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Representing the Other: A Conversation among Mikhail Bakhtin, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wislawa Szymborska
Comparative Literature, Winter 2005 by Graf, Anastasia
All characterizations and determination of present-on-hand being that set it into dramatic motion blaze with the borrowed axiological light of otherness.
-Bakhtin, "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity"
The monument's an object, yet those decorations, carelessly nailed, looking like nothing at all, give it away as having life, and wishing; wanting to be a monument, to cherish something.
-Bishop, "The Monument"
The master rejects with distaste the absurd thought that a table lost from view must remain a table, that the chair behind his back stays within the boundaries of a chair without even trying to take advantage of the situation.
-Szymborska, "Interview with a Child"
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IN THE LAST STANZA OF "The Silence of Plants," Wisiawa Szymborska writes, addressing the plants, "A conversation with you is necessary and impossible,/ urgent in a hurried life/and postponed for never."1 With Szymborska, we ask, how are conversations with objects possible? What is the possibility for the representation of things as interlocutors rather than either grounds for colonization or silent bystanders?
Our knowledge, Elizabeth Bishop writes in "At the Fishhouses," is always historical and "flowing and flown"-constantly changing and constantly changed by a context outside our immediate perception. She refers to her poetry as the poetry of motion, and her figure for the act of perception is the "Sandpiper," who is obsessed with noticing every grain of sand between his toes. As with Szymborska, conversation with things is both necessary and difficult. But what is the nature of this difficulty and what is its creative value?
In Bakhtin's later writings the chronotope is the grounds for representability. Our acts are depicted against varying contexts and assumptions regarding history and place, and the more profoundly chronotopic the context, the more meaningful our acts. But before Bakhtin defined the chronotope, he developed in his early writing the concept of architectonics as the I-Other relation that is the basic unit of meaning and that is at once both a temporal event and the concrete relation of the unique I to the unique Other. Insofar as the only productive representation for Bakhtin is of the Other, architectonics as a world view offers a possible way to represent objects as truly Other-that is, as always implicated in a creative relation with a self rather than merely as objects that stand against a subject.2 For the Bakhtin of "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity" (early 1920s), the aesthetic act is a particular aspect of architectonics. As such, it provides the basis for a theory both of the creative process and of the ethical !-Other relation. It is through and with Bakhtin's discussion of the aesthetic act in this early essay, then, that I want to turn to Bishop's and Szymborska's questions regarding the representability of objects and, by means of this three-way conversation, illuminate both Bakhtin's theory of the aesthetic act and the practice of this act in the poetry of Bishop and Szymborska.3
For Bakhtin, the category of the Other is primarily and paradigmatically the human other, the hero in a work of art set over and against the author or subject. As a result, Bakhtin rarely addresses the problem of object-perception where the object is a thing in the world. However, Bakhtin's understanding of the category of the Other is also extremely flexible, in part because the phenomenological terminology he borrowed from Kant, Husserl, and neo-Kantian philosophers and applied to his notion of the hero extended to objects as well as humans.4 Moreover, Bakhtin designates the hero as both an actual character in a work of art and the potential for the existence of the Other. Whenever the perceiver is confronted with "only" objects, he must make them human by imbuing them with an emotional-volitional capacity ("Author and Hero" 4-256, 66; "From Notes Made in 1970-71" 132-58, 137). The Other, human or object, always possesses a voice, since to deny the Other its own active self-determination is for Bakhtin to efface the Other as other. When language and dialogue become the dominant themes in Bakhtin's later thought, the idea of voice resolves itself into a purely human use of language. But in his early writings, it is simply the irreducible difference of the Other that makes the Other other.
From the standpoint of Bakhtin's definition of the Other as hero or heropotential, conversations with objects of the sort in which both Szymborska and Bishop engage are the creation of hero-potential in the world. In fact, it is the anthropomorphic necessity of such a conversation (anthropomorphism being the enabling factor of conversations with objects) that raises various ethical dilemmas for Bishop and Szymborska. For Bakhtin, the problem of anthropomorphism does not arise, since the Other as predominantly hero possesses a voice as an a priori quality. Thus, the question of distortion is by and large irrelevant for Bakhtin, since the Other can always answer for himself. When Bakhtin does address the Other as a thing, he gives it a soul instead of a voice, a move in part made possible by Bakhtin's presupposition of supra-existence or the super-addressee ("Notes 1970-71" 137). Bishop's notion of the Other, if any such notion can be "deduced" from her poetry, is closer to Bakhtin's than is Szymborska's. For Bishop, as we shall see, the world is an a priori socialized space and thus always anthropomorphized "before" the individual act of perception takes place. Szymborska's objects, on the other hand, retain a thingliness that is set over against culture. However, her poems put into question the objects' separation from the cultural sphere, so that their independent life is sometimes the product of the speaker's fantasy (as in "Interview with a Child"), and sometimes a claim made for or by objects themselves but simultaneously undermined in the poem.
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