Elizabeth Bishop - Prose

II

To requote again: “The existing monuments [read moments] form an ideal order among themselves…” and, “The existing order is complete before the new work arrives…”

Almost, it seems to me, one is born with a perfect sense of generalities. At five years one looks around the dinner table at the cumulative family with as great a sense of recognition and understanding as ever comes later on. There is always an absolute pitch, a perfection to the understanding which may shift, branch out suddenly, or retreat, and yet can never be “improved on.” The existing order is complete; every other is absorbed into it. When you see someone for the first time, in the blank moment just before or during a hand-shake, this knowledge of them slips into the mind and no matter what you may learn of them later this is always the first fact about them: a knowledge of recognition which when compared to the things you may learn later is much the more amazing. The connection between this and my idea of the interplay of influence between present and past may seem at first a little obscure, but in reality the latter depends directly upon it. I can think of the existing moments which make up their “ideal order” as existing first of all as these moments of recognition. From a vacant pinpoint of certainty start out these geometrically accurate lines, star-beams, pricking out the past, or present, or casting ahead into the future.

Cross-references, echoes, cycles, take on in their lowest forms the name of “superstitions,” and an author who wrote a novel filled with such might be called either a primitive or, worse still, a mystic. But I have always felt a certain amount of respect for superstitions and coincidences; the fact that a friend’s birthday falls on the same day as my own impresses me; always I am startled when something I have dreamed comes true, or someone I have been thinking of arrives on the scene. I have always looked askance at the theory of irreversibility. The point is: the moments I have spoken of occur so sharply, so minutely that one cannot say whether the recognition comes from the outside or the inside, whether the event or the thought strikes, and spreads its net over past and sometimes future events or thoughts. Over all the novels I can think of the author has waved a little wand of attention, he holds it in one position, whereas within the shiftings produced by the present over the past is this other shifting, rhythmical perhaps, of the moments themselves.

To do justice to one’s sense of characters, events, thoughts, I think that not only should they be presented in such a way as to show perpetually changing integration of what has been written with what is being written, but also the recognition itself of what is being written must be kept fluid. These recognitions are the eyes of the novel, not placed on the face-side looking ahead, but rather as in certain insects, capable of seeing any side, whichever seems real at the moment.

III

A paper I wrote recently ended with these sentences:

Is it possible that there may be a sort of experience-time, or the time pattern in which realities reach us, quite different from the hour after hour, day after day kind? All books still seem bound to this much order, but I have a suspicion that it will go next and writers will discover new beauty in breaking up this most ancient of patterns and rearranging it. If you’ve seen boys dive after pennies you know how the coins sink shimmering to the bottom at unequal rates, and the diving boys sometimes pick them up halfway down, or even get there before the coins do. Why should the days behind me retreat systematically — Friday, Thursday, Wednesday, Tuesday — and not any other way? why not Wednesday, Friday, Tuesday, if they seem that way to me? And why should even Gertrude Stein say, “Now then to begin at the beginning …”?

We have all had the experience of apparently escaping the emotional results of an event, of feeling no joy or sorrow where joy or sorrow was to be expected, and then suddenly having the proper emotion appear several hours or even days later. The experience could not really have been counted chronologically as having taken place, surely, until this emotion belonging to it had been felt. The crises of our lives do not come, I think, accurately dated; they crop up unexpected and out of turn, and somehow or other arrange themselves according to a calendar we cannot control. If, for example, I have a “feeling” that something is going to happen, and it does, then the feeling proper to that experience has come too early — its proper place was afterwards. If I suffer a terrible loss and do not realize it till several years later among different surroundings, then the important fact is not the original loss so much as the circumstance of the new surroundings which succeeded in letting the loss through to my consciousness. It may seem that when a novelist talks about such things he is giving them the credit they deserve, but it seems to me that the fact of experience-time can be made of use possibly in its own order, in order to explain the endless hows and whys of incident and character more precisely than before. Again, I do not believe this in any way contradicts my belief in the expression of the constant re-adjustment of the actions within a novel — rather, it only helps to bear it out. Events arriving out of accepted order are nevertheless arriving in their own order, and the process will be just as true, no matter whether 2:4:: 4:8, or 4:2:: 8:4.

This is very plainly related to my original conviction that each successive part of a novel should somehow illuminate the preceding parts for us, that the whole should grow together. A belated emotion points back, of course, to whatever caused it, which was experienced in two different ways, each way exerting its own influence, the two seeking to eradicate or supplement each other.

IV

I have been speaking more or less of a new form and some reasons for its existence; now I should like to go on and speak of a particular reason why some modern novels seem unsatisfactory to me. One remove behind the truism that the substance of a piece of writing defines its form, comes a second truism: the author’s frame of mind defines the substance. This is a very murky stretch of woods, impossible to get under cultivation in a paper of this length, but there is one small path following naturally from what I have been saying.

A frame of mind is shown in what I think of as “keeping up the front” of a novel — by which I mean not letting the reader see the under side of it. Gertrude Stein keeps up a magnificent front, as terrifying as a crusade of vacant-faced children. Hemingway attempts to do it by putting up a bluff. But some writers, such as Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain, James Joyce in certain sections of Ulysses, and often Virginia Woolf, approach one in a series of outriders and sallies with constant returns to headquarters. For example, the chapter in The Magic Mountain called an “Excursus on the Sense of Time” is just such a retreat to headquarters. When the author says, “We have introduced these remarks here only because our young Hans Castorp had something like them in mind when, a few days later…” etc., it is as if he were confessing the problem to be a little too difficult. His ideas on time cannot be injected into the actual story — the two must be presented side by side and the reader must take one as a chaser, so to speak, for the other. In this book, as in The Waves (although it is doing Thomas Mann a great injustice to couple them), it seems often as if we were confronted with sections of a story combined with sections of an essay upon it; the reader must do the work, fuse one with the other. He is let in on the problem either in order that he may realize its difficulties, or as the only way of solving it. The question is still left open. What does Mrs. Woolf’s talking about flux do if her characters remain as rocks? In some parts of Ulysses it seems as if Stephen-Joyce were rather experimenting in thought than expressing the thought through the medium of novel-experiment, although Joyce has probably gone further with this latter work than any other modern author. (Hemingway is so determined to avoid this particular pitfall that he goes to the other extreme. In limiting himself to what he can do in the story and in getting the proper distance between himself and the finished writing he rids himself of problem after problem. He lops them off, refusing to talk about them or to attempt to incorporate them into the substance of his work — until the work reminds us of a hero coming back complacently from the wars in a basket.)