Randall Jarrell and Extremity of Self

Randall Jarrell is particularly interested in the intersection of the self and the social world. In "90 North," he takes the concept of one's interaction with the world to its logical extremity: the north pole. But rather than a sort of transcendence or ultimate selfhood, the speaker recognizes the inevitability of the physical world.

What intrigues me most about this recognition of physical reality is the spatial configuration of the self that results. When the speaker reaches the north pole, he does not reach a sort of undiluted self-consciousness; instead, he comes to realize that he cannot avoid the world: "Turn as I please, my step is to the south." He is necessarily mapped onto the world, no matter which way he turns.

To me, this perspective seems radically different than the modernist poets who came before Jarrell and the others of the "middle generation." Certainly the authority over the physical world that Ezra Pound asserts, or the power of the imagination in shaping the world advanced by Wallace Stevens, are far from the immanence intimated in Jarrell's poem. Perhaps William Carlos Williams at his most "objective" harbors some of the same ideas, but Williams seems to suggest different implications. In "Paterson," for example, the protagonist both moves through and *is* his world. This duality is empowering in Williams.

Jarrell's figuration is not as holistic. The energies of the self-in-the-world instead form a whirlpool: "all lines, all winds / End in this whirlpool I at last discover." The self is a whirling chaos and it doesn't seem to have any agency or be able to learn. It is at the mercy of the winds.

If it could be said that the self (the Freudian "ego") is challenged, however, it does not seem that the unconscious takes over. The poem isn't like a return of the repressed. Instead, the poem suggests that the loss of the self is more like being cast from the Garden of Eden, more like the devolution of humankind. He casts this struggle in terms of knowledge and ignorance. The fruit of the tree of knowledge in this case (the approach to the extremity of self) is not a stay against the chaos of the world. For the poem itself is figured as a night voyage, a dream of discovery, but ultimately an emptiness.

Immanence is a sort of nightmare rather than an example of a reassuring solidity in the world. The speaker is bereft of a meaning beyond the brute fact of the world. This notion of immanence is important to recognize because it runs counter to the sort of joyous immanence that Charles Altieri talks about in "postmodern" poets in his noteworthy study "Enlarging the Temple." The sort of positive experience, or at least the unburdening of such testimony, shown in the slightly later poets Altieri talks about, is not yet possible in the "middle generation."