While reading “Song of Myself,” I could not help but to connect this text to one of my favorite books, Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. In this story, the author’s newly adopted religion, Bokononism, advises its followers not to indulge themselves in granfalloons, which are essentially meaningless classifications marked by human ideologies (such as national identity and sports fanhoods). Although I am not the most seasoned reader of poetry, it does seem to me that Whitman pays a far greater deal of attention to “granfalloons” than most poets I have read. On pages 42-43 of our textbook, Whitman lists the multitudinous variety of human experiences he inhabits, including great nations, southerners, northerners, Yankees, Kentuckians, Hoosiers, Buckeyes, and so on. Where the bokononist would shudder at such recognition of granfalloonery, Whitman celebrates it; every classification is attributed some sort of humanizing behavior, as the Kentuckian walks “in my deerskin leggings,” the Canadian “with fishermen off Newfoundland” and the northwesterners “loving their big proportions,” to name a few.
On first reading, it seems that Whitman indulges in the political divide Vonnegut and many other writers strive to resist. However, toward the bottom of page 43, Whitman states, “This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is, / This is the common air that bathes the globe.” Here, the celebration of separate identities dissolves into the ether of human existence, pulled together by the ties that bind. This solid-to-liquid movement is tethered throughout “Song of Myself,” such as pages 36-37, where we receive a series of images which include a female-gendered character observing twenty-eight young men, a Blacksmith workshop, and a negro horseman. This section is followed by the line “In me the caresser of life wherever moving…. backward as well as forward slueing.” Again, the particularized disintegrates into this general movement that Whitman projects.
Although these episodic shifts convey unique messages and hold their own value in context of the work’s whole, they also work together to convey the momentary nature of the concrete, that in some way the human experience is ultimately characterized by the “fixedness” of our consciousness.
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I like the mention of Vonnegut–I just taught this book for the first time last year. V’s idea of the granfaloon carries with it that inevitable post-modern irony. The person “in the know” who can see classifications as arbitrary. For Whitman, they are inherently meaningful, but part of that broader unity–he holds both together with an earnestness that would make many a postmodernist sneer.