Notes to Reader: Whitman’s Adventures in Metafiction

Abstract

Notes to ReaderWhitman’s Adventures in Metafiction David Faflik (bio) “Brooklyn audiences:—How strangely stiff and formal they are!”1 With these words, the New York journalist and occasional dabbler in prose fiction Walter Whitman prescribed what he felt were the proper rituals of response for the theatregoers of his native city in November 1845. Advocating for what he named “heart-music and art-music” in the opinion pages of the Brooklyn Evening Star, Whitman made clear that he believed “readers” had a vigorous, participatory role to play in his aesthetics of reception. Rather than have audiences “perched, as it were, on their propriety,” he maintains that whatever emotions were to appear on the stage or page should be met by listeners, watchers, and readers alike with feelings that were commensurate with those that informed the originating creative process itself.2 Come the following summer, Whitman would concede in an article on dramatics in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle that “we never acted upon the stage.” But “we know well enough,” he continues, “from the analogy of things,” that “a kind of reciprocal excitement” was a requisite component of any brand of romanticism to which he, in good conscience, could subscribe.3 Not only was Whitman stating on record his early romantic faith in the upwelling of “true” feelings; he was articulating as well his conviction that creator and consumer collaborated in the making of artistic meaning.4 An entire decade before the publication of the first edition of his poetic masterwork, Leaves of Grass (1855), Whitman had already made clear the pivotal place he envisioned for the emotions of “the reader” in any work of art that commanded collective attention. Such convictions are conspicuous by their comparative absence from the serial novel that Whitman produced in six installments in 1852 for the New York Dispatch, a short-lived metropolitan paper to which the always watchful writer contributed a handful [End Page 55] of pieces for payment in these years. Whitman scholars have greeted Zachary Turpin’s recent recovery and republication of the anonymous, thirty-six-thousand-word Life and Adventures of Jack Engle as a milestone for its challenge to our generic understanding of an author who is known today for having undertaken famous experiments in free verse. Ed Folsom remarks of reading Jack Engle, “It’s like seeing the workshop of a great writer. We’re discovering the process of Whitman’s own discovery.” David S. Reynolds agrees, likening the work to the contemporary city mysteries novels with which an urban beat reporter of Whitman’s standing would have been familiar.5 Turpin himself describes Jack Engle as a literary testing ground for an author who, despite having composed and published some thirty imaginative tales before the appearance of Leaves of Grass, “never once identified himself as a fiction writer.”6 In his now identified novel, Turpin writes, “Whitman incorporates elements of autobiography, character study, suspense fiction, place painting, revenge narrative, morality tale, and detective fiction.” Whitman furthermore gestures toward the social reform literature of the day as well as the rags-to-riches genre then being developed by the American writer Horatio Alger, while also giving his best impression of Englishman Charles Dickens’s popular David Copperfield (1850) with a storyline that portrays a pair of innocent urban orphans who make good as much as they do good.7 And yet, notwithstanding the various characteristics of the different literary forms to which Jack Engle pays promiscuous tribute, the book in its entirety lacks the sense of forthright self-possession that distinguishes at least a select portion of Whitman’s contemporary journalism. To read Jack Engle is to confront the work of a writer who might not know what he expects from his readers, let alone what he expects from himself as a teller of fictional tales. Notably absent from Jack Engle in this respect are Whitman’s emotional expectations. The eponymous first-person narrator of the novel seems uncertain as to what or whether he would have his readers feel in receiving his work. Our anticipated response to Jack Engle must change, regardless, with each of the book’s indiscriminate shifts between one and another of...