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

Style, Spring, 2004 by Ernesto Suarez-Toste

   The allegory comes unsnarled
   Too soon; a shower of pecky acajou harpoons is
   About all there is to be noted between tornadoes. I have
   Only my intermittent life in your thoughts to live
   Which is like thinking in another language. (Houseboat Days 32)

In French, in descriptions of heavy rain, there exists the idiomatic expression pleuvoir des hallebardes [to rain halberds], which is closer to the English "cats and dogs" than to other, more logically appropriate terms of measure (a seaux [bucketfuls]). These hallebardes have an exact equivalent in Spanish (a chuzos [spears]), but not in English. Therefore Ashbery's "shower of pecky acajou harpoons" between tornadoes works as a reference to prickling raindrops. The proximity of the phrase "thinking in another language" may provide a clue here.

Naming was a very important task for de Chirico, who learned from his readings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche that the best way to achieve his metaphysical, defamiliarizing presentation of ordinary events and objects is to see things again with the freshness of the first time. This--of course--applies equally to their names, since these are inevitably charged with banality. In a sense, he needed to begin from a tabula rasa to avoid these connotations: "What is needed above all, is to rid art of all that has been its familiar content until now; all subject, all idea, all thought, all symbol must be put out" ("Eluard Ms." 187). Similarly, Ashbery wrote in 1962 that his purpose in poetry was "a restituer aux choses leur vrai nom, a abolir l'eternel poids mort de symbolisme et d'allegorie" ([to return things their true names, to lift the immemorial burden of symbolism and allegory] qtd. in Longenbach 123n. 11). "To return things their true names" is traditionally an orphic function, and to rid names of the accumulated "burden of symbolism" is exactly what de Chirico aspired to do in his paintings.

It is in the second half of "All and Some" where we can find a profusion of elements from de Chirico's landscapes. Returning to the nostalgic tone of the valediction, the setting acquires an intensely evocative power, and the poet complains that now no one "Cares or uses the little station any more. / They are too young to remember/How it was when the late trains came in./Violet sky grazing the gray hill-crests" (Self-Portrait 65). A similar melancholy can be attributed to the innumerable train stations in de Chirico's paintings. These perfect settings of anxiety and nostalgia, of departure and arrival, of greetings and farewells, would eventually become emblematic of surrealism, and so, in his description of the 1938 surrealist exhibition in Paris, Georges Hugnet referred to it both as a "railroad station for the imagination and the dream," and "a steam engine that broke a breach in the ramparts of our senses large enough for the heroic charge of our dreams, desires, and needs" (qtd. in Sawin 10-11).

Many of Ashbery's poems feature passages that recreate the wait in stations ("Melodic Trains" in Houseboat Days [24-26]), or describe a metaphysical landscape seen from a train. "Pyrography" (Houseboat Days 8-10) is a remarkable example of the image of Ashbery as passenger in one of de Chirico's trains. The "slow boxcar journey" takes us through a country built "partly over with fake ruins, in the image of ourselves: / An arch that terminates in mid-keystone, a crumbling stone pier / For laundresses, an open-air theater, never completed / And only partially designed." The vision of those ruins is very apt to share the feeling evoked in metaphysical paintings. Not ruins as criticism of the decay of modern civilization, but "fake ruins" as a gratuitous demonstration of disdain for functionality, and a further concession to aestheticism. But the introduction of such a landscape is not for aesthetic purposes only, and the metaphysical potential of the ruins triggers Ashbery's imagination into one of his typical reflections on time and what attitude we should adopt to face its passing: