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IV. COLLECTIVE INARTICULATION

But outside, the streetscape

--John Ashbery, Flow Chart

In her essay "Impossible Music," Susan Schultz concludes that, "Ashbery’s vision, however difficult, is inclusive" (6). This inclusiveness is essentially democratic, though its catholicity distinguishes itself from, say, Whitman’s celebration of the American social landscape, in that Ashbery not only embraces the public spaces and diverse faces of the United States, but also pays homage to the multiplicity of languages and idiolects within what H.L. Mencken called "the American language." The American language is, in Ashbery’s work, the widest, most exhilarating of social spaces, and the one with the greatest possibility for contemporary poetry. It is not suprising that Australian poet-critic John Tranter not only characterizes Ashbery’s poetry as situated within and commenting upon public space, but also that right in the middle of his description Tranter locates a dictionary:

Well, what is the Transcendental Ashbery about? Let me count the ways: it is about weather, particularly involving trees, leaves and flocks of birds. It is about shadowy fall evenings in a deserted schoolyard, the teacher alone in the empty classroom and the ghostly image of a lost or dead boy fading around a corner in the distance. It is lacustrine, a Latinate word Ashbery plucked from the dictionary for the title of his poem ‘These Lacustrine Cities’: about lakes, and pools, and rivers, and shores, and the waves of the ocean. It is about art, pots of paint, canvasses, theatre sets, late night parties…scenes from a ballet, performances of impossible music and sleigh rides over the tundra. It is about farms like the ones around where he grew up near the shores of Lake Ontario in upstate New York: cold, dark and silent in the long northern winter, with brooding weather and flocks of migrating birds to match ("Three Ashberys" 5).

Ashbery has been both praised and condemned for being quintessentially "American" in his facility for mixing the various registers of English as spoken in the United States, and for graphing them onto definitively American social structures. Tranter argues that Ashbery’s work "revels in gossip as much as in learning" and

"occupies the same cognitive space as the brand name of the mineral water you’re drinking." The polyphonic and multivalent nature of Ashbery’s poetry makes it "a collective cultural representation like ‘Apple Pie,’ ‘Tide’ or ‘Postmodernism’" ("Three Ashberys" 1-2). Schultz notes that his book-length poem Flow Chart, for instance, contains the languages of Wall Street, guerilla war, the wild west, big government, sports and archaic English poetry, as well as medical lingo, contemporary political rhetoric and the esoteric lingua franca of post-modern theory (3). "Ashbery sees himself," she says, "as a less-tyrannical bard, one whose identity accrues through the voices around him, rather than one who demands that his reader share his every assumption" (5).

Ashbery has accepted and promoted this image of himself as a kind of latter-day Rimbaud, for whom the self was always other. Though he’s been appropriately called "The Last of the Romantics" by Tranter (3), a view inaugurated by Harold Bloom, much of Ashbery’s work reveals not a singular consciousness expressed by means of a dominating, usurping, self-actualizing "voice," but rather a poet of Keatsian negative capability, who evicts the voice in order to hear all sounds surrounding and informing the poetic consciousness. In his 1991 volume Flow Chart, Ashbery is explicit about his role as ego-less medium (related to Thoreau’s "naked eyeball" and to Stevens’s "snow man," though neither teleological like the former nor reductive like the latter, and less "mystical" than both), observing, "I see I am as ever / a terminus of sorts, that is, lots of people arrive in me and switch directions but no one / moves any farther (quoted in Schultz 5).

Schultz calls attention to Ashbery’s mention of an "agent" a few lines later, arguing that the poet is at once a ticket agent, managing and distributing languages as if they were passengers, and a kind of secret or undercover agent, who conspires with creative forces to discover information which cannot or should not be revealed (5). The result, as Ashbery implies, is that through the poetic lens, linguistic registers are exchanged, reflected in and refracted by one another, and reversed, but never moved forward in a fashion that suggests Hegelian progress towards an ideal. In figuring the languages he directs and re-directs as "lots of people," Ashbery orchestrates not an apologia, ars poetica or other private discourss—though Flow Chart is all of these—but rather some larger, communal narrative more accurately enacted as poetry than as linear, directed narrative itself.

"My own autobiography," Ashbery said in an interview with Joe David Bellamy, "has never interested me very much. Whenever I try to think about it, I seem to draw a complete blank" (quoted in Schultz 10). His well-known "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" (1975) is indeed less the autobiography its title promises and more an establishment of aesthetic principles and the way they apply to or derive from wider aspects of human experience. His earlier poem "Soonest Mended" (1970) is concerned more specifically with the dynamic between the private and public, posing as a confessional poem that resists its own personal disclosures in favor of revealing a collective identity. Ashbery has called it

is a kind of signature poem. If you know what I mean. I’ve often characterised it as my "One Size Fits All Confessional Poem." Since it’s not really about me, but about—I guess it’s what Gertrude Stein called "everybody’s autobiography" (Tranter, 1988 interview, 6).

The so-called confessional poem, as defined in the 1960s by Plath, Sexton, Lowell and Berryman, was overtly if not excruciatingly personal, such that one poet’s confession could not be mistaken for that of another, let alone for that of an entire group. "Soonest Mended" is obviously a critique of a genre already waning in the early 70s, and by means of its malleability, attempts to configure, however obliquely and among other interpretive valences, the fact that the self is no longer a stable or fixed entity, but is rather a fluctuating construct defined by the selves encompassing and penetrating it. Ashbery’s conclusion is one of inconclusiveness: that there is no single voice, and that any utterance, even a polyphonous, collective statement, cannot escape participation in the most comprehensive public space—history. Schultz recalls Ashbery’s remark that his poetry is "not private, but about everyone’s privacy" (3), and within that shared intimacy, he locates the enormous burden of trying and failing

to transcend historical trajectories through utterance.

The seeds of the poem’s discontent are in the phrase at once hidden in and evoked by the title: "Least said, soonest mended." Whereas many poems by Ashbery, most notably "Saying It to Keep It from Happening," demonstrate that the act of speaking or of writing itself might offer salvation from the anxiety of some nameless and perhaps unnamable event (usually Ashbery’s code for "history"), "Soonest Mended" suggests that speech is not a cure for timeless human despair but rather a part of the ailment and pain it strives to alleviate. The phrase, "Least said, soonest mended," implies that something was ruptured or disrupted previously, that such a division was perhaps the result of language, and that the most promising or most efficient way of mending the situation is to say as little as possible. The poem begins "on the margin," testifying to the divisive and exlusionary nature of whatever breaking occurred earlier, and the public "we" that Ashbery employs to analyze the present situation is "on the brink of destruction" and "always having to be rescued…Before it was time to start all over again." Thus Ashbery establishes the primary problematic of the poem: that humanity has been split apart, that history repeats itself, and that everyone is seeking reprieve from the self-destructive cycle.

One answer to the Nietzschean dilemma of the eternal return is, of course, to attempt to ignore or forget history altogether, which Fredric Jameson and other theorists say is always-already an integral and defining characteristic of the very postmodern era in which Ashbery is writing anyway. One figure conjured in the poem, Angelica from Ingres’s 1819 painting "Roger Delivering Angelica," wonders "whether forgetting / The whole thing might not, in the end, be the only solution." This position is undermined throughout the poem as empirically impossible, given history’s repetition: there is no "in the end." The allure of forgetting, however, is grounded in the desire to escape negotiating the new. No sooner have Angelica and the protagonists of Orlando Furioso been introduced than Happy Hooligan, the everyman title character of the 1930s popular comic strip, enters "in his rusted green automobile / …just to make sure everything was O.K." Any attempt to assimilate this latest piece of information" is problematized both by its status—"Was it information?"—and by an uncertainty of agency on the part of the spectators:

Weren’t we rather acting this out

For someone else’s benefit, thoughts in a mind

With room enough to spare for our little problems (so they began to seem),

Our daily quandary about food and rent and bills to be paid?

Ashbery sketches a bathetic, animated figure for God in order to begin critiquing the inefficacy and pernicious influence of the so-called Logos upon modern society. He implies that "acting this out / For someone else’s benefit" is to no one’s benefit when "someone else" does not exist or is, in any case, merely a supreme fiction. Nonetheless, the characters of the poem desire simplification in the form of a unifying, liberating narrative, understood as a consistent or coherent "voice":

This was our ambition: to be small and clear and free.

With the "Alas" that follows, however, Ashbery undermines the possibility of achieving such a transcendental release into harmony. "Our star," he says, "was brighter perhaps when it had water in it," indicating that the light and nobility of language or spirituality have, in effect, dried out. The center no longer holds, and the subjects, while self-proclaimed "talkers," know that "underneath the talk lies / The moving and not wanting to be moved," since movement into history is immediately to participate in its repetition, not in its theoretical forward march. Ashbery further subverts consoling notions of an overarching voice by characterizing the de-centering of the self and its community as surprising, even when its constituents presumably know that "the course was hazards and nothing else":

To be without, alone and desperate.

Ashbery signals the death of the nineteenth century notion of "the Book" as propagated most forcefully by Mallarme, saying that to speak or to write is not to possess or to inhabit language but to dwell alongside it, in a parallel, perhaps arbitrary space—or to be denied it, despite one’s desire or need. As subjectivity is questioned and the speaking subject suddenly realizes that his or her vantage point is constantly shifting with the accretion of each "latest piece of information," any stable position from which to speak is eliminated. Instead of establishing a subject and a public space in which to exist, the act of speaking condemns the speaker to a cycle of repetition, since to speak is not to achieve "the end that is past truth, / The being of our sentences," but to give oneself up to a historical flux of signifiers. Only "the fantasy," says Ashbery, "makes it ours, a kind of fence-sitting," stating that the decentered subject’s dream of somehow straddling—let alone mending—the divide that language establishes is only a dream.

Ashbery concedes that there do exist "moments, years, / Solid with reality, faces, namable events, kisses, heroic acts," but that these apparently tactile or stable concepts are "not too reassuring, as though meaning could be cast aside some day / When it had been outgrown." He determines that to "stay cowering / Like this in the early lessons"—to refrain from speaking—is "better" if not best, "since the promise of learning / Is a delusion." There can be no learning without a notion of "progress," but such a notion is refused by history and language. The circular motion of history, insofar as "Tomorrow would alter the sense of what had already been learned," eliminates any attempt to achieve some pure, everlasting, transcendental truth. And the postmodern poet’s role as ticket agent and undercover agent means that he first filters and shuffles languages and then shares their truths with the community—but as secrets, or codes of collective inarticulation. Ultimately, "learning," or progress into understanding or meaning, is extended infinitely, and thereby deferred into uselessness. Time, he says, "is an emulsion."

These resignations are finally unsatisfactory, however. "Nothing / Has somehow come to nothing," he writes: despite the dangers and divisive anxieties of speaking, humanity—and not least among it the poets—attempts to ameliorate anxiety through the speech that initiates desire. In participating in the structure of language, subjects subject themselves to history:

To the mooring of starting out, that day so long ago.

Ashbery mentions not living at home or in a home, but "around the home," testifying both to language’s inherent periphrastic nature as well as to the individual subject’s absent center, around which it circulates. There can be no forgetting, only the "making ready to forget," and the "and" after that phrase renders the ending not a contrast to but an extension of the attempt to remove oneself from history: an attempt to forget results in an "always coming back." That the cycle of history remains unbroken is furthered in the oxymoron of the phrase, "the mooring of starting out": every act of speech, while an intended starting out or an attempt at progress, is arrested by the "mooring" that defines it as speech.

One of the most interesting questions raised by "Soonest Mended" is: Just how universal is this "everybody’s biography"? The context of the poem suggests a "technological society" sometime after the 1930s, and apparently aware of its relationship to history as such. Ashbery’s democratic vista is implicitly social and explicitly temporal: that subjects conform to or are thrust into the role of "good citizens" is at once an index of the settling-down of social and political upheavals of the late 1960s—the white-mainstreaming of post-hippie, post-dissenting American culture—as well as a broader statement about the inevitability of history and the shattered self within its slipstream. A "One Size Fits All Confessional Poem" is not a confessional poem at all, as that genre was understood in the 1950s. Rather, "Soonest Mended" verifies and laments that to speak of one’s self in late twentieth century society is to necessarily speak of everyone, and that to speak at all is to participate in that history which has exploded the self. That Ashbery has written a poem in defense of silence demonstrates the difficulty if not futility of understanding historical anxiety.