Jean-Paul Sartre, Elizabeth Bishop, and Unbecoming

Jean-Paul Sartre makes a compelling argument about the nature of self-consciousness. In the introduction to Being and Nothingness, Sartre states that "self-consciousness we ought to consider not as a new consciousness, but as the only mode of existence which is possible for a consciousness of something" (16). In this way, Sartre suggests that self-consciousness is not something that occurs after consciousness itself. That is, one does not retain a power of consciousness that subsequently gets turned upon the self.

What makes this such an intriguing idea is how starkly it contrasts with so many other important ideas. Lacan's mirror stage comes immediately to mind, because the mirror stage relies explicitly on the idea that the subject conceives of himself after he is conscious. He must see the image in the mirror and begin to shape a notion of himself. Any theories which describe how the self constructs itself seems to be demolished by Sartre's argument.

But it is fascinating that poets such as Elizabeth Bishop spend so much energy questioning the self and its operations. It seems that Bishop and others unravel the co-existence of consciousness and self-consciousness, and are therefore engaged in a sort of Undoing of the self that Sartre envisions. If consciousness is the "dimension of transphenomenal being in the subject" (10), as Sartre claims, then the excessive questioning of the being that exists through multiple phenomena seems to undo the unity of that conception. Or maybe another way to say it is that the subsequent consciousness of a split self is co-existent with a split consciousness -- despite our potential to be unsplit.

I'm thinking of Bishop's "The Gentleman of Shalott" in particular. In this poem, she writes, "But he's resigned / to such economical design." Especially in her early poetry, she very persistently questions the viability of consciousness, which has an obvious effect on self-consciousness. She is almost a fabulist in how frequently she reshapes the external world -- not to impose a self-willed order upon it, but rather to de-solidify the external world. Our consciousness of the world then is somehow inauthentic because it topples the transphenomenal being described by Sartre.