The Lyrical Object in Elizabeth Bishop's Poetry

The Lyrical Object in Elizabeth Bishop’s Poetry Axel Nesme “Emotion is essential,” Bishop once explained in an interview. “The only question is in what form. I am at work on a villanelle that is pure emotion.” (Monteiro 66) Ever since Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads, the expression of personal emotion has been one of the most hackneyed features of poetic lyricism. It might well be, however, that emotion does not necessarily presuppose a foregrounding of lyrical subjectivity. Instead, by examining the function of “the lyrical object” in this discussion I would like to temporarily follow the tracks of Michel Collot who, in “Le sujet lyrique hors de soi,” defines e- motion as that which “only prolongs and reenacts that movement which constantly carries the subject and makes it drift outside of itself, and through which alone it can ek-sist and ex-press itself […] Modern poetry,” Collot adds, “compels us to overcome all dichotomies in order to try to understand how the lyrical subject can only be constituted by way of its relationship to the object” (115-6).1 While this certainly applies to Bishop, I hope to show that it does not necessarily lead to the conclusions suggested in Collot’s account of Ponge’s objective lyricism, which demonstrates how through objects the poet “invents himself outside and in the future, in the movement of an emotion which brings him out of himself in order to rejoin himself and the others within the horizon of the poem” (117). Relying on the Lacanian notion of the voice as object, I would argue on the opposite that the voice of the invoking drive emerges precisely when meaning as a condition of intersubjective communication falters and gestures towards the unsayable: “the voice comes in the place of what is unsayable in the subject […] the agency of the voice is always present as soon as I must locate my position vis-à-vis the signifying chain, insofar as this signifying chain is always in connection with the unsayable object. To this extent the voice is precisely what cannot be uttered” (Miller 51). I would like to broach the questions raised by the call for papers that initiated this conference by examining one of Bishop’s poems where issues of intersubjectivity and the inscription of the subject are foregrounded. In “The Armadillo” (CP 103-4) the poet witnesses a manifestation of some Brazilian villagers’ faith that involves casting fire balloons into the air in order to honor a local saint. While the fire balloons are supposed to disappear into the sky and thus materialize a scenario of union with transcendence, the ritual falls short of this expectation. Instead the fire balloons fall randomly and sometimes set houses on fire. While the communal bond that gathers the villagers around this ceremony is powerful enough to defy the ban on those “illegal fire balloons” (line 3), Bishop nonetheless stresses its frailty. The enjambment of lines 5-6, in particular, clearly suggests that the ritual followed by the poet from an ethnographer’s perspective is threatened with obsolescence : “rising toward a saint / still honored in these parts.”2 As a primitive mix of Christianity and paganism, this quaint ceremonial seems unlikely to survive much longer. Indeed, depending on the direction of the wind, the fire balloons seem to merge with stars whose names carry echoes of Latin mythology and which are significantly seen on the wane: “Once up against the sky it’s hard / to tell them from the stars— / planets, that is—the tinted ones: / Venus going down, or Mars”. They may also “steer between / the kite sticks of the Southern Cross,” an obvious Christian symbol whose relevance is also thrown into question through Bishop’s possible allusion to the episode of the Passion where Jesus shows his humanity by asking God why he has forsaken him. “Receding, dwindling, solemnly / and steadily forsaking us,” the fire balloons thus embody the demise of old beliefs around which communities were once built and whose disappearance might cause their dissolution. What object may be substituted for those instruments of worship that so miserably fail to connect man with the beyond, i.e., to give consistency to the Other who retroactively guarantees the social bond? What intersubjective link may subsist when religious ritual collapses like the fire balloon which, in stanza 6, “splattered like an egg of fire?” I would contend that “The Armadillo” attempts to provide a specifically poetic answer to these questions by thematically and formally deploying its own suppletory strategy. As I have just indicated, although the fire balloons are supposed to disappear into thin air and become one with the invisible or the transcendent, they do not reach their destination and share the fate of those “unanswered letters” that are littered in “The Bight” (CP 60). However, their 1 All translations from French are mine. 2 Emphasis mine. Nesme, Axel. “The Lyrical Object in Elizabeth Bishop’ Poetry”. EREA 2.2 (automne 2004): 53-9.<www.e-rea.org> 53 final collapse disturbs a couple of owls who take off and vanish into the night, “their whirling black- and-white / stained bright pink underneath.” Thus the purpose that the fire balloons were unable to accomplish, the owls seemingly fulfill when their feathers ironically reflect their light before they “shriek[ed] up out of sight.” In other words, the successful although unprogrammed ascent of the owls strips the balloons of their symbolic significance by accidentally staging in the real the imaginary merger of the visible and the invisible that the religious artifacts have failed to bring about. Likewise, in the penultimate stanzas, the rabbit who is described as “a handful of intangible ash” seems to have borrowed from the realm of transcendence the attribute of intangibility, much as the light of the fire balloons did previously spill over onto the feathers of the owls. As to whether the letter finally reaches its destination, however, Bishop carefully remains silent. Indeed the writing of “The Armadillo” seems designed to exhibit Bishop’s skepticism as to the possibility of controlling direction, textual or otherwise. This appears especially in the odd relationship between the poem’s thematic title and its contents, which clearly runs counter to its avowed intention. What announces itself as a poem about an armadillo dedicates only one out of ten stanzas to the animal of whom we just catch a glimpse as it leaves the scene, in line 31. It is as if the poem drifts away from its theme almost as soon as it gets under way. In this respect it thus seems to mirror the fate of the fire balloons, a fact further corroborated in line 7, where those “paper chambers” are reflected in the poem’s layout on the page, since it too is made up of a succession of stanzas, the Italian word for “chamber.” Indeed, the very prosody of certain lines seems to imitate the motions of the fire balloons in the sky. This is particularly striking in the iambs and final choriamb of line 14: “they flare and falter, wobble and toss.” Thus as the owls and the armadillo borrow their color from the fire balloons, so too the poem entertains with those a degree of kinship. Is the poem however intended as a mere counterpart, or more interestingly as an alternative to the ritual under scrutiny? The answer, I believe, lies in its final lines and their rejection of “Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry,” warning us against a strictly mimetic reading of the preceding stanzas. Underlying the religious ritual described in this poem is the naive belief in the possibility of communication with the saint to whom those offerings are addressed. What if the Other to whom this ceremony thus attempts to give consistency has forsaken us? Perhaps then “surprise” can be substituted for religious awe, as seems to be the case in the penultimate stanza. Perhaps also the Other may still be postulated, at least within the strict boundaries of literary communication? This would be one way of accounting for the fairly exceptional presence of the dedication, “For Robert Lowell,” whereby Bishop seems to substitute for the failed offering of the villagers to their saint, the gift of her own poem to the tutelary figure of her friend Lowell. Thus the literary intersubjectivity created by that object which is the poem might be seen as an alternative to the futile ceremonial of the fire balloons. That this alternative is viable enough and that not all letters remain unanswered, might in this particular instance be confirmed by literary history which, as if plotting to lend the Other that answerability which was found so sorely lacking in “The Armadillo,” teaches us that Robert Lowell’s own “Skunk Hour” was in the poet’s own words “modeled on Miss Bishop’s ‘The Armadillo’” (Lowell 227). Of course such confirmation is purely anecdotal and eventually misleading, at least inasmuch as it fosters a view of the poem as a successful invocation, a calling upon the voice of the Other, who conveniently answers back. This view may quite possibly have been intended by Bishop herself since Anne Colwell (161) mentions that “The Armadillo” initially appeared in the New Yorker without the dedication, which Bishop possibly added after Robert Lowell wrote to her that he admired her poem. This nonetheless does not help us solve the poem’s main difficulty, which lies in the enigmatic status of its last stanza. In contrast with the stylistic clarity of the preceding stanzas, where comparisons predominate, lines 37-40 are jarringly opaque, and have therefore triggered a wide range of interpretations.3 What matters most, however, is not to identify the “weak mailed fist” as metaphorical of the armadillo and possibly of man’s bellicose tendencies.

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