In Chapter 1 I argued that the intensification and proliferation of difference within O'Hara's poetry produces a metonymic web of association which is hypertextual in essence. This hypertextual/ metonymic network is the ground of the hyperscape discussed in Chapter 2. In Chapter 1 I also discussed the way the hyperscape engages modernist innovation and postmodern appropriation so that O'Hara adopts genres, and then extends them beyond their apparent limits. This chapter will amplify and cohere both of these lines of inquiry. It will analyse how O'Hara's poems explore difference at a structural/technical level to such an extent that they produce intricate webs of association similar to those of the hypertext. At the same time, it will show how this hypertextual web arises from the dismantling of modernist genres and their subsequent recombination into a postmodern synthesis.

More specifically, this chapter analyses the cohabitation within certain O'Hara's poems of three genres which might seem to be mutually incompatible: the anti-symbolic, symbolic and surreal. This produces a literary hybridity which displaces the boundaries between these different genres and calls into question their dissimilarity from each other. Consequently, O'Hara's poetry rocks the foundations of any given genre, but at the same time bestows continuity between what might seem to be radically different ones. My particular focus will be the crossing over or ‘cross-dressing’ of the symbolic and the surreal, which re-emerge not as binary opposites (one centripetal and the other centrifugal), but as different sides of the same coin. I argue that this cross-dressing can occur because of the deconstruction within O'Hara's work of figures of analogy (metaphor/symbol/simile) into part–whole relationships (synecdoche). The result is exchange and inversion: symbolism in O'Hara's poetry often disseminates meaning, while surrealism assumes the unifying force which symbolism lacks. But the breakdown of metaphorical cohesion results in the release of a huge metonymic/synecdochal network of associations, forged through near and distant links as they are in hypertext. This ‘intertwingling’ is neither completely surreal nor symbolic, but arises out of the interface of anti-symbolic, surreal and symbolist genres.