"The tension is in the concept": John Ashbery's surrealism

Style, Spring, 2004 by Ernesto Suarez-Toste

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 an explanation of anything. Structurally it recalls those false "tips" by magicians who announce they will teach the audience how to do a trick at home to impress our friends, and end up by complicating it even more. De Chirico is hardly ever so openly self-conscious, although he can introduce unmediated remarks in his canvases. In The Fatal Temple he painted a still-life and then mapped it by writing names next to the objects. The names were not those of the objects, but more abstract and symbolic, like joie or souffrance. In radical contrast to these, by the side of a distorted fish he bluntly wrote chose etrange. This is not just an example of unmediated address, it is a fitting technique to introduce an ambiguous irony and rescue the painting from the risk of falling into the sublime. Ashbery, to mention only one example, fearing the same elevation of tone in one of his poems, wrote the deflating 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 of twentieth-century poetry the new has an intrinsic value, and de Chirico relates this to 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 the middle of a dream with one's mouth full / Of unknown words [...]" (Self-Portrait 55). These lines, moreover, establish a sort of dissociation between the conscious self and the unconscious, suggesting the powerful transformations undergone during dreams. For both de Chirico and Ashbery the role of memory and the world of dreams acquire particular relevance. They do not attempt to describe, but to reproduce, explore, sometimes even subvert them. De Chirico followed Schopenhauer in developing his own theory about madness and art, and held that memory is responsible for the irreversible prosification of the world, for it causes us to become bored with repeated experience:

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

   ("On Metaphysical Art" 450)

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