Ok... so... Daffy Duck in Hollywood. hmmm... Sorry for the lengthy explanation underneath. This is an incredibly difficult poem to interpret. But well worth the hard work. Ashbery is a genius!
Daffy Duck in Hollywood
Something strange is creeping across me.
La Celestina has only to warble the first few bars
Of “I thought about you” or something mellow from
Amadigi de Gaula for everything – a mint-condition can
Of Rumsford’s Baking Powder, a celluloid earring, Speedy
Gonzales, the latest from Helen Topping Miller’s fertile
Escritoire, a sheaf of suggestive pix on greige, deckle-edged
Stock – to come clattering through the rainbow trellis
Where Pistachio Avenue rams the 2300 block of Highland
Fling Terrace. He promised he’d get me out of this one,
That mean old cartoonist, but just look what he’s
Done to me now! I scarce dare approach me mug’s attenuated
Reflection in yon hubcap, so jaundiced, so deconfit
Are its lineaments – fun, no doubt, for some quack phrenologist’s
Fern-clogged waiting room, but hardly what you’d call
Companionable. But everything is getting choked to the point of
Silence. Just now a magnetic storm hung in the swatch of sky
Over the Fudd’s garage, reducing it – drastically –
To the aura of a plumbago-blue log cabin on
A Gadsden Purchase commemorative cover. Suddenly all is
Loathing. I don’t want to go back inside anymore. You meet
Enough vague people on this emerald traffic-island – no,
Not people, comings and goings, more; mutterings, splutterings,
The bizzarely but effectively equipped infantries of happy-go-nutty
Vegetal jacqueries, plumed, pointed at the little
White cardboard castle over the mill run. “Up
The lazy river, how happy we could be?”
How will it end? That geranium glow
Over Anaheim’s had the riot act read to it by the
Etna-sized firecracker that exploded last minute into
A carte du Tendre in whose lower right-hand corner
(Hard by the jock-itch sand-trap that skirts
The asparagus patch of algolagnic nuits blanches) Amadis
Is cozening the Princesse de Cleves into a midnight micturition spree
On the Tamigi with the Wallets (Walt, Blossom, and little
Skeezix) on a lame barge “borrowed” from Ollie
Of the movies’ dread mistress of the robes. Wait!
I have an announcement! This wide, tepidly meandering,
Civilized Lethe (one can barely make out the maypoles
And chalets de necessite on its sedgy shore) leads to Tophet, that
Landfill-haunted, not-so-residential resort from which
Some travellers return! This whole moment is the groin
Of a borborymic giant who even now
Is rolling over on us in his sleep. Farewell Bocages,
Tanneries, water-meadows. The allegory comes unsnarled
Too soon; a shower of pecky acajou harpoons is
About all there is to be noted between tornadoes. I have
Only my intermittent life in your thoughts to live
Which is like thinking in another language. Everything
Depends on whether somebody reminds you of me.
That this is a fabulation, and that those “other times”
Are in fact the silences of the soul, picked out in
Diamonds on stygian velvet, matters less than it should.
Prodigies of timing may be arranged to convince them
We live in one dimension, they in ours. While I
Abroad through all the coasts of dark destruction seek
Deliverance for us all, think in that language: its
Grammar, though tortured, offer pavilions
At each new parting of the ways. Pastel
Ambulances scoop up the quick and hie them to hospitals.
“It’s all bits and pieces, spangles, patches, really; nothing
Stands alone. What happened to creative evolution?”
Sighed Aglavaine. Then to her Selysette: “If his
Achievement is only to end up less boring than the others,
What’s keeping us here? Why not leave at once?
I have to stay here while they sit in there,
Laugh, drink, have fine time. In my day
One lay under the though green leaves,
Pretending not to notice how they bled into
The sky’s aqua, the wafted away no-color of regions supposed
Not to concern us. And so we too
Came where the others came: nights of physical endurance,
Or if, by day, our behaviour was anarchically
Correct, at least by New Brutalism Standards, all then
Grew taciturn by previous agreement. We were spirited
Away en bateau, under cover of fudge dark.
It’s not the incomplete importunes, but the spookiness
Of the finished product. True, to ask less were folly, yet
If he is the result of himself, how much the better
For him we ought to be! And how little, finally,
We take this into account! Is the puckered garance satin
Of a case that once held a brace of duelling pistols our
Only acknowledging of that color? I like not this,
Methinks, yet this disappointing sequal to ourselves
Has been applauded in London and St Petersburg. Somewhere
Ravens pray for us”
The storm finished brewing. And thus
She questioned all who came in at the great gate, but none
She found whoever heard of Amadis,
Nor of Stern Aureng-Zebe, his first love. Some
There were to whom this mattered not a jot: since all
By definition is completeness (so
In utter darkness they reasoned), why not
Accept it as it pleases to reveal itself? As when
Low skyscrapers from low-hanging clouds reveal
A turret there, an art-decco escarpment here, and last perhaps
The pattern that may carry the sense, but
Stays hidden in the mysteries of pagination.
Not what we see but how we see it matters; all’s
Alike, the same, and we greet him who announces
The change as we would greet the change itself.
All life is but a figment; conversely, the tiny
Tome that slips from your hand is not perhaps the
Missing link in the invisible picnic whose leverage
Shrouds our sense of it. Therefore bivouac we
On this great, blonde highway, unimpeded by
Veiled scruples, worn conundrums. Morning is
Impermanent. Grab sex things, swing up
Over the horizon like a boy
On a fishing expedition. No one really knows
Or cares whether this is the whole of which parts
Were vouchsafed – once – but to ambling on’s
The tradition more than the safekeeping of it. This mulch for
Play keeps them interested and busy while the big,
Vaguer stuff can decide what it wants – what maps, what
Model cities, how much waste space. Life, our
Life anyway, is between. We don’t mind
Or notice anymore that the sky is green, a parrot
One, but have our earnest where it chances on us,
Disingenuous, intrigued, inviting more,
Always invoking the echo, a summer’s day.
The poem allegedly utilizes both Tex Avery’s cartoon, Daffy Duck in Hollywood, as well as Chuck Jones’s celebrated "Duck Amuck" of 1953. Daffy Duck is the poem’s speaker (atleast in part); the character itself arguable utilized as part of the poet’s allegorical tribute to the cartoonish reality of a particular intersection of Hollywood; where ‘Pistachio Avenue rams the 2300 block of Highland Fling Terrace’, and where ‘something strange is creeping across [him]’; both the pen of the cartoonist, as well as the plethora of fleeting impressions inherent to sensual experience in the late capitalist milieu of the cartoon’s conception.
There is an emphasis on the mixing of so-called high and low culture; the sight of “Speedy Gonzales”, the imagined sound of “La Celestina”, and a prolific romance novelist’s “fertile escritoire”, as if there were no bounds or limits to what type of cultural impression might cross one’s path. Given that the poem is “set” (to use the term loosely, since Ashbery’s poetry often tends not to “position” as such, in geographical reality) in Hollywood, one might easily imagine the potency of such an assertion; since the American film industry, in its mainstream, deals primarily with the subject of so-called low culture, whilst it’s fringes also find funding for more experimental, “higher-cultured” works. All things are present.
The speaker often changes accent and register, claiming (in a mockneyed styling) that ‘I scarce dare approach me mug’s attenuated / Reflection’, only to revert to the narcissistic aesthetic of himself ‘so jaundiced, so deconfit’ (the juxtaposition of pretension in the French with the English “low-brow” perhaps symptomatic of the cartoon’s unlimited sphere of influence in contemporary culture; its dissemination and translation rife and quasi-arbitrary in the latter part of the 20[SUP]th[/SUP] century). The mixing of registers and accents, parody and pastiche, within the poem is also indicative of general cultural experience in the modern world, since – as societal beings – we are ourselves subject to an impossible or infinite proliferation of arbitrarily symbolic impressions.
Daffy’s satire of the ‘phrenologists fern-clogged waiting room’ is quite untenable since we are only really familiar with him possessing a playful, cartoon intelligence. The poem is thus inaugurative of a kind of modern, symbolic absurdism. The effect of a ‘magnetic storm’ on ‘Fudd’s garage’ [invoking Elma Fudd, perhaps?], is that it is reduced to the ‘aura of a plumbago-blue log cabin on / A Gadsden Purchase commemorative cover’; the physics of the weather affecting the cartoon reality, affecting the other register of the Arizonian stamp/cover. We are thus largely situated in the symbolic (even in the physics of the storm, which is hung in a “Swatch” – a sample of cloth, material; a tapestry), and must accept the bizzarely frantic interplay of the realm’s variety of forms (from songs to stamps to cartoons to nominal identities, either personal or corporate or fictional – seemingly unlimited).
The poem’s assertion that ‘Suddenly all is loathing’ rather reminds one of O’Hara’s poem A Step Away From Them: ‘Suddenly every honks’; the suddenness, a transition perhaps indicative of a momentary lull in consciousness proceeded by rapid visceral awakening again; immersed in sensual impressions. The sheer volume of impressions inherent to either New York or Hollywood speak directly of this suddenness. The speaker claims; ‘I don’t want to go back inside anymore’, meaning perhaps that he does not want to be contained in his cartoon allegory, or perhaps that he has no wish to return to a state of introversion, given the richness of the external stimuli. He describes the people on the “traffic island” as ‘comings and goings, more; mutterings, splutterings,’ (the traffic island on which he presumably stands itself symbolic of the immersion of the subject, awkwardly situated there in the very middle of the traffic; a kind of futurist image, one imagining the flux and the speed-marks of the eye not able to process the sight of moving vehicles).
The ‘infantries of happy-go-nutty / Vegetal jacqueries’ is perhaps invocative of the cities homeless population; the ‘happy-go-nutty’ a satire of the more popular phrase, meant perhaps also to characterise the mood of the poem itself. A few lines later the appearance of the question: ‘How will it end?’ is once more an example of the type of metafictional approach to poetry Ashbery seems to privilege; this time Daffy Duck (as well as the poem pure and simple) asking the question; "how will Daffy Duck’s description/How will life/How will the poem/Post-Modern culture/Hollywood/The Earth “End”"?
The next 5-6 lines of the poem are incredibly complex. If one is cognizant of both the vocabulary and the cultural significance of the likes of the Princesse de Cleves (an anonymously published French novel), the Carte du Tendre (or map of tenderness), of the ‘asparagus patch of the algolagnic nuits blanches’ (an art installation at an all-night erotic exhibition???), and of the “Tamigi” (the Italian word for London’s River Thames, I think???), then one is transported (or rather flung) into a variety of seemingly contradictory spaces of culture. It is Ashbery’s point, however, that these spaces are not unusually juxtaposed, but rather imitate the flourish of unlikely-seeming juxtapositions inherent to human thought.
‘Wait!’, says the speaker; ‘I have an announcement!’; and his following description of the ‘wide, tepidly meandering, / Civilized Lethe’ which ‘leads to Tophet (a Jewish synonym for “Hell”; a place in Jerusalem of ancient child sacrifice and ritual burnings), invokes both the meandering quality of the Thames, as well as traditional, theological images of Hell on Earth; Hollywood. And yet this equation of the biblical with reality foregrounds the poet's vague via negativa (a process of defining God and the sublime by what it is not). The ‘not-so-residential-resort from which / some travellers return’ is also (I believe) invocative of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno; a rather modernistic-seeming referent. Perhaps one of the poem’s most memorable lines comes here shortly after: ‘I have only my intermittent life in your thoughts to live / Which is like thinking in another language’. And what is communicated here is yet another metafictional proposition; that both Daffy Duck, as well as the poem, as well as any imagery or voice, can only “live”, as it were, “intermittently”; for life is not present in descriptions of it, not present in representation, nor totally in one’s imaginative reflection of that representation; perhaps the intermittent “life” of the character portrayed here is itself an assertion too far by Ashbery; there are only words here, afterall, not people (or existence). But the assertion that it is like thinking in another language perhaps then confirms Ashbery’s commitment to the post-structural emphasis on reality-as-linguistic-construct. ‘While I / Abroad through all the coasts of dark destruction seek deliverance for us all, think in that language’, then allegedly invokes Milton’s Satan, a pathos inaugurated upon hearing his predicament having to speak in the impossible language, somewhere inbetween himself and us and the living hell on Earth.
‘That this is a fabulation’, says the speaker, ‘and that those “other times” are in fact the silences of the soul’, once again requires of us a metaficional engagement with the poem. He is speaking of course of the “fabulation” of his own linguistic construct; the poem, and the “other times” are perhaps simply “times” or spaces in which the poem is not; those impossibly describable times-without-language; the “silences of the soul” (for want of a better word ‘aye John!?). The idea of the speaker performing in a linguistic terrain that is unfamiliar of foreign to him is also one shared by Deleuze. I cannot remember the quote verbatim, but to paraphrase; a style is the equation of one’s ability to carve out a foreign language within one’s own conventional language, for as Proust also says; ‘All great books are written in a kind of foreign language’ anyway.
The ‘pastel ambulances’ invoke once again the allegory of the poem, i.e. its animated, cartoon nature; itself a construct; a construct of a construct.
The introduction by the poem to the speakers of Aglavaine and Selysette is a strange one. It is unclear whether or not Daffy Duck is host to the poem any longer, for they simply appear; Aglavaine seemingly commenting on the poem and its “patches”, how ‘nothing stands alone’, and then speaking to Selysette; ‘If his achievement is only to end less boring than the others…’, as if perhaps criticising the poet (Ashbery), or Daffy Duck, or perhaps also merely invoking Maeterlincks drama in which the two characters feature, embroiled in a love triangle, Aglavaine pursuing Meleandre, Selysette’s husband. The literary appropriation of the characters is both a mark of how poetry (and literature in general) is an inter-textual process, as well as inaugurative of a type of readerly framework, for one must necessarily conjure in one’s mind the drama by Maeterlinck, must therefore impose this scene on the poem, must – as a consequence – become increasingly conscious of the poem as a linguistic construct. ‘What’s keeping us here?’, asks Aglavaine, meaning both what is keeping them “here” in the mind of the poem’s reader, as well as what is keeping them “here” in their affections for Meleandre; the suggestion of a latent theme of homosexuality; heteronormativity decentred in the performative act of discarding the patriarchal lynchpin of the male character.
Aglavaine continues to talk; this time of a epoch prior to the one of her current inhabitance (as if she were speaking to us from the past, albeit a fictional one), and laments a time when objects were seen as separate by the aesthetic auditor, i.e. ‘Pretending not to notice how the[] [green leaves] bled into / The sky’s aqua’. She says that ‘we, too, came where the others came: nights of physical endurance’, as if this time perhaps referring more crudely to the latent theme of sexuality. ‘if’, she says, their behaviour was ‘anarchically / Correct, at least by the New Brutalism Standards’ (referring to a type of oppressive, modernist art/architecture that flourished in the mid-20[SUP]th[/SUP] century), ‘all then grew taciturn by previous agreement’. The portion of Agalvaine’s speech is incredibly difficult to interpret. Perhaps she is speaking of how the characters themselves evolved in cultural significance throughout the modernist period; perhaps merely how sexuality suffered at the oppressive hands of Brutalist doctrine, or the like, i.e. it grew ‘taciturn’ or “silent”.
The image of the ‘duelling pistols’ and the applauding of the characters in London and St Petersburg is something that escapes me. If anybody has any ideas what this means, please tell me!!! I think perhaps this section relies heavily upon one’s knowledge of Maeterlinck’s characters and their progressively oblique cultural significance, but I am not familiar with the play at all, so…
Once Anglavaine is done speaking, the poem continues: ‘The storm finished brewing’, a type of post-modern, self-conscious pathetic fallacy; the weather allied to the “storm” of the poem’s fragmented cultural tornado. The speaker claims that ‘she questioned all who came in at the great gate’, unclear whom he refers to; perhaps Anglavaine. ‘None she found whoever heard of Amadis [a tragedy by Jean-Baptiste Lully] / Nor of Stern Aureng-Zebe, his first love’ (Aurung-Zebe a character by Dryden in 1675, based on the then Mughal Emperor). ‘Some there were to whom this mattered not a jot’, says the speaker: ‘since all by definition is completeness’. And perhaps this is the poet’s relinquishment of the modernistic notion that a supreme knowledge could exist at all; that in fact, passersby who do not know anything of so-called “high culture” are already complete, and that it “matters not a jot”.
The image of the skyscrapers in the cloud, which – when uncovered – reveal turrets, speaks expertly of the manner in which the tradition, and one’s historical knowledge, informs one’s present moment. Knowledge not as necessary, but as constitutive of an entirely unique experience; one that is not only culture specific, but one that is specific to the individual’s apprehension of cultural information. ‘All life is but a figment’, Daffy claims, rather elevatedly, pretentious. And yet “conversely”, he says, ‘the tiny / Tome [book] that slips from your hand is not perhaps the / Missing link’. It appears he is saying that (contrary to Steven’s “supreme fiction; poetry as answer), fiction/poetry does not provide anything ultimate, but rather something that (if this poem is anything to go by) exists in a state of perpetual fluctuation.
The speaker’s assertion that one is to ‘grab sex thing’, and ‘swing up / Over the horizon like a boy / On a fishing expedition’, further invokes a playful, cartoonish quality to the act of engaging in life. And yet the poet also seems to intervene here in the suggestion that ‘ Play keeps them [critics?] interested and busy while the big, / Vaguer stuff can decide what it wants’. This idea that the bigger vaguer stuff can “decide” is a strange one, since it appears to endow some unknowable, or unnamed, quantity with a consciousness of its own; seemingly antithetical to the poem’s pervasively materialist stance.
‘We don’t mind / Or notice anymore that the sky is green’, says the speaker at the poem’s outro, referencing part of its own construct, i.e. Aglavaine commenting on how the sky and the leaves had previously appeared to her as separate; the poet/Daffy concluding now that the colours are whatever we say they are in the performative act of saying-so. The final line of the poem, ‘Always invoking the echo, a summer’s day’, perhaps then draws to a close with a final obscurity, forbidding real closure; the motif of the echo ironically prevalent as a metafictional node of displacement; a “summer’s day” forever echoed; re-inscribed, re-imagined; never one thing in particular to an infinite mass that are subject to infinitely morphing impressions.
If ANY of this is useful to ANYBODY EVER, I would love to know. And likewise, if anybody has any ideas about the Aglavaine section, I'd love to know also...
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