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Postmodern Thought and Aesthetics in Bishop's "Santarm"

In the 1979 poem "Santarm," Elizabeth Bishop presents the reader with two different concepts of beauty concerning the wasp's nest that the narrator, presumably Bishop herself, receives from the pharmacist. These opposing aesthetic views create a dichotomy between perceptions of beauty and ugliness. Once this dichotomy is complicated by Bishop's inherent postmodern position, several questions arise: what are the multiple significances of the aesthetic dichotomy? how is Bishop's view of beauty complicated by her agnostic inability to arrive at definite truths? by her seemingly self-defeating struggle for mastery? Her descriptive approach to searching futilely for knowledge and postmodern unwillingness to believe in definite truths pushes herself and the reader to a point that blurs the subject/object line and sheds light on mankind's amorphous relationship with truth.

The utter necessity of an aesthetic evaluation contrary to her own is implicit in Bishop's commentary on dialectically tense relationships in literary interpretation in the second stanza of the poem. Regardless of what criticism of literary interpretation Bishop is trying to make, the mere act of citing dichotomies such as "life/death, right/wrong, male/female" begs one to create another dichotomy to complete the lista dichotomy such as "beauty/______." Bishop sustains the first part of the implied dichotomy, "beauty," for almost the entire length of the poem, until finally, in the last line, employing the words of Mr. Swan to fill in the blankthe second half of the dichotomy"ugliness." By bringing this dichotomy to light, Bishop sets the stage for a broader evaluation of aesthetics.
Bishop's agnostic mode of thinking prevents her from completely accepting one view of anything, including aesthetic critique and evaluation. Critic Bonnie Costello, in her book Elizabeth Bishop: Questions of Mastery, argues that "Elizabeth Bishop concerned herself, throughout her career, with questions of mastery" (Costello, 1). That is to say that, because of Bishop's agnostic denial of the ability to arrive at universal truths, she knows that she cannot have mastery over anythingnot even aesthetic evaluation. In the first line of the poem, Bishop states that she "may be remembering it all wrong." This all-inclusive "all" must necessarily apply to her favorable evaluation of the town, as well as the wasp's nest, and therefore her particular aesthetic point of

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