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Swathi Gangadharan

Professor Anannya Dasgupta

ES411E: Academic Writing

Short Essay 2 Second Draft

5 September 2018

Conjuring Chronology: How Narration Wields Time

Between the happening and the recounting, there is time and distance, or

rather, distance via time. Narration is the act of bridging this distance by editing

together often patchwork-like experiences into the smooth-seeming stream of a tale

well told. For narration to be persuasive, it has to illuminate cause and effect and

therefore hold within its strands past, present and future simultaneously – though not

necessarily in that order. Even in a journalistic essay like Charles Siebert’s “An

Elephant Crackup?” (2006), which studies the worsening of human-elephant

behavioral patterns explicitly with respect to time, the order in which events occurred

is not the order in which they are disclosed in the narrative, but instead follows the

conceptual moves required to build the argument. In poetry, where inward looking

thought often dominates over action-focused reportage, narration wields chronology

much more subtly, yet equally pointedly. This is exemplified perfectly by American

poet Elizabeth Bishop’s 1935 poem “The Fish”, which describes the narrator’s brief

encounter with a fish that she catches and observes as it is held suspended out of

water. Because it crafts an apparently real-time picture of the narrator’s mindscape,

the order in which the observations are narrated is neatly read as the order in which

these thoughts occurred as well. Chronological ordering however exists only in

objective clock-time, whereas the inner life of the poet-narrator is organized much

more arbitrarily in subjective time by memory and emotion. This is the realm of the
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unquantifiable, seemingly endless moment, whose significance in “The Fish” is

written extensively about in American author Mark Doty’s critical essay, “A

Tremendous Fish”, which comments on how Bishop’s narration replicates the

intensely subjective ways in which we inhabit an experience, unanchored by clock-

time. Since narration is a re-telling always in hindsight, the narrator, whether in

reportage or poetry, consciously gears the telling towards a pre-processed meaning, to

support which, events ordered objectively by chronology or subjectively by memory

are rearranged purposively.

It can seem like events generally have chronology as a pretty straightforward

ordering principle, but this is not so, because narrative has more to do with the

progression of an argument, rather than the progression of time. Although it is central

to Siebert’s essay to situate events in a tidily ordered timeline, chronology still takes a

back seat to argument as narrative ordering principle. Siebert narrates by linking his

travels to the ideas that each location characterises. He introduces the aggravated

nature of elephant hostility with a physical move to Kyambura, Uganda, which had

been very recently alarmed by one instance of this. Similarly, the description of his

visit to an asylum for disturbed elephants upon his return to America enables

smoothly a conceptual move towards the idea of treating elephantine aggression.

When he wants to make the parallel between trauma in humans and elephants clear,

he goes back in time to when he had stopped in London during his return trip to

America to invoke his meeting with a London-based source he had met then. His

concluding paragraph follows the same pattern, with Siebert harking back to the

chronologically earliest event that he had begun his article with: “As Nelson Okello

and I sat waiting for the matriarch and her calf to pass, he mentioned to me an odd

little detail about the killing two months earlier of the man from the village of Katwe,
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something that, the more I thought about it, seemed to capture this particularly fraught

moment we’ve arrived at with the elephants (21)”. Evidently, Siebert had actively

withheld the information of this “odd little detail” provided by his driver, Okello, at

the very beginning of his account when he had talked of this very moment in time, for

the purpose of ending on an appropriately somber note. The chronological timeline is

then clearly as subordinate to narrative intent as any other ordering of time.

Narration in poetry is more complex, having to do with the emotional contours

of how an event is experienced, and so draws on the intensely subjective inwardness

of felt time, which works side-by-side with chronological narration. In “The Fish”, the

actual exterior action that takes place is very brief – the fish is caught, observed, and

then let go. However, in the retelling of this event, there is a chronology of acts subtly

at work even in that leisurely descriptive part of the poem that seems to have nothing

to do with ordered activity. While encountering something, sight, sound, smell and

touch are all simultaneous experiences. While narrating obviously, some particular

thing has to be necessarily described first. The narrator comes to that feature of the

fish on which the poem turns, i.e. its hardened, weapon-like lip only at the very end.

All the observations that precede this are a catalogue of difference that gradually

subsides towards similarity as the poem proceeds. From the wallpaper-like skin, so

divergent from a human being’s, to the gills that are frightening in their unfamiliar

edges, to the sudden reflections on the insides of the fish that does not follow from

any immediate visual prompt, Bishop moves towards a physical feature that the fish

actually does share with her, the eyes. Even though her stare is not returned, its eyes

can at least be described in relative terms to her own – “larger”, “shallower”,

“yellowed” (35-36). The poem is thus moving closer to an empathetic identification,

even the animalistic physical features now beginning to bear a distant resemblance to
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the human even in their obvious difference. The final elevation of the five hooks in its

jaw to a symbol of a universal impulse of life to cling to itself completes this

movement towards kinship that ends with the fish being let go. As with Siebert, the

order in which the narrator’s acts of “I thought”, “I looked” and “I admired” appear in

her monologue is significant, not any consideration of when they might have actually

occurred during the originary episode. Chronology within poetic narration is a

necessarily contrived thing, and one of many ways in which narrative brings itself to

bear upon time.

Clearly, the poetic narration of an inner mindscape has order, even if it

projects itself as a meandering collection of thoughts and observations. A chronology

is invented that may or may not adhere to how things might have happened in clock-

time or thoughts occurred in subjective time. However, the order in which the poet

comes to these events is a different matter from how much mental bandwidth they can

occupy, or how densely subjective time pools around these moments. Mark Doty’s

commentary on “The Fish” titled “A Tremendous Fish” ruminates on that unit of time

that is so different from chronology, i.e. the lyric moment where clock-time holds no

sway and there is instead free reign for the mind to give play to all the tangential

thought-chains and associations that it dreams up: “… a slipping out of story and into

something still more fluid, less linear: the interior landscape of reverie (22)”. These

roving coils of thought escape the trappings of chronology and follow no reasoned

chain of causality; they rise from the rich subconscious musings of a mind that dwells

on memory, fantasy and reality without pause. Bishop’s indulgent examining of her

inner world holds sometimes some old memory fragment of peeling wallpaper and

sometimes a rainbow-like explosion of some vast, unnamed emotion, and in these

individual reflections there is complete disregard for the outside world in which she is
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holding a rather heavy fish. Narration in “The Fish” intersperses the forward narrative

force of action with these pauses that delve deep and inward; both objective and

subjective time plied with precision for the poem to impress its point on the reader’s

mind. There is then no tension between chronology and subjectivity; time in all its

measures is subservient to narrative purpose.

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Works Cited

Bishop, Elizabeth. “The Fish”. 1946.

Doty Mark. “A Tremendous Fish”. The Art of Description. Minneapolis: Graywolf

Press, 2010. Print.

Siebert, Charles. ““An Elephant Crackup?”. The New York Times Magazine.

www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/magazine/08elephant.html. Accessed 15

August, 2018.