Slaves of Nativity

We have to wonder then, how much of what we are roots not from what we do, but from what has been done before us. 

David S. Reynolds’ cultural biography of the poet Walt Whitman “Walt Whitman’s America” gives us the detailed portrait of the antecedents that bred the poet.

Throughout the biography there is an over emphatic, almost incarcerating importance placed upon the social and economic background in which Whitman was brought up.  Born in 1819, the poet got to experience the last reminiscences of a rural America, and lived through the vicissitudes caused by economic transition to capitalism. But permeating in his life and work was a sense of perpetual (perhaps delusional) nostalgia for simpler past times, even ones previous to his birth. Whitman exhaustingly carries the weight of an unreachable past, and can only make sense of the present by lingering in his precedents. This is evidenced in his poetry, explicitly in his 1856 poem “By Blue Ontario’s Shore” where he writes:

                “Underneath all, Nativity,

                 I swear I will stand by my own nativity.”

Although Nativity proportions certain clarity to a people, it is also quite a burden. I can relate to Whitman’s thinking because in my family, the weight placed on family history is similar. In birth, one already bears the load of family history with the idiosyncrasies, mistakes, attitudes, and ideologies inherent to that heavy concept: Nativity. Because when one’s family has inhabited the same piece of land for such a long time, then one has to cohabit with the unerased, eternal action reaction chain from distant lineage. The genealogy that should be irrelevant to the present stares heavily into every action, and you, you are just another link to the chain, another proliferator of ritual and genetic tradition.

According to the book, the mentality of the time being revolved around believing that “Education is something, but PARENTAGE is EVERYTHING; because it dyes in the wool, and thereby exerts an influence on character almost infinitely more powerful than all other conditions put together.” (p.22)  In response to this, Walt “[who] could not change his parents, in poetry he constantly reinvented them and –by the law of hereditary descent- himself.” (p.22)

So although Walt bore the innate burdens of Nativity, he uses literature as an opportunity to abide to other constraints of character and history brought by an imaginary lineage.

Whitman’s obstinacy concerning parentage, nevertheless, is just him trying to make sense of his own being. It is easy and satisfying to attribute certain attributes of one’s self to genetics. Although obscure and far-fetched, it is less frustrating to attribute one’s “bad temper” or one’s “enthusiasm for thrill” to a predisposition than to the ether. Learning all of this contributes to a deeper and clearer understanding of Whitman’s work, which despite its transcendence, is nothing more than the expression of a conscience’s profundity.