SOURCE: "Tropes of Selfhood: Whitman's 'Expressive Individualism,'" in The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman: The Life After the Life, edited by Robert K. Martin, University of Iowa Press, 1992, pp. 39-52.

[In the following essay, Killingsworth argues that the concept of expressive individualism—a twentieth-century attitude which promotes success as its primary goal and looks to "internal, intuitive measures of achievement" rather than external standards—exemplifies Whitman's beliefs about the nature of selfhood as both individual and universal.]

Power ceases in the instant of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes …

—Ralph Waldo Emerson

The limits of language, as of reality itself, are not rigid but fluid. Only in the mobile and multiform word, which seems to be constantly bursting its own limits, does the fullness of the world forming logos find its counterpart. Language itself must recognize all the distinctions which it necessarily effects as provisional and relative distinctions which it will withdraw when it considers the object in a new perspective.

—Ernst Cassirer

In Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, the best-selling study of national character as revealed through hundreds of interviews with contemporary Americans, Robert Bellah and four distinguished coauthors are the latest generation of American social scientists to find in Walt Whitman a representative voice for selfhood in the United States. Like the first generation, which included William James, these cartographers of the soul are attracted by the poet whose great theme was what he believed to be simultaneously (and ironically) most common and most precious—"myself":

I resist anything better than my own diversity,

…..

This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
This is the common air that bathes the globe.
This is the breath of laws and songs and behaviour,
This is the tasteless water of souls …
("Song of Myself [1855], 347, 358-361)

Within himself, Whitman felt "the current and the index" of human life, in the general as well as in the particular. In his first great poems, published in 1855 and inspired by the physical strength of a robust middle age, he put his secret intuitions onto the record of public life in an attempt to live out the Emersonian dictum that, in speaking his inmost thoughts, he would make universal sense. Trusting inner resources, he proclaimed in "Song of Myself": "These are the thoughts of all men in all ages and lands, they are not original with me, / If they are not yours as much as mine they are nothing or next to nothing" (353-354).

The poet's confidence in the sympathy of readers was hardly unflagging, however, even in the early poems. By 1860, "Calamus" would record the downward turn of selfhood, the crisis of identity, the alienation of the isolated individual, the anxious homosexual in a predominantly heterosexual culture: "I wonder if other men ever have the like out of the like feelings?" he would ask (see Killingsworth, 102). Throughout his life, through the flow and ebb of extensive sympathy and defensive withdrawal, Whitman would continue to ask the big questions that, despite methodological sophistication and ever-deepening specialization, still haunt the social sciences: "What is a man anyhow? What am I? and what are you?" ("Song of Myself" [1855], 390).

Bellah and his colleagues and James before them have, in one sense, rescued Whitman from his isolation. For them, the Whitmanian "I" has come to represent a prototypical relationship between self and society. However, the honor of being a representative person, an Emersonian hero, is compensated negatively by the requirement that the self sacrifice its proud "diversity," the very thing which resists "anything better." Fitting Whitman into a category has meant neglecting the power of his poetic language to transform categories, indeed, to overwhelm them. What Ernst Cassirer has said of dogmatic metaphysical systems may be applied just as well to the categories theorized in the social sciences: "Most of them are nothing other than … hypostases of a definite logical, or aesthetic, or religious principle. In shutting themselves up in the abstract universality of this principle, they cut themselves off from particular aspects of cultural life and the concrete totality of its forms" (82). Dealing with what Cassirer calls "the problem of signs"—the question of how a sing like "I" relates to and interpenetrates the multiform realities that it represents—is for social psychology a matter of looking "backward to its ultimate 'foundations'" in mental life; Whitman's poems, on the other hand, engender an attitude of discovery that looks forward, pressing language toward a "concrete unfolding and configuration in … diverse cultural spheres" (105). In poetic language, Whitman discovered a fluidity that denied the trivialization of selfhood, that broke through the limits imposed by too tight a system, and that curved back upon its source. Indeed, he found that expression of the self tended to erode and reformulate that which had been expressed. Like Emerson before him, he realized the "one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes."

According to the scheme developed in Habits of the Heart, history has produced two distinctively modern attitudes of the self toward society at large, utilitarian individualism and expressive individualism. In contrast to the earlier republican and biblical versions of autonomous selfhood, both utilitarian and expressive individualism are seen as failures, for they undermine the connection between person and community. In the view of Bellah and his coauthors, the utilitarian and the expressivist lose sight of historical tradition and subsequently view community as merely an environment of personhood. This ahistorical psychic isolation produces a chronic lack of social commitment in contemporary American life.

Utilitarian individualism is the characteristic attitude of the "self-made" woman or man. Utilitarians may allow their personal goals to be defined by external standards—better salaries and bigger houses or progress up the social ladder—but they are motivated exclusively by the drive for individual success. The great predecessor of the utilitarian outlook, according to Bellah, is Benjamin Franklin, particularly as he appeared in his own Autobiography. The difference between Franklin and modern utilitarian individualists is that he tempered his drive for success with a measure of republican idealism, which his cultural descendants lack altogether. The legacy of his famous list of practical virtues has thus become the cult of professionalism, the sixty-hour workweek, the fast fortune, dressing for success, and, ultimately, conspicuous consumption.

Expressive individualism, like its utilitarian cousin, is preoccupied with success, but the expressivist longs to break even more completely with community, trusting internal, intuitive measures of achievement instead of accepting external standards. Whereas for the utilitarian individualist success is merely a technical matter of finding the right means to a preestablished end, the expressivist tries to extract both means and ends from the inner sources of body, heart, and soul. For Bellah, Whitman is the cultural prototype of expressive individualism. His legacy in our times—which, like Franklin's, has lost its republican moorings—is the therapeutic search for identity and the overthrowing of communities based on kinship and regional or national identity in favor of homogeneous "life-style enclaves," the ubiquitous support groups of our age, gatherings defined by special interests and expressive styles of behavior rather than by shared traditions or political goals. How, Bellah seems to ask, could Whitman's democratic personalism have come to this?

Despite this conservative tendency to valorize figures from the past at the expense of contemporary Americans, however, it is quite possible to argue that Whitman made some progress toward the completed image of modern expressivism quite on his own. At times he reached points where his expressiveness came to threaten not only the basis for community but also the very concept of the individual. Exploring the tensions inherent in expressive individualism, the poet found himself, like many of our contemporary expressivists, on the very brink of selfhood, the place theorized by the sociologist Erving Goffman and by the deconstructionists, for whom there is no foundational self at all but, in Bellah's words, "merely a series of social masks that change with each successive situation," an "absolutely empty, unencumbered and improvisational self" (80).

Bellah argues that Whitman's idea of success "had little to do with material acquisition": "A life rich in experience, open to all kinds of people, luxuriating in the sensual, as well as the intellectual, above all a life of strong feeling, was what he perceived as a successful life" (14). Whitman's homosexuality, in this reading, represents one "way in which he rejected the narrow definition of the male ego dominant in his day" (15). If we extend this line of reasoning, accounting for the rhetorical as well as the expressive aims of the poems, we come to see "Calamus" as an encouragement for like-minded men to join him in ignoring the "plaudits in the capital," to follow him down "paths untrodden," bypassing the impositions of class, region, and economic condition—much as he himself had done in choosing his friends from among young intellectuals and working-class men in the late 1850s—and forming an enclave of comrades bound by the sentiment and expression of "manly love."

If we use Bellah's interpretive line as a critical tool, however, we must allow that such an enclave could have but a weak effect on the political life and social commitaient of the individual members. Its chief character, the persona of the "tenderest lover," is too malleable, too ephemeral, too promiscuous, too concerned with image and appeal to inspire communal action. In "Are You the New Person Drawn toward Me?" the speaker wards off a would-be disciple with this admonition:

Are you the new person drawn toward me?
To begin with take warning, I am surely far different from what you suppose;
Do you suppose you will find in me your ideal?

…..

Do you suppose yourself advancing on real ground toward a real heroic man?
Have you no thought O dreamer that it may be all maya, illusion?
(1-3, 8-9)

In like manner, Whitman would fend off John Addington Symonds, a homosexual who sought a political ally, and he would snub the advances of his female admirer Anne Gilchrist with these words: "Dear friend, let me warn you somewhat about myself—& yourself also. You must not construct such an unauthorized & imaginary ideal Figure, & call it W. W. and so devotedly invest your loving nature in it. The actual W. W. is a very plain personage, & entirely unworthy such devotion" (Correspondence, 2:170). Of course, the "actual" Walt Whitman in these biographical instances could well be read as yet another expressive trope, fulfilling within other contexts the need of the self for defense against external social demands.

In the very concept of expressive individualism, then, there is a deep tension which in his poems and public life Whitman freely tested. Individualism favors singularity, but expression favors multiplicity, diversity. Except in its most radically expressive phase, individualism is a foundationalist concept, placing the certain inner self at the center of an uncertain world. Expression tends to dislocate every center, to undermine every foundation, including the self, and to impinge, for example, upon the private self of the "Calamus" poet, rooting out either a confession of his true nature or stimulating yet another evasion, yet another mask. As the self is expressed, it is transformed, yielding by turns the "tenderest lover" of the "Calamus" poems, the "friendly and flowing savage" of "Song of Myself," or the "very plain personage" of the letters.

In "O Living Always, Always Dying," which was originally grouped in "Calamus," the speaker chants, "O to disengage myself from those corpses of me, which I turn and look at where I cast them, / To pass on, (O living! always living!) and leave the corpses behind" (5-6). Living, in this trope, is a transcendental

act of expression, shedding the old self as the new self emerges. In its final placement in the "Whispers of Heavenly Death" cluster, the poem strikes a bold contrast with its companion, "A Noiseless Patient Spider," which in a superb figure relates the soul to an "isolated" spider launching filaments out of itself, seeking among the surrounding spheres a "ductile anchor" for its "gossamer thread." While the spidersoul stands at the center of expressive life, the snake-soul of "O Living Always, Always Dying" sheds the self with each new expression, leaving behind an empty and discarded skin, a mere corpse.

Whitman thus demonstrates a division within the category of expressive individualism. The self may remain more or less secure and thereby realize expressions as its products. Or it may with each strong expression utterly refashion its very basis for being. If it is continually re-expressed—or if expression becomes an end in itself—the self loses its status as a substance and becomes the empty cipher "I" that semioticists have described as the sign most clearly disconnected from any stable referential base. "What is the reality to which / or you refers?" asks Émile Benveniste. "It is solely a 'reality of discourse'" (218-219). Whitman himself approached this extreme reduction of "myself to a linguistic reality in a now-famous latter-day reflection on his poems: "I sometimes think the Leaves is only a language experiment—that it is an attempt to give the spirit, the body, the man, new words, new potentialities of speech" (American Primer, viii-ix).

In light of the tension between foundationalist individualism and the antifoundationalist tendency of tropic expressiveness, what can we identify as the sources of selfhood for expressive individualism in general and for Walt Whitman in particular? Three possibilities arise in Leaves of Grass. The first is the body, attention to which brings forth a kind of physical individualism, such as that of the libertine. The second is the soul, the intuition, the unconscious, which produces psychic individualism or egotism. The third is language, the poem, the text, or tropic individualism. In Whitman's poetry, if not in every instance of expressive individualism, all three sources are invoked, often simultaneously. Unlike the deconstructionists, who insist that individuality is always undone in its own making and thereby discharged into a consuming network of intertextuality, Whitman never completely uncouples tropic individuality from physical and psychic sources.

In the 1850s he seems indeed to have generated tropic power by seeking language adequate for expressing the demands of the robust body and the corresponding shapes of soulful fantasy. The tropes of "Song of Myself are especially dazzling as a result of this interior interchange. In section 5, for example, we find the physical self addressing the "other I am," the soul, seducing the unconscious, and liberating an orgasmic flow of language that wraps in ambiguity the conventional gender relations of body and soul: " … you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn'd over upon me, / And parted the shirt from my bosombone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart" (88-89).

Language provides the negative principle of the poem, playing Shiva the destroyer to the soul's and body's Brahma the creator. The body is erotic and as such demands intercourse with others. The Emersonian soul is republican and seeks communion through the sympathetic imagination. The text obliges with its fluent "I am" but insists as well upon distinction, upon "not." The tropes of selfhood require continual differentiation:

People I meet, the effect upon me of my early life or the ward and city I live in, or the nation …
These come to me days and nights and go from me again,
But they are not the Me myself.
(67, 73-74)

And what is the "Me myself" if not a poem resisting the reading of others?

Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am,
Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary,

…..

Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next,
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.
(75-76, 78-79)

Language is the medium that provides distance, the detachment in the attitude of these lines. Writing creates the space wherein the self becomes free from the demands of the body and the power of the soul to overwhelm the senses and to drive loving observation into self-absorbed reverie. In the strongest poems of Leaves of Grass, the demands of body and soul merge in images of the fantastic, delightfully recorded by the writer standing "Apart from the pulling and hauling … / … amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary … / Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next."

Not only in the energetic bursts of the 1855 "Song of Myself but also in the later poems, in which the force of physical life is somewhat withdrawn, Whitman celebrates the de-centering and re-creative power of poetic language. "Passage to India" (1874) is among the best examples. In his old age Whitman told Horace Traubel, "There's more of me, the essential ultimate me, in that than in any of the poems. There is no philosophy, consistent or inconsistent, in that poem … but the burden of it is evolution—the one thing escaping the other—the unfolding of cosmic purposes" (Traubel, 1:156-157). The poem begins with a celebration of the soul's power to set the foundations for material progress. Centuries before the transatlantic cable was laid in 1866—"The seas inlaid with eloquent gentle wires"—the self, here in its guise as the Emersonian oversoul, established its networks of sympathetic union across the seas and over the lands. The actual placing of the cable, like the building of the Suez Canal and the transcontinental railroad—all the spanning accomplishments of Whitman's era—is but a late realization of the connections pioneered by soulful meditation. Even with these realizations, the soul will not rest:

After the seas are all cross'd, (as they seem already cross'd,)
After the great captains and engineers have accomplish'd their work,
After the noble inventors, after the scientists, the chemist, the geologist, ethnologist,
Finally shall come the poet worthy of that name,
The true son of God shall come singing his songs.
(101-105)

Ironically, the soul of this "true son of God" is selfsurpassing. The soul that had been the foundation for material progress has come by the poem's conclusion to be the principle by which that progress is discounted, surpassed, erased. In wiping the slate clean, the troping self risks all, even its own status as a foundation for further invention, further realization:

Sail forth—steer for the deep waters only,
Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me,
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.
(248-251)

Bellah's homage to Whitman, the attribution of paternity in the lineage of expressive individualism, fails to do justice to the range and the political value of the Whitmanian self. The sociologist's conservative reading particularly neglects the linguistic root of antifoundationalist expressivism. In like manner, William James honored Whitman with metaphysical oversimplification, finding in the poet the very type of "healthy-mindedness," the tendency toward a radical openness whose mysticism is large and whose democratic embrace contains multitudes (81-83). But Whitman's poems eloquently protest such reduction; even if reduction takes breadth as its theme, its net effect is a conceptual narrowing.

It is not especially surprising that the Whitman of the poems resists the Whitman of the social scientists. To say that they fall short is not to slander James and Bellah—for who could exhaust the meanings of the best poems?—but is instead a comment on the different politics of poetry and the social sciences. Poems like Whitman's have their own social agenda. They aim to explode just the kind of categories that the social sciences work to build, explanatory frameworks that make life stand still, solid structures in the uncertain sweep of history.

Whitman's expressivism arose in opposition to the flatness and meanness that had overwhelmed the republican spirit. Developed in the mood of 1848, the poems of the fifties were no doubt a "language experiment," a radical essay in consciousness, whose aim, in Whitman's own words, was "to give the spirit, the body, the man, new words, new potentialities of speech" (American Primer, viii-ix). As the philosopher Charles Taylor has recently suggested, in the "search to recover a language of commitment to a greater whole," Bellah and his colleagues "write as though there were not really an independent problem of the loss of meaning in our culture, as though the recovery of a Tocquevillian commitment would somehow also fully resolve our problems of meaning, of expressive unity, of the loss of substance and resonance in our man-made environment, of a disenchanted universe" (509). The so-called human potential movement—which, like Bellah, Taylor traces to Emerson and Whitman—and all other forms of sentimental, therapeutic expressivism aim to create a haven of selfhood away from the demands of commitment. In contrast to this weak strand of expressivism stands a strong form of expression that challenges the individual to test external demands against the needs of the body and to experiment with the tropes of a new life, as Whitman did in all of his best poems, perhaps most clearly in "I Sing the Body Electric" (see Killingsworth, 1-15).

Bellah gives no criteria for distinguishing between weak and strong versions of expressive individualism. Nor, for that matter, does he provide criteria for distinguishing between weak and strong republican individualism. He appears to suggest that republicanism is inherently stronger than expressivism and thus ignores the historical development of republicanism toward the aggressive and domineering practices of male, middleclass, middle-aged, heterosexual, white, and industrialist individuals. It was no doubt the emergence of this hegemony within the bosom of republican individualism that urged Whitman and other strong expressivists to look within themselves for alternatives.

In this light, life-style enclaves, which Bellah views as necessarily degenerate, take on a different aspect as well; they arise when traditional communities fail to meet the needs of certain groups. The one example discussed at any length in Habits of the Heart is retirement communities, which clearly fill the gap left when families no longer can or will care for their oldest members. Presumably for rhetorical reasons, Bellah waffles on the exact status of certain other groups, notably the gay and lesbian communities. Though fitting rather well the definition of a lifestyle enclave, these groups and others like them may represent rising forces of life-style expression that try out a political will that is destined eventually to alter the current of a more general community's mainstream. Just as there are strong and weak versions of expressivism, there are strong and weak life-style enclaves. While the weak enclave discovers its ultimate goal in adjustment to the status quo, the strong enclave is at the very least protopolitical. Like the strong poem, it encourages the individual to hold fast against contrary social demands and to remake social life according to a new image.

In his poems and in his life, Whitman embodied the waverings of the expressivist spirit, with full pendulum swings from strong to weak and back again. In moments of personal doubt and in periods of dryness he withdrew his faith from the text, leaving the poems mere vehicles for asserting a conventional soul, an I'm-ok-you're-ok therapeutic crutch. This trend is particularly noticeable in Drum-Taps and in certain poems of the early 1870s, when the Civil War and physical hardship had numbed the poet's body and stifled his confidence in tropic individuality—a condition chronicled in this war-struck poem:

Quicksand years that whirl me I know not whither,
Your schemes, politics, fail, lines give way, substances mock and elude me,
Only the theme I sing, the great and strong-possess'd soul, eludes not,
One's-self must never give way—that is the final substance—that out of all is sure,
Out of politics, triumphs, battles, life, what at last finally remains?
When shows break up what but One's-Self is sure?
("Quicksand Years")

The considerable beauty of this poem depends upon the reader's identification of the expressed soul as the center of the poet's pain. The pain comes partly from grief over republican individualism, the hopes of which, for Whitman as for many others, had died in the Civil War (see Killingsworth). And the pain comes partly from the thought that the poet of "Song of Myself" and "Calamus" could stand for this reduction of expressive individualism to such an empty cipher abstractly expressed—"the theme," "One's-self," "the final substance," "the soul."

In the hundred years since Whitman's death, American social sciences have used the poet's tropes of selfhood as mere emblems for social categories—healthymindedness, expressive individualism. The suggestiveness of this work cannot be denied; the concept of expressivism, if not definitive, has a great deal of heuristic power. Moreover, through the attention of readers as prominent as James and Bellah, Whitman's place in American culture is affirmed. In many ways, the homage of social scientists is the realization of all the poet longed for—a form of canonization (in both the literary and the religious senses). "The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it," he wrote in 1855 in the preface to Leaves of Grass.

And yet Leaves of Grass, when read not as the product of a talkative ego but rather as a "language experiment," may seem to challenge the social theorists of the next hundred years to value the specific instance or experience in the face of the abstract category, to treat with suspicion the label, the system, the class, all that narrows, confines, or brutalizes by denying singularity, to recognize in language a creative medium that will not remain a slave to the world of referents, and to regard the ambiguity of poetic language as a means of social revitalization.

All truths wait in all things,
They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,
They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,
The insignificant is as big to me as any,
What is less or more than a touch?

Logic and sermons never convince,
The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.

Only what proves itself to every man and woman is so,
Only what nobody denies is so.
("Song of Myself' [1855], 647-655)