Randall Jarrell's answerable style: revision of elegy in "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner".

Publication: Texas Studies in Literature and Language

Publication Date: 22-MAR-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)

This paper is concerned with the position of Randall Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" in the elegiac tradition, but to define that position I must begin with another genre and another poet: the heroic epic and John Milton. In the preamble to Book IX of Paradise Lost, Milton anatomizes and scornfully rejects both the style of traditional epic--"The skill of Artifice or Office mean" (39)--and the heroic ethic of personal courageous acts, proposing instead "the better fortitude / Of Patience and Heroic Martyrdom / Unsung" (31-33). This proposal of a "higher Argument" (42) and prayer for an "answerable style" (20) come after he has demonstrated the inadequacies of epic style and heroic ethic in his account of the war in heaven in Books V and VI, an account many readers find ridiculously funny, with, for example, angels wearing armor and throwing mountains at each other (not to mention Satan inventing the cannon). Arnold Stein calls this episode a "mock heroic" (17-20), but William Riggs points out that that mode derides everything to which it is applied, and therefore would tar the loyal angels with the same brush used on the rebels, something Milton wishes to avoid. So Riggs proposes a modification, seeing Milton as writing not mock heroic, but "mocked heroic in which poetic manner is intentionally depreciated by its inability to answer adequately to the demands of a heavenly subject" (120). (1)

In "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," Jarrell is engaged in a similar project of revising, indeed rejecting the style and ethic of a traditional genre, elegy, to make his poetry more adequately address and render the conditions of twentieth-century life in general, and twentieth-century war in particular. In writing what amounts to an anti-elegy (see below), however, he manages to avoid mocking his elegiac subject, and with this avoidance writes mocked elegiac.

Elegies traditionally have offered to their readers some form of consolation for a particular death and often, by extension, for death itself. If, as Peter M. Sacks puts it,"... mourning is an action, a process of work" (19), traditional elegies are a part of that process, allowing mourners to find solace in the transcendence or transfiguration and persistence of the elegiac subject. Indeed, the long history of the elegiac tradition is part of that solace; centered on "The vegetation god [who is] the predecessor of almost every elegized subject and provides a fundamental trope by which mortals create their images of immortality" (26-27),"... the elegy takes comfort from its self-insertion into a longstanding convention of grief. And ... an individual elegy may borrow the ritual context of consolation .... The unique death is absorbed into a natural cycle of repeated occasions" (23-24, Sacks' emphasis).

But Jahan Ramazani argues that the modern era produces a revolution in elegy. He sees most good modern elegies as being "not a guide to 'successful' mourning" (ix), but "melancholic," "mourning that is unresolved, violent, and ambivalent" (4). They are "anti-consolatory and anti-encomiastic, anti-Romantic and anti-Victorian, anti-conventional and sometimes even anti-literary" (2)--that is, they are anti-elegies and the poets who write them "attack the dead and themselves, their own work and tradition; and they refuse such orthodox consolations as the rebirth of the dead in Nature, in God, or in poetry itself" (4). However, this anti-elegiac movement "does not disprove the existence of the conventions or the genre; 'the transgression requires a law,' as Todorov writes, and the norm becomes visible in being transgressed" (25). Further citing Derrida and others, he argues that in perceiving something as violating a form, we simultaneously perceive the form that is being violated: The new form is embedded in various ways, sometimes by noteworthy absence of traditional elements.

Such transgressive reference is central to "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," and Jarrell uses Percy Bysshe Shelley's elegy for John Keats, "Adonais," for this purpose. The connection between these poems was first noted by Leven M. Dawson, and because his arguments are so closely tied to the language of both poems, it is best to quote Jarrell's here in full:

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State, And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze. Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life, I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose. (2)

Dawson focuses on the first four lines of stanza 39 of "Adonais":

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep-- He hath awakened from the dream of life-- 'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife ... (343-46)

Dawson notes that the gunner

also awakens from the "dream of life." As, paradoxically for Shelley, the death of Keats was birth, birth in the Gunner's new "state" is death; in his condition life is an unnatural, insecure "dream" from which one awakens to "stormy visions" of "strife" with "phantoms" ("black flak and the nightmare fighters") and then dies ... Everything in war ... is reversed:.up is down, one ascends to die, life is merely a dream of earth, awakening or realization is "nightmare." .... [Man] enters into abnormal states where he must dress unnaturally and regressively and where insensitivity becomes a sustaining virtue. (Dawson's emphasis) (3)

So far so good, but this sharp focus on "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" as a war poem distracts Dawson from Jarrell's reversal of the central consolatory movement of traditional elegy: Rather than the vegetation-god figure dying / descending to rise / live again, the gunner rises to die and descends permanently, and the gunner's movement is shorn of even the most rudimentary rites of funerary mourning, the kinds of rites Shelley, following tradition, so voluminously details....

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