ELH

ELH 69.4 (2002) 1047-1082

"Hinting" and "Reminding":
The Rhetoric of Performative Embodiment in Leaves of Grass

Vincent J. Bertolini

Indeed if it were not for you, what would I be?
What is the little I have done except to arouse you?
I depend on being realized . . ." ¹

Contemporary criticism on the body and sexuality in Leaves of Grass finds Whitman's central political investments in the ways he represents his male speaker's erotic subjectivity in relation to the sensual bodies of primarily male readers. In the more stringently gay identitarian version of these readings, the historical author of the Leaves is identified with the speaking and self-representing persona of the lyric, and Whitman's poetry is constructed as a species of gay confessional. ² These energetic and politically passionate readings unfortunately often extend the old enterprise by which empirically oriented critics have traditionally tried to sound the truth of Whitman's sexuality through literary interpretation, sometimes with the seeming (and sometimes explicit) purpose of heterosexualizing or de-eroticizing it. ³ Gay identitarian readings of Whitman's verse typically do one of two things. They either treat Leaves of Grass as a repository of data to be read back into the biography as a way to compensate for the maddening lack of reliable evidence of the author's actual activities; or, they take what biographical data they can find—"evidence" shrewdly crafted by Whitman himself—and read it back into the poetry by way of producing gay readings of Whitman's often highly ambiguous erotic verse. ⁴ These two critical strategies, often practiced in tandem, exhibit the slippage endemic to criticism on sexuality in Whitman between talking about Whitman the historical author's sexuality; talking about the sexual content of his poetry; and talking about the sexuality of "Walt," the speaker of Leaves of Grass. Gay identitarian examples of this tradition tend on the one hand to apply anachronistically the signifier "homosexual" to Whitman and his poetry, in reference to a period well prior to the emergence of the [End Page 1047] distinctive complex of attitudes, identifications, and activities that the term came to name. ⁵ They also tend to produce ahistorical treatments of antebellum cultural concepts such as the male love and friendship tradition, phrenological "adhesiveness," and such emergent gay-signifying terms as "gay" and "queer," while making entirely undocumented claims about Whitman's actual erotic practices. ⁶ Not only does work of this sort homogenize all of the different text genres Whitman engaged, in all of their rhetorical particularity; it also reveals a fair amount of theoretical naiveté about what constitutes evidence of a life in the first place. ⁷

This temptation to conflate the historical Whitman with the speaker of his lyric, which remains tantalizing even to sophisticated post-identitarian critics like Michael Moon, is a sign, I want to argue, of the rhetorical ethico-politics of subjectivity operating in Whitman's text. ⁸ For even as the author of Leaves of Grass, who has his speaker name himself "Walt Whitman," continually tempts the reader to identify the speaking "I" of his lyric with him, he also repeatedly deflects those identifications, inviting the reader instead to see the self gaining expression in the poetry as "being realized"—being instantiated, rendered real, brought into being—through the reader's participatory agency. As Whitman's speaker slyly suggests, this self compounded of both speaker and reader, as much the abstract "you" addressed in the epigraph above as the lyric persona himself, possesses a body, one that can be excited, awakened, stirred to action, and the "realization" of the poet "depends" in some sense on his poetry's ability to stimulate such bodily responses.

A cluster of related tropes from the first three editions of Leaves of Grass—"hinting," "reminding," and "translating"—allows us to make out some of the ethical and political motives behind this slippery rhetorical game. ⁹ These are metaphors that, when read against some of the text's highly unstable representations of embodiment (and disembodiment), sensuality, sexuality, and bodily agency, can...