John Ashbery's revision of the post-romantic quest: meaning, evasion, and allusion in "Grand Galop."

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1993 by Frank J. Lepkowski

The dilemma posed is essentially that any overall synthesis the mind can conceive will lack sufficient specificity to be useful; but the sheer profusion of details that present themselves to the mind to be interpreted in our time is overwhelming. One's immediate response to this is a state of paralysis and resignation, or even an attempted rejection of the mind's project: "I not only have my own history to worry about / But am forced to fret over insufficient details related to large / Unfinished concepts that can never bring themselves to the point / Of being, with or without my help, if any were forthcoming" (16). The sort of history here contrasted to the personal is presumably the kind constructed by specialists in academies, which is irrelevant to the common progress of life as it is lived on those streets with air-conditioners that drip on people as they walk their dogs. These histories become esoteric specialties which are "like a first-aid kit that no one ever uses / Or a word in the dictionary that no one will ever look up" (16).

But one is thrown perforce back into history of some kind because to try to live in the mere present is to be paralyzed by indecision, and afflicted again with the terrible sense of waiting:

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 And they sink steel needles deep into the pores, as though to say There is no use trying to escape And it is all here anyway.

Critics who stress Ashbery's opacity on the one hand or abstraction on the other tend to overlook the genuine emotional power he brings to bear on his subject. The tone created by strong, serious emotion - desperation, sorrow, longing, rapture - anchors Ashbery's project in "the rag and bone shop of the heart" sufficiently, one would hope, to defend it from being criticized as "a boring'castles in the air' approach" (Molesworth 165). It ought to be apparent that Ashbery's work, once one has attuned oneself to his mode of expression, is fundamentally and unmistakably passionate.(4)

The forced return from untenable present to some notion of history brings about a meditation on the mythic past, "The lackluster, disorganized kind without dates / That speaks out of the hollow trunk of a tree" (Self-Portrait 17). This is the kind of history which seems to spring from some deep human necessity, and we wonder "What precisely is it / About the time of day it is, the weather, that causes people to note it painstakingly in their diaries / For them to read who shall come after?" (17). Whether they who come later will care what the time or weather was is beside the point in the urgency of the impulse, which comes because "the ray of light / Or gloom striking you this moment is hope / In all its mature, matronly form" (17). This illumination inspires one to begin "taking all things into account / And reapportioning them according to size," which will result in our "having reached the end, wise / In that expectation and enhanced by its fulfillment, or the absence of it" (17).