'Whispers Out of Time': The syntax of being in the poetry of John Ashbery

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 1995 by Jody Norton

If each of these versions of subjectivity is transient, "Like a wave breaking on a rock, giving up / Its shape in a gesture which expresses that shape" (73), "their importance / If not their meaning is plain" (73). They serve "to nourish / A dream which includes them all" (73) - the dream of an enduring, proper, fully real identity. And if such a dream can never actually be fulfilled, nevertheless it can provide us with a sustaining dimensionality. As Ashbery's speaker puts it,

Why be unhappy with this arrangement, since Dreams prolong us as they are absorbed? Something like living occurs, a movement Out of the dream into its codification. (73)

It is clear all the same why one should be unhappy, in Ashbery's speaker's view: without a valid identity it is only "Something like living" that occurs, not real life.

If hypothetical structurations of the subject are ontologically hollow, however, if their "locking into place" is even "'death itself'" (76), nevertheless "the 'all'" of "the 'it was all a dream' / Syndrome . . . tells tersely / Enough how it wasn't" (82). First of all, the real of being is "Like a dozing whale on the sea bottom / In relation to the tiny, self-important ship / On the surface" (70) (the identificatory fiction of the subject). Second, even the chameleon subject, considered as the historical sequence of structurations of the individual, "Was real, though troubled," a "waking dream" (82). The continuity of this existence is textual and temporal, however, rather than metaphysical. "Each part of the whole," each successive deposit "falls off," over time, and is aware of its past formation only "in cold pockets / Of remembrance" (83). "'Death itself,'" finally, the provisional stability of the self-portrait in image or word, is life As We Know it.

The boy who cried "wolf" used to live there.

- John Ashbery, "Litany" (As 19)

Ashbery's sense of the subject as a becoming-structure-going-past that can never stabilize itself as a durable presence, that involves a certain originary separation of the individual from himself as the condition of its presencing, and whose hypostatizations often appear most clearly legible when they have taken on the strangeness of the past, lends Ashbery's work a touch of pathos which is not always fended off with a joke. For example, the image of the subject - "This profile at the window" - Ashbery writes, is "The picture of hope a dying man might turn away from, / Realizing that hope is something else, something concrete / You can't have" (Houseboat 39).

This impression of the oppressive lostness of the self inevitably creates a host of echoes in Victorian and Modernist poetry. "For what wears out the life of mortal men?" Arnold asks in "The Scholar-Gipsy," and replies, "'Tis that from change to change their being rolls." The Scholar-Gipsy, having made the romantic choice of vision over ambition, and hence possessed of "perennial youth," is much to be admired and envied, despite Arnold's speaker's derogation of him as a "truant boy." His life is one of "unclouded joy," while we, who live "a hundred different lives," "pine, / And wish the long unhappy dream would end" (Arnold 178-80).