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Ashbery hors cadre

 | 
Hélène Aji
, 
Agnès Derail

Storytelling in John Ashbery’s self-portrait in a convex mirror

Fiona Mcmahon

Testo integrale

… The streets / Offered a variety of directions to the foot
“Grand Galop”, p. 18

  • 1  D. Herd, John Ashbery and American Poetry, p. 146.
  • 2  Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov”, Illuminations, ed. (...)

1The image of a figure poised to begin weaving their way through the streets is a familiar paradigm of literary modernity. In John Ashbery’s 1975 volume, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, it is indicative of an expansive and quizzical consciousness whose meandering paths bear comparison with other rambling figures encountered in the American long poem. Ashbery’s metaphor recalls how the interactions between lyric and epic modes in American poetry since Walt Whitman have helped build metionymic frames to trace the progress of the mind as one would the footsteps of a central poetic persona. With Ashbery, the elusiveness of the pivotal figure shaping the journey renders the plot of this progress more difficult to map. The imprint of the consciousness is permanently shifing ground and as a result, it appears adrif in any number of mindscapes. The promise of “variety” (p. 18) risks slipping into forms of ontological uncertainty, though we might identify shades of a Whitmanian impulse to build a universe fit for travel that the reader may meld with their own experience. As David Herd argues, “[T] he ideal reader of an Ashbery poem will […] be active like Emerson’s, the activity of reading bringing the reader to the point at which he or she might (ideally) write the poem for themselves”.1 Given the extent to which the free verse paragraphs of Ashbery’s volume stray from poetic convention, the relationship between writer and reader is conditioned problematically upon the disruptions effecting style and the reader’s willingness to puzzle through the difficultes that arise. Points of reference are equally undermined by a propensity to shif contexts and essentally deflect narratve sequentality. As a result, the response of the partcipatory audience is implicitly shaped by verbal motfs suggestng the fragmentation of the human condition. Part of the experience of reading Ashbery is shaped thus by a negatvely ambiguous relationship between the linguistc medium and the possibility of meaning it affords. However this paradox does not distract from the fascination Ashbery’s disjunctve poetcs may hold over the reader, partcularly when it brings into view the mechanics of narratve discourse and in the words of Walter Benjamin, the “communicable experience”2 it purports to provide. The incongruity of narratve as it takes root and dissolves in Ashbery’s poetry will form the basis of our discussion of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Narratve tactcs will be examined as a mirror and as a challenge to Ashbery’s poetcs, as they build from a referental premise to an array of discursive strategies that favor circular paths over linear ones.

2The transformations Ashbery brings to the referential heft of the long poem provide a relevant point of departure, whether discussing the poet’s perspectives on instances of monumental enumeration reflected in a Whitmanian “kosmos” or the cumulative macrocosms that organize a world in William Carlos Williams’s long poem, Paterson. For instance, “Grand Galop,” in the tradition of the long poem, takes an inventory of the world: “All things seem mention of themselves / And the names which stem from them branch out to other / referents” (p. 14). The stiff neutrality of these lines offers a bland acknowledgment of the exponential character of material existence. Yet it is followed by an invocation of spring that recalls the existential certainty ingrained in depictions of nature that one may find in Romantic poetry: “Hugely, spring exists again” (p. 15). The adverb “hugely” is paired with the verb “exist” in a jarring combination of terms that may be read as a gesturing towards the plight of the contemporary poet whose task it is to observe and devise a way to name the immensity of experience. The misalignment of the poet’s task is cast glaringly in the ordinariness of the universe he proceeds to name. Indeed, the reader is presented with a host of familiar objects that comprise aspects of a contemporary American socio-cultural context: “Jello, milk and cookies”; “lawns and vacant lots” (p. 14-15). In a bathetic twist, these ordinary items are cast paradoxically as ‘imponderables” (p. 15) whose meaning the “words” of poetry, inexplicably “weightless” (p. 15), fail to communicate. The evanescence of language disrupts efforts to tie the poetic catalogue closely associated with the contingencies of a contemporary American scene to a representational canvas.

3More generally, John Ashbery’s poem “Grand Galop” signals an affinity for efforts to allegorize poetry as a voyage of discovery buoyed along by some form of lively brilliance that the poem’s title urges us to anticipate. If received as an allusion to a nineteenth-century piano piece by Liszt of the same name, one might assume a note of deference to stylistic bravura in this citational reference. However it reads part whimsical part parodic when considered against the poem as a whole. The assertiveness of compositional models learned from prosody, narrative and music are defeated by the directionless traveler who emerges in this poem. Poetry’s embeddedness in the enduring question of influence is played out through the musings of a persona who when not pausing is “speed (ing) away in the opposite direction” (p. 16) or acknowledging flatly: “I cannot decide in which direction to walk” (p. 17). There is an implicit recognition of the derivative nature of writing and the long history stretching back to classical poetry of the analogies used to describe the movement written into lines of verse. Though the poems of SPCM do little to mirror a musical dance pattern, as in the Greek ode for instance, they relentlessly draw attention to the creative process as a deliberate patterning. They build upon the long-practiced conversation with respect to the generic demarcations of poetry. The tendency of poetry to variation is dramatized in the progress of Ashbery’s persona whose prosus or going forth is never quite resolute. Instead, his fate is identified with versus, the Latin etymology of verse, literally the action of “turning”. With Ashbery, this is a turning back as the mind races forward, as the persona’s footsteps bring him back repeatedly though unsteadily to a new point of entry along an indeterminate path.

  • 3  S. Ross, Invisible Terrain: John Ashbery and the Aesthetcs of Nature, p. 109.

4The critic Stephen Ross obligingly synthesizes the various means by which the emblematic hesitations of an unstable consciousness are embodied on the page. For Ross, Ashbery’s “evanescing syntax, drifting subject matter” and “pronominal migrations” combine with “the see-sawing of the highbrow and the lowbrow, the jostling of the connotative and the denotative” to form a “poetics of dispersed subjecthood”.3 The map of contemporary culture pictured in Ashbery’s poetry is one whose intellectual, psychological and artistic mediacy are mirrored through these destabilizing creative processes. The central figure of this culture is the questing persona who self-consciously reflects on the rhetorical model of literature and its limitations to act as a vehicle of meaning:

But I was trying to tell you about a strange thing
That happened to me, but this is no way to tell about it,
By making it truly happen. It drifs away in fragments.
And one is lef sitng in the yard
To try to write poetry
Using what Wyat and Surrey lef around,
Took up and put down again
Like so much gorgeous raw material
“Grand Galop”, p. 19

  • 4  Peter Quartermain, Disjunctve Poetcs: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe, New Yo (...)

5While characteristcally conversational, the tione conveyed in these lines underscores the predicament of an Ashberian persona whose discourse is undercut by instances of caesura, oxymoron and the uncertain designs of metaphor. If the story of what “happened” is made to collapse— “it drifs away in fragments” —there is an abiding interest in the structures of narratve as they relate to the formal and rhetorical organization of poetry. The “gorgeous raw material” of the early sonneteers Wyat and Surrey is pictured as though the remnants of a tradition that have been abandoned. There is an image of the contemporary poet woven into these lines who is contemplatng the usable past, that which has been discarded, now collected and put to use once more in the present. But he who “is lef sitng in the yard” merely acknowledges the tools learned from the sonnet’s Tudor lineage, while the mediation between the contemporary context and tradition remains circumstantal and provisional. The encounter with the past is no more rational than the experience the persona atempts to relate in the present. This is a world that defies coherence and whose strangeness is carried over into Ashbery’s prosody. We are reminded of the principle behind much contemporary experimental poetry described by the critc Peter Quartermain: “Ordinary syntax is, like the language of classical mathematcs, incapable of describing a world whose unity seems ofen more delusional than actual.”4

… . Each person
Has one big theory to explain the universe
But it doesn’t tell the whole story
And in the end it is what is outside him
That maters, to him and especially to us
Who have been given no help whatever
In decoding our own man-size quotent and must rely
On second-hand knowledge. Yet I know
“SPCM”, p. 81

6The poetry of John Ashbery invites us to consider what it means to write in and of the present. There is an evident deliberateness in settting the idiosyncrasies of free verse against the background of an exquisitely unique though ever-changing present time. The “lapidary / Todayness” (p. 78) celebrated in Ashbery’s long poem, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” draws upon a proclivity for fashioning poetry after a practce that finds its seeds of invention in a permanently evolving present. The expediency of enjambment carries the line from an image of careful refinement to the edge of a luminous Wordsworthian commonality that is brought into view in the “sunlight” of Ashbery’s “never to-be-defined daytime” (p. 78). However, no matter how closely the language of poetry is colored by the temperament of Ashbery’s idealized present, at once mundane and complex, the speculative mind at work is at once untethered and exploratory, looking backwards to “second-hand knowledge,” as in this instance. The ars poetica that emerges from this long poem and more broadly, from the eponymous collection is an indication of the degree to which the poet’s endeavor to imagine the poetry of the present is conditioned upon the paradoxical lure of what can be learned from the past.

7The observation of representational conventions sustains the reader in a relationship with the past from the opening line of Ashbery’s long poem, “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror”. The scene is rooted in the accomplishments of the 16th-century painter, Francesco Parmigianino, whose self-portrait provides the ekphrastic impetus behind Ashbery’s poem. While the painterly motif may intermittently retreat from view over the course of the six sections that comprise the poem, the initial ouverture, “As Parmigianino did it” (p. 68) is echoed in the closing section: “This past / Is now here: the painter’s /Reflected face, in which we linger, receiving / Dreams and inspirations on an unassigned / Frequency…” (p. 81). This former time we are told is present in “the painter’s / Reflected face”, though the speaker cautions against the notion that we may fully identify with the world it records. Its imprint has faded, we are liable to be disappointed with what we find in the painting: “The curves and edges are not so rich” (p. 81). Yet the remanence of craft is a persistent subject, embodied in the image of Parmigianino’s hand “thrust at the viewer” (p. 68).

8The metapoetic drama that Ashbery’s writing consistently fosters does little to distract from the latent epistemological quest underscoring a host of miniature plots. A procession of scenes is dispatched for the reader’s contemplation without any single thread tying them together. The narrative discontinuity that ensues is facilitated by continuous enjambment as the lines elliptically shift into new images and rationalizations. The urgency with which the persona unfolds a mental canvas is expertly frustrated by bathetic effects of false jocularity that emphasize a sense of separation from reality:

It’s a bit mad. Too bad, I mean, that getting to know each just for a fleeting second
Must be replaced by imperfect knowledge of the featureless whole,
Like some pocket history of the world, so general
As to constitute a sob or wail unrelated
To any atempt at definition.…
“Grand Galop”, p. 16

  • 5  Peter Quartermain, Disjunctve Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe, p. 10
  • 6  D. Herd, John Ashbery and American Poetry, p. 10.

9Ashbery’s concern, one might suggest, along with David Herd, “is with the tme, place, situation and circumstances of the poem itself.”5 Not that the writing is solipsistic, uninterested in the world. Instead, it tells the story of how the poems come to “characterize the circumstances they grow out of.”6 Here we are reminded of Ashbery’s legacy as a critic when he praises the complexity of Gertrude Stein’s aesthetic:

  • 7  “The Impossible”, Review of Stanzas in Meditation by Gertrude Stein, Poetry, vol. 90, no 4, July 1 (...)

But it is usually not events which interest Miss Stein, rather it is their « way of happening, » and the story of Stanzas in Meditation is a general, all-purpose model which each reader can adapt to fit his own set of partculars. The poem is a hymn to possibility; a celebration of the fact that the world exists, that things can happen.7

  • 8  Ibid., p. 252.
  • 9  Three Poems, New York, The Viking Press, p. 41.
  • 10  “The Impossible”, p. 251.
  • 11  “Mysteries of Construction: The Dream Songs of John Ashbery”, The Poetcs of Indeterminacy, Princet (...)

10If the contexts that are brought into view are fleeting and fractured, it is because they are at root faithful to life. “Because these pauses are supposed to be life” (p. 17), the speaker claims in the poem “Grand Galop” or because, as Ashbery argues in relation to Stein, “the aesthetic problem” is “a microcosm of all human problems.”8 Marjorie Perloff has meaningfully connected Ashbery’s critique of Stein to his own reflexive modes of mediation, described in Three Poems (1972) as “an open field of narrative possibilites. Not in the edifying sense of the tales of the past that we are still (however) chained to, but as stories that tell only of themselves…” (p. 41).9 As Perloff explains, what Ashbery calls the “logic of a dream,10” with respect to Stein’s writng closely resembles his own involvement in the weaving of stories and their narrative opacities. Comparing Ashbery to Arthur Rimbaud, Perloff argues: “the dream structure itself is the event that haunts the poet’s imagination”.11

Other dreams came and left while the bank
Of colored verbs and adjectves was shrinking from the light

For nothing in the complex story grew outside:
The greatness in the moment of telling stayed unresolved
Until its wealth of incident, pain mixed with pleasure,
Faded in the precise moment of bursting
Into bloom, its growth a static lament.
( “Scheherazade”, p. 9-10)

  • 12  J. Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry, p. 167.
  • 13  In his essay, “What is an Author”, Michel Foucault develops this analogy, explaining that “Scheher (...)
  • 14  Ibid., p. 166.

11Dreams are intricately bound to the texture of narrative and the modes of storytelling reflected upon in Ashbery’s poems. Synesthesic vocabulary is employed — “verbs” and “adjectves” shot through with color— so as to suggest the primacy of unreality in the construction of narrative possibilites. Through personification, even in the absence of a single, underlying story, dreams acquire the privilege acquired by personae partaking in a narrative sequence: “Other dreams came and went…”. John Shoptaw has discussed at length the interest Ashbery displays in the nonteleological frameworks observed in romances and fairy tales. For instance, he pinpoints the narrativizing potential of the “labyrinthine landscapes”12 developed in the volume, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Commenting in particular upon the poem “Scheherazade,” named after the storyteller in “AThousand and One Nights,” Shoptaw underlines the analogy between the elliptical narrativizing of Ashbery’s poetics and the tactcs deployed by Queen Scheherazade to ensure her survival.13 By interrupting her stories each morning, with the promise to resume them at dusk, the storyteller successfully eludes death. The “complex story” (p. 10) woven into Ashbery’s poetic narrative brings into focus the alternate modes of “bloom” and stasis learned from Scheherazade’s adventure as a storyteller. It mirrors, to borrow from Shoptaw’s analysis, “the pleasurable dynamics of waitng for and warding off the satisfying conclusion”.14

12The reflexive strategies of Ashbery’s storytelling do not stand alone in their examination of how experience is fathomed and relayed. The poems are equally reliant upon the disruptive properties of parody that align methods of storytelling with the narrative of a poetic struggle. In Ashbery’s 1975 collection the lines self-consciously spill over from a note of concern to one of blithe indifference:

For things can harden meaningfully in the moment of indecision.
I cannot decide in which direction to walk
But this doesn’t matter to me, and I might as well
Decide to climb a mountain (it looks almost flat)
As decide to go home
Or to a bar or restaurant or to the home
Of some friend as charming and ineffectual as I am
Because these pauses are supposed to be life
“Grand Galop”, p. 17

13If the progress of the solitary figure along a road or up the flank of a mountain suits the purposes of allegory ( “and I might as well / Decide to climb a mountain…”), Ashbery invariably ties the search for adequate prosodic tools to an exercise in tionality. When equivocation in these lines is aimed at the units of measure devoted to poetic composition— “… these pauses are supposed to be life” (p. 17) —this amounts to more than a conceit blurring the lines between art and life. We come close to evaluating how art and life sustain one another as they are relentlessly, and it would appear, resignedly pulled in a myriad of directions.

Note

1  D. Herd, John Ashbery and American Poetry, p. 146.

2  Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov”, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, New York, Schoken Books, 1968, p. 84.

3  S. Ross, Invisible Terrain: John Ashbery and the Aesthetcs of Nature, p. 109.

4  Peter Quartermain, Disjunctve Poetcs: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 3.

5  Peter Quartermain, Disjunctve Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe, p. 10.

6  D. Herd, John Ashbery and American Poetry, p. 10.

7  “The Impossible”, Review of Stanzas in Meditation by Gertrude Stein, Poetry, vol. 90, no 4, July 1957, p. 251.

8  Ibid., p. 252.

9  Three Poems, New York, The Viking Press, p. 41.

10  “The Impossible”, p. 251.

11  “Mysteries of Construction: The Dream Songs of John Ashbery”, The Poetcs of Indeterminacy, Princetion, Princetion University Press, 1981, p. 252.

12  J. Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry, p. 167.

13  In his essay, “What is an Author”, Michel Foucault develops this analogy, explaining that “Scheherazade’s narrative is an effort, renewed each night, to keep death outside the circle of life”. In Michel Foucault, Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, ed. James D. Faubion, Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, vol. 2, New York, The New Press, 1998, p. 206.

14  Ibid., p. 166.

Autore

Professeure de littérature nord-américaine à l’université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3. Ses recherches portent sur le modernisme, les poétiques des xxe et xxie siècles (États-Unis/Canada), ainsi que sur les relations intermédiales dans les arts et les lettres. Elle est l’auteure de deux monographies : Charles Reznikoff : une poétique du témoignage (L’Harmattan, 2011) et H.D. Trilogy (Atlande, 2014) ; parmi ses codirections d’ouvrage : Penser le genre en poésie contemporaine (Classiques Garnier, 2018) et Adapting Margaret Atwood : The Handmaid’s Tale and Beyond (à paraître en 2021 dans la Palgrave Macmillan Series in Adaptation and Visual Culture).

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