John Ashbery's Surrealism

Ernesto Suarez-TosteUniversidad de Castilla-La Mancha

"The Tension Is in the Concept":John Ashbery's Surrealism

[AJfter all it all came from Chirico and he was not a surrealist he is veryfanciful and his eye is caught by it and he has no distinction between thereal and the unreal because everything is alike to him, he says so, but therest of them nothing is alike to them and so they do not say so, and that isthe trouble with them [...].

(Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography)Much has been written about the relationship between John Ashbery's poetry

and avant-garde art, particularly the painting of the Abstract Expressionists. Twoof the earliest articles dealing with this subjectby Fred Moramarco (1976) andLeslie Wolf (1980)have considered not only Ashbery's use of objets d'art asstarting motifs for his poems but also the painterly quality present in much of hispoetry itself.' That the early-century collage aesthetic has been a major influenceon him is beyond doubt, and the most controversial issue nowadays is probably thenegative view still taken of his surrealist experiments, A number of annoyed criticshave trivialized Ashbery with the label "surrealist" whenever the poems in avolume are unusually dark, displaying a curious fondness for fitting them into thevague category of post-surrealist surrealism.^ For very similar reasonsand asense of automatism that Ashbery rejectsthis work has been praised byLanguage poets.

Ashbery himself has shaken off the surrealist label with remarkable energy attimes, most likely out of boredom, and has certainly tired of the reductionistconnotations whichsadly enoughthe term has acquired. Ashbery, who lived inFrance for ten years, had a first-hand experience of the country where surrealismwas born, and it seems clear that his privileged access to "the real thing" hasallowed him to appreciate in surrealism aspects that are neglected by the generalpublic. We know from his art criticism that Ashbery distinguishes two kinds ofsurrealism, and only rejects the label in equal fear of excessively academicist orpopulist interpretations. Although "the term surrealism has fallen into disfavor," hepraised Yves Tanguy as its embodiment on the ground that for him "the arbitrarydistinction between abstract and figurative art did not exist" (Reported Sightings27). It is clear from the context that he is referring to surrealism "not in the parochial1920s sense ofthe term but in the second, open sense in which it can still be said to

Style: Volume 38, No. 1, Spring 2004

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animate much of the most advanced art being done today" (see also McCabe 151).Although the most convincing analysis of surrealism as a twofold movement ismade in the formally related terms of automatist-abstract and illusionistic-oneiric(see Krauss 91-94), Ashbery's distinction shows a greater personal involvement,not necessarily based on formal criteria. His categorization opposes the outdatedand dogmatic received idea of surrealism with an empowering and liberatingalternative conception. It is clear enough, though, that the former is related toBretonian automatism, which he rejects: "The coupling of this acknowledgedinterest tin surrealism] with the alleged difficulty of his writing has led readers toview Ashbery mistakenly as an American Surrealist, practicing an automaticwriting that 1. . .] directly expresses his unconscious. Ashbery flatly denies theassertion that he composes by automatic writing" (Fredman 130). I would like toargue here that Ashbery's decade in France influenced him not only through hisacquaintance with surrealist art and poetics, but also through his increasingknowledge of the possibilities of the French language and the linguisticexperiments conducted by the Oulipo group. This will explain many obscurefeatures of Ashbery's idiom, including the automatic aspect of his poetry and manyapparently whimsical collocations. His French experience made him not anAmerican Surrealist but a surrealist American, that is, not a writer whose mainperception of the movement came from the 1940s interaction of the New Yorkperiod of surrealism, but a poet and art critic who lived in Paris for a long part ofhis life and acquired insider's knowledge of the original movement as it wasconceived."*

The matter of Ashbery's reception becomes increasingly complicated whendealing with his later work, whose acceptance is widespread. While certainindividual examples are acclaimed as masterpieces by consensus ("Self-Portrait ina Convex Mirror"), other poems published in these books continue to baffle publicand critics alike. I want to focus here on several poems, some of which have so farreceived little critical attention and, indeed, show how these are touched bysurrealism, but in a way that has little or nothing to do with the mainstreammovement ("hard-core surrealism" as Ashbery puts it). Alan Williamson hassuccessfully argued that Ashbery uses disjointed narrative and descriptivefragments as deliberate interruptions in his poems, like elements in a collage (120-22). Among these we can spot a clearly defined group whose inspiration seems tohave been the characteristic iconographic catalogue of the Italian painter and poetGiorgio de Chirico, co-founder of the school of Pittura Metafisica and precursor ofsurrealism. His literary work has already been related to Ashbery's, regarding thelikeness of the prose in Three Poems and de Chirico's novel Hebdomeros(Fredman 131-32). In the endnotes to The Double Dream of Spring Ashberyhimself explained that the title was borrowed from one of de Chirico's paintings,and this is something most critics mention but hardly ever elaborate."

"The Tension Is in the Concept": John Ashbery's Surrealism

However, it would not be exaggerated to suggest that Ashbery at some stagedeveloped a passion for de Chirico's work, and a close look at the poems of theperiod around 1975 shows how Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror and HouseboatDays are sprinkled all over with elements from the Italian's metaphysicallandscapes. In 1988 a volume was published in English containing Hebdomerosand several other pieces by de Chirico. Ashbery was among the translators, and his1966 review for Book Week of the French edition of Hebdomeros (1964) wasreprinted as the preface. (His translations date from 1967 to 1975, with theexception of those commissioned for this edition). This shows to how well and howlong he knew de Chirico's writing.'' Not long after Ashbery published HotelLautreamont, a book that represents his late "surrealistic reassertion" (Moramarco,"Coming" 43).

In fact, it is little wonder that Ashbery has felt attracted to de Chirico, sincethey share a wide range of obsessions. Traveling and the passing of time havebecome major preoccupations for both, and they have associated these in a verysimilar way. Spatial and temporal movement are thus intrinsically connected, thetraveling impulse having a cathartic function against the burden of passing time.But at the same time our wandering stands for the permanent sense of loss, thetypically metaphysical anxiety. Moreover, they are equally fond of chanceassociations, but within certain restrictions, scarcely following the Bretonian ruleof the unconscious that led to automatic writing. The effect sought by Ashbery's"logic / Of strange position" {Some Trees 74) found a consecrated poetics in deChirico's "metaphysical aesthetic," a vague term coined by the Italian to refer to hisspecial sensibility toward those privileged moments of random intersectionbetween the uncanny and the mundane:

One must picture everything in the world as an enigma, not only the great questions onehas always asked oneself [.. .]. But rather to understand the enigma of things generallyconsidered insignificant. To perceive the mystery of certain phenomena of feeling [...].To live in the world as if in an immense museum of strangeness, full of curious many-colored toys which change their appearance, which, like little children we sometimesbreak to see how they are made on the inside, and, disappointed, realize they are empty.

("EluardMs." 185-86)Equally, both feel an unusual interest in the role of memory and the world of

dreams, which accounts for their characteristically uneasy atmospheres. Theysubvert the logic of natural events, and provide an alternative of their own. DeChirico managed to "turn the realities of the seen world and the logic of traditionalperspective systems into a theater where dreams could unfold" (Rosenblum 47).But despite his distortions of perspectiveanother technique he shares withAshberyde Chirico is considered a narrative painter, somewhat foreign to thespirit of formal experimentation that swept over the Paris of Cubism and Dada.Ashbery has written of Parmigianino's self-portrait that "The surprise, the tensionare in the concept / Rather than its realization" {Self-Portrait 74). Similarly, Max

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Morise wrote of de Chirico that "his images are surrealist, but their expression isnot" (26). A link between the two painters can be found in Ashbery's own artcriticism, where he has proposed Parmigianino as a precursor of de Chirico onaccount of "his craftsmanship at the service of a sense of the mystery behindphysical appearances" (Reported Sightings 31).

Affinities of approach and treatment are reinforced by Ashbery's adoption ofmetaphysical imagery for Self-Portrait and especially Houseboat Days. In thelatter volume a good number of poems feature passages where the voice seems toinhabit a metaphysical landscape/dreamscape, as if it belonged to one of thepassengers inside de Chirico's trains, embedded in his own thoughts but alsolooking sporadically through the window and thus interrupting the flow by lettingthe landscape intrude (Ashbery wrote The Vermont Notebook during a bus tour, ofMassachusetts). Naturally, and given the connotations of metaphysical landscapes,this happens in those moments when the poem's mood is already (or wants tobeccjme) nostalgic or melancholy. A long list of items could be extracted fromHouseboat Days to match de Chirico's favorite iconographic choices: towers,trains, stations, clocks, statues and pedestals, plazas, shadows, arches, maps, spires,machicolations, flagpoles, battlements, etc. But they also share techniques.Richard Howard applied Andre Gide's extrapolation from heraldry to show howAshbery slips lines en abyme by writing unmediated comments into the poem,often about the poem's own process of becoming (26-27)." De Chirico's TheDouble Dream of Spring is an apt example of the same technique. It portrays theartist's studio, showing an unfinished painting within the painting: a painting enabyme that echoes the title's suggestion of dreaming within a dream, and thus givesaway the circumstances of artistic creation.

Ashbery's poem "All and Some" (Self-Portrait 64-65) is a case of poem enabyme in the way it advances the mood and aesthetics of the following volume byintroducing metaphysical imagery and touching upon those concerns that willbecome crucial in Houseboat Days. It is representative of a wide variety ofrecurrent elements in Ashbery's poetry and therefore a sort of emblem in itself.''The scenario is that of a valediction, putting an end to a love story. The openinglines emphasize change and departure from previous habits, which adds to thedeparture of the lover and also Ashbery's departure from the tradition ofvaledictions in English poetry: here the poet is the one who stays, and the one witha greater sense of loss. The nostalgic mood later adopted in the poem will suit theinclusion of de Chirico's imagery.

The poem is also representative of the shell games Ashbery plays withlanguage and the readers' expectations. The opening line ("And for those whounderstand:") seeks to establish a complicity with the reader, based not only on thein medias res beginning but also on the apparently selective implications of thestatement, and of the title, too. One may feel entitled to wonder, in difficult poetrylike Ashbery's, whether we are in for a higher level of difficulty from now on. No

"The Tension Is in the Concept": John Ashbery's Surrealism

one would aceept that this is a discouraging opening, for we would hardly deservethe name of readers then. In fact, it works in the opposite way, more like aggressiveadvertising strategies. Charles Molesworth, in a less celebratory attitude, hasdenounced the way in which "the author-reader contract is a conspiratorial one forAshbery, as he writes not simply for those 'in the know,' but for those who candally at will" (170). Well, it is. We want to be "those" who deserve the confidenceof the poet.

Another deceptive phrase in the poem comes in line 22: "But what I mean is[. . . ] ." This is another trick played on the reader, for what follows is hardly anexplanation of anything. Structurally it recalls those false "tips" by magicians whoannounce they will teach the audience how to do a trick at home to impress ourfriends, and end up by complicating it even more. De Chirico is hardly ever soopenly self-conscious, although he can introduce unmediated remarks in hiscanvases. In The Fatal Temple he painted a still-life and then mapped it by writingnames next to the objects. The names were not those of the objects, but moreabstract and symbolic, likeyoie or souffrance. In radical contrast to these, by theside of a distorted fish he bluntly wrote chose etrahge. This is not just an exampleof unmediated address, it is a fitting technique to introduce an ambiguous irony andrescue the painting from the risk of falling into the sublime. Ashbery, to mentiononly one example, fearing the same elevation of tone in one of his poems, wrote thedeflating two-word sentence "Time farted" immediately after one such passage(Double Dream 29).

Ashbery and de Chirico also share a strong drive toward originality,emphasizing the importance of a fresh approach to reality and art. In the case oftwentieth-century poetry the new has an intrinsic value, and de Chirico relates thisto the principle of revelation in art: one is surprised by one's own inspiration.Ashbery seems to appreciate revelations when he writes about "waking up / In themiddle of a dream with one's mouth full / Of unknown words [...]" (Setf-Portrait55). These lines, moreover, establish a sort of dissociation between the consciousself and the unconscious, suggesting the powerful transformations undergoneduring dreams. For both de Chirico and Ashbery the role of memory and the worldof dreams acquire particular relevance. They do not attempt to describe, but toreproduce, explore, sometimes even subvert them. De Chirico followedSchopenhauer in developing his own theory about madness and art, and held thatmemory is responsible for the irreversible prosification of the world, for it causesus to become bored with repeated experience:

Schopenhauer defines the madman as a person who has lost his memory. It is an aptdefinition because, in fact, that which constitutes the logic of our normal acts and ournormal life is a continuous rosary of recollections of relationships between things andourselves and vice versa [...]. By deduction we might conclude that everything has twoaspects: a normal one [... and] the other, the spectral or metaphysical which can be seenonly by rare individuals in moments of clairvoyance or metaphysical abstraction [. . .].

("On Metaphysical Art" 450)

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Ashbery has his own statement on this subject, which does not altogether lackthe mystic tone of de Chirico's, and evidently shares with it the interest in thefunctions of mental machinery. Moreover, Ashbery's idea ofthe poem as foundobject, something which has an existence of its own and which the poet has todiscover, fits in with the Italian's welcome to revelation:

Memory, forgetfulness, and being are certainly things that are happening in our minds allthe time which I'm attempting to reproduce in poetry, the actions of a mind at work or atrest [...]. My poetry is really trying to explore consciousness to give it perspective [...].I begin with unrelated phrases and notations that later on I hope get resolved in the courseof the poem as it begin.': to define itself more clearly for me.

("Craft Interview" 118-19, emphasis added)Therefore it is not strange that Ashbery has adopted such experimental modes

during his career, with a particularly innovative attitude toward language. DeChirico on his part wrote his novel Hebdomeros in French, which was not hismother tongue but allowed him the kind of prose Ashbery has repeatedly praised.Even outside The Tennis Court Oath Ashbery has sporadically afforded suchdefying gestures as resorting to the techniques of the Oulipo writers group; orsimply making use of cultural differences in direct translations from the French. Inthe poem "Variations, Calypso and Fugue on a Theme of Ella Wheeler Wilcox" heused the Oulipian strategy of replacing words by their definitions: "On the onehand, a vast open basinor sea; on the other a narrow spit of land, terminating ina copse, with a few broken-down outbuildings lying here and there. It made nodifference that the beyb-e-y this time, oriental potentatehad ordained theirrelease [. . . ]" {Double Dream 28). In the opening of this passage Ashbery hasdescribed a bay ("vast open basin" limited by the "narrow spit of land"), so hepretends that the mention of the bey in the third line demands spelling to avoidconfusion, and then provides a crossword definition in two words. This is achallenge to the reader's patience, for many would rather miss the point than findout how perversely playful the poet can be. But there is certainly pleasure in thefinding, if one happens to be "in the mood for Ashbery."

Ashbery's adoption of Oulipian techniques seems to work on the basis ofpersonal affinity rather than systematic adherence to the movement. In fact, manyof these strategies are very similar to those employed in Ashbery's collaborationswith Kenneth Koch, like logo-rally (in the random selection of teleutons insestinas, for example). Ashbery's self-imposed use of highly demanding formssuch as the sestina, the cento, or the pantoum, where form can be said to conditionmeaning by restricting the paradigm available, pursues a very deliberate aestheticeffect, which in fact constitutes an established genre of Oulipian practice (thoughit is a genre in permanent flux). In this sense Ashbery is always moving between theautomatic-looking experimentalism of The Tennis Court Oath and theserestrictions, which are defined by Raymond Queneau as the very opposite strategy:

"The Tension Is in the Concept": John Ashbery's Surrealism

Another false idea that is current nowadays is the equivalence established betweeninspiration, the exploration of the subconscious, and liberation; between chance,automatism, and freedom. The kind of freedom that consists of blindly obeying everyimpulse is in reality a form of slavery. The classical author, who when writing his tragedyfollows a certain number of rules that he knows, is freer than the poet who writes whatevercomes into his head and is the slave of other rules he is unaware of.

(Oulipo 123)Among other Oulipian techniques there is one more associated with Ashbery' s

poetry. "Pumectation" can be defined as "the ostensible procedure that a writeruses to mask the procedure he is actually using" (211). This is also called"Imparmigianization" and very aptly so in this context, because Ashbery sawthrough Parmigianino's use of this technique from the very third line of "Self-Portrait," in the way the hand is advanced "as though to protect / What it advertises"(68). Equally, within "All and Some" we can find this imparmigianization in thealready mentioned "But what I mean is [. . . ] ," a device that actually helps toconceal the meaning it promises to reveal.

Another technique that seems expressly devised by a would-be saboteur of theRosetta stone is the exploitation (by means of direct translation) of cultural oridiomatic differences with French. Sarah Lundquist has studied Ashbery's "FrenchPoems"originally written in French so that his own translation into Englishwould avoid "customary word-patterns and associations" {Double Dream 95)and reached the conclusion that he used cognates wherever possible, emphasizingthe inherent similarities between the two languages. While this applies to the"French Poems," the opposite is also true outside this small corpus. Perhaps thissecond technique is limited to very specific expressive possibilities that Ashberymisses in English, but these are hardly "expressive" if the readers overlook them.Of the following two examples one is easily justified, the other less so.

The first one is recurrent in Ashbery's poetry, but he has explained it onlyonce, as if he took his readers' faithfulness for granted. At least this is a meaningfulcase, where he might have reasonably missed the resources available in French.Two of Ashbery's most recurrent themes, time and the weather or climate, happento share the same French word {temps), and this establishes an "extra" happyconnection which somebody with his sensibility toward language cannot helpcelebrating. Thus in "The Ice-Cream Wars" he writes "Time and the weather /Don't always go hand in hand, as here [...]" {Houseboat Days 60). But other timeshe stretches the coupling along several lines, or else one of the two terms is merelyimplicit, as in "Pyrography": "The page of dusk turns like a creaking revolvingstage [. . . ]" (8). Here the connotations of rusty machinery and heavy, slowmovement recall the internal mechanism of a clock, hence time, contrasting withthe transition from day into night, which is the most natural in the world, but it isa meaningful mixture if the poet has the polysemic French temps in mind. Thesequotations belong to Houseboat Days, and their explanation is found in the titlepoem of his previous volume, "Self-Portrait": "the weather, which in French is / Le

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temps, the word for time [...]" (Self-Portrait 70). In any case it becomes clear thathe can play with concepts and names at will.

The second example is the allusion to rain in "Daffy Duck in Hollywood":The allegory comes unsnarledToo soon; a shower of pecky acajou harpoons isAbout all there is to be noted between tornadoes. I haveOnly my intermittent life in your thoughts to liveWhich is like thinking in another language. (,Hou.ieb()at Days 32)

In French, in descriptions of heavy rain, there exists the idiomatic expressionpleuvoirdes hallebardes [to rain halberds], which is closer to the English "cats anddogs" than to other, more logically appropriate terms of measure (a seaux[bucketfuls]). These hallebardes have an exact equivalent in Spanish (a chuzos[spears]), but not in English. Therefore Ashbery's "shower of pecky acajouharpoons" between tornadoes works as a reference to prickling raindrops. Theproximity of the phrase "thinking in another language" may provide a clue here.

Naming was a very important task for de Chirico, who learned from hisreadings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche that the best way to achieve hismetaphysical, defamiliarizing presentation of ordinary events and objects is to seethings again with the freshness of the first time. Thisof courseapplies equallyto their names, since these are inevitably charged with banality. In a sense, heneeded to begin from a tabula rasa, to avoid these connotations: "What is neededabove all, is to rid art of all that has been its familiar content until now; all subject,all idea, all thought, all symbol must be put out" ("Eluard Ms." 187). Similarly,Ashbery wrote in 1962 that his purpose in poetry was "a restituer aux choses leurvrai nom, a abolir l'eternel poids mort de symbolisme et d'allegorie" ([to returnthings their true names, to lift the immemorial burden of symbolism and allegory]qtd. in Longenbach 123n. 11). "To return things their true names" is traditionally anOrphic function, and to rid names of the accumulated "burden of symbolism" isexactly what de Chirico aspired to do in his paintings.

It is in the second half of "All and Some" where we can find a profusion ofelements from de Chirico's landscapes. Returning to the nostalgic tone of thevalediction, the setting acquires an intensely evocative power, and the poetcomplains that now no one "Cares or uses the little station any more. / They are tooyoung to remember/ How it was when the late trains came in. / Violet sky grazingthe gray hill-crests"(5e//-forrra/r65). A similar melancholy can be attributed to theinnumerable train stations in de Chirico's paintings. These perfect settings ofanxiety and nostalgia, of departure and arrival, of greetings and farewells, wouldeventually become emblematic of surrealism, and so, in his description of the 1938surrealist exhibition in Paris, Georges Hugnet referred to it both as a "railroadstation for the imagination and the dream," and "a steam engine that broke a breachin the ramparts of our senses large enough for the heroic charge of our dreams,desires, and needs" (qtd. in Sawin 10-11).

"The Tension Is in the Concept": John Ashbery's Surrealism

Many of Ashbery's poems feature passages that recreate the wait in stations("Melodic Trains" in Houseboat Days [24-26]), or describe a metaphysicallandscape seen from a train. "Pyrography" (Houseboat Days 8-10) is a remarkableexample of the image of Ashbery as passenger in one of de Chirico's trains. The"slow boxcar journey" takes us through a country built "partly over with fake ruins,in the image of ourselves: / An arch that terminates in mid-keystone, a crumblingstone pier / For laundresses, an open-air theater, never completed / And onlypartially designed." The vision of those ruins is very apt to share the feeling evokedin metaphysical paintings. Not ruins as criticism of the decay of moderncivilization, but "fake ruins" as a gratuitous demonstration of disdain forfunctionality, and a further concession to aestheticism. But the introduction of sucha landscape is not for aesthetic purposes only, and the metaphysical potential of theruins triggers Ashbery's imagination into one of his typical reflections on time andwhat attitude we should adopt to face its passing:

How are we to inhabitThis space from which the fourth wall is invariably missing.As in a stage-set or doUhouse, except by staying as we are.In lost profile, facing the stars, with dozens of as yetUnrealized projects, and a strict senseOf time running out, of evening presentingThe tactfully folded-over bill?

Existential doubts of all sorts, including the fear that we may be little more thana puppet show for some good-humored deity, are softened by the witty image oftime as a maitre d', with an implicit carpe diem messagemake the best possiblemeal, for the bill will invariably be too expensive. Ashbery's description of thesetting is extremely apt here. De Chirico's "drama of objects" needs a stage, andAshbery's typically untypical scenario is very much like a stage-set, an "open fieldof narrative possibilities" (Three Poems 41).

Other poems use the iconography of de Chirico's train stations to describeimaginary settings, as is the case in "On the Towpath," where, as Marjorie Perloffhas noted, "unspecified persons perform unspecified and unrelated acts against thebackdrop of a constantly shifting landscape whose contours dissolve before oureyes" (72). De Chirico's painting participates in this general indeterminacy bycreating the feeling that indeed "something" is happening, that there is a logicruling these events, but one we are not invited to understand. In that sense he couldbe said to paint in medias res. One of de Chirico's paintings. Mystery andMelancholy of a Street, features a typical metaphysical setting where a girl runs upa street (not a rampart but a ramp) and the building behind her shows spires andmachicolations. A variation on the same motif, Melancolie d'une rue, pictures abackground with a station clock and the shadow of a tower, projected from outsidethe frame. Compare with the setting of "On the Towpath":

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On the earth a many-colored tower of longing rises.[]A white figure runs to the edge of some rampartIn a hurry only to observe the distance,And having done so, drops back into the massOf clock-faces, spires, stalactite machicolations. (Houseboat Days 22-23)

The girls in both canvases indeed seem to be running for its own sake, eitherwith a hoop or with a skipping-rope." They run "to observe the distance," that is, notto see, but to keep the distance with a world in permanent motion: "One must movevery fast in order to stay in the same place, as the Red Queen said, the reason beingthat [. . .] you must still learn to cope with the onrushing tide of time and all theconfusing phenomena it bears in its wake" (Three Poems 90). This is alsoapplicable to de Chirico's frozen trains, whose arrested motion is strangelyforegrounded in the paintings. Regarding the "many-colored tower of longing," deChirico has several paintings devoted exclusively to a multicolored tower builtwith narrowing layers of square or circular colonnades, in the fashion traditionallyattributed to the tower of Babel. The evocation of Babel, with its verbal confusion,is equally appropriate in both cases, and a motif that keeps reappearing inAshbery's poetry (acquiring particular relevance in the "New Spirit" section ofThree Poems).

Finally, the frequent apparition of trains in Ashbery's poemsas in deChirico's canvasessuggests the way in which he seems to relate them to hisobsessions. We find speeding trains and trains in stations; scenes observed fromtrains and inside other trains, even words read on the windows of passing trains. Forboth Ashbery and de Chirico railway timetables seem to be simultaneously reliableand somewhat flexible. Trains constitute an alternative timing system and at thesame time they are subject to human delay. It is a very fitting treatment of the motif:both need to feel that there is a chance for human control of time, but they know thisfeeling of control is only illusory: "The train comes bearing joy; / [ . . . ] / For longwe hadn't heard so much news, such noise. / [ . . . ] / As laughing cadets say, 'In theevening/Everything has a schedule, if you can find out what it is'" {Some Trees 9).The train brings joy, and the possibility of a universal logic and harmony. Its ownschedule seems to endow life with a meaning yet unrevealed to us. On the otherhand, it is laughing cadets, representing inexperienced and playful youth, whovoice the statement. Whether the message is reassuring or merely intriguingdepends upon readers, and that is probably Ashbery's intention. The message doesnothing but mirror the predetermined attitude of the reader, at its best opening newpossibilities but not aimed at converting anyone. In "Melodic Trains" (HouseboatDays 24-26) the poet comments on all these questions with a similar attitude:

A little girl with scarlet enameled fingernailsAsks me what time it isevidently that's a toy wristwatchShe's wearing, for fun [.. .].

"The Tension Is in the Concept": John Ashbery's Surrealism 11

[... A]s though our train were a pencilGuided by a ruler held against a photomural of the AlpsWe both come to see distance as something unofficialAnd impersonal yet not without its curious justificationLike the time of a stopped watchright twice a day.

Only a child would wear a watch "for fun," says Ashbery in his late forties. Thegirl is playing at being an adult, but Time will take care of making her one of them.On the other hand, she does not really want to know the time, but rather the timeremaining before their arrival. The image of the train as pencil on a photomural (ora tnap, as in films) makes this clear: when traveling, time and distance becomeindissociably united, assuming, as he seems to do, that speed is a reliable constantfor modern trains. A stopped watch is right twice a day, far more often than a slowor fast one, and yet it is good for nothing, since you cannot check when it is right(unless you have another watch). This implies that human time works onapproximations rather than exactness. Then the train schedule becomes a reliable,alternative time-measuring system, like "the philosopher's daily walk that theneighbors set their watches by" {Three Poems 32). Ashbery seems to envy the logicbehind train timetables, like those "wafer-thin pedestrians / Who know where theyare going" {Self-Portrait 5). Of course he knows that their security is just a falseimpression we get from outside, but;just like boys watching ants in the gardenthe feeling that they know their mission necessarily filters through the cracks in ourconfidence.

De Chirico has his own way of feeling he can control time, through thesystematic immobilization of trains in his paintings. Often even the smoke cloudrising from the chimney remains vertically static, despite the wind that keeps thestation flags in permanent flapping and betrays the incoherence: "Le don etrangede Chirico est d'immobiliser le temps dans le silence de sa memoire, sur une placeou deux personnages se rencontrent ou se separent a la fin d' une chaude apres-midid'6t6" ([De Chirico's strange gift is to immobilize time in the silence of hismemory, in a square where two characters meet or part at the end of a hot summerafternoon] De Bonnafos).

John Ashbery's poetry, sharing a variety of common concerns with deChiricosuch as the passing of time, the impulse to travel, and the enigma ofordinary objects and situationshas repeatedly demonstrated the influence of thelatter's plastic and literary work. This shows through Ashbery's adoption ofmetaphysical aesthetics whenever he seeks the melancholy, nostalgic tone evokedby the Italian's paintings. The frequency with which this happens coincides fullywith Ashbery's periodic translations of de Chirico's literary work from 1967 to1992, and this surprises no one, given his characteristic permeability to externalinspiration. Even less surprising is the choice, considering his interest in art and hisrecurrent nostalgia for the French language. This choice may be surrealist inorigininsofar as we can call de Chirico a surrealistbut most likely what

12 Ernesto Suarez-Toste

attracted Ashbery to de Chirico is his selective distance from surrealism, not hismembership in the movement. Beyond the interpretation of specific passageswhich otherwise would be thrown into the surrealist bin, I hope to have contributedto the clarification of Ashbery's surrealist affinities and techniques, emphasizingvisuality but also his playful approach to language and poetry. Of particular interestis the way he manages to cultivatesimultaneously or sequentiallydifferentpairs of opposites, a typically surrealist aspiration. He does not really balance orreconcile these opposites, but rather oscillates between them, between automatic-looking experimentation and restrictive Oulipian practices, between the use ofcognates and the exploitation of untranslatable idiomatic expressions, betweenself-revelatory texts en abyme and deceiving pumectation, and finally between themost irreconcilable set of contraries: just as Gertrude Stein praised de Chirico formaking "no distinction between the real and the unreal" (30), Ashbery wrote ofTanguy that for him "the arbitrary distinction between abstract and figurativepainting did not exist [and so he] painted real if nonexistent objects [. . .] in theinterest of a more integral realism" {Reported Sightings 27). There can be littledoubt that Ashbery has succeeded in the same terms.

Notes' Wolf aligned Ashbery with Abstract Expressionism, but his poetry has been

too diverse to allow any integral identification with a particular movement. DavidSweet and David Bergman have successfully corrected his view. Sweet is theauthor of the most satisfactory analysis of Ashbery' s relationship with the painterlyavant-garde at large, pointing at his kinship with marginal figures and precursorsof surrealism. He argues that Ashbery's "ritual collagism" is characteristic ofsurrealism and does not fit in with Abstract Expressionism (324). Bergman goesdeeper in his rejection of "lack of finish" in Ashbery's surfaces, which he seesinstead as overworked in the Mannerist style of Parmigianino, partly revived in thiscentury by de Chirico (xxi-xxii). Bergman refutes Wolfs dismissive treatment ofspecific works and authors mentioned in the poems, claiming de Chirico as a"touchstone" in Ashbery's career, without further elaborating this point (xiv). I willargue here that the relevance of de Chirico cannot be overstressed. Indeed, thisessay aims primarily to explore his influence on Ashbery and traces the recurrenceof metaphysical aesthetics during almost twenty years of Ashbery's poeticproduction underI borrow Robert Rosenblum's phrasede Chirico's "longAmerican shadow."

^ Apparentlyperhaps not surprisinglymost critics who are hostile to theearly Ashbery are also fierce enemies of surrealism. Hence my use of "trivialized,"which in fact means that these critics renounce further exploration once the fearfuldiagnostic has been reached. There is a whole tradition of Ashbery detractorsdemanding meaning in his poetry, including Robert Boyers (1978), CharlesMolesworth (1979), and James Fenton (1985), among others. Fenton's review is

"The Tension Is in the Concept": John Ashbery's Surrealism 13

titled "Getting Rid of the Burden of Sense," quoting a line from Ashbery that I alsouse here, with decidedly different intentions.

' For a convincing refutation of Ashbery's rejection of other Frenchinfluences, see Ford.

Richard Howard would be an exception here, for he pointed as early as 1970that de Chirico's "oneiric dissociations are the kind of thing Ashbery himselfaspires to" (45).

' Ashbery' s thirty years of art criticism, collected in Reported Sightings, wouldsimply not make any sense without his constant references to the Italian, who ispraised as a major figure in the development of twentieth-century painting.

^ Howard delights in the way "many writers have provided a clue in the formof an imaginative schema or construct which heightens the work's inner resonanceat the same time that it defines the poetics by which the contraption operates" (26-27). He explains that for Gide the epitome of this technique was the heraldicsuspension of a second, identical blazon in the center of the first. Gide's literaryexamples are classics like Hamlet's "Mousetrap" and Las Meninas. For acompelling study of this device see Dallenbach.

' For David Sweet, "Self-Portrait" marks a climax in Ashbery's participationin a "Stevensian" tradition: "Gone are the piano-legged girls, the bottle-labels andother discarded objects that betoken dada and surrealist influences and assume therough texture of assembled fragments or the marvelous sheen of chimericaljuxtapositions. In contrast, Parmigianino's art involves intention, reproduction,and discrimination" (331). As a poem included in the same volume, "All andSome" advances Ashbery's imminent return to de Chirico's metaphysicalsensibility in Houseboat Days. Indeed, Sweet admits that "Self-Portrait" actually"does not set the standard for Ashbery' s subsequent poetry, which often vigorouslyreincorporates the experimental plasticities of collagist, juxtapositional, and otherdisjunctive strategies."

" There is in Ashbery's poetry at least an instance of a "girl / With the hoop"(April Galleons 67).

Works CitedAshbery, John. April Galleons. New York: Farrar, 1987.

. "Craft Interview with John Ashbery." The Craft of Poetry: Interviews fromThe New York Quarterly. Ed. William Packard. Garden City: Doubleday,1974. 111-32.

. The Double Dream of Spring. New York: Ecco, 1970.

. Hotel Lautreamont. New York: Knopf, 1992.

. Houseboat Days: Poems. New York: Viking, 1977.

14 Ernesto Suarez-Toste

. Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957-1989. New York: Knopf, 1989. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror: Poems. New York: Viking, 1975.. Some Trees. New Haven: Yale UP, 1956.

. The Tennis Court Oath: A Book of Poems. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1962.

. Three Poems. New York: Viking, 1972.

. The Vermont Notebook. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1975.Bergman, David. Introduction. Ashbery, Reported Sightings xi-xxiii.Boyers, Robert. "A Quest without an Object." Times Literary Supplement 1 Sept

1978: 962-63.

De Bonnafos, Edith. "Au-del^ de l'image par le mystere." Grands peintresHachette: Chirico 96 (April 1968). N. pag.

Dallenbach, Lucien. The Mirror in the Text. Trans. Jeremy Whiteley with EmmaHughes. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989. Of Le recit speculaire: essai sur lamise en abyme. Paris: Seuil, 1977.

De Chirico, Giorgio. The Double Dream of Spring. 1915. Private collection.. "Eluard Manuscript." Trans, various. Hebdomeros 175-204.. The Fatal Temple. 1914. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Hebdomeros, with Monsieur Dudron's Adventure and Other MetaphysicalWritings. Preface by Ashbery. New York: PAJ Publications; rpt. Cambridge:Exact Change, 1992. Hebdomeros 1929 (1-117).

. Melancholie d'une rue. Private collection.

. Mystery and Melancholy of a Street. 1914. Private collection. "On Metaphysical Art." 1919. Trans. Joshua C. Taylor. Theories of ModernArt: A Source Book by Artists and Critics. Ed. Herschel B. Chipp. Berkeley: Uof California P, 1968.448-52.

Fenton, James. "Getting Rid of the Burden of Sense." New York Times BookReview 29 Dec. 1985: 10.

Ford, Mark. "Mount d'Espoiror Mount Despair. Early Bishop, Early Ashbery, andthe French." Poetry and the Sense of Panic. Ed. Lionel Kelly. Amsterdam-Rodopi, 2000. 9-27.

Fredman, Stephen. Poet's Prose: The Crisis of Modern American Verse. NewYork: Cambridge UP, 1983.

Howard, Richard. Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the UnitedStates since 1950. Enl. ed. New York: Athenaeum, 1980.

"The Tension Is in the Concept": John Ashbery's Surrealism 15

Krauss, Rosalind. The Originality oftheAvant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths.Cambridge: MIT P, 1986.

Lehman, David, ed. Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery. Ithaca:Cornell UP, 1980.

Longenbach, James. "Ashbery and the Individual Talent." American LiteraryHistory 9 (1997): 103-27.

Lundquist, Sara. "'L^gerete et Richesse': John Ashbery's English 'FrenchPoems.'" Contemporary Literature 32 (1991): 403-21.

McCabe, Susan. "Stevens, Bishop, and Ashbery: A Surrealist Lineage." TheWallace Stevens Journal 22 {FaW 1998): 149-68.

Molesworth, Charles. The Fierce Embrace: A Study of Contemporary AmericanPoetry. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1979.

Moramarco, Fred. "The Painterly Poets: John Ashbery and Frank O'Hara."Journal of Modern Literature 5 (1976): 436-62.. "Coming Full Circle: John Ashbery's Later Poetry." The Tribe of John:Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry. Ed. Susan M. Schultz. Tuscaloosa: U ofAlabama P, 1995.38-59.

Morise, Max. "Les yeux enchantds." La revolution surrealiste. 1 Dec. 1924.Oulipo Compendium. Ed. Harry Matthews and Alastair Brotchie. London: Atlas

Press, 1998.Perloff, Marjorie. "'Fragments of a Buried Life': John Ashbery's Dream Songs."

Lehman 66-86.Rosenblum, Robert. "De Chirico's Long American Shadow." y4rf in America July

1996: 46-55.Sawin, Martica. Surrealism in Exile and the Beginning of the New York School.

Cambridge: MIT P, 1995.Stein, Gertrude. Everybody's Autobiography. 1937. New York: Random, 1973.

Sweet, David. '"And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name': John Ashbery, the PlasticArts, and the Avant-Garde." Comparative Literature 50 (1998): 316-32.

Williamson, Alan. Introspection and Contemporary Poetry. Cambridge: HarvardUP, 1984.

Wolf, Leslie. "The Brushstroke's Integrity: The Poetry of John Ashbery and theArt of Painting." Lehman 224-54.