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postscript: material resistance Language, in Whitman’s poetry, is treated in a new way. A long time ago now, Constance Rourke noted how Whitman “used language as a new and plastic and even comical medium,” one in which e∂ects of disjunction and incongruity between linguistic registers are exploited for the purposes of humor.1 The fundamentally humorous approach Whitman takes toward language involves seeing the linguistic medium as a substance that can be worked over: bent with a mechanic rudeness into contorted shapes or smoothed out by genteel accents. Language in Whitman appears as a substance that—like paint on a modern artist’s canvas—has been heavily worked, the marks of its facture left conspicuously visible. Roy Harvey Pearce takes this perception a step further, claiming that Whitman “invents modern poetry” through his realization that the linguistic medium has a kind of “‘life’ of its own.”2 More recently, Jerome McGann has written of Whitman’s “immersion in the material resistance of language.”3 We get a sense of that immersion when Whitman describes his body as being composed of “loveroot, silkthread, crotch and vine,” or when he tells us that he is “stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds,” or when he sounds his “barbaric yawp” over the roofs of the world (LG 25, 55, 85). Whitman’s language o∂ers an aesthetic seduction, savoring as it does the phenomenal aspects of words—the crunchy texture of consonants (“gneiss and coal and fruits and grains and esculent roots”) as well as the seductive play of long and short vowel sounds (“only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice”). With its phonemic patterning and its restless foraging among dictionaries and lexicons , the poetry consistently foregrounds what Roland Barthes famously called the “materiality of the signifier.”4 But how are we to account for that beguiling materiality? Whitman shares with other romantic poets a fascination with Bildungskraft, with the productive activity of the poet: mimesis as poiesis, or making. Tzvetvan Todorov describes Romantic aesthetics as giving a special emphasis to the “necessary internal coherence” of the poetic artifact, seeing in the organic form of the poem what Wilhelm Von Humboldt called a “higher linguistic power” than the merely expressive or referential.5 Michel Foucault writes of how the findings of German comparative philology resulted in the early nineteenth century in a shift from the linguistic analysis of representation to a concern with intrinsic verbal elements, so that language becomes, for the first time, an object, an “autonomous organic structure.”6 Words are now, Foucault observes, “weighed down with their own material history.” Language ceases to be “transparent to its representations” and undergoes a “thickening,” taking on “a peculiar heaviness.”7 As an apprentice printer who held the shapes of words in his hands, Whitman, of course, knew about the materiality of the signifier in a particularly concrete sense. This brings us to another explanation for the weight and density of his words: “the explosion of text that accompanies the conversion to a market society in the United States.”8 In the torrent of “[a]lmanacs, cheap newspapers, story papers, popular novels, sensational nonfiction and sentimental journalism” that poured from the presses of metropolitan centers like New York, words, heavily inked and variously formed, shouted for the attention of the reading public. The origins of the materiality of the signifier might thus be found in the “repetitiveness, autonomization, and commodification” of language in the popular press.9 Another broad cultural development, alongside that of commercial printing, is the growth of the publishing market itself. As R. Jackson Wilson notes, the literary marketplace seems to o∂er writers “a radical autonomy,” a bracing independence from the requirements of patrons or literary institutions : the market creates “a world composed only of the author and the public, with language itself as the only link between them.”10 The paradoxical outcome of the author’s new relationship to the marketplace is that language becomes both an autonomous field for experiment, opening the possibility of forging an individual “style,” and a commodity subject to the ruthless calculus of exchange. All these factors—the more or less simultaneous growth of philology, of a commercial print culture, and of the literary market—undoubtedly bear down on language and lend it a new materiality. But what “Song of Myself” reveals, I think, is the influence of what Foucault calls “constant factors of attrition and admixture.”11 Language in Whitman’s...

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