Joshua Schneiderman

The Divided Self: John Ashbery’s “The Skaters”

While critics almost universally acknowledge “The Skaters” as a watershed poem of John Ashbery’s career, a hermeneutical problem persists: how to make sense of the poem’s markedly heterogeneous parts as a whole. Critics John Shoptaw and Brian McHale have divided “The Skaters” into useful temporal and narrative categories. Such readings, however, fail to observe that in this poem that aspires to the condition of music, leitmotifs of death and absence bind these seemingly discreet “movements” together. By reading “The Skaters” through William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, I argue that “The Skaters” addresses a primary concern of James’s Varieties: that “life and its negation are beaten up together.” “But if life be good,” James continues, “the negation of it must be bad. Yet the two are equally essential facts of existence; and all natural happiness thus seems infected with a contradiction. The breath of the sepulcher surrounds it” (101).

As James himself knew all too well, this is the paradox of “the sick soul.” What makes life precious, what makes us desire being in the first place, is the inescapable fact of death. Or as Ashbery puts it in “The Skaters,” “So error is plaited into desires not yet born” (RM 38). This recognition, along with the permanence of evil and suffering, is a root cause of the spiritual affliction James calls “the divided self,” which “lies at the heart of every positivistic, agnostic, or naturalistic scheme of philosophy” (100). For James, “conversion” is the broad process by which the divided self is made whole again. The various, discontinuous narrative fragments of “The Skaters” compose a conversion narrative, but the conversion in question is not a religious conversion in the narrow sense. It is a conversion to aesthetics as a way to inscribe, preserve, and contain being in the face of death. Ashbery offers a solution to the paradox of the sick soul, and thus signals a return to, as James would put it, “firmness, stability, and equilibrium” (127). But these concepts, which suggest solidity and stasis, are somewhat misleading and must be qualified when dealing with such a complicated work. “The Skaters” implicitly addresses a concern that Ashbery would confront explicitly in “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”: namely, that the danger of traditional aesthetic representations is that they deaden their subjects by “locking into place” (SP 76). Thus, as these poems argue, if art is to stave off mortality, we need novel forms that represent thinking and being as living, ever-changing organisms that are “stable, within / Instability” (SP 70). “The Skaters” endorses this notion as a theoretical matter but also puts it into poetic practice by mimetically setting itself into constant, ever-mutating action, as exemplified by the central image of the skaters. Viewed in this framework, “The Skaters” is a pragmatist attempt to cope with death. While the poem’s relentless drift between presence and absence has been read as a “conclusion of dissolution, rather than solution,” just the opposite is true (Shapiro 97). The oscillation between presence and absence, which Ashbery compares to “the rhythm of too-wet snow” (RM 47), sustains the creative energy of the poem by refusing to settle down on one calcifying pole.

Josh Schneiderman is a second-year PhD student in the English program at the CUNY Graduate Center.  He holds a BA from LaSalle University and an MA from the University of Georgia.  He has interests in modernism, American literature, and “The New American Poetry.”