Skip to main content

John Ashbery, Daffy Duck in Hollywood (9)

Subjectivity and Hollywood

Ashbery’s highly developed rhetorical strategies are designed less to prove his craftsmanship than to confront the naturalised rhetorical mediation of all forms of experience. This is Perloff’s point, that postmodern prosody is a type of avant-garde insurrection in the halls of the poetic institution. The other side of the critical fence in relation to postmodern poetry concentrates less on its materiality and more on its interventions on subjectivity and everyday discursive practices. A lot of work has been done in consideration of Ashbery’s take on the postmodern problem of subjective uncertainty, both because his poetry often openly addresses this issue and because his poetry causes us to question his and our own subjectivity. John Koethe grapples with this idea in relation to the presence of the poet’s voice in the poem, so recognisable and yet so hard to pin down:

But even though Ashbery’s work embodies the presence of a particular psychological ego, it is almost unique in the degree to which it is informed by a nonpsychological conception of the self or subject: a unitary consciousness from which his voice originates, positioned outside the temporal flux of thought and experience his poetry manages to monitor and record”.[i]

Koethe concedes that Ashbery as a unified subject is very strongly felt in this and all his works, but that as a personality he is almost non-existent, noting things like the poet’s seemingly haphazard use of pronouns. Sometimes the poet speaks of himself, sometimes of herself, sometimes of us, sometimes of them, often all within the same poem and, supposedly, via a single lyrical ego. This exploded, decentered subjectivity is not only evidenced in “Daffy Duck in Hollywood,” it is also all about that. From the moment the duck regards his distorted reflection in the hub-cap, reminding us of Ashbery’s earlier poem about distorted self-regard “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”, we realise that this is a soul-searching kind of a poem, if ducks have souls.

Ashbery is not a poet of personae, rather he occupies many subject positions within his work, within a single work, all of which can be seen as constructions and, therefore, personae of a sort. As the title suggests, the poem is divided into two areas of interest, Daffy Duck who is nominally, although in the end not convincingly, the speaker of the poem, and Hollywood the context from which he speaks. In relation to this and within the context of the poem, Hollywood becomes a rather problematic location as the duck-disguised poet suggests in his descriptions of it:

Suddenly all is
Loathing. I don’t want to go back inside any more. You meet
Enough vague people in this emerald traffic-island—no,
Not people, comings and going, more: mutterings and splatterings[ii]

It is something of a cliché now to think of Los Angeleans as a bit flaky, but the description of LA as an emerald traffic island is inspired. The duck that turned could be the subtext of this section as Daffy rebels against the torments of Duck Amuck. Like so many popular actors he is looking for the art; for lasting credibility. The people of this locale are reduced to their mobility and the noises they make, splatterings, surely a reference to Daffy’s soggy lisp, to intersubjective spacing and to the social act of talking irrespective of the content of the conversation. Hollywood has a lot to answer for in the postmodern age; surely it is the origin of postmodern hyper-reality? In addition it seems also to be hell if Daffy is like Satan, an opinion at odds with ideas of Hollywood when Daffy was in his black-plumed pomp, but which a contemporary audience used to endless exposés of Hollywood such as The Player or Get Shorty wouldn’t find to hard to swallow.

Most critics seem in agreement that Ashbery is concerned with the effects of mass, postmodern, popular culture on lasting values, and most critics of postmodernism also take this line, but along with Keith Cohen I am not so sure. While Cohen notes that Ashbery “aims consistently at the glibness, deceitfulness, and vapidity of bourgeois discourse”[iii] and that cartoons are central to Ashbery’s attack on what we might call the industrialisation of the imagination because they “reflect in a quite transparent manner the leading social myths of the day”,[iv] it would be wrong to ascribe to the poem a form of culturalist critique. Ashbery is both a critic of the system and a happy consumer of its products. Like Daffy he occupies an ambivalent position in relation to the cultural homogenisation that is the result of Hollywood’s hegemony. As Cohen notes, “the poem seems to be a celebration of the way Hollywood manages to incorporate everything—from classical opera to pop music”, aware of “Hollywood’s celluloid power of reducing everything it can record to the same level of mediocrity”, still the poet makes it clear “the greatness of Hollywood is that, even at the moment you realize you are being conned, you succumb to the artificial glory, romp amid the discordant array of cultural objects, feel uplifted by the phony appeal of the archaic or exotic effects”.[v]

Notes
[i] John Koethe “The Metaphysical Subject of John Ashbery’s Poetry” in Lehman 89.
[ii] Ashbery, Three Books 30.
[iii] Cohen 128.
[iv] Ibid. 129.
[v] Ibid. 130, 131 & 132 respectively.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

For a long time I have felt that poetics has not taken into consideration a great deal written about issues pertaining to difference and repetition to be found in contemporary philosophy. As poetry's whole energy and dynamic is based on a fundamental relation to differential versus repeated units of sense (sense both in terms of meaning and the sensible), any work on difference and repetition would be welcome. That some of the greatest thinkers of the age, notably Deleuze and Derrida, have made both issues core to their whole philosophical systems is so remarkable that poetics is impoverished if it does not fully acknowledge this. Not that I am one to talk. Although I am aware of the centrality of Deleuze's work to postmodern poetry, I have as yet not been able to really address this but in Poetry Machines I began that work at least. In preparation for the few hundred words I wrote there, here are the 10,000 words I annotated in preparation. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference an

John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Manchester: Carcanet, 1977) First Published (New York: Viking, 1975) Close Readings and annotations of every poem in the collection March-April 1997 in preparation for In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Garde (Bucknell UP, 2001) Introduction: · Shoptaw notes that this return to poetry is dominated by images of waiting, that narrative (especially fairy-tale) returns, as do the musically based titles, there are no prose poems and no fixed forms such as sonnets of pantoums, most are free verse paragraphs, also bring forward a new American speech, more direct and inclusive. “As One Put Drunk into a Packet-Boat”, 1-2 · Shoptaw notes this was the original title for the collection, marking a self-consciously Romantic return to poetry, recording the thoughts of “I” from afternoon to night, just outside a childhood country home. Has a pastoral crisis narrative in that a summer storm gathers but passes leaving the poet reli

Charles Bernstein, Introduction

Bernstein’s three collections of poetics statements and contributions to the important collection The L=A=N=G… Book have set the agenda for a contemporary, postmodern, experimental aesthetic His comments on absorptive poetics have set the standard for a postmodern poetics developed from the modernist conception of estrangement to be found in Russian Formalism and of course then picked up on by Brecht amongst others. Bernstein on absorption: “By absorption I mean engrossing, engulfing completely, engaging, arresting attention, reverie...: belief, conviction, silence. Impermeability suggests artifice, boredom, exaggeration, attention scattering, distraction, digression, interruptive, transgressive, undecorous, anticonventional, unintegrated, fractured, fragmented...: skepticism doubt, noise, resistance “ (Charles Bernstein, A Poetics Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992) 29. Bernstein is committed to poetry in all its possible manifestations and several impossible Through the