John Ashbery: Was Plato right? Are the best poets crazy?
You know it will happen: the inevitable revulsion: the coy poem that doesn’t mean anything, but washes over us with a million possible meanings, will, very soon, one day, make us sick, and post-modernism will become our vomitorium.
Let’s cast our eye on just part of an Ashbery poem (he won’t mind):
Everything
Depends on whether somebody reminds you of me.
That this is a fabulation, and that those “other times”
Are in fact the silences of the soul, picked out in
Diamonds on stygian velvet, matters less than it should.
Prodigies of timing may be arranged to convince them
We live in one dimension, they in ours. While I
Abroad through all the coasts of dark destruction seek
Deliverance for us all, think in that language: its
Grammar, though tortured, offers pavillions
At each new parting of the ways. Pastel
Ambulances scoop up the quick and hie them to hospitals.
“It’s all bits and pieces, spangles, patches, really; nothing
Stands alone. What happened to creative evolution?”
Sighed Aglavaine. Then to her Sélysette: “If his
Achievement is only to end up less boring than the others,
What’s keeping us here? Why not leave at once?
I have to stay here while they sit in there,
Laugh, drink, have fine time.(from “Daffy Duck in Hollywood,” J. Ashbery)
It is a truism that art and life are mathematical: “She Loves You” is more interesting than “I Love You” because the former contains three souls and the latter contains two. Yet, as regards love lyrics, two might be a more popular number than three.
Love, mostly, is a number. When poetry once had a certain amount of respect among the learned, back in the 19th century, it was sometimes referred to as numbers. Art and measurement were practically the same thing for two thousand years. Science has stuck to measurement, but art, over the last 150 years or so, has—and there can be no doubt—consciously rebelled.
If we read this line—from the Ashbery excerpt above—in a hurry, it might sound to us like an interesting piece of mathematical love-song-manship:
“Everything depends on whether somebody reminds you of me.”
Philosophically, one needn’t argue with “everything:” in love’s world, everything rings the lover’s bells. But in any case,”whether somebody reminds you of me” is a nice, measurable bite. We have “you,” “me,” and “somebody else, ” the triad of love. In the Beatles’ revolutionary parlance: I observe that she loves you. No need to be greedy in basic love mathematics: going from two (I love you) to three is a profound enough leap. And this is what love does to us, and one imagines Ashbery’s Romantic side knowing this, too: everything reminds us of the beloved, and if “somebody reminds you of me,” for the sake of love, that’s good for the “me.” If love’s peril creeps in here, too: the blurring of one person for the other (“somebody” is like “me”) disturbing the lover’s unique identity—that’s OK, we all know how complicated it gets when we begin counting from “one.”
But look at what happens in Ashbery’s poem; minor complication quickly becomes major. Ashbery abandons the mathematical phrase with all its possibilities of love, for pure nonsense:
That this is a fabulation, and that those “other times”
Are in fact the silences of the soul, picked out in
Diamonds on stygian velvet, matters less than it should.
Now we are in la-la land. One could admire this (certainly it is more complex than “Everything depends on whether somebody reminds you of me”) but for us it is a let-down; it points to Ashbery’s laziness; the matter of “Everything depends on whether somebody reminds you of me” is allowed to spill. The poem is not building; it is dribbling what it had away.
It is not that Ashbery makes the phrase, “Everything depends on whether somebody reminds you of me,” go away. It is still there in the poem. If the reader wants, they can pause and contemplate this delicious phrase. As we move into the next lines, the possible meanings of Ashbery’s poem explode into the nearly infinite—and surely Ashbery is proceeding along such an arc intentionally; he is stirring up the stream on purpose; he’d rather not mine ”Everything depends on whether somebody reminds you of me” for its meaning; it is allowed to do what it can on its own, which is a lot, depending on how much the reader wants to contemplate it. But Ashbery has no intention of teasing out the meaning of this phrase for the reader. He is going to multiply his meanings with subsequent lines until there are literally billions of possibilities of meanings, just as one might simply string together random digits to produce a large enough pool of different social security numbers to fit a very large population. Adding does not produce meaning. Subtraction does. Ashbery is not interested in meaning, because his poems continually add item after item in a way that is essentially random.
One could imagine a real person actually having this thought: “Everything depends on whether somebody reminds you of me.” It could mean a number of things, but it strongly evinces an emotional attachment between a “you” and a ”me,” with “somebody” playing an interesting but subservient part. Perhaps the abstract meaning that leaps to the front of the line is: that in order for me to be memorable to you, I (paradoxically) must participate in the identity of others (“somebody.”)Ashbery’s next lines do not grow out of this phrase in any sort of logical or dramatic way; they are merely additions, which expand (loosen) the field, rather than narrowing (defining) it. Addition is a valid way to proceed, but it is a very particular way to proceed, and one which thwarts drama and meaning.
The New Critics make much of the whole poem’s meaning as the crucial thing: whether or not a particular line has meaning is not as important as what all the layers and parts of the poem add up to. Ashbery, then, can use “Everything depends on whether somebody reminds you of me” as one part of his addition.
Adding creates the potential for meaning, but never creates meaning itself.
Ashbery does not mean. He adds.
Is it the reader’s job to fit every part of the poem together? Or the poet’s?
This question is not even fair to ask, because it is not a matter of reader versus poet. This gets us into a false argument, along the lines of the “Affective Fallacy,” another in the long line of New Critical red herrings.
The real issue is “fit every part of the poem together.” If all we have in the poem is addition, it becomes mathematically impossible to “fit the parts of the poem together,” and this is precisely what Ashbery does: he adds without fitting.
Ashbery, belonging to his Art for Art’s Sake school, is trying to escape the poem that means—the sort of poem that lacks art because all it essentially does is convey information which one could otherwise find in an encyclopedia. Ashbery’s escape is a noble pursuit of art, but we wonder if the escape needs to be pursued quite so desperately. Is Ashbery perhaps tunneling into bedlam?
