Scrutinizing Whitman

WHITMAN 83 page; they drive thought to acceptance of a higher, spiritual order, but they can never be deciphered or controlled because there is no way of finding a nonmetaphorical standpoint from which to deal with them. Ricoeur insists that this is a myth; 'dead metaphors are no longer metaphors' (p 290) - the dead metaphor is 'lexicalized' into a new standard dictionary entry. There is no necessary connection between the philosopher's technicalization of initially figurative language and his temptation to a metaphysics of 'presence' (or 'absence: which is for Derrida the same thing, since it presupposes the possibility of presence), The arguments of both Derrida and Ricoeur are too complex and ramified to deal with adequately here, and neither has had the last word. It is my opinion that in this essay Derrida was willingly led along anti-metaphysical lines of thought long congenial to him by his initial choice of figures. 1think the process by which the multiple meanings of fresh metaphors congeal into standard dictionary senses is not at all aptly described as the wearing away of inscriptions on a coin; it is, if anything, the domestication of a wild creature for assigned agricultural tasks. In Derrida's essay, perhaps, we see one more indication ofour need for better understanding of how metaphor is to be ruled , or what its rules (if any) are - for more mastery, less mystery. Scrutinizing Whitman CHA VIVA HOS E K Ivan Marki. The Trial of the Poet: An Interpretation of The First Edition of Leaves of Grass New York: Columbia University Press 1976. 301. $17.50 Stephen A. Black. Whitman's Journeys into Chaos: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Poetic Process Princeton: Princeton University Press 1975· 255· $13.50 The Age Df Faith is Dver, and one no longer accepts all the claims of Whitman's poet/persona. In The Trial of the Poet: A~I Interpretation of the First Edition of Leaves of Grass Ivan Marki sees Whitman's shrillness as rationalization; he has a solid sense of Whitman's deceptiveness and self-deception, suggesting that 'the distance between the 'great poet' and a confidence-man ... can be travelled in the blink Df an eye' (p 216). Stephen Black in Wh itman's Journeys Into Chaos: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Poetic Process notes that the casual manner that Whitman develops for his persona belies the intensity of his need for control, and that 'one aspect of Whitman's tolerance and acceptance is the utter divorce of feelings from objects ... very often there is a psychological movement in the poems ... in which initial anaesthesia is overCDme and the poet learns increasingly ... to attach his feelings to external objects' (p 41). Both authors have a fine UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME XLIX, NUMBER 1, FALL 1979 0042-024717911000-0083$00.00/0 © UNIVERSITY OF TORDNTO PRESS 84 CHAVIVA HOSEK ear for the bad faith in Whitman's voice, for Whitman's subterfuges, exaggerations , and lies; both deal directly with the unearned quality of many of Whitman 's assertions, occasionally exhibiting the whine of the disappointed reader of Whitman which I recognize as the badge of the veteran - the reader who, having become intimate with the text, grows uneasy, and who, having been seduced by the poet's persona, discovers himself abandoned in an echo-chamber with Walt Whitman seemingly self-involved to the last. Marki's method is formalist; he wishes to explain to his audience, primarily other literary critics, the shape of a text. The aim of this book is not so much to see the poems in the context of literary or of cultural history, but to make the text of the first edition 'more accessible than it seems to have been so far to those critics who wish to follow (it] up' (p 6). Marki's attempt to make something of the role of the 1855 Preface to LeavesofGrass in Whitman's career is a critical corrective of major proportions. He has recognized the essential importance of both it and 'Song of Myself' in making certain kinds of poetry possible for Whitman. In his treatment of the Preface and 'Song of Myself,' he tries to give readers phenomenological...