When reading a text or watching a film, the audience is rarely aware of how much time, effort, and forethought went into the finished product that they are experiencing. Take for example a two hour movie that a family might watch for fun on a Saturday night. Every minute that goes by, every frame of film, has been manipulated by a dozen hands to ensure that the message intended or idea perceived is communicated. Whether this manipulation comes from the director, producer, screenplay writer, or even the post production manager; the fact remains the same: Perceived or not the intention of the creative mind always affects the finished work. The interpretation of that effect is up for debate, as it is the highest of follies to assume to know what an author or director thinks, but regardless of all the academic squabbling over the meaning of authorial intent we as an audience must remember that know work falls fully formed from the head of a giant, rather it is crafted for our enjoyment, our enrichment, and most importantly our consideration.
Wislawa Szymborska’s poems, Conversation with a Stone and The Onion are perfect examples of this trait in literary terms. As different as the two may appear; one short, one long, one rhymed one not, there is still a discernable is not palpable undercurrent tying the two together. Both poems address the idea of human identity, but each promotes a unique sense of ‘persondom’ with its own rhetorical and formal strategies. Conversation with a Stone achieves this by forcing the audience to ask ‘Can I identify with you if I don’t know myself?’ whereas The Onion, in its own lighter, more satirical voice observes that the depth and complexity of human identity is unrivaled should be lauded.
The idea of the stone is a common one in literature. Cold as stone, stone hearted, rock-head, etc. The approach Szymborska takes to the stone in her poem Conversation with a Stone therefor stands out. The poem opens with an unnamed speaker beseeching ‘entrance’ to the stone saying “I knock at the stone’s front door / ‘It’s only me, let me come in. “ (1) These two lines are repeated six times throughout the poem, at the start of every stanza where the speaker speaks save one.
This repetition would imply that the desire to enter the stone is more than a passing whim for the speaker. It is approached as almost a necessity. Each time however the speaker is denied by the stone and each time until the last the speaker returns or readdresses the stone with a revised plea, a stronger urge, a more desperate attempt. The speaker’s first attempt is plain and straightforward, saying only “I want to enter your insides, / have a look around,” (3) After the stone reveals that it is “shut tight” (7). This back and forth continues throughout the poem , with the stone becoming more resolute with each attempted entry until finally it replies
“You shall not enter,” says the stone
“You lack the sense of taking part.
No other sense can make up for your missed sense of taking part.
Even sight heightened to become all seeing
will do you no good without a sense of taking part.
You shall not enter, you have only a sense of what that sense should be,
only its seed, imagination.” (45-52)
This is where the metaphor of the stone is revealed. This response to the speaker is the longest in the poem, seven lines, suggesting that this retort, as insulting and vituperative as it is to the reader, is the one most worth listening to. The reply is also set apart and therefor made important by its first two lines which are set in iambic tetrameter. “ ‘You shall not enter,’ says the stone. / ‘You lack the sense of taking part.” (47-48) This is the only instance of a regular and observable meter in the entire poem. That is how we know that this is the stone’s true issue with the speaker. The stone is not a jaded heart, weary of loving again at the risk of loss, nor is it idolized virginity of youth resisting the temptation of lust. Nay, the stone is the mind of another, truly unknowable and especially untrusted to those of ill-experience. In this way the stone is more human than the speaker, or at least wiser.
The true irony of the stone however is its last line. This is the line that clinches the speaker’s non-entrace. The running anaphora is repeated once more and the stone finally replies with “’I don’t have a door.’” This grand anticlimax truly sums up the great amount of futility in the speaker’s metaphorical endeavor. The speaker cannot and can never enter or ‘know’ the stone, or the drop of water, or the leaf. The speaker can only know him/herself.
Szymborska’s other poem discussed here could be considered the complement to Conversations as it deals with the same idea of human identity. On sight the poem is simple enough, four stanzas, each one an octave, a little rhyme in the beginning. Very nice. The poem however cannot be judged on sight alone. It seems Szymborska (or her translator) worked very hard to bury the meaning of this poem in word play and structure.
The poem does tell a story, however. It begins with a nice, bouncy rhymed octave that says “The onion, now that's something else. / Its innards don't exist. / Nothing but pure onionhood / fills this devout onionist.” (1-4) Here we see the author’s sense of humor. These four lines evoke a strange view of our typical and beloved root vegetable. No longer the staple of a hardy diet, now the onion is stalwart, resolute. She continues with “Oniony on the inside, / onionesque it appears. / It follows its own daimonion / without our human tears.” (5-8) Here we see a repetition of the nonsense words from the first four lines. This would suggest that the character of the onion is so unique to our world that it deserves, in the author’s eyes, an entirely new lexicon. If we assume however that the ‘oniony’ words are derived from our own, a new meaning pops out. Following “its own daimonion” for example would become following its own daemon, or guiding force, without the trials of humanity. (7-8)
This nonsensical play with words sets up what is perceived to be the true message of the poem, a comparative critique of humanity as compared to the titled bastion of perfection. The binary established by Szymborska sets humanity below the onion, calling our organs “the anathema of anatomy” and praising the onion’s “unanimous onminudity”, or prevailing sense of sameness, throughout the poem. She then goes on to refer to the onion as a “centripetal fugue / Polyphony compressed.” Now she slowly begins to reveal her satire. By combining quantitative, scientific terms like “centripetal” with artful ones like “fugue” and “polyphony”, Szymborska makes her argument seem more and more ridiculous until finally in the last stanza of the poem do we see the poem’s true satirical ramifications.
Nature's roundest tummy,
its greatest success story,
the onion drapes itself in its
own aureoles of glory.
We hold veins, nerves, fat,
secretions' secret sections.
Not for us such idiotic
onionoid perfections
It is there that we see that the poem is satire. Those “idiotic” perfections of the onion described throughout the poem are just that, idiotic. Humanity is so much more than one mass of like-minded doppelgangers. Humanity is too great and diverse to approach the level of homogeny preached by the onion, and that is what makes it so great.
In the end, both poems speak the idea identity, or persondom. The Onion forces the reader to appreciate the complexities that make up humanity and identity, the blood, nerves, and fat. Conversation with a Stone, in it’s own way asks ‘Can I identify with you if I don’t know myself?’
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