Whitman's Life and Art: The Precarious Boundary

Abstract

Dennis Berthold and Kenneth M. Price, eds. Dear Brother Walt: The Letters of Thomas Jefferson Whitman. Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 1984. 202 + xxxvii pp. C. Carroll Hollis. Language and Style in "Leaves of Grass. "Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983. 277 + xiii pp. Paul Zweig. Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1984.372 + xi pp. In the first chapter of Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway offers crucial advice to himself and to all other conscientious witnesses of life and death: "If they sense the meaning and end of the whole thing even when they know nothing about it; feel that this thing they do not understand is going on, the business of the horses is nothing more than an incident."1 The context of this statement is a defense of bullfighting, which—as ritual—must not, he believes, be viewed fragmentarily ; rather, the goring of picadors' horses must be subordinated to the deadly confrontation between man and bull. Heming- way's statement aligns strikingly with David Lodge's definition of metonymy: "representing the whole by parts, parts which are contiguous (because they belong to a larger complex of phenomena taking place at the same time) rather than similar."2 The metonymic stylist—inductive, syntagmatic, denotative, prosaic—is finely represented by both Hemingway and his self-acknowledged mentor, Mark Twain, either of whom discovers meaning through the artful accumulation—or conjunction—of vivid images and incidents.