Representing the Other: A Conversation among Mikhail Bakhtin, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wislawa Szymborska

Comparative Literature, Winter 2005 by Graf, Anastasia

In different ways and with different levels of ethical anxiety, Szymborska's and Bishop's poetry asks: Does the world remain Other if to maintain its otherness I must invest it with a voice which renders it pseudo-human? The poets' creative engagement with object-Others also poses a challenge to Bakhtin's understanding of the category of the Other or hero-a challenge Bakhtin himself demanded from the literary works with which he entered into dialogue.

I. Architectonics: Meeting the Other

The aesthetic act in Bakhtin's early essays is the ideal instance of the I-Other relation. While the cognitive relation to the Other fails to take into consideration the Other's uniqueness and the ethical relation fails to make an adequate distinction between self and Other, since the ethical act is characterized by empathy, the aesthetic act imbues both self and Other with specificity and sets the self outside the Other:

What makes a reaction specifically aesthetic is precisely the fact that it is a reaction to the whole of the hero as a human being, a reaction that assembles all of the cognitive-ethical determinations and valuations of the hero and consummates them in the form of a unitary and unique whole that is a concrete, intuitable whole, but also a whole of meaning. ("Author and Hero" 5)

This finalization of the Other, Bakhtin goes on to write, is a creative act: only by viewing the objects of our world as closed can we see them in relation to ourselves and not as arbitrary, foreign, and contingent. There is nothing necessarily meaningful in a lived life. When objects and experiences fulfill the tasks we assign them, we see them without form. From the openness of our task-directed lives, we see things as percepts without structure; when we engage in the aesthetic act of perception, on the other hand, the world is creatively engaged and embodied. Determination, it must be noted, as well as objectification and finalizability, is for Bakhtin the enabling condition of creativity rather than a reification that arrests the creative process. Thus the creativity inherent in consummation is something other than closure as stasis: it is, as Bakhtin conceives it, an architectonic closure within the unique creative event-an event, insofar as it is an architectonic act, which is always subject to renewal. That is, the architectonic act is my particular point of view at a specific chronotopic point and therefore one possible point of view among many. If the I is unique, it is also one optional position that has no permanence or priority. If "only I-the one-and-only I-occupy in a given set of circumstances this particular place at this particular time" ("Author and Hero" 23), then the reverse of this claim must be that my aesthetic act-and with it its finalizability-is also contingent.

The contingency of the wholeness bestowed upon the Other in the aesthetic act is not so much a challenge to Bakhtin's notion of finalizability as it is both a boundary between closure and openness and an attribute of both-a characteristic that helps us to see the shift in his thought from closedness to openness as a transition rather than a reversal. The uniqueness of the self and Other in a particular aesthetic relation bestows closure on the aesthetic act. At the same time, its temporary nature renders it repeatable although never identical, with the repeatability constituting for Bakhtin the potentiality always present in the aesthetic act. What is important to note here is that the slippage between the terms closure and potentiality, while ostensibly a linear reorientation for Bakhtin from the early to the middle period in his career, is for Szymborska and Bishop a constant shuttling back and forth between a finished image of an object and the knowledge that the object is inexhaustible, between the desire that objects be absolutely other and the knowledge that objects are always already socialized, between the absence of fullness in memory and experience and the knowledge that a momentary glimpse of a thing, however contingent, is a miracle/' This is the co-presence of absence and fullness in all perception that is articulated by Szymborska's traveler in "Travel Elegy,"