Place and body in Elizabeth Bishop´s writing: history, gender and architecture

Abstract

This article examines the importance of place and body in the autobiographical narrative of Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979). The selection of texts evokes the years of relationship with Maria Carlota [Lota] de Macedo Soares (1951-1967), without necessarily following a chronological order. In this premise, reflections on history, gender and architecture are seen as contributions to the affirmation of a creative existence, attentive to the impasses and potentialities of its time. In this cut, more affective and less committed to linear chronology, we intend to investigate the affirmation of an existence necessarily related to the place of dwelling. The analysis of the extracts, between letters, prose and poetry, is based on statements by Friedrich Nietzsche and Walter Benjamin. In Nietzsche, the contribution of the bodily senses to the exercise of thinking is examined, subverting the idealist tradition that has given to an alleged intangible substratum, sometimes called reason, the ability to reflect on the essential. Nietzsche maintains in this reasoning the possibility of carnal subjectivity to propose a universality of the absolutely singular, in no way generated by abstractions, nor even conceived by a pure and disembodied subject, as postulated by modern dualism. In Benjamin, the proposal of approximation between the singular and the universal gains relevance to observe how phenomena, grouped in meaningful units, can illuminate the experience. In both authors, the analysis of textual extracts considers the role of recall as a necessary imperative to the articulation between past and future, making possible a perspective 'knowing', analogous to a mosaic of memories dispersed between apparently harmless traits, as pointed out by Marc Augé.