Elizabeth Bishop’s Grammar School for the Aspect-Blind and A-rhetorical

Walter Jost

doi:10.3390/rel8070125

Abstract

This paper uses Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” as an exemplar that displays the centrality of aspect perception in her work.

Highlights

The present essay is wrested from a larger inquiry of mine concerning what a mode of grammatical and rhetorical criticism of literary works, one motivated “after Cavell after Wittgenstein,”
The larger account proceeds on the understanding that those two predicates in the first place—“rhetorical,” and the “grammatical” investigations of Ludwig Wittgenstein and others—can be seen as mutually constitutive, that is, more or less discriminated from or assimilated to each other according to the circumstances in which they are used
In this regard they function like many of the concepts involved in the particular mode of thinking and understanding that Wittgenstein, in Philosophical Investigations (1951), calls “aspect perception”: “Different concepts touch here and coincide over a stretch;” “[M]any of our concepts cross here”

Summary

Introduction

The present essay is wrested from a larger inquiry of mine concerning what a mode of grammatical and rhetorical criticism of literary works, one motivated “after Cavell after Wittgenstein,”. By “characteristic mode of thoughtfulness” I want to describe a habit in Bishop of picturing different kinds of data in multiple possible ways—in the present case to begin with, actual or represented land in actual or represented water, and either one “with” and/or “as” green shadows/shallows This technique belongs to what Wittgenstein calls “seeing aspects” and “aspect-dawning” and “continuous aspect perception.” the mere fact that an author gets us to “see differently” is not headlines. In any case the scene itself gets even busier, for in the lines that follow the shading-cum/qua-shadows/shallows is somehow “showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges” (l. 3) . . . ” But “showing” in what sense? Is that something we are to see ourselves when we imagine looking at a map? And just what do we imagine or interpret when the poet further asks, “Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under?” (l. 5) And just what, is Bishop asking of us in “Over 2k,” I mean when the speaker asks, “Why couldn’t we have seen/this old Nativity while we were at it?”

Aspect Perception

Seeing-as