“We fathom you not—we love you”: Walt Whitman’s Social Ontology and Radical Democracy

Abstract

In a notebook from 1855-56, not long after he published first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) with high hopes but few sales, Walt Whitman paused to reconsider overall purpose of his art. Across from lines for what would become Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, he notes, newer better principle / through all my poems.-(dramas? novels?, compositions of sort.) / Present only great characters, / good, loving characters.-/ Present best phases of / character, that one, man or woman, is eligible to. Whitman reiterates and clarifies this agenda a few pages later, explaining that Idea to pervade largely / [must be] Eligibility-I, you, eligible to condition or attributes or of being, no matter who. Such a statement is startlingly blunt, explicitly unveiling what Whitman chose to leave implicit in Crossing Brooklyn Ferry (What I promis'd without mentioning it, have not accepted?). But notebook goes on to explain strategy behind coy guardedness of poem's speaker. Simply announcing in poem that any one has this would not be as effective as enabling people to locate it within themselves and among other. So Whitman crafts an indirect mode of argument, involving an intricately staged sequence of addresses intended to make a reader wristle [>/c] with him since the good comes by wristling for it.' But what does Whitman mean by eligibility, and why does it become central not just to Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, his most intricate metapoem, but to his understanding of his work as a whole?This pursuit of eligibility seems consistent with Whitman's advocacy of social equality encompassing any . . . being, no matter who. But suggestion that condition[s] or attributes or advantages belonging to any one may belong to you sounds epistemologically and perhaps even materially possessive and thus potentially in tension with social equality he describes, a suspicion reinforced by his sly indirect mode. However, sense of belonging Whitman locates at heart of his poetics of eligibility may be understood in a very different way, intimating not an act of possession so much as a state of association, a being-with that we all can share. This claim may seem to place a good deal of pressure on a few sentences from a drafting notebook, but this essay will show how Crossing Brooklyn Ferry rests on a social ontology, an understanding of being in terms of being-with others, that serves as ground of Whitman's most radically democratic poetics and politics.The essay starts with a reading of beginning of Crossing Brooklyn Ferry that demonstrates how speaker sets aside epistemological urge to know others in favor of seeking to be with them. The speaker approaches you cautiously, using various carefully calibrated modes of address, along with extensive, elaborate anaphora, and a highly responsive free-verse line, taking care to base this relation in a sense of mutuality. But at midpoint of poem, just as speaker feels convinced that he has found a way, even across boundaries of time and space, to achieve an ontological proximity to others, he comes to realize that he must traverse internal as much as external distances, that he must be at peace with himself in order to be at peace with others.Part 2 examines this difficult task. The speaker becomes unsettled by questionings about his body and its desires and temporarily succumbs to shame and self-loathing. The speaker's challenge parallels those of contemporary theorists who struggle to formulate social ontologies capable of interrogating and even rejecting normative categories that potentially confine within narrowly defined ways of being. A brief consideration of how Jean-Luc Nancy's and Judith Butler's social ontologies respond to Hegelian concept of recognition highlights distinctiveness of Whitman's concept of eligibility. …