15 2costello

Elizabeth Bishop's Impersonal Personal
Costello, Bonnie.
American Literary History, Volume 15, Number 2, Summer 2003, pp. 334-366 (Article)
Published by Oxford University Press
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Elizabeth Bishops Impersonal Personal

Bonnie Costello
This article confronts the persistent argument that Elizabeth Bishops poems are autobiographical, and the implicit assumption that the self and tradition are unitary and contending realities. It calls for a shift toward generic and rhetorical models of lyric subjectivity that remove voice from identity while still allowing for a connection between the poem and history. The article discusses reception of Crusoe in England (Complete Poems 162 68) as a focused instance of the critical tendency to absorb voice into author, and vice versa. It presents the poem instead as a conguration of various social impulses struggling toward transition, and as a meditation on the very problem of negotiating a relation between particular experience and the generalities of language.
1. Who Speaks for Bishop? You wish theyd keep some of these things to themselves, Bishop famously complained of confessional poetry. Now the idea is that we live in a horrible and terrifying world, and the worst moments of horrible and terrifying lives are an allegory of the world (qtd. in Cory and Lee 69). She kept a great deal to herself, but for more than a decade criticism has been busy rummaging through her closets. Connections between Bishops themes and images, and her autobiography, are obvious to anyone who reads her letters or visits the archive at Vassar. Are these connections necessarily representational? Recent commentary reads a construction of Bishops personal life back into her poems and assumes the allegory she abhorred in others. Art becomes a circular activity in which source and end narrowly converge. But Bishops poetic intelligence is not so reexive. Her poems do not so much veil or transmute the personal as expose the categories of the personal and impersonal to scrutiny. Bishop would have been uncomfortable with a biographical
2003 OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS AMERICAN LITERARY HISTORY DOI: 10.1093/ALH/AJG027
American Literary History
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study of this sort. . . . She had a ferocious sense of privacy, notes biographer Gary Fountain (xi). Perhaps she also had a sense of how such publications blur the distinction between the writing subject and the voice in which we necessarily read (and read into) the poem. One need not lean on rigid prohibitions against the intentional fallacy, transcendent claims for the autonomy of art, or even notions of the death of the author, to resist the absorption of the lyric speaker into the biographical author. My concern here is not to evaluate the ethics of biographical research, but rather to examine some of the contradictions and misapprehensions that arise within the criticism emerging from it. These problems are by no means unique to Bishop criticism. They arise from our relentless curiosity about the lives of celebrities, and our perennial uncertainty about the nature of lyric voice and the relation between the poet, the poem, and society. Bishops now virtually mythic story is here toldin the nick of timeby those who knew her best, writes Lloyd Schwartz in his book-jacket endorsement of the oral biography, in which he is a key witness. What this comment unwittingly reveals is the production of a myth, which gets read as Bishops personhood and projected onto the mythmaking Bishop practices in her poems. Jacqueline Rose captured just this reexive fantasy of Plath in her 1991 book The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. Like Plath, Bishop wrote poems that enact the very problems of forging identity and of linking identity to voice. As with Plath, there are those who pathologize Bishop, seeing her writing as therapeutic. And there are those who relish her perversity as a mark of her subversive relation to patriarchy. Some would wrest control of the poets corpus. (The question of what gets published where and by whom may not be as contentious as in Plaths case, but it is certainly as vexed.) The soap opera drama of Bishops psychosocial adventures has emerged in the ostensible quest for the truth of Bishops inner life (Rose 6). But what Rose says of Plath is true of Bishop, perhaps of any great writer: Inside her writing [the poet] confronts us with the limits of our (and her) knowledge. In this context it becomes more than a commonplace of recent literary analysis to insist in advance that there is no direct access to the writer, that the only thing available for commentary and analysis is the text (5). Recent Bishop critics often acknowledge the historical and rhetorical dimensions of lyric subjectivity, but ignore them in practice. As Rose points out, feminist critics of Plath recognized that the personal is political; however, they did not fully make the connection to an inseparability of history and subjectivity (7). Similarly, Bishops critics have celebrated her subversive relation-
My concern here is . . . to examine some of the contradictions and misapprehensions that arise . . . from our relentless curiosity about the lives of celebrities, and our perennial uncertainty about the nature of lyric voice and the relation between the poet, the poem, and society.
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ship to the Western tradition rather than emphasizing the many ways in which that tradition, by no means unitary, might haunt her and shape her, or recognizing how the I of her poems might emerge as a site of cross-identications and cultural yearnings rather than as a coherent self. In reading Bishop we would do well to remind ourselves of the hermeneutical problem Rose identies: There is no history outside its subjective realisation . . . just as there is no subjectivity uncoloured by the history to which it belongs (8). Surely the author of Geography III understood this principle, though the lures of biographical and ideological reductionism (two sides of the same coin) have distracted us from it. There have, of course, been exceptions to this reductionism. Lee Edelmans seminal article, Geography of Gender: Elizabeth Bishops In the Waiting Room, warns against literalism and organic models of identity, showing how identity becomes a constricting force of language and culture. The inuence of his article has led more often to arguments for Bishops alienation from mainstream culture, however, than to discovery of her ctive manipulations of voice. In The Politics of Form, Mutlu Konuk Blasing points out the ways that Bishop resists both natural and metaphysical grounds of identity and truth, recognizing that meaning and selfhood arise within historical and rhetorical contexts: If the textual meaning of personal experience can only be a shared meaning, it must appeal to a tradition or history of what constitutes meaning within a given discursive framework (96). Langdon Hammer, in a review of books on Bishop from the late 1980s and early 1990s, noted Bishops challenge to the model of the writing self in contemporary lyric autobiography, a model in which the poem has its origin in the poets life, as the voice originates in the self (149). Despite Hammers warning, this model of the writing self continues to dominate Bishop criticism, even where it espouses a theory of subjectivity as uent and decentered. Criticisms desire to control and dene both art and the artist, even in the name of uncontrollable, unstable psychic, linguistic, or social forces, has produced some troubling distortions. Bishops songs are those of an asthmatic, Marilyn May Lombardi asserts. Her alcoholism is the key to her work, Brett Millier reveals. For others, Bishops imagination can be localized in sexual preference. Her unpublished lesbian love poetry, declares Lorrie Goldensohn, suggests what kind of poet she might have become if only she had lived in a less repressive society. Goldensohn announces her motives starkly: We hunger for poems that can be shown to be based on actual experience because we wish to be relieved from the weight of our ctions (52). In practice this has involved reading the author anthropomorphically into the lyric voice. Susan Mc-
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Cabes Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss begins by insisting on Bishops interrogation of unied selfhood with its internalized . . . inauthentic narcissism (105).1 Yet the poets personal loss and struggle, as well as the isolation brought on by her lesbianism, she argues, govern her representations. Bishops is an autobiographical stance (McCabe xx). We do not have stark confessions, McCabe admits, but rather passions covert and implied (101). This leads her to read the descriptive poem A Cold Spring as a love letter to Jane Dewey, in which the landscape symbolizes the female body (your big and aimless hills) toward which the poet, in the guise of a newborn male calf, having come out, seemed inclined to feel gay (117). Bishops autobiographical impulses, in McCabes reading, must be reconciled to her ideological impulses. The calf is male so that Bishop may take on a subversive relationship to the Romantic gendering of nature as female.2 But is this how poems get written? Despite numerous citations of poststructuralist theory, recent Bishop critics retain a Romantic model of organic personhood in which the work is an uninterrupted extension of the poet, and the voice of the poem provides a path back to the life of the writer. Even those who would acknowledge Bishops unRomanticism choose to show how her poems encoded and revealed her life (Harrison 20). Bishop may have resisted the confessional model of the expressive self, but Victoria Harrison implies that it is crying to get out. Beginning with a condensed biography, she writes (recent critics of Bishop almost always begin this way), I foreground important intimacies of Bishops life, so that these will resonate in or provide a backdrop for my discussion of her poetrys enacted relationships (20). Since to publish a poem about love was to submerge its gay or lesbian particularities, it follows for Harrison that all language of pleasurable relation in the poetry is somehow an oblique variation on Bishops particular sexuality (45). The Map becomes another register of homoeroticism, displaced through the gure of the peninsulas like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods (Complete Poems 3). All inversions in the early poems are an expression of Bishops sexual inversion according to Marilyn May Lombardi, who invokes Frank Kermodes The Genesis of Secrecy (1979) to support her idea that Bishops dark speech was a cloaking of its carnal meaning (The Body and the Song 46).3 The proof for such critics lies in the unpublished drafts and fragments which, though no one has made a convincing claim for their literary merit in comparison to published work, more concretely enact same sex love and sexuality and thus become the standard by which the published work is understood. Her published poetry, with its cool surface and its
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secret recesses, therefore demands of its readers a special hermeneutics (Lombardi 45). After several pages of gruesome details about Bishops eczema, asthma, and related aictions, Lombardi writes cheerily that Bishop uses her physical ailments to develop a poetic that confronts cultural labels and their stiing impact on personal and erotic expression (Closet 68). She continues: Bishops private struggle to bring her swollen form back down to the scale of human life is expressed in her poetic struggle to control tone and form (57). But writing is the struggle to control tone and form. Bishop did not become a poet because she suered from eczema. This hermeneutics requires the exposure of specic somatic and psychosexual meanings behind apparently indeterminate lyric moments. Such criticism portrays poetry as an instrument of deceptionsecreting the personal sources of insight while nevertheless seeing the world entirely in terms of those sources. David Jarraways O Canada! The Spectral Lesbian Poetics of Elizabeth Bishop represents a culmination and extreme of the psychoanalytic approach in Bishop criticism and the paradoxical grounding of that approach in autobiography. Jarraways logic is dangerously circular: the treatment of subjectivity is oblique because gay subjectivity produces oblique rhetoric in an oppressive culture: hence (this nudge toward logic arises almost arbitrarily in these arguments) Bishops obliquity is the very portrait of gay subjectivity (245). Jarraway assumes that there is some uniform or coherent psychological phenomenon that can be called lesbian identity even while the argument admits that it remains spectral and nonreferential (245).4 It is all the more puzzling, then, that Jarraway should begin his article with this remark: Though the writing of Elizabeth Bishop (19111979) has in the past few years greatly increased awareness about her sexuality, literary critics are still generally reluctant to talk about that topic( 243). In fact, they have talked of little else. For evidence of this reluctance Jarraway quotes Alicia Ostrikers notable attention to one reviewers surprise that the volume [Elizabeth Bishop: Geography and Gender] has almost nothing concrete to say about [Bishops] lesbianism (243). One wonders, from this thirdhand remark, whether Jarraway or Ostriker has read that volume of essays, which includes such titles as Bishops Sexual Poetics, The Bodys Roses: Race, Sex, and Gender in Elizabeth Bishops Representations of Self, Elizabeth Bishop: Gaiety, Gayness, and Change, Perversity as Voice, and so on. All these articles move from the biographical concrete to the metaphoric, often through wordplay. That is, they allegorize a narrow selection of facts of Bishops sexual and medical history,
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then account for a broad range of Bishops images and strategies in terms of that allegory, as if it was hers, not theirs.5 As the story of Bishop as a poet of permeable, dynamic, multiple selfhood gets mapped, ironically, onto reductive biographical narratives, the force of the poetrys complex subjectivity is lost. Plath comes to mind again: It is that provisional, precarious nature of self-representation which appears so strikingly from the multiple forms in which Plath writes. What she presents us with, therefore, is not only the dierence of writing from the person who produces it, but also the division internal to language, the dierence of writing from itself. It is then all the more striking that so many critics have felt it incumbent upon themselves to produce a unied version of Plath as writer and as woman, as if that particular form of fragmentation or indirect representation were something which, through the completion of their own analysis of her, they could somehow repair. The frequent diagnoses of Plath seem to me to have as at least one of their eects, if not purposes, that they have transposed into a fact of her individual pathology the no less dicult problem of the contradictory, divided and incomplete nature of representation itself. (Rose 5) There is an obvious sense, of course, in which these critics are right: private experiences and impulses shape and determine our worldview; imagination is in some sense inextricable from the givens of our lives. There is no need to invoke the purities of New Criticism or to construct a simplistic divide between poet and speaker. Private experience largely shapes the range of a poets concerns and is inevitably reected in her representations. In disclosing biographical material, archival research has connected those givens to the made world of art. But it has exercised no restraint in doing so, and has made imagination a mere function of personal psychology, mistaking psychological and biographical origins for the meaning and direction of the work. Each of these critics acknowledges the poets transmutations and transmogrications of the personalfrom the body to the song, as Lombardi puts ityet very little attention is turned to the song itself, not just its formal properties but its rhetorical ones, in creating the eect of an individual voice. Such studies appeal on the one hand to our desire for something factual and localized, something real, in relation to the ethereal freedom and possibility of poetry. Like Crusoe, we never feel quite at home in our ctions. We
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crave our real shade and yet we are restless in these particulars too, looking for ways to endow them anew with allegorical import, to extrapolate from them a radical account of the world. The Romantic model denes an individual who exists independent of social structures, and who can thus stand singly against them. Bishop questions not only the dominant phallic perspective of our culture but its corollary political categories, hierarchies and prejudices, writes Jacqueline Brogan (176). Bishop aims at nothing short of freedom from the inherently dualistic tradition that lies at the very heart of Western tradition, claims Joanne Diehl (6). But hasnt the Western tradition been trying to get beyond dualism ever since Descartes? Bishop might equally be seen as profoundly invested in the Western traditions habit of questioning. The accounts of Bishop as a subversive poet, motivated by her personal alienation, falter once one begins to read the letters. The Bishop of the lettersimpatiently complaining of Third World conditions, the sloppiness of Brazilian culture, the sluggishness and insubordination of the servants, and the general uncompliance of the world with her expectations of itis often the very persona that the poems (Arrival at Santos, Brazil, January 1, 1502,and Manuelzhino, for instance) seem to undermine through irony and contradiction. Which is the real Bishop? Or are we up against not only the dierence of life and art, but of writing with itself ? Rather than read Bishop as an individual standing against a monolithic and oppressive tradition, it might be more useful to consider a lyric subjectivity taking shape in relation to the contradictory and unarticulated aspirations of the culture. And perhaps it is time to put aside the idea of Bishops art as the default or therapeutic position of an alcoholic-asthmatic-lesbianhomeless orphan cloaking and allegorizing personal experience, for an idea of art she herself articulated: What one wants in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration (Ltr. to Anne Stevenson, 8 Jan. 1964).
2. Tradition and the Individual Talent Bishops version of the impersonal quoted above takes Darwin as example, and refers to the pull of the physical world. But the making of art also forgets the self in the pull toward the social and the aspiration for community. If Bishops poems, like Plaths, remind us that we cannot know the self, they also remind us that the poem is a social gesture, not just an alienated critique. Theodor Adornos Lyric Poetry and Society oers one version
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of this idea. He argues that the poets intense engagement with language involves a drive toward noninstrumental communication, and ultimately thus toward self-forgetting. From a condition of unrestrained individuation, the lyric work strives for, awaits the realm of the general . . . the generality of the lyric poems content . . . is essentially social (57). This individuation is not the false consciousness of bourgeois individualism that invites speculation about the psychology of the speaking subject, nor is the general here identied with ideology, or the consensus in tradition of a group or race. Rather, poetry connects individual voice to the entirety of society as a unit of contradictions (57). That entirety is contained within language as its collective substratum to be distinguished from the depersonalized, abstract language of collectivity. As Susan Hahn has pointed out, in Adornos theory the poet ceases to relate instrumentally to language and the self. The poet is thus capable of forgetting himself, by cultivating a condition of selessness or impersonality, by making of himself a vessel for the ideal of pure language (67). Adornos language can seem almost mystical: The most sublime lyric works . . . are those in which the subject, without a trace of his material being, intones in language until the voice of language itself is heard. The subjects forgetting himself . . . and this direct intimacy and spontaneity of his expression are the same (62). In Adornos ideal, the impersonal (as opposed to the depersonalized) and authenticity are reconciled. But his examples are drawn not only from this sublime ideal of authenticity, but also from instances in which societys inner contradictory relationships manifest themselves in the poets speaking (65). The poets drive toward community is not, then, the submission of her will to a group narrowly dened, but rather the gathering into an aesthetic unity of the various and even dissonant voices of a society aspiring to community. One does not need to share Adornos utopian vision of art, or even his post-Marxist understanding of society, to appreciate his defense of the lyrics social, as opposed to ideological, content. While language allows for great particularity, creating congurations that submit to all possible stirrings of emotion it remains a medium of concepts and ideas [that establishes] our indispensable relation to generalities and hence to social reality (62). What the lyric does, then, is draw on the collective substratum in language where societys inner contradictory relationships reside, to communicate, spontaneously, a new conguration from within it. Ultimately, for Adorno, neither the private person of the poet, his psychology, nor his so-called social viewpoint, come into question . . . what matters is the poem itself as a philosophical sundial of history (65). Literary language is part of
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the larger contradictory wholeness of language, so that the history of the former is marked by and marks the history of the latter. The collective substratum with its inner contradictions would include historically propelled genres and archetypes, and even individual works in their historical reception. The individuation of lyric is not something prior to this historically dynamic whole, nor is it to be deduced from it. It shapes it and is shaped by it. Adorno does not take up the problem of the dramatic monologue or modernist persona poem per se. He focuses on more purely lyric forms, although he shows how these are increasingly embattled in the modern lyric as it speaks from the pressures of industrial society, where the idealism of lyric seems remote. Indeed, the persona poem would seem to be a particularly clear embodiment of what Adorno represents as the modern condition of lyric, in which the Possible stubbornly ashes its rays over lyric poetrys own impossibility (68). We distance ourselves from the extremities of the subject in modern dramatic monologue, yet we entertain those extremities as we read the poem, holding them in solution rather than in ironic disdain. Of course Bishop had not read Adorno, but she had read T. S. Eliots essays, and her way of understanding them bears surprising comparison with Adorno. She read Eliots tradition, at least, in the broadest sense. Her past would include all kinds of cultural and linguistic residue, not just artistic tradition. And she undermined the monolithic and autonomous vision of literature. Her tradition is a historical residue. The presence of the past was for Bishop only partially legible, more a haunting than a stabilizing of the historical moment. She began her college essay, Dimensions for a Novel, by quoting this passage from Tradition and the Individual Talent: The existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered . . . . This is the conformity between the old and new (Dimensions for a Novel 97). In general critics have assumed that Bishop needed to overcome the inuence of modernist impersonality in order to realize her full potential as a poet. But James Longenbach has challenged this breakthrough narrative by pointing out that Bishop read Eliot more subtly than we do now. For all his enthusiasm for a complete, ideal, and monumental order, Eliot recognized its historical dynamic: Whoever has approved this idea of order will not nd it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past (Tradition 50). Here Eliot reveals, as Longenbach points out, Eliots investment in post-Hegelian skepticism and his resulting awareness of the contingency of anything
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like impersonality (23). Bishops story The Sea and Its Shore presents the order as decidedly fragmented and transient, something altered by its ingestion in the present. Tradition is a series of scraps of paper, with variant messages, both literary and demotic, blowing around on a beach. While such detritus may not constitute a collective substratum or a monumental order, yet it is dicult for the narrator to distinguish the beach from the papers, so inscribed is the present reality with the representations of it that accumulate. It is not that we have mistaken language for the world, but that the world, especially the social reality, comes to us in the form of language, undergoing constant changes of contour. The sand itself . . . looked a little like printed paper (Collected Prose 179). This text-soaked world has no ideological structure: The papers had no discernable goal, no brain, no feeling of race or group (174). The protagonist struggles to nd, or rather to create, an intelligible unity in all these scraps. Yet the pastness of the past and also its presence continues to dene for Bishop the space of poetry, the individual talent, and the subjectivity of the narrative, emerging in the eort toward meaningful conguration. Her protagonist Boomer has no clearly dened identity apart from the papers he tries, often unsuccessfully, to read in reference to himself. We might be tempted to view the image of this character (given in the beginning of the story and repeated at the end), in some ways like a Rembrandt, but in some ways not (180), as a key to autobiographical reading. But Rembrandts self portraits are famously elusive as well as absorbing, forging as much as disclosing identity. In another way the reference displaces autobiography, putting not Bishop but an Old Master at the site of self-scrutiny, just as she will do later with Crusoe.6 Like Eliot, Bishop aimed to write poetry that would participate in something larger than the self. What have been called cloaks or shrouds in Bishop, designed for self-protection, might better be understood as masks in the more classical sense, designed for symbolic expansion, and engagement with the generality (to use Adornos word) of language. In modern poetry the mask has been a device allowing for individuation of voice without unitary subjectivity, and for connecting ideas (the general and abstract realm of language) to experiencenot personal experience, but particularity. Perhaps this is why Bishop borrowed Eliots method for Crusoe in England long after she had abandoned, as critics generally agree, other aspects of his style. The abstracted, psychological landscape, the allusiveness, the ctional persona, all recall Eliots early poetry, and suggest that Bishop was carrying forward, rather than breaking through, modernist assumptions.
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3. Who Is Crusoe? Ian Watt long ago identied the story of Robinson Crusoe as one of the great myths of our civilization (288); as such, it expresses some aspect of the aspirations of Western man (288). Watt goes on to point out that those aspirations are changing and conicting, and that myth is subject to the contradictory impulses of history. It is not an author but a society that metamorphoses a story into a myth; by retaining only what its unconscious needs dictate (290). And Robinson Crusoe, as myth, has come to represent competing ideologies: Back to Nature (expressed in Rousseaus Emile), The Dignity of Labor (Protestant Ethic, Max Weber), and Homo Economicus (Karl Marx). In our own time Crusoe has come to represent exile and dissociation from the moorings of tradition (hence his appearance not only in Bishop but in Paul Valery, Karl Shapiro, George Oppen, John Ashbery, Derek Walcott, and other major poets and novelists of our time), even those traditions that originally encoded him. All of these interpretations still haunt us (most recently, in the series Survivor and the movie Cast Away [2001]). Defoe may have engendered Crusoe and gendered him, but he does not control the archetypes evolution. We tend to treat inuences and allusions in isolation, and critics have made comparisons between Defoes and Bishops texts, forgetting that Defoe and Crusoe are not the same, that the connections are not person to person but pass through social and cultural history, and that the earlier gure is experienced as part of a larger, already repeatedly transformed, cultural formation. Bishop witnessed this transformation directly when restoration of a slave church in Ouro Preto exposed a mural of Crusoe, umbrella, goats and allgilt on red lacquer panels (Ltr. to Anne Stevenson 15 Aug. 1965). The slave who once modeled Friday has organically appropriated Crusoe as an archetype. (Walcott was of course acutely aware of this inversion in his own appropriation of the myth.) Informed by Watt, we may consider the Crusoe Bishop projects as voice not as a determinate gure with whom she either identies or argues, but as a channel for the dialectical processes of history. Bishop takes up the myth of Crusoe within a dierent culture, with a dierent set of aspirations and stresses that collide with the ones that gave rise to it. Bishops version of the story is haunted by all the conicting readings it has had over timeCrusoes fragmentary legacy and it reects tensions and yearnings of her own historical moment which these past interpretations have not addressed. Yet critics have tended to read Crusoe in England primarily in terms of personal psychology and social viewpoint. Cru-
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soe in England, Millier remarks, is as close as [Bishop] gets to verse autobiography(447). For these readers the poems engagement with the literary and cultural past is less a gesture of communityan awakening of the collective substratum of a social reality with all its inner contradictionsthan another marker of personal loss and disaection: Bishops muted connection to tradition mirrors her silenced lesbian relationships, along with their eventual loss (McCabe 197). A trope is treated as a therapeutic device, like a child using a doll to tell about abuse. Diehl writes: Casting her story as Crusoes enables Bishop to deal with subjects that would otherwise remain unspoken because they were overtly threatening or simply too overt (21). Yet the rst nine of the twelve verse paragraphs of Crusoe in England have no explicit connection to Friday, who for such readers signies Lota and homoerotic love, presumably the subject Diehl imagines to be threatening in a more overt form. On the contrary, Friday makes a late appearance in the poem, which is mostly about solitude, hardly a forbidden topic for lyric. Even such a devoted friend as Frank Bidart calls her magnicently inconsistent in her resistance to the confessional label: For example, someone once said something to her about how Crusoe in England is a kind of autobiographical metaphor for Brazil and Lota. She was horried by the suggestion. And obviously the poem is (qtd. in Fountain 333). Or is it? How much of the poem can actually be accounted for in these terms? While the stimulus and even the raw material of the poem may have been personal experience, should it be read as a metaphor for the poets personal experience in any pointed sense? And which personal experience? Bishop had been fascinated by the story of Crusoe from her earliest days. Long before her life in Brazil she had read it as a narrative of making things in a pinch (Bishop, Notebook).7 Lotas death occurred years after the poem was nearly complete in draft form. And when identity enters a metaphoric structure, does it remain as the signied? As Virginia Woolf put it in The Second Common Reader, in which she complains of the excesses and irrelevancies of biographical criticism: [I]f we knew the very moment of Defoes birth and whom he loved and why . . . should we suck an ounce of additional pleasure from Robinson Crusoe, or read it one whit more intelligently? . . . Our task is to master his perspective (51). And in Crusoe in England we must allow that the perspective arises within crossidentications and may not be the expression of a unied self. The device of the mask foregrounds the dierence between the poet and the lyric subject. Robert Langbaums classic study of dramatic monologue showed how this dierence allows the reader to participate in both sympathy and judgment, to enter into ex-
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traordinary emotional, moral, or historical positions to which the writer is not fully committed. At the same time the reader could recognize the distance of such a position from his or her own norms, and the normative (rhetorical and historical) nature of his or her own positions. The form itself, for Langbaum, reects a historical condition: We adopt a mans point of view and the point of view of his age in order to judge himwhich makes the judgment relative, limited in applicability to the particular conditions of the case. This is the kind of judgment we get in the dramatic monologue, which is for this reason an appropriate form for an empiricist and relativist age, an age which has come to consider value as an evolving thing dependent upon the changing individual and social requirements of the historical process. For such an age judgment can never be nal, it has changed and will change again; it must be perpetually checked against fact. (108) One of the things that distinguishes the modern dramatic monologueEliots Gerontion or Bishops Crusoe in Englandis how this historicizing relativism is built into the texture of the voice itself, which becomes loosed from any single historical position without becoming ahistorical. The gure retains the eect of individuality that invites sympathy and judgment. Bishops Crusoe speaks from the shocks of the historical process and from the uneasiness and yearning that form the burden of a relativistic age. The modern dramatic monologue marks a distinction not just between life and art, artist and speaker, but internally, within representation, especially in the case of a recast classic. To collapse that dierence into a unityeither autobiographical (the poem as veil) or ideological (the poem as antagonism)is to ignore the complexity of a trope embedded in what it examines. An essential dissonance and irresolution characterizes the persona, even within the artistically seamless whole of the poem. Crusoe indeed vents the very problem at hand: the unrecoverable origin in language and the indeterminacy of the lyric subject: They named it. But my poor islands still / un-rediscoverable, un-renameable. / None of the books has ever got it right (162). What existence does Crusoe have independent of the literature, which has never got it right? In one sense the poems opening seems to announce the disclosure of the personal. This book will rediscover and rename. This book will get it right. But one hears the same ambiguity in Adrienne Richs Diving into the Wreck with its book of
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myths, in which our names do not appear (22). On one hand, Rich makes a didactic point about the absence of women in a patriarchal history; she will see to it that their names are included in the future. But Rich also implies that by denition the personal individual does not, perhaps cannot, and should not appear in a book of myths, or any ction, which is by its very nature general and impersonal to us. (The poem is not our map to Richs failed marriage and husbands suicide, for instance.) We cannot, Richs poem implies, make the journey to the unconscious vicariously or voyeuristically. The words of a poem are maps to an unrediscoverable country. Richs very private dive leads not into a reication of the individual, but to a collective substratum, the half destroyed instruments that once held a course, the repository of broken social formations, the We are, I am, you are of a nontotalized social reality, the voice of men between whom barriers have fallen (Adorno 72). (Given the insight of her poem, it is surprising that Rich was so insistent on locating the personal in Bishops work, and that she was only satised with the poems once she could identify what she saw as their lesbian code.)8 The un-re construction of Bishops opening and the temporal imbalance of past (unrediscovered) and future (unrenameable) resist a determinant reading. (Bishop attempted several adjectives before she got it right. The draft of this poem at Houghton Library strikes out irrecoverable and implausible.) Crusoe complains about his own representation, but also announces the historicity of language and the failure of past generalities to x particular experience. Bishop creates in Crusoe in England an archetypal gure with the presence of the individual and thereby submits the generalizations of language to the historical force of particulars. Rather than thinking of the poem as personal testimony or counterideology, we might read it as the site for an emergent perspective, in which the poet expresses the unfullled aspirations of her culture even as she writes within established forms and points of view. In this sense the poem is a unique pattern made from what Lionel Trilling called the kaleidoscope of historical elements (184). Trilling wisely reminds us not to simplify the historical sense into a narrow matrix (18). But Bishops Crusoe does focus two salient, contradictory structures for mans relation to natureinstrumental reason (the authority of the impersonal) and visionary power (the authority of the personal)both of which arise within a myth of atomic individualism. We tend to forget when reading Bishops poem that the Romanticism she evokes saw itself as a counterforce rather than a succession to the Enlightenment principles that Defoe embodies in Robinson Crusoe. And both of these
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myths are residual in the unnamed representations of Bishops own time: the Death of God, the Descent of Man, and the Will to Power. Bishops Crusoe speaks from within these structures, still fetching supplies o the ship, even as he expresses desires they fail to satisfy. In this sense Adorno might recognize her poem as a philosophical sundial of history (65). Crusoe the enlightenment scientist (he knows something about geology, zoology, astronomy) is haunted, in Bishops inversion, by modern sciencerelativity, the uncertainty principle, and various other unhingings of positivism. He is especially haunted by Darwin, the writer who sounded the death knell of religion and humanism. He pursued knowledge not so much instrumentally as compulsively, without hope of encyclopedic mastery. I had to live one each and every one, eventually for ages, registering their ora, their fauna, their geography. Of course this image of the lonely young man, his eyes xed on facts and minute details, sinking or sliding giddily o into the unknown (Bishop, Ltr. to Anne Stevenson, 8 Jan. 1964) coincides with the gure of Bishop emerging from three prior volumes of geography. This would explain the attraction of the gure for her rather than its signicance. Her Crusoes religion is similarly haunted by a history of its undoing. Christianity isnt just left out, as she said, from the poem; it is conspicuously absent, an absence that is itself a legacy from the modern poets she admired. Defoes Crusoe invents double-column bookkeeping and nds that God is in the black. But Bishops Crusoe has passed through Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and others who set the world permanently o balance. After Defoes Robinson Crusoe, the primary gure haunting Bishops Crusoe is of course William Wordsworth, or rather, Wordsworths lyric I. Wordsworths presence in this poem follows from Rousseaus misappropriation of the Crusoe myth as a celebration of mans happiness in the state of nature. While Alexander Selkirk, upon whom Robinson Crusoe is based, would dance among the goats, Defoes man is much too practical for such antics. Romanticism transgured the Crusoe myth into a celebration of solitude and communion with nature. Bishop admitted to Lowell that she was a nature lover, but the redemptive possibilities of the natural landscape are quickly withdrawn in this poem. The draft of the poem at Houghton Library explicitly refutes the promise of pastoral:
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not green & dripping, dressed in full-grown trees with shafts of sunlight on them and birds starting up to sing, merely a wisp of smoke ten miles away, a black eck in the glass, low down[.] Wordsworth not only extolled the beauty of nature; he extended Enlightenment individualism and rational self-interest to a visionary power, which turned it inside out. But solitude does not seem to ll the modern poems blanks. By presenting Crusoe rst as an explorer-observer recording scientic and aesthetic data (the island he sees in the distance is basalt, probably, the waterspouts are hexagonal, etc.), then as a contemplative poet transguring nature (snail shells look like fertile iris beds, the gulls sound like trees in a strong wind, evoking the thought of pastoral shade), Bishop represents a historical logic. The Romantic impulse arises from longings unsatised within the scientic and formalist worldview, longings for an extension of the personal into the interpersonal. The waterspouts are beautiful, yes, but not much company. In seeking company, Crusoe enacts the Romantic impulse to turn objects into subjects by projecting the self onto nature. But the slightly personied elements of the landscapethe throats of the volcanoes, the feet of the waterspouts, the eyes of the irisesare vestigial, grotesque and unstable, since she is writing in a later moment. Modernitys Nature (not just Darwins but Thomas Hardys, and even Marianne Moores) doesnt have a human face or voice, does not conrm our personhood. The billy goats eyes express nothing, or a little malice. If Romanticism arose out of discontent with scientic impersonality, its own solutions are similarly lost to historical process. Well, I tried Reciting to my iris-beds, they ashed upon that inward eye, which is the bliss. . . the bliss of what? One of the rst things that I did When I got back was look it up. In calling herself a minor female Wordsworth, critics suggest, Bishop was masking a subversive relationship to this looming gure. But the struggle with Wordsworth here has more to do with the lyric subject, who represents the experience of cultural legacy, rather than with the poet herself. The challenge to idealized solitude is itself inherited, and draws from pre-Romantic as well as modern sources. Indeed, the critique of solitude comes
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from Defoe, who recognized the tragic isolation inherent in his portrait of economic man, and wrestled with the meaning of his creation in Serious Reections During the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. The rst chapter is called Of Solitude and has this as its epigraph: How uncapable to make us happy, and / How unqualifyd to a Christian life (243). Defoe, in the mask of Crusoe, spends the rst several paragraphs of this text acknowledging the passion of self-interest and the profound silence of life that results from the circle of self-interest. Every Thing revolves in our Minds by innumerable circular Motions, all centring in our selves. . . . The World, I say, is nothing to us, but as it is more or less to our Relish: All Reection is carryd Home, and our Dear-self is, in one Respect, the End of Living (244). But after this long acknowledgement of our self-centeredness, Crusoe admits that he enjoyed no happy solitude on his island. How is it aicting, while a Man has the Voice of his Soul to speak to God, and to himself ? (244). Perhaps predictably, from an eighteenthcentury writer, the aloneness of the self-circular being leaves him unsatised and longing for society. Man is a creature so formed for society, that it may not only be said that it is not good for him to be alone, but tis really impossible he should be alone (245). (Defoe may here be arguing with Michel de Montaignes Of Solitude.) Yet the Silence of Life pervades his social existence as well, and Defoe seems unable to shrug o the emotional price of becoming economic man. As Watt has pointed out, The essay is inconclusive, and there are several dierent strands of thought in it. But the bitterness of isolation as a primordial fact repeatedly moves Defoe to a great fervor of communication (305). Defoe is not, then, the coherent embodiment of the Western Tradition. His text expresses a model of atomic individualism prevailing in his society, but also a yearning for something else which also arises there. Toward the end of the essay Crusoe claims that he can more enjoy . . . solitude in London while I am writing this than in all his years on the island (245). But the profound silence of life that haunts all speech lingers as a bitter legacy for this hero of rational self-interest (245). Romantic writers themselves recognized the limits of this myth of man alone. The Back to Nature movement of the 1960s and 1970s took Thoreaus Walden as its guidebook, and his chapter Of Solitude stands as contrast to Crusoes experience. But Bishop would probably also have read Keatss rst published poem, To Solitude, which appears to answer Wordsworths I wandered lonely. Wordsworth could revive his bliss within the city, but Keats, like Bishops Crusoe, nds little to
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distinguish solitude from loneliness. O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell, / Let it not be among the jumbled heap / Of murky buildings (6). Rural solitude is better, but far from ideal. His souls pleasure is rather the sweet converse of an innocent mind. It is Almost the highest bliss of human-kind, / When to thy haunts two kindred spirits ee (6). While Keats presumably had someone other than Friday in mind as kindred spirit, the answer to Wordsworth anticipates Bishop. Eliot would also expose this troubling silence within the din of society, and describe his unfullled longing for intimate conversation, in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. In expressing the unsatised yearnings of atomic individualism, then, Bishop is not standing alone against Western tradition, or relaying her personal experience; she is giving individual voice to an aspiration for community that echoes throughout the language, even in times least agreeable to it. Bishop encounters Crusoe through the lens of her own time, with its anti-Romantic and antipositivist philosophies, its vocabulary of relativity, uncertainty, evolution, and its proposition of existence before essence. What appears in the telescope as an island might be a y. If our instruments of measurement aect what we measure, the superperspectives of these instruments also undermine the experiential standards of observation. If we are home-made, this freedom of self-creation brings only temporary gaiety. Existentialism is a miserable philosophy by comparison to the great philosophies of the past, which seemed to give coherence and signicance to human life. In a draft of the poem in the Vassar archive, Bishop had written insecure philosophy. And while miserable better captures the mood of this Crusoe, insecure indeed describes a modern temperament, which is hardly empowered by its disinheritance. Defoes Crusoe cries out to the Lord to pity him and the good Lord eventually makes him rich. Bishops postexistentialist Crusoe makes a temporary home in self-pity. But this home is narrow and hollow, having none of the Romantic internal innite to ll its spaces. Crusoes legs dangle over the craters edge (the crater itself a gure for the inner life?) as he tells himself that pity should begin at home. Forgetting charity is more than a sardonic wink at the shallowness of homespun morality. Charity, caritas, loving thy brother as thyself, not as an object of possession or an extension of identity, is precisely the forgotten impulse in the ethics of all these philosophies. Yet Bishop does not oer a utopian counterideology to subvert them. She creates, rather, an individual voice expressing a protest of the present through a residual longing for the past. She conveys,
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too, the persistent longing for human connection that arises inevitably within all systems of distinction, the need not only to master but to love another.
5. Who Is Friday? The question of who Crusoe is cannot be separated, of course, from the question of who Friday is. They are as much a single entity in canonical memory as Quixote and Panza. The personal and the political come together most intensely here. The Other for whom Bishops Crusoe longs does not speak and little is said of him. In this sense he is an aspect of Crusoe, both dramatically in the poem and in terms of the cultural logic from which Crusoe is formed. But James Merrill wanted to know more. The poems last line, its true, gives the full resonance of feeling earlier withheld or deected into the landscape + fauna. Yet I wondered: why that faintly dismissive tonepoor boy and his prettiness? Why that, I mean, without some expression of the relation that makes him dear as well (19 Apr. 1974). Readers have been quick to decode Crusoes reticence as the expression of ineable and forbidden feeling, in contrast to Robinson Crusoes famous lack of sentiment. But the essentially erotic (as opposed to economic) nature of this relationship is fairly explicit in the poem, even amusing in its striptease and its epoch and gender crossing if only he had been a woman. Something more complex is going on than Bishops unutterable personal loss or feelings about the love that dare not speak its name. Merrills questions focus a central problem in trying to assign a unitary identity to Crusoe, or to Friday, and reveal again that the poem is designed to expose the inner contradictoriness embedded in language. As critics have repeatedly noted, gender and geography come together in Bishops last volume. Friday clearly carries the burden of homoerotic, transcultural, and even transracial themes. Postcolonial theory is relevant to all of Bishops poetry about Brazil, and Crusoes failure of mastery has been interpreted in relation to an imperialist legacy. But again, Bishops rhetorical strategy invites sympathy as well as judgment. The representation of Friday suggests a historical process rather than a simple critique of the Western tradition. In the passages on Friday especially, the rhetoric of objectication and hierarchical mastery contends with a relational rhetoric of felt connection. In this we might see her extending beyond Joseph Conrad, who identies the horror of colonialism, but conveys only revulsion in the proximity of
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the Other. Bishop was rereading Conrad while in Brazil. Indeed, Bishops letter to Lowell mentions Conrad (Coming down on the boat I started reading Conrad) in the same paragraph that describes Aruba in terms suggestive of Crusoe in England: Aruba is a little hell-like island. . . . It rarely if ever rains there and theres nothing but cactus hedges and prickly trees and goats and one broken-o volcano (Bishop, One Art 349). Heart of Darkness seems the most relevant text for Bishop, with its proximities of wilderness and civilization, cannibalism and commerce, and its disaected narrator, Marlow (a tonal kin to Bishops Crusoe).9 Conrads story haunts her poem In the Waiting Room as well. The poems colonial gures of Osa and Martin Johnson, juxtaposed to its possibly cannibal victim, dead man slung on a pole, imply a contagion as well as a contrast (Complete Poems 159). The waiting room itself exposes a heart of darkness, the void beneath language and culture, and transforms the narrators sense of self and world. Kurtzs intimacy with the savage is of course a kind of enormous egoism growing out of a hollow selfhood, the logical extreme of imperialism. Marlowe entertains no such intimacy, remaining the observer, entrenched in the discourse of otherness that has created the structure he abhors. The connection to Conrad reminds us that in Defoe, Friday, before he is a slave, had been a cannibal, and that cannibalism becomes for Crusoe the touchstone for anxiety about his own cultural predation. Bishop has left out this central image of colonialisms other, but it lurks in the poem, in Crusoes horror of slitting a babys throat mistaking it / for a baby goat. The passage recalls the anxiety of Defoes Crusoe, as he negotiates the distinctions between satisfying his appetites by slaughtering fellow creatures, and Fridays nasty habit of consuming his fellow man. Bishops Crusoe is haunted, that is, by Conrads inversions of the colonial paradigm, in which the savage lurks within the civilized man. This inversion is already latent in Defoes story where, as Carol Houlihan Flynn has shown, the oppositional structure of savage and civil is belied within the consumptive ctions of physical economy in Defoes world (423). Bishops relational image of the Crusoe-Friday connection is not nally Conradian, however; it expresses the yearning for an alternative discourse, though it does not shift out of an older one. Bishop may indeed have felt this crux between the hegemonic and the relational by falling in love with an aristocratic woman in an underdeveloped country. The boundaries between self and Other, whether in terms of gender or in terms of geography, become uncertain in the poem. But this uncertainty does not point back to the poets private life or convey her anti-imperialist ideology. The
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poems language makes it clear that these tensions are embedded in the culture, and that they are not easily resolved into a holistic stance. The most abstract, generalizing, and depersonalized words in the lexicon can become sites for these contradictory impulses, and emergent discourses: Friday was nice. / Friday was nice and we were friends. The repetition of the word nice draws attention to its blandness or lack of sentiment, but also to conicts of meaning. (The same is true of the word pretty, also used twice.) Throughout the poem Crusoes language is impoverished, but here it is conicted. Nice may hold a residue of social propriety, instrumentality, and exclusivity. Bishop was deep in the poems of D. H. Lawrence during her college years and undoubtedly knew The English Are So Nice (One Art 37), in which the word appears eighteen times with all its snobbish permutations and nice distinctions. And she might have remembered the erotic grotesque in Eliots Whispers of Immortality, Griskin is nice, especially since Eliot compares her to a Brazilian jaguar. But in Bishops poem the word lets in a desire for something else, something like generosity and fellowship. Crusoe admits, within the impersonal assertion I wanted to propagate my kind that Friday is indeed of his kind (thus overriding the racial dierence that underscores the master-slave logic of Robinson Crusoe). And this kindness, this sense of caritas and eros, comes through in and so did he, I think, poor boy. The I think is familiar Bishop caution about the limits of intimacy and knowledge and boy (Robinson Crusoes term for all racial others within his power) reasserts the dierence that kind overrides. In the voice of Crusoe the tension between kind and boy marks a broader cultural movement, the aspiration toward love struggling to assert itself within the structure of racial, economic, and social domination. Bishop replied to Merrill that there had been more about Friday, but that she had thought it boring and cut it out. (There is no evidence of such passages in the extant drafts.) I still like poor boybecause he was a lot younger; and because they couldnt communicate (ghastly word) much, Crusoe guesses at Fridays feelings (Apr. 1974). Here Bishop insists on the ction (Lota was close to Bishops age, her social superior, and spoke excellent English), yet admits new meaning into it. The binary of the colonial model (Crusoe as the natural master, Friday the good slave) cannot accommodate the feelings emerging here. Bishops drafts suggest doubts about a hierarchical model of society and a yearning for a model of reciprocity: Just when I couldnt stand my hegemony/hegemonic self a minute longer, Friday came. (She had also used binary as an alternative to hege-
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monic.) But it is within the colonial model, not from outside it, that the yearning for reciprocity arises, hence the conicts Merrill observed in the language about Friday. To call Bishops poem a meditation on her loss of Lota, as Fountain does (265), is to ignore the social history roiling within these lines. Friday, like Crusoe, belongs to history and to the mythic pantheon history creates. The crucible of language has transformed him many times overas the natural servant, the noble savage, the Winander Boy, Samuel Becketts Lucky, Gal Friday. Indeed, Friday has left the realm of myth and entered the realm of idiom. Bishop indicates this when she remarks: Just when I couldnt stand it another minute longer, Friday came. Friday (whether slave or weekend harbinger) promises release from the alienating force of monotonous routine and lonely labor (registering the ora and fauna). By drawing on this historically inected myth the poem does not stand against the social reality but rather enters into its dynamic, allowing the re-seeing to arise as a cultural, not just a personal impulse. Accounts of that have everything all wrong not because the past has lied and the truth is personal, or because Bishop is presenting a radical counterideology, but because language and meaning are historical and social.
6. The Figure of Voice and the Sound of the Poem When we identify the speaker of lyric we tend to forget the gurative structure of voice. We convert an eect to a cause. We need not abandon the activity of personication, which brings the lyric speaker into a relation with our personal and social history, in order to retain a sense of its ctional quality, and to distinguish the lyric subject from the recuperated authorial origin of the lyric. Unquestionably, late in her career Bishop established a more intimate, immediate voice for lyric, one that encourages this act of personication. That this intimacy might be a matter less of personal disclosure than generic achievement is seldom acknowledged. Before Geography III Bishops poems tended to feature image over voice. The landscapes of Florida, Paris, New York, the Maritimes, and other illustrations were highly particularized, engaging the readers mental observation, while the speaker tended to be remote, even abstract or generalized. In Crusoe in England we have the opposite case, a poem that refuses description and unsettles point of view, creating ritualized and allusive landscapes, yet projects a distinctive, immediate voice. This is per-
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haps why readers have been so tempted to anthropomorphize the voice and absorb the author into it. But while Crusoes voice is individuated, his identity is not unitary. He cannot be reduced to a speaker whom the poem positions ironically or dramatically, even though his voice is more distinctive than that of Prufrock or Gerontion. He is distinguishable from Defoes monotoned Robinson Crusoe by his constant shifts of register and diction. One hears a steady rising and falling of the voice between expectation and disappointment, and a rhythm less disjunctive and schematic than Prufrocks swerves from climax. A new volcano has erupted, begins the poem, gathering aspiration with born, breath, rst, until a climactic rose in the mates binoculars yields to caught on the horizon like a y, and the stanza exhales tonally, gradually declining with but, and un, until the culminating negation of none. We nd a similar rhythm in the next stanza, where the overlapping rollers, bring constant promise of sublimity, but never quite close in. Indeed, the emotional rhythms of the poem produce an eect much like ocean waves, gathering force toward a consummation that never comes. Pretty to watch; he had a pretty body. // And then one day they came and took us o. The eect of such shifts of momentum is not simply ironic negation. We hear instead, in linguistic conict, an unsuppressible ideality (marked in the French Mont dEspoir) contending with the persistent denials of modern knowledge (in the English Mount Despair). The modern disillusion does not merely stie the ideality; it works dialectically, as Adorno suggested, toward some new disposition of language, and thus of society. The same voice can speak of waterspouts as sacerdotal beings of glass and yet lack any word for Friday but nice and pretty. These shifts become signs for an inverted ratio of language to feeling. The poem reminds us repeatedly that natures voice is occluded (the craters have parched throats) or unintelligible (baa . . . shriek. . . baa), and that we merely play with names, and yet the poem creates a strong sense of the speakers presence and address to the reader. The markers of storytellingwell, I had . . . , Now, the ellipses, the dashes and exclamationsall contour this gure of voice projecting itself out from the Silence of Life, far more social than the shadowy you and prophetic we of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. This is not primarily a voice of meditation, even if the interrogatives circle back to their source. The poem indeed contrasts a past voice of self-counsel with the socially impelled voice of the present narration in which
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it is embedded. The narrative markers and asides convey a performative aspect, in which the reader becomes inscribed as a listener in the gure of voice and a window opens out from solitude. Historical displacements, like discontinuities of tense, create another curious conict in the gure of voice. The dramatic monologue of the nineteenth century (Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson) often made use of historical gures, and past ctional gures, to allow at once for the sympathy toward an inheritance and a modern dissociation from the past. In Eliot, the technique of simultaneitythe First World War veteran Stetson called to remember the ancient war at Mylaeevokes a transhistorical realm of imagination and cultural memory. But the displacement here Crusoe trying to recite Wordsworthtends to recall us to the ctive nature of voice, and to the historical nature of the language that creates voice. In these and other ways, Crusoe in England remains true to the central concern of the lyricthe selfwhile at the same time becoming impersonal. Bishop was negatively capable, inhabiting more than one perspective, dramatizing questions rather than projecting views. She resists the literary eects and entrapments of self-regard, through a wide range of distancing strategies: self-quotation, parentheses, distortions of clich, etc. Narrative in Bishop interrupts the cyclical ow of lyric self-absorption, even in this relatively circular poem.10 Crusoe is an unsuccessful narcissist, and through the mask Bishop is able to achieve some detachment from his self-absorption and to display its failings. In the constant aronts to his narcissism we nd him learning ways to operate in a world that does not greet his eyes. Indeed, we hear him almost break out of his narcissism in that last dear Friday. Other poems in Geography III (The Moose, The End of March, Poem), which are rich in reality eects, recognize and articulate a beauty that is not of the self, suggesting alternatives to his narcissism, so that we do not simply feel that solipsism and narcissism are inevitable conditions of consciousness, or that these attributes of Crusoe are the essential Bishop. She dissociates herself from the insistent I that rings so prominently in the poemeight times in eighteen lines of stanza two; eight times in 10 lines in stanza fourseeking to solace himself in self-pity by inhabiting various subject positions (me, myself, my). The poem does not rest there, does not make a home in self-pity. This construction rests over a craters edge and there is something ludicrous, the poem indicates, about the familiar legs dangling down with no ground (or leg) to stand on. They form an emblem
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of ungrounded identity. Crusoe in England is not itself an exercise in self-pity, but its opposite, a work of modesty, detachment and humor. These impersonal eects move us in part, as in any art, because we sense the immense personal, and artistic, eort involved in achieving them. This is the heroic nature of the impersonal, but Bishop conveys it in her remarkable handling of the persona, not in the encoding of autobiographical detail. While the poem is more voice than image, the voice conveys us to a pattern of conicting images that articulate more than Crusoe can know. I wanted to propagate my kind, says Crusoe, and Bishops critics have been quick to point out her comment to friends that she would like to have had a child (Millier 451). What is less often observed is the pervasive and ambivalent language of propagation (and a corollary language of violence, displaced cannibalism, and sterility) that runs throughout the poem. If we direct our attention to the poetry, not the poet, we notice that the desire to propagate comes right after a frightening dream of Islands spawning islands (my brain bred islands he recalls later in the poem). His desire to participate in the continuity of life must be set against a view of life itself as involuntary, uncontrollable propagation, inextricably bound to violence. Indeed, the rst island is born in the poems opening lines and breathes steam, though its source is volcanic eruption. Beside these images of fecundity are images of sterile repetition and asexual reproduction. Where dierence does coincide the result is more often violence than union. The problems of singularity and repetition that torment Crusoe, of imposing violence where reciprocity is sought, may or may not have their origin in Bishops feelings about loneliness, or about same-sex love (which Freud read as a form of narcissism, a view Bishop would likely protest), but they extend into matters of creativity, representation, consciousness, and experience that link her to her tradition and to her readers. The force of repetition and violently cancelled dierence constitutes one of this poems deep rhythms. It makes a clear formal mark on the poema kind of undersong or tone of meaningeven when thematically ambiguous. Poetic form was not only another means of distance and detachment from the entrapments of the self, it was a social gesture, another means of communication. The poem, though mostly unrhymed and only loosely recalling pentameter from time to time, is riddled with same-word end rhymes (epistrophe)giant/giant, everything/everything, gull/gull, island/islandreinforced by internal echo (baa, baa, baa, shriek, shriek, shriek, bleat, bleat, eye, iris, homemade, homemade, nice, nice, pretty, pretty. Bishop knows, with Emily Dickinson, that internal dierence is where the
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meanings are and her soundtrack of Crusoes consciousness lacks these inections. The occasional couplets (gray/display) build no interesting play of opposition, but rather undermine the minimal variety: the beaches were all lava, variegated, / black, red, and white, and gray; / the marbled colors made a ne display. The sea/me rhyme might allow a dialectical ow, except for the repetitions that surround it: The sun set in the sea; the same odd sun / rose from the sea / and there was one of it and one of me. The sea is not a thing seen, then, but a mirror of loneliness. Even where a line intervenes between the rhymes, the internal rhymes of the line reinforce the sense of sterile repetition, or dierence (as in hope and despair) collapsing into sameness (despoir/despair/air): One billy goat would stand on the volcano Id christened Mont dEspoir or Mount Despair (Id time enough to play with names), and bleat and bleat, and sni the air. The rhymes here reect the theme. Crusoe wants to recognize in the goat a fellowship in dierencean empathic connection between his own voiced yearnings and the bleats of the animal. But the species remain isolated; dierence collapses into repetition, or malice, which subverts dierence. We are left with a dialogue of one, or two independent dialogues of one, natures with its questioning shrieks, . . . equivocal replies, and Crusoes with his question-answer monologue: Do I deserve this? I suppose I must. /. . . Was there / a moment when I actually chose this? / I dont remember, but there could have been. The poem glimpses some redemptive dierence. Friday was nice. Friday was nice and we were friends is incremental, at least, in its repetition. But what we never get in this poem is the lovely coupling of opposites possible in rhyme (and present in other Bishop poems), suggesting again representations internal dierences. One might choose almost any rhyme from The Moose with its marvelous mingling of the human and the natural: past clapboard farmhouses and neat, clapboard churches, bleached, ridged as clamshells, past twin silver birches[.] The comparative redundancy of rhyme in Crusoe in England has to do with all the singularities of the world reproducing their kind in an asexual spawning that involves no love between different kinds. The fear that poetry may be just this sort of spawn-
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ing simulacra, repetitions of the self, propagation of the merely personal rather than engagement with the world in its otherness, haunts the poem. Fridays tactile communion with nature (hed pet the baby goats, and carry one around) recalls a model of engagement lively throughout Bishops work. We might recall how in The Map these peninsulas take the water between thumb and nger / like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods. Crusoe remains a spectator, for he destroys what he touches. Yet in creating the gure of Crusoe, so wonderfully particularized in his ctive world, markedly distanced from Bishop, yet sympathetic as the voice of lifes great puzzles and troubles, the poet has succeeded where Crusoe fails. She has broken her lyric isolation (a generic, not a personal condition) and she has found a way to propagate her kind without mere repetition of the self and without a narrow autobiographical purpose. Sound creates voice not only through the rhymes of this poem, but also through its consonants. Crusoes tonal range, the shifting expression on the face of the words, can be heard particularly in his penchant for grousing b soundsbeing born, breath, black, basalt, binoculars, books all in the rst stanzavacillating with mock-alliterative, tongue-twisting s soundsThe sun set in the sea: the same odd sun / rose from the sea, sooty, scrub aair, snail shells, slithery strides. Within this Baa, baa, baa and shriek, shriek, shriek, of the poems soundtrack Bishop creates a lyricality which is not general, but specic to the gure of voice. Susan Stewart is one of the few critics to pay more than passing attention to the expressive power of Bishops prosody. Her essay Lyric Possession calls our attention to the somatic meaning of poetic music and meter. Such a meaning is not intentional in Wimsatts sense of mastering an original poetic will but on the contrary, it haunts the poets explicit utterance (Stewart 37). Stewart draws together classical models of poetic genius (possession by the muse) and psychoanalytic models of transgenerational haunting and the permeability of the voice and person to describe a tension or at least a distinction between propositional and what might be called somatic utterance (43). But even here Stewart moves to possess the poet psychologically. The permeability of voice and person extends only to the writers personal past. From the powerful reminder of the way poetry involves being spoken through as well as speaking (38), its way of being haunted by others (52), she moves not toward a social or dialogical understanding of the unconscious of poetry, but toward the recovery of the personal. The choice of ballad form enables
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Keats to re-enact the betrayal of his brother Tom [by a hoax perpetrated by George Wills] (44). Stewart draws out striking examples of Bishops allusion to nursery rhyme, but in the end, in At the Fishhouses, for instance, this somatic meaning simply reawakens a tragic childhood (44). The [poems] move from the most abstract senses of sound and sight to the immediate physicality of touch and taste is a historical journey to the sources of Bishops early loss of her father and mother (61). But in At the Fishhouses that loss is explicit from the outset (from the substitution of grandfather for parents); it hardly needs a somatic meaning to bring it out. For the poet living in New York or Florida but writing about the Maritimes, this childhood has long since been reawakened and brought into the prepositional realm of language. The point is not to be in touch with the past but to open it to transpersonal discourse. The rudimentary, prebourgeois rhythms of nursery rhymes and hymns, as Adorno pointed out (64), give the poet access to a holistic community residing within language. Stewart misses an opportunity to read lyric possession in this way, as ultimately impersonal. For while she recognizes that form can represent the transport or waylaying of subjective intention she ultimately does so, as Yopi Prins has pointed out, with reference to a model of the unconscious that still assumes an individual consciousness (155). Bishops disavowal of autobiography would seem most clearly belied by the end of the poem, where Crusoe looks with detachment at the relics of his island life. The museum may be an expression of modernitys desire to collapse time and space and to replace experience with objects that represent it. These things have no aura for Crusoe. The ego connection to them has burned o. The images clearly also form a gure of the writing life, and the relationship of the poet to her poetic materials and products. Universities and libraries, as Harrison has documented in detail, had approached Bishop about manuscripts and letters for their archives (121). But what seems most important is how this serves as the autobiography of all creative eort, not just Bishops. The last two stanzas of Crusoe in England involve a nal intersection of the personal and the impersonal. The creative urge, the poem tells us, is born of desperate need; the word becomes esh as if to redeem the user: The knife there on the shelf it reeked of meaning, like a crucix. It lived. How many years did I beg it, implore it, not to break?
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The knife can easily be translated to a writing implement with its broken tip whose living soul, like ink, has dribbled away. But if we follow the logic of this image we might also conclude that the abandonment of personal connection does not render the object useless. A cultural transfer is taking place, not just of the apparatus of art, but of art itself, in the form of the parasol, that shield against weather. And the scene itself, of the poet dissociated from the remnants of his creative process, is a topos. Wallace Stevens depicted himself as The Man on the Dump for whom even the dew has grown stale. Yeats complained of his Circus Animals Desertion, but returned to the foul rag and bone shop of the heart by way of a return to ottava rima. Surrounded by uninteresting lumberof comfortable First World furnishingand with real tea on hand, the imaginative and vital energy required to make do in a pinch has petered out for Crusoe. If he resembles the poet in a dry period, he recalls too Tennysons Ulysses, bored by the comforts of domestic life, recalling the intensity of his quest for home. Crusoe seems particularly dissociated from the remnants of his past, the personal eects, which so fascinate the public: How can anyone want such things? At the same time these items are metaphors for poetry nature poetry in particular, since ute and goat suggest the Pan of pastoral, just as the parasol, like a plucked and skinny fowl, recalls the bird of lyric stripped bare to reveal its artice. If the poets disaection from the relics of her career was a spur to this passage, the recent cultural past, at least, provided plenty of reinforcement. The object of postmodernity has lost its aura, and sits in the museum emptied of a past it fails to conjure through nostalgia. What consolation or access do such relics provide to the personal, really? The unspeakable loss of Friday, meanwhile, is marked with the calendar precision of Defoes Crusoe, and with his dates in mind. Has Bishop masked her losses in the gure of Crusoe, or has she used her losses as an emotional material that contributes to the re-seeing of the archetype, introducing into the myth of desire and mastery the inevitable narrative of disillusionment and loss? And now that narrative too is part of the collective substratum of our language. What animates these poems is not their biographical origins, nor a solitary stance against Western tradition, but the prospective intimacy the poet has created within the impersonal frame of art. The ending speaks not of Bishop and Lota (however they may factor in its creative origins), but of modern man, bored by the immediate fulllment of his material wants, unconsoled by his habits of preservation, unable to overcome personal loss, transgure it in song, or live in memory. This gure does not emerge from Bishops
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singular antagonism toward the past but from her profound engagement with its contending aspirations and mutating myths. Jerey Perl may be correct that inversion, travesty and obsessive negative allusion seem indispensable to nonhumanist aesthetics (17). But Bishops Crusoe in England has a more complicated relation to the past; she recognizes that the antagonisms emerge from within rather than against the humanist tradition. The compelling personal voice of the impersonal Crusoe makes this poem unforgettable, live in detail, not a nomans voice of Everyman. Impersonal craft conveys it: full of sentence sounds, bent across an inimitable music, rich in alliteration, modulating in and out of blank verse and free verse, rhyming and unrhyming, ranging from primer verse to swan song, now intoning, now jaded. The rhythm of long sentences against short, the parentheses, dashes, ellipses, all these impersonal devices (largely ignored by critics) give a personal inection to the speaker, create an eect of immediate voice. But while Bishops Crusoe gives the sense of the particular within the generality of language, he also gives voice to contradictory, historical impulses that his particularity does not resolve. His reection, his boredom, his self-irony, his knowledge and doubt, his moments of passion in love, loss, or fear, are not Bishops or Defoes, but ours.
Notes
1. This is hardly a new point, having been made rst in my essay The Impersonal and the Interrogative in Elizabeth Bishop and again by Edelman. 2. I would like to thank my student Eoin Cannon for drawing my attention to this passage in McCabes book, in his excellent paper on Bishops A Cold Spring. 3. Lombardi misreads Kermode, whose argument is in many ways the reverse of hers. The secrecy is not a diversion from carnal meaning to keep the uninitiated out; rather, the carnal meaning is the diversion, the latent meaning only hinted to the initiate through the diversions from the carnal meaning. For an alternative application of Kermodes thesis to Bishops poetry, see my article Narrative Secrets. 4. Valerie Rohy, inuenced by her thesis advisor, Edelman, has provided a more rhetorical reading of Bishop within a gay-studies framework. In her analysis, lesbian sexuality in Bishop must be understood as itself operating within language and linguistic displacements (119) and embedded in structures of symbolization rather than with reference to the place of the unrepresentable real (Jarraway, qtd. in Rohy 121). But again, art circles back to biography. Gwendolyn for Rohy becomes a narrative by which Bishop comes to terms with her lesbian identity as a form of metaphoric substitution for the lost mother.
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5. Jerredith Merrins article is typical and proceeds with exactly the same logic as Jarraway employs: I suggest that Bishops gaiety or delight in the possibilities of change is in turn inextricable from her gayness: her questioning of gender boundaries, for example, and the exploration (however oblique and shrouded) of the pleasures and anxieties of same-sex love (154). Inextricable in what way she does not make clear. Is the link motivational? Causal? Referential? Are all Bishops references to mutability (the central topos of the lyric tradition) traceable to her sexual preference? How we understand the link has profound implications for how we read the poems. 6. The Monument, which Vernon Shetley has also associated with Tradition and the Individual Talent (41), again directs us away from the Romantic model of creativity. The bones of the artist-prince may be inside / or far away on even drier soil (Complete Poems 24). The poem suggests that we think of subjectivity not in terms of origin (or biographical past), but in terms of parable, the perpetual future of trope: [W]atch it closely (24). 7. Bishop noted as early as 1934 that On an island one lives all the time in a Robinson Crusoe atmosphere . . . A poem should be made about making things in a pinch& how it looks sad when the emergency is over (Notebook). There is of course a lot more in the poem she did write, but this outline, which predates Lota and Brazil by 20 years, suggests the poem is not reducible to late biographical impulses. Bishop writes to Lowell in 1964 that she had been up late working on a poem about Crusoe. (qtd. in Millier 446). Two pages of that eort, essentially the rst two pages of the poem, called Crusoe at Home with (in Hull?) written below, can be found in the Houghton Library. 8. See Rich, The Eye of the Beholder: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. Jarraway seems unaware of this essay, though it anticipates his argument. 9. One wonders, too, whether Bishop knew Hardys In a Waiting Room, which takes place in a train station. The text the speaker encounters there is the Bible, and it prompts his move through several stages in thinking about his connection to others. 10. Louise Glck makes these points about Berryman (Glck 45).
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. Lyric Poetry and Society. Trans. Bruce Mayo. Telos 20 (1974): 5672. Bishop, Elizabeth. The Collected Prose. New York: Farrar, 1984. . The Complete Poems, 1927 1979. New York: Farrar, 1986. . Dimensions for a Novel. Vassar Journal of Undergraduate Studies 8 (May 1934): 95103. . Letters to Anne Stevenson. Washington University Library Special Collections. . Letters to James Merrill. Vassar College Library Special Collections. . Notebook from Cutyhunk, Maine. Jul. 1934. Papers. Vassar College Library Special Collections. . Poetry Notebook, 1964, 1965.
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Ms. Am 2115. Houghton Library, Harvard University. . One Art: Selected Letters. Ed. Robert Giroux. New York: Farrar, 1994. Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. Politics and Form in Postmodern Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Brogan, Jacqueline Vaught. Elizabeth Bishop: Perversity as Voice. Lombardi. 17595. Cory, Chris, and Alwyn Lee. Poets: The Second Chance. Time 89.2 (2 Jun. 1967): 6774. Costello, Bonnie. The Impersonal and the Interrogative in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1983. 10932. . Narrative Secrets, Lyric Openings: Wallace Stevens and Elizabeth Bishop. The Wallace Stevens Journal 19 (1995): 180201. Defoe, Daniel. Serious Reections during the Life and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. (1720). 14. Rpt. in Robinson Crusoe: A Norton Critical Edition. Second Edition. New York: Norton, 1994. 24345. Diehl, Joanne Feit. Bishops Sexual Poetics. Lombardi. 1745. Edelman, Lee. The Geography of Gender: Elizabeth Bishops In the Waiting Room. Contemporary Literature 26.2 (1985): 17996. Eliot, T. S. The Complete Poems and Plays. New York: Harcourt, 1962. . Tradition and the Individual Talent. Rpt. Selected Essays 1917 1932. New York: Harcourt, 1932. 311. Lombardi, Marilyn May, ed. Elizabeth
Bishop: The Geography of Gender. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1993. Flynn, Carol Houlihan. Consumptive Fictions: Cannibalism and Defoe. Robinson Crusoe: A Norton Critical Edition. Second Edition. New York: Norton, 1994. 42332. Fountain, Gary and Peter Brazeau. Elizabeth Bishop: An Oral Biography. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1994. Glck, Louise. Proofs & Theories. New York: Ecco, 1994. Goldensohn, Lorrie. Elizabeth Bishop: The Biography of a Poetry. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. Hahn, Susan. Authenticity and Impersonality in Adornos Aesthetics. Telos 117 (1999): 6079. Hammer, Langdon. The New Elizabeth Bishop. The Yale Review 82: 13549. Harrison, Victoria. Elizabeth Bishops Poetics of Intimacy. New York: Cambridge UP, 1993. Jarraway, David. O Canada!: The Spectral Lesbian Poetics of Elizabeth Bishop. PMLA 113 (1998): 24357. Keats, John. Selected Poems and Letters. Ed. Douglas Bush. Boston: Houghton, 1959. Langbaum, Robert. The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1957. Lombardi, Marilyn May. The Body and the Song: Elizabeth Bishops Poetics. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1995. . The Closet of Breath: Elizabeth Bishop, Her Body and Her Art. Lombardi 4669.
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Longenbach, James. Modern Poetry After Modernism. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. McCabe, Susan. Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss. University Park: Penn State UP, 1994. Merrill, James. Letters to Elizabeth Bishop. Vassar College Library Special Collections. Merrin, Jeredith. Elizabeth Bishop: Gaiety, Gayness, and Change. Lombardi. 15372. Millier, Brett. Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Perl, Jerey. Skepticism and Modern Enmity: Before and After Eliot. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. Prins, Yopi. Victorian Sappho. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999. Rich, Andrienne. Diving into the Wreck: Poems 19711972. New York: Norton, 1973. . The Eye of the Beholder: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop. Boston Review 8 (Apr. 1983): 1517. Rohy, Valerie. Impossible Women. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2000.
Rose, Jacqueline. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. Schwartz, Lloyd, and Sybil P. Estess, ed. Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1983. Shetley, Vernon. After the Death of Poetry: Poet and Audience in Contemporary America. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. Shetley, Vernon. On Elizabeth Bishop. Raritan 14.3 (Winter 1995): 15163. Stewart, Susan. Lyric Possession. Critical Inquiry 22 (1995): 3464. Trilling, Lionel. The Sense of the Past (1942). Rpt. in The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. New York. Scribner, 1950. 17691. Watt, Ian. Robinson Crusoe as Myth. (1951). Rpt. in Defoe, Robinson Crusoe. A Norton Critical Edition. New York: Norton, 1994. 288306. Woolf, Virginia. The Second Common Reader. New York: Harcourt, 1960.

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Elizabeth Bishops Impersonal Personal

American Literary History

Elizabeth Bishops Impersonal Personal

American Literary History

Elizabeth Bishops Impersonal Personal

American Literary History

Elizabeth Bishops Impersonal Personal

American Literary History

Elizabeth Bishops Impersonal Personal

American Literary History

Elizabeth Bishops Impersonal Personal

American Literary History

Elizabeth Bishops Impersonal Personal

American Literary History

Elizabeth Bishops Impersonal Personal

American Literary History

Elizabeth Bishops Impersonal Personal

American Literary History

Elizabeth Bishops Impersonal Personal

American Literary History

Elizabeth Bishops Impersonal Personal

American Literary History

Elizabeth Bishops Impersonal Personal

American Literary History

Elizabeth Bishops Impersonal Personal

American Literary History

Elizabeth Bishops Impersonal Personal

American Literary History

Elizabeth Bishops Impersonal Personal

American Literary History

Elizabeth Bishops Impersonal Personal

American Literary History

Elizabeth Bishops Impersonal Personal

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