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New Literary History, 2008, 39: 619643

The Egyptian Pronoun:Lyric, Novel, the Book of the Dead

Wai Chee Dimock

Does it make sense to think o literary history as a special kindo world history, and what are the consequences o globalizingin this way, claiming the entire planet as an interlocking archive?

How many continents can we realistically embrace, what time rames be-come necessary, and do these yield a new morphology o genres, along

with new longitudes and latitudes? What is the relation between scaleand scope in this exercise, between details observable at close range andpatterns discernable rom aar?

In what ollows, I propose to go back to the ancient worldto Egyptto make a case or a literary history with just this broad compass. Cru-cial to this undertaking is what Anne Freadman calls an inter-generic

landscape, populated not by discrete classes o literary objects but bythe breakdown o that discreteness, a process o transposing, adapting,and cross-ertilizing, enacted on every route, every locale.1 The his-tory o genres, told as a ormal diasporaa history o scattering andrecombiningcalls or a theater o maximum length and width, or tothe extent that movement has always been a human propensity, choreo-graphed by words no less than by bodies, the relational arcs generatedmust span several continents and several thousand years. Far-ung kin-ship emerges here as key. Lyric and novel, not ordinarily imagined as

having much to do with each other, are recast and reintegrated by theseenlarged coordinates. Their kinship is counterintuitive, though I hopenot unthinkable, or given the importance o Egypt as the crossroads orancient civilizationsperhaps the frst example o what we now call theglobal Southit is quite possible that seemingly disparate traditionsmight arise here, a nodal point rom which several lines o descent canbe traced. To reclaim this Aro-Asian nexus, to put it at the head o anetwork subsequently extending rom the Mediterranean across the At-lantic, is to imagine a globalism o the largest scale, one that would seem

to require the sort o distant reading proposed by Franco Moretti.2By distant reading, Moretti has in mind a process o deliberate reduc-

tion and abstraction, necessary in order to put the whole world to a

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new literary history620

census, to track the total sum o its literary productions, tabulating theseas a series o graphs, maps, and evolutionary trees.3 Close reading has noplace in this kind o globalism, or Morettis method is quantitative rather

than textual, an aerial survey yielding a set o statistics. Across-the-boardtally takes precedence over any fne-grained engagement. Moretti doesnot mince words here: I the text itsel disappears, he writes, it is oneo those cases when one can justifably say, less is more.4 What he callsor is nothing less than a remaking o literary studies into a branch omacroeconomics, a global accounting based on a presumed ungibilityamong texts, and thereore using aggregation as the key principle, surelyone o the most interesting proposals on the table.

Still, there are limits to what numbers can tell us. Those limits are es-

pecially severe when we are dealing, not with supposedly discrete genres,but with the unplanned, unsupervised, and oten unclassifable relationsevolving among genres. A work-in-progress, held in dynamic suspensionamong multiple players, this intergeneric landscape is most interesting inits incompleteness, its susceptibility to new input, its tendency to conoundfxed taxonomies through the unpredictableness o local variations. Sincethese variations stem rom multiple actors, their scales and degrees oresolution have to be determined case by case. They are not countableon any single platorm and do not lend themselves to a unifed tally.

Indeed, they might not even be statistically signifcantmight not yielda fgure or a rule that is valid across the boardthough they are ar romnegligible rom a literary standpoint. Literary history, in this light, standsat the very limits o aggregation: it tells us what tallying and averagingcannot. Not an aerial survey, the most vital orm it takes might turn outto be microhistory: a ground-level analysis o the complex membershipo individual texts, ocusing on words and syntax, and drawing on theirantecedents in letters, reading notes, and journal entries, as well as thearchives o publishing and marketing. This microhistory is crucial, orintergeneric relations are highly specifc, highly localized, based not onungibility but on particularity, and call or a burrowing into the texts,not a birds-eye view.

Kinship among genres, though a large-scale problem, is in this wayrescaled into a orm o close reading. This is what local variations callor. At the same time, or the concept o local variationto make sense,there has to be some larger universea playing feld sufciently robust,extended, and elementalthat can serve as the genetic environment, notan actualized feld but a feld o incipience, whose potentiality is bothmarked by such departures and in turn marks them as nontrivial. I thehistory o genres has to be downsized, miniaturized into microhistoryat some point, that scale reduction has orce only when it is seen as aresponse to the nonstandard, nongeneralizable, but also nonisolated

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621the egyptian pronoun

eect o a global diaspora, its scalar opposite. To take that diasporaseriously is to trace the contours o an extended network writ small. Itis to make up in recessional depth what is conceded away in the tight

knot o the textual ocus.This particular symbiosis between the micro and the macro suggests

that space and time might be complementary registers, that the scalingup or down on one side is best supported by some parallel action onthe other. To globalize the feld, deep time might turn out to be asnecessary as spatial expanse. In this essay I pursue this twin ocus, con-structing a trajectory that goes back to the second millennium BCE andusing this longue dureto chart a world history or a small grammaticaleature, the frst-person pronoun. This is a part o speech at once minute

and elemental, temporally ubiquitous and locally salient. No languageis without this eature; its usage is virtually coterminous with recordedhistory. And yet, as basic as it is, the pronoun is at the same time in-ectionally complex, calling or a continual discrimination o the ear,and generating an acoustic signature that roams across registers, withdierent accents that can be variously amplifed or muted, singled outor inspection or restored to a common abric. On the strength o thispronominal spectrum that can be heard either separately or togetheratonce modular and modulatingI propose a common ground or lyric

and novel, reconciling the practice o close reading (or close listening)with the cascading eects o a global environment. Lyric and novel areusually assigned to opposite ends o the literary scale, and assigned toradically dierent critical practices. They need not be. A literary historythat takes stock o boththat enlarges on small amily resemblancestraced through the singularity as well as the continuity o these genresmight turn out to be one o the most ruitul lines o inquiry. A crucialfgure or this exercise is Walt Whitman, who writes about atoms as

well as multitudes, whose frst-person pronoun, with its deep roots andextraordinary claims, gives us just this dynamics o collectivization andindividuation, not only encircling the globe but also gathered aroundnodes o kinship.

Microhistory: Walt Whitman

Whitman seldom read any book deliberately through, Richard Mau-rice Bucke, his literary executor, reported. [H]e seemed to read a ewpages here and a ew there, and pass rom place to place. Once in a

while, though, he would get sufciently interested in a volume to readit all. I think he read almost i not quite the whole o Renous Egypt,and Brusch-beys Egypt but these cases are exceptional.5

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This reading list, read with exceptional care, must come as a surpriseto those o us who think o Whitman as a quintessential American poet,never straying much rom the United States. This is not altogether true,

as his wide reading attests. Whitmans interest in Egypt was thereore notan anomaly, but part o his general interest in the ancient civilizationso the world. For him, these are the necessary starting points or all ous. Hindostan, Egypt, Assyria, Persia, China, Phoenicia, and other elderlands, preceded the Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews, he wrote.6 Whatdoes it mean to assign priority to the East rather than the West? In oneo the notes and ragments collected by Bucke, Whitman gave us a liter-ary history sel-conscious about this new orientation: The frst literatureto be mentioned is doubtless Assyrian literature, and the literature o

Egypt and Hindostan. Many, many thousand years since, books, histo-ries, poems, romances, Bibles, hymns, works illustrative o mechanics,science, arithmetic, humor, Government, war, manners, manuactureso all the principal themes o interest to civilized lie and to men and

women, were common in the great Asiatic cities o Nineveh and Babylonand their empires, and in the empire o Hindostan, and in the AricanMemphis and Thebes and through Egypt and Ethiopia.7 Literary his-tory is world history as ar as Whitman is concerned, with the bulk othe input coming rom Asia and Arica. Given what has already been

done, originality is a tough call or most o usor American poets inthe nineteenth century, and even or Greek poets in the ourth centuryBCE. [O]ne cannot at this day say anything new, I suppose, rom aliterary point o view, a problem already evident in the Iliad, Whitmansays, or that work was certainly o Asiatic genesis, as Homer himsel

wasconsiderations which seem curiously ignored.8 It is a mistake tothink o the West as a reestanding tradition, or it is heavily indebtedto Asia and Arica, both in the pursuit o scientifc knowledge and inthe writing o literary works important enough to be called deep divingbibles. Greek epic is a latecomer here, and American literature is barelyon the map, since the New World is just an outpost, a peninsula to thegreat civilized continents to the east.9

Whitman seems to have anticipated the groundbreaking (and muchdebated) recent work by Martin Bernal and Walter Burkert, arguing or

just this Asiatic genesis o Western culture. For Bernal, the Mediterra-nean was anEgyptiansea, with the ormative inuence owing rom southto north, rom Thebes and Memphis to Athens.10 For Burkert, Greece

was on the receiving end o a civilization still more ancient, located eastrather than south, in Mesopotamia, with Akkadian, Ugaritic, Phoenician,

Aramaic, and Egyptian oshoots.11 Whitmans hunches are very much inline with these recent arguments. This is not altogether surprising, orthe nineteenth century, with its interest in comparative philology and

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comparative religion, was already at the cusp o a paradigm shit, onethat Dipesh Chakrabarty would now call provincializing Europe.12 WithSanskrit seen as the ancestor o all European languages, the centrality o

the West could no longer be taken or granted.13

Emerson, Thoreau, andPoe were all drawn to the hieroglyphics o ancient Egypt, as John Irwinhas shown.14 Whitman was part o this general comparative climate. In anotebook entry, Fossil History, he writes: Comparative Philology study-ing languages as living organismssubject to organic laws o growth anddecayhas shown that we possess in speech a grand recorded Historyo Humanity, where in colossal outlines man, his afliations, migrations,

workings, growths, are drawn.15 Thanks to this colossal record embeddedin the phonemes o words, the European nations have all been tracked

back to Oriental oundations.16

And, among those Oriental oundations, two in particular standout: Egypt has ashed up rom the deeps o fty centuries with herantique and august civilization, and now rom the deciphering o thecuneiorm inscriptions o West Asia are emerging those old Assyrianand Babylonian worlds, venerable with years, coevals o primeval man.17

Assyria and Babylon are awe inspiring as historical monuments, but orWhitman it is Egypt that remains a living orce, still active in the world.In Good-Bye My Fancyhe writes about his visits to the Egyptian Museum

as an encounter with a civilization still present to us, its lineaments stillpalpable. The great Egyptian Collection was well up in Broadway, andI got quite acquainted with Dr. Abbott, the proprietorpaid many visitsthere, and had long talks with him, in connection with my readings omany books and reports on Egyptits antiquities, history, and how thingsand the scenes really look, and what the old relics stand or, as near as

we can now get.18

This intriguing nearness o Egypt probably began in the 1830s, whenWhitman was in his twenties, and lasted or the rest o his lie. He frstread Sir John Gardner Wilkinsons three-volume Manners and Customs ofthe Ancient Egyptians(183640), and later the abbreviated A Popular Accountof the Ancient Egyptians(1854), as well as Christian Karl Josias Bunsensfve-volumeEgypts Place in Universal History(184859) and Outlines of thePhilosophy of Universal History(1854).19 He probably also read George R.Gliddons Ancient Egypt, published in 1843 as a special number o theNew World, in which his own novel,Franklin Evans, had appeared just the

year beore.20 And he seems to have attended all six lectures on Egyptthat Gliddon gave at the Brooklyn Institute rom November to December1846, writing several notices in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.21

Egypt is central to Whitman because it was central to the ancientworld. From Wilkinson, Whitman would have gotten the idea that Egyptis the crossroads between two continents: not only is it the gateway to

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Arica, but there has always been a striking resemblance between theEgyptians and Asiatics, both as to their manners, customs, language, andreligion, so much so that some scholars have divided the country into

two parts, the east and west banks o the Nile, assigning the ormer toAsia, the latter to Arica, and taking the river as the boundary line othe continents.22 Whitman likes to think that this Aro-Asian nexus isimportant not only to himsel, but to all those Greek historians, poets,and philosophers he sees as his intellectual orebears. In his 1855 articleOne o the Lessons Bordering Broadwaya tribute to the EgyptianMuseumhe points to the large debt o Herodotus, Pythagoras, andHomer to their southern neighbor:

The length and breadth o Egyptian records cause to shrivel into nothingnessthe oldest reminiscences o modern nations. Herodotus, 400 years beore Christ,traveled through both Asia and Arica. At Memphis, in the latter continent, inthe temple o Hephaestos, or Phtha (the creator), the priests argued with himon astronomy and other branches o learning, and, much as he knew, he thereseemed to them, as to himsel, a child. . . . Not only Herodotus, but all theGrecian and Latin sages, poets, rhetors, sophists, and teachers o every descrip-tion, learned rom Egypt. The Egyptians, more than fve hundred years beoreChrist, taught Pythagoras that the sun was fxed in the center, and that theearth revolved around it. Homer is supposed to have visited Egypt in the ninth

century beore Christ; he was charged with gleaning some o his fnest fguresrom Egyptian sources.23

Herodotus, Pythagoras, Homer: one could not have asked or betterprecedents. And what these people teach us is the importance o hav-ing Egypt as a precedent in turn, one whose length and breath causemodern chronologies to shrivel into nothingness. This shriveling isnot as bad as it seems, or being reduced to nothing is not a bad way obeing mortal in world history, making the most o ones fnitude by disap-

pearing into the infnite. The Egyptians had a knack or it; their entirecivilization was built upon the enlargement o this apparent negativity,making death the mortar or an edifce that does not end with death.

Whitman pays tribute to this art in Salut au Monde! He writes: I seeEgypt and the Egyptians, I see the pyramids and obelisks, . . . / I seeat Memphis mummy-pits containing mummies embalmd, swathed inlinen cloth, lying there many centuries, / I look on the alln Theban,the large-balld eyes, the side-drooping neck, the hands olded acrossthe breast.24

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Posthumous Lie

Though allen, the large-balld eyes, the side-drooping neck, and

the olded hands o the Theban remain intact, with individual eatures,very much a part o the here and now. Ancient Egypt was a culture thatallowed or this longevity against the brute act o physical dissolution.Posthumous lie was very much a part o lie here: it dwelled on death tomake it more than death. InDemocratic Vistas, Whitman reers to thoseUnknown Egyptians, graving hieroglyphics.25 The hieroglyphics wereengraved on the sides o pyramids: the earliest versions o the Book of theDeadare called Pyramid Texts. But the Egyptians were also gravingthose hieroglyphics in the sense that the inert noun seems to be behaving

like an active verb, springing up like grass rom the dead who ertilizethem. In 1855, in the Astor Library in New York, Whitman had comeacross a large collection o etchings o Egyptian hieroglyphics and tombcarvings, published fteen years previously by the Italian archeologistIppolito Rossellini.26 One o them, showing the resurrection o Osiris,eatured twenty-eight stalks o wheat sprouting rom his cofn. One yearlater, this etching would inspire this line rom Whitman: The resur-rection o the wheat appears with pale visage out o its graves. 27 Thissprouting o lie rom death seems to have been a reproductive unction

peculiar to the Egyptian script, which Song o Mysel directly names asits generative medium. Or I guess it is a uniorm hieroglyphic, Whit-man says in section 5 o that poem, when the child brings him the grass,adding, And now it seems to me the beautiul uncut hair o graves. 28The beautiul uncut hair o graves comes rom the white heads oold mothers, rom the colorless beards o old men, and rom theaint red roos o mouths. These diverse orms are interrelated; theycan be recycled across a chromatic continuum. Through that recycling,mortality becomes a point o transit rather than a terminal point, with

transmutation across species coming ater the death o any individualmember: The smallest sprout shows there is really no death, / And iever there was it led orward lie, and does not wait at the end to arrestit (SM 34).

The dead are in this sense the undead, since they are reproducedover and over again. They come back as grass, and they also comeback in other orms. Whitman was unusually prescient to dwell on thismortuary sequence in 1855, when Leaves of Grassfrst appeared. In theollowing decade, as the looming threat o the Civil War turned into

grim statisticsan estimated 620,000 ell in battle between 1861 and1865, dwarfng any war casualties beore or sincethe entire nationmight be said to have been engaged in a mortuary sequence, a collec-tive work o killing, dying, and mourning.29 Whitman, who went South

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in 1863 to care or the wounded soldiers in Washington, DC and wroteabout it inDrum-Tapsand the Civil War section oSpecimen Days, knewsuch carnage intimately. Still, there is no fnality even here, no absolute

devastation, or the dead do not stay under the ground or long. Theyrise up almost immediately, as they do in Ashes o Soldiers: Noise-less as mists and vapors / From their graves in the trenches ascending,/ From cemeteries all through Virginia and Tennessee, / From everypoint o the compass out o the countless graves, / In wated clouds, inmyriads large, or squads o twos or threes or single ones they come, /

And silently gather round me.30

The dead not only rise rom their graves, they do so with a defnitepurpose, making their way to a frst-person pronoun that awaits them,

that relieves them o their mortality, turning that into a lie orce. Therecycling that underwrites posthumous lie is very much at work here. Asmists and vapors, the dead are destined to morph into other shapes, justas their ashes have a literal, ertilizing unction. It is this chemistry,this sequel o transormations, that Whitman emphasizes at the end othe poem:

Make these ashes to nourish and blossom,O love, solve all, ructiy all with the last chemistry.Give me exhaustless, make me a ountain,That I exhale love rom me wherever I go like a moist perennial dew,For the ashes o all dead soldiers South or North.

(492)

The conjunction or (wishul but not altogether utile) puts the CivilWar frmly behind it: it does not matter now whether the dead comerom South or North, whether they are Conederate or Union, or de-composed into ashes, they make the same kind o ertilizer. (In an earlier,happier moment, Whitman has written: And as to you corpse I think

you are good manure, but that does not oend me [SM 87].) Subjectto the same chemical reaction, they come out as perennial dew romthe mouth o the frst-person pronoun, a return to the elements thatrecasts sectional conicts as mere ephemera. The mortuary sequence,in Whitmans hands, is benign, even-tempered, endlessly reproductive,and endlessly harmonizing. It reunites the nation, even as it reunitesthe living and the dead.

Still, on this score the American poet is no match or the Egyptians.Thanks to the unusual lexical capabilities o the hieroglyphics, posthu-

mous lie in this language is not only durable, taken or granted, butdizzying in its variety, probably more so than in any other language. Thedead here is not a single entity, absolutely and uniormly dead, but givenseven dierent names, each dying (or persevering) in its own way, each

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with a dierent relation to the world o the living. While the khat, thephysical body, remains buried in the tomb ater mummifcation, the ka,or double (an abstract embodiment o all the attributes o individuality

or personality) is not confned at all, but ree to roam, eat and drink, andenjoy all the oerings and urnishings in the tomb. Also not confned isthe ba, or soul, an aspect o the dead with an even greater reedom omovement. According to E. A. Wallis Budge, this ba

dwelt in the ka, and seems to have had the power o becoming corporeal or in-corporeal at will; it had both substance and orm, and is requently depicted onthe papyri and monuments as a human-headed hawk; in nature and substance itis stated to be ethereal. It had the power to leave the tomb, and to pass up intoheaven where it was believed to enjoy an eternal existence in a state o glory; itcould, however, and did, revisit the body in the tomb, and rom certain texts itseems that it could re-animate it and hold converse with it. 31

In its plurality o orms, the Egyptian dead is a taxonomic nightmare,hard to pin down. The pronoun I, used by such a being, can be anynumber o things: it can be either embodied or disembodied, still onearth or even back in the tomb, but possibly also aoat somewhere, insome indeterminate region in the vastness o the universe. In the Glid-don Lectures at the Brooklyn Institute in 1846, Whitman would have

encountered such a pronoun frsthand: dead, but not deceased, notdeparted, and enjoying a posthumous reedom unknown to the living.During the last lecture, he reported, Gliddon treated his audience toseveral translations o the inscriptions upon the mummy cases, whichis to say, rom the Book of the Dead.32 Those translations were also to beound in volume 5 o BunsensEgypts Place in Universal History, with thedead regularly saying things like this: I went in as a Hawk, I came outas a Phoenix, and I have opened the doors o the heaven, the doorso the earth open to me.33

Here then is the I that Whitman wants, an individuation oreverresilient, unhumbled and unconstrained by death. With input rom amortuary practice ourishing in the south and east o the Mediterranean,the integrity o this pronoun is not dependent on the permanence othe physical body. Corporeal dissolution is a spur here, or this seem-ingly destructive orce also turns out to be a reproductive orce. Thepronoun I remains intact in its wake: lusty, lustul, phoenixlike andhawklike, ree to go back and orth across the line o mortality andacross the boundaries o species. This is the pronoun we encounter in

Whitman: a poetic persona born o an ancient presumption about thedead and laying claim to a reedom o entry and exit that was once theEgyptian deads imagined privilege. Unscrew the locks rom the doors!/ Unscrew the doors themselves rom their jambs! Whitman writes in

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Song o Mysel (SM 52). Near the end o the poem he also says: Thespotted hawk swoops by and accuses . . . he complains o my gab and myloitering (SM 89). Like the hawk, this I is a world traveler, claiming

the totality o space and time as its habitat:

Speeding through space. . . . speeding through heaven and the stars,Speeding amid the seven satellites and the broad ring and the

diameter oeighty thousand miles,Speeding with tailed meteors . . . throwing fre-balls like the rest,Carrying the crescent child that carries its own ull mother in its

belly . . .I visit the orchards o God and look at the spheric product,

And look at quintillions ripened, and look at quintillions green.(SM 64)

Song o Mysel is a special kind o autobiography: not o a person buto a pronoun, one that defes gravity, defes all biological limits. Astro-nomical numbers are no problem or this I. Eighty thousand miles,trillions o winters and summers (SM 77), quintillions o spheres ripenedand greenit can take them all in, or its duration is defned not by thefnite length o the liespan but by the infnite length o posthumous

lie: Distant and dead resuscitate, / They show as the dial or move asthe hands o me . . . and I am the clock mysel (SM 67). That beingthe case, the morphology o this pronoun is roughly similar to that ogeological ormation: My oothold is tenoned and mortised in granite,/ I laugh at what you call dissolution, / And I know the amplitude otime (SM 48). These extraordinary claims would have been unthinkableoutside the grammatical lie o the frst-person pronoun: not a perish-able entity, but an imperishable part o speech, endlessly needed andendlessly reusable, and able, even ater tens o millions o years, to take

center stage and play a part larger than any hitherto enacted. As Whit-man says: One world is aware, and by ar the largest to me, and that ismysel / And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or tenmillion years, / I can cheerully take it now, or with equal cheerulnessI can wait (SM 48).

I and You

That waiting suggests that the frst-person pronoun, or all its vitalityand longevity, is not quite able to reproduce posthumously by itsel.It is dependent on a syntactical partner: a second person, a recipient,standing ready to take in what is said and to take o on its own, to do

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some urther grating and increasing.34 This, too, Whitman wouldhave learned rom the Book of the Dead. In these mortuary texts, thedead, though speaking in the frst person, is never without the presumed

presence o a hearer, a you addressed with utter sel-confdence, ayou who will always be there: When I have opened, who art thou?Or whom do I see pass? I am one o ye being with you. What my eyesdesire is that thou lettest him draw near [in peace], head to head, ac-companying him to the birthplace o the heaven . . . . The name o theerry-boat is the Boat o plaited white Corn.35 What emerges rom theBook of the Deadis a pronominal structure revolving around the untram-meled claim o I, in turn resting on the unceasing presence o you.Licensing a subjectivity surviving in the ace o death and beyond the

terminus o death, this structure marks the intersection o two genres,lyric and autobiography, even though these Egyptian texts are almostnever discussed in the context o either. Paul de Mans essay on lyricand autobiography, Autobiography as Deacement, is especially help-ul in suggesting a way to revisit the question, to rethink literary history

with these mortuary texts in mind. Beginning with WordsworthsEssaysupon Epitaphs, de Man observes that the claim or restoration in theace o death depends on the fgure o prosopopeia, the fction o anapostrophe to an absent, deceased or voiceless entity, which posits the

possibility o the latters reply and coners upon it the power o speech.Voice assumes mouth, eye, and fnally ace, a chain that is maniest inthe etymology o the tropes name, prosopon poien, to coner a mask ora ace (prosopon). Prosopopeia is the trope o autobiography, by whichones name . . . is made as intelligible and memorable as a ace.36

Prosopopeia is very much the structure o the Egyptian texts, thoughthe claim or restoration in the ace o death is enacted not as anapostrophe to the deceased but as an apostrophe by the deceased: afrst-person pronoun speaking rom beyond the grave and singing outto those still on this side o mortality. It is this dedicated, long-distancesinging that allows the posthumous I to lay claim to infnite space andtime, and to write an autobiography luxuriating in the hyperbole o lyric.

What these two genres have in common, and what is dramatized in theBook of the Dead, is a gray area, a penumbra o the world, not known,not surveyed, mappable on an ascending or descending scale, and ac-commodating both the speaker and the addressed, inhabited by themeither separately or together as a purely conjectural feld. Just as theI can be a posthumous orm without a fxed body, the you can be aprenatal orm without a crystalized shape. The extravagant claim o themortuary texts rests on this twin release rom the constraints o mate-rial embodiment. Whitman is very much a benefciary and descendenthere. His Song o Mysel is posthumous in this sense: not so much

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a soliloquy as a ar-ung projectile, hurled in the direction o a youlocated in some unspecifed uture, not an individual but a collectivity,an installment o the species yet to take shape.

The poem opens with the two pronouns suspended across just such aconjectural arc: I celebrate mysel, and sing mysel / And what I assume

you shall assume, / For every atom belonging to me as good belongs toyou (SM 28). This ongoing and unending reproduction o the I in theyoua continual transer o atomsallows the speaker to address aprogeny whose eatures he has yet to glimpse, but about whose existencehe is never in doubt: What am I? And what are you? / All I mark as myown you shall oset it with your own, / Else it were time lost listening tome (SM 47). Since the second person will always be there, will always be

listening, the frst-person pronoun knows that its duration is infnite: AndI know I am deathless, / I know this orbit o mine cannot be swept by acarpenters compass, / I know I shall not pass like a childs carlacue cut

with a burnt stick at night (SM 48). This pronoun will not come to anend because its existence in time is grammatical rather than individual,kept alive by a morphology that is long-running, ever-renewable, andever-prehensile. Even though I teach straying rom me, yet who canstray rom me? / I ollow you whoever you are rom the present hour;/ My words itch at your ears till you understand them (SM 85).

In his essay, On Lyric Poetry and Society, Theodor Adorno urges usto think o lyric in light o just such a morphology. Until we have eitherbroadened it historically or turned it against the sphere o individual-ism, Adorno writes, our conception o lyric poetry has a moment odiscontinuity in it.37 Even though the I whose voice is heard in thelyric is an I that defnes and expresses itsel as something opposed tothe collective, that opposition is momentary rather than permanentbecause there is, in act, a undamental common ground between theone and the many, both being under the shadow o yearning and eveno death (OLP 41). Mortality is a great unifer, and it binds any singleinstance o the frst-person pronoun to every other instance. Adornogoes on to say:

It is commonly said that a perect lyric poem must possess totality or universality,must provide the whole within the bounds o the poem and the infnite withinthe poems fnitude. I that is to be more than a platitude o an aesthetics thatis always ready to use the concept o the symbolic as a panacea, it indicates thatin every lyric poem the historical relationship o the subject to objectivity, o theindividual to society, must have ound its precipitate in the medium o a subjec-

tive spirit thrown back upon itsel. The less the work thematizes the relationshipo I and society, the more spontaneously it crystallizes o its own accord in thepoem, the more complete the process o precipitation will be. (OLP 42)

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Adorno speaks only o the precipitation o the lyric I out o the dia-lectic o a society contemporary to it. What the Book of the Deadsuggests isthe precipitation o that pronoun out o a society that has yet to emerge,

one that is simply the projected uture o the species, addressed here asan unseen and unrealized you. This second person, not yet born butguaranteed to be born, is the syntactical complement that underwritesthe frst person, that allows the otherwise fnite shape o autobiographyto take up residence within the infnite continuum o lyric. Song oMysel is very much a precipitate within that medium. At the end othe poem, Whitman amously writes:

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,And flter and fbre your blood.

Failing to etch me at frst keep encouraged,Missing me one place search another,I stop some where waiting or you.

(SM 89)

Ater an unspecifed length o time, the you will eventually catch upwith the I. Whitman seems to promise as much. In the meanwhile,

though, the two o them would appear to be in dierent locations, sepa-rated by a width o space also unspecifed, though this does not stop theI rom addressing you, not in the least worried that his words mightnot carry. What is it that allows the words to get across, what means otransportation do they use?

Ferry across Time

The Book of the Dead is quite clear about its chosen means o trans-portation: the name o the erry-boat is the Plaited White Corn. Theerry has a special meaning or the Egyptians, being an important parto the uneral ritual. The custom was to put the body o the dead onthis boat and carry it to the west bank o the Nile, where it would beburied. Wilkinson, in his Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians,discusses this custom at length. Even though the erry is just crossing ariver, Wilkinson says, nonetheless, To the river [Homer] gives the nameo Ocean, because, as they say, the Egyptians call the Nile Oceanus in

their language. And the reason o the dead being thought to inhabitthese places, he adds, is that the greater part o the Egyptian catacombsare there, and the bodies are erried over the river.38

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The erry is the customary carrier or the Egyptian dead, a vehicle thatcrosses a river loosely and hyperbolically called an ocean. It is also thechosen carrier or Whitman in Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, setting him

aoat on the East River, as i it too were an ocean, with shores ratherthan banks, with seagoing trafc, and with a diurnal tidal rhythm:

Others will enter the gates o the erry and cross rom shore toshore,

Others will watch the run o the ood-tide,Others will see the shipping o Manhattan north and west, and the

heights o Brooklyn to the south and east,Others will see the islands large and small;Fity years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun hal an

hour high,A hundred years hence, so ever so many hundred years hence, others

will see them,Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in o the ood-tide, the alling-

backto the sea o the ebb-tide.39

Long Island is not usually known as a ood plain, but this is how Whit-man sees it, thanks to its amily resemblance to the Nile Delta. Powered

by that resemblance, the Brooklyn erry crosses rom Manhattan to LongIsland, across an ocean interchangeably Atlantic, Mediterranean, andAegean. Fity years hence, a hundred years hence, and ever so manyhundred years hence, it will still be navigating these bodies o water,singing out to any who would hear.

Where will the poet be, ater these increasingly elongated intervals?He should not be around any more, but he still seems to be:

Closer yet I approach you,What thought you have o me now, I had as much o youI laid in my

stores in advance,I considerd long and seriously o you beore you were born.Who was to know what should come home to me?Who knows but I am enjoying this?Who knows, or all the distance, that I am as good as looking at you

now, or all you cannot see me?(163)

The speaker should have been dead a long time ago, but there he is, still

holding us in his feld o vision, with an eerie tropism that always sendshim our way. Helen Vendler detects in this undead voice the ordain-ing power o the shaman, a power that hails rom the invisible world,rom a nonphysical orce. She calls this orce lyric intimacy and adds:

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Yearning toward someone who may not be born or some years or evenhundreds o years hence is . . . a eeling not uncommon in lyric, but

Whitman carries it urther than any poet beore or since.40

What is it, then, that enables Whitman to go this length? And whereis lyric intimacy located, in the world o the living or the world o thedead? This is the wrong question to ask, or there is no such clear-cutdivision in Whitmans topography, and the operating orm o his pro-noun is grammatical, in any case, rather than biological. While thereis emphatically an I here, we are not sure what kind o body it has,or whether it has a body at all. This uncertainty o corporeal state iscompounded by the uncertain location in time. Closer yet I approach

you, this pronoun says, naming the direction in which it is moving, but

not speciying the starting point. Its eyes are fxed on usI am as goodas looking at you nowbut we are not sure rom what distance. It ishovering somewhere, in that interval between the two verb tenses, hadand have: What thought you have o me now, I had as much o you.But exactly how ar apart are these two moments? It can be an hour, orit can be a decade, a century, a millennium. The interval can be o anylength, or the I will still have a relation to you ater anylapse o time.Commutable distance here is not predicated on the human lie span; itis a unction o the syntactic relation between two pronouns.

And in act, in Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, we are getting only a mildversion o this pronominal power. Elsewhere its durational claim is evenbolder, more in defance o common sense, as in So Long! where Whit-man says: I am as one disembodied, triumphant, dead.41 Being dead,disembodied, and triumphant are all the same thing, adding up to thesame equation. It is an equation that allows the frst-person pronoun tospeak rom beyond the grave, and to act as i the grave were nothing,as in this poem ragment called Ater Death:

Now when I am looked back upon, I will hold levee,I lean on my let elbowI take ten thousand lovers, one ater

another, by my right hand. 42

Mortality does not spell an end or this I, not a cessation o its earthlypleasures. On the contrary, it is still lounging around, still holding court,and still making ree with its right hand, draping it around anyone it

wants rom the living world. No actual human being can make such aclaim; only a pronoun can. To highlight this is to highlight the undyingpotency o grammar not only o elemental parts o speech, but also o

generic conventions that scatter and recombine, creating a kinship net-work out o a ormal diaspora, allowing fnite instances to survive withinthe continuum o the infnite. These generic conventions, or Whitman,

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cannot be derived rom the Greek epic; he is emphatic on this point. Ina prose ragment written in September 1856, he wrote: Leaves of Grassmust be called not objective, but altogether subjectiveI know runs

through them as a perpetual rerain. Yet the great Greek poems, also theTeutonic poems, also Shakespeare and the great masters are objective,epicthey have described characters, events, wars, heroes, etc.43

This is true. The epic is relentlessly objective when it comes to thehuman liespan: mortality is the sad end or all o us, no frst-personpronoun can hope to escape. The underworld (which Odysseus visits inbook 11 o the Odyssey) is a dark and orbidding place, and the dead areanxious, helpless, sorrowul, yearning incessantly or their ormer lie.In the Buckley prose translation, Whitman would have come upon this

speech by Achilles, railing against his confnement in Hades, preerringeven living servitude to this dead end: Do not, O illustrious Ulysses,speak to me o death; I would wish, being on earth, to serve or hire withanother man o no estate, who had not much livelihood, rather thanrule over all the departed dead.44 The epic is a genre where mortals aremortal, a line that marks our untranscendable limit.

Whitman admires the epic, but it is not the only genre available, andto him it is clear that mortality is more bearable when it is submittedto a dierent, less austere reckoning.45 His dead pronoun is, or that

reason, a satisfed pronoun, assertive and confdent, waxing eloquent inits undiminished powers. There is no sense o an ending here, becausethe posthumous I is able to do all the things it once did, and it knowsthat there will always be a uture in store, which it has prepared or inadvance, giving it all the time in the world. This is not the pronouno epic, but the pronoun o lyric. Specifcally, it is the lyric pronoun as-sociated with the Book of the Deadthat underwrites this subjective orm

without temporal limits, an autobiography that violates, avant la lettre,what we now take to be the standard constraints o autobiography. Thisis a literary history at once macro and micro, illegible without the fneprint o Whitman, but also making that fne print newly legible againsta global environment, against an intergeneric landscape, death flledand death deying, emanating rom the south rather than the north othe Mediterranean.46

Macro as Micro: Naguib Mahouz

How does that landscape evolve in the twentieth century? It is almoststating the obvious to say that the Egyptian pronoun has now spread arand wide, not only crossing back and orth rom death to lie, as it is wontto do, but also crossing many other dividing lines. Initially conjoining

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autobiography and lyric, the posthumous I has now coalesced aroundyet another major genre, the novel, pointing to a dierent genealogy ornarrative fction, and pointing to a kinship network extending robustly

across poetry and prose. It is worth ollowing the empirical evidence tosee what sort o literary history it yields, what geographical coordinates itactivates, and what sort o globalism it brings into play. In what ollows,I look at two extensions o the Book of Deadcourtesy o Naguib Mahouzand Norman Mailerextensions that not only novelize the ancientpractice o lyric but also reect obliquely on the poetry o Whitman,making the micro carrier o pronouns the theater or a large-scale worldhistory, a globalism that bears witness to the passions and controversieso the twentieth century.

Naguib Mahouz1988 Nobel laureatebegan his career not only withthree novels set in ancient Egypt, but also with a collection o short stories,several o them centrally eaturing the posthumous I. In A Voice romthe Other World, this frst-person pronoun is ront and center, makingexactly the same claim as his ancestors. The speaker here is Taw-ty, a

writer and servant o his Majesty the Prince, who has suddenly allenill and died. He is not pleased with this turn o events; all the same, hedoes not think o death as a pure and unmitigated disaster, or as ar asthis pronoun is concerned, quite the contrary is true:

I was shackled with etters, then they were smashed. I was trapped inside a vessel,then I was set ree. I was intensely heavy on the earth, then I shed my bonds andwas rid o my weight. My orm was narrow, then I stretched everywhere outwardwithout any bounds. My senses were limited, then each aculty changed utterly;I could see all and I could hear all and I could comprehend all, and I couldperceive all at once what was above me and below me and around meas i Ihad my body sprawled beore me to take rom Creation an entirely new one. 47

So ar, the posthumous reedom o this pronoun would seem to be a

quotient carried over, unmodifed, rom the Book of the Dead. Still, sincethis is the twentieth century, there are complications not oreseen by theancients, political developments jolting to the dead when rudely trans-ported across three millennia. The Mummy Awakens, another storyin the collection, capitalizes on just this vexatiousness as it proceeds torewrite the Book of the Dead, overloading (and in this way jeopardizing)its pronominal structure, straining the arc between I and you to thebreaking point. Ater a silence o three thousand years, the two pro-nouns are in act not on the same page. The meeting o I with you

irks both parties, though it is the kingly mummy who is more vocal in hisdispleasure, in his contempt or Mahmoud Pasha al-Arnauti, the modernEgyptian who has accidentally brought him back to lie: But you cameto me on your own two eet. I am bewildered at how you could seduce

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yoursel into doing this oolish thing. Madness and vanity have overtakenyou. Do you not praise the gods that Death had intervened between us?What did you come to do here, servant? You arent satisfed with robbing

my sonsso you have come to plunder my tomb, as well? Speak, youslave!48 The ancientBook of the Dead(and even the nineteenth-century

Whitman) had assumed a happy continuity rom I to you, an un-problematic errying across time. Mahouzs twentieth-century pronounsmake it clear that such errying will not be painless. Between the kinglymummy and the modern grandee he calls his servant and slave,there is not only mutual hostility but also a staggering cultural divide.Mahmoud Pasha al-Aranuti is Turkish in race, Egyptian in nationality,and French in his heart and mind (30). His name, Al-Arnauti (meaning

the Albanian), is a thinly veiled reerence to the non-Egyptian originso the Egyptian royal amily, ounded by Mohammad Ali, an Albanianofcer who had come to Egypt with Turkish troops to fght Napoleonand who had stayed on ater the French evacuation, gaining enoughpower by 1806 to orce the Turks to recognize him as Pasha o Egypt.Mohammed Alis grandson, Ismail, was a notorious Francophile. Theone-sentence summation o Mahmoud Pasha al-Arnauti rings all thesechanges. To be in the salon o this man is to be transported to Paristhe French urniture, the French people present, the French language

spoken, and the French cuisine (30). Indeed, that is why the narrator isthere to begin witha French Egyptologist, with the equally telling nameo Proessor Dorian. This Frenchman is literally an intervening orce,coming between ancient Egypt and its modern counterpart. Colonialismis a phenomenon mummies are ill-equipped to ace.

Colonialism had frst arrived with Napoleons invasion in 1798. By theearly twentieth century, however, the British had become the dominantpower. The British began occupying Egypt in 1882, ormally changingits status to a British protectorate at the outbreak o World War I. Evenater the declaration o independence in 1922 under Sultan Fuad (great-grandson o Mohammad Ali), the British remained a conspicuous pres-ence, stationing troops along the Suez Canal, a act bitterly resented bythe Egyptians.49 In the Cairo Trilogy(1950s), one o Mahouzs characters

would say: This is 1935. Eight years have passed since Sads death andfteen since the revolution. Yet the English are everywhere, in the bar-racks, the police, the army, and various ministries. The oreign capitu-lations that makes every son o a bitch a respected gentleman are stilloperative.50 This is the macro background or The Mummy Awakens,the new world order that makes modern Egypt alien to the dynastic dead.But the macro is also intensely micro here, as we can see in the small,seemingly trivial, but reerentially explosive relation between pronouns,a world drama traced through the minutiae o generic transormations.

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Colonialism is a phenomenon o many scales, many degrees o resolution:it is at once a geopolitics, a socioeconomic regime, and an etymology, apronominal structure variously spoken and variously heard.

And indeed, the pronouns are caught up in a still more complicatedweb o political crosscurrents. Ferrying across time is treacherous, thanksto not one buttwointervening orces: English and French colonialism,on the one hand, and the doctrinal pressures o Islam, on the otherhand. Even though Mahouzs linguistic medium is Arabic, a pan-Islamiclanguage and altogether unobjectionable, his choice o subject matteris much riskier, since he is going deliberately back to ancient Egypt, apre-Islamic world, polytheistic, with a hieroglyphic script not related to

Arabic, and dangerous in its seeming priority. This interest in ancient

Egypt was, to be sure, part o an intellectual trend (Tawfg al-Hakim hadalso inserted quotations rom unereal laments and the Book of the Deadin his celebrated novel Return of the Spirit51). But Mahouz also seemedto be wielding it or a special purpose. In his case, the interest wentback to 1931, when he was twenty. Still a student at Cairo University, hehad translated an English work, Ancient Egypt, by James Baikie, publish-ing it in the New Review(Al-Majalla al-Jadida), under the editorship oSalama Musa, whose secularism had called or just this strategic returnto the pre-Islamic past o Egypt.52 Ancient Egypt or the Egypt o the

Pharaohs is still alive among our fellahin, Musa had written in 1926.53

From Salama Musa, Mahouz later writes, I have learned to believein science, socialism, and tolerance.54

Secularism o this sort easily ran aoul o the Islamic establishment,and, like many Egyptian writers, Mahouz was, or much o his lie, on adeath list issued by undamentalists. His 1959 novel, The Children of Gebe-lawi(with its irreverent portrayal o a monotheistic God), was banned inEgypt and throughout the Arabic-speaking world, with the exception oLebanon.55 In 1989, ater the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a atwa againstSalman Rushdie, Mahouz joined eighty other Arab intellectuals in adeclaration stating that no blasphemy harms Islam and Muslims somuch as the call or murdering a writer. Death threats against Mahouzhimsel soon ollowed, including one by the powerul Egyptian cleric,Sheik Omar Abdul-Rahman. He was almost killed in 1994, stabbed in theneck just outside his Cairo home when he was eighty-two years old.56

The frst-person pronoun, the posthumous I o The Mummy Awak-ens and A Voice rom the Other World, is most certainly carryingon a debate with this Islam. Mahouz cannot help novelizing the lyricconvention o the Book of the Dead, cannot help turning it into a collec-tive autobiography, though a negative one, an inversion o the subjec-tive reedom o the lyric orm. What unolds here is not the hawklikeand phoenixlike roaming across space and time, but the entrapment

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within the modernity o Egypt, tasting the bitter taste o colonialismand the equally bitter tension between doctrinal Islam and its seculardissent. Even i he had wanted to, Mahouz could not have shut out

these mediating circumstances o the twentieth century, variations thatmake a dierence to literary history just as they do to parts o speech.The posthumous I, that quintessential Egyptian pronoun, is a misftat home or just that reason.

I Without You: Norman Mailer

What i that pronoun were to travel, once again, to America? What sea

change would it undergo now, what new circumstances would it witness?Norman Mailers massive work, Ancient Evenings(1983), is by no means anecessary way station or this journey, though it does point to an interest-ing shape or this intertwined history o lyric, novel, and autobiography.Here, the posthumous I has a run o 709 pages and, in the guise oMenenhetet the First (great-grandather o Meni the Second, the initialspeaker), is able to go through three reincarnations and our lives. Thenovel ends where it begins, with the frst-person pronoun doing whatthe Egyptian dead all seem to do: getting onto a erry, speeding across

space and time. By this I am told that I must enter into the power othe word. For the frst sound to come out o the will had to traversethe undament o pain. So I cry out in the voice o the newly born atthe mystery o my frst breath, and enter the Boat o Ra. We sail acrossdominions barely seen, washed by the swells o time. We plow throughfelds o magnetism. Past and uture come together on thunderheads andour dead hearts live with lightning in the wounds o the Gods.57

Mailer is no stranger to the frst personall his books are, in somesense, versions oAdvertisements for Myselfbut why hand over this pro-noun now to the Egyptian dead? Ten years in the making, there is nothingcasual aboutAncient Evenings. At the same time, Mailer has no illusionthat this will be an easily recognizable genre, that it will be greeted withready enthusiasm: Its by ar the most unusual work Ive done, and itsout o category. I can think o no other novel thats remotely like it. . . .People are going to be immensely conused by the book. They are goingto say, why did Mailer write it? What is he saying that means somethingto him? The man we know. What is this?58

Mailer is right to be worried about his generic oddity. Even a sympa-thetic reviewer like Richard Poirier, writing or the Times Literary Supple-ment, comments that this is indeed the strangest o Norman Mailersbooks, and its oddity does not in any important way have to do either

with its Egyptian setting or the exotic careerexotic even by ancient

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Egyptian standardso Menenhetet, its protagonist, but rather with thedegree to which Mailer has naturalized himsel as an ancient Egyptian,so that he writes as i saturated with the mentality and the governing as-

sumptions . . . o a culture in which the idea o the human is markedlydierent rom what it has been in the West or the last 1,500 years orso.59 Humanness so exotically conceived has little appeal or twentieth-century American readers. And the problem with Ancient Eveningsis thatthe novel does not fnd this exotic, that it insists on linking this ancientpractice o posthumous lie with the preoccupations and obsessions oa late 20th-century mind.60 For some reviewers, this is an unorgivablesin. Benjamin DeMott, writing or the New York Times Book Review, is

withering in his condemnation: Ancient Eveningsturns out to be neither

magnifcent nor a masterpiece. What is more, describing the book simplyas a ailurea near miss earning respect or noble ambitions and partialtriumphswill not do. The case is that, despite the brilliance o thosefrst ninety pages, this 700-page work is something considerably lessthan a heroic venture botched in the execution. It is, speaking bluntly,a disaster, and the reasons why want careul inquiry.61

Ancient Evenings is a novel in search o readers, overowing with thegarrulousness o the speaking I but with no ospring, no correspond-ing you standing ready to receive it. Mailers situation is not always so

dire. He has been quite comortable beore handling the second-personpronoun, most notably in The Armies of the Night, which opens with thisline: From the outset, let us bring you news o your protagonist.62 Thatbook, a chronicle o the 1967 march on the Pentagon, is a rhetoricalexercise secure in the knowledge that it has a place in the world, thatit will be read, and that people will know which genre to consign it to.(Robert Lowell here makes the mistake o saying to Mailer, I reallythink you are the best journalist in America, provoking this barbedreply: There are days when I think o mysel as being the best writer in

America [33].) That ambition is undiminished in Ancient Evenings, butsadly unmoored rom any certainty o audience. And indeed, twenty-fve

years ater its frst release, the novel seems largely orgotten, inspiringno work like-minded, and getting very little critical attention.

What does it mean to be stuck with a pronominal structure that istruncated, shorn o its receiving end, and knowing this rom the out-set? A backward look to Whitman is helpul here, and this is, in act,the comparison made by Alred Kazin in his review oThe Armies of theNight: I am the man, said Walt Whitman. I suerd, I was there.

When a writer gets old enough, like Whitman, one orgets that he wasjust as outrageous an egotist and actor as Norman Mailer is . . . I be-lieve thatArmies of the Night is just as brilliant a personal testimony as

Whitmans diary o the Civil War, Specimen Days, and Whitmans great

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essay on the crisis o the Republic during the Gilded Age, DemocraticVistas.63 Kazin is right aboutThe Armies of the Night: this is indeed anautobiography in the tradition o Whitman, one inected by the claim

o lyric, the hyperbole o an unbounded, unending subjectivity. Thatclaim has been stretched to its limits in Ancient Evenings, and literalizedinto all the minute details o a culturally sanctioned posthumous world.Even though this does bring Mailer close to Whitman in some sense,and even though there are sentences here that gesture strongly in thedirection o the poet (Is one human? Or merely alive? Like a blade ograss equal to all existence in the moment it is torn? Yes, i pain is un-dament, then a blade o grass can know all there is64), in the end thepronominal structure that worked or Whitman is no longer possible or

Mailer, i only because ancient civilizations have become hopelessly exoticin the twentieth century, as they were not in the nineteenth, and, withthis exoticization o the past, a posthumous lie is no longer creditablehabitation or anyone. Mailer ares much better when he plies his tradeelsewhere, when he imagines the dead as absolutely dead, as he does inhis widely acclaimed and best-selling frst book:

The Japanese had been dead or a week, and they had swollen to the dimen-sions o very obese men with enormous legs and bellies, and buttocks which splittheir clothing. They had turned green and purple and the maggots estered intheir wounds and covered their eet.

Each maggot was about a hal inch long and it looked like a slug except thatit was the color o a fshs belly. The maggots covered the dead bodies the waybees cluster over the head o a beekeeper. It was impossible to see any longerwhere the wounds had been, or the maggots covered every bit o ruptured eshand crawled sluggishly over all the minor sores on the corpse. 65

In The Naked and the Dead, there is also a kind o healing, a kind ochromatic continuum, extending across species and across the line o

mortality: the corpses turn green, the wounds disappear, the maggot-covered bodies look like the heads o living beekeepers. This is notthe healing or continuum that Whitman has in mind, the healing andcontinuum that resuscitate the fnite in the infnite. Which is to say that

what Mailer is writing here is a novel that is strictly and starkly a novel:more epic than lyric, a song o mysel without subjective reprieve, anautobiography without the Egyptian pronoun.

Yale University

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NOTES

1 Anne Freadman, Uptake, in The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre: Strategies for Stabilityand Change, ed. Richard Coe et al. (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002), 3956.2 Franco Moretti, Conjectures on World Literature, New Left Review1 (JanuaryFebruary2000): 5468.3 Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary Histor y(London: Verso, 2005),1.4 Moretti, Conjectures, 57.5 Richard Maurice Bucke, Walt Whitman(Glasgow: Wilson and McCormick, 1884), 52.6 Walt Whitman, Assyria and Egypt, MS at Duke Univ., collected in Whitman, Notebooksand Unpublished Prose Manuscripts(New York: New York Univ. Press, 1984), 5:1928.7 Whitman and Bucke, Notes and Fragments, 102, collected in Whitman, Notebooks,4:1566.8 Whitman, Notebooks, 5:54546.9 Whitman writes: The Iliad(Buckleys prose version) I read frst thoroughly on thepeninsula o orient, northeast end o Long Island. Whitman, A Backward Glance Oer TraveldRoads, in Prose Works 1892, ed. Floyd Stovall (New York: New York Univ. Press, 196364),2:722.10 Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, 2 vols. (NewBrunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 198791).11 Walter Burkert, The Orientalizing Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press,1992).12 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference(Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2000).13 Linguists have since reconstructed a proto-Indo-European language as the commonancestor o European languages. See, or instance, Calvert Watkins, How to Kill a Dragon:Aspects of Indo-European Poetics(New York: Oxord. Univ. Press, 1995).14 John T. Irwin, American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the AmericanRenaissance(New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press, 1980).15 Whitman, Ramble Fith. Fossil History, in Notebooks, 5:1632.16 Whitman, Notebooks, 5:1633.17 Whitman, Notebooks, 5:1633.18 Whitman, Prose Works 1892, ed. Stovall, 2:696.19 Floyd Stovall, Notes on Whitmans Reading, American Literature26 (November 1954):esp. 33839, 34647.

20 Stovall, Whitmans Reading, 339.21 Notices about the Gliddon lectures appeared regularly in the Brooklyn Daily EagleromNovember to December. Whitmans reports appeared on November 14, December 12,and December 18, 1846. The archive is available online at http://eagle.brooklynpublicli-brary.org. I thank David Blake and Michael Robertson or alerting me to this importantresource.22 Sir John Gardner Wilkinson, The Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, ed.Samuel Birch (1836; London: J. Murray, 1878), 1:9.23 Whitman, One o the Lessons Bordering Broadway: The Egyptian Museum, writtenor Life Illustrated, reprinted in New York Dissected, ed. Ralph Adimari and Emory Holloway(New York: 1936), 32.

24 Whitman, Salut au Monde! in Leaves of Grass, ed. Harold W. Blodgett and SculleyBradley (New York: NYU Press, 1965), 145.25 Whitman, Democratic Vistas, in Prose Works 1892, 2:406.26 In One o the Lessons Bordering Broadway (1855), Whitman writes: Rosellini, oTuscay, has issued a complete civil, military, religious, and monumental account o the

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Egyptians, with magnifcent plates. This work is o such cost that only wealthy libraries canpossess it. There is a copy in the Astor Library in New York. Whitman, New York Dissected,37.27 Whitman, Poem o Wonder at the Resurrection o the Wheat, later The Compost.

For an illuminating discussion o this poem as well as Song o Mysel in the context oWhitmans encounter with the Egyptian etchings, see Esther Shepard, Possible Sourceso Some o Whitmans Ideas and Symbols in Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus and Other

Works, Modern Language Quarterly 14 (March 1953): 6081; and Lewis Hyde, The Gift:Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property(New York: Vintage, 1979), 18082.28 Whitman, Song o Mysel, in Leaves of Grass, ed. Blodgett and Bradley, 34 (hereatercited as SM).29 Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: The Civil War and the Culture of Death(New

York: Knop, 2008).30 Whitman, Ashes o Soldiers, in Leaves of Grass, ed. Blodgett and Bradley, 491 (here-ater cited in text).

31 E. A. Wallis Budge, Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life (London: Kegan Paul, 1899),16466.

Humans have our other component parts besides the khat, the ka, and the ba. Theseare the ab, the heart; the khu, the spirit; the sekhem, the power; and the ren, the name.Budge was the keeper o the Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities at the British Museum.32 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, December 18, 1846.33 Christian Karl Josias Bunsen,Egypts Place in Universal History, 2nded., trans. CharlesCottrell, 5 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1867), 5:167, 5:205.34 The importance o this you has struck many Whitman scholars. See, or instance, C.Carroll Hollis, Language and Style in Leaves of Grass(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ.Press, 1983), 65123; Erza Greenspan, Walt Whitman and the American Reader(Cambridge:

Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990); Stephen Railton, As I I Were with You: The Perormanceo Whitmans Poetry, in The Cambridge Companion to Whitman, ed. Greenspan (Cambridge:Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995).35 Bunsen,Egypts Place, 5:204.36 Paul de Man, Autobiography as Deacement, MLN94 (1979): 92526.37 Theodor Adorno, On Lyric Poetry and Society, in Notes on Literature, 2 vols., trans.Rol Tiedemann and Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1991),1:4041 (hereater cited in text as OLP). For an illuminating discussion o this essay, seeRobert Kauman, Adornos Social Lyric, and Literary Criticism Today: Poetics, Aesthetics,Modernity, in Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (New York: Cambridge Univ.Press, 2004), 35475.

38 Wilkinson, Manners and Customs, 3:457.39 Whitman, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, in Leaves of Grass, ed. Blodgett and Bradley, 160(hereater cited in text).40 Helen Vendler, Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery(Prince-ton, NJ: Princeton Univ Press, 2005), 35.41 Whitman, So Long! in Leaves of Grass, ed. Blodgett and Bradley, 1506.42 Whitman, Ater Death, in Leaves of Grass, ed. Blodgett and Bradley, 687.43 Whitman, ragment 70 in Notes and Fragments, ed. Bucke (Folcrot, PA: Folcrot LibraryEditions, 1899), 73.44 The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Theodore Alois Buckley (London: Henry Bohn, 1851),159.45 Homer, however, remains central to Whitman. See my Epic and Lyric: The Aegean,the Nile, and Whitman, in Whitman: Where the Future Becomes the Present(Iowa City: Univ.o Iowa Press, 2008).

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46 Miriam Lichtheim points out that the autobiography emerged in Egypt during theFith Dynasty, in tandem with the prayer or oering, that during the Sixth Dynasty itattained great length, and or the next two millennia it remained in use. The purposeo this sel-portrait in words, she adds, is to sum up the characteristic eatures o the

individual person in terms o his positive worth and in ace o eternity. His person shouldlive orever, in the transfgured orm o the resurrected dead, and his name should lastorever in the memory o people. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Reading,

vol. 1, The Old and Middle Kingdoms(Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. o Caliornia Press,1973), 34. In that anthology, Lichtheim translates the Book of the Deadnot as prose, butas verse.47 Naguib Mahouz, A Voice rom the Other World, in Voices from the Other World: Ancient

Egyptian Tales, trans. Raymond Stock (Cairo: American Univ. in Cairo Press, 2002), 64.48 Mahouz, The Mummy Awakens, in Voices from the Other World, 43 (hereater cited intext).49 Ater the war, Egyptian nationalists, under the leadership o Sad Zaghlul, demanded

an end to colonial rule; when Sad was deported in 1919, demonstrations and riots brokeout, orcing the British to permit his return and to grant partial independence. This partialindependence clearly continued well into the reign o King Fuad.50 Mahouz, Sugar Street, trans. William Maynard Hutchins and Angele Botros Samaan(New York: Anchor, 1993), 36.51 Tawfg al-Hakim, Return of the Spirit, trans. William M. Hutchins (Washington, DC:Three Continents Press, 1990), epigraphs to vol. 1 and vol. 2.52 Rasheed El-Enany, Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning(London: Routledge, 1993),35.53 Menahem Milson, Najib Mahfuz: The Novelist-Philosopher of Cairo(New York: St. MartinsPress, 1998), 71.

54 El-Enany, Naguib Mahfouz, 13.55 Samia Mehrez, Respected Sir, in Naguib Mahfouz: From Regional Fame to Global Recogni-tion(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press, 1993), 6180.56 Milson, Najib Mahfuz, 5354.57 Norman Mailer, Ancient Evenings(Boston: Little Brown, 1983), 709.58 Robert Begiebing, Twelth Round: An Interview with Norman Mailer, Harvard Maga-zine, MarchApril 1983, 50.59 Richard Poirier, In Pyramid and Palace, Times Literary Supplement, June 10, 1983.60 Benjamin DeMott, Norman Mailers Egyptian Novel, New York Times Book Review,

April 10, 1983.61 DeMott, Norman Mailers Egyptian Novel.

62 Mailer, The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, The Novel as History (New York:Signet, 1968), 13 (hereater cited in text).63 Alred Kazin, The Trouble Hes Seen, New York Times, May 5, 1968.64 Mailer, Ancient Evenings, 3.65 Mailer, The Naked and the Dead(New York: Rinehart, 1948), 21213.

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