‘I take off my hat’: Elizabeth Bishop’s Comedy of Self-Revelation

Abstract

Elizabeth Bishop’s laughter often appears to be at someone else’s expense. But it generally gives way to self-critique (as in ‘Maneulzinho’) and to a rethinking of the observer’s position (as in ‘Filling Station’). Bishop’s poems combine empathy with judgment: her speakers’ failures of sympathy are to be both rejected and felt as our own. This simultaneous heightening of sympathy and critique is possible because Bishop rejects Henri Bergson’s model of humor, in which the self/other dichotomy is the basis for laughter. Instead, Bishop suggests that subjective experience can be continuous between observer and observed, and that laughter marks the infrequent moments when we recognize that continuity. This chapter argues that, for Bishop, humour arises from the tension between sympathy and distance, marking both the moment of revelation and the inevitability of that moment’s passing.

The Impact of Elizabeth Bishop’s Tragic Experiences on her Poetry

“…It seems that Bishop is trying here to attract attention to the double-sidedness of life and how sadness and happiness replace each other continuously in life. Trousdale (2019) elucidates, "The 'joking voice' Bishop adopts in "One Art" shows how pain and joy… are not just simultaneous but mutually constitutive" (p. 78). Sircy (2005) supports this view by illustrating that, in the poem, "Bishop appears … to have constructed an admittedly bittersweet,,, philosophy of survival" (p. 242).…”