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

Style, Spring, 2004 by Ernesto Suarez-Toste

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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:

   How are we to inhabit
   This space from which the fourth wall is invariably missing,
   As in a stage-set or dollhouse, except by staying as we are,
   In lost profile, facing the stars, with dozens of as yet
   Unrealized projects, and a strict sense
   Of time running out, of evening presenting
   The tactfully folded-over bill?

Existential doubts of all sorts, including the fear that we may be little more than a puppet show for some good-humored deity, are softened by the witty image of time as a maitre d', with an implicit carpe diem message--make the best possible meal, for the bill will invariably be too expensive. Ashbery's description of the setting is extremely apt here. De Chirico's "drama of objects" needs a stage, and Ashbery's typically untypical scenario is very much like a stage-set, an "open field of narrative possibilities" (Three Poems 41).

Other poems use the iconography of de Chirico's train stations to describe imaginary settings, as is the case in "On the Towpath," where, as Marjorie Perloff has noted, "unspecified persons perform unspecified and unrelated acts against the backdrop of a constantly shifting landscape whose contours dissolve before our eyes" (72). De Chirico's painting participates in this general indeterminacy by creating the feeling that indeed "something" is happening, that there is a logic ruling these events, but one we are not invited to understand. In that sense he could be said to paint in medias res. One of de Chirico's paintings, Mystery and Melancholy of a Street, features a typical metaphysical setting where a girl runs up a street (not a rampart but a ramp) and the building behind her shows spires and machicolations. A variation on the same motif, Melancolie d'une rue, pictures a background with a station clock and the shadow of a tower, projected from outside the frame. Compare with the setting of "On the Towpath":

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

Style, Spring, 2004 by Ernesto Suarez-Toste

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