Elizabeth Bishop’s

“12 O’Clock News”

A New Historicist Reading

Ideological opposition is manifested in the texts through the way in which they organize the elements of the story.

Texts, in fact, reveal their ideology to us - not the other way round.

All texts - literary, historical or otherwise - are ideological or are shaped by ideology.

Ideology is not “irrelevant” to literary texts.

Some key concepts of

New Historicism

Co-text represents a specific place at a specific moment – Saigon, during Vietnam War, being bombed by the US Air Force – while the speaker in the text avoids naming either the place or the time being alluded to.

Text: even though there are no explicit references to a particular time, place or characters, Bishop‟s poem does allow us to locate ourselves: the title – “12 O’Clock News” – invites us to situate ourselves in front of the TV or the radio listening to a news bulletin.

Connection between McCarthy’s prose extract (co-text) and Bishop’s

poem (text). Aconnection” can be a similarity or a contrast, a

parallel or a difference, a presence or an absence.

Different

no title title title

prose (seeming) prose

paragraphs (seeming) paragraphs

Inter-connectionsCo-text vs Text

standard format non-standard (2

columns)single typography double typography (2

typefaces) lone Vietnamese on a bicycle unicyclist-courier Vietnam is identified no country identified historical period inferred no historical period

inferred America criticized America not mentioned explicitly anti-war anti-war sentiment impliedReportage /report mock reportage/reportPress simulated radio/TV news

Similar

War as theme death as theme

1st person narrator /speakerUse of pronouns

Aerial/superior viewpointDetailed description

Use of irony

This is not an event that could take place, for instance, in the desert or the Arctic Circle or in a swimming pool or an operating theatre. Bishop connects us to 20th century technology and casts the reader as the recipient/consumer of a particular product, probably from within his/her own home: the news bulletin and, within that, the war dispatch.

This is a very familiar experience – think of news coverage of the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, etc. In fact, the absence of a specific context makes it easier for the reader to relate the poem to other wars, places and peoples.

Co-textwe know exactly where we and the narrator

are located – South Vietnam during the US air offensive in the Vietnam War.

The narrator speaks from the Western side even though she does express some sympathy for the Vietnamese and criticizes American intervention.

As readers, we receive this passage as news reportage and/or a chronicle of real events.

We are more likely to limit ourselves to the time and place of what is being represented, rather than extend our reading to include conflicts in other places or times.

The co-text encourages us to fix or stabilize meaning in the text.

Reading the two together also draws attention to their differences, contrasts and similarities.

While the themes may be very similar (anti-imperialist, anti-war, sympathy for the victims of war), we are reminded how these themes (indeed, any themes) can be expressed through different forms and how, in turn, form shapes our reading.

Form is central to how a text (any text) produces meaning and how the reader receives that same text.

The fact that Bishop’s poem has the title it has and looks like a news bulletin, therefore, encourages us to read it as such.

However, there are aspects which distance the text from this particular genre: the words in the margin, for instance.

One effect of this device is to draw attention to the language and shape of the text, something that poetry tends to do (see the exercises for the Dylan Thomas poem).

Intra-connections (within the Text)

If we read just the words in the left-hand margin we get the impression of a situation or activity connected to writing in the days before computer technology.

Many of the objects of course are still part of our 21st century reality: the lamp, the manuscripts, the envelopes and ashtray. In fact, even the typewriter, ink-bottle and eraser are still preferred by some writers.

Nevertheless, the absence of digital technology already affects how we read this poem.

Visual parallelsThe intra-connections are established mainly through visual parallels, but not only.

There seem to be very deliberate intra-connections between the two “texts” in this poem.

gooseneck lamp: the lamp connects to the full moon and the light shed by both. The moon sheds “little‟ or “poor‟ light, suggesting the lamp also gives off dim illumination.

In English, the expression “to shed light‟ has a literal and a figurative sense, meaning both to shed physical light in darkened surroundings and also “to clarify or illuminate‟ a situation or mystery.

typewriter: the typewriter rows of keys anticipate the image of “those small, peculiarly shaped terraces”, connecting a contemporary (and urban?) object to a timeless (“What endless labor…”) and rural activity.

pile of manuscripts.: if we assume manuscripts to be white in colour, then this would connect to the image of the “white, calcareous, and shaly” soil. The last adjective – shaly – refers to “soft finely stratified rock […] consisting of consolidated mud or clay” and also reinforces the image of sheets of paper piled on top of one another.

typed sheets: again, this reaches out to the image of “a large rectangular “field‟ […]. It is dark-speckled”, which recalls a sheet of paper covered in typed words resembling “dark-speckled” marks.

envelopes: the visual parallel is somewhat less obvious here, though references to “communications‟, “industrialization‟ and “sign-boards‟ suggest a continued attempt to connect the practice of written communication to the environment or world represented in the right-hand text.

ink-bottle: the “mysterious, oddly shaped, black structure” echoes the shape of the ink-bottle we can imagine the speaker to have on his/her desk or at least within his/her field of vision as h/she writes the “12 o’clock news”.

The blackness of the ink picks up the “little light” and “poor visibility” of the first paragraph.

Here we are told that the moonlight is “feeble”. The absence of proper illumination seems to suggest an inability to understand or relate to the events the speaker is describing.

typewriter eraser: again, the imagistic or visual connections here are elusive On the other hand, the presence of an eraser seems to anticipate the “erasure” of the life of the unicyclist-courier.

Note how indirectly the death of the cyclist is conveyed: “he appears to be – rather, to have been – a unicyclist courier, who may have met his end […]. Alive, he would have been…”. Death is expressed through the past, modal and conditional forms of the verb, rather than the simple present or a declarative statement.

ashtray: perhaps the most striking equivalence between left- and right-hand texts. The “nest‟ of “soldiers” lying “heaped together” and “in hideously contorted positions, all dead” vividly mirrors the image of an ashtray full of half-smoked cigarettes or cigarette butts.

Is the speaker saying that the dead war victims have no more significance for the west than cigarette butts in an ashtray?

Or is there another (implicit) attempt to implicate the West in the horrors of the war that it is perpetrating on “the elusive natives”?

Note that the poem ends here with an unequivocal image of death, a theme which has only been suggested in previous “paragraphs‟. It’s almost as if “12 O’Clock News” has been building up to this final moment to give us the message: WAR KILLS.

This poem seems to be about armed aggression or war and its human consequences.

The shape of the poem itself suggests division and conflict: the items listed on the left are western, industrialized, modern, while the scenes and events described on the right are non-western, rural, backward (according to the speaker).

However, on closer reading this “binary opposition‟ is subverted by the seeming connections between the two halves of the poem indicated.

Some conclusions

The them/us binary suggested by the imperialist, condescending tone of the speaker (“this people”, “the elusive natives”, “From our superior vantage position”, etc.) and the visually separate texts, is undermined by the poem’s strategy to make connections between its left and right hand.

Is the poem, through its integrating strategy, suggesting that art (the attempt to give shape to experience) can redeem us from atrocities such as war?

Thanks