Slantwise Moves. Douglas A. Guerra
else—it looks, in fact, a lot like the “breath of God” that Bryant imagines—because all players are forced into an “equivalently functioning” agency.97 Accordingly, Mansion produces a selfhood that is akin to the self Dimock reads into “Song of Myself, “a self that is beyond luck [and correspondingly] is … barred from the contingent.”98 The present analysis of Life, however, offers an alternative perspective on Whitman’s poem, one that is developed through an understanding of the operational differences between Life and Mansion.
While the rules of Life do adjudicate certain core conditions of winning and losing, contingency is built into the role of the players—even beyond their unruly interactions around the game board—via a foregrounding of the tactical roles they might take within the algorithm at any given turn. Whitman’s use of the second-person perspective and inclusive disjunction shows him employing a similar mechanism, despite the syntactic and categorical concessions he makes to enable it. While the text itself may be notably “silent about those objects that, for us, are not categoric, not interchangeable or substitutable,”99 it is only as silent as a game board without players. Whitman invokes this in one of his most pointed passages, calling to mind both the symbolism of gaming amusement and the chaotic role of interpersonal sensation. He writes:
Let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being.
To be in any form, what is that?
If nothing lay more developed the quahaug and its callous shell were enough.
Mine is no callous shell,
I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,
They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.
I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,
To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.
Is this then a touch? …. quivering me to a new identity.100
Indeed, via a purely formal analysis the poem appears “callous.” But one cannot determine “callous[ness]” simply by appearance; one must be willing to “touch” or interact with the object in question, and it is precisely on the issue of interaction (a central aspect of the avatar figure) that Whitman lingers in this passage. Here, he is at pains to force the poetic medium to reach out, despite the coldness of the textual space, to develop a relationship with its readers. If, as he has written earlier, “you shall assume” the same position as the “I” of the poem, then the sensational image of “stir[ring], press[ing], [and] feel[ing]” serves to draw you into the ontic materiality of holding a book, of touching that book with your fingers and restlessly moving about in your seat. And, tellingly, what you are touching in this moment is the material document of this poem, a poem Whitman described in his notebooks as “someone,” just as he does here in the moment of touch: “To touch [your?] person to some one else’s is about as much as [you?] can stand.”
Again, this “someone” is a variable in need of substantiation; and this substantiation requires a nonabstract agent such as the reader. What of yourself will you begin to associate with the book, the ideas, the time spent in reading, the place that surrounded you, and this thing that kept you there? How will these associations change both you and the book? With these questions in mind, it is not surprising that Whitman seizes the moment of touch to foreground the “instant[aneity]” and disruptiveness of this sensational connection to the poem as a path to “new identit[ies],” stable points of focus in the undecided algorithm that makes up the poem. One might see here a correspondence between the “callous shell” and the game marker, and the non-callous shell that such a marker becomes when it is touched by the player—moved in ways that “quiver” it to a new position of possibility on the board, a potential “new identity.” If Whitman’s text is silent in these moments, it is because interactivity takes place across the interface of the book, between the text and the reader, between the player and the avatar. Again, “Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you, / You must travel it for yourself.”101 An avatar, in one sense, may be a figure of formal representation, but its fundamental value for Whitman lies in its ability to mediate between a productive simulation and the user’s reality. “Folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects,” he claims in the preface, “They expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls.”102
The power he ascribes to poetry is in the way it reminds one of the unfathomable excesses within “things”—that which goes beyond their conceptual “reality” as “dumb real objects.” The body itself would be just such a “dumb real object,” a “callous shell,” if it weren’t constantly interposed with associative sensations that prompt it to “talk wildly,” to adopt new models or playfully turn “traitor” to its typical habits of behavior, framed by a static concept of self. Instead, “Being” is found, Whitman says later, in a “villain touch” that extends beyond any concept, and that suggests a certain bodily liberty over conceptual models of self: “All truths wait in all things…. What is less or more than a touch?”103 What you see represented in Whitman’s poem is a manifold or categorical person, but what you feel and experience in the seeing of this “person” is an act of touching, a contraction of feeling and thinking that is part of the radical potential figured by the piece. As in Bradley’s Life, Whitman’s avatar figure can be viewed as an attempt at achieving a legible and outward-directed view of freedom within the increasingly restrictive context of “reformist interiority and middle-class institutionalism.”104 The cost of this legibility is implication in a system of possibilities that is not, strictly speaking, free in the most powerful sense of the word. “Both in and out of the game,” the avatar is a figure that exists avowedly with one foot in the rule systems or ideologies of its moment: in this case, the interiorization of culturally dictated identity categories, outward character as the representation of self, and a general drive toward human proceduralization that corresponded to specific forms of technological growth and engagement in the middle nineteenth century.105
Yet, as we have seen, both Bradley and Whitman’s representative interventions use these ideological poles as tools to leverage the agential, using legibility to imagine a parallel and tactically unpredictable ability. In Bradley’s game, players were encouraged to see matrices of traditional values as opportunities for crafting an accountable and publicly materialized individual agency. This agency was undoubtedly bounded by the underlying algorithms of the game, but these algorithms became the basis for strategic habituations that a player could transpose into a mathematically complex number of recombinations suited to different situations. Similarly, Whitman’s “Song of Myself” used ambivalent pronouns, repetitive syntax, and complex lists of “American” character traits to visualize the poetic speaker as a model for a self, an avatar that could legibly incarnate—“celebrate” itself even—and fully interact with the world around it without an assumed divide between thought and feeling. In Whitman, the recombination of known quantities, achieved by putting atemporal representations in contact with temporal realities, forms a basis for thinking through how a “someone” becomes an agent, how a “you” becomes an “I,” as well as how this process is both figured and given matter on the page—not just for writers but for readers as well. To read game and poem together is to disallow certain all-too-easy erasures of dimension, to remain focused on elements of media interaction that were a part of everyday life, and to take seriously the idea that authors and readers were aware of these dimensions. The construction of self and avatar was indebted not only to conceptual or grammatical innovations but also to the cognitive environments that gave a body to these innovations.
Before developing these embodiments further in the chapter that follows, it’s worth reinforcing that Bradley and Whitman, examined in parallel, give us considerable insight into the specific range of resources being employed to reimagine agency in the mid-century moment: fixations on the graphic affordances of visual media, attempts to materialize the potentials and limitations of categorical forms, and deployments of interactivity used as a way to constitute