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5. Whitman after Collage/ Collage after Whitman
- University of Nebraska Press
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fter Whitman discovered his groundbreaking approach to literary composition he struggled with how to define and describe it, even in his notes to himself. The word collage had not yet been invented; nor did Whitman have recourse to related terms such as pastiche, montage, or found art. Lacking a critical lexicon for his creative method he worked with the tools at his disposal.1 In an early notebook often described as a kind of homemade dictionary he offers this puzzling definition for the Italian rifacimento: “riffacciamento-rumble (sort of mosaic work mixture mess.” The word, which Whitman likely encountered in reference to operas, refers to a modernization of a musical or literary artwork, and Whitman’s misunderstanding (there is no intrinsic mosaic-like quality to rifacimentos) seems to reflect his preoccupation with his evolving creative process.2 Introducing his prose collection, Specimen Days, he described a creative backstory in which he would “go home, untie the bundle [of notebook fragments], reel out diaryWhitman after Collage / Collage after Whitman whitman after collage / collage after whitman 216 scraps and memoranda, just as they are, large or small, one after another, into print-pages, and let the melange’s lackings and wants of connection take care of themselves.” It’s difficult to imagine a better description of collage making, and the result, Whitman unabashedly announced, was “the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed” (pw 1). Having invented a form of composition so novel that no vocabulary existed to describe it, Whitman was forced to torque the meaning of the approximate language that did exist in order to indicate his intentions . Fortunately for his twenty-first-century readers, a substantial amount of writing and thinking has been subsequently applied to the kind of artistic production he envisioned and made. Part of my purpose in this coda to my exploration of the poet’s creative process is to take advantage of this emergent body of thought so that we may better understand what Whitman accomplished. Although literary collage has recently evolved into a widely discussed aspect of modern and postmodern writing, collage has evoked an even more substantial record of critical thought in the visual arts, where the term was originally coined to describe certain Cubist practices of Picasso and Braque, and developed further in discussions of work associated with Surrealism and Dada. More specifically I hope to illuminate Whitman’s achievement by way of another peerless innovator , Marcel Duchamp, whose relation to the visual arts significantly mirrors Whitman’s relation to literature. In addition to Duchamp I consider the work of some who interpreted him, relying especially on thinking associated with conceptual art. My argument is that Whitman created an art of ideas that few have recognized and of which even fewer have understood the implications. Like some protean miasma pooled beneath the surface, certain of his most radical ideas underlie those of conceptual art, and only now are we [35.175.180.255] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 08:37 GMT) whitman after collage / collage after whitman 217 prepared to see how. So advanced were some of these ideas that to understand their significance we must read back to them through the lens of what we now know. The ensuing conversation flows both ways: just as subsequent art forms help us to understand Whitman, so Whitman too sheds light upon his heirs. Whitman anticipates those later movements that worked to consign the existing world around them to their own artistic ends, and so, far from representing a failure of imagination, his appropriations are inseparable from his originality. What follows is both an interpretation of these ideas and an argument for their creator’s innovation. The importance of Whitman’s influence on subsequent artists throughout the world is no longer in question, and studies of this influence on specific individuals are legion. My argument is different. I am not arguing for his influence, but for his precedence. Although I touch upon the writing habits of certain subsequent poets and writers, I am more concerned with coming to grips with the implications of Whitman’s writing than I am with the specific ways artists themselves processed his work. These implications have taken many generations to tease out, and now that we are finally in a position to assess them other innovations have emerged that obscure our view of Whitman’s. They have emerged in ways Whitman himself could never have anticipated, and their practitioners, aware of Whitman but not of those aspects of his...