Only The Dead Know Brooklyn Ferry: The Inscription of the Reader in Whitman

TOM COHEN Only The Dead Know Brooklyn Ferry: The Inscription of the Reader in Whitman It is a priceless historical joke that the one poet we accept as the National Bard should lack all the accredited national virtues. . . . Whitman speaks for the national ethos, the divine average, the En Masse, but he is actually a solitary, a secretive watcher ... It is all a comedy of errors, and if one sometimes feels that Whitman's critics serve him right, one may also indulge the feeling that Whitman serves American right. Irving Howe Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat, —Hypocrite lecteur, —mon semblable, mon fferel Baudelaire, Au Lecteur IWANT t? ask after the possibility of an "evil" Whitman, a Whitman who, in the sense of mai used sometimes by Baudelaire, is more alert to the violent implications of rhetorical technique than we tend to allow, considering his repeated denial of interest in literary technique or style.1 After all, when we hear him saying almost as much in a remarkably convoluted addtess in "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" ("Nor is it you alone who know what it is to be evil,/ 1 am he who knew what it was to be evil,/ I too knitted the old knot of contrareity,/ Blabb'd, blush'd, resented, lied, stole, grudg'd" [196]), is it only, being in the past tense, as further confessional proof of his care? In many respects, a certain familiar "Whitman" remains a distracting cultural icon—that is, the image citculated of a writing, author, or idea attached to what Arizona Quarterly Volume 49 Number 2, Summer 1993 Copyright © 1993 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004-161 24Tom Cohen Benjamin calls its "afterlife," the iconic mode in which a production is iconicized, circulated as commodity and, potentially, attached to interpretive figures designed implicitly to contain its transgressive import— and, as such, a site where ideological analysis, cultural criticism and close reading may profitably join up.2 Invested in, identified with, transferred as educational codes, such icons (the "Walter," say, mocked yet left unshaken by D. H. Lawrence) play organizational roles independent of analysis, cultural referentials installed as implicit guardians against alternate readings. Yet what happens to Whitman's "voice" if it is thought not through transparency—which always suggests, or promises , a transparency of language itself—but the reverse, through Whitman 's decidedly knowing reflection on and manipulation ofthe material dimension of language itselfwhich he pretends to dismiss?3 Throughout this essay, I will use the term materialist to suggest where Whitman can be read, contrary to custom, as a text fully aware of its status as a certain technological achievement—even to the point of making that technology in the figure of Brooklyn Ferry a figure of what his own text is performing. Aside from presenting us now with an unusually double text (or talk), this also suggests Whitman's awareness of the negative power wielded by naming and addressing the other (reader) in a hortatory manner—what I will call, temporarily, Whitman's inscription of the reader. It is the effects of such inscription, I will argue, that substantially complicate and revise any pretended immediacy, transparency or presence, and for that matter, the very integrity of the voice itself. Despite the "presence" Whitman projects, there has been comparatively little theoretical interest in him until recently, as if his assertion of transparency were granted at the price of interest, or as if he were simply the most easy figure to sacrifice to the controls of the Americanist ideology of the self. For many contemporary readers, however, there may be a tendency to simply assume Whitman's claim to "transparency" is itself another strategem; if so, the question becomes: how successful, and to what end? Where, in routinely constructing "Whitman," do we overlook a rupture in the address itself, one irreducible to explanations available through some dissenting tradition relying on an image of the anti-social Whitman?4 I will ask, instead, where Whitman's inscription of the reader can display not only a highly sophisticated formalist and metatextual dimension, but where that inscription might appear "dialogic," Inscription of the Reader in Whitman25 not in the sense of a communal...