Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Randall Jarrell and Basic Instinct

In his "Field and Forest," Randall Jarrell strips man of civilization in order to get down to the root of instinct. The agricultural field is a metaphor for the ego, while the forest stands in for the unconscious as the realm of instincts. Our egos, like the fields, "have a terrible monotony." Between the fields, however, are the dark forests.

What makes this poem a good representation of the "middle generation" is its ambivalence. Jarrell occupies a middle ground, and his poem takes pains to show that the farmer wishes to turn everything into farmland. The exploration of this wish, simultaneous with (and contradictory to) the wish to re-enter the forest, marks a significant difference from most postmodern poetry. This is particularly true of the "Deep Image" poets, who would have rushed headlong flaming into the ethereal forest, civilization be damned. (See my earlier post on Galway Kinnell's "The Bear").

Jarrell shows us an undressing of the self: "The farmer, naked, takes out his false teeth: / He doesn't eat now. Take off his spectacles: / He doesn't see now. Shuts his eyes." The physical body is taken apart, and Jarrell explores what might be left after such a dismantling. He takes an important step along the way, suggesting that the man is able to take off his cultural inheritance: "And after he has taken off the thoughts / It has taken him his life to learn, / He takes off, last of all, the world." It seems a bit naive, in light of contemporary theory, to believe that one can dispense with our own cultural constructedness. But it is important that Jarrell does this in the figure of the child. Though it was the old farmer who went off to sleep, it is the boy who enters the dream forest and encounters the fox.

I think Jarrell's point is that we long for the past, before the imposition of the reality principle. In this way, we are haunted by the civilizing process. Repression cannot be undone, but the dream of the pleasure principle inhabits us at our core.

The other interesting thing is that Jarrell suggests the world itself can be taken off. Again, departing from Altieri's notion that postmodern poets celebrate immanence, Jarrell describes a type of being that somehow escapes being-in-the-world. Once we have shed our physical selves and the objective world, all that's left is "A wish, / A blind wish; and yet the wish isn't blind, / What the wish wants to see, it sees." The blind wish, however, is not made explicit. Jarrell does not show us how it operates or to what end.

The poem ends with a stalemate typical for the "middle generation." There's a frozen quality to the face-off at the end, in which child and fox stare at one another. The farmer is ensconced within a dream, and the figurative child and fox are frozen and indistinguishable. I find the last line particularly illuminating, for though Jarrell dispensed with the world earlier in the poem, it ends with an enduring world: "The trees can't tell the two of them apart." Through the poem, we see the ego diminished by its breakdown, but we also see the "blind wish" ultimately broken by the trees which exist objectively regardless of this subjective struggle.

This static triangulation of ego, unconscious, and enduring object world seen in this and many other poems by Randall Jarrell. The same confrontation (which could also be termed self/desire/world) is found in particularly provocative ways in the work of Elizabeth Bishop. Jarrell is more prone to substitute to the social world, broadly conceived, for the object world. (Robert Lowell substitutes the nuclear family in this position). There's a sense in all of their work that one cannot but be trapped in this matrix of forces, dissolved but undissolvable.

1 comment:

  1. Great article! Have you ever wondered about the narrator? Examining the world from a plane.... bomber? Seems like a bombardier to me :-)

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