Deceiving Appearances

Deceiving Appearances ; The Nature of Identity as seen in Conversations with a Stone and The Onion

Alex Totten

            In Heidegger’s pivotal work, Being and Time, he outlines the idea of the Dasein and the Mitsein. The Dasein, described by Heidegger, is the being onto itself, or the philosophical center of the universe. The self, the one, is the Dasein, and each structure of existence is centered on its experience of existence. The Daseins interpret and understand existence differently from one another. The Mitsein, on the other end, is the being onto others. The Mitsein is everything else that the Dasein interacts with. A table, a cat, a tree, and, more importantly, other Dasein are all Mitsein when in reference to the Dasein of that instance. For the Dasein, knowing other Dasein as he knows himself is impossible, to the point that they are considered Mitsein. The other subjects in the Dasein’s world are unknowable. To the Dasein, they are merely other interactions; their identities are something trivial because they are unknowable. In the poems, The Onion and Conversations with a Stone by Wislawa Szyborska, the author deals with the nature of identity. In Conversations with a Stone, the narrator carries on a conversation with a stone, asking the stone if she can come into the stone. The narrator wants to know the stone, but the stone refuses, knowing that the narrator can never know the stone. This statement is on the nature of identity as unknowable. In The Onion the narrator muses on the onion, the pinnacle of natural achievements. Unlike a human, an onion is the same throughout with nothing to hide, every layer is just as much of an onion as the last; the particles of the onion are onions themselves. The onion, although heralded as a great organism, is actually inferior to the human because of the human’s intricacy and ability to hide itself. Identity, in The Onion, is not something complex and unknowable, not something similar at all layers, like the onion. In both of these poems, the nature of knowing identity is a reoccurring theme, and is exemplified through the structure and devices contained within.

            In Conversations with a Stone, the narrator stands at the entrance of the stone, rapping at the door, asking to be let in. The stone refuses time and time again, but the narrator persists. The narrator appeals to the stone’s vanity, curiosity, and reason in a vain attempt at gaining entrance into the stone. The stone is unwilling to move. The stone ends the argument by saying “I don’t have a door”, and the poem ends there, without the narrator entering the stone. Rather the poem being a literal conversation with a stone about the physical impossibility of entering a stone, the poem is a statement on the nature of identity, and, more specifically, the nature of knowing another.

            The narrator is persistent on entering the stone, not physically, but in a metaphorical sense. The narrator isn’t going to any sort of destination; rather, she wants to know the stone on a personal level. It appears that there is a physical destination for the narrator, at first, “I want to enter your insides,/ have a look around/ breathe my fill of you,” (Lines 3-5), but the poem is riddled with other lines that indicate that the destination is internal. The stone retorts to the initial inquiry of the narrator by saying, “Even if you break me into pieces,/ we’ll all still be closed./ you can grind us into sand,/ we still won’t let you in.” (Lines 7-10). The usage of we in like 8 implies that the destination is within the stone itself, meaning the narrator is trying to know the stone’s identity.

            The poem isn’t about getting to know a stone though; it’s about not being able to know another person. First, the stone is clearly a person and not a literal stone; nothing in this poem indicates that it is of fantasy, and thus a talking stone wouldn’t exist. Rather, the author is using the stone as a metaphor for the type of person that would resemble a stone in emotional content. Archetypally, the stone is stubborn, hard, cold, unloving and emotionless. The stone’s overall demeanor is indicative of the fact that he is like the archetypal stone, but that doesn’t prove that he is a person and not a talking stone. He says, “’I’m made of stone,’ says the stone,/ ‘and therefore I must keep a straight face./ Go away./ I don’t have the muscles to laugh.” (Lines 20-23). Although this seems to prove the negative, that he is, in fact, a literal stone, the language actually indicates the positive. The line, “I must keep a straight face” indicates that it is a duty, rather than a physical impossibility, implying that he has choice in the matter. Further, he says, “I am bursting out with laughter, yes, laughter, vast laughter,/ although I don’t know how to laugh.” (lines 66-67). Saying that he is laughing, but saying that he can’t; this is a contradiction of what he said earlier, indicating that it is an act again. Also, he repeats “laughing” three times. Repetition emphasizes the word, making it more important. The stone isn’t a personified stone, but rather a human that acts like a stone because of the idea of choice. He chooses to keep the straight face, to act like a stone, unlike a stone who couldn’t express laughter, even if he wanted to.

            The stone is a man, but that is clearly not the point of the poem; it’s not just a topical conversation; rather, it is about the nature of knowing another’s identity. The narrator’s explicit purpose in the poem is to “enter” the stone, meaning know him, but he is willing to allow it. Not because he is an inherently mean person, or a stubborn individual, but it is because he knows the nature of knowing. He says, “You lack the sense of taking part./… You shall not enter, you only have a sense of what/ sense should be,/ only its seed, imagination.” (lines 49, 56-57). This line is important in understanding the idea of the poem. The stone states that the narrator wants to know the stone, but can’t because the narrator doesn’t understand what it is to be a stone. At their core, the stone and the narrator are different beings, and this essential difference makes it impossible to understand one another. The narrator thinks she knows the stone, the imagination of knowing another person, but she cannot truly know another. First, the beginning of the stanza is in iambic tetrameter, the only two lines that are like this in the poem, emphasizing the poem and accenting its meaning. The line “sense should be” is enjambed on its own line; emphasizing that idea of thinking she is right, when she is not. The only other time the author enjambs a line to only stop it short was when talking about the nature of knowing in the sixth stanza, where he parallels what he’s saying here, “but you’ll never know me/ through.” Through is emphasized here, showing that a surface understanding is all the narrator will get, even if she enters the depths of his person. Further, Imagination in the last line follows a caesura, denoting a stop in the line, accenting the word. Imagination is key, for the narrator is deluded the entire time, thinking that she can know him. She cannot know her, and that is the author’s take on identity. Fancy words and modern guilt cannot prevent the base barriers between races, genders, and identities. There is always something separate.

            In her second poem, The Onion, the narrator is musing on the greatness of onions. Unlike in the previous poem, the onion is, in essence, an onion, but it’s used an extended metaphor to explain an allegory for the nature of identity. Identity, for the narrator, is complicated and ugly. The skin hides the true identity for the person, and what lies beneath is something hideous, “Our skin is just a cover up/ for the land where none dare to go,/ an internal inferno,/ the anathema of anatomy.” This line is the narrator’s explanation of the idea of identity, not an attack on the internal workings of the body. The internal, archetypally, contains not the inner workings and organs, but the dark secrets, hidden desires, things one does not share. In a poem that talks about uniformity and the beauty in the uniform in the onion and the disgusting nature of the chaotic human body. The lines, “an internal inferno” and “the anathema of anatomy: emphasize this. The alliteration makes the metaphors stand out with importance, making the disgust the reader has with complex human identity that much more prevalent. Further, she talks about the connection between the internal metaphor and the actually inner workings of the body that she alludes to in the poem, “We hold veins, nerves and fat,/ secretions’ secret sections,” (Lines 29-30). The alliteration in the second line emphasizes the idea, making it more prevalent to the meaning. The veins, nerves and fat are the secretions’ secret sections; she utilizes the extended metaphor in a blatant way here, comparing actual structures in the human body to the secret working of the internal identity.  

            Instead of the human body, the onion, who is uniform, is something to be admired, “At peace, of a piece,/ eternally at rest./ Inside it, there’s a smaller one/ of undiminished worth./ The second holds a third one,/ the third contains a fourth.” (lines 17-22). The onion is complete because it is uniform throughout, never changing. What is on the outside of the onion is what is on the inside. The first line in this stanza, “At peace, of a piece,” indicates this. The piece is the part of the onion, independent but part of the whole, and, with that unity, part of the onion as a complete work of art. The onion, unlike a human, is the same at every layer. The enjambed line, “Inside it, there’s a smaller one of undiminished worth.” indicates this explicitly, emphasizing the idea of undiminished worth. Later, the author talks about the onion’s nature and how it is better than a human, “its greatest success story,/ the onion drapes itself in its/ own aureoles of glory.” (Lines 25-26). The onion is now being compared to a saint; its skin is that of holy measure. It’s draped in its own skin, which is and “aureole” and, its skin is the same as its innards, making it beautiful throughout.   

            So the poem is about the evils of the human body, the complexity that the skin hides underneath, waiting to burst forth and revile all that past. A human’s past, their secrets and desires, are all things the onion doesn’t have. The onion is perfect, or so it would seem. The literal meaning she is conveying is just that, until the last line of the poem where she refutes her own idea, “Not for us such idiotic/ onionoid perfections.” (Lines 31-32). The line is enjambed, bringing it to the forefront of the reader’s consciousness and emphasizing it. This is a truly important line. She calls the onion’s perfection idiotic after exalting the onion on high for being clean and simple, unlike the human. This reveals the piece of work to be satire.

            Looking back on the work makes this point blatantly obvious; she is using satire to actually say that human identity is complicated, but that isn’t a bad thing. In satire, the satirist will commonly use over the top tactics as a form of sarcasm and irony to indicate to the reader that the content of the piece is not to be taken seriously. Throughout the poem she uses the rhetorical device of hyperbole to emphasize this idea, “In an onion there’s only onion/ from its top to its toe,/ onionymous monomania,/ unanimous omninudity.” (lines 12-16). These words are over the top descriptions of the onion; she’s using hyperbole. Omninudity, meaning always naked, and monomania, meaning focused intently on one object, describe the onion to an extreme. Also, the way she describes the onion with musical terminology, relating it to fine pieces of art, “A centripetal fugue./ Polyphony compressed.” (Lines 23-24). Using the endstops here, she accents the lines themselves, and the hyperbole of comparing the onions to music make for a ridiculous scene.

            Another contributing factor to the over the top nature of this satire is the structure of the lines themselves. The stanzas are extremely uniform; each having eight lines each, both with two quatrains. Like the onion itself, the poem is uniform, showing the perfect nature of the onion in the lines of the poem. Further contributing to that is the rhyme scheme thrown into the poem. The rhyming only happens within two stanzas, and is not uniform without, but the first stanza and the last stanza has two rhyming pairs in it. In the quatrains of the first and last stanza, the second and the fourth line rhyme. The rhyme is so inconsistent, but it given the poem a quality of playfulness, as if the subject isn’t serious at all. Along those same lines, playfulness contributes to the idea of satire, combined with the hyperbole, when she uses the portmanteaus of onion throughout the story. Words like “onionhood, onionist, Oniony, onionesque, daimonion, and onionymous” make the poem seem incredibly playful and it again exalts the onion. The onion is so amazingly important that words need to be made up to describe them; previously expected English words are not simply enough. 

            The onion, for the author, is not the pinnacle of identity, but a charade. Identity is not uniform. Identity is not pretty. It is scarred, marred and torn apart. The piece is a perfect example of satire, exalting the human body through the inverse. The human, with all of its secrets and complexity, is beautiful.

            The two poems are a statement on identity, but they are two sides of the same idea. One deals with the conversation with the self and the other is with the conversation with the other, but they’re both dealing with the identity as something grotesque, something sublime. In Conversations with a Stone, the stone and the narrator push at one another. Their dance is a movement back and forth; the forces of the prodding other versus the need of internal solace coupled with the want for isolation. The repetition of certain lines exemplifies this. The narrator, at the beginning of all but one stanza where she is talking says the lines, “I knock at the stone’s front door, ‘it’s only me, let me come in.”, and the stone twice says, “Go away”. The stone’s reply is end stopped in the fourth stanza, accenting it to the reader, making it ever more prevalent. The end stopping of this sentence gives sternness to the conversation, exemplifying this relationship of give and take. Further, the idea of the other is prevalent in this with the narrator’s point of view of the stone. She claims that she wants to know him, but, throughout the poem, stone is never capitalized. Capitalization, in poetry, usually accents the word and denotes emphasis, but, in this instance, it would simply mean that the stone is a proper noun. It’s not. It’s the other. It’s so different from the narrator that he is less than she.

            Whereas Conversation with a Stone is the interaction of the two parties, The Onion is a conversation with the self. The onion, as the satirical perfect form, is something that is easily seen. The onion is unchanging and uniform throughout; what is on the surface is underneath, ad infinitum. Every particle of the onion is a piece and whole onion. This is not the same for a human. The conversation that take place in The Onion is exemplary of understanding the self’s identity. It is grotesque. It is misshapen. It is unknowable form the surface. The layers of human identity are something that is so detached from outward appearances that it is unseen.

            In Conversation with a Stone, the stone says, “my whole surface is turned towards you,/ all my insides turned away.” (line 37-38), meaning that the outside is unseen by others at all times, but the same can be said for the individual. The interior is something that cannot be understood, but felt, like the human body in relation to its organs. One cannot see their lungs, or their heart, but they can feel their echo, the result of its existence. In both situations from both poems, identity is truly unknowable to both parties, the outsider and the individual. Skin is impenetrable, opaque; identity is mysterious and fluid. That sentiment is echoed in The Onion, as the author talks about the idea of the multiple layers. If the idea of the poem as satire is acceptable, then the idea of the onion being beautiful because its surface is like its innards is actually false as well. The innards of the onion are knowable because the onion is an onion, but a human’s innards, one’s identity, is something that is unknowable to others and to one’s self. The basic ideas of the innards can be known, as in, one knows that they have the constructs of the liver, the kidneys and the lungs, but one never is able to understand and study those constructs. The intricacies of the liver, the texture of the lungs, the tunnels of the kidney, the owner of these organs wouldn’t know their intimate details. The same is with knowing one’s self. Identity in the broad sense can be inferred on, but never really known with precision, for one or the other.

            In both poems, identity is something of a mystery, unknowable for one and unknowable for another, and, it could be taken in the context of gender, in two senses. The poems could be talking about the interaction of the two genders, specifically in Conversations with a Stone. The interaction of the genders, gender as a barrier of understanding; all of these ideas are conveyed as a possible interpretation of the poem. The idea of identity and knowing another is something that oft causes problems in gender critical pieces of literature, and the poem can be seen as that. Further, The Onion can be a statement on the nature of gender as a fluid subject or as something complicated and complex. The human in the poem, paralleled with a human outside of the poem, is unknowable at the surface, leaving many ideas to speculate after the initial meaning of unknowableness. It could be on gender, sexuality, preference, a myriad of possibilities, or it could simply be about the all encompassing theme of knowing oneself and all of the struggles that come with that pursuit. The author leaves this up to ambiguity, warranting the reader to consider further the idea, and try to decrypt, the meaning of the poems. 

Alex Totten is a Junior English Major and Journalist at Wabash College. Contact: actotten13@wabash.edu