September 27th, 2009:

                I have coined a corny but Groom-appeasingly tech-ish acronym to encapsulate our prevailing interest in adapting Whitman to a modern context:

                 WWWDOT.  (What Would Whitman Do… Today?  Huzzah!  Of course, to describe the process by which we figure out Whitman’s compatibility with digital communication, we can use the clever little acronym WWWDOTCOM, or “What Would Whitman Do to a Computer?”  There’s also a little innuendo in that one that rightly brings Whitman’s playful flesh-mongering back into the conversation.)

                More specifically, since this is the post immediately preceding the Mary Wash Whitmans’ trip to the Fredericksburg battlefield, I find myself drawn into the speculating on Whitman’s probable relationship to battlefield preservation.  How does the notion of cordoning off and essentially memorializing a piece of ground interact with Whitman’s sense of the total fluidity of every physical object, his assumption, as articulated from the first edition of Leaves of Grass, that any molecule making up a particular object might soon make up any other, that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (27)?  Would Whitman be on the side of battlefield preservation, or shrug at its futility?

            In his introduction to Memoranda During the War, Whitman affirms that “Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background of countless minor scenes and interiors, (not the few great battles) of the Secession War; and it is best they should not” (5).  Not only does he defy the hope that a historical (geographical, demographic, whatever etc.) stranger to the war—that is, one who was never “the actual soldier of 1862-‘65” (5)—might ever understand that war’s experiences, he also identifies “the few great battles,” and thus the fields on which they were fought, as the exact spots at which the non-soldier might superficially taste the war and presume to understand a little of it.  In this sense, Whitman anticipates the “battlefield tour” as a vehicle for shallow “re-living,” if the tourists believe they can come away with any semblance of the field’s erstwhile trauma.

               Whitman further underscores his conviction that the American Civil War passes all understanding by linking that cosmic bafflement with a trope that decidedly refuses the idea of battlefield-as-stable-monument: quicksand.  Betsy Erkkila places particular emphasis on the poem “Quicksand Years That Whirl Me I Know Not Whither” as an illustration of the degree to which the war had destabilized Whitman’s broad sense of oneness with the world beyond the solitary Self.  This is the version of the poem published in the 1867 Leaves:

 “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, death—what at last finally remains?

When shows break up, what but One’s-Self is sure?” (31a)

 Whitman here transmutes his sublime conception of the constant, benign flux and fluidity of nature into the feeling that “substances mock and elude me,” and reveals the extent to which the grand interconnectedness of “One’s-Self” with “the word EN-MASSE” (6) had broken down in the maddening cycle of “politics, triumphs, battles, deaths” that characterize the “quicksand years” of 1861-65.  The sucking, all-devouring slippage of a pit of quicksand provides a convenient topographical illustration of Whitman’s consternation in the Memoranda at the thought of “how much, and of importance, will be—how much, civic and military, has already been—buried in the grave, the eternal darkness!” (6).  If the physical world perpetually shifts and changes, and time acts like soil that swallows the memories that walk over it, then Whitman’s logical conclusion might be total resignation at that wartime transience and loss, and an absolute refusal of the impulse to preserve (stories, fields, etc.), when what he preserves will not change the fact that the full story of a even a single combatant “will never be written—perhaps must not and should not be” (5). 

Still, we know how Whitman gets with impossible tasks.  Having established in the Memoranda introduction that the infinitely detailed “black infernal background” of the war can never be fully shown, he assays “a few stray glimpses into… that many-threaded drama” (6).  Even if the war’s battlefields only contain a shred of their “original” soil and stone, and just as little of their wartime appearance, Whitman suggests that it is not up to him or any other non-veteran to deny those scraps their grim significance.  The trope of “quicksand years” here augments the urgent need to salvage whatever small memories might remain, and so reveals Whitman’s probable conviction that, despite the reality of a field slipping away with the rain or getting covered up by houses (even Dr. Scanlon’s, man!), we have to take whatever “stray glimpses” of that field we can get.  We just can’t delude ourselves into thinking we’ll get any more.  And so, on to the visitor’s center. 

By the way, WWWDOTCOM is a registered 2009 trademark of Sam Protich, Esq.

     So, earlier in the semester, I posted about how Whitman’s soldier descriptions in Song of Myself were generalized and idealized, with a promise to update on how his writing changed once he got up close and personal with war. It’s hard to think of a better time to do just that. I am going to track what I see as an important indicator of Whitman’s connection (or lack thereof) to the Civil War soldiers: his naming of them.

     As the war (and our reading in the LOA) began, Whitman’s view of the soldiers seems to have been similar to what it was in 1855, with his descriptions of the returning, defeated Union soldiers after the first Battle of Bull Run remaining pretty general. These men, lacking “the proud boasts with which you went forth,” do not have names (732). The act of naming someone, or something, signifies an affection that Whitman does not yet seem to feel for these men; instead, they are “queer looking objects” (733). Not surprisingly, this distance rapidly shrinks when Whitman begins to search for his brother in the hospitals.

     By December of 1862, Whitman had begun to see the faces of the soldiers he was writing and hearing about. Beginning with the “Back to Washington” note, Whitman begins to give names to the soldiers he had previously left untitled. “D.F. Russell” and “Charles Miller” are sitting there, with Whitman watching over them (738). That exact specificity does not last though; a mere six months later, Whitman reduces the soldier’s names to abbreviations.

     The abbreviations are not a sign of a returning disconnect between Whitman and the men: they convey the man’s initials, as we as his unit and where the unit was raised from (presumably around where the soldier was from). Instead, the reduction of names abbreviations reflects how there were simply too many men that Whitman was in contact with for him to convey how he truly felt for each individual. Despite the grand declarations he made about himself, our great poet of democracy had to deal with the limitations of being one man.

     Whitman deals with that forced namelessness in an interesting way though: instead of bemoaning his powerlessness, Whitman turns it into a glorification of the working-class foot soldier. However, while in “Unnamed Remains the Bravest Soldier” Whitman seems to solve his own problem and put a plug in for his favorite team, to do it requires him to put that old distance between himself and the men. Like Whitman’s captive hunters that are betrayed and slaughtered in Song of Myself, the bravest soldier here is also unfailingly young: “Our manliest—our boys—our hardy darlings; no picture gives them. Likely, the typic one of them (standing, no doubt, for hundreds, thousands)…” (748). That distance turns out to be more the rule than the exception with Whitman’s treatment of the Confederate soldiers.

     Although it is admirable that Whitman did not appear to show preference for northern soldiers when he was moving through the hospitals, he does in the written descriptions he gives of soldiers. With a couple of exceptions, the personal descriptions he gives of the soldiers he encounters are of Union men, with some men warranting entire notes for themselves. Not so for the Confederates: they remain almost entirely faceless. This should not be surprising, since Whitman was spending his time in Union army hospitals, that doubtlessly gave preference to Union wounded over Confederate wounded, but it shows another of Whitman’s limitations.  While he may have celebrated himself as containing galaxies, Whitman was very quickly shown by the war what size he was. It warrants mention though that, while these boundaries may have affected Whitman’s writings, they drove him to physically do work that belied those limits.

Whitman’s “batch of convulsively written reminiscences” (799) about the Civil War in “Specimen Days,” particularly his record of encounters with soldiers he cared for as a nurse, really started me thinking about what the war represented to Whitman.  Obviously the day to day violence and massacre would take its toll on anyone, both physically and mentally.  But for Whitman, the war seemed to be a catalyst for the complete dissolution of the soul or spirit, and therefore came to tear the United States further away from the ideal democracy that Whitman stressed as necessity.

I say that the war may be viewed as a recipe for the breakdown of the soul by looking at the connections Whitman often made between the soul and body.  As frequently discussed in class, Whitman viewed the human body as ultimate perfection, writing often of its splendors and praising its uses and beauty.  He also declared that the soul and body are in a completely mutually beneficial relationship and that they rely on each other through this; this is shown when he writes, “The spirit receives from the body just as much as it gives to the body” (21) in the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass.  As Whitman viewed, recorded, and even engaged in attempting to mend the devastation brought about by the war, he focused particularly on the hundreds of amputations various soldiers (from both the North and the South) were forced to endure.  He writes in “Specimen Days,” “I notice a heap of amputated feet, legs, arms, hands, &c., a full load for a one-horse cart” (736) and mentions these severed and disposed appendages many times throughout the remainder of the text, as well as within several of his more graphic war poems.  The physical dismemberment of the limbs of soldiers, the removal of pieces of their bodies, can equally be said to allow for the chipping away of their spirits as well.  In losing one part of the aforementioned relationship, the whole deteriorates.

This is even more difficult for Whitman to grapple with as it is the result of America against America – a kind of national suicide.  The spiritual dismemberment that follows physical dismemberment hits him in a way that leaves him reaching for ways to bring the country back to some level of commonality.  He attempts to accomplish this by focusing on the natural world, the land that remains beautiful despite all of the violence and tragedy.  He writes:

The night was very pleasant, at times, the moon shining out full and clear, all Nature so calm in itself, the early summer grass so rich, and foliage of the trees—yet there the battle raging, and many good fellows lying helpless, with new accessions to them, and every minute amid the rattle of muskets and crash of cannon, (for there was an artillery contest too,) the red life-blood oozing out from heads or trunks or limbs upon that green and dew-cool grass (746).

In illuminating a battle scene by jumping back and forth between the harsh brutality of war and the peaceful serenity provided in and by nature, Whitman seems to hope to force his readers and the American people back into a place where their spirits and bodies may be uncompromised and where they may remain united.  In his writing, he seeks to piece together a people that continually divide themselves and hopes to stop them from doing so before there is nothing left to reunite.

In response to the prompt and quote for this week, what did Whitman consider the “real” war to be? My interpretation, which could be wrong, is that Whitman saw the real war as the devastation that was felt by the families of soldiers and civilians, and the stories of the soldiers themselves. The history that is in the books is impersonal. I think Whitman tried to personalize the war and bring it down to less grandiose level by relating the stories of the soldiers he met. Unfortunately he only captured most at the ends of their lives, after they were physically and mentally destroyed by the war.

I think some of the problems with Whitman’s description of his war experiences are the same problems that we run into with his poetry. He tries to represent everything and everyone, and therefore somewhat loses something when he begins to generalize and list. I saw this in the way he kept his diary like a catalogue, a description we have used for his poetry, a catalogue of the various soldiers he met, their injuries, what he gave them, whether or not they died.  On the one hand we are seeing the mass amount of destruction caused by this war- it seems like every soldier Whitman described had something amputated- but on the other hand we’re still not seeing any reflection on how this is going to affect the soldier’s life from then on, or his family.

I thought Whitman’s most interesting observations were not necessarily with the soldiers, but when he observed life outside of the hospitals. I loved the passage where he described the inauguration ball taking place in the patent office, where months before he had seen the cots of the soldiers.

So to answer the question for this week, I’m not really sure whether or not Whitman succeeded in getting the “real” war into his books. At his time, I feel like it’s very likely that all of the horrible injuries and mass casualties were not necessarily widely reported, so maybe for Whitman’s time he really was giving a more real account of the civil war than anyone else was at the time. The passage about the two brothers who were fighting on opposite sides and were injured in the same battle, the wounds from which both subsequently dies, strikes me that way. Perhaps no one in Whitman’s time would have made a statement like that. I feel like now though, especially the way the civil war is gone over and over again in history classes throughout grade school, most people are very aware that family members often fought against each other, that the battles were extremely bloody, and the politics involved in the fighting. I wonder if Whitman would say that the history books now are giving a more true account of things.

Ok this is a side note but, every time Whitman mentioned the “naked” bodies of the soldiers and then that part where he said he was sitting by the side of the soldier while he was sleeping, I just got this really weird image of him being a creeper and watching people while they slept…not to mention the part where he alludes to stalking Lincoln…