Archives, Whitman, and the Transatlantic Remix

Although archives readily present scholars and students with much information, navigating them can be somewhat of a challenge. It’s relatively easy to move through one like Project Gutenberg, because it’s a bare-bones collection of texts. But what about one more rich in features? To test the “scholasticity” of one such archive, I am here looking at the Walt Whitman Archive, specifically concerned with an example class lesson that teaches his Leaves of Grass (1855) in terms of the questions: “Does Whitman negotiate the individual’s space/place/role in the collective? How? Why?,” and in what ways we can remix the poem in order to defamiliarise it and read it with a fresh perspective.

One way for scholars and students to navigate an archive such as this is through the mysterious ways of online tools such as TokenX—no, not the latest derogatory term the GOP has for Obama, but an online tool that has been customised for this particular archive. My colleagues (blogroll bar to the side>>) have already done such a bang-up job of tinkering with it through every nook and cranny. So, at the risk of being repetitive, I am instead looking at the poem through other means: by defamiliarising it through foreignness.

I am here looking at a "transatlantic remix" of the poem, not one I've done myself, but the British edition that is already catalogued in the archive. Whitman's 1855 original begins with the lines: "I CELEBRATE myself, / And what I assume you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you." The "I" is clearly an "American 'I'" for an American audience because, even though it is singular first-person speaking to a singular second-person "you," it offers an invitation to assume something together. The speaker begins by establishing that the the idea of the individual American is confluent with the idea of American society.

On the other hand, the first edition printed in 1868 Britain, our "transatlantic remix," begins with a stanza/short poem that wasn't even in Whitman's 1855 original: "I HEARD that you ask'd for something to prove this puzzle the New World, / And to define America, her athletic Democracy, / Therefore I send you my poems that you behold in them what you wanted," and didn't appear in any American edition until 3 years later in the American 1871 edition. That Whitman was growing in notoriety in the international scene, even so far as to gain a loyal fanbase across the pond, may have made Whitman and/or the British edition's editors choose this stanza to open with. Although, however diplomatic or friendly the gesture, the Othering of the non-American reader creates a sociolinguistic chasm, within which very little confluence of the individual and society takes place.