Elizabeth Bishop: Nova Scotia in Brazil

Papers on Language and Literature, Summer 2001 by Axelrod, Steven Gould

For most of its length the poem remains counterpoised between the poem it echoes, Moore's "The Steeple-Jack," and the poem it anticipates, Lowell's "Waking Early Sunday Morning."5 But Bishop's text climaxes with an image that appears in neither its precursor nor its inheritor text: "a man carrying a baby," who gets off a bus and walks toward "his invisible house beside the water" (68). This is, I believe, the key image of the poem, its last and greatest puzzle. It almost demands that we ask, Where is the child's mother? Who is this man carrying the child? The "invisible" house can tell us nothing, being yet another of Bishop's many inscrutable interiors, places "where we cannot see" (67; cf. "Sestina," "Arrival at Santos"). Hidden in these discursive gaps and visual scotomas are the images or imagoes that resist articulation: the sundered family, the avoidant or departed mother, the displaced child, and the poem's unspoken and unseen "L" Once the poem has marked the space of this absent mother-daughter dyad, mist and an "ancient chill" reenvelope the scene, occluding the view (68).

Once settled in Brazil, however, Bishop almost immediately peered inside those heretofore "closed" or "invisible" Nova Scotian houses. She evoked the loss of the mother most explicitly in the story "In the Village," though the narration is actually anything but direct (Collected Prose 251-74). Rather, the text concentrates on a shifting series of auditory and visual details that may seem to contribute to what Victoria Harrison benignly calls "the making and remaking of subjectivity" (110), but which also reflect what Susan McCabe calls the "numb detachment" of short-circuited mourning (8). Most prominent among these details is the mother's scream, which marks her final descent into mental illness as well as her daughter's immersion into perpetual grief:

A scream, the echo of a scream, hangs over that Nova Scotian village. No one hears it; it hangs there forever, a slight stain in those pure blue skies, skies that travelers compare to those of Switzerland, too dark, too blue, so that they seem to keep on darkening a little more around the horizon-or is it around the rims of the eyes?-the color of the cloud of bloom on the elm trees, the violet on the fields of oats; something darkening over the woods and waters as well as the sky. The scream hangs like that, unheard, in memory-in the past, in the present, and those years between. It was not even loud to begin with, perhaps. It just came there to live, forever-not loud,just alive forever. Its pitch would be the pitch of my village. Flick the lightening rod on top of the church steeple, with your fingernail and you will hear it. (251)

We note here a synesthetic fusion of auditory and visual imagery and a set of almost compulsive tropic displacements: the scream becomes a darkening stain, then "too blue" skies, violet flowers, and "darkening" night.6 The scream, that is, immediately changes from a physical phenomenon to an endlessly replicating series of psychic and textual signs. It resounds through the narrator's thoughts and feelings, not so much "around the horizon" as "around the rims of the eyes." It resonates in her ear from the church's steeple, which she reduces in fantasy to the size of a human fingernail-a miniaturized version of the omnipresent death knell in Dickinson's "I felt a funeral in my brain" (Poem 280). Beyond its psychic reverberations, the scream resonates through the text as a series of endlessly deferred metonyms: stain, sky, flowers, church bells, and even the mother's sanatorium address, which, like a stain, "will never come off (272). Bishop's narrator and her diagesis are haunted by the scream, which figures not only her mother's despair but more importantly her own. The scream is the signature of the daughter's wreck, her plunge from intermittent maternal care into parentlessness, solitude, and the wish to forget-a future life figured in the text as "broken china" (256). It is her own "unheard" scream, perhaps more than the mother's, that perpetually lingers.7 "I suppose I shriek," the narrator says of her childhood self when a characteristically Bishopian fire breaks out, devastating the landscape of the past (268).