Ontological Distance Research Articles

John Ashbery and the Idea of the Reader

It has been fashionable in the last decade to discuss separately the writer's attention to his act of composition and the reader's experience of that composition. But rather little has been said about the writer's idea of the reader, about his dependence on the reader, his sense of the gap between fictive and actual reader, his efforts to overcome or deny that gap. Reading is as much Ashbery's subject as writing is, and it is through his idea of reading that his self-reflexiveness escapes banal solipsism and opens onto larger questions of communication. In Rivers and Mountains Ashbery first uses the reader as his model for the experience of otherness and he continues this habit throughout the seventies, increasingly inscribing the reader in the text to the point of a second column in Litany. Such reflections on the reader do not reduce the meaning of the text, but on the contrary give immediacy to its great themes. Here is not the image of experience but experience itself, not the record of a relationship but the establishment of one. Convexity is Ashbery's paradigm of the psychic and ontological distance between writer and reader, and the circumscribed eternity of the work of art. It marks the artist's yearning and failure to escape the confines of his medium to reach the reader's present. Conversely, it marks the reader's sense of being surrounded but not enclosed in the world of a text, the 1800 panorama of art's illusion. By the image of convexity the desire between writer and reader is linked to the larger structure of thought which characterizes Ashbery's work, the paradoxes and patterns of assertion and denial which gesture toward but never yield to the mind of the reader. Convexity in Ashbery is also the spatial equivalent of his concept of temporality, the present no