ENGL3021 Short Essay

James Elias u5333810

Q1. In Walt Whitmans poetry, the celebration of the speaker is imagined as a celebration of the larger
human community, and of the natural world. Discuss. Your answer to this question should refer to, and
include detailed analysis of, at least 3 cantos/chants of Whitmans Song of Myself.

Walt Whitmans Song of Myself, from the original publication of Leaves

of Grass, is an extended poetic chant, at once a celebration of nature and
humanity and the description of a personal experience of transcendence.
Whitmans transcendence is an identity between the subject and the
universal, an epiphany regarding the insignificance of the immanent
within the grander scale of the absolute; of human intellect and quotidian
frustrations within the eternal harmony of nature. Significantly, Whitmans
transcendentalism is comparable to Kantian notions of the absolute or
Hindu notions of nirvana in that, while immanence is merely the
phenomenological manifestation of the absolute, the homogeneity of this
absolute is determined through a central locus, that of God. As Whitman
writes in the 5th Canto of Song of Myself:
Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and joy and
knowledge that pass
all art and argument of the earth;
And I know that the hand of God is the elder hand of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own,
And that all men ever born are also my brothersand the women my
sisters and
lovers,
And that a keelson of creation is love;1

As such, an aporia is already apparent. If Whitmans absolute transcends

all art and argument, why does it require a central transcendent
signifier in order to invest relativistic value? Why is this transcendental
absolute a presence at all? If presence is defined through absence, what is
absent from Whitmans absolute? Furthermore, why must God be not only
gendered, but endowed with a patriarchal authority? What is identity if
men are inducted into Gods fraternity and women relegated to sisters
and lovers?
What these problems allude to is the sexual psychology inherent in
Whitmans philosophy; a network of desire and repression seeking outlet
in social utility. In short, Whitmans transcendence can be understood in
terms of Freuds theory of sublimation.
In Civilizations and its Discontents, Freud writes of an honoured friend:
he was sorry I had not properly appreciated the true source of
religious sentiments. This, he says, consists in a peculiar feeling,
which he himself is never without, which he finds confirmed by

1 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York: Penguin, 1986), 29.

many others, and which he may suppose is present in millions of

people. It is a feeling which he would like to call a sensation of
eternity, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded as it
were, oceanic.2

Freuds response is that, if I have understood my friend rightlyit is a

feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a
whole,3 a ideal manifest throughout Whitmans poem. Significantly,
Freud would later explain this oceanic feeling as the preservation of the
primitive ego feeling of infancy. This refers to the point before which the
infant has disassociated itself from its mother, before it has identified
itself in relation to the other. Freud argues that only through separation
from the mothers breast is the infant forced to recognize itself as
subject, distinct from the absolute. Preceding this, the ego is unnecessary
as the infant need make no demand for sustenance.4
It is this that Whitmans transcendentalism aspires to: a psychical locality
that transcends the ego and comprehends existence in such a state of
unity. For Freud, this aspiration is desire itself; the subject locates itself in
relation to an object that promises the fulfillment denied in infancy. Thus,
Whitmans transcendental aspiration is in fact the promise of desire
fulfilled, the object being the focal point of said transcendence, that is,
God. It is here that Whitmans aspiration is comprehensible as
sublimation. Freud writes in his paper On Narcissism: An Introduction:
libidinal impulses undergo the vicissitude of pathogenic

repression if they come into conflict with the subjects cultural

and ethical ideas. By this we never mean that the individual in
question has a merely intellectual knowledge of the existence of
such ideas; we always mean that he recognizes them as a
standard for himself and submits to the claims they make on
him.5

Thus, Whitmans desire is frustrated by social regulations; in an effort to

circumvent the repression inherent in such a frustration, he must direct
such desire elsewhere:
Sublimation is a process that concerns object-libido and consists
in the instincts directing itself towards an aim other than, and
remote from, that of sexual satisfaction; in this process the
action falls upon deflection from sexuality.6

2 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey

(New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 1961), 11.
3 Freud, Civilization, 12.
4 ibid., 12-13.
5 Sigmund Freud, On Narcissism: An Introduction, in The Standard
Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14,
trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1965), 93.
6 ibid., 94.

Sublimation is thus a way out, a way by which [sexual] demands can

be met without involving repression.7 But what is this desire of
Whitmans that causes such friction against social constraints? The
answer is apparent within the text of Song of Myself, namely, the
pronounced homoeroticism expressed throughout the poem. The 11th
Canto describes a lady in a window observing a group of bathing men
below:
The beards of the young men glistened with wet, it ran from their long hair,
Little streams passed all over their bodies8

Significantly, in this Canto, Whitmans literary perspective embodies that

of the woman observing the bather. The woman, in turn, identifies herself
within the homogenous throng of the bathers, she is the 29th bather / the
rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them. Whitman is
able, as such, to vicariously describe An unseen hand [passing] over
their bodies; to note that they do not ask who seizes fast to them;9 to
codify his own homoerotic desire into heteronormative discourse.
That Whitmans homoeroticism, hitherto only codified, is in fact
sublimated toward the figure of God as an object of desire is apparent in
consideration of the 3rd Canto of his poem, particularly:
I am satisfiedI see, dance laugh, sing;
As God comes a loving bedfellow and sleeps at my side all
night and close
at the peep of day,
And leaves for me baskets covered with white towels
bulging the house
with their plenty.10
This personification of God may be blatantly facetious, yet it signifies an
unconscious truth; it is the poetic expression that unveils unconscious
desire. What is interesting about the adjacent lines, however, is the
eroticism of the gifts that are left to the poet, the bulging of the
unspoken produce veiled by white cloth. In order to unpack the
significance of this pastoral sexualisation, manifest throughout Whitmans
poem, it is necessary to turn to the post-structuralist Freudian
interpretations of Jacques Lacan.
In his Seminar VII, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan writes:
The [drives] were discovered and explored by Freud within an
experience
7 ibid., 95.
8 Whitman, Leaves of Grass, 34.
9 ibid., 34.
10 ibid., 27.

founded on the confidence he had in the play of signifiers, in the

play of
substitutions [this is] where the whole action of the
pleasure principle is motivated, [it] directs us toward the
mythic point that has been articulated in terms of an object
relation.11
However, he expresses that attentive readers of Freuds work express
dissatisfaction
or unassuaged thirst [with] Freud's formulations12 Particularly, Lacan
identifies the problem of Freuds views on the plasticity of the numerous
drives, that: One of them may accumulate the intensity of the others.
When the satisfaction of one is denied by reality, the satisfaction of
another may offer total compensation.13 Lacans response is that There
is something that cannot be sublimated; libidinal demand exists, the
demand for a certain dose, of a certain level of direct satisfaction, without
which harm results, serious disturbances occur.14
Lacan identifies Freuds concept of drive as problematic. While Freud
appreciates that the desire to regress into the primal state of maternal
sustenance is impossible, he suggests that through sublimation a new
object of desire can fully compensate for the thwarted attempts at
satisfaction of the former. The contradiction, then, is that the gratification
of the sublimated object of desire would equate complete gratification of
desire, that is, the dissolution of the ego. As Lacan explains:
It is obvious that the libido, with its paradoxical, archaic, socalled pregenital characteristics, with its eternal
polymorphism, with its world of images that are linked to the
different sets of drives associated with the different stages
that whole microcosm has absolutely nothing to do with the
macrocosm; only in fantasy does it engender world.15
His solution is the splitting of Freudian drive into a duality, drive and
desire, the former a play in the symbolic network of fantasy, and the latter
a libido doomed to frustration. Through a sadistic relationship, however,
these two aspects of libido constitute pleasure within Lacans Symbolic
and Imaginary registers, known as Joissance. Lacans desire holds as its
goal the satisfaction of the thing (the unrepresentable pleasure), the
regression to the Real, forever unattainable as it is equitable with the
destruction of the ego. Lacans drive, however, is satiated through the
frustration of desire; by placing a symbol for the thing in place of the
11 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis, trans. Jacques Alain Miller (W. W. Norton & Company Inc.,
1992), 90
12 ibid., 90.
13 ibid., 91
14 ibid., 91-92
15 ibid., 92.

actual thing, it can perversely abstract pleasure through the desires

perpetual grasping of symbols for pleasure in place of actual pleasure; 16
there is the possibility of satisfaction, even if it is substitutive, and
through the intermediary of what the text calls a Surrogate.17
This interpretation of Freuds sublimation demonstrates the surrogate in
Whitmans poem; the sexualized pastoral, the untamed wilderness of
Leaves of Grass that imagines a return to nature, the natural, the wild and
uncultivated as synonymous with transcendence to the absolute. The
impossibility of a return to the natal plethora of the mother and the
concessional eroticism thwarted by social constraints find compromise
through a regressive nostalgia of an imaginary pre-repressive fantasy; in
place of Whitmans desire, the universal unity with God as its focal object,
the symbolic order intervenes and offers up manifold images of
overdetermined Arcadian ideals invested with the eroticism
psychologically denied to its author.

Bibliography
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. New York: Penguin, 1986.
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and its Discontents. Translated by James
Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 1961.
Freud Sigmund. On Narcissism: An Introduction. In The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14,
Translated by James Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press, 1965.
Sigmund Freud, On Narcissism: An Introduction, in The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14, trans.
James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1965),
Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis. Translated by Jacques Alain Miller. W. W. Norton &
Company Inc., 1992.
Kesel, Marc de. Eros and Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacans Seminar VII.
Translated by Sigi Jottkandt. Albany: State University of New York Press,
2009.

16 Marc de Kesel, Eros and Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacans Seminar VII,
trans. Sigi Jottkandt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009),
169-170.
17 Lacan, Seminar VII, 94.