Whitman and Genre: The Dialogic in "Song of Myself"

DANA PHILLIPS Whitman and Genre: The Dialogic in "Song of Myself" i: "fusion," literature, AND OTHER DISCOURSES In the preface to the first edition ofLeaves ofGrass, Whitman attributes to the poet a special character: only the poet possesses all the traits which define Americans as a people. This kind of representative character is also basic to present-day popular culture, which deploys images ofthe famous as métonymie representations of (all) value: the famous thus seem to enjoy a greater degree of personhood than the rest ofus do. They alone are "personalities." That Whitman's 1855 portrait ofthe bardic personality should seem congruent with the values of contemporary popular culture reveals one of the ironies of his canonization as a great poet: the definition ofhis work as "literature" obscures the ways in which it aspires to be something other than an object of academic study. Whitman himself thought that his poetry ought to have popular appeal of a sort not unlike that which, since his day, has been enjoyed by—for example—the western and the detective story. These are the kinds of texts likely to have been carried around in the hip pockets of workingmen's jeans, one of the ideal sites in which Whitman would have placed copies ofhis Leaves. Recently, Whitman's relationship to the popular has been reinterpreted by David S. Reynolds, in whose book on the relationship of the American Renaissance to popular culture—Beneath the American Renaissance —die poet figures centrally. The new and more socially-inclusive character of Whitman's poetry has often been cited as contributing to his greatness. Inclusiveness is the chief ideological imperative of his Arizona Quarterly Volume 50, Number 3, Autumn 1994 Copyright © 1994 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 32Dana Phillips aesthetic, as well as one of the necessities of his celebrity, of his being the American bard, which many of Whitman's readers—following the poet's own suggestions—have identified with his very being. Reynolds, however, argues that Whitman's inclusiveness is not simply a matter of personal character and genius: he contends that the poet was indebted to popular culture as a source for much ofwhat critics and scholars have long regarded as a product of Whitman's uncanny, intuitive identification with everyday life. Reynolds, like many others, still calls Whitman "the greatest poetic innovator of nineteenth-century America," but he also demonstrates that the poet "was nurtured by a popular culture that carried the seeds ofnew thematic and stylistic rebelliousness," and that Whitman "moved from this appreciation to a literary performance that was at once scathingly subversive and individualistically reconstructive ."1 But while Reynolds convincingly demonstrates Whitman's ties to reform literature (temperance pamphlets, for example) and other popular genres, he conceives of these ties unilaterally (literary influence only flows in one direction, from the popular to the more universal ), because he is dedicated to preserving Whitman's status as a great American poet and high-cultural icon. Whitman may include popular culture, but popular culture does not include him. Reynolds argues that the social survey attempted in some ofdie catalogs in the Leaves has its roots in sources like the dime novel, or the sensationalist literature of urban "mysteries," texts which purported to offer their readers exciting glimpses behind the facades of the official culture, where sordid sexual relationships were conducted, and crime was rampant. Many ofthe more daring scenes in Whitman's poetry are, according to Reynolds, analogous to similar scenes in the subversive, morally ambiguous literature of popular culture. The difference is rJiat Whitman has taken such popular materials and given them "universal" value. Universality remains an important value for Reynolds, and he often reiterates the essential difference between "literary" texts and culturally significant, but ephemeral popular texts: "The distinguishing quality of the literary text is not radical subversiveness but unique suggestiveness and great reconstructive power" (10). This is a conservative argument, whether Reynolds acknowledges its conservatism or not (he doesn't), in that it substitutes reconstruction as a term of value in place of subversion (or its more political synonym, revolution). It is no surprise , then, that Beneath the American Renaissance preserves the estab- "Song ofMyself33 lished authors...