Slantwise Moves. Douglas A. Guerra
or with our will.
Nor less I deem that there are powers,
Which of themselves our minds impress,
That we can feed this mind of ours,
In a wise passiveness.77
Here we are given the image of a “passive” self “impress[ed]” upon by the circumstances of the world—much in line with the Lockean metaphor to which Emerson found himself responding in “The Transcendentalist.” Will is subordinate to the hungry mind that fills itself with sights and sounds, and the player’s role is, again, one of accounting rather than accountability.
This ideology of “wise passiveness” is reflected in the American literary context by a poet like William Cullen Bryant. Taking the torch of Wordsworth’s wise cipher, Bryant’s speaker in “The Prairies” (1832) collapses history and nature into a justification for the transcendent self of the present. Bryant writes:
The Prairies. I behold them for the first,
And my heart swells, while the dilated sight
Takes in the encircling vastness. Lo! they stretch
In airy undulations, far away,
As if the ocean, in his gentlest swell,
Stood still, with all his rounded billows fixed,
And motionless for ever.78
The viewer “Takes in the encircling vastness,” transforming the immensity and incorrigibility of the natural world into a “sight” that locates the speaker who has mastered it, much as a Claude glass frames an image and points an optic line from the scene to the eyes of its viewer. Moreover, in this instance, “tak[ing] in” amounts to a similar accounting to that found in The Mansion of Happiness, where the player who takes in the most virtues is given his or her “due” in the form of forward movement toward the endpoint of the game. The ebb and flow of accounting is reflected in Bryant’s teleological perspective later in the poem: “Thus change the forms of being. Thus arise / Races of living things, glorious in strength, / And perish, as the quickening breath of God / Fills them, or is withdrawn.”79 The player who stands at the endpoint of history, at the top of the game, occupies that position because the “breath of God”—or the roll of the teetotum—has made it that way. Within a naturalized Protestant ethic of grace and election, those who have experienced withdrawals of this “breath,” who have moved backward on the board, have only gotten what was due to them all along.
Yet if informed passivity is a virtue linking Mansion to early Romantic modes of privileged self-awareness, then we find an analogue for the interactive self of Life in Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” While both Wordsworth’s and Bryant’s speakers appear to yearn for a perfect passivity within the game of life that allows them a certain amount of subjective interior transcendence, Whitman’s “gigantic and generous treatment” never quite leaves the active and exterior parts of this game behind. As an attempt at both prompting and rendering social life within the constraints of paper media, Whitman’s textual subject is always, as he writes, “both in and out of the game.”80 Accordingly, his use of the second person and repetition in the poem shows him determined to leave the reader with a strong sense of implication, responsibility, and material embeddedness within the world he demarcates.81 Tracing the medial continuities between Bradley and Whitman enables a reading of “Song of Myself” that moves beyond the apparent categorical emptiness of its “I” and toward a more active understanding of the poem’s potentials and sensual interventions.
Walt Whitman and the Puzzle of Puzzles
A curious thing happens if you squint a bit at the title page and frontispiece of the first edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (Figure 6). Though the image of an author on the verso (that is, the left side of the binding crease) was a typical accompaniment to recto titling (on the right side), the proportion of image to text feels playfully conceived. A tiny (yet full-bodied save for the lower legs) Whitman gazes at you ambiguously, self-composed, leaning against one hip; you can barely make out the eyes, but it is certain that he looks in your direction—a challenge, an invitation? Glancing away from the intensity of this miniature man, you scan to the recto and are accosted by a massive bit of interposing signage, a constellation of font sizes that produces a near shouting effect: Leaves! of (this time even bigger) Grass! Below you note, in a more subdued font, the place and year of publication, “Brooklyn, New York: 1855.” In the context of the kind of public banners and billboards that historian David Henkin has so vividly recovered as part of our urban model of mid-nineteenth-century New York City, it’s almost as if the title itself were a sign hanging in the air, one much closer to you than the provoking man staring from across the way—as close, indeed, as this little green book, where even the cover evokes the grass just outside your door or under your feet as you read. This book—the book bent open in the reader’s hands, paper arching out against the fingers on either side—is nothing if not a “medium,” a center point of exchange between the body of the reader and the distant body of Whitman himself, whether figured on the verso or out loafing in the grass somewhere.82 This codex is the place where, if you feel the literal tension of those pages against the edge of your thumbs, you share a feeling as well as a set of terms with someone else through the mediation of something that is neither of you, although it is now and for this moment intimately associated with both at once. This shared association, a tactile dislocation of self relocated in the instant of readerly interaction, might be the starting point for a conception of the collection’s entry-point poem, “Song of Myself,” that takes a second look at its seemingly private, engulfing, lyric “I.” The book, and that “I,” are, in this view, less markers of some secret world to which we have stolen access, and more the markers and playfield for a staging of the type of association Milton Bradley would materialize five years later on the pasteboard grid of Life.
Figure 6. Leaves of Grass. Brooklyn: Walter Whitman, 1855. Courtesy of Library Company of Philadelphia.
After the celebratory opening of “Song of Myself,” the speaker declares, “what I assume, you shall assume / for every atom belonging to me as good as belongs to you.”83 Here, as with the interactive counters of Life, Whitman establishes an early interface between the first and second person as recursively connected positions, a structured place from which to understand circumstance and shape it accordingly: “You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.”84 As a result, the imperious “I” of the speaker’s effusion is inaugurated with a gesture that is equal parts ego and radical formal empathy: we are the same because we shall occupy the same grammatical place in the text, a place where “all sides” are “filter[ed].” The speaker’s use of “assume” in these opening lines reinforces this by playing on both a locating sense—“assume the position!”—and an informational sense—“here are the facts that can be assumed.” This multivocality of “assumption” foregrounds Whitman’s equivocation between locating the reader in a place and giving a range of data possibilities that he or she may work with at that location. As in Life, the position a marker assumes has an intimate relationship with the options available to it (the assumptions it may make).
These possibilities are enumerated throughout the poem as various character types, locations, and affections that radiate outward in a flurry of inclusive disjunction—“or”s that do not preclude the possibility of “both.” We see one of the most explicit statements of this in Whitman’s characterization of the grass that forms the poem’s central metaphor: “Or I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. / Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord … / Or I guess the grass is itself a child.”85 This series of disjunctions never excludes any of the others; they are consistently additive, although only one may be read at a time. Each option maintains a singular quality both in terms of textual space and in terms of the