Content provided in partnership with

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

Style, Spring, 2004 by Ernesto Suarez-Toste

[A]fter all it all came from Chirico and he was not a surrealist he is very fanciful and his eye is caught by it and he has no distinction between the real and the unreal because everything is alike to him, he says so, but the rest of them nothing is alike to them and so they do not say so, and that is the trouble with them [...].

--(Gertrude Stein, Everybody's Autobiography)

Most Popular Articles in Arts: Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism; Free-standing cardboard sculpture; What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...; Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...; Tino Sehgal at the ICA; More »

Much has been written about the relationship between John Ashbery's poetry and avant-garde art, particularly the painting of the Abstract Expressionists. Two of the earliest articles dealing with this subject--by Fred Moramarco (1976) and Leslie Wolf (1980)--have considered not only Ashbery's use of objets d'art as starting motifs for his poems but also the painterly quality present in much of his poetry itself. (1) That the early-century collage aesthetic has been a major influence on him is beyond doubt, and the most controversial issue nowadays is probably the negative view still taken of his surrealist experiments. A number of annoyed critics have trivialized Ashbery with the label "surrealist" whenever the poems in a volume are unusually dark, displaying a curious fondness for fitting them into the vague category of post-surrealist surrealism. (2) For very similar reasons--and a sense of automatism that Ashbery rejects--this work has been praised by Language poets.

Ashbery himself has shaken off the surrealist label with remarkable energy at times, most likely out of boredom, and has certainly tired of the reductionist connotations which--sadly enough--the term has acquired. Ashbery, who lived in France for ten years, had a first-hand experience of the country where surrealism was born, and it seems clear that his privileged access to "the real thing" has allowed him to appreciate in surrealism aspects that are neglected by the general public. We know from his art criticism that Ashbery distinguishes two kinds of surrealism, and only rejects the label in equal fear of excessively academicist or populist interpretations. Although "the term surrealism has fallen into disfavor," he praised Yves Tanguy as its embodiment on the ground that for him "the arbitrary distinction between abstract and figurative art did not exist" (Reported Sightings 27). It is clear from the context that he is referring to surrealism "not in the parochial 1920s sense of the term but in the second, open sense in which it can still be said to animate much of the most advanced art being done today" (see also McCabe 151). Although the most convincing analysis of surrealism as a twofold movement is made in the formally related terms of automatist-abstract and illusionistic-oneiric (see Krauss 91-94), Ashbery's distinction shows a greater personal involvement, not necessarily based on formal criteria. His categorization opposes the outdated and dogmatic received idea of surrealism with an empowering and liberating alternative conception. It is clear enough, though, that the former is related to Bretonian automatism, which he rejects: "The coupling of this acknowledged interest [in surrealism] with the alleged difficulty of his writing has led readers to view Ashbery mistakenly as an American Surrealist, practicing an automatic writing that [...] directly expresses his unconscious. Ashbery flatly denies the assertion that he composes by automatic writing" (Fredman 130). I would like to argue here that Ashbery's decade in France influenced him not only through his acquaintance with surrealist art and poetics, but also through his increasing knowledge of the possibilities of the French language and the linguistic experiments conducted by the Oulipo group. This will explain many obscure features of Ashbery's idiom, including the automatic aspect of his poetry and many apparently whimsical collocations. His French experience made him not an American Surrealist but a surrealist American, that is, not a writer whose main perception of the movement came from the 1940s interaction of the New York period of surrealism, but a poet and art critic who lived in Paris for a long part of his life and acquired insider's knowledge of the original movement as it was conceived. (3)

The matter of Ashbery's reception becomes increasingly complicated when dealing with his later work, whose acceptance is widespread. While certain individual examples are acclaimed as masterpieces by consensus ("Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror"), other poems published in these books continue to baffle public and critics alike. I want to focus here on several poems, some of which have so far received little critical attention and, indeed, show how these are touched by surrealism, but in a way that has little or nothing to do with the mainstream movement ("hard-core surrealism" as Ashbery puts it). Alan Williamson has successfully argued that Ashbery uses disjointed narrative and descriptive fragments as deliberate interruptions in his poems, like elements in a collage (120-22). Among these we can spot a clearly defined group whose inspiration seems to have been the characteristic iconographic catalogue of the Italian painter and poet Giorgio de Chirico, co-founder of the school of Pittura Metafisica and precursor of surrealism. His literary work has already been related to Ashbery's, regarding the likeness of the prose in Three Poems and de Chirico's novel Hebdomeros (Fredman 131-32). In the endnotes to The Double Dream of Spring Ashbery himself explained that the title was borrowed from one of de Chirico's paintings, and this is something most critics mention but hardly ever elaborate. (4)

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

Style, Spring, 2004 by Ernesto Suarez-Toste

Find Research Guides for:

Find Featured Titles for: Reference

Most Popular Articles in Arts

Most Popular Publications in Arts