of the hand, not simply of the mind.
In what follows, I contend that Bradley wasn’t alone in his engagement with an emerging figure of agency constituted through touchy media operations. If the mid-nineteenth-century board game was a site of experimentation in this frame, so too was the book—in ways that can be lost if our approach is primarily oriented toward textual dimensions of meaning. This chapter invests in the idea that both reading and gameplay were variations on coincident habits of self-production that were constituted and expanded by both the formal and the forensic materialities of their respective media.16 Subjecting Life to deeper scrutiny enables contrapuntal opportunities to think about the variety of social practices that were or could be imagined to ally with the term “reading.” Appropriately enough, a compelling and recognizable counterpoint to Bradley’s reemployment of the checkerboard is a “song” reinvented by the affordances of the book.
The same year that Milton Bradley was making his fateful trip to the city, Walt Whitman trekked in the opposite direction, leaving Brooklyn to oversee the third edition of Leaves of Grass in Massachusetts.17 In this collection, one can see elements of the same avatar-like perspective on self that was so integral to Bradley’s game. Opening with “Song of Myself”—a poem he identified simply by its first line, “I celebrate myself,” in early manuscripts—Whitman frames agency as a kind of avatar positionality with regard to social choices.18 And like Life, Whitman’s poem was deeply invested in the interface of things, ideas, and personal potential: “Put in my poems,” he directs himself in early notebooks, “American things, idioms, materials, persons, groups, minerals, vegetables, animals, etc.”19 Though Whitman desired the poem to be a “channel of thoughts and things,” this channel was not only a text but also a weight and volume that strategically gestured at the unsettling tactilities of the body itself.20 There is some cause to believe, especially when considering The Checkered Game of Life and “Song of Myself” in a shared mediascape, that Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is less a masterpiece of abstract and lyric yearning, and more a material instrument of occasion—a work indebted to and embedded in its medium that persistently asks its reader to register their position qua reading body: “Both in and out of the game,” as the speaker frames himself.
With Virginia Jackson’s piercing critique of lyric genre in the reception of Emily Dickinson in mind, I should note that in the effusive pages of the 1855 Leaves of Grass Whitman never once refers to his writing as “lyric.” He instead writes of “poems,” “poets,” “orations,” “rhyme,” “meter,” and of course “song.” Each of these terms reflects the conscious impact of form, both within the domain of verbal-textual governance (“meter”) and within the domain of medium and performance (“oration”). Through this terminology Whitman documents a materialist schema of poetry as an explicit technology of social arrangement, taking an expansive view of what a “poem” might be above and beyond a companion to private intellectual meditation. In his best-case scenario, as articulated thirty years later to Horace Traubel, a poem was an inducement for “people to take me along with them and read me in the open air”—bringing sensation and cognition into a radically overlapping alignment.21 This entanglement of paper and text, reading and the body of the reader, coincides with a rhetorical fusion of the first- and second-person perspective in Whitman’s poem to imagine a promiscuously creative interplay between texts and bodies, ideas and things, exercise as deciding-upon and exercise as physical preparation.22 As I mentioned earlier, Bradley’s game pivots on a similar equivocation in the act of exercising “judgment,” and this coincidence is a prompt to further inquiry.
My purpose, then, in putting Whitman’s work into conversation with Bradley’s materialization of avatar-selfhood in The Checkered Game of Life, is to supplement and expand traditionally textual approaches to Leaves of Grass while broadening our view of reading practices in the nineteenth century. It’s not as though we need to take a poet’s word as gospel, but it is intriguing to recall that even Whitman himself protests, “No one will get at my verses who insists upon viewing them as a literary performance, or attempt at such a performance, or as aiming mainly toward art or aestheticism.”23 Yet in the field of literary criticism we haven’t always done much to address this (admittedly paradoxical-seeming) challenge to the general methods of our practice. Consider this the experiment of the present chapter.
When read alongside Life, Whitman’s voracious “I” can be seen as an avatar-like position within an algorithmic piece of writing: not a lyric ego but a more uncanny physical marker of a place where we might linger, a leaving (like the stain from sitting in the grass) that enables a reader to both leave (as in exit) and leave (as in grow and flourish in one place). The cascade of inclusive “or”s that characterize Whitman’s writing implicate the reader in something more than catalog-like reportage scanned along linear and sequential vectors. Instead, they become an opportunity to define a self that chooses, that decides among complex, but limited, collections of marked subject positions within the American social milieu, even as one feels the stasis and limitation that situate this freedom. Later, Whitman would generalize this view to the whole of Leaves of Grass, writing, “You do not read [it], it is someone that you see in action, in war, or on a ship, or climbing the mountains, or racing along and shouting aloud in pure exultation.”24 Here he places distinct emphasis on the inclusive possibilities of this “someone,” noting a game-like series of disjunctions that one might choose to seize upon in defining the poem’s character. Through this determined emphasis on inclusive disjunction, he can be seen as making an intervention into nineteenth-century debates on characterization—moving the conversation beyond Lockean notions of the self as a passive intellectual vessel (a soft malleable brain upon which the world is impressed) and toward the same avatar-like self that Bradley imagines in Life.
The sections that follow enlist the models of avatar action and social legibility that are constructed and highlighted by Bradley’s board game to arrive at a different way of reading Whitman’s “leaves.” In parallel, I also consider the broad sociohistorical significance of Bradley’s game. Because avatar is defined by action (the “interactive” aspect of Meadows’s definition), it makes sense to trace its operational dynamics first in Life, contrasting it with the other board games of the period as a way of understanding the competing small media materializations of selfhood that existed in Bradley’s moment. Using Bradley’s innovations to codify these differences, I reexamine Whitman’s deployment of form and materiality in “Song of Myself.” What I hope to gain in this move is a more substantial way of thinking about the literary materialities that supplement Whitman’s linguistic deployment of exchangeable poetic grammars. Bradley’s game foregrounds the mechanics of avatar agency in ways that are obliged to accept media materiality as a given—the game takes place on a lithographed sheet that will inevitably bear the torn and scratched traces of its interactions. Whitman, America’s “printer-poet,” plays a coincident game by emphasizing the embodiment of writing in ways that echo these deep engagements with form, both on and as the page. By placing categorical subjectivity alongside disruptive visual patterning and persistent extratextual indication, Whitman’s poem resists the breathless ideality of language and rehearses the interleaving of materials and agency in the act of reading.
Milton Bradley and the Game of Self-Representation
Born on 8 November 1836 and raised in Lowell, Massachusetts, by working-class parents, Bradley had a persistent interest in the practical uses of art.25 The pragmatic tenor of his aesthetic pursuits appears to have been conditioned by a singular coupling of tendencies: a taste for the world of technical engineering paired with a knack for interweaving social threads. By 1853, Bradley had proven himself an ambitious teenager, navigating the bustling Lowell industrial scene with grace, “peddling paper, envelopes, pens, ink, wafers, etc., through the boarding houses in the corporations.”26 He recalls, “All the mill girls at that time were intelligent Americans, and in some of the larger houses there were fifty girls in a tenement. Usually I would find from ten to twenty-five assembled around the dining table
