Randall Jarrell's Answerable Style: Revision of Elegy in "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner"

Abstract

This paper is concerned with position of Randall Jarrell's The Death of Ball Turret Gunner in elegiac tradition, but to define that position I must begin with another genre and another poet: epic and John Milton. In preamble to Book IX of Paradise Lost, Milton anatomizes and scornfully rejects both of traditional epic The skill of Artifice or Office mean (39) and 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 inadequacies of epic and ethic in his account of 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 cannon). Arnold Stein calls this episode a heroic (17-20), but William Riggs points out that that mode derides everything to which it is applied, and therefore would tar loyal angels with same brush used on rebels, something Milton wishes to avoid. So Riggs proposes a modification, seeing Milton as writing not mock heroic, but in which poetic manner is intentionally depreciated by its inability to answer adequately to demands of a heavenly subject (120).1 In The Death of Ball Turret Gunner, Jarrell is engaged in a similar project of revising, indeed rejecting and ethic of a traditional genre, elegy, to make his poetry more adequately address and render 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