• Responses to American Poetry

The aim of this online space is to host the research work of university students or young scholars as this emerges from larger projects focusing on the American poetry scene. The objective of this initiative is to bring this kind of research activity to the attention of the general public in an attempt to further promote the exchange of ideas with regard to the process of reading, understanding and appreciating poetry writing.

  

Tatiani Rapatzikou 
(Professor, School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece; Advisor and initiative co-ordinator trapatz@enl.auth.gr)

 

ZOI VRENTZOU

 

Manipulating Time: Agency and Mortality in Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” and Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”

In the middle of the twentieth century, a new body of poets and poetic verse emerges, scarred by the traumatic experience of the two World Wars. Out of this atmosphere of chaos and uncertainty come Randall Jarrell and Elizabeth Bishop, both deeply immersed in the political discourse of their time. In 1945, Jarrell produces “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” appearing in his collection Little Friend, Little Friend (1945), and closely after, Bishop publishes her first poetry collection, “North & South,” featuring “The Fish,” in 1946. The two poems touch upon the issue of agency and individuality from wildly different viewpoints. Jarrell composes an antimilitarist war poem, and highlights the dehumanizing effect of war, through a harrowingly brief overview of a soldier’s life –or rather lack thereof– and death. Bishop’s “Fish,” a polar opposite of Jarrell’s eulogy, celebrates human agency and presents a single imagist moment, stretched into timelessness, as the image of the fish becomes central to a symbolic journey for self-realization at the face of imminent destruction. This article examines the issue of human agency in relation to mortality, as encountered in the two poems, through their form and imagist elements, with special reference to Necessarian and Jungian philosophies.

The two poems occupy a key position in the continuum of American poetry, as they signal the gradual transition from the modernist movement towards the postmodern, as evidenced in their image use. In this post-WWII period, writers experimented with form and meaning, dealing with the trauma and irrationality of war brutality (Hungerford 17). The writings of the early twentieth century are hued by an increasing skepticism towards the grand narratives and ideals that captivated the earlier generations of modernist writers. The channel to convey these dissenting sentiments becomes the image, with imagism still being a major stylistic influence. First introduced by Ezra Pound and his imagist credo in 1903, imagism highlights the non-descriptive role of language as it moves beyond mere symbolism; the image, defined by Pound as an “intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” (qtd. In Hungerford 322), should not be perceived as an objective representation of external reality, but as a vessel, the means through which personal and emotional responses to the afore-mentioned reality can be transmitted. This multi-layeredness of the image has been pivotal to the perseverance of imagism well into the midst of the twentieth century, and into Jarrell and Bishop’s poetics of human agency. Both poets, emerged at a time when the “violent, empty, fragmented and soul-crushingly conventional forms of modern life” (Hungerford 17), were just starting to be processed in literature. Along with their peers, they “carried [American] poetry a little farther into the dangerous unknown territory of the ‘crisis of personality’” (Rosenthal 252). It is precisely this crisis that imagism helps capture in “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” and “The Fish”. Jarrell’s gunner traverses through consecutive images that fracture his life into snapshots which rapidly lead him from his moment of birth to his own death experience. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Bishop’s “The Fish” revolves around the singular image of “a tremendous fish” (1). Temporality is warped around that image, as a single moment is stretched in time, across the seventy-six lines of the poem –significantly longer than the compact five-lined “Gunner”. This image allows both the fish and the narrator a degree of freedom and individuality that Jarrell’s solder, trapped in the confines of “the State” (1), caught in the enemy crossfire, could never have achieved. It is through the image that the poets grant or withhold agency from the characters, using description to prolong life or cut it short.

Getting into the poems, Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” subverts the traditional style of the elegy, stranding the poetic subject in a hellscape. Elegiac poetry is conventionally consolatory, “allowing mourners to find solace in the transcendence or transfiguration and persistence of the elegiac subject” (Cyr 93), promoting a sense of immortality, as isolated grief becomes part of a larger whole. This kind of comfort in grief was, nonetheless, inconsistent with the erratic rejection of grand ideals starting to seep into modernist poetry, which instead called for an “anti-elegy,” and “refuse[d] such orthodox consolations as the rebirth of the dead in Nature, in God, or in poetry itself” (Ramazani, qtd. in Cyr 93). In this vein, Jarrell, in the context of an all-consuming war, reports in his poem the realities of life and death, and documents them in terms of a chaotic reverie in which the individual is irreparably alone. The gunner of the poem “fell” (1) as the poem points out, “from [his] mother’s sleep” (1), originating from an “unconsciousness […] so rudimentary it cannot even be labeled as his” (Hrovath 30). In the poem, the soldier becomes disengaged from anything remotely human, absent even from his own metaphorical birth, which begins in the mother’s sleep –not even she is conscious of his delivery. In the middle of this absence of consciousness, this imagery of sleep and dreaming, the “I” of the poem stands alone, intensifying the gunner’s suffering and dehumanization, as we move further away from the traditional elegy.

The gunner appears utterly alone, with no comrades to join in his suffering, no sense of community to alleviate the pain he’s experiencing. The presence of the “nightmare fighters” (4) –the only other human presence in the poem– is never explicitly stated to be friendly or hostile, while the “nightmare” accompanying the “fighters” does not bid well for the narrator. As the gunner is not only estranged from himself, but also from everyone else, M.L. Rosenthal characteristically notes that “Jarrell adds the thought of an ultimate and absolute vulnerability in men, a virtually fetal helplessness or blamelessness. […] [The gunner] is later reborn in the nightmare of air combat, and then is delivered yet again in the grotesque fashion the last line describes” (245). Here, he refers to the fighter describing his own death experience: “they washed me out of the turret with a hose” (5), a faceless “they” washing him out of existence. What is striking throughout the poem, and particularly in this final line, is the fact that the images are described in the first person singular by the soldier himself, in a misleading display of mock-control over his own narrative. The stark contrast between the first-person narration and the grim reality these images present culminates in this final image of the dead gunner being washed out of the ball turret, as his human essence and individuality are completely eradicated, his voice forever silenced. Mortality here does not appear to imbue life with meaning, since the gunner may be alive, but hardly exists, oscillating between dreams and nightmares, occupying a liminal space of semi-consciousness, that replaces the comforting loop of life as described in traditional elegiac poetry: birth-death-rebirth. His mortality condemns him rather than uplifting him to the heights of transcendence; as he vacillates on the verge of his own sensibility, his selfhood is forfeited, and is eventually washed away into morbid nothingness.

The “blamelessness” mentioned earlier in Rosenthal’s citation is central to the argumentation here, as the gunner is granted no control over the events of the poem, being robbed of his agency, as Jarrell adopts a fatalistic approach to human existence in the context of war. The gunner’s fate seems predetermined, and his unceremonious death is a fact that frames the narrative, constituting the first piece of information that the readers gain access to by the very title of the poem. And so, death haunts the poem, being the framework for the soldier’s life, and its inescapability forms the lens through which the poem is read and understood. This reading is tied to the concept of “Necessarianism”. Described by Percy Shelley as “an immense and uninterrupted chain of causes and effect, no one of which could occupy and other place than it does occupy,” Necessarianism supports that “[e]very human being is irresistibly impelled to act precisely as he does act” (qtd. in Cyr 95), which is to say people –or in our case, the turret gunner– have no power to govern their own lives, their fate is sealed and the course of their lives is predetermined; essentially, free will is an illusion and the soldier’s every act is a result of forces greater than him, namely, in the poem, “the State” (1), that overpowering “they” (5), over which he has no control. Marc D. Cyr understands the application of Necessarianism to Jarrell’s poem, as “[t]he forces, natural and human, act through the abstract entities of Trade and the State […] and in Jarrell’s war poems these entities perform […] as representatives of Necessity” (95).1 Under this light, Brooke Horvath’s question, “[i]n what sense is a ball turret gunner ‘innocent’ when charged with shooting down enemy aircraft piloted and crewed by young men like himself?” (29), becomes irrelevant. The gunner in the poem appears to have no choice; his fate has been predetermined, and his actions do not derive from his own conscious volition.

Maintaining this Necessarian point of view, the idealistic image of the warrior-hero is shattered and replaced by the powerless figure of an inactive victim, suffering, being catapulted from one state of being into another, with barely any control over his own sleep and wakefulness. The syntax and vocabulary employed in the poem appear to corroborate this argument, as a series of passive expressions presents the gunner as “inactive, uninstigating recipient[] of suffering” (Cyr 96). In truth, Jarrell’s gunner documents how he “fell into the State” (1), and “hunched […] till my wet fur froze” (2), the poet himself noting that he “looked like a foetus in the womb” (qtd. in Levine 160). He is subsequently “loosed” (3) into aerial battle, which –in stark contrast to the vocabulary used to describe him– is buzzing with energy, the “black flak” (4) and “nightmare fighters” (4). The effect triggered by the images used here is further intensified, as it is acoustically enriched with the /l/ and /k/ alliterative effect (“black flak”), the assonance of the /ai/ sound (“nightmare fighters”) and internal rhyme. The gunner, conversely, is “trapped” and “we never see him do anything, not even die” (Cyr 96); his death is glossed over, much like his life. He is never presented in a position of power –that would normally accompany the operation of a ball turret’s “pair of .50 caliber machine guns” (Horvath 29). Instead, he “only suffer[s], only die[s]” (Kipling, qtd. in Cyr 96). Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner” records the annihilation of human agency and individuality. As the soldier’s psyche is caught in the crossfire of battle, and is eradicated along with his physicality.

In contrast to this inescapable erasure of personality, Bishop’s “The Fish” employs images in an effort to promote subjectivity, a kind of individuality that extends beyond what is simply human, to encompass the natural, capturing with an image perseverance and endurance in nature. Bishop’s fish stands at the precipice of life and death, “half out of water” (3). In a flowing image, starting from the skin of the fish, moving to its gills, which become an entrance point for the meticulous exploration of its interior, bones and “shiny entrails” (31), the narrator attempts to enter the fish. In this act, the “poem’s structural scaffolding is established: a shuttling of attention from outward detail to inward association” (Doty 60). This is inherently connected to Ezra Pound’s imagist credo, as his theory itself shifts the focus of the image from outward detail –objective representation and documentation of an external reality– to inward association –emotional responses and the internal processing of the outside world. In a similar vein to Pound, Bishop too is preoccupied with the process of observing –the result of which observation is presented in the form of an image– as an experience that defines the observer as much as the object perceived. According to Mark Doty, the act of description traces out the narrative voice, and the poem becomes a “voiceprint” (62), as “subjectivity is made of such detail, of all the ways in which the world impresses itself upon us” (62), and thus, the unique sensibility that orchestrates the poem comes on the surface. This is achieved through the distinct character of the fish, which, despite the narrator’s attempts to anthropomorphize and define it, it remains distinct in its otherness.

While the narrator struggles to pin the creature down with descriptions, it refuses to give in to the narrator’s control. Indeed, the details provided by Bishop in the poem, images of “his brown skin hung in strips / like ancient wallpaper” (10-11), instead of building familiarity, reveal the non-human traits of the fish. Even so, adorned with fishing lines, described “Like medals with their ribbons” (61), the fish is presented as a survivor, looking more the part of the decorated war hero than Jarrell’ gunner. The hardships it has encountered do not diminish, but empower its character, and have become an inextricable part of itself, “a five-haired beard of wisdom” (63). Thus, the subjectivity of the narrator is carefully outlined through the efforts to describe the fish, while the fish itself continues to persevere, thwarting the attempts to pin down its identity.

Bishop also resorts to images to masterfully manipulate time, blurring the boundaries between past and present, stretching one moment into timelessness, presenting mortality as something that can be overcome, not suffered. As the narrator stares into the creature’s otherworldly eyes, time grinds to a halt. An amalgamation of alliterations –/t/ and /s/ sounds (“tarnished” and “tinfoil,” “lenses of […] scratched isinglass”)–, assonances –the vowels in “far larger” (35), “scratched” (40) and “glass” (40)–, combined with internal rhyme –“backed and packed” (37)– intensify the emotional power of the poem and add a physical layer to it, that require time to enunciate. Bishop’s short lines, combined with extensive image-driven descriptions do not allow for momentum to build up, slowing down the reading pace. This way, in “The Fish,” “an Imagist instant of experience [is] held and prolonged until the object perceived, the ‘tremendous fish,’ becomes more than the poem can encompass” (Rosenthal 253), into what Doty describes as “lyric instant” (62). As Doty connects selfhood with the perception of time, tying together individuality with temporality, the lyric instant is seen as an “isolate” (63) moment, “lead[ing] toward an unpointed awareness, a free-floating sense of self detached from context, agency, and lines of action” (63).

Within this context of blurred temporal boundaries, there are three consecutive extensive descriptions: the exterior-to-interior of the fish –for twenty-five lines–, its eyes –occupying eleven lines– and the hooks on its jaw –in seventeen lines– “[w]hen the speaker […] knows the fish’s jaw is ‘aching,’ and when she perceives ‘wisdom’ in his beard, she’s entered into the fish’s life” (Doty 65), swiftly moving to the epiphany of the final lines, as a “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!” (75) takes over the little boat. This reading correlates to Carl Jung’s theories on the psyche.2 In Jungian philosophy “the ocean is generally a symbol of the unconscious, and fishing thus symbolic of confronting one’s unconscious” (Marcus 29). For Jung, a key part of individuation, or rather self-realization, for women was the encounter with a buried male component of the human psyche, the “Animus,” represented by the fish in his “big dream of fishing” (Marcus 30).3 Thus, in this encounter, on the verge of life and death, floating on the ocean of the subconscious, more than the fish’s life is at stake: the narrator’s psyche. The last act of releasing the fish, combined with the ecstatic image of the rainbow flooding the scene, is eternal: “I let the fish go” (Bishop 76), either past or present tense, the gesture an ongoing timeless liberation, eclipsing mortality. As “victory filled up / the little rented boat” (66-67), the ecstatic image of the “rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!” (75) flooding the scene, serves as a turning point in the poem with the narrator releasing the fish, “I let the fish go” (76), instead of exercising her power on it. The act transcends time: “I let the fish go” (76), either past or present tense, the gesture an ongoing timeless liberation, eclipsing mortality. As Doty notes:

We read the final line as past tense consistent with the body of the poem: I let the fish go yesterday, or last week, or years ago. But since let is also the present-tense form of the verb, the line also has the immediacy of something happening now, as if the poem’s final gesture of release is still taking place. (65)

Ambiguity reigns in the poem, an “intoxicating uncertainty” (Doty 66) –of the narrator’s decision, uncertainty surrounding the tense, the temporality of the poem, the identity of the fish that refuses to be described. This highlights the elusiveness of the moment, the vulnerability of existence as everything becomes fluid, relying on momentary decision and, thus, Bishop “restore[s] us to a sense of energized, liberating uncertainty” (66). So, in this poem, liberation features as a moment of transience and fragility, not as a given.

Overall, the two poets dive into the human condition, examining the capacity for agency in the face of mortal peril and imminent death. On the one hand, Jarrell’s (anti-)war poem, grisly realistic, observes from a distance as the dehumanization of war strips the individual of his sense of selfhood. On the other hand, Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish” exults human agency at the face of adversity, when the individual comes face to face with their own shortcomings by the way they connect with other creatures around them. Jarrell compresses the gunner’s life into five lines, while Bishop grasps a momentary decision and stretches it into seventy five lines worth of eternity. The two poets, following the long tradition of modernism that stretches from the high modernists, adapt the concept of imagism to encapsulate the post-war experience and ruminate on questions about selfhood and subjectivity, as it gradually enters what is about to become the uncertain and obscure terrain of the postmodern.

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Elizabeth Bishop:

• ​"The Fish" -  https://poets.org/poem/fish-2

Randall Jarrell:

• “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57860/the-death-of-the-ball-turret-gunner

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WORKS CITED

Aldrighetti, Jacopo. “Reverie, Wild Animals, and Gasoline: The Interrelatedness of the Human and Natural Worlds in Elizabeth Bishop.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, vol. 25, no. 3, 2023, pp. 315-337.
Bishop, Elizabeth. “The Fish.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, edited by Robert S. Levine, 9th ed., W. W. Norton & Company, 2018, pp. 56-58.
Cyr, Marc D. “Randall Jarrell’s Answerable Style: Revision of Elegy in ‘The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner’.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 46, no. 1, 2004, pp. 92-106.
Doty, Mark. “A Tremendous Fish.” New England Review, vol. 31, no. 2, 2010, pp.58-66.
Horvath, Brooke. “Deconstructing Randall Jarrell’s ‘The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner’.” The Explicator, vol. 73, no. 1, 2015, pp. 29-32.
Hungerford, Amy. “Introduction.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, edited by Robert S. Levine, 9th ed., W. W. Norton & Company, 2018, pp. 3-20.
Jarrell, Randall. “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, edited by Robert S. Levine, 9th ed., W. W. Norton & Company, 2018, p.160.
Jung, Carl. The Collected Works of C.G. Jung: Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. Translated by R.F.C. Hull, 2nd edition, vol. 9, Princeton UP, 1970.
Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Child and the Shadow.” The Quarterly Journal of the Library of Congress, vol. 32, no. 2, 1975, pp. 139-148.
Marcus, Philip L. “‘I Knew that Underneath Mr. H and I Were Really a Lot Alike”: Reading Hemingway’s ‘The Old Man and The Sea’ With Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Fish’.” The Hemingway Review, vol. 33, no. 1, 2013, pp. 27-43.
Pound, Ezra. “[From A Retrospect.]” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, edited by Mary Loeffelholz, 9th ed., W. W. Norton & Company, 2018, pp. 322-323.
Rosenthal, M.L. “Exquisite Chaos: Thomas and Others: Poets of the New Academy.” The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction, Oxford UP, 1975, pp. 244-264.

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FOOTNOTES:

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