Abstract

Notorious for its opacity, John Ashbery’s “Description of a Masque” typifies both the avant-garde’s unearthing of some odd precursor and its antipurist experiments with syncretism. It is a postmodernist re-vision of a Renaissance spectacle, where the traditional shifts in medium, backdrop, stage properties, cast, and action extend to elements imported from film and TV. The masque and the imaginary neomasque intersect—first, in their rich allusive poetics and, second, in their equal (if ultimately opposed) commitment to the endless conflict between the visual and the verbal media. However, Ashbery’s text operates at a further remove from the evoked phenomena, because it translates the multimedia show into words: as “Description,” it verbally re-presents the spectacular representation, often re-re-presents what the masque theater itself re-presents from its multiple sources. This work-length engagement in interart transfers does not just enrich our idea of postmodern ekphrasis, or of the relations between ekphrastic and all-literary allusiveness, or of the yoking together of artistic movements across history. (E.g., the borrowing from an obscure de Chirico ekphrasis interposes an early, surrealistic avant-garde between the Renaissance masque and the postmodern writer.) It also proves crucial to making (narrative, hence also thematic) sense of the protean world and discourse world. Along one line, “Description” thus narrates the metamorphoses of the two divine protagonists: the ever-adaptable Mercury and the resistant Mania. Each alludes simultaneously to more than one incarnation of the mythological figure, sometimes in more than one medium. And sequence joins forces with coexistence to variegate and disunify the self, so that on reappearance the figure looks either transformed altogether or a mixture of earlier and new properties, notably including costume. In either case, language here re-presents the changing features even when already unseen, to signify the dynamism of roles and images and past identities hidden in the visual present. Along a convergent line, “Description” narrativizes the speaking observer of the performance—and exactly when the changes in the imaginary scene are fastest. A close analysis reveals the measures taken here to weaken the visual effect, thereby assimilating the object of description to the belated process of enlightenment. To realize that “the setting would go on evolving eternally” is to discover the existential principle behind the appearances of incessant, even meaningless change. Owing to language, insight outranks and reverses sight.

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