The Strange Relationship of Memory and Religiosity in “Over 200 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance”
Elizabeth Bishop is revered in part for her ability to self deprecate and convey the human emotion of disappointment and state of naivety. Her work reflects personal growth and an ever-evolving world view. In her poem, “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” Bishop offers a juxtaposition between the experience of reading the family bible and the less impressive experience of travelling to places of immense religiosity. Thus the poem plombs a sentiment of disillusionment with reality and modernity, among other related themes. “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” charts an underlying struggle to interpret and hold onto religious belief, especially when new knowledge confounds it. The narrator’s relationship to an illustrated bible is overtly nostalgic because of its role as a familial devotional object. Through the relation between the enchantment of reading and sharing the bible and seeing the sites of larger religious practice, the narrator feels as though the nostalgia must remain a fond memory rather than an experience which can be actualized. The discordance of what should have been similar experiences for the narrator causes them to dissolve entirely into a new revelation that acknowledges the fragility of memory and knowledge as a whole.
The poem is comprised of three stanzas: two of roughly equal length and one ten line stanza at the end. The form of three stanzas is significant for its relationship to Christianity. The form of the poem is similar to a triptych, a 3 paneled painting which typically pertains to the holy trinity of father, son, and holy spirit. This is especially interesting when it is connected with the content of the poem, which loosely follows the structure of the narrator’s personal past remembrances, followed by accounts of travel and new knowledge, then culminating in a profound and difficult reflection on the wellbeing of memory and nostalgia as a whole. In the first stanza, the narrator details the experience of reading the family bible, paying close attention to the illustrations that accompany the text. She describes:
The Seven Wonders of the World are tired
and a touch familiar, but the other scenes,
Innumerable, though equally sad and still,
Are foreign. (“Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance 3-5)
Bishop recalls the fascination with the foreignity of the people and landscapes pictured in the bible in vivid detail. The domestic portrait of a family’s time spent reading a bible as is recounted in the first stanza lends to the idea that the form of the poem is set up in order to reflect father, son, and holy spirit.
The narrator’s own familial remembrances are situated firmly in a piousness often related to fatherly authority. As the descendant of the family tradition of Christianity, the narrator represents the figure of the son, which encapsulates the second stanza. The stanza details the travels of the narrator to historically Christian places, ultimately to experience a sense of disappointment with the lack of Christian piety among the people. The narrator recalls:
In Mexico the dead man lay
In a blue arcade; the dead volcanoes
Glistened like Easter lilies.
The jukebox went on playing “Ay, Jalisco!” (39-42)
In the second stanza, Bishop recounts images of senseless violence, commercialism, and exploitation. As she matures and acquires knowledge through education and travel, her connection to her religion becomes much more tenuous. She ties the cruel scene of the dead man being blatantly ignored to the biblical event of Easter, signifying the harsh realization that this man is far from ever being resurrected. Her faith in an exotic holiness of these places dwindles as the “son” of an inherited tradition.
The last, somewhat abstracted stanza tackles the subject of the spirit as a holy, intangible form. For the narrator, the holiest form or spirit is knowledge, though it has a complicated, tense relationship with religion itself. The proximity to holiness comes after the instructional line, “Open the heavy book” (66) as the language begins to describe a type of revelation through continual images of something opening: “--the dark ajar, the rocks breathing with light” (70). The narrator proposes that any religious zeal is partially confounded by time spent travelling and attempting to actualize fond memories. The result is a strong sense of disappointment and a longing to return to the naivety which nostalgia provides.
The obvious text to which Bishop alludes is a family’s bible with the luxuries of having additional illustrations and a concordance, aiding the joy of reading the tome. The title ironically mimics the tone of a sales pitch as it provides the perks of a particular bible. The author omits the phrase which would presumably be preceded by a phrase like “The Jerusalem Bible.” The result is a de-emphasis on the religion associated with the text and an overt emphasis on the ironic commercialization of the holy text as a consumer product. Part of what makes the voice of the poem disillusioned is the sense of fraud the narrator feels when travelling to places where Christianity is practiced devoutly. Strangely, the poet does not concentrate on the text of the bible, but rather fixates on her recollection of images in the particular bible she had as a child. Her dismay is not primarily with the text, but with the tenuousness of the mental images she had previously grasped so firmly. Notably, the poem begins, “Thus should have been our travels:/serious, engravable” (1-2). The narrator is concerned primarily with the appearance of the travels, or the part that would be engraved, as is a pictorial representation in said bible.
But as the poem discusses the truthful visions of sightseeing, a less moral representation emerges. Bishop illustrates a form of religion that is subverted to something greedy and falsified. The most striking moment comes at the end of the second stanza as Bishop describes the Middle East, the most religiously significant location:
the little pockmarked prostitutes…
did their naked belly dances; flung themselves
naked and giggling against our knees
asking for cigarettes. It was somewhere near there
I saw what frightened me most of all:
A holy grave, not looking particularly holy…
half-filled with dust…
In a smart burnoose Khadour looked on amused. (50-64)
The storyteller senses a level of consumerism which she finds to be disturbing and remarkably distinct from the images in her childhood bible. The commercialization of religion which she sees through her travels come to discount her prior experience with religion, as she is newly able to see that religion and consumerism are linked. This realization is inflected in the title, which recalls the other half of the title of the family bible. She becomes crudely aware that her childhood bible was an object bought with money at some point, which weakens its position as a holy object for the narrator. The entities of “Illustration” and “Concordance” thus imply that images and their supposed meaning are insubstantial within the context of the poem. The poem takes on a second meaning in the contexts of nostalgia and poetry as a whole. The author’s nostalgia for the time spent enjoying this bible is clouded by the life experience which makes the memory less fond. Poetry and its use of imagery also becomes jeopardized for its relative weakness when brought into reality.
The author complicates the struggle to interpret the religious text by implying that her most devout relationship is to the pictures in the bible, which she strengthens through a string of fragmented images. These images conjure a sense of morality that is distinctly unchristian by most definitions, building a contrast to the exoticized images which the author preconceived as being “serious” (2) as well as “sad and still” (5). The disjointed form of these recollections is nearly journalistic in nature-- the narrator faithfully describes the specific experiences such as “entering the Narrows at St. Johns” (32) and “The Englishwoman poured tea” (47). The truthfulness of these remembrances somewhat invalidate the previous stanza, which imaginatively recalls the images in the family bible. The poem culminates in a significantly shorter stanza which details the inevitable acquisition of knowledge. The author remarks that the experiences are “only connected by “and” and “and.”” (65). Thus, the religiosity which supposedly connects all of these sacred images and places dissolves into a less legible reality. The narrator wistfully asks, “Why couldn’t we have seen/this old nativity while we were at it?” (78-79) The line is an admission of remorse and an acknowledgement that the narrator wanted to see an actualization of nostalgia, an eternal sense of infantilization, but instead is forced to see the truth. The images of the “unbreathing flame” (71) and “a family with pets” (73) conjure a contrast between an immortal spirit and a finite human experience. The author does not slander the process of attaining knowledge, but does suggest that nostalgia can be clouded by life experience.
“Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” is a poetic masterpiece that tackles religion, image making, and memory. It cannot be fully explored in six pages, for it provides a multiplicity of meanings which form dialogues with one another. Ultimately, the poem suggests that belief systems can be looked at with adoring and imaginative eyes, but can never successfully be entered. Memory evolves with life experience and can be altered willfully or forcibly. The poem does not settle on one thesis but is decidedly as complex as are personal growth and the persistence of human memory. Ultimately, through the existence of the poem, Bishop argues that the propagation of knowledge and enchanting images should never be quelled.
Works Cited
Bishop , Elizabeth. “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance.” The Vintage
Book of Contemporary American Poetry, by J. D. McClatchy, Vintage Books, 2003, pp. 23–25.