Whitman and Wilde

INTRODUCTION || DISIDENTIFICATION || THEORY || TECHNOLOGY || QUEER RHETORIC || LOGOS || PATHOS || ETHOS || TONGUES || WORKS CITED

We could begin almost anywhere, but we choose to begin in 1882, with Walt Whitman. We start with Whitman because, as Richard Rorty argues in Achieving Our Country, Whitman was amongst the first major writers of the nineteenth century to conceive of the democratic public sphere as substantively different than preceding public spheres. As Rorty puts it,

Whitman thought that we Americans have the most poetical nature because we are the first thoroughgoing experiment in national self-creation: the first nation-state with nobody but itself to please--not even God. We are the greatest poem because we put ourselves in the place of God: our essence is our existence, and our existence is in the future. Other nations thought of themselves as hymns to the glory of God. We redefine God as our future selves. (22)

Whitman’s engaging emphasis on self-creation curiously foreshadows Warner’s characterization of the public sphere as equally poetical as rational. We need the tools not just of argument but also of creation and imagination. Just as curiously, though, Whitman’s un-self-acknowledged queerness, despite all of this love of comrades, portends the circulation even in the emerging American public sphere of normative sex/gender expectations and the forceable silences around non-normative erotic and intimate expression. Whitman can push some boundaries, but he certainly felt he could not break them.

We begin, even more specifically, with a visit of one poet to another: Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman. The two while away an afternoon over elderberry wine, the Irish poet leaving with Whitman’s “kiss still on [his] lips” and writing back to friends in England that there is “no doubt” Whitman is one of the boys. Whitman remembers Wilde fondly, too, calling him a “fine large handsome youngster” (Schmidgall 283). Whitman would die in about a decade, near the height of Wilde’s fame and fortune; the Irishman himself just a few years away from scandal, disgrace, and imprisonment. In the two poets—two such totally different poets, with Wilde’s dandyism and cultured elegance contrasting sharply with Whitman’s down-to-earth (but cultivated) rustic sensibility—we sense the emergence of enabling tensions in queer rhetorical practice. Both are clearly queer, in their investment in the homoerotic, but also in their insistence, variously performed, of the inter-relationship between sex and politics (Schmidgall 283-337).

Walt Whitman (1st 2 Verses) “Song of Myself.” YouTube.com

As famously as their lives may have become figured in the larger public discourses marking the construction and circulation of a homosexual identity, the narrative of their lives is not directly on point here. Such narratives give us the identity story: here is one of us, here is our past. We do not deny the identification, but we resist that seduction just long enough to look again at the work, for in the work we see articulated the emergence of recognizably queer rhetorics, a “density of text which emerges at the same time as an overt discourse of homosexuality in the United States and Western Europe” (Cope 124); within that density of text, we see an emerging critique of normative relations as figured on sex and sexuality. Specifically, Whitman offers us the expansive line, the cataloguing of diversity, the capacious appreciation and eroticization of everything—“The scent of these armpits is aroma finer than prayer”—that includes the love of comrades and manly love, however homosocial. In contrast, Wilde savagely attacks, albeit with the pinpoint of humor, offering us a moralistic novel about someone named Dorian Gray who suspends morality to pursue hedonism and the remaking of the self. Wilde prefaces this text with an aesthetic manifesto that denies the morality of any text, and at the same time laces the stage with drawing-room comedies that reduce the most important and “earnest” Victorian values to so much empty posturing, devoid of referential content. As Roger Moss puts it in his article, “The Rhetoric that Dare Not Speak Its Name,” “Wilde’s wit…is rhetoric directed against rhetoric. It uses verbal formulations of great elegance to attack precisely that area of conventional language where language and values not only coincide to formulate [types] of behaviour, but where language itself becomes a sign of sustainable values” (111).

Whitman expands himself and his vision of the country to make sure that he’s included; Wilde, an outsider by birth (Ireland) and disposition (a sodomite) shows from deep inside the rotting of a culture’s values at its core. Both moves strike us as delightfully queer: on one hand, the expansiveness of Whitman becomes so ridiculous, so ludicrous that it risks intelligibility and returns us to the body as the playground of the senses, where we truly know and connect:

Through me forbidden voices,

Voices of sexes and lusts….voices veiled, and I remove the veil,

Voices indecent by me clarified and transfigured. (48)

On the other hand, Wilde is equally outrageous, but his game is one not of expansion but of reductio ad absurdum in that he shows us the freeing possibility of the Nietzschean transvaluation of all values. Empty a value of its meaning—earnestness, say—and you can fuck, I mean marry, whom you want. Put another way, Whitman wants to value everything, Wilde nothing—but both relations to value (embrace and rejection) are mobilized for political ends: specifically, to call into question the narrowed values of the cultures in which these men lived and wrote. If both felt constrained by the sexual politics of their day, if both felt around them the lack of imagination necessary to envision different kinds of freedom, then both sought ways to question the values that kept most people’s imaginations barely fed.

Certainly, this capacious cataloguing is not unique to Whitman. Most notably, as Karin M. Cope points out, Gertrude Stein’s “passionate grammar” gives us “difficult words” that open out onto “not transparency, but the productive power borne in the density, resistance, and publicity of language” (132).

We see in the years following Whitman and Wilde a century of queer rhetorical strategies playing themselves out. Whitman’s heirs—Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and even Adrienne Rich in her troubled but nonetheless Whitmanian “dream of a common language”—grapple queerly with the bard’s vision and its aftermath, with the failure of the Enlightenment to make good on its promise of the “pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness” for its citizens. In these poets’ expansive lines, their capacious cataloguing is just as often the laundry list of injustices enumerated by those denied Whitman’s inclusive vision. Wilde’s heirs—Warhol, ACT UP, Queer Nation, Lesbian Avengers—perform and re-perform the ridiculous and ridiculously empty gendered and sexed norms of our culture, questioning the ontological sincerity of values as practiced by those deemed bigots and hypocrites. Here we find a provocative set of legacies, demanding attention in the public sphere that would otherwise deny or delimit our existence.