상실과 글쓰기: 엘리자베스 비숍의 「한 가지 기술」과 「마을에서」

Abstract

Elizabeth Bishop always had her interrogations of ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Where do I belong?’ through her experiences of loss and displacement in her life. She also recognized what the unsafe life was and how the uprootedness which could be prodigal was. With these, she raised her ability to dissolve and erase boundary markers in the interrogations of a fixed or static self. She also knew that writing helped her raise and recall her losses so she could move ahead. Therefore, in her work, she shows her mourns for the sense of loss and poetics of loss as the expressions of identity through her writing. I can say that her releasing of her experiences through language is the writing for loss as loss, like Freud’s ‘burial of memory’. In other words, her writing is writing loss with the language of loss, and this is the process of losing. Bishop’s writing plays a role of a mirror. She sees herself and her relations with the world through the mirror of writing. There she recognizes her own identity and observes the world objectively, and finally finds out that losing is an art that she should master in her life. However the process of losing, for Elizabeth Bishop, is not an art like any other. It requires that she goes to gain mastery, that she neither monumentalizes her experience nor fixes what is always in the process of dissolution. For she recognizes how inseparable her living is from her art and shows an aesthetics of impersonality and autonomy by an interlacing of her life with her art. In Bishop, writing is a way not to overcome, but to come to terms with loss. Her poetics of loss and writing can be explained as the curative process by Freud’s “fort/da”, which is also expanded by the concept of Lacan’s identity and language. Such an understanding of language and identity as grounded in loss is central to Bishop’s feminist attempt to undo fixed or unitary identity. She shows how writing becomes a means of mourning and how for her a poetics of loss imbricates a writing of a fluid and unfixed self as the expression of a particularly feminine identity through a poem, “One Art” and a prose, “In the Village” which is a story which recounts some episodes of her Nova Scotian childhood as tinted by the loss of her parents and by the emergence of her poetic temperament.