Intellectualist Poetry in Eccentric Form: John Ashbery, French Critical Debate, and an American Raymond Roussel

Judging by anecdotes, John Ashbery and the New York school poets found out about Raymond Roussel's work somewhat by chance. As David Lehman tells the story, Kenneth Koch was studying in France on a Fulbright scholarship in 1950 when he asked the owner of the librarie José Corti in Paris if he could recommend any exotic poetry:

"What's really exciting and crazy?" he asked. "I've read Surrealism." "Have you read Roussel?" The man handed him a faded yellow book containing Nouvelles Impressions d'Afrique (1928), a long poem in four cantos, each of which consists of a single sentence expanded to fantastic length by an accordion system of parentheses within parentheses.

When Koch showed the book to friends and fellow poets back in America, they were astounded. Ashbery in particular "felt an immediate rapport with the eccentric genius" (Lehman 148), even though he did not understand French very well. Soon after this first encounter, Ashbery reports that he decided to go to France and learn the language better, "if only to find out what [the poem] could possibly be about" (Other Traditions 46).¹ While in France, Ashbery's enthusiasm for Roussel led him to study the French writer and his body of work in depth. And over time, he has become Roussel's most important American advocate.

In this essay, I explore the roots and nature of Ashbery's thinking about Roussel. Recently, Ashbery has turned to Roussel to define a kind of intellectualism that he thinks experimental poetry can offer. I claim that Ashbery finds an intellectual naturalism in Roussel's work. I use this loaded term without reference to other "naturalisms" in the history of literature, but on an ad hoc basis to highlight the ways Ashbery presents Roussel as an author whose writing can reveal basic truths about the mind's activities. In Ashbery's view, Roussel's work has a significant value for an American audience partly because of its intellectual qualities. I use this term also to distinguish Ashbery's thinking from that of earlier French critics of Roussel, like Michel Foucault and Alain Robbe-Grillet, prominent figures in the rehabilitation of Roussel in the late 1950s and early 1960s in France, the milieu in which Ashbery began his own research on the eccentric writer. Where Foucault and Robbe-Grillet describe Roussel's artistic and intellectual achievements largely in antihumanist terms, Ashbery believes Roussel's writing reveals a mind at work. In the writing that Ashbery seems always to have liked best, Nouvelles impressions d'Afrique, Roussel takes life's banalities as his subject and organizes them to seem like everyday experience. As Ashbery puts it, Roussel depicts "daily life as it is actually lived" (Other Traditions 67). For Ashbery, the way Roussel transforms banality while putting the creative act on display gives his work an instructive, almost ennobling quality, as it leads the reader to contemplate her or his own mind's workings.

As I go forward, I will take a comparative approach to examine the origins, nature, and implications of Ashbery's intellectualist interpretation of Roussel. I will do so by studying the French rehabilitation of Roussel and Ashbery's relation to it. Then I will look at Ashbery's attitudes toward Roussel in the light of Ashbery's own poetry. Ashbery, I contend, thinks that Roussel's best work achieves what all good art can achieve: it inspires its audience to self-reflection.

On a general level, this story is important because it offers an example of how contemporary American poets have often turned to French counterparts not just for inspiration but for help in establishing their own poetry's intellectual bona fides. On a more specific level, Ashbery's critical work is important also because it represents an attempt to make space in America for a poorly known French writer and to gain acceptance for a mode of poetic writing. Ashbery tries to challenge the standard American poetic canon with his introduction of Roussel, an outsider in terms of both nationality and...