Maudsley Lecture | ‘O beautiful sound’: the bonus of pleasure in the writing of Elizabeth Bishop

Faced with an unstoppable cascade of losses, the speaker in Elizabeth Bishop’s famous poem, ‘One Art’, finally blurts out a desperate ‘note to self’ - ‘Write it!’  In this paper, I read Elizabeth Bishop and the French psychoanalyst, Piera Aulagnier, as parallel theorists of the ‘bonus of pleasure’ which sustains investment in the work of psychic representation, so that we do think it, talk it, write it.

Following her analysis in the 1940s, Bishop wrote an extraordinary, autobiographical prose-poem, ‘In the Village’.  The text opens with the child narrator’s registration of her mother’s scream, a catastrophically unpleasurable first encounter with the mother as ‘porte parole’, bringer of meanings.  Aulagnier’s concept of the pictogram, a primal psychic representation recording the first encounter between mother and infant and the affect present at this moment of encounter, places reciprocal pleasure at the origins of the infant’s capacity to invest in representing.  Bishop’s text stages the damage done by the mother’s pain-inducing scream as it continues to reverberate and echo in the child’s own linguistic functioning.  But the scream is countered by a blacksmith’s ‘beautiful sound’, the pleasure of which initiates a progressive revivifying of the child’s representational capacities and the achievement of a partial linguistic cure.  

I ask whether a shared element in the work of poetry and psychoanalysis is the working through of the founding violence of our initiation into language, work which is sustained by the bonus of linguistic pleasure?