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"Controlled Panic": Mastering the Terrors of Dissolution and Isolation in Elizabeth Bishop's Epiphanies
Style, Fall, 2000 by Martin Bidney
Terror, together with the lifelong attempt to master it, is at the root of Bishop's art to an extent that only epiphanology, combined with psychoanalysis, can show. In Bishop's epiphanies, the terror of flooding or fiery motions that threaten mental chaos through dissolution of the self is as great as the contrasting fear of rounded, hardening shapes that embody the deadness of the isolated, bounded self. How psychoanalysis and what I call epiphanology combine to elucidate the problem and its semi-abstract visual embodiments will be most fully shown when we examine Bishop's epiphanic paradigm from both standpoints.
After first offering an analysis of Bishop's epiphanic paradigm, "In the Waiting Room," I will show how preoedipal psychoanalysis can expose the roots of the terror that the poem recalls and arouses. With the help of Fairbairn's psychological insights, and with reference to various controlling strategies I shall discuss shortly, I will next study Bishop's strongest epiphanies in a two-stage progression that leads from four epiphanies climaxing in dissolution, submersion, death or the threat of death, to seven epiphanies showing a greater degree of what Bishop calls "controlled panic," a psychological mastery of the threat of the self s disintegration or deadening dispersal. Such control is attained through spatial distancing, conceptual framing, or both. Finally, I will show that Bishop attains a rare, hard-earned psychological "victory" (clarified by "Sonnet") through compassionate empathy when she finds an adequate visionary love object in "The Fish," a poem giving a sense of destruction narrowly averted b y the liberating revelation of a spreading, flowing light. Before analyzing specific epiphanies or Bishop's epiphanic paradigm, however, I must first explain the semi-abstract pattern of motions, shapes, and elements that unifies Bishop's epiphanies.
Motion in Bishop's epiphanies is sudden, violent and terrifying; the psyche of the Bishop epiphanist-persona is subject to upheavals, eruptions, and surges from within and without, all of them threatening psychological dissolution. In Bishop, panic-striking movement is most often vertical--upward surges and downward plunges, sometimes a surge followed by a plunge--but that it can also be horizontal indicates that the source of terror is either inside (a sinking feeling, a rising excitement) or outside (an invasive incursion). Because dramatic motion is central for Bishop, she focuses on fluxile elements: fire and water. She most often links eruptions and submersions to fire (volcanos) and water (powerful descending waves), though she may strangely merge fire and water, and in the merger may reverse their most common directions of movement. A weed suddenly bursting up from the ground may bring the element of earth, as well, into the pattern of violent vertical motion. Bishop may find lateral movements equally threatening: tidelike currents cause a blackout; the horizontal rolling of a rocklike armored car is devastating. Especially with surging-plunging surflike waves, water movements may merge vertical and horizontal. Any of these sudden motions may annihilate the epiphanist-persona.
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