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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
The poem proceeds from stems of language to an invocation of spring and its display in shrubs and flowers, followed hard by the banal realm of everyday life. Its representation by entries from the school cafeteria menu is "not an ecstatic Whitmanian catalogue," in Hollander's felicitous formulation, "but more like a recital by W. C. Fields, trying to incapacitate further an already nauseated bank examiner" (174). A sense of entrapment prevails here, "waiting for the wait to be ended," a stasis so overwhelming it "Invests everything like a climate" (Self-Portrait 14). A portentous "event rounding the corner" he foresees as the desired end, the end which gives meaning to the question "Does anything matter?" (14).
But instead of a great event of transcendent meaning, we find as we round the corner the repulsive effluvium of an air-conditioner, cascading upon us, a nauseating reimmersion in the quotidian world. The untenability of the present moment leads to a meditation on time wherein the units sum up from smaller to larger. Ashbery is diametrically opposed to the imaginative chronology of Blake, whose series implies a continuity, with the smallest possible unit being the "Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find / Nor can his Watch Fiends find it" which "renovates every Moment of the Day if rightly placed" (526). Instead Ashbery flees from the agonized moment, reaching for comfort in the more capacious month, still familiar and human in scale. However, beyond months one must cross into the threatening otherness of the seasons, which are "foreign / To our concept of time" (15). We are comfortable with months as units of time because they are human constructs complete with the names and numbers we affix to impose our order on time; but the seasons are part of the vast and uncontrollable processes of nature, operating from reasons not our own, reasons which in fact are part of the mystery we are trying to understand.
Because they are so "other" we invent abstractions (like the matronly Hope, whom we will meet further on) to try to define and control them, which inevitably leads to a falseness both in art and in the construction of reality we are trying to maintain: "these abstractions / That sift like marble dust across the unfinished works of the studio / Aging everything into a characterization of itself" (15). We see things as they are characterized as being rather than as they truly are. Nevertheless, our perception may be renewed by the artistic "cleanup committee" through attention to obscure, overlooked details and by rearrangements which provide a fresh context for them. In less than thirty lines Ashbery has taken up in turn ennui with our given world, meditation on time, and rumination on aesthetics. He arrives at a qualified affirmation that justification is possible in art where the work if not the artist may be "redeemed at the end / Under the smiling expanse of the sky / That plays no favorites but in the same way / Is honor only to those who have sought it" (15). Seeking honor has always been a cardinal trait of the quester.
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