{"id":89446,"date":"2015-09-02T14:26:56","date_gmt":"2015-09-02T18:26:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=89446"},"modified":"2015-09-04T09:26:48","modified_gmt":"2015-09-04T13:26:48","slug":"the-age-of-udge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/09\/02\/the-age-of-udge\/","title":{"rendered":"The Age of Udge"},"content":{"rendered":"

Learning a word from John Ashbery.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

From Edward Burtynsky\u2019s Oil<\/i>, 2012, color photograph.<\/p><\/div>\n

It started, as things sometimes do, with an Ashbery poem: \u201cStaffage,\u201d from his book A Wave<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n

The poem is more than thirty years old now, and it\u2019s remarkable how well it captures the generation then just being born: \u201cI am one of a new breed \/ Of inquisitive pest\u201d (the poem makes clear-ish that this is a pest from the perspective of the older speaker, not in the eyes of the poet himself) \u201cin love with the idea \/ Of our integrity, programming us over dark seas \/ Into small offices, where we sit and compete \/ With you, on your own time.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a kind of prophecy Ashbery can still pull off, for instance with the artisanal children of today in a poem from 2015\u2019s Breezeway <\/em>called \u201cSeven-Year-Old Auroch<\/a> Likes This\u201d: \u201cWill research tell us tomorrow \/ of normal morals? Take a Brooklyn family \/ in fracture mode, vivid, \/ energizing, throbs to the earlobes \u2026 Exeunt the Kardashians.\u201d I predict this poem will make perfect sense in thirty years. <\/p>\n

Less than Ashbery\u2019s hypersensitivity to the stirrings of the future per se, what got me about the earlier poem was the title, a word I had to look up. Staffage<\/em> turned out to be perfect for something I never knew I needed to say, and as the years go by\u2014fewer than thirty, but more than a few\u2014it only seems increasingly central to our time. This is the Age of Staffage.<\/p>\n

Staffage is the little people, or sometimes animals, in a landscape painting, there to give it scale or liveliness but not portrayed for their own sake. A shepherd or soldier off in a field somewhere is staffage, or bricklayers on the Tower of Babel, or CGI coffee-drinkers strolling delightedly through a lobby in an architectural rendering. Karel van Mander, the Vasari of the north, called these figures \u201cstorykins\u201d (Dutch storykens<\/em>): \u201clittle stories\u201d to animate the scenery and bring it to life.<\/p>\n

Sound familiar? Politically, economically, environmentally, online: we are all staffage now, there only to flesh out the bigger picture. The background noise, the foreground filler. It\u2019s not about us at all. This is not a crisis of meaning, as we had in the post-Holocaust, threat-of-nuclear-war midcentury, but rather of being, or maybe status: What do we count for, amount to? In Ashbery\u2019s poem \u201cStaffage\u201d: \u201cWe want only to be recognized for what we are; \/ Everything else is secondary.\u201d But what are we?<\/p>\n

For one thing, the age of staffage is the age of -udge<\/em>. There are a few other words in English, mostly artsy ones, that keep the French -age <\/em>and the stress on the final syllable: montage <\/em>(mounting or showing), collage <\/em>(pasting together, French coller<\/em>). Others are going native, with a stronger stress up front and the hardening of the -aazh <\/em>into -ahdge <\/em>(entourage<\/em>; garage<\/em>, French garer<\/em>). But \u2011age <\/em>is also, as the OED <\/em>says, \u201ca living English formative,\u201d making all sorts of words on its own, especially for some kind of process or its result: language<\/em>, marriage<\/em>, message<\/em>, usage<\/em>, image<\/em>, pilgrimage<\/em>, passage<\/em>, voyage<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In these, -age <\/em>is spoken with a dull -udge. <\/em>Typical words in this group are for clusters or collectives: baggage<\/em>, tonnage<\/em>, signage. <\/em>Tellingly, their meanings are borderline pejorative. Signs qua signage, bags qua baggage, are not exactly treasured for their special individual nuances, any more, perhaps, alas, than orphans in an orphanage when that word was coined. Carnage<\/em>\u2014the reduction of bodies to carne<\/em>, meat. Wreckage<\/em>. Garbage<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Staffage: <\/em>In the dictionary, it\u2019s sta-FAAZH<\/em>; I say it\u2019s time to make it STAF-udge. <\/em>Office workers have shifted, over the years, from being personnel<\/em>, to human resources<\/em>, to staff<\/em>; from people to raw material to an even more de-individualized mass. Nowadays, I sure feel like insignificant, interchangeable staffage, programmed over dark seas into small offices.<\/p>\n

It turns out staffing a position <\/em>and staffage <\/em>are etymologically unrelated. The latter started in Dutch a century or two after Van Mander, as fake-French built on the verb stofferen<\/em>, \u201cto fit out, garnish, accessorize with stuff,\u201d that is, with French estoffe.<\/em> It quickly moved into German, and that country\u2019s Romantics brought it into English. (The truly curious should consult Sabine Strahl-Grosse\u2019s Staffage: Begriffsgeschichte und Erscheinungsform<\/em>, also Leopoldine van Hogendorp Prosperetti\u2019s Landscape and Philosophy in the Art of Jan Brueghel the Elder<\/em>.) In English the word hung around in obscure art history writing for another couple of centuries, waiting for Ashbery to bring it to life.<\/p>\n

Other staff <\/em>words come from German Stab<\/em>, originally the long walking stick and its offshoots (a flagpole is a flagstaff), then, metaphorically, a support: bread is the staff of life. <\/em>Since German military leaders used to hold a large ceremonial scepter-like baton, or Stab<\/em>, the heads of the army were the general staff, under the chief of staff. All the civilian senses\u2014nursing staff, staff of a newspaper, employee of a large-ish business in general\u2014came later.<\/p>\n

Today, the convergence of a team of people with a pejorative mass noun is a potent one. The poet A. R. Ammons\u2019s magnum opus is the book-length poem Garbage<\/a> <\/em>(2001), written after he saw a giant pyramid of trash in Florida and felt that this was \u201cthe sacred image of our time.\u201d In fact, though, the Udge is us. In the visual version of Garbage<\/em>, Edward Burtynsky\u2019s Oil <\/em>(2012), a book of stunning photographs of sludge, salvage, oilfields, tankers, refineries, cars, roads, factories, polluted water, and skies on fire, some of the photographs are bird\u2019s-eye; most of the rest are from slightly overhead, so that the picture plane tips us in. There are almost no people in the pictures, except, as it were, for the tipped-in viewer. We are the staffage. Turning page after oversized page of that book makes you feel it: your place in the world.<\/p>\n

The narrative implied by Burtynsky\u2019s book is simple and we all know it: Individual action doesn\u2019t make a difference. I think that those months in the summer of 2009 as hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil a day, day after day after day after day, poured into the Gulf of Mexico from an exploded underwater well and we all went about our business even while we knew, because nothing could be done, was when it started to sink in. Staffage. No more storykins.<\/p>\n

Damion Searls<\/a>, the <\/em>Daily\u2019s language columnist<\/a>, is a translator from German, French, Norwegian, and Dutch.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Learning a word from John Ashbery. It started, as things sometimes do, with an Ashbery poem: \u201cStaffage,\u201d from his book A Wave. The poem is more than thirty years old now, and it\u2019s remarkable how well it captures the generation then just being born: \u201cI am one of a new breed \/ Of inquisitive pest\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":754,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[807],"tags":[2742,19330,10882,16321,5234,687,15542,7221,19329,19331,2393],"class_list":["post-89446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-translation","tag-a-r-ammons","tag-edward-burtynsky","tag-etymology","tag-garbage","tag-john-ashbery","tag-language","tag-oil","tag-poems","tag-staffage","tag-storykins","tag-words"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStaffage: A Word I Learned from John Ashbery<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Damion Searls on staffage and its history.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/09\/02\/the-age-of-udge\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Age of Udge by Damion Searls\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"September 2, 2015 \u2013 Learning a word from John Ashbery.It started, as things sometimes do, with an Ashbery poem: \u201cStaffage,\u201d from his book A Wave. 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