Slantwise Moves. Douglas A. Guerra

of each possibility.⁸⁶

      Moreover, in terms of format, there is the suggestion of the kind of newspaper printing work that had informed much of Whitman’s life. From the dense two-column arrangement of the preface to the irregular clustering of lines that distinguish his poetry throughout, Whitman cues the movement of the eye across discrete morsels held together and split apart by the cognitive gravity of the page and its whitespace. In both form and format, his collection figures both synchrony and diachrony. Being an American is being this or this, or all of these things, but only as time allows, only as one lingers or returns to a given option in an ever-growing list.

      Demonstrating a strategically flickering interplay between the liminal and the discrete, Whitman uses the phrase “I am the” to reinforce this effect. In one short passage, he writes: “I am the hounded slave,” “I am the mashed fireman with breastbone broken,” “I am the clock myself,” and “I am an old artillerist, and tell of some fort’s bombardment / …. and am there again.”⁸⁷ Here, analogous syntax reinforces the connection between each of these disparate narrative characters, linking them in an inclusive “I am,” notably in the present tense. Yet it also invokes the metronomic quality discussed above, acting as a reminder of those that have previously passed: the slave transforms into the fireman, and the fireman into the ticking clock. As a reader scans the disparate activity of these lines, they either say or think an “I am” that becomes, in Elizabeth Maddock Dillon’s useful diptych, a “mimetic” script for subjecthood accompanying the “ontic” act of holding, sitting, standing, or lying down.⁸⁸ There is a strangeness to the inclusive disjunction of the language that I would argue mirrors the uncanny feelings of physical difference and relatedness in the poem. Here the flesh itself becomes a messy but nonetheless legible-in-flashes kind of poetry along with the text. “Read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life,” Whitman stresses in the preface, “and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.”⁸⁹

      Equally suggestive in a more conventional mode, the concreteness of each incarnation, the ability of the I/writer and linked you/reader to place themselves in the role that follows the “I am,” is specifically coupled to the passage of time. The “old artillerist” has a place (“[I] am there again”) just as he begins to “tell of some fort’s bombardment.” Telling a story takes time; it requires the teller to move in one narrative direction over another, to make choices. This interaction of temporal movement and identity reminds us of Life’s synchronic grid, where “Wealth” is always present, but players only enact its benefit in the right moment, in time, using the position they have assumed on the board. As a player’s eyes must drift across the possible positions available and settle upon the one that they would like to make, so must a reader (the “I” or “you” of Whitman’s poem) give attention to one thing at a time, even as they might remember the total assemblage. And as with Bradley’s counter, what holds Whitman’s ambivalent first/second person together is its unity as a place of decision making, along with its persistence as a thing that remains even after one has moved one’s hands away.

      Apprehending the self as a possibility locus coincident with a body may account for Whitman’s declaration that the poem should be seen not as something one reads but rather as “someone.”⁹⁰ This term, “someone,” acts as a personal cipher or marker, only fully intelligible in the action of choosing to linger on one or the other of the character choices imagined by the transcendent speaker. One cannot understand who “someone” is in the abstract; the pronoun simply stands as a mathematical variable might, a formal placeholder, unable to produce an output on its own. Yet one might understand this someone as a specific person if supplied with information about either the person’s actions or the framework in which those actions were carried out. “Song of Myself” is at pains to produce the latter, but it makes appeals to the reader to provide the activity that will make this framework productive of a concrete self (rather than an abstract someone). “Not I,” Whitman writes, “not any one else can travel that road for you, / You must travel it for yourself.”⁹¹ The “you” of Whitman’s song gains its constitutive definition by making decisions of focus from within the possibilities enunciated by the poem, similar to Bradley’s algorithm.⁹² This “you” is a strategy for visualizing an inhabitable marker, for allowing any number of readers to imagine themselves as a part of the world Whitman creates. In other words, it is defined as an avatar: in and through its situational use. In the patent for Life, the usefulness of the game lies its capacity to “exercise … judgment”; in the original 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass, Whitman echoes this focus, claiming that the poet “is no arguer … he is judgment…. If he does not expose superior models and prove himself by every step he takes he is not what is wanted.”⁹³

      By 1856, Whitman was developing this figure in a specifically national mold, drawing again on the discourse of character that was so important to Bradley and other reformers. He writes to Emerson: “There is being fused a determined character, fit for the broadest use for the freewomen and freemen of The States … each indeed free, each idiomatic, as becomes live states and men, but each adhering to one enclosing general form of politics, manners, talk, [and] personal style.”⁹⁴ Here, again, Whitman defines the “fit[ness]” of this figure by its capacity for broad “use”; it is not a model to aspire to but a facilitator of any number of future models, a figuring figure. In this way, what Whitman refers to as “character” is, in its formal sense, less like the “character” described in Halttunen’s work and more akin to the avatar figure Bradley would develop in Life: a tool for developing a self as aggregated judgments, a formal index through which the “free” and “idiomatic” might be expressed and habituated. Because of this, we might say that Whitman’s “determined character” is the lithographic press itself—or the “forme” of the printing press, a wooden frame that held movable type in place during the printing process—rather than the iterated impressions made from it.

      Coming to a similar conclusion, Wai Chee Dimock has argued that the self at the center of Whitman’s poem is “turned into a categoric idea, so that it can remain structurally inviolate even as it undergoes many substantive variations, even as it entertains an infinite number of contingent terms.”⁹⁵ Whitman does this, she claims, to eliminate the role of chance in the ethics of democracy. In short, the formal democratic subject must be vacated of luck, of the contingent, in order to guarantee the categorical equality of all human actors in general and all democratic U.S. citizens in particular. In order for there to be a universal and unified notion of justice, chance cannot play a role in its validity: “[Whitman’s is] a noncontingent poetics, which … in effect eliminates luck by eliminating the invidious distinctions it fosters…. The objects of Whitman’s attention are admitted as strict equals, guaranteed equals, by virtue of both the minimal universal “Me” they all have in common, and of a poetic syntax which greets each of them in exactly the same way, as a grammatical unit, equivalently functioning and structurally interchangeable.”⁹⁶ For justice to be equally applicable, from the slave to the auctioneer, the structure of subjectivity must be seen as strictly equivalent across the board.

      What Dimock highlights here dovetails with the general ethic of fair play that, in important ways, acts as a limit to the actions and potentials of the avatar figure as discussed. In gaming terms, the price one must pay for playing a game is to accept its rules, as well as its form, format, and medium. These limitations rule out certain possibilities, both strategic and otherwise. For instance, we saw earlier that the rules of Mansion insisted on purely linear motion. Because this structured the possibility of the player’s counter, it forced the player to move to “Immodesty” when a less linear rule system might have allowed a move to “Truth” or “Humanity” instead. Through this, the game guaranteed a structural interchangeability, a kind of justice, for all the players; it produced a discrete output for any input the chance roll of the die might impose. This is not to say that luck does not play a role, but from the perspective of the player its role is strictly determined by rules of the game. The self cannot take advantage of its own luck one way or another, and