Kasparas Varžinskas
Self-Reflection in English Poetry
Research Master’s Literary Studies
University of Amsterdam
22 December 2018
Speculating Self: Distortion of Mimesis in John Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
The intensity of Ashbery’s poems, especially Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1974), is often achieved by the poetic Self overwhelmed by dualities and paradoxes such as seeing the invisible, touching the ungraspable, or speaking the indescribable. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror has been hailed as a work of genius that set new limits to ekphrastic poetry while employing the aesthetics of uncertainty. However, not many critics have focused on the speaking voice as a productive locus which can be regarded as a blind spot in Ashbery’s reception having in mind that his poetry is rooted deeply in the post-Romantic tradition of American poetry. Harold Bloom claimed that “Ashbery is essentially a ruminative poet, turning a few subjects over and over, knowing always that what counts is the mythology of self“. Truly, there is something allegorical regarding Ashbery’s poetic ‘Self’ who is always concerned, in a truepostmodern fashion, with the reliability and dependence of representation. Playing with oxymorons, misreadings, and the discrepancies of object-world relations, Ashbery in his poetry places the notion of Self as the visible subject, although always at a distance, struggling to know itself via external experiences, usually, the artistic ones. This essay puts forward a claim that the poem is not a conventional ekphrastic poem but rather a project of a becoming Self – the poem is a transformative site of speculation and revelation which culminates in not the representation of Parmigianino’s painting but in a portrait of the poetic Self. The internalization of Parmigianino’s painting for the poetic voice opens up a reflective realm of images that constitute the self-portrait of the poet.
The initial response to the poem is aligning the reader’s perspective with the perceiving poetic voice. In the center is, of course, the ekphrastic object, self-portrait done by Italian Mannerist painter Francesco Mazzuoli (1503-1540), more commonly known as Parmigianino. Painted in c. 1524, the small (only 24 cm in diameter) round portrait, depicting a distorted reflection of the young Parmigianino, was created "just as an example to showcase his talent to potential customers", but now is recognized as one of the most notable portraits in the history of Western art. In the poem, convex mirror gains a status is a conscious experimental device to break the illusion of the homogeneity of self and mirrored image. The portrait itself (because of its convex distortion) defamiliarizes the practice of visual self-reflection and draws attention to the unique strangeness of the portrayed image, disconnected from the mimetic object. The attraction for the poet lies not in the depiction of Parmigianino as a model, but rather in the very act of representation itself. In very first lines the poetic voice observes the evasiveness and ambiguity that the painting evokes by focusing not on what is seen but in what way the portrait is constructed:
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
(p. 247)
Ashbery’s ekphrasis hinges on the perception of mobility and ambiguity – the run-on, flowing description of the portrait is paralleled by the dualistic imagery of the elements of the portrait, especially the hand, which simultaneously moves ‘forward and backward’, as poet notes, it reaches and protects at the same time. The flexible visuals of the portrait mobilizes not only these elements but the painting’s meaning in general. In other words, the meaning becomes mobile as the poetic voice struggles with arriving at a singular interpretation as the persona becomes frustrated (“Your argument, Francesco, / Had begun to grow stale as no answer / Or answers were forthcoming” (255)). The portrait does not yield and refuses to be subordinate to the objectification of ekphrasis causing a break in horizon of expectation of the persona. There is already a suggestive discrepancy between the artwork as an autonomous, impenetrable whole resistant to the hermeneutic penetration of a perceiver and, as we now will observe, the poetic creator himself.
The poetic Self slowly grows aware of the disrupted automatism of representation and the nature of his ekphrasis changes as the voice turns inwards incited by speculation. The notion of speculation is of a great importance for the poem as it opens up act of creating and reading as multifarious acts. The beginning of the second stanza marks the central shift of the poem where it ceases to be a purely ekphrastic description and becomes a project of self-reflection of the poetic Self:
That is the tune but there are no words.
The words are only speculation
(From the Latin speculum, mirror)
(p. 248)
One of the critics, David Kalstone marks this shift from the visual to the linguistic as a significant change of mode in the poem and it is suggestive to claim that it foregrounds the dialectical relationship of the image and expression. The poetic Self already sees the speculative nature of the painting because of the mirror (speculum) which acts as a medium of the portrait producing ambiguities and doubt. One of the messages that the speculation carries that it is not only visual, it also lies in language. Thus, if the initial fissure was the ambiguity of painting, the second fracture in the persona’s perception is the very medium he is working with in order to decode the uncertainty – language. Progressively, the poet, after the initial ekphrastic episode of the painting, is now situated not only before the reflective Parmigianino portrait but also before his own writing, speculation of words, becoming a linguistic mirror on its own accord.
The poetic voice becomes suspended between these two reflective surfaces, (‘But you eyes proclaim / That everything is surface’ (249) feeding onto each other, resulting in a claustrophobic space of visual and textual signifiers. The initial hope to derive meaning from the painting is now complicated by the notion of medium which is seen, also, ambivalent:
One would like to stick one's hand
Out of the globe, but its dimension,
What carries it, will not allow it.
(p. 248)
The ‘one’ here at this point becomes problematic as it can be Parmigianino or the self-conscious persona. The voice of the poet and the gaze of the painter are both reaching out from the medium, ‘its dimension’. It is both the container and the obstacle, obfuscating the reliability of self-expression even more. The central paradox of mimetic transference opens up – by creating, one is automatically susceptible to the limitations of the artistic medium while at the same seeking freedom of expression and transcendence.
It is tempting to say that Ashbery seeks resolve the issue of representation via writing itself. As an author, he foregrounds the materiality of language which in traditional poetry was treated as a space of true, transcendent self-reflection. In a postmodernist fashion, echoing post-structuralist tenets of disillusionment of authenticity of language, Ashbery questions the representability of language, and in relation to Parmigianino, the mimetic capability of art in general. Language in his poem, just like Parmigianino’s convex mirror, distorts reality and draws attention to the workings of language itself. In other words, the poet here engages in the aesthetics of defamiliarisation where he, as well as the reader, observes his own convex image as an autonomous creation and not an identical representation of the Self.
The interplay of mirrors and foregrounded issue of representation allows Ashbery to present the speaking Self both as a spectator and an artist at the same time rather than either a controlling genius or a passive observer. This is one of the outcomes that lets to interpret the title of the poem as the self-portrait of a self-conscious creator. Towards the end of the poem, the voice remarks: “I go on consulting / This mirror that is no longer mine”. If we understand ‘this mirror’ as this second mirror that is the self-portrait, we start to see how the voice becomes aware also of the temporal implications of writing and how the artwork establishes itself regardless of the maker, just like “the soul [of Parmigianino] establishes itself” in the opening lines.
At the end, Ashbery’s poem proves to be something else than what it hoped to be in the beginning. Parmigianino’s self-reflective distortion contaminated the poet’s preconceived notion of objective ekphrasis and thus rendered the whole project in new light. The self-portrait of the Self is convex in its own fair way – the dialectic nature of language encourages the Self to question mimetic transference and affirm the position of a creator and a creation. The postmodern paradox of representation in a menacing fashion takes over the poetic Self and threatens it with its own autonomy and still, Ashbery through an anxious self-reflection establishes his own portrait. There may be nothing to be authentically said about objective reality in the age of evasive forms, but there is a productive affordance of poetic nature for working with ambiguities.
Works cited
Ashbery, John. “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” Poetry, vol. 124, no. 5, Poetry Foundation, 1974, pp. 247–61.
Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and Schools of the Ages. Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994.
Edelman, Lee. “The Pose of Imposture: Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.’” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 32, no. 1, Duke University Press, 1986, pp. 95–114.
Kalstone, David. “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” Five Temperaments. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979, pp. 176–181.
Stamelman, Richard. “Critical Reflections: Poetry and Art Criticism in Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.’” New Literary History, vol. 15, no. 3, The John Hopkins University Press, 1984, pp. 607–30.
Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects. Trans. Gaston du C. de Vere. Macmillan and Co. & The Medici Society, 1914.