with an equally impersonal "I" in the third stanza as with an almost audible sigh Bishop readies her autobiography for consumption, having commodified the ruins of her life for the poetry marketplace: "I lost my mother's watch. And look! My last, or / next-to-last, of three loved houses went. / The art of losing isn't hard to master" (CP 178). In so doing, Bishop's life assumes the lineaments of Benjamin's historical allegory in which "Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things" (Benjamin, Tragic Drama 178).

Departing from an austerity as resigned and public as anything in Stevens's later work, this ars poetica breaks in the final stanza, at Benjamin's "jagged line of demarcation between physical nature and significance" (Tragic Drama 166) in which the master's voice succumbs to the inaccessible reaches of grief:

- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

The dash and parenthetical breaks jog the artificially sustaining literary archness of the archaic "shan't" as the poem resolves into a present-tense, self-directed lesson for the artist alone, "(Write it!)," one that echoes the antecedent imperatives of Stevens and Williams.

The act of restating in other terms the imperative of loss, the metamorphosis into language, from maker to makings, in which the poet joins "after death, the non-physical people" (Stevens, CP 325) while his poems assume earthly affluence, links Stevens's personal and public worlds. In "The River of Rivers in Connecticut," the superimposition of the mythical and "fateful" river Styx upon the serene, familiar, and ordinary Connecticut landscape allows the personal resonance of Farmington and Haddam to assume public and enduring proportions:(11)