Whitman's Rhizomes

ERIC WILSON Whitman's Rhizomes Loving journey more than destination, Whitman would often spend his summer evenings during the 1840s and '50s riding the Brooklyn ferry back and forth between his home borough and Manhattan . During the same period, in less aqueous moods, he would do the same on the horse-drawn buses in the city, riding up and down Broadway , often sitting up top with the driver (Specimen 16-19). These twilight excursions allowed Whitman to indulge in a favorite activity: moving with no end in mind, taking pleasure in merely circulating. Favoring the potential more than the actual, the nomadic poet could open himself to possibility, never knowing what the next block would offer, always expectant, hoping for a glimpse of radiance, a sympathetic glance. These rides constituted revolutions against universals. They kept before Whitman's gaze a steady stream of particulars, randomly moving in and out of assemblages, coalescing into vaguely defined flocks, only to disintegrate again into unique units. Wishing to hold agitated parts separate from a stabilizing whole, Whitman the ferry man, Whitman the bus driver, was revolting against two primary philosophies of his day: Platonism, embodied most notably by the American Swedenborgians, and idealistic organicism, incarnated most obviously by the early Emerson. While the Platonist would degrade the particular to a mere cipher of the universal, while the idealist organicist would gather individual organisms into the unifying circuits of a holistic principle of life, the early Whitman kept evanescent parts free from an enduring whole by endorsing the Epicurean atomism that he found in Lucretius's De Reran Natura (c. 50 bce). Fresh from reading this text in the early 1850s, Whitman in the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) suggests that things are not reflections of a universal or Arizona Quarterly Volume 55, Number 3, Autumn 1999 Copyright © 1999 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 Ene Wilson patterns of immanent life but rather temporary gatherings of heterogeneous atoms, shifting multiplicities, random conglomerations. For the young Whitman, "unity" is an evanescent agglomeration of atoms; "life," the stochastic pulses ofatoms in a void, perpetually whirling into polarized vortices. In revolting against such "universalist" philosophies in his 1855 edition of Leaves, especially in the poem later to be titled "Song of Myself ," Whitman pushes ancient atomism toward the recent nomadology of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. In the form and content of the first version of "Song of Myself," Whitman inflects Lucretius' philosophy through his love of motion, energy, and potential to uproot the radicle symbols of Platonism and idealistic organicism—plant, leaf, tree, parts consolidated by a whole—and to replace them with Deleuze and Guattari's radical rhizomes: heterogeneous, shifting, unstable gatherings —fields of grass. Reading the Whitman of the 1855 "Song of Myself in light of this cutious conjunction of Lucretius and Deleuze and Guattari shows that the early Whitman's persistent invocations of cosmic unity are not his efforts, as D.H. Lawrence once claimed, to conquer the many with the AU, or his endeavors, as Quentin Anderson has argued, to impose an imperial self on the world. While Whitman certainly spent many lines pushing for philosophical wholeness and political unity, he never let go of an opposing desire for the liberation of particulars. While this tension , as Kerry C. Larson and David S. Reynolds have shown, beset Whitman most of his life, in 1855, Whitman, fresh from Lucretius and restless to circulate, emphatically extols the particular without reducing it to the universal. While Whitman's embrace of this philosophical insecurity may have waned, his first poem stands as a manifesto of nomadic thought, an unsettling text that forces us to reassess his later paeans to the universal, to cosmic law. Perhaps we will come to see Whitman's cosmos, early and late, not as a unity organizing diversity, as a vast, stable, rooted tree of life, but rather as a temporary federation of selfpropelled atoms, a heterogeneous assemblage, an unrooted ever-moving rhizome. "Rhizome" is the primary trope ofthe nomad thought ofDeleuze and Guattari, who proffer a perpetually mobile philosophy moving on the margins of tradition, beyond stable, universal concepts. In A Thousand Plateaus (1987), Deleuze and Guattari...