Michael Cunningham’s fourth novel, Specimen Days follows in the vein of The Hours in having a very specific and concrete connection to another author’s work. In this case it is Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass in particular, though the title of Cunningham’s novel comes from another Whitman work of the same name. Cunningham’s novel is clearly informed by Whitman’s becoming in a very real sense of form of palimpsest, re-mixing the themes and occupations of Whitman’s earlier work. Whitman even appears as a character in the novel, just as he continually crops op at other places.
The novel is not so much a typical novel as it is a collection of three novellas, at first sight. However, it soon becomes evident that there is more than just thematics which tie the stories together. The novel depends greatly on parallel narratives, where a number of things crop up in similar shape across the different stories. Names of protagonists are re-used such as Luke/Lucas, Simon, Catherine/Catareen, while there are a number of different images and object which also crop up again and again. A certain bowl makes its presence in all three stories, while references and encounters with horses and a ‘goblin child’ are also evident.
It is also evident that the events all fall along the same narrative trajectory, so that not only is the novel three seperate stories but they are also connected. This is specified by the references to earlier events, such as The Children’s Crusade and the reference to the fire which ends the first story. The end of the first part, “In the Machine,” sets events in motion which are specifically investigated in the second part, while we hear of events in the third part which we recognise from the second. Such a strategy creates a very direct link between the stories and we feel that their connection is clearer and more significant than in three separate novellas dealing with Whitmanesque themes.
The main references in the novel are drawn from Whitman, of course, but there are others such as Emily Dickinson. There seems to be an almost forced point to the novel’s overt reference to Whitman’s book of the same name, while all the direct quotes are from Leaves of Grass. Since Specimen Days is an autobiography, Cunningham’s novel might be read in the same light though such an insight proves frustrating since there is no autobiography in Cunningham’s novel, unless we see the text as an allegory, certainly too limiting to be the actual case. Instead, one might regard the nature of Whitman’s book to inform Cunningham’s text; that we may see ourselves in nature and the world around us. If this is the case, it is not always a pretty sight.
There is one reference which is used extensively in the second part of the novel, “The Children’s Crusade,” which is never solved. The reference is “in the family” which the suicide children constantly refer to. It does not come from Leaves of Grass and confounds the police trying to solve the mystery surrounding the children. It seems that the reference lies at the end of the first part, where Lucas argues that God is a machine and to be eaten and to die is the same; and it is to be loved by God. The Whitman quote “I am large. I contain multitudes” refers to this notion of the machine world/machine God where everything is connected, thus being “in the family,” but also being dead.
Walt Whitman, his work, his presence as character in the first part “In the Machine,” as pseudonym for the mysterious woman on “The Children’s Crusade” and as the poetry chip inserted in Simon in “Like Beauty,” all these versions of Whitman frame the novel. It sets up a distinct way of reading the novel, but there is more framing going on here which in a sense is a form of backward framing, where the last part of the novel undercuts and to some extent undermines what has gone before and thus alters its status and its authenticity.
In the two first parts there are characters who sprout forth quotes from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. In the first it is Lucas who cannot help doing it; we suspect that he is slightly shocked over losing his older brother Simon and seeing his parents disintegrate in front of his eyes. When he begins talking of Simon living inside the world of machines we are convinced that he is disturbed. When in the second part we encounter children who also quote the same text and then committing suicide, we suspect brainwashing and abused children, reinforced when the woman who has taken care of them refers to herself as Walt Whitman and we learn that she has put pages of Whitman’s writing all over the walls. However, when we in the third part learn that there are stimulos (artificial humans) who cannot help quoting poetry, this casts the earlier pieces into doubt; we hesitate over the status of the children wondering if they could possibly have been stimulos as well. This is clearly impossible since the stimulos were only invented later, but it does cast the the authority of the earlier pieces into question. We must also wonder about Cat, the protagonist of the second part, and why she made those lyrical lists constantly. Suddenly Lucas’ notion that Simon lived in the world of machines also makes peculiar sense as the stimulo protagonist of the third part is called Simon and quotes Whitman when he becomes agitated or nervous. The world of machines takes on a different meaning and narrative authority is undermined.
Such a case is what Brian McHale refers to as a strange loop, where the forward causality of time is reversed or turned upside down. We know that Lucas cannot be a stimulo, since they were only invented later, yet he exhibits all the traits of being one. What we are presented with is the case of a metafictional hesitation; we as readers are unsure whether this is simply a coincidence, thus pushing the novel into the uncanny, or if it is actually true, ie. that Lucas is actually a stimulo though this is impossible. The later case, which I regard as the most reasonable, is the postmodern hesitation between one world and the next (McHale), where the text is revealed to be a fiction.
We move towards a parallel existence between Lowell and Whitman, as alternating machine gods and hence as creators of the fiction we are reading. Whitman and Lowell thus both ultimately frame the novel in their hybrid existence. Much like the Whitman Lucas encounters and the female Whitman Cat encounters, Lowell is the Whitman of the stimulo Simon, just as he is the author of all the other stimulos, although in this case he is a different author to each of them; Yeats, Keat, Dickinson and so forth. He has even named the planet they are going to Paumanok, a reference again to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. The end in a peculiar way loops back to the beginning, in that the spaceship becomes, in a sense, a family which will move to the stars. We can only suspect that the spaceship is aimed for the Pleiades, and so echoing the naive thought of Lucas that the stars is somehow an alternate map of the world with the Pleiades mirroring the placement of New York, which is reinforced with the name Paumanok since it is an alternate name for Long Island.
The framings that we are caught up in here show no real sign of diminishing; we can continually move around in the text trying to find the proper beginning of this framing, but since Whitman is fictionalised we cannot posit him as the final authority, nor can we establish the last part of the novel as having narrative authority, since it is so clearly speculative. This notion of authenticity and veracity loops back to the beginning, to the Author’s Note where Cunningham notes on the difficulty of writing historical fiction since it needs to have some form of veracity to actual history. He admits that he has speculated and altered to meet his own ends, again undercutting any firm grounding we might otherwise have expected. The novel seems to thus ultimately be parallel to the house with quotes where the strange woman from the second part lives in; surrounded by quotes and fictions.