Walt Whitman was asked about the contradictions in Leaves of Grass. He replied: 'Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.' This is often quoted as a defence of inconsistency. It is actually a more radical claim: the self is not a single, coherent thing that should not contradict itself. The self is an ensemble — many voices, many impulses, many inherited perspectives — and the contradiction between them is not a sign that something is wrong. It is the sign that something is alive.
Each voice has its own frequency. Together they produce interference — constructive and destructive. The white sum line is the self at any moment: not any single voice but the pattern of their interaction. Silence a voice completely and the self changes. Amplify it and the self reorganises around it.
Song of Myself is fifty-two sections and the most expansive work of American poetry. Whitman begins: 'I celebrate myself, and sing myself.' This sounds like narcissism. It is actually the opposite — an argument that the self is not a private, enclosed thing but a representative of the whole, containing 'multitudes.' Whitman is celebrating not his individual self but the self as a site of contradiction, multiplicity, and democratic inclusion. He contains the slave and the slaveholder, the prostitute and the president. He contains them all.
The politics of multitude
Whitman was writing in the 1850s, as American society moved toward civil war. His democratic vision — that every person contains every other, that the boundaries between selves are permeable, that the self is large enough to include its opposites — was a political claim as much as a psychological one. A self that contained multitudes could not be easily ranked. The self that contains multitudes is, by definition, not superior to any other self that contains multitudes.
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes. — Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
Contradiction as evidence of life
The self that is entirely consistent is either very simple or very dishonest. Real people contradict themselves. They want incompatible things. They hold beliefs that generate friction against each other. They behave differently in different contexts and cannot explain why. Whitman's insight is that this contradiction is not a flaw in the self but evidence of its richness. A self large enough to contain contradiction is larger than a self that has reduced itself to consistency.
The modern concept of 'identity' tends toward coherence — we speak of a 'coherent identity' as a goal, as health. Whitman's concept tends toward amplitude. A healthy self is a large self, a capacious self, a self that can accommodate the tension between its different components without needing to resolve it into a single note. The tension is the music.
The grass as a model
When a child asks Whitman what the grass is, he cannot answer. 'I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,' he says, and 'I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.' The grass is many things at once. It is a flag, a hieroglyph, a journal, a burial cloth, a promissory note. It cannot be reduced to a single definition without losing most of what it is. The self, Whitman suggests, is the same. 'What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? They are alive and well somewhere.' Everything persists. Everything is present. The self is porous.