PARADOX OF IDENTITY
381
gest people, and we ought to have the biggest conceptions. The biggest
conceptions of course would bring forth in time the biggest performances.
We had only to be true to ourselves, to pitch in and not be afraid, to
fling Imitation overboard and fix our eyes upon our National Indi–
viduality. "I declare," he cried, "there's a career for a man, and I've
twenty minds to decide, on the spot, to embrace it-to be the consum–
mate, typical, original, national American Artist! It's inspiring!"
Not only the doctrine but the occasion here is Whitman's:
Roderick's inspiration of a moment Whitman might be said to have
expanded into a poetic career. Reclining on the grass above the virgin
natural vistas of America- this is such an archetypal situation in
Whitman that even our advertisers have long since learned to ex–
ploit it as a ritualistic
mise en scene
for the evocation of "the Ameri–
can Dream." But a paradoxical irony inheres in all such scenes; and
here that irony clearly emerges in the fact that Rowland should
make his complaint of "everlasting impatience" ("Is one's only safety
then in flight?") and that Roderick should wax rhapsodic about
"our National Individuality" from a position which is already, in
effect, a personal refuge. Our national society, it seems, is always
being affirmed (as in
Cinerama,
for instance) from some great height
or distance, from a situation of personal withdrawal and sohcitude,
eminently free of all social trammels.
If,
then, we allegorize Whitman
here as the enthusiastic Roderick, we must also place the expatriate
James by his side as the troubled Rowland: in vastly different ways
both men were obsessed, and to some extent enthralled, by the mani–
fold paradox of our American self-consciousness. Certainly no other
of our writers have been more obsessively concerned with the 'Ameri–
canness' of the American personality. In James that paradox became
refined into the multiple ironies of our moral sensibility, while in
Whitman it remained the native paradox of democracy-that "sphinx
of Democracy" that James let more or less alone. But the riddle of
the sphinx is, I believe, the same in both; the truth that each made
his own is implicit in the other. For if it was James who knew that
no American subjectivity, no matter how seemingly individual and
"free," could ever be understood as anything but American-and
precisely in its very insistence on its spiritual freedom and innocence;
so among all champions of the American Dream it is only Whitman
who constantly remembers to represent the condition of that dream-
