Fiction as Reality in Frank O’ Hara

Many of Frank O’ Hara’s poems are written in the first person. They often give an inside look of the mind of the narrator during a specific moment. The question is whether or not fictions are more credible than real­ities. To address that question, let us first define what should be deemed a fiction and what can be considered a reality. Merriam-Webster defines fiction as “some­thing invented by the imag­i­nation or feigned.” Alter­na­tively, it is “an assumption of a possi­bility as a fact irre­spective of the question of its truth.” Fiction by its nature is not a dependable account, thought it can be rooted in the truth.

Then one must ask, what is truth? The dictionary tells us that it is the state of being fact, the body of real things. In other words, reality is a certain type of truth. Or perhaps truth is a certain type of reality. Reality is described as the quality or state of being real. Therein lies the conundrum. What is real?

Consider the reality of the first poem. The narrator arrives at an acquaintance’s home, finding himself the first on the scene of a grisly suicide. Yet the tone of the poem is almost whim­sical. One might even say that there is a tinge of dark narcissism to the poem.

Let’s imagine that you are at a party. You meet someone who takes an interest in you and they wish to become friends. However, you are more or less dismissive of him. One day, you receive a note from this new acquain­tance: “The eager note on my door said, ‘Call me, call when you get in!’” He is rela­tively unim­portant to you: he is a rather casual acquain­tance. So despite your best inten­tions, you make only lack­adaisical efforts to get back to them. Several months later, you take him up on his offer to meet up. Perhaps you are in the neigh­borhood and only out of conve­nience do you stop by his home. You notice that the lights are on and the hall door is open at this hour. You enter the dwelling. And lo and behold you find that this acquain­tance of yours is lying flat on his back, with blood flowing prodi­giously down the stairs.

Most people would be horrified at such a discovery. They would mourn the tragic loss of someone they knew, even if it was someone they knew only in passing. Most people are deeply and very emotionally impacted upon learning that someone they knew committed suicide. Suicide is an immensely affective event, one that touches most everyone connected to the victim, leaving them with the lingering question of, “Why?”

However, we see here that the narrator is not one such person. Instead of a tone of sadness, he takes on an almost whim­sical attitude, irre­spective of the finality of the event he just stumbled upon. Take the following line, “…oh all unwilling to be either pertinent or bemused, but the leaves were brighter than grass on the sidewalk!” Unwilling to be either pertinent (in other words having a logical rele­vance) or bemused (absorbed, baffled, or deeply thoughtful) brings attention to this whim­sical attitude. As he makes his way to the house, he observes the late hour of the night and takes compliment that his host is awaiting his arrival: “What a host, so zealous!” Continuing on, he finally reveals his narcis­sistic nature by commenting that he appre­ciated such a thor­oughly prepared greeting for a guest, espe­cially one that kept him waiting for months. Instead of a reverent respect for the departed, he has a morbid self­ishness. He does not ask why the man took his own life. He presumes to know the answer to that already. By saying, “I did appre­ciate it,” O’Hara implies that he believes that the man’s act of suicide was done for him.

And it is in this fashion that O’Hara shapes reality. Fictions of the mind are far more credible than the world presented to us in reality. As Taoism suggests, there are as many worlds as there are living things. For each fish in a pond, there is another world. O’Hara manages to present to us a suicide in the light of capri­ciousness. In that poem, the truth that is presented to us is one in which a man committed suicide in order to impress him. We are not presented with any other truths. However, as readers we can form our own ideas of the truth and react in a way different from the narrator, therefore creating our own reality.

Let us now examine Medi­ta­tions in an Emer­gency. The entire poem is again written in first person, through O’Hara’s (or some imagined narrator’s) eyes. It is essen­tially an account of his emotional reaction to matters of the heart, some­thing that happened to him that created an emotionally tumul­tuous moment. However, he also speaks on many tangents of the elusive topic of love and romance. In this poem, there is a reality that is created in his mind (a type of fiction if you will), and then there are the actual events that tran­spired. In the stanza beginning with, “Each time my heart is broken,” we can deduce that he has gone through some­thing of a romantic break-up that resulted in his heart­break. In all like­lihood, it was the denial of the object of his affec­tions to remain loyal and committed to him (“Why should I share you?”).

If we were to look strictly at the facts, we could only see that he was attempting to go steady with his romantic partner. In this endeavor, he was denied. And that would be the end of the discussion. There would be no poem, only a “just the facts ma’am” type of account. However, if you examine the poem beyond only what is presented to you as reality (or the objective truth), O’Hara provides a rich but convo­luted image of his emotions.

This poem is not only about his failed romantic affair. If we were to strip away every­thing but the facts, then we would miss out on the struggle with his sexu­ality (“Hetero­sex­u­ality! you are inex­orably approaching. How discourage her?”) We would not be able to see his internal mono­logue about unre­quited love or his wandering eyes. The fiction of his mind is just as important as the events that factually (though whose accuracy is still arguable and open to inter­pre­tation) happened. The fiction of his mind is his perceived reality, which is one’s own ultimate measure of cred­i­bility. If we were to attempt to figure out just what happened in Medi­ta­tions in an Emer­gency, it would be a safe bet to say that there would be many different inter­pre­ta­tions. Each of these inter­pre­ta­tions can be a truth in its own right, its own separate reality. And so these worlds are no more valid than each other, with each one holding its own truth.

The simple act of picking up a leaf in the poem Les Etiquettes Jaunes, as short as it is, would not mean very much if we did not accept the fictions of our minds as a certain kind of reality. The childish wonder that is expressed in the poem repre­sents O’Hara’s emotional state at that particular moment. Who are we to question the veracity of the poem? We must accept his reality to be truth in order to attempt to analyze, under­stand, and even question the poem. Without this accep­tance, nothing ever expressed holds any value what­soever. Les Etiquettes Jaunes would be nothing more than three lines describing a single action if we are to adhere to a strict defi­n­ition of what is to be considered reality.

Poetry is subjective and open to inter­pre­tation. The meaning behind many of O’Hara’s poems is elusive. As we search for the truth in his words, we must ask ourselves: just how sound are these ideas that are put forth for us to read? How truthful is this reality that lies in front of our eyes? Did that suicide victim really kill himself for O’Hara? What really happened to O’Hara in Medi­ta­tions in an Emer­gency? The truth that we may find isn’t any more real or dependable just because we deduce certain things from the text. Because the world is a reflection of our percep­tions, there is no single truth, no single unified reality. Ulti­mately, the fictions of our minds are the truths that make our reality, making reality that much more elusive.