Through his works The Cultural Turn, A singular Modernity, and “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Fredric Jameson provides a standpoint from which postmodernism can be viewed and understood. Jameson defines postmodernism as the cultural logic of late capitalism, or the cultural counterpart of what he calls present-day multinational capitalism, referring to postmodernism as a phenomenon of Western society, especially that of American culture. The cultural expression of postmodernism is most obvious through the realms of aesthetics, including but not limited to art, music, literature, and poetry. Of these expressions, poetry has been slower to garner attention due to the very thoughts that the subject of poetry evokes in people. The notion of poetry has traditionally been one that calls to mind difficult verses that contain great depth and profound meaning. Indeed, poetry in the past has been one that required strict analyzation and close reading in order to achieve an understanding of the deeper significance of the writing. Within the realm of modern poetry, the poetry that was considered high art masterpieces were those that contained heavy symbolism expressed through complex literary effects and elaborate forms. Although postmodern poets have not completely abandoned the use of literary techniques and traditional metrical forms, the reading of poetry has moved away from the modern guidelines of high culture poetry and the greater purpose of uncovering the underlying message.
Literary critic and theorist Fredric Jameson argues that Postmodernism must be understood as a product of changes in contemporary society and culture as a whole. This refers to the fact that Postmodernism is not a mere trend or style, but is a concept which embodies the emergence of a new culture, social life, and economic order in postmodernity. A Marxist, Jameson recognizes the basis of postmodernity in the economic stage of late capitalism that arose after World War II. Jameson anchors his argument for Postmodernism as a true cultural logic by emphasizing that today’s economic force of multinational capital is driving the proliferation, expansion, and diversification of societal structure in such a way that postmodern society is no longer a unified subject. Therefore, modernity, with it enlightened foundations of absolute truth and reason, can no longer be used to explain and understand the world. Essentially, modern thinking can only be used to define a linear society and, thus, cannot be applied to a postmodern society of perpetual webs. There is no longer the need to create something novel or to focus on a well-defined subject, but rather, there is a drive for obtaining new perspectives and a sense of decentralization in the mode and focus of writing. This aspect of postmodern poetry is in line with Jameson’s idea of aesthetic populism, in which there is no space between popular culture, or low-modernist culture, and high-modernist culture. Postmodern culture is one in which the predominance of popular culture has led to abolition of boundaries and the modern idea of high art. Jameson views this change as a sort reshuffling and deconstruction of class divisions of modernist society. Moreover, postmodern poetry has become more self-reflective in its focus on language itself and its relationship to the subject. These ideas consistent with Frederic Jameson’s notion that postmodern culture is one in which members of society are constantly in search of their identities and positions in a world that has developed upon historical discontinuity and in which the subject is dead.
A key poet of postmodern times is John Ashbery, whose poems exemplify the necessity to discover oneself through creation rather than formal production and rigid design. Considered avant-garde postmodern poetry, John Ashbery’s poems are uncertain and inconsistent in tone, and employ seemingly fragmented syntax and irrational form. Ashbery employs unconventional grammar and punctuation that causes his poetry to read as if he wrote the verses in a stream of consciousness style. Despite the run-on lines and sometimes abrupt line endings, however, Ashbery’s poetry remains lyrical and rhythmic, which further adds to the lyrical nature of his poetry. At first glance, Ashbery’s poems seem to contain random thoughts pushed together in a nonsensical manner much like an abstract painting made of words. Interestingly, over the course of his poems the ideas begin to build upon one another and lead to more questions and ideas. Unlike modern poets who brought readers clarity and a certain answer, Ashbery takes the reader through a transitory journey of contradictory questions and juxtapositions that lead to no definite answer. In modern poetry, the reader often finds that a work will come full circle after proposing a subject. There is no such logical pattern to postmodern poetry, which begins in one place and ends in another because the creation and the reading of the poetry is the experience that is being studied. One of Ashbery’s most prominent works is “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” which explores the discovery of identity and highlights the issues of perception and representing truth and reality.
John Ashbery’s 1975 poem begins and continues based on the creation of Parmigianino’s 1523 painting, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” Ashbery, in being greatly involved in the arts, is exceptionally familiar with the process of painting and art creation. In his poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” Ashbery combines poetry with the visual artistry of painting in an innovative form of expression. Jameson stressed the combination of forms of aesthetic expression as a feature of postmodernism, in which boundaries and categories become meshed and diversified. In his visual poem, Ashbery takes the reader through a dream-like sequence through Francesco’s creative and though processes. In doing this, Ashbery is also going through his own creative process as he is writing the poem. Similarly, the reader follows both creative processes and the artists’ encounters with problematic representation. This is characteristic of postmodern poetry, which engages the reader to become more writerly than readerly in order to experience the formation of art rather than just to read the work as a complete masterwork to be studied from afar. In the poem, Ashbery provides the reader with details on how Parmigianino sat down with the purpose of painting his self portrait including precise angle degrees, reflecting upon how the painter chose to paint on a section of a wooden sphere that reproduced the exact dimensions and shape of the convex mirror instead of a flat surface. It is important to note the distinct shape of the mirror and painting, as they both resemble the globular world, which is much more complex and dynamic than a two dimensional surface. The circularity of the convex mirror and painting exclude the outside just as much as it includes what is in the interior. This further emphasizes how representation cannot be complete at any one point. The perfection and self-contained qualities of the painted globe can be contrasted with the real globe and reality, in which there are no such ideals. This contributes to what Ashbery alludes to as the problem of pathos versus experience. The feelings and emotions that the qualities of art can evoke may reflect and represent those of reality but may never truly be experience in the same way that the convex nature of the mirror distorts the image of reality. Looking at Parmigianino’s painting, one can see the distorted proportions of the artist’s self-portrait, with the especially noticeable enlarged hand. This is the key paradox of the self-portrait for in the painting, Parmigianino extends his right hand toward the viewer, but the convex mirror curves the hand along its surface and back into the rounded world occupied by the mirror image. The artist is reaching out beyond the world of art but finds that art and reality cannot touch. The painting presents a complete world that is separate from the world of reality, another universe. In viewing art and self-portraits, people can become caught up in the reflection of reality in the mirror. If the reflection of reality is indeed another universe, the image that is reflected must be another form of the self that exists in the realm of reality. Thus, the self-portrait presents the reader with a paradoxical sense of encountering a world that can be considered to be other and yet it is inseparable from the world of reality.
There is also great emphasis put on the glass that is in place to reflect upon the subject during the painting process. Once the painting is done, it will be a reflection of the reflection portrayed in the mirror, which is the reflection of subject. In essence, art is a reflection of a reflection. This raises the question of how art could represent reality truthfully if it is only a reflection of a reflection and whether it is able to truly express reality by only representing a surface. In the past, writers and artists used poetry and art to expand upon layers of meaning in an attempt to achieve truth. Postmodern poetry, on the other hand, exposes the limits of representing meaning and challenges conventional conceptions of beauty and depth in art. In postmodernity, Jameson stresses a sense of depthlessness which manifests itself through qualitative superficiality. Postmodernism rejects the belief that one can fully move beyond the surface appearances of ideology or false consciousness to arrive at some deeper truth. Instead, as in the representations of art, there are multiple surfaces of reality, but no depth. Ashbery further emphasizes this superficial physicality by concentrating on the simple physical environment around the artist and himself rather than drawing from grand images of the world or intricate settings.
Ashbery forms interrelationships between various art objects throughout the poem including the supplies and tools of Parmigianino and his own pictures, desk, papers, and books. By connecting these physical objects and the commonality of the globe, Ashbery distinguishes the physical world from the artistic one while demonstrating how they are closely connected and affect each other. Ashbery’s descriptions of his surroundings infused with colors forms a visual painting for the reader and further combines the arts of poetry and painting.
Within Ashbery’s poem there is a conflict between what is at the surface and what is beyond. The convex surface of the mirror is what determines how the image will be reflected, and in the same way, the superficial image that is reflected determines what is interpreted to be truth. However, the soul is, according to Ashbery, held captive and not allowed to advance beyond the superficial reflection. Due to this, the superficial surface of representations can never be fully authentic. Moreover, because society lives in this dimension, there is no way to move beyond the surface and see above what exists on the outer surface. In the same way that the body holds and entraps the soul, the painting also seems to keep the soul captive, causing it to be unable to express itself beyond the portrait. Ashbery consistently brings the reader’s attention to the hand of the artist as it creates the art and tries to extend beyond the globe that it is painting but fails. This image proposes that there is no way to go beyond the work as a representation due to the dimension that the artist exists in, one in which life is “englobed.” One realizes that there is a surface that is a visible core but there is no way to describe it, just as there is no way to affirm representations. Ashbery juxtaposes the stability of the global painting with the instability of the world globe and reiterates that there is no answer to the problem of pathos versus experience and no way to affirm any truths.
At the end of this section of the poem, Ashbery abruptly bursts the bubble that the reader is thinking in with the popping of the balloon and begins to narrate the poem in first person voice for the first time. In this mode, Ashbery can directly address the reader and adds personal interjections that add a dimension of immediate presence to the poem. Almost as if having woken up from a dream during the popping of the balloon, the next section of the poem discusses dreams and their irreconcilability with reality. Ashbery proposes that there is some sort of surreal relationship between art and dreams in which dreams idealize beauty and distort visions of reality. However, Ashbery makes peace with the role of dreams in living, stressing that dreams prolong existence and that living is really the codification of dreams. In his discussion of dreams, Ashbery once again mentions the self-portrait of Parmigianino and that it is nearly complete. As Ashbery weaves in and out of dreams and dimensions of consciousness in the writing of the poem, the process of creating the self-portrait is steadily advancing, showing the simultaneous parallel of the two artistic processes. Although the two artists are working in distinct places in very different time periods, there is something that they two share in their art. Ashbery tells the reader that he is presently in New York but he has seen the completed painting in Vienna in 1959 after it was completed hundreds of years ago in Rome. Ashbery further establishes the space of today’s world by touching upon contemporary spaces of the city and its collapse into undefined spaces of suburbs. The globalization of the world today severely diminishes the significance of historicity and Ashbery emphasizes this by connecting the artists by using space to connect the gap of time. This concept is critical to Jameson’s understanding of postmodern cultural emergence which is based on a consumer society that lives in a perpetual present with a limited sense of history due to a decline in focus on time. While modernism was concerned with time and the temporal, postmodernism is centered on the concept of space and the power of spatial arrangement and design. This postmodern concept of space encompasses not only the traditional notion of physical space, but also the abstract space between the past and present, and the categorical space that modernity used to departmentalize and separate forms and levels of all that concerns society, including aesthetics, the economy, and politics. Time is no longer a focal point, and therefore, present postmodern social system is one in which history does not play a pivotal role.
Through the dream, Ashbery takes the reader to the present day. In eloquent verses, Ashbery stresses the uniqueness of today, of the present time, and that no previous day was like that of today. There is no sense in dwelling in the past for you cannot live there according to Ashbery. The abstract notion of time is portrayed by Ashbery as he explores the various levels of a museum, in which history and the secrets of the past have been reduced to black-and-white illustrations and sculptures. According to Ashbery, there is no need for the past in order to recognize the present, and thus he questions why it is necessary to acknowledge the existence of the past. The present time is undivided and has the justification of logic. However, just as with the past, the present has a way of transforming into a caricature of itself similar to the way that art as a representation strays away from the original intentions of the artist due to the pure principle of representation. Ashbery likens the deviation of the production of art from the artist’s intentions to a game in which a whisper becomes transformed once passed around a room. This is what Ashbery terms life-obstructing because extraneous matters are allowed to intervene, change, and break up normal daily life. While Ashbery views history with a sense of nostalgia, it is only this. Beyond nostalgia, it is nearly impossible to reconcile the past with the current state of the present. This issue was addressed by Jameson who believed that historicity is a crisis that revolves around the problem of integrating time and temporality into a culture that is increasingly dominated by space and spatial logic. The very idea of the subject has moved beyond linear organization of past and future and as Ashbery’s fragmented poem demonstrates, the current culture is one full of heterogeneous bits of past, present, and future that makes no sense in the context of linear time.
The last stanza of Ashbery’s poem is the most disparaging as well as the most hopeful of all the verses in the work. Despite the inability to solve the problems of representation and time, Ashbery resolves that because man has not been given any tools by which he could understand himself and his world, that it is necessary to understand the universe through what is outside of himself. Man could have lived in Eden but it was just not meant to be. Life on earth may be the first step towards understanding and achieving a sense of calm and peace with existence. However, Ashbery emphasizes that this is only the first step. Man must move forward from the present. In the last lines of the poem, Ashbery seems to be speaking from a source of frustration with the slow movement of change and the still confined nature of discovery. Fredric Jameson’s discussion of postmodernity arises out of less frustration than Ashbery but shares in the same hopefulness in the present time. Jameson’s articulation of postmodernism demonstrates that it is indeed a time of empirical chaos that is largely beyond comprehension. Jameson himself points out that postmodernism may not ever be fully deconstructed and understood, as it is based on the idea of immanent and open indeterminacy, rather than the closed determinacy of modernism. Nevertheless, in the attempt to comprehend these concepts, it is possible to form what Jameson calls a cognitive global map with which an individual can then utilize to navigate through the multifaceted cultural turn and perhaps grasp more of a sense of position in the spatial arrangement of the complex postmodern world.
John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” is a postmodern poem that can be interpreted in many ways, just as a piece of painting could be seen in various lights and with different perspectives. The analysis of the poem is at a more superficial level than in modern poetry because much of the purpose of the poem is the art of the writing itself. It is impossible to prove any interpretation of the poem as true and not true and the reader can fully view the failure of reason in art. Beyond exposing the indeterminacy of reality however, is the concept of the writer as artist and the writing of fiction as an art. Postmodern poetry allows the reader to take on the role of the artist and create a reality rather than read in an attempt to discover the author’s meaning. In this way, postmodern poetry provides yet another perspective through which one can view and understand the world.
