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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
It has been the fate thus far of John Ashbery's poem "Grand Galop" to languish in the shadow of its great companion piece "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror." Such has been the undeniable attraction of the latter poem that what attention "Grand Galop" has received has been cursory or utilitarian. It has been mined occasionally for an example to illustrate some thesis about Ashbery's style, or to cast light upon another of his poems. Joanne Huybensz, in the most extended study the poem has yet received, epitomizes this attitude when she states, "It can be seen as a hinge, an opening into, or a clue to some deconstructed understanding of many of the other poems in Self-Portraz't as well as into the title poem itself" (45-46).
Yet even in having been treated as essentially a secondary work in Ashbery's canon, "Grand Galop" has attracted praise and attention if not sustained examination. John Hollander rates it as "great" (173), David Bromwich as "marvelous" (46), both in asides from studies primarily devoted to other topics. More impressively, "Grand Galop" excites from the unsympathetic Charles Molesworth the observation that it constitutes "the most succinct expression of Ashbery's concerns and strategies," as well as that "it pursues that special kind of abstract thought that Ashbery excels in .... The poem clarifies much that was baffling and unproductive in the earlier books" (176-77).(2) The present study takes issue with the notion that this poem, or Ashbery's best work in general, functions primarily as an exercise in abstraction, but readily accedes to Molesworth's identification of "Grand Galop" as a central work in Ashbery's canon.
Huybensz's affirmation that the poem's "highly personal quality and its refusal to admit the reader into its individual context repeatedly throw the reader out of the poem" (45) concedes too readily the poem's supposed opacity.(3) Since the novelty of Ashbery's distinctive style has worn off somewhat, critics including Helen Vendler, far from being flung away by his poems, have been entertaining the notion that "It seems time to write about John Ashbery's subject matter" (224). A reading of "Grand Galop" sensitive to the fundamental cues of symbol, tone, allusion, and narrative action can suggest ways in which it does in fact mean.
Viewed on its own terms, "Grand Galop" is an ambitious, various, and wide-ranging meditation on the means with which we try to find meaning in life. If the poem initially seems like an up-to-date treatment of the problematical nature of language and poetical expression, it moves, over the course of its development, toward the broader and profounder question of "how to live, what to do." "Grand Galop" concentrates and focuses themes and motifs adumbrated in the earlier Three Poems, and achieves a more poetic expression of them. In struggling to express his vision Ashbery finds himself almost guiltily reaching back into the literary past to the figure of the Romantic quester in order to find the symbol for his struggle. He turns to his predecessor, uneasy romancer Robert Browning, to guide him to the qualified position of precariousness that he sees as his predicament. Because Ashbery's dilemmas are in many ways emblematic of the modern condition of life and mind, he ends up speaking for the ways in which we repeatedly strive but fail to reconcile ourselves to our cosmos, our society, and our selves.
Despite one critic's ingenious suggestion that "the premise of this marvellous poem is a walk around New York City" (Bromwich 46) the operating metaphor in the title is that of the dance. The OED informs us that a galop is "a lively dance in 2-4 time, originally a separate and independent dance, but now also forming a portion of a set of quadrilles." Ashbery has commented,
The title of a poem is really much more than the word title generally suggests; it's also the subject of the poem .... The title almost amounts to the "given" for me; it indicates a space in which I will work. In addition to introducing the poem, it introduces me to the poem. (Lehman 111)
The poem includes as one of its elements a walk in the city, but it takes the form of a dance of the intellect of a most energetic tempo.
The starting point of "Grand Galop" is an oxymoronic observation on the relation between language and reality: "All things seem mention of themselves / And the names which stem from them branch out to other referents" (Self-Poyfrait 14). The first line seems to envision an organic connection between the word and the thing it names, whereas the second expresses the problem of multiplicity and thus indeterminacy of meaning; furthermore, they are not opposed but seemingly coexistent, since they are connected by the inclusive "and" rather than the exclusive "but." The distinctive intellectual rhythm of the poem is off and whirling, established in the way immanence is asserted, then immediately contradicted by dispersion, albeit a dispersion controlled again by an essentially organic metaphor. As Charles Altieri has noted, it is central to Ashbery's method to give each motion of the mind its due, "not to represent confusion but to dramatize qualities of mind, shifts of emotional levels, and possible structures of coherence among dispersed particulars and interpretive codes" (138). In miniature here we see the weaving pattern which will develop the fabric of the poem.
