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

Comparative Literature, Winter 2005 by Graf, Anastasia

Like the illusory interiors of Bishop's landscapes in poems such as "Cape Breton" and "Arrival at Santos," the inside of the monument is teasingly suggested by the speaker-presenter at the same time that Bishop makes it clear that the contents are irrelevant and lie outside her intentions as the artist of the monument-poem. While the speaker-observer tries to get at the meaning of the monument with questions such as "Where are we," "What is that," "Why did you bring me here to see it," the speaker-presenter urges the restless observer to return to the surface and to the act of observation and the restless reader to focus on the reading of the poem rather than its exegesis. Just as after the last line of "Arrival at Santos" "we are driving to the interior," here we are left at the beginning of another journey, watching closely and devising an alternative to the inside, an alternative based on surface and the phenomenal aspect of the thing. The last sentence, "Watch it closely," at once ends the poem and brings us back to the beginning, both of the act of observation and the poem itself: "Now can you see the monument? "The poem moves us back on itself, and we are forced to become aversion of Bishop's obsessed "Sandpiper," enacting the encoded repetition-compulsion of the poem. Because the monument moves, our task is to accept the difficulty of keeping it in motion through tireless perception.6

If the repetition-compulsion of Bishop's speaker-presenter makes her poem a kind of seeing primer for the exegetically-minded reader, Szymborska's speaker is unable to see the stone as an object, apparently dooming the pursuit to see entirely. The speaker represents the stone not by describing its surface appearance, but by imagining its interior: "I hear you have great empty halls inside you,/unseen, their beauty in vain,/soundless, not echoing anyone's steps." But imagination, the stone suggests, is almost as inadequate as sensory perception. Partaking, on the other hand, does not attempt to empty form of content. It is comparable to what Bakhtin calls the transgredient approach to the other, an approach that allows the self to coexist with, rather than in or over, the object of perception. Indeed, the stone's caveat would sound particularly apt were it addressed by the hero to the author as Bakhtin conceives that paradigmatic aesthetic pair. That is, if the heroes of Tolstoy's works could escape determination by their author and speak as the Other in the aesthetic act, one imagines that their charge would resemble the stone's.

Whatever the "outcome" of the encounter between this particular author/hero, or self and object pair, a conversation with an object, by Szymborska's definition, is "necessary and impossible," monologic from the start and fated to receive no response. What, then, is the status of knowledge gained from this dialogue, or from any object whose "voice" must be penetrated with-if not ventriloquized by -our own? Yet things are not as hopelessly one-sided as they may at first seem. For, if the voice in "Conversation with a Stone" belongs entirely to the speaker, then the realization in the last line that the stone lacks a front door is after all an acquired understanding that supercedes the speaker's earlier naïve fantasy of access to the stone's interior. This understanding is the result of prolonged attention to the stone, of a Bakhtinian lingering over the object, which is attributed to love. Such an understanding, acquired in the presence of the Other, cannot be monologic, although the response must belong to us rather than to objects. What constitutes the aesthetic act within this conversation is that both the speaker and the stone are transformed. The stone defines its boundaries against the speaker and the speaker senses her own corporality in the imposition of the world's boundaries. The corporeal meeting place of stone and speaker affects both, coaxing the speaker into a position of cognitive skepticism.7 Here, then, is an example and an elaboration of the definition of author-hero relations in Bakhtin's early work. While such a poem would inevitably strike the later Bakhtin as monologic, as indeed it is insofar as language is concerned, the Bakhtin of the early 1920s would see a mutual bestowal of form in the relationship between the speaker and the stone.