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Solitude, Singularity, Seriality: Whitman vis-a-vis Fourier

2006; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 73; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/elh.2006.0019

1080-6547

Michael Moon,

Poetry Analysis and Criticism

Solitude, Singularity, Seriality:Whitman vis-á-vis Fourier Michael Moon One evening as the sun went down and the jungle fire was burning, Down the track came a hobo, hikin' And he said, Boys, I'm not turning— I'm headed for a land that's far away, beside the crystal fountain. So come with me, we'll go and see the Big Rock Candy Mountain. In the Big Rock Candy Mountains, there's a land that's fair and bright, Where the handouts grow on bushes and you sleep out every night, Where the boxcars all are empty and the sun shines every day On the birds and the bees and the cigarette trees, The lemonade springs where the bluebird sings In the Big Rock Candy Mountain. In the Big Rock Candy Mountains, all the cops have wooden legs, And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth and the hens lay soft-boiled eggs. The farmers' trees are full of fruit and the barns are full of hay. Oh, I'm bound to go where there ain't no snow, Where the rain don't fall, the wind don't blow, In the Big Rock Candy Mountain. In the Big Rock Candy Mountains, you never change your socks, And the little streams of alcohol come a-tricklin' down the rocks. The brakemen have to tip their hats and the railway bulls are blind. There's a lake of stew and whiskey, too. You can paddle all around 'em in a big canoe In the Big Rock Candy Mountain. [End Page 303] In the Big Rock Candy Mountains, the jails are made of tin, And you can walk right out again as soon as you are in. There ain't no short-handled shovels, no axes, saws, or picks. I'm a-goin' to stay where you sleep all day, Where they hung the Turk that invented work In the Big Rock Candy Mountain. The success of the Coen brothers' film O Brother, Where Art Thou (2000), and especially of its soundtrack, had the effect of temporarily propelling Harry McClintock's 1928 recording of "The Big Rock Candy Mountain" back to somewhere near the top of the charts. Here at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it may be hard to hear much more in the song than some over-familiar strains of "old-timey music," but at the time McClintock recorded the song seventy-five years ago it was just coming to the end of its long career as an anthem of a far-flung "hobohemian" sub-culture that had strong affinities with such varied social movements as anarchism, communalism, and tramping. Although its topography of "candyland" may sound innocuous, the song actually gives us a key back into the heyday of the ideal of roving cameraderie that Walt Whitman saluted in poems such as "Song of the Open Road," and, even farther back, into the protosocialist utopias—social, economic, and sexual—planned by the French theorist Charles Fourier. Or so I shall argue in this essay. But in order to do that, I need first to discuss the relation of the individual person to the group in Whitman's writing, and, in turn, the relation of Whitman's way of imagining this to Fourier's theories of social and sexual seriality. I. Walt Whitman projects two equally powerful, in some ways quite contradictory, versions of himself through his poetry. I believe we are to take this contradictoriness as part of the design of the writing, this being the poet who famously indemnified himself at the beginning of his career by announcing, "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself; / I am large, I contain multitudes."1 One of these versions of himself is as the celebrator of the American social mass, in which he is part of and in the midst of the throngs of the citizens, laborers, loafers, and holiday-makers the poetry evokes: "I Hear America Singing." The other is the "Solitary Singer," the title of Gay Wilson [End Page 304] Allen's long-standard 1955 biography of Whitman, a designation for the poet that derives from his own writing, as in the line, "Solitary...