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

Style, Spring, 2004 by Ernesto Suarez-Toste

Among other Oulipian techniques there is one more associated with Ashbery's poetry. "Pumectation" can be defined as "the ostensible procedure that a writer uses to mask the procedure he is actually using" (211). This is also called "Imparmigianization" and very aptly so in this context, because Ashbery saw through Parmigianino's use of this technique from the very third line of "Self-Portrait," in the way the hand is advanced "as though to protect / What it advertises" (68). Equally, within "All and Some" we can find this imparmigianization in the already mentioned "But what I mean is [...]," a device that actually helps to conceal the meaning it promises to reveal.

Another technique that seems expressly devised by a would-be saboteur of the Rosetta stone is the exploitation (by means of direct translation) of cultural or idiomatic differences with French. Sarah Lundquist has studied Ashbery's "French Poems"--originally written in French so that his own translation into English would avoid "customary word-patterns and associations" (Double Dream 95)--and reached the conclusion that he used cognates wherever possible, emphasizing the inherent similarities between the two languages. While this applies to the "French Poems," the opposite is also true outside this small corpus. Perhaps this second technique is limited to very specific expressive possibilities that Ashbery misses in English, but these are hardly "expressive" if the readers overlook them. Of the following two examples one is easily justified, the other less so.

The first one is recurrent in Ashbery's poetry, but he has explained it only once, as if he took his readers' faithfulness for granted. At least this is a meaningful case, where he might have reasonably missed the resources available in French. Two of Ashbery's most recurrent themes, time and the weather or climate, happen to share the same French word (temps), and this establishes an "extra" happy connection which somebody with his sensibility toward language cannot help celebrating. Thus in "The Ice-Cream Wars" he writes "Time and the weather / Don't always go hand in hand, as here [...]" (Houseboat Days 60). But other times he stretches the coupling along several lines, or else one of the two terms is merely implicit, as in "Pyrography": "The page of dusk turns like a creaking revolving stage [...]" (8). Here the connotations of rusty machinery and heavy, slow movement recall the internal mechanism of a clock, hence time, contrasting with the transition from day into night, which is the most natural in the world, but it is a meaningful mixture if the poet has the polysemic French temps in mind. These quotations belong to Houseboat Days, and their explanation is found in the title poem of his previous volume, "Self-Portrait": "the weather, which in French is / Le temps, the word for time [...]" (Self-Portrait 70). In any case it becomes clear that he can play with concepts and names at will.

The second example is the allusion to rain in "Daffy Duck in Hollywood":