George B. Hutchinson Literary Shamanism and the Crisis of the Union GEORGE HUTCHINSON
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Literary Shamanism and the Crisis of the Union George B. Hutchinson Literary Shamanism and the Crisis of the Union GEORGE HUTCHINSON EXAMINING WHITMAN'S CAREER AS A FORM OF PROPHETIC role-playing, George Hutchinson develops an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural method to illuminate the interrelations be tween the poet's mysticism, his aesthetic, his psychological conflicts, and his participation in the social drama of his age. The book sets Leaves of Grass against the background of a family romance of national identity, a developing civil religion, and socioeconomic transformations that brought the psychic trauma and fears of spiritual decay to mid-nineteenth-century Americans. Such stresses impelled religious phenomena tend ing toward prophecy, spiritual possession, and ecstaticism in a multifaceted movement to revitalize American culture. Within this context, Hutchinson examines Whitman's devel opment of a prophetic role and a corresponding aesthetic, showing the pattern of affliction, crisis, self-training, and mastery of the techniques of ecstacy that anthropologists have noted in shamanism and prophetic movements throughout the world. Viewing the ecstatic performance as a means of revitaliz ing a cultural identity under stress, Hutchinson reveals the ecstatic structures, functions, and techniques that are fun damental to Whitman's creativity. Close readings of the great poems and poem clusters of 1855,1860,1865-67, and 1871-72 reveal Whitman's adaptations of the ecstatic role-playing pro cess to master crises of faith—crises precipitated by historical developments but having profound psychic and spiritual resonances. By drawing upon anthropological insights into ecstatic prophecy as it relates to social change, Hutchinson implicitly demonstrates a new approach to American Studies and to the connections between literature and social history while addressing the major issues in Whitman scholarship. GEORGE HUTCHINSON is assistant professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. ISBN 0-8142-0412-0 Book and jacket design by Arrow Graphics and Typography. Cover photograph courtesy of the Collection of Rare Books, Duke University. Xhe Ecstatic QUhitman Ecstatic QVhitman Literary Shamanism & the Crisis of the Union George B. Hutchinson Ohio State University Press Columbus Copyright © 1986 by the Ohio State University Press All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Hutchinson, George, 1953 The ecstatic Whitman. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Whitman, Walt, 1819-1892—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Shamanism in literature. 3. Prophecies in literature. 4. Ectasy in literature. 5. United States in literature. I. Title. PS3242.S52H88 1986 811'.3 86-877 ISBN 0-8142-0412-0 To Momma Anne and Poppa George CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix INTRODUCTION xi CHAPTER ONE BACKGROUNDS OF REVITAUZA TION I The Legacy of the Fathers Frustrations of a Native Son Religion and Revitalization CHAPTER TWO SORCERERS' APPRENTICE 26 The Prophet's Affliction The Dawn of Religion The Techniques of Ecstasy The Healing Way The Shamanic Persona and Ecstatic Achievement CHAPTER THREE HEALER AND PROPHET 1855 58 "The Sleepers" "Song of Myself" CHAPTER FOUR "0 WHAT IS MY DESTINATION?" 95 "The Love of Comrades" "Proto-leaf" "A Word Out of the Sea" "So long!" CONTENTS • viii CHAPTER FIVE THE RITUAL OF WAR 136 America, "brought to hospital in her fair youth" "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" CHAPTER SIX THE PROPHET IN REPOSE 170 NOTES 187 INDEX 221 Acknowledgments /WOULD LIKE TO THANK the following people for the criticism, encouragement, and advice they provided at vari ous stages in the preparation of this book: Robert E. Stillman, William H. Shurr, and Bethany Dumas of the University of Tennessee; Jerome Loving of Texas A & M University; and Robert G. Gunderson, Terence Martin, J. Albert Robbins, and James H. Justus of Indiana University, Bloomington. I owe special thanks to Professor Justus for directing the dissertation from which this study derives, and to my friend Keith lams, with whom I often discussed my ideas as they first developed. I am also grateful to Wayne State University Press for per mission to use portions of my article on "The Sleepers" first published in the Walt Whitman Review, and to the editors at the Ohio State University Press—particularly Elizabeth A. Mar tin—for their patience and help. The Graduate School of The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and the John C. Hodges Fund of the department of English at the same institution kindly provided summer re search grants which helped me to finish revisions in the sum mers of 1984 and 1985; and Dinah Brock helped type the final manuscript. Neither apologies nor acknowledgments can make up for the attention scholarship has stolen from my long-suffering wife, Portia, and our little boy, Spencer, who have reason to diagnose this project as an acute and sustained episode of spirit-possession. To my parents, my best teachers, acknowl edgments are equally inadequate; I can only hope they will be proud if they lurk somehow in the better pages of this book. Finally, this study is dedicated to the memory of my grand mother, Anne Karrs Bain, and to my grandfather, George W. Bain, professor emeritus of geology at Amherst College, who has been a constant standard in my life for honesty and curi osity, for interdisciplinary probing and synthesis regarding the broadest of human concerns. Introduction TO THE STUDENT of American civilization, Whit- man presents a challenge essentially three-fold, involving his aesthetic, his religious impulse, and his relation to mid-nine teenth-century American culture. In each of these realms, Whitman, as a visionary poet, is a fascinating if perplexing study. In all of them together, he is an alluring puzzle for interdisciplinary synthesis, a magnet attracting diverse meth ods and insights. Moreover, no figure in American literature has been more often the subject of cross-cultural investiga tions. Thus appeals to paradigms or correspondences in vari ous literary and religious traditions or psychological frame works proliferate, and bringing into coherence the different approaches now seems a hopeless task. Yet as we seek a holistic understanding of Whitman's significance we must in evitably wonder: by what method might we integrate the most important interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives de veloped in the last thirty years? In this study I argue that in terpreting Whitman's career as a form of ecstatic prophetism can accomplish such integration, and I choose shamanism as a practical model for understanding his brand of ecstaticism. The shamanistic model of prophetic role-playing reconciles various interpretations of the poet's religious orientation, his visionary ecstasies, and his psychological make-up. More im portantly, while linking the rise and decline of his career as a visionary poet to historical context, it helps illuminate the ec static structures and techniques of Whitman's major poems as well as his view of the poet's social function. Although scholars have frequently termed Whitman a prophet—and occasionally a shaman—we have yet to see a studied, interdisciplinary attempt to explore the implications of this terminology.1 Knowledge of specific forms of ecstatic expression provides, of course, a necessary basis for any such investigation, and much of the following study will demon strate how the process of the shamanistic experience sheds light on the unity and power of several of Whitman's greatest poems, as well as the Drum-Taps cluster as a whole. These poems are chosen not only for their reputations in the critical literature but for their importance in revealing the nature of INTRODUCTION • xii Whitman's inspiration. Each appears within the Whitman can on as a fountain out of the poet's psychological and spiritual reservoir, which was tapped periodically in response to crises and overflowed into new editions or clusters of verse. Most of Whitman's other poems are chiefly preliminary surges or tribu taries emanating from the central inspiration that gave suste nance to Leaves of Grass. Yet what are we to make of the similarities between shamanism and Whitman's poetry? The answer to this question is of far greater significance than the recognition of phenomenal correspondences alone, and has to do with the basic functions of ecstaticism in human societies. To "explain" Whitman's similarities with the shaman re quires forays into anthropology and an untraditional approach to literary history—an approach that welcomes the many dis coveries of influences upon the poet but subordinates these discoveries to a more fundamental notion of the relationship of ecstatic performance to cultural crisis and development. Iden tifiable "sources," as traditionally conceived, are secondary to the manner in which ecstatic transformation gives the vision ary a method of responding to environmental change, thus "revitalizing"—in some ways reorienting, in others reinforc ing—the symbolic systems of his culture. Whitman's em ployment of literary and popular-cultural resources is shaped by the more fundamental necessity of adaptation to a changing social order. Hence, an essential point of this book is that knowledge about the nature of ecstatic role-playing can help us explain the mystery of Whitman's transformation into a poet as well as later changes in his career. Moreover, such knowl edge helps illuminate his kinship with other prophets and reformers of