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

Comparative Literature, Winter 2005 by Graf, Anastasia

Salutation and farewell

In a single glance.

For surplus and absence alike,

A single motion of the neck (18)

and by Bishop's speaker in "One Art,"

The art of losing isn't hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster. (178)

Both poets understand possession in the aesthetic act as a moment laced with loss and absence. This gives much of their poetry its elegiac key; but it also gives it a stoic playfulness and perpetual curiosity about the world, a curiosity that stands to be renewed only because no possession is possible. As the sandpiper figures this obsessive curiosity in Bishop's poetry, so the acrobat stands as an analogous figure in Szymborska's poem of the same name:

Solo. Or even less than solo,

less, because he's crippled, missing

missing wings, missing them so much

that he can't miss the chance

to soar on shamefully unfeathered

naked vigilance alone. (57)

The need for vigilance has frequently been used to describe the poet's task, especially as it pertains to the problematically named "object poetry" of Jean Follain and René Char, or Robert Frost and Marianne Moore. It is an especially apt term for Szymborska's and Bishop's poetry of minute observation and precarious relations to objects that threaten to retreat from the poet's rapt focus. "Vigilance" captures the fleeting temporality of the aesthetic act while implicitly suggesting its meager but precious reward: "A little poem, a sigh, at the cost of indescribable losses" (Szymborska, "A Large Number" 95). The point is that vigilance, with its concomitant acknowledgment of loss, is never an admission of impoverishment for Bakhtin, Bishop, or Szymborska, nor for that matter for the so-called objectpoets who use this term. Thus, although "One Art" is often read as an elegy, it is very much a twentieth-century elegy in the tradition of Wallace Stevens-that is, an elegy that does not try to subsume loss but figures it as an enabling quality of experience. Bishop's mastery of loss, then, is less a paradoxical formulation or a consolatory gesture than a nutshell definition of experience, and especially the experience of the aesthetic act, as such.

Theory can and must afford the luxury of decisiveness and precision; every poem, on the other hand, draws up its own volatile definitions only to dissolve them. In Bakhtin's thought, the necessity and contingency of the architectonic moment hinges on the ambivalence between a closed spatio-temporality of perception and the inexhaustibility of the Other. But while Bakhtin must choose a side, poetry is free to enact both. It is in seeing objects as open and simultaneously closed that Bishop's and Szymborska's speakers explore the vicissitudes of Bakhtin's aesthetic act; and it is through their exploration that we reach a revised and refined understanding of Bakhtin's ethical aesthetics or aestheticized ethics.

II. Necessary Conversations

I now want to turn to two poems by Szymborska and Bishop, both of which depict a face-to-face encounter with an object: Szymborska's "Conversation with a Stone" and Bishop's "The Monument."