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Reading John Ashbery's The Tennis Court Oath through Man Ray's eye

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 21; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502360701529150

1470-1308

Daniel Kane,

Publishing and Scholarly Communication

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 See Andrew Ross, ‘Taking the Tennis-Court Oath’, in The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry, ed. Susan Schultz (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 1995), pp. 193–210; Bruce Andrews, ‘Misrepresentation: A text for The Tennis Court Oath of John Ashbery’, in In the American Tree, ed. Ron Silliman (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation) pp. 520–29; Peter Nicholls, ‘John Ashbery and language poetry’, in Lionel Kelly (ed.), Poetry and the Sense of Panic: Critical Essays on John Ashbery and Elizabeth Bishop, pp. 155–167; and Marjorie Perloff, ‘Normalizing John Ashbery’, Jacket Magazine, January 1998. Retrieved 30 April 2007 from < http://jacketmagazine.com/02/perloff02.html >. These works are good starting points to find examples of poets and critics affiliated with language writing and poststructuralist theory who cite The Tennis Court Oath as an influential literary model. On the other end of the spectrum, see Harold Bloom's essay ‘The charity of the hard moments’, John Ashbery: Modern Critical Views, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1985), pp. 44–72, in which Bloom defines The Tennis Court Oath as ‘the outrageously disjunctive volume’ which is problematic because Ashbery ‘attempted too massive a swerve away from the ruminative continuities of Stevens and Whitman’ (111). In her essay ‘John Ashbery and the Idea of the Reader’, Contemporary Literature, 23, 4 (Autumn 1982), pp. 493–514, Bonnie Costello comments that poems in The Tennis Court Oath, ‘while daring in their writerly qualities’ are ‘finally unreadable in that the reader is excluded from them. They imply a theory of language in which communication is not a primary goal’ (p. 494). James Longenbach's ‘Ashbery and the individual talent’, American Literary History, 9, 1 (Spring 1997), pp. 103–27, also features a relatively conservative take on Ashbery's work generally. Perloff provides us with a lively assault on what she views as Longenbach's reactionary recuperative moves. Both Longenbach and Perloff seek to represent the ‘true’ Ashbery even as their interpretations are almost wholly opposite each other. Longenbach, a critic looking to break the claim of the avant-gardes on the reception of Ashbery's work, takes the poet at his word as it were in order to assert that Ashbery is, essentially, a safe and sound realist poet writing within an intact Modernism: ‘Over and over again Ashbery justified the disjunctive quality of poems in his book The Tennis Court Oath in mimetic terms. In the dust-jacket statement for the Tennis Court Oath, Ashbery said his goal was to reach ‘a greater, more complete kind of realism’. And he subsequently maintained that the ‘polyphony’ of his poetry is a ‘means toward greater naturalism’. Here Longenbach relies on Ashbery's comments to situate the book firmly within a mimetic tradition wherein fragments are composed in response to the fragmented visible world. On the other end of the spectrum, Perloff positions Ashbery as a kind of Birth Father to the language poets: ‘Ashbery's poem is doing something else – establishing, for one thing, a different relationship between writer and reader, a relationship that looks ahead to the poetics of “embodiment” as practiced by such later poets as Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews, Maggie O'Sullivan and Karen MacCormack. Ashbery's is thus less a “worried continuing” than the recognition that, in the words of “Syringa”, “All other things must change too”’. Perloff's reading is fairly typical of the way Ashbery is generally praised for exhibiting an approach that celebrates and manifests not a transparent realism but indeterminism, aleatory procedures, performativity and a wholly decentred conception of self, meaning and power. Ashbery has encouraged a Perloff-like reading – in a 1986 interview, for example, Ashbery stated ‘the simultaneity of Cubism is something that has rubbed off on me … as well as the Abstract expressionist idea that the work is a sort of record of its own coming-into-existence; it has an anti-referential sensuousness.’ This from the same poet who insisted his goal was to reach ‘a greater, more complete kind of realism’. These apparently competing interpretations of his own work strategically anticipate the gossip and conflict between the late Modernist and language camps, and guarantee a kind of contingent inclusion on either end. Thus we have an Ashbery who is both naturalist and anti-referentialist, every now and then providing both sides with gnomic rhetorical ammunition to continue the ongoing debate of which Ashbery is the real Ashbery. One might want to revisit Jonathan Culler's Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975). In his short but incisive comments on Ashbery's ‘Thoughts of a Young Girl’ (included in The Tennis Court Oath), Culler concludes that ‘The poetic persona is a construct, a function of the language of the poem, but it nonetheless fulfils the unifying role of the individual subject, and even poems which make it difficult to construct a poetic persona rely for their effects on the fact that the reader will try to construct an enunciative posture’ (170). 2 Ashbery, ‘They Dream Only of America’, in The Mooring of Starting Out: The First Five Books of Poetry (New York: Ecco, 1997), pp. 62–3. All subsequent references to poems and page numbers in The Tennis Court Oath correlate to the book's placement in Ashbery's The Mooring of Starting Out. 3 ‘To Redoute’, p. 73. 4 ‘White Roses’, p. 91. 5 ‘The Suspended Life’, p. 93. 6 ‘The Ascetic Sensualists’, p. 109. 7 We can refer to O'Hara's poem ‘At The Old Place’ (The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995], 223–24), in which O'Hara describes dancing with Ashbery in the eponymous gay bar; ‘Wrapped in Ashes’ arms I glide./(It's heaven!).' In O'Hara's poem ‘All That Gas’, the speaker asks, ‘where have you gone, Ashes, and up and out/where the Sorbonne commissions frigidaires/from Butor and Buffet and Alechinsky storages/Beauty!’, p. 324. 8 ‘Landscape’, p. 113. 9 ‘The Unknown Travelers’, p. 123. 10 John Ashbery, ‘Introduction to a reading by Robert Duncan’, in Eugene Richie (ed.), Selected Prose (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005), p. 93. 11 John Ashbery, in David Bergman (ed.), Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957–1987 (New York: Knopf, 1989), pp. 5–6. 12 Ibid., p. 6. 13 ‘Interview with the author’. John Ashbery's home, New York City, 18 September 2005. 14 Ibid. Surrealist and ‘New American’ films were shown fairly regularly throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Programs included ‘Why Experimental Films’ (15 January 1952), ‘Sixty Years of French Film’ (29 May to 2 October 1957), ‘Robert Frank’ (1–3 February 1962), ‘The New American Cinema’ (3 May 1962), ‘The Independent Film: Animation and Abstraction, Surrealism and Poetry, Symbolism and the Unconscious’ (11 April, 2 May, 13 June, 1963) and ‘The Independent Film: Selections from the Filmmakers’ Co-operative' (15–22 November 1965). My thanks to Charles Silver, Associate Curator in the Department of Film and Media at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, for providing me with access to the Film Library's archives. 15 See, for example, the poems ‘They Dream Only of America’, ‘To Redouté’, ‘Our Youth’, ‘An Additional Poem’ and ‘Landscape’. I would be hard put to read these poems as any more ‘difficult’ or ‘decontextualized’ than Ashbery's purportedly tamer lyrics in books like Wakefulness and Where Shall I Wander. 16 Jean-George Auriol, ‘Whither the French Cinema’, transition 15 (February 1929), p. 263. 17 Man Ray, Self-Portrait (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1998), pp. 223–4. 18 P. Adams Sitney has also recognized the importance of subjectivity implicit in the phrase ‘tel que l'a vu’, though he does not address or explore the significance of the fact that the phrase was handwritten. See Sitney's Modernist Montage: The Obscurity of Vision in Cinema and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p. 29. 19 Man Ray, Self Portrait, p. 225. 20 Sitney, Modernist Montage, p. 28. 21 Inez Hedges, ‘Constellated visions: Man Ray's “L’Étoile de mer”‘, in Rudolf Kuenzli (ed.), Dada and Surrealist Film (New York: Willis Locker & Owens, 1987), p. 107. 22 Ashbery, ‘The Lozenges’, p. 106. 23 Ashbery, interview with the author. 24 Sitney, Modernist Montage, p. 29. 25 Ashbery, ‘Rain’, p. 85. 26 Ashbery, ‘Europe’, p. 187. 27 Ashbery, ‘The Lozenges,’ p.107. Ashbery uses surrealist effects consistently to interrogate normative sexuality. Note the poem ‘Idaho’, for example, where ‘all-American’ characters ‘Carol’ and ‘Biff’ negotiate a complex sexual flirtation that includes ‘flowers, moral turpitude’, flora inserted into mouths, a ‘great, senseless knob’, and an attitude towards marriage summed up by Carol's definition of the institution: ‘She shivered. “It's—it's a death”!’, p.157. 28 Ashbery, ‘The New Realism’, p. 118. 29 Tellingly, Ashbery has praised surrealist painter Yves Tanguy for showing how ‘the arbitrary distinction between abstract and figurative art did not exist’ (Bergman [ed.], Reported Sightings, 27). 30 In On The Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery's Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), John Shoptaw argues that Ashbery's ‘homotextuality’ is the defining characteristic behind much, if not all, of Ashbery's work. ‘With their distortions, evasions, omissions, obscurities, and discontinuities, Ashbery's poems always have a homotextual dimension’ (p. 4). While such a claim is perhaps unnecessarily reductive, given the variety of discourses Ashbery has engaged in throughout his career, Shoptaw's focus on Ashbery's negotiation of sexuality within his poetry is nevertheless one that should not be glossed over. Additionally, in his Queer Lyrics: Difficulty and Closure in American Poetry (New York: Palgrave, Macmillan, 2002), John Vincent discusses homosexuality in Ashbery's poetry as it relates to formal and narrative closure. 31 Given all the references to chugging engines and water, the ‘small persistent tug’ might also stand in for a literal water-going tug. 32 Ashbery, ‘The Lozenges’, p. 107. 33 We might also note the many references to projected light and moving images in Ashbery's collage poem ‘Europe’. Consider the single line ‘the club had bought aperture’ that makes up all of Section 42; the pictorial way in Section 85 in which Ashbery arranges the lines; the montage-like moment in Section 85, ‘hair banana’, followed by the line ‘does not evoke a concrete image’ (as opposed to, one might conclude, a more favoured moving image); and Section 111, which refers to Morse code being projected through a device that suggests the film projector itself: ‘They suddenly saw a beam of intense, white light,/A miniature searchlight of great brilliance,/–pierce the darkness, skyward.//They now recognized to be a acetylene,/a cylinder mounted/upon a light tripod of aluminum/with a bright reflector behind the gas jet.’ Ashbery, ‘Europe’, p. 149. 34 Ernesto Suárez-Toste, ‘“The tension is in the concept”: John Ashbery's Surrealism’, Style, 38, 1 (Spring 2004), pp. 1–16. 35 Ashbery, ‘America’, p. 69. 36 Ashbery, ‘A Life Drama’, p. 95. 37 See Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, trans. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, 1977), pp. 37–8. 38 Ashbery, ‘Night’, p. 74. 39 Ibid., pp. 74–5. 40 As Kuenzli points out, ‘[The surrealist's] favorite films were the very popular serials: Fantômas, Les Vampires, Les Mystères de New York, as well as American films by Charlie Chaplin, Mack Sennett, and Buster Keaton’ (8). See J.H. Matthews Surrealism and Film (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1971) for further discussion of surrealist's appreciation for movie serials including Fantômas. Matthews provides a useful analysis of ‘The surrealist sense of poetry in film’, and encourages us to notice ‘how much faith surrealists place in the capacity of the movies to convey a poetic content that appeals to them. “What we ask of the cinema”, Robert Desnos pointed out, when discussing “Mystères du Cinéma” in Le Soir on April 2, 1927, “is the impossible, the unexpected, dreams, surprise which efface the baseness in souls and rush them enthusiastically to the barricades and into adventures; we ask of the cinema what love and life deny us, that is mystery, miracles”‘(3). 41 Ashbery, ‘Introduction to Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre's Fantômas’, in Selected Prose, p. 183. 42 Ibid., p. 188. 43 In his essay on the Fantômas books and films, Ashbery discusses one episode where the nefarious anti-hero infects ‘the luxurious ocean liner British Queen by injecting rats with plague germs and watching its five hundred passengers die ghastly deaths’ (Selected Prose, p. 187). 44 Ibid., 188. 45 Bill Berkson, ‘“The arctic honey blabbed over the report causing darkness”: An interview with John Ashbery’, unpublished manuscript (John Ashbery Papers, Berg Collection, New York Public Library, 1970), p. 10. 46 Ashbery, ‘Introduction to Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre's Fantômas’, in Selected Prose, p. 190. 47 Ashbery, ‘“The arctic honey blabbed over the report causing darkness”‘, p. 9. 48 Given the content of this letter from Ashbery to O'Hara. (September 6 [n.y]. Berg Collection, New York Public Library), it is probable that it was written during one of Ashbery's sojourns back to the United States during the early stages of his ten year residence in France (1955–1966). Evidence includes the following sentence discussing plans for an upcoming anthology: ‘I hope that you will carry on my untiring efforts to launch it while I'm in Europe’. Ashbery also refers to his Fulbright grant, which allowed him to go to France initially: ‘I hope to arrive [in New York] a week from Saturday, in advance of my parents (the Fulbright sent me my train fare to New York and ah intends to use it’). 49 Ashbery defined the conflation of surrealism with ‘daily life’. In a 1964 review of a surrealism show in Paris, Ashbery insisted ‘Surrealism has become a part of our daily lives: its effects can be seen everywhere, in the work of artists and writers who have no connection with the movement, in movies, interior decoration and popular speech. A degradation? Perhaps. But it is difficult to impose limitations on the unconscious, which has a habit of turning up in unlikely places’ (Bergman [ed.], Reported Sightings, p. 4). 50 Ashbery, ‘How Much Longer Will I be Able to Inhabit the Divine Sepulcher’, p. 79. 51 Ibid., p. 78. 52 Ibid., p. 80. 53 Ibid., p. 81. 54 Ibid., p. 79. 55 Ibid., p. 80. 56 Ibid., p. 81.