'Whispers Out of Time': The syntax of being in the poetry of John Ashbery

13 Michael Warner describes heterosexuality as "the modern discursive organization of sex that treats gender difference as difference in general" (202). On gay theory and sex/gender difference see Boone and Cadden, and Fuss.

14 Wittgenstein writes, "Even if the most trustworthy of men assures me that he knows things are thus and so, this by itself cannot satisfy me that he does know. Only that he believes he knows" (On Certainty 20e). He adds, "The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing" (24e).

15 In his reading of the speaker's attraction to the figure of Parmigianino, Shoptaw notes both the "enchantment of self with self" (Self-Portrait 72) and the search for "the self in another and . . . the other in oneself" (Shoptaw 181-82). But Shoptaw does not attempt to analyze the incompatibility of Freud's theoretically unsatisfactory description of homosexuality in "On Narcissism" (Freud actually theorizes homosexuality more convincingly elsewhere) with the attraction to an other as such that narcissism, strictly speaking, precludes. Lacan's conception of the mirror stage offers an explanation of the self-other relation that accounts for its reflexive character as a dynamic exchange, rather than a static contradiction. Shoptaw refers to the mirror stage at one point, but does not distinguish it from narcissism (see 184).

Freud discusses the genesis and character of homosexuality in Three Essays and "Psychogenesis," as well as in "Psycho-Analytic." Kaja Silverman analyzes Freud's theories of male homosexuality at length.

16 For the purposes of this brief discussion, I will take as representative of the category Language poets those authors whose work appears in Ron Silliman's collection or Douglas Messerli's anthology.

17 Recent critical works in which connections between Ashbery's writing and that of the Language poets are asserted or implied include Fredman; Andrews "Misrepresentation"; Silliman, Watten, et al.; Waldrop; Nicholls; and Reinfeld.

18 The exception in Ashbery's oeuvre, perhaps, is the radically non-sequential poetry of The Tennis Court Oath, which is referred to with approval in Language poetics. See Andrews "Misrepresentation."

19 Analyzing Charles Bernstein's "The Simply," Jerome McGann writes, "The ultimate subject of a text like this is the reader" (36).

20 Peter Nicholls warns that "to reject the 'voice' is not only to deny the imperial claims of the lyric self, but also to court an extreme of tonelessness which effaces social discourse in 'style'" (125). The ironically depoliticizing (because dehumanizing) effect of the Language poets' radical renunciation of personality in language, and the emotional and aesthetic aridity that are apt to plague resolutely voiceless forms of writing, are the chief risks the Language project takes.

WORKS CITED

Altieri, Charles. "John Ashbery and the Challenge of Postmodernism in the Visual Arts." Critical Inquiry 14 (1988): 805-30.

-----. Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry. New York: Cambridge UP, 1984.