As Ashbery’s poetry evolves, it becomes more novelistic — a novel whose characters, places, even plots, emerge from a collision of languages and parodies of styles. This explains the increasing allusions to plot and character, the increasing flirtation with narrative. Though the tone is radically different, Dostoyevsky’s method of allowing his characters their say, however it contradicts him or others, is a useful model for the dialectic between narrator and narrative in Ashbery. “The Path to the White Moon,” for instance, in A Wave, originates in a story fragment that includes something that “looked like farmhouses yes” and proceeds to tell not a story per se but a narrative of the speaker’s attempts to discover a plot, a series of propositions, possibilities, with references to probable pasts. As the setting expands geographically, the “you” grows in consciousness: “And then the space of this behavior, the air, / Has suddenly doubled / And you have grown to fill the extra place.” The drama involves the “you’s” desire not to repeat things: “once you have seen a thing you have to move on.” In this context, “time unfolds like music trapped on the page / Unable to tell the story again.” But the poem does not hold out a specific teleology; the “you” and so the “we” (self and other-you) can only move away from an origin, can only fragment itself. The result is that the resolution of time, history and the self, as well as the resolution of the whole poem, become a sort of fraying of the narrative and dialogic threads:

In fact, the first poem in A Wave — “At North Farm” — introduces the importance of the kind of Other encountered here. It begins, “Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you” and the rest of the poem, indeed the rest of the book, can be seen as a sequence of gradual, cumulating definitions of the other, always tentative. The poem ends by suggesting that a specific identification may not be as important as the effect the Other has on the self:

This focus on the paradigmatic rather than the specific — a mythic impulse, really — emphasizes narrative (the author’s evolving relation to the unfolding text, tone, nuances of meaning) rather than plot (the scheme of action of the character[s]), or story (the bottom line of what occurs in plot):

I am arguing for a notion of style as a sort of double writing, a kind of erasure, as Derrida would say, that, like a blackboard erasure, leaves behind traces of the threatening knowledge it would erase. And I also argue that, as Bakhtin suggests, a carnivalistic style holds a number of possible and often contradictory visions in balance, providing an incredible richness of vision. James Tate’s work provides an further extension of this idea. Tate’s poetry showcases a mobility in style, double writing at an extreme of the imagination: “I would / have to disagree with me always, / miss a train in my head,” he says in “I Got A Little Flat off 3rd & Yen.” In “The Human Eraser” he writes: “My one minute stands up and salutes / a monument of startled glass.” The moment/monument, the life, gradually contains the whole of human history that also contains it. The meaning of things becomes “a terrible message that has stopped / searching for the perfect night.” Such an overplus of language, a surplus of meaning, reveals, in the end, the role of indecision and playfulness in Tate’s work:

The “subject” of Tate’s poems is precisely the way our limited language behaves when confronted with a world that means always more than language can know.