Representing the Other: A Conversation among Mikhail Bakhtin, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wislawa Szymborska

All characterizations and determination of present-on-hand being that locate it into dramatic motion blaze with the borrowed axiological light of otherness.

-Bakhtin, "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity"

The monument's an external reality yet those decorations, carelessly nailed, looking like nothing at all, give it away as having life, and wishing; wanting to be a remembrancer to cherish something.

-Bishop, "The Monument"

The master throw asides with distaste the absurd cogitation that a table lost from view must remain a table, that the chair behind his back stays within the boundaries of a chair without level trying to take advantage of the situation.

-Szymborska, "Interview with a Child"

IN THE LAST STANZA OF "The Silence of Plants," Wisiawa Szymborska writes, addressing the plants, "A conversation with you is necessary and impossible,/ importunate in a hurried life/and postpon for never"1 With Szymborska, we ask, by what mode are conversations with objects possible? What is the possibility for the representation of things as interlocutors rather than either soils 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 through a context outside our immediate perception. She give in charges to her poetry as the poesy of motion, and her figure for the act of perception is the "Sandpiper," who is obsess with noticing each grain of sand between his toes. As with Szymborska, conversation with things is one as well as the other 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 moulds for representability. Our acts are depicted against varying connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughtss and assumptions regarding history and place, and the more profoundly chronotopic the connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts the more meaningful our acts. on the contrary before Bakhtin defined the chronotope, he make knowned in his early writing the conception of architectonics as the I-Other relation that is the basic unit of meaning and that is at one time both a temporal event and the solidify relation of the unique I to the unique Other. Insofar as the single productive representation for Bakhtin is of the Other, architectonics as a world view proffers a possible way to show objects as truly Other-that is, as always implicated in a creative relation with a self rather than simply as objects that stand against a subject2 For the Bakhtin of "Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity" (early 1920s) the aesthetic act is a particular aspect of architectonics. As of that kind it provides the basis for a theory the pair of the creative process and of the ethical !-Other relation. It is from one side and with Bakhtin's discussion of the aesthetic act in this early essay, then, that I want to revolve to Bishop's and Szymborska's questions regarding the representability of facts and, by means of this three-way conversation, illuminate the couple Bakhtin's theory of the aesthetic act and the practice of this act in the verse 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 place over and against the author or control As a result, Bakhtin rarely addresses the question of object-perception where the fact 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 reach forthed to objects as well as humans.4 Moreover, Bakhtin designates the hero as the couple an actual character in a work of art and the potential for the existence of the Other. Whenever the perceiver is stand over againsted with "only" objects, he must make them human through 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 thing perceived always possesses a voice, since to contradict 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 meditation the idea of voice separates itself into a purely human use of language. on the contrary 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 realitys of the sort in which the two Szymborska and Bishop engage are the creation of hero-potential in the world. In fact, it is the anthropomorphic necessity of of that kind a conversation (anthropomorphism being the enabling factor of conversations with objects) that raises various ethical dilemmas for Bishop and Szymborska. For Bakhtin, the vexed question of anthropomorphism does not arise, since the Other as predominantly hero possesse a voice as an a priori quality. Thus, the question of distortion is by dint of 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 mind instead of a voice, a impel in part made possible by dint of Bakhtin's presupposition of supra-existence or the super-addressee ("Notes 1970-71" 137) Bishop's notion of the Other, if any like notion can be "deduced" from her metrical composition is closer to Bakhtin's than is Szymborska's. For Bishop, as we shall diocese the world is an a priori socialized space and thus always anthropomorphized "before" the individual act of perception takes place. Szymborska's phenomenons on the other hand, retain a thingliness that is place over against culture. However, her piece of poetrys put into question the objects' separation from the cultural sphere, with equal reason that their independent life is sometimes the outcome of the speaker's fantasy (as in "Interview with a Child"), and sometimes a claim made for or by dint of objects themselves but simultaneously undermined in the poem