Elizabeth Bishop’s Equivocal Communions

Bishop’s poems experiment with combinations of empathy and judgment. Such combinations are possible because Bishop rejects the Bergsonian self/other dichotomy as the basis for humor. Bishop returns to a more Romantic model of intersubjectivity, suggesting that experience can be continuous between observer and observed, and her laughter marks that continuity. Bishop’s empathic humor is partial, however, because speculation about another’s interiority always misses something, and self-criticism often falls short of full self-awareness. Bishop suggests that for intersubjective insight to work, all subjects must participate. The “joking voice” in “One Art” shows how pain and joy, joker and audience, lover and beloved are mutually constitutive. But Bishop does not think communion lasts, and her jokes highlight the discontinuities they overcome. For Bishop, humor comes from the tension between empathy and distance, the partial nature of friendship, marking the moment of revelation and the inevitability of that moment’s passing.