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Walt Whitman and new biographical criticism
College Literature, Winter 2003 by Knoper, Randall
Having reduced Pollak's reduction, I must, to be fair, stress that the work is devoted to the complications and contradictions that spin out from the generative psychobiographical matrix that Pollak describes. For example, Pollak has much of value to say about Whitman's criticisms of conventional gender roles-and his accommodations of them. In his early fiction Whitman treats patriarchal violence and white male abuses of power in denunciatory ways, and in the first two editions of Leaves of Grass, Pollak writes, he mandates the death of the vengeful father. While aggressive masculinity remained a problem for him, always plaguing his versions of male-male affection, Whitman nevertheless manages to identify with "working-class figures who represent the cruelty he fears" (63). Pollak suggests various ways that Whitman grapples with his problematic, conflicted relationship to rivalrous, competitive masculinity: He fashions angry male figures who are then feminized. He transforms his self-image from the vulnerable Walter to the roughened Walt. And he ultimately evades his anxieties and tensions over masculinity by subsuming them, without resolving them, in an all-encompassing, affectionate friendliness. In Pollak's hands, Whitman's difficult relationship with his father-and with nineteenth-century masculinities-generates some persuasively complicated scenarios. Fresh understandings emerge from the sturdy psychobiographical paradigm.
Even as Whitman adopts familial models for his poetry of comradeship and connection, Pollak writes, he launches a critique of the repressive aspects of domestic culture. He censures domestic culture for its repression of women and children, its separation of the sexes, its misogyny and homophobia. But Whitman still retreats to the realm of the mother as a refuge from male-male aggression and competition. To the extent that Whitman rehabilitates intimacy between men by the "refeminization of male-male love" (140), and by rewriting such intimacy through tropes of heterosexual marital fidelity and domestic harmony, he raises fears, Pollak argues, of his own feminization. To the extent that he tries to neutralize his anxieties about the dissension and cruelty of masculine and patriarchal culture by drowning them in a quasi-maternal enclosure and embrace, he invokes the matriarchal in a way that makes it function as a falsely unifying, de-eroticized, and premature solution to his problems. Such articulations of Whitman's problems and tensions are cogent, and believable. Pollak notes that she transformed a previously published essay into her chapter on Whitman and femininity, trying to make it "less theory-driven and more closely attentive to the emotional complexities of Whitman's social experience" (239 n.1).The effort pays off.
While Pollak is good at thus pressing her generalizations about Whitman's familial/sexual anxieties, so that his ambivalences and contradictory feelings about them emerge, her study falls somewhat short of the promise to show how Whitman's language and poetics issued from these tensions-another familiar difficulty of this kind of biographical criticism. Pollak asserts, that is, that Whitman's poetry was a means by which "dangerous psychological elements" could be "translated into a new tongue" (88). She says similarly that his poetry was meant to transform "intimate fears and fears of intimacy" into "'a new tongue'" (193). The self division between Walter and Walt was "the basis of his language experiment" (80). And "his revisionary poetics of the democratic sexual body emerged first out of his own need for a new language of love," a need that rose from the pain of his family relationships (85). The clearest connection between these psychodynamics and the "tongue" of Whitman's poetry, however, is simply that between a maternal/infantile inclusiveness and Whitman's encompassing of multiple voices and his promiscuous jumbling of sounds. In other words, the book is better at thematic psychobiography than at the criticism of poetic language. Notably, on those occasions when Pollak reads the poetry closely, the psychobiographical point can disappear, just as the poetry can disappear under the biographical argument.
