that these momentary tactics or inspirations will begin to be inked—linked to positive strategic outcomes that the player wants to reproduce, in the game of course but perhaps in real life as well (since this distinction is specifically rendered ambivalent by the content of Life). Once the players’ habits are “inked” they can then be reproduced and transposed into different situations, as different individual documents. In the case of printmaking, each individual document maintains the idiosyncrasies of the medium and the pressing (how might an errant drop of sweat gradually change the picture over the course of many impressions?), while still maintaining a proximate genetic similarity that can read as a single text. In the case of character, this text is a person’s public identity or avatar. Much as the lithographic press “forcibly impress[es]” its prints upon the many leaves of paper and cardboard that make up an edition run, the player now has a sense of repeatable, but nevertheless potentially mutable, character. And even if this reading requires a few logical leaps, a bit of calculated risk in this regard may be warranted. Because even allowing for some amount of analogic fuzziness, it seems to me ultimately imperative to consider the degree to which extant technologies of reproducibility—the resources, tools, and mechanisms that were the everyday associates of media producers in this era—must have had bearing on the figures that these media producers deployed to imagine collective life. It is unlikely that the specific affordances of material reproducibility had no bearing on models of social and personal reproduction. Discussed further in the next chapter, metaphors of self are nearly always drawn from those models most ready at hand (often literally).
For now, suffice to say that the idea of social reproducibility reminds us that Bradley’s game participated in an emerging discourse, one insisting that the relationship between selfhood and society or selfhood and history was not passive.75 Life supplements and contrasts itself to earlier figurations of Romantic-era selfhood, aptly visualized by the counter of a game like Mansion. In these previous figures the self is a cipher, or in Locke’s language an “empty cabinet” through which the events of life pass. If these events happen to be virtuous, the vessel gains value. A poem prefacing Mansion explains that the game “gives to those their proper due, / Who various paths of vice pursue, / And shows (while vice destruction brings) / That good from every virtue springs.”76 Unlike in Life, where a virtue like truth is framed as a strategic position and may not “spring” positive results, Mansion both thematically and operationally asserts that one’s choices have very little to do with outcomes. Agency is the ability of the individual to know rather than the ability to decide. This perspective can be summed up by William Wordsworth’s position in “Expostulation and Reply,” first published in the 1798 Lyrical Ballads:
The eye it cannot choose but see,
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where’er they be,
Against, or with our will.
Nor less I deem that there are powers,
Which of themselves our minds impress,
That we can feed this mind of ours,
In a wise passiveness.77
Here we are given the image of a “passive” self “impress[ed]” upon by the circumstances of the world—much in line with the Lockean metaphor to which Emerson found himself responding in “The Transcendentalist.” Will is subordinate to the hungry mind that fills itself with sights and sounds, and the player’s role is, again, one of accounting rather than accountability.
This ideology of “wise passiveness” is reflected in the American literary context by a poet like William Cullen Bryant. Taking the torch of Wordsworth’s wise cipher, Bryant’s speaker in “The Prairies” (1832) collapses history and nature into a justification for the transcendent self of the present. Bryant writes:
The Prairies. I behold them for the first,
And my heart swells, while the dilated sight
Takes in the encircling vastness. Lo! they stretch
In airy undulations, far away,
As if the ocean, in his gentlest swell,
Stood still, with all his rounded billows fixed,
And motionless for ever.78
The viewer “Takes in the encircling vastness,” transforming the immensity and incorrigibility of the natural world into a “sight” that locates the speaker who has mastered it, much as a Claude glass frames an image and points an optic line from the scene to the eyes of its viewer. Moreover, in this instance, “tak[ing] in” amounts to a similar accounting to that found in The Mansion of Happiness, where the player who takes in the most virtues is given his or her “due” in the form of forward movement toward the endpoint of the game. The ebb and flow of accounting is reflected in Bryant’s teleological perspective later in the poem: “Thus change the forms of being. Thus arise / Races of living things, glorious in strength, / And perish, as the quickening breath of God / Fills them, or is withdrawn.”79 The player who stands at the endpoint of history, at the top of the game, occupies that position because the “breath of God”—or the roll of the teetotum—has made it that way. Within a naturalized Protestant ethic of grace and election, those who have experienced withdrawals of this “breath,” who have moved backward on the board, have only gotten what was due to them all along.
Yet if informed passivity is a virtue linking Mansion to early Romantic modes of privileged self-awareness, then we find an analogue for the interactive self of Life in Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” While both Wordsworth’s and Bryant’s speakers appear to yearn for a perfect passivity within the game of life that allows them a certain amount of subjective interior transcendence, Whitman’s “gigantic and generous treatment” never quite leaves the active and exterior parts of this game behind. As an attempt at both prompting and rendering social life within the constraints of paper media, Whitman’s textual subject is always, as he writes, “both in and out of the game.”80 Accordingly, his use of the second person and repetition in the poem shows him determined to leave the reader with a strong sense of implication, responsibility, and material embeddedness within the world he demarcates.81 Tracing the medial continuities between Bradley and Whitman enables a reading of “Song of Myself” that moves beyond the apparent categorical emptiness of its “I” and toward a more active understanding of the poem’s potentials and sensual interventions.
Walt Whitman and the Puzzle of Puzzles
A curious thing happens if you squint a bit at the title page and frontispiece of the first edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (Figure 6). Though the image of an author on the verso (that is, the left side of the binding crease) was a typical accompaniment to recto titling (on the right side), the proportion of image to text feels playfully conceived. A tiny (yet full-bodied save for the lower legs) Whitman gazes at you ambiguously, self-composed, leaning against one hip; you can barely make out the eyes, but it is certain that he looks in your direction—a challenge, an invitation? Glancing away from the intensity of this miniature man, you scan to the recto and are accosted by a massive bit of interposing signage, a constellation of font sizes that produces a near shouting effect: Leaves! of (this time even bigger) Grass! Below you note, in a more subdued font, the place and year of publication, “Brooklyn, New York: 1855.” In the context of the kind of public banners and billboards that historian David Henkin has so vividly recovered as part of our urban model of mid-nineteenth-century New York City, it’s almost as if the title itself were a sign hanging in the air, one much closer to you than the provoking man
