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Mutlu Kong Blazing " One Art" not only effects such poetic reversals but exposes them as affected. Bishops choice of a villanelle, a traditional form of repetition that promises to make " art" out of " losing, " seems to support the opening assertion, but the negatives cast doubt on the project at the outset: The art of losing isnt hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Yet the title tells us that the art of writing and the art of losing are one, and the requirements of the form serve to render loss certain from the start. The third line already gives us the last word of the poem-the word she means to deny but is fated to write: ? Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shant have lied. Its evident the art of losings not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it! ) like disaster.
Writing and losing are one art because the formal repetition of loss, which promises mastery, simultaneously finalizes disaster: " (Write it! ) like disaster. " Repetition duplicates and divides, both masters and loses, and thus makes for " disaster. " The division-by-duplication of the " aster" is the ill star that governs poets. from American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987. Copyright? 198 J. D. McClatchy (1989) [McClatchy is discussing the last stanza. ] The loss of love here is not over and thereby mastered, but threatened: a possibility brooded upon, or an act being endured.
How Bishop dramatizes the threatened loss is uncanny. " I shant have lied, " she claims. Under such intense emotional pressure she shifts to the decorous " shant, " as if the better to distance and control her response to this loss, the newest and last. And again, my minds ear often substitutes " died" for " lied. " In self-defense, lying makes a moral issue out of the hearts existential dilemma; a way of speaking is a habit of being. The real moral force of her stanza comes and this is true in many other Bishop poems from her adverbs: even losing you; not too hard to master. These shades of emphasis are so carefully composed, so lightly sketched in, that their true dramatic power is missed by some readers. And then that theatrical last line how severely, how knowingly and helplessly qualified!
It reminds me of that extraordinary line in " At the Fish houses, " at three removes from itself: " It is like what we imagine knowledge to be. " The line her begins with a qualification (" though" ), goes on to a suggestion rather than the assertion we might expect of a last line (" it mat look" ), then to a comparison thats doubled, stuttering (" like like" ), interrupted by a parenthetical injunction that is at once confession and compulsion, so that when " disaster" finally comes it sounds with a shocking finality. The whole stanza is in danger of breaking apart, and breaking down. In this last line the poets voice literally cracks. The villanelle that strictest and most intractable of verse forms can barely control the grief, yet helps the poet keep her balance.
From J. D. McClatchy, " Elizabeth Bishop: Some Notes on One Art, " in White Paper: On Contemporary American Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 14 Joanne Feet Diehl Bishops late poem, " One Art (whose title conveys the implicit suggestion that mastery sought over loss in love is closely related to poetic control), articulates the tension between discipline in life and the force of circumstance. The poem speaks in the tones of the survivor: the art of losing isnt hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. The opening fine, with its echo of a folk prescription such as " an apple a day, " leads into the specifics of daily loss keys, of time syntactic parallelism suggesting an evaluative equation of what we immediately recognize as hardly equal realities. Such parallelism, by providing a temporary distraction that draws the reader away from the force building in the poem, functions as a disarming form of humor that undercuts the potential self-pity otherwise latent in the poems subject.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isnt hard to master. " One Art" presents a series of losses as if to reassure both its author and its reader that control is possible ironic gesture that forces upon us the tallying of experience cast in the guise of reassurance. By embracing loss as Emerson had Fate (the Beautiful Necessity), Bishop casts the illusion of authority over the inexorable series of losses she seeks to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel.
None of these will bring disaster. The race continues between " disaster" and " master" as the losses include her mothers watch, houses, cities, two rivers, a continent, and, perhaps, in the future, an intimate friend whom, breaking out of the pattern of inanimate objects, the poem directly addresses: Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shant have lied. Its evident The art of losings not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it! ) like disaster. Here conflict explodes as the verbal deviations from previously established word patterns reflect the price of the speakers remaining true to her initial claim that experience of loss can yield to mastery. With a directness that comes to predominate in Bishops later work, " One Art" delineates the relationship between the will and the world.
Note the split of " a gesture / I love" across two lines; the profession stands by itself as it turns back toward the beloved gesture. Syntax reveals the pain " One Art" has been fighting, since its beginnings, to suppress as the thought of losing " you" awakens an anxiety the poem must wrestle with down to its close. This last time, the refrain varies its form, assuming an evidentiary structure that challenges as it expresses what has hitherto been taken as a fact recognized from within the poets consciousness. Coupled with the addition of " its evident" is the adverbial " too" (Its evident / the art of losings not too hard to master" ), which increases the growing tension within the desire to repeat the poems refrain while admitting growing doubts as to its accuracy. In the end, the pressure to recapitulate the by-now-threatened refrain betrays itself in the sudden interruption of the closing line by an italicized hand that enforces the completion of the " master" / " disaster" couplet that the poem itself has made, through its formal demands, an inevitable resolution: " the art of losings not too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it! ) like disaster. " The repetition of " like" postpones, ever so fleetingly, the final word that hurts all the more.
The inevitability of " disaster" ironically recalls the fatalism of such childhood rituals as " he loves me; he loves me not" in which the childs first words, " he loves me, " and the number of petals on the flower determine the games outcome. In its earlier evocation of folk ritual and in the villanelle's rhyme scheme, " One Art" reveals an ironic playfulness that works in collusion with high seriousness, a strategy that proliferates throughout Bishops work. from Women Poets and the American Sublime. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990.
Copyright? by Joanne Free Diehl Elizabeth Dodd " One Art" is Bishops one example of a villanelle, a form she admired and tried to work with for years. It is widely considered a splendid achievement of the villanelle... Loss is its subject, but the poem begins almost trivially.
The first line, casual and disarming, returns throughout the poem. The natural-sounding contraction helps to create the semblance of real speech even within this complex form, and the details and examples that follow immediately do not, indeed, seem like great losses. Door keys, a wasted hour, even forgotten names certainly do not warrant the term consistently invoked by the rhyme: " disaster. " But the poem builds, until " cities" and " realms" of great import to this geographically inclined poet implied by this and all her books have been lost. Not until the final quatrain, bringing the villanelle to the completion of its required form, does the real occasion of the poem appear. Here the loss is very personal, a person, " you. " Yet the details and attributes here too are muted.
Only parenthetically does Bishop reveal the importance of the you: " (the joking voice, a gesture / I love), " yet love is evident through the speakers difficulty in revealing herself. There is a slight change, too, in the refrain line: " the art of losings not too hard to master, " qualifying that original assertion that loss " isnt hard to master. " And in the final line the speaker must even exhort herself to complete the rhyme (Write it! ) since disaster looms very large indeed. Yes, says the poem, this is a great loss, which I am still working to master. After the suicide of Macedon Soares, Bishop returned to the United States, and so the loss of lands and love compound one another. At least in part, " One Art" is a deeply felt elegy, but Bishop uses both a strict and difficult form and a casual, conversational tone to hush the emotional intensity. In this fine poem, her attempt to mute serves also to heighten the poignancy.
from The Veiled Mirror and the Woman Poet: H. D. , Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, and Louise Gl? ck. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992. Copyright? 1992 by the Curators of the University of Missouri C.
K. Dore ski The simple sentence of the opening stanza seems to subvert the title, declaring that this poem is not about art; rather, it is concerned with an acquired skill, the " art of losing. " Critics anxious to commiserate with poets will find this reading psychologically appealing. Not only does it guarantee numerous opportunities to rehearse this art, but (Bishop suggests through the acceleration of enjambment) supplies materials branded " with the intent / to be lost. " This perishable quality simultaneously allows for repeated practice and diminishment, if not extinction, of the pain. The poet offers a primer for the mastery of disaster, couched in the Puritan form of the sermon to others for their moral improvement. Mindful always of the common auditor, Bishop forces the second stanza to visualize with the philosophical ruminations of the first.
Readers learn precisely how to master this art, and are urged to practice, to make it into a virtuous habit: " Lose something every day. " A further injunction counsels the reception and approval of that resulting disorder the " fluster" produced by haste, undue agitation. Loss, art, master, disaster the lofty conceptual diction of the first stanza crumbles in the mockery of this near rhyme. The " lost door keys, the hour badly spent" become concrete entities and lost time. The refrain vulgarly collides with " fluster" to master fluster? in an uneasy rhyme casting the very tone of the poem into doubt. Bishop enforces a progressively dynamic, almost uncontrollable, schedule of loss in the third stanza.
Then simply shifts the focus to the next lesson. No longer does the homilist tally manageable, sympathetic incidents; the poem has moved beyond them to over- whelming concerns: places, names, and destinations. Each reader must supply concrete examples. The " intent" of the first stanza blossoms into the broader intentions of " where it was you meant / to travel" of the third stanza.
Bishop continues to induce specific details from the reader as the pace and range grow. Soon drained of places, names, and travel plans, the reader must struggle to fill the lists. The muted refrain rings hollow as these clustered categories of loss and faster / disaster cacophonies. After the impersonal professorial tone, the abrupt introduction of the lyric I requires immediate reappraisal of all that comes before this stanza.
The homilist's experiential knowledge, suppressed in the first half of the poem, surfaces as the teacher has obviously experienced frustration in the auditors ability to comprehend these lessons of loss. Bishop draws to the heart of the matter and summons the ultimate parting gift, her mothers watch artifact that links the living and dead, recalling a time, expressing a generation making tangible the feeling of irretrievable loss. Bishop literally lost her mothers time, as the stories " In the Village" and " Gwendolyn, " and the poems " Sestina" and " Manners" all demonstrate. Looking beyond autobiography to the truth of this loss, however, Bishop exploits what is, after all, only one more " minor family relic. " The exemplum confounds conventional ideas of the subjective and objective, and demonstrates that loss is grave and universal, but too conventional to be deeply personal. She defers the threat of sentiment by the sweeping rhetorical gesture of " And look! " Her life, no longer a chaos of events, seems orderly and safe as Bishop inventories and schedules her losses: " my last, or / next-to-last, of three loved houses went. " Her autobiography assumes an oddly reassuring linearity and predictability as the poem hurtles toward its closure. In spite of approximate knowledge" my last, or next- to-last" the end is palpable by its very proximity.
This registry of loss proceeds to the missing " three loved houses. " Even that great modifier loved cannot convert these houses into homes. In spite of the wisdom of Bishops crusade" Home-made, home-made! But arent we all? " (see " Crusoe in England" ) the ex patriot narrating this poem remains homeless. The narrator, further emboldened by self-knowledge, begins again with " I lost. " The scale has tipped; forsaking the personal for " two cities, lovely ones" the poet supplies lineaments and character to these scenic vagaries. Like the child-artist of " Sestina, " the speaker approaches the unspecified, the un embraceable, yet concrete, type of loss: " two rivers, a continent, " the loss of which suggest the impermanence, the unpossessable nature of the earth itself. Though there remains a tension between the public and private exempla, that tension is ill-defined and ill-conceived.
Bishop has adhered to the standards and expectations of her aesthetic; she has captured knowledge within the language and form of the villanelle. Yet with the displaced utterance delivered sotto voce, Bishop conveys a struggle between growing self-knowledge and her poetic of reticence in this dialogue between the self and the lost. " Even" moors this hierarchy of loss to that always poorly articulated world of extremity without you, I cant go on, I cant live without you those contracted conditionals meant to express the inexpressible love between two people. What threatens to emerge is that very thing her rhetoric strives to cloak: the self, naked to the vagaries of language. This ultimate series of I-You dependencies is the final protest against human perishability.
Herein lies the true lesson of loss: " Even losing you. " Turning from her common audience, Bishop allows the parenthetically ensnared qualities to create a caesura: " (the joking voice, a gesture / I love). " Readers participate in the auditory and visual recall of pleasure (not pain) reduced to this synecdoche for the severed other. The positive qualities of this ultimate sacrifice displace the irritations and categorizations that came before in the poem. The situation challenges not the pupils but the master herself. In the almost processional resignation of " I shant have lied. Its evident" rests the captive wisdom of the poem. In the extended refrain the art of losings not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it! ) like disaster.
readers see that parenthetical cure for the only true disaster. This encapsulated lesson is for the master alone; unlike the free, gestural " And look! " designed to deflect attention from the self, the parenthetical injunction maps a course for only one. The poet knows that only knowledge, not wisdom, can be shared. Like the child in " Sestina, " the adult must also make something of absence. Her reward is the knowledge with which to write.
In this rare command" (Write it! ) " Bishop distinguishes herself from even Stevens " Snow Man, " who is " nothing himself, " emerging as she does in this dramatic echo of William Carlos Williams " Say It! " The formal constraints of the sestina and villanelle freed Bishop to work with personal material without inducing the maudlin self-despairing tone she despised. The most forbidding and private sorrows, monumentalized in art, oddly affirm human dignity, emotion, and care. from Elizabeth Bishop: The Restraints of Language. Copyright? 1993 by Oxford UP Susan McCabe Though personal loss is often not explicitly confronted in Bishops poems, it pervades them. Readers of Bishop frequently turn to " One Art" in Geography III as distinctively Bishop ian in its restraint, formality, classicism.
Yet this poem deals openly with loss and has been rightly called by J. D. McClatchy " painfully autobiographical. " The formal demands of the villanelle keep " squads of undisciplined emotion" from overwhelming the poem, while James Merrill has spoken of " One Art" as resuscitating the villanelle in that its " key lines seem merely to approximate themselves, and the form, awakened by a kiss, simply toddles off to a new stage in its life, under the proud eye of Mother, or the Muse. " Personal expression makes the form looser, more pliant and intimate. In fact, Bishop uses form frequently, and especially here, to show its arbitrariness, its attractive flimsiness. Bishop claims that she had not been able to write a villanelle before but that " One Art, " possessing a somewhat dualistic dating through its metrics and tone, " was like writing a letter. " It is a form tellingly imitative of the obsessional behavior of mourners with their need for repetition and ritual as resistance to " moving on" and their inevitable search for substitutions.
We are ultimately left not with control but with the unresolved tension between mastery and a world that refuses to be mastered; we are left with language. Restraint is tense hilarity here: ? Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shant have lied. Its evident the art of losings not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it! ) like disaster. The imperative self-prompt " (Write it! ) " conveys the immense energy needed to utter the last word of " disaster. " From the beginning, Bishop presents " the art of losing" as perverse rejection of the desire to win.
In the poems alternating rhyme of " master" with " disaster, " disaster has the last word. " The art of losing isnt hard to master" is true because losing is all we do. The poem reveals a struggle for mastery that will never be gained. We can only make loss into therapeutic play. One does try to master loss, but Bishop recommends that we recognize our powerlessness and play with the conditions of loss: the blurring and splitting of presence and absence, being and non being. Bishops " art of losing" resembles what Freud in Beyond the Pleasure Principle calls the rule of " fort-da" (gone / there), after a game his grandson constructed in his mothers absence: The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied round it. It never occurred to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at its being a carriage.
What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skillfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering the expressive " o-o-o-o. " He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful " da" (" there" ). This, then, was the complete game? disappearance and return. At first perplexed by an impulse seemingly opposed to the pleasure principle, by a symbolic repetition of the distressing experience of the mothers departure, Freud offers two explanations for the childs apparent gratification in this loss game. At the outset he was in a passive situation was overpowered by the experience; but, by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took on an active part. These efforts might be put down to an instinct for mastery acting independently of whether the (repeated) memory were in itself pleasurable or not.
But still another interpretation may be attempted. Throwing away the object so that it was " gone" might satisfy an impulse of the childs, which was suppressed in his actual life, to revenge himself on his mother for going away from him. In that case it would have a defiant meaning: " All right, then, go away! I dont need you. Im sending you away myself. " (10) Freud finally hands over to a " system of aesthetics" (17) the consideration of how pleasure can come from repeating traumatic moments of dissatisfaction. The childs rendering of loss in symbolic terms with the accompanying verbalization " fort-da" suggests that loss marks entry into language, as language marks entry into the awareness of the presence of absence.
The shifting between such appearance and disappearance. as we have seen, becomes quite vivid through abruptly sequential sentences of " In the Village" First, she had come home. with her child. Then she had gone away again, alone, and left the child. Then she had come home. Then she had gone away again, with her sister; and now she was home again.
In a sense, Bishop practices the " instinctual renunciation" Freud points to in her poem not only by making loss an intention and active practice (as she does by swallowing the coins and burying the needles in the story) but by losing and recuperating words in rhyme. Poetry can imitate through refrain the experience of " fort-da. " The poets " one art" handles plural loss; but the expansion of this phrase to include so much validates such activity as the one and only one possible? with death as the ultimate project to be undertaken even as it is postponed within language. The middle line endings weave together to spell ultimate " evident" loss? " intent" / " spent, " " meant" / " went" : the other side of will and choice must always be loss of control, abandon, renunciation. Bishop instructs us: " Lose something every day, " and in the third stanza, " Then practice losing farther, losing faster. " The tercets logically build up from small (keys) to big (continent) with demonic precision and momentum. We are reassured by the second stanza that mastery will come to the novice in time, that we will develop the ability to " [a]cnet the fluster. " Yet the items lost become increasingly personal with her " mothers watch" at the center, deliberately at the beginning of a line as if to skip over it with a distracting exclamation, one that further heightens the way the poem presents a consciousness in process: I lost my mothers watch.
And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn? t hard to master. Still a potentially " last" or " yet-to-be-dismantled" house remains for us to see slip away from the poet, but there will always, one senses, be a further house, the never-to-be-secure home of her childhood that must be continually re figured, the child of " Sestina" drawing yet " another inscrutable house. " As we move forward, we also step backwards. The watch stands in for her mothers absence and loss?
a timekeeper that reflects its inability to " keep" time. Embedded in the loss of the watch is also the loss of her mothers caretaking and vigilance, as well as her fathers position as timekeeper. In the penultimate stanza, she leaps from the moment of initial loss: I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasnt a disaster. She can afford to let go of these " realms" because her imagination can provide new ones.
She travels from one tercet to the next, pushing the poem in opposing directions with rhyme. Crisis occurs just when we might expect " mastery. " Even within lines there emerges the desire for mastery along with its inevitable breakdown. Enjambed lines in all stanzas but the next to last indicate slippage. A complete sentence occupies only part of a line in stanzas 2, 4, and 5 and so disintegrates any effect of finality or surety.
Movement in time? " losing farther, losing faster" ? is loss, and Bishop reinforces her theme of displacement with " farther" liminal ly haunted by " father. " Bishops characteristic dash emphasizes breakage and propels us forward into the last encamped four lines: ? Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shant have lied. Its evident the art of losings not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it! ) like disaster. Loss and love are significantly encamped with the first two lines of this final stanza, but they not only confess how loss and love are bound, but give continuing evidence of " I love), " risked with a solitary parenthesis in the line. The most intimate words are not de emphasized by being parenthesized but blaze out as a temporary withholding, as her most prominent resistance to and acceptance of losing.
We no longer have an object such as the timepiece standing ill for a person but an evanescent voice and gesture, silhouette and trace. There appears a breakdown also in the certainty of the declaration " The art of losing isn? t hard to master" by the addition of " not too hard" and an admission of strain with the fiercely whispered " (Write it! ) " between the stuttered double " like. " Her " write it" is another way of saying " dont lose it. " But disaster exceeds trying. Writing reveals a doubleness: Bishop wants language to gain mastery, but writing brings us back to the recognition of displacement and loss. Rhyming, dashing, parenthesizing, joking? all these are activities meant to contain but in emphatic practice remind only how such strategies finally fail.
They can lead to renunciation not by making " disaster" into reified form but by accepting it as process and reenactment. The " work of mourning, " explains Freud, involves a gradual withdrawal of investment from a loved and lost object but against such a necessity " a struggle of course arises? as maybe universally observed that man never willingly abandons a libido position, not even when a substitute is already beckoning to him. " Bishops art is one that gives up fixed positions. We can now understand, perhaps, how " One Art" is only seemingly far removed from The Diary or " In the Village" : these texts demonstrate as well, as we have seen, Bishops concern with absence as it participates in writing. Language insists upon presence but always keeps loss in sight through its movement; ultimately it cannot hold back the fluid self and reminds us of the space left between us and our words. Elaborating upon Freud's " fort-da, " which brings language and loss together, Jacques Lacan asserts that the experience of primal loss and the emergence of identity coincide in language.
An original un relocatable moment, removing us from a state of undifferentiated wholeness with our mothers, commits us to continuous desire and translates us into the symbolic order of language and law. We become bound up in the paradoxical condition that " is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second, the phenomenon of their splitting" ; our " demand for love, " the articulation of it, then, puts us forever out of loves reach. Coming to see and say ourselves outside of the maternal body, we call ourselves others and feel the loss that this entails. Since our identity, our assertion of " I, " can only be constituted through language, according to Lacan, we see ourselves as whole or unified subjectivities only through the " function of me connaissance" most notable in the mirror stage when the child sees its fragmented drives and motor impulses duplicated as a whole-but a whole that rests on the split or chasm necessitated by mirroring; the " me connaissance" occurs as " form situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction" and offers a gestalt, or " an exterior ity in which this form... is certainly more constituent than constituted" and that " symbolizes the mental permanence of the I, at the same time as it prefigures its alienating destination. " Language, thus, aids us in believing the false vision of wholeness even as it shows such a vision to be an oversight. Consciousness attempts to veil over the power of the signifier over the signified, " the incessant sliding of the signified under the signifier" that represents the operation of the unconscious.
Poems that reflect such ontological uneasiness will appear from Bishops first volume on, with its " Gentleman of Shalott" presenting a character divided by a shifting, unstable mirror, living within the breach " of constant re-adjustment, " within perpetual yet " exhilarating" uncertainty and harness (CP, 9). Such a poem almost literalizes the Lacanian fracturing of the self. Lacan, as does Bishop, always points us back to our language. Dreams rely upon the functions in language of metonymy and metaphor, covered over in waking consciousness to conceal fissure.
Both metaphor and metonymy reveal that we cannot escape an endless chain of signifier's. Metaphor corresponds to " condensation, " the superimposition of one signifier upon another: " One word for another, that is the formula for metaphor" ; metonymy, on the other hand, reflects " displacement, " the continual " veering off of signification, " the " eternally stretching forth towards the desire for something else" (" Agency, " 156), much like the tireless and timely parataxis another early poem " Over 2, 000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance" discovers in its own text and the childhood book it describes with " Everything only connected by and and and" (58). According to Lacan's psycholinguistic model, we are constituted by a language that de constitutes us, where " no signification can be sustained other than by reference to another signification" (150): subjectivity is always then, at risk, so precarious that it becomes appropriate to say: " I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think" (166). The entry into the symbolic through the Oedipal event inaugurates a gendered subject while the desire for wholeness exists in excess of possible satisfaction: this desire for completion will be thwarted by the subjects fragmentation within language.
The phallus comes to stand for that moment of rupture from the imaginary dyadic relation with the mother, where one does not feel desire for the Other, because the Other is yet the self, or not other, without limit or demarcation. Lacan's definition of demand is relevant in showing the gap that persists between the subjects need and demand; this gap constitutes desire, so that " [d]email constitutes the Other as already possessing the privilege of satisfying needs, that is to say, the power of depriving them of that alone by which they are satisfied" ; this explains the " unconditional element of the demand, " which must look beyond itself to some fictive " absolute condition, " and it is from such an absence, " the residue of an obliteration" that " the power of pure loss emerges, " which cannot, in any last analysis, be singularized or pinpointed (" Signification, " 287). Such an understanding of language and identity as grounded in loss is central to Bishops feminist attempt to undo fixed or unitary identity. Jacqueline Roses introduction to Lacan's essays makes clear his acknowledgment that the phallus is made only to figure by anatomy and signals its own " pretence to meaning, " and the impossibility of satisfying desire; sexual identity is only " enjoined" upon the individual through entrance into language. Because of the arbitrary element in gender division, Rose sees implicit in Lacan's argument the possibility that " anyone can cross over and inscribe themselves on the opposite side from that which they are anatomically destined" (49). Lacan's project, in this light, encourages boundary transgression, especially if we consider his belief that analysis should not allow an individual to mask over the precariousness of her or his identity.
In the Lacanian economy, woman becomes, however, " other. " As Rose exposes, the phallus is by no means un problematically privileged, for it is: " from the Other that the phallus seeks authority and is refused, " but even as woman is subversive Other, Rose does not think females have " access to a different strata of language" (as does Yaeger, for example, in her discussion of " In the Village" ): there is no escape from the Law of the Father (55). However, as Lacan does not differentiate enough the breakage of mother-child dyad in terms of the childs gender, he misses the distinct relationship that persists between mother and daughter. The female may indeed, come to the symbolic via an alternate route? her language a different relation to loss. For the girl child, the ruptured primordial relationship may appear less final, and her gender role less reified than the boys in his identification with his father, as Chodorow has described.
Rose objects to Chodorow's apparent assumption of a unified identity (37), yet Chodorow acknowledges gender position as social construction that makes intra subjective shifting more available to women; in his emphasis on lack and loss, Lacan does not acknowledge relation (as do both Chodorow and Bishop), primarily because his andro centric perspective posits woman as the eternal Other. If language is joined inseparably with the recognition of loss, females come to that language doubly exiled from the dominant sign system. Nevertheless, identification with the mother makes for a potentially more pluralistic and multiple self. Julia Kristeva, for instance, rereads Lacan and posits a " questionable subject in process" that exists through the fluctuation between the poles of the semiotic (associated with the unconscious, the maternal, the disruptive) and the symbolic (responsible for the rational, the paternal, the systematic). She considers such movement " poetic language, " which through its " signifying operations, is an unsettling process?
when not an outright destruction? of the identity of meaning and the speaking subject, " and links the feminine with poetry, or more precisely, with the disruption it produces. While she does not explicitly catalogue her writing as feminist or, for the most part, treat women writers, Kristeva tellingly concedes: " It is probably necessary to be a woman... not to renounce theoretical reason but to compel it to increase its power by giving it an object beyond its limits" (146). Bishops poems subvert the very forms? not in themselves radical or " avant-garde" ?
they employ. " One Art, " specifically, casts itself either forward or backward: testing the limits of rational control, revealing the subject unsettled within flux; it literalizes displacement through its calling up of and discarding of objects. While " One Art" appears almost hyper rational, it remains consistent with Bishops earlier more explicit surrealism? the Paris poems " Sleeping on the Ceiling, " " Sleeping Standing Up, " and " Paris, A. M. , " to name the most striking? which openly affronts reason and logic, manipulating dream symbols in incongruously neat stanzas, to disorient and to trouble. We come upon form, yet cannot locate or settle into a " subject. " Bishop wrote at least seventeen drafts of " One Art" before she considered it written.
Not surprisingly, the act of writing is a focal concern of the poem, as becoming an artist is in the story " In the Village. " Earlier drafts of the poem show her struggling with the crucial final stanza where phrases such as " Say it, " " Oh, go on, write it! " recur as she tries to allow herself to articulate " disaster. " Draft 2 even has the tentative entitlement: " (Why not just write disaster? ), " protected within a parenthesis. The stilted archaism of " shant" reveals the essential feebleness involved in the final versions assertion " I shant have lied. " In some of the telling drafts, she simply admits " all that I write is false. Im writing lies now. Its quite evident" ? with false crossed off. Writing may tempt us into lies, but it also shows us up.
It is only in the process of " writing it" that Bishop can face the catastrophic losing of a love, though the drafts do not foresee surviving such an event: the first one trails off with the impossible maxim, " He who lost his life, etc. ? but he who / loses his love? never, no never never never never again? " (draft 1). As Lorrie Goldensohn acutely reminds us in her study on Bishop, written with biography as guide to the poetry, we cannot read the poems in Geography III, and especially " One Art, " underestimating the impact Lotas death had upon Bishop or without appreciating the topographical loss Bishop felt in repatriating to the States from Brazil: loss of person, home, family, country can hardly be disengaged (126).
The seventeen drafts Bishop wrote present a series of " mislaying's, " a word Bishop uses in her first version, and the published poem continues to confess its inevitable lying. " I really / want to introduce myself, " says draft 1: identity is predicated upon mislaying, so that like the more lavishly described loved one who disappears into a flickering " you, " the " I" completely goes under. The " you" is at first an " average-sized" " dazzlingly intelligent person" with blue eyes that " were exceptionally beautiful" (draft 1), and does not, by the way, seem necessarily identifiable with Lota, but with all those whom she has lost or could lose. What becomes " eyes of the small wild aster" in draft 2 evaporates in the remaining trials. " One Art, " with all its drafts, represents an archaeology of the struggle with losing. a process that is always with us, so that every loss comes to be all losses, retrogressive and prospective, shuttling through villanelle. As a love poem, " One Art, " as Goldensohn points out, does not necessarily signpost a same-sex relationship. Yet it must; for we know what we know.
It is stitched together through a lineage of female loss, with the mothers watch in the centrifugal position, with all other love relationships with women timed by it. Throughout her work, Bishop will test and question the boundaries imposed by " theoretical reason" with the awareness that we must resort to them; if we continue to use Kristeva's model, language and sense emerge only in the spaces created through severance from the semiotic. Retrieval through rhyme in " One Art" again serves as a way of pointing up the passage of language from the semiotic through the symbolic; form becomes a net through, which identity and all its belongings slip. In spite of Bishops reliance on form, her poem disturbs through its attention to arbitrary and frangible boundaries. Ultimately, Bishop practices forfeiture, a recognition of human limits and imperfection, and therefore, also a potentially freeing activity. When Adrienne Rich writes " Its true, these last few years Ive lived / watching myself in the act of loss, " she pointedly addresses Bishops " One Art. " Instead of sanctifying art, Rich insists upon imperfection, and says that " the art of losing" is " for [her] no art / only badly-done exercises. " Rich's poem insists on the primacy of loss and refuses to accept " acts of parting. " She concludes inconclusively: trying to let go without giving up yes Elizabeth a village there a sister, comrade, cat and more no art to this but anger Celebrating attachment to earthly things.
Rich calls for a vitriolic response, not the pained submission that might be read in Bishop. Yet Rich's poem presents itself as both homage and umbrage in mirroring what " One Art" un- says by its terminal " disaster. " Bishop does indeed feel her " heart forced to question its presumption in this world" (Rich, " Contradiction, " Your Native Land, 98) because she does not see any reason to presume. Still " One Art" admits that? tied to the villanelle in a ritual exercise and exorcism of loss? she cannot but be caught up in desire and attachment. Bishops poem suggests that she would like to write off artfully what she realizes always eludes inscription?
those spaces marking the losses of a " questionable subject" ; the form of poems becomes, again and again, expressive of the unruly processes of consciousness they denote. from Elizabeth Bishop: Her Poetics of Loss. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 1994. Copyright? 1994 by The Pennsylvania State Joanne Colwell (1997) [Colwell is examining the various drafts of " One Art, " and focuses here on Bishops struggle to write the last stanza. ] [B]y embodying uncontrollable emotion in a form meant to control it, and in an utterance meant to deny it, Bishop can create tension, ambivalence, and a poignant recognition of the pathos of human attempts to control the uncontrollable. In the earlier drafts of this stanza, Bishop struggled with the desire to say and unsay, to say two things at once, both admitting to the truth of the argument that the villanelle has established and admitting to the evasion of the truth that the tone has insisted on. To accomplish this she tried lines such as " of course, Im lying" and " its evident Im telling the truth" ; one draft of one verse completely explodes the villanelle form: All that I write is false, its evident The art of losing isnt hard to master oh no anything at all anything but ones love. (Say it: disaster).
This duality that Bishop works so hard to achieve in draft after draft (there are seventeen drafts of " One Art" in vassar's manuscript collection) she finally finds in one word, " shant. " This word, with its over formal stiffness, its anachronistic sound, its school-marsh precision, says both " Im lying" and " Im not lying. " Using the future perfect tense allows an ambiguity that no other grammatical structure can provide. Bishop accomplished the feat of expressing her ambivalence about her own endeavor; in the word " shant" she combined opposite meanings in one utterance. From Anne Colwell, " Geography III: The Art of Losing, " Chapter 4 in Inscrutable Houses: Metaphors of the Body in the Poems of Elizabeth Bishop (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 178
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