Ersatz Truths: Variations on the Faux Documentary

When W. H. Auden supplied the foreword to John Ashbery’s first book of poetry in 1956—Some Trees, which Auden had chosen for publication in the Yale Younger Poets series that year—one of the few poems he singled out for attention was “The Instruction Manual.” Ashbery’s speaker was so bored with his task of writing a technical manual that he instead daydreamed of a trip to Guadalajara, Mexico. Auden praised the poem for its contrast between the speaker’s “historically real but profane situation, doing hackwork for a living” and “his sacred memories of a Mexican town,” and quoted from these lines near the poem’s close:

How limited, but how complete withal, has been our
  experience of Guadalajara!
We have seen young love, married love, and the love
  of an aged mother for her son.
We have heard the music, tasted the drinks, and
  looked at colored houses.
What more is there to do, except stay? And that
  we cannot do.
And as a last breeze freshens the top of the weathered
  old tower, I turn my gaze
Back to the instruction manual which has made me dream
  of Guadalajara.

“Reading this,” Auden remarked, “I who have never been to Mexico nor wish to go there translate this into images of the happy life drawn from quite different cities.” Yet it seems all too obvious that Ashbery, exactly like Auden, had also never been to Mexico nor had he any wish to go there. This “tour” has all the earmarks of a cheap travelogue, the kind of thing one might have dozed through as part of a double bill in movie theaters in the 1940s. As a conveniently-located band plays excerpts from Scheherazade, Ashbery sweeps us from one side of the public square to the next. If, at first, the sights seem suitable enough, though a bit mundane—“Around stand the flower girls, handing out rose- and lemon-colored flowers, / Each attractive in her rose-and-blue stripe dress (Oh! Such shades of rose and blue), / And nearby is the little white booth where women in green serve you green and yellow fruit”—by the time we enter a “typical” household to be introduced to family members (“Let us take this opportunity to tiptoe into one of the wide streets” where an “old woman in gray sits... fanning herself with a palm leaf fan”) we realize we have by now been trapped wholly in the realm of the cliché, the unreal, the “picturesque.” The colors that play throughout each description—as pushy as any technicolor print—give an impression of “detail” and individuation even as they relentlessly neutralize any information, reducing each scene to a play of picturesque tints, as is evident when we look out from the church tower: “There is the rich quarter, with its houses of pink and white, and its crumbling, leafy terraces. / There is the poorer quarter, its homes a deep blue.” (These particular colors are precisely weighted, but it takes a moment’s pause to recognize Caucasian skin coloring and the hue of despair associated with poverty.) Ashbery understands the daydream perfectly, of course; it is precisely an exercise in looking without seeing. So we never have left home—we never have even escaped the simple rigidity of the instruction manual. As “the last breeze freshens the top of the weathered old tower,” we should realize how often we have been at this same juncture in the closing images of a slipshod documentary. This old tower has been in need of a freshening breeze for a long time indeed.

Auden had a particular talent for misunderstanding Ashbery that has not gone unnoticed. “Remarkably...