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One aspect of our conversations re: Whitman and Husvedt that has been lingering in my head is where we have chosen to draw the line between author and character in each. For Whitman, our conversations centered around Walt as a person, perhaps most clearly seen through our debates about whether or not we would want to live with him. In these, we took his poetry to be an exploration and extension of himself, as a window into what "kind" of person he is. Certaintly, Whitman's use of the first person seems to indicate that he is writing as the "self" he is celebrating. And yet, Whitman also uses the third person. For example, in "Song of Myself" he writes "Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughts, a kosmo..."(38). In this distinctly distanced stance, Whitman seems to be writing more about someone, then as someone--I'm not sure if this is an important distiction to draw, and yet it seems to introduce an interesting tension when contrasted with our discussions of Husvedt.

In our conversations about Sorrows of An American, we drew a clear line between the author and her charecters, even though she too, like Whitman, writes in the first person. The gender distinction between Husvedt and Erik is perhaps the most notable aspect of the novel that allows such an immediate boundary to be drawn. However, as we noted, such "gender trouble" was also afoot in Whitman. But instead of understanding Whitman as writing about a character who "contains multitudes," rather we were quick to critize the poet for what seemed to be a concieted, egocentric understanding of himself. 

The differences in how we read these authors would be unproblematic to me if not for how we weighed the benefits and limitations of Husvedt's book. In our small group Dr Grobstein suggested that the bee in his bonnett about Sorrows of an American was that it was preoccupied with looking to the past, as opposed to demonstrating to its readers the interesting new possibilities for the future that arise through evolution. While I think it is true that Husvedt's characters are engaged in a somewhat hopeless project of attempting to piece together their past so as to understand their present, Dr Grobstein's critique relies upon an unfragmented idea of author and self that at once accords with how we read Whitman and disregards the multifaceted self that Whitman asserted. Though Husvedt writes about charecters who are stagnanted by their preoccupation with the past, she herself seems to have evoked the possibilities of the future through the creative production of a novel. Some of us(myself inclued) were a little taken aback by the revelation that Husvedt had used her own father's diaries for those of Erik's father. And yet with Whitman, we accepted that the person illustrated through his poems was meant as a kind of self-portrait.

I guess I am not advocating for one or the other approach, but rather asking why do we understand some people as inalienable from the texts they author, while with others we speak about the characters they depict? I think our discussions demonstrate how slippery it is when we attempt to concretely do one or the other, and how even in a class in which we have, from the beginning, admitted that there are "cracks" both between one another, and within ourselves, we retain a need for a central, singular understanding of the self as we delve into analysis.