1856, Whitman was developing this figure in a specifically national mold, drawing again on the discourse of character that was so important to Bradley and other reformers. He writes to Emerson: “There is being fused a determined character, fit for the broadest use for the freewomen and freemen of The States … each indeed free, each idiomatic, as becomes live states and men, but each adhering to one enclosing general form of politics, manners, talk, [and] personal style.”94 Here, again, Whitman defines the “fit[ness]” of this figure by its capacity for broad “use”; it is not a model to aspire to but a facilitator of any number of future models, a figuring figure. In this way, what Whitman refers to as “character” is, in its formal sense, less like the “character” described in Halttunen’s work and more akin to the avatar figure Bradley would develop in Life: a tool for developing a self as aggregated judgments, a formal index through which the “free” and “idiomatic” might be expressed and habituated. Because of this, we might say that Whitman’s “determined character” is the lithographic press itself—or the “forme” of the printing press, a wooden frame that held movable type in place during the printing process—rather than the iterated impressions made from it.
Coming to a similar conclusion, Wai Chee Dimock has argued that the self at the center of Whitman’s poem is “turned into a categoric idea, so that it can remain structurally inviolate even as it undergoes many substantive variations, even as it entertains an infinite number of contingent terms.”95 Whitman does this, she claims, to eliminate the role of chance in the ethics of democracy. In short, the formal democratic subject must be vacated of luck, of the contingent, in order to guarantee the categorical equality of all human actors in general and all democratic U.S. citizens in particular. In order for there to be a universal and unified notion of justice, chance cannot play a role in its validity: “[Whitman’s is] a noncontingent poetics, which … in effect eliminates luck by eliminating the invidious distinctions it fosters…. The objects of Whitman’s attention are admitted as strict equals, guaranteed equals, by virtue of both the minimal universal “Me” they all have in common, and of a poetic syntax which greets each of them in exactly the same way, as a grammatical unit, equivalently functioning and structurally interchangeable.”96 For justice to be equally applicable, from the slave to the auctioneer, the structure of subjectivity must be seen as strictly equivalent across the board.
What Dimock highlights here dovetails with the general ethic of fair play that, in important ways, acts as a limit to the actions and potentials of the avatar figure as discussed. In gaming terms, the price one must pay for playing a game is to accept its rules, as well as its form, format, and medium. These limitations rule out certain possibilities, both strategic and otherwise. For instance, we saw earlier that the rules of Mansion insisted on purely linear motion. Because this structured the possibility of the player’s counter, it forced the player to move to “Immodesty” when a less linear rule system might have allowed a move to “Truth” or “Humanity” instead. Through this, the game guaranteed a structural interchangeability, a kind of justice, for all the players; it produced a discrete output for any input the chance roll of the die might impose. This is not to say that luck does not play a role, but from the perspective of the player its role is strictly determined by rules of the game. The self cannot take advantage of its own luck one way or another, and so the concept of luck as we understand it can be said to disappear. Contingency may exist in the spin of the teetotum, but in effect (to borrow Dimock’s phrase) it looks as much like determinism as anything else—it looks, in fact, a lot like the “breath of God” that Bryant imagines—because all players are forced into an “equivalently functioning” agency.97 Accordingly, Mansion produces a selfhood that is akin to the self Dimock reads into “Song of Myself, “a self that is beyond luck [and correspondingly] is … barred from the contingent.”98 The present analysis of Life, however, offers an alternative perspective on Whitman’s poem, one that is developed through an understanding of the operational differences between Life and Mansion.
While the rules of Life do adjudicate certain core conditions of winning and losing, contingency is built into the role of the players—even beyond their unruly interactions around the game board—via a foregrounding of the tactical roles they might take within the algorithm at any given turn. Whitman’s use of the second-person perspective and inclusive disjunction shows him employing a similar mechanism, despite the syntactic and categorical concessions he makes to enable it. While the text itself may be notably “silent about those objects that, for us, are not categoric, not interchangeable or substitutable,”99 it is only as silent as a game board without players. Whitman invokes this in one of his most pointed passages, calling to mind both the symbolism of gaming amusement and the chaotic role of interpersonal sensation. He writes:
Let up again to feel the puzzle of puzzles,
And that we call Being.
To be in any form, what is that?
If nothing lay more developed the quahaug and its callous shell were enough.
Mine is no callous shell,
I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,
They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.
I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,
To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.
Is this then a touch? …. quivering me to a new identity.100
Indeed, via a purely formal analysis the poem appears “callous.” But one cannot determine “callous[ness]” simply by appearance; one must be willing to “touch” or interact with the object in question, and it is precisely on the issue of interaction (a central aspect of the avatar figure) that Whitman lingers in this passage. Here, he is at pains to force the poetic medium to reach out, despite the coldness of the textual space, to develop a relationship with its readers. If, as he has written earlier, “you shall assume” the same position as the “I” of the poem, then the sensational image of “stir[ring], press[ing], [and] feel[ing]” serves to draw you into the ontic materiality of holding a book, of touching that book with your fingers and restlessly moving about in your seat. And, tellingly, what you are touching in this moment is the material document of this poem, a poem Whitman described in his notebooks as “someone,” just as he does here in the moment of touch: “To touch [your?] person to some one else’s is about as much as [you?] can stand.”
Again, this “someone” is a variable in need of substantiation; and this substantiation requires a nonabstract agent such as the reader. What of yourself will you begin to associate with the book, the ideas, the time spent in reading, the place that surrounded you, and this thing that kept you there? How will these associations change both you and the book? With these questions in mind, it is not surprising that Whitman seizes the moment of touch to foreground the “instant[aneity]” and disruptiveness of this sensational connection to the poem as a path to “new identit[ies],” stable points of focus in the undecided algorithm that makes up the poem. One might see here a correspondence between the “callous shell” and the game marker, and the non-callous shell that such a marker becomes when it is touched by the player—moved in ways that “quiver” it to a new position of possibility on the board, a potential “new identity.” If Whitman’s text is silent in these moments, it is because interactivity takes place across the interface of the book, between the text and the reader, between the player and the avatar. Again, “Not I, not any one else can travel that road for you, / You must travel it for yourself.”101 An avatar, in one sense, may be a figure of formal representation, but its fundamental value for Whitman lies in its ability to mediate between a productive simulation and the user’s reality. “Folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real
