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

Comparative Literature, Winter 2005 by Graf, Anastasia

Likewise, the speaker in "Conversations with a Stone" can claim victory if he can still maintain a relation to the stone while acknowledging the fact that it has no front door.

This is the difficulty in Bishop's and Szymborska's poetry: the world is a task for which both speaker and reader are by definition inadequate. The figured reader in "The Monument" is restless, stubborn, rebellious. The difficulty here is one of attention, of being quiet and still enough to see the object rather than one's reaction to it. Patience is difficult, as is silence of the self. The simpler the object, the more difficult the prolonged vigilance.8 Vigilance also describes the task that Bishop's poetry demands of the reader. Left face to face with the monument at the end of the poem, we must, Bishop cautions us, watch it closely. The difficulty is not discovering the best, or correct, interpretation; rather, it is declining to interpret at all. We may tell stories about objects or people, which may or may not be accurate, but only as empirical observations within an aesthetic act. And in this act of deference, of speaking only through and with, not over, objects, is the vision of care for the world that the works of Bishop, Szymborska, and Bakthin create.

"Deferences and vigilances" characterize the position of Bishop's and Szymborska's speakers as one that is fully engaged but un-empathetic in Bakh tin's sense of the term-empathy being a fusion with the Other without subsequent retreat to outsidedness. The speakers' engagement with objects takes place on the level of observation, in the unrelenting act of perception. But in addition to a self-restraint vis-à-vis the objects of observation, the speakers practice self-restraint towards themselves. This is a quality that Moore attributed to Bishop, but which likewise describes Szymborska's objectivity as noted by Mitosz. Bishop also characterizes her own poetry as objective. In a letter to May Swenson, she wrote,

I think myself that my best poems seem rather distant, and sometimes I wish I could be as objective about everything else as I seem to be in and about them. I don't think I'm very successful when I get personal,-rather, sound personal-one always is personal, of course, one way or another. (Harrison29)

For Bishop, objectivity is an attitude toward herself and toward her objects and, most significantly, it is a relation between self and world that is based on distance and epistemological self-restraint. Likewise, for Bakhtin, objectivity is an essential attribute of the author and a quality of the author-hero relation. According to Bakhtin, objectivity is non-self-reflexivity:

An author reflects the hero's emotional-volitional position, but not his own position in relation to the hero; his own position is something he actualizes-it is objective, that is, actualized in an object, but does not itself become an object of examination and reflective experience. ("Author and Hero" 6)

Like Bakhtin's author, Bishop's speakers can be located in a position of outsidedness with respect to the hero-both human and object.9 And like Bakhtin's author, Szymborska's and Bishop's speakers are not deprived of the power to imagine an interior!ty for their objects and heroes. Bakhtin's authors-real and idealized -create rich inner lives for their characters. And Szymborska and Bishop practice live-entering into their chosen objects, acknowledging the boundary between self and Other but freely crossing it nevertheless, since to refuse to cross is for all three writers a cowardly, self-absorbed non-relation to the world, neglectful of the dynamism and the event-quality of being. Objectivity that purports to maintain strict subject-object demarcation, Bakhtin argues and Bishop and Szymborska demonstrate, risks reducing one to silence-a fatal condition for poetry, not to mention for an existence in a world of objects. Objectivity as both intense vigilance and self-restraint is thus the only relation to the world that preserves both self and Other and forms a relation between them. To practice epistemological self-restraint is to adopt an architectonic world view.10