Walt Whitman's Song of Myself

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Walt Whitman's Song of Myself

This paper deals with Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" in relation to Julia Kristeva's theories of abjection--my paper does not point to abjection in the text, but rather the significance of the abscence of abjection. This abscence, looming and revolting, arises from Whitman's attemt to refigure a conception of sublimity which delimits the material which can trigger the sublime moment. Whitman's democracy of the sublime is inclusive of those figures on the American landscape, their lives and voices, which are functionalized into his world. This paper employs the theories of George Lukacs and Julia Kristeva allow the unearthing of the archeological layers of Whitman's text.

The most literal adjective that could be applied to them is arresting. We are seized by them. (I am aware that there are people who pass the over but about them there is nothing to say.) As we look at them, the moment of the other's suffering engulfs us. We are filled with either despair or indignation.

John Berger, on Photographs of Agony.

Here I am, bent over the keyhole; suddenly I hear a footstep. I shudder as a wave of shame sweeps over me. Somebody has seen me. I straighten up. My eyes run over the deserted corridor. It was a false alarm. I breathe a sigh of relief.

Jean Paul Sartre

If in the paneled objectification of Eakin's Whitman there lies something in the (re)presentation which unsettles, one could suffer the seizures of revulsion. The viewer stays to uncoil the snare, to locate it outside of one's own "perversion" and locate it inside the text; the viewer indicts the bleached figure who stands as stark harpee against the shadowed relief. For Kristeva, "there looms, within abjection, one of those viol...

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...hus fear having been bracketed, discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confront that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject. There is no urgent unceasing in Whitman's Song, all segments and voices are transfigured into the trigger of the sublime. His space cannot have the abject, for the "abject" signals the ejection of a culture, the refuse of society, whose culinary habits allow them to exist. But Whitman confronts there gradient and levels it: his polyphony is democratic. But there is that looming text, which, for all that Whitman has tried to conceal, is left as the burden, the subtext, from lack of attention, confrontation. With Eakin's panel and Whitman's Song of Myself there is only foreground, perspective is lost, and only sensed by the imaginary relief of the shadow.

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