“The New Realism”: An Ontological Revolution and Its Deconstructive Impact on a Language System in John Ashbery’s The Tennis Court Oath

The Tennis Court Oath fraught with melancholy, horror, and violence is the appropriate site for the operation of the death drive which reflects the death of realism and ontological difference in a postmodern world. As a dissimilatory process the death drive displays widespread disruption, the forfeiture of etiology and teleology. Notable is the fact that partial objects such as shreds and pieces, the products of the death drive serve as a source of Ashbery’s new realism, which employs his renowned technique of fragmentation. The incoherently fragmented words of the poetry impede interpretation through the disturbance of semantics and syntax. On the other hand, as the death drive paradoxically reveals productive energies, the discordant fragments also foster the effect of signification as an absent presence through metonymic concatenation, anthropomorphism, and metamorphosis, while interweaving different dimensions. But it is true that, owing to the traumatic atmosphere engendered by the death drive, The Tennis Court Oath does not relish the full development of multiple meanings, compared with his later poetry.