Phrenology’s mind/muscle analogy contributes, in Whitman’s work, to an athleticization of mind, brain as brawn, and the trope of a gymnastic text. Thus, in “So Long!”: “To young men my problems offering—no dallier I—I the muscle of their brains trying.” In prose as well as verse he advances the figure of mind as muscle, calling for writing which would make reading a kind of calisthenic. In “Democratic Vistas” we read:
In fact, a new theory of literary composition for imaginative works of the very first class, and especially for highest poems, is the sole course open to these States. Books are to be call’d for, and supplied, on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay—the text furnishing the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does. That were to make a nation of supple and athletic minds, well train’d, intuitive, used to depend on themselves, and not on a few coteries of writers.
He returns to this idea in the essay “Poetry To-day in America—Shakspere—The Future.” The participatory-democratic ethic or ideal is obvious, but one of the more interesting things about Whitman proposing this role for the reader is that it’s not a role that seems to apply to his own work. Whitman would appear to be a writer who does it all for the reader (“what I assume you shall assume”), offering an explicit, self-evident text of a prodigiously declarative, transparent sort. Is this a symptom of the ideological nature of Whitman’s stance, the false consciousness doctrinal exuberance can’t help but be compromised by? The idea of the reader actively contributing to the construction of the text has become something of a commonplace by now, advocated by a range of twentieth-century experimental movements that includes the French New Novel, the Fiction Collective and the Language Poets, to name a few. The writing advanced by this idea is characteristically opaque, oblique, convoluted, often refractory—hardly “reader-friendly,” however much it invites the reader’s participation (or, more to the point, because it invites the reader’s participation). The sort of work Whitman’s advocacy of a gymnastic text might lead us to expect—recondite, elliptical work that catches us up in extended puzzlement and indeterminate exegesis, work we hermeneutically wrestle with, the sort of work offered in his own century, for example, by Emily Dickinson—is not what we get. Whitman teases the brain with paradox and contradiction on occasion, but his most characteristic manner is aggressively straightforward and accessible, requiring little of the reader beyond turning the page.
The demand is actually elsewhere—or directs the reader elsewhere. Whitman doesn’t invite the reader to dwell on the text at great length. Rather, he cautions against exactly that, turning the reader away from the text. At the end of “Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand” he admonishes:
For it is not for what I have put into it that I have written this book,
Nor is it by reading it you will acquire it, …
For all is useless without that which you may guess at many times and not hit, that which I hinted at;
Therefore release me and depart on your way.
Such admonition borders on abolishing the text. Whitman imagined world reform of such magnitude as to do away with the need for poetry. In “Thou Mother with Thy Equal Brood”:
Brain of the New World, what a task is thine,
To formulate the Modern—out of the peerless grandeur of the modern,
Out of thyself, comprising science, to recast poems, churches, art,
(Recast, may-be discard them, end them—may-be their work is done, who knows?)
The work to be done goes beyond the page but takes up its image, for the gymnastic text is not the text as such but a turning toward the world as text. The athleticism resides in that turn, a conversion to the work of reform which is willing to envision poetry’s abolition, poetry as literary text replaced by poetry as concrete action.
Whitman and phrenology shared a reliance on tropes of textuality, figurations of human character and action as forms of writing or printing. Phrenological prognosis was viewed and referred to in such terms; one had one’s bumps read. A contemporary account of an afternoon at the Phrenological Cabinet contains the following: “ … you hear some one reading rapidly. Looking up, you find that it is from a page of Nature’s imprint, and that … the reader does it by the sense of touch. Standing beside a young girl, with his hands upon her head, forthwith that head under his deft manipulation turns tell-tale … betraying her idiosyncrasies.” This was consistent with the motto under which Fowler & Wells published the Phrenological Almanac: “Nature’s Printing Press is Man, her types are Signs, her books are Actions.” The presumed legibility of human beings was crucial to the promises of individual and social reform with which both Whitman and phrenology were involved. Democracy itself was believed to hinge on it. Democratic community, the argument went, depended on the ability of human beings to know one another; the democratic imperative was not only to know oneself but to know one’s fellow citizens as well. We find the American Phrenological Journal insisting that nature aids this project of knowing by making people legible to one another, imprinting signs upon human surfaces:
To this requisition—imperious demand— for knowing our fellow men, Nature has kindly adapted the expression of those mental qualities on the one hand, and our recognition of them on the other. Nature has ordained that we do not hide the light of our souls under the bushels of impenetrability but that we should set them on the hill of conspicuosity, so that all that are with insight may observe them. She even compels such expression. She has rendered the suppression of our mentality absolutely impossible. She has rendered such expression spontaneous and irresistible, by having instituted the NATURAL LANGUAGE of emotion and character … which compels us to tell each other all about ourselves. … It is desirable for us to know all … all the existing emotions of mankind are legible. They come to the surface.
Haunting such insistence is an anxiety over the limits of knowability, the specter of an opaque latency resistant to full disclosure. Phrenology’s assurances of providential imprint sought to dispel that specter. According to Henry Ward Beecher, a friend at Amherst who introduced Orson Fowler to phrenology: “Men are like open books, if looked at properly.”
Whitman’s famous “Camerado, this is no book, / Who touches this touches a man” is the converse of Beecher’s formulation and bespeaks a two-way, phrenologically informed translation between body and book, person and poem. His assurance and exhortation in the 1855 preface that “your very flesh shall be a great poem” agrees with a statement made by Lydia Fowler, wife of Lorenzo Fowler and one of the first female medical students in the United States: “every bone and muscle is an unwritten poem of beauty.” Castings of body as text and of text as body recur with notorious insistence throughout Leaves of Grass: “the expression of a well-made man” that “conveys as much as the best poem” in “I Sing the Body Electric,” the phallic “poem drooping shy and unseen that I always carry, and that all men carry” in “Spontaneous Me,” the assertion that “Human bodies are words, myriads of words” and that “In the best poems re-appears the body, man’s or woman’s” in “A Song of the Rolling Earth,” and so on. There is, though, more to this than there might seem, as phrenology’s accent on textuality and self-improvement moves away, in Whitman’s work, from simple surface cheer and celebration of health toward evocations of death and disappearance. The translatability of body and book subsists on writing as sublimation, compensation, the two-way traffic between text and flesh on a sense of the text as an alternate body, mind masquerading as body, flesh’s death or sublimation as text.
There is a great deal in Whitman’s work that suggests that writing is a kind of dying, a disappearance into (in order to live on in) the book, that the alternate body afforded by th
e book is an improved, augmented body, the page a place of alternate growth (grave plot and a compensative going forth: “leaves of grass”). In the same poem in which he writes, “I the muscle of their brains trying” and “Who touches this touches a man,” a poem tellingly entitled “So Long!,” he writes: “I spring from the pages into your arms—decease calls me forth.” And at the end: “I depart from materials, /I am as one disembodied, triumphant, dead.” A poem whose final version was completed in 1881 and included in a section of the 1891-92 Leaves of Grass called “Songs of Parting,” it can, of course, be read as Whitman, having entered his sixties, referring to an approaching and quite literal death. But the first version was completed twenty-one years earlier, in 1860, a fact suggesting that “decease” is also a figurative death afforded by writing, that writing was valedictory all along, a long rehearsal for death, also that death equates with words as nondeeds, not-doing. One of the notable things about Whitman’s phrenological chart is that he was rated very high in “Cautiousness”; Lorenzo Fowler, evaluating the faculties on a scale that ran from 1 to 7, gave him a 6. Several critics and commentators on Whitman’s relationship to phrenology find this surprising, given the audacity of Leaves of Grass, but they miss the fact that in his written assessment Fowler says to Whitman, “You are more careful about what you do than you are about what you say.” Fowler may have, phrenology notwithstanding, happened upon an accurate characterization, for all the questions and doubts that have been raised as to what Whitman actually did rather than said he did or wrote about as though he’d done—questions and doubts about an affair in New Orleans, about the children he claimed to have fathered, about whether he was sexually active at all, etc.—suggest a relationship of compensation between words and deeds in his life and work. Words compensate for the not-done, improving on deeds hemmed in by caution and convention. In “Ventures, on an Old Theme,” Whitman argues that poetic audacity, a disregard for social propriety of the sort found in Leaves of Grass, serves a necessary function:
One reason [for not respecting the rule of society in my poems], and to me a profound one, is that the soul of a man or woman demands, enjoys compensation in the highest directions for this very restraint of himself or herself, level’d to the average, or rather mean, low, however eternally practical, requirements of society’s intercourse. To balance this indispensable abnegation, the free minds of poets relieve themselves, and strengthen and enrich mankind with free flights in all the directions not tolerated by ordinary society.
Borges is right: “There are two Whitmans: the ‘friendly and eloquent savage’ of Leaves of Grass and the poor writer who invented him. … The mere happy vagabond proposed by the verses of Leaves of Grass would have been incapable of writing them.” The idea of poetry as compensation explains, in part, Whitman’s turning the reader away from the text and his willingness to envision poetry’s extinction. If poetry subsists on lack and not-doing, the reader, if there is to be substantive fulfillment and realization, mustn’t be encouraged to linger with it.
Writing, self-improvement and death form a matrix in Whitman’s work that echoes phrenology’s advocacy of writing—specifically, epitaph writing—as an aid to self-improvement. Lorenzo Fowler counseled his audiences, “Write your own epitaphs in legible characters on a slip of paper; make them as flattering and eulogistic as possible. Then spend the remainder of your lives, endeavoring not only to reach the standard … you have raised, but to go far beyond it.” Self-eulogy abounds in Leaves of Grass. A sense of the book as an epitaph is evident throughout, nowhere more explicitly than in the 1881 poem “As at Thy Portals Also Death”: “I grave a monumental line, before I go, amid these songs, / And set a tombstone here.” Whitman’s investment in a compensatory sense of writing closes off the possibility of living up to and even beyond, as Fowler would have it, the standard such writing sets, but the specter it raises of textualization as a shortcut to self-improvement, a means to fraudulent self-improvement, applies to phrenology as well. Practitioners such as the Fowlers, who were, after all, running a business, appear to have sweetened their readings to make them appeal to their clients. A person who had undergone a reading wrote in 1835: “The faculties the phrenologist made mention that I possessed were in almost all cases very true so far as I can judge of my own mind. I am rather inclined to think he neglects to tell the evil passion as in my case and many others none were noticed which I am confident we possessed. Perhaps self-interest prompts him.” The reading itself was an act of improvement. The Fowlers, responding in the American Phrenological Journal to questions regarding the accuracy and integrity of their readings, admitted that “if we must err, we prefer to err upon the side of charity.”
Phrenology’s sweetened readings remind us that both the advantage and the danger of textualization is the ability to erase and to revise. This sheds some light on Whitman’s decades-long revision of Leaves of Grass, a process which included a revision of the phrenological chart which he published with the first three editions, a revision in which he took a cue from the Fowlers. Finding his scores in some faculties not high enough, he changed them (not an altogether surprising move for someone “6 to 7” in “Self-Esteem”). After the first edition he edited Lorenzo Fowler’s comments; among the phrases he excised was one describing him as “too unmindful probably of the conviction of others,” a trait inconsistent with the democratic outlook he advertised. Reduced to textual manipulation, the project of self-improvement borders on self-parody, as does the frequently hollow ring of Whitman’s exclamations in Leaves of Grass, but not without saying something real about nineteenth-century U.S. aspirations. “Self-made or never made,” one of the Fowlers’ most famous mottos, says more than they intended perhaps in its implication of an urgency (a desperation even) willing to risk vanity, self-aggrandizement, mere self-service.
Phrenological revision, both the revision of Gall’s founding precepts and practical phrenology’s willingness “to err on the side of charity,” served an American optimism beginning to make a move on world ascendancy. It offered a hopeful hermeneutic, banishing the threat of dark recesses with an assurance that everything could be brought to light, everything seen, everything brought to the surface. The American Phrenological Journal in 1846 claimed that phrenology offered “tangible, certain, absolute, KNOWLEDGE,” going on to exclaim: “Behold, then, the true SCIENCE OF MIND! Behold the study of this godlike department of our nature reduced to DEMONSTRABLE CERTAINTY!” Uncertainty, doubt, was the serpent in the Garden the New World was taken to be (Whitman refers to “doubt nauseous undulating like a snake” in “Rise O Days from Your Fathomless Deeps”); phrenology said no to that serpent. One of the critics of phrenology, Dr. Thomas Sewall, warned that “nature does not reveal her secrets by external forms.” Likewise, several major writers assumed a much more skeptical stance toward phrenology than did Whitman. Poe, though he favorably reviewed phrenological journals early on and used phrenological categories in some of the characterizations in his fiction, went on to write parodies of it. Twain dealt skeptically with it as well. Melville, in Moby Dick, has Ishmael attempt to phrenologize the whale only to conclude that it can’t be done; a work having so largely to do with inscrutability would of course find phrenology’s hopeful hermeneutic suspect.
If, as Allen F. Roberts observes in an essay on the epistemology of the Tabwa people of Zaire, black is “a looking inward at what is not apparent but is nonetheless the essence of being,” “an artfully indirect suggestion or insinuation—the gnawing suspicion that an act or event has meaning beyond what one sees,” phrenology was a white way of knowing. It valorized obtrusion, surface, apparency, warding off the obscurities and indeterminacies of recess, crevice, fold. It was also white in another sense, serving other senses of whiteness. While its advocates preached self-improvement and social reform, the emphasis was by and large individualistic, seeking to better society through individual cultivation of the virtues of self-help—thrift, hard work, purity, perseverance. Its ad
vocacy of social reform, while populist in many respects, failed to offer its beneficence and promise of improvement to those who were not white; its will to reform didn’t extend to reforming notions of racial determinism or the social relations upheld by such notions. Phrenology in fact shared with these notions an assumption that human surfaces offer incontestable evidence of the qualities, capacities and traits not only of individuals but of groups. Its attention to cranial bumps is consistent with and occupies a place within a mode of reading human prowess which also attends to skin color, hair texture and other phenotypic and physiognomic features. As the frontispiece to his Phrenology: Fad and Science, John Davies reproduces a phrenological diagram which compares, along an evolutionistic scale of development, the cranial shape and the forehead slope of eleven creatures. It shows four animals and seven humans; the animals, in order of development, are a snake, a dog, an elephant and an ape; the human figures, in order of development, are designated “Human Idiot,” “Bushman,” “Uncultivated,” “Improved,” “Civilized,” “Enlightened” and “Caucasian—Highest Type.”
Racist evolutionism textualized earth surfaces as well, ascribing a providential imprint to bodies of land. Representative John A. Harper in 1812 employed a trope which was to be repeatedly taken up in the rhetoric of manifest destiny, arguing that “the Author of Nature has marked our limits in the south, by the Gulf of Mexico; and on the north by the regions of eternal frost.” The decimation of indigenous populations and the wresting away of their lands was an act of erasure and revision, a providentially mandated improvement in which a superior race vanquished and evicted an inferior one. Whitman, as he was with phrenology, was on intimate, speaking terms with such notions. He was an admirer of John L. O’Sullivan, whose Democratic Review he frequently wrote for and who, in support of annexing Texas in 1845, invoked “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” In March 1846 Whitman wrote in favor of acquiring Oregon, saying that “the name of ‘American’ must, in a few years, pale the old brightness and majesty of ‘Roman’”; in the same year, when Yucatan seceded from Mexico, he wrote an editorial, “More Stars for the Spangled Banner,” arguing that “she won’t need a long coaxing to join the United States”; he supported the war against Mexico from its beginning in May of that year.
Tributes Page 24
