McEvoy (quoting from “Modern Poetry and Its Underlying Structures of Thought:
Banality vs Profoundity” – ch.: Ashbery) aims straight at the start of what
Harold Bloom said set Ashbery in the “Pantheon” – among other literary greats
like Emily Dickinson, etc. The opening goes:
As Parmigianino did it, the right hand/Bigger than the head, thrust at the
viewer/And swerving easily away, as though to protect/What it advertises. A few
leaded panes, old beams,/Fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring run together/In a
movement supporting the face, which swims/Toward and away like the hand/Except
that it is in repose.
But surely we don’t want to drop the name “Ashbery.” McEvoy favours an approach
to poem that is what McEvoy calls ‘unseen’ – He draws from I. A. Prichards,
“Essays on practical criticism” – who first presented his Cambridge students
with pieces of poetry with the name of the poet detached.
McEvoy notes: “Imagine [the first eight lines of Ashbery’s “Self-portrait”] are
given as an "unseen" passage for evaluation in a … literature examination. What
might we make of it? The first part might be trying to appreciate what the poet
is trying to do. Here that shall be skipped.”
Not by Grice, the literary critic. He spent a whole seminar at
Brandeis noting that ‘trying’ only IMPLICATES (but never ‘entails’) “and does
not succeed”: “Surely I can try to topple the wall just to build muscle, and
not because I intend to succeed in toppling it”). What Ashbery is trying to do,
i.e. meaning, seems clear enough – as poets’s standards go. _His_ problem was
in the ‘reception’ or ‘understanding’ or ‘appreciation’, or ‘accessibility’ of
what he meant – to others. “I suppose I am, yes, unaccessible. At least that’s
what I’ve been told. But then, aren’t we all?” Here Ashbery quotes from Witters
and Witters’s idea that privacy is a _bonum_ (“Witters and the private language
argument: on Robinson Crusoe’s tooth-ache and Friday’s implicatures with it.”)
McEvoy goes on: “The second, more critical, part might be to evaluate the
merits of what has been attempted. Here there are two main problems. First,
what is the quality of the thought the poet is trying to express? On one
reading, the key thought is the last "Except that it is in repose". Is this
really an insightful thing to observe, or is it a kind of phoney-baloney
observation?”
Or both. Grice gave a seminar at Oberlin on “or” – “The genealogy of
disjunction, or the myth of exclusive ‘or’. His example was: “My wife is either
in the garden or in the kitchen.” “Now,” Grice says, “suppose the kitchen in my
cottage” – they lived in a lovely cottage on Woodstock road – “connects
directly to our garden. Suppose, further, that my wife is lying on the floor of
the kitchen, with the upper part of her body facing the kitchen itself, while
her body, waist down, lies on the garden itself. Under these circumstances,
surely, the ‘or’ is inclusive. Since my wife happens to be in the kitchen AND
in the garden. People misuse ‘or’ but that’s THEIR problem. It’s all in the
implicature,” he added for emphasis. Surely Ashbery, who almost attended
Grice’s lectures on implicature at Harvard knew of this.
McEvoy goes on: “Second, and relative perhaps to the first problem, what is the
quality of expression (relative to the thought expressed)? On one reading, the
poet uses a tortuous language lacking clarity in order to convey his "thought".”
When Grice gave his lectures on implicature at Harvard he was ‘going Kantian.’
One of his maxims reads, “Avoid unnecessary prolixity [sic].” Note that Grice
is “[sic]-ing hisself. I.e. a maxim that enjoins the utter to ‘avoid
unnecessary prolixity is a maxim uttered by an utterer who is NOT abiding by
it. This kind of Griceian paradoxisms [sic] surely fascinate Ashbery, and he
uses them to good effect. So, yes, Ashbery IS using a ‘tortuous’ _vehicle_,
“lacking clarity,” as McEvoy puts it – in his pre-Kantian lectures, Grice
speaks of a desideratum of conversational clarity. And the super-maxim under
which “Avoid unnecessary prolixity” falls is, “Be perspicuous [sic]”, where we
have the same manoeuvre. Grice is implicating that an utterer who utters a
maxim that reads, ‘be perspicuous!’ is _hardly_ being perspicuous. “Be clear”
seems, er, so much more perspicuous. The fact that Grice adds the ‘sic’ shows
that the implicature is in this case disimplicated. Grice’s example of a
deliberate obscure poet here is William Blacke, who, compared to Ashbery, reads
like a nursery-rhyme in Provencal.
McEvoy goes on: “There are wider issues that could be weaved into the
discussion. One is the tendency of 'modern poetry' to present 'small beer in
small bottles' - to go for 'particularities' (of whatever sort e.g.
'experience').”
Ashbery famously (or ‘infamously,’ if you mustn’t) said that: “A poet does not
write a poem about his experiences. He writes a poem OUT OF HIS experiences.”
For this see: “Ashbery on the ‘experience of experience’. Keyword:
“meta-experience”. The above infamous quote rates second perhaps to his better
known one, “Some say poetry should improve one’s life. I think this conflates
poetry with The Salvation Army.” Incidentally, as Grice notes, “Either
‘salvation’ OR ‘army’ must be understood as being used figurative in one of my
father’s favourite organisations: “Onward Christian soldiers…” unless the
utterer is being too clever and a remorseless literalist. In any case, I
thought Ashbery was a POST-modern poetry – at least that’s what Foucault
thought! Derrida calls him a ‘mediaeval’ poet, but I suppose he is implicating.
McEvoy goes on: “This tendency leads perhaps to another: what at face value
might appear both unclear and tortuous”
i.e. obvious poetic flouts to Grice’s ‘conversational maxims’ – for
‘unclear’ vide Grice, “Be perspicuous [sic]” – for ‘tortuous’, listen to George
Martin’s orchestration to “A Long And Winding Road” –
“might be redeemed if the specifics of its expression were believed to convey a
profound 'particularity' of thought.”
I’m sure Ashbery thought the thought profound enough. Although I’m
unsure whether Grice would allow, in his lit. crit. seminars, to use ‘deep’ as
applied to ‘thought’ so freely (“I am sceptical about Descartes’s idea that
“Cogito ergo sum” expresses a _deep_ truth – surely, the philosopher should
stay in the shallow berths of the seas of language – and let the poet drown!”).
I’m not sure what to make of ‘particularity.’ “Particular” is a philosopher’s
term of art (vide Grice’s disciple, or tutee, as they say in Oxford, and his
“Individuals: an essay in descriptive metaphysics.” In some respect, all
individual thoughts are _particular_. Suppose Mrs. A and Mrs. B are having tea
and they both entertain the ‘same’ thought, “This tea is too weak” Even if the
_expression_ of the thought is identical, what is weak for Mrs. A may not be
identical to what is weak for Mrs. B. If it’s Mrs. Grice and Mrs. Frege, the
denotatum of the ‘particularity’ of ‘weakness’ poses an extra problem. And if
you think ‘weak’ is too figurative, think the qualia ‘sweet’ and provide the
appropriate replacements. McEvoy finishes his section on Ashbery in the
above-cited textbook: “But who generally believes this? It seems to me most
readers are rightly sceptical, at least most of the time, and suspect they are
being sold a pup. Hence the genuine appetite for most 'modern poetry' is less
than the appetite for classic poetry. Now imagine you are evaluating this post.
Now imagine you are doing so "Except that it is in repose". [As the liiterary
Critic To The Stars] [m]y guess is that [Ashbery’s] '"repose" [on line 8]
thought' might appear profound/significant.” In a Witters sort of way.
‘Significant’ sounds Peirceian and Griceian. But alas, Grice allows that a poem
written in Deutero-Esperanto can also appear ‘significant’ – “at least if we
follow Peirce’s krypto-technical semeiotic”
McEvoy: “because it appeals to a kind of aesthetic sense that bases itself on
apposite ‘positioning.’” In the “Answers to Quiz,” McEvoy provides the clue:
“The rick here is that an 'aesthete' _uncritically_ [i.e. anti-Popperianly –
Speranza] takes this conveyed sense of apposite 'positioning, ‘conveyed by the
term “repose,” as if it is presenting something profound or worthwhile, whereas
the underlying thought is banal and empty because (in truth) any object can be
regarded as "in repose" to any other without this telling us anything
significant about those objects or their relation.”
I’m not sure Newton would agree. He famously sat under a tree in Lincolnshire
and saw an apple fall. As Grice rephrases this: “Newton saw THAT an apple
fell.” The implicature being that the apple, unlike Newton, was NOT “in
repose.” It turns out that the Earth, on which Newton was lying, was neither,
strictly, “in repose,” which led Newton to formulate his famous tautology, G =
m1m2/d2, about which Parmigianino was perhaps aware. As Hollander notes in The
Gazer's Spirit, in John Ashbery's long and complex poem, "it may be observed
the Francesco Parmigianino's celebrated anamorphic self-portrait becomes, as
the object of elaborately digressive meditation, a skewed representation of a
skewed representation.”
A meta-representation, and a meta-experience of a meta-representation. This
itself comprises, in its intense mimetic function, another sort of figurative
mirror (or ‘speculation,’ as Ashbery prefers, noting that ‘speculation’ comes
from a cognate for Italian for ‘mirror’) in which the self-portrait of the
artist generates an image of Ashbery at work – if poets may be said to ‘work,’
as they MAY be said to ‘work’ even if they are ‘in repose’ -- and thereby of
anyone at the rest of life. It starts out with a casual ecphrasis (the opening
sentence seems syntactically to start with the poem's-and the picture's-title),
but concentrates on the hand in the foreground:
1 As Parmigianino did it, the right hand/2 bigger than the head, thrust at the
viewer/3 And swerving easily away, as though to protect/4 What it advertises. A
few leaded panes, old beams,/5 Fur, pleated muslin, a coral ring run together/6
In a movement supporting the face, which swims/7 Toward and away like the hand/
8 Except that it is in repose.
The ever-problematic gaze of the subject in self-portraiture is compounded here
by the matter of the distortion – it is a CONVEX mirror, after all – which
actually isn’t – since Parmigianino is working on wood -- and by that of the
mirroring of the viewer's or addressee’s gaze as well. Ashbery’s profound poem
moves in and out of attention to the painting which the poet, through his poem,
sets to meditate upon anecdotes about the self-portrait’s composition,
citations of commentaries on it (notably by Vasari, with references to the
Pope) and multifaceted reflections on art's own reflectiveness of itself and
what is around it, on time and chance and Griceian self-referential intentions.
Ashbery’s ‘Self-portrait’ not only reads Parmigianino’s ‘Self-portrait’, but
reads the readings that it itself gives to it, and develops a profound and
extended fiction which encloses, and comes to terms with 'this otherness, or
the ‘not-being-us’ which seems at bottom: “all there is to look at/In the
mirror.'" As Helen Vendler (she married a philosopher, who is a Griceian) notes
in her New York Review of Book review, “There are two chief reasons why poets
love the stimulus to description offered by a work of art.” (Vendler has
already examined those artists who found inspiration in nature, rather – but
cfr. Da Vinci, “Nature is God’s Art”). “First, description is par exellence a
means of multiplying words. Any verbal description is potentially unlimited,
and the more slender the point d'appui on which the fantasy-construct of words
is raised, the more magnificent and self-sustaining (as in Ashbery's "Self
Portrait" and the painting it describes) is the Grician perlocutionary effect
brought about.”
So there!
Cheers,
Speranza