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SAM WHITSITT The Fall Before the Fall: the Game of Identity, Language, and Voice in Melville's White-Jacket I have this sense/ that I am one/ with my skin. Charles Olson, Letter 27 And it [Romantic Poetry] can also—more than any other form—hover at the midpoint between the portrayed and the portrayer, free of all real and ideal self-interest, on the wings of poetic reflection, and can raise that reflection again and again to a higher power, can multiply it in an endless succession of mirrors. Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragment No. 1 16. A man is the word made flesh. Emerson, "Self-Reliance" ???G am one with my skin," writes Charles Olson. Like that priest JL of corporeal truth, the body-builder, Olson strains towards making the exterior, signifying flesh submit to an interior "essence" which presses outward. Olson would make the word become flesh by making the flesh submit to and become word. While he claims a strong sense of self-identity, this sense of identity both announces a difference between interior and exterior, and asserts the insignificance of that difference. Only by assuming that this difference makes no difference can one then entertain the idea of identity, of being at one with one's skin. But what of this difference? Arizona Quarterly Volume 48 Number 2, Summer 1992 Copyright © 1992 by Arizona Board of Regents issn 0004- 1 6 10 58Sam Whitsitt Schlegel's sense of the poetic voice or presence of the poet, as that which "hover[s] at midpoint between" the portrayer and the portrayed, positions this voice on a vertical axis, running down between poet and poem, both between these two terms, and also hovering above them; between and above. For Olson, however, between the "I" of the phrase, "I have this sense," and the "I" who is one with his "skin," there is not, or for him ought not be, any difference: there is only a singular, compact identity. If there is transcendence for Olson, it would not be a mere disembodied voice hovering above and/or between bodies, as for Schlegel, but the entire embodied individual, hovering in space. Such a theme, as R. W B. Lewis shows in The American Adam, is hardly foreign to American writers.1 Olson's line is of course susceptible to a reading in which the voice of the poet hovers just at that midpoint between the "I" (the portrayer) and the "I am one/ with my skin" (the portrayed). That midpoint, not above or below, but somehow right between, is a non-transcendent place. This reading would put the poetic voice in the place of that difference which ought to make no difference, that space which is not supposed to be a space, and must be denied as a significant space if identity is to be achieved. Olson might endorse a transcendent voice which presides from above as it yokes the portrayer and portrayed together , but he would no doubt resist the notion of a voice "between," for it would threaten to undo the identity which that same voice nonetheless seems to desire. Olson is one of the great readers of Melville. He seems to have had an uncanny relation with the author: at times, in reading Call Me Ishmael, one is not sure whose voice is being heard. Olson's sense of being at one with his skin has many echoes in Melville's works, which begins to complicate the very self-identity being asserted. The Melville who wrote of self-identity in tetms of being at one with one's skin was a young Melville; not the Melville who wrote Pierre, or anything after. Even before Pierre, when Melville was writing his fifth novel, WhiteJacket (1849-50), the possibility of being at one with one's skin was being both posed and explicitly put into question. The natratot-ptotagonist of this novel is named White Jacket because of a white jacket he so continuously wore that it seemed to become his second skin. Towards the end of the novel he finally divests himself of this jacket, saying I "ripped my jacket straight up and down [with a knife], as if I...

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